Red Cell

CHAPTER 2

The midnight shift was still young, but Jakob Drescher wasn’t and the senior duty officer refused to show weakness to the staff. He was past middle age, older by a decade than anyone else in the Operations Center, and night watches were getting harder by the year. He argued to himself that his subordinates’ true advantage came only from coffee’s power to keep the brain active in the dead of night. Caffeine addicts staffed the night shift in CIA’s Operations Center, and they couldn’t imagine how Drescher found the will to resist. One of the perks that made up for a government salary was access to the river of java that ran through Langley, fueled by officers in the field sending back foreign brews that made domestic brands taste like swill. But good Mormons don’t drink coffee, Drescher was a Mormon, the son of Cold War East German immigrant converts, and the argument ended there.

The world was quiet tonight. The broadcast news playing on the floor-to-ceiling matrix of plasma televisions was all trivial stories. The cables coming in from CIA field stations were infrequent and blissfully dull by any standard. If the rest of the shift stayed this quiet, he would have nothing to pass over to his day shift counterpart in a few hours. Drescher checked the clock, which was a mistake. The true secret to surviving a night watch was to never mark the time. Drescher couldn’t prove it, but he swore that Einstein must have worked night shifts as a patent clerk to come up with the theory that the passage of time was relative. A night during a crisis could pass in a hurry, but tonight the lack of activity was the answer to a prayer. Drescher had plans for his weekend, which fell on a Wednesday and Thursday this week because of the rotating Ops Center staffing schedule. He would miss church on Sunday, which his wife wouldn’t appreciate, but he would need the sleep during the day too much. He would always pass on the coffee, but he was too old to give up the Sunday sleep anymore.

“Got something for you.” The analyst from the Office of Asian Pacific, Latin American, and African Analysis (APLAA) rose from her desk and maneuvered her way down the aisle without looking, eyes locked on the hard-copy printout in her hand. Drescher couldn’t remember the young woman’s name. She was a Latina, a pretty girl, newly graduated from some California school, but Drescher had forgotten her name as soon as he’d heard it. He’d given up on trying to learn the names of most of his subordinates, in fact, and had taken to calling them by the names of their home offices. The Ops Center staff changed so often, with all the young officers eager to punch tickets for promotion and staying only a few months at a time.

“Either give me a hundred dead bodies or I don’t want to hear about it,” Drescher grumbled. “Fifty, if it’s Europe. And where’s my hot chocolate?”

“You know, under that gruff exterior beats a heart of lead,” APLAA remarked.

“Compassion is for the weak,” Drescher said. “It’s why I’m the boss and you’re my peon.”

“I live to serve,” the analyst replied.

“Don’t be facetious, APLAA.”

“I’ve got a name, you know,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s APLAA. What have you got?”

“NIACT cable from Taipei. One body and a lot of other people getting carried away in paddy wagons and ambulances. The locals just arrested big brother’s chief of station.” APLAA thrust the paper at Drescher. NIght ACTion cables required immediate attention regardless of when they arrived. That wasn’t a problem at headquarters, where there was always someone on duty. Cables going back to field stations were more troublesome. When one of those went to a station overseas, someone, usually the most junior case officer, had to report to work — no matter the obscene hour — to field the request.

Drescher took the paper and scanned it twice before looking up. “Why did they need a hazmat unit—?” He stopped midsentence. None of the answers his tired mind offered were encouraging.

“Yeah. Hazmat got the call in the middle of the raid. NSA labeled it a ‘panic’ call. Someone walked into a nasty surprise. The Fort is waking up everyone who can understand at least basic Mandarin, but they’ll need a few more hours to translate everything.” Translators were a scarce resource for the hard languages, and Mandarin Chinese was in the top five on the list.

“Any civilian casualties?” Drescher asked. This was getting good.

“None reported.”

The senior duty officer grunted. “Any reaction from the mainland?”

“Nothing yet,” the woman told him. “Beijing Station said they’re going to work their assets. Wouldn’t tell me who they’d be talking to.”

“Don’t bother asking,” Drescher ordered. “You’ll just make ’em mad.” CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the directorate that did the true “spy” work of recruiting foreign traitors, was protective of its sources. Twelve dead Russian assets courtesy of Aldrich Ames had been a string of harsh reminders that intelligence networks could be fragile things. But the APLAA analyst was young, one of the ambitious young officers who didn’t yet know not to ask.

“Nothing on the local news or the Internet,” APLAA said, ignoring the rebuke. “Taipei probably clamped down on the press. Nothing like a story about a Chinese spy bringing chemical weapons onto the island to scare the locals.”

“Don’t assume that it was a chemical weapon,” Drescher corrected her. “Could’ve been a gas spill or bystanders downwind of some tear gas. Just report the facts and save the analysis.” He kept a map of the world’s time zones under glass on his desk. The first cable said the arrests started at 1830 eastern standard time—6:30 p.m. on a civilian clock and six hours ago. A twelve-hour time zone difference meant 1830 in Washington DC was 6:30 a.m. in Beijing and Taipei. The raids went down almost at the crack of the winter dawn. Drescher checked the television. CNN’s brunette was talking about yesterday’s minuscule drop in the Dow, a nonstory meant to waste a minute of on-air time during a slow news cycle. BBC’s blonde was talking about labor protests in Paris, and the other channels were offering stories equally trivial. “It hasn’t reached the foreign wire services,” he noted. “Does State Department have anything?”

“Their watch desk hadn’t even seen the report yet.”

Drescher sat back, reread the two cables, and finally allowed himself a smile. He was awake now. Adrenaline was the best stimulant, far better than caffeine. Taiwan had arrested twelve people, several of which were known to work for China’s Ministry of State Security, and arresting officers were down. David had poked Goliath in the eye with a sharp stick and Goliath might have poked back.

The senior duty officer reached for the phone and pressed the speed dial without remorse. The CIA director picked up her own secure phone at home on the third ring. “This is the Ops Center,” Drescher recited. “Going ‘secure voice.’” He pressed the button that encrypted the call.

Kyra Stryker turned onto the headquarters compound from Route 123 and slowed her red Ford Ranger as she approached the guard shack. The glass and steel shelter connected with the Visitor Control Building to the right through a dirty concrete arch open to the wind. Kyra dreaded lowering the cab window but there was no choice. The freezing air invaded her truck and she thrust her badge out at the SPO. A second guard was standing on the other side of the two-lane road, this one cradling an M16 with gloved hands. A luckier third was sitting inside the heated shack to the left with a 12 gauge Mossberg shotgun within arm’s reach. Doubtless there were more inside the Control Building, all carrying 9 mm Glock sidearms and surely with much heavier guns in reach. Kyra’s was the only vehicle coming down the approach and she had their undivided attention. For a brief moment, she had seriously considered running the checkpoint and pressed the brake only when she conceded that the guards wouldn’t open fire. They would have just activated the pneumatic barricades that would smash her truck. Then they would have arrested her and spent the rest of the day with her in a detention room, asking repeatedly why a CIA staff officer with a valid blue badge had done such a stupid thing. Not wanting to go to work would have been viewed as a very poor excuse.

The officer gave her the signal to proceed, a lazy military wave. Kyra withdrew her arm, rolled up the window, and turned the heater on full so the cab would recover the warm air it had hemorrhaged to the outside.

