Red Cell (4 page)

Not safe.

Kyra speed-dialed the only number programmed into the cell phone.

The call connected. The voice on the other end was American.

“Operator.”

TWO MONTHS LATER

BEIHAI PARK, BEIJING
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Of Beijing’s countless parks, Pioneer loved this one alone. Emperors had lived in this retreat a thousand years ago, when the Christians had been losing the Crusades. Its beauty was unique, he thought, and the Tai Ye lake offered comfort even in winter, when the Siberian wind tore through his thin coat and left him shivering on the shoreline. Tonight he had spent a full hour in the cold as he watched the soft waves lap the rocks. It was not the act of pure meditation he would have liked. He had been watching to see if the few people willing to endure the wind lingered near him. The eternal rumors of a mole in the ranks of the Ministry of State Security—the Guojia Anquan Bu—had turned into an internal sweep again. It was always a concern, but the investigations had come before and always passed him by.

Still, Pioneer indulged in the dinner. Coming to the Fangshan restaurant was a persistent mistake but his discipline always failed him in this one way. The show of affluence was a risk. Presidents and prime ministers dined here. The prices were high by local standards, almost three hundred yuan for this evening’s supper and it was not the most costly meal he’d ever ordered. It was the one expense he allowed for the funds the CIA had been paying him. The rest was in an account held by the Wells Fargo Bank in the United States and it all meant nothing to him. He would never live long enough to use it. He was sure of that. Traitors received no final meal of their choosing in the People’s Republic of China. If he was going to walk into an arrest, and therefore his execution, he would enjoy a meal worthy of an emperor before he went. At least that was the lie he told himself. The truth was that it gave him something to focus on. He was a traitor to his country, not proud of the fact, so he sat at his table before every meeting with his handler and caged his guilt in a private liturgy as routine to him now as drinking the green leaf tea with his meal.

He finished the meal of fried prawns and crabmeat and lifted his teacup. It was almost time to leave and his mind was running like a
clock counting down. He always hated this moment. He could never stop counting the minutes until the next meeting. The little timepiece in his head never spoke louder than a whisper, but somehow it always threatened to swallow every other thought. Relentless, quiet torture it was, and had been for twenty-five years. He never lost track of that time even when he was sleeping. It was a miracle that he was still a sane man.

The restaurant was only half-full. The filthy, polluted snowfall had kept most of the tourists away. Pioneer counted three tables of Occidentals, whether Americans or British he couldn’t tell. He recognized a table of Koreans, a pair of lovers he thought were Thai, and a small group of . . . Turks? Iranians? He could never tell the Arabs from the Persians.

In the far corner he saw a Chinese face, a man dining alone like himself. He had seen that face . . . when? His memory was eidetic by training but his recall was not instant. He held his own features in a rigid mask as he searched his memory. Time and distance . . . had he seen the man today? Yes, at the lunch market seven hours and two miles from the very table where he now sat—too far away and too long ago. Was it random chance that the man was here in the Fangshan? That was possible but not probable.

“Your bill, sir.” The waiter laid a leather folio on the table.

Pioneer nodded, let the waiter leave, placed cash inside, and left the table. He did not turn to see whether the familiar man was standing to follow. The dinner ritual was finished, and he had more subtle ways to see whether the man pursued him.

Pioneer quieted the voices in his mind and walked into the dusk. He walked over the short bridge to the mainland and turned east.

TAIPEI
REPUBLIC OF CHINA (TAIWAN)

The condominium was average in all respects, a space on the third floor of an unremarkable structure in one of Taipei’s oldest boroughs. Perhaps forty years old, the exterior was clean with a small lawn, a few hedges, and bare flowerbeds with graying mulch that would wait another few months before filling with weeds and wildflowers. The apartment
sat near the building’s rear stairwell, so chosen by the occupants so that visitors could not approach easily without notice.

The building presented no tactical challenges for Captain Kuo’s team. Such places were not designed for defense against an armed raid, and the variables involved in staging one were minimal. It would be unfortunate for the targets that a safe house remained safe only so long as it was secret.

