Jonathan watched Kyra’s eyes look to the rearview mirror every few seconds. Courtesy of Monaghan, the woman was, by all appearances, a middle-aged brunette, short hair, glasses, wearing casual clothing and a bit overweight. Her height was unchanged and Monaghan hadn’t toyed with her build, though she was slightly broader across the shoulders and larger in the chest. Except for the added weight, it wasn’t a bad look for her, and he idly wondered how much of it she might choose to keep once they returned to the States. If we get that far, he thought.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kyra caught him studying her. “Sorry you didn’t get a makeover?” she asked. Jonathan hadn’t performed an operational act since their arrival, so there had been no reason to change his appearance. The MSS had no reason to suspect him of anything.
“Hardly,” Jonathan said. “Anyone on us?”
“Don’t think so,” Kyra said. “A couple of possibles, but they’re giving us plenty of space.” She had watched the same Hafei Motor sedans hold their distance behind the minivan for more than ten miles. The black cars were trading positions every few miles, but they weren’t driving aggressively. They were almost lazy and let any number of cars get between them and the embassy SUV. “No sirens. Always a good sign.” She was only half joking.
“You won’t be able to come back here,” Jonathan said. “You know that.”
“I know.” Kyra regretted not seeing more of the city, or the countryside for that matter — the Great Wall at least. There was so much history, and it would all be denied her now. Ironic, she thought. It made her feel like her rebellious walk on the streets had been justified. She hadn’t joined up to play tourist. She had always wanted to prowl the side streets and see the underbellies and dirty corners of the cities where the Agency would send her. She’d had to fight the MSS for it, but for one night, she had gotten a true taste of the real Beijing. She wanted more, always would, but what she’d seen felt good and that was something she hadn’t felt for a while. “I’ll survive.”
“Good for you,” he said. Kyra turned to look at him, but Jonathan was staring out the car window at the skyline and she couldn’t see his face.
Time to get serious, she thought. “When you get to the waiting area, don’t talk to Mitchell or Pioneer,” she advised. “They should be sitting apart. Try to keep some distance from both of them. If you have to sit near one of them, sit near Mitchell. Otherwise, let him find you when you deplane in Seoul.”
“No problem.” Jonathan knew the practice perfectly well but nodded assent.
“Monaghan is good,” Kyra said. “She does solid work. But if the MSS does pick either of them up, you just get on the plane, then call the embassy when you land.” The telephone number was scribbled on a blank index card in his wallet.
“If that happens, Pioneer is dead,” Jonathan said. “And Mitchell goes to prison.”
Kyra said nothing for a moment. He was right. If Pioneer was detained, there would be no saving him from a sure bullet to the head after a trial that would be finished in a few weeks at most. “No. But somebody will have to tell the director ASAP.”
“Agreed.” They lapsed into silence. The GPS unit mounted on the dash guided them into the airport and Kyra pulled the car into a covered garage. Someone from the embassy would come out to retrieve it later.
Kyra killed the engine. “I’ll go in first. Follow me in five minutes.”
“See you in Seoul.”
Kyra moved through boarding security without drawing attention, retrieved her carry-on, and worked through the masses toward her assigned gate. The airport crowd was thin, but the number of uniformed guards moving through the terminal was far higher than the night she and Jonathan had entered the country. Soldiers were standing by the doors leading to the boarding ramps. To her eye, there was no sense of urgency on their part. They stood to the sides, close enough to the boarding lines that some of the Western passengers seemed uncomfortable with the attention. The Asian passengers seemed unmoved by the scrutiny. The sense of calm was a good sign. A blatant show of hostile sorting through departing passengers would be the surest sign that the MSS had figured out something was up. Kyra had managed her magic trick almost two hours ago. Mitchell’s liberal estimates gave them at least another hour before the MSS would figure out that Pioneer had disappeared. Jonathan was not so optimistic, but even if his calculation proved better than Mitchell’s, the MSS would still be losing the game. There were so many ways to leave Beijing, the MSS couldn’t cover them all. Even with the help of the PLA and the other security services, they would have to spread themselves thin in a panicked effort to canvass the major travel hubs. Even then, they would have no assurance that CIA hadn’t simply driven him out in a car. The options were legion, China was a very large country, and the security resources were not unlimited. Time and geography were finally working against the MSS.
Kyra found her gate and scanned the waiting group. Mitchell had advised that flights to Seoul at this hour were usually full, and the numbers seemed to confirm that guess. There were few open seats. She did not have her pick, and that alone gave her plausible deniability that she knew any of her covert traveling companions. No security officer could reasonably use the seating arrangements here to infer personal connections. She chose one of the few open seats, settled herself, and stared out the bay windows to the dark tarmac.
Two guards stood by the boarding door, watching the seated passengers. Kyra saw them study her for a moment, but neither made a move in her direction. Her watch, an atomic piece accurate to within hundredths of a second, showed eight minutes to the posted boarding time. Mitchell had tried to time their arrival at the airport to get the group to the gate with little time to spare and therefore to be observed and identified by any officials. It was strange how time could be both an ally and an enemy. Jonathan was five minutes behind her. Mitchell and Pioneer should have been there already, but she couldn’t pick them out in the crowd and didn’t look around for them. Still, the crowd was calm moving through the terminal. Likely they would have been excited had the soldiers been dragging men away anywhere nearby. Mitchell and Pioneer were still loose, if they were here.
If the airline delayed boarding, it would be the first sign that something was going very wrong.
The boarding was announced in Chinese, English, and another language she did not recognize but assumed was Korean. The crowd stirred and Kyra released the breath she hadn’t realized that she’d been holding.
It was a mistake. She heard the shouting before she saw the running guards following two civilian men in suits. The waiting passengers turned en masse as four PLA soldiers in fatigues with weapons drawn slowed to a fast walk, led by the civilians holding portable radios. Other mixed groups of suits and fatigues ran past, moving out to cover the other boarding areas.
The suits — Kyra assumed they were MSS — were speaking loudly in Chinese and the crowd parted before them. They reached the podium and cornered both the guards on duty and the airline staff who were preparing to open the door to the passengers. The guards who had been standing over the crowd shook their heads vigorously to some question. The MSS officers pushed them aside and began to bark orders to the airline staff. One, a petite Chinese woman, picked up the wall microphone. She issued her announcement first in Mandarin, then English.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin boarding. As an extra security precaution, in addition to your boarding passes, we ask you to please produce your passports and present them for inspection. We appreciate your cooperation. Our first-class and business passengers are now welcome to board, as well as any other passengers who may require extra time or assistance.”