The second perimeter Read online

  Emma just stared at Hanover until the stupid grin disappeared from his face.

  “You need to develop a sense of humor,” Hanover said. When Emma still didn’t respond, he shrugged and plucked the olive out of his martini with thick fingers and popped it into his mouth. “We think that whoever’s running this thing,” he said while chewing, “will check you out because the most sensitive place they’ve penetrated is the Pacific Fleet’s message center.”

  * * *

  EMMA NOTICED THE young Chinese woman two days after she began working at the message center.

  Emma, in her persona as flake in residence, had shown up late both days for work, her uniform poorly pressed, and her eyes red-veined from alcohol or drugs. To get that red-eyed look, Emma had mixed a small amount of contact lens cleaning solution with saline and then dropped it in her eyes right before entering the office. The eyedrops stung like crazy.

  The Chinese woman was in her early twenties, lovely, tall, and perfectly proportioned. She caught Emma’s attention not because she was Chinese— half the population of Hawaii is Asian— but because she didn’t have the proper badge for being in the building she was in. Since she was being escorted by another woman who did have proper clearance, she wasn’t technically in violation of any security procedure, but the fact that she was in a restricted area was enough to make Emma notice her. The other reason she noticed her was because of her beauty. No, not just her beauty. Her vitality. The young woman just hummed with energy. Later, Emma noticed her sitting outside at a picnic bench with three women having lunch. One of the women, also Chinese, worked in the message center with Emma.

  The young Chinese woman approached Emma two days later. Emma had taken to stopping at the officers club every night after work. She did this for two reasons: first, because such behavior was in keeping with her reputation as a boozer; and second, because officers clubs have historically been a good place for foreign agents to recruit potential traitors. The only drawback was that she had to keep fending off amorous navy drunks.

  When Emma entered the club she saw the young Chinese woman at the bar flirting with a navy commander. The commander was homely and pudgy and balding, and Emma knew that never before in his life had he been with anyone so lovely. Emma made a point of wandering past the commander on her way to the ladies’ room, and as she did, she memorized the name on his badge and his unit insignia.

  Fifteen minutes later the young woman gave the commander a little kiss on the cheek, which left him openmouthed and stunned, and walked over to Emma’s table. She introduced herself as May Chen. She didn’t have a trace of an accent and sounded as if she was U.S. born and bred. She told Emma she had been friends with the woman in the message center whom Emma had replaced.

  It took no time at all for May Chen to become Emma’s new best friend. And Emma, in keeping with her cover, drank too much, called her boss a bitch, and said how much she hated the fuckin’ navy. She made it very clear that her paycheck didn’t come close to matching the cost of living in Hawaii.

  While they talked, Emma was again impressed by how beautiful the young woman was: small, delicate ears; flawless, golden complexion; perfect rosebud lips. China doll, she thought, as she sat across from May Chen. There was also this sparkle in May’s dark eyes and Emma had the impression that this young woman— if she was a spy— was enjoying her mission as if it was the most exciting game she’d ever played. She was absolutely high from the thrill of what she was doing.

  Within a week, Emma established that May Chen had a boyfriend, also Chinese. The boyfriend wasn’t classically handsome but he was striking; he had a hawkish, angular face you tended to notice and the build of a gymnast, those men you see holding on to the rings, their arms perpendicular to their bodies, their muscles barely quivering as they maintain the position for minutes. To do that takes not only strength but the mental toughness to ignore tendons and ligaments screaming in agony.

  The couple didn’t live together but they met most nights at one or the other’s apartment. When they were together, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. And like May Chen, the young man gave off the same vibration— as if he too was having the time of his young life.

  * * *

  THE CIA RESEARCHER was a sour-faced man who sucked his teeth. Between the teeth sucking and the smoke from Hanover’s ever present cigarette, Emma wanted to scream.

  “Both of them have excellent covers,” he said, “and they go pretty deep. Birth certificates and social security numbers that belong to dead people whose names they’ve taken, high-school diplomas from places in California and Washington State, pictures in high-school yearbooks that even look like them. Naturally, their supposed parents are dead and they moved away from their supposed hometowns a long time ago so you can’t talk to anyone who’s known them in the last five years. If all you did was a cursory background check on these two, you wouldn’t spot a thing. I did more than a cursory check of course.”

  “But who are they?” Emma said.

  “The guy, we don’t have a clue. But the woman, she’s Red Army. She played on their Olympic volleyball team and it was pure luck we found that out. One of my assistants is a volleyball nut because her daughter plays. The Chinese team played an exposition match in D.C., and my assistant remembered her because of her defense. So we went through about twenty hours of tapes from the last Olympics, and sure enough, it was her. Her real name is Li Mei Shen.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME they met, Emma had made it clear to Li Mei that she couldn’t live on her salary, then two days later she told her new friend that she was now in extremis because they were going to start garnishing her wages to pay back her creditors. The next day Li Mei made her approach.

