Atop a big table inside this second room was a forest of mirrors and lenses, several score of them, of different sizes and calibrations, mounted atop small stainless-steel platforms. This network focused down the laser beams that were used to target the positions of single ions of ytterbium. The ions were trapped with electrical fields at super-cold temperature that avoided the de-coherence effects of heat. Then other lasers bumped these trapped particles into a quantum state, one particle entangled with another, to build the array.
As Warren tuned her magnets and lasers, Kronholz watched it happen: Inside the forest of mirrors, you could barely see the beams of laser light as they focused down to the infinitesimal bands needed to target the ions. But the tiny tools did their work inside the atomic structure of ytterbium: They were fixed, excited to superposition, and then assembled into entanglement. Two particles appeared on a monitor in the control room, each one representing a fixed ion in a quantum state; then four, sixteen, sixty-four, and so on. More of them, entangled for longer, with greater stability, than people had thought possible.
It wasn’t everything, but it was something.
“I’ll be damned,” said Kronholz quietly. “It looks like you did it. Maybe.”
Warren sat next to him, watching the dots that represented the trapped particles, glowing like ghostly planets on the screens. “Spooky action” was how Albert Einstein had imagined such entangled particles that behaved identically at separate locations.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? And now you’re going to kill it.”
“Not kill it. Protect it. Make it flourish. Turn it into a real machine. But in secret.”
“I really hate this.”
“I know you do. But you love it even more. Now come with me and do the right thing. The sooner you get your smart post-docs out of here, the sooner they can start doing other research back home in Rotterdam or Shanghai. Right?”
Warren nodded. She had indeed known the deal when she started the lab and agreed to accept government money. She had just let herself forget. They stayed in the lab another half hour, removing disks and drives that recorded the previous night’s efforts and their own moments before. After a few minutes, the digital record of success was gone. They could write whatever they wanted into the space.
Warren told Klein to enter data from twenty-four hours earlier, when they hadn’t been able to get the array to work. He tapped his kippah into place and busied himself typing instructions and shifting files. He had worked at No Such Agency. He knew the deal.
Warren made one last check of the monitors and control machines. She put a hand on the casing of the laser generator as if it were a living thing and gave it a pat. Good-bye. See you somewhere else.
She took her briefcase, headed toward the door, and punched the lock again, opening the door to a buzz of noise. The group of students and post-docs in the corridor had swollen to several dozen now. They began a cheer, but Warren held up her hands. There was deep sadness in her eyes; her jaw was set, accentuating the lines of her cheekbones.
“It didn’t work,” she said.
“What?” demanded half a dozen voices. “Impossible.” “It worked last night.” “Something’s broken.” “Try it again.” It was a cacophony of disappointment and denial.
“It didn’t work,” she said again. “Last night’s readings were wrong. Andrew and I reviewed the data. It wasn’t robust. We were getting false positives. We’ll never get peer review.”
“What does that mean?” asked one of the post-docs in the front.
Warren set her jaw. For the sake of kindness, she couldn’t be kind. Kronholz was right: The sooner the non-U.S. researchers were released, the better it would be for their careers.
“Because I couldn’t reproduce last night’s result, we have a big problem. This gentleman”—she pointed to Kronholz—“is from an organization that’s one of our funders. I hoped I could show off, but instead I showed him a picture of failure. If that holds up, we lose our money. Is that right, sir?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Kronholz. “If something doesn’t work, we need to cut the cord.”
“Andrew and I will see if we can fix whatever isn’t working,” said Warren, with mock reassurance. “But we all have to be realistic. I am available starting tomorrow afternoon to speak to the post-docs individually.”
“Bullshit,” muttered one of the post-docs. Most were too stunned to speak. Working in a lab was like betting at a casino. If you had all your chips on red and it came up black, you were out of the game.
