It was getting near the time Wang should leave for his meeting. He made one last stop in the garden out back. Trotsky’s ashes were buried under a granite stone, bearing his name and the hammer and sickle, below a red flag flapping stiffly in the fall breeze. Carlos Wang looked at the marker and remembered a line of Trotsky’s he had read years before, when even to say the man’s name in China was the rankest heresy. It had been written by the young Trotsky in 1924, before the unraveling, when revolution was still a white sheet of consciousness and the dreamer was trying to imagine the future:
“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”
Carlos Wang bowed, imperceptibly, before the tomb. He reminded himself what the stakes were in the project he had embraced. They were seeking a quantum computing machine that would replicate the very essence of human thought, a machine as subtle and ambiguous as the human brain, whose fruits would rise even above the peaks that his secret mentor had imagined. The idea that a venal, corrupted America would possess this thinking machine first was an abomination.
Harris Chang approached the Gran Hotel from the wide expanse of the Zocalo plaza. Behind him, a hundred yards distant, was the splendid façade of the National Palace. In the southwest corner was the turreted tower of the hotel.
Chang was dressed in a pale blue windbreaker over a turtleneck. His eyes were covered by wraparound shades with mirrored lenses. He was wearing a backpack with the gear he had brought with him on the flight from D.C. He had traveled light, unsure how long he would stay. His instructions from Vandel were as skimpy as his kit.
Chang had stopped earlier that day at a safe house near the U.S. embassy on the Paseo de la Reforma. The local operations chief said he had stationed six watchers at the Gran Hotel. He was grumpy: A big station like Mexico City was like a hot-sheet motel; guests in and out, no questions asked.
Chang thanked the ops chief for arranging surveillance, but the team wasn’t large enough to do much good if someone wanted to grab him.
Chang fell in behind a group of Chinese tourists gathered in the Zocalo. The Chinese were just off a bus, forming an orderly queue behind their guides. Chang accompanied them toward the southwest corner of the Zocalo and then slipped away. He waited for a knot of visitors arriving at the entrance to the hotel and followed in their wake. Inside, it was as if he had entered another century. Vaulting above the lobby was a delicate ceiling of stained glass.
Chang headed for the concierge desk. He asked the uniformed attendant in halting Spanish to be connected to Miss Li. The concierge answered in English: He asked for identification and Chang handed over his Peter Tong passport. The man at the desk called up to the room, announced the visitor’s name, nodded, and then handed the phone to Chang.
“Hello,” Chang said. “I want to make sure I have the right room. What is your address?”
“I have missed you, James Bond,” the Chinese woman said. “I live on 4200 Lougheed Highway in Vancouver. I am happy that you want to see me again. Will you come upstairs please?”
The concierge, with a knowing wink, pointed Chang toward the elevator.
Chang knocked on the door. Young, helpless Miss Li was standing just inside. She was wearing a form-fitting silk dress. It exposed the curves of her breasts, but she had gathered a shawl around her shoulders. She looked guilty and embarrassed.
Chang entered warily. It was a setup; it had to be. When she closed the door, Chang could see that she had in her hand an envelope.
“A Chinese man was here before you,” she said. “He wants to meet you. He said to give you this. I am sorry.”
Chang stared at her until she dropped her gaze.
“Maybe I am a bad woman to make you come all this way. But I am Chinese, you understand.”
She handed Chang the envelope. It was addressed to “Harris Chang.” He opened it and read the computer-printed note inside:
“Dear Mr. Chang: I have a message concerning Dr. Ma Yubo. Please meet me this afternoon in Pachuca district, fifty miles north of the city. It is not safe here for our conversation. For that same reason, I cannot give you the address in Pachuca. A car is waiting for you downstairs, at the corner of Palma and 16 de Septiembre. It has a blue pennant on the passenger-side window. The car will bring you to me. Come alone. If you are followed, the meeting will not take place.”
The note was signed in Chinese characters. Below that, the sender had typed “Wang Ji, Ministry of State Security.”
“You need to go now,” said Li Fan. “They will be waiting.”
The car was on the corner, just as the note said, a block from the hotel entrance, next to a Nike Outlet Store. A muscular Mexican man was sitting in the driver’s seat, his head nearly touching the car’s upholstered roof. Chang read the license plate and then stepped away into the shadows on Calle de la Palma, several dozen yards away, and called Vandel on his secure cell phone.
“I’m at the meeting place, down in the street, outside. Nobody was in the hotel room other than the fairy princess. She handed me a note addressed to me in my real name, not the Tong identity. It was signed by Wang Ji. It says he wants to meet outside the city. If I’m followed, no meeting.”
