“Yes. Not possibly dangerous but actually dangerous. It’s already caused destruction… disaster.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“Now, even though it’s no longer my job, I think I can figure out how to neutralize it. It would take a lot of effort on my part, and require a little skullduggery, but I think it could be done-with proper planning.”
She waited.
“Well?”
“Oh! You want me to tell you if you should do it or not.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, is it dangerous? For you.”
“No,” he said, the lie coming out before he had a chance to wrestle with it.
“Then, yes. I mean, if it’s about saving America, you know I’m all about that,” she said, grinning. “Is that the answer you wanted?”
He leaned forward to kiss her again, and this time she didn’t pull away.
He’d known Dorothy Collingwood for three years; they’d met through his in-laws. Penelope’s family had always gotten a rush mingling with America’s power brokers, and with Democratic members of the Senate and the House to its credit, the Collingwood clan qualified. Dorothy, however, had chosen a different path from her relatives, using their connections to get herself placed within intelligence. When they first met, she’d been working in the support staff of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. She had higher ambitions, though, and once she realized that she could trust Alan, she promised that he would be part of her rise. “You’re a smart guy, Alan. Solid. And you don’t speak Beltway. Besides, your wife shows well at social functions.” When she did move up, becoming an NCS staff operations officer, planning and running global counterintelligence and intelligence collection operations, she found herself faced with a new world-“a parallel world,” she called it over drinks. “You wouldn’t believe it, Alan.”
“Of course I would,” he’d said, for he had always played the unflappable war veteran with her. When she told him that there was an opening for the directorship of a hush-hush department on the fringe of the Langley beast, he’d tried not to show excitement. “What happened to the previous director?”
“Right now Senator Nathan Irwin’s got one of his puppets in place, but he can’t make that stick.”
“The one before that, I mean.”
“He was killed by one of his own men.” She’d raised a brow. “Sound interesting?”
She hadn’t been in the room when he’d been eviscerated by Butler, nor had she come to his defense, and when he told her he wanted to spearhead a retaliation against Xin Zhu he pointed out that she owed him this. She admitted that she did owe him something but said, “It shouldn’t be seen to come from me, so take this to Irwin. We both know it’s personal for him, so he’ll go for it. Tell him to bring in Stuart Jackson.”
“Who?”
“He’s the old me. My predecessor. Retired, but still very much in touch. He’s got China locked up, and you won’t get far without him. He also knows the whole Tourism fiasco. Get them on board, and take it to my boss. They bring it in, and I lobby for it.”
He marveled at how quickly she’d put the scheme together. “And that’s it?”
“Essentially. But you have to bring in Stuart Jackson. He knows we can make this work on different levels, and he knows that in my position I have some helpful connections, because he’s the one who set up those connections. If I’m right-and, as you know, I always am-it’ll end up a joint project between myself, Stuart, and Nathan.”
“What different levels are you talking about?”
She placed a hand on his arm. “You worry about your level, and I’ll worry about mine.”
Dorothy was never truly wrong, and so it was no real surprise when he found himself sitting with her, Nathan, and Stuart Jackson. The surprise was that they were sitting in a dusty safe house rather than some clean office in Langley, and then he learned the reason: Dorothy’s superior had nixed the operation. “Then what are we doing here?” he asked the three of them, noting that there was no anxiety in any of their faces.
“We’re going to make it happen anyway,” Irwin said.
Dorothy said, “We’ve got access to funds, and you can contact your remaining Tourists. I’ll have access to current intelligence.”
Stunned, Alan said, “So no one’s worried about losing their jobs over this?”
“I’m self-employed,” said Stuart Jackson.
Nathan rocked his head noncommittally, and Dorothy said, “You know how ambitious I am, but ambition is empty without the ability to take risks. This is a large risk, but its rewards could be immeasurable.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, for no one ever got a promotion over revenge.
“Remember what I said, Alan. We stick to our own levels, and we’ll all be fine.”
They largely agreed to his tactic of distraction, but when it came to the actual attack there was dispute. Alan, after toying with psychological warfare, had come to the conclusion that wet work was the best way to deal with Xin Zhu. “We know where he lives. Better yet, we know where his office is. We can wire the building and bring it down. A rocket launcher should do the job. Blame it on the Turkestan revolutionaries-they’re already making overt threats. Ideally, we do this during the Olympic Games, when security will be focused on the venues, not on Xin Zhu’s office. Zhu is eradicated, we disrupt the Games, and we also send a clear message to the Chinese Central Committee.”
A week later, Alan was in Slovenia, taking a clean, modern train from Ljubljana, east to Sevnica, eyeing the cool, stylish Slovenians all around him. He’d mistakenly thought this would be a walk in the park. After all, he’d known Afghanistan, and when you left Afghanistan you left with the confidence that the rest of the world was a walk in the park. However, the impossibility of places had less to do with the places themselves than with what you were carrying in yourself; it had to do with the measure of your guilt. The guilt he was once able to measure with a yardstick now seemed to require a milestick-thirty-three of them.
There was no need for worry, though. The SOVA had no interest in someone who was no longer employed by the American government, and Tran Hoang had done his job well, piloting his plane from Budapest, flying low across the nighttime border to the landing field at Cerklje ob Krki. He’d driven himself and his drugged package in a waiting car north along the Sava River and just past Sevnica to a cabin in the foothills of Gavzna Gora.
When he arrived at Sevnica’s small, provincial train station, Alan walked through the lobby and crossed the bustling morning street to reach, around a corner, a small pharmacy. Tran Hoang’s ten-year-old Yugo idled at the curb, and it was a sign of the man’s skills that pedestrians didn’t even notice that a Cambodian man was in their midst, one who’d spent a time in Sri Lanka as he was being nurtured and then recruited by the Department of Tourism. Alan got in on the passenger’s side, and Hoang put the car in gear. He drove west, toward the bridge that crossed the Sava. “How’s our guest?” Alan asked.
Hoang rocked his head. He was chewing on gum.
“I suppose that means he’s still alive?”
“Sure.”
Of all the Tourists Alan had met, Hoang was the mutest. Talking to him was like dealing with someone who only had ten words left in him and had better uses for them than communicating with you. “Have you started the questions?”
Hoang shook his head.
“Why not?”
“We flew in last night,” said Hoang, making no effort to hide his irritation.
“Is there something wrong?”
His jaw worked on the gum. He shook his head.
It took a half hour to reach the gravel road that snaked through the forest, and the temperature dropped as their elevation rose. The cabin, which Hector Garza, a.k.a. Jose Santiago, had tracked down, was a two-room affair, nestled against a boulder and surrounded by trees. A thin stream of smoke rose from a tin chimney. Hoang parked and led him into an empty room with a dirty kitchenette in the corner. The air was stuffy-someone had been smoking. They took off their coats. Against the far wall, beside a collection of faded, curling pornographic centerfolds, was a door. “In there?” Alan asked.
Hoang nodded.
Alan went to the door, took a breath, and opened it-another empty room, with the exception of a low cot.