Please let the barricades go off, she thought, and she was surprised at how much she meant it. The pneumatic rams had enough power to snap the truck’s frame in half, if not flip the vehicle onto its cab on the frozen asphalt. But the thought of a sure trip to the hospital didn’t seem any worse to her than where she was going at the moment.

Her Ranger rolled over the closed hydraulic gates, the barricades didn’t rise up from the road underneath, and Kyra sighed, not in relief, she realized, but in slight frustration. She hadn’t been to headquarters in six months. She shouldn’t have been returning for at least six more, but that plan had jumped the rails and nobody was happy about it. Her visit today wasn’t by choice, hers or anyone else’s, and it galled her to think that she would have to make the same trip every day going forward. Maybe the new assignment would be short. Working at headquarters was not one of her ambitions.

She passed the front of the Old Headquarters Building (OHB), which offered the view most familiar to those who had only seen the facility on the news. She was taking the long way around but she was in no hurry. The George Washington Parkway entrance was ahead and it would have been easy to turn right, leave the compound, and go home. She turned left after sitting at the stop sign for ten full seconds. There were no other cars on the road.

There’s my girl.

The A-12 Oxcart loomed over the roadway, sitting at a rolled angle, nose up on three steel pylons, and Kyra smiled for the first time that morning. She loved the plane. She’d never earned that pilot’s license despite her childhood ambitions — her parents had never been willing to spend the money — and had been reduced to reading about planes and spending hours in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and its annex at Dulles Airport. On her first visit to the Agency compound, she’d climbed the concrete facade surrounding the Oxcart and touched the cold, black wing. It had been the most spiritual experience she had enjoyed in her twenty-five years. Kyra still wondered what it would be like to fly Kelly Johnson’s masterpiece at ninety thousand feet, setting the air on fire at Mach 3.

The plane passed behind her and the diversion came to a rude end.

Those with more leave hours to burn, which looked to be almost everyone, had left the parking garage nearly empty. Kyra pulled into a space on the bottom level near the front, killed the engine, and debated starting it again and driving away.

Just do it. Or you’ll have to come back and do it just like this tomorrow.

She abandoned the truck before she could talk herself out of it.

The wind brushed up snow from the drifts piled on the grounds and threw it across her path. She hadn’t bothered with a hat or gloves and instead thrust her hands into her coat pockets. There was no help for her face. Her cheeks and ears, numb when she reached the glass doors to the New Headquarters Building, tingled painfully as she passed through the heated air curtain. A shot of Scotch would have warmed her stomach faster than coffee, and for a second she wished for a hip flask of anything strong. The urge died quickly. Meeting with the CIA director while smelling of alcohol before lunch would kill whatever career she still had left.

The lobby was a cathedral in miniature, unlit, thirty yards long, and flanked on both sides by dark gray marble pillars that framed bronze sculptures and modular gray vinyl couches along the walls. The grayish-blue carpet, brightened only by the CIA seal in the center, matched the odd gloom that was unusual for the normally bright space. Kyra looked up and saw snow covering the semicircular glass ceiling. It blocked out the sun and washed out the colors in a drab, filtered light. The entrance was abandoned except for a security protective officer manning the guard desk at the lobby’s far end. His reading lamp created a small bubble of warm light in the darkness.

She walked the length of the room, ran her badge over the security turnstiles, and entered her code. The restraining arms parted and the SPO didn’t look up. Kyra walked around the guard desk to the escalator leading to the lower floors. The windows beyond ran floor to ceiling and Kyra could see the empty courtyard below and the massive Old Headquarters Building a few hundred feet beyond. The dark and quiet combined to make the compound feel deserted, which was an unearthly feeling given the size of the OHB filling the bay windows. The Agency complex covered three hundred acres cut out of the George Washington National Forest along the GW Parkway, barely a stone’s throw from the Potomac. Kyra couldn’t guess from the view how many people worked there. The exact number was classified anyway, and the building’s size made her realize how important she was to the place.

Not at all. A cog in the machine.

The desire to reverse course welled up in her throat again. She beat it down without mercy, never breaking stride, and the craving for a drink surged up to replace it.

The walk to her destination took a long three minutes. The Office of Medical Services lobby on the first floor looked like any doctor’s office, which had surprised her the first time she visited. It was a medical facility like any private practice in the outside world, but it seemed out of place in a government building. More so, Kyra thought, given that it was wedged in between the Agency museum and the Old Headquarters lobby.

Kyra signed in. After a short wait, the desk nurse escorted her back to an examination room. Kyra took the usual place on the exam table and the nurse didn’t bother to assure her that someone would be in to see her in a few minutes.

The doctor was an old man, she noted, gray hair and his share of weathered skin, though Kyra suspected he’d been a handsome man when he was younger. He said nothing as he studied her chart, and Kyra took the time to study him. She’d been here, just after Caracas, and talked with another doctor about his job. It was relatively simple, with most duties consisting of performing physicals and dispensing vaccinations to clear staff officers to travel overseas. The doctors were usually busiest at Christmas when they had to dole out the free flu shots to all comers. But every so often analysts would call for a consult about theoretical patients they wouldn’t identify despite the doctors’ own TS/SCI security clearances. They were trying to determine when some particularly unpopular foreign leader was going to drop dead, Kyra supposed, which made for a nice puzzle with no patient to examine.

And sometimes they got to treat patients, like Kyra, with wounds or diseases contracted in places they couldn’t always tell him they’d been. She was sure that broke up the monotony.

“Still sore?” the doctor finally asked. He closed up the chart and set it on the nearby counter.

“Yes,” Kyra admitted. “It’s stiff mostly. Makes driving a little more complicated.”

“You drive an automatic or a stick?”

“An automatic,” Kyra said, and she was grateful for it. Driving a stick shift would’ve been torture in Beltway traffic, which was stop-and-go most of the time. “I usually don’t feel it until I have to make a hard turn or mess with the radio.”

“You probably still have some residual deep tissue bruising,” the doctor said. “You lost some triceps and brachialis, and there’s scarring across the site and down into the muscle. Scar tissue isn’t real pliable, so you’re going to suffer some loss of flexibility. Not too much, I think, but you’ll notice it. Right- or left-handed?”

“Left.”

“That’s good news. It won’t affect your primary arm,” the doctor told her. Kyra was sure it was an attempt to comfort her, but it struck her as weak. “Okay. Let’s have a look.”

Kyra unbuttoned her shirt and pulled her right arm out of the sleeve, exposing a large, thick medical bandage taped on all four sides across the back of her right upper arm. The doctor pulled the cover back, gently separating the tape from her skin until the gauze came away. She had a lateral laceration running almost three inches across her triceps. The once-ragged edges of the torn skin had been trimmed neat by a surgeon’s scalpel and pulled together, and they were still held by two dozen tight stitches.

The doctor stared at the wound, turning her arm slightly from side to side as he studied the wound. “It looks good,” he finally said. “No signs of infection. I think the stitches can come out whenever you want, but keep it covered for another couple of weeks to be safe.” Kyra nodded, put her arm back inside her shirt, and pulled it down over her waist. “How’s the Vicodin working for you?” he asked.

“Pretty good, I guess,” Kyra said. “It lets me sleep. Still hurts sometimes, though. Like deep, in the bone.”

