Red Cell (27 page)

Stuart didn’t miss the implication. “Do you have any intel to back that up?” Stuart demanded. “That they have an asset inside my administration?”

Cooke said nothing. It was Rhead’s question to answer, but the odds that the Chinese had an asset inside the administration were so high
that she considered the question to be almost nonsensical. “No, sir,” Rhead answered. “But I’d be stunned if they didn’t. If you look at the history, there hasn’t been a time since 1947 that the intelligence community hasn’t been penetrated by somebody. In any case, the director of the National Counterintelligence Executive would be in a better position to answer that question with hard proof.”

“NCIX reports to you,” Stuart observed.

“Yes, sir,” Rhead said, “and they are working a number of Chinese espionage cases with the FBI—”

“None of which are inside the Pentagon,” Stuart said.

“That was a hypothetical—”

“I’m not going to be paralyzed by hypotheticals,” Stuart said. He put a hand on the OPLAN binder and pushed it back. He was tempted to scrounge a cigarette. He’d kicked that habit years ago rather than face cancer, but like all true addictions, the nicotine craving never truly went away. It helped his resolve that the White House was a US federal building, wherein smoking was illegal, the Oval Office included. “Kathy, do you have any assets in Beijing who can tell us whether the Chinese have a copy?”

“One,” Cooke conceded. Technically it was still true. Pioneer was physically in Beijing, even if he could no longer pass information in a timely fashion.

“Who?” Stuart asked.

“A senior systems administrator inside the Ministry of State Security,” she told him. “His code name is Pioneer.”

“Have you tasked him specifically on that point?”

“Harry, this isn’t a courtroom.” Showalter usually avoided such informality, but he saw the prosecutor in the president coming out.

“It is if I want it to be,” Stuart said. “Answer the question, Kathy.”

“His standing requirements are to report any MSS acquisition of sensitive military information,” Cooke said. “Getting a copy of the OPLAN would certainly qualify.”

“And he hasn’t flagged this”—Stuart lifted the OPLAN—“as showing up stolen.” It wasn’t a question. His line of reasoning had been carried to its logical conclusion, or at least as far as the lawyer in Stuart wanted it to go.

Cooke would have preferred that he had asked the logical next question, but she knew he would not, leaving her to give him the answer
to it anyway. “That is true, sir. However, I regret to inform you that operational conditions on the ground in Beijing have left us unable to maintain secure communication with Pioneer. In fact, we have reason to believe that the MSS has identified him as a CIA asset and has him under direct surveillance. Given that, the director of the National Clandestine Service has determined that it’s necessary to terminate Pioneer as a CIA asset and exfiltrate him as soon as possible.”

Rhead jerked in his chair toward Cooke. “Who screwed up?”

“Sir?”

“How did the Chinese figure out that he was ours?” Rhead said, his voice rising.

“We don’t know,” Cooke said.

“When was he compromised?” Showalter asked.

“Again, we don’t know,” Cooke said. She despised not having the answers. “But recently, we believe.”
We hope.

“How long has he been in service?” Stuart asked.

“Since 1991,” Cooke told him. She could have told them the exact date when Pioneer walked into the US embassy in Tokyo and offered himself up, but that was a level of detail the president didn’t need.

“And we lost him on your watch,” Rhead said.

“It’s your watch too, Mike,” Showalter said.

“We’re not going to lose him,” Cooke answered. “Yes, he’ll no longer be in service as an asset, but we’re going to get him out. He’ll still be of use to us here. He knows more than he’s—”

“You lost our best asset in Beijing and you just don’t want to—,” Rhead started.

“There’s no time for that,” Stuart said, cutting everyone off. “It’s possible to do everything right and still lose the game. So put the knives away and save them for the PLA.”

“Kathy, your people are sure about this?” Showalter asked.

“That’s he’s been compromised? He’s sure and that’s what matters.”

“Hardly,” Rhead said. “He’s just an asset.”

“He’s as close to a professional intelligence officer as you can get in this business without having gone through the Farm,” Cooke answered.

“You want to burn him, Mike?” Stuart asked.

“There are times when burning an asset is worth the gain,” Rhead answered. “Stopping a war with the Chinese would be one of them if this man can feed us the details on the PLA’s current operations.”