The sun would break the horizon within the half hour and Kuo wanted the element of surprise that would vanish with the dawn. He looked to the rear of the staging area behind the line of trees. Officers from the National Security Bureau stood there fidgeting and trying to find something to do with their hands. They wanted desperately to smoke cigarettes to ease the tension but the light of burning tobacco could give away his men’s positions in the dark and would certainly disturb their night vision, so Kuo had forbidden it. They were an arrogant lot, ordering his men about like they were hired help, so he had enjoyed the exercise of that little bit of authority.

The senior NSB officer had been on an encrypted cell phone for more than an hour. He caught Kuo’s look and muttered an impolite phrase into the phone. He finally closed the handset and approached Kuo.

“I say again, you must use the rubber bullets,” the NSB officer said.

Idiots
, Kuo thought. “Can you guarantee that the targets are unarmed?” Like a good lawyer, he’d known the answer to the question before he had asked it.

The NSB officer gritted his yellow-and-brown teeth. He’d answered that particular question twice already during the night and had no desire to humiliate himself again before this arrogant little policeman. The man was barely one step removed from a street cop. He couldn’t have any appreciation for the political sensitivities at stake. “You must bring them out alive and unharmed.”

Kuo rolled his eyes and gently ran his gloved finger across the safety on his Heckler & Koch MP7, which act the federal officer couldn’t see in the dark. “How they come out depends on how they react once we go in,” Kuo said.

“My superiors demand this! Alive! Do you understand me? Even bruises on their faces and hands are unacceptable, much less a corpse.”

Kuo studied the other man. The federal was agitated, almost desperate.
That meant he was under high-level scrutiny during this operation, and
that
meant the targets were to be bargaining chips for someone very senior. Who the NSB wished to bargain with was the question, and Kuo was sure he didn’t want to know. He had demanded the federals’ dossiers on the targets, refusing to even accept the raid assignment without access to the intelligence reports. Three were mainland Chinese. Their affiliations had been blacked out. Organized crime was a possibility, but the government wouldn’t bargain with the Triads. One target was a Taiwanese American, and Taiwan would not hold hostage a citizen of its largest Western patron. That left one possibility. It was common knowledge that Taiwan was overrun with Chinese spies, and until now the government had been smart enough to leave them alone. The National Security Bureau had never arrested a Chinese spy for fear of the reaction. Apparently that policy had changed . . . or someone was changing it now. Kuo didn’t like it, but foreign relations with the Chinese were far beyond the scope of his job.

“Then your superiors can execute the raid,” Kuo said.

“You have your orders!” The federal was almost yelling now and drawing attention from the others standing nearby, police and NSB officers alike.

Kuo stepped forward and leaned toward the man’s face. “I will not put my men at risk for someone’s political agenda,” Kuo said, sotto voce. “Whether your suspects come out alive will depend on whether they are armed and resist. If that is unacceptable, then you should rethink this.”

The NSB officer took a deep breath and shook his head. “If my superiors are unsatisfied—”

“Given the information you’ve provided, my decision is correct,” Kuo said. “Do we go or not?”

The federal toyed with his phone, thought about making another call, then finally returned his cell phone to his coat pocket. “You go.”

Kuo turned away, motioned his men forward with a hand signal, and gave the same order over his encrypted radio to the team on the building’s far side. In the back, men in black boots, jumpsuits, hoods, and helmets moved forward in the early morning dark. They reached the building’s side and raised portable ladders against the brick wall. Two men quickly climbed to the top rungs, careful to keep their heads below the windowsills, and pulled breaching crowbars out of their backpacks. The men below extracted stun grenades from their vests.

Kuo led his team to the front entrance, then held up a fist, and the line of men stopped on command. The officer behind Kuo stepped around, dropped to a padded knee on the dirty concrete, and slipped a fiber optic line under the door. There was a camera in the tip and the officer held the color monitor where Kuo could see the screen. The officer twisted the line to the right. Kuo saw no one. He heard voices through the door, but his helmet and balaclava dulled his hearing and he couldn’t make out the conversation. The kneeling officer twisted the optic line back and the camera looked left. Three men came into view. Kuo nodded and held up three fingers to the men behind him. The officer removed the camera and fell to the back of the line.