“I’m not surprised,” the doctor replied. “It’s probably the bruising. The fracture in the humerus should be healed by now. And if it gets too bad, we can go up on the Vicodin. Do you need a refill?”

“Sure,” Kyra said, without enthusiasm.

“I’ll write one up.” He caught the depression in her voice. She hadn’t tried to hide it. “You were lucky,” he offered. “You could’ve lost that arm.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” Kyra told him. She finished straightening her shirt and pushed herself off the exam table onto the floor.

“Getting shot will do that, I guess,” he conceded.

Kyra finished rolling up her sleeve as the doctor left the room. One appointment finished. She was far more worried about the second.

Kathryn Cooke’s first visit to the Oval Office had been her own inauguration as CIA director. That summer day, the president of the United States had spent two minutes, carefully timed by the White House chief of staff, on small talk and a tour of the room. The national security advisor had administered the oath of office while the White House photographer recorded the event. The White House press corps had been admitted to hear the president deliver a statement of confidence in the job she would do. Cooke made her own brief statement — she’d worked for six hours, revised it a dozen times, and memorized it — expressing the usual gratitude. Five minutes were granted for six questions before the president excused the press corps. Cooke was allowed thirty seconds of small talk and then was politely dismissed. Her few return visits had mostly been social affairs. The job of CIA director was not what it once had been. For fifty-nine years, her predecessors had both run the CIA and managed the intelligence community, as much as it could be managed. But the Agency had suffered too many failures, an angry Congress had created a new office to take over the latter job, and so Cooke answered to the director of national intelligence. The DNI, Michael Rhead, was now the president’s intel advisor, and that left little reason for the commander in chief to ever summon the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to the White House.

Cooke had never dwelled on the job’s new limitations. It was a higher post than she’d ever expected to hold and she was still an agency director with the usual perquisites — a basement of security personnel and secure communications gear, an armored Chevrolet SUV with a driver, and a chase car of armed guards. She would have preferred to drive her BMW but conceded that the escort gave her time to read instead of fighting perpetually clogged Beltway lanes.

It was a true blessing this morning. The Ops Center call came after three hours of sleep. Coffee, a shower that wasn’t as hot as she preferred, and old Navy discipline brought her online. The senior duty officer had sent the raw SIGINT to her secure fax, and a scan of the pages over blueberry yogurt and granola put her in full motion. It had then been her unpleasant task to notify the DNI and the national security advisor. The former had a demeanor that always made phone calls an irritating duty regardless of the hour. The latter took the early call like the gracious gentleman that he was.

The cold Virginia morning chased away the last vestiges of sleepiness as she walked to the armored car. A security officer ran the President’s Daily Brief article to the vehicle as she was climbing into the back seat.

Cooke’s driver pulled the armored car into the executive garage under the Old Headquarters Building a minute after passing through the George Washington Parkway gate. The garage had its own guard post manned by SPOs to keep out the masses. Cooke didn’t care for the elitism. Many employees had to walk a good quarter mile from the parking lot’s outer limits, but she bowed to the fact that, most days, parking spaces and time on her schedule were too limited.

The cold erased her guilt that this garage had a private elevator that ran to her office. The doors opened onto the Old Headquarters Building seventh floor, where Clark Barron, the director of the National Clandestine Service, stood waiting for her with a cup of hot coffee in hand. Cooke wondered how the man had ever blended into a crowd during his younger days as a case officer. The CIA director was not a short woman, a few inches shy of six feet, and she still strained to look up at the man’s face.

“God bless you, Clark,” Cooke said. She traded her coat for the mug and drained half the coffee in a single swig.

“I thought you were agnostic,” Barron said.

“Just shows how grateful I am,” Cooke said. “And this is good brew. How did you know how I like it?”

“I recruited your assistant,” Barron said. “She’s my most valuable asset now. I’ve been thinking about assigning her a code-name crypt.”

“Scoundrel.”

“It’s what case officers do,” Barron reminded her. “Even the old ones.”

“And you do it well. Whatever you want, it’s yours,” Cooke promised.

“No ulterior motives this time. I knew you were coming and chivalry is dead in this town, so I’m left to play the gentleman,” Barron said.

The CIA director’s “office” actually was a complex. The door to Cooke’s private workspace sat back along the rear wall of the larger area. Her office windows opened to a view of the George Washington National Forest. Her desk sat to the immediate left of the door and she was religious about keeping it clear, mostly out of fear that once the paperwork started to pile up she would never get ahead of it. The walls were home to curiosities under glass, the number evenly split between gifts from foreign peers and trophies smuggled out of countries by case officers. A US flag covered the western wall, shabby and torn, with burns and scorches over its surface. A CIA officer had recovered it from the smoking crater of the World Trade Center and no Agency director would ever remove it. The September 11 flag was the lone permanent artifact in an office that changed occupants and mementos more often than the Oval Office changed presidents.

Barron followed Cooke into the office and closed the door behind her. “The National Weather Service says we’ve got two days before the temperature climbs up into the teens and more snow inbound from a nor’easter. We should just catch the edge of it, but still,” he said. “A shame we can’t close the place down and send everyone home.”

“Unfortunately, it’s not snowing in Taipei,” Cooke observed.

“Or Beijing,” Barron said. “I renew my request for a CIA Southern Command in Miami.”

“Denied,” Cooke said. “Again.”

“I have allergies to snow, I swear.”

“I grew up in Maine. I have no sympathy for you,” Cooke said. “Didn’t you do a rotation in Moscow?”

“Two actually. Three years as a case officer, four as station chief,” Barron said. “And I grew up in Chicago. You can see why I’m looking to spend my remaining years in the sun.” The promotion path to Barron’s office historically ran through Moscow. Even during the War on Terror, getting that ticket punched without being declared persona non grata by the Russian government never hurt a case officer’s career.

“If you can get it past Congress, I’ll go for it.” Cooke finished the coffee in a single swallow and traded the empty mug for the black binder of intelligence traffic Barron carried under his arm. She opened the book. “Tell me the story.”

The first page was a map. “NSA caught most of it from the raid teams’ radios and some phone calls made after the fact by federal officers. Some of our people filled in the blanks afterward using our own data about officers the MSS has in country. The raids went down at two different locations in Taipei,” Barron said. “There were also raids in Taoyuan to the north and Kaohsiung in the south. Federal officers were present at all four scenes and reported to their superiors by cell phone, which gave us the intel identifying the targets at the first site. Eight Chinese nationals and four Taiwanese detained. One of the Taiwanese is an expatriate, now a naturalized US citizen employed by Lockheed Martin. James Hu. He entered Taiwan on his US passport the day before the raid.”

“The raid teams’ radios weren’t encrypted?” Cooke asked.

“They were, in fact,” Barron said.

“Kudos to NSA,” Cooke said. “Hu was working for the MSS?”

“Looks that way.”

“Have FBI contact Lockheed. Find out what he was working on,” Cooke directed.

“I assume the Bureau is already working on that,” Barron assured her.

“I try not to assume anything when it comes to the Bureau,” Cooke said. “What do we have on the Chinese taken down at that site?”

