She rolled the gauze around her arm to hold in the wad she had stuffed into the tear in the arm. It was an ugly wrap job, but both the drug and the cloth did their job and a pair of butterfly clips finished the task.
Kyra staggered back into the bedroom and almost collapsed before reaching the bed. She pulled herself off her knees onto the mattress and rolled onto her back. She rifled through her jacket and found the encrypted cell phone the deputy chief of station had given her two hours before.
The morphine and stress release were going to knock her unconscious, she knew. She had maybe a minute to call before she passed out in a haze. Her arm was entirely, mercifully numb.
A pair of sirens sounded outside the window. She couldn’t judge the distance but they seemed to come from different points.
Not safe here, she thought. She didn’t know the last point at which the SEBIN had seen her, and therefore the point that would mark the center of the enemy’s search. They could be nearby, going high-rise to high-rise, floor by floor. The SEBIN could come crashing through the safe house door. They could be outside, in the hall, on the stairwell. The walls wouldn’t keep them out.
The room seemed to shrink around her. Kyra felt the panic rising inside her chest, the stress of the last few minutes finally catching up. Her good hand started shaking, this time not from shock or pain.
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.”
CHAPTER 1
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.
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.”