Kyra called for the elevator. Then she closed her eyes and listened. Turning back to look around the corner and watch the door would have been obvious, but sound carried through the lobby just fine. The elevator took more than a minute to reach the lobby floor, and the building’s main entrance door didn’t open during that time. Either she was alone, the best possibility of all, or the surveillance team was splitting apart to surround the building. They might have been calling for additional assets, but even so it would likely take them longer to arrive than she planned to give them.
Kyra stepped into the elevator car and wondered where the hidden cameras were.
The view of the Forbidden City was one of the few amenities worth the rent Pioneer had paid for more than twenty years. Looking south he could see the Qianqinggong, the Palace of Heavenly Purity, rising above the northern wall. Beyond it farther to the south was Tiananmen Square. He couldn’t see the square from his bedroom but he knew it was there.
The MSS knew what he was. There was no question about that. They had not dragged him away to be shot only because they wanted to expose the larger network of which he was a part. He had signaled the CIA and only after did it occur to him that it might have been exactly the wrong play. CIA now knew he was exposed, and there would be no more covert meetings. They might not come for him. Pioneer would live out his last days working for the party until the MSS decided that there was nothing else to be gained from watching him, and then they would come for him some night, take him away, and shoot him in a grubby basement. He didn’t know how many more days he had, but the length of his life would be set by some MSS officer’s patience.
There had been a disturbance in the apartment above his the night before, heavy knocking on the floorboards. Perhaps the MSS had taken over the apartment. They could have installed fiber-optic cameras in the ceiling when he had gone for dinner. His first impulse was to search for them, but he had concluded that it was futile. If the MSS wanted to watch him, they would watch him and he couldn’t stop it. They could enter his home anytime he left within moments of his departure. Any person he passed in the hallway could be the MSS officer who would soon put the pistol to his head. Any apartment in the building could be an MSS watch post. The same held true for any apartment in any building he could see from his own home. He’d felt alone for years, but now his home was filled with a sense of murderous hostility.
Despite that, he felt a strange calm. He wondered if the unknown God was with him, whispering peace to his soul. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Could God love a traitor? Perhaps, he supposed. A loving God surely could not love the party, so perhaps God could love one who fought them. Perhaps there was some reward waiting for him after death instead of the oblivion that the party promised. Either was a more tempting path than what he was living now. Suicide had occurred to him, but Pioneer felt that would be a surrender to the enemy. He had fought the party for more than half his life and he could not give that up so easily. No, if he was going to die today, they would have to kill him. He would not do their job for them. If he couldn’t hurt them any other way, they would at least pay for the cheap bullet they would use on the back of his head.
Someone knocked on his door. Pioneer turned and didn’t rise from the table. The knock came again after a half minute.
They had come. The MSS officer in charge, whoever he was, wasn’t a patient man after all.
Pioneer pushed his half-eaten plate of lamb roast across the table, wiped his mouth, and stood. He walked to the entryway, gripped the knob until his knuckles cracked, and opened the door to look his short future in the face so he could spit on it.
“Jian-Min!”
The blond woman leapt at him. Only the smile on her face kept him from backing away in a panic, and he found his arms full of an American girl he did not know. She jabbered at him in Chinese with an accent poor enough that he questioned whether she understood her own words or was just repeating memorized phrases like a good foreign actress.
Pioneer had never seen her before, so there was no question the MSS wouldn’t be able to figure out their relationship. Almost certainly that would put them on alert. If she was CIA, here to exfiltrate him from China, they wouldn’t have much time.
“I missed you so much. It’s been so long!” she said in her poor Mandarin. In fact, her intonation sounded robotic, like she didn’t understand what she was saying.
“Yes, it has.” It was best to keep his answers short and simple. If this woman didn’t speak Chinese, she wouldn’t be able to form answers to complex statements. Her replies would be nonsensical if he even asked her a simple question, and that would almost certainly bring the MSS running.
“I’m so happy you are free tonight. I promised you dinner at the Yueming Lou if you would show me the Forbidden City, remember?”
Pioneer stepped back. Yueming Lou. He had almost forgotten, but in the instant she said it, the memory came back with force.
Yueming Lou, he thought.
The Yueming Lou was a three-story restaurant in the Xicheng district converted from a church by the owners and popular with the Western tourists. The food was good, not excellent, traditional Hunan, and the prices were reasonable. He enjoyed it more for the third-story terrace views of the northern Beijing lakes and the hutong, the ancient narrow alleyways that had once spiderwebbed across Beijing before the party rebuilt the city after the Revolution. Pioneer had dined there many times, at least yearly, under orders that his case officer gave him starting in the third year of his treason. The request surprised him initially. Once he had earned the trust of his case officers, in the fifth year of his labor, they made their reasoning clear. Not every asset earned the promise of exfiltration to the United States. Many didn’t really want it. Abandoning home was not an easy matter even for traitors and especially for those motivated by ideology and not money. Among those who did want the promise, relatively few proved themselves worth the risks involved. Pioneer had.
Clark Barron — Pioneer had not known him by that name — was the case officer who made the promise. When Pioneer had asked him about the details of the plan, Barron had refused to answer. It was better if he didn’t know the details. What he did need was the signal that the plan was in motion. When the moment came, Barron explained, the case officer would give him a code phrase. “Whatever you’re doing,” Barron said, “drop it. Walk away. We’ll give you some warning if we can so you can pack some things, one bag at most. But when you hear that phrase, you leave with the contact right then. Whatever the contact tells you to do, follow their orders and they’ll get you out.” What Barron didn’t say, but what he had implied, was that hearing the code phrase meant that after he left China, he would not be coming back.
The code phrase was dinner at the Yueming Lou. The woman was here to keep Barron’s promise.
Pioneer stepped back and for a moment Kyra wondered whether his nerve was going to break.
The man looked at her. His face became a serene mask, but she had seen the brief emotion on it. The look on his face at that moment was a pure expression of his true feelings before it hardened to control his surprise.