“Their watch desk hadn’t even seen the report yet.”
Drescher sat back, reread the two cables, and finally allowed himself a smile. He was awake now. Adrenaline was the best stimulant, far better than caffeine. Taiwan had arrested twelve people, several of which were known to work for China’s Ministry of State Security, and arresting officers were down. David had poked Goliath in the eye with a sharp stick and Goliath might have poked back.
The senior duty officer reached for the phone and pressed the speed dial without remorse. The CIA director picked up her own secure phone at home on the third ring. “This is the Ops Center,” Drescher recited. “Going ‘secure voice.’” He pressed the button that encrypted the call.
Kyra Stryker turned onto the headquarters compound from Route 123 and slowed her red Ford Ranger as she approached the guard shack. The glass and steel shelter connected with the Visitor Control Building to the right through a dirty concrete arch open to the wind. Kyra dreaded lowering the cab window but there was no choice. The freezing air invaded her truck and she thrust her badge out at the SPO. A second guard was standing on the other side of the two-lane road, this one cradling an M16 with gloved hands. A luckier third was sitting inside the heated shack to the left with a 12 gauge Mossberg shotgun within arm’s reach. Doubtless there were more inside the Control Building, all carrying 9 mm Glock sidearms and surely with much heavier guns in reach. Kyra’s was the only vehicle coming down the approach and she had their undivided attention. For a brief moment, she had seriously considered running the checkpoint and pressed the brake only when she conceded that the guards wouldn’t open fire. They would have just activated the pneumatic barricades that would smash her truck. Then they would have arrested her and spent the rest of the day with her in a detention room, asking repeatedly why a CIA staff officer with a valid blue badge had done such a stupid thing. Not wanting to go to work would have been viewed as a very poor excuse.
The officer gave her the signal to proceed, a lazy military wave. Kyra withdrew her arm, rolled up the window, and turned the heater on full so the cab would recover the warm air it had hemorrhaged to the outside.
Please let the barricades go off, she thought, and she was surprised at how much she meant it. The pneumatic rams had enough power to snap the truck’s frame in half, if not flip the vehicle onto its cab on the frozen asphalt. But the thought of a sure trip to the hospital didn’t seem any worse to her than where she was going at the moment.
Her Ranger rolled over the closed hydraulic gates, the barricades didn’t rise up from the road underneath, and Kyra sighed, not in relief, she realized, but in slight frustration. She hadn’t been to headquarters in six months. She shouldn’t have been returning for at least six more, but that plan had jumped the rails and nobody was happy about it. Her visit today wasn’t by choice, hers or anyone else’s, and it galled her to think that she would have to make the same trip every day going forward. Maybe the new assignment would be short. Working at headquarters was not one of her ambitions.
She passed the front of the Old Headquarters Building (OHB), which offered the view most familiar to those who had only seen the facility on the news. She was taking the long way around but she was in no hurry. The George Washington Parkway entrance was ahead and it would have been easy to turn right, leave the compound, and go home. She turned left after sitting at the stop sign for ten full seconds. There were no other cars on the road.
There’s my girl.
The A-12 Oxcart loomed over the roadway, sitting at a rolled angle, nose up on three steel pylons, and Kyra smiled for the first time that morning. She loved the plane. She’d never earned that pilot’s license despite her childhood ambitions — her parents had never been willing to spend the money — and had been reduced to reading about planes and spending hours in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and its annex at Dulles Airport. On her first visit to the Agency compound, she’d climbed the concrete facade surrounding the Oxcart and touched the cold, black wing. It had been the most spiritual experience she had enjoyed in her twenty-five years. Kyra still wondered what it would be like to fly Kelly Johnson’s masterpiece at ninety thousand feet, setting the air on fire at Mach 3.
The plane passed behind her and the diversion came to a rude end.
Those with more leave hours to burn, which looked to be almost everyone, had left the parking garage nearly empty. Kyra pulled into a space on the bottom level near the front, killed the engine, and debated starting it again and driving away.
Just do it. Or you’ll have to come back and do it just like this tomorrow.
She abandoned the truck before she could talk herself out of it.
The wind brushed up snow from the drifts piled on the grounds and threw it across her path. She hadn’t bothered with a hat or gloves and instead thrust her hands into her coat pockets. There was no help for her face. Her cheeks and ears, numb when she reached the glass doors to the New Headquarters Building, tingled painfully as she passed through the heated air curtain. A shot of Scotch would have warmed her stomach faster than coffee, and for a second she wished for a hip flask of anything strong. The urge died quickly. Meeting with the CIA director while smelling of alcohol before lunch would kill whatever career she still had left.
The lobby was a cathedral in miniature, unlit, thirty yards long, and flanked on both sides by dark gray marble pillars that framed bronze sculptures and modular gray vinyl couches along the walls. The grayish-blue carpet, brightened only by the CIA seal in the center, matched the odd gloom that was unusual for the normally bright space. Kyra looked up and saw snow covering the semicircular glass ceiling. It blocked out the sun and washed out the colors in a drab, filtered light. The entrance was abandoned except for a security protective officer manning the guard desk at the lobby’s far end. His reading lamp created a small bubble of warm light in the darkness.
She walked the length of the room, ran her badge over the security turnstiles, and entered her code. The restraining arms parted and the SPO didn’t look up. Kyra walked around the guard desk to the escalator leading to the lower floors. The windows beyond ran floor to ceiling and Kyra could see the empty courtyard below and the massive Old Headquarters Building a few hundred feet beyond. The dark and quiet combined to make the compound feel deserted, which was an unearthly feeling given the size of the OHB filling the bay windows. The Agency complex covered three hundred acres cut out of the George Washington National Forest along the GW Parkway, barely a stone’s throw from the Potomac. Kyra couldn’t guess from the view how many people worked there. The exact number was classified anyway, and the building’s size made her realize how important she was to the place.
Not at all. A cog in the machine.
The desire to reverse course welled up in her throat again. She beat it down without mercy, never breaking stride, and the craving for a drink surged up to replace it.
The walk to her destination took a long three minutes. The Office of Medical Services lobby on the first floor looked like any doctor’s office, which had surprised her the first time she visited. It was a medical facility like any private practice in the outside world, but it seemed out of place in a government building. More so, Kyra thought, given that it was wedged in between the Agency museum and the Old Headquarters lobby.