“If he’s really been compromised, he couldn’t give us that,” Cooke noted. “Best case, the Chinese would just roll him up. Worst case, they’d feed him misinformation and then we’d confirm he’s one of ours by acting on it.” She didn’t have to mention that the best case would still be an epic disaster.

“We’ve got two carrier battle groups sitting less than two hundred miles from the Chinese coast,” Rhead said. “We should get someone in the room with him, calm him down, send him back in to see what he can deliver for us. If we weren’t sending carriers in to protect twenty million people, I’d say pull him out. But we’re facing a war with our ability to maintain alliances in the Pacific for the next few decades on the line. Bad enough to lose our best asset in Beijing, but we stand to lose a lot more if we botch an exfiltration, which could be real easy to do if he’s under surveillance. We should cut our losses.”

“We owe this man—,” Cooke said.

“We owe him nothing,” Rhead cut her off. “Traitors don’t work for charity. They have their own agendas and we paid this one. He got what he wanted.”

“That’s cold, Mike,” Stuart observed.

“That’s pragmatic, Harry,” Rhead said, speaking informally to the president for the first time in Cooke’s presence. “Kathy’s people make deals with devils and I wouldn’t put this country’s long-term interests at risk for someone like that.”

“He’s a dead man if we abandon him,” Cooke replied. “Done deal. He gets a bullet in the back of the head.”

“If we try to save him, we’re risking our long-term relationship with the Chinese,” Rhead said.

“We’re risking that right now anyway,” Stuart said. The president leaned forward, put his hands together, and pressed them against his chin.

Stuart said nothing. Cooke held his gaze, refusing to look over at Rhead, whose stare she could feel on her skin. “The only way out is through, eh?”

“Mr. President—,” Rhead started.

Stuart cut him off with his hand. “Kathy, proceed at your discretion, but if your people get caught, getting them out won’t be your job. It’ll be Aidan Dunne’s. No ops to save them from jail. Mike has a point. Anyone who gets arrested will be spending a few years in jail. Understood?”

Cooke nodded slowly. “Yes, sir.”

CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

As a rule—and it was a rule that was given no exceptions—the Farm did not graduate case officers if there was any doubt about their skills. There was a wall in the Old Headquarters Building main entrance with one hundred two chiseled gray stars, each marking a dead CIA officer. Beneath them sat a black book under glass, bound in Moroccan goatskin leather, the pages handmade of parchment paper, with the names of the deceased each handwritten in calligraphic style next to a gold star. The Book of Honor had only fifty-four names. Forty-eight dead officers remained anonymous, some more than fifty years after having made their final sacrifice for their agency and their country. They died not because their training hadn’t been equal to the game. It was simply a fact that the game had rigid rules and, at times, no rules at all. Sometimes luck just ran bad and sometimes no training was enough.

So the exercises at the Farm were constantly revised, trainees were graded by unforgiving instructors, and there was no curve given. Trainees were either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” Those who couldn’t achieve the former rating received desk jobs. Those who did went to the field and ran operations. It was that simple.

Cooke stared at Kyra Stryker’s file on the flat panel monitor. She had achieved the “satisfactory” rating in every Farm exercise with no exceptions. The instructors’ comments were devoid of negative criticism, and even the known curmudgeons on the Farm staff had found occasion to pay her random compliments. Stryker’s memory was near-photographic and her surveillance detection ability was unusually sharp. The report on her escape-and-evasion exercises was fascinating despite the dry prose. Few students managed to stay free in the woods of the Virginia Tidewater for the several days they were hunted by their instructors, but Stryker had managed it. The spotters spent days searching the brush in lines while the dogs sniffed the swamp marshes. The woman had disappeared into the woods and that was the last anyone saw of her until the morning the exercise ended and she’d walked back out. She endured the kidnapping, the screams and taunts, and the humid sweatbox room during the simulated interrogation course well enough. Her qualification scores with the Glock 17 and the HK417 were excellent, and she’d done as well with the 40 mm grenade launcher as any woman her size could have.

They had tried every way to break her under stress and failed. One
instructor’s typed comment summarized Stryker more neatly than any other phrase Cooke could imagine:

“She’s solid.”

