Red Cell (8 page)

“Only that you’re not very popular,” Kyra said.
Two can play the cranky game,
she thought, and she wasn’t in the mood to put on airs herself.

Jonathan lifted his head and studied the younger woman. “True. And irrelevant. Occasional hostility is the acceptable price of doing this business. And you’re keeping company with the director, so a lack of likability hasn’t slowed you down,” he observed.

“At the moment, being liked is not my problem,” Kyra said.

“How charming.” Jonathan looked to Cooke. “She shows promise. But I assume that you didn’t come just to escort this young lady down?”

“You heard about Taipei?” Cooke asked.

“Of course,” Jonathan said. “The hazmat unit was the interesting bit.”

“‘Interesting’ is not the word I would choose, but I agree. That’s why everything else on the Red Cell’s plate is now on hold.”

“You disagree with the China analysts on the situation?” Jonathan asked.

“You don’t?” Cooke answered.

“Of course I do,” Jonathan said. “But I’m disagreeable, so here I sit. What’s your issue?”

“My issue is that we’ve suffered a major intelligence failure every seven years since Pearl Harbor on average,” Cooke said. “So when APLAA tells me this is just going to be a little tiff, I want some insurance in case they’re wrong. The Red Cell is it. So tell me what you think.”

“I think the president should send in the aircraft carriers,” Jonathan said.

“You’re serious?” Kyra asked. “The Taiwanese arrest a few Chinese and you—”

“The Taiwanese arrested a few Chinese
spies
,” Jonathan corrected her. “And that is the prerogative of sovereign nations, so you can imagine why the Chinese might object to the Taiwanese doing that. Before last night, the Taiwanese had never detained an MSS officer in six decades precisely because they didn’t want to rile Big Brother. Now that little policy has changed and I suspect the Chinese won’t be amused. They’ll rattle the saber before this is finished.”

“All right,” Cooke said. “You have my attention.”

The analyst directed the women to a pair of chairs in the small open bullpen space and took a seat across from them. He stared past them out the window as he talked, making no eye contact with either woman. “Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists lost the Revolution, then fled to Taiwan and never surrendered. Imagine Jefferson Davis moving the capital of the Confederacy to Cuba in 1865 and never giving up its claim to the southern states. The Chinese see the Taiwanese as descendants of an enemy who should have surrendered, didn’t, and now want a consolation prize they don’t deserve. So the Chinese established the ‘One China’ policy and made it the prerequisite for doing business with the mainland. But every so often, the Taiwanese stick their head up, act like a sovereign country, and make the policy look like a farce. That doesn’t just humiliate Beijing. The
Communist Party partly justifies its hold on power by arguing that it’s the best protector of Chinese interests. That includes bringing Taiwan back into the fold, so the government’s legitimacy depends in part on Taiwan keeping its head down. Arresting spies threatens that. Tian will have to act.”

“You’re talking about military action?” Kyra asked.

“Possibly,” Jonathan observed. “Military exercises along the coast opposite Taiwan are always a favorite way to send a message.”

“What about an invasion?” Cooke asked.

Jonathan shrugged. “There has always been a debate about whether the PLA has the capability to invade Taiwan proper. But that kind of yes-no argument discourages thinking about scenarios that don’t fit neatly at the poles, which is foolish. History proves that there is such a thing as limited war for limited gains. So a few years ago I drafted a Red Cell paper positing a limited war scenario in which the Chinese moved across the strait in stages. It took five years, but the ‘incremental moves’ view has become accepted now, not that APLAA is happy about it.”

“They disagree?” Kyra asked.

“Actually, no,” Jonathan responded. “They just dislike the fact that I and not one of their own wrote the paper. That group holds grudges and has long memories.”

“I’ve had to stop them from ordering a hit on you more than once. You’re welcome, by the way,” Cooke said. “How will Tian play this?”

“Passive-aggressive at first, to see if Liang will cave,” Jonathan said. “He’ll start with the usual public speeches, editorials in the
People’s Daily,
that sort of thing. Keep track of what the
People’s Daily
is saying. It’s the Chinese
Pravda
, controlled by the party, so the editorials are official announcements. On the diplomatic front, Tian doesn’t see Liang as an equal. He’ll suggest negotiation in public, but privately he’ll expect all the compromises to come from Liang.”