“Sweet! Carlos himself!”
“Should I go? There’s a car here waiting to take me someplace up north in Pachuca, toward the Sierra Madre. Or so the note said. What should I do?”
“Go! Vaya con dios,” said Vandel. “I wish I could come along.”
“Can anyone cover me up there? I don’t know where we’re going.”
“Not to worry, Harris. The Chinese won’t hurt you. They aren’t ISIS. They don’t operate like that. Let’s just see what the play is. We’ll have you overhead. I have a drone up on loan from the DEA. We’ll follow you out of Mexico City. We can jump in if you get in trouble. But you won’t.”
“Thanks, bro,” said Chang, sarcastically. “I think the Chinese care more about my ass than you do.”
“Don’t say that, Harris. Not even in jest. Let them lead. This is their show. If they ask any questions, say you have to check with Headquarters and request another meeting.”
Chang sighed. He looked at the car and driver from his perch. “All in.” That was what his commander in the 101st Airborne liked to say at the commander’s morning huddle every day in Mosul.
“You want the license plate number?”
“Sure. What’s the tag?”
“The number is ZHB-43-36. The car is a black Lexus.”
“Got it,” said Vandel. “Have fun.”
Chang went back into the hotel. He put his secure cell phone into his backpack and checked that he was carrying only Peter Tong identification and pocket litter. He asked the concierge to check his backpack, gave him a twenty dollar bill, and took the ticket. He went back on the street and found the black Lexus, still idling on the corner. The blue pennant was fixed to the right window, as promised.
Chang leaned toward the driver to say who he was, but the Mexican just nodded and pointed toward the back seat. He had already gotten confirmation from someone that the Chinese-American in the blue windbreaker was the designated passenger. Chang opened the back door and took a seat. A lock clicked, and Chang found he couldn’t open his door. The driver went to the trunk, took a new set of license plates and, after removing the previous tags, fastened the new ones in place.
“All in,” Chang told himself.
The Lexus pulled away from the corner and headed north toward Avenida de los Insurgentes and the slow crawl of afternoon traffic. Chang scanned the forest of billboards that skirted the slum neighborhoods on either side. “Will you choose good or great?” asked a whiskey ad. Chang would settle for “alive.”
When the car reached Route 85, the main route north, the
driver pulled off the road and loosely bound Harris Chang’s hands, blindfolded him, and made him lie down flat on the back seat before continuing toward Pachuca.
23.
MINERAL DEL MONTE, PACHUCA, MEXICO
Harris Chang felt the change in altitude as the car rumbled up the Sierra Madre. It was like being back home: high, dry air; the hum of tires on pavement. He could smell the pine forests until it got chilly and the driver closed the window. The driver was playing Mexican pop songs on the radio. For a big man, he seemed to have a taste for ditzy pop music. Over and over the radio pulsed with upbeat, mindless songs and a breathless DJ trilling the names: “Thalia!” “Belinda!” “Anahi!” as if they were goddesses.
The blindfold was tight, so Chang had no sense of where they were, other than the feel of the terrain in his lungs and nostrils. The car began ascending more steeply, up a series of switchbacks, until it finally came to a halt. The driver uncuffed Chang’s hands and gently eased him out of the back seat to his feet but kept the blindfold on. He led him up stone steps and into a room where he seated him in a comfy chair. Chang could feel the warmth of a crackling fire to his right and the cool breeze from a window, straight ahead.
The driver removed the blindfold. In the low light, it took a moment for Chang’s eyes to adjust. Out the open window was a vista of high hills at sunset, pine forests climbing the hillsides. A half-mile below was a town, the buildings painted in fading, early evening tones of pink and ochre, illuminated by streetlights. A pale stucco church stood in the center of the little town, its twin bell towers fronting on the town square.
Chang didn’t see, at first, the man sitting in shadow to his left. But the flicker of the fire caught his face for a moment. He was Chinese with high, hard cheekbones. He had long hair that stretched to his shoulders and a wisp of a goatee. He was wearing a beret, tilted on his head. He was smoking a cigarette, each puff illuminating his features. It was a face that Chang had seen in pictures; up close, he looked more like his reputed role model, Che Guevara, than Chang had expected.
“Hello, Harris Chang,” said the voice in the shadow. He spoke English with a Spanish accent rather than a Chinese one. “I am sorry for the long and bumpy ride. This was the only way to meet in confidence. I hope you were not too uncomfortable.”
“Wang Ji,” answered Chang. He spoke the name slowly. “You are a mystery that lures people from a great distance.”
“You will call me Carlos, I hope. I like that name, especially here in my dear Mexico. Do you like this place? I thought it would remind you of Flagstaff, Arizona.”