Stryker’s career should have been textbook—several field tours, moving from less important and dangerous posts to hard-target countries, an occasional headquarters rotation, eventually a series of station chief posts, one or more in Europe or Asia, maybe working Beijing as a real assignment before being brought home for good. With luck and her tickets punched, she would have been tapped to join the NCS leadership team or maybe take a senior DNI post. Reaching the Senior Intelligence Service should have been an inevitability.

Cooke considered it an injustice, if so polite a term could be applied, that Stryker’s career had imploded six months after her graduation from the Farm.

“Mitchell’s exfil plan?” Barron was standing in the doorway to Cooke’s office.

“Stryker’s service record,” Cooke corrected him.

“You thinking about giving her to Mitchell?”

“I’m considering it,” Cooke said.

“That would be one fewer officer we’d have to get into the country,” Barron admitted. “And Rhead would have a stroke. Win-win.”

“Fine by me,” Cooke agreed. “Stuart left the call to us, but he promised there wouldn’t be any ops to save our people if anyone gets pinched.”

“We don’t have any Chinese agents in custody to bargain with anyway. I suppose we could always exhume Larry Wu-tai Chin. Or rearrest Wen Ho Lee,” Barron said, a smile breaking across his weathered face.

“No leverage there,” Cooke said, half-serious. “The Bureau couldn’t convict him the first time.”

“True,” Barron said. He pulled the guest chair away from the desk and let his body fall into it. The man appeared tired and Cooke couldn’t fault him for it.

She turned the monitor off, drained the last bit of cooling black sludge from her mug, then stared at it. “What makes a person turn on their country?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“If we’re going to expose Stryker and Mitchell to that kind of risk, I’d like to think we were doing it for someone who was worth it,” Cooke said.

“It’s bad tradecraft to spend too much time asking traitors why they’re doing what they do,” Barron said. “You ask them that and the ones that are angels might reconsider. The ones who are devils will just lie, which is usually preferable to hearing the truth. Quite frankly, I don’t want to know the private secrets of dirty people, strange as that sounds. Better to take them as they come. Judge them by their reliability and credibility, not their integrity.”

“That doesn’t make it easier to risk good people for bad.”

“Our people are breaking Chinese law every time they set foot on the street,” Barron pointed out. “It’s just a matter of degree what they’ll have to do to get Pioneer out. But I do know how you feel.”

“Do you?” Cooke asked. It was a genuine question, not a try at sarcasm.

“Yeah.” Barron sucked on his teeth. “Three of the stars on the Memorial Wall were mine. The first one died in Baghdad. Charlie Lyman. He was on his way to meet with an informer when a roadside bomb took out his Humvee. We had to pick him and his Iraqi translator up with shovels. The second was Tim Pratt. An Afghani drug courier shot him in the head while he was doing counternarcotics work outside Ghazni. It took us two days to find his body. The birds led us to him.” He stopped speaking.

“And number three?”

Barron sighed and lowered his head a bit. “Emmanuela Giordano. We called her Emma. She bought it in a car wreck in Moscow. Stupid buggers had her under close surveillance, and the moron driving the lead car actually managed to hit her in the rear quarter. She wasn’t even trying to lose them. The idiot just panicked in bad traffic and spun her out on the freeway. The car rolled three times and a truck didn’t stop quick enough. Hit her broadside on the driver’s side door.”

“Anyone else with her?”

“Me. Four broken ribs and a concussion. I have just enough hair to hide the scar.”

Cooke smiled. “Glad you made it.”

“Me too,” Barron said. “Emma was dead on the scene. I spent six months in recovery and got sent to Beijing for my next tour. The next year, Pioneer made contact and I set him up as an asset. So I can tell you that he’s as close to one of the angels as we find in this business.”

“Good reasons for turning traitor?” Cooke asked.

“One reason, and it’s a good one,” Barron said.

“I thought you didn’t ask the reasons.”

“I didn’t ask. He volunteered it,” Barron said. “If I never did anything else here, getting him set up made everything else worth it. I’d sure like to see him again.”

Cooke finally set the mug onto the desk. “Do you think Stryker can handle the mission?”

Barron sat back and stared down for a moment. “Hard to say. She passed the Farm. She’s not a seasoned officer and Beijing is a tough place to do the work. But she survived Venezuela. Some of that was dumb luck. A lot wasn’t. She trusted her instincts.”