Red Cell (19 page)

Jonathan considered the idea, turning it over in his mind. “You don’t change military doctrine to accommodate ‘new’ weapons if those weapons are just more of what you already have.” He leaned forward and stared at the paper. “Look at the timeline. Jiang Zemin orders the project in ninety-seven, NSA grabs a flurry of reports about one project that peters out almost immediately, and then nothing until ninety-nine, when the PLA starts writing again about changing war plans. The idea didn’t just go away.” He put the hard copy down on the desk and pushed it back toward the young woman. “And it’s a given that the various
shashoujian
projects are run at multiple facilities and involve different groups of personnel.”

“Meaning what?” Kyra asked.

“You were a case officer. Think about it.”

A puzzle.
Kyra was good at puzzles. She leaned back in her chair and tilted her head to think.
Multiple facilities, different groups, one asset.
She smiled. “There’s a compartment of Assassin’s Mace reports that we don’t have.”

“I agree.” For the first time, she noted, Burke smiled back. “Your reasoning?”

She rolled the facts around inside her mind, reordering them. It was funny, she thought, how the mind could hold random thoughts
simultaneously but struggled to catalog them so a person could verbalize them, which was a linear process. “There’s an asset in a position to report on a change in war planning. That means the asset likely had access to the underlying technology driving the change. But if that technology was part of a black program, then we would have to separate that intelligence from the rest of the report because a leak could identify the asset. So the NCS would publish the report”—Kyra waved the paper in the air—“minus the good bits about the technology. But this asset is reporting on a change inspired by an Assassin’s Mace technology, which is just one part of a bigger program, so the asset likely has access to other Mace information. The more Mace projects he can report on, the faster the Chinese could triangulate on him if the information is leaked. So the NCS would pull out the stops to keep that from happening, which means that somewhere around here is a nice, fat compartment of Mace reports.”

Jonathan nodded. “Just because a reporting stream is new doesn’t mean the activity being reported is new,” he said. “And just because a reporting stream dies doesn’t mean the activity died. Sometimes it just vanishes into a classified compartment.”

Kyra narrowed her eyes and studied the man. He’d agreed with her several times over the last few hours and it seemed . . . wrong. She’d only known him for a few days but she could read a man. Any case officer worth her salt could. And Burke was a thinker—

Then she saw it. “You’re just saying that to butter me up because you want me to go get that compartment,” Kyra said. It wasn’t a question.

“You’re perceptive,” Jonathan said, smiling. “Much more enjoyable than having to explain everything.”

Another dig. She enjoyed this one.

It took Kyra an hour to find the phone numbers. The National Clandestine Service refused to publish a phone directory, citing the possible security risk of a foreign power stealing it. After pleas to Deity, enough curses to negate her prayers, and repeated calls to the Agency’s telephone switchboard, Kyra finally reached an officer who didn’t plead ignorance on China. The words
assassin’s, mace
, and
compartment
in the same sentence worked like a wizard’s incantation. The officer begged off and hung up, and the return call came a half hour later from a senior NCS manager several pay grades higher who agreed to talk in person readily enough to leave Kyra suspicious.

George Kain’s initial manner bordered on sycophantic. Kyra had been trained to evaluate character on short notice, Kain’s voice on the phone had disturbed her, and she had been appalled to find her evaluation more than accurate. Kain took precisely one question from Jonathan regarding information on any Assassin’s Mace project and switched from fawning to filibuster. He prattled without pause, talking over all attempts to interrupt, offering nothing useful, and staring out the window at the New Headquarters Building. Kyra was sure he hadn’t made eye contact with her once in the last hour.

She looked around the Red Cell vault for a wall clock and didn’t find one.
How long?
she mouthed silently to Jonathan. He didn’t move his head and said nothing, instead curling his hand on his leg into a fist, then sticking out two fingers. Kain didn’t see it. The man was in his own world.

Two?
She mirrored his sign with her own fingers.
Hours?

Jonathan nodded, barely.

Way past time to end this.
For the first time, Kyra was ashamed to have been a case officer.

