Cooke steered Kyra to the left. The second floor hallways were claustrophobic and dark, the combination of government-standard yellow paint and fluorescent bulbs that always looked like they were dying. The ceiling was low; Kyra could have touched it with her fingertips. There was no carpet, just dirty tiles that, permanently soiled from over a half century of footsteps, soaked up what little light escaped the ceiling. “They do those occasionally, but it’s not their sole mission. And to be honest, the rest of the analysts don’t like them. Or I should say ‘him.’ The Cell is running low on manpower,” Cooke said.
“How many?”
“Right now, one.” Cooke admitted. “It’s not field work, but you’ll stay connected with what’s going on around, you’ll draw a paycheck, and we can pull you back in a hurry.”
They turned right down another hallway. Kyra found herself reading wall placards that announced room titles and numbers cut in small white letters on black plastic as she went. Cooke stopped in front of a door on the hallway’s left side near a dead end. The vault sign was distinct, not government standard but white letters in sans serif type on a globe bathed in red, all of which was hard to see in the dim light.
CIA RED CELL
THE MOST DANGEROUS IDEAS IN THE WORLD
“Questions?” Cooke asked.
“Why are you walking me down in person?” Kyra asked.
“To make sure he doesn’t kick you back out,” Cooke told her. She pressed the buzzer set in the wall next to room 2G31 OHB. No one answered. Cooked swiped her badge against the reader and the door opened with a click.
Every government office Kyra had ever seen looked the same. They were all nests of shoulder-high, beige dividers set up to cram as many public servants as possible like cattle into the available space. It was a miracle, she thought, that anyone with claustrophobia could be a bureaucrat, and she had assumed that DI offices would adhere to the norm. Analysts and case officers were different animals, but government-approved floor plans were the same everywhere.
Except here, she thought. The Red Cell had more in common with a newsroom than a government office. The cramped vault was divided into a large bullpen, a smallish conference room, and a manager’s office. The far wall was glass, floor to ceiling, giving Kyra a wide view of New Headquarters. The other walls were covered with marker boards, maps of Middle Eastern nations, calendars, political cartoons, and newspaper articles. Stacks of The Economist, New Republic, Foreign Affairs, and intelligence reports covered the tables. The east wall was home to a life-sized full-body portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that some case officer might well have stolen from some abandoned Soviet building. Facing the Russian across the room was a near shrine of smaller black-and-white photographs of a young Ronald Reagan, dressed as a cowboy with six-shooters drawn, and a framed Economist cover billing the dead president as “The Man Who Destroyed Communism.”
A man stood at the far side of the room, his back to the door, his full attention given to a whiteboard. He held a red marker in one hand and an eraser in the other. He didn’t turn to see who had just invaded the room.
“Mr. Burke,” Cooke announced. It wasn’t a question.
The man turned his head slightly, barely enough to look back over his shoulder for a second before turning back to the board. “Director Cooke.” Jonathan Burke was tall, only slightly more so than Cooke, with an average build for his height. His hair had no observable gray and his eyes were an intense green. He wore the standard analyst uniform of brown khakis and a blue oxford shirt.
“What’s on the board today?” Cooke asked.
Burke said nothing for a second while he drew connections on a wire diagram with labels so sloppy that Kyra couldn’t read them. “I’m trying to develop a structured analytic technique to counter confirmation bias in finished intelligence products.”
“Ambitious,” Cooke warned him.
“I was bored,” Burke said. “I don’t handle boredom well.”
“I’m aware. Does it work?” Cooke asked.
Burke sighed, capped the marker, and dropped it on the whiteboard tray. He stared at the board for several more seconds before turning around. “Given how much confirmation bias goes on around here, you would think that developing a test for it would be trivial. Not so.”
“So that’s a ‘no,’” Cooke said, smiling.
“A ‘not yet,’” Burke corrected her. “I have no shortage of case studies to work with. But I assume you’re here to send me on a detour.”
“You’ve always said that you don’t have enough warm bodies,” Cooke said.
“I have plenty,” he said.
“You have one,” Cooke observed.
“As I said.”
Cranky bugger, Kyra thought. And the man was putting on no airs for a CIA director. That was interesting. How do you get away with that?
“Now you have two. Kyra Stryker, meet Jonathan Burke, analytic methodologist.”
Jonathan looked at the younger woman only briefly. “What have you heard about the Red Cell?”
“Only that you’re not very popular,” Kyra said. Two can play the cranky game, she thought, and she wasn’t in the mood to put on airs herself.
Jonathan lifted his head and studied the younger woman. “True. And irrelevant. Occasional hostility is the acceptable price of doing this business. And you’re keeping company with the director, so a lack of likability hasn’t slowed you down,” he observed.
“At the moment, being liked is not my problem,” Kyra said.
“How charming.” Jonathan looked to Cooke. “She shows promise. But I assume that you didn’t come just to escort this young lady down?”
“You heard about Taipei?” Cooke asked.
“Of course,” Jonathan said. “The hazmat unit was the interesting bit.”
“‘Interesting’ is not the word I would choose, but I agree. That’s why everything else on the Red Cell’s plate is now on hold.”
“You disagree with the China analysts on the situation?” Jonathan asked.
“You don’t?” Cooke answered.
“Of course I do,” Jonathan said. “But I’m disagreeable, so here I sit. What’s your issue?”
“My issue is that we’ve suffered a major intelligence failure every seven years since Pearl Harbor on average,” Cooke said. “So when APLAA tells me this is just going to be a little tiff, I want some insurance in case they’re wrong. The Red Cell is it. So tell me what you think.”
“I think the president should send in the aircraft carriers,” Jonathan said.
“You’re serious?” Kyra asked. “The Taiwanese arrest a few Chinese and you—”
“The Taiwanese arrested a few Chinese spies,” Jonathan corrected her. “And that is the prerogative of sovereign nations, so you can imagine why the Chinese might object to the Taiwanese doing that. Before last night, the Taiwanese had never detained an MSS officer in six decades precisely because they didn’t want to rile Big Brother. Now that little policy has changed and I suspect the Chinese won’t be amused. They’ll rattle the saber before this is finished.”
“All right,” Cooke said. “You have my attention.”
The analyst directed the women to a pair of chairs in the small open bullpen space and took a seat across from them. He stared past them out the window as he talked, making no eye contact with either woman. “Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists lost the Revolution, then fled to Taiwan and never surrendered. Imagine Jefferson Davis moving the capital of the Confederacy to Cuba in 1865 and never giving up its claim to the southern states. The Chinese see the Taiwanese as descendants of an enemy who should have surrendered, didn’t, and now want a consolation prize they don’t deserve. So the Chinese established the ‘One China’ policy and made it the prerequisite for doing business with the mainland. But every so often, the Taiwanese stick their head up, act like a sovereign country, and make the policy look like a farce. That doesn’t just humiliate Beijing. The Communist Party partly justifies its hold on power by arguing that it’s the best protector of Chinese interests. That includes bringing Taiwan back into the fold, so the government’s legitimacy depends in part on Taiwan keeping its head down. Arresting spies threatens that. Tian will have to act.”