Red Cell

CHAPTER 9

Truman called the Oval Office the “crown jewel of the American prison system,” but unlike most federal inmates, every president of the United States is allowed to decorate his cell to his personal tastes at the considerable expense of the taxpayers. Harry Stuart had been more frugal than most in that regard. The office now satisfied the colonial tastes that stemmed from his heritage as the eighth president from Virginia, but a few pieces were constants that carried over through administrations. The Resolute desk sat in its usual place at the room’s south end, flanked by Old Glory and a Seal of the President flag with gold curtains behind framing the window to the South Lawn. Stuart had raided the Smithsonian for Lincoln and Washington portraits and a Churchill bust. Any piece of artwork in the office would have fetched hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, on the open market. The furniture could have paid for the BMW Cooke almost never got to drive. The room was a fine museum of American history in its own right. The CIA director would have liked more time to study the pieces, but the commander in chief had given her less than five minutes before ordering his staff to place a call to the president of the People’s Republic of China.

“This attack is not in the best interests of your people, Mr. President.” Stuart was not given to fits of temper, but he was a man who did not enjoy surprises. No president did. Those who sat in the Oval Office all prayed for an orderly world, even the ones who were not religious despite their public image, and they rarely got it. Surprise was one of the few constants of the job and the PLA attack on Kinmen had set the new standard for it. That particular patch of soil in the South China Sea was so small that it wasn’t labeled on most maps, but it now had the undivided attention of the United States’ commander in chief.

“Mr. President, is it not the policy of the United States that Taiwan and all her territories are part of China?” Tian’s voice was smooth over the speakerphone. Cooke knew that Tian Kai had been a government functionary his entire adult life, but the man was debating like a trained lawyer. He certainly was smart enough never to ask a question for which he didn’t already know the answer.

“It is our policy that we oppose any unilateral change in the relations between China and Taiwan.” Stuart was on the defensive. “Your attack on Kinmen is just such a change. Your attack on the Ma Kong is just such a change—”

“And what evidence do you have that we sank the Ma Kong?” Tian interrupted.

Stuart stopped short, surprised that Tian would ask such a question under the circumstances. He looked over to Cooke, who shook her head. It was a request — she couldn’t give orders to this man — not to reveal classified information to his Chinese counterpart. “Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t sink it?” Stuart asked.

Good, Cooke thought. Deflect a question with a question.

“I question the separatists’ ability to maintain the military equipment that you have been selling them,” Tian said. A nonanswer.

“Yes, Mr. President, we built those Kidd-class destroyers, so I can promise you that they don’t just spontaneously explode anchored at the dock, good maintenance or not.” Ingalls Shipbuilding of Pascagoula, Mississippi, did fine work, he was sure.

Tian didn’t respond and Stuart let that silence hang pregnant in the air for a few moments before continuing. “Your government made certain decisions without any prior consultation, no bilateral or multilateral negotiations of any kind, or any effort to resolve your dispute through the UN Security Council. We object to that.” It was a hard thrust back at the Chinese president to regain the initiative.

“Mr. President, the UN has no role here,” Tian answered in a blunt parry. “We are suppressing a potential rebellion, as your President Lincoln did when your southern states tried to secede. I ask you to respect our sovereign right to maintain the ‘domestic tranquility,’ as you call it, of our union.” Tian’s English was perfect, if accented, his grammar and diction exact, and Cooke found it unnerving to hear the shades of a British accent coming from the mouth of a Beijing-born oligarch.

“Mr. President, it seems to me that it’s the PLA who’s disturbing your domestic tranquility at the moment, not the Taiwanese,” Stuart said, his frustration starting to show.

“Not so,” Tian answered. “Liang is trying to save his political career by fomenting insurrection in the province. We cannot allow him to succeed. China’s long-standing position is that Taiwan will not be allowed to declare independence.”

“The United States respectfully disagrees with your assessment of President Liang’s intentions.” It was a weak rebuttal and Stuart knew it.

“You are entitled to your own interpretation of events,” Tian said. “However, as this is an internal security matter, it is our interpretation that matters here, sir. Liang would not have set himself on this present course if he did not believe the United States would intervene. And so the People’s Republic of China formally asks the United States not to interfere in our domestic affairs. There are no American interests at stake and our military action has been quite restrained.”

Restrained? Cooke thought. Hardly.

“Mr. President, restrained is not the word I would choose,” Stuart said, echoing the CIA director’s thought. He leaned in toward the telephone mic. “Your attacks were unprovoked. The senior military officer on Kinmen and his wife were shot in their home. Yes, we know about that, and don’t bother asking me how because I won’t tell you. The power grid is wrecked. The airport is a smoking ruin. The Ma Kong was cut in half, sitting at the bottom of her dock, and a number of her crew went down with her. None of that, by definition, is restrained. But in case there was any question, peace and stability along the Pacific Rim have always been and continue to be American interests, even if they are no longer yours.”

All done being diplomatic, Cooke thought. She decided that she preferred Stuart that way.

“Of course they remain ours,” Tian said, refusing to take Stuart’s bait. “We have chosen to demonstrate our resolve and our capabilities on a limited scale. Kinmen is hardly worth our notice or yours. It is our sincere hope that by our seizing this minor spit of land, President Liang will have to face the reality of his situation and choose to back down. But our strategy of restraint can only work if the United States does not offer Liang false hope by intervening. Any show of support from you, Mr. President, could only prolong the conflict and cause unnecessary suffering.”

