For a moment, Mo thought the man might lift the First Lady off her feet. Instead, he held her out at arm’s length, grinning wildly. “It’s been too long, my dear,” he said in an accent that was either British, or affected upper-crust American English — like he was clenching a cigarette holder between his teeth. “How is my old study partner?”
“Things are busy,” Ryan said. Underplaying her hand.
“I’ll bet,” Dr. Dan Berryhill said. “I miss our study sessions… Remember those little mnemonic ditties we used to sing?”
He raised his bushy brows up and down in an inside joke.
Dr. Ryan gave a nervous laugh, trying to demur, but he dragged her into a rollicking duet to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
The agents in scrubs looked on, mildly amused.
Mo Richardson stifled a giggle.
A blond nurse, who wore a white ceramic lapel pin over her nametag, leaned closer to Mo and whispered, “My experience, the brightest ones are always just a little odd…” The nurse stood up straighter and addressed the group. “You guys want to follow me to the back? There are some folks here you probably want to talk to.”
Hope was never a plan, but sometimes, after you did all you could, that was all that was left. Adam Yao had done everything he could to bolster his chances for success.
The execution of Yao’s plan began as soon as the Songs, a very tired little girl, the general’s twitchy aide, and Tsai Zhan, the minder, approached the Immigration checkpoint at JFK on their arrival to New York after the fourteen-hour flight from Beijing. Every country in the developed world had some level of medical screening for inbound visitors. Some methods were overt, like the large, cameralike thermometer aimed at the arrival corridor in Narita, Japan. Some, like the sensors and sniffers at U.S. Immigration in JFK, were less noticeable.
President Ryan had ordered the State Department to smooth the Songs’ entry into the U.S. with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They didn’t have to stand in lines, but they were required to report to an Immigration official.
The inspector, a middle-aged woman of Chinese heritage whom Yao had chosen because her human-capital sheet listed acting experience, noted to Tsai Zhan when he came through that he had a low-grade fever. She asked him a series of mandatory health questions, had him present himself to a bleary-eyed staff doctor in a small room off to the side, who asked him more questions. There had been talk at Langley of stopping him here, but Yao’s supervisors concluded that it would look like too much of an obvious political attempt to scrape him from the entourage, and would only cast more suspicion on the general.
“Welcome to the United States,” the inspector said with a welcoming smile, once the doctor gave the nod. “Probably just a bug. Get some rest and drink lots of fluids. Maybe some chicken soup.”
Tsai said that he felt fine, but the inspector reported to Yao that he’d touched his forehead with the back of his hand as he walked away — just in case.
Because of the late hour, they’d arranged for a charter flight from New York to Wayne County Airport in Detroit.
A clerk at the charter company (a CIA officer whom Yao had embedded there) met the group with a look of genuine concern. He asked if Tsai was feeling a little under the weather, mentioning offhand that there was something going around. He offered him a squirt of hand sanitizer — that Yao had laced with a scopolamine concoction developed by the docs at CIA. Tsai accepted, with a sneer of disgust. He didn’t take much, but he got enough to add to the queasiness he was already feeling from the earlier suggestions that he looked sick. The power of suggestion was a wonderful social engineering tool.
Not an official government trip, the Songs and their two hangers-on had squished into a large sedan, rented at the general’s personal expense and driven west on a dark and almost deserted I-94 through a steady rain. By the time they reached Ann Arbor, the general’s white shirt and his wife’s fashionable gray suit looked as though they’d been dug out of a hamper.
Kellogg had no covered parking, but staff ushered them quickly out of the rain and up to the fourth floor. Mrs. Song helped settle little Niu into an exam room to be prepped for surgery. The room was cramped, so General Song wished his granddaughter well at the doorway and remained in the lobby, slouching on the sofa, stoically looking a thousand yards away.