She made her own covert gesture at the mini fridge. Jonathan saw the motion, smiled slightly, then nodded again.

Kyra walked to the mini fridge, retrieved a bottled water, then walked back to her seat. She offered the plastic bottle to Kain. “You must be thirsty.”

For the first time in hours, Kain paused. “Thanks.” He uncapped the bottle, took a swig, and then saw the tactical error too late.

“You’ve tried very hard not to answer the question,” Jonathan said as soon as Kain’s mouth filled with Dasani water. “Stop wasting our time. We’re not idiots.”

Kain swallowed. “If we have anything worth reporting, you’ll have to wait until we publish it in finished intel channels.”

“The reports we’re looking for could be more than ten years old. They’d already be in finished intel channels if you were ever going to release them,” Kyra observed.

“Not my problem,” Kain said. “If there is any reporting being held back in a compartment, I’m not going to second-guess the decision not to release it.”

“This tasking came from Director Cooke—,” Jonathan said.

“I don’t care if it came from the president,” Kain interrupted. He drew another swig from the bottle. “If there’s something we think the
president needs to know, we’ll tell him. We don’t need the DI to do it for us, not that your little fantasies even qualify as analysis. And we certainly don’t need a pair of failed wannabe operators turned analysts to do it for us.” Kain smirked at Jonathan, then frowned at Kyra, stood, finished the bottle, and took his time dropping it in the nearest garbage can. “Thanks for the water,” he said. He then strode out of the vault.

“You should have let me choke him,” Kyra said.

“You thought I would have stopped you?”

“He should run for the Senate,” Kyra said. “He wouldn’t be the first case officer to become a politician.”

“The two professions do share a disturbing number of skills,” Jonathan agreed. “Good move with the water.”

“I should’ve done it an hour earlier,” Kyra said. “Now what?”

“I suspected that was coming,” he admitted. “Some cooperation would have been nice, but I didn’t expect it. Still, we had to make a good faith effort to request access before we ask Cooke to start twisting arms.”

“I hope there really is a compartment,” Kyra said. “I’d hate to pick a fight just to find out they don’t have anything worth fighting over.”

“They do. Despite what you might think, an NCS manager doesn’t take two hours out of his day to belittle analysts just for fun,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be back.” He marched out of the vault and disappeared into the stairwell across the hall.

Kyra stared at the back of his head until the stairwell door closed and then let out a long breath. It was apparent where he was going. She wondered just how close Jonathan and Cooke really were.
Real close,
she hoped. The bureaucratic games were starting to get under her skin.

CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

Barron’s composure had limits, and Cooke’s account of Kain’s sandbagging had pushed him close to them. Some things he expected to be handled
below
his pay grade. Hearing about them from one of the very few people he answered to always lit his very short fuse. But he expected that had been Burke’s intention. Sometimes it really did take a trip to the director’s office to make the case officers and analysts stop acting like children protective of their toys.

“They were asking about Pioneer’s compartment?” Barron asked. The question was almost redundant. There was no other sets of files that fit the bill Cooke had just described.

“They were,” Cooke confirmed. “George Kain stonewalled them. Sat in their space for two hours and treated them like they were complete idiots.”

“I’ll go talk to him about it. I understand his reasons, but his tactics were faulty, to say the least.”

“How many people have access to Pioneer’s reporting?” Cooke asked.

“If you count the two of us, still fewer than a dozen,” Barron replied.

“Has he fed you anything on the Assassin’s Mace lately?”

“No.” Barron frowned and took a deep breath. “He’s the guy who told us about it in the first place back after the ninety-six Taiwan Strait crisis. By ninety-seven it was clear the project wasn’t going anywhere, so we put him on other targets. Every once in a while he still sends us something on the project, but it’s just not a high priority. We’ve been more worried about the Russian equipment the PLA’s been buying.”

Cooke leaned back. “If there’s not much on it, then there shouldn’t be an issue letting the Red Cell have access to it.”

Barron knew an order when he heard one, but he didn’t have to like it. “I’d rather not.” He knew it was a weak protest.

