Kyra stared at the back of his head until the stairwell door closed and then let out a long breath. It was apparent where he was going. She wondered just how close Jonathan and Cooke really were. Real close, she hoped. The bureaucratic games were starting to get under her skin.
Barron’s composure had limits, and Cooke’s account of Kain’s sandbagging had pushed him close to them. Some things he expected to be handled below his pay grade. Hearing about them from one of the very few people he answered to always lit his very short fuse. But he expected that had been Burke’s intention. Sometimes it really did take a trip to the director’s office to make the case officers and analysts stop acting like children protective of their toys.
“They were asking about Pioneer’s compartment?” Barron asked. The question was almost redundant. There was no other sets of files that fit the bill Cooke had just described.
“They were,” Cooke confirmed. “George Kain stonewalled them. Sat in their space for two hours and treated them like they were complete idiots.”
“I’ll go talk to him about it. I understand his reasons, but his tactics were faulty, to say the least.”
“How many people have access to Pioneer’s reporting?” Cooke asked.
“If you count the two of us, still fewer than a dozen,” Barron replied.
“Has he fed you anything on the Assassin’s Mace lately?”
“No.” Barron frowned and took a deep breath. “He’s the guy who told us about it in the first place back after the ninety-six Taiwan Strait crisis. By ninety-seven it was clear the project wasn’t going anywhere, so we put him on other targets. Every once in a while he still sends us something on the project, but it’s just not a high priority. We’ve been more worried about the Russian equipment the PLA’s been buying.”
Cooke leaned back. “If there’s not much on it, then there shouldn’t be an issue letting the Red Cell have access to it.”
Barron knew an order when he heard one, but he didn’t have to like it. “I’d rather not.” He knew it was a weak protest.
“Clark, there are two men that I answer to,” Cooke said, talking slowly and clearly, as though to a child. “And at some point, I’m going to get a call from the president or, more likely, the director of national intelligence. That man will start asking me some very pointed questions about what’s going on here. And right now, I don’t have any good answers, just good theories. If the Red Cell can prove those theories, I’ll be a very happy woman, but that’s going to be very hard for them to do if your half of the house is refusing to lower the drawbridge and let them inside that big stone wall you case officers have erected between yourselves and the analysts.” Cooke stopped to let the tongue-lashing sink in. “If the Red Cell includes any of Pioneer’s intel in their report, I’ll restrict it to POTUS only,” she offered. “No one outside the Oval Office even hears about it, much less reads it.”
Barron’s face showed that he didn’t like it, and yes, ma’am, he certainly was going to worry about it, but an order was an order. “How many people are we talking here?”
“Two people. Burke, of course. The other one is your girl, Stryker,” Cooke said.
“I can live with that. Just make sure they don’t give me a reason to regret it, or next time I’ll let Kain have his way with them,” Barron warned.
“Fair enough,” Cooke said.
“I need glasses,” Kyra said. She dropped a stack of reports on Jonathan’s desk, closed her eyes, and rested her head on her arms. The morning painkiller had finally worn off.
“You need to learn that caffeine is not a substitute for sleep.” Jonathan knew a hangover when he saw one, had never suffered one but had seen plenty in graduate school. She was lithe, he’d noted, not too much body mass to absorb alcohol. The current weather precluded many opportunities for parties, so the woman was either drinking alone or haunting one of Leesburg’s several excellent pubs and bars along King Street. A few shots of something harder than beer would cross her line between drinking to relax and drinking to excess. An officer’s personal drinking habits could become a matter for the Counterintelligence Center, the unit that hunted moles inside the Agency. Stryker was too new for that, he supposed, but she’d almost gotten killed, might have been self-medicating the stress with something harder than beer, and officers had been fired for alcoholism before. “Is that it?” he asked.
“Finally,” Kyra said. She had been logging Pioneer’s reports since Kain’s flunky arrived with the paperwork to get the Red Cell analysts read into the Assassin’s Mace compartment. The forms they signed were the United States Government’s version of a blood oath and promised vile retribution if they leaked the information to anyone, even other DI analysts.
Jonathan wheeled his chair over to Kyra’s desk and stared at the Excel spreadsheet on her screen. “What’s the final count?”
“Two hundred twenty-seven Assassin’s Mace reports total,” Kyra said. “One hundred thirty-six on aerospace projects. Fifty-seven on antiship missile projects. Twenty on naval projects, nine on lasers, and the rest on weapons that we’ve labeled as miscellaneous.”
“That breakdown matches our thinking,” Jonathan said. “Heavy numbers on aerospace and missiles.”
Kyra sat back and stared at the screen. It was an impressive list. “What about that stealth fighter the PLA was building back in the aughts? The J-20?”
“That one’s trying to be an air superiority plane, not a bomber,” Jonathan said. “The Chinese have always had serious issues building decent fighter engines. Still, it’s possible that they cross-bred the technology into another project. Any commonalities in the aerospace reports?”
“Most of them named the China Aviation Industry Corporation as the primary conduit for the projects. Only one other company was mentioned, Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute. According to the cable, the PLA was funding a big effort with Xian under CAIC direction. One of the CAIC senior managers asked for a progress report. Pioneer intercepted the Xian reply and copied a DVD that was part of the package.”
“What was the date on that cable?” Jonathan asked.
“June 1999,” Kyra said after a brief hunt for the paper.
“What was on the disk?”
“Whoever looked at the file said it was a computer-aided design program,” Kyra said.
Jonathan leaned back in his chair. “A CAD program wouldn’t tell us much. It’s the data files on whatever Xian was building that you’d want.”
“There’s no record that we got those. But look at this.” Kyra leaned over and made the spreadsheet obey. “If we reorder the list of Pioneer’s reporting by date instead of technology, almost all of the aerospace reports are dated after ninety-nine. Maybe CAIC made a technology breakthrough, developed some new tech.”
“Or stole some,” Jonathan said. “They’re big on that.” He pushed back from the desk with his foot and let his chair roll across the floor back until it stopped near the marker board where he had drafted his list. He stood and walked to the window and stared out at the A-12 monument overlooking the west parking lot. “You don’t actually need a fighter to attack a carrier. A bomber could do the job just fine if it could penetrate the air defense umbrella. Very difficult, but not impossible.”
Kyra thought for a moment. “Speed?”
“Speed. Altitude. Stealth. Any of those three would solve the problem. When the Cold War broke out and we needed to keep watch on the Russians, we built the U-2. And by ‘we,’ I do mean CIA. The U-2 was ours — highest-altitude plane ever built at the time. When the Russians figured out how to shoot those down, we went for speed and built the A-12. The Russians never did figure out how to shoot that down, but it was only a matter of time. So the Air Force worked out stealth and built the F-117 Nighthawk. Back in the Gulf War, Saddam had more antiair defenses surrounding Baghdad than the Russians had surrounding Moscow, literally. Three thousand double-A guns and sixtyish SAM batteries. The Iraqis never even managed to scratch the paint on a Nighthawk, much less shoot one down.”