“Names and bios. They caught a big fish,” Barron said. The second page featured photographs of the arrested suspects. Several of the slots were blank, black silhouettes with white question marks inside. Barron pointed at one of the photos. “Li Juangong. We pegged him a year ago as the MSS station chief in Taipei. We think the other two are members of his senior staff.”

“He’s a piece of work,” Cooke noted, skimming the bio.

Barron grunted. “The mean ones always are.”

“You would know,” Cooke said, smiling.

“You try herding a few thousand case officers,” Barron said.

“I’ll call your bet and raise you two congressional oversight committees,” Cooke joked. “How long can the Chinese keep the story contained on their side?”

“Good odds, not very long,” Barron said. “The MSS has a very poor record of keeping state secrets. In Chinese society, family relations are valued so highly that officials don’t consider sharing classified information with close relatives a breach of security. State secrets can end up on the streets relatively quickly. And Tian Kai is already trying to get ahead of it.” He pointed Cooke toward page three. “Tian convened a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee within an hour of the arrests. We don’t know what was said.”

“They were talking damage control most likely,” Cooke said. She set her binder on the table. “If you told me that the MSS had rolled up twelve of our assets in China, I’d run you out of town on a rail.”

“If the MSS rolled up twelve of our assets, I’d deserve it,” Barron agreed. “My guess is that Liang pulled this stunt because of the presidential election next month. He’s too far down in the polls to come back without rigging the election or creating a crisis. Nixon had better approval numbers when he resigned in seventy-four. And Liang will face a corruption indictment if the opposition wins, so he’s motivated. He could be setting this up to turn the public’s attention to an external threat.”

“I’m worried about the Chinese reaction,” Cooke said with a frown.

“You think Tian wants to get rowdy?”

“APLAA says no, but I’m not sure I believe it,” Cooke said. “Have somebody connect with Pioneer. I want to make sure we’ve got some advance notice if they’re wrong.”

Barron bit his lip at the mention of the “Pioneer” crypt, which itself was classified Top Secret NOFORN. NO FOReigNers, not even the friendly ones, had access to it. Some sources and methods were too sensitive to tell even allies that they existed, much less share the information they yielded. “I’ll talk to Carl Mitchell,” he conceded. “He’s the station chief out there.”

Cooke saw the hesitation in his face. “You haven’t run this by anyone in the Directorate of Intelligence,” she realized. The DI was the CIA analytic division.

“No,” he admitted.

“Not even Jim Welling?” Cooked asked. Welling was the director of the DI and Barron’s equal. The two men even worked out of the same vault on the seventh floor, just down the hall from Cooke’s own.

“That’s one source I don’t want burned,” Barron admitted. “It’s personal. I don’t even want Jim to know about him, much less some DI analyst. They’re all a bunch of glorified journalists, just looking for the next big thing to write about in an intel assessment for some politician who can’t keep his mouth shut.”

“Same team, Clark,” Cooke said.

“Mistakes get made,” Barron said.

“They do, but your people have blown more ops than DI analysts ever have.” She knew that would offend the NCS director’s pride, but he knew it was the truth. “I want your people to cooperate,” Cooke told him. “If an analyst asks about sources and methods, the one answer your people aren’t allowed to give is no. If they don’t like that, they’ve got my phone number.”

“I won’t let it come to that,” Barron promised.

“You know, this clash of civilizations between the DI and the NCS needs to stop,” Cooke said. “Analysts and case officers need to be working together, not sitting around in little cliques like kids at the prom.”

“If you can manage that, the president should nominate you for secretary of state,” Barron replied. “By the way, I saw Stryker sitting out in your waiting room. I’ve told my people to play dumb if anyone from the DNI’s staff asks about her. Have you decided where to stash her?”

“Oh yes.” Cooke sounded very satisfied with herself. “A nice safe harbor where nobody will go looking.”

“Want to let me in on the secret?” Barron asked.

“You sure you want to know? Mistakes get made, after all,” she said.

“Touché.”

Cooke told him. All Barron could do was shake his head before leaving for his office.

Kyra knew Clark Barron on sight. He’d addressed her class during the graduation ceremony at the Farm the year before. Many of the men who had held his post — there had never yet been a woman chosen for it — had been disliked by the rank and file. Some of his predecessors considered that to be a job qualification. Barron argued in the speech that if charisma was a valuable trait for a case officer, a manager who didn’t have enough to connect with his own troops must not have been very good in the field. He left unspoken, though not unnoticed, the insinuation that those unlikables must have climbed to the top using other, less respectable skills. Kyra had liked him instantly.

Barron moved past the door into the hallway without a word. A minute later, Cooke stood in the doorway to the waiting room. “You’re Stryker?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kyra answered. She rose and fought the urge to stand at attention.

“Let’s take a walk,” Cooke said without preamble.

Kyra followed Cooke out to the hallway. The director steered Kyra to the right. The corridor was empty, leaving their conversation as private as if they had been sitting behind the door of Cooke’s office. “Have you found a place to live?”

“Yes, ma’am, a condo in Leesburg just off Route Seven.”

“Long commute,” Cooke remarked. “General George Marshall’s house is out there in Leesburg. Dodona Manor. Interesting place if you like military history.”

“I was a history major at the University of Virginia,” Kyra said. “I prefer the Civil War, though. Shelby Foote and Michael Shaara.”

“The Killer Angels. A great book, that one,” Cooke said with approval. “You couldn’t find anything closer to headquarters?”

“Not on a GS-twelve salary, ma’am,” Kyra said. “And I don’t think a promotion is coming anytime soon.”

Cooke cocked her head, nonplussed, and looked at the younger woman. Bold honesty? she thought. Or no sense of self-preservation? Cooke had read the girl’s file. Stryker’s sense of self-preservation was just fine, so the former, Cooke decided, probably with a healthy dose of anger and resentment in the mix. “You deserve one, but no,” she admitted. “I know it feels like you’re getting hostile treatment—”

“Yes, ma’am, it does,” Kyra admitted. “I just expected it to come from the enemy and not our own people.”

Cooke repressed a sigh. “Have you called the Employee Assistance Program yet?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Any reason why?”

Kyra kept walking but said nothing for a few paces, long enough that Cooke looked over. The younger woman finally spoke. “I don’t walk to talk to a counselor, ma’am. I’m fine.”

“That would surprise me very much,” Cooke told her. “Don’t make me turn it into an order.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It will help. So will getting a little satisfaction. Sam Rigdon might be a station chief, but he’s not one of our people,” Cooke said. “Your exposure was his fault and we’re not going to let the DNI sacrifice you to save him. But I want you to understand how bad this might get. Washington Post headlines and Sunday morning talk shows if it leaks,” Cooke advised her.

“Are you trying to scare me, ma’am?”

“No. I just don’t want you to drop out on me when the shooting starts,” Cooke said. “You’ve got a chance to do something for the Agency now. Lose the attitude and be patient. I’ll get you back into the field. I can’t tell you when or where, but I can tell you that Clark will remember that you took the bullet.” In more ways than one, she thought. “We’ll get you right again. You understand me?” Cooke opened a stairwell door and the two women began their descent to the lower floors. The stairs were grubby and dark, and red pipes erupted from the walls, clashing with the yellow cinderblock.

“I think so, ma’am,” Kyra answered.

“Either you do or you don’t. If you fold on me when the moment comes, then we’re both done here. Clark Barron too, and probably a few others.”