It was a neat trap. Do nothing and China wins. Act aggressively and get painted as a scapegoat, Cooke thought. She guessed that Stuart wanted more time to think, and he wasn’t going to get it sparring with a Chinese president who’d had days to practice this conversation. Doubtless, there was nothing Stuart could say for which Tian didn’t already have an answer… nothing diplomatic, anyway.

Stuart proved her right. “President Tian, thank you for taking my call,” he said abruptly. “I do hope that this can be resolved swiftly and without unnecessary loss of life, or any interruption in trade between our two countries.”

“Of course. We are committed to stability and the preservation of our trade relationship with the United States. Your economic well-being is in our interest, as you know, as ours is in yours. We have invested in so many of your government securities and we do not wish to see them devalued,” Tian replied. “Your servant, sir.”

And the line went dead.

Stuart fell back into his chair and clutched the armrests with a frustrated grip. “We just got caught with our pants down and our laundry still hanging on the line.”

“You didn’t exactly strip the paint off the walls,” the secretary of defense observed. General Lance Showalter (USMC, retired) stood a head taller than Cooke, half again as wide at the shoulders. The observation was kinder than the one running through Cooke’s mind, but generals had to be diplomats as much as State department officers.

“Tian was right,” Stuart said. “We don’t have any evidence that the PLA took out the Ma Kong. We know they did it, but we can’t prove it, and without that my hands are tied.” He looked at his CIA director. “Any information on that?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Cooke replied. “Nothing on radar and this definitely wasn’t a Chinese sapper team. Security at the Tso Ying Naval Base is too good to let that happen. Navy Intelligence thinks that a Chinese submarine must’ve slipped through the Taiwanese sonar nets and put a torpedo into her.”

“That would be one quiet submarine,” Showalter said.

“Agreed,” Cooke said. “Not to mention it begs the question why they would only take out the Ma Kong. There were a half-dozen other vessels in port, including the Kee Lung, which is another Kidd-class destroyer. The Kidds are a cornerstone in Taiwan’s air defense network, so if this attack was the precursor to an invasion, the Chinese would take both ships out if they could. If the PLA Navy could get a submarine that close, they could’ve turned this into Taiwan’s Pearl Harbor. So why take out one ship and not the others?”

“So is this the prelude to invasion or not?” Stuart asked.

“We don’t know,” Cooke admitted. It hurt to say it.

“Figure it out,” Stuart ordered. “Until we do and can prove it, I don’t have room to move. Kinmen really is a piddling little spit of land.” He slapped the couch arm with his open hand and stared out the windows in thought. “A lot of the public wouldn’t be happy about going to war with China over Taiwan itself, much less over an island you can’t see on most of the world’s maps.” The president exhaled and turned back toward his guests.

“We’re not done yet, Harry,” Showalter consoled him. The SecDef was one of the few who could show such familiarity with Stuart in this office.

“No, but I think we’re going to be playing for a draw on this one. At least the Taiwanese legislature is screaming impeachment. Liang’s probably hiding under his desk,” Stuart said. “We can’t afford any more mistakes. The talk shows are already going to have a field day with this and I’m sure the Post headline tomorrow morning is going to be all kinds of calm and restrained. And I’m about to order my secretary to tell anyone calling from the Hill that I’m in an undisclosed location. I might have to send you out to do the rounds,” he told Showalter.

“I’d rather be shot.”

“I’d rather shoot you than go on television myself to talk about this.”

“And you call yourself a politician,” Showalter scoffed.

“I am a tired politician. Seven years in this office feels like seventy outside. There’s a reason all presidents go gray in here,” Stuart said, and followed the admission with a sigh. “What’s the next move?”

Showalter reached over the side of the couch to retrieve a map case and unrolled it onto the coffee table. As a soldier, he’d carried the case through two wars. As a civilian, he only pulled it out when he was ready to recommend that death and destruction become the official policies of the United States Government. Underneath the flimsy plastic cover was a large satellite photograph of the Taiwan Strait with map markings overlaid. Showalter pulled out a grease pencil and circled a small island. “Here’s Kinmen. Six townships, population of seventy-five thousand. It’s so close to the coast that for the PLA, putting troops on it was more like a river crossing than an amphibious attack. The Potomac is wider in places. The Taiwanese excavated some serious bunker and tunnel complexes in response to all the shelling during the Cold War, so the PLA would take high casualties clearing them out. Now that most of the shooting is over, they don’t have to. They just have to keep the troops penned inside, and there won’t be reinforcements coming from Taipei. Liang has to hold them back to defend against a larger possible incursion into the Strait.”

“Can we liberate the island?” Stuart asked.

Showalter shook his head. “Horatio Nelson said ‘a ship’s a fool to fight a fort’ and he was right. We’d have a tough time protecting battle groups in China’s littoral waters, and sustaining air superiority that close to the mainland would be tougher. PLA supply lines would only be a few miles long, while ours would stretch more than a few thousand. Any planes we sent over Kinmen would be within range of SAMs on the mainland, so we’d have to use the B-2s to attack sites on Chinese soil. You order that and we’ll have more to worry about than just liberating Kinmen.”

