Xibeiwang, the second street north of Hou Chang Village Road
Haidian district
Beijing, China
2011 local time
Zhīzhū (the Spider) walked her web, the strands invisible to everyone but her.
Like an actual orb weaver, Léi had designed her tapestry with diverging meridians tied together by a spiral that began at the front door of her apartment and expanded outward. And, just like a real spider, she’d committed every node and filament to memory. She’d lived in the same apartment, in the same neighborhood, for twenty-five years. Getting lost or turned around was impossible for her. Her mental map and ability to geolocate within her domain would give even the best satellite GPS program a run for its money. She knew and recognized every sign, building, street corner, and alley. She knew hundreds of locals—from business owners to bartenders, baristas to beauticians—and she interacted with them regularly and in meaningful ways. She patronized their shops and salons. She learned the names of their spouses and children. She tipped often and generously and performed thoughtful favors that made people like and appreciate her. And in the doing, she had slowly and methodically built a network of genuine allies who would, if ever called upon, reciprocate her kindness. Their shops, restaurants, and apartments all served as safe, highly vetted, and inconspicuous signal nodes and drop locations.
In the espionage business, operating “in pattern” was critical to an asset’s survival, but, of course, patterns had their own risks and she sought to find that balance as the world changed. Over the past two decades, the number of cameras in Beijing had increased exponentially. The Ministry of State Security and Beijing police watched everyone, everywhere, all the time. More troubling than the cameras themselves, however, were the powerful data-processing servers the cameras fed. Léi was no computer expert, but she didn’t need to be a hacker to appreciate the threat.
According to her current CIA handler, Scott Kincaid, the Chinese government used artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform facial recognition, movement tracking, and pattern recognition. Everywhere she went and everything she did was monitored and studied by the computer network. So long as her behavior wasn’t flagged, she was unlikely to warrant the attention of a dedicated human surveillance team. However, there was no way for the CIA, or for Léi herself, to know if she’d been flagged, so the recommendation was for her to always operate under the assumption she was under active surveillance. This didn’t frighten or unnerve her. It had been her default mindset her entire career. Assuming she was being watched is what kept her on her toes and focused.
Paranoia was her best friend.
Paranoia kept her alive.
“Hi, Ping,” she said, greeting a street cart vendor at the location she thought of as node nineteen.
“Léi! It’s wonderful to see you. How are you?” the middle-aged man asked with a wide smile on his face.
“I’m well. How is the bun business today?”
Ping sold homemade baozi, aka bao buns. He only sold one variety, a steamed bun stuffed with a savory BBQ pork filling that was so delicious that she actually daydreamed about them often.
“The business of baozi is a steamy one,” he said, laughing at his own joke, which he repeated each and every time they crossed paths. Then he made small talk as he used a pair of bamboo tongs to select a fresh bun from the tray and wrap it in paper for her. She used the moment of his distracted attention to check her six and scan for watchers. “On the house, for the most beautiful woman I know.”
“Ping, if you give them away for free, your wife is going to be furious with you,” she said, graciously accepting the culinary gift.
“She’s furious with me no matter what I do,” he said and tapped his cheek. “But at least this way, I get a kiss from a pretty girl and end the day happy.”
She chuckled, leaned in, and gave him a peck on the cheek.
This was their routine, fifteen years in the making, and they both looked forward to it.
“Thank you, Ping. My stomach is already grumbling,” she said, stepping back.
“I hope you have a nice walk. Good night, old friend.”
She glanced at the side of Ping’s cart, looking for a mark, and saw nothing. Then she unwrapped the paper to expose the steaming-hot bao bun and took a bite. “Heaven,” she said, grinning with food in her mouth as she turned to leave.
Conducting SDRs, or surveillance detection routes, was a critical component of every “web walk.” The purpose of SDRs was twofold: first, to make it more difficult for any would-be surveillance team to effectively track and trail her; and second, to provide multiple opportunities for her to conduct countersurveillance to spot any would-be tails, or ticks, as they were known. Typical SDR maneuvers included route variations, random stops to allow visual scans, and speed changes. Advanced SDR techniques included unexpected reversals of direction, clothing changes, vehicle swaps, and employing confederates to distract, delay, or confuse any watchers.
