The medics arrived, splinted the cyclist’s leg, and wheeled him out of the bar on a gurney while helping the woman to the ambulance. Pioneer watched them go and then went on his way to the coffeehouse. He was moving entirely on automatic pilot, keeping up the good show even while his brain screamed that it was futile.
They know.
How did they know? When and where exactly had he made the mistake that had tipped them off? He couldn’t come up with an answer but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Finally, he forced his mind away from the obsession as best he could. It was a riddle without a solution. Other spies had been exposed by the most trivial of errors, and his error surely had been trivial because he could not, for the life of him, identify what it had been. He likely would never learn how they had been tipped off to him unless they wanted to tell him at his trial, and that was unlikely. It would be a closed-door hearing with him absent in a cell.
His time as a spy was over, but he still had one operational act left to perform. After that, the sole remaining question of how long he might live would be completely out of his control. Would the CIA fight for him? Even if the Americans had the will to exfiltrate him, time was still not his friend and never had been. Before, it had at least left him alone. Now it would torture him. Assuming that they would decide to save him, the CIA would need time to position enough assets to act, while the MSS could arrest him almost at its leisure. Why hadn’t they done so? Maybe they had only recently become aware that he was a traitor? They didn’t know the extent of his crimes and were still exploring the magnitude of his treason? He had no answers to questions that he wouldn’t be able to stop asking. They would be like a merciless children’s song playing over and over in his head until he was ready to scream.
Answers wouldn’t change the fact that Pioneer was now a dead man walking free with one hope only. Every case officer he’d ever worked with had promised to get him out of China if he were compromised. It was time for one of them to keep the promise.
CHAPTER 8
Mitchell was driving, which was no small feat for an American in Beijing. The written driving test had a hundred questions and the English version was nearly incomprehensible. Most of Dunne’s people who had licenses had taken the test repeatedly, often sharing and memorizing the right and wrong answers among themselves to improve their scores. Mitchell took the test in Mandarin, a notable feat itself, and passed with a perfect score, which was unheard-of for an American. Yet he still preferred to use the railways as a matter of course. Traffic in Beijing flowed through the streets like floodwaters through a Venetian canal, and the rules of maneuver were mostly unwritten. Motorists acted on instinct and moved like schools of fish, where a single car’s turn could lead a wave behind it. It had taken Mitchell months to develop a feel for the flow and pace of traffic here, but it was worth the effort. It made life miserable for the Chinese security officers who had to conduct surveillance.
He made the turn onto the Wangfujing Dajie road and pressed the accelerator. His eyes moved back and forth between the road and the rearview mirror every few seconds. The MSS was back there. Vehicular countersurveillance was a difficult skill to master, largely because it meant the driver had to spend more time looking to the rear than ahead at the road. But the Russians, giving Mitchell no end of practice, had quickly fixed the habit in him.
At least five cars had made the last three turns with him. He wasn’t sure which were driven by security officers, but he was certain at least two and possibly three of them were following him. He had no issues with that. His only stop tonight would be for gas.
Pioneer stood in front of the Capital Theater, watching the traffic as though waiting to flag down a taxi. It was his preferred site for such operations. Pioneer enjoyed the performing arts and could speak intelligently about a broad range of plays, particularly Western musicals. The music of Les Misérables haunted him. Jean Valjean’s story of a man living a life of secrets felt like his own, and Pioneer had learned some of his limited English by following the libretto’s text as he listened to the album in his apartment.
It was cold enough that Pioneer’s breath was visible in the air; yesterday’s warmth was gone. He wore a black overcoat and red scarf — not the blue one that he usually wore — positioned not to obscure his face. This operational act didn’t require him to do anything except be recognizable from a short distance. Pioneer carried no classified material tonight. There was nothing on his person that could incriminate him if he were searched, and yet he was more tense tonight than he had been any other night he could remember. Perhaps the evening he had first walked in and volunteered to work for the CIA could compare, but his stress that night almost twenty-five years before had merely been compounded by nervousness. Ignorance worked in his favor then. Now his anxiety was multiplied by experience. He wondered if the MSS had tracked how often he changed the colors of his scarves, the answer to which was never until tonight. He hoped that they wouldn’t realize that the change had to do with something more than mere fashion.
Mitchell approached the theater. He moved the car one lane to the left out of the rightmost lane. It was a purely diversionary maneuver that forced the MSS officers in the cars behind to watch his car instead of the sidewalk to his right as he passed the Capital Theater. The patrons, both Chinese and foreigners, were still mingling in front in a sizable crowd. Mitchell wished that he could park the car and buy a ticket to whatever was playing. The Monkey King, which had been as good as the reviewers claimed, had left the station chief thinking about another night out at the theater with his wife.
The time window for the sign of life was five minutes. There would be no contact between them, which would make it impossible for some counterintelligence analyst to prove that the close proximity wasn’t a coincidence. That was the theory. Proximity might be enough to set the MSS off, depending on their level of paranoia, if they were watching Pioneer… and the Chinese were a paranoid bunch.
Mitchell didn’t slow the car or turn his head to look for the asset. It was all done with the eyes. He looked right. Pioneer was there as scheduled.
Sign of life. He’s still free, Mitchell thought. But Pioneer was wearing the red scarf, not the blue, and the CIA officer was sure he felt his chest seize up.
They’re watching him.
He made the left turn onto the Jianguomennei Dajie, the artery road that passed between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, both landmarks west of his position. He straightened out the car and drove east toward the embassy district. He said nothing until he arrived at his office, closed and locked the door, and dialed the number for Barron’s office. Only here could Mitchell open up. The room was swept for microphones and other such gear on a schedule. “Hey, boss.”
“How’d it go?” Barron asked.
“He’s alive and running loose, but they’re on him,” Mitchell said.