LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE

      Edward Carstairs couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the worsted wool of his navy blue dress slacks. Barely containing his impatient sigh, he peered through the thick, gray smog at the bumper-to-bumper traffic inching along the eight-lane superhighway. Although there was still an hour before sunset, the cloud of pollution lent a hazy, unreal appearance to the world outside.

      We’ll never get there at this rate, he worried. “How long now?” he asked his driver in flawless Mandarin.

      “Ten, fifteen minutes,” the man replied.

      Rolling his eyes, Carstairs ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. It was the exact same answer he’d gotten the last three times he’d asked—inflection and all—over the past forty-five minutes.

      He took a deep breath, tasting the pervasive, acrid odor of Beijing’s polluted air, and stared out the window, pondering what the successful completion of this assignment could mean to his career.

      Carstairs had only been in China for eight weeks, and was still figuring things out at the US Embassy. So far the capital city had been a constant swirl of contradictions, delightful one day, maddening the next. But when a coded message had arrived from Washington, DC, instructing his superior to send a car and an escort with a stated “low profile” to pick up a family from an exclusive address in a gated community and bring them back to the embassy, Ambassador Balcius had picked Edward to carry out the task.

      “It should be a simple pickup,” he’d said. “No one knows you’re coming, and the neighborhood is fairly close to your home. Your background and recent arrival make you perfect for the job, as no one has gotten a bead on you yet—at least, as far as we know. I’m sorry I can’t give you more information other than the minimum need-to-know, just know that this assignment has repercussions far beyond its seeming mundanity. Above all, be careful—the government here has its hand in everything. Take nothing for granted, and above all, trust no one.”

      His superior’s words ran through Carstairs’s mind again and he patted his right pocket, feeling the small tube of metal there. If he was caught carrying it, or even worse, using it, it would be a diplomatic incident at the least, and get him expelled from the country and possibly even end his career at the worst.

      But Edward Carstairs was well prepared to handle just about anything that might happen; three years in the US Army had seen to that. He would have gone into Ranger School but for the accident that had blown out his knee; however, his ASVAB score had allowed him to move to intelligence. After his four-year hitch was up, his flawless command of Mandarin made him a top recruit of the State Department, and Carstairs soon found himself swimming in the murky waters of international diplomacy on the other side of the world.

      With a lurch, the traffic knot untangled itself and as quickly as they’d been blocked, the nondescript sedan sped up and took the next exit to the neighborhood and the address Carstairs was heading to. As they left the jam-packed main streets behind and entered the rarified neighborhood, his breathing quickened. He already knew that this was more than just a simple pickup—whoever he was going to collect was important to the United States, which meant there could be trouble before the night was over.

      His sedan motored down wide, empty streets with homes built like Italian villas on either side. He stared, eyebrows raised, at the Western-style grounds that made the neighborhood even more surreal. To buy a house out here took real money, even considering China’s artificially inflated economy. Whatever was going on, it was bigger than anything in which Carstairs had previously been involved.

      In a few minutes the car stopped in front of a more modest, Tudor-influenced house several blocks inside the neighborhood. His driver pointed to the home. “This is address.”

      Carstairs looked up from his smartphone, which had confirmed his driver’s words, and down the block. There was no one else in sight. His car was the only one here. “Keep the engine running. I’ll be back with three other people very soon.”

      His driver nodded and grunted a response. Edward slipped his paper mask over his nose and mouth, then stepped out into the night air.

      It was a little easier to breathe out here. Glancing up he was surprised to be able to barely make out the night sky amid the smog and light pollution. Carstairs trotted up the flagstone-inlaid walk to the large, double front doors made of some sort of exotic wood he didn’t recognize, complete with a small, inset door for seeing who was outside. Scanning the area one last time, he noticed there were no lights on inside as he raised his fist and knocked on the door. There was no answer at first and Carstairs was just about to knock again when the viewing portal cracked open. A woman’s eyes stared at him.

      “Good evening, Mrs. Liao,” Edward began, “My name is Edward Carstairs, and I am from the United States Embassy—”

      He had only gotten to “United” when the portal closed and he heard locks being opened on the other side. The door cracked open just wide enough for him to enter, and a woman’s hand shot out, grabbed his arm and pulled him inside.

      Before he could react, Carstairs found himself standing in an opulent vestibule. The floor was white marble, and an unlit, massive, blackened-iron candelabrum hung overhead. The woman who had yanked him inside was also wearing a breathing mask, and dressed all in subdued gray and black. She was younger than he expected, somewhere around thirty years old, and clutched a dark green leather Hermès satchel purse, her only apparent nod to fashion. Two children stood in the doorway, a girl of about ten years old and a boy about eight, both wearing backpacks. The boy stared at him silently. The girl had her nose buried in some kind of portable game console.

      “You are American,” she said. “From the embassy?” The second sentence was practically a statement, with the barest upward inflection at the end to hint at uncertainty.

      Carstairs nodded. “Yes, I’ve been sent to get you and your family and to take you back to our compound.” He looked over the children’s heads into what appeared to be a richly appointed dining room.

      “Where

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