“So Kinmen is a done deal,” Stuart said.

“The PRC owns it now,” Showalter said, nodding his head. “Taiwan will only get it back if Tian is feeling generous.”

“Yeah, well, this isn’t going to go further,” Stuart said. “We’re going to make sure of that.”

“‘This will not stand?’” Showalter offered.

“I may not be able to run the PLA off of Kinmen, but it’s the last island I’m going to let them take without a fight,” Stuart told him. He turned back to Cooke. “So what’s Tian’s next move? And don’t tell me you don’t know.”

She reached into a lockbag and pulled out a three-page paper stapled at the corner. “One of our Red Cell analysts drafted this a few years ago. It’s a model plan for how the PLA could take Taiwan with limited resources. Most analysts believe that China would want the invasion to go quickly to limit our ability to respond or for anyone to intervene diplomatically. This,” she said, passing the Red Cell paper to the president and a second copy to Showalter, “posits a strategy where they hit fast, stop fast, and supposedly give Liang time to think things over. But what they’re really doing is giving the PLA time to regroup and prepare for the next stage while confusing the diplomats as to China’s real intention.”

Stuart ground his teeth together. “That sounds familiar.”

“Yes, it does,” Cooke agreed. “And if Taiwan surrenders at any point, so much the better. Stage One calls for an assault on Kinmen. Stage Two is a push on the Penghu.” The CIA director took Showalter’s grease pencil and tapped another landmass in the Strait, this one more than halfway to Taiwan. “The Pescadores are a natural staging point for a full-on invasion of the main island. Sixty-four islands, but the largest one, Penghu, has air- and seaport facilities that would let the PLA resupply its biggest transports, and it’s less than fifty miles off Taiwan.”

“Why not increase the pressure by taking the Matsus or some of the other smaller islands closer to the mainland?” Stuart asked. “Easier to grab, fewer casualties.”

“They’re not in the direct path of an invasion like Kinmen. And if the PLA seizes control of Taiwan, Tian will get them all anyway,” Showalter answered.

“And your people don’t think Liang will back down?” Stuart asked Cooke.

“Nobody is optimistic,” Cooke said. “He’s too corrupt to care about the soldiers on Kinmen, and he’s no strategic genius. If his party loses the election, he loses all protection from prosecution on corruption charges. He needs friends in power, so he was desperate enough to light this tinderbox in the first place. He wanted the Taiwan public focused on an external threat. They’re focused now, but if Liang shows weakness and backs down, he loses everything. And Tian’s right. Liang is almost certainly banking on you to stop the PLA and get Kinmen back for him.”

“So where does this hit on the Ma Kong fit into this?” Stuart asked, waving the paper in the air.

“The Red Cell has a theory, but I’m not prepared to explain it in detail—” Cooke started.

“Then give me the short version,” Stuart ordered.

“Yes, sir,” Cooke said. She hated to share unproven theories, but an order was an order. “It was a weapons test.”

Stuart stared at the CIA director, surprised. “What kind of weapon?”

“We don’t know exactly, but something designed to kill an aircraft carrier.” She spent less than a minute on the history of the Assassin’s Mace project. “Basically, if this ‘assassin’s mace,’ whatever it is, can take out a Kidd-class destroyer, then it might be able to take out a carrier.”

Stuart rolled his eyes, dropped the paper on the table, and slumped back into his chair. “So the Chinese think they have a way to kill carriers. No wonder Tian was shoving it all in my face.”

“We don—,” Cooke started.

“‘We don’t know,’ yes, yes,” Stuart cut her off. He sucked in a deep breath in frustration. “Lance, could Taiwan defend the Pescadores without our help?” Stuart asked.

“No,” Showalter said. The man’s response was quick and final. Cooke raised an eyebrow. “But if you want, we can draw a line in the sand there. There’s fifty miles of South China Sea between Penghu and the mainland coast. With Taiwan’s support, we can make it feel like fifty thousand. Lincoln and Washington are both en route. Lincoln is sailing south, three days out of Yokosuka. Washington is one day east of Guam. We can back them up with the air wing at Kadena, and if you want to start hitting some ground targets, we can start flying the B-2s out of Kansas.” He considered knowing the position of all twelve US carriers a basic function of his job.

“But we could lose a carrier to this… thing, whatever this thing might be,” Stuart said. He sounded more tired than before.

“Harry, you could lose a carrier even if they don’t have this thing,” the SecDef said.

“Sir, if I may?” Cooke interrupted him.

“Yes?”

“In my job, I’m not supposed to recommend policy. I’m just supposed to give you the intelligence and the analysis. But I can tell you what the likely implications of any course of action might be. Sir, if you turn those carriers around, it will send a very loud message to every one of our allies on the Pacific Rim and a louder one to our enemies everywhere else. And I don’t believe I have to spell out to you what that message is. But it will be final and irreversible, and the United States will never recover the influence we will lose. You’ll change the world and not in a way you will like, sir.” Cooke sat back and realized that her heart was pounding harder than she could ever remember.

“That was bold,” Stuart said quietly.

