Despite being American-owned, she knew that the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza was not a safe harbor. The staff was almost entirely Chinese and the security briefings detailing the MSS counterintelligence presence in Chinese hotels had been near-terrifying. They were on enemy soil and the locals had all the advantages. There was no guarantee that their rooms had been assigned at random. They were assigned adjoining rooms, which seemed overly convenient. Searching for surveillance equipment would be an obvious giveaway. She had no doubt at all that her bag would be searched the first time she stepped out.
Jonathan went straight for the television. The channel was irrelevant; he increased the volume until it was far louder than necessary. “Under the circumstances, I would have preferred housing at the embassy.”
“No room at the inn, I guess,” Kyra answered. “State Department will have a brigade of Foreign Service officers in country trying to talk Tian down.”
“I doubt the PLA is going to allow diplomats to stop them now,” Jonathan said. “Our friends do know we’re coming?” Cables from headquarters to field stations were not always read on schedule, regardless of how they were marked.
“They should,” Kyra hedged.
“Call the concierge and get another taxi to take us over in an hour.”
“See you then,” she told him, moving to the shared door that led to her room. “And clean up. You need the shower.”
“Don’t lie down,” he warned. “I don’t want to have to wake you up.”
“This is not a good time,” Mitchell said. Stryker was a case officer, or had been, which nominally put her on Mitchell’s side of the CIA divide. But she wasn’t one of his officers and she was keeping company with a DI analyst. Those two facts alone made her suspect.
“When would be a good time?” Kyra asked, impatient.
“After the war.”
“We can’t wait that long,” Jonathan informed him. He’d dealt with enough NCS officers to know that Mitchell might be serious.
“Beijing is not a safe operational environment at the moment.”
“Is it ever?” Kyra asked.
“No,” Mitchell conceded. “But the locals are on a bender. They’re harassing everyone who leaves the embassy short of the ambassador. My case officers are getting manhandled in the street. It takes a major operation just to pass a message to any of our local assets, much less get a meeting with them. And now I get this”—the COS waved a headquarters cable in the air—“ordering me to get you in the same room with Pioneer, who you’re not supposed to even know about. Kathy Cooke says you get to talk to him, fine, I know how to take orders. But I’d love to know how you found out about him.”
“That’s hardly relevant at the moment,” Jonathan said.
“What is relevant is that I don’t know if I can put you in the same room with him.”
“Surveillance is that tight?” Kyra asked.
Mitchell dropped the headquarters cable on his desk and slumped back into his chair. “He’s been burned,” he admitted.
Kyra stared at the chief of station. The security measures in place to protect Pioneer had been in the file and they were impressive. Losing an asset through bad luck and random chance was bad enough, but it happened. Someone’s career would die if the breach had come from operational error. “How?”
“We don’t know,” Mitchell admitted. “We pulled off a sign of life but that’s the only direct contact we’ve managed for two weeks. We’ve lost a dead drop. I don’t know if the MSS intercepted it or some third party just randomly picked it up. That could happen, but that’s an awful lot of bad luck given everything else that’s going on.”
Jonathan frowned. “This started at the same time as the surveillance crackdown?”
“They started around the same time, yes. Whether they’re connected, I don’t know, and at the moment I don’t particularly care. I’ll leave that for you analysts to figure out. What I do care about is getting him out of the country without burning my officers. I’ve got headquarters screaming for intel that I can’t provide, we’ve lost our best asset, and the MSS could wrap him up at any time. If they do, they’ll put it on the front page of the People’s Daily and our other assets will decide we can’t protect them and they’ll go dry. So, no offense, but I have bigger worries than arranging a meeting that could get Pioneer killed and you arrested. I’d be doing you a favor if I just turned down the request, orders or not.”
“But you won’t,” Kyra said.
“Don’t test me,” Mitchell said. There was a difference between being bold and being brash, and Stryker was leaning toward the latter. “Getting Pioneer out is my priority, and once we start an exfiltration, I’m sure not going to put it on hold for a few hours so you can have a chat while the MSS is tearing Beijing apart to find him. If we can get him out of the country, you can talk to him then. Until then, I don’t want to hear it. And you go over my head and I’ll kick you out of the country. You understand me?”
Jonathan opened his mouth to answer, but Kyra cut him off. “Understood.”
CHAPTER 11
“This”—Stuart threw OPLAN 5077 onto his desk—“calls for nuclear weapons.” He knew the plan had been revised a few years before and he wondered which general had thrown in that little provision.
Showalter closed his own copy. The operations plan laid out the logistics and mobilization schedule of all US military assets to be used in the defense of Taiwan. It was the product of more than thirty years of work by the Pentagon’s best minds. No single president could match that level of collective experience, though several had been arrogant enough to think they could. “Only as a strategic option. Mr. President, you need to have the flexibility—”
“Unacceptable.”
“Any OPLAN that doesn’t at least have weapons of mass destruction as an option for this would put you in a weak position from the start. Mr. President, if the Chinese are unable to counter our carriers, they could choose to use a nuclear weapon—”
“Tian is not going to nuke our carriers and I’m not going to even consider nuking the mainland. I wouldn’t order a nuclear strike even if the PLA was marching on Taipei, and I sure wouldn’t order a first strike. Seventy years on and we’re still catching grief over Hiroshima. So I am not going to nuke Beijing over that little Kinmen sandbar in the Strait.”
“If I may, sir,” the director of national intelligence cut in. Michael Rhead had been a deputy defense secretary when the plan was revised. “The OPLAN would be deficient if it didn’t offer a full range of options, however unlikely some of them might be. Besides, the OPLAN has been a priority target of the Chinese intelligence services for years. If they’ve secured a copy, they’ll think the option is still active—”
Stuart didn’t miss the implication. “Do you have any intel to back that up?” Stuart demanded. “That they have an asset inside my administration?”
Cooke said nothing. It was Rhead’s question to answer, but the odds that the Chinese had an asset inside the administration were so high that she considered the question to be almost nonsensical. “No, sir,” Rhead answered. “But I’d be stunned if they didn’t. If you look at the history, there hasn’t been a time since 1947 that the intelligence community hasn’t been penetrated by somebody. In any case, the director of the National Counterintelligence Executive would be in a better position to answer that question with hard proof.”