Red Cell (2 page)
Touchstone
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Henshaw
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First Touchstone hardcover edition May 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henshaw, Mark, 1970–
Red cell / Mark Henshaw.—1st Touchstone hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction. 2. International relations—
Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.E586R43 2012
813’.6—dc23
2011040716
ISBN 978-1-4516-6193-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-6194-1 (ebook)
To Janna,
who got me started;
and
to Russell, Adam, and Natalie,
the reasons I keep going.
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Chapter 3: Tuesday - Day Three
Chapter 4: Wednesday - Day Four
Chapter 5: Thursday - Day Five
Chapter 7: Saturday - Day Seven
Chapter 11: Wednesday - Day Eleven
Chapter 12: Thursday - Day Twelve
Chapter 13: Friday - Day Thirteen
Chapter 14: Saturday - Day Fourteen
Chapter 15: Sunday - Day Fifteen
Chapter 16: Monday - Day Sixteen
Chapter 17: Tuesday - Day Seventeen
Chapter 18: Wednesday - Day Eighteen
Chapter 19: Thursday - Day Nineteen
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
SANTIAGO DE LEÓN DE CARACAS
BOLIVARIAN REPUBLIC OF VENEZUELA
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.
Then he did exactly the wrong thing.
He waved her toward him.
Kyra clenched her fists to give the nervous energy somewhere to go. She held her poker face and she cocked her head at him a bit as her mind tore the situation down. It took a bare fraction of a second.
You don’t know me,
she thought. They had never met. She wasn’t the asset’s handler. A paranoid asset, worried for his safety, should
have been skeptical of a stranger arriving at an isolated meeting site. She could be a random tourist, however unlikely that was at this hour in this dark place, or, more likely, Venezuelan security, so the proper response was to act like he was ignoring her as he would any random person he met on the street. The burden should be hers to give him a prearranged signal to confirm both her identity and that she was clean of surveillance. He should then respond with a signal of his own. The asset had violated that simple protocol.
Nervous?
It was the only logical reason to have done what he did. The man was an experienced SEBIN officer, a trained professional. But he’d forgotten his training.
Why are you nervous?
There were two possibilities. He suspected surveillance, in which case he knew to give her a signal. Or he had confirmed surveillance, in which case he shouldn’t have even come. Both assumed he really was a traitor in danger of prison or execution if he was caught.
Of course, if he wasn’t in danger, then he would be nervous for a different reason entirely.
You’re here, amigo. No signal. Nervous.
SEBIN was here. But he still wanted her to walk onto the bridge.
He wasn’t afraid he would be caught. He was afraid she wouldn’t be. Afraid that the endgame of an operation in which he had a stake would fail.
Then Kyra saw it all, as clearly as though it had already happened.
El Presidente owned the courts. The conviction of an arrested CIA case officer on charges real and imagined would be a given. The would-be tyrant would use her to extort apologies and concessions from the US. He would make the detention public and drag out the story for weeks, months if he could. Humiliate her, the Agency, the United States. He would claim that her arrest was proof that the US wanted to overthrow him, maybe assassinate him, all to build him up in the eyes of allies here and abroad. He would declare every American at the embassy persona non grata and throw them out of Venezuela as retribution. And when all that was finished, expelling her from the country along with her colleagues would not be a given. He would keep her like a dusty old war trophy on display more to rankle enemies—no,
the
enemy—than for allies to admire.