The voice delay between Beijing and Langley was slight but perceptible. At CIA headquarters, Barron checked the world clock on his wall and realized what time it was on the other side of the globe. “You’re up late.”
“Going home just got dangerous,” Mitchell said. “I had a meet scheduled with Pioneer, but our hosts were on me the minute I walked out the door. No subtlety at all.”
“You’ve been burned?” Barron asked. Losing a station chief in Beijing at any time would be more than a minor inconvenience, but losing one at this particular moment would be a significant problem.
“I don’t think so,” Mitchell said. “From what I’m hearing, they’re roughing up everyone. Same thing with the State officers. They’re following everybody going out the front gate.”
Barron grunted. “I talked to Sir Lawrence at Vauxhall Cross last night. He says his boys are getting the same treatment. The Aussies too. ‘Very uncivilized’ was how he described it. How close did they ride you?”
“Close. I’ve got bruises.” Mitchell could feel another on his right arm where Alpha had pushed him into a wall. He would need aspirin and an ice pack for it after the call.
“Did you give any back?” Barron asked.
“Nope. I’ll find other ways to hurt ’em,” Mitchell said. He’d learned that lesson in Moscow when an SVR officer had almost pushed him into a moving bus. Mitchell had a short scar between two knuckles born from the Russian’s tooth. The man’s friends had given Mitchell three broken ribs and trashed his apartment before he returned from the hospital.
“Is this a response to Taiwan?” Barron asked.
“I don’t think so. People started getting roughed up before Liang staged his little raid party. Today was the first time I got touched up, but I haven’t really been out on the street much lately.”
“Did any of your people give them a reason to set this off?” Barron asked. Such physical harassment was rare except in Moscow, and confrontation had never been China’s style.
“If they did, no one’s told me. I’ll get everyone together in the morning and put the question to them, but I don’t think we started this,” Mitchell said.
“Well, somebody’s chapped their hide. That’s a lot of manpower to throw around,” Barron said. “And if they’re not just unhappy about Liang’s stupidity, then something else is going on. The Chinese aren’t the Russians. They don’t do this kind of thing just for jollies.”
“No doubt,” Mitchell agreed. “Our hosts out there have a bug up their pants and they want operational activity stopped until they’ve shaken it out. Or at least they want us to work harder. My bet is they’ve got a line on somebody’s asset but they don’t know who he’s working for. So they rough up everyone and then throw up a tight net around their target to see who’s desperate enough to come through it. If that’s right and I were them, I’d cover anyone from a NATO country, and the Koreans and Japanese for good measure. Maybe the Russians too, just on general principles.”
“You think it’s Pioneer?” Barron asked.
Mitchell frowned. “No way to know without making contact. Catch-twenty-two. The times when you need to meet an asset the most are the times when you’re the least free to do it. We’ll see if he responds to the next dead drop. If not, we’ll go for a sign of life.”
“Approved,” Barron said. “Just make sure that you’re taking smart risks, not dumb ones.”
“Always. Call you in the morning.” Mitchell replaced the handset on the cradle and settled into his leather chair to think tactics. They want to smother us, he thought. His people had done nothing to provoke the local security services. The streets were quiet. The population was restless because of the Taiwan events, but they weren’t taking their anger out on Westerners. Beijing was always a dangerous environment, more so in recent years, but not unworkable by any stretch. Still, the MSS had changed tactics and Mitchell would have to reevaluate. The security services had started getting physical with his people before the Taiwanese had launched their raids. Maybe the MSS knew that was coming? he thought. If so, why not extract their officers in Taipei before the arrests? If so, why rough up Westerners in Beijing? He shook his head to clear the nonsensical thoughts from his mind. It was a puzzle without an obvious answer and he knew he lacked the information to solve it.
But digging up information is what you do for a living, isn’t it? he thought.
A dead drop attempt with Pioneer was not optional but he might have to suspend other, less critical operations. The MSS wouldn’t hesitate to arrest a US case officer. They had jailed two for almost twenty years during the Cold War. A handsome young American man in custody, or, even better, a pretty young woman, would make a fine diplomatic bargaining chip, and the Chinese knew how to drag out negotiations.
The story was different for the assets, natives working for a foreign power. Chinese citizens arrested for espionage were to be shot, of course, and it was no urban myth that the family would get a bill for the bullet. The trials were always short and private, and there would be no negotiations.
CHAPTER 4
The evening was warmer than average for a Beijing winter, ten degrees Celsius, which had brought the tourists and lovers out in force. Crowds were always expected on such pleasant nights in the Shichahai neighborhood north of Beihai, where the bars and lakes clustered. Pioneer welcomed them. The crush of foreigners would stress the surveillance teams. If the MSS were following him, they would be looking for actions out of the ordinary, which became problematic as the mobs of alien visitors grew in size, with every person looking and acting far out of the Chinese view of ordinary. They engaged in innocent behaviors that drove paranoid security officers mad — taking photographs of government buildings, talking with PLA soldiers and bartering for pieces of their uniforms, wandering down little-used side streets and alleyways outside the usual tourist lanes. In this locality, the MSS would have to ignore those who appeared ordinary, and Pioneer had never harbored any illusions that his appearance was more than that. It was nature’s one blessing in support of his true profession. So he sat on his park bench, content to watch the water and bore anyone watching him. His operational act for the night was finished. There would be nothing for them to see now and it was always an easy thing for Pioneer to lose himself in his own thoughts.
Some nights he wished that they would come for him. It was a miserable thing, being a traitor to one’s country for ideological reasons. Such men were found in every country, he suspected, and they all had the same idea in common, that they were fighting their own private revolutions against those who were the real traitors to the countries they loved.
A political revolution is a living animal, he thought, conceived in outrage, fed with anger, and born in blood more often than not. In its early life, there comes a moment when its parents must decide what kind of animal their child will be. Some are allowed to run free and become wild predators that can only be killed by rising tyrants. Others are restrained to become loyal guardians who protect their children’s lives and liberties until those children can protect themselves. Washington, Lenin, Mao, Gandhi, Castro, and Khomeini each raised their own, and those revolutions, like all things in nature, looked and behaved like their parents.
Pioneer had watched as the Second Chinese Revolution was killed during delivery by its grandparents on June 4, 1989, in the streets around an open ground called Heaven’s Gate — Tiananmen Square.