“Good enough to start.” Cooke stood and nodded at Kyra. “Send me that invasion plan of yours by close of business. And put this young lady to work.”

“If I must,” he said. He turned to Kyra. “How long will you be staying?”

“Ask her,” Kyra said, pointing at the director.

“Undetermined,” Cooke said.

“So helpful.” Jonathan pulled a pad across the desk and wrote out
the titles and publication dates of several intelligence papers, all inked in neat block letters. “The China analysts keep hard copies of past research papers in their vault. Fifth floor.” He ripped the paper out and handed it to Kyra.

The titles were boring but the publication dates were not. “Some of these are as old as I am,” Kyra said.

“I wasn’t going to mention it, but that’s true,” Jonathan replied. “It’s a common error of the young to mistake the recent for the important.”

“You’re too kind,” Kyra said.

“Without question,” Jonathan agreed.

“Five bucks says you’ve got Asperger’s,” Kyra said.

“You’ll have to raise your bribe to find out,” Jonathan said.

“What if they won’t let me have these?” she asked, holding the paper up.

Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “If you have to ask permission before taking things, you’re working for the wrong Agency.”

Jonathan waited until the door closed behind Kyra before moving to the manager’s office. He threw himself into a chair while Cooke stopped at the doorway and leaned against the metal frame.

“I presume that she’s the reason you asked me to come in today?” he asked.

“She is,” Cooke answered. “Thanks for doing this.”

“I know an order when I hear one.”

“Still, you could have made this much more unpleasant,” Cooke said.

“The day is still young.”

The CIA director allowed herself a smile. “How’ve you been, Jon?” she asked.

“Well enough,” he said. “And you?’

Cooke shrugged. “Well enough,” she answered back.

“Are you still smoking Arturo Fuentes?”

“Only at home,” Cooke said. “I can’t change the no-smoking policy. It’s a federal law, after all.”

“It was bad enough when George Tenet walked around here chewing those things,” Jonathan said. The former director’s love for cigars had been so famous that his official portrait in the Agency gallery showed one sticking out of his coat pocket.

“George had impeccable taste in tobacco,” Cooke observed. “And
he had the king of Jordan slipping him Montecristo Edmundos from Havana. I still have a few in the humidor at home that he gave me. You should come by and light one up with me sometime.”

Jonathan either missed the hint or ignored it, and Cooke couldn’t tell which. “No, thank you,” he said. “I’m on good terms with my lungs and I want to stay that way.”

“Your loss,” Cooke said. “You seeing anyone?”

Jonathan cocked his head and his mouth twisted into a wry grin. “Hardly. I’m an acquired taste,” he said. “You?”

“The job keeps me busy. And there’s not much privacy at home with all the SPOs running around.”

“No doubt.”

“It won’t last forever, Jon,” Cooke told him. “Tread lightly with Stryker. Sending her up to APLAA by herself was throwing a Christian to the lions.”

“I don’t believe in teaching analysts to swim in the shallow end of the pool,” Jonathan said.

“What do you think of her?”

Jonathan shrugged. “She’s too young for me.”

“Not what I was asking,” Cooke said, her voice taking on a slightly cold edge. “She’s a case officer. Her first tour lasted six months. We had to pull her back from the field.”

“She blew an op?” Jonathan asked.

Cooke shook her head. “In a manner of speaking. She crossed paths with a station chief who’s personal friends with the director of national intelligence. He sent her to meet with an asset who turned out to be a double. She suspected it going in, and so did we, but the station chief ignored her. Gave her a direct order to go. She got burned and was almost picked up by the locals.”

Jonathan considered the answer for a second. “Venezuela?”

Cooke nodded. “The DNI was basing his advice to the president on a double agent’s reports. He needed someone to blame and was close friends with the station chief, so the hammer wasn’t coming down there,” she told him. “She needs a safe harbor.”

“The rest of the DI doesn’t like me, and the NCS doesn’t like the DI as a whole. You just put her in the one place where she’s guaranteed to be hated by everyone.”

