“I’m pleased to see you,” the man said.
The man was middle aged with a finely lined face and a fashionably short hair cut. Kate immediately had the unsettling feeling that she knew him, but she couldn’t quite place him. Then, he spoke again, this time in a high pitched squeal and Kate knew exactly who she was dealing with. The hair was different, and the nose, but the voice was the same. It belonged to Larry Wu. Shanghai Larry.
“Surprised to see me again so soon?” Larry asked.
This was the man who had died in a pool of blood in Michael’s arms, the man who had given him the cell phone message, the man who had solidified her interest in Michael as an asset. He was absent the prosthesis, but there was no doubt about it. It was him.
Larry’s voice dropped a full octave and he said, “I know I’m glad to see you.”
Kate felt a pull in the pit of her stomach. If Larry wasn’t dead, then his death had been faked. And in the spy game there were only a couple of reasons to fake death. One was of course to enable a subject to disappear, but another was to foster credibility in a mark. And if this had been a case of the latter, then one more thing was clear. She had been set up. Kate forced herself to remain calm. What mattered now was not the duplicity, but the extent of it. What they wanted was for her to panic. If she could retain a cool head she might still find a way out.
Then the battered metal door opened. And Kate felt the pull in her stomach drop into a free fall because this time her old backpacker pal Crust entered the room. True, he was clean shaven in a crisp suit, his dreadlocks neatly tied back, but it was Crust, there was no question about that. He carried a Beretta semi-automatic in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. He tossed Kate the phone. It landed in her lap, a video clip already playing.
Kate looked down. She recognized the clip. It was the message from Michael’s father. Only this time she noticed something that she couldn’t possibly have recognized before. The interrogation room. She glanced around the bare space in which she sat. The concrete walls were the same as the walls in the video clip. The battered metal door was the same. The lone incandescent bulb, the gray metal table, the very chair she sat in, it was all the same. There was no doubt about it, the video had been recorded here, in this room. This was bad news. About as bad of news as she could get. It occurred to Kate that things had not been as they appeared for some time. Michael had not been as he had appeared.
She thought about his naïve blue eyes. About the way he arrived in Hong Kong, earnest, but eager for answers. She thought about how she had extricated him from the bloody scene in Chungking. How she had wanted to help him, but more to the point, how she had seen how he could help her. How what his father might have told him could be a potential asset in her work. But what she hadn’t considered at the time were the inconsistencies. They were subtle, but they were there. Like the fact that Michael seemed reasonably comfortable under pressure; the kind of comfort that comes only with training. Or the fact that he never fully relaxed, not even when they made love, not really. Or even the fact that after what she had done to him, after what she had done to his father, he had simply allowed her to walk away. No one could do that, no one could be that forgiving. Unless he knew she was walking into a trap; unless he had set the trap himself.
Kate flashed to the temple cellar where she had first interrogated Michael. “I’m a spy,” he had said. She hadn’t thought much of it at the time. It was just bravado, a civilian coping mechanism to deal with an impossible situation. But then when Huang had held them at gunpoint in the cave, he had said it again. “I’m a slacker-boy spy come to kick your sorry ass.” Again, it had to be bravado, or was it? When he wasn’t talking about Mata Hari being his prom date he was kidding about espionage being a 24-7 game. Was it that obvious? Could she really have missed it? Kate felt an involuntary shiver run through the length of her body. Then she felt the bile rise from the back of her throat. It tasted bitter on her tongue. It was the taste of deception.
“Where is he?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell us,” Crust said.
“Not the father,” Kate said. “Chase. Where is Michael Chase?”
Chapter 61
Michael’s father’s final lesson to him was no test. It was an act. He sent Michael a message. It was on a radio frequency that Michael had never heard of, encoded in an algorithm that Michael couldn’t possibly break. And it had come through Ted. But that didn’t diminish it in any way. Because the message said that his dad needed his help. And Michael did what he had to do. He went to find his father. That’s when Michael learned what his dad had been teaching him all along. From being brave, to reading strangers, to the art of deception and everything in between, his father had been teaching him one thing. The family business. Michael now knew that from his earliest memory, his father had been teaching him how to be a spy.
***
He awoke to the rhythmic sweeping of a straw broom outside his window. Slowly opening his eyes Michael watched as the morning sunlight danced on his pillow. It had been a hell of a night. Now it was time to see if it had all been worth it. The safe house was a simple two-story affair, just far enough outside the city center of Hanoi as to be unobtrusive. From the outside it was merely a well-maintained compound amidst a series of similar compounds; a neighborhood for the city’s well-heeled. Inside, however, it was a sanctuary, and within its walls Michael felt the simple luxury of letting his guard down without the fear that someone might discover that he was more than he pretended to be. It might not seem like much, but to Michael, who had been diligently maintaining his cover since before his arrival in Hong Kong, it was the world. Allowing his eyes to wander to the bedside clock, he was surprised to see that it was nearly nine a.m. He’d gotten less than four hours of sleep, but they’d been good hours. Debriefing had been scheduled for 0900 sharp. He noticed that a fresh pair of jeans and a short-sleeved shirt had been left neatly folded on the edge of his bed. It was time to meet the man.
A quick shower and change of clothes later and Michael ambled down the stairwell to the smell of freshly brewed coffee. The first doorway on his right revealed a bright kitchen off of which sat a garden view breakfast room. Inside he was greeted by the Hanoi Station Chief, Sam Grolling. A tall man with a long chin and deep worry lines etching his face, Michael had briefly met Grolling back at Camp Peary in Virginia. His presence felt noteworthy to Michael because in some small way it signified completion, at least of this leg of the journey.
“Good to see you safe and sound, Agent Chase.”
Michael pulled up a chair. There were three others at the table: a dark haired petite woman whom Michael had never seen before, Song, the bubbly Australian who palled around with Crust, and Ted, his gray ponytail knotted in a clean bandanna for the occasion.
“I believe you’ve already met Song.”
Song rose briefly and curtsied. “My liege.”
Grolling went on. “This is Aimie, our program coordinator, and of course, Mr. Fairfield.”
“Ted,” Michael said. “Glad you made it.”
“I could use about fourteen hours under a hot shower, but yeah, I made it.”
“Well then,” Grolling said, “shall we get started?” He took the quiet around the table as consensus and continued. “As of 0800 this morning the Horten had been transported via a local fishing vessel out of Ha Long Bay and into international waters where it was picked up by the Frigate USS Kingfisher. A CIA science team has already begun the initial examination of the plane and barring bad weather, it should be stateside for further study within ten days.” Grolling paused for emphasis. “Given that the recovery of the Horten was your primary mission objective, Langley is pleased with the outcome.”