  She was in such a hurry, Emma thought. The fact that Emma was a good actress and came across as disgruntled and corruptible may have been the reason Li Mei moved so quickly: she saw Emma as an easy target and not one requiring much patience or finesse. But it wasn’t just that. This young woman and her boyfriend— Emma had been watching the boyfriend, too— were like two kids who had been let loose in a candy store. They were moving at breakneck speed, caution be damned, just grabbing handfuls of intelligence. And they were having a blast while they did it.

  The previous night, Emma had watched Li Mei and her boyfriend dance at a club. They were both athletic and graceful and completely in sync with the music and one another. They may have been spies but they had looked just like all the other twenty-year-olds writhing to the music, and they had danced until they shined with sweat and the promise of sex to come. They had gone to the club right after Li Mei’s boyfriend had met an air force staff sergeant from Hickam and taken a manila envelope from him.

  So now Emma sat with Li Mei at the officers club at what had become their usual table, and while Emma drank, Li Mei made her pitch. She told Emma that she belonged to a group of peace activists that would pay for messages related to the movements of nuclear submarines in the Pacific. The peace-activist angle was given so that if Emma— the Emma who worked in the message center— had a conscience, she could assuage that conscience with the belief that she was working for the noble cause of global harmony.

  Emma would never forget the way Li Mei looked that evening. Her long black hair had been combed into artful disarray, and a lock would occasionally fall forward and play peekaboo with one of her bright eyes until a graceful hand would sweep it back into place. She had worn a casual, eye-catching outfit, the type favored by the beach girls of Waikiki: a short pink skirt, a midriff-baring lime green blouse, and flip-flops that were covered with some sort of sparkling substance. She had looked so young and fresh. So alive. Emma couldn’t help but like her— and feel bad for her at the same time.

  * * *

  IT SHOULD HAVE gone down easily. There was no reason for anyone to have died.

  That day, Li Mei had gone to a bank and filled a briefcase with material from a safe-deposit box. The box was where they kept the material th
ey had acquired until it was time to give it to the courier. One of the items in the box was a bogus encrypted message that Emma had given Li Mei the day before. The content of the false message was so important that Hanover figured the Chinese would want to get it out of the country immediately. During the last three weeks, Hanover’s surveillance team had identified five U.S. servicemen who had provided classified material to Li Mei and her partner. These five people and the courier would be picked up at the same time they arrested the Chinese spies.

  A six-man takedown team would make the arrest. Emma insisted that she be allowed to be part of the team. Hanover made some crack about her not getting in the way of the “pros” but he eventually agreed, acting like he was humoring her. The team members were all CIA civilians and Emma didn’t trust them. They had the right equipment and probably had had the right training, but they acted like high-school jocks before a big game, horsing around and joking during the preoperational briefing. They didn’t have the discipline that Emma was used to seeing when working with military teams.

  It was almost funny, the thing that turned the operation into a disaster. Funny, but afterward no one laughed, not even the CIA jocks.

  Li Mei lived in a duplex off Lumiaina Street in Pearl City. The idea was to wait until three a.m. when Li Mei and her partner would be sleeping in one another’s arms. Emma and two CIA agents would take the front door, and the other three guys would come in through the rear. As the rear-entry team was approaching Li Mei’s back door they had to pass under the windows of the connecting apartment, and the windows were open. As one of the team members crawled under Li Mei’s neighbor’s window, a parrot the neighbor kept in a cage near the window went berserk. It began squawking, its screams ripping apart the night. The funny part was that the parrot was squawking, “Tiny bubbles! Tiny bubbles!”

  The CIA team leader made the decision to go in right away, while Li Mei and her partner were hopefully coming out of the fog of sleep, still trying to figure out why the parrot was screaming. The team leader made a bad decision. By the time the CIA team broke through the doors, Li Mei and her lover were in the central hallway of the small apartment, standing back-to-back with guns in their hands and a line of sight to both entrances.

  Li Mei shot the first two men who came through the back door. She shot one in the throat and one in the forehead. Li Mei’s partner shot the first guy who came through the front door and then he shot Emma. Twice. The first shot hit her body armor, the other went through her left bicep. Emma was returning fire as she was shot the second time.

  Emma shot Li Mei’s lover in the face, though she’d been aiming for his shoulder.

  Li Mei saw her lover fall and spun toward him involuntarily, and the third member of the rear-entry team, the only one still alive, was able to leap over his teammates’ bodies and butt stroke her in the head before she could get off another shot.

  The objective of the operation had been to capture both spies alive.

  The operation had been a disaster.

  * * *

  HANOVER TOLD EMMA that she would be Li Mei’s primary interrogator.

  When Emma told him to go to hell, Hanover had said, “First of all, honey, it’s already been cleared with your bosses. We figure you’ll probably have the best rapport with the Chinese gal, you being female. The second thing is, you’re not good for much else at the moment with your arm still in a sling.”