Léi’s taxicab company was one of her greatest SDR assets. She employed sixty percent women and made an effort to hire girls who resembled her in build and appearance. She put herself in the rotation of drivers, taking shifts every week. This not only created a pattern of her behind the wheel, but kept her driving and navigation skills sharp. She also patronized her own taxi service regularly, hailing rides from dispatch many times a week.
Location “jumps” by taxi during her walking SDRs were a backbone maneuver.
Using central dispatch, she would pre-stage a pickup at a particular intersection or alley so that her driver would be ready and waiting before her arrival. That way, she never had to wait on a ride and any ticks following her on foot would be forced to hand her off to a partner in a vehicle, which would almost certainly be out of position. If she wanted to really level things up, she would use multiple taxis to play a shell game—swapping cars in covered locations like parking garages and tunnels. For shell games, she only used her most senior and trusted employees. To explain this odd behavior, she confided in one that she had a secret romance with a person of importance and let the office rumor mill take care of the rest. The knowing smiles and blushing cheeks were all the proof she needed that “her girls” were fully invested in helping her “get a little action on the side.”
The first five blocks of her SDR involved three stops to check her six, two direction changes, and one prolonged loiter at a local grocery store, where she bought a few items. During that first leg, she checked for signal marks in designated places—signposts, curbs, building corners, and the price placard for scallions in the produce section of the grocery. If a mark was present, it would indicate that a drop awaited her at a different location. Every signal node was tied to a specific dead-drop location, and that one-to-one relationship never changed. She compartmentalized this information carefully. No source was aware of any other source’s signal or dead-drop locations, and she served as a firewall between her CIA handler and her sources.
Having successfully completed her SDR without spotting any tails, she began leg two of her web walk. On reaching the third signal location—a noodle shop—she saw a panda sticker stuck on the bottom left corner of the shop window. Her heart rate instantly spiked, followed by a surge of adrenaline. Scott Kincaid used three different stickers to communicate with her: pandas, dragons, and butterflies. The panda sticker signaled a drop with tasking of the highest priority.
Kincaid had never used a panda sticker before.
Feeling the most alive she’d felt in months, she centered herself to contain her emotions. She could not risk letting any of the excitement she was feeling impact her demeanor, body language, or the pace at which she walked. The drop location she’d selected for panda events was Club Icon, a high-end bar, gastropub, and nightclub frequented by Westerners. A place where the very Caucasian and closely watched Scott Kincaid could visit without drawing too much attention. She’d never actually met Kincaid face-to-face, but she knew what he looked like because his headshot was on the U.S. State Department’s Chinese embassy website. Kincaid was supposed to go to Club Icon biweekly to establish a pattern of patronage.
Hopefully, he’d kept this promise.
She walked the remainder of leg two, completing the route as she normally would, before hailing one of her trusted drivers for a ride to Club Icon. When the cab arrived, she climbed into the back seat and greeted the driver, a woman named Biyu. During the drive, Léi transformed her appearance by applying dramatic mascara, eye shadow, and lipstick, letting her hair down, and ditching her sweatshirt and track pants for the yoga pants and exercise bra she already wore underneath. In the dim club lights, she would fit in just fine. In fact, the last time she’d gone to Club Icon, she’d had men half her age hitting on her all night long.
Flattering, but also annoying.
“Biyu, can you please take my groceries and outerwear back to the garage at the end of your shift?” she asked when they arrived at the club.
“Yes, madam. Do you have a hot date tonight?” Biyu asked.
“Very hot,” Léi said with a mischievous grin, and climbed out of the back seat of the taxi.
“I wish I could be so bold as you. I live vicariously through your adventures. I want to hear all about it tomorrow,” Biyu said, grinning back.
“That’s a deal,” Léi said, and shut the door.
She took a deep, centering breath, imagined herself twenty years younger and as the sexiest woman in Beijing, then walked with confidence to the entrance of Club Icon. The bouncer at the door looked her up and down, then waved her inside without making her pay the cover charge. It was still early, two hours before Icon transformed into a dance club, but the bar and dining areas were packed with the after-work crowd.
The hostess, standing beside a podium just inside the door, greeted Léi with polite disinterest—as if to say, I’m better than you, but you’re also a paying customer I’m supposed to serve.
“All of our tables are spoken for,” the young woman said, not even bothering to make eye contact with Léi, “but you’re welcome to look for a seat at our bar.”
