The Arctic Event

by James Cobb

  The device’s verdict must have been favorable, for when Maggie Templeton spoke again it was with considerably more warmth and animation. “Hello, Jon, how’s Washington? The state, that is.”

  “Very green, Maggie, at least the half I’ve been in. I gather you and the bosses have something for me.”

  “We do.” The professionalism crept back into her voice. Margaret Templeton was more than Fred Klein’s executive assistant. The widow of a CIA field operative and a veteran of her own years at Langley, the slender, graying blonde was, for all intents and purposes, Covert One’s second in command. “Mr. Klein wants to brief you personally. Are you set up to receive hard copy?”

  Smith glanced at the desktop laser printer connected to the secure deck, noting its glowing green check lights. “Yes.”

  “I’ll start sending you the mission database. I’m putting you through to Mr. Klein now. Take care.”

  “I always try, Maggie.”

  As the desk printer started to purr and hiss, the phone clicked, and Smith visualized the connection jumping from Maggie Templeton’s integrated workstation/office with its bristling array of computer and communications accesses to that second, smaller, starker room.

  “Good morning, Jon.” Fred Klein’s voice was quiet and instinctively controlled. “How’s the training going?”

  “Very well, sir. I only have three days left to go on the course.”

  “No, you don’t, Colonel. You’ve just graduated. We need to put that training to work right now. A problem has developed that you are uniquely positioned to deal with.”

  Smith had been bracing for this ever since receiving his contact notification. Still, he had to suppress a sudden shiver. It was happening again, as it had happened so often since Sophie’s death. Once more something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong.

  “What’s the situation, sir?” Smith inquired.

  “Your specialty, biological warfare,” the director of Covert One replied. “Only on this occasion the circumstances are somewhat unusual.”

  Smith frowned. “How can biowar ever be considered anything but unusual?”

  A humorless chuckle came back. “I stand corrected, Jon. Let me escalate that to exceptionally unusual.”

  “How so, sir?”

  “For one, the location-the Canadian Arctic. And for the other, our employers.”

  “Our employers?”

  “That’s right, Jon. It’s a long story, but this time around it appears we’re going to be working for the Russians.”

  Chapter Five

  Beijing

  Randi Russell sat in the Cantonese restaurant that opened off the Hotel Beijing’s large and somewhat careworn lobby, breakfasting on dim sum and green tea.

  She had worked inside Red China on a number of occasions for the Central Intelligence Agency, and oddly enough, she had found it a comparatively easy operating environment.

  The mammoth PRC state security machine was ever present, purring and clicking away in the national background. As an idowai, a foreigner, every taxi or train ride she took would be recorded. Every long-distance telephone call would be monitored, every e-mail read. Every tour guide or translator or hotel manager or travel agent dealt with would answer to his or her assigned contact within the People’s Armed Police.

  So totally pervasive was this mechanism that it actually began to work against itself. As a spy, Randi was never tempted to let her guard down or become sloppy with her cover, because she was always acutely aware she was under observation.

  This morning, her observers would be seeing a decidedly attractive American businesswoman in her early thirties, dressed in a neat beige knit dress and a pair of expensive but sensibly heeled pumps. Short, tousled golden-blond hair framed her face, and her open farm girl’s features bore only a light touch of cosmetics along with the dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  Only another member of the profession might note the irregularity, and then only by looking deeply into her dark brown eyes. There could be seen the hint of an internal bleakness and an instinctive, perpetual wariness of the world around her-the mark of one who had been both the hunter and the hunted.

  Today she hunted, or at least stalked.

  Randi had chosen her table in the cafe with care, her position giving her an uninterrupted band of vision that cut across the hotel’s lobby between the elevator bank and the main entrance. She scanned it only from the corner of her eye. As she nibbled and sipped, her attention appeared to be focused solely on the open and totally irrelevant business file on the table in front of her.

  Intermittently she would glance at her wristwatch as if counting down time to some appointment.

  She had no such appointment. But someone else might. The previous evening she’d committed the Beijing traffic schedules for Air Koryo, the North Korean national airline, to memory, and she was moving into a potentially hot time frame.

  Randi had been covering the lobby for almost two hours now. If nothing happened within the next fifteen or twenty minutes, another member of the CIA cell assigned to the hotel would take over the surveillance, and Randi would disengage before her lingering became a cause for suspicion. She would spend the rest of the day doing suitable junior executive busywork around the Chinese capital, all of it essentially as meaningless as the report she was reading.

  But she had the duty now, and she caught the passage of the two men through the lobby.

  The smaller, slighter, and more nervous of the pair was dressed in blue jeans and a crisp khaki-colored nylon windcheater, and he carried a battered computer case as if it was a precious thing.

  The second man, taller, burlier, and older, wore a poorly cut black business suit and an air of guarded grimness. A person familiar with Asian ethnology might have been able to identify them both as Korean. Randi Russell knew them to be so. The man in the suit was an agent of the North Korean People’s Security Force. The man in the windcheater was Franklin Sun Chok, a third-generation Korean American, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, an employee of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, and a traitor.

