The Ghost War

1

TED BECK WALKED WEST DOWN THE ROTTING PIER, squinting through his wraparound sunglasses into the late-afternoon haze. He moved without haste. He’d arrived early, and the boat he’d come to meet was nowhere in sight.

At the end of the dock, trash from three countries — China and the two Koreas — bobbed in the dank water, the eastern edge of the Yellow Sea. The air was heavy with smoke from the ships that docked at Incheon every day to load up on cars and televisions for the United States. The sun had baked the fumes into a brown smog that burned Beck’s throat and made him want a cigarette.

He fished a packet of Camel Lights from his pocket and lit up. He’d tried to quit over the years. But if he was going to sign up for missions like this one, what was the point? He smoked slowly and when he was done flicked the butt away. It spun into the harbor, joining the empty beer cans and condom wrappers.

Then he heard the low rumble of a boat engine.

Incheon was an industrial port fifty miles west of Seoul and a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, the strip that separated North and South Korea. During the Korean War, General Douglas Mac-Arthur had landed here, cutting behind North Korean lines to stop the Communist advance.

A statue of him stood atop a hill not far from this pier. Binoculars in hand, the general looked out to the Yellow Sea, which separated China and the Korean Peninsula. This afternoon, Beck would head into those waters, on a mission smaller than MacArthur’s assault but just as dangerous.

The rumble of the distant boat grew louder. Beck pulled his wallet out of his pocket, a battered piece of cowhide that had seen him through thirty-two countries and three counterinsurgencies. He wasn’t carrying any identification or a passport, just money. About $3,000 in all. And three pictures: his wife and their two sons. He took out the pictures and kissed them.

Then he flicked his lighter to them and watched them burn, holding them as long as he could, until the flames singed his fingers and he had to let them go. Their remnants sank into the water and drifted away.

Beck carried out the same ritual before every mission, for reasons both practical and superstitious. If he was caught, the photographs would give his captors a psychological edge. More important, burning the pictures was his way of accepting the danger of the mission. When he came back, he’d put fresh copies in his wallet. Until the next time.

THE MESSAGE HAD COME IN twelve days before, to a signals-intelligence station at Camp Bonifas, on the edge of the Demilitarized Zone. The six hundred Americans and South Koreans who lived at Bonifas stayed on alert twenty-four hours a day, knowing they would be the world’s tripwire if the North Korean army came over the DMZ. As they waited, they monitored the North’s airwaves, listening for messages from American spies across the border.

To the officers at the Bonifas station, the transmission was gibberish, a twenty-two-second series of Is and 0s. But they knew it meant something, for it came in on a shortwave frequency reserved for the highest-priority messages. They forwarded it around the world to Fort Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. From Fort Meade, the message, now decoded, took a shorter trip, across the Potomac to a seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters.

There it caused Vinny Duto, the director of the CIA, to unleash a few uncoded curses of his own. For the message was short, simple — and unwelcome. The Drafter wanted out of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the country-sized prison commonly called North Korea. Immediately if not sooner.

The Drafter’s real name was Sung Kwan. Dr. Sung Kwan. He was a scientist in North Korea’s nuclear program, and by far the most important asset the United States had in North Korea. “Asset” was a rather clinical way to describe Sung, who was after all a person, not a spy satellite or a well-placed bug. But the term was fitting. For Sung had told the United States exactly where the North Koreans held their nuclear weapons — information that was priceless.

Most analysts outside the CIA thought that North Korea hid its nukes in caves, hoping to keep them safe from an American airstrike. They were wrong. In fact, the nukes were kept in a warehouse in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. The Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, wanted them close by, protected by the same army regiment that provided his personal security.

Now the USS Lake Champlain,a guided missile cruiser in the Sea of Japan, had a dozen Tomahawk missiles targeted on the building. If the order came, the Tomahawks could turn the warehouse into rubble in minutes. All thanks to Sung. And now he wanted an emergency exfiltration. No wonder Vinny Duto was upset.

SUNG WAS A CAREFUL SPY. He had met American agents only three times, each time in Pakistan, outside the Orwellian gaze of the North Korean secret police. But now something had gone wrong. In his message, Sung said he was concerned for his safety and believed he needed to get out of North Korea. He didn’t explain more.

At Langley, the officers on the North Korea desk struggled to make sense of Sung’s message. How did he know he was about to be taken in? Had he been interrogated? Or had he been arrested already, strung up and left to rot? In that case, the pickup request was nothing more than bait, an SOS from a man who had already drowned, meant to lure would-be rescuers into an ambush.

The CIA responded to Sung with its own shortwave broadcasts, asking him for more detail. But as the days ticked by, the listening station at Bonifas remained quiet.

Finally Duto decided that the agency had to send in a team. Without proof that the message was a trap, Langley couldn’t ignore Sung’s plea. The agency always promised its moles to respond if they asked for help. The vow was both a moral obligation and a recruiting tool. Moles needed to believe that their agency handlers shared the risks they took.

Three men were going in. Beck, the leader, was a former Navy Seal, now a senior officer in the agency’s Special Operations Group. He was accompanied by Seth Kang, a Korean-American operative who’d infiltrated North Korea before, and Choe Gu, a lieutenant in the South Korean navy. All knew the risks of this mission. But they couldn’t say no, not once they understood the stakes.

THE PHANTOM LOOKED FAST even when it wasn’t moving. The boat was matte black, narrow and long, with an arrow-shaped hull that came to a razor-sharp tip. It was a cigarette boat, the kind favored by drug runners for quick trips in calm seas. But in place of an open deck, like most cigarette boats, the Phantom had a cabin covering its cockpit, topped by a small forest of microwave dishes. Its windows were two-inch-thick bullet-resistant glass. For extra range the Phantom carried three gas tanks that held six hundred gallons in all. For extra protection its hull was coated with Kevlar. And for extra speed it had twin Mercury engines that threw out 650 horsepower apiece. At full throttle, it ran at seventy knots.

Langley had given Beck carte blanche to decide how to pull off Sung’s extraction. A helicopter was out. The North Koreans operated radar stations every few miles on the coast. Beck had considered using a fishing trawler before deciding on the Phantom. The boat was practically invisible on radar, and surprisingly quiet, thanks to the oversized mufflers on the Mercurys. Plus, if the North Koreans were waiting for them, a speedboat would give them a chance of getting away.

The Phantom was based in Miami, where the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration used it to chase drug traffickers around the Caribbean. Three days before, the agency had chartered a cargo jet and flown the boat in, landing it at Osan Air Base outside Seoul to avoid pesky Korean customs agents.

Beck and his men had spent two nights jetting around the Yellow Sea to learn the Phantom’s quirks. The boat seemed to want to fly. Jam the throttles and its nose lifted from the water as the engines opened up.

Beck hoped that tonight they wouldn’t have to take it anywhere near its limits.

RIGHT ON TIME, 5:00 P.M., the Phantom curled up to the dock. Beck hopped on and stepped into the pilothouse, feeling the slight sway of the boat beneath his feet. Inside, the air was crisp, and the tinted windows provided relief from the sun. Beck slipped his sunglasses into his jacket pocket. As he did, his fingers brushed across the plastic bag he had picked up that morning from the chief of Seoul station.

Before they left this dock he would have to tell Choe and Kang about what he was carrying in the bag. They deserved to know. They deserved the choice.

Kang sat in the navigator’s chair, scrolling through satellite photographs of Point D, the pickup site. North of the DMZ, the Korean Peninsula widened, jutting west into the Yellow Sea toward China. Point D was located on a sliver of land a hundred miles northwest of Incheon. The satellite photos showed unbroken forests on the hills around the inlet. Haeju, the nearest city of any size, was fifty miles east.

Beck and his men would arrive at the landing spot at 2330 and wait thirty minutes. If Sung didn’t show, they would assume he had changed his mind — or been killed — and wait for a new message.

“Simple enough,” Kang had said two days before, when Beck explained. “What could go wrong?”

Beck hardly needed to answer. For starters, North Korea claimed control of the Yellow Sea well past the twelve-mile limit of international law. The North Korean navy had been known to fire on fishing trawlers unlucky enough to cross their path. The Phantom would have to dodge them. Then there were the shore artillery batteries along the coast. And the minefields, some new, others left over from the Korean War.

Not to mention the possibility that the North Koreans already had arrested Sung and set them up. With the help of the NSA, Langley had done what it could to make sure that the Phantom wasn’t heading into an ambush. For the last week, spy satellites had watched the waters around the pickup spot, looking for overflights by the North Korean air force or unusual activity by the navy. So far the satellites hadn’t picked anything up.

Meanwhile, Chinook rescue helicopters and F-16 jets were on standby at Osan and the Navy had moved the USS Decatur, a destroyer, into the Yellow Sea.

But the helicopters had strict orders against violating North Korean territory. Pyongyang would view an American incursion into its airspace as an act of war. And now that the North had nuclear weapons, Washington couldn’t antagonize it needlessly.

But the Phantom was expendable. It didn’t carry American markings, or any markings at all. If North Korea captured it, the United States and South Korea would disavow knowledge of its existence. Beck and his men would have to be well outside the twelve-mile limit, fifty or more miles from the North Korean coast, to expect a rescue. Any closer, and they were on their own.

THE GOOD NEWS WAS THAT they weren’t going in blind. The Phantom carried the newest military and civilian mapping equipment, including a Global Positioning System receiver capable of pinpointing its location to one meter. The receiver was synched to software that plotted the topography of every major body of water in the world. The combination allowed Kang, the navigator, to track their course in real time.

Meanwhile, a satellite transceiver connected the boat to an encrypted radar feed from an E-2 Hawkeye circling above the Yellow Sea. Thanks to the Hawkeye, the Phantom could dodge enemy boats without risking detection by using its own radar. Beck wanted to do everything possible to stay out of sight. If they got caught in a firefight, they’d already lost. They couldn’t outshoot the North Korean navy.

And so Beck had dumped the.50-caliber machine gun the Phantom had carried when it arrived at Osan. In its place, he had added a Zodiac, an inflatable flat-bottomed boat with a small outboard motor. The Zodiac was loaded with fresh water, a first-aid kit, even a spear gun, and hooked to the hull of the Phantom.

Aside from the raft, Beck, Kang, and Choe hadn’t brought much survival gear. They each had a change of clothes, in case they wound up in the water. They had personal transceivers, a more powerful version of the ones used by backcountry skiers, which sent a signal that the Chinooks could track. But they hadn’t bothered with body armor or even helmets. Instead Kang, who’d grown up in South Florida, was wearing a Miami Dolphins hat — for luck, he said. They weren’t being nonchalant or cynical, Beck thought. They knew they would get out quickly or not at all.

BECK SAT BESIDE KANG, who was tracking the radar link from the Hawkeye on a titanium-hulled laptop attached to the Phantom’s dash.

“How’s it look around the LZ?” The landing zone.

“Quiet.” Kang was thirty-eight, though he looked younger. A tattoo of the ace of spades covered his right forearm, near the elbow. Beck had wondered about the tat for weeks, but he hadn’t wanted to ask.

Kang tapped on the laptop’s keyboard and the screen lit up with white blips. “That’s Incheon. What a real port looks like.” He clicked on the keyboard again and the screen returned to the dark area farther west. “And that’s North Korea. Dead as a whatever.”

“The good citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic don’t need the corruptions of the outside world.”

“Yeah. Like food.”

