Mark Henshaw
Red Cell
To Janna,
who got me started;
and
to Russell, Adam, and Natalie,
the reasons I keep going.
EXCERPT FROM THE CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
For centuries China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation.
After World War II, the Communists under MAO Zedong established an autocratic socialist system that, while ensuring China’s sovereignty, imposed strict controls over everyday life and cost the lives of tens of millions of people…
Following the Communist victory on the mainland in 1949, 2 million Nationalists under CHIANG KAI-SHEK fled to Taiwan. Over the next five decades, the ruling authorities gradually democratized. In 2000, Taiwan underwent its first peaceful transfer of power from the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) to the Democratic Progressive Party.
The dominant political issue for both countries continues to be the question of eventual unification.
CIA World Factbook
PROLOGUE
The floods had killed another dozen people this year, all nameless caraqueños who lived in the shantytowns that covered the hills around the capital city. The mudslides had cut swaths through the slums a week before and dumped the dead into the concrete channel that cut Caracas in half and barely held the Guaire River in its course. Now the canal swelled to its rim with dirty December water and whatever had lined the Caracas streets between the hills and the city center. Cars driving above sent a constant spray into the river, adding a strange sound to the gurgling rush, like the hand of God tearing paper. The brown water was barely visible in the moonlight under this stretch of the Autopista Francisco Fajardo freeway. The shadows turned the canal graffiti into silent monsters, watching the flood, waiting to laugh at anyone foolish enough to play along the water’s edge.
Kyra Stryker trudged along the north side of the river, staying off the dirt embankment and giving herself enough distance that a stumble wouldn’t send her in. The canal was too steep and the river’s current too strong for anyone who fell in to climb out again. The only question was whether the poor soul would expire from the pollution or drowning on his way to the Caribbean Sea. However she was going to die, she wasn’t going to go that way, she promised herself.
It would be no trouble for the enemy to come up behind her here. She’d given up trying to identify possible ambush spots, there were too many, and the river would be the perfect tool for killing a CIA officer and disposing of the body in a stroke if the SEBIN, the Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia, were so inclined. They hadn’t been so reckless, yet, but the murder rate in Caracas would make it an easy matter to write off her disappearance. The police, as corrupt as the criminals, would wag their fingers at the embassy officer sent to file the missing persons report. A woman walking alone at night in a dark barrio? Americans need to be more careful, they would say.
Her dirty-blond hair, pulled into a braid, was already wet from the evening drizzle, and she shoved her hands into the empty pockets of her jacket to keep them dry. The rain was keeping most of the natives off the street, which left her feeling exposed. Tall, fair-haired, even dressed down in blue jeans and a brown leather jacket, she didn’t mix well with the normal street crowds in this city. It could have been worse. More than a few of her Farm classmates had drawn slots in Africa and the Middle East, both murderous places for Americans in their own ways, where her only way to disappear would have been under an abaya. Caracas offered civilized living, with natives more friendly to Americans than the government. That made the capital a hostile but not lethal environment in which to hone her craft, at least during the daylight hours.
Working the capital streets at night was another matter.
It would be a simple meeting, or so her chief of station had insisted. But Sam Rigdon was a fool and Kyra wasn’t the only one who thought so. Rigdon was letting the asset, a senior SEBIN officer, choose the site and time of the meet. The asset claimed he knew the city better than any American — probably true but beside the point — and Rigdon had accepted the man’s logic. Kyra wasn’t six months out of the CIA Farm and even she knew conceding that particular power to any asset was plain stupid. In this business, stupid was just another word for dangerous, which could lead to dead very quickly.
“This man has brought us good intel,” Rigdon said. That was questionable at best. The asset’s cigars and Caribbean rum were better than the intel he’d delivered. Kyra tried to talk reason to Rigdon, which was a bold move for someone as junior as she was. CIA chiefs of station were little kings, with the power to eject any junior officer from the country. The mercurial ones were known to do so for the most arbitrary reasons, but Rigdon was more arrogant than erratic, and that was the greater sin. At least the erratic ones could see their mistakes. Some of the other senior officers had stood behind her, and Kyra had heard more than one shouting match erupt behind Rigdon’s closed door while she sat outside. But the station chief just dismissed all worries with an impatient wave. “The asset,” he said, “is still on our side, still working for us. His loyalty will guarantee your safety.”
Kyra was sure that she’d never heard a more stupid thing in her life.
So she was on the street, unarmed. There was no explaining away a Glock to the SEBIN. Caution was her only defense, but the rumble of autopista traffic and the sound of the rushing water assaulted her ears, and the staggered street lighting destroyed her night vision. Every possible route to the meeting site was a surveillance detection nightmare.
Kyra cursed herself for being a coward and refusing to disobey Rigdon’s order.
The footbridge finally appeared after an hour’s walk. It was more a scaffolding than a bridge, barely half-built by the look of it, with a metal grate for a floor. It was twenty meters long, maybe two meters wide, all dark metal, probably rusted over from years of neglect and floodwaters rising and falling over the rails and crawlspace under the walkway. Kyra half expected to see it shored up by vine ropes.
At ten meters from the bridge, Kyra finally saw the asset’s silhouette at the midpoint through the trees but could make out no other details. The lights on the bridge were out, whether from neglected bulbs or shoddy wiring she didn’t know. She saw the burning end of a cigarro rise to meet the asset’s mouth, glow brighter for a short second; then the small light fell into the water and disappeared as he tossed the stub away.
A streetlamp marked where the sidewalk ended at the bridge. Kyra reached the spot, stopped, and put herself in front of the light cone so the illumination was behind her. The asset would only see her silhouette, not her face.
Her chest tightened as she scanned the space in front of her. The streetlamp lit up the line of trees in front of her but the light didn’t go far beyond. No movement, no sound beyond the water and the freeway.
It felt wrong. She couldn’t explain it better than that.
The asset saw her and turned. No question now, she had his full attention. He raised another cigarro and Kyra finally saw his face for a short second as he flicked on a torch lighter and set the tobacco on fire. He frowned as he replaced the unit in his pocket. He could make out her shape in the dark. She was in the right place at the right time, but he was expecting to meet a man, Kyra was sure, not a woman.