“I won’t resign,” Kyra assured her. “But if you’re not sending me to the field, where are you sending me?”

“You’re going to the Directorate of Intelligence,” Cooke said.

“You’re hiding me?”

“That’s one way of putting it. You have a problem with it?” Cooke asked.

“I’m not an analyst,” Kyra replied, dismayed. “I don’t know how to do that job. And I’ve never heard much good about analysts anyway.”

“Have you heard of the Red Cell?” Cooke asked.

“No, ma’am, I haven’t,” Kyra admitted.

“It’s an alternative analysis unit… not your usual DI shop,” Cooke said. “George Tenet created the Red Cell on September thirteenth to make sure the Agency didn’t suffer another September eleventh. Their job is to ‘think outside the box’—to find the possibilities that other analysts might overlook or dismiss.”

“Devil’s advocate? War-gaming?” Kyra asked. That, at least, could be interesting.

Cooke steered Kyra to the left. The second floor hallways were claustrophobic and dark, the combination of government-standard yellow paint and fluorescent bulbs that always looked like they were dying. The ceiling was low; Kyra could have touched it with her fingertips. There was no carpet, just dirty tiles that, permanently soiled from over a half century of footsteps, soaked up what little light escaped the ceiling. “They do those occasionally, but it’s not their sole mission. And to be honest, the rest of the analysts don’t like them. Or I should say ‘him.’ The Cell is running low on manpower,” Cooke said.

“How many?”

“Right now, one.” Cooke admitted. “It’s not field work, but you’ll stay connected with what’s going on around, you’ll draw a paycheck, and we can pull you back in a hurry.”

They turned right down another hallway. Kyra found herself reading wall placards that announced room titles and numbers cut in small white letters on black plastic as she went. Cooke stopped in front of a door on the hallway’s left side near a dead end. The vault sign was distinct, not government standard but white letters in sans serif type on a globe bathed in red, all of which was hard to see in the dim light.

“Questions?” Cooke asked.

“Why are you walking me down in person?” Kyra asked.

“To make sure he doesn’t kick you back out,” Cooke told her. She pressed the buzzer set in the wall next to room 2G31 OHB. No one answered. Cooked swiped her badge against the reader and the door opened with a click.

Every government office Kyra had ever seen looked the same. They were all nests of shoulder-high, beige dividers set up to cram as many public servants as possible like cattle into the available space. It was a miracle, she thought, that anyone with claustrophobia could be a bureaucrat, and she had assumed that DI offices would adhere to the norm. Analysts and case officers were different animals, but government-approved floor plans were the same everywhere.

Except here, she thought. The Red Cell had more in common with a newsroom than a government office. The cramped vault was divided into a large bullpen, a smallish conference room, and a manager’s office. The far wall was glass, floor to ceiling, giving Kyra a wide view of New Headquarters. The other walls were covered with marker boards, maps of Middle Eastern nations, calendars, political cartoons, and newspaper articles. Stacks of The Economist, New Republic, Foreign Affairs, and intelligence reports covered the tables. The east wall was home to a life-sized full-body portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that some case officer might well have stolen from some abandoned Soviet building. Facing the Russian across the room was a near shrine of smaller black-and-white photographs of a young Ronald Reagan, dressed as a cowboy with six-shooters drawn, and a framed Economist cover billing the dead president as “The Man Who Destroyed Communism.”

A man stood at the far side of the room, his back to the door, his full attention given to a whiteboard. He held a red marker in one hand and an eraser in the other. He didn’t turn to see who had just invaded the room.

“Mr. Burke,” Cooke announced. It wasn’t a question.

The man turned his head slightly, barely enough to look back over his shoulder for a second before turning back to the board. “Director Cooke.” Jonathan Burke was tall, only slightly more so than Cooke, with an average build for his height. His hair had no observable gray and his eyes were an intense green. He wore the standard analyst uniform of brown khakis and a blue oxford shirt.

“What’s on the board today?” Cooke asked.

Burke said nothing for a second while he drew connections on a wire diagram with labels so sloppy that Kyra couldn’t read them. “I’m trying to develop a structured analytic technique to counter confirmation bias in finished intelligence products.”

“Ambitious,” Cooke warned him.

“I was bored,” Burke said. “I don’t handle boredom well.”

“I’m aware. Does it work?” Cooke asked.

Burke sighed, capped the marker, and dropped it on the whiteboard tray. He stared at the board for several more seconds before turning around. “Given how much confirmation bias goes on around here, you would think that developing a test for it would be trivial. Not so.”

“So that’s a ‘no,’” Cooke said, smiling.

“A ‘not yet,’” Burke corrected her. “I have no shortage of case studies to work with. But I assume you’re here to send me on a detour.”

“You’ve always said that you don’t have enough warm bodies,” Cooke said.

“I have plenty,” he said.

“You have one,” Cooke observed.

“As I said.”

Cranky bugger, Kyra thought. And the man was putting on no airs for a CIA director. That was interesting. How do you get away with that?

“Now you have two. Kyra Stryker, meet Jonathan Burke, analytic methodologist.”

Jonathan looked at the younger woman only briefly. “What have you heard about the Red Cell?”

“Only that you’re not very popular,” Kyra said. Two can play the cranky game, she thought, and she wasn’t in the mood to put on airs herself.

Jonathan lifted his head and studied the younger woman. “True. And irrelevant. Occasional hostility is the acceptable price of doing this business. And you’re keeping company with the director, so a lack of likability hasn’t slowed you down,” he observed.

“At the moment, being liked is not my problem,” Kyra said.

“How charming.” Jonathan looked to Cooke. “She shows promise. But I assume that you didn’t come just to escort this young lady down?”

“You heard about Taipei?” Cooke asked.

“Of course,” Jonathan said. “The hazmat unit was the interesting bit.”

“‘Interesting’ is not the word I would choose, but I agree. That’s why everything else on the Red Cell’s plate is now on hold.”

“You disagree with the China analysts on the situation?” Jonathan asked.

“You don’t?” Cooke answered.

“Of course I do,” Jonathan said. “But I’m disagreeable, so here I sit. What’s your issue?”

“My issue is that we’ve suffered a major intelligence failure every seven years since Pearl Harbor on average,” Cooke said. “So when APLAA tells me this is just going to be a little tiff, I want some insurance in case they’re wrong. The Red Cell is it. So tell me what you think.”

“I think the president should send in the aircraft carriers,” Jonathan said.

“You’re serious?” Kyra asked. “The Taiwanese arrest a few Chinese and you—”

“The Taiwanese arrested a few Chinese spies,” Jonathan corrected her. “And that is the prerogative of sovereign nations, so you can imagine why the Chinese might object to the Taiwanese doing that. Before last night, the Taiwanese had never detained an MSS officer in six decades precisely because they didn’t want to rile Big Brother. Now that little policy has changed and I suspect the Chinese won’t be amused. They’ll rattle the saber before this is finished.”

“All right,” Cooke said. “You have my attention.”