“Well, they managed to come up with a nuke,” Beck said. “How’s the boat running?”

“Choe says it looks great,” Kang said. He said something in Korean to Choe, who nodded vigorously. Beck’s Korean was weak, and Choe’s English was worse, so Kang played translator. Choe tapped the throttles forward. The engines rumbled and the Phantom’s cabin began to vibrate.

Beck looked at his watch. 1725. He wanted to reach the landing zone at exactly 2330. No reason to spend more time in North Korean waters than necessary. The Yellow Sea was flat in the summer. If they wanted, they could run safely at sixty knots. But Beck preferred to keep them in the high teens. The slower pace would save fuel and keep noise to a minimum. They would leave here in five minutes, give themselves plenty of time.

But before they went. Beck touched the plastic bag in his pocket. He didn’t want to have this conversation, but he saw no other choice. He motioned to Choe to cut the engine. The Phantom sat beside the dock, bobbing on the low waves.

“Before we go—” Beck pulled out the bag. Inside were three glass capsules. “L pills.”

“L pills?” Choe shook his head in confusion.

“L for lethal. Cyanide.” Choe still wasn’t getting it, Beck saw. “Poison. If they catch us. You bite down on the glass.” He took a capsule out of the bag and pretended to put it in his mouth.

Choe slammed a hand against the dash of the boat and stammered angrily in Korean. Kang put a hand on Choe’s arm, but Choe shook him off.

“He says you’re crazy,” Kang said. “He says—”

“Never, never,” Choe said in English.

“He says it’s a sin.”

“Yes, sin.”

“Fine,” Beck said. “But tell him he knows as well as we do, if we get caught, no one’s coming for us. No prisoner exchange. And the North Koreans, they’ll make it hell. These pills, they’re quick, and they work.”

Kang translated, rapid-fire.

“One more thing,” Beck said. “Tell him, he should at least carry it. So he has the choice.”

Choe shook his head, fired back in Korean, and turned away.

“He says no,” Kang said. “He says even talking about it is bad luck.”

Beck ran his tongue over his teeth. His mouth felt dirty and he knew he’d smoked too many Camels this day. “More for me, then. You want yours?”

Kang reached out. Beck shook the little capsule, hardly an inch long, into his palm.

“Remember to give it back to me when we’re done,” Beck said. “You don’t want these lying around the house.”

“Roger that.”

Beck stuffed the baggie with the other two pills into his jacket. He checked the disposable cell phone he’d bought the day before. His station chief had the number. If Langley had decided to abort the mission, the call would have come to this phone. But Beck hadn’t been expecting a call, and sure enough, none had come. He looked once more at his watch. 1730.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Go west, young man.” Koreans called the Yellow Sea the West Sea.

“Yes, skipper,” Kang said. “A three-hour tour, right?”

“Something like that.” Beck hummed the famous theme song, hoping to clear the cabin of the bad karma the pills had brought. “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.”

“Think Ginger and Mary Ann will be waiting for us in Pyongyang?”

“Let’s hope we never find out. Sing it with me now. ‘If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost.”’

“‘The Minnow would be lost.”’

If Choe got the joke, he didn’t smile. He looked away, out the front window. He pushed forward on the throttle and the Phantom slid away.

2

John Wells wound down the throttle with his gloved right hand. Beneath him the engine groaned and the tachometer rolled toward 8,000 rpm and the big black bike jumped forward. Wells leaned close to the bike’s angular gas tank to lower his profile against the wind. Still he had to fight to keep upright. The Honda was a meaty motorcycle, heavier and wider than a true racing bike.

Wells lifted his head and peeked at the speedometer. Ninety. He’d imagined faster. Beside him the highway was a blur, the trees beside the road blending into a single leafy cipher. He was halfway between Washington and Baltimore, hardly a rural oasis, but at 3:00 A.M. even the interstate was empty. At this speed the road’s curves disappeared in the dark. Interstates were built for bad drivers, Wells knew, grandmothers heading to the mall, truckers high on meth and anxious to get home. They were built with soft curves to forgive mistakes.

Even so, Wells was pushing the limits of this highway. Anything could take him out. A raccoon prospecting for garbage. A car changing lanes and forgetting to signal. A broken bottle blowing out his front tire, sending him over the handlebars and into eternity. A stupid, pointless way to go. Yet here he was in the dark, as he’d been the week before, and the week before that, on the nights when midnight and 1:00 A.M. came and went and sleep remained foreign territory.

Here the rich, smooth pavement soothed him. The speed made his mind vanish, leaving him with snatches of half-remembered songs, some old, some new. The words blended into a strange poetry he could never remember when the rides were done.

Wells relaxed the throttle and the tach and the speedometer dropped in unison. At seventy-five the wind dropped slightly and the Springsteen in his head faded.

From his earlier rides he knew he was approaching the sweet spot. He slowed to sixty as the road lifted him gently over a low hill. The trees disappeared. To his right, a shopping center parking lot glowed under oversized lights. Behind a blue Dumpster, two police cars nuzzled beside each other, windows down, the cops inside telling each other stories to make the night pass. Just a few hours to go. It was close to 5:00 A.M., and the sun would be up soon enough. Wells thought of Exley, alone now in their bed, wondering when he’d be back, and in how many pieces.

Jennifer Exley, his girlfriend. His boss at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked as a — as a what? Hard to say. Last year he and Exley had stopped a terrorist attack that would have dwarfed September 11. Now he was back in Washington, and — how to put this politely? — at loose ends. Osama bin Laden wasn’t happy with him, that much was certain. In an hour-long communique that even Wells hadn’t bothered to sit through, bin Laden had promised eternal glory to anyone who killed him. “Allah will smile on the martyr who sends this infidel to hell….” Yadda yadda yadda. But as a practical matter, Qaeda couldn’t touch him, at least in the United States. So Wells was waiting for a new mission. In truth, though, he couldn’t imagine what that might be. He wasn’t built for desk work.

Meanwhile, he burned his days with three-hour- long workouts, and his nights with these joyless joyrides. Exley hated them, and a week earlier, Wells had promised her they would end. He’d thought he was telling the truth. But this morning he hadn’t been able to stop himself. Exley hadn’t argued when he rolled out of bed and pulled on his jeans and grabbed his helmet. No, Exley hadn’t argued, hadn’t said a word, and Wells supposed he loved her for her silence.

But not enough to stay.

Now Wells flexed his shoulders and stared down the perfect three-lane void ahead. This time when he twisted the throttle he didn’t hesitate but instead pulled back as far as he could. The bike surged, and suddenly Wells heard:

Just don’t playwithme‘cause you’re playing with fire….

Not the confident strut of Mick Jagger but the bleak, reedy tones of Johnny Thunder.

The engine roared and the speedometer needle jumped from fifty-five to eighty-five and kept going. When it topped one hundred, Wells flattened himself on the gas tank and hung on. For dear life, he thought. Though anyone watching might wonder exactly what those words meant to him. And then everything faded but the wind and the road, the bike jolting off every crease, its wheels caressing the highway, and Springsteen’s unmistakable voice in his ears:

Drink this and you‘llgrowwings on your feet.

Wells glimpsed the speedometer, its white needle past 120, its tip quivering. It maxed out at 125, with the tach in the red zone at 9,000 revolutions per minute. He had never pushed the bike so far. He laid off the throttle and watched himself come back to earth.

A few seconds later, he heard the siren screaming. The lights pulsed red-blue-red-blue in his mirrors, half a mile behind but gaining fast.

He flexed his hand around the throttle. Part of him wanted to wind it down and take off again. He doubted the trooper could match his speed. He could probably get to the next exit and disappear.

But Wells didn’t want to tangle this cop in whatever game he was playing with God, or himself, or the patron saints of the interstate. Instead of taking off, he flicked on his turn signal — see, Officer, I’m careful — and eased the Honda to a stop in the breakdown lane. As he waited, he patted the bike’s gas tank as if it were a horse that had just won the Kentucky Derby. Despite the trouble he was facing, an absurd pride filled him at the speed the machine had achieved.

The Crown Victoria screeched to a stop behind him, its headlights glaring.

“Turn off your vehicle, sir. Now!” Underneath the cruiser’s scratchy speakers, Wells picked up a trace of nervousness. This trooper was probably just out of the academy, stuck on the overnight shift, jumpy about pulling over a triple-digit speeder with no backup. Wells pulled the little black key from the ignition and dropped it on the cracked pavement.

“Off the bike. Now.”

Wells wondered if Exley would appreciate the irony of his being shot in a traffic stop after getting the bike to 125 without a scratch. Probably not. The statie crouched behind the door of his cruiser, hand on the butt of his pistol. He was young, Wells saw. Maybe twenty. He had a thick, square face, but even so, he hadn’t lost all his baby fat. “Don’t look at me, sir! Look straight ahead!”

Wells looked straight ahead, wondering why he always got sideways with the cops.

“Helmet on the ground.”

Wells pulled off his helmet. His eyes burned from the wind. Next time he’d wear goggles under the face plate. Next time?

“You have a wallet? Identification?”

“Yes, Officer.”

“In your pants or your jacket?”

“Pants.”

“Take it out. Slowly.” Wells pulled off his gloves and fished at his wallet. “Put it on the ground and kick it to me with your foot.”

“Kick it with my foot? Not my hand?”

“You’re talking back, asshole?” The trooper no longer sounded scared, just pissed. “I have you on the gun at one eighteen.”

Wells dropped his wallet on the ground, and kicked it toward the trooper. The kid was about to get the surprise of his life, he thought.

“Lean forward and put your hands on the bike.”

The metal of the gas tank was cool under his fingers.

“Do not, don‘t, move.” The statie grabbed the wallet, flipped it open.

“Mr. Wick? James Wick? That your name?”

“Not exactly, no, Officer.” Might as well tell the kid. When he got brought in, the truth would come out anyway.

“You’re telling me your license is fake?”

“There’s an ID card inside.”

A few seconds later: “Is this real? Is that you?”

“I’d be awful dumb to lie about it.”

“Turn toward me. Slowly.” The officer looked at the CIA identification card in his hand — the one with Wells’s real name on it — then at Wells. “You expect me to believe this crap?”

Then Wells heard the faint thump of a helicopter’s blades. A few seconds later, the trooper heard it too. Together they looked up as the helicopter closed on them, dropping through the night, landing on the side of the highway, a black two-man bird with a long narrow cockpit. The passenger door opened and a man Wells had never seen before stepped out.

The trooper’s mouth dropped open. Wells was just as shocked. The agency had been watching him? Watching these rides? Did he have no privacy left?

“Officer,” the man shouted over the whirr of the rotors, “do you know who this man is?”

The trooper bolstered his pistol. “Well, he said — I mean, he said — but I wasn’t sure—”

“You believe him now? Or do I have to get somebody with stars on his collar to talk to you?”

“Yes. I mean no. I mean yes, I believe him.”

Without another word, the man walked back to the helicopter. As it rose off the side of the highway, the trooper rubbed his eyes like a kid waking up from a dream.

“Damn.” The statie shoved the identification card into the wallet and tossed it back to Wells. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wells.”

“You don’t have to apologize. Pulling rank on you like that was a real jerk move.”

“No, no. If I’d known it was you, I never would have pulled you over. That’s the absolute truth.” The officer stepped over to him and extended his hand. He didn’t seem bothered at all by what had just happened.