“Yes, sir. I’ll understand if you want me to—”

Stuart cut her off once again, this time with a wave of his hand. “I like bold. And it helps that I agree with you.” He left the implied consequences of disagreeing with her unsaid. “Any ideas about what story I should feed the press about the carriers going in?”

“You could make a statement that the carriers are there to protect the right to free maritime passage through international waters during hostilities,” Showalter offered.

“You wouldn’t even be lying,” Cooke said in agreement. She pointed at the map and traced a line. “Taiwan sits in the Luzon Strait connecting the Pacific with the South China Sea north of the Philippines. That is the major shipping lane linking Japan and the Koreas to Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. If Tian takes over and creates a Kinmen — Pescadores — Taiwan line under one flag, he could close off access to commercial shipping at will through both the Taiwan and Luzon Straits.”

“I like it.” The president of the United States smiled and nodded. “Lance, pull the plans off the shelf for defending the Pescadores. And send that Red Cell report to the carrier groups. If that’s the PLA’s playbook, I want them to know it back and front.”

Barron had a whole pot of coffee waiting in Cooke’s office this time when she came through the door. The CIA director downed two mugs of it to give herself some time to think and she drew a third before sitting down.

She opened the file and pulled out a research paper. “The Red Cell came up with this a few years ago. I just shared it with the president.”

Barron took the paper and scanned the abstract. “That’s not bad,” he said. “If they’re right, Penghu and the rest of the Pescadores are next on the menu.” He dropped the paper on the table.

“The president liked it,” Cooke said. “We need to get an idea of when the PLA could make a run on the Pescadores. What’s the holdup with Pioneer?”

Barron sucked in a deep breath and Cooke felt her intuition scream. She said nothing. The NCS director needed the chance to break the news in his own way. “Chief of station says that Pioneer’s been burned,” he said, sotto voce. It was the worst thing he could have said at that moment and he knew it.

Cooke closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands, and gritted her teeth so hard she was afraid she was going to break her jaw. “What happened?” she asked slowly, her voice controlled.

“We don’t know,” Barron admitted.

“Do we know how long he’s been under surveillance?” Cooke asked.

“No.” Barron had done nothing, but felt incompetent all the same.

“I assume Mitchell has an exfiltration plan?” asked Cooke.

Barron confirmed the assumption with a nod. “We’ve had one in place for twenty years.”

“Always risky,” Cooke said. Exfiltrations were rare. Most foreign assets retired in place or left their homeland on their own. “How long before Mitchell can get him out?”

“Hard to say, given the increased security over there,” Barron admitted. “I’d send a separate team to do the job if I could, but with Beijing in lockdown, it’ll be tough to get more than a few people in on short notice without raising red flags. So it might just be grab-and-go.”

“That’s a devil of a thing to do to a man,” Cooke said. It wasn’t a criticism. “Ask him to walk out of his whole life on a moment’s notice.”

“Better than getting shot by the MSS on a moment’s notice,” Barron said.

Cooke sat back in her chair. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Barron said. “The Red Cell just put in a request to send a pair of analysts to China to debrief Pioneer.”

Cooke nodded. “Burke and Stryker think they’ve got something developing on their Assassin’s Mace theory.”

“Normally, I wouldn’t let a DI analyst within a hundred miles of an asset that sensitive, but if they’re on to something with this Assassin’s Mace idea, I might be inclined to give them some latitude. But even if we send them, there’s no guarantee we can get them and Pioneer in the same room. Sending a pair of analysts might just be feeding the surveillance monster. I’m fine with sending Stryker, but Burke sounds too high-risk to me.”

“He’s done time in the field, so he’s got some ops training,” Cooke replied. “Firearms, Crash-and-Bang, the usual stuff we run analysts through before we sent them to the sandbox”—Iraq. “I’ll get his file to you.”

“Crash-and-bang isn’t the same as training to operate in a hostile countersurveillance environment.”

Cooke nodded. “True, but risk is the business,” she said, finishing the argument. “Greenlight the Red Cell TDY to Beijing.”

“They don’t say two words to Pioneer without one of my people in the room,” Barron said.

“Agreed,” she assured him. “But I want Mitchell to give them full cooperation. None of those station chief king-of-the-hill games.”

“Mitchell will love that,” Barron said.

“He’d better learn,” Cooke said. “If the Chinese are going after the Pescadores, I want Stuart to have plenty of warning this time. If the diplomats fail, the PLA won’t just be rolling tanks for the next part. They’ll be flying planes, and those move just a bit faster.”

The Information Operations Center was one of five CIA divisions set up to attack problems not bounded neatly by national borders. Drug trafficking, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and counterintelligence each had earned their own units, but IOC had outgrown most of them in little more than a decade. The criminals engaged in the other offenses were not blind to technology’s march, and the Internet had come to underpin their activities as much as money. IOC pursued them all, fueled by a budget that would have placed it easily in the Fortune 1000.

Kyra was surprised to see that Jonathan knew his way through the Analysis Group spaces. It was a cubicle farm like the one she had expected to see in the Red Cell, but the sheer number of workspaces was enormous. There were dozens, easily more than a hundred, all flanking a single aisle that ran more than a hundred yards from end to end. The vault took up the entire side of the building on this floor alone.

Farm is too small, she decided. A cubicle plantation?

