Red Cell (9 page)

Kyra smiled. “I understand, but we really need APLAA’s help on this one. Our paper is going to Director Cooke, so we have to make sure we’ve got our facts straight.”

“Oh.” The girl’s expression faltered.

“If you could just show me where everything is filed, I could probably find the paper myself. I don’t want to take up your people’s time.”

“Which papers?” The intern sounded unsure.

“I have a list,” Kyra said. She looked down at her notebook. “I’d be happy to do the hunting if you’ll just show me where you store copies of your finished intel reports since 1990?”

The intern’s thought process was visible on her haggard features. “Need-to-know” was a gospel commandment. Just because people asked for information, didn’t mean they automatically got it. Mere curiosity wasn’t sufficient. The intern had to reason out whether Kyra actually needed to have access to the materials she had requested.

“I guess that would be okay,” she said. “Come with me.” The intern finally cracked a smile, the sure sign that Kyra had defused her. The girl had gone from an adversary to a willing accomplice in minutes. Kyra followed her through the maze to a pair of government beige filing cabinets only a little shorter than herself. “NIEs, IAs, and Serial Fliers here in the top two racks. PDBs and WIRes with background notes and references filed in chronological order in the bottom two. Anything else?”

“Nope. This’ll be fine. And thanks. I really appreciate your help.”

“You’re welcome,” the intern said before she walked away.

Kyra stared at the file cabinet, opened it, and began searching through the papers.

CIA RED CELL

Kyra dropped her pencil on the table and checked the clock on the wall; 2030 hours.
I lost track
, she thought. Jonathan had disappeared for hours at a time, leaving her to the welcome privacy of the bullpen
for most of the day. Hunger had finally driven her out of the vault a few hours before, but the cafeteria didn’t serve dinner and she couldn’t stomach anything the vending machines were serving. She had finally settled for the old doughnuts she had found sitting in a box on the refrigerator. She had thought about asking before eating but decided that Jonathan’s earlier rebuke about taking without asking gave her the permission she needed.

“Bored?” Jonathan asked. He stared up at the television mounted near the ceiling in the corner. Liang’s press conference was starting late and a pair of British journalists were filling time with inanities that the analyst didn’t want to hear, so he left the mute on.

“This is some kind of hazing, right?” She had been reading binders of intel reports since lunchtime and hadn’t quit even though her brain had stopped absorbing the words hours before.

“If I wanted to haze you, I’d tell you to streak through the gift shop.”

“You can guess what I would tell you to do,” she told him. “I don’t think the China analysts have missed anything.”

“They have,” Jonathan said. “It’s standard practice.”

“I see why they love you so much,” Kyra said.

“It would be a mistake to care,” Jonathan told her.

“Words to live by?”

He sighed. “Cooke was right when she said that CIA has suffered a major intelligence failure on average once every seven years. Postmortems show that every one of them was a failure of analysis, not collection. We had the information to figure out what was happening. And in every case, the analysts suffered from the same mental mistakes—groupthink and whatnot. Requiring analysts to go through more training doesn’t prevent them. More coordination and more review and more editing and every other process we’ve set up to prevent them doesn’t work. In some cases, it even makes them more likely. So when I said it was standard practice, I meant it literally.”

“So what does work?” she asked.

“Judging by our track record? Nothing, apparently. But a good Red Cell helps,” he answered. “Red Cell analysis isn’t about right and wrong, or predicting the future. It’s about getting people to think about the overlooked possibilities. Evolution, or God depending on your preference, has left us with brains that latch on to the first explanation that seems to fit the facts and our own mind-sets and biases when we face a puzzle. Even smart analysts develop shallow, comfortable mental ruts.
To get them out, you have to make them uncomfortable, make them consider new ideas, including some that they might not like. And that means you have to be—”

“Unlikable?” Kyra asked.

