“You can thank me when you’re home, safe and sound.”
Decker smiled and shifted onto his back. Slowly but surely, he lowered himself to the surface of the roof until the line held his weight. Then, carefully, he wrapped his gloved hands round the line, swung his feet up, and pulled himself out over the edge of the building.
For a moment, the line seemed to give. Decker felt himself fall. His feet slipped from the cable and his hands chafed as he slid backwards away from the building and down toward the street.
Then the line tensed and he came to a halt.
Don’t look down, Decker said to himself. He could feel the harness cut into the flesh of his thighs, around the back of his arms. Don’t look down. But he did.
He was dangling now, all his weight on his harness and hands. Far below, cars and scooters whipped by. With great difficulty, Decker swung his feet up and over the line until he was stable again. Then he started to pull himself forward, hand over hand down the line.
For years, Decker had suffered from an aversion to heights. For eight years and two months, to be precise, he recalled, ever since watching his partner Bartolo fall to his death. Before that, heights had never really affected him. He’d even done a fair amount of rock climbing in college. Then, they had chased those three suspects in the early stages of the El Aqrab incident, across those rooftops in Long Island City, New York, and Bartolo had slipped at the last moment on the glistening parapet, as he was jumping from one building to the next. He had fallen just short, and the lip of the next building had caught him full on the chest with a loud thump and knocked the wind out of him.
Decker could still see him, even now, to this day — the way he had struggled and kicked and waved about in the air. As if it were yesterday. “Help me,” his partner had screamed. “Help.” But Decker had not been able to save him.
“Stop it,” he said to himself, looking down at the street. Stop thinking. React. He dragged himself forward.
When he finally arrived at the other end of the line, it took him several minutes to secure a good handhold on the edge of the roof and to haul himself upward and over the parapet. The place seemed deserted. But there were too many air conditioning units, brick walls and chimneys to see very far. He unfastened himself from the harness and started to make his way carefully across the roof of the Shanghai Hotel.
He was more than halfway across, threading his way through a labyrinth of chimney pots, when he caught his first glimpse of the guard. The soldier was standing near the edge of the roof, about twenty yards away, smoking a cigarette. His silhouette was outlined against the nightscape of the city and sky. He was oblivious, with not a care in the world. There was a rail hub on the far side of the Shanghai, and beyond that a few blocks of low buildings, mostly brick, before the glimmering high-rises on the bank of the river.
The soldier may have been guarding a North Korean installation, but he was dressed in PLA Chinese green. Decker could make out the telltale red collar as he puffed on his cigarette. For a moment, he turned in Decker’s direction.
Decker froze. Has he seen me? he wondered. He pressed himself to the chimney pots, trying hard not to breathe. The hackles rose up on his neck.
Then, the guard turned away. He took another drag off his cigarette and continued to stare at the glimmering city.
Don’t think, Decker said to himself. Don’t think… except about those shiny black burns baked into her thighs and her arms, like the carapace of a beetle. Think of Becca.
A moment later, he found himself sprinting across the last few yards of the roof. The guard turned just in time to feel a hand on his forehead, another on his neck. Decker twisted, there was a bone-grinding snap, and the soldier slumped to the ground. It was over in seconds.
Decker squatted beside him. He was only a boy, barely twenty. And, now, he would never grow a single day older.
Decker slipped off his backpack and pulled out a new line. Moments later, he’d secured it to a pipe near the edge of the roof. With his heart in his mouth, he peered over the lip of the parapet.
The Unit 110 team was bivouacked on the top four floors of the hotel. The top floor, the eighteenth, was where they kept most of the servers and where the hardware specialists worked, according to the latest Mossad intel. The seventeenth and sixteenth floors housed the analysts. And the fifteenth featured meeting rooms and security.
Decker lowered the rope carefully over the edge of the roof. Fearing security leaks from within the hotel, a nominally public location, the new fiber-optic cables had been strung up on the outside of the building. They would eventually be housed within a reinforced PVC casing. But, as they were still adding new lines, the cables around the top two floors had yet to be covered. He could see the black mass snaking out of the building only a few yards away. They were exactly where Seiden had said they would be.
Decker stared down at the blackness below. He must have been at least two hundred feet off the ground yet he couldn’t make out the bottom, despite the ambient light. It was simply too dark off the train yard. All the better, he thought.
Without pausing to reconsider, Decker connected an ascender, hooked his harness to the line, and lowered himself over the edge. Moments later, he was dangling in free space.
There! A rat’s nest of cables sprouted out of the building.
Decker tried to grab them but they were just out of reach. He needed to lower himself further so he could swing in underneath the edge of the roof and get at the cables, but he was afraid that if he slid down too far, someone might spot him from one of the windows. The eighteenth floor was only a few feet below him. Already his feet might be visible if someone were to walk by and look up.
With great care, Decker lowered himself further, inch by inch. He started to pendulum back and forth on the line until, with a grunt, he managed to snag the outermost cable with the very tips of his fingers. He pulled himself into the building. Then, holding on with one hand, he reached into his chest pouch and removed the transponder.
As he worked to affix it, Decker thought about the dead guard on the roof. He could still see his face, the bald look of surprise in his eyes. What else was he going to have to do to silence that nagging voice in his head? And he wondered again, for the ten thousandth time, what the hell was he doing there? Why had he really come to Dandong? Was he justified in thinking there was a mole at the Center? Is that why he had gone rogue, staged this mission? Was he indeed being framed, or was he simply afraid that he knew who the mole really was?
Eight years earlier, Decker had spent time as El Aqrab’s prisoner. Who knows what the Islamist extremist had done to him. Perhaps El Aqrab had programmed him somehow, embedded a post-hypnotic suggestion in his psyche, turned him into some kind of sleeper agent — like The Manchurian Candidate.
Occam’s Razor, thought Decker. The simplest explanation was usually the correct one. Perhaps his had been the only terminal compromised at the NCTC because he was the mole.
And, try as he might, he couldn’t set aside the memory of what Ali Hammel had told him just before bombing his house, when Decker had asked him how he had gotten the number to the secure phone at the Center: “You gave it to me. Don’t you remember? On La Palma.”
But that was ridiculous. Decker hadn’t even been working at the Center at the time. Then what had he meant by that?