Jonathan just looked sideways at her. There was no arguing with emotion and particularly not this patriotic kind. But his own thoughts were jumbled up, he couldn’t straighten them out, and it disturbed him. “Just don’t let the honorable thing earn you a star on the wall,” he finally said.
The green phone rang and Cooke lifted the receiver. “Cooke.”
“Barron. I just got the call. Stryker accepted escort duty for Pioneer.”
Cooke nodded despite being alone in the office. She looked up at the clock. “When?”
“They hit the street tomorrow at dusk,” Barron said. “She’ll have a ninety-minute window to get him to the meeting site. Their flight out leaves at twenty-one hundred local time, so they’ll have a few hours to hunker down.”
“The MSS will be all over the airport by then,” Cooke said.
“No help for it,” Barron said. “But, yeah, trust me, I’d love to have the Navy send in a sub and use a SEAL team to extract him by sea.”
“The Navy wouldn’t cut one loose for us. It’s a bad time to have a war,” Cooke said.
“The Chinese forgot to call us first,” Barron admitted. “Awfully inconsiderate.”
“I thought so,” Cooke agreed, smiling for the first time in days.
“I’ll call as soon as we know something.”
“I’ll be here,” Cooke said. She hung the green phone back on its cradle and stared out into the early dawn rising across the George Washington National Forest.
CHAPTER 13
Beijing’s air under the streetlamps looked like the fall morning fog that rolled off the James River bend at Scottsville where Kyra grew up. Her bedroom had given her an open view of the river valley, which was usually covered by mist formed by the supersaturated air hiding the trees along the shorelines. She had always cursed the pervasive humidity in Virginia, which never died except during winter, but this urban fog was a deep, dull gray. It disgusted her to see the monochrome color so clearly in the headlights of hundreds of cars, and the smell made her want to retch her dinner onto the sidewalk. She could feel the particulates seeping into her lungs, and the urge to hold her breath was overwhelming. She assumed that her body could learn to ignore the odor, but she imagined that, given time, the air would paint her lungs with a black coat of toxin and guarantee cancer or worse.
Kyra hoped that she would get a few minutes in the safe house to wash the city air off her skin, but her discomfort was a minor issue. Her immediate concern was the fog’s effect on surveillance. For her, it would make detecting surveillance a more complex chore than usual. Her forward visibility was less than fifty feet; people faded into hazy shapes beyond that range, but that worked both ways. MSS teams would have to ride her closer than they might otherwise prefer. They would likely give her some distance, but in the gaseous soup the instinct would be to close the distance to keep her in sight. It seemed counterintuitive, but the plan said that her best countermove was to help them do exactly that. It made her nervous but she trusted the plan. The variables were eliminated or controlled in ruthless fashion as far as Mitchell could manage, but the odds still were not in her favor. Don’t think about the odds, he’d said. Follow the plan, choose your moments, remember your training.
Of course, Mitchell didn’t know that Kyra had nearly beaten an MSS officer to death in an alleyway the night before. That man was surely in a hospital. If he had identified her and the MSS picked her out tonight as the woman responsible, they would probably be looking for payback. Then again, they were keeping their distance tonight. Maybe finding one of their officers crippled had made them think twice about their tactic of playing rough. The change introduced a new level of uncertainty.
Maybe I shouldn’t have done this, she thought. Jonathan was right. She really hadn’t been thinking straight. No help for it now. The MSS had fallen back. That worked in her favor for the moment, and all she could do now was follow the plan.
Her first task was to let the MSS keep her in sight. They were working hard at that, and it was now an advantage that Kyra was taller than the average Chinese woman and had far lighter hair. Her second task was to make them believe she was unskilled and a desperate choice on Mitchell’s part. Too tall, too blond, badly dressed for a covert operation — an American woman with a bright red backpack had no chance of mixing with the pedestrian crowd here no matter what she tried.
That she was even trying was a false assumption.
She fumbled to put on a baseball cap, then pulled off her coat and reversed it far too slowly after turning the corner, to make a few other clumsy changes to her appearance. All were awkward. Amateurs could have done as well. Kyra was no amateur.
Her third task was to let them see the red backpack. The bag could not have been more visible had it been the blaze orange color she’d worn those times when her father had dragged her into the woods hunting Virginia white-tailed deer. Here it would create a constant point of reference for anyone following her at a longer distance, even through the fog. No matter what else she did to change her gross profile, the surveillance team could always look for the red backpack. In the polluted air, with visibility low and the crowds heavy, it would draw their focus.
Then she would perform an act of magic.
Every magic trick has three parts. Kyra had already delivered the “pledge” to her hostile audience. She had offered them an ordinary American woman walking for twelve blocks. Kyra memorized the route before stepping out — so many blocks in one direction, then turn, so many blocks in the next direction. A few landmarks had kept her on the track. With those in sight, Kyra maintained the appearance of a disinterested expatriate wandering the Beijing dajies and dongdajies. She did nothing unusual, and the resulting boredom would set up the gallery to focus on the “turn,” when she would give them something interesting to watch. The MSS would have to wait a few minutes for the “prestige,” the act of misdirection that would complete the trick. They wouldn’t appreciate the artistry when they finally realized that a trick had taken place. This act would be subtle. It would not be a performance meant to impress.
Pioneer lived in a studio flat on the tenth floor of an aging tower. The building was a cylinder, twice as tall as the Watergate and topped by a roof that extended past the exterior walls. Lit apartment patios lined up in neat columns and drew muted vertical concrete stripes in the haze.
The building was less than a block ahead now and Kyra could sense the surveillance team behind her. She wondered if these particular foot soldiers knew about Pioneer. Given the extent of Pioneer’s treason against the state, Mitchell considered it likely that the MSS would have compartmentalized his case. The Ministry of State Security was not small, and anyone low enough in the organization to be stuck following random Americans on the street likely wouldn’t know about him, and therefore where he lived. It was a gamble, but an unavoidable one. Depending on the efficiency of their internal communications, she would likely have a few minutes before the Sixth Bureau pieced anything together. If they were like CIA’s bureaucracy, she could have days. Another gamble — the enemy’s response time was unpredictable.
Kyra entered the building.
The cramped lobby was not well lit and the dark paint and carpet soaked up most of the available light. The elevator was ahead to the left, out of the line of sight of anyone at the front door. Unless the surveillance team wanted to enter the building to maintain pursuit, they would have to fan out to cover all the exits. There were two others, one a fire exit to the east, the other a cargo entrance in the building rear. Spreading the team out would actually help her. Her magic act would work best if played out for a small audience, the smaller the better. A single witness could be more easily confused than several who might each notice different details and piece together the truth more quickly. If only one man saw the trick, he would call out to his team, out of sight at the other exits, and they would have to take his word for what he saw.