“Twenty years ago, there was exactly one analyst working computer security issues,” Jonathan muttered quietly to her.

“I guess somebody figured out that the Internet was changing the world.”

“A rare case of the Agency staying on top of technology instead of playing catch-up,” he agreed. Jonathan steered her by the arm to a private office at the end of a wall opposite the analyst pens and pushed the door open without bothering to knock.

“Jonathan!” Kyra heard the voice, basso, but her position kept her from seeing the man in the office. “Get in here and close the door before someone sees me consorting with the Red Cell.”

“I apologize for what you’re about to endure,” Jonathan said quietly. He held out his arm in gentlemanly fashion to let Kyra pass.

Kyra stepped into an office large enough only for the desk, a file cabinet, and a shabby visitors’ couch that looked far older than the room itself. The desk was overrun by no less than four computer monitors and Kyra counted at least five hardware towers on the floor, making the rat’s nest of wiring underfoot entirely predictable. What space was left on the desktop was overtaken by papers and DVD jewel cases with assorted classification markings scribbled on them in permanent blue ink. The room’s occupant was reasonably handsome, young, with two days’ growth of blond beard on his face, but his threadbare military sweater was hardly the height of fashion. He smiled innocently, and Kyra got the impression that the man was utterly ignorant that his clothes were totally without style.

“Kyra, meet Garr Weaver,” Jonathan said.

“One of the few here who will still speak to Jon. How did Mr. Burke here convince you to hook up with his outfit?” Weaver spoke with a light southern accent that seemed mixed with occasional New England inflections on the vowels. Weaver was either raised in the South and educated in the North, or the reverse. Kyra settled on the former, given that his southern accent was more prominent than the Boston cadence.

“He didn’t—,” Kyra started.

“A volunteer!” Weaver exclaimed, taking Kyra’s answer and logically extending it to the wrong extreme. Weaver stood and offered his hand, which she shook before sitting on the couch. Up close she saw it was covered with the hair of a hundred visitors. She was appalled that she would have to attack her shirt and pants with a lint brush when she got home but tried not to show it.

“A directed assignment,” Kyra said.

Weaver’s eyebrows went up in mock surprise. “The seventh floor has instituted the draft again?”

“Don’t mind the interrogation,” Jonathan advised. “Garr is one of the Red Cell’s emeritus members.”

“I did a rotation there a few years ago when I got swept up by one of Cooke’s press gangs. Jonathan and some heavy drinking made it tolerable,” Weaver said. Kyra figured that the last part was a lie. “So what can I do you for?”

“A favor, I hope.” Jonathan held out the CD. “This is a custom software program developed by a Chinese aerospace company, but we have no follow-up on it. I need you to take a look at it.”

“Excellent. I love tearing foreign software apart.” Weaver extracted the disk by the edges and placed it carefully in the tray sticking out of a Macintosh tower under his desk. He pressed a button on a grubby keyboard and the tray slid shut. “Anything you can tell me about the asset who handed this over?”

“No,” Jonathan said.

“Ah. One of those,” Weaver said. “Does the company have a name?”

“Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute,” Kyra said. “It might have also been filed under China Aviation Industry Corporation.”

“Ah, the Chinese. The source of all cyberevil in the world, or so the Pentagon thinks,” Weaver said. The disk finished loading and a single icon appeared on one of the monitors. Weaver called up a window displaying the file’s statistics. “Not a very big file, a Linux binary, almost a hundred megabytes.”

“The Chinese use Linux?” Jonathan asked.

“A variant called Red Flag Linux,” Kyra said.

“You know Linux?” Weaver asked, surprised.

“Computers are a hobby,” she admitted.

“A woman with some geek cred. Jonathan, you’ve been holding out on me,” Weaver said. Then he turned serious. “About, oh, fifteen years ago, the Chinese government got worried that Microsoft might have put backdoors into Windows that would give us or NSA covert access to their systems. The source code to Linux is free, so the Chinese decided that it would be safer to own their own operating system for critical functions. So they created their own variant called Red Flag Linux. The logo is a marching penguin carrying a Chinese flag. I’m not kidding.”

He double-clicked the icon. A Linux virtualization program launched, followed by the application. The program filled Weaver’s monitor with a blank window divided into quadrants, all black, and a small toolbar of icons across the top under a menu of Mandarin characters. “It looks like a pretty standard CAD program, I think,” Weaver observed. “Did you get any of their data files that we can load up?”

“No,” Jonathan admitted. “Or if we did, the NCS wouldn’t hand them over.”

“Always a possibility with that lot,” Weaver conceded. “I can build some test objects later to scope out the program functions. What I can tell you right now is that these”—Weaver pointed to a set of characters in the upper left quadrant—“are probably simple measurements fields: height, width, scale, and so on.” He clicked his mouse several times and rendered a cube with each quadrant displaying the object from a different vantage point in two dimensions. The upper left window showed the cube in three. “Yeah,” Weaver said. “Definitely units of measurement, all metric, probably — centimeters, meters, whatever. I’m not sure what this one is,” he said, pointing at a label of unreadable characters. “This measurement field doesn’t change when I change the object size. I’ll call APLAA and see if they’ll send me a translator to read the label. But if all else fails, I’ll just reverse-engineer the algorithm behind that field.”