Kuo extracted a stun grenade from his vest, pulled the pin, and held down the spoon. He nodded to the breaching officer holding the ten-pound sledge. The camera officer in the rear of the line grasped his radio microphone and whispered. The breacher drew the sledge back and then swung his tool hard, smashing the lock and ripping the dead bolt out of the door frame with the sound of branches snapping in a high wind. Kuo tossed the grenade into the room.

The targets in the front room twisted in their chairs to look toward the broken door as it crashed open. It was an instinctive reaction. The grenade ignited a 6 million candela flash that lit up all the photosensitive cells in their retinas simultaneously. Their vision froze like a film reel stuck on a single frame, sending the same picture to their brains over and over as their eyes struggled to restore their sight. The 180-decibel blast that struck their inner ears a millisecond later was not far below the threshold that would have caused soft tissue damage. Blind, nearly deaf, they reached out and groped for any support within reach.

In the rear, the second team smashed out the windows with expandable batons and threw their own grenades into the back rooms. They had kept the apartment under surveillance for more than a week while Kuo argued with the federals about the raid plan. There were four men inside the apartment, but only three in the front room. Another was somewhere in the rear, where the lights were dimmed. Kuo had hoped that the last target was not inside the windowless bathroom they knew to be in the back.

Kuo heard the grenades in the rear rooms fire. He turned the door’s corner into the apartment, his line of officers following behind like a black snake, each man raising his MP7 rifle to eye level. Kuo and the
man behind swept the front room while the rest moved to the hall to help the rear entry team secure the back rooms.

There were no armed combatants in Kuo’s sight and the men they had come for were helpless. Kuo extracted a baton from his belt, snapped it open, and struck behind the first man’s knees hard enough to topple him. The second and third men went down like the first. Kuo and his partner fell on them and bound the men’s hands with flex cuffs.

Kuo heard shouts from the back of the apartment and the high
crack
of small arms fire, a 9 mm pistol from the sound. He raised his own weapon to eye level and took a step toward the hall when he heard the faint three-round buzz of an HK like his own. He moved down the hall to the bedroom on the right, staring over the gun barrel as he went.

There were three men in the room. One wore street clothes—the Taiwanese expatriate who worked for the American company and who had been meeting with the Chinese spies in the front room. The other two were Kuo’s breaching team. The civilian was prone, motionless, with a bloody stain growing on the front of his shirt. Kuo’s men were gagging. There was a hole in a silver metal thermos on the floor and a white aerosol was escaping like steam from a kettle with enough pressure to spin the bottle in a lazy circle. One of Kuo’s men had likely mistaken the container for a weapon in the dark and fired a three-shot burst. Two rounds had struck the dead man in center mass. One had penetrated the pressurized thermos.

One of his men let out a strangled gurgle and Kuo reached out a hand. Without thinking he took in a breath to hold. It was a mistake and he realized it as his throat began to burn. He dragged his subordinate back toward the hall by the drag strap that ran across the top of the man’s tactical vest.

“Out! Everyone out!” he yelled. It came out as a wet rasp. He felt his throat swelling.

His partner in the front room saw Kuo dragging a body and radioed for medical help. Kuo expelled the contaminated air in his lungs and sucked in a breath of fresh air. It did not stop the burning, which felt like a thousand needles driving into his throat from the inside. He ignored the pain and rushed back down the hall for his second teammate. He would not bother with the civilian. Two of the three rounds had struck near the dead man’s heart. The quantity of blood on the floor suggested that a bullet had perforated a major artery, if not the heart itself.

Breathing was becoming difficult, the burning was worse, and Kuo began gasping for air himself. The burning pain and slow asphyxiation collapsed his knees. Certain that he was going into cardiac arrest, he pounded his chest with a fist to keep his heart beating. An officer took him under the shoulder and carried him outside while the others took the prisoners and their incapacitated colleagues. Kuo fell onto the grubby hallway floor and rolled onto his back.