Kyra, trying very hard not to take a deep breath, dug into her carry-on for her falsified passport. Hers and Jonathan’s were economy seats. She didn’t know which seating class Mitchell and Pioneer would be in. She looked through the crowd and picked out Jonathan thirty feet from her position, standing in the thoroughfare. She didn’t make eye contact with him. He had nothing to worry about. He wasn’t the one who had beaten an MSS officer in an alley or ditched several more during a run through the city with the most-wanted man in the People’s Republic of China.
The MSS officers stood almost shoulder to shoulder, the first taking a passenger’s passport and holding it over a printout the second held. They compared the travel document with the printed page, then held it to the passenger’s face.
They waved the first passenger through.
They know he’s loose. The MSS had almost certainly detained the Zhous. But the large number of security officers and soldiers running past through the terminal meant they didn’t know where Pioneer was.
Kyra approached the gate. An old Korean man standing at the head of the line moved forward, leaning on his cane, and he held his boarding pass and passport out to the security officers. The lead MSS officer took the passport, rifled through it until he found the visa stamp, and scrutinized it for several seconds. He turned to the inside cover and held the man’s photograph next to the sheet his partner held. They jabbered on in Mandarin. The one not holding the passport spoke into a portable radio and waited until he received an answer. Kyra wished dearly that she could understand the language to get some feel for their level of anxiety.
The Korean stood calmly as the two Chinese security officers talked over his case. The one holding his passport leaned over and looked at his face for several seconds. The Korean pulled back, apparently uncomfortable with the close inspection, but otherwise held his ground.
The MSS officer frowned, closed the passport, handed it to its owner, and waved him through. The airline attendant gave him a traditional Mandarin greeting. He nodded and gave her his boarding pass. She ran it under the scanner and extended it to him, but the Korean was still trying to pocket his passport with shaky old hands, leaving Kyra to wait an eternity until he could move on. He finally managed to secure it inside his jacket, then took back his pass and awkwardly pushed himself forward through the door.
Several more passengers moved through, then Kyra stepped up to the gate and held out her passport. She focused on her hands to make sure there was no tremor in her fingers. She wanted to give no outward sign of discomfort. The MSS officer took the passport and studied the brunette with an ugly look for a long second before opening the fake document. She put her hands in her pockets and turned her attention to her breathing and her heart rate, which was faster than its usual pace but not enough to make her uncomfortable. The two officers spoke again and the officer holding the radio clicked the mic and spoke into it. It spat back an answer and the MSS officers frowned but said nothing. The one holding her passport looked to her again. Kyra gave them no expression. She wondered if they had studied Western faces enough to discern emotional states.
Just give me back the passport, she thought.
The Korean reached the end of the ramp and carefully stepped over the small gap onto the Boeing 767. A pretty young Korean attendant asked him in her native tongue if he would like help finding his seat. He didn’t understand the language, but he nodded anyway. She took his boarding pass, directed him toward the first-class cabin, and then took his arm and helped him down the aisle. He shuffled between the seats, using them for support, until he reached his row. The attendant helped him settle into the seat, noted that he had no carry-on for the overhead bin, and asked if he would like a drink and a hot towel for his face. He demurred on the towel.
He had no idea what it would do to the prosthetics Monaghan had applied to his face.
The attendant left and Pioneer turned to the window. His face rigid, he stared unseeing at the city skyline in the distance. Beijing was lost to him. He realized that he didn’t know what tears would do to the prosthetics either. Perhaps he should have asked for the towel after all.
He looked to the front and saw the attendants repeating the greeting ritual with another passenger who entered the cabin. Kyra Stryker nodded to the attendant and turned down the aisle. She didn’t look at him.
The MSS officer returned the last passport to its owner, a teenage Canadian girl, and his partner shrugged and spoke into his handset. Their superior acknowledged and the PLA soldiers who stood to the side slung their rifles. They moved as a unit through the terminal toward another gate at the far end. Flights would be boarding all night. The entire Sixth Bureau was stretched very thin, they had been told, and no one could tell them when replacements would arrive.
The attendant closed the boarding ramp door, locked it, and tested the security panel. Her shift was over. Walking away from the gate, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a disposable cell phone, and pressed a button. She didn’t know who she was calling or even what phone number had been preprogrammed into it.
“Hello,” a woman answered in excellent Mandarin.
“Dinner is served, four courses, all cold,” the attendant said.
“My thanks.” The call disconnected from the other end. The attendant entered the nearest restroom, waited a few moments until the lone visitor walked out, then removed the SIM card from the phone and flushed it down a toilet. She then dropped the phone into the garbage.
At Mitchell’s now-empty desk, Monaghan replaced the telephone handset and put her hands over her face. See you soon, boys and girls, she thought. She suppressed the urge to walk to the window and make a rude gesture in the direction of Zhongnanhai.
Mitchell had prewritten two cables to Langley the night before. Now Monaghan could tell his former deputy, the newly promoted chief of station, which one to delete. The other would only take a few moments to transit the Pacific. There was no telling how long it would take the Ops Center staff to flag it for Barron after it arrived. The NCS Director would be impatient. Monaghan picked up a secure phone and dialed.
Cooke hadn’t left her office on the seventh floor for two days. She took her meals in the director’s dining room — the Agency provided her with a personal chef, who worked in a restaurant-quality kitchen — and stepped out into the hall only when she had to return to the Operations Center for short briefings on military developments in the South China Sea. When Barron had advised her to go home the day before, Cooke had dismissed the suggestion out of hand. She knew that it had hardly been sincere, made more out of duty than any belief she would act on it. Barron would never sincerely ask her to do something he wasn’t doing himself. Still, the guilt from wanting to heed the man was sharp. Cooke was tired and even the coffee was losing its power to keep her going. The amount of caffeine required to keep her alert was making her hands shake. She told herself that going home was pointless, that she wouldn’t be able to sleep because the thought of her people in the field would keep her awake. Cooke knew that was a lie and wouldn’t admit it to herself, but finally she didn’t have a choice. The couch looked to be a better pillow than her desk, and so she dismissed Barron, locked her office, and reclined on the couch. The director kept the lights on, the blinds open, and hoped that she had enough strength left to keep the rest short.