Can’t even get arrested, Wells thought. When did I turn into such a saint? But he knew exactly when. The moment he shot Omar Khadri in Times Square. Wells wasn’t sorry for what he’d done. If he had a hundred more chances to kill Khadri, he’d take them all. But he was sick of being a hero. He shook the officer’s hand, feeling the sweat on the young man’s palm.

“Won’t you get in trouble, letting me go?”

“Radar gun’s been on the fritz all week. Says one eighteen when it means fifty-eight.” The trooper turned back to his car, then stopped. “Be careful out there, Mr. Wells. We need you safe.”

“You too, Officer. Lot of crazy drivers out there.” Wells meant it ironically — crazy like me — but the trooper didn’t laugh. Wells thought sometimes that no one except Exley would ever laugh at him to his face again, no matter how much he deserved it. No one laughed at heroes. How could he trust a world that took him so seriously?

The trooper returned to his sedan. Wells got back on his bike. At the next exit he turned back to Washington. He kept the Honda at an even sixty-five the whole way home.

WHEN HE GOT BACK to Logan Circle the black Ford sedans with tinted windows were waiting, one on Thirteenth and the other on N. Two men in each, their engines running. As always. Security guards from Langley, there to watch out for him. And watch him, evidently. Wells hadn’t liked having them around before tonight. He liked them even less now. But Vinny Duto had insisted. If nothing else, they would keep the other residents in the building safe, Duto said. He promised that the guards wouldn’t follow Wells or Exley without their permission. Until tonight, they seemed to have kept their side of the bargain.

Wells parked his bike in the building’s garage and went upstairs. As quietly as he could, he opened the door to Exley’s apartment. Their apartment, he supposed, though he had trouble thinking of it that way. Down the narrow hall filled with black-and-white pictures of Exley’s kids, past the little open kitchen. His boots smelled of grit and oil and the highway. He tugged them off. Exley’s looked child-sized next to them.

“Jennifer?” he murmured. No answer. She was asleep, or more likely too angry with him to answer.

Exley’s old Persian rug scratched his toes as he walked toward the bedroom. She’d picked up the carpet during her posting in Pakistan. It was one of the few possessions she really cared about, its reds faded but the weave still tight. The apartment had only three rooms — this living room, their bedroom, and a spare bedroom where Jessica, Exley’s daughter, slept when the kids stayed over.

Exley and Wells had talked about finding something bigger, maybe a row house on Capitol Hill so her kids could have their own bedrooms. David, Exley’s son, was ten, too old to sleep on the lumpy couch in the living room. Maybe someplace with a garden for Wells to weed and plant. Someplace they could keep a Lab, a big happy mutt that would slobber all over the house. They had even called a broker, gone to a few open houses. But everything they saw was too expensive, or too run-down, or too big, or small, or… The truth was that the house-hunting filled Wells with dread. He had run so long that he could hardly imagine being penned in by four walls and a roof.

Left unsaid was the possibility that the new house might be a place for him and Exley to have a baby of their own. Wells didn’t know how he felt about becoming a father, though somehow it seemed less scary than buying a house. He didn’t even know if Exley could get pregnant. She was on the wrong side of forty, but women that age had babies these days. Didn’t they?

He stepped into her — their — bedroom. The lights were out, but an infomercial for an all-in-one barbecue grill played silently on the little television on her desk. Outside, the sky was just starting to lighten.

“Jenny? You awake? You won’t believe what happened tonight.” Even as he said the words, he wondered if he should tell her. He didn’t want to admit how fast he was going. Maybe he’d just have to take this up with Duto himself, though he hated visiting the seventh floor of the headquarters building, where Duto had his offices.

Exley stayed silent as he turned off the television, kissed her forehead, smelling the lemon scent of her face wash. He could tell from her uneven breathing that she was awake, but if she didn’t want to talk he didn’t plan to push. He put the helmet on the night-stand and pulled off his jacket.

In one quick move she rolled over, grabbed the helmet, and threw it at him. But Wells had played linebacker in college and still had a football player’s reflexes. He caught it easily and put it on her desk.

“Jenny, I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn‘t, but I really needed it tonight.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Up 95, toward Baltimore.”

“How fast?”

“I don’t know, Seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“John. Please. Shafer’s had a helicopter on you the last couple weeks.” Ellis Shafer, their boss at the agency.

“Shafer what?” So that’s who’d been watching him tonight. “Did Duto put him up to it?”

“Haven’t you figured out yet that Vinny Duto couldn’t care less about you, John? Shafer did it because I asked him to. He said they clocked you at a hundred ten. I wasn’t going to tell you, but that’s why I asked you to stop.”

“Jenny—” He guessed he wouldn’t be talking to Duto after all. A small consolation.

“I swear, John, I wish you were out drinking, screwing somebody else.” Her voice broke. “Anything but this. Every time you leave I think you’re not coming back.” He sat beside her on the bed and put his hand on her hip, but she pulled away. “Do you even care if you live or die, John?”

“Of course.” Wells tried to ignore the fact that he’d asked himself the same question a few minutes before, with a less certain answer.

“Then why don’t you act like it?” She searched his face with her fierce blue eyes. He looked away first, down to her breasts, their tops striated with tiny white stretch marks. Her milky white thighs. And the scar above the knee where the bullet had hit.

“Sometimes I forget how beautiful you are,” he said.

He heard a police siren whistling to the northeast, one of the precincts of Washington that hadn’t gentrified. The siren wasn’t as close as it sounded, he knew. Wells had spent a decade away from America, living undercover as an al Qaeda guerrilla, slowly ingratiating himself with the group. He’d picked up more than a few survival tricks along the way, including the knowledge that gunshots and sirens carried much farther at night than during the day. Just another bit of wisdom that no longer did him much good.

“Your hand,” she said. He looked down. His left hand was trembling on his jeans. She caressed it in hers until the shaking stopped.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said. For a while they were silent. She squeezed his hand and he found his voice again. “You know, I thought when I woke up in the hospital and saw you there that it would all be okay. That I was out on the other side. And now. ” In the distance a second siren rang out, then a third. Trouble in the night.

“Even Utah isn’t Utah,” Exley said. He looked at her questioningly. “When I was a kid, I used to love to ski. Before everything went bad with my family.” She slipped a hand around his shoulder. “Nothing scared me. Bumps, steeps, any of it. I didn’t want to hit puberty because I thought having a chest would mess up my balance. And it did.”

She arched her back, jokingly thrusting out her breasts, and despite his gloom Wells felt himself stir. He imagined her, a narrow boyish body cutting down the mountain, her ponytail tucked away. “They must have been surprised when they saw you were a girl.”

“Mainly we went to Tahoe. We did it on the cheap, stayed in motels, brought sandwiches to the mountain. The most fun I remember having as a kid. But I always wanted to go to Utah.” She ran a hand down his arm. “My dad didn’t want to. Said we didn’t have the money. But I pestered him and finally, when I was twelve, we flew to Salt Lake City. Me, my brother, my mom and dad. The whole happy family. My mom didn’t ski much, but she always came.”

“She was afraid to leave him alone,” Wells said. “Poor Exley.” He kissed her neck softly.

“Lots of people have alcoholic dads.”

Yeah, but you’re the one I love, he thought. And didn’t say, though he didn’t know quite why.

Outside the sirens faded. Wells walked to the window, looked at the agency’s guards in the Crown Victorias. He turned back to the bed. Exley had her legs folded under herself kittenishly now.

“You listening, John?”

He laid a hand on her knee.

“Anyway. It’s snowing when we get to Utah. Snows all night. The next morning we drive up to Alta. I’m so excited. The best skiing in the world. And we get there, we buy our tickets. We get on the lift. ”

He tried to slide his hand between her legs, but she squeezed them tight.

“We get to the top. And we ski down.”

“So you ski down? That’s the story? How was it?”

“Great. But, you know. It was skiing, like Tahoe. Just skiing. And I kept thinking that it was costing money we didn’t have, and I should have loved it, not just liked it. So somehow I was disappointed, even though I knew I shouldn’t be. I didn’t say anything. But my dad, he figured it out. Because at the end of the day, he said to me, ‘Even Utah isn’t Utah, huh?’” She paused, then continued. “There’s no magic bullet. Nobody in the world will blame you for feeling like hell, needing time to put yourself back together. But this — you’re not being fair to yourself. Or me.”

He knew she was right. But he wanted to ask her, how long until I don’t dream about tearing men apart, gutting them like fish? How long until I sleep eight hours at a stretch? Six? Four? Until I can talk about what I’ve seen without wanting to tear up a room?

“You’re not crazy, John,” she said. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. People specialize in this stuff.”

“A shrink?”

“They’re professionals.” The desperation in her voice disturbed Wells more than anything she’d said, gave him a clue how hard he’d made her life.

“I’ll be okay. I just need to figure out what’s next. I promise.” He felt himself close up again. Good.

“Or me. You can talk to me if you want.”

“I will. But not now.” Instead he reached for her. She pushed him away, but just for a moment. And for a little while they thought only of each other.

3

THE NORTH KOREAN SHORELINE WAS JUST A MILE AWAY, but Beck hardly would have known if not for the blue line on the laptop screen that marked the coast. Thick clouds blotted out the stars, and even through his night-vision binoculars Beck saw no buildings, roads, or cars. No signs of life at all. Just an inky darkness stretching to eternity.

The Phantom crept in at ten knots, its twin engines rumbling quietly. Beck, Choe, and Kang had traveled 120 miles west, past the tip of the North Korean coast. Now they were swinging back east-northeast toward Point D. With any luck the Drafter, and not the North Korean army, would be waiting.

Beck’s Timex glowed in the night, its blue numbers telling him they were right on time: 2320. The trip had been quiet so far, their biggest excitement coming in Incheon harbor a few minutes after they left. Choe cut too close to a containership, and the Phantom hit the boat’s giant wake. It sprang out of the water like a forty-five-foot-long Jet-Ski and thudded down, sending Beck sprawling. He wasn’t sure, but he thought Choe had hit the wave on purpose, revenge for Beck’s offer of the cyanide pills.

They’d run at twenty knots most of the way, using the radar feed from the Hawkeye overhead to dodge the handful of ships along the coast. The dark sky had helped too. Beck had seen only two boats in the last hour, and neither had spotted the Phantom.

They closed on the coast, barely five hundred yards away now. Through his binoculars Beck saw a broken rock wall, its stones crumbling and scattered. But still no signs of life.

“Stop,” he said. The engines quieted and the boat rocked gently on the sea’s dull waves. The lights mounted in the pilothouse filled the cabin with a dim blue-black glow.

“Depth?” Beck said to Kang.

“Twenty-four feet. Lucky we ride high. This thing’s just a big lake.” Indeed, the Yellow Sea was exceptionally shallow. It got its name from China’s Yellow River, which filled it with mountains of silt. Its average depth was less than 150 feet.

“Anything in our way!”

“Smooth the whole way in.”

From here, the Phantom could reach shore in thirty seconds, but Beck didn’t want to move until he knew what awaited them. A couple of miles east, a cluster of lights, seemingly placed at random, glowed weakly. Through his night-vision binoculars, Beck looked west and east as far as he could, then tried again with his thermal scope. He saw nothing but the lights and the dying stone wall.

“Cut the engines,” he said.

