Dark Zone (5 page)

The phrases did nothing to soften the officer’s grimace. He requested her travel documents. Lia hesitated, worrying that the officer intended on taking her place on the plane himself, a contingency she had not considered until now. But she had no choice but to hand over the small sheaf of papers.

As she did, she mentioned that she hoped all of the proper fees had been paid. The lieutenant did not take the hint. Nor did he seem all that interested in the documents themselves. He pushed the papers to one side and stared at her.

“My superiors would not wish me to be late arriving in Beijing,” she said in Chinese. She wanted the Korean translation—she thought it likely now that the officer did not speak Chinese very well, if at all—but the Art Room had gone silent. Possibly they had decided to communicate as little as possible, which was standard procedure when a field op was in a difficult situation.

And this definitely qualified. The aircraft engines seemed to kick up another notch.

Lia decided to turn her communications system on and off, in effect flashing her runner back home. But as she reached for the belt buckle, one of the guards grabbed her arm. His fingers dug into her bicep. It took all of her self-restraint to avoid turning on the man and taking him down.

Could I if I have to?

Absolutely. She could have his rifle in a breath, club his companion in the stomach—no, the head or neck—then bring the gun to bear on the officer.

And then?

The officer said something in Korean. Lia did not catch it all, but the words she understood were ominous: he called her a tasty plum.

The Art Room translator started to supply the words, but Lia didn’t wait. “My employer wishes me home on time,” she said in Chinese. “And unhurt. I do not work for a mere newspaper,” she added. And then, switching from Chinese to Korean, she asked if she had to pay a customs tax:
“Gwanserui neya hamnikka?”

Her sharp and quick tone conveyed her anger and emotion quite clearly, just as her snapping open the purse showed she was willing to pay for her freedom.

The lieutenant leaned forward, eyes locking on hers. He told her in Korean that she was not in China. As the translator began translating in her head, Lia placed her hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward.

“I’m in a hurry,” she said in Korean. The phrase sounded like
“ku-p’haiyo”
and under the best of circumstances would not have been considered particularly polite.

“You’re going too far,” hissed the Art Room supervisor, Marie Telach. “Relax. He just wants money. And to see you cower. Let him have his ego trip.”

Lia stared at the Korean officer; the lieutenant stared back. Finally he started to smile and then laugh. He raised his head, looking at the guards. Lia, though still angry, began to relax.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She launched into the standard apology again, blaming the stress of travel for her rude behavior.

The lieutenant nodded. The documents, he said, were good, but she had neglected to get a stamp.

“Then that must be taken care of,” said Lia, relieved that finally they had come to the endgame. “How much is the fee?” she asked in Chinese. “I understand that it is very important to pay properly for the trouble a visitor brings.”

As the Art Room translator began giving her the words in Korean, Lia saw the shadow of one of the guards moving from the corner of her eye. She started to spin toward him and was caught off-guard by the hard shock of the other man’s fist against the other side of her head.

Her breath caught in her throat as she fell forward, fists flailing but catching nothing but air. She tried to get up but lost her balance and spun down toward the floor, pummeled into a cocoon of numbness.

5

The autumn air had a slight chill to it, and Dean zipped his windbreaker as he walked along the lake, feigning interest in the nearby pelicans. Buckingham Palace lay almost directly ahead, though the park’s trees and rolling terrain hid it from view. His interest in the palace was in keeping with his cover; to authenticate the person he was supposed to meet—and vice versa—he had to ask about the palace and its tours. The contact was to give the hours for tours backward : 5:30 to 9:30.

Karr was somewhere behind him, a hundred or so yards away, wandering around the park near the lake. St. James Park was once a marshland, and despite its well-kept gardens and elaborate lawns, it did not take all that much imagination to picture the park wild. Tourists and office workers lolled through it, pausing to stare at the birds or admire the flowers, then wandering off nonchalantly, as if they had no cares in the world. Dean tried willing himself into a similar mind-set; his mission was a simple one and could have been accomplished by a clerk at the embassy—or so Karr said. All they had to do was meet a messenger, get something from him, and bring it home.

