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“Too enthusiastic? Or too much of something else?”
“Like what?”
“Like it scares me to say it out loud,” Noa says. “You have to admit that what he’s doing isn’t normal.”
“Jesus, Noa, what’s considered normal when it comes to a president. Do I have to remind you of—”
“No, you don’t,” she says. “At least this boss stays off Twitter and doesn’t claim to be a stable genius. But you and I, we’re in a privileged spot.”
“No argument there,” he says. “And I’ll talk to you if I’m concerned about an op or issue, if you promise to do the same.”
“Deal,” Noa says. “But we’ve got to prepare for something that’s coming our way, Liam. We and our teams are disappearing a number of opposing units. One of these days, our enemies are going to take notice, and they’ll respond.”
Liam thinks for a moment and says, “Like what we did after we armed the jihadists in Afghanistan when they were fighting the Russians. We walked away from the wreckage we helped cause, and that helped breed the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
“We’re causing chaos now, Liam, we need to be eyes open for what happens next.”
Liam nods. “Blowback.”
Noa says, “Blowback like we can’t even imagine.”
CHAPTER 33
ON THE OFFICIAL employment list of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China on 3505 International Place NW in Washington, DC, Xi Dejiang is listed as a deputy agricultural attaché, even though it has been years since he’s stepped onto a farm or into a slaughterhouse, and that suits him just fine.
He’s the senior representative for the Chinese Ministry of State Security for all of North America, and he is pondering a series of problems this morning while holding court in what’s known in the embassy as the Cube, or among his enemies in Britain and the United States, a SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.
It’s in a subbasement of a compound that was never officially designed or constructed with the knowledge of local and American federal officials, but Dejiang still takes the necessary precautions. It’s a room made of lead, cloth, Lucite, and radio-frequency-blocking foil and paint. There are no electronic connections that pass through the cube: no power cords, no communications lines, nothing, save for one dedicated and heavily secure phone line. The only furniture is a flimsy wooden table and four equally flimsy and thin wooden chairs, meaning it is nearly impossible to hide any type of listening or recording device in them.
Even then, this room is swept four to five times a day—and never on a regular schedule—and the furniture is also replaced on occasion.
The only bit of decoration in the small and nearly airless room is a framed print of the Grand Admiral Zheng He, who set sail from China in the early 1400s with ships of such size that they would not be matched again until the twentieth century. With his fleet and soldiers, Admiral Zheng had been poised to begin an undefeated march that would have conquered the world, until the idiot Hongxi Emperor and his finance ministers had called him back to shore and sunk his ships.
On days like this, he likes to think of the brave admiral’s ships going up the Thames or the Seine, burning London and Paris. He touches the frame and says, “Ah, ancestor, if they had listened to you, we would have taken our rightful place in the world nearly six centuries ahead of schedule.”
A tap outside on the cube and he calls out, “Enter!” The interior of the room is smelly, due to Dejiang’s habit of smoking American Marlboro cigarettes. He likes the taste and the nicotine rush and won’t toady up to the Ambassador by smoking Zhonghua cigarettes. He has also told the maintenance staff who asked him not to smoke in the Cube toGun kaithemselves.
A sliding door opens and his deputy, Sun Zheng, makes a slight bow and sits across from him, the thin wooden chair creaking ominously. Zheng is at least a hundred kilograms overweight and the compound staff tease him that his trouser legs and jacket sleeves clamp him tight, like sausage skins. But behind the flabby jowls is a sharp-rate mind and all-seeing, cold, dark eyes.
His hands are empty, yet Dejiang knows he’s ready for the briefing Dejiang requested two days ago. Zheng doesn’t need a notepad or paper, and since no electronic devices of any kind are allowed into the Cube, he can still do his job.
“Well?” Dejiang asks.
“The situation has gotten worse,” Zheng says. “We’ve lost another station in Redmond, and two of our Fox teams have gone dark. One in New York and the other in Chicago.”
Operation Fox Hunt,Dejiang thinks. Highly classified, highly controversial, with teams of State Security agents being sent undercover to the United States to observe, harass, and—where possible—seize dissidents, defectors, and suspected state criminals and bring them back to China.
On occasion in years past, Fox Hunt teams had been discovered in the United States, but it has been years since the last one.
And now there’s two?
“Any warning?”
“None,” Zheng says.
“And no word from the Americans?”
“Officially … no.”