The twin Mercurys stopped. In the hush that followed Beck heard only the breathing of the men around him, the listless slap of the waves, the faint beeping of the Phantom’s radar. There were birds and animals and people too in the hills up ahead. Had to be. But they were silent as ghosts.

“Must be what the moon is like,” Kang said.

“Imagine living here.”

A whistle sounded to the north, eerie and distant. Choe said something in Korean.

“He says it’s a steam train,” Kang said. “The North Koreans still run coal locomotives.”

The whistle faded. Beck signaled to Choe to turn the engines back on and a moment later heard their reassuring rumble.

“Bet you can pick up waterfront property cheap around here.”

“Seth, was it this dark when you came over here before?”

“Once yes, once no. You’re figuring—”

“Not figuring anything yet.”

An alarm on Kang’s laptop beeped. He tapped a few keys and the monitor opened up. “Well, this isn’t good. Two boats, coming around Kudol”—a spit of land about ten miles southeast. “They were hanging close to the coast before, so the Hawkeye didn’t pick them up.”

“How fast?”

“Twenty, maybe twenty-five knots.”

“Aiming for us.”

“Looks that way.” The laptop beeped again. “More bad news.” Kang pointed to the screen. Another white blip was moving toward the Phantom, this one from the southwest. “He was stopped in open water, maybe twenty-five miles out. I had him figured for a fishing trawler. Now he’s moving our way.” The screen beeped again. “This one too, straight in from the west.”

“They’re setting up a cordon?”

“Looks that way.”

“Can we outrun it?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. For a few minutes.”

Beck checked his watch. 2330. No way was he waiting a half-hour. He would give the Drafter ten minutes, no more. He had been in tight spots before. During the first Gulf War, his SEAL team had landed in Kuwait City to sabotage a Republican Guard tank brigade. In the Philippines, he’d helped fight an ugly counterinsurgency against the Muslim guerrillas of the Jemaah Islamiyah.

But this mission felt different, not like a fight at all, more like they were bait dangled before a hungry animal. He was sure they’d been set up. Though all this activity could still be a coincidence, North Koreans out on pleasure cruises in the middle of the night.

Yeah, right.

POINT D WAS A SMALL INLET formed by a creek that flowed into the Yellow Sea from the northeast. A good spot for a pickup, easy to find in satellite photographs. And with the tide high, the Phantom could ride in nearly all the way to the beach.

“Ted,” Kang said urgently, “these just popped.” He pointed at two yellow blips on the radar screen. “Jets,” Kang said. “At three thousand feet. Just under the cloud cover. Running at three hundred fifty knots.”

“How far?”

“Sixty kilometers. Six, seven minutes, give or take.”

Choe sputtered in Korean and pointed at the shore. A man in a baggy nylon jacket had stepped out of the woods, walking strangely, almost limping. He raised a pair of binoculars and slowly scanned the water. As he spotted the Phantom, he waved slowly, metronomically. A backpack was slung across his shoulders.

“Well, hello, soldier,” Kang said.

Beck stared at the man through his own binoculars, trying to decide if he was looking at Sung Kwan, the Drafter. The CIA had secretly taken long-lens photographs of Sung at its meetings with him. Twelve hours before, in a secure room in the American embassy in Seoul, Beck had stared at those pictures, trying to memorize Sung’s face.

But Sung had few distinguishing characteristics. He was short and squat, like many Koreans, and wore the oversized glasses that Korean and Chinese men favored. His most notable feature was a birthmark on his left cheek. Beck peered through his own binoculars, looking for the birthmark. He thought he saw a smudge on the man’s cheek, but couldn’t be sure. Too bad Sung wasn’t seven feet tall or missing an arm.

“Bring us in,” Beck said to Choe. “But slow. And be ready to take off.”

“Slow,” Choe said. He eased the throttle forward. They were two hundred yards from shore, then one hundred, and through his binoculars Beck could clearly see the birthmark.

“That’s him,” Beck said. He waited for the trap to spring, for North Korean soldiers to pour out of the trees. But the woods stayed silent. Sixty yards out, the depth finder beeped.

“Any closer and we beach,” Kang said.

Choe was already swinging the Phantom around. Beck stepped out the back of the pilothouse and waved for Sung to swim out to the boat.

The North Korean limped into the sea. Halfway out, with the water at his shoulders, he began to yell.

“He can’t swim,” Kang said.

“He can’t swim? Maybe he should have thought of that before he chose this godforsaken beach for his pickup.” Beck took one more look at the shore. Still silent. “I guess this is why I get the big bucks.”

Beck pulled off his clothes and his pistol and put them in a pile and dove off the Phantom into the cool salty water. He swam underwater as long as he could, coming up for air a few feet from Sung. He reached Sung and wrapped his arms under Sung’s shoulders, the grip lifeguards used to save drowning swimmers. Sung’s body was flabby in his hands.

Panic filled Sung’s face and he struggled, from fear or surprise or both, his arms swinging wildly. But Beck overcame his thrashing and dragged him back to the Phantom, where Kang pulled him up.

“GO,” BECK YELLED as soon as he’d hoisted himself out.

Choe pushed the throttle forward and the boat took off, swinging hard right, throwing Beck against the pilothouse wall.

“Dammit, Choe.”

Choe let up on the throttle and the Phantom straightened out. They headed southwest, skimming the waves at fifty-five knots.

“You all right?” Kang said.

“Fine.” Beck’s forehead was throbbing, but he counted himself lucky. They were halfway home. Sung chittered at them in Korean.

“He says he’s sorry he doesn’t know how to swim,” Kang said.

“Me too.” Beck flipped on the pilothouse lights. The birthmark was unmistakable.

“Calm down,” he said to Sung in Korean. “You’re safe.” He pushed Sung onto a bench at the back of the cabin. “Just sit.”

Beck grabbed dry clothes from his bag, pulled them on, tucked his pistol into his pants. He had a lot of questions for Sung, but they would have to wait until the Phantom got into international waters. “Run a sim,” he said to Kang.

Kang tapped on his keyboard, projecting the Phantom’s position and those of the enemy boats for the next half-hour, assuming both sides stayed on their current tracks.

“On this heading, the boat to the west is our biggest problem,” he said. “We’ll make contact in roughly five minutes.”

“How about the jets?”

“One’s heading straight for us. The other west in case we run for the open sea. And there’s this.” Kang pointed at two more yellow blips moving toward them. “Those are airborne, less than a thousand feet, a hundred fifty knots.”

“Helicopters,” Beck said. “They’re pulling out all the stops.”

“Anxious to make our acquaintance.”

Beck examined the screen. None of the enemy boats or planes were headed directly for the Phantom. “Doesn’t look like they have a fix on us, though.”

“They need visual contact. Radar’s their big weakness.”

“So we hope,” Beck said. The helicopters were the real problem, he thought. The boats couldn’t catch them, and the jets couldn’t fly low or slow enough to spot them. But helicopters could. Which meant that—

“Tell Choe not to follow the coast,” Beck said. “I want him to run southwest. Two hundred fifteen degrees.” Into the open water of the Yellow Sea. They’d still have to get by at least one boat, but at least they’d be separating from the helicopters.

The North Koreans had obviously chased Sung toward the pickup point. But they hadn’t expected a speedboat, Beck thought. Without a radar fix, they were tightening the net methodically, coming from all directions, hoping to get a visual fix on the Phantom and blast it out of the water.

But the North Koreans didn’t know how fast the Phantom could run. The speedboat had geometry on its side. Only one enemy cutter stood between it and the open sea. And with each mile the Phantom ran, the search area widened, making it harder to find. In forty-five minutes they’d be in international waters, with F-16s, the world’s best babysitters, watching over them.

“And tell him to stay straight, max us out,” Beck said to Kang. Best to get out of danger as fast as possible. Their speed would save them. Kang said something to Choe, and suddenly the Phantom was flying across the flat sea at seventy-five knots, kicking up long, low waves of foam. Despite the danger, Beck couldn’t help but be amazed by the boat. Under other circumstances he would have liked to sit beside Choe and watch the ocean roll by, Corona in hand.

But not tonight. Even before it reached the enemy cutter, the Phantom had to run another obstacle: two small islands five miles off the coast, separated by a three-mile-wide channel. Both islands had naval stations, according to the satellite photos.

Overhead, the clouds were lifting slightly and the night sky was brightening, showing a sliver of moon, not what Beck wanted. He scanned the islands. Changnin, to the east, was silent, and for a moment he wondered if the satellites were wrong. Then, to the west, a stream of red tracers lit the night. The bullets landed far short of the Phantom, but they meant trouble nonetheless. Whoever was on that island had seen the boat pass.

As Changnin disappeared behind them, Beck heard the faint whine of jet engines. “How close?” he said to Kang.

“At least five minutes out.”

“And the cutter?”

“We’ll cross him in three minutes.”

“Range?”

“A thousand meters, give or take.”

Beck could have adjusted their heading to give them more room around the enemy boat. But running straight ahead meant that the two boats would cross each other for only a few seconds, giving the enemy ship little chance to fix its guns on the Phantom.

In the corner, Sung huddled in his chair, arms folded, clothes soaked, thin black hair matted against his skull. Beck wondered what was wrong with him. He didn’t look like a man who had just escaped the world’s most repressive regime. Maybe he was afraid of what would happen to his family. According to his dossier, he was married and had two teenage sons.

“You’re safe now,” Beck said in his halting Korean.

Sung just groaned and shook his head. Beck turned to Kang. “We’ve got to find out what’s wrong with him.”

“Right now we’ve got bigger problems,” Kang said. “That fighter’s closing.”

Through the cabin’s tinted windows Beck saw the North Korean jet, its running lights blinking in the night. The fighter was moving south-southwest, a couple of miles behind them but closing, the screech of its engines intensifying by the second.

“Either he’s got X-ray vision or they bought new radar when we weren’t looking,” Beck said. The jet banked steeply, looking for an angle to fire.

“He’s under two thousand meters,” Kang said. “Fifteen hundred. one thousand. ”

The fighter had stubby wings high on its fuselage and eight rocket pods under its wings. A Russian-made Su-25, a single-seat jet introduced in the 1980s. Obsolete by Western standards but still plenty lethal.

The Phantom shook as the Su-25 screamed by and unleashed a pair of rockets. The surfboard-sized missiles crashed into the water behind the boat, the force of their explosions sending five-foot-high waves across the sea. The Phantom jumped out of the water and crashed down, jumped and crashed, slap-slap-slap, until the waves finally subsided. Beck put a hand against the cabin wall and stayed upright this time.

The noise of the jet faded as the fighter prepared to swing around for another pass. Then the North Korean cutter appeared out of the darkness, a gray-black boat with heavy machine guns mounted behind the cabin. The cutter’s twin spotlights swung left and right, searching for the Phantom, finding it and for a moment filling the pilothouse with a white light, implacable and all-knowing. As if God himself were watching.

In the sudden brightness, Beck saw Sung trembling in his chair. The cutter’s machine guns opened up, their rounds thunking into the Phantom’s hull and the glass of the pilothouse. The windows shook and began to crack, long white scars cutting through the clear plastic. So much for running straight at the enemy, Beck thought. Time for Plan B.

“Choe! Hard right! Heading two-seven-zero! Now!”

Beck threw Sung down and lay on top of him and waited for the Phantom’s twin engines to get them out of trouble. Choe swung the boat west, easing off the throttle as he did, just enough that the boat wouldn’t tip. Beck closed his eyes and heard windows shatter as shards of fiberglass cut into his neck.