Long before the unclassified grant for the ion-trap experiment expired, a new grant was issued by an interagency group that included representatives from the National Security Agency and the CIA. The new funding would support the same work that had been done at the University of Maryland but at a highly classified lab at Fort Meade, behind barbed wire and with background checks and layers of secrecy.
The number of the new contract was a jumble of letters and numbers: S204GV-71-P-2067. This contract number and confirming documentation were transmitted on an encrypted intelligence community network that had no link with the dirty wire of the Internet. It could not be hacked.
Within days, a full report about contract S204GV-71-P-2067 was on the desk of Li Zian, the director of the Ministry of State Security in Beijing.
13.
BEIJING, CHINA
Li Zian did not like to be observed by his colleagues at the Ministry of State Security when he was digesting bad news. They were so attentive, waiting on each hint of how the boss reacted or what he might do. They encouraged the worst qualities of leadership: the loud braggadocio of command, the appearance of clarity when it did not yet exist. Better the logic of the masters of the Qi dynasty twenty-five centuries ago: Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
Li was a tall, ascetic man. The natural set of his face was a Mandarin disdain. He felt himself surrounded by little men, courtiers and flatterers and crooks. That was the price of Party discipline; it weeded out the ones who might tell the truth and make trouble.
The police had come that morning to arrest the vice minister. Li didn’t ask why. He had heard the rumors for weeks about the crash of the Ferrari. And then when he was briefed on the “incident” in Singapore, he had understood why his ministry was too weak to protect its own. It was filled by frightened, little men. The looks in the corridors showed anxiety and greed. MSS officers wondered if they should escape, now. The ones who thought they had leverage asked for meetings with the minister; Li refused.
Li sent meddlesome questioners to see his acting deputy, Xiao-Xi, a man who had a nervous, high-pitched giggle that became more pronounced when he heard or conveyed bad news. Your mother has died, ha-ha-ha. That was the way Xiao-Xi would deliver the message.
The corruption investigations were a mortal threat. Li pretended otherwise, but the ground was shaking under his feet. There were cracks in the walls; the portraits were askew. He had heard the rumors in the corridors outside Central Committee meetings: Why did China need an intelligence service, and a broken one at that, when it had the efficient and disciplined cadres of the People’s Liberation Army, Second Department, to conduct intelligence operations?
Li’s world had been darkening for many months; now the dreadful “incident” in Singapore, followed by the ouster of his colleague.
Li called a staff meeting. To show face. They would all be talking behind his back about the arrest of the vice minister. But in public, they would pretend they never knew the man.
“You are the wise analyst, Li Buzhang,” said his flattering, gibbering deputy as the staff meeting began, attaching the honorific word for “minister” to Li’s name. And it was true: Li Zian had been the Ministry’s top analyst of the United States before he was appointed minister in charge. He assessed the main enemy in the way that an all-source analyst does, putting together the bits of evidence to reach a balanced judgment. But when danger struck—a scientist attached to the Mi
nistry ended up dead in a foreign country—Li wished for the instincts of an operations officer: See it, own it, crush it.
Li looked over at Wang Ji, the head of the American Operations Division. Wang sat silently in a corner of the room, as usual, smoking, listening, and radiating disdain. His nickname was “Carlos,” from his many years of working in Cuba and Mexico City, where the American target was more accessible.
Wang was an oddball in a service that liked predictability. Because of his many years working in Latin America, he had taken on the traits of that culture. He was at once a reticent Chinese and a macho Latino, a Party man and a ladies’ man; it was a rare and precious combination in the MSS, and for that reason he was resented by more conventional, less talented colleagues. There was another thing about Carlos Wang. He wasn’t corrupt. He was still, in his peculiar way, a leftist revolutionary.
Li Zian passed Carlos a note saying they would talk later in the week when the dust settled. Carlos nodded and took another long drag on his cigarette.
