Red Cell

CHAPTER 13

Beijing’s air under the streetlamps looked like the fall morning fog that rolled off the James River bend at Scottsville where Kyra grew up. Her bedroom had given her an open view of the river valley, which was usually covered by mist formed by the supersaturated air hiding the trees along the shorelines. She had always cursed the pervasive humidity in Virginia, which never died except during winter, but this urban fog was a deep, dull gray. It disgusted her to see the monochrome color so clearly in the headlights of hundreds of cars, and the smell made her want to retch her dinner onto the sidewalk. She could feel the particulates seeping into her lungs, and the urge to hold her breath was overwhelming. She assumed that her body could learn to ignore the odor, but she imagined that, given time, the air would paint her lungs with a black coat of toxin and guarantee cancer or worse.

Kyra hoped that she would get a few minutes in the safe house to wash the city air off her skin, but her discomfort was a minor issue. Her immediate concern was the fog’s effect on surveillance. For her, it would make detecting surveillance a more complex chore than usual. Her forward visibility was less than fifty feet; people faded into hazy shapes beyond that range, but that worked both ways. MSS teams would have to ride her closer than they might otherwise prefer. They would likely give her some distance, but in the gaseous soup the instinct would be to close the distance to keep her in sight. It seemed counterintuitive, but the plan said that her best countermove was to help them do exactly that. It made her nervous but she trusted the plan. The variables were eliminated or controlled in ruthless fashion as far as Mitchell could manage, but the odds still were not in her favor. Don’t think about the odds, he’d said. Follow the plan, choose your moments, remember your training.

Of course, Mitchell didn’t know that Kyra had nearly beaten an MSS officer to death in an alleyway the night before. That man was surely in a hospital. If he had identified her and the MSS picked her out tonight as the woman responsible, they would probably be looking for payback. Then again, they were keeping their distance tonight. Maybe finding one of their officers crippled had made them think twice about their tactic of playing rough. The change introduced a new level of uncertainty.

Maybe I shouldn’t have done this, she thought. Jonathan was right. She really hadn’t been thinking straight. No help for it now. The MSS had fallen back. That worked in her favor for the moment, and all she could do now was follow the plan.

Her first task was to let the MSS keep her in sight. They were working hard at that, and it was now an advantage that Kyra was taller than the average Chinese woman and had far lighter hair. Her second task was to make them believe she was unskilled and a desperate choice on Mitchell’s part. Too tall, too blond, badly dressed for a covert operation — an American woman with a bright red backpack had no chance of mixing with the pedestrian crowd here no matter what she tried.

That she was even trying was a false assumption.

She fumbled to put on a baseball cap, then pulled off her coat and reversed it far too slowly after turning the corner, to make a few other clumsy changes to her appearance. All were awkward. Amateurs could have done as well. Kyra was no amateur.

Her third task was to let them see the red backpack. The bag could not have been more visible had it been the blaze orange color she’d worn those times when her father had dragged her into the woods hunting Virginia white-tailed deer. Here it would create a constant point of reference for anyone following her at a longer distance, even through the fog. No matter what else she did to change her gross profile, the surveillance team could always look for the red backpack. In the polluted air, with visibility low and the crowds heavy, it would draw their focus.

Then she would perform an act of magic.

Every magic trick has three parts. Kyra had already delivered the “pledge” to her hostile audience. She had offered them an ordinary American woman walking for twelve blocks. Kyra memorized the route before stepping out — so many blocks in one direction, then turn, so many blocks in the next direction. A few landmarks had kept her on the track. With those in sight, Kyra maintained the appearance of a disinterested expatriate wandering the Beijing dajies and dongdajies. She did nothing unusual, and the resulting boredom would set up the gallery to focus on the “turn,” when she would give them something interesting to watch. The MSS would have to wait a few minutes for the “prestige,” the act of misdirection that would complete the trick. They wouldn’t appreciate the artistry when they finally realized that a trick had taken place. This act would be subtle. It would not be a performance meant to impress.

Pioneer lived in a studio flat on the tenth floor of an aging tower. The building was a cylinder, twice as tall as the Watergate and topped by a roof that extended past the exterior walls. Lit apartment patios lined up in neat columns and drew muted vertical concrete stripes in the haze.

The building was less than a block ahead now and Kyra could sense the surveillance team behind her. She wondered if these particular foot soldiers knew about Pioneer. Given the extent of Pioneer’s treason against the state, Mitchell considered it likely that the MSS would have compartmentalized his case. The Ministry of State Security was not small, and anyone low enough in the organization to be stuck following random Americans on the street likely wouldn’t know about him, and therefore where he lived. It was a gamble, but an unavoidable one. Depending on the efficiency of their internal communications, she would likely have a few minutes before the Sixth Bureau pieced anything together. If they were like CIA’s bureaucracy, she could have days. Another gamble — the enemy’s response time was unpredictable.

Kyra entered the building.

The cramped lobby was not well lit and the dark paint and carpet soaked up most of the available light. The elevator was ahead to the left, out of the line of sight of anyone at the front door. Unless the surveillance team wanted to enter the building to maintain pursuit, they would have to fan out to cover all the exits. There were two others, one a fire exit to the east, the other a cargo entrance in the building rear. Spreading the team out would actually help her. Her magic act would work best if played out for a small audience, the smaller the better. A single witness could be more easily confused than several who might each notice different details and piece together the truth more quickly. If only one man saw the trick, he would call out to his team, out of sight at the other exits, and they would have to take his word for what he saw.

Kyra called for the elevator. Then she closed her eyes and listened. Turning back to look around the corner and watch the door would have been obvious, but sound carried through the lobby just fine. The elevator took more than a minute to reach the lobby floor, and the building’s main entrance door didn’t open during that time. Either she was alone, the best possibility of all, or the surveillance team was splitting apart to surround the building. They might have been calling for additional assets, but even so it would likely take them longer to arrive than she planned to give them.

Kyra stepped into the elevator car and wondered where the hidden cameras were.

The view of the Forbidden City was one of the few amenities worth the rent Pioneer had paid for more than twenty years. Looking south he could see the Qianqinggong, the Palace of Heavenly Purity, rising above the northern wall. Beyond it farther to the south was Tiananmen Square. He couldn’t see the square from his bedroom but he knew it was there.

The MSS knew what he was. There was no question about that. They had not dragged him away to be shot only because they wanted to expose the larger network of which he was a part. He had signaled the CIA and only after did it occur to him that it might have been exactly the wrong play. CIA now knew he was exposed, and there would be no more covert meetings. They might not come for him. Pioneer would live out his last days working for the party until the MSS decided that there was nothing else to be gained from watching him, and then they would come for him some night, take him away, and shoot him in a grubby basement. He didn’t know how many more days he had, but the length of his life would be set by some MSS officer’s patience.

There had been a disturbance in the apartment above his the night before, heavy knocking on the floorboards. Perhaps the MSS had taken over the apartment. They could have installed fiber-optic cameras in the ceiling when he had gone for dinner. His first impulse was to search for them, but he had concluded that it was futile. If the MSS wanted to watch him, they would watch him and he couldn’t stop it. They could enter his home anytime he left within moments of his departure. Any person he passed in the hallway could be the MSS officer who would soon put the pistol to his head. Any apartment in the building could be an MSS watch post. The same held true for any apartment in any building he could see from his own home. He’d felt alone for years, but now his home was filled with a sense of murderous hostility.

Despite that, he felt a strange calm. He wondered if the unknown God was with him, whispering peace to his soul. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Could God love a traitor? Perhaps, he supposed. A loving God surely could not love the party, so perhaps God could love one who fought them. Perhaps there was some reward waiting for him after death instead of the oblivion that the party promised. Either was a more tempting path than what he was living now. Suicide had occurred to him, but Pioneer felt that would be a surrender to the enemy. He had fought the party for more than half his life and he could not give that up so easily. No, if he was going to die today, they would have to kill him. He would not do their job for them. If he couldn’t hurt them any other way, they would at least pay for the cheap bullet they would use on the back of his head.

Someone knocked on his door. Pioneer turned and didn’t rise from the table. The knock came again after a half minute.

They had come. The MSS officer in charge, whoever he was, wasn’t a patient man after all.

Pioneer pushed his half-eaten plate of lamb roast across the table, wiped his mouth, and stood. He walked to the entryway, gripped the knob until his knuckles cracked, and opened the door to look his short future in the face so he could spit on it.

“Jian-Min!”

The blond woman leapt at him. Only the smile on her face kept him from backing away in a panic, and he found his arms full of an American girl he did not know. She jabbered at him in Chinese with an accent poor enough that he questioned whether she understood her own words or was just repeating memorized phrases like a good foreign actress.

Pioneer had never seen her before, so there was no question the MSS wouldn’t be able to figure out their relationship. Almost certainly that would put them on alert. If she was CIA, here to exfiltrate him from China, they wouldn’t have much time.

“I missed you so much. It’s been so long!” she said in her poor Mandarin. In fact, her intonation sounded robotic, like she didn’t understand what she was saying.

“Yes, it has.” It was best to keep his answers short and simple. If this woman didn’t speak Chinese, she wouldn’t be able to form answers to complex statements. Her replies would be nonsensical if he even asked her a simple question, and that would almost certainly bring the MSS running.

“I’m so happy you are free tonight. I promised you dinner at the Yueming Lou if you would show me the Forbidden City, remember?”

Pioneer stepped back. Yueming Lou. He had almost forgotten, but in the instant she said it, the memory came back with force.

Yueming Lou, he thought.

