by Alex Ryan
Lankford made the hush sign again and pointed his index finger toward the ceiling. Then he lifted the lid to pan to check the “risotto.” Nick saw the little grains were now sticking to the bottom of the pan, a little funnel cloud of dark smoke rising from the center of his culinary disaster.
“This looks basically inedible, dude,” Lankford said.
Nick said nothing.
“Turn it off, put your lamb chops in the fridge, and let me buy you dinner,” he said. “Think of it as recompense for tonight.”
“Fine,” Nick said. He tossed the pan full of ruined starch into the sink where it hissed when it hit the wet surface. Then he packed up his lamb chops, tossed them into the fridge, and turned to Lankford. “Your treat.”
“Of course.”
“Where?”
“I know a place.”
The two men quickly finished their beers and headed out.
The counter-surveillance dance from Nick’s apartment to the restaurant took over a half hour, and Nick figured every minute they pressed over thirty upped the stakes of whatever it was Lankford wanted to tell him. When they were finally settled into a booth sipping on bottles of Tsingtao beer, Lankford ended the suspense.
“I’m missing a man,” Lankford said and suddenly looked five years older.
Nick was a SEAL—or used to be—so the weight of ‘a man left behind’ was not lost on him. He looked around the room. No one seemed to be paying them any mind, and he then leaned in, “Tell me.”
“His name is Peter Yu. He was conducting routine surveillance in Xi’an and missed a check in. I didn’t think anything of it, at first—lots of check-ins get missed and we have a protocol for that. But then he missed another and then three. I have managed assets in Xi’an. They checked his apartment and his office—he’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
Lankford clenched his jaw and balled his hand into a fist on the table.
“Well, I don’t fucking know, Nick. If I did, he wouldn’t be missing, would he?”
Nick pursed his lips.
“Sorry,” Lankford said after beat. “I’m tired.”
“It’s fine,” Nick said and meant it. This was a touchy subject for Lankford, after all. Two months ago, the CIA man had lost another agent on his watch—a talented, rising star in the Beijing office named Jamie Lin. Lankford had bonded with the girl, thought of her as a surrogate daughter. Jamie Lin’s murder had hit Lankford hard. Best to tread lightly on this one, Nick thought.
“What was Yu working on?”
Lankford placed a silver tablet on the table between them.
“I loaded his reports on this. Feel free to take a look, but I suspect you won’t find anything interesting. I didn’t. Yu was fairly new to the post and was spending the majority of his time sniffing around for anything that didn’t smell right. Routine monitoring and surveillance mode, you know the gig. His official cover was a branch manager for ViaTech, mostly business development and IT staffing for some of the big Chinese tech companies in Xi’an.”
“Placing talent?”
“Exactly, to keep an eye on government contracts, tech transfer, pipeline R&D, cyber, and so on.”
“So what do you want from me?” Nick asked, feigning apathy. He didn’t want to be interested, but he was. When he left the SEALs to join a charitable NGO, he’d intended to leave the clandestine life behind. But here he was, dining with the CIA’s ranking official in China talking spook shit. Teaming up with Dash and Lankford to foil a bioterrorism plot in Beijing two months ago had reignited the fire in his belly. He’d been bitten by the ‘need to know’ bug, and now he was compelled to scratch that itch.
Lankford pushed the still untouched tablet computer closer to Nick. “I was hoping, maybe you could poke around Xi’an for me.”
“Poke around Xi’an?” Nick echoed, cocking an eyebrow at Lankford. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I can’t trust my assets in Xi’an with this. They’re all managed assets—you know, guys we pay for information. In my experience, the minute a managed asset thinks he’s in any real danger, he turns. I need someone I can trust to go to Xi’an and try to pick up Yu’s trail.”
“I thought you had people for shit like this?”
“Of course,” Lankford said. “But thanks to you, your girlfriend, and your buddy Commander Zhang, I have to assume my entire operation in Beijing is outed. My people, as you say, are blown. Peter Yu is proof of that. Anyone I send could be in real danger if the Chinese government is behind Yu’s disappearance.”
