Target America

26

Pope slipped into his hotel room to find Lijuan Chow asleep in bed. Her name meant “beautiful and graceful,” and she was definitely both, with a mind to match: a brilliant intelligence analyst and computer technician whom he’d recruited right out of MIT ten years earlier. She was thirty-four, exactly half his age, and over the past decade, he had come to love her with all of his soul, despite the folly of it. He stood watching her sleep — his peaceful Chinese princess — and was overcome by a profound sense of melancholia. Exactly when their relationship would come to an end, he did not know, but he knew that it must be soon.

He opened his laptop and went online to check in with the system back in Langley, making sure that all of his surveillance programs were still running nominally. Some of the programs were of his own design, and the intelligence they gathered went into his own personal database: everything from satellite photos to banking transactions. He was a very, very curious man about a great many goings-on around the globe, and he wanted to learn as much about the world as possible before he was finally forced into retirement. Some of his most secret programs would, of course, remain accessible to him even after his retirement, but he would have to be careful to limit his time in the cloud, because technology was constantly evolving, and his personal programs — many of which ran parallel to the CIA programs and accessed all of the same intelligence — wouldn’t likely remain secret forever.

Satisfied that all was as it should be, he turned off the computer and went to take a shower. When he came back from the bathroom, Lijuan was sitting propped in the pillows wearing a nightgown made of blue silk that extended to her knees.

“How did it go?” she asked, her English as perfect as her body.

“Good,” he said, shouldering into a hotel robe and pulling the towel from his waist. He sat down on the bed and gathered her into his arms. “They’re the best at what they do, so it should go well. My biggest concern is that Faisal won’t know enough to help us.”

“And if he doesn’t want to talk?”

“Oh, he’s going to talk. He won’t have any choice about that. The trouble will be in knowing when to quit extracting information. A man begins to make up lies once he runs out of truth.”

“What sort of torture will they use?” she asked softly, slipping her hand inside his robe to touch his chest.

“Whichever I tell them. They’re reliable men.”

“They must be barbarians,” she said sadly. “To be able to cause such pain without remorse.”

“Am I any less barbaric for giving the order?”

She rested her head against his chest. “Can’t you just retire? Can’t we leave and go to Singapore like we’ve talked about?” She lifted her head to gaze soulfully into his eyes. “What does it matter what happens here now? This country doesn’t care about all that you’ve done for it; all that you’ve sacrificed. The president and his men will betray you in the end — you know they must. We have enough money, Robert. Let us go away… tonight. Right now.”

He caressed her hair, wanting very much to go with her to Singapore, to live out the rest of his life and to die in her arms. Christ in heaven, what man wouldn’t? But Singapore was another world and beyond their destiny.

“You won’t allow them to betray me,” he said with a smile. “You’re my protection against them.”

She shook her head, a tear falling. “You put too much faith in me, Robert.”

He petted her and kissed her hair. “Do you trust me?”

“Of course,” she said.

“In that case, you should have nothing to worry you. I tell you that you are my talisman against them, and you can believe it.” He smiled and touched the tip of her nose with his finger. “Now, no more tears for me. I’m as safe in your arms as anywhere on earth.”

She hugged him tight, allowing the cloth of his robe to soak up her tears. She was not afraid for herself, only for him, and she knew that they would crucify him after she fled.

“When will they take Faisal?” she asked.

“Tomorrow night. Once I leave here in the morning, you can take your time about getting back to Langley. Midori has everything under control there.”

“Are you sure Langley is safe?”

He opened her nightgown with a long index finger and smiled. “If we could be so lucky that they’d waste such a weapon on Langley, Virginia.”