The Yueming Lou was a three-story restaurant in the Xicheng district converted from a church by the owners and popular with the Western tourists. The food was good, not excellent, traditional Hunan, and the prices were reasonable. He enjoyed it more for the third-story terrace views of the northern Beijing lakes and the hutong, the ancient narrow alleyways that had once spiderwebbed across Beijing before the party rebuilt the city after the Revolution. Pioneer had dined there many times, at least yearly, under orders that his case officer gave him starting in the third year of his treason. The request surprised him initially. Once he had earned the trust of his case officers, in the fifth year of his labor, they made their reasoning clear. Not every asset earned the promise of exfiltration to the United States. Many didn’t really want it. Abandoning home was not an easy matter even for traitors and especially for those motivated by ideology and not money. Among those who did want the promise, relatively few proved themselves worth the risks involved. Pioneer had.

Clark Barron — Pioneer had not known him by that name — was the case officer who made the promise. When Pioneer had asked him about the details of the plan, Barron had refused to answer. It was better if he didn’t know the details. What he did need was the signal that the plan was in motion. When the moment came, Barron explained, the case officer would give him a code phrase. “Whatever you’re doing,” Barron said, “drop it. Walk away. We’ll give you some warning if we can so you can pack some things, one bag at most. But when you hear that phrase, you leave with the contact right then. Whatever the contact tells you to do, follow their orders and they’ll get you out.” What Barron didn’t say, but what he had implied, was that hearing the code phrase meant that after he left China, he would not be coming back.

The code phrase was dinner at the Yueming Lou. The woman was here to keep Barron’s promise.

Pioneer stepped back and for a moment Kyra wondered whether his nerve was going to break.

The man looked at her. His face became a serene mask, but she had seen the brief emotion on it. The look on his face at that moment was a pure expression of his true feelings before it hardened to control his surprise.

For the first time in her life, Kyra had seen pure, unrelieved bitterness. It was hatred so intense she couldn’t understand what could cause it.

Then he looked at her again and she knew that she was not the target. They were the target of his anger, whoever they were, the ones who had driven him to choose this life. They had led him to this moment when he had to abandon his homeland or die. Kyra Stryker had no idea exactly who they were, but in that moment she hated them as much as Pioneer did, and then she understood.

She looked back at him. They’ll have to kill me to stop me from getting you out, she thought. Kyra hoped that he understood.

Pioneer eyed the young woman. She was still smiling, but it was a facade. There was a hard look in her eyes that sent him a very different message and, in the instant he saw it, he trusted her. She couldn’t speak Mandarin, which perplexed him for a second. Why did they send someone without that skill? Something was wrong. But this girl had come for him anyway, and that meant she was a bold one. He hoped it would be enough. His options were limited at the moment.

“I remember. Let me get my coat. It’s very cold outside,” he said in his native tongue. He saw that she tensed up as he started speaking. She clearly didn’t understand a word he’d said, but she relaxed when he turned away, walked to the closet, and retrieved a thick jacket. Then he indulged in a moment to look around home. It had never been a beautiful place, but it had been his shelter. The dishes were undone, food was still on the table. His books were lined up neatly on the shelf by a small television where he spent most of his nights watching party-approved foreign movies. The bed was unmade and his dirty clothing would now sit in the basket until the MSS took it away, searched it, and then burned it. His desk was neat at least. It was a writing desk built by his father for his mother from light brown Chinese elm with a matching chair. It was one of the few gifts that his parents had been able to leave him. He’d committed much of his treason sitting at that desk as he typed out reports on his laptop for the CIA. There was not much here that he could live without, but the desk he would miss. He prayed that rather than destroy it, some MSS officer might appreciate the craftsmanship and take it for his own. He thought for a moment that it might have been better to burn it, but in truth he wanted it to survive even if he couldn’t be there to own it. He’d known for years that he wouldn’t be able to take the desk to the United States were he ever exfiltrated. It was far too large and he’d known there wouldn’t be enough time to pack it up and ship it out of the country.

The CIA had not confirmed that they would be getting him out, so he had packed nothing. He did have a few photographs of his parents in a small envelope; he slipped them into his pocket. His parents were dead. It was the first moment that he was grateful for the party’s one-child policy. He had no siblings, so there was no one else to leave behind. No wife, no children, no lover, not even a pet. He’d only allowed himself a few friends at work, who would wonder tomorrow morning where he was. The party would almost certainly never tell them the truth about his disappearance. Perhaps the MSS would feed them a lie about his being killed in an automobile accident. He hoped they wouldn’t stage one and kill someone to provide a plausible foundation for the story.

He put on his coat and took his last look around his home. Thank you, he thought. He had suddenly become a sentimental fool, but this once he could not bring himself to care. A man who couldn’t be sentimental at such a moment didn’t deserve to live.

He looked at the young American woman and smiled. “I’m ready. Lead on,” he said. He motioned with his hands so she would understand.

Kyra took him by the hand and led him out the door. He turned, locked it, and they walked down the hallway toward the stairwell.

The stairway shaft leading to the first floor was filthy beyond anything Kyra had ever seen. She refused to touch the handrail and prayed that she wouldn’t fall, more out of fear of touching some organism that she’d never be able to clean off than for physical safety. She was unsure that the builders had ever painted the walls, much less repainted them over the years. Years of grime covered the steps, and the smell rising from below was ugly enough to be nauseating.

Kyra held Pioneer’s hand as they took the stairs by twos as fast as she thought was safe. They’d covered less than half the distance to the ground floor when she heard a noise from above. Several pairs of feet struck the metal stairs. She took a short moment to judge their direction of travel by the volume and decided they were descending the steps at least by threes. Kyra grabbed Pioneer by the arm and led him down the next flight to the sixth-floor exit. She tested the knob, found it unlocked, and no one was standing on the other side. Kyra pulled her charge through the door and closed it as quietly as she had opened it. She scanned the hallway and looked around the corner for any alcove deep enough for them to hide. There were none. The choice was to remain in place or run around the curved hallway to the opposite stairwell. Kyra judged the distance and decided they could not get out of sight before the men on the stairs would reach their level. She pushed Pioneer against the wall next to the door hinge so the opening door would give him some cover. She stood on the opposite side and set her balance for a strike to the face of anyone who came through.

The feet on the stairs reached their level. The men on the other side did not test the door. They continued down and Kyra counted to thirty before cracking the door. Without it closed and impeding her hearing, she took another moment to judge their distance and direction. The men were nearing the bottom and still moving.

She had focused on sounds in the stairwell too much. The MSS officer came around the corner, his feet silent on the worn carpet, and he caught Kyra across the face with a stiff forearm, pinning her against the wall. Pioneer grabbed for the man’s head. The attacker kicked backward into Pioneer’s stomach and knocked him to the ground with a hard grunt. It was a moment’s distraction that he couldn’t afford, and Kyra made him pay for it.

She kicked her own foot back against the MSS agent’s knee, and the man’s joint bent in the wrong direction almost to the point of breaking. He cried out and staggered back, unable to keep his weight against the woman to pin her to the wall. Kyra threw a hard elbow, caught him square on the nose, and she felt the crunch against her arm. The adrenaline killed the pain from the unhealed wound in her triceps; she felt nothing but the hard hit of the man’s face against her elbow. Her attacker fell back further, his hands over his face to hold back the blood that started to flow from his damaged nose. Kyra drove her foot into his stomach, but the officer was too close to the wall and Kyra’s kick compressed his solar plexus enough to drive the wind and vomit out of him. He started to double over. Kyra pivoted, stepped forward to close the distance, grabbed his hair, and pushed down as she drove her knee against his face. The bones she had cracked before shattered this time. The strike knocked him backward against the wall. Kyra finished him with a forearm across his throat. The officer fell to the floor, curled into the fetal position, unable to make a noise other than a rasping gurgle as he tried to suck in air and tasted his own blood for his trouble.

Kyra led Pioneer around the bending hall to another stairwell. She had planned to cross over to the building’s other side at some point, but Mitchell had left it to her discretion when to make the move. They entered the second shaft, as filthy as the first, and she listened. There were shouts from far above and below, but Kyra started down anyway.

She surprised her charge by leaving the stairwell again on the third floor. Pioneer watched as the woman reached into her pocket and pulled out a disposable cell phone. It had only two numbers preprogrammed. She speed-dialed the first as they ran. Eight doors down on the left, a door opened and Pioneer heard a telephone ringing inside. Kyra pushed him in.

The apartment was decorated in modern Chinese fashion with only a few nods to traditional furniture. The television was on with the volume unduly loud, the blinds were drawn, and the lights dimmed. A Chinese woman stood behind the door and closed it behind them.

“You’re Kyra?” she said.

“I am. You speak English?” Kyra said.

“Duke University, class of 2003. The package is on the counter by the stove.” Kyra nodded and made for the tiny galley kitchen.

The woman turned to Pioneer. She was Kyra’s age as best he could judge. She was young, lithe, taller than the average Chinese woman by several centimeters, with blond hair, which shocked him. He had seen her on occasion in the building lobby, but never often enough to warrant his close attention and always with black hair. Now, with light hair and casual Western clothing, he realized that she was not pure Chinese. He inspected her face closely and saw that her Chinese features were softened by some Western traits. “You are Long Jian-Min,” she said. Her Mandarin was flawless.

“I am.”

“I have waited a long time to meet you, but I had hoped that it would be some other way,” the woman said. “My name is Rebecca Zhou.”

“You are American?” Pioneer asked.

The woman nodded. “My grandparents fled to the United States during the Revolution when they were very young.”

Pioneer stared at her. “How long have you lived here?”

The young CIA officer smiled at him. “Six years.”

“Six years? CIA officers have lived in my building for six years?” He was astonished.

“CIA officers have lived in your building for almost as long as you have been working for us. You are a very valuable man. We are the fourth team to hold this post. Our job was to watch you, report back on your condition, and assist in your evacuation if it became necessary,” Rebecca said.

“Then you knew that the MSS was watching?” he asked.

Rebecca shook her head. “Not until you signaled. The MSS has been far more subtle than we ever expected, so we didn’t know until you discovered it yourself. But they have overreached, trying to use you to find a larger network of assets that doesn’t exist. We changed some of our tradecraft just for you. They didn’t realize this, and so they waited too long to arrest you.”