“Clark, there are two men that I answer to,” Cooke said, talking slowly and clearly, as though to a child. “And at some point, I’m going to get a call from the president or, more likely, the director of national intelligence. That man will start asking me some very pointed questions about what’s going on here. And right now, I don’t have any good answers, just good theories. If the Red Cell can prove those theories, I’ll be a very happy woman, but that’s going to be very hard for them to do if your half of the house is refusing to lower the drawbridge and let them inside that big stone wall you case officers have erected between yourselves and the analysts.” Cooke stopped to let the tongue-lashing sink in. “If the Red Cell includes any of Pioneer’s intel in their report, I’ll restrict it to POTUS only,” she offered. “No one outside the Oval Office even hears about it, much less reads it.”

Barron’s face showed that he didn’t like it, and
yes, ma’am,
he certainly was going to worry about it, but an order was an order. “How many people are we talking here?”

“Two people. Burke, of course. The other one is your girl, Stryker,” Cooke said.

“I can live with that. Just make sure they don’t give me a reason to regret it, or next time I’ll let Kain have his way with them,” Barron warned.

“Fair enough,” Cooke said.

CIA RED CELL

“I need glasses,” Kyra said. She dropped a stack of reports on Jonathan’s desk, closed her eyes, and rested her head on her arms. The morning painkiller had finally worn off.

“You need to learn that caffeine is not a substitute for sleep.” Jonathan knew a hangover when he saw one, had never suffered one but had seen plenty in graduate school. She was lithe, he’d noted, not too much body mass to absorb alcohol. The current weather precluded many opportunities for parties, so the woman was either drinking alone or haunting one of Leesburg’s several excellent pubs and bars along King Street. A few shots of something harder than beer would cross her line between drinking to relax and drinking to excess. An officer’s personal drinking habits could become a matter for the Counterintelligence Center, the unit that hunted moles inside the Agency. Stryker was too new for that, he supposed, but she’d almost gotten killed, might have been self-medicating the stress with something harder than beer, and officers had been fired for alcoholism before. “Is that it?” he asked.

“Finally,” Kyra said. She had been logging Pioneer’s reports since Kain’s flunky arrived with the paperwork to get the Red Cell analysts read into the Assassin’s Mace compartment. The forms they signed were the United States Government’s version of a blood oath and promised vile retribution if they leaked the information to anyone, even other DI analysts.

Jonathan wheeled his chair over to Kyra’s desk and stared at the Excel spreadsheet on her screen. “What’s the final count?”

“Two hundred twenty-seven Assassin’s Mace reports total,” Kyra said. “One hundred thirty-six on aerospace projects. Fifty-seven on antiship missile projects. Twenty on naval projects, nine on lasers, and the rest on weapons that we’ve labeled as miscellaneous.”

“That breakdown matches our thinking,” Jonathan said. “Heavy numbers on aerospace and missiles.”

Kyra sat back and stared at the screen. It was an impressive list. “What about that stealth fighter the PLA was building back in the aughts? The J-20?”

“That one’s trying to be an air superiority plane, not a bomber,” Jonathan said. “The Chinese have always had serious issues building decent fighter engines. Still, it’s possible that they cross-bred the technology into another project. Any commonalities in the aerospace reports?”

“Most of them named the China Aviation Industry Corporation as the primary conduit for the projects. Only one other company was mentioned, Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute. According to the cable, the PLA was funding a big effort with Xian under CAIC direction. One of the CAIC senior managers asked for a progress report. Pioneer intercepted the Xian reply and copied a DVD that was part of the package.”

“What was the date on that cable?” Jonathan asked.

“June 1999,” Kyra said after a brief hunt for the paper.

“What was on the disk?”

“Whoever looked at the file said it was a computer-aided design program,” Kyra said.

Jonathan leaned back in his chair. “A CAD program wouldn’t tell us much. It’s the data files on whatever Xian was building that you’d want.”

“There’s no record that we got those. But look at this.” Kyra leaned over and made the spreadsheet obey. “If we reorder the list of Pioneer’s reporting by date instead of technology, almost all of the aerospace reports are dated after ninety-nine. Maybe CAIC made a technology breakthrough, developed some new tech.”