THE GUNS FADED as the Phantom pulled away. Beck stood and shook plastic shards off his clothes. The windows at the back of the cabin had been partly shot through. Even supposedly bulletproof glass couldn’t hold up to close-in machine-gun fire. The roar of the engines filled the pilothouse.

Boom! Sparks flew from the engines. The cabin shook and the boat’s nose lifted out of the water. The Phantom slowed and dragged right. Choe laid off the throttle. “Engine! Engine!” he yelled in English, before switching to Korean.

“He says we lost one of the Mercurys and the other one is light on oil,” Kang told Beck a few seconds later. “We can’t do better than thirty-three knots and we’ll be better off at twenty-five.”

Under other circumstances, thirty-three knots, or even twenty-five, would have been fine. Not tonight, Beck thought.

“How come they’re finding us so easily?” Kang looked at Sung.

“I was wondering that too.” Beck grabbed Sung’s backpack. Sung tried to stop him, but Beck lashed him, a hard flat chop that snapped the North Korean’s head sideways and sent him sprawling. Beck flipped over the pack. A pair of threadbare nylon pants, a thin cotton shirt, cheap black shoes, all drenched—

And, inside a waterproof bag, a plastic box, twelve inches by eight by four, three lights blinking red and green on its top. A transponder, broadcasting the Phantom’s location to every North Korean ship and jet within twenty miles. The man they’d come to rescue had betrayed them.

4

THE ELEVATOR’S DINGY STEEL DOORS GROANED OPEN. Exley stepped onto a threadbare brown carpet that probably hadn’t been vacuumed since Saddam Hus sein was alive. At the end of the corridor a discreet brass nameplate reading “Okay Enterprises” marked a black door. Exley touched her thumb to a security reader, and a deadbolt lock slid back with a heavy thunk.

The welcome scent of fresh coffee filled her nostrils as the door closed behind her. The office that greeted her was as absurdly ordinary as a dentist’s waiting room. Motivational posters and Thomas Kinkade lithographs covered the walls. Narrow wooden chairs sat next to a table of old magazines for visitors to thumb through. But no one ever read the magazines. No one ever visited Okay Enterprises.

“Mornin‘, Ms. Exley.”

“Mornin‘, Tim.” Tim was a solidly built man in his late forties. Today, as every day, he wore pressed khakis and a sport coat to hide his shoulder holster. He rarely spoke. Shafer, Exley’s boss, swore by him. Beside his desk, the coffeemaker burbled happily.

“Guess I got here just in time.”

“Brewed it figuring you were coming.” Tim’s accent was unplaceable, sometimes vaguely Southern, sometimes flatter, more Midwestern. He was already tipping steaming coffee into a plastic mug, camouflage print with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” stamped in white on the side. Shafer had bought the mugs at an Army-Navy surplus store. They’d originally cost $9.99 each but were marked down to a dollar. “Pretty good deal,” Shafer had said. “I wanted some with Rumsfeld’s face on the side, but I guess those got pulped a long time ago.”

Exley took the mug gratefully. “Thanks. Have a nice weekend?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He turned back to the Post on his desk.

I’ll take that as a yes, Exley thought. She and Wells had wondered about Tim’s personal life ever since Shafer brought him in. Was he married, divorced, a bigamist, gay? Did he live near the office? Did he spend weekends on Jupiter and come to Earth via warp drive every Monday morning? She’d never know. She wasn’t even sure that “Tim” was Tim’s real name. Shafer, who did, wasn’t telling.

“Tim’s a very private person,” Shafer said when she asked. “I’m sure you and John can respect that.” And he’d smiled his Cheshire Cat smile. But Shafer had given her one crumb. Tim had never worked for the agency.

TIM’S PEDIGREE, OR LACK THEREOF, was no accident. These scruffy offices reflected the unique and uneasy position that Wells, Exley, and Shafer occupied at the CIA. They still spent about half their time at the Langley campus, a few miles down the road. But Shafer intentionally kept this space as far outside the agency’s orbit as he could.

The agency paid for the suite, and CIA electronics countermeasures teams swept it for bugs every month. What Shafer didn’t tell them was that he had his own contractors sweeping the place as well, looking for devices that the agency might have missed — or planted. And instead of having the agency’s guards provide security, Shafer depended on Tim.

Naturally, Vinny Duto hated the arrangement. He had every right to be unhappy, Exley thought. Shafer was breaking agency regulations, and a dozen laws besides. But after what had happened in New York the year before, Wells, Exley, and Shafer were untouchable.

Of course, the aftermath of the mayhem in Times Square had been messy. Both Wells and Exley had been shot along the way and needed months to recover. And Wells faced another burden. The agency had never disclosed Exley’s identity, but Wells’s name had come out, though not his picture or biographical details. The agency had offered to announce to the world that Wells had died, and even give him a fake funeral. But Wells had rejected that idea, telling Exley that he didn’t want to have to explain to Evan, his son from his first marriage, that he was alive but pretending to be dead. Anyway the plan wouldn’t work, he said. Too many people, both inside and outside the agency, knew he’d survived. Instead he had to cope with moments like the one with the trooper.

For everyday life, the agency had given Wells a new identity, complete with driver’s license, passport, and credit cards. To confuse anyone who was looking for him, Langley had created fake websites that claimed to have the truth about him but were filled with disinformation. A few said Wells had died and was buried under a fake name at Arlington. Others claimed that “John Wells” didn’t exist at all and that the attack he’d stopped was a CIA plot to make the War on Terror seem relevant. Still others said he’d retired from the agency and was living under a CIA protection program.

Fortunately, Wells couldn’t be easily traced. Thousands of men shared his name, and the only pictures of him in circulation were twenty years old. But he couldn’t be completely disguised either. Too many officers at Langley knew him. So did his buddies from the Army and friends from high school and college. Enough fragments about his life were floating around the Internet that a steady stream of tourists now visited his childhood home in Montana.

Meanwhile, Duto and Wells circled each other warily. They’d never gotten along, and even the fact that Wells had stopped the New York attack didn’t end that hostility. Wells was uncontrollable, the anti-bureaucrat. What he’d done in Times Square made the rest of the agency look incompetent, almost irrelevant. But Duto, no fool, knew that he couldn’t attack Wells directly. So he’d gone the other way, giving Wells, Exley, and Shafer free rein. They had Top Secret/SCI/All Access clearances, the same as Duto’s own. They could crash any meeting, read any analysis, get the details of any operation they wanted.

At the same time, Duto had put them outside the agency’s usual chain of command. They reported directly to him, and he’d made clear that he didn’t plan to take responsibility for their mistakes. In a way, they’d become an agency within an agency, a mini-CIA. Exley and Shafer had been in a somewhat similar position years earlier, but now they were a lot more powerful.

Exley wasn’t sure how to use the carte blanche they’d been given, and she didn’t think Shafer did either. As for Wells. Wells spent his time these days working out, riding his motorcycle, and watching westerns. He was in great shape physically, if not mentally. Exley wished she could figure out how to get him out of his funk — a polite word for clinical depression. But she knew better than anyone that pushing on him would only backfire.

She tapped on Shafer’s door.

“Enter.” Shafer was stretched on his couch, poking at his laptop. He was legendary among longtime CIA employees for his fashion sense, and not in a good way. At various times Exley had seen him in red pants, a brown suit — something only Ronald Reagan could pull off — and her personal favorite, black leather boots more appropriate for a transvestite hooker. Shafer had worn those on one of Washington’s rare snowy days. When she asked Shafer where he’d found them, he told her that he couldn’t find his winter boots and had stopped at Nordstrom’s for replacements.

“These were on sale,” he said.

“I’ll bet.”

Sometimes Exley thought Shafer intentionally dressed badly to buttress his reputation as an absent-minded genius. Then he’d show up in something like today’s ensemble — a canary-yellow polo shirt coupled with jeans that ended two inches above his skinny ankles — and she’d reconsider. No one would knowingly look so ridiculous.

“Flood at home?” she asked him. He looked blankly at her. She decided not to explain.

“Check this out.” Shafer pointed at his computer, its browser set to a page from eBay. “A Dartmouth yearbook, Wells’s year. It’s being advertised as having a picture of ‘The Real John Wells.’ A headshot.”

Exley looked, then looked again to be sure. “Someone’s bidding eight hundred dollars? For a yearbook? Got to be a joke.”

“You should take some candids.”

“Funny,” Exley said.

“Where is your better half, by the way?”

“He was up late riding. As you know.”

“Someone needs to steal that bike.” Shafer closed the laptop. “How is our problem child?”

“Please don’t call him that.” Shafer was infuriating, but she trusted him more than anyone else at the agency, including Wells. She sat beside the window, which was coated with a layer of Teflon that damped the vibrations of the glass, making eavesdropping from outside impossible.

“It’s easier for me,” she said. “I still have David and Jess to take care of. I have my friends. He doesn’t have friends, Ellis. The people he knows die at an unusually high rate.”

“He ought to stop killing them.” Shafer vigorously rubbed his nose. She looked away in case he decided to poke a pinky inside, as she’d caught him doing over the years. “He could write a book. A memoir. At least it would give him something to do.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “A memoir? ‘How I got shot saving the world.’ By John Wells. Then he could go on Oprahand talk about it. Jump on her couch.”

“Good. Let him quit, then. He wants to be someplace nobody cares who he is, let him run an orphanage in Africa. You too. The agency’ll make sure you never have to worry about money. Duto will write the check himself just to be rid of you.”

She had considered something similar herself. And yet she couldn’t imagine it working, not now. “I don’t think he’s ready for that.” She paused, trying to find the words. “Ellis, nobody else in the world could have stopped Khadri.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I do. And you do too. Without him Manhattan would be a toxic waste dump. Nobody’s paying for your college yearbook. Or mine.”

“I wish you were my girlfriend,” Shafer said. “You’re good for the ego. Saving a few kids in Africa would be a waste of his talents, you’re saying.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t agree.”

“I agree he’s earned the right to do what makes him happy. You too. If the two of you can figure out what on God’s green earth that might be.”

“It’s not just that. I think he has posttraumatic stress disorder. He doesn’t sleep. Sometimes he’s not there at all. I wake up in the morning, he’s on my laptop, playing solitaire, like he’s been there all night.”

“It would be the least surprising thing in the world if he had PTSD. Have you ever talked to him about what it was like over there?”

Exley felt her eyes well up. She turned away so Shafer couldn’t see. She’d failed. By failing to challenge Wells, she’d failed him. “He needs an op, Ellis. We need to get him an op.”

“Killing more guys isn’t gonna get him over PTSD.”

“It’ll get him off that damned bike. If he’s going to take these chances, let it be for a good cause.”

“You think what we do is for a good cause?”

“Please stop proving how smart you are, Ellis.” She was tired of this conversation. “There’s something else I wanted to ask you about. Unrelated. I think.” She walked out.

IN A FEW MINUTES she was back, carrying a sheaf of papers from her safe.

“After-action reports from Afghanistan, ours and the Army‘s, raw field files. The Pentagon didn’t want to send them, but I gave them my clearance and told them they didn’t have a choice.”

“Membership has its privileges,” Shafer said. Exley handed Shafer some papers. “This is a summary of reports from SF units”—Special Forces. “Basically, the Taliban tactics are steadily improving. Their body counts are down, ours are up.”

