“So what does work?” she asked.
“Judging by our track record? Nothing, apparently. But a good Red Cell helps,” he answered. “Red Cell analysis isn’t about right and wrong, or predicting the future. It’s about getting people to think about the overlooked possibilities. Evolution, or God depending on your preference, has left us with brains that latch on to the first explanation that seems to fit the facts and our own mind-sets and biases when we face a puzzle. Even smart analysts develop shallow, comfortable mental ruts. To get them out, you have to make them uncomfortable, make them consider new ideas, including some that they might not like. And that means you have to be—”
“Unlikable?” Kyra asked.
“I was going to say ‘aggressive.’ But the two are often the same.” He looked up at the television. Liang stood at the podium, waving his arms almost violently. Jonathan lifted the remote and turned on the volume as the Taiwanese president pounded the podium in a steady rhythm with his words. “Zhonghua minguo she yige zhuquan duli de guojia!” The translator rendered the English a half second out of sync with Liang’s excited voice. “Taiwan is a sovereign state!”
“Subtle,” Kyra observed. She cracked open a Coke and took a short swig. She was running on caffeine now.
“It’ll take some diplomacy to smooth that one over,” Jonathan agreed.
It was less a speech than a tirade, and Kyra found herself staring at the screen but hearing nothing. “There was a Beijing native in my masters program at the University of Virginia, son of a professional chef and a state-certified culinary artist himself,” she said. “When we graduated, he cooked a four-course meal for some of us that ruined me for American-made Chinese food for years. He asked me once whether I thought Taiwan was a sovereign country or a Chinese province.”
Interesting, he thought. She was sharing a personal memory with someone she barely knew. “That’s a loaded question. What’d you say?”
“I asked him if Beijing collected taxes from Taipei,” Kyra said.
“Old debater’s trick,” Jonathan said, approving. “Answer a question with a question.”
“Yeah. I hate that. But he took it well,” she recalled. “He was friendly. He was also a Communist and an atheist. When he graduated, we gave him a tee shirt that said, ‘Thank Heaven for Capitalism.’ That made him laugh. After I joined the Agency, I started wondering if that dumb joke hadn’t gotten him in trouble when he got home — spending some time under the bright lights with some MSS officers trying to figure out just how much we’d corrupted him.”
“They have a talk with plenty of students who go home,” Jonathan observed. “Partly to collect intel, but mostly to intimidate them.”
“It works. We don’t get many Chinese walk-ins.” Kyra stared out the window into the dark. “I never found out what happened to him, even with all the resources this place has.”
Jonathan cocked his head. The young woman seemed hardly aware that he was in the room. He decided to offer her a way out. “You can go home. It doesn’t take two people to run this up to Cooke.”
Kyra looked up and said nothing, as though she hadn’t heard him. Then she hesitated, but only to avoid looking like she was rushing for the door. She had the impulse to ask if he was sure but decided against it. She was quite sure that the question would annoy him, if not diminish his opinion of her intelligence.
“See you tomorrow.” Kyra picked up her coat, fled the vault, and didn’t look back.
The New Headquarters Building lobby had eight security gates, four on either side of the security desk. Half had “out of service” signs taped over the keypads. Kyra searched for a working gate, found one on the far right, and held her badge to the reader. The machine did nothing for a moment, then made a rude noise and refused to open its metal arms. She pressed her badge to the scanner a second time to no effect. Irritated, Kyra looked to the guard, who finally lifted his head after the third alarm.
“Just go around.” The guard returned his attention to his monitor.
Kyra dropped her head. The biggest intel agency in the world can’t keep the badge readers working.
In the dark, the guard didn’t see her disgust as she obeyed. The automatic doors at the far end waited until the last second to open and the cold air smacked her face as she passed through the air curtain into the wind. The sidewalk lights cut a path in the darkness as she hurried south to the garage. Clouds hid the moon. Kyra couldn’t see more than twenty yards into the night in any direction.
With the parking deck nearly empty, her truck was easy to find. She crawled into the frigid cab and started the engine.
“… the existence of such a large spy network puts the lie to President Tian’s claim that China is a partner for peace and harbors no unfriendly intentions towards the Taiwanese people. Accordingly, I am suspending Taiwan’s participation in the National Unification Council…” Kyra had left her satellite radio tuned to the BBC World Service. The translator’s English came in calm, measured tones that stripped out the anger and emotion that Kyra could hear in Liang’s voice as he spoke underneath the translation. Kyra wished that she understood Chinese and could hear the original feed without the translator. Hearing dual voices in stereo gave her a headache.
“… the mainland and Taiwan are indivisible parts of China. We should seek peaceful and democratic means to achieve the common goal of unification. We are one nation with two governments, equal and sovereign…”
Kyra accelerated out of the parking deck and made her way around the compound until she reached the Route 123 entrance. She passed the guard shack ten miles faster than the posted limit. The guards, she guessed correctly, only cared about vehicles speeding inbound.
Route 123 was empty and Kyra plowed through the snow burying the town of McLean. She took the Dulles Toll Road exit, the lane markers appearing sporadically under the shifting white powder, hidden more often than not. The highway straightened a mile past the toll plaza — the snow plows and salt trucks had made at least one pass over the road — and she put the accelerator to the floor. It was foolish to take the truck up fifteen miles over the speed limit, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Kyra reached the top of the stairs and kicked three flights of wet snow off her boots. It was still falling and there was no covered parking down on the street. She would spend a half hour of her morning defrosting the truck and scraping the windshield with a credit card before she could even get onto the road. That assumed someone would plow the lot during the night.
The knob was freezing in her hand as she pushed open the door to her home and kicked her feet on the mat again before stepping into the small entryway. She tossed her keys onto the cherry hall storage bench, where they slid across the dark wood and fell onto the floor. Kyra left her boots by them and hung her coat.
The flashing voice mail light leaped out in the low light. She stared at it for several moments. She disliked talking on the phone even when her mood wasn’t dark, but the blinking light had triggered a thought that had, in turn, started a debate inside her head that dragged on for a surprisingly long minute.
Kyra leaned against the wall and tried to order her thoughts.
Analysis couldn’t be that hard.
First step, collection of the facts. She’d lived in this apartment for less than two weeks and Verizon had assigned the phone number even more recently. She’d given it only to her parents, the Agency, and several local pizza parlors and Asian restaurants within the delivery radius. End of collection.