Kyra emerged from the kitchen with an open box. She dropped the red backpack, shed her coat, and began to pull off layers of clothing. Pioneer wondered for a moment just how much clothing she intended to remove.

Rebecca reached into the box and pulled out a bundle of clothing. “Please put this on, and hurry.”

Pioneer looked at Kyra, who had removed all but the base layer of her clothing. Rebecca took Kyra’s outer-layer shirt and pulled it over her head. Both women were wearing casual blue jeans cut slightly large to facilitate quick movement. Standing next to Rebecca, he saw that her appearance was similar to Kyra’s from moments ago. Not similar, he realized. Identical, as much as two unrelated women could appear. “And where is my twin?” he asked.

“My husband, Roland, is in the bedroom, waiting for your clothing,” the young woman answered.

Pioneer removed his coat, shirt, shoes, and pants and handed them over. Rebecca took them and disappeared into the darkness in the rear of the apartment. He donned the clothing the woman had provided for him. The fit was perfect. How did they know? he thought. He supposed that over the years, at least one of the people who met with him had had a trained eye for clothing sizes. Or had they been in his apartment as well? He doubted they would ever tell him.

Kyra pulled out another package from the box, this one zipped inside a black nylon case. She gestured for Pioneer to come with her and led him into the light of the kitchen.

The disguise package was descended from the “Silver Bullet” technologies developed by the Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology in the 1970s to help case officers penetrate KGB surveillance in Moscow. Kyra had never seen the original disguises. They were older than she was, but the pieces she applied to his face and body were realistic enough to make her stomach turn. The sight of blood had never fazed her, but holding body parts realistic enough to pass close inspection was another matter. They took thirty seconds to apply. She stepped back, inspected him, nodded, and led him back to the entryway. He looked around for a mirror but could not find one.

Rebecca was waiting with another man who was dressed as Pioneer was when he had entered the apartment.

“Are we ready?” Roland said in English.

“Ready,” Kyra said.

Rebecca reached down and hefted the red backpack. It was full of books, newspapers, pencils, and other items common to any Western exchange student. There was nothing to incriminate the carrier. The color was the only feature that made the pack important. “You have the keys to your car?” Rebecca said.

Pioneer nodded. It took him a moment to understand that she was asking for them. He handed them over. He was about to tell her where to find the car when it occurred to him that she surely knew.

Roland turned to Pioneer and spoke in his own perfect Mandarin. He also appeared Chinese, but Pioneer inspected his face and saw that he looked more like a Beijing native than his wife. “I regret I didn’t get to know you better. Perhaps we’ll get to talk in the United States one day soon.”

“I hope so,” Pioneer said. “You have my gratitude. But you could be arrested. Why would you do that for me?”

Roland grinned. “The director says that risk is our business. It’s what we do. And you have earned it.”

“Thank you.” The words felt insufficient.

“Thank us after you’re out of China,” Roland said. Pioneer nodded and smiled. Roland turned to Kyra and switched back to English. “We leave first. Give us ten minutes to draw surveillance. You’ll get a call, one ring only, if they figure things out before time is up. If that happens, you run. Which stairwell did you come down?”

“The west,” Kyra said.

“Anyone pass you?” Roland asked.

Kyra nodded. “We had to switch over on six.”

“We’ll take the central elevator down. They’ll think that’s as far as you went when you left the stairwell. Take the east stairwell. Turn left when you get outside, one block, and then cut through the park. That’ll send you north. The taxi will be waiting on the far side,” Roland said. “The driver is one of ours. We’ll buy you as much time as we can.”

“Done deal. You’re on the clock,” Kyra said.

“See you in the States,” Roland assured her. “Ready for dinner and a movie, hon?”

“Six years. You have no idea how ready I am,” his wife answered. She put the red backpack over her shoulder, then turned back to Pioneer. She leaned in close and put a hand behind his head. She whispered something in Mandarin that Kyra could not understand.

“You were never alone.”

Rebecca smiled at the man and took his hand as his facade finally cracked and he began to sob. His body shook and he covered his face, trying to hide the sudden shame he felt at crying before women. His knees felt weak. He feared that he would fall to the floor when Rebecca put a hand to his shoulder and pulled him close, saying nothing, until he could compose himself. Though he had controlled his emotions for decades, it still took a full minute.

She stepped away, took Roland’s hand, and the husband-and-wife team walked out into the hallway. Kyra closed the door and marked the time on her watch. It was going to be a very long ten minutes.

The deadline came and the phone never rang. Kyra took Pioneer by the hand and they ran anyway.

The hotel suite that Mitchell had arranged was larger and far nicer than Jonathan had expected. The US Government was not usually extravagant when paying for travel accommodations, but the NCS had its own standards. The analyst had heard stories, exaggerated he’d thought, about how well some case officers lived on the road, but this room lived up to them. The suite featured a very large sitting and dining area, divided from the kitchenette by a wet bar, and a bedroom separated by a sliding French door with opaque glass panes set in a grid. Jonathan parted the suite’s heavy white curtains an inch, which was enough to see that the view of the Forbidden City was inspiring. The food service had been excellent, with classic Italian cuisine on the menu as well as the local favorites. The television dominating the near wall was an impressive plasma display so large that Jonathan knew he would never be able to afford one for his own home. Mitchell had the volume up high enough to annoy both Jonathan and anyone who might try listening through hidden microphones. The senior analyst wished that he could afford such places on his own salary when he was traveling privately. Analysts didn’t get approvals for this kind of accommodation. Jonathan accepted that with a grudge, but he had no desire to play on the case officers’ field, no matter what the perks were.

In truth, he had no interest in the room’s interior design. He shifted his feet, clasped his hands behind his back, and tried to suppress the part of his mind shouting that his study of it was an effort at self-distraction. He was trying very hard not to wonder where Kyra was at the moment.

Mitchell had chosen the suite at random. Beijing had thousands of hotels, likely hundreds of thousands of rooms for rent, and even the MSS could not bug them all. At least that was the theory. There was still a decent chance that somewhere in the basement the MSS was listening, but Mitchell didn’t seem worried. Jonathan was sure it was a poker face. No cover story would hold up if they were raided. If they were arrested and Pioneer identified, whatever they told the Chinese government would be irrelevant. The MSS would consider proximity to be guilt, and none of them would set foot on United States soil again for a very long time. Jonathan had been in war zones, but he doubted that he had ever been in as much danger as he was this evening.

Mitchell sat at the cherry dining table finishing the remains of his risotto while a plate of pastry fritters waited on the side. Jonathan had tried to beg off the food — his jet-lagged stomach didn’t think it was time to eat — but Mitchell insisted and the analyst took a bowl of gnocchi. Mitchell had ordered frittate for Kyra and Pioneer, and it was keeping warm under a tray cover. Jonathan was sure she would appreciate the wine. His initial thought had been to wait to order until she arrived — he refused to think in terms of if—but he supposed that once Pioneer was in the room, Mitchell wouldn’t want anyone coming to the door.

Jonathan looked at the digital clock on the writing desk by the window. “We’re behind schedule,” Mitchell said.

“We have a schedule?” Jonathan asked.

“Always,” Mitchell said. “Twenty minutes late, but she’s still inside her window. If she doesn’t get here in the next ten minutes, we might have to push everyone back to the next flight.” He set his utensils on the plate, picked up a fritter, and walked over to the window.

There was a knock at the door. Jonathan resisted the urge to answer it, instead letting Mitchell take the job in case there was some private entry protocol he’d arranged. If there was one, it was subtle. The senior NCS officer simply looked through the peephole and opened the door. The woman at the door was shorter than Kyra, with shoulder-length dark hair. She was dressed in casual clothing and dragging a wheeled suitcase behind. She marched past Mitchell and he closed the door to the hallway.

“John, this is Anna Monaghan,” Mitchell said. “She’s with S and T”—the Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. “John’s an analyst.”

Anna offered her hand. “Cooke told me about you before I got on the plane.”

“Then you’re a recent import?” Jonathan asked.

“I am,” Anna said. “Just got in. Hate the flight from Dulles. Coming down over Russian airspace drives me up the wall.”

“The Russkies don’t shoot down airliners anymore,” Mitchell said. “And you won’t be here long enough to get lagged. After you do your beauty work on our friend, you’re on the first flight out tomorrow,” Mitchell said.

“A shame you won’t get the suite when we’re done,” Jonathan said.

“I wish,” Anna said. “Same hotel, but I’m six floors down with the common folk.” She scanned the room and looked to Mitchell. “Stryker’s still on the street?”

“Stepped out ninety minutes ago. She’s still got ten minutes,” Mitchell said. “Fifteen before I get really worried.”

“I’ll set up in the bedroom. I need to steal the desk, and I am taking a shower.”

“No arguments here,” Mitchell said. The woman rolled her case into the bedroom and closed the sliding door.

Kyra and Pioneer entered the Marriott lobby twenty-two minutes behind schedule. The taxi driver had taken a winding route to find any persistent cars behind, and their surveillance detection run on foot had not turned out any hostiles. It still wasn’t a given that they were alone, but having made it this far was a promising development. Unless the MSS was running a particularly sophisticated operation, waiting to learn the hotel room number so they could arrest Pioneer together with his handler, their odds of escape had risen considerably. She hoped that their body doubles would not have to spend an unpleasant evening in the local lockup. The MSS would not be able to prove that their proximity and similar dress to a known traitor and his escort was sure evidence of participation in a conspiracy, but Kyra doubted that the MSS required proof beyond a reasonable doubt. She suspected that their threshold for conviction dropped as their annoyance level rose, and once they realized that Pioneer was no longer under their watch, the annoyance level would be stratospheric.

