problems. I don’t know a damn word of Chinese, and I don’t have a clue where the Starbucks coffee shops are there. Then there’s my Beretta. I have no way to slip it into China.”
“I’ll have the Starbucks information faxed to Taipei. I’ll have an interpreter waiting for you in Shanghai, and he’ll bring you a weapon.
Recognition words: ‘ latte.’ ”
“One more thing.” Smith told him about the old man in the Chinese prison farm who claimed his name was David Thayer. He repeated the details Mondragon had passed on.
“Thayer? I’ve never heard of a connection by someone named Thayer to the president. Sounds like a dodge of some kind.” “Mondragon’s asset said the old man is definitely American.”
“Is the asset reliable?”
“As much as any,” Smith said. “At least, according to Mondragon.”
“I’ll tell the president. If the man’s an American, no matter who he really is, Castilla will want to know.”
“Then I’ll start working on finding the invoice manifest in Shanghai.
What about the other copies?”
“I’ll take care of the one that should be in Baghdad. With luck, we won’t care where the third is.” He paused. “You should know, Colonel, that the time frame’s tight. According to the navy, we’ve got only five days, maybe less, until the Empress reaches the Persian Gulf.”
In the Oval Office, President Castilla ate lunch at the heavy pine table he had brought with him from the governor’s residence in Santa Fe. It had served as his desk there as it did here. With a sense of nostalgia, he put down his chile-and-cheese sandwich and swiveled in his new chair to stare out his window at the lush green grounds and distant monuments he had grown to love. Still, another view blotted it from his mind — the wide red sunsets and vast, empty, yet perpetually alive desert of his ranch far down on the borderlands of his native New Mexico, where even a wild jaguar might still be found roaming. He was feeling suddenly old and tired. He wanted to go home.
His reverie was interrupted by the entry of his personal assistant, Jeremy. “Mr. Klein is here. He’d like to speak with you, sir.”
The president glanced at his desk clock. What time would it be in China?
“No calls or visitors until I tell you otherwise.”
“Yes, sir.” The assistant held open the door.
Fred Klein hurried in, his pipe stem sticking up from the handkerchief pocket of his Harris tweed jacket.
As Jeremy closed the door, Castilla waved Klein to the London club chair that had been a gift from the queen. “I’d have come to the yacht club tonight.”
“This can’t wait. With the leaks, I didn’t want to trust even the red phone.”
The president nodded. “Do we have the manifest?”
Klein heaved a sigh. “No, sir, we do not.” He repeated Smith’s report.
The president grimaced and shook his head. “Terrible. Has your agent’s family been notified?”
“Of course, sir.”
“They’ll be taken care of?”
“They will.”
The president glanced out his high window again. “Do you think they’d like to visit the Oval Office, Fred?”
“You can’t do that, Mr. President. Covert-One doesn’t exist. Mondragon was in private business, nothing more.”
“Sometimes this job is particularly hard.” He paused. “All right, we don’t have what I have to have. When will we have it?”
“Smith has a lead in Shanghai. He’s working on a way there now, as a guest of the Chinese government. He’ll be talking to microbiologists from China’s research establishments. Meanwhile, I have people in Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and some of the new manufacturing cities that have sprung up there over the last few years. They’re looking for any sign Beijing orchestrated this, as well as information about The Dowager Empress, even rumors. And there’s a possibility we can find a second copy in Baghdad. I’m assigning an agent to it.”
“Good. I have the navy sending a frigate. Brose says at the most we’ll have ten hours before the Empress tumbles to what we’re doing. After that, China knows, and probably the world.”
“If the Chinese want them to.” Klein hesitated.
Klein was not a man who hesitated.
“What is it, Fred? If it involves those chemicals, I’d better know it.”
“It doesn’t, Mr. President.” Klein paused again, choosing his words.
This time the president didn’t prompt him, but he frowned, puzzled by what could be unsettling the iron chief of Covert-One.
At last Klein continued: “There’s an old man being held in a prison farm in China who claims to be an American. He says he’s been a prisoner since Chiang’s defeat in 1949.”
President Castilla nodded, his face sober. “Things like that did happen to our people after World War Two. Probably to many more than we actually knew about or suspected. Nevertheless, it’s outrageous and totally unacceptable, as well as unconscionable, that he’s still being held today. It’s one of the reasons I insisted the human-rights treaty include outside inspectors to investigate foreign prisoners of war. In any case, if it’s true and we have firm intel, we’ll have to do something about him immediately. Does this American have a name?”
Klein watched the president’s face. “David Thayer.”
The president showed no reaction. No reaction at all. As if he had not heard. As if he still waited for Klein to say a name. Then he blinked.
He swiveled in his chair. Abruptly he stood up, strode to the window behind his desk, and stared out, hands clasped in a white knot behind his back.
“Sir?”
Samuel Castilla’s back was rigid, as if he had just received a beating.
“After all these years? How is it possible? There was no way he was still alive?”
“What happened—?” Klein began but did not finish. With a sinking stomach, he knew the answer to the question.
The president turned, sat down again, leaned back, his eyes seeing somewhere faraway in both space and time. “He disappeared in China when I was in diapers. The State Department, the military, and Truman’s own staff people tried to find him, but we were heavily opposed to Mao’s Communists, as you know, and they had no love for us. But we did manage to get some clandestine information from the Soviets and some American and British sources in China, and all of it indicated Thayer was dead.
Either he’d died fighting, had been captured and executed by the Communists, or killed by Chiang’s own people for trying to talk to the Reds. He’d told my mother he was going to try to do that before he left.”
He inhaled deeply and gave Klein a small smile. “Serge Castilla was another State Department man, a close friend of Thayer’s. He led State’s efforts to locate him, which threw him into almost weekly contact with my mother. Because I was so small, there was no way she could explain what was happening. By the time I was four, everyone finally accepted Thayer was dead. With Serge and my mother, one thing led to another, and they married that year, and he adopted me. By then, as far as I was concerned, Serge was my father, and David Thayer was just a name. When I was in my late teens, she filled me in on everything they’d learned about his time in China, which was damn little. I didn’t see any purpose in telling the world, because Serge was my dad. He’d raised me, had been there for me through chicken pox and spelling tests, and I loved him.
Since we had the same last name, people never bothered to ask whether he was my biological father.”
The president shook his head, bringing himself back to the present. He met Klein’s worried gaze steadily. “David Thayer is part of my history, but at the same time, I have no memory of him.”
“It’s a thousand to one this man is simply an opportunist, possibly a common criminal, probably not even American. He could’ve met Thayer back before he vanished. So now he’s on a low-security farm, has heard about you and your efforts to make China give more respect to human rights, and he sees an opportunity to get out of there.”
