“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.
CHAPTER 2
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?”