Jonathan had been right. She was craving a shot of anything she could lay hands on, knowing this would be a terrible time for it. If the operation went south and Roland and Rebecca went to prison… she knew without a doubt that the imprisonment of two fellow officers as the price paid for her sake would drive her down into the bottle.

Kyra cursed herself for letting her mind wander. It was like Venezuela again. She had picked a poor moment for self-examination. Still not safe. She exhaled, scanned the lobby, and found the elevators. She led Pioneer away from the front desk toward the lifts and reached for her front pocket. She extracted the disposable cell phone, a low-end Nokia.

She dialed the second number preprogrammed into the phone, which was the chief of station’s number for his own rented disposable phone. Both units were destined for secure disposal, where and how Mitchell hadn’t bothered to tell her. This would be the last call her phone would ever make.

She was surprised to hear Jonathan’s voice on the phone. “We’ve been waiting on you for dinner. Your frittata is cold,” he said. No doubt Mitchell had coached him on what to say. The first sentence was the pass phrase. The second was a bit of a rebuke. You’re late.

He’s never made a call in Beijing, Kyra realized. The MSS won’t have his voiceprint. They would almost certainly have one of Mitchell, and having her talk to Jonathan would fit their cover story better if the cell phone was intercepted. They had come through customs together, so surveillance video and voiceprint matches would come together to support the cover story that they were traveling companions.

“Sorry, I was talking to some friends,” she replied. “I hope the food didn’t cost too much,” Kyra said. Pioneer is with me. Where are you?

“Not too bad. Given the exchange rate, ten dollars and twenty-two cents, not counting the service fee.” Room 1022. The Third Department could figure out eventually what Jonathan had really said. First, they would need to separate the conversation from every other call made in Beijing by a Westerner at the same moment, triangulate Kyra’s position, and translate the conversation into Chinese. They would have to be bright enough to look up the Marriott’s price for frittate and realize that Jonathan was quite mistaken about it, given the day’s yuan-to-US dollar exchange rate. Kyra had worked in bureaucracies long enough to know that they wouldn’t manage the feat and get an armed team to room 1022 in the next hour.

“Warm it up for me.” Coming up. She turned off the phone and led Pioneer to the elevator.

Jonathan closed the phone and returned it to Mitchell. “Thanks,” Mitchell said. “I don’t know if the Chinese have a voiceprint of me they can match up, but no sense taking the chance. Don’t want them tracing my voice to find us.” He didn’t know how many they’d been able to collect of him over the years. None would be preferable, and anything higher than zero was bad news as far as the chief of station was concerned. Mitchell checked the clock. “We’re doing okay. Might be able to make up a little time on the road to the airport if traffic isn’t bad. We don’t want to be sitting around at the airport for a long stretch anyway.”

“You’re coming too?” Jonathan asked.

Mitchell glared at the analyst for a moment, then suppressed his frustration. “I tried to retrieve a dead drop before we figured out that Pioneer was burned. The MSS was probably watching the drop site, so I’m burned too. Hard to be a chief of station when the enemy knows what you do for a living. I’m Pioneer’s escort back to the States and I’m not coming back. My wife’s packing up the house right now and she’s flying home tomorrow. Anna’s going to give me a makeover after she finishes up with Pioneer and Stryker.”

“Hard way to end a tour,” Jonathan said. It was as close to showing compassion as he could come with a stranger.

“I was almost done here anyway. Would’ve been home by Independence Day,” Mitchell said. He smiled. “Next time I’m back at Langley, you’re going to have to explain to me how you talked Cooke into approving a debrief with Pioneer.”

“A shame they don’t have a bar at headquarters. I don’t drink, but I’d buy you a beer for not throwing us out of your office when we showed up and told you what we wanted.”

Mitchell chuckled. “To be honest, I was more surprised than angry, at first anyway.” He checked the clock again, walked to the door, and pulled it open. He’d timed his own ascent from the lobby to the room to get a ballpark estimate of the travel time. Kyra and Pioneer were approaching the room. Mitchell closed the door behind them and led them out of the front room. “Any problems?” he asked.

“We confirmed surveillance at his apartment,” Kyra replied. “No one followed us after we left the building. I think our friends were able to draw everyone away. Good people. I hope they don’t get picked up.”

“They might,” Mitchell conceded. “But Becca’s been toting that red backpack for years. If the MSS has been watching the building for any time at all, they’ll have seen her wearing it. They might figure out what happened after a while, but they’ll never be able to prove it.”

Mitchell turned to Pioneer and spoke, this time in accented Mandarin. “Long Jian-Min, it is my honor to meet you in person. I regret that I cannot give you my name. Perhaps in the United States I will be able to do so. In a few minutes, we will dress you and take you to the airport. This gentleman needs to ask you some questions after we have delivered you safely out of the country, if that would be acceptable?” Mitchell was intentionally vague with the details, more out of habit than any particular concern that they had missed some listening device. Pioneer nodded politely.

Jonathan moved close to Kyra. “Good to see you without a pair of handcuffs.”

“You softie.”

“Hardly. The Chinese built a big airport,” Jonathan explained. “I need somebody to watch my carry-on while I’m buying dinner in the airport terminal.”

“So it’s still all about you?” Kyra asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“Ah.”

“All right, people,” Mitchell said. “Enough with the touchy-feely. We’re on the road in forty-five.” He pointed toward the back room. “Get our man back there. The clock’s ticking.”

Monaghan’s tools of the trade were on display. The Directorate of Science and Technology officer had left a lucrative future as a makeup artist at Fox Studios in Los Angeles to work for the Agency, and Kyra had no doubt that the woman had been very good at her job. The portable electronics she was carrying were fascinating. During the Cold War, producing fake travel documents required a skilled forger with a steady hand who could copy signatures and poor-quality typesetting, but it wasn’t done by hand anymore.

“You’re going out through the airport?” Monaghan asked.

“Not much choice,” Kyra said.

“Then I’ll have to set you up with something better than a gross profile change. If they’re looking for him”—Monaghan nodded toward Pioneer, who was sitting in the corner—“you can expect close inspection, maybe less than two feet.”

“How are you getting out?” Kyra asked.

“Oh, honey,” Monaghan said. “I’ve got my ways. Besides, I’ll be fine having a long cup of coffee with some handsome MSS officer if they really want me to stay. They won’t have anything on me. I’m leaving the gear with our people here.” She picked up a Ziploc bag full of bottles. “You go on into the bathroom and use this. You’ll make a real pretty brunette. And I hope you like short hair. Do you wear color contacts?”

“No,” Kyra said.

“You do now. A shame to cover up those pretty green eyes, but there’s no help for it. I’d bet that the MSS doesn’t know your eye color, but I’m not going to take the chance. Those boys have cameras everywhere. And you’re going to wear glasses too.” Monaghan picked up another Ziploc and pulled it open. “I’ll get started on our friend here. I’ll finish you up when I’m done with him.” Monaghan took Pioneer gently by the arm, led him to a chair, and picked up a bottle of spirit gum. Kyra squeezed his arm, then left him and stepped into the bathroom.

They took separate cars. The airport traffic was light, which Kyra might have considered a sign of divine intervention had she been a religious woman. The open road meant no delays en route to the airport and offered the added benefit of keeping the enemy from hiding in traffic. Identifying hostile surveillance on foot was relatively easy compared to performing vehicular detection on any freeway during peak hours, and Kyra was sure that Beijing’s freeways were worse than most. At the moment, she wanted every advantage she could claim.

Jonathan watched Kyra’s eyes look to the rearview mirror every few seconds. Courtesy of Monaghan, the woman was, by all appearances, a middle-aged brunette, short hair, glasses, wearing casual clothing and a bit overweight. Her height was unchanged and Monaghan hadn’t toyed with her build, though she was slightly broader across the shoulders and larger in the chest. Except for the added weight, it wasn’t a bad look for her, and he idly wondered how much of it she might choose to keep once they returned to the States. If we get that far, he thought.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kyra caught him studying her. “Sorry you didn’t get a makeover?” she asked. Jonathan hadn’t performed an operational act since their arrival, so there had been no reason to change his appearance. The MSS had no reason to suspect him of anything.

“Hardly,” Jonathan said. “Anyone on us?”

“Don’t think so,” Kyra said. “A couple of possibles, but they’re giving us plenty of space.” She had watched the same Hafei Motor sedans hold their distance behind the minivan for more than ten miles. The black cars were trading positions every few miles, but they weren’t driving aggressively. They were almost lazy and let any number of cars get between them and the embassy SUV. “No sirens. Always a good sign.” She was only half joking.

“You won’t be able to come back here,” Jonathan said. “You know that.”

“I know.” Kyra regretted not seeing more of the city, or the countryside for that matter — the Great Wall at least. There was so much history, and it would all be denied her now. Ironic, she thought. It made her feel like her rebellious walk on the streets had been justified. She hadn’t joined up to play tourist. She had always wanted to prowl the side streets and see the underbellies and dirty corners of the cities where the Agency would send her. She’d had to fight the MSS for it, but for one night, she had gotten a true taste of the real Beijing. She wanted more, always would, but what she’d seen felt good and that was something she hadn’t felt for a while. “I’ll survive.”

“Good for you,” he said. Kyra turned to look at him, but Jonathan was staring out the car window at the skyline and she couldn’t see his face.

Time to get serious, she thought. “When you get to the waiting area, don’t talk to Mitchell or Pioneer,” she advised. “They should be sitting apart. Try to keep some distance from both of them. If you have to sit near one of them, sit near Mitchell. Otherwise, let him find you when you deplane in Seoul.”

“No problem.” Jonathan knew the practice perfectly well but nodded assent.

“Monaghan is good,” Kyra said. “She does solid work. But if the MSS does pick either of them up, you just get on the plane, then call the embassy when you land.” The telephone number was scribbled on a blank index card in his wallet.

“If that happens, Pioneer is dead,” Jonathan said. “And Mitchell goes to prison.”

