Kyra signed in. After a short wait, the desk nurse escorted her back to an examination room. Kyra took the usual place on the exam table and the nurse didn’t bother to assure her that someone would be in to see her in a few minutes.
The doctor was an old man, she noted, gray hair and his share of weathered skin, though Kyra suspected he’d been a handsome man when he was younger. He said nothing as he studied her chart, and Kyra took the time to study him. She’d been here, just after Caracas, and talked with another doctor about his job. It was relatively simple, with most duties consisting of performing physicals and dispensing vaccinations to clear staff officers to travel overseas. The doctors were usually busiest at Christmas when they had to dole out the free flu shots to all comers. But every so often analysts would call for a consult about theoretical patients they wouldn’t identify despite the doctors’ own TS/SCI security clearances. They were trying to determine when some particularly unpopular foreign leader was going to drop dead, Kyra supposed, which made for a nice puzzle with no patient to examine.
And sometimes they got to treat patients, like Kyra, with wounds or diseases contracted in places they couldn’t always tell him they’d been. She was sure that broke up the monotony.
“Still sore?” the doctor finally asked. He closed up the chart and set it on the nearby counter.
“Yes,” Kyra admitted. “It’s stiff mostly. Makes driving a little more complicated.”
“You drive an automatic or a stick?”
“An automatic,” Kyra said, and she was grateful for it. Driving a stick shift would’ve been torture in Beltway traffic, which was stop-and-go most of the time. “I usually don’t feel it until I have to make a hard turn or mess with the radio.”
“You probably still have some residual deep tissue bruising,” the doctor said. “You lost some triceps and brachialis, and there’s scarring across the site and down into the muscle. Scar tissue isn’t real pliable, so you’re going to suffer some loss of flexibility. Not too much, I think, but you’ll notice it. Right- or left-handed?”
“Left.”
“That’s good news. It won’t affect your primary arm,” the doctor told her. Kyra was sure it was an attempt to comfort her, but it struck her as weak. “Okay. Let’s have a look.”
Kyra unbuttoned her shirt and pulled her right arm out of the sleeve, exposing a large, thick medical bandage taped on all four sides across the back of her right upper arm. The doctor pulled the cover back, gently separating the tape from her skin until the gauze came away. She had a lateral laceration running almost three inches across her triceps. The once-ragged edges of the torn skin had been trimmed neat by a surgeon’s scalpel and pulled together, and they were still held by two dozen tight stitches.
The doctor stared at the wound, turning her arm slightly from side to side as he studied the wound. “It looks good,” he finally said. “No signs of infection. I think the stitches can come out whenever you want, but keep it covered for another couple of weeks to be safe.” Kyra nodded, put her arm back inside her shirt, and pulled it down over her waist. “How’s the Vicodin working for you?” he asked.
“Pretty good, I guess,” Kyra said. “It lets me sleep. Still hurts sometimes, though. Like deep, in the bone.”
“I’m not surprised,” the doctor replied. “It’s probably the bruising. The fracture in the humerus should be healed by now. And if it gets too bad, we can go up on the Vicodin. Do you need a refill?”
“Sure,” Kyra said, without enthusiasm.
“I’ll write one up.” He caught the depression in her voice. She hadn’t tried to hide it. “You were lucky,” he offered. “You could’ve lost that arm.”
“I don’t feel lucky,” Kyra told him. She finished straightening her shirt and pushed herself off the exam table onto the floor.
“Getting shot will do that, I guess,” he conceded.
Kyra finished rolling up her sleeve as the doctor left the room. One appointment finished. She was far more worried about the second.
Kathryn Cooke’s first visit to the Oval Office had been her own inauguration as CIA director. That summer day, the president of the United States had spent two minutes, carefully timed by the White House chief of staff, on small talk and a tour of the room. The national security advisor had administered the oath of office while the White House photographer recorded the event. The White House press corps had been admitted to hear the president deliver a statement of confidence in the job she would do. Cooke made her own brief statement — she’d worked for six hours, revised it a dozen times, and memorized it — expressing the usual gratitude. Five minutes were granted for six questions before the president excused the press corps. Cooke was allowed thirty seconds of small talk and then was politely dismissed. Her few return visits had mostly been social affairs. The job of CIA director was not what it once had been. For fifty-nine years, her predecessors had both run the CIA and managed the intelligence community, as much as it could be managed. But the Agency had suffered too many failures, an angry Congress had created a new office to take over the latter job, and so Cooke answered to the director of national intelligence. The DNI, Michael Rhead, was now the president’s intel advisor, and that left little reason for the commander in chief to ever summon the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to the White House.
Cooke had never dwelled on the job’s new limitations. It was a higher post than she’d ever expected to hold and she was still an agency director with the usual perquisites — a basement of security personnel and secure communications gear, an armored Chevrolet SUV with a driver, and a chase car of armed guards. She would have preferred to drive her BMW but conceded that the escort gave her time to read instead of fighting perpetually clogged Beltway lanes.
It was a true blessing this morning. The Ops Center call came after three hours of sleep. Coffee, a shower that wasn’t as hot as she preferred, and old Navy discipline brought her online. The senior duty officer had sent the raw SIGINT to her secure fax, and a scan of the pages over blueberry yogurt and granola put her in full motion. It had then been her unpleasant task to notify the DNI and the national security advisor. The former had a demeanor that always made phone calls an irritating duty regardless of the hour. The latter took the early call like the gracious gentleman that he was.
The cold Virginia morning chased away the last vestiges of sleepiness as she walked to the armored car. A security officer ran the President’s Daily Brief article to the vehicle as she was climbing into the back seat.
For the President
February 2
In the Last Few Hours…
Arrests in Taipei Threaten Cross-Strait Status Quo
Taiwan’s arrest of eight Chinese nationals — at least three of whom are PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS) intelligence officers — could sow confusion among the PRC leadership about Taiwanese President Liang’s intentions and lead to a confrontation over the “One China” policy. We have no information on how Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB) identified the MSS officers or who issued the orders to arrest them.
• The arrests could damage the MSS espionage infrastructure in Taipei in the short term, but the MSS almost certainly has other MSS officers in place who will redeploy to maintain or reconstitute asset networks affected by the arrests.
It is unlikely that Taiwan’s NSB would have executed the counterintelligence operation without Liang’s knowledge and approval. Tian almost certainly will consider Liang personally responsible for the operation and will demand the release of the detainees.
• Liang likely will resist giving up the detainees without diplomatic concessions from the PRC to avoid appearing even weaker before the March general election.