“‘Just,’” Jonathan mused. “How long?”

“If APLAA will help, a few hours, maybe. But that’s unlikely,” Weaver said with certainty. “We are a bit of a drive from headquarters out here. They won’t be anxious to come this far out in the snow, even if the Agency does reimburse the mileage.”

“They’ll beg off,” Jonathan agreed. “So without their help?”

“I’ll have to tear the app apart. A week if I put in some long hours,” Weaver replied.

“Any way you can speed that up?” Kyra asked.

Weaver turned slightly in his chair and considered the woman. Kyra wasn’t sure she liked the look on his face. “I’ve been known to work a minor miracle with the proper incentive.”

“And what incentive are you looking for?” Kyra asked.

“You and me. Lunch in the Agency dining room,” Weaver said. He was perfectly serious.

“You’re bold,” Kyra answered. She kept her face neutral.

“Life gives nothing to the meek,” Weaver told her.

Jonathan raised an eyebrow and looked at the young woman. Kyra didn’t flinch, whether from case officer training or just personal experience with software engineers, Jonathan couldn’t tell. “What text editor do you use? Vi or Emacs?” she asked.

“Emacs,” Weaver said.

“Sorry, I’m a Vi girl. I don’t go out with Emacs guys.” Jonathan suspected that Kyra would have picked whichever option Weaver hadn’t.

“I’ll convert.”

“I can’t respect a coder who’s willing to abandon his preferred text editor for a woman he just met. That’s just bad form. Shows desperation.” Kyra paused for just the right effect. “I’m embarrassed for you now.”

“Hey, I’m not a Linux fanboy with bad hygiene,” Weaver said. “I know how to show a girl a good time.”

Kyra cocked her head and smiled, and Jonathan sensed Farm training was coming into play. Weaver was out of his league. Dating any woman was an exercise in codebreaking for men under normal circumstances. Chasing women trained in covert operations and espionage recruitment elevated the game to a new level, southern charm notwithstanding. “I’ll make you a deal,” she finally said. “You reverse-engineer that app and figure out what that number means for us in three days. Reconstruct it in C plus plus. If your interpretation of the algorithm is sufficiently elegant, I’ll let you take me to the ADR.”

“Objective-C would be prettier.”

“And cheating if you use the Cocoa framework. You do that and you only get to take me to Starbucks. I like a man who can write his own root class from scratch,” Kyra chided. Jonathan was completely lost in the jungle of jargon that the two were tossing around.

“Three days, eh?” Weaver scratched his stubble. “You’re on. Jon, you’ll have to excuse me. I have a deadline to meet.”

“You realize that I didn’t understand a word of that?” Jonathan asked the pair.

“Suffice it to say that your partner there will be enjoying a rack of lamb with me in the ADR a week from today.”

“You’re assuming that your code will be elegant enough to meet my standards,” Kyra said. Jonathan couldn’t tell whether she was teasing. “That’s a subjective measure and totally out of your control.”

“Let’s just say that I have a high opinion of my coding skills,” Weaver told her, smiling. “And I appreciate the challenge, no matter how this turns out.”

“I doubt your team chief will appreciate us monopolizing your time,” Jonathan said.

“Did you tell anyone here that you were coming?” Weaver asked.

“No,” Jonathan said.

“The word will get out. It always does. If anyone asks, I’m working with you in the interest of damage control.”

“Whatever makes you happy,” Jonathan said. “Good to see you, Garr.”

“Always my pleasure. I’ll call when I have something.”

“Good luck,” Kyra said with a wry smile.

“Luck is for people who lack skill,” Garr replied. He turned back to the monitor, and Kyra watched the cybersecurity analyst vanish in a moment into his own little world.

“In a hurry?” Drescher asked. Kyra’s manner was impatient.

“I’m on my way to the airport,” she said. “Pictures of a hundred dead bodies?”

“Much better,” Drescher said. He pressed a button and the Ops Center monitors blanked out the news channels and replaced them with single feed. “A few hundred Chinese tanks rolling for the coast. Pretty shot too. Low-orbit, great lighting, the overhead angle is almost straight down. Satellite imagery doesn’t get prettier than this.”

“Where are we looking?” Kyra asked.

“Nanjing, Guiyang Army Base,” Drescher replied. He held out a map of the Chinese coast with symbols marked on the page. “Eleven infantry divisions, eight special forces regiments, two armored divisions, one artillery division, and a pair of reserve units,” Drescher read off a paper prepared by his APLAA analyst. “Total manpower around three hundred thousand. No heat blooms in any navy ships along the coast, so all those tanks are just for show until they get their air bridge set up. That’s where the real action is.”

He handed over a set of photographs. “I don’t think they’re lining these up just to send us a message. Too many working bodies around the planes.” Some of the dark specks marking the ground crews in the pictures were standing by spaghetti hoses of jet fuel lines snaking up to the planes. “There’s activity at Shantou, Fuzhou, Zhongshan, Taihe, and Zeguo. But that’s not what’s interesting.” Drescher pushed another set of photos into her hands, then turned and put his finger down on a map of China taped to the wall behind his desk. “All of that other activity is along the southeastern coast, but those were taken over Chengdu.”