The Ministry of State Security occupied a protected compound at Xiyuan, on the northwest edge of the city. It was hidden away in an array of gray brick buildings, beyond two locked fences. It was in an area of Beijing known as “Academic City.” Beijing University was nearby; so were the technical schools that did intelligence and military work. The Higher Party School, the campus-like retreat for senior cadres, was nearby, too. All secrets in China were subordinate to the great secret of the Party’s rule.
Li excused himself from his giggling deputy and the other briefers and said he wanted to take a walk, alone. The Ministry compound was a sheltered and manicured enclave, and usually it afforded the privacy that Li needed to reflect and consider his next moves.
But on this day, he encountered in the lobby an old friend from Fudan University who was paying a visit, and in the front courtyard a visitor from the Foreign Ministry. He had to be polite to both, but their eyes had solicitous, worried looks. They had heard about the vice minister’s arrest, undoubtedly. Li hated their pity; how happy they must all be to see him take a fall.
When Li finally found the solitude of a bench in a garden behind the main building, he was approached by the ambitious young man who had just been promoted to run the Sixth Bureau, which was responsible for counter-intelligence. This was the very last person Li Zian wanted to see on that morning, so he excused himself abruptly and exited the compound altogether.
A guard pursued him, assuming that the boss would want his limousine if he was leaving the Ministry gate. Li loped away in long strides, past the outer perimeter, and hailed a taxi. He told the driver he wanted to go to the Summer Palace, a half mile distant. It was full of tourists, which promised anonymity and a chance to think. They rumbled past the Xiyuan subway stop. Across the intersection stood a KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s, like America, inescapable.
Li entered through the gabled roof of the Eastern Palace gateway, head down, hands in his pockets, his tall form bent forward as if to cut the autumn breeze. This was a morning when you could at least see the clouds above and didn’t have to chew the air in your mouth.
“The ruler who rules benevolently will live a long life,” read the inscription on the pavilion just inside the gate. How much help was that to a man who ran a spy service, whose trade was thievery and deceit? Benevolence was for another kingdom.
Li escaped the tourists at the gate and took a seat by himself. Finally alone, he turned over in his mind the case of Dr. Ma Yubo, the chief science adviser to the Tenth Bureau and a man whom Li had actually liked, in contrast to so many of his colleagues.
Li had been troubled by Ma’s death the moment he heard about it. They were both Shanghai boys; that was part of it. The whole of the Ministry of State Security was a kind of Shanghai Mafia; they recruited from the top ten percent of Fudan University every year; they had the everlasting patronage of the former Chinese president and clique godfather, whose name, like that of the fictional Lord Voldemort, was rarely spoken.
This Shanghai-ness was part of the Ministry’s problem, Li understood. But he could no more sever the MSS-Shanghai connection than you could take Harvard and MIT out of Cambridge.
And there was the deeper stain: The Ma case involved foreign hands. It came at a time when the Ministry was under assault from those who said it was too western, too corrupt, too clumsy, too infected with the arrogance of Shanghai. The new Party leadership did not like the Ministry of State Security; the Discipline Commission took down its senior leaders, one by one, like the targets in a shooting gallery. Li survived, to their annoyance. They waited for him to make a fatal error.
The investigators had concluded that Dr. Ma had committed suicide. The toxicologists in Beijing had worked the body every way they could, but the answer came out the same. He had hung himself with a plastic cord in his bathroom. His neck had snapped. His body had fallen to the tile floor. The abrasions didn’t lie; they couldn’t be faked that well. Dr. Ma had killed himself, all right. But why? How had the Americans gotten to him? What had he said?
Li Zian stopped to admire the cast-iron sculpture of an imaginary beast called the Kylin, which guarded the temple grounds. Its magic was that it transcended nature: It had a dragon’s head, a lion’s tail, a deer’s antler, a cow’s hoof. Combining things—sun and moon, light and dark—brings power. Simple things that are all the same, that all go in one direction, are not so strong.
