Allender smiled. “That’s a secret for now.”
“Fuck that noise, Preston—I’m the DDO.”
“That’s the difference between creating a black swan and every other op you can think of,” Allender said. “That was your tasking to me, remember? I’m not an operator, but if you want to cause a black swan within the MSS, then you must leave your controller to it. It will not disappoint. By the way, how high have you briefed this?”
“I’ll have to tell our beloved director about this, eventually,” McGill said. “By law, actually. But for now, I’m as high as this one goes.”
“I think you should at least let me brief Hank.”
“Before or after?”
“Before. I agree with you about the director, but Hank’s the Company’s wise man. If there’s a reason not to proceed, Hank will see it.”
“Perhaps,” McGill said. “Let me think about that, but if Hank does get briefed, I’ll do the briefing, understand? So what’s the deal, again?”
Allender smiled. “Nice try.”
McGill broke out in expletives. Allender waited patiently.
“This cannot ever be acknowledged as a Company affair, Carson,” Allender said. “It goes down and then it goes dark, for ever and ever. No backgrounders for reporters, no leaks to our best friend over there on Capitol Hill, just panic and pandemonium within MSS and its senior leadership and a united ‘Who, us?’ here at Langley.”
McGill groaned at Allender’s reference to Congresswoman Martine Greer, chairwoman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Agency’s current nemesis in the House. “The way you’ve set this up, the Chinese will know it was us,” he pointed out.
“That’s the best part,” Allender replied. “You still keep some Scotch in that cubby over there?”
* * *
By the time he’d arrived home he was more than a bit pleased at how the mission was shaping up. He had met earlier with David Smith to review some details for the actual strike. Smith had suggested giving Chiang one more taste of the eye candy before they executed the mission.
“Think of it as a photo op,” he’d said. “I think we should let him see her one more time, exchange a look, maybe, but not actually talk or interact. This time she’ll be with someone under deep cover. An innocent encounter, recognition across the room, a sexy smile from her, then back to paying attention to whomever she’s with. No looking back.”
“And if he makes a move?” Allender asked.
“We’ll have an interceptor in place,” Smith said. “Someone who stops his move by recognizing him as a long-lost acquaintance, or a senior Chinese official—whatever, but takes up enough time for Melanie to make her creep.”
“‘Melanie’ is it now,” Allender had said.
Smith had the good grace to blush. “She is by God the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And nice, too. Down-to-earth. Real people.”
Oh, dear, Allender had thought. Maybe the op needed a new controller. On the other hand, he now knew that Smith would certainly be paying attention, so he’d agreed to the additional “viewing,” as Smith had phrased it.
He brought a bottle of chilled white Burgundy and a stemmed glass to the tower office while he decided whether to go out or burn something in the kitchen for dinner. He still hoped that McGill would let him go brief Henry Wallace, the deputy director of the Agency. Hank Wallace was something of a legend at Langley, the man career Agency people thought of as the Company’s executive flywheel, especially with Hingham in the front office. He was the closest thing in the American government to what the British called a permanent undersecretary. British cabinet officers came and went at the whim of the electorate, but the PUS remained in place so that whatever member of Parliament was given the portfolio, at least someone in the front office knew what time the tea lady came around.
Wallace had seen several directors come and go in the unending whirl of high-level presidential appointees during his twelve years. He was in his early sixties, a bit crusty, a cunning bureaucrat, a keeper of both bones and secrets, but fiercely loyal to the Agency and its people. He kept himself firmly in the background and, as best he could, tried to steer newly appointed directors away from the traditional minefields peculiar to running the CIA in the rough-and-tumble world of Washington factional politics. Some listened, some didn’t. The ones who did tended to last longer than the ones who didn’t. McGill was, of course, correct in demanding that he, the DDO, brief Wallace, but Allender had made it a condition of his own participation that motormouth McGill was not to be briefed on just exactly what was coming. Allender knew, however, that it would be foolish to keep Hank Wallace in the dark. He was going to have to think of some way to get around McGill’s sense of the Agency’s pecking order.
One thing he did know: If this thing worked, the damage to the MSS operation here in town was going to be substantial. Chiang was part of an important faction in the Chinese government, which meant that the dozens of Chinese based out of the embassy owed their jobs and careers to him. Hit the warlord, take out the clan.
He thought about the way Sloan’s ample front had spilled invitingly out in front of the poor general. Then he chided himself—he was supposed to have been watching Chiang. He smiled and had some more wine.
EIGHT
Melanie stood in the shower at her new apartment with her eyes closed, imagining that she was luxuriating in a large porcelain tub with a magnum of champagne sweating nearby. She and Mark used to do that after an afternoon of lovemaking in one of the villas he liked to rent outside of Lisbon. It had been a tedious couple of days of house hunting, and she was now ready to pretend that she was “home” at last. Being quasi-homeless came with the territory of being a junior operative in the Clandestine Service. You went overseas for two to three years at a pop, came home for training and some time off, and then back out into the wide, wide world of human intelligence work at yet another grubby embassy. Some officers bought homes or condos, rented them out when they were gone, and then did a time-share routine when they came back for a few months, but if one had to bail out of station on short notice, there was always a scramble to find somewhere to live while the lease worked itself out. The Agency had solutions for this at its various installations around Washington, but most operatives wanted some separation from Biggest Brother in their daily lives when not actually on station.