Kyra saw where his finger had landed on the map and her eyebrows went up. “You’re on your way to India that far west.”

“That’s why it’s interesting. Thought your partner might like to know.”

“Has Taiwan responded?” Kyra asked.

“Nothing significant. Increased air patrols, but they’re all staying inside Taiwanese airspace.” Drescher rested a hand on the photo stack. “No heat blooms in Taiwanese Navy ships in port. Tian has got Liang shell-shocked. The PLA storms Kinmen, Taiwan tries to start moving, and the PLA knocks out one of their best ships while it’s still in port. Liang’s probably too scared to make a move. He hasn’t got a skirt to hide behind until Lincoln and Washington show up.”

“Thanks,” Kyra said.

“Talk to you on the other side,” Drescher said with a slight bow.

“At least we got business class. Economy would have killed me,” Kyra said. Agency regulations allowed travelers to upgrade on flights over eight hours, which Kyra had hoped would give her a fighting chance to sleep.

“It won’t help,” Jonathan said. The woman sounded very satisfied with herself at getting approval for the trip, and had been from the moment she saw his surprise when they received the notice. He was still wondering why Cooke had approved the trip and quietly hoped that the chief of station at the other end wouldn’t just out them to the Chinese on arrival. He imagined that Carl Mitchell would be less than enthusiastic about taking responsibility for a pair of analysts, given current events. “China is thirteen hours ahead of us. Your body clock will be jet-lagged no matter how much sleep you get. You’d do better to stay awake for a while.”

“Pessimist,” she accused him.

“Realist. There is a difference,” Jonathan said. His eyes didn’t shift from the copy of the Economist on his tray table. “Optimists make poor analysts,” he said. “They aren’t critical enough.”

“That’s just morose.”

“Reading the PDB every day will do that to you,” Jonathan said.

“The president does that, and he still smiles.”

“A politician’s job depends on smiling. Mine doesn’t. It does depend on my being awake, even after fourteen hours on a plane. Yours too. So lay off the wine,” he advised her. “You don’t want to fight jet lag and a hangover at the same time.” The plane had only been in the air for half an hour and Kyra was already working on her second glass. Dinner was still a few hours off, so she was drinking on an empty stomach, and he knew that case officers favored bars and pubs as places to meet assets for reasons that had nothing to do with security. CIA’s clandestine service was still a boys’ club that ran on a machismo that made an inability, or unwillingness, to imbibe alcohol a fatal weakness among one’s peers. Mormons and Muslims got a pass, but the rest were expected to follow the unwritten rule, and Burke had no doubts that Stryker could match the men drink for drink.

“Why? The coffee is free,” she deadpanned.

“So is the turbulence.”

“Speaking from experience?” she asked.

“I don’t drink,” Jonathan said, his voice suddenly cold.

Alcoholics in the family tree? They weren’t nearly close enough for her to ask that question, and Kyra knew when to turn a conversation. “Sounds like you’ve traveled your share for work,” Kyra said. She didn’t refer to the Agency by name. Even on a Boeing 777, business class was cramped quarters, and they had no idea who was a foreign national and who wasn’t. The case officer had already picked out several of their fellow travelers as Chinese nationals and heard at least four other languages being spoken that she couldn’t identify at the moment. One sounded vaguely Japanese, though Kyra couldn’t really distinguish some of the Asian tongues from each other. Some of the other languages closer to his side of the aisle sounded like they came from Eastern Europe. She didn’t know what anyone around her was talking about, but the conversations were animated enough that she assumed they were discussing the Kinmen invasion. Every passenger on the plane was flying into a country that was at war, and she couldn’t imagine what else they might talk about under the circumstances, even if Jonathan seemed determined to avoid the subject.

“I’ve flown domestic plenty. London a few times, Rome once. I hiked the Okinawa battlefields. And I did a tour in the sandbox.”

The sandbox, she thought. Iraq. “You see any action?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I was at Camp Doha before the war. Saddam sent some Scuds over during the buildup, but nothing close. Then I was in the Green Zone for a year. Zawahiri’s boys sent some mortar rounds our way. There were some car bombs. Nothing too close.” He shifted in the seat and stretched out his legs to work out the kinks. “So you going to tell me what happened down in Venezuela?”

Her head twisted in surprise and he saw pain flash across her eyes. “Cooke told you about that?”

“Only after I made a few deductions about why she brought you to the Red Cell.”

Kyra frowned and looked around the darkened cabin. Most of the passengers were settling in to sleep or starting to watch movies. She reached down and rolled up the long shirt sleeve on her left arm. She still had a padded gauze bandage taped across her upper arm. She pulled it back and turned so the senior analyst could see the back of her arm but her body blocked the view of wandering eyes across the aisle.

Jonathan looked down at the wound. The girl had a lateral laceration running across her triceps. No question, she had lost some meat and the scar was going to be ugly. He tilted his head and studied the wound. “Seven-point-six-two-millimeter round?”

“Lucky guess,” she said. Kyra replaced the bandage and pulled her sleeve down.

“It’s a common caliber used by South American militaries,” he said. “They were close.”

“Yeah, they were,” Kyra said. “You ever make it to Beijing?” she asked. Please let it go.

