Red Cell (5 page)

“Evacuate the building,” Kuo tried to say. He failed. He tasted blood on his tongue. Lots of blood.

The unexposed officers set up for triage on the lawn and started artificial respiration on their teammates. Kuo doubted they would live. He rolled onto his side and spit blood. Whatever else the aerosol was, it was highly acidic. He could feel it eating his mucus membranes, and the amount he had inhaled had been small compared to the others. Even if the medics rushing to his side had the supplies to treat this—whatever
this
was—the exposure his teammates had suffered would prove too severe.

The federals approached the group and examined the prisoners on the grass. One pulled out a sheet of photographs and compared it to the targets’ faces in sequence. All three were bleeding heavily from their noses and ears but the medics assured the officers that no permanent damage had been done. They had been secured without visible injury besides the blood, which could be cleaned up, and they had not breathed in the chemical that had incapacitated Kuo’s team. Their identities confirmed, the security officer stood and pulled out his cell phone.

A medic lifted Kuo’s head and a second forced a tube down his throat. Kuo’s last thought was that the federals would answer to him if they had known about the thermos.

CIA OPERATIONS CENTER
7TH FLOOR, OLD HEADQUARTERS BUILDING,
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

The midnight shift was still young, but Jakob Drescher wasn’t and the senior duty officer refused to show weakness to the staff. He was past middle age, older by a decade than anyone else in the Operations Center, and night watches were getting harder by the year. He argued to himself that his subordinates’ true advantage came only from coffee’s power to keep the brain active in the dead of night. Caffeine addicts staffed the night shift in CIA’s Operations Center, and they couldn’t imagine how Drescher found the will to resist. One of the perks that made up for a government salary was access to the river of java that ran through Langley, fueled by officers in the field sending back foreign brews that made domestic brands taste like swill. But good Mormons don’t drink coffee, Drescher was a Mormon, the son of Cold War East German immigrant converts, and the argument ended there.

The world was quiet tonight. The broadcast news playing on the floor-to-ceiling matrix of plasma televisions was all trivial stories. The cables coming in from CIA field stations were infrequent and blissfully dull by any standard. If the rest of the shift stayed this quiet, he would have nothing to pass over to his day shift counterpart in a few hours. Drescher checked the clock, which was a mistake. The true secret to surviving a night watch was to never mark the time. Drescher couldn’t prove it, but he swore that Einstein must have worked night shifts as a patent clerk to come up with the theory that the passage of time was relative. A night during a crisis could pass in a hurry, but tonight the lack of activity was the answer to a prayer. Drescher had plans for his weekend, which fell on a Wednesday and Thursday this week because of the rotating Ops Center staffing schedule. He would miss church on Sunday, which his wife wouldn’t appreciate, but he would need the sleep during the day too much. He would always pass on the coffee, but he was too old to give up the Sunday sleep anymore.

“Got something for you.” The analyst from the Office of Asian Pacific, Latin American, and African Analysis (APLAA) rose from her desk and maneuvered her way down the aisle without looking, eyes locked on the hard-copy printout in her hand. Drescher couldn’t remember the young woman’s name. She was a Latina, a pretty girl, newly graduated from some California school, but Drescher had forgotten her name as soon as he’d heard it. He’d given up on trying to learn the names of most of his subordinates, in fact, and had taken to calling them by the names of their home offices. The Ops Center staff changed so often, with all the young officers eager to punch tickets for promotion and staying only a few months at a time.

“Either give me a hundred dead bodies or I don’t want to hear about it,” Drescher grumbled. “Fifty, if it’s Europe. And where’s my hot chocolate?”

“You know, under that gruff exterior beats a heart of lead,” APLAA remarked.

“Compassion is for the weak,” Drescher said. “It’s why I’m the boss and you’re my peon.”

“I live to serve,” the analyst replied.

“Don’t be facetious, APLAA.”

“I’ve got a name, you know,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s APLAA. What have you got?”

“NIACT cable from Taipei. One body and a lot of other people getting carried away in paddy wagons and ambulances. The locals just arrested big brother’s chief of station.” APLAA thrust the paper at Drescher. NIght ACTion cables required immediate attention regardless of when they arrived. That wasn’t a problem at headquarters, where there was always someone on duty. Cables going back to field stations were more troublesome. When one of those went to a station overseas, someone, usually the most junior case officer, had to report to work—no matter the obscene hour—to field the request.

Drescher took the paper and scanned it twice before looking up. “Why did they need a hazmat unit—?” He stopped midsentence. None of the answers his tired mind offered were encouraging.

“Yeah. Hazmat got the call in the middle of the raid. NSA labeled it a ‘panic’ call. Someone walked into a nasty surprise. The Fort is waking up everyone who can understand at least basic Mandarin, but they’ll need a few more hours to translate everything.” Translators were a
scarce resource for the hard languages, and Mandarin Chinese was in the top five on the list.

“Any civilian casualties?” Drescher asked. This was getting good.

“None reported.”

The senior duty officer grunted. “Any reaction from the mainland?”

“Nothing yet,” the woman told him. “Beijing Station said they’re going to work their assets. Wouldn’t tell me who they’d be talking to.”

“Don’t bother asking,” Drescher ordered. “You’ll just make ’em mad.” CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the directorate that did the true “spy” work of recruiting foreign traitors, was protective of its sources. Twelve dead Russian assets courtesy of Aldrich Ames had been a string of harsh reminders that intelligence networks could be fragile things. But the APLAA analyst was young, one of the ambitious young officers who didn’t yet know not to ask.

“Nothing on the local news or the Internet,” APLAA said, ignoring the rebuke. “Taipei probably clamped down on the press. Nothing like a story about a Chinese spy bringing chemical weapons onto the island to scare the locals.”

“Don’t assume that it was a chemical weapon,” Drescher corrected her. “Could’ve been a gas spill or bystanders downwind of some tear gas. Just report the facts and save the analysis.” He kept a map of the world’s time zones under glass on his desk. The first cable said the arrests started at 1830 eastern standard time—6:30 p.m. on a civilian clock and six hours ago. A twelve-hour time zone difference meant 1830 in Washington DC was 6:30 a.m. in Beijing and Taipei. The raids went down almost at the crack of the winter dawn. Drescher checked the television. CNN’s brunette was talking about yesterday’s minuscule drop in the Dow, a nonstory meant to waste a minute of on-air time during a slow news cycle. BBC’s blonde was talking about labor protests in Paris, and the other channels were offering stories equally trivial. “It hasn’t reached the foreign wire services,” he noted. “Does State Department have anything?”

“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.

CIA HEADQUARTERS
ROUTE 123 ENTRANCE

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.