“Yeah,” Nick agreed and leaned in with a tight smile. “But then wouldn’t I also be in danger? You know for damn sure that they’re watching me. No mystery there. Zhang was explicit—get caught working with you and the CIA again, and he’d personally kick my ass is out of China on the next available flight.”
“He was just trying to rattle your cage.”
“Oh I see how it is. Since I’m not on your payroll, I’m expendable. Is that it?”
Lankford looked irritated and shook his head. “It’s not like that, Nick. You have a real NOC. You don’t work for me, as you love pointing out. You conduct legitimate business in Xi’an. Hell, you were there just a few weeks ago if I’m not mistaken. No one would find it curious if you travelled back to Xi’an for Water for the People, or Habitat for Humanity, or whatever the hell tree hugging shit it is you do for a living.” The tension in Lankford’s voice was rising now.
“Relax, Chet. I was just kidding,” Nick said. Then, under his breath he added, “Well, sort of.”
Lankford said nothing, just held Nick’s gaze with tired, desperate eyes.
After a beat Nick flashed him a half-baked smile, “Isn’t this the part of the conversation where you’re supposed pull out the red pill and the blue pill and tell me I have to choose between taking the trip down the rabbit hole, or going back to living my normal, boring life?”
Lankford tapped the silver tablet computer on the table with the tip of his index finger and said, “Red pill.” Then he tapped Nicks beer bottle. “Blue pill . . . Look Nick, it really is that simple. Either you go to Xi’an and look for my missing man, or you stay in Beijing, hang out, drink beer, and learn how to cook risotto. The choice is yours.”
Nick stared at the tablet. No matter how much Lankford loved to mock him, the work he did with Water 4 Humanity was important. Access to sanitary drinking water was the most fundamental of human needs. In the few short months he had worked for W4H, he had helped provide life water for thousands of poor and indigent Chinese, most of them children. He believed in the mission, and yet here he was, bantering with Lankford about spy games. The truth was obvious. He wouldn’t be having this discussion if the NGO life filled all his needs. The chase and gunfight in the tunnels of the Beijing Underground City, solving the mystery of Jamie Lin’s murder, stopping a bioterrorist minutes before he killed thousands of innocents—had made Nick feel alive. These were the things that would make him say yes.
“Okay, look,” Nick said. “We have a satellite office in Xi’an where we manage projects in the north and west—mostly around the low mountain villages outside of Yaojiagouzhen. I’m sure I can invent some reason to go there and check in with my regional managers on those projects. While I’m in Xi’an I’ll stop by Yu’s apartment and report what I find. Will that help?”
“Yes. Thank you, Nick,” Lankford said with more sincerity than Nick had ever heard from the sarcastic spook. “All of Peter’s reports are on the PDA—zipped in file number one. All of his assets’ reports are zipped as file two. Fair warning, Nick, there’s not much to work with. The third and final file contains all the details of his OC in Xi’an and redacted personnel file.”
Lankford pulled a small gift-wrapped box from his coat pocket and slid it over to Nick. The card on top said ‘Thanks for everything.’
Nick looked up and arched his eyebrows.
“Don’t get too mushy or excited on me,” Lankford said. “It’s an en
crypted burner. Call me if you need help or if you find anything. Anything, at all. That being said, save your minutes, because once you start using it, our friends will get to work cracking the encryption. The number for my encrypted burner is in the speed dial.”
Nick slipped the tablet and the gift box into the pocket of his barn jacket.
“Thanks for this, Nick. I mean it.”
“I know you do, Chet. I hope I can find something for you.”
Lankford stood up from the table.
“I thought you were buying me dinner?” Nick said.
Lankford smirked.
“Should’ve eaten before you let me screw you. You’re a SEAL, even you know that.”
The waitress arrived and set a plate of steaming beef noodles in front of him. Nick looked from his food back to Lankford, but the spook was already gone.
Shit, Nick thought as he dug into the spicy fare. Here we go again.
But this time, he realized he was smiling.
