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  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.”

  Kuo rolled his eyes and gently ran his gloved finger across the safety on his Heckler & Koch MP7, which act the federal officer couldn’t see in the dark. “How they come out depends on how they react once we go in,” Kuo said.

  “My superiors demand this! Alive! Do you understand me? Even bruises on their faces and hands are unacceptable, much less a corpse.”

  Kuo studied the other man. The federal was agitated, almost desperate. That meant he was under high-level scrutiny during this operation, and that meant the targets were to be bargaining chips for someone very senior. Who the NSB wished to bargain with was the question, and Kuo was sure he didn’t want to know. He had demanded the federals’ dossiers on the targets, refusing to even accept the raid assignment without access to the intelligence reports. Three were mainland Chinese. Their affiliations had been blacked out. Organized crime was a possibility, but the government wouldn’t bargain with the Triads. One target was a Taiwanese American, and Taiwan would not hold hostage a citizen of its largest Western patron. That left one possibility. It was common knowledge that Taiwan was overrun with Chinese spies, and until now the government had been smart enough to leave them alone. The National Security Bureau had never arrested a Chinese spy for fear of the reaction. Apparently that policy had changed . . . or someone was changing it now. Kuo didn’t like it, but foreign relations with the Chinese were far beyond the scope of his job.

  “Then your superiors can execute the raid,” Kuo said.

  “You have your orders!” The federal was almost yelling now and drawing attention from the others standing nearby, police and NSB officers alike.

  Kuo stepped forward and leaned toward the man’s face. “I will not put my men at risk for someone’s political agenda,” Kuo said, sotto voce. “Whether your suspects come out alive will depend on whether they are armed and resist. If that is unacceptable, then you should rethink this.”

  The NSB officer took a deep breath and shook his head. “If my superiors are unsatisfied—”

  “Given the information you’ve provided, my decision is correct,” Kuo said. “Do we go or not?”

  The federal toyed with his phone, thought about making another call, then finally returned his cell phone to his coat pocket. “You go.”

  Kuo turned away, motioned his men forward with a hand signal, and gave the same order over his encrypted radio to the team on the building’s far side. In the back, men in black boots, jumpsuits, hoods, and helmets moved forward in the early morning dark. They reached the building’s side and raised portable ladders against the brick wall. Two men quickly climbed to the top rungs, careful to keep their heads below the windowsills, and pulled breaching crowbars out of their backpacks. The men below extracted stun grenades from their vests.

  Kuo led his team to the front entrance, then held up a fist, and the line of men stopped on command. The officer behind Kuo stepped around, dropped to a padded knee on the dirty concrete, and slipped a fiber optic line under the door. There was a camera in the tip and the officer held the color monitor where Kuo could see the screen. The officer twisted the line to the right. Kuo saw no one. He heard voices through the door, but his helmet and balaclava dulled his hearing and he couldn’t make out the conversation. The kneeling officer twisted the optic line back and the camera looked left. Three men came into view. Kuo nodded and held up three fingers to the men behind him. The officer removed the camera and fell to the back of the line.

  Kuo extracted a stun grenade from his vest, pulled the pin, and held down the spoon. He nodded to the breaching officer holding the ten-pound sledge. The camera officer in the rear of the line grasped his radio microphone and whispered. The breacher drew the sledge back and then swung his tool hard, smashing the lock and ripping the dead bolt out of the door frame with the sound of branches snapping in a high wind. Kuo tossed the grenade into the room.

  The targets in the front room twisted in their chairs to look toward the broken door as it crashed open. It was an instinctive reaction. The grenade ignited a 6 million candela flash that lit up all the photosensitive cells in their retinas simultaneously. Their vision froze like a film reel stuck on a single frame, sending the same picture to their brains over and over as their eyes struggled to restore their sight. The 180-decibel blast that struck their inner ears a millisecond later was not far below the threshold that would have caused soft tissue damage. Blind, nearly deaf, they reached out and groped for any support within reach.

  In the rear, the second team smashed out the windows with expandable batons and threw their own grenades into the back rooms. They had kept the apartment under surveillance for more than a week while Kuo argued with the federals about the raid plan. There were four men inside the apartment, but only three in the front room. Another was somewhere in the rear, where the lights were dimmed. Kuo had hoped that the last target was not inside the windowless bathroom they knew to be in the back.

  Kuo heard the grenades in the rear rooms fire. He turned the door’s corner into the apartment, his line of officers following behind like a black snake, each man raising his MP7 rifle to eye level. Kuo and the man behind swept the front room while the rest moved to the hall to help the rear entry team secure the back rooms.

  There were no armed combatants in Kuo’s sight and the men they had come for were helpless. Kuo extracted a baton from his belt, snapped it open, and struck behind the first man’s knees hard enough to topple him. The second and third men went down like the first. Kuo and his partner fell on them and bound the men’s hands with flex cuffs.

  Kuo heard shouts from the back of the apartment and the high crack of small arms fire, a 9 mm pistol from the sound. He raised his own weapon to eye level and took a step toward the hall when he heard the faint three-round buzz of an HK like his own. He moved down the hall to the bedroom on the right, staring over the gun barrel as he went.

  There were three men in the room. One wore street clothes—the Taiwanese expatriate who worked for the American company and who had been meeting with the Chinese spies in the front room. The other two were Kuo’s breaching team. The civilian was prone, motionless, with a bloody stain growing on the front of his shirt. Kuo’s men were gagging. There was a hole in a silver metal thermos on the floor and a white aerosol was escaping like steam from a kettle with enough pressure to spin the bottle in a lazy circle. One of Kuo’s men had likely mistaken the container for a weapon in the dark and fired a three-shot burst. Two rounds had struck the dead man in center mass. One had penetrated the pressurized thermos.

  One of his men let out a strangled gurgle a
nd Kuo reached out a hand. Without thinking he took in a breath to hold. It was a mistake and he realized it as his throat began to burn. He dragged his subordinate back toward the hall by the drag strap that ran across the top of the man’s tactical vest.

  “Out! Everyone out!” he yelled. It came out as a wet rasp. He felt his throat swelling.

  His partner in the front room saw Kuo dragging a body and radioed for medical help. Kuo expelled the contaminated air in his lungs and sucked in a breath of fresh air. It did not stop the burning, which felt like a thousand needles driving into his throat from the inside. He ignored the pain and rushed back down the hall for his second teammate. He would not bother with the civilian. Two of the three rounds had struck near the dead man’s heart. The quantity of blood on the floor suggested that a bullet had perforated a major artery, if not the heart itself.

  Breathing was becoming difficult, the burning was worse, and Kuo began gasping for air himself. The burning pain and slow asphyxiation collapsed his knees. Certain that he was going into cardiac arrest, he pounded his chest with a fist to keep his heart beating. An officer took him under the shoulder and carried him outside while the others took the prisoners and their incapacitated colleagues. Kuo fell onto the grubby hallway floor and rolled onto his back.

  “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

  MONDAY

  DAY TWO

  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,” Dresche
r 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.