The analyst directed the women to a pair of chairs in the small open bullpen space and took a seat across from them. He stared past them out the window as he talked, making no eye contact with either woman. “Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists lost the Revolution, then fled to Taiwan and never surrendered. Imagine Jefferson Davis moving the capital of the Confederacy to Cuba in 1865 and never giving up its claim to the southern states. The Chinese see the Taiwanese as descendants of an enemy who should have surrendered, didn’t, and now want a consolation prize they don’t deserve. So the Chinese established the ‘One China’ policy and made it the prerequisite for doing business with the mainland. But every so often, the Taiwanese stick their head up, act like a sovereign country, and make the policy look like a farce. That doesn’t just humiliate Beijing. The Communist Party partly justifies its hold on power by arguing that it’s the best protector of Chinese interests. That includes bringing Taiwan back into the fold, so the government’s legitimacy depends in part on Taiwan keeping its head down. Arresting spies threatens that. Tian will have to act.”

“You’re talking about military action?” Kyra asked.

“Possibly,” Jonathan observed. “Military exercises along the coast opposite Taiwan are always a favorite way to send a message.”

“What about an invasion?” Cooke asked.

Jonathan shrugged. “There has always been a debate about whether the PLA has the capability to invade Taiwan proper. But that kind of yes-no argument discourages thinking about scenarios that don’t fit neatly at the poles, which is foolish. History proves that there is such a thing as limited war for limited gains. So a few years ago I drafted a Red Cell paper positing a limited war scenario in which the Chinese moved across the strait in stages. It took five years, but the ‘incremental moves’ view has become accepted now, not that APLAA is happy about it.”

“They disagree?” Kyra asked.

“Actually, no,” Jonathan responded. “They just dislike the fact that I and not one of their own wrote the paper. That group holds grudges and has long memories.”

“I’ve had to stop them from ordering a hit on you more than once. You’re welcome, by the way,” Cooke said. “How will Tian play this?”

“Passive-aggressive at first, to see if Liang will cave,” Jonathan said. “He’ll start with the usual public speeches, editorials in the People’s Daily, that sort of thing. Keep track of what the People’s Daily is saying. It’s the Chinese Pravda, controlled by the party, so the editorials are official announcements. On the diplomatic front, Tian doesn’t see Liang as an equal. He’ll suggest negotiation in public, but privately he’ll expect all the compromises to come from Liang.”

“Good enough to start.” Cooke stood and nodded at Kyra. “Send me that invasion plan of yours by close of business. And put this young lady to work.”

“If I must,” he said. He turned to Kyra. “How long will you be staying?”

“Ask her,” Kyra said, pointing at the director.

“Undetermined,” Cooke said.

“So helpful.” Jonathan pulled a pad across the desk and wrote out the titles and publication dates of several intelligence papers, all inked in neat block letters. “The China analysts keep hard copies of past research papers in their vault. Fifth floor.” He ripped the paper out and handed it to Kyra.

The titles were boring but the publication dates were not. “Some of these are as old as I am,” Kyra said.

“I wasn’t going to mention it, but that’s true,” Jonathan replied. “It’s a common error of the young to mistake the recent for the important.”

“You’re too kind,” Kyra said.

“Without question,” Jonathan agreed.

“Five bucks says you’ve got Asperger’s,” Kyra said.

“You’ll have to raise your bribe to find out,” Jonathan said.

“What if they won’t let me have these?” she asked, holding the paper up.

Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “If you have to ask permission before taking things, you’re working for the wrong Agency.”

Jonathan waited until the door closed behind Kyra before moving to the manager’s office. He threw himself into a chair while Cooke stopped at the doorway and leaned against the metal frame.

“I presume that she’s the reason you asked me to come in today?” he asked.

“She is,” Cooke answered. “Thanks for doing this.”

“I know an order when I hear one.”

“Still, you could have made this much more unpleasant,” Cooke said.

“The day is still young.”

The CIA director allowed herself a smile. “How’ve you been, Jon?” she asked.

“Well enough,” he said. “And you?’

Cooke shrugged. “Well enough,” she answered back.

“Are you still smoking Arturo Fuentes?”

“Only at home,” Cooke said. “I can’t change the no-smoking policy. It’s a federal law, after all.”

“It was bad enough when George Tenet walked around here chewing those things,” Jonathan said. The former director’s love for cigars had been so famous that his official portrait in the Agency gallery showed one sticking out of his coat pocket.

“George had impeccable taste in tobacco,” Cooke observed. “And he had the king of Jordan slipping him Montecristo Edmundos from Havana. I still have a few in the humidor at home that he gave me. You should come by and light one up with me sometime.”

Jonathan either missed the hint or ignored it, and Cooke couldn’t tell which. “No, thank you,” he said. “I’m on good terms with my lungs and I want to stay that way.”

“Your loss,” Cooke said. “You seeing anyone?”

Jonathan cocked his head and his mouth twisted into a wry grin. “Hardly. I’m an acquired taste,” he said. “You?”

“The job keeps me busy. And there’s not much privacy at home with all the SPOs running around.”

“No doubt.”

“It won’t last forever, Jon,” Cooke told him. “Tread lightly with Stryker. Sending her up to APLAA by herself was throwing a Christian to the lions.”

“I don’t believe in teaching analysts to swim in the shallow end of the pool,” Jonathan said.

“What do you think of her?”

Jonathan shrugged. “She’s too young for me.”

“Not what I was asking,” Cooke said, her voice taking on a slightly cold edge. “She’s a case officer. Her first tour lasted six months. We had to pull her back from the field.”

“She blew an op?” Jonathan asked.

Cooke shook her head. “In a manner of speaking. She crossed paths with a station chief who’s personal friends with the director of national intelligence. He sent her to meet with an asset who turned out to be a double. She suspected it going in, and so did we, but the station chief ignored her. Gave her a direct order to go. She got burned and was almost picked up by the locals.”

Jonathan considered the answer for a second. “Venezuela?”

Cooke nodded. “The DNI was basing his advice to the president on a double agent’s reports. He needed someone to blame and was close friends with the station chief, so the hammer wasn’t coming down there,” she told him. “She needs a safe harbor.”

“The rest of the DI doesn’t like me, and the NCS doesn’t like the DI as a whole. You just put her in the one place where she’s guaranteed to be hated by everyone.”

“Not your problem. If she’s smart, she won’t let it become her problem either.” Cooke pushed herself away from the doorframe, turning to leave. “By the way, Liang is going to give a statement to his press corps at twenty-thirty. I’ve told Open Source Center to make sure it runs on the internal network. State Department says that he’ll be talking about the arrests.”

Jonathan checked the wall clock and corrected for the time zones in his head. “Is that solid or a rumor some junior diplomat heard over drinks?”

Cooke shrugged. “Neither? Both? The arrests are the only thing going on over there worth a press conference. Anything else you need to get started on this?”

“A transcript of that Politburo Standing Committee meeting in Zhongnanhai.”

“That’s what you call a hard target,” Cooke said, smiling. “It would be like trying to plant a bug inside the White House.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Jonathan replied. “We should be able to recruit a member of the Standing Committee, right?”

“Couldn’t tell you if we had,” Cooke said.