They had no idea what they were getting and only the vaguest description of the man: He would wear a brown beret and would stand at the crown of the bridge for a moment before descending to meet them ten yards “farther on” from the base. They would then authenticate each other with the prearranged phrase.

Simple enough. But in his short stint with Desk Three, Dean had learned that nothing associated with the NSA was simple. Dean gazed at the water, then turned abruptly and began walking. He glanced at his watch; he was right on time.

Two small girls ran past him.
They must be schoolgirls,
he thought, then wondered why they were out of school in the middle of the day. A middle-aged woman followed. She looked as if she were going to say something to him; he smiled. He didn’t know if his contact would be male or female, but he doubted he or she would have children along. That might be the ultimate cover for a spy, Dean thought—kids.

The path before him was empty. He turned back toward the pond, stooping low to see one of the brightly colored birds. He had to make contact along this side of the path and wanted to stay within a fifty-yard stretch where it was easy for Karr to watch him. So he became a bird-watcher, inordinately interested in the red feathers of the nearby fowl.

When he rose there were more people ahead. He strolled forward slowly, forcing a smile on his face.

Come on,
he thought to himself.
Come on.

Tommy Karr rubbed his chin as he leaned against the iron fence, watching Dean from the corner of his eye. Their contact was running at least five minutes late. Delays were an inevitable part of the business and did not in and of themselves signal trouble. Nonetheless, delays tended to complicate matters even when they were caused by nothing more dangerous than a traffic jam. The rendezvous point had probably seemed like a good one to whoever had chosen it—Karr suspected the messenger but did not actually know—but in point of fact the park was not well suited for an exchange. The woods on the other side of the lake provided easy cover for a surveillance operation; Karr had gone through them earlier and found none, but a jogger could easily trot down the nearby path and vanish in the woods. Karr had also planted a small video camera on a tree near the path—the camera was about the size of a large marble and called a video fly,
fly
being a takeoff on
bug.
Signals from the fly were relayed to a small transmitter that uploaded them to an orbiting satellite and from there to the Art Room. But it would have been impossible to cover every possible position where a trail team might hide. Just as bad, there were policemen at both ends of the path and others who would eventually notice Dean pausing on the pathway; sooner or later someone would get nosy.

Not that they hadn’t covered that contingency, at least to an extent. At ten minutes past, Dean would walk to the very far end of the arranged area, cross over the bridge, and then loop back. When he reached the far end of the area he would look impatiently at his watch and begin playing the worried companion, wondering where his date had gotten to. That act could take them through another fifteen minutes ; they’d then swap positions for five minutes before bagging it. Karr didn’t know what the reset procedure was or even if there was one. If the messenger failed to show, they would go back to being tourists, take in some of the sights, and wait for further instructions.

Something cracked sharply in the distance. Dean spun abruptly around. Karr, unsure what was going on, pushed upright from the railing. Then Dean started to run, and Karr did, too. Only after his first two steps did he realize the crack had been a gunshot.

Dean ran toward the bridge. He knew the crack belonged to a rifle—it was difficult to identify a specific weapon from the sound of a shot fired in the distance, but the sound was so familiar to him that he had no trouble guessing it was a Remington Model 700 or some military variant. He also knew it had not been aimed at him, for if it had it surely would have struck him; the rifle was once the weapon of choice among snipers, preferred for its accuracy.

A man somewhere past middle age lay sprawled in the middle of the bridge. He’d been taken down with a shot in the precise middle of his temple.

It was the messenger—his brown hat lay on the pavement. He’d only just reached the middle of the bridge.

Dean glanced around. The woman he’d seen with the two girls earlier was looking at him in horror. There were two, three other people nearby.

“Call the police,” he said. “A bobby. Quick! Go!”

