Cooke stared at Kyra Stryker’s file on the flat panel monitor. She had achieved the “satisfactory” rating in every Farm exercise with no exceptions. The instructors’ comments were devoid of negative criticism, and even the known curmudgeons on the Farm staff had found occasion to pay her random compliments. Stryker’s memory was near-photographic and her surveillance detection ability was unusually sharp. The report on her escape-and-evasion exercises was fascinating despite the dry prose. Few students managed to stay free in the woods of the Virginia Tidewater for the several days they were hunted by their instructors, but Stryker had managed it. The spotters spent days searching the brush in lines while the dogs sniffed the swamp marshes. The woman had disappeared into the woods and that was the last anyone saw of her until the morning the exercise ended and she’d walked back out. She endured the kidnapping, the screams and taunts, and the humid sweatbox room during the simulated interrogation course well enough. Her qualification scores with the Glock 17 and the HK417 were excellent, and she’d done as well with the 40 mm grenade launcher as any woman her size could have.
They had tried every way to break her under stress and failed. One instructor’s typed comment summarized Stryker more neatly than any other phrase Cooke could imagine:
“She’s solid.”
Stryker’s career should have been textbook — several field tours, moving from less important and dangerous posts to hard-target countries, an occasional headquarters rotation, eventually a series of station chief posts, one or more in Europe or Asia, maybe working Beijing as a real assignment before being brought home for good. With luck and her tickets punched, she would have been tapped to join the NCS leadership team or maybe take a senior DNI post. Reaching the Senior Intelligence Service should have been an inevitability.
Cooke considered it an injustice, if so polite a term could be applied, that Stryker’s career had imploded six months after her graduation from the Farm.
“Mitchell’s exfil plan?” Barron was standing in the doorway to Cooke’s office.
“Stryker’s service record,” Cooke corrected him.
“You thinking about giving her to Mitchell?”
“I’m considering it,” Cooke said.
“That would be one fewer officer we’d have to get into the country,” Barron admitted. “And Rhead would have a stroke. Win-win.”
“Fine by me,” Cooke agreed. “Stuart left the call to us, but he promised there wouldn’t be any ops to save our people if anyone gets pinched.”
“We don’t have any Chinese agents in custody to bargain with anyway. I suppose we could always exhume Larry Wu-tai Chin. Or rearrest Wen Ho Lee,” Barron said, a smile breaking across his weathered face.
“No leverage there,” Cooke said, half-serious. “The Bureau couldn’t convict him the first time.”
“True,” Barron said. He pulled the guest chair away from the desk and let his body fall into it. The man appeared tired and Cooke couldn’t fault him for it.
She turned the monitor off, drained the last bit of cooling black sludge from her mug, then stared at it. “What makes a person turn on their country?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“If we’re going to expose Stryker and Mitchell to that kind of risk, I’d like to think we were doing it for someone who was worth it,” Cooke said.
“It’s bad tradecraft to spend too much time asking traitors why they’re doing what they do,” Barron said. “You ask them that and the ones that are angels might reconsider. The ones who are devils will just lie, which is usually preferable to hearing the truth. Quite frankly, I don’t want to know the private secrets of dirty people, strange as that sounds. Better to take them as they come. Judge them by their reliability and credibility, not their integrity.”
“That doesn’t make it easier to risk good people for bad.”
“Our people are breaking Chinese law every time they set foot on the street,” Barron pointed out. “It’s just a matter of degree what they’ll have to do to get Pioneer out. But I do know how you feel.”
“Do you?” Cooke asked. It was a genuine question, not a try at sarcasm.
“Yeah.” Barron sucked on his teeth. “Three of the stars on the Memorial Wall were mine. The first one died in Baghdad. Charlie Lyman. He was on his way to meet with an informer when a roadside bomb took out his Humvee. We had to pick him and his Iraqi translator up with shovels. The second was Tim Pratt. An Afghani drug courier shot him in the head while he was doing counternarcotics work outside Ghazni. It took us two days to find his body. The birds led us to him.” He stopped speaking.
“And number three?”
Barron sighed and lowered his head a bit. “Emmanuela Giordano. We called her Emma. She bought it in a car wreck in Moscow. Stupid buggers had her under close surveillance, and the moron driving the lead car actually managed to hit her in the rear quarter. She wasn’t even trying to lose them. The idiot just panicked in bad traffic and spun her out on the freeway. The car rolled three times and a truck didn’t stop quick enough. Hit her broadside on the driver’s side door.”
“Anyone else with her?”
“Me. Four broken ribs and a concussion. I have just enough hair to hide the scar.”
Cooke smiled. “Glad you made it.”
“Me too,” Barron said. “Emma was dead on the scene. I spent six months in recovery and got sent to Beijing for my next tour. The next year, Pioneer made contact and I set him up as an asset. So I can tell you that he’s as close to one of the angels as we find in this business.”
“Good reasons for turning traitor?” Cooke asked.
“One reason, and it’s a good one,” Barron said.
“I thought you didn’t ask the reasons.”
“I didn’t ask. He volunteered it,” Barron said. “If I never did anything else here, getting him set up made everything else worth it. I’d sure like to see him again.”
Cooke finally set the mug onto the desk. “Do you think Stryker can handle the mission?”
Barron sat back and stared down for a moment. “Hard to say. She passed the Farm. She’s not a seasoned officer and Beijing is a tough place to do the work. But she survived Venezuela. Some of that was dumb luck. A lot wasn’t. She trusted her instincts.”
“Well, that’s the real issue, isn’t it?” Cooke asked.
“It counts for a lot,” Barron admitted. “So what’r’ya gonna do?”
“Trust my instincts, I suppose.”
“Your call.” Barron stood up to leave for his office. “Either way, we’ll get it done. No excuses.”
CHAPTER 12
Kyra had hoped that a walk on the streets would offer the distraction she had needed so much for weeks, but the reality was disappointing. If not for the signs in Mandarin, the neighborhood surrounding the US embassy could have passed for a great number of cities that she had seen. The architecture was all avant-garde, even daring, and certainly impressive to her untrained eye. The city had become a laboratory for architects, and the modern constructions were devouring the sections that still matched Kyra’s notion of what a Chinese city should be. But her first impression of the city she saw from the taxicab had been right. The Chinese were making their home a modern place at a cost that the case officer found depressing.
Mitchell had warned her and Burke about leaving safe ground, ordered them against it really, but Jonathan had buried himself in papers and research and Kyra had had enough of that. Her mind was screaming to do something besides sit at another desk and stare at another monitor. She could have that life anywhere, and Kyra had joined the Agency hoping for something better. Now she was standing in one of the great countries — illegally, she admitted — that all case officers hoped to see in their lifetime. It was the new field where case officers could test their skills against an enemy that was respected, skilled, and persistent. It was the kind of assignment that Kyra had hoped to earn, would probably never have now, and so she was determined that she hadn’t traveled so far to see nothing but the inside of the embassy compound. Throwing her out of the country was the worst penalty Mitchell could lay on her and she’d been through that once. So Kyra checked her rear pocket for her passport and Chinese yuan and slipped out through the south gate past the Marine guard onto An Jia Lou Road. The embassies of South Korea and India sat across the street and the embassies of Israel and Malaysia just beyond with their own guards standing watch over the darkened street. Kyra worked her way south until she passed the Israeli embassy and diplomatic housing complex to the south and the loose pedestrian crowd began to change from Westerners and South Asians to Chinese natives.