Chang smiled. This was a carefully constructed piece of theater. In the flames of the fire, his skin and Carlos’s were the same lustrous tan, sparking when the flames rose like golden wheat on fire.
“Flagstaff is special,” said Chang. “No place quite like it. What’s this town? Does it have a name?”
“We are in Mineral del Monte. It is high in the mountains, beyond Pachuca. We are in a little safe house I found many years ago. I didn’t like to tell anyone, it was so beautiful. I never knew how I would use it, until now.”
“Now that you’ve brought me all this way, what do you want from me? I’m here to listen.”
“I want to talk with you about China. About your life as a son of China.”
“Come on!” Chang snorted. “Are you shitting me? I am the least Chinese man you ever met. I bleed red, white, and blue. If that’s why you invited me, it’s a waste of time.”
“Really?” asked Carlos Wang.
He took another long puff on his cigarette. The glow illuminated his eyes, bright with intelligence. He said nothing more for a long while, just smoking on the cigarette. He offered one silently to Chang, who refused, so Carlos puffed away until the ash fell to the floor. Carlos rose and went to the pantry of the little mountain chalet. He returned with a bottle of Mexican red wine and two glasses. He poured one for himself and one for Chang.
“Try it,” said Carlos. “It’s from Baja. ‘Único.’ It’s very good, I think. Americans don’t like it, but as with many things, they are mistaken.”
Chang tasted the wine. Carlos was right. It was delicious.
“I know many things about you,” said Carlos. “I know that you are from Flagstaff, yes. I know that you were in the Army. In Iraq, too, sorry for that. I know you work for the CIA. I know you were in Singapore. So I know pretty much, you might say.”
“You do your homework. That’s good. But you didn’t bring me here to show off, did you?”
“No, I told you. I want to talk to you about China.”
“I have no authority to make any deal. I have to check back with Langley.”
Carlos snorted and waved his hand.
“Listen to me, please, young Chang. Here’s what I want to tell you. Your great-grandfather came to America to work on the railroad. Do you know where he was from in China?”
“Canton.”
“Yes. Guangdong, we say now. He was recruited there with so many other poor men. I know the town he was from and even the village, too. Would you like to hear?”
Chang knew that he should feign disinterest and change the subject. But in fact, he did want to know where his great-grandfather had come from. He had asked, as a boy, and his father had said he didn’t know. But he had always been curious. Now this proffer of information. It wasn’t free, but the price was elusive.
“All Americans are interested in their ancestry,” said Chang. “That’s part of what makes us American. We can be proud of our roots and not be embarrassed or worried about where we came from. So, sure, I’d like to know where my great-grandfather came from. If you really know.”
“Ah, but we know everything.”
Carlos Wang lit himself another cigarette and poured them both another glass of wine.
“Your great-grandfather’s name was listed as Chung Hoy Co on the manifest. He was from Taishan County in the Pearl River Delta. It is just west of Hong Kong. The name of his village was Baisha. Many Chinese people went from there to California and Canada. Would you like to see a picture of some of your cousins from Baisha? The Xiang family there?”
“Sure. But don’t think this is buying you anything, because it’s not.”
Carlos Wang shook his head. He would never presume on the loyalty of his guest. He pulled from his satchel a photograph of a beautiful young woman, an orchid of a girl, and then a picture of a young Chinese man, dressed in a PLA uniform—smooth tan features, muscular body—who looked astonishingly like Harris Chang.
“You see? He is a soldier, too, your cousin. His name is Xiang Kun-Ming. He asked me to give you this picture.”
“Did he really?” responded Chang skeptically.
“Yes. Take it. He would be insulted otherwise. The woman, too.”
Carlos handed over the pictures gently, like fragments of another world. Despite himself, Chang took them, passing his finger over the faces.
“Very nice,” said Chang. He tried to hand the photos back.
“Keep them, please. The village of Baisha is very proud of its American cousins. It is part of the story that families tell, how during the famine years at the time of the opium wars, so many brave men went to America. They feel a hole, an empty place.”
“Stop it,” said Chang. He was fighting the pull of the narrative, but something powerful in him wanted to hear it.
“Would you like to know more about your great-grandfather?”
Chang didn’t answer. Carlos waited patiently, and then proceeded, with Chang’s silent assent.
“Your great-grandfather worked for the Central Pacific Railroad. He was part of a Chinese labor force recruited in Guangdong by a businessman named Charles Crocker. We found the pay record for Chung Hoy Co in 1866. He worked in Camp 6. His foreman was Mister G. W. Taylor. He worked for