“So we took out the dumb ones.”

“It’s more than that. This report mentions ‘company-level coordination typically seen among professionally trained armies.’ And this one.” She opened another file. “‘Enemy command-and-control has improved…. A combination of suppressing fire and point-to-point movement not seen before.’ It’s all over the place.”

“Fine. The Talibs are learning how to fight. Good for them, bad for us. So?”

Exley pulled out another report. “Two months ago, in Kandahar”—the city in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban had been headquartered—“a Colonel Hamar in the Afghan army tells us that the Taliban are getting ‘professional training’—his words — from ‘foreign fighters.’”

“The only foreign fighters in Afghanistan are bin Laden’s boys. They’re hardly professionals. Unless you think blowing yourself to bits is a hallmark of professionalism.”

“Let me finish, Ellis. By the way, the good lieutenant colonel died shortly after passing this rumor along.”

“I’m going to guess it wasn’t natural causes.”

“Throat cut in half.”

“In Kandahar that’s practically natural.”

Exley passed Shafer a photograph of a blood-drenched corpse rolled up in a rug. “His body was left in front of the local police HQ.”

“I guess that’s what’s known as sending a message.”

“Anyway. So the Special Forces say the Talibs are fighting better. Kandahar reports foreign fighters. Then this from the Tenth Mountain Division.” She handed him another file.

“More foreign fighters?”

“In eastern Afghanistan near the Pak border.”

“Nowhere near Kandahar,” Shafer said.

“I looked for more reports from the Tenth Mountain, but there weren’t any. They just rotated in. So I checked back to the old reports from the 101st.” The 101st Airborne Division.

“More foreigners.”

“Gold star, Ellis. Two reports. But no one linked them to the new ones. You know once a division leaves, its intel goes with it. These were also in eastern Afghanistan.”

“Okay. I’ll play.” Shafer began to read again, not skimming this time. Exley waited. One of Shafer’s strengths was his willingness to reconsider his preconceptions when he got new evidence. She wished more people at the agency — and across the river in the White House — shared that trait.

Finally Shafer looked up. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? The Taliban is getting outside help? Some foreign power is sending its own soldiers to give the Talibs tactical support?”

“I seem to remember we did something similar.” During the 1980s, America had aided Afghan guerrillas against the Soviet Army. Some of those same guerrillas had now turned against the United States.

“Supporting the Talibs would be an act of war against the United States. All of NATO too.”

“Proxy war.”

“Let’s say you’re right. Who’s doing it? The Russians would never help the Talibs. No matter how badly they wanted to hurt us. They haven’t forgotten they lost a hundred thousand soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.”

“Someone else, then.”

“Who? Nobody in NATO. They’re on our side. Iran and Pakistan would hardly count as foreign. North Korea? China? Anyone say anything about Asians?”

“No. The fighters are specifically identified as white. Mercenaries maybe?”

“Maybe. But it’s a seller’s market these days for mercenaries.”

Shafer was right, Exley knew. Former Special Forces soldiers could make $5,000 a week providing security in Iraq. South African and Russian soldiers made less, but even so they could take home $10,000 a month. They would want even more money to help the Taliban against the United States. Not for moral reasons either. Simply because of the risk.

“The Talibs couldn’t afford these guys,” Shafer said. “Who would pay them?”

“I think it’s time to find out.” She handed him the last report in her file. “Also from the Tenth Mountain Division. Two days ago. A fairly big camp in eastern Afghanistan, at least fifty Talibs. And several white fighters.”

“And they’re going after it?”

“Not at the moment. They have other priorities. And it’s in a very difficult location. Way up in the mountains. I think we should get a satellite up to take a look at it.”

“Sounds reasonable. And then?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what we see. Maybe we can convince the SF to go after it.”

“Okay. Talk to Greg Levine at NSA.” Shafer scribbled a number for her and handed back the files. “If he gives you any lip, tell him to call me. And Jennifer — do you want me to say anything to John?”

She walked out without answering. Let somebody else deal with Wells for once.

THREE HOURS LATER, Exley walked into Shafer’s office at Langley. Wells was already there. A nice surprise. She’d called and asked him to show up, but she hadn’t been sure he would.

“We got them already?” Shafer said. “This must be a record.”

“Levine said they had a satellite right there and it would be no problem as long as I had a cost center for him,” Exley said. “I told him to put it on your tab.” As part of the government’s internal accounting procedures, the National Security Agency dunned the CIA whenever Langley asked for photographs that required the NSA to alter the orbit of its satellites. The agencies had teams of auditors to squabble over the accounts, though in the end the American tax-payer footed the bill for everything. The system was either a necessary check on spending or a cosmic joke, depending on who was explaining it.

“There it is. Your tax dollars at work.” Shafer clicked on a folder on the workstation in the corner, which was linked to a fiber-optic network that transferred encrypted images between Langley, the Pentagon, and NSA headquarters. The agency refused to extend the network to the offices at Tysons Corner, so they had to come to Langley to see photographs like these.

The folder popped open, revealing dozens of graphical files. Shafer clicked one and turned to the fifty-inch flat-panel screen that hung on one wall of his office. But the screen stayed dark.

“Wow, the Eiffel Tower,” Exley said.

“No, it’s the rain forest,” Wells said. He was lounging on the couch, his long legs stretched on Shafer’s coffee table. He showed no ill effects from his ride the night before. Exley noticed that he’d even shaved.

“Everybody’s a critic,” Shafer said. He fiddled with the back of his workstation and clicked again. This time a remarkably clear image of the Afghan mountains filled the flat panel. At the end of the Cold War, American spy satellites had been celebrated for their ability to read license plates from space. Now they could read not just license plates but newspaper headlines.

Shafer focused on a patch of flat ground several hundred yards long, the most likely spot for a camp. Wells lifted himself off the couch and stared. The mountains had woken him up, Exley thought. She hadn’t seen him so alert in months.

“It’s a camp for sure,” Wells said. “A big one.”

“Then where is everybody?” Exley said. Only two men were visible in the photograph. They sat against the side of the mountain, rifles slung over their shoulders. “These were taken a couple of hours ago. Near dusk over there. Dinnertime. Shouldn’t they be lining up?”

“They’ll be back soon. Look, there’s two campfires going. You don’t do that unless you’ve got a lot of guys to feed. And over here—” Wells stepped close to the screen and pointed to the southern part of the camp, where holes were dug behind a makeshift rock wall. “Those are privies. At least five of them. Another sign they’ve been there awhile, and they’re decently organized.”

“The report says forty to fifty men.”

“At least that. Ellis, pull it back. Give me the widest view you can.” Wells ran his finger over the screen, tracing a line from the ridge, south, into the valley. “See this?”

Shafer got it first. “A trail, down the side of the mountain.”

“Follow it south, south—” Shafer scrolled down the screen, leaving the plateau and moving into the valley.

“No wonder the evil American infidels always knew where we were, back in the day,” Wells said. “If we’d had one of these, it would have been a fairer fight.” He grinned at Shafer. His confusion of “we” and “they” was no accident, as Shafer and Exley well knew.

“Want to switch sides again?” Shafer said.

“I’m not so sure they’d have me, Ellis.”

“Anyway, where would you ride your bike?” Exley said.

“Children,” Shafer said. “Focus, please.”

“Fair enough,” Wells said. He stepped closer to the screen. “Can you scroll farther down?”

“This set doesn’t run any farther south. We get another pass tomorrow.”

“Magnify it. The southern edge.” Wells looked at Exley. “See what they did at the base of the valley? Just left of where the trail ends.”

“Those branches?”

“See how they’re arranged? They look like they’re part of the forest, but they’re not. They’re thicker.”

Slowly, Exley recognized the hidden shapes under the branches. “Trucks?”

“Pickups, at least four. Toyotas most likely. All with fifty-cals. When I was with them, they never would have bothered to hide them.”

“Which means—”

“It doesn’t prove anything,” Wells said. “But yeah, it’s evidence they’re getting lessons.” He looked at Exley. “Well done, Jenny. Though I have to admit I don’t get it. Who would be crazy enough to help the Taliban right now?”

“What do you think we should tell Bagram?” Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, the headquarters of the American military command in Afghanistan.

“They’ve got to hit it,” Wells said. “Find out if it’s real. Though it’s gonna be tough. Whoever’s up there can enfilade anyone coming up that trail something vicious. And I’ll bet they’ve got heavy stuff in those caves. Mortars, RPGs, some SAMs”—rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles.

“You want to go? Summer vacation in Afghanistan? For old times’ sake?”

Shafer had asked the question, but Wells looked at Exley instead. She hated to see the eagerness in Wells’s face. He looked like a hound that had just sniffed out a fox. Did killing thrill him so much? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. Anyway this mission was what she’d told Shafer she wanted for Wells. Something that would test him, get him out of his funk.

“Go for it, John.” Anything beats the bike, she thought.

“If the guys at Bagram will have me, I’ll think about it.”

“It may take a few days to put together, but you’re right,” Shafer said. “We have to hit it. And they’ll have you.”

Shafer’s phone trilled. Shafer held a finger to his lips, warning Exley and Wells to stay quiet, and picked up. “Hello, Mr. Tyson.” George Tyson was deputy director for counterintelligence, the man in charge of making sure that foreign intelligence services didn’t infiltrate the CIA.

“When? Where? Tomorrow would be better. No… if it’s urgent, okay. We’ll see you there. Yes. We. Me and the two musketeers.”

He cradled the phone. “Strange. Tyson wants to talk to us tonight. Not here. Says something’s happening in Korea.”

5

BETRAYED. THE WORD RANG IN BECK’S MIND as he opened the Phantom’s hatch and hurled the transponder as far as he could into the foaming water. Betrayed. He threw Sung against the side of the cabin. Betrayed. He drove his right fist into Sung’s soft belly until the North Korean’s mouth flopped open and his legs went flaccid. Sung slid to the floor, gasping, wordlessly begging for oxygen.

“Ask him,” Beck said to Kang. “Ask him why he’s killing us.” Beck was even more furious with himself than with Sung. He should have checked the bag as soon as Sung got on board. But he simply hadn’t imagined that Sung would destroy his own chance for escape.

“If he doesn’t start talking, I’ll put a bullet in him.” Beck drew his pistol. “I will, too. Tell him.”

Kang finished translating. The cabin was silent. Then Sung spoke, the words coming in broken spurts.

“He says the security services have his family. Wife, parents, children, cousins. They’ll all die if he doesn’t follow orders.”

“How did he blow his cover?” When Sung heard Kang’s translation, he shook his head before muttering a response.

“He didn’t. He’s sure. It must have been someone on our side. One day the police came. Nothing he said mattered. They knew.”

“Why didn’t they just arrest us, sink the boat, when we landed?”

This time Sung said nothing at all. Beck put aside his pistol and kneeled on Sung’s chest and hit him in the face, twice. He got his shoulder behind the second punch and felt Sung’s flat nose break under his fist. “There’s no time for this.”

Sung spoke, the words so quiet that Kang had to lean in to hear. “He doesn’t know. He thinks they wanted to see where we were going, who would meet us.”

“Why didn’t you warn us?” Beck asked Sung directly in Korean. The North Koreans had forced Sung to ask CIA for the pickup, of course. But he could have flashed a different code, one that told them that he’d been compromised.

“No choice.”

“Of course you had a choice,” Beck said.