Dr. Ma’s death was explained clearly, perhaps conveniently, by the evidence found in his suite. Sheets of his hidden bank accounts were found, torn, in the waste basket. They were foreign accounts, held and managed abroad. The logic train was evident: He was stealing money; he feared he would be caught; the banker had demanded a higher cut, perhaps, and threatened to expose him. Dr. Ma panicked; he feared exposure and ruin, so he killed himself.
That was the story the room told, to the Singapore police, and then to the MSS investigators who were quietly allowed access to the scene when they advised the Singaporean security service that Dr. Ma had been there on “special” business. It all read clearly; too clearly, a suspicious man would say. But Li knew the additional, essential fact that MSS investigators had discovered: The Americans had sent a clandestine team to Singapore. This had been an operation targeting Dr. Ma.
And there was the one, last, horrifying fact: Dr. Ma’s secret notebook had not been found. An MSS officer never moved without his dossier. It hadn’t been found in his home or office; he must have taken it with him to Singapore. And now it was in someone’s hands. Weirdly, perhaps, Li hoped the Americans had the scientist’s mijian. That would be less dangerous to him than the alternative.
The Doorway was still safe and wide open, at least. Only a day before, another report had come in from America via the special MSS satellite communication channel. The message identified another computing project that was disappearing from the open world into the secret.
Li would have taken this information to Dr. Ma and asked what this new quantum computing idea, “ion trap,” was about. Dr. Ma would have explained the technology and used his secret contacts in the Academy of Sciences to fund a new, parallel Chinese effort. Perhaps Li would have allowed Dr. Ma to join him in registering for the reward, the many millions that went to the individual and agency that delivered new technology secrets. But Dr. Ma was gone, so Li could keep the money for himself, if he wanted it. But he didn’t. That was part of why his colleagues feared him. Money bored him.
Li strolled down the hill toward Kunming Lake. The crowd was thinning out. Tourists were queuing to enter the Summer Palace with its four delicate floors atop a forbidding stone plinth a hundred yards square. How Chinese, to put a precious structure atop an insurmountable block of stone. Li descended toward the murky blue-black waters of the lake.
Coincidence was possible. The simplest explanation might be correct. But you had to assume the opposite; you had to consider that the picture of what happened in the villa on Sentosa Island had been composed and a
rranged to send a message that was not the real message.
Li Zian reviewed once more the details of the problem as he walked toward the Marble Boat, the vast structure that anchored the eastern shore of the lake, splendid and immobile.
The Ministry’s best officers had investigated the case carefully at Li’s direction. The team included members of the Sixth Bureau, responsible for counter-intelligence, the Ninth Bureau, which oversaw anti-defector and counter-surveillance activities, and the Third Bureau, which handled matters in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. They had done their work carefully, at least. The paperwork was what it appeared to be.
The investigators confirmed that a firm called Luxembourg Asset Management had an office in Taipei and a branch in Macao, which did business under-the-table with many Chinese officials who wanted to get money out of the country. They confirmed that Gunther Krause, whose name was atop the torn documents, was a German national who worked as a portfolio manager with the Luxembourg firm, and that he had traveled to Singapore for a meeting with a Chinese client, presumably Dr. Ma Yubo. By examining Ma’s personal email traffic, they confirmed that he had made an appointment to visit with Krause, during a trip whose nominal “official” purpose was to attend a one-day symposium on cryogenic computing.
It had all seemed annoyingly simple, until an officer in the MSS station at the Chinese embassy on Tanglin Road in Singapore began working his best contact at the Security and Intelligence Division, a man who saw all the paperwork, internal and external.
There were some peculiarities to the Ma case, confided the Singapore intelligence officer. Informants at Ma’s hotel on Sentosa Island reported that the German, Gunther Krause, had been accompanied to his meeting with Dr. Ma by a Chinese man. The security staff made him sign in before they allowed him to go down to Dr. Ma’s villa. His name was “Peter Tong.” There were no pictures of him; the hotel’s surveillance tapes were blank for the afternoon of his visit.
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