Kyra said nothing for a moment. He was right. If Pioneer was detained, there would be no saving him from a sure bullet to the head after a trial that would be finished in a few weeks at most. “No. But somebody will have to tell the director ASAP.”

“Agreed.” They lapsed into silence. The GPS unit mounted on the dash guided them into the airport and Kyra pulled the car into a covered garage. Someone from the embassy would come out to retrieve it later.

Kyra killed the engine. “I’ll go in first. Follow me in five minutes.”

“See you in Seoul.”

Kyra moved through boarding security without drawing attention, retrieved her carry-on, and worked through the masses toward her assigned gate. The airport crowd was thin, but the number of uniformed guards moving through the terminal was far higher than the night she and Jonathan had entered the country. Soldiers were standing by the doors leading to the boarding ramps. To her eye, there was no sense of urgency on their part. They stood to the sides, close enough to the boarding lines that some of the Western passengers seemed uncomfortable with the attention. The Asian passengers seemed unmoved by the scrutiny. The sense of calm was a good sign. A blatant show of hostile sorting through departing passengers would be the surest sign that the MSS had figured out something was up. Kyra had managed her magic trick almost two hours ago. Mitchell’s liberal estimates gave them at least another hour before the MSS would figure out that Pioneer had disappeared. Jonathan was not so optimistic, but even if his calculation proved better than Mitchell’s, the MSS would still be losing the game. There were so many ways to leave Beijing, the MSS couldn’t cover them all. Even with the help of the PLA and the other security services, they would have to spread themselves thin in a panicked effort to canvass the major travel hubs. Even then, they would have no assurance that CIA hadn’t simply driven him out in a car. The options were legion, China was a very large country, and the security resources were not unlimited. Time and geography were finally working against the MSS.

Kyra found her gate and scanned the waiting group. Mitchell had advised that flights to Seoul at this hour were usually full, and the numbers seemed to confirm that guess. There were few open seats. She did not have her pick, and that alone gave her plausible deniability that she knew any of her covert traveling companions. No security officer could reasonably use the seating arrangements here to infer personal connections. She chose one of the few open seats, settled herself, and stared out the bay windows to the dark tarmac.

Two guards stood by the boarding door, watching the seated passengers. Kyra saw them study her for a moment, but neither made a move in her direction. Her watch, an atomic piece accurate to within hundredths of a second, showed eight minutes to the posted boarding time. Mitchell had tried to time their arrival at the airport to get the group to the gate with little time to spare and therefore to be observed and identified by any officials. It was strange how time could be both an ally and an enemy. Jonathan was five minutes behind her. Mitchell and Pioneer should have been there already, but she couldn’t pick them out in the crowd and didn’t look around for them. Still, the crowd was calm moving through the terminal. Likely they would have been excited had the soldiers been dragging men away anywhere nearby. Mitchell and Pioneer were still loose, if they were here.

If the airline delayed boarding, it would be the first sign that something was going very wrong.

The boarding was announced in Chinese, English, and another language she did not recognize but assumed was Korean. The crowd stirred and Kyra released the breath she hadn’t realized that she’d been holding.

It was a mistake. She heard the shouting before she saw the running guards following two civilian men in suits. The waiting passengers turned en masse as four PLA soldiers in fatigues with weapons drawn slowed to a fast walk, led by the civilians holding portable radios. Other mixed groups of suits and fatigues ran past, moving out to cover the other boarding areas.

The suits — Kyra assumed they were MSS — were speaking loudly in Chinese and the crowd parted before them. They reached the podium and cornered both the guards on duty and the airline staff who were preparing to open the door to the passengers. The guards who had been standing over the crowd shook their heads vigorously to some question. The MSS officers pushed them aside and began to bark orders to the airline staff. One, a petite Chinese woman, picked up the wall microphone. She issued her announcement first in Mandarin, then English.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin boarding. As an extra security precaution, in addition to your boarding passes, we ask you to please produce your passports and present them for inspection. We appreciate your cooperation. Our first-class and business passengers are now welcome to board, as well as any other passengers who may require extra time or assistance.”

Kyra, trying very hard not to take a deep breath, dug into her carry-on for her falsified passport. Hers and Jonathan’s were economy seats. She didn’t know which seating class Mitchell and Pioneer would be in. She looked through the crowd and picked out Jonathan thirty feet from her position, standing in the thoroughfare. She didn’t make eye contact with him. He had nothing to worry about. He wasn’t the one who had beaten an MSS officer in an alley or ditched several more during a run through the city with the most-wanted man in the People’s Republic of China.

The MSS officers stood almost shoulder to shoulder, the first taking a passenger’s passport and holding it over a printout the second held. They compared the travel document with the printed page, then held it to the passenger’s face.

They waved the first passenger through.

They know he’s loose. The MSS had almost certainly detained the Zhous. But the large number of security officers and soldiers running past through the terminal meant they didn’t know where Pioneer was.

Kyra approached the gate. An old Korean man standing at the head of the line moved forward, leaning on his cane, and he held his boarding pass and passport out to the security officers. The lead MSS officer took the passport, rifled through it until he found the visa stamp, and scrutinized it for several seconds. He turned to the inside cover and held the man’s photograph next to the sheet his partner held. They jabbered on in Mandarin. The one not holding the passport spoke into a portable radio and waited until he received an answer. Kyra wished dearly that she could understand the language to get some feel for their level of anxiety.

The Korean stood calmly as the two Chinese security officers talked over his case. The one holding his passport leaned over and looked at his face for several seconds. The Korean pulled back, apparently uncomfortable with the close inspection, but otherwise held his ground.

The MSS officer frowned, closed the passport, handed it to its owner, and waved him through. The airline attendant gave him a traditional Mandarin greeting. He nodded and gave her his boarding pass. She ran it under the scanner and extended it to him, but the Korean was still trying to pocket his passport with shaky old hands, leaving Kyra to wait an eternity until he could move on. He finally managed to secure it inside his jacket, then took back his pass and awkwardly pushed himself forward through the door.

Several more passengers moved through, then Kyra stepped up to the gate and held out her passport. She focused on her hands to make sure there was no tremor in her fingers. She wanted to give no outward sign of discomfort. The MSS officer took the passport and studied the brunette with an ugly look for a long second before opening the fake document. She put her hands in her pockets and turned her attention to her breathing and her heart rate, which was faster than its usual pace but not enough to make her uncomfortable. The two officers spoke again and the officer holding the radio clicked the mic and spoke into it. It spat back an answer and the MSS officers frowned but said nothing. The one holding her passport looked to her again. Kyra gave them no expression. She wondered if they had studied Western faces enough to discern emotional states.

Just give me back the passport, she thought.

The Korean reached the end of the ramp and carefully stepped over the small gap onto the Boeing 767. A pretty young Korean attendant asked him in her native tongue if he would like help finding his seat. He didn’t understand the language, but he nodded anyway. She took his boarding pass, directed him toward the first-class cabin, and then took his arm and helped him down the aisle. He shuffled between the seats, using them for support, until he reached his row. The attendant helped him settle into the seat, noted that he had no carry-on for the overhead bin, and asked if he would like a drink and a hot towel for his face. He demurred on the towel.

He had no idea what it would do to the prosthetics Monaghan had applied to his face.

The attendant left and Pioneer turned to the window. His face rigid, he stared unseeing at the city skyline in the distance. Beijing was lost to him. He realized that he didn’t know what tears would do to the prosthetics either. Perhaps he should have asked for the towel after all.

He looked to the front and saw the attendants repeating the greeting ritual with another passenger who entered the cabin. Kyra Stryker nodded to the attendant and turned down the aisle. She didn’t look at him.

The MSS officer returned the last passport to its owner, a teenage Canadian girl, and his partner shrugged and spoke into his handset. Their superior acknowledged and the PLA soldiers who stood to the side slung their rifles. They moved as a unit through the terminal toward another gate at the far end. Flights would be boarding all night. The entire Sixth Bureau was stretched very thin, they had been told, and no one could tell them when replacements would arrive.

The attendant closed the boarding ramp door, locked it, and tested the security panel. Her shift was over. Walking away from the gate, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a disposable cell phone, and pressed a button. She didn’t know who she was calling or even what phone number had been preprogrammed into it.

“Hello,” a woman answered in excellent Mandarin.

“Dinner is served, four courses, all cold,” the attendant said.

“My thanks.” The call disconnected from the other end. The attendant entered the nearest restroom, waited a few moments until the lone visitor walked out, then removed the SIM card from the phone and flushed it down a toilet. She then dropped the phone into the garbage.

At Mitchell’s now-empty desk, Monaghan replaced the telephone handset and put her hands over her face. See you soon, boys and girls, she thought. She suppressed the urge to walk to the window and make a rude gesture in the direction of Zhongnanhai.

Mitchell had prewritten two cables to Langley the night before. Now Monaghan could tell his former deputy, the newly promoted chief of station, which one to delete. The other would only take a few moments to transit the Pacific. There was no telling how long it would take the Ops Center staff to flag it for Barron after it arrived. The NCS Director would be impatient. Monaghan picked up a secure phone and dialed.

Cooke hadn’t left her office on the seventh floor for two days. She took her meals in the director’s dining room — the Agency provided her with a personal chef, who worked in a restaurant-quality kitchen — and stepped out into the hall only when she had to return to the Operations Center for short briefings on military developments in the South China Sea. When Barron had advised her to go home the day before, Cooke had dismissed the suggestion out of hand. She knew that it had hardly been sincere, made more out of duty than any belief she would act on it. Barron would never sincerely ask her to do something he wasn’t doing himself. Still, the guilt from wanting to heed the man was sharp. Cooke was tired and even the coffee was losing its power to keep her going. The amount of caffeine required to keep her alert was making her hands shake. She told herself that going home was pointless, that she wouldn’t be able to sleep because the thought of her people in the field would keep her awake. Cooke knew that was a lie and wouldn’t admit it to herself, but finally she didn’t have a choice. The couch looked to be a better pillow than her desk, and so she dismissed Barron, locked her office, and reclined on the couch. The director kept the lights on, the blinds open, and hoped that she had enough strength left to keep the rest short.