Dean turned to judge where the shot would have come from, then pointed in that direction. “There! Call someone—have the police go there.”

There was no need for an ambulance, and so he didn’t suggest it. But he knelt down and opened the man’s sports coat as if checking him for more wounds and making him comfortable.

In reality, Dean was looking for whatever the man was supposed to pass him or at least an ID. He found nothing. Dean leaned down as if listening for a heartbeat and rifled through the man’s pockets. There was a hotel room card with a magnetic strip, some change; nothing else. He pocketed the card, then looked up to see one of the little girls staring at him. He pretended to try to resuscitate the dead man with CPR.

A hand on his shoulder sent a shock through his body. Dean spun around to find Tommy Karr.

“Our package?” asked Karr.

“Don’t see anything,” said Dean.

“Nothing?”

“I don’t think so.”

“ID?”

“Can’t find any.”

“We want to blend into the crowd,” said Karr, standing up. For once he wasn’t smiling. “Come on. He’s dead, Charlie.”

“I know that.”

“Well, let’s go.”

“We can’t just leave him.”

“Yeah, we can. Come on.”

Dean started to get up, but it was too late to fade away. One of the policemen who’d been on foot patrol through the park came running up, radio microphone and a whistle in hand.

“The shot came from over there,” Dean told the officer. He pointed across the lake. “From over there somewhere.”

“Please remain where you are,” said the policeman, pulling his radio microphone up. “Please wait. If you took anything from him, I advise you to lay it on the ground quickly.”

“I didn’t rob him.”

“I didn’t say you did, sir. Please don’t move. There will be questions. You, too, sir,” he added, pointing at Karr.

Dean belatedly realized he’d made a serious mistake.

6

Rubens stared at the large screen at the front of the Art Room. “When did you last hear from her?” he asked.

“It’s over ten minutes now,” answered Telach. “She was in this room here.”

The red dot from Telach’s laser pointer moved through the boxes on the schematic of the airport terminal building, skimming across the lower left-hand side of the screen. Their information on the layout of the terminal was sketchy, based largely on Lia’s observations when she had arrived a few days before. The building was only one story and not very large, and they knew exactly where Lia was thanks to the small implant of a radioisotope in her body. They also gathered that the belt controlling and powering her communications system had been removed, since the signal and feed had died without being turned off. As a security measure, the communications gear only worked when close to the implant in an operator’s skull.

“It’s nearly eleven o’clock their time,” said Telach. “Nighttime.”

“I see that,” answered Rubens. He glanced at Lia’s runner, Jeff Rockman, who was sitting a few feet away, staring at his computer screens. His head slumped forward and his face looked like the color of a bleached bone.

“You’re sure she was struck?” Rubens asked.

“No doubt at all,” said Telach, though the question had been directed at Rockman. “The blows were pretty loud. The plane took off five minutes later.”

“No indication that they knew she was an agent?”

“As I said, we think the officer was looking for a bribe.”

“And Lia didn’t give him the money?”

“She tried. He just seemed—she didn’t act submissive at first....”

Telach’s voice trailed off, but Rubens could easily picture what had happened. Lia had run into a young officer who expected to be treated as a god. Suddenly confronted by someone who didn’t cower at his sneer, either he or his minions had lost it.

The man wouldn’t have been assigned to the airport because he was a genius or a stellar officer. And in his eyes, women—even Chinese women—would be lower than animal dung. Hopefully he was smart enough to realize that killing a foreigner would cause him difficulty.

Not much to pin one’s hopes on.

“She could be dead,” blurted Rockman.

Rubens glared at him. “Let us remain calm. We will watch the situation as it develops and respond accordingly.” It was a cold reply but the correct one. The Art Room needed to operate with quiet detachment. “Contact the terminal manager,” Rubens told Telach. “The civilian. Have the call come from someone from the airline who noticed that she wasn’t aboard the plane, looking for her. Then the military people there, then the people in town. Everyone she’s spoken to since she landed.”