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He unlocks the door to apartment 3-B, steps in, closes the door behind him.
The dark apartment seems small and cluttered, and a shape erupts from behind the couch, coming at him hard.
CHAPTER 5
HE TAKES THE cane, thrusts it between the person’s legs, causing a trip and tumble, and then he’s on top, twisting arms behind, breathing hard. He says, “Hell of a day, don’t you think.”
“You go to hell, right now,” comes the woman’s voice.
“Dante won’t approve,” he replies, and he gets up, the recognition phrase he used, and the reply, and his reply to the reply, all checking out.
He gets up, puts a hand against the wall near the door, fumbles for a second, turns on the light.
A slim and attractive Chinese woman gets off the floor, wearing black shoes, gray slacks, a light-yellow blouse, and black leather jacket. Her hair is long and ink black.
She stands staring at him, and he stares right back.
“You nearly broke my leg,” she says, her English perfect.
Ben says, “Had to do it. You came after me in the dark.”
Another stare, and then she shakes her head.
“Damn, Ben,” she whispers. “It’s good to see you!”
“You too, Lin,” he says, stepping forward, giving her a good hard hug and kiss on the cheek. She is Chin Lin, a fellow student back at Stanford, onetime girlfriend of his and now an operative of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
He looks around the cluttered and dirty apartment, checks his watch, sees he has five minutes before he signals for the exfiltration.
Good.
In exactly three hundred seconds after his signal, a black delivery van is going to pull up in front of this apartment building and spirit him and Chin Lin away. By this time tomorrow she should be in a safe house somewhere in Europe.
“How was your morning?” he asks.
She smiles. Damn, that smile …
How long before she gets back to the States? How long from then can he have the opportunity to be with her, one on one, with no Agency handlers or interrogators nearby?
“Fine,” she says. “Managed to slip away from my minders back in Pretoria and got here about ten minutes ago.”
Lin reaches over, gently fluffs the edge of his newly grayed-out hair. “Damn, Ben, you’re letting yourself go.”
He smiles. “You … you look great.”
Again, that sweet look and dark eyes that gripped him, the moment she sat down next to him at a Writing and World Literature English class at Stanford, and the class after that, and the one after that, when he had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out for coffee.
Those were definitely the days.
Stop it,he thinks. Stop thinking of those wonderful, sweet days at Stanford, studying and traveling and learning together, him telling her his story of being a lonely adoptee, her telling her story of being part of a large Beijing family, involved in both business and government in China.
After graduation she had returned to China, and he had stayed home in California, still alone. In a series of weird twists that could probably end up as an internet meme, they had both found employment with their own nations’ intelligence agencies.
“Long way from Tresidder,” she says, mentioning a student hangout back at Stanford.
“Six years’ worth of a long way,” he says, which is true—that’s how long it’s been since he last saw her.
He spares a thought: she wanted to defect, and she chosehim.