She shrugged again. “Those symptoms...the experts call it cybersickness. They believe it happens when you don’t have enough real world detail in a given scenario. Your eyes are looking for all the tiny little sights that seem to be imperceptible but are really picked up and registered by your brain. And that are hard to recreate in full. It isn’t virtually flying over mountains that makes you airsick. It’s flying over mountains that don’t cast the right shadows or have snowcaps in season.”

“So what are you saying?”

“We need a clearer picture of the Wolf’s new den. And that means cracking their security long-distance.”

Carmody was quiet for several seconds. Then he nodded. “OK,” he said. “That it?”

“Yes and no,” she said. “We should have a conversation about your friend Kali.”

He looked at her. “I’m listening,” he said.

Morse tossed her coffee cup in the trash receptacle and stood up.

“Not here,” she said. “It’s a glorious spring morning. Let’s take this outside.”

South China Sea

Major General Wei Shun Zeng was dead tired and bone sore. Dead tired because of his long, drawn-out trek from Beijing traveling incognito as an ordinary citizen. Bone sore thanks first to his shoddy overnight accommodations in third-tier Nanjing, and now to the cheap rattletrap jet flying him on the last leg of his fool’s errand. He was only glad to have a skilled military pilot at the controls to make the island landing at night.

The aides who had met him at the airport for the second leg of his trip—both also traveling in civilian clothes—were wise to sit far to his rear in the cabin. In his current mood, he wanted no one in his personal space. Cramped as it might be.

Until last week, he had never heard of Captain Zhou Kexin. Nor should he have. Zhou was a mere field officer. Born in Xinjiang Province, with the majority of his service across the border from Primorsky Krai, Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District—two marks against him right there. But he had become Wei’s central focus virtually overnight. And the government’s. With one brash and irresponsible action, Zhou had brought China to the edge of a mind-boggling crisis.

Wei was in a classic no-win situation. He’d known it the moment he received his orders. What he did not know was the reason the supreme leader had sent him as a glorified messenger to someone of vastly lower rank and inarguable lunacy. It might well be taken as an insult...but only if he failed to consider the mission’s gravity.

Still, it left him wondering. Was he eminently trusted or exceedingly dispensable? Or both?