She knew she had failed when the knock came at the door. Her sense of time was gone and her mind was foggier than before. Her vision finally focused on the wall clock. Four hours had passed. She pulled herself up. The doorknob felt like lead in her hand.

It was Barron. Her body felt like a heavy sack of grain as it fell into the chair. “Give me some good news,” she ordered.

Barron obeyed the order after he’d closed the door behind him. “He’s in the air,” he said without preamble. Cooke closed her eyes in relief. “Ninety minutes and he’ll be on the ground in Seoul. The MSS overran the airport but they didn’t ID him. Two feet away and they couldn’t figure out who he was. Monaghan did some great work.”

“What about the others?”

“Everyone’s on the plane,” Barron said. “They’re all clear unless the PLA decides to send some MIGs after them.”

“Make sure Stryker gets a promotion and a week’s leave. Monaghan too. I take it you flew Pioneer in style?”

“You asked, he received,” Barron said. “First-class seat and a charter flight to Dulles from Seoul. Mitchell is sitting nearby to keep him under control in case he gets panicky. That happens sometimes when people finally realize that they’re not going home again. They’ll be on the ground here by tomorrow afternoon. We’ll change planes there and take him to the Farm.”

“He deserves it. Stryker?”

“She and Burke got coach. We didn’t want everyone sitting together in case somebody got picked up.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigar tube, a Davidoff Millennium. He offered it to Cooke and pulled out another for himself when she took it. “He’s out of China. I think that’s worth breaking a minor federal law.”

Cooke extracted the pungent stick from its cylinder and drew it under her nose. “Expensive. I thought you gave these up.”

“It’s never too late to restart a bad habit.”

“I have a better tradition in mind. And it’ll save you from an argument with your wife.” Cooke took Barron’s cigar, pulled it from the cylinder, and put the brown stick in her mouth. She replaced the cigar he had given her in its tube. Then she fetched a Sharpie from her desk and scrawled Pioneer 2016 on the side. The CIA director turned to the shelf behind her desk, opened the humidor sitting there, and dropped the cigar inside. Barron’s addition to her collection made four.

The handwritten sign read “KWON Moo-hyun.”

Milo Sachs had no idea who Kwon Moo-hyun was but he doubted that Mr. Kwon was truly Korean. Sachs was the youngest case officer in Seoul, so he’d drawn the short straw for this duty. Chief of station Seoul gave him the name for the placard and an order not to ask questions. He was to stand with the other professional drivers, meet Mr. Kwon, and lead him to a private hangar near the edge of the field, then fly with him on the private Learjet back to Dulles Airport. He was under orders not to talk to Kwon except to direct his movements. Sachs was an escort, nothing more. He would get three days’ leave in Northern Virginia as compensation, hardly enough to recover from the time lag, after which he would fly back to Seoul to resume his regular tour of duty.

The plane landed on schedule, the airline attendants opened the door, and the limousine service drivers took their places to the side of the exit. The first two people off saw his sign and walked to him. The Westerner was balding, salt-and-pepper hair in the places he still had it, with a sizable paunch at his waistline. The Korean man walked with a cane, but he appeared somewhat more spry than his age should have allowed.

“I am Kwon,” the man said in Korean. It clearly was not true. His accent was so heavy that Sachs was sure the man had memorized the phrase. He probably didn’t even know what he was saying.

“A pleasure,” Sachs replied. “Come with me, I will take you to your next flight.”

“Not yet,” Mitchell said. “We need a private place where we can ask this gentleman a few questions first.”

“You’re Mitchell?” Sachs asked. Mitchell nodded. “We’ve got a charter flight waiting in a private hangar. Safest place to talk is probably on the plane.”

“Works for me,” Mitchell said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the door where the passengers were deplaning. Another pair of Westerners exited, looked around for a brief second, and then moved in their direction. The woman was quite pretty, Sachs thought. A short-haired brunette with glasses, she doubtless was a case officer. He wondered how old she really was. It was easier to make a younger person look older than to do the reverse.

“Time to talk?” Kyra asked Mitchell without preamble.

“Private hangar,” Mitchell told her. “You get fifteen minutes. That enough?”

“We’ll find out,” Jonathan said.

Mitchell gestured everyone toward couches in the plane’s aft section and they all took their places. Jonathan leaned forward and studied the Chinese man. He had extrapolated Pioneer’s age from the biographical data in the files he’d finally gotten after badgering Barron for access. The Chinese asset had been in college during the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which meant that he would be middle-aged now, but the disguise obscured all traces of that. He’d only seen the man’s true appearance for a short minute before Monaghan had gotten her hands on him. Pioneer had looked somewhat older than middle age, though Jonathan knew he had no baseline for comparison, but it didn’t surprise him. Pioneer had been committing treason for over twenty years. Such a life could age a man well before his time.

“I’m Jonathan. This is Kyra,” Jonathan said in English. “I want to ask you some questions about the Assassin’s Mace program.” Mitchell translated. If the senior officer disapproved of using real names, he said nothing. Jonathan caught the shashoujian term but recognized nothing else. It was a beautiful language. The tonals made it sound like singing and he doubted that he could ever master it. He spoke Romance languages only and found them difficult enough.

Pioneer nodded and replied. “I wish that I had been able to access more information on the shashoujian, but much of it was compartmented beyond my reach. What do you want to know?”

“We sorted through your reports. There wasn’t any progress on the shashoujian until 1999. Correct?”

“Correct. Jiang Zemin started the program in 1996, but there was little worth reporting for three years. A few papers, a few efforts to steal some US weapons. Several senior military officers developed ideas for weapons, but the PLA lacked the expertise to make any of the designs work. It was all science fiction.” Mitchell didn’t bother trying to convey the venom he heard in Pioneer’s voice. “They were stupid old men dreaming of weapons that we won’t be able to build for a hundred years. Anything they could dream of that could reach your carriers, the PLA couldn’t build.”

“So what changed in 1999?” Kyra asked.

“I don’t know,” Pioneer admitted. “If there was a breakthrough, it was compartmented and I couldn’t access it. There was some new cooperation between the PLA and Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute, but I reported on that.”

Jonathan nodded. “I read that report. If there were no successes, were there any significant failures that you didn’t report?”

“Why are you asking about failures?” Mitchell asked.

“Science is all about failure,” Jonathan explained. “Test, fail, test again, until you have a breakthrough. If he can outline some major research failures after 1999, it might show us the direction that the PLA’s research took.”

“Fair enough,” Mitchell said. He translated.

“The J-20 was a disappointment, useful mostly for trying to humiliate your visiting military officers, and we would never have enough to match your Raptors. And the Dongfeng missile was always suspect. Senior party leaders were losing faith in all of it, so they removed it from the shashoujian program,” Pioneer answered.

“No successes, lots of failures,” Jonathan said. “Something set them off. We’re missing something.”

“I agree, but I don’t know what it would be. In fact, around that time, the MSS even wanted to shut the program down.”

“Why?” Jonathan asked. That hadn’t been in the reporting.

“Because the MSS feared that CIA had penetrated the program. It was true, as I had done that, but not like they thought.”

“What do you mean?” Mitchell said.

“I was sure that the CIA did not have another penetration with better access than mine inside the shashoujian. I know that intelligence services like to confirm information from multiple sources, but my case officers were never asking me about the things the MSS was afraid you knew. I was the senior MSS archivist. I assumed that even if you had a more senior penetration, my case officers would still have asked me those questions. They never did. I tried to raise them sometimes, but the case officers never seemed interested. They liked me to respond to their questions. They did not like me to invent my own taskings. They said it was a risk.”

“He’s got your number cold,” Jonathan told Mitchell.

“Yeah, well, it happens when the case officers aren’t technical specialists in the subject they have to ask about,” Mitchell said. “They stick to the questions that you analysts send them from headquarters. If you don’t send the right questions, they never get asked.”

“Chalk one up for the system,” Kyra said.

“What triggered their fears that we had penetrated their program?” Jonathan asked.

Pioneer sat back and thought for a moment. “It happened after you bombed our embassy in Serbia. I forget the exact date.”

Jonathan cocked his head. “Serbia…,” he said quietly, but Kyra overheard. “Did the MSS smuggle anything through that embassy related to the Assassin’s Mace?”

“I know that the Guojia Anquan Bu Tenth Bureau purchased something of value from a senior Serb army officer in Belgrade and sent it to Beijing through the diplomatic pouch a few days before the bombing. The Tenth Bureau is responsible for stealing foreign technologies, so I assumed the Serbs had stolen some piece of equipment from NATO. When your Air Force blew up the embassy wing, the MSS was convinced that President Clinton had ordered the strike to keep the delivery out of their hands. That is why they refused to believe that the bombing was an accident. They still believe that.” Mitchell translated. Jonathan leaned forward and put his head in his hands.

“You don’t know what was in the package?” Mitchell asked Pioneer.

“I don’t. I tried to find out, but the MSS kept the records compartmented. I could never access them, so I had nothing to report. I was not even sure that the technology had anything to do with the shashoujian. The timing of the sale and the MSS worries about a penetration could have just been coincidence. I do know that after it came to Beijing, the MSS gave it to the PLA and from there it went to Chengdu. But they often buy stolen technology abroad. It is common.”

“I’ve been an idiot!” Jonathan hissed.

“What? What is it?” Kyra asked.

“It’s been sitting there the entire time and I was too stupid to see it,” Jonathan said. “We should have seen it when we did the timeline.” He stood up and looked at Mitchell. “We’re done. I’ve got what I need.” Mitchell nodded and spoke to Pioneer in Mandarin, telling him the conversation was finished.