Sung murmured to Kang. “He wants to show us something. Says you have to get up,” Kang said.

Beck stood. The North Korean shrugged off his nylon sweatpants. He wasn’t wearing underwear, just some surgical gauze over his crotch, stained black-red with blood.

Sung lifted the patch.

“Jesus,” Beck said.

Sung’s penis and testicles had been removed, leaving a raw hole in his crotch that had been pulled together with crude black stitches. A plastic catheter poked from the wound, spilling drops of reddish-tinted urine.

“Fuck. Animals.”

Tears ran down Sung’s cheeks, mixing with the blood still streaming from his nose, the combination a ghastly purple under the cabin’s blue running lights. More than ever, Beck was glad for the little glass capsules in his pocket. He pulled up Sung’s sweatpants as gently as he could. Sung was talking again, his shoulders shaking.

“He says, he says they told him he would die no matter what,” Kang said. “For betraying Kim Jong Il. But they said if he warned us, they’d hurt his sons and his father also, the same way they hurt him.”

“Tell him he’s not gonna die. We’re not letting him die. Even if he wants to.”

NOW THAT BECK HAD DUMPED the transceiver, the North Koreans had lost them, at least temporarily. The radar feed from the Hawkeye showed that the Su-25 and the helicopters had made two loops around the transceiver. Soon enough they’d realize their mistake and widen the search.

Meanwhile, Choe had changed the Phantom’s course, turning the boat to 165 degrees, south-southeast, angling slightly toward South Korea. If they had both engines running, they could have gotten to international waters in twenty minutes. Instead they had an hourlong ride. Still, Beck wanted to believe the worst was over. With every minute that passed, they were closer to getting out.

Sung lay curled against the wall, a hand covering his crotch, his body shaking. Beck wanted to ask more questions, but this obviously wasn’t the time. Beck reached for his emergency first-aid kit. He grabbed a bottle of forty-milligram OxyContin and shook one and then another of the yellow pills into Sung’s hand. The North Korean popped them into his mouth with a hopeless shrug and choked them down. Whatever you’re giving me, his eyes said, whatever it does, I’ll take it.

FIVE MINUTES PASSED, and another five. Sung sighed and closed his eyes, and Beck hoped the Oxy had knocked him out, or at least dulled his pain. The feed from the Hawkeye showed that the helicopters and the Su-25 had split up, circling south and west as they searched for the Phantom. Through the blown-out windows at the back of the cabin, Beck saw one of the helicopters making long diagonals to the north, its spotlight shining down on the empty black waves. We might get out of this, Beck thought. Busted engine and all. We really might.

Then—

Ping! Ping! Ping!

The pilothouse vibrated as the sonar waves bounced off the Phantom’s hull, three in a row in quick succession. Beck had never felt sonar so strong. The boat’s sonar-detection system began to sound its automatic alarm, the whine of its horn filling the cabin, telling them what they already knew: a submarine had targeted them. From very, very close. Just like that, they were in worse trouble than ever.

“Where is he?” Beck said.

“Six hundred yards east. Periscope depth. Want me to ping him back?”

“No.” What was the point? They had no torpedoes or depth charges, and on the one-in-a-million chance that the sub had missed them, they might as well stay quiet.

“Choe,” Beck said. “Heading two-one-five.” Southwest again.

“Two-one-five.” Choe began to turn the helm.

“Tell him to push that engine as fast as he can,” Beck said to Kang.

“I think he figured that out all on his own.” But Kang said something in Korean to Choe nonetheless. Without looking up, Choe said in English, “Thirty-three knots.” He spat a stream of Korean, a language that had never sounded uglier to Beck than at this moment. Beck knew enough of what Choe was saying to understand that Choe was cursing him for leading them on a mission doomed to failure even before it began. Nonetheless, Choe pushed the throttle forward and the Phantom picked up speed.

Ping!

Again the cabin rattled. The sub was double-checking its range. Its skipper couldn’t believe how close he was either. But Beck didn’t think the sub would fire without being certain it wasn’t accidentally targeting a fishing trawler.

He looked east but couldn’t see the periscope. He wondered if the sub had tracked them all the way from the rendezvous point. Probably not. The North Koreans had ordered it here in case the Phantom somehow escaped their cordon. Running across the sub was nothing more than bad luck. The kind of bad luck that would kill them all.

Still, as long as it could move, the Phantom had a chance, Beck knew. North Korean subs were badly made copies of Russian Romeo-class subs, whose basic design was fifty years old. Thus the telltale active sonar pings. Unlike modern subs, the Romeos needed active sonar to lock on their targets, even at close range.

The North Korean torpedoes were equally dated, copies of old Russian 53–61 Alligators, with a top speed of forty knots and a range under ten miles. With both engines, the Phantom could easily have outrun the torpedo. Instead, the boat’s fate would depend on how quickly the North Koreans could load and fire, how badly the years of famine had degraded their readiness.

Beck’s watch read 00:00:30. A new day. He hoped he’d see the end of it.

Thirty seconds later, Kang looked up from his screen. “They’ve launched,” he said.

“Range?”

“Twelve hundred yards.”

Now it’s just math, Beck thought. Either that Alligator runs out of juice before it gets to us, or it tears us up. The torpedo was running 1,200 yards a minute, give or take. With its blown engine, the Phantom was limited to about 1,000 yards a minute. The torpedo had started 1,200 yards behind, but it was picking up roughly 200 yards a minute, maybe a little less. Unless it ran out of fuel, it would be making their acquaintance in six minutes, seven at most.

For a moment, Beck thought about ordering Choe to stop the Phantom so they could try to launch the Zodiac raft. But they probably couldn’t get to it before the torpedo hit, and even if they could, they’d have to leave Sung behind. Beck wasn’t willing to abandon the North Korean, even though his treachery had put them in this jam. He’d suffered more than any of them.

The seconds ticked by miserably. 00:03:40. 00:03:41… “Range?”

“Seven hundred fifty yards and closing.”

Beck wished they could do something more. Take evasive action. Drop chaff. Fire their own torpedo. Call in air support to blast that damned sub out of the water. But they could only run, and hope.

00:05:56… “Range?”

“Three hundred fifty yards. Still on us.”

“Is he slowing?” The torpedo wouldn’t stop all at once. It would sputter to a halt as it exhausted its stores of kerosene and hydrogen peroxide.

“Not yet.” Kang turned the Dolphins hat around. “Time for a rally cap.”

00:07:03… “Range?”

“Under two hundred. a hundred fifty now.” Kang’s tone was steady. “Wait. he’s slowing.” Hope crept into his voice. “He’s at thirty-eight knots. Thirty-seven.” The hope faded. “He’s still coming. A hundred yards now.”

Even so, the torpedo was now hardly gaining ground on the Phantom — and it was near the end of its effective range. If they could just stay ahead for a minute longer, they might get free.

“Sixty-five yards. Sixty. but he’s lost another two knots. Down to thirty-four. He’s hardly catching us now. Fifty yards.”

And now Beck could see the wake of the torpedo, cutting through the flat waves, chasing them, trying to destroy them. It was just a mindless piece of steel, but Beck hated it more than he’d ever hated anything.

“Only forty yards,” Kang said. Then his voice lifted. “He’s down to thirty-three.” At thirty-three knots the torpedo wasn’t closing anymore.

“That’s right,” Beck said to the thing behind them. “Die. Get lost and die.”

“Thirty-two.” Kang didn’t try to hide his joy. “We’re outrunning him!”

In their excitement neither Beck nor Kang noticed that a red warning light had flared on the dashboard. “Oil!” Choe yelled. “Oil!”

“What?”

Choe pointed at the light, the engine oil-pressure warning light. They’d run the damaged Mercury too hot for too long. Minute by minute, the oil leak had worsened. They’d dripped oil like blood across the sea. Now the engine had no oil left at all, and—

With a loud thunk, it seized up, leaving the Phantom without power.

And no power meant the Phantom was a floating paperweight.

With only its momentum to carry it along.

But the torpedo hadn’t forgotten them.

And even as Beck put all this together, the Alligator slammed into the Phantom’s keel. The torpedo’s firing pin smashed backward. Electricity flowed into the firing cap, setting off the charge. A fraction of a second later, the Alligator’s warhead exploded, blasting the boat with 670 pounds of explosive.

The Russians had designed the Alligator to sink destroyers and cruisers, big ships with thick steel hulls. The Phantom didn’t stand a chance.

The explosion threw the speedboat twenty feet in the air. The blast wave tore through the cabin in a fraction of a second, splitting the four men inside into unrecognizable bits. They had no time for last words or even last thoughts, just a bright flash of pain followed by the unknown and unknowable. By the time the blasted hull of the Phantom crashed into the sea, they were dead.

The boat itself lasted longer. It burned for ninety seconds, a floating funeral pyre visible in the night for miles. Then water filled its hull and it sank, taking its crew of corpses to the bottom of the sea.

6

EVEN BEFORE THE PHANTOM DISAPPEARED beneath the waves, word of its destruction was spreading.

The North Koreans knew first, of course. The sonar operators on the Nampo, the submarine that had launched the torpedo, picked up the explosion immediately. After radioing its commanders, the Nampo chugged toward the wreckage, seeking survivors. It found no life, just an oil slick and pieces of the Phantom’s hull.

The torpedo had blown apart the Phantom at 12:08 A.M. By 12:25, word of its sinking had reached North Korean’s military headquarters in Pyongyang, a crumbling concrete building ringed with antiaircraft guns and missile batteries. Five minutes later, Kim Jong Il, the chubby gnome who ruled North Korea, received a report of the Phantom’s sinking at his palace in Pyongyang. He celebrated with a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue, his favorite scotch. He had taken the Drafter’s betrayal personally. He knew only too well that his survival depended on the nuclear arsenal he had so carefully assembled. Kim had personally ordered Sung’s arrest and castration, an object lesson to anyone else who might betray him. Kim had no regrets about what he’d done. Regret had no place in his vocabulary. Loyalty, on the other hand, was a word he understood. The fact that a boat had come for Sung proved the man’s treachery beyond any doubt. His death was fitting punishment.

Now Kim had a call to make — to the man who had informed him of the Drafter’s treachery. He didn’t like depending on the Chinese. They used him and his people as pawns against the United States. But he couldn’t deny that this time, they’d proven valuable.

WASHINGTON LEARNED OF THE PHANTOM’S sinking not long afterward. At 00:08:02 local time, the boat disappeared from the screens of the E-2 Hawkeye. The plane immediately passed a message to the sonar operators on the USS Decatur—the destroyer in the Yellow Sea — advising them to listen for shock waves that might signal an explosion.

The Decatur didn’t have long to wait. The blast from the Alligator created a pressure wave that passed through the water at a mile a second, reaching the destroyer in under a minute. The sonar operators aboard the Decatur were used to tracking quiet Soviet submarines. To their trained ears, the blast wave sounded like a scream.

The Decatur reported the explosion to the combat information center at the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier steaming in the Korea Strait. The Reagan sent the news to Osan Air Base. From there it went to the CIA station in Seoul. A few minutes later, the South Korean coast guard station at Incheon passed word that two containerships were reporting a fire in the Yellow Sea.

At this point, Bob Harbarg, the chief of Seoul station, decided he had to tell Langley. He fired off a Critic-coded message, the highest priority, reporting that the Phantom was missing and presumed lost. The agency hadn’t saved the Phantom, but it had done a fine job watching the boat sink.