The APLAA vault was everything Kyra had thought the Red Cell would be, ten times the space or more, with enough cubicles that Kyra wondered whether the Agency wasn’t violating fire codes. There was a two-level rack of laser printers sitting next to an industrial-sized copier, all of them running. The burn bags were overflowing with classified trash waiting to be thrown into the dump chutes that ran to the basement, where somebody would haul them away to be shredded and burned. It looked and sounded like a hundred people or more were in close quarters, and she could feel their energy. Not-so-controlled chaos, she thought. The tension in the vault was like the humidity on a hot Virginia day, nearly tactile and just as pervasive. There was no shortage of noise but an almost complete absence of human voices that Kyra found unnerving. Everyone was working, no one was talking. She wondered whether DI analysts were trained to retreat into their cubicles under stress.

A girl in blue jeans and a black polo shirt — acceptable attire on snow days — stepped forward; a gray badge clipped to her pocket announced her status as a college intern, CIA’s version of legal slave labor.

Poor kid, Kyra thought, though there was probably less than five years’ difference in their ages. They should’ve let the interns stay home instead of dragging them in on a snow day.

“Can I help you?” the intern asked.

I hope I sound like an analyst. She felt like an idiot. “I’m Kyra Stryker, from the Red Cell. We’re writing a piece on the Taiwan raids that went down last night and I wanted to pick up a few research papers.”

The intern frowned. “Does our office director know about it?”

Even the temporary help hates the Red Cell. “I don’t know,” Kyra admitted. “We just got the assignment an hour ago. I’m just doing some research for a backgrounder.” Another term that she’d heard analysts use and hoped she was using correctly.

Apparently she had. “What do you need?” the intern said, with attitude. The younger woman was showing a remarkable lack of patience given that she wasn’t even a full-time staff member. She, of all the staff in the vault, had the least claim on pressure and analytic burdens to justify a lack of manners.

“I could use your help to find some finished intelligence reports.”

“Like I said, we’re all busy right now. You should look them up online.”

They’re busy. You’re just here to run interference. Kyra studied the younger woman for a moment. Her instructors at the Farm had uncovered a talent in Kyra for sizing people up at a glance, finding character flaws through nonverbal cues alone. It was a divine gift for a disciple learning the arts of espionage, and her instructors had taught her to harness it with tactical planning. Some case officers didn’t know how to turn it on and off, lacking the needed conscience, and so used the skill on everyone. Kyra didn’t suffer from that problem. Her inner voice nagged her whenever she considered the idea of “case-officering” fellow Agency employees, but that voice was not inclined at the moment to be blocked by a DI analyst, and a college intern barely qualified for that status anyway.

Hostility was not the best approach at the moment, she decided. The intern was under stress and had shown enough spine to defend her assigned territory against an outsider who outranked her. But that courage was founded on borrowed authority, so a display of anger would just put the woman further on the defensive and possibly drive her to call in reinforcements with real power to say no.

Most people have a natural desire to be helpful, her instructors had told her. Be nice. Be reasonable. Tell them you need them. Don’t give them a reason to dislike you, and their conscience will work in your favor.

Kyra smiled. “I understand, but we really need APLAA’s help on this one. Our paper is going to Director Cooke, so we have to make sure we’ve got our facts straight.”

“Oh.” The girl’s expression faltered.

“If you could just show me where everything is filed, I could probably find the paper myself. I don’t want to take up your people’s time.”

“Which papers?” The intern sounded unsure.

“I have a list,” Kyra said. She looked down at her notebook. “I’d be happy to do the hunting if you’ll just show me where you store copies of your finished intel reports since 1990?”

The intern’s thought process was visible on her haggard features. “Need-to-know” was a gospel commandment. Just because people asked for information, didn’t mean they automatically got it. Mere curiosity wasn’t sufficient. The intern had to reason out whether Kyra actually needed to have access to the materials she had requested.

“I guess that would be okay,” she said. “Come with me.” The intern finally cracked a smile, the sure sign that Kyra had defused her. The girl had gone from an adversary to a willing accomplice in minutes. Kyra followed her through the maze to a pair of government beige filing cabinets only a little shorter than herself. “NIEs, IAs, and Serial Fliers here in the top two racks. PDBs and WIRes with background notes and references filed in chronological order in the bottom two. Anything else?”

“Nope. This’ll be fine. And thanks. I really appreciate your help.”

“You’re welcome,” the intern said before she walked away.

Kyra stared at the file cabinet, opened it, and began searching through the papers.

Kyra dropped her pencil on the table and checked the clock on the wall; 2030 hours. I lost track, she thought. Jonathan had disappeared for hours at a time, leaving her to the welcome privacy of the bullpen for most of the day. Hunger had finally driven her out of the vault a few hours before, but the cafeteria didn’t serve dinner and she couldn’t stomach anything the vending machines were serving. She had finally settled for the old doughnuts she had found sitting in a box on the refrigerator. She had thought about asking before eating but decided that Jonathan’s earlier rebuke about taking without asking gave her the permission she needed.

“Bored?” Jonathan asked. He stared up at the television mounted near the ceiling in the corner. Liang’s press conference was starting late and a pair of British journalists were filling time with inanities that the analyst didn’t want to hear, so he left the mute on.

“This is some kind of hazing, right?” She had been reading binders of intel reports since lunchtime and hadn’t quit even though her brain had stopped absorbing the words hours before.

“If I wanted to haze you, I’d tell you to streak through the gift shop.”

“You can guess what I would tell you to do,” she told him. “I don’t think the China analysts have missed anything.”

“They have,” Jonathan said. “It’s standard practice.”

“I see why they love you so much,” Kyra said.

“It would be a mistake to care,” Jonathan told her.

“Words to live by?”

He sighed. “Cooke was right when she said that CIA has suffered a major intelligence failure on average once every seven years. Postmortems show that every one of them was a failure of analysis, not collection. We had the information to figure out what was happening. And in every case, the analysts suffered from the same mental mistakes — groupthink and whatnot. Requiring analysts to go through more training doesn’t prevent them. More coordination and more review and more editing and every other process we’ve set up to prevent them doesn’t work. In some cases, it even makes them more likely. So when I said it was standard practice, I meant it literally.”

“So what does work?” she asked.

“Judging by our track record? Nothing, apparently. But a good Red Cell helps,” he answered. “Red Cell analysis isn’t about right and wrong, or predicting the future. It’s about getting people to think about the overlooked possibilities. Evolution, or God depending on your preference, has left us with brains that latch on to the first explanation that seems to fit the facts and our own mind-sets and biases when we face a puzzle. Even smart analysts develop shallow, comfortable mental ruts. To get them out, you have to make them uncomfortable, make them consider new ideas, including some that they might not like. And that means you have to be—”

“Unlikable?” Kyra asked.

“I was going to say ‘aggressive.’ But the two are often the same.” He looked up at the television. Liang stood at the podium, waving his arms almost violently. Jonathan lifted the remote and turned on the volume as the Taiwanese president pounded the podium in a steady rhythm with his words. “Zhonghua minguo she yige zhuquan duli de guojia!” The translator rendered the English a half second out of sync with Liang’s excited voice. “Taiwan is a sovereign state!”

“Subtle,” Kyra observed. She cracked open a Coke and took a short swig. She was running on caffeine now.

“It’ll take some diplomacy to smooth that one over,” Jonathan agreed.

It was less a speech than a tirade, and Kyra found herself staring at the screen but hearing nothing. “There was a Beijing native in my masters program at the University of Virginia, son of a professional chef and a state-certified culinary artist himself,” she said. “When we graduated, he cooked a four-course meal for some of us that ruined me for American-made Chinese food for years. He asked me once whether I thought Taiwan was a sovereign country or a Chinese province.”

