She knew she had failed when the knock came at the door. Her sense of time was gone and her mind was foggier than before. Her vision finally focused on the wall clock. Four hours had passed. She pulled herself up. The doorknob felt like lead in her hand.
It was Barron. Her body felt like a heavy sack of grain as it fell into the chair. “Give me some good news,” she ordered.
Barron obeyed the order after he’d closed the door behind him. “He’s in the air,” he said without preamble. Cooke closed her eyes in relief. “Ninety minutes and he’ll be on the ground in Seoul. The MSS overran the airport but they didn’t ID him. Two feet away and they couldn’t figure out who he was. Monaghan did some great work.”
“What about the others?”
“Everyone’s on the plane,” Barron said. “They’re all clear unless the PLA decides to send some MIGs after them.”
“Make sure Stryker gets a promotion and a week’s leave. Monaghan too. I take it you flew Pioneer in style?”
“You asked, he received,” Barron said. “First-class seat and a charter flight to Dulles from Seoul. Mitchell is sitting nearby to keep him under control in case he gets panicky. That happens sometimes when people finally realize that they’re not going home again. They’ll be on the ground here by tomorrow afternoon. We’ll change planes there and take him to the Farm.”
“He deserves it. Stryker?”
“She and Burke got coach. We didn’t want everyone sitting together in case somebody got picked up.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigar tube, a Davidoff Millennium. He offered it to Cooke and pulled out another for himself when she took it. “He’s out of China. I think that’s worth breaking a minor federal law.”
Cooke extracted the pungent stick from its cylinder and drew it under her nose. “Expensive. I thought you gave these up.”
“It’s never too late to restart a bad habit.”
“I have a better tradition in mind. And it’ll save you from an argument with your wife.” Cooke took Barron’s cigar, pulled it from the cylinder, and put the brown stick in her mouth. She replaced the cigar he had given her in its tube. Then she fetched a Sharpie from her desk and scrawled Pioneer 2016 on the side. The CIA director turned to the shelf behind her desk, opened the humidor sitting there, and dropped the cigar inside. Barron’s addition to her collection made four.
The handwritten sign read “KWON Moo-hyun.”
Milo Sachs had no idea who Kwon Moo-hyun was but he doubted that Mr. Kwon was truly Korean. Sachs was the youngest case officer in Seoul, so he’d drawn the short straw for this duty. Chief of station Seoul gave him the name for the placard and an order not to ask questions. He was to stand with the other professional drivers, meet Mr. Kwon, and lead him to a private hangar near the edge of the field, then fly with him on the private Learjet back to Dulles Airport. He was under orders not to talk to Kwon except to direct his movements. Sachs was an escort, nothing more. He would get three days’ leave in Northern Virginia as compensation, hardly enough to recover from the time lag, after which he would fly back to Seoul to resume his regular tour of duty.
The plane landed on schedule, the airline attendants opened the door, and the limousine service drivers took their places to the side of the exit. The first two people off saw his sign and walked to him. The Westerner was balding, salt-and-pepper hair in the places he still had it, with a sizable paunch at his waistline. The Korean man walked with a cane, but he appeared somewhat more spry than his age should have allowed.
“I am Kwon,” the man said in Korean. It clearly was not true. His accent was so heavy that Sachs was sure the man had memorized the phrase. He probably didn’t even know what he was saying.
“A pleasure,” Sachs replied. “Come with me, I will take you to your next flight.”
“Not yet,” Mitchell said. “We need a private place where we can ask this gentleman a few questions first.”
“You’re Mitchell?” Sachs asked. Mitchell nodded. “We’ve got a charter flight waiting in a private hangar. Safest place to talk is probably on the plane.”
“Works for me,” Mitchell said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the door where the passengers were deplaning. Another pair of Westerners exited, looked around for a brief second, and then moved in their direction. The woman was quite pretty, Sachs thought. A short-haired brunette with glasses, she doubtless was a case officer. He wondered how old she really was. It was easier to make a younger person look older than to do the reverse.
“Time to talk?” Kyra asked Mitchell without preamble.
“Private hangar,” Mitchell told her. “You get fifteen minutes. That enough?”
“We’ll find out,” Jonathan said.
Mitchell gestured everyone toward couches in the plane’s aft section and they all took their places. Jonathan leaned forward and studied the Chinese man. He had extrapolated Pioneer’s age from the biographical data in the files he’d finally gotten after badgering Barron for access. The Chinese asset had been in college during the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which meant that he would be middle-aged now, but the disguise obscured all traces of that. He’d only seen the man’s true appearance for a short minute before Monaghan had gotten her hands on him. Pioneer had looked somewhat older than middle age, though Jonathan knew he had no baseline for comparison, but it didn’t surprise him. Pioneer had been committing treason for over twenty years. Such a life could age a man well before his time.
“I’m Jonathan. This is Kyra,” Jonathan said in English. “I want to ask you some questions about the Assassin’s Mace program.” Mitchell translated. If the senior officer disapproved of using real names, he said nothing. Jonathan caught the shashoujian term but recognized nothing else. It was a beautiful language. The tonals made it sound like singing and he doubted that he could ever master it. He spoke Romance languages only and found them difficult enough.
Pioneer nodded and replied. “I wish that I had been able to access more information on the shashoujian, but much of it was compartmented beyond my reach. What do you want to know?”
“We sorted through your reports. There wasn’t any progress on the shashoujian until 1999. Correct?”
“Correct. Jiang Zemin started the program in 1996, but there was little worth reporting for three years. A few papers, a few efforts to steal some US weapons. Several senior military officers developed ideas for weapons, but the PLA lacked the expertise to make any of the designs work. It was all science fiction.” Mitchell didn’t bother trying to convey the venom he heard in Pioneer’s voice. “They were stupid old men dreaming of weapons that we won’t be able to build for a hundred years. Anything they could dream of that could reach your carriers, the PLA couldn’t build.”
“So what changed in 1999?” Kyra asked.
“I don’t know,” Pioneer admitted. “If there was a breakthrough, it was compartmented and I couldn’t access it. There was some new cooperation between the PLA and Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute, but I reported on that.”
Jonathan nodded. “I read that report. If there were no successes, were there any significant failures that you didn’t report?”
“Why are you asking about failures?” Mitchell asked.
“Science is all about failure,” Jonathan explained. “Test, fail, test again, until you have a breakthrough. If he can outline some major research failures after 1999, it might show us the direction that the PLA’s research took.”