“What did we miss?” Kyra asked.

Jonathan took a deep breath. “You remember that the timeline showed no progress in the Assassin’s Mace project until 1999?”

“Yeah,” Kyra said. “We’ve been looking for an event that kick-started it.”

“We’ve been looking for an event in China,” Jonathan said. “That was stupid and narrow-minded. There was a kick-start event, but it didn’t happen in China. It happened in Serbia.”

“What happened in Serbia?”

He shook his head. “Stupid,” he said, quiet but still intense. “We can break this thing open. He gave us the Assassin’s Mace.” His voice was calm. “He’s had pieces that he didn’t know belonged to the puzzle. So did we, for that matter. We could’ve figured it out without him if we’d been smart enough. I was an idiot not to see it,” Jonathan said. It was an honest admission that stemmed more from exhaustion than humility. The sleep deprivation was finally degrading his ability to think, and the caffeine pills were now doing him more harm than good. He hoped Kyra was doing better, but she had been under more stress and alternating between coffee and alcohol.

Jonathan checked the clock and did the conversion of time zones in his mind. It was 0830 at Langley. He turned to Mitchell. “I need a secure cell phone and a laptop.”

Sachs reached into his pocket and produced a mobile handset. A backpack from the plane’s cockpit produced an iPad. “You can’t keep those. I had to sign for them.”

Jonathan shot the junior officer a withering look as he pulled the phone from his hand. “How long before we leave?” he asked Mitchell.

“By the schedule, thirty minutes. But we own this plane. You need us to wait?”

“If you would,” he said. He handed the tablet computer to his partner. “I’m calling home. I need you to look someone up for me.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Pyotr Ufimtsev. P-Y-O-T-R. U-F-I-M-T-S-E-V. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.” Kyra shrugged, pressed a button on the computer, and began typing. “We just need a little more,” Jonathan said, as much to himself as anyone listening. “And we need to talk to the Navy.”

“About what?” Mitchell said, exasperated.

“Have you ever heard of Noble Anvil?” Jonathan said.

Kyra looked up. He was as excited as she had ever seen him during their short time together. She sifted through her thoughts as she pressed the return button to start the Internet search on the name Jonathan had given her. She had a good memory for acronyms and code words. Developing memory skills was a standard part of case officer training, and life in government service demanded it anyway. “The US part of NATO’s Allied Force operation in Yugoslavia back in ninety-nine,” she said.

Jonathan nodded. He was more grateful that he wouldn’t have to explain the reference than impressed with Kyra’s knowledge of military history. “The Air Force bombed the Chinese embassy by accident. The Chinese believed there’s no way we could have screwed up our targeting that badly, so somebody must have ordered it. And they think we ordered it because they had a piece of classified US technology in the building — something sensitive enough that the Chinese thought we might be willing to bomb their embassy to keep them from shipping it to Beijing.”

“Wait… the F-117 Nighthawk?” She started swiping her finger across the computer’s screen, looking through the search results.

Mitchell said nothing for a moment, searching his thoughts. “The one the Serbs shot down.”

Jonathan nodded. “The only stealth plane we’ve ever lost to hostile fire. Six weeks later to the day it was shot down by the Serbs, we dropped a bomb on the Chinese embassy sixty miles away. But the PLA wasn’t part of the shootdown, so we never had a reason to connect it with the Assassin’s Mace program even when the Chinese thought we had.”

“I thought the Nighthawk was destroyed on impact,” Kyra said.

Jonathan shook his head. “There was more than enough intact for an intel service to reverse-engineer. Imagery shows that the plane wasn’t vaporized.”

“Why not?” Mitchell asked, curious. “Most planes that fall from a few miles up just leave a smoking crater.”

“Nobody knows for sure,” Jonathan said. “My guess is that the fly-by-wire computers kept trying to level the plane after the pilot bailed out. Nighthawks have the aerodynamic properties of a brick. The only way one stays up is if the computers can make adjustments to the control surfaces fast enough, so the pilot uses the stick to tell the computers where he wants to go, and they figure out how to adjust the airframe to make it happen. I think the SAMs exploded close enough for the shrapnel to shred the airframe and damage the control surfaces. The pilot bailed out, but the computers kept trying to fly. They leveled the plane out enough to keep it from turning into a fireball when it hit.”

“That actually makes sense. You would think that the engineers could have come up with something that could glide in a pinch,” Mitchell mused.

Kyra stared at the iPad screen. “I read about this. Computers in the seventies weren’t powerful enough to calculate the radar cross sections of curved surfaces,” Kyra said. “They could only crunch numbers for flat surfaces, but flat areas are perfect radar wave reflectors. Right angles are the real killers because they reflect virtually the entire radar wave back to the receiver. So Lockheed had to build a plane with flat surfaces and no right angles. Now you could do the math on one of these.” She held the tablet computer up.

“The Air Force didn’t bomb the crash site?” Mitchell asked.

“Serb civilians overran the site too quickly,” Jonathan replied. “We’ve got pictures of little old Serb ladies dancing on wing sections still smoking from the impact. The idiots probably all died of cancer. And the Serbs don’t have the industry to build fighters, stealth or not, so they likely went looking to sell the technology for money. The Chinese would be the perfect buyers. They’ve got money, our technology in the Gulf War freaked them out, and they were trying to modernize their military. The Assassin’s Mace project was under way, and stealth bombers would be the perfect weapons to use against an aircraft carrier.”

“You think they’ve got a working stealth bomber?” Mitchell was engrossed now.

“Yes,” Kyra said. “Yes, they do.” She pulled the phone out of Jonathan’s hand.

The STU-III’s tiny display finally read “TS//SCI” and the secure voice button went red. Weaver had hoped that there were enough fiber optic lines between Beijing and Langley that the encrypted phones could make a connection quickly, but the wait had been painful. In truth, it probably had taken less than fifteen seconds.

The encryption stripped Stryker’s voice of life, as expected. “I hope you’ve got something for me, Mr. Weaver,” she said.

“Lunch, I think,” Weaver said. “I finished reverse-engineering the CAD app’s subroutine yesterday. I extracted the algorithm and converted it to standard mathematical notation. That took most of the night, but it’s oh so pretty. The problem is that I can’t match the equations to anything. I’m not good enough at math to know what I’m looking at,” Weaver said. He had earned a C grade in the required course for his computer science degree, and that had been a gift from a merciful professor. Weaver had never seen the point. He’d been a programmer for more than a decade now and had never needed any math beyond what he had learned in high school.

“I might be able to save you the trouble,” Kyra said.

“I’ll buy you a beer if you can.”

“You’ll be buying me more than that. Take a copy of the equations and run over to—” There was a pause as Kyra asked someone a question that Weaver couldn’t make out. The encryption stripped too much detail for him to understand quieter voices. “Run over to WINPAC.”—the Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arm Control center—“You need to find a senior analyst who works air defense issues. If you can, they should be able to lay hands on a copy of a Russian science paper that will explain the algorithms.”

“It’s not on the web?”

“Only in Russian,” she explained. “You read Russian?”

“You have the title and author?”

“Theory of Edge Diffraction of Electromagnetics. Written by Pyotr Ufimtsev, 1966. The original Russian title is Metod kraevykh voln v fizicheskoi teorii difraktsii.” It sounded like Stryker was reading the titles off something. Weaver’s ear for accents wasn’t well trained, but he’d been sent to Russia on several occasions. Stryker’s Russian pronunciation sounded flawless, the accent nearly pure Muscovite as far as he could discern.

“Give me a second, I don’t have a Cyrillic keyboard,” Weaver said. He winced and hoped that Kyra appreciated sarcasm, but she sounded too tired to care. The tech stole an engineer’s graph pad from the next cubicle and hunted for a pencil. “Repeat the name.” Kyra repeated the Russian words again. “What’s the paper about?”

“Stealth.”

“I thought Lockheed Martin invented stealth in the seventies,” Weaver said.

“Ufimtsev worked out the math, but the Russians didn’t realize what it could be used for. Lockheed Martin did. We think the algorithms you extracted are Ufimtsev’s equations for calculating radar cross sections. He figured out that the size of the object reflecting the radar wave is irrelevant: all that matters is the shape. That’s why that number on the CAD program only changed when you loaded a new shape. It was the radar cross section. The actual dimensions of the object were irrelevant.”

“That’s counterintuitive,” Weaver said.

“The technology works.”

“I guess,” Weaver said. “If nobody in WINPAC has a copy of that paper, I’ll have to see if the librarians can track it down.”

“Whatever you have to do,” Kyra conceded. She disconnected the phone.

The CIA director’s secure phone rang. She enabled the encrypted connection. “Cooke.”

“It’s Burke. We’re in Seoul.”

“How were the potstickers?”

“Wish we’d had the chance to try some,” Jonathan said. “I need a favor.”

“Sure.”

“This might be nothing, but I want to rule it out if there’s no connection. Did the Taiwanese ever figure out what that chemical was that took down those SWAT officers in Taipei?”

“The Ops Center finally dropped that one on my desk yesterday, after you two started playing games with the Chinese,” Cooke said. “The chemical was something called chlorofluorosulfonic acid. Finding out what that is took another call. The common use is to inhibit water vapor from condensing at near-freezing temperatures. It’s used occasionally by DoD to break up contrails on aircraft so they can’t be tracked visually from the ground. Is that helpful?”

“You have no idea.”

“You going to tell me what this is about?” Cooke asked.

Jonathan told her. “Kyra and I need a flight to one of the carrier battle groups in the Strait,” Jonathan said.

“Not a chance. I am not sending you two into an active war zone,” Cooke declared.

“We know what the Assassin’s Mace is. I can either explain it to an admiral in person, or I can explain it in a cable and we can pray that he bothers to read it and loves my Shakespearean prose.”

“You’re not the most charming analyst.”

“Charming enough for you, I hope,” Jon answered.