“I was going to say ‘aggressive.’ But the two are often the same.” He looked up at the television. Liang stood at the podium, waving his arms almost violently. Jonathan lifted the remote and turned on the volume as the Taiwanese president pounded the podium in a steady rhythm with his words.
“Zhonghua minguo she yige zhuquan duli de guojia!”
The translator rendered the English a half second out of sync with Liang’s excited voice.
“Taiwan is a sovereign state!”

“Subtle,” Kyra observed. She cracked open a Coke and took a short swig. She was running on caffeine now.

“It’ll take some diplomacy to smooth that one over,” Jonathan agreed.

It was less a speech than a tirade, and Kyra found herself staring at the screen but hearing nothing. “There was a Beijing native in my masters program at the University of Virginia, son of a professional chef and a state-certified culinary artist himself,” she said. “When we graduated, he cooked a four-course meal for some of us that ruined me for American-made Chinese food for years. He asked me once whether I thought Taiwan was a sovereign country or a Chinese province.”

Interesting,
he thought. She was sharing a personal memory with someone she barely knew. “That’s a loaded question. What’d you say?”

“I asked him if Beijing collected taxes from Taipei,” Kyra said.

“Old debater’s trick,” Jonathan said, approving. “Answer a question with a question.”

“Yeah. I hate that. But he took it well,” she recalled. “He was friendly. He was also a Communist and an atheist. When he graduated, we gave him a tee shirt that said, ‘Thank Heaven for Capitalism.’ That made him laugh. After I joined the Agency, I started wondering if that dumb joke hadn’t gotten him in trouble when he got home—spending some time under the bright lights with some MSS officers trying to figure out just how much we’d corrupted him.”

“They have a talk with plenty of students who go home,” Jonathan observed. “Partly to collect intel, but mostly to intimidate them.”

“It works. We don’t get many Chinese walk-ins.” Kyra stared out the window into the dark. “I never found out what happened to him, even with all the resources this place has.”

Jonathan cocked his head. The young woman seemed hardly aware that he was in the room. He decided to offer her a way out. “You can go home. It doesn’t take two people to run this up to Cooke.”

Kyra looked up and said nothing, as though she hadn’t heard him. Then she hesitated, but only to avoid looking like she was rushing for the door. She had the impulse to ask if he was sure but decided against it. She was quite sure that the question would annoy him, if not diminish his opinion of her intelligence.

“See you tomorrow.” Kyra picked up her coat, fled the vault, and didn’t look back.

CIA HEADQUARTERS

The New Headquarters Building lobby had eight security gates, four on either side of the security desk. Half had “out of service” signs taped over the keypads. Kyra searched for a working gate, found one on the far right, and held her badge to the reader. The machine did nothing for a moment, then made a rude noise and refused to open its metal arms. She pressed her badge to the scanner a second time to no effect. Irritated, Kyra looked to the guard, who finally lifted his head after the third alarm.

“Just go around.” The guard returned his attention to his monitor.

Kyra dropped her head.
The biggest intel agency in the world can’t keep the badge readers working.

In the dark, the guard didn’t see her disgust as she obeyed. The automatic doors at the far end waited until the last second to open and the cold air smacked her face as she passed through the air curtain into the wind. The sidewalk lights cut a path in the darkness as she hurried south to the garage. Clouds hid the moon. Kyra couldn’t see more than twenty yards into the night in any direction.

With the parking deck nearly empty, her truck was easy to find. She crawled into the frigid cab and started the engine.

“. . . the existence of such a large spy network puts the lie to President Tian’s claim that China is a partner for peace and harbors no unfriendly intentions towards the Taiwanese people. Accordingly, I am suspending Taiwan’s participation in the National Unification Council . . .”
Kyra had left her satellite radio tuned to the BBC World Service. The translator’s English came in calm, measured tones that stripped out the anger and
emotion that Kyra could hear in Liang’s voice as he spoke underneath the translation. Kyra wished that she understood Chinese and could hear the original feed without the translator. Hearing dual voices in stereo gave her a headache.

“. . . the mainland and Taiwan are indivisible parts of China. We should seek peaceful and democratic means to achieve the common goal of unification. We are one nation with two governments, equal and sovereign . . .”

