Unhurriedly Randi closed her file and tucked it into her shoulder bag. Removing a pen, she ticked her room number onto the bill on the table. Rising, she crossed into the lobby and dropped onto the trail of the two men.
Outside, the hotel's taxi marshal was feeding a line of guests into the swarm of cabs clumping up on a smog- and car-clogged Dong Chang an Jie Street.
Sun Chok got into the cab first, moving quickly. The North Korean security agent paused before following, sweeping a last jet-eyed stare around the hotel entrance. Randi felt that cold gaze brush past her.
She kept her own eyes averted until the Korean's cab pulled away. Given the timing of their movement, Randi knew where they must be bound. She wasn't unduly concerned about maintaining continuous contact. A minute or so later, using a hesitant Chinese several grades below her actual grasp of the language, she instructed the driver of her own cab to take her to Beijing's Capital Airport.
As the little Volkswagen sedan struggled through the hysterical traffic of Beijing's Forbidden City district, Randi flipped open her tri-band cellular phone, hitting a preset number.
"Hello, Mr. Danforth. This is Tanya Stewart. I'm on my way out to meet Mr. Bellerman at the airport."
"Very good, Tanya," Robert Danforth, the manager of the Beijing office of the California Pacific Consortium, replied. "He should be coming in on the Cathay Pacific flight nineteen, or at least that's the last word we had. No guarantees. You know how the Los Angeles office is."
"I understand, sir. I'll keep you posted." Randi snapped her phone shut, having completed her carefully scripted verbal dance.
Robert Danforth was actually the senior agent in charge of the CIA's Beijing station, and the California Pacific Consortium was a front company used to provide cover for transient agents operating in northern mainland China. As for Mr. Bellerman, he existed only as a justification name inserted into routine Consortium business traffic over the past few days.
The cellular call had served two purposes. For one, it would explain Randi's actions to PRC State Security, should their curiosity be aroused. For the other, it would advise her superiors that two years of carefully crafted counterintelligence work was about to reach fruition.
When Franklin Sun Chok first appeared as a blip on the CIA's screens, he had been a graduate student of physics at Berkeley, employed at the huge Lawrence Livermore Laboratory complex in the Bay Area. A studious and intensely earnest young man, his after-hours interests and concerns included international disarmament and his ethnic heritage.
Neither of which was particularly out of place for a young American academic, but given the highly secretive nature of much of Lawrence Livermore's work, it had rated him a spot check by laboratory security. Alarm bells rang.
Sun Chok was found to be associating closely with a small Korean nationalist group on the Berkeley campus, a group promoting, loudly, the national unification of Korea and the withdrawal of the United States military from the peninsula. It was also an identified front organization for North Korean espionage in the United States.
Randi's cab drew up in the long line of vehicles feeding through the tollbooth access to the airport expressway. Perhaps a dozen cars ahead, she spotted the taxi carrying Sun Chok and his security escort. All was still on track.
Sun Chok had been placed under intensive covert surveillance. He was tailed, his apartment was searched and bugged, and his telephone and Internet traffic was closely monitored. In short order it was confirmed that he was indeed spying for the North Korean government.
The evidence was adequate for an arrest warrant, but an alternative had been decided upon. Franklin Sun Chok's betrayal would be put to good use.
Randi glanced at her wristwatch and frowned. If this traffic didn't break soon, both she and the Koreans would be in trouble. Then she told herself not to be silly. The next flight to Pyongyang wouldn't be going anywhere until its VIP passengers were aboard.
No doubt to the delight of his North Korean controllers, Franklin Sun Chok was given a promotion at the Lawrence Livermore facility, complete with a handsome pay raise, a private office, an executive assistant, and a deeper access to the laboratories' secrets. In reality, he was being encapsulated in a technological fantasyland of the Central Intelligence Agency's creation.
For over a year, Sun Chok was fed a carefully metered diet of solid, valid, low-grade information: research breakthroughs that were destined to be