No dig at the Dark Side of the house? She’d made herself a target and he’d passed up a chance to take a rhetorical shot at point-blank range. Maybe the man had a soft side after all. Or maybe he’d been testing her and had seen what he’d wanted. She wasn’t going to ask. “Maybe they did,” Kyra said, suspicious. “Maybe the project never went anywhere. Sometimes the assets report data that’s not worth writing up.”
Jonathan considered the idea, turning it over in his mind. “You don’t change military doctrine to accommodate ‘new’ weapons if those weapons are just more of what you already have.” He leaned forward and stared at the paper. “Look at the timeline. Jiang Zemin orders the project in ninety-seven, NSA grabs a flurry of reports about one project that peters out almost immediately, and then nothing until ninety-nine, when the PLA starts writing again about changing war plans. The idea didn’t just go away.” He put the hard copy down on the desk and pushed it back toward the young woman. “And it’s a given that the various shashoujian projects are run at multiple facilities and involve different groups of personnel.”
“Meaning what?” Kyra asked.
“You were a case officer. Think about it.”
A puzzle. Kyra was good at puzzles. She leaned back in her chair and tilted her head to think. Multiple facilities, different groups, one asset. She smiled. “There’s a compartment of Assassin’s Mace reports that we don’t have.”
“I agree.” For the first time, she noted, Burke smiled back. “Your reasoning?”
She rolled the facts around inside her mind, reordering them. It was funny, she thought, how the mind could hold random thoughts simultaneously but struggled to catalog them so a person could verbalize them, which was a linear process. “There’s an asset in a position to report on a change in war planning. That means the asset likely had access to the underlying technology driving the change. But if that technology was part of a black program, then we would have to separate that intelligence from the rest of the report because a leak could identify the asset. So the NCS would publish the report”—Kyra waved the paper in the air—“minus the good bits about the technology. But this asset is reporting on a change inspired by an Assassin’s Mace technology, which is just one part of a bigger program, so the asset likely has access to other Mace information. The more Mace projects he can report on, the faster the Chinese could triangulate on him if the information is leaked. So the NCS would pull out the stops to keep that from happening, which means that somewhere around here is a nice, fat compartment of Mace reports.”
Jonathan nodded. “Just because a reporting stream is new doesn’t mean the activity being reported is new,” he said. “And just because a reporting stream dies doesn’t mean the activity died. Sometimes it just vanishes into a classified compartment.”
Kyra narrowed her eyes and studied the man. He’d agreed with her several times over the last few hours and it seemed… wrong. She’d only known him for a few days but she could read a man. Any case officer worth her salt could. And Burke was a thinker—
Then she saw it. “You’re just saying that to butter me up because you want me to go get that compartment,” Kyra said. It wasn’t a question.
“You’re perceptive,” Jonathan said, smiling. “Much more enjoyable than having to explain everything.”
Another dig. She enjoyed this one.
It took Kyra an hour to find the phone numbers. The National Clandestine Service refused to publish a phone directory, citing the possible security risk of a foreign power stealing it. After pleas to Deity, enough curses to negate her prayers, and repeated calls to the Agency’s telephone switchboard, Kyra finally reached an officer who didn’t plead ignorance on China. The words assassin’s, mace, and compartment in the same sentence worked like a wizard’s incantation. The officer begged off and hung up, and the return call came a half hour later from a senior NCS manager several pay grades higher who agreed to talk in person readily enough to leave Kyra suspicious.
George Kain’s initial manner bordered on sycophantic. Kyra had been trained to evaluate character on short notice, Kain’s voice on the phone had disturbed her, and she had been appalled to find her evaluation more than accurate. Kain took precisely one question from Jonathan regarding information on any Assassin’s Mace project and switched from fawning to filibuster. He prattled without pause, talking over all attempts to interrupt, offering nothing useful, and staring out the window at the New Headquarters Building. Kyra was sure he hadn’t made eye contact with her once in the last hour.
She looked around the Red Cell vault for a wall clock and didn’t find one. How long? she mouthed silently to Jonathan. He didn’t move his head and said nothing, instead curling his hand on his leg into a fist, then sticking out two fingers. Kain didn’t see it. The man was in his own world.
Two? She mirrored his sign with her own fingers. Hours?
Jonathan nodded, barely.
Way past time to end this. For the first time, Kyra was ashamed to have been a case officer.
She made her own covert gesture at the mini fridge. Jonathan saw the motion, smiled slightly, then nodded again.
Kyra walked to the mini fridge, retrieved a bottled water, then walked back to her seat. She offered the plastic bottle to Kain. “You must be thirsty.”
For the first time in hours, Kain paused. “Thanks.” He uncapped the bottle, took a swig, and then saw the tactical error too late.
“You’ve tried very hard not to answer the question,” Jonathan said as soon as Kain’s mouth filled with Dasani water. “Stop wasting our time. We’re not idiots.”
Kain swallowed. “If we have anything worth reporting, you’ll have to wait until we publish it in finished intel channels.”
“The reports we’re looking for could be more than ten years old. They’d already be in finished intel channels if you were ever going to release them,” Kyra observed.
“Not my problem,” Kain said. “If there is any reporting being held back in a compartment, I’m not going to second-guess the decision not to release it.”
“This tasking came from Director Cooke—,” Jonathan said.
“I don’t care if it came from the president,” Kain interrupted. He drew another swig from the bottle. “If there’s something we think the president needs to know, we’ll tell him. We don’t need the DI to do it for us, not that your little fantasies even qualify as analysis. And we certainly don’t need a pair of failed wannabe operators turned analysts to do it for us.” Kain smirked at Jonathan, then frowned at Kyra, stood, finished the bottle, and took his time dropping it in the nearest garbage can. “Thanks for the water,” he said. He then strode out of the vault.
“You should have let me choke him,” Kyra said.
“You thought I would have stopped you?”
“He should run for the Senate,” Kyra said. “He wouldn’t be the first case officer to become a politician.”
“The two professions do share a disturbing number of skills,” Jonathan agreed. “Good move with the water.”
“I should’ve done it an hour earlier,” Kyra said. “Now what?”
“I suspected that was coming,” he admitted. “Some cooperation would have been nice, but I didn’t expect it. Still, we had to make a good faith effort to request access before we ask Cooke to start twisting arms.”
“I hope there really is a compartment,” Kyra said. “I’d hate to pick a fight just to find out they don’t have anything worth fighting over.”
“They do. Despite what you might think, an NCS manager doesn’t take two hours out of his day to belittle analysts just for fun,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be back.” He marched out of the vault and disappeared into the stairwell across the hall.