Léi fantasized about dropping the woman with a four-beat, four-strike Wing Chun combination to the face and neck. Then, without a parting word, she left the pathetic thing behind the hostess stand and made her way to the reverse U-shaped bar twenty meters away.
The Icon Bar, as it was known colloquially, was truly a sight to behold. Somehow, the designer had managed to suspend colorful crystals in a fifteen-centimeter-thick block of clear resin that formed the bar top. The “floating” crystals were then illuminated by UV strip lighting that ran the perimeter, causing the floating crystals to glow like stars in a purple sky. It genuinely looked to Léi as if someone had miniaturized a vast chunk of outer space and trapped it in glass.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” a male voice said behind her as she stepped up to the right corner of the bar. “The entire universe, trapped in amber.”
She turned to see a tall, thirty-something Chinese man, whom she didn’t recognize, smiling at her. He was dressed in a hipster suit with a starched white shirt that was open at the collar.
“Yes, it is,” she said, taking a measure of his motives—noting his posture, pupil dilation, and nature of his smile.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, moving into position beside her. He placed both his hands on the bar top where she could see them.
“I like cosmopolitans,” she said, wondering whether this was a random pickup or something else. He could have been sent by Kincaid. Or…he could be an MSS agent. “I’m Qiū Léi, by the way.”
“Wang Disung,” he said and extended his hand to her.
She looked at his palm, smiled, and nodded, but did not shake it. Instead, she leaned against the bar and fixed him with a sultry gaze.
“Disung. I don’t hear that name often. What does it mean?” she asked, but she already knew the answer.
“It means ‘one who can be trusted,’ ” he said, then flagged down a bartender and ordered her cosmopolitan and a bourbon for himself. He returned both his hands to the bar, again where she could see them. She noted he wasn’t wearing a wedding band. “What does your name mean?”
“Autumn Thunder,” she said, looking up to meet his gaze.
He nodded, as if trying to decide what to say next.
“Do you like whiskey?” she asked him.
“Bourbon,” he corrected.
“Oh, I didn’t realize there was a difference.”
“Yes, an important one. For a whiskey to be called bourbon, it must be distilled in the United States with fifty-one percent corn content. So, you see, to call yourself bourbon, you must first be American,” he said, speaking in Mandarin with the exception of the last word. “American,” he spoke in perfect English with an American accent.
He’s signaling me, she thought, but still needed to be careful. She would wait and see if he passed the final test, something only Scott Kincaid would be able to instruct his proxy on how to do it.
“I did not know that,” she said with a smile before adding, “I wonder what other useful facts and information you know about the world.”
“I’m full of information,” he said. “I could bore you to death with trivia.”
“Oh really? Try me. You might be surprised.”
“Okay, here’s a nature fact. Did you know there are over three thousand species of orb weaver spiders, making them one of the most successful nocturnal predators in the natural world?”
This sealed the deal. Disung was definitely here as Kincaid’s proxy.
“That’s fascinating,” she said, and let her hand drift until the outside edge of her little finger was touching his. “Did you know that orb weaver spiders are the longest-lived species of spider, and that their resilience is directly related to their unparalleled ability to weave and service their web?”
Before he could answer, the bartender arrived with their cocktails, which Disung instructed be charged to his tab. The barkeep nodded and turned to the next customer. The proxy picked up his bourbon as she picked up her cosmo.
“To new opportunities,” he said, meeting her gaze.
“To dangerous liaisons.”
They clicked glasses.
With the vetting complete, the next fifteen minutes was a ballet of countersurveillance scans and overt physical flirting in preparation for the handoff. When the moment finally arrived, he placed his hand on the small of her back, and she let him. He turned her so her back was to the bar and his torso shielded her from most of the other patrons in the room. Then she felt him slip something slim and flat inside the waistband of her yoga pants. Her clothing options for this impromptu drop had been limited and what she wore lacked pockets, but Disung had found a way to make it work.
“Thanks for the drink, but I should be going.” She tipped up on her toes, wrapped her arms around his neck, and whispered in his ear, “Check node thirteen for my reply.”
When she let go and stepped back, she watched him blink once in acknowledgment before he said, “Wait, can I at least get your number?”
She shot him a coy smile as she turned to leave. “Sorry, I’m not into younger guys.”