There was a very long pause and Jonathan found himself listening to the slight hissing static. “You’re going to owe me whole barrels of whiskey when you get home,” Cooke finally said.

“I’ll be able to afford them with the performance bonus that you’re going to give me,” Jonathan said. “By the way, you should call Garr Weaver. He’s an IOC analyst but he should be knocking around WINPAC in another hour or so. He’s got something you’ll want to see.”

“I’ll track him down,” Cooke said. “Give me fifteen minutes to call the SecDef and see about getting you down to the Lincoln.” It took her precisely that long to get back to him with the answer.

Jonathan snapped the handset shut and tapped it lightly against his forehead.

“And?” Kyra asked.

Jonathan looked to Mitchell. “You’re taking off without us,” he said. He turned to Kyra.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“The Abraham Lincoln.” It was his turn to smile. “You never get to go if you don’t ask.”

Kyra grinned. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned over to Mitchell. “I want to say good-bye to him.” Mitchell nodded, then turned to Pioneer and spoke to him in Mandarin. The Chinese asset listened to Mitchell, focused on his face until the man stopped speaking.

Sachs watched as the old man turned to Kyra after a moment’s silence. “Thank you,” Pioneer said. The man spoke a bit of English after all. There was a strong undercurrent of gratitude in the words, stronger than he would have expected between an asset and his escort. Sachs wondered what the brunette had done to deserve it.

“You’re welcome,” Kyra said. Then she leaned in close and whispered to him in plain English. “You’ll never be alone.”

Sachs couldn’t tell whether the man understood her. He seemed to grasp the emotion if not the words. Regardless, Pioneer gripped her hand with both of his own, bowed to her again, and then turned to Mitchell and said something in Mandarin.

“‘I hope to see you soon,’” Mitchell translated. “We need to get in the air.” Kyra looked at Pioneer and nodded.

“We’re gone,” Jonathan said.

The analysts climbed down the stairs and moved to a safe distance. Mitchell grabbed the rope and pulled the stairway up into the plane, then locked the hatch as the Learjet’s engines began to spin up.

“They’ll be at Dulles in eighteen hours,” Kyra said. “Now what?”

“We meet our own escort,” Jonathan said. “Have you ever been on an aircraft carrier?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

Jonathan smiled. “Trust me, you’ll love it.”

“No, I won’t,” Kyra assured him. “I get seasick.”

She made the analyst wait as she bought Dramamine at one of the airport shops.

Captain Nagin eased back on the F-35’s throttle and leveled the plane as he came out of his turn. Two fellow Bounty Hunters were behind him, one fifty meters off each wing, and another trio of his fellow Bounty Hunters ten miles behind. All six stealth planes were sharing data with feeds coming from Lincoln, an AWACS out of Guam, and a pair of E-2C Hawkeyes that had taken off from the carrier after Nagin’s flight. For the moment, their own active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars were off and the F-35’s four-panel cockpit screen still offered Nagin a fine view of the sky ahead. The horizon was dark with thunderclouds, and a lightning storm thirty miles ahead was giving a light show as good as any the Lincoln CAG had ever seen from a cockpit. It was a beautiful sight, as long as one kept a respectful distance, and one he wouldn’t have minded lingering to watch.

The four Chinese Su-27 Flankers ahead marred the view.

The Flankers were in an echelon formation, each plane slightly to the rear and to the right of the one ahead, and all a thousand feet higher and two miles ahead of Nagin’s flight. They were also on course to encroach on Lincoln’s defense zone unless they changed course in the next five minutes. Some things were not to be trifled with in Nagin’s world, and the safety of home was one them. At the moment, home was the Lincoln—the landing strips on the flattop, not to put too fine a point on it.

“Think they know we’re here?” asked one of Nagin’s wingmen, a youngish lieutenant, call sign Squib. The other wingman was Cleetus.

“Nope,” said Nagin. The Flankers’ relatively weak radars almost certainly hadn’t been able to get a return off the stealthy F-35s. And with the AESA systems off, there were no emissions for the Flankers to detect. “Think I’ll go introduce myself.”

Nagin pulled back on the stick and advanced the throttle ever so slightly, and his plane obediently rose in the sky, pulling ahead of the rest of his personal pack and pushing forward toward the Chinese fighters. He closed the distance gently until he was in position to join the formation, becoming the rearmost plane in the echelon line.

I love this part, he thought. He pushed the F-35 forward a few meters until he flanked the Chinese fighter in the rear position.

The PLA pilot took a moment to notice, obviously seeing the US Navy aircraft only out of his peripheral vision at first. Then his head swung full around. Nagin couldn’t see his face through the darkened helmet visor, but the other pilot’s body language told him everything. His head began to jerk wildly about and he started to slip switches in the cockpit with abandon. Doubtless he was yelling to his flight leader and wondering where the American had come from.

Nagin waved, then motioned hard for him to change course. The PLA pilot made no obvious response. Nagin gave the entire group several seconds to respond, but the line held steady on course.

Okay, Nagin thought. Meet the boys. “Gentlemen,” he said over his radio, “time to open the coat.”

The two Bounty Hunters to the rear both grinned behind their visors, reached forward to the four-panel computer screens above their knees, and pressed virtual buttons on the glass. The AESA radars in the F-35s both came alive in tandem and washed the Flankers in electromagnetic waves. The Su-27s began screaming threat warnings in their masters’ ears. A second later, the F-35s’ bay doors snapped open and their missile loads emerged, breaking the stealth profiles. The F-35s were suddenly visible to anyone with a radar.

The Flankers immediately began to break formation.

“Now where did they come from?” Nagin chuckled to himself. The sight of two F-35s appearing out of nothing on the Flankers’ heads-up display must have been a brutal shock, which was the point.

The Flankers went in four different directions, all moving west at varying altitudes and headings. Nagin eased back on his throttle and pushed his stick forward to descend a thousand feet to rejoin his flight. “Close up and pull back,” he radioed back to Squib and Cleetus. “No sense making them think we’re too anxious to get rowdy.” The two wingmen retracted their bay doors, restoring the stealth profiles, then killed the AESA radars, and all three F-35s disappeared off the Flankers’ screens.

I wonder which one scares them more? Nagin asked himself. Watching us just appear or seeing us go away?

They came aboard the carrier in the middle of a squall. The flight from Seoul to Tokyo’s Narita Airport had been turbulent but short. A Navy driver had delivered them to the US Naval Air Facility at Atsugi and led them to a waiting C-2A Greyhound on the tarmac. There had been no conversations with the crew, no talking at all except for the short safety briefing, which Jonathan had ignored. The ease with which he strapped himself in suggested that he’d had practice, but the turboprops were loud enough to discourage Kyra from asking him any questions. Once aloft, Jonathan slept and left Kyra to wish she could do the same. The float coat vests they were ordered to wear were not uncomfortable but the seats and the “Mickey Mouse” helmets with heavy ear protectors were. She might have made do, but the plane itself refused to sit still. She had never been aboard a propeller-driven aircraft. The Dramamine did nothing for her nerves. Every bit of wind and rough air made the Greyhound jump, leaving her edgy and awake. Alone in her thoughts, she wondered whether the aircraft could evade a MIG should the Chinese decide to take offense at their approach to the war zone. Probably not.

The seat belts performed as advertised when the plane hit the deck harder than Kyra thought possible for an aircraft to survive and then rushed to a stop in a distance too short to be natural. Unseen crewmen disconnected the tailhook from the wire and Kyra watched, too tired to be curious, as they folded up the wings. The plane taxied to a space forward of the carrier island to make room for a Hornet coming less than a minute behind them. The crew chained the Greyhound to the deck and only then did the passengers deplane.

Horizontal rain lashed the deck and everyone on it. Kyra was stunned to feel the deck pitching and rolling under her feet. She’d thought a carrier was too large to toss about, and she stumbled as the crew hurried them to a hatch into the island. A seaman from the Air Transport Office dropped their wet bags at their feet and gave them cursory directions to their quarters.

It was the night watch. The island decks were at full lighting but the spaces under the hardtop were visible only under the red floodlights that preserved the crew’s night vision. Their staterooms were on the O-2 level, a single deck removed from topside, where Kyra could still hear and feel aircraft launching and landing. The planes were hitting hard in the storm. She suspected that they could have berthed her several decks below and she still would have heard it. Jonathan had warned her during the drive to Atsugi that a carrier was not a quiet place.

The stateroom was smaller than a college dorm, all gray metal and blue carpet, but she had the space to herself, for which she was grateful. She had her choice of three racks stacked in a vertical bunk; she chose the middle. Entering the lowest would have required her to get on her knees, and the upper rack was even with her head. She was sure that trying to get out of it in the dark with the ship pitching about would have been a dangerous exercise.

There was a television mounted on the upper shelf of the metal desk, and Kyra found a live feed of the flight deck besides the DoD channels. She settled on CNN and tried to catch up on the war, but the news, the noise, and the rolling of the carrier in the restless sea together failed to keep her from wanting to collapse. The adrenaline that had surged through her during the Beijing operation had long since worn off. She hadn’t slept in days and now she was more tired than she could ever remember.

She changed her clothing, pulled a Mini Maglite from her pack and turned it on, then killed the room light and crawled into the small bed. The rack barely gave her the space to roll onto her side, as her shoulder brushed the upper bunk. Kyra clenched the lit Maglite in her teeth as she locked the restraining curtain to keep herself from rolling out. A fall onto the metal desk next to the bed could kill her.

She turned off the flashlight and was surprised for a few moments at how complete the darkness was before she dropped into unconsciousness.

Reveille sounded at 0600, full lighting came on in the hallway and climbed under the door, breaking the blackness. The aircraft beating on the deck had never broken their rhythm throughout the night, and the morning shift now began pounding its way across the hallway’s floors. None of it disturbed Kyra a bit until Jonathan’s endless pounding on her door finally broke into her private oblivion.