James Cobb: The Arctic Event

“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.”

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.”