  A doctor on CIA payroll was brought in to assist in the interrogation, meaning he would be the one who would torture Li Mei with drugs and sleep deprivation and carefully controlled pain. The doctor never showed any emotion while he did his work; Li Mei was no more human to him than a medical-school practice cadaver. When Emma protested to Hanover about the doctor’s methods, Hanover told her to shut up and do her job.

  And Emma did. God help her, she did. Emma was still a young woman when this occurred, barely ten years older than Li Mei. She didn’t have, at this point, the self-assurance she would later acquire but she knew in her heart that what the CIA was doing was wrong— and yet she did what she was told.

  That was the last time during her career that Emma ever did something that she was ashamed of.

  In five weeks, they drained Li Mei dry. They found out who she had turned and what information she had taken, and as a bonus, they rolled up another Chinese team operating on the mainland. Nobody thought it unusual that Li Mei was vomiting every morning when they took her from her cell. Considering the drugs he had given her, the doctor felt that was a mild side effect.

  The playfulness and vitality that Emma had once seen in Li Mei disappeared the day her lover died. Now all that remained in those once sparkling eyes was hatred— and all that hatred was focused on Emma. Emma had set her up; Emma had killed her lover; and Emma was the one who questioned her until she could no longer remember what she had said. Emma had never thought it possible to actually feel hatred, but when Li Mei looked at her it was as if there were white-hot beams emanating from her eyes, twin lasers burning holes into Emma’s soul.

  Six weeks after being captured, Li Mei was exchanged for a U.S. “tourist” who just happened to have a camera that looked like a pack of cigarettes and who had been taking pictures of people entering a laboratory in Zhejiang Province.

  Before returning Li Mei to the Chinese, the CIA doctor gave her a complete physical; the U.S. government wanted it on record that she had remained in perfect health while in American custody. During the physical the doctor discovered why Li Mei had been vomiting during the interrogation sessions: she was pregnant.

  When Emma heard that, she threw up.

  39

  DeMarco left the Pentagon and rushed back to Mahoney’s office.

  “I have to talk to him,” DeMarco said. “Now.”

  Mavis, Mahoney’s secretary, raised an eyebrow at DeMarco’s tone. DeMarco was usually polite— and laid back. And he never came to Mahoney’s offices unless he was summoned. Now here he stood, glowering, his big hands on the edge of her desk like he might tear the top off. He really turned her on.

  “He’s busy, Joe. There’s something big going on and he’s with Perry right now,” she said. Seeing the look on DeMarco’s face, she said, “I’ll let you know as soon as he’s free.”

  “Don’t bother,” DeMarco said, and started back toward Mahoney’s office.

  “Joe!” Mavis said. “Joe! What do you think you’re doing?”

  DeMarco opened the door to Mahoney’s office without knocking. Mahoney was behind his desk, his feet up, his tie undone. Sitting in front of his desk was a fat man wearing red suspenders over a wrinkled white shirt. The man’s suspenders matched his tie.

  The man was Perry Wallace, Mahoney’s chief of staff.

  Most of Mahoney’s staff members were youngsters— bright, hardworking kids in their twenties or early thirties. Most of them had degrees in law or political science. Congressional staff work didn’t pay very well but these smart youngsters took the job to have something shiny to put on their résumés, to learn how Washington really worked, as a springboard toward their own political careers. Perry Wallace was an exception; he had been with Mahoney twenty-five years.

  Wallace was one of the smartest and hardest-working people DeMarco knew. He was also one of the most obnoxious. He could read about ten thousand words a minute, and he never forgot any of the words he read. He knew every politician of any importance throughout the United States, and exactly what buttons to push to get those politicians to move in the direction the Speaker desired. Ninety percent of the decisions Mahoney made were based on recommendations from Perry Wallace.

  “What the hell…,” Mahoney said when DeMarco burst into the room.

  “Beat it, Perry,” DeMarco said to Wallace.

  Wallace just smiled— it was a mean little smile— and he didn’t budge.

  “I need to talk to you,” DeMarco said to Mahoney. “It’s about the…the thing out in Bremerton. It’s important.”

  “Go on, Perry,”
Mahoney said. “Go get some dinner or something. And you,” Mahoney said, pointing a thick finger at DeMarco’s face, “this better be the most important fuckin’ thing you’ve ever had to tell me.”

  Perry Wallace slowly raised his bulk from his chair and picked up a stack of papers from the corner of Mahoney’s desk. He shook his head at DeMarco— the head shake was one of pity not annoyance— and then lumbered slowly from the office. DeMarco knew that at some time in the future, Wallace would make his life miserable for this breach of etiquette.

  “So what is it?” Mahoney said after Wallace left the room.

  DeMarco told him.

  “Jesus,” Mahoney said when he finished. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to shake up the world. I want you to make sure the DIA and the FBI are doing everything they can to find her.”