She’d finally found a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in a tower block near the Ballston Metro station, known to the locals as Randy Towers. It was filled with bachelor diplomatic staff, the occasional spook, contractors on short-term jobs, and even politicians who worked in Washington three days a week and then went home to the district. The absence of wives and families lent credence to the building’s nickname. Because she was in between duty stations, Melanie’s apartment was paid for by the Agency, and the Metro station two blocks away gave her access to everything official in Washington—except, perversely, the headquarters building at Langley.
As she rinsed the shampoo off her body with a washcloth, she thought again about weekends with Mark. She hadn’t been entirely honest with Allender about who’d come on to whom. Once she’d figured out that Mark’s marriage was mostly about having a well-trained hostess for all their diplomatic functions, she’d decided to make a run on him. He was handsome and certainly aware of her during the official times they spent together, although there’d been no exploratory asides. All that changed one late Saturday afternoon when she’d had to take an urgent cable from Washington to his residence, an apartment building in downtown Lisbon. He’d opened the door wearing only a towel around his hips. She’d presented the cable in a locked pouch and then casually checked him out while he was reading it. He’d been perspiring heavily, and she spotted a weight set out on the balcony. The veins on his upper body stood out among all the muscles.
“Like what you see?” he’d asked, while still reading the message.
She smiled when she remembe
red blushing just a little and then saying something truly subtle like she wouldn’t kick it out of her bed.
“I’m headed for the hot tub,” he’d said, handing her back the message. “It’s right through there.”
The bathroom had a stand-alone tub that doubled as a Jacuzzi. There was a separate shower, and another enclosure for the toilet. He’d dropped the towel and stepped into the swirling tub. She’d done her best impression of a demure striptease, and then stepped into the shower, where she’d slowly soaped off the day’s sweat and urban fug with the shower curtain fully open before getting into the tub with him, kneeling between his legs and then turning around to sit down and press her back against his chest, all with desirable results. Remembering gave her a warm feeling in her belly. She wondered how Dragon Eyes would have reacted to all that. The thought made her giggle, but the thought did not readily disappear.
Once out of the shower she put on jeans and a T-shirt and went out onto the tiny balcony to enjoy the sunset and a glass of wine. The balconies were all separated by concrete-block privacy screens, which suited her just fine. She was on the eleventh floor, with a magnificent view of the backs of two other apartment buildings and their connecting alleys. The rental agent had told her that the people in the apartment next door, a corner unit, were Southwest Asians and in diplomatic status. Based on the familial noise, the unit probably contained five times the number of people registered on the lease, and the eau de turmeric permeated that corner of the building when the breeze was right. On the other side was supposedly a Defense Department contractor whom she’d not actually seen. Just about everybody in the building was a transient, usually with a government stipend for the rent. There was a pool and gym in the basement, and a party venue up on the roof. It was as anonymous as you wanted it to be, and Melanie rather liked it. Genuine solitude was a difficult thing to achieve in the Clandestine Service, where everything you did had a controller’s strings on it.
Her dinner with young Mr. Smith had been mostly awkward. He was younger than she was, and after the first half hour of his undisguised adulation, she’d decided she was definitely an older-man kind of girl. Smith was super nice, physically quite attractive, and unabashedly trying to score. Dinner had been fine, but the table conversation had centered on what she termed millennial activities—the urgent pursuit of things to do and places to go on the weekend, almost as if the weekend wouldn’t be complete if not spent walking a piece of the Appalachian trail, attending symphony night at Lincoln Center, or taking a day trip to Antietam, all aimed at casual bragging rights on Monday morning when the coffee-station crowd inevitably asked, “How was your weekend?” She recognized some familiar symptoms; she was becoming tired of the daily grind of trying to get ahead in yet another government bureaucracy, interesting as this one was. And a lot more interesting since she had encountered Dr. Dragon Eyes, she had to admit.
That said, she knew this Chinese thing was going to be a one-shot operation, which would either succeed or it wouldn’t. She understood that she was mostly a fancy prop, the well-dressed and well-coiffed bait in some intricate upper echelon game in the—what was the term that woman had used? Serious-shit arena. Whoopee. When the op was over, she would still be thirty-three, unmarried and alone, with no prospective relationships, and, to be honest with herself, an almost disturbing disinterest in establishing a relationship. As Allender had warned her, she might even have to leave the Agency and find other employment, especially if this thing “succeeded,” whatever that meant. The bonus would be cool, of course, but she had a clear idea of how long even a big lump sum like that would last her if she did have to leave the intel world, especially when one was a professional woman who would not be able to describe any aspects of her previous employment with the Agency. “I worked in government. Period.” She knew any sophisticated Washington employer would know what that meant in a heartbeat, but she wondered if there was much of a future in the Washington game of what one of her office friends used to describe as white-collar welfare.
