Circumstances often forced an intelligence officer to approach strangers in strange lands. Time and again, these people were no more than the proverbial friend of a friend — or, worse, the enemy of a common enemy. No matter how tenuous the connection, there had to be some trust to move forward in any mission.
And then there was the problem of the mole hiding out somewhere in the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community. Yao’s contacts in and around Kashgar didn’t have to be bad themselves. They could simply be compromised — and that would drop everyone in the grease.
The driver’s-side door of the old pickup creaked and groaned when Clark pulled it open. Too late to quit now, he didn’t even look around to see if anyone had heard. Instead, he waved Hala in ahead of him. She scuttled quickly across the bench seat and ducked down while he shut the door. The inside of the truck smelled like tobacco and lanolin — sheepherder smells. Exploring, Hala opened the glove box and found a loaf of bread and a can of apple juice.
“Lunch,” she said, holding them. A half-moon of saliva dampened the collar of her shirt, but she was smiling now instead of chewing it — breathless and elated at having gotten away.
Clark was relieved, too, but had enough experience to know all of that could change in a heartbeat. Midas would be fine, so long as his cover held.
Clark turned the ignition. The truck started up without a fuss, and he pulled out onto the road, rattling east, out of town, away from the dusty livestock market, and the dead man in the slumping caravanserai — outlaws on the Silk Road.
Illegal entry into a hostile nation was beyond tricky.
Adam Yao weighed the pros and cons carefully of which point of entry would be best to take the Campus operators across. Holograms and embedded biometrics had rendered forged passports all but anachronistic. Fortunately, stolen passports still worked, so long as the offended country didn’t report the missing numbers. The Finnish documents Yao provided were genuine, with matching biometrics and authentic barcodes. To add a touch of even more veracity, VICAR, Yao’s agent in place in Russian SVR, had arranged for a Russian entry and exit stamp, with which Yao was able to mark each visa. Travelers with some history drew less scrutiny — at least that was the theory. Thanks to Yao’s contact in Beijing, the last-minute Chinese tourist visas were all in order. Probably. Trust was always a risk. CIA did have the mole, but Yao told himself he’d mitigated that by keeping his asset off the radar, paying him off the books with discretionary funds. Assets were supposed to have control numbers, files. Langley, and, more important, Congress, liked to know where their money was going. Thank God he’d broken the rules on that one.
They’d seriously considered crossing by bus at Maikapchagai, Kazakhstan, into Jeminay, a sparsely populated county in western Xinjiang. Locals used the crossing, so tourists, even benign Finnish ones, would raise a fuss. Still, the border guards were poorly paid, and Yao felt certain he’d be able to sort it out with a few hundred well-placed American dollars. Scrutiny sometimes wasn’t quite as tight at land crossings as it was at airports.
The problem was one of logistics. Entry with a stolen passport was one thing. But regulations at the Maikapchagai/Jeminay crossing required them to take a bus rather than a private or rented vehicle. It was much closer to their destination on a map, but the realities of vehicle procurement and border delays could add hours or even days to the journey. A commercial flight into Urumqi had put them seven hours away, but at least they had the independence of their own transportation. Security had been tense, but they’d been admitted with Yao, a Hong Kong resident, acting as their guide and minder. Yao slapped magnetic signs on both sides of the rented van, proclaiming them a “Sun Country” guided tour to ease the minds of jumpy security patrols. Chavez had wanted two vehicles, but the XPCC officials were suspicious of outsiders as it was. An extra vehicle without someone Chinese driving it would be an extra chance for random search — particularly in the off season, when tourists were rare and personnel at the checkpoints had little to occupy their time. So far, they’d passed three, and Yao had gushed about the beauty and glory of mainland China at every turn.
A Web search revealed Lake Kanas, a day’s drive north of Urumqi, was situated in a mountainous forest on a small protrusion that was bordered by Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. It was remote, and difficult to police. It was also famous for a large fish that was said to drag unsuspecting horses into the water while they were drinking. Beginning in May, tourists would flock to the lake for the numerous tour boat excursions, hoping to catch a glimpse of China’s version of the Loch Ness Monster.