“Not your problem. If she’s smart, she won’t let it become her problem either.” Cooke pushed herself away from the doorframe, turning to
leave. “By the way, Liang is going to give a statement to his press corps at twenty-thirty. I’ve told Open Source Center to make sure it runs on the internal network. State Department says that he’ll be talking about the arrests.”

Jonathan checked the wall clock and corrected for the time zones in his head. “Is that solid or a rumor some junior diplomat heard over drinks?”

Cooke shrugged. “Neither? Both? The arrests are the only thing going on over there worth a press conference. Anything else you need to get started on this?”

“A transcript of that Politburo Standing Committee meeting in Zhongnanhai.”

“That’s what you call a hard target,” Cooke said, smiling. “It would be like trying to plant a bug inside the White House.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Jonathan replied. “We should be able to recruit a member of the Standing Committee, right?”

“Couldn’t tell you if we had,” Cooke said.

OFFICE OF ASIAN PACIFIC, LATIN AMERICAN,
AND AFRICAN ANALYSIS (APLAA)
CIA HEADQUARTERS

The APLAA vault was everything Kyra had thought the Red Cell would be, ten times the space or more, with enough cubicles that Kyra wondered whether the Agency wasn’t violating fire codes. There was a two-level rack of laser printers sitting next to an industrial-sized copier, all of them running. The burn bags were overflowing with classified trash waiting to be thrown into the dump chutes that ran to the basement, where somebody would haul them away to be shredded and burned. It looked and sounded like a hundred people or more were in close quarters, and she could feel their energy.
Not-so-controlled chaos,
she thought. The tension in the vault was like the humidity on a hot Virginia day, nearly tactile and just as pervasive. There was no shortage of noise but an almost complete absence of human voices that Kyra found unnerving. Everyone was working, no one was talking. She wondered whether DI analysts were trained to retreat into their cubicles under stress.

A girl in blue jeans and a black polo shirt—acceptable attire on snow days—stepped forward; a gray badge clipped to her pocket announced
her status as a college intern, CIA’s version of legal slave labor.

Poor kid
, Kyra thought, though there was probably less than five years’ difference in their ages.
They should’ve let the interns stay home instead of dragging them in on a snow day.

“Can I help you?” the intern asked.

I hope I sound like an analyst.
She felt like an idiot. “I’m Kyra Stryker, from the Red Cell. We’re writing a piece on the Taiwan raids that went down last night and I wanted to pick up a few research papers.”

The intern frowned. “Does our office director know about it?”

Even the temporary help hates the Red Cell.
“I don’t know,” Kyra admitted. “We just got the assignment an hour ago. I’m just doing some research for a backgrounder.” Another term that she’d heard analysts use and hoped she was using correctly.

Apparently she had. “What do you need?” the intern said, with attitude. The younger woman was showing a remarkable lack of patience given that she wasn’t even a full-time staff member. She, of all the staff in the vault, had the least claim on pressure and analytic burdens to justify a lack of manners.

“I could use your help to find some finished intelligence reports.”

“Like I said, we’re all busy right now. You should look them up online.”

They’re busy. You’re just here to run interference.
Kyra studied the younger woman for a moment. Her instructors at the Farm had uncovered a talent in Kyra for sizing people up at a glance, finding character flaws through nonverbal cues alone. It was a divine gift for a disciple learning the arts of espionage, and her instructors had taught her to harness it with tactical planning. Some case officers didn’t know how to turn it on and off, lacking the needed conscience, and so used the skill on everyone. Kyra didn’t suffer from that problem. Her inner voice nagged her whenever she considered the idea of “case-officering” fellow Agency employees, but that voice was not inclined at the moment to be blocked by a DI analyst, and a college intern barely qualified for that status anyway.

Hostility was not the best approach at the moment, she decided. The intern was under stress and had shown enough spine to defend her assigned territory against an outsider who outranked her. But that courage was founded on borrowed authority, so a display of anger
would just put the woman further on the defensive and possibly drive her to call in reinforcements with real power to say no.

Most people have a natural desire to be helpful,
her instructors had told her.
Be nice. Be reasonable. Tell them you need them. Don’t give them a reason to dislike you, and their conscience will work in your favor.