Kyra accelerated out of the parking deck and made her way around the compound until she reached the Route 123 entrance. She passed the guard shack ten miles faster than the posted limit. The guards, she guessed correctly, only cared about vehicles speeding inbound.

Route 123 was empty and Kyra plowed through the snow burying the town of McLean. She took the Dulles Toll Road exit, the lane markers appearing sporadically under the shifting white powder, hidden more often than not. The highway straightened a mile past the toll plaza—the snow plows and salt trucks had made at least one pass over the road—and she put the accelerator to the floor. It was foolish to take the truck up fifteen miles over the speed limit, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Kyra reached the top of the stairs and kicked three flights of wet snow off her boots. It was still falling and there was no covered parking down on the street. She would spend a half hour of her morning defrosting the truck and scraping the windshield with a credit card before she could even get onto the road. That assumed someone would plow the lot during the night.

The knob was freezing in her hand as she pushed open the door to her home and kicked her feet on the mat again before stepping into the small entryway. She tossed her keys onto the cherry hall storage bench, where they slid across the dark wood and fell onto the floor. Kyra left her boots by them and hung her coat.

The flashing voice mail light leaped out in the low light. She stared at it for several moments. She disliked talking on the phone even when her mood wasn’t dark, but the blinking light had triggered a thought that had, in turn, started a debate inside her head that dragged on for a surprisingly long minute.

Kyra leaned against the wall and tried to order her thoughts.

Analysis couldn’t be
that
hard.

First step, collection of the facts.
She’d lived in this apartment for less than two weeks and Verizon had assigned the phone number even more recently. She’d given it only to her parents, the Agency, and several local pizza parlors and Asian restaurants within the delivery radius. End of collection.

Second step, develop scenarios and assign probabilities.
She could eliminate the eateries. They didn’t call customers to solicit business. A telemarketer? She’d submitted her number to the National Do-Not-Call Registry within an hour of the phone’s activation, but some telemarketers ignored the registry. So that probability was very low, though not zero.

Her parents? A strong possibility, but not one equally split between her mother and father. Her mother might have called, but not her father. Their differences had sparked too many arguments. The professor was too proud of his intellect to tolerate a daughter who could see politics in a different way, particularly one who didn’t hate either the butchering military or corrupt intelligence agencies. But her mother was the diplomat of the family, always trying to save the father-daughter bridge that was perpetually burning under Kyra’s feet.

The Agency was a lesser possibility. As required, Kyra had given her phone number to the Agency, though only two days ago. It would be in the locator database but she had no close friends at headquarters who could dredge it up. There was a possibility that someone from the director’s office might have called. That had happened yesterday, the secretary calling to summon Kyra to the director’s office, where she had met Kathy Cooke this morning. So it was unlikely Cooke would be the caller.

Burke was a possibility, but she had been with him less than an hour before. He’d been the one who told her to leave. Barring some emergency, and she couldn’t fathom what would constitute an analytic emergency, he had no obvious motivation.

Her mother, the director’s office, Burke, and a telemarketer. The probabilities stacked up in that order.

Third step, test the hypothesis,
she thought.

Kyra pushed the voice mail button.

“Kyra, this is Reverend Janet Harris, assistant to the rector at Saint James Episcopal Church here in Leesburg. Your father called earlier this morning and asked—”

“Thanks so much, Dad,” she said to no one, least of all her father.
Kyra lifted the handset, dropped it back onto the cradle, then flung it onto the living room carpet.

Maybe the old man really did care? Not likely. He would be more worried about his public standing than her soul. One of his two doctorates was in theology and he was a senior warden in the vestry at the Saint Anne’s Parish in Scottsville, where her parents lived. Having a daughter living outside the church was probably an embarrassment. She doubted he even talked about her to the other parishioners.

Kyra went for the near-empty refrigerator and pulled out leftover gumbo from some Cajun place she’d found off Market Street. She also took out a beer, not lite, and a Styrofoam box of sticky rice and mango. She ate the leftovers, drained the can, left the garbage on the table, then fell into bed.