Interesting, he thought. She was sharing a personal memory with someone she barely knew. “That’s a loaded question. What’d you say?”

“I asked him if Beijing collected taxes from Taipei,” Kyra said.

“Old debater’s trick,” Jonathan said, approving. “Answer a question with a question.”

“Yeah. I hate that. But he took it well,” she recalled. “He was friendly. He was also a Communist and an atheist. When he graduated, we gave him a tee shirt that said, ‘Thank Heaven for Capitalism.’ That made him laugh. After I joined the Agency, I started wondering if that dumb joke hadn’t gotten him in trouble when he got home — spending some time under the bright lights with some MSS officers trying to figure out just how much we’d corrupted him.”

“They have a talk with plenty of students who go home,” Jonathan observed. “Partly to collect intel, but mostly to intimidate them.”

“It works. We don’t get many Chinese walk-ins.” Kyra stared out the window into the dark. “I never found out what happened to him, even with all the resources this place has.”

Jonathan cocked his head. The young woman seemed hardly aware that he was in the room. He decided to offer her a way out. “You can go home. It doesn’t take two people to run this up to Cooke.”

Kyra looked up and said nothing, as though she hadn’t heard him. Then she hesitated, but only to avoid looking like she was rushing for the door. She had the impulse to ask if he was sure but decided against it. She was quite sure that the question would annoy him, if not diminish his opinion of her intelligence.

“See you tomorrow.” Kyra picked up her coat, fled the vault, and didn’t look back.

The New Headquarters Building lobby had eight security gates, four on either side of the security desk. Half had “out of service” signs taped over the keypads. Kyra searched for a working gate, found one on the far right, and held her badge to the reader. The machine did nothing for a moment, then made a rude noise and refused to open its metal arms. She pressed her badge to the scanner a second time to no effect. Irritated, Kyra looked to the guard, who finally lifted his head after the third alarm.

“Just go around.” The guard returned his attention to his monitor.

Kyra dropped her head. The biggest intel agency in the world can’t keep the badge readers working.

In the dark, the guard didn’t see her disgust as she obeyed. The automatic doors at the far end waited until the last second to open and the cold air smacked her face as she passed through the air curtain into the wind. The sidewalk lights cut a path in the darkness as she hurried south to the garage. Clouds hid the moon. Kyra couldn’t see more than twenty yards into the night in any direction.

With the parking deck nearly empty, her truck was easy to find. She crawled into the frigid cab and started the engine.

“… the existence of such a large spy network puts the lie to President Tian’s claim that China is a partner for peace and harbors no unfriendly intentions towards the Taiwanese people. Accordingly, I am suspending Taiwan’s participation in the National Unification Council…” Kyra had left her satellite radio tuned to the BBC World Service. The translator’s English came in calm, measured tones that stripped out the anger and emotion that Kyra could hear in Liang’s voice as he spoke underneath the translation. Kyra wished that she understood Chinese and could hear the original feed without the translator. Hearing dual voices in stereo gave her a headache.

“… the mainland and Taiwan are indivisible parts of China. We should seek peaceful and democratic means to achieve the common goal of unification. We are one nation with two governments, equal and sovereign…”

Kyra accelerated out of the parking deck and made her way around the compound until she reached the Route 123 entrance. She passed the guard shack ten miles faster than the posted limit. The guards, she guessed correctly, only cared about vehicles speeding inbound.

Route 123 was empty and Kyra plowed through the snow burying the town of McLean. She took the Dulles Toll Road exit, the lane markers appearing sporadically under the shifting white powder, hidden more often than not. The highway straightened a mile past the toll plaza — the snow plows and salt trucks had made at least one pass over the road — and she put the accelerator to the floor. It was foolish to take the truck up fifteen miles over the speed limit, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Kyra reached the top of the stairs and kicked three flights of wet snow off her boots. It was still falling and there was no covered parking down on the street. She would spend a half hour of her morning defrosting the truck and scraping the windshield with a credit card before she could even get onto the road. That assumed someone would plow the lot during the night.

The knob was freezing in her hand as she pushed open the door to her home and kicked her feet on the mat again before stepping into the small entryway. She tossed her keys onto the cherry hall storage bench, where they slid across the dark wood and fell onto the floor. Kyra left her boots by them and hung her coat.

The flashing voice mail light leaped out in the low light. She stared at it for several moments. She disliked talking on the phone even when her mood wasn’t dark, but the blinking light had triggered a thought that had, in turn, started a debate inside her head that dragged on for a surprisingly long minute.

Kyra leaned against the wall and tried to order her thoughts.

Analysis couldn’t be that hard.

First step, collection of the facts. She’d lived in this apartment for less than two weeks and Verizon had assigned the phone number even more recently. She’d given it only to her parents, the Agency, and several local pizza parlors and Asian restaurants within the delivery radius. End of collection.

Second step, develop scenarios and assign probabilities. She could eliminate the eateries. They didn’t call customers to solicit business. A telemarketer? She’d submitted her number to the National Do-Not-Call Registry within an hour of the phone’s activation, but some telemarketers ignored the registry. So that probability was very low, though not zero.

Her parents? A strong possibility, but not one equally split between her mother and father. Her mother might have called, but not her father. Their differences had sparked too many arguments. The professor was too proud of his intellect to tolerate a daughter who could see politics in a different way, particularly one who didn’t hate either the butchering military or corrupt intelligence agencies. But her mother was the diplomat of the family, always trying to save the father-daughter bridge that was perpetually burning under Kyra’s feet.

The Agency was a lesser possibility. As required, Kyra had given her phone number to the Agency, though only two days ago. It would be in the locator database but she had no close friends at headquarters who could dredge it up. There was a possibility that someone from the director’s office might have called. That had happened yesterday, the secretary calling to summon Kyra to the director’s office, where she had met Kathy Cooke this morning. So it was unlikely Cooke would be the caller.

Burke was a possibility, but she had been with him less than an hour before. He’d been the one who told her to leave. Barring some emergency, and she couldn’t fathom what would constitute an analytic emergency, he had no obvious motivation.

Her mother, the director’s office, Burke, and a telemarketer. The probabilities stacked up in that order.

Third step, test the hypothesis, she thought.

Kyra pushed the voice mail button.

“Kyra, this is Reverend Janet Harris, assistant to the rector at Saint James Episcopal Church here in Leesburg. Your father called earlier this morning and asked—”

“Thanks so much, Dad,” she said to no one, least of all her father. Kyra lifted the handset, dropped it back onto the cradle, then flung it onto the living room carpet.

Maybe the old man really did care? Not likely. He would be more worried about his public standing than her soul. One of his two doctorates was in theology and he was a senior warden in the vestry at the Saint Anne’s Parish in Scottsville, where her parents lived. Having a daughter living outside the church was probably an embarrassment. She doubted he even talked about her to the other parishioners.

Kyra went for the near-empty refrigerator and pulled out leftover gumbo from some Cajun place she’d found off Market Street. She also took out a beer, not lite, and a Styrofoam box of sticky rice and mango. She ate the leftovers, drained the can, left the garbage on the table, then fell into bed.