She speculated about the doctor and his upscale town house near Dupont Circle. That part of town was known as a haven for wealthy gays who renovated the nineteenth-century mansions along the avenue into truly valuable properties. Except: He didn’t strike her as being that way. More like a confirmed bachelor who wasn’t above taking a look at all the pretty women but not to the extent of lighting the fuse on any kind of relationship. Some of that came with the job, she supposed. His rep in the Agency was borderline scary. And those eyes: Jesus. She wondered if that’s what kept him from getting close with a woman. And if he was some kind of mind reader, who would want to go to bed with that? A little voice in her head had an answer for that: He’d know exactly what you like.… She giggled again.
She heard her cell phone ringing. Somehow she just knew it was young David Smith.
“Call me back with the KY attached,” he said.
She hung up, went and found the attachment that turned her cell phone into an encrypted radio, and called him back.
“We’re going to do one more encounter with the general,” he said. “No actual contact beyond letting him see you and your reaction to seeing him.”
“Will I be alone?” she asked.
“No, of course not,” he replied. “You’ll be escorted by one of our deep-cover operatives. Someone who is not known to the opposition as being one of us.”
“What if Chiang makes a move?”
“We have an app for that. Basically, we want him to see you one more time, and we want you to signal your continuing interest—but only for a moment.”
“Don’t you think he’ll realize he’s being teased?” she asked. “I mean, he’s definitely a player and he sure as hell knows the signs and signals of a willing woman. At some point he’s going to review the bidding and then say—WTF.”
“We don’t think so,” David said. “He’s impetuous. He likes the sudden collision of desire, situations where an adult woman telegraphs that she’d like to bed him, and he jumps at it. And then he’s gone. Tigers mating in the night and then withdrawing to a respectful distance.”
“Interesting analogy, Mister David Smith,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “Too many books, I guess,” he said. “But that’s what we need. Ten seconds of eye-to-eye acknowledgment that you and he are going to have a go. He’ll go away wondering how and when, and we’ll go away to rehearse exactly how.”
“Rehearse?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “We’ve built a mock-up of the rooms involved, and we’re going to rehearse each move, from the point where you two decide to find someplace and get it on to the final exposure. That’s how it’s done, Melanie.”
“Wow,” she said. “When I go to the hotel, how many people are going to be involved in this thing?”
“On whose side?” he asked, and then hung up.
She detached the KY device and wondered if she was imagining that David Smith was no longer sounding like a horny young millennial and a whole lot more like a controller. Had she missed something at dinner?
* * *
The next morning she took a taxi out to the headquarters building and was escorted to a section of the building she’d never seen before. Being escorted felt strange; she was a bona fide member of the Clandestine Service with a chainful of badges to prove it, and yet Smith had instructed her to call him when she got there so that he could send an escort. The low building behind the main headquarters structure looked like it had been a basketball gym at one time, which, she later found out, it had. On the floor was a freestanding maze of rooms, hallways, doors, and stair entrances—all walls with no ceilings.
“This is a pretty close mock-up of the fifth floor in the Wingate hotel,” Smith began, after introducing Melanie to a group of ten men and women dressed casually. Melanie was wearing a suit and heels, as previously instructed by Smith. “Especially the heels,” he’d said; “we need to see how fast you can move in those things.”
“
The Wingate is probably Washington’s second-most-prestigious hotel,” he said now. “You can book the Jefferson Suite for five thousand dollars a night if you feel really important. Your room costs us seven hundred dollars a night, which will dovetail with your puffed-up legend. You’re there for one night so you can attend the awards function, drink, and not have to drive to your apartment over there in Ballston.”
“I wonder if I should even mention my apartment over in Ballston,” she said. “To the general, I mean.”
“Absolutely not,” Smith said. “If he asks, you say that your domestic arrangements are necessarily private. Remember, he’s supposed to think you are a department head or better. But: By this time, if they have access, and we think they do, they’ll know that you’re a low-level worker bee in S and T. Now, here’s the script. I’d like you to read through it, and then you and all these folks are going to rehearse each page of it. They, by the way, will be your security and support team, and you may or may not even see some of them when it goes down. The first time we’ll walk it in slo-mo as we all absorb the details. After that, we’ll try to get to real time by the end of the day. Can I get you some coffee?”
She felt a little bit like the star in a soap opera when he handed her the thick folder. The group ended up sitting on what had been the stands while everybody looked over his or her copy of the script. For her, it was indeed a script: start positions, end positions, dialogue, movements, place marks, timing marks. She didn’t know what the others were reading. She skimmed through the entire thing while sipping some coffee, and then announced that she had a question. David Smith raised his eyebrows.
“This is amazingly detailed,” she said. “But—if I understand the game, we’re going to bump into one another, talk, get all hot and bothered, and then agree to meet somewhere where we can satisfy our mutual desires. How can that be scripted?”
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