The only question left was whether Ted Beck and his men had somehow escaped the boat. Four Chinooks scrambled from Osan Air Base to search for signals from the transponders that Beck, Kang, and Choe carried. A Predator drone was launched to photograph the site of the explosion. But the Chinooks and Predator found nothing. As the hours ticked by, the sailors on the Decatur, the crews on the Chinooks, and the spies in Virginia had to accept the truth. The men aboard the Phantom were lost.

On the Decatur and at Osan, the mission ended there. But at Langley, the Phantom’s sinking brought new urgency to a different set of questions.

THAT NIGHT, WELLS AND EXLEY walked down the Mall under a cloudless sky. The moon hung behind them, the Washington Monument rising toward it like a needle poised to pop a balloon. Aside from the joggers and Frisbee players sweating in the night air, they had the open green field to themselves. The hard-packed Mall path crunched under their feet, a sound Exley found oddly satisfying. She reached for Wells’s hand, squeezed it. He squeezed back.

“Jenny.” His voice was hardly above a whisper. “I won’t go if you don’t want me to.” She knew what he meant. Afghanistan.

“Shh.” She put her arm over his broad back, rubbing the scar tissue left over from his run-in with the police in Times Square. “Does it still hurt?”

“It’s fine.”

Would you tell me if it did? she wondered. Not a chance.

About thirty yards away a fat man in a gray suit sat reading the Post. He waved to them and pushed himself up, grunting like a loaded semi heading up a mountain pass. He was at least three hundred pounds, a coronary waiting to happen. He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his head.

“George Tyson. You must be the famous John Wells.” He put the handkerchief away and extended his hand. Wells let it dangle.

“Right. You don’t like being called famous, Mr. Wells. And you don’t like counterintelligence.” Tyson’s accent was humid and southern.

“Any reason I should?”

“I want to tell you that Vinny Duto didn’t ask my opinion of you. Back in the day, I mean. He had strong ideas about you. Still does.”

“And if he had asked? What would you have said?”

“A fair question, Mr. Wells. But try to remember how you looked to us back then. With your Quran and your disappearing act. Accept my apologies, then, and shake an old man’s hand.”

Wells reached out for Tyson’s big paw — and found himself gripping a joy buzzer. He grunted, more from surprise than pain, as the electricity rattled his palm. Tyson smirked. Wells vaguely remembered hearing about his practical jokes, his way of keeping alive the CIA’s traditions from the 1950s, before the agency turned into a bureaucratic monster.

“Cute, Mr. Tyson.”

“So now you’re wondering if I’m a fool, or merely pretending,” Tyson said. “Hard to say, I reckon. Maybe both.”

“Actually I was wondering how many punches I would need to break your jaw.”

“I’d rather we didn’t find out. It’s interesting, though, the way you responded to an unanswerable question with one that has a definite answer.”

“Double as a shrink in your spare time?”

“I’ll bet you don’t like them either, Mr. Wells.” Tyson turned to Exley. “And you must be Jennifer Exley. Where’s Ellis?”

“Waiting in the car, like you asked,” Wells said. To Exley: “Whatever you do, don’t shake his hand.”

“I’d never mistreat a lady.”

They walked on, heading toward the Capitol. Then Tyson turned back toward the Monument, craning his neck like a curious tourist. “Mr. Wells? Would you say there’s anyone on us at the moment?”

“I’d say no. Why? You have some genius tracker following us? Somebody who can smell bear scat at fifty paces?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, the fewer people who know about this meeting, the better.”

“So we’re on the Mall? I see why you’re a master of counterintel.”

“Come now, Mr. Wells. You know there’s nothing better than a nice open space where we can see anybody who wants to see us. I’m not concerned about these joggers.”

“Yeah, you don’t strike me as the type to care much about exercise.”

“John,” Exley said. She turned to Tyson. “Ignore him, George. He’s been acting out recently.”

“So I hear.”

“So you hear?” Wells said.

“Mr. Wells. I heard only from Ellis. He’s concerned about you.”

“Is that why you’re here? An intervention? To convince me to behave?”

“Mr. Wells. Believe it or not, I’ve got a few other problems.” Tyson’s syrupy accent faded notably. He stuffed the joy buzzer into his pocket and leaned in close to Wells, putting his hands on Wells’s shoulders. “I said that Mr. Shafer is concerned about you. Not that I am. Others across the river may think that you’re some kind of superspy. You may think so, for all I know.”

“No, I don‘t—”

“Please let me finish. Me, I’m not a fan of the great-man theory of history. The Confederacy had all the best generals and we still lost the war. I think you got lucky in Times Square. We all got lucky. You are here tonight because Mr. Shafer wants you to be. Not me. Are we clear?”

Wells’s face tensed and he stood rigid under Tyson’s heavy hands. He stepped back, shook Tyson’s hands off his shoulders. For a moment Exley thought Wells might actually hit Tyson. Then Wells’s face softened.

“We’re clear. Thank you.” He stuck out his hand, and after a moment Tyson put out his own. They shook for a long time before Wells finally let go.

“Thank me?”

“Somebody needed to say it. Thank you for not treating me like I’m something special. Or some wounded animal. Even if I am.”

BASEBALL PRACTICE HAD ENDED HOURS earlier, but fluorescent lights still shined over the field at Cardozo High School, just up Thirteenth from Exley’s apartment. In fact the lights never went dark, possibly because of Washington’s legendary municipal incompetence, possibly to make the stands by the field less inviting for midnight trysts. Now Exley, Shafer, and Tyson sat in the stands, waiting for Wells. They’d driven around Washington for fifteen minutes, confirming that no one was following them, before Wells dropped them off and promised to find parking.

Wells trotted up, holding a plastic bag and handing out paper bags.

“Beer?” Tyson peered into the bag distastefully.

“For our cover,” Wells said. “Picked them up at that package store on U Street.”

“For our cover?” Exley couldn’t help but laugh. Wells’s mood had certainly improved, with the promise of a mission and his dressing-down from Tyson, she thought. Even if he hadn’t said a word she would have known. He was watching the world in a way that he hadn’t in months.

Wells popped open his beer and took a swig. Tyson looked at him. “What kind of Muslim are you, anyway, John?”

“Don’t spend much time at the mosque these days,” Wells said.

“I might feel the same if my co-religionists spent their days thinking of new and exciting ways to kill me.” Tyson poked the can out of the bag. “Budweiser?”

“Budweiser, George. Put hair on your chest.”

“Is she going to drink one too, then?” Tyson looked at Exley. “I’ve never had a Budweiser in my life. It’s Yankee beer.”

“Budweiser’s from St. Louis,” Exley said.

“All beer is Yankee beer,” Tyson said. “Real Southerners drink whiskey.”

“George, why can I picture you overseeing a plantation, whip in hand?”

“That’s your overactive imagination. Now, this is turning into a real fun evening, but I’d like to tell you why we’re here.” Over the next half-hour, Tyson filled them in on the Phantom’s mission, and its failure.

“And we had no hint of trouble before our guy, the Drafter, asked for the extraction?” Exley said when Tyson was finished.

“No. We saw him eight months ago in Pakistan, offered to get him out then. He refused. They’d just promoted him. Which is another reason I think it was from our side. Kim Jong Il doesn’t have enough good scientists to turn on them for no reason.”

“And counterintelligence investigations always leave a trail,” Shafer said. “No matter how hard you try, you can’t watch the suspect without him knowing.”

“He sees someone’s been poking in his office,” Tyson said. “Or we dangle something and he wonders why all of a sudden he’s got new access. Moles have this spooky sense of when we’re watching.”

“Tell me about it,” Wells said, remembering the years he’d spent in the mountains. Every day he had wondered if al Qaeda and the Taliban would recognize him as an American agent.

“So I suspect Sung would have known if they were after him,” Tyson said. “Instead he was as snug as a termite in a lumberyard until the day he told us to get him.”

“Could you repeat that last bit?” Wells said. “In English?”

“Ignore the Dixie twang and you have the facts,” Shafer said. “Odds are the North Koreans were tipped from the outside.”

“Maybe they caught him holding something classified,” Exley said.

“He was too careful for that,” Tyson said. “His stuff all came shortwave or face-to-face.”

“How important was he, this guy?” Wells said.

“Our most important human source.”

“In North Korea?”

Tyson sighed. “Anywhere. He told us where they hid their nukes.”

“Then maybe it wasn’t the North Koreans.” Wells raised the Budweiser to his lips, filling his mouth with the cool tart liquid.

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe they got tipped by some other hostile service, somebody who wanted to hurt us bad and knew this would do it.”

“Makes perfect sense,” Shafer said. “Somebody gets this, banks it, takes it out now, gives it to the North Koreans when it can really mess us up.”

“I understand, Ellis,” Tyson said irritably. Tyson raised the beer to his mouth, took a tiny sip.

“Not bad, is it, Mr. Tyson?” Wells said.

“I wish I could say yes. Please give it a good home.” Tyson handed the bag to Wells.

“So why are you telling us this?” Exley said.

“For the moment I’m taking the usual steps,” Tyson said. “My staff is examining who had access to the Drafter’s identity or the information he provided. Looking for unusual travel patterns for the officers in the North Korean unit.”

“You’re going to have a lot of people to look at,” Shafer said.

“And it’s no secret that our record in these investigations has been less than stellar.”

“Counterintel doesn’t get the cream of the crop,” Wells said. “Present company excepted.”

“I can’t disagree. It’s far more exciting to be chief of station in Tokyo than stuck in Langley poring over bank records. And anyone with half a brain knows that questioning the loyalty of one’s fellow employees won’t win friends when it comes time for the promotion boards to meet. But you—”

“Have no friends anyway,” Exley said.

“I was going to say that you have shown the ability to work outside the agency’s institutional confines.”

“In other words, no friends,” Wells said.

“I was hoping you might run your own informal inquiry. You’ll have access to everything that the official investigation turns up. If you need subpoenas or extra eyes, I’ll get them for you. In return I ask only that you let me know what you find.”

“Like who got our boat blown to bits twelve hours ago. More black stars.” Every time a CIA employee died on a mission, the agency added a black star to the north wall of the lobby at its original headquarters building. There were now more than eighty stars.

“Exactly, Mr. Wells.”

“You never told us — who was on that boat?”

“Lead agent was named Ted Beck.”

Wells pounded a fist into his open palm. “Dammit.”

“You knew him?” Tyson said.

“He was one of the good guys.” Beck had been one of Wells’s instructors at the Farm — officially called Camp Peary, the CIA’s training center for new recruits — back in the mid-1990s. Beck wasn’t much past thirty, but even then he was bald as a cue ball, tough and strong. He and Wells had shared a love for Pierce’s Pitt Bar-B-Que, a restaurant off Highway 64 where a full rack of ribs cost just $9.95.

Suddenly Wells was irritated at himself for the self-pity he’d indulged in over the last months. He’d sacrificed some, for sure. But Ted Beck — and lots of others — had sacrificed far more.

“You’re the only one who will know what we’re doing?” Exley said.

“Yes. I can give you something in writing. If you feel you need that protection.”

“Not necessary,” Shafer said.

“I’m in,” Exley said.

“Mr. Wells?”

“I’d love to. Especially now that I know who got hit. But I’ve got my own business to take care of. In Afghanistan.”

“Well.” The stands creaked as Tyson stood up. “Good luck with that.”