False Horizon - Alex Archer [106]
Annja nodded. “I heard. Tuk said something about your cancer being in remission. That’s wonderful news! Congratulations.”
“Thanks. But it’s not in remission.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s gone. Completely.”
Annja felt her heart leap. “Even better! Wow, how did that happen?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t want you to get mad at me, okay?”
Annja backed away. “What is it?”
“I never had it to begin with.”
“What?”
Mike held up his hands. “Annja, hear me out—”
“You faked that? I was beside myself with grief for you and now you tell me it was all a lie? How dare you!”
“I had to lie, Annja.”
“Why in the world did you have to lie?”
“Because that was part of my cover.”
Annja frowned. “Cover? What cover? You’re a teacher, Mike. You don’t need a cover.”
“The teacher thing is my cover. The brain cancer was another facet of it. Together, they helped sell me.”
Annja shook her head. “Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you’re a spook.”
“Guilty.”
Annja sighed. “How the hell did that happen? The last I heard you were doing great at your job and you had a great career.”
“I do have a great career. But it’s doing something other than teaching. The Agency uses me for a variety of unorthodox assignments, and the rest of the time I’m a mild-mannered teacher. It works out very well.”
“CIA?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look like a case officer.”
Mike smiled. “Not everyone who works for the CIA, works for the CIA, if you get my meaning.”
“I don’t.”
“The Agency uses a whole network of independent contractors. It goes back many years. In this country there is a network of people who can be called upon at any time to step up and take on assignments best handled by someone other than official CIA officers, even those deep-cover guys. So the Agency uses us and we’re sort of cutaway from the apparatus as a whole. It gives us better flexibility and more freedom to pursue what needs to be done without a whole bunch of hamstringing oversight.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t be upset with me, Annja. I feel bad enough that I had to get you involved in this. It’s all my fault that this happened to you and you got so banged up. But I needed you to come along or I never would have been able to sell it to Tsing.”
“Sell what to Tsing?”
Mike sighed. “For a long time now, the Agency has suspected that the Chinese have been dumping nuclear waste somewhere, but we never knew where. Some analysts thought it was a safe bet that they were dumping it at sea, but we’ve been watching for signs of that and never caught them doing it. That left either space or they were burying it.
“Now the Chinese have a fairly admirable space program, but they’re not anywhere ready to start shipping rockets full of waste to dump up there. So that left burying it.”
“Would they really do that?”
“China’s got more environmental waste than almost any other country on the planet, including us, if you can believe that.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
Mike continued. “We’d heard rumors about a construction project that happened over near Mustang, but we never had a solid lead to follow until a few weeks ago. One of the contractors offered a map of the area on the black market.”
“A map? That one you had that supposedly showed the way to Shangri-La?”
“The same. Of course, Tsing tried to buy it back, but the dealer said no way. We heard about it and the Agency figured I would have the best chance of acquiring the map.”
Annja shook her head. “Wait—why would Tsing need to buy back a map to a place he already knew all about? Didn’t he help build it?”
“He sure did. But he wanted the map so he could make sure it was off the market. He didn’t need it per se, it was just his attempt to contain an information leak.”
“But why go to him for the fifty thousand you needed to buy the map? Couldn’t the Agency just front you the cash?”
Mike frowned. “No, Tsing was too well connected in Chinese Intelligence to ever believe that I had the capacity to finance the map purchase. If the Agency fronted me the money, Tsing would have known who I was immediately and just had me killed.”
Annja sighed. “I’m