He hated feeling impotent. He’d had no choice but to put his trust in people he hardly knew to carry out his plans, too often a recipe for disaster. His Chinese trainers had dinned into his head over the years never to give anyone else a task that was critical to a mission. And nothing could be more critical to him than Cindy and Clive Cahill dying tonight.

It was at moments like this that he wondered what his life would be like if he had stayed Joe Keats, the name he’d picked for himself when he was eighteen and tired of having Xian Xu mangled and then mocked as a girl’s name by the uneducated idiots in Lampo, Indiana. No one ever mispronounced Joe Keats. Except for some of the braying asses he’d trained with in Beijing, who thought it shameful that he, with a Chinese father, had taken on an American name.

He drew a calming breath. He had done what he could, and if his plans went south, he was ready to run, from the FBI, even from Chinese intelligence, if he had to. He would survive.

Joyce Yang, the girl who’d turned him to the dark side, she’d say and laugh her husky laugh that made him mad with lust, and why not, he’d been only twenty years old. He’d loved her with everything in him, at least in those long-ago days before she’d betrayed him with a mid-rung operative, Li Han, in Chinese intelligence, and Xu had cut her throat and buried her deep near her precious hometown of Beijing, where he knew the choking sand from the Gobi Desert would score her grave until her bones were uncovered in the years to come, a fitting place for her, he’d thought at the time. As for Li Han, a man who looked like he was supposed to—Chinese through and through—Xu had left him with a slit throat in an alley in one of the many nasty parts of Beijing where murder was as common as girls selling themselves for a bowl of rice. Would their kids have looked Caucasian like him or like their mother, a full-blooded Chinese?

He looked at his watch. Nine-twenty on this dark rainy night in San Francisco. Soon he’d be drinking scotch at the Fairmont Hotel, watching the football wrap-up of the Monday-night game on the big flat-screen TV in the sports bar.

He whistled, realized he didn’t have enough spit in his mouth. For twelve years he’d survived—indeed, he’d thrived—working undercover in the American section of Chinese intelligence. They had taken to calling him mingzing—the star—because of what he’d accomplished for them. He’d learned to be ruthless in the way they respected, and yet he was charming enough to talk people out of their paychecks. Maybe his black hair was a bit too glossy and coarse, but no one would question that he looked entirely American, just like his mother, Ann Xu, who’d been an American history teacher at Lampo High School. The principal, fat Mr. Buck, hadn’t made fun of him like his peers had, since Xu was the school system’s expert in cyber-security. Buck even managed to get him a computer science scholarship to Berkeley. Xu wondered sometimes what Mr. Buck was doing these days. He smiled now. No way Mr. Buck, the bulwark of American conceit and smugness, could know his prized student had killed three students on his watch. Even then, Xu had been good at making people simply disappear.

Joyce poked into his memory again, those beautiful almond eyes of hers, whispering her flawless English in his ear how it would astound her trainers that he could so easily pass for a Caucasian. Like him, she’d been born in the U.S., not twenty miles from Berkeley. Ah, those days at Berkeley, hoisting up the Chinese flag, screaming with other protesters about the brilliance and honor of the Chinese people and the profligacy and corruption of Americans. He’d learned over the years, though, that it was the Chinese who had the market cornered in corruption. He wasn’t like the Chinese, he wasn’t corrupt, he carried his assignments out promptly and professionally—but now he was watching in disbelief as his life spiraled into the crapper in the span of five short days.

He’d failed in his mission—his anli—his superiors had told him, because he’d chosen defective tools, yet they’d happily approved Xu’s plans when he’d assured them Cindy Cahill could focus her attention on Mark Lindy and he’d be stuttering to do whatever she wished. And he’d been right, Lindy couldn’t resist her, just as his handlers couldn’t resist trying to get their hands on the latest generation of the Stuxnet worm Lindy was working on. Even the original Israeli worm had infected sixty percent of Iranian computers and slowed down their production of nuclear fuel for years. Having the access codes to Lindy’s work was as important to their industrial security as having the hydrogen bomb.

But his superiors had ended up being right about those two losers, Cindy and Clive Cahill. To cover themselves, they said they’d known Lindy would be too smart and too cagey to fall for a Mata Hari, that he’d be as careful with his passwords as the devil with a bowl of ice cubes.