He paused, as though considering whether to grant her unspoken request. “No, unfortunately,” he said finally. “It would be very useful if one of us had spent time on the ground there. I’m told it can be a difficult city to navigate.”

“Not a problem,” Kyra said.

“Optimist.”

“If we can’t find our way around a foreign city without a map, then we’re working for the wrong agency,” she said. It surprised her to finally see Jonathan smile.

Weaver put the soda can a safe distance from the keyboard — he’d lost more than one electronic device to carbonated drinks — and turned his attention back to the monitor. It was dead quiet inside the vault except for the hum of the server fans mounted in the rack under his desk. He had the vault to himself and he preferred it that way. It was difficult enough to translate hexadecimal code into assembly language without the distractions of other analysts talking in the hallway.

Reverse-engineering a compiled computer program was the most difficult craft a programmer could master. Writing programs in the first place, even complex ones, was child’s play by comparison. The programmer could use any one of dozens of languages to create one. Any of those languages made life easy for the coders by letting them use English words — called source code—instead of forcing them to use pure numbers, which was all that computers really understood. Those English commands were converted into those numbers by a compiler, a one-way translator between the two.

Reverse engineering was the craft of turning those raw numbers back into English commands with no source code to act as a guide. It was like trying to translate demotic Egyptian without benefit of a Rosetta Stone. Humans thought in the base-ten counting system, where the numbers ran 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 before adding a second digit to make 10. Computers thought in eight-bit binary — base two — where the sequence was 00000000-00000001-00000011, on to infinity. But it was easy to misread the streams of 0s and 1s while suffering a boredom that no Coke or coffee could cure. So Weaver used a decompiler to convert the binary numbers into hexadecimal — base sixteen. Weaver could at least think in hexadecimal, which counted 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-a-b-c-d-e-f. But from there, he had to look at the numbers and try to turn them back into source code that performed the same functions.

The private sector paid good money to the few who could reverse-engineer programs. It was a useful skill to any company looking to steal a competitor’s software trade secrets, and Weaver had just the right amount of insanity for the craft. His skills should have brought more than double his government salary, and Microsoft and Google had both made generous offers, but Weaver’s patriotic streak kept him tethered to government service. He supposed that he could have made a healthy living performing corporate espionage, but he could perform the same acts here without worrying about the law. If Weaver hadn’t kept himself pumped full of caffeine — the true blood of programmers everywhere — he would have slept the sleep of the righteous.

The program that the Red Cell had brought him was straightforward. The Chinese coders who’d written it had been competent but uninspired. Programming was a craft where efficiency created a natural elegance, but the best algorithms ceased to be lines of code and became something beautiful, all pure in their efficiency and working together in a modular harmony. The lines of code that Weaver spent the night reconstructing weren’t even close to that, which was both a blessing and a curse. It made them almost predictable to reverse into assembly code. It also made them boring, which was not helpful, given that it was well past midnight.

The algorithm Weaver extracted from the Chinese CAD program was longer than expected and more complicated than its size implied. MIT had required him to take an introductory course in differential equations, and he’d only gotten a middling grade, so it took him an hour to realize that the algorithm was one of those. He had borrowed a colleague’s textbooks — Weaver had sold his own back to the college hours after the final exam — but they hadn’t helped him one whit. It occurred to him that, given that the algorithm was integrated into a CAD program, texts on general mathematical theory weren’t going to help him much. Geometry or mechanical engineering texts, or maybe physics, would be more relevant.

The other equations measured the simplest of physical properties — length, width, depth, area. This one stayed constant when the dimensional variables were kept proportional: changing an object’s overall size did not change the equation’s output, but changing its shape did. He was overlooking… what? Mass? Weaver ruled it out. That would have changed along with the area measurement. Tensile strength? Not possible without inputting the specific material the shape would be cut from, and Weaver couldn’t see a way to enter that value into the program. He considered that it could be a parts number generator, assigning unique identifiers to each new part being designed so it could be located in some database. But the equation was too complex for that. Was it some other engineering function that he wasn’t familiar with?

He finally asked an APLAA analyst to help him identify the related pictograph on the CAD program’s interface. The APLAA analyst had wasted an hour searching out the Mandarin pictograph radicals of that label before realizing they weren’t likely to be in a standard usage dictionary. She found them in a technical dictionary in short order—hengjiemian. The literal translation was… “cross-view”? That made no sense to Weaver. Yes, mechanical engineers used CAD programs to create cross-section technical drawings, but where was the connection to a mathematical formula that changed its product when the object’s shape changed but not its size?

Still, even if he had the source code in hand, it was probable that he still wouldn’t understand what the mathematical calculation was supposed to tell him. It was one thing to know that a piece of source code calculated e=mc². It was another to know that that particular formula explained why nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. This Chinese algorithm promised to be far more complex than Einstein’s simple formula. But Weaver wasn’t going to fail. Identifying the equation’s purpose was now a point of professional pride. Lunch with Stryker was just going to be the capper. She was one of the few DI officers that he’d met of late who weren’t either taken or socially useless introverts. Besides, the woman knew how to write code. That and the fact that she was easy on the eyes made her worth the effort.

Weaver rolled back from the desk and dropped the soda can in the garbage. It was late enough that the pitiful amount of caffeine in a cola wouldn’t keep him awake. Time for the coffee mug.