  He was why she and an entire task force of CIA operatives had been positioned across the width of the Pacific: to oversee his act of treason and, if necessary, to assist him in carrying it out.

  Unhurriedly Randi closed her file and tucked it into her shoulder bag. Removing a pen, she ticked her room number onto the bill on the table. Rising, she crossed into the lobby and dropped onto the trail of the two men.

  Outside, the hotel’s taxi marshal was feeding a line of guests into the swarm of cabs clumping up on a smog- and car-clogged Dong Chang an Jie Street.

  Sun Chok got into the cab first, moving quickly. The North Korean security agent paused before following, sweeping a last jet-eyed stare around the hotel entrance. Randi felt that cold gaze brush past her.

  She kept her own eyes averted until the Korean’s cab pulled away. Given the timing of their movement, Randi knew where they must be bound. She wasn’t unduly concerned about maintaining continuous contact. A minute or so later, using a hesitant Chinese several grades below her actual grasp of the language, she instructed the driver of her own cab to take her to Beijing’s Capital Airport.

  As the little Volkswagen sedan struggled through the hysterical traffic of Beijing’s Forbidden City district, Randi flipped open her tri-band cellular phone, hitting a preset number.

  “Hello, Mr. Danforth. This is Tanya Stewart. I’m on my way out to meet Mr. Bellerman at the airport.”

  “Very good, Tanya,” Robert Danforth, the manager of the Beijing office of the California Pacific Consortium, replied. “He should be coming in on the Cathay Pacific flight nineteen, or at least that’s the last word we had. No guarantees. You know how the Los Angeles office is.”

  “I understand, sir. I’ll keep you posted.” Randi snapped her phone shut, having completed her carefully scripted verbal dance.

  Robert Danforth was actually the senior agent in
charge of the CIA’s Beijing station, and the California Pacific Consortium was a front company used to provide cover for transient agents operating in northern mainland China. As for Mr. Bellerman, he existed only as a justification name inserted into routine Consortium business traffic over the past few days.

  The cellular call had served two purposes. For one, it would explain Randi’s actions to PRC State Security, should their curiosity be aroused. For the other, it would advise her superiors that two years of carefully crafted counterintelligence work was about to reach fruition.

  When Franklin Sun Chok first appeared as a blip on the CIA’s screens, he had been a graduate student of physics at Berkeley, employed at the huge Lawrence Livermore Laboratory complex in the Bay Area. A studious and intensely earnest young man, his after-hours interests and concerns included international disarmament and his ethnic heritage.

  Neither of which was particularly out of place for a young American academic, but given the highly secretive nature of much of Lawrence Livermore’s work, it had rated him a spot check by laboratory security. Alarm bells rang.

  Sun Chok was found to be associating closely with a small Korean nationalist group on the Berkeley campus, a group promoting, loudly, the national unification of Korea and the withdrawal of the United States military from the peninsula. It was also an identified front organization for North Korean espionage in the United States.

  Randi’s cab drew up in the long line of vehicles feeding through the tollbooth access to the airport expressway. Perhaps a dozen cars ahead, she spotted the taxi carrying Sun Chok and his security escort. All was still on track.

  Sun Chok had been placed under intensive covert surveillance. He was tailed, his apartment was searched and bugged, and his telephone and Internet traffic was closely monitored. In short order it was confirmed that he was indeed spying for the North Korean government.

  The evidence was adequate for an arrest warrant, but an alternative had been decided upon. Franklin Sun Chok’s betrayal would be put to good use.

  Randi glanced at her wristwatch and frowned. If this traffic didn’t break soon, both she and the Koreans would be in trouble. Then she told herself not to be silly. The next flight to Pyongyang wouldn’t be going anywhere until its VIP passengers were aboard.

  No doubt to the delight of his North Korean controllers, Franklin Sun Chok was given a promotion at the Lawrence Livermore facility, complete with a handsome pay raise, a private office, an executive assistant, and a deeper access to the laboratories’ secrets. In reality, he was being encapsulated in a technological fantasyland of the Central Intelligence Agency’s creation.

  For over a year, Sun Chok was fed a carefully metered diet of solid, valid, low-grade information: research breakthroughs that were destined to be openly published in science journals in months to come, and minor military secrets that would be secret only until the next round of congressional budgetary hearings.

  As eager and as innocent as a baby bird gobbling an offered worm, he had relayed this information to his contacts, building their confidence in him as a valid resource.

  When U.S. intelligence assets monitoring North Korea’s internal R amp; D programs began to see this fed information being put to use, they knew that the Sun Chok line was being trusted. It was time to drive home the dagger.

  Beijing Capital Airport looked little different from any other modernistic airline terminal anywhere else in the world. Drawing up at the departure entries, Randi caught only a glimpse of the Koreans as they entered the terminal, but that was as she wished it. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her.

  Barring the usual large number of assault rifle-carrying People’s Armed Police, airport security was actually lighter than at an American airport. Randi was permitted access to the concourses after only a single pass of her shoulder bag through an X-ray machine. She had nothing to be concerned about here. She carried neither weapons nor any James Bondian gadgetry. None were needed for this tasking.

  With the hook solidly set in the North Korean jaw, Franklin Sun Chok was “cleared” to an even higher security level and assigned work on a major new project involving the national antiballistic missile defense network. Information began to cross Sun Chok’s desk that hinted tantalizingly at possible countermeasures to the system.

  On the evening before Sun Chok left on his annual vacation from the laboratory, he remained late in his office, “cleaning up his desk.” As CIA observers looked on cybernetically, Sun Chok accessed and downloaded a long series of secure data files on the antiballistic missile network.

  Unknown to him, each of his illicit computer accesses was diverted to a carefully doctored alternate file set, prepared just for this moment. Then, instead of heading for Las Vegas as he had told his coworkers, Sun Chok had driven north, for the Canadian border.

  Clearing security, Randi strode through the luggage-burdened crowds. She was less apparent here, for Capital Airport handled all the international traffic for Beijing, and many of the tourists and business travelers bustling around her now were American or European.

  Cathay Pacific had been chosen as the preferred carrier for the mythical Mr. Bellerman because its boarding gates were located immediately adjacent to those of Air Koryo. Crossing to the Cathay Pacific waiting area, she took a seat that gave her a peripheral view of the North Korean gate. Once more she removed the false file from her shoulder bag and focused her false attention upon it.

  Sun Chok’s flight across the Pacific had been a long and tortuous one: from Vancouver to the Philippines, from the Philippines to Singapore, from Singapore to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to Beijing. Pyongyang was not an easy place to get to from anywhere. Twice during the journey, Franklin Sun Chok had been contacted by North Korean agents, who had passed him falsified passports, visas, and identification, and in Hong Kong he’d picked up his escort from the People’s Security Force.

  At each stop Sun Chok had also acquired a CIA shadow. A network of American agents had been deployed to cover the primary Pacific travel nodes, monitoring the traitor’s transit. In Singapore, the local station chief had even been forced to hastily intervene with the local authorities when a sloppily forged document had almost led to Sun Chok’s arrest.

  Randi Russell would be the last link in this chain. She would oversee Franklin Sun Chok’s final passage into darkness.

  Covertly she studied the youthful traitor. He kept glancing back down the concourse. Did he still fear some last-minute pursuit? Or could he be thinking back to San Francisco Bay and the apartment, life, and family he would never see again? Emoting to some idealized political principal was all well and good, but it was quite another thing to live out its reality.

  Randi Russell knew full well what this reality was. She had been on the ground inside the last “workers’ paradise.” The experience still occasionally made her wake up bathed in a chill sweat.

  She wondered if the young man was having second thoughts about his decision. Could it be that his fashionable intellectualist’s disdain for the United States was starting to wear thin? Could he now be sensing a ghost of what had made his parents flee to the Western world?

  If so, such considerations were coming too late. Another delegation of black-suited North Koreans had been standing by at the Air Koryo Jetway, a security team from North Korea’s Beijing embassy. They closed around Sun Chok, a few curt words were exchanged, and the American was hustled down the extendable Jetway to the waiting airliner, past the Chinese People’s Police officer, who was careful to not see him or his escorts.

  Randi caught his eyes as he looked back one last time, and then he was gone.

  She closed her eyes and sat unmoving for a long moment. Mission accomplished.

  She knew what would happen next. The information contained within Franklin Sun Chok’s laptop computer and within Sun Chok himself would be poured into the North Korean ballistic missile program. The information would promise leads in the direction of a foolproof countermeasures syst
em that could defeat the U.S. antimissiles and leave the cities of the American West Coast open to attack.

  But one after another, each promising lead would reach a technological dead end after devouring a precious percentage of the North Korean military budget and thousands of equally precious research and development man hours.

  Eventually it would become apparent to the North Koreans that they had been duped, that their intelligence coup had, in fact, been a time bomb planted within their armaments program by the United States.

  North Korea’s “Dear Leaders” would be displeased. Specifically, they would be displeased with Franklin Sun Chok. The displeasure of the “Dear Leaders” would not be trifling.

  Randi snapped her eyes open. If she were not careful with her memories, the cold-sweat nights would return.

  From the concourse windows, she watched as the elderly Ilyushin jetliner climbed away from the airport on the final leg of Sun Chok’s last journey. Returning to her seat, she waited for the next Cathay Pacific flight to come in and unload before making her call.

  “Mr. Danforth. This is Tanya Stewart out at Capital. Mr. Bellerman wasn’t on his flight. What should I do now, sir?”

  Translation from agent doublespeak: the package has been successfully delivered.

  Danforth sighed theatrically. “Los Angeles strikes again! I’ll look into it, Tanya. In the meantime you’d best get back here. Something’s come up.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  “They need you back in the States as soon as possible. At the Seattle office.”

  Randi frowned. The States as soon as possible? This was a deviation, and a radical one. Upon completion of this assignment she was supposed to ease out of China over a period of days, maintaining her businesswoman’s cover. And what the hell was in Seattle?

  “I’m already setting up your travel arrangements,” Danforth continued. “You’ll be flying out this evening on Asiana to Seoul, and from there by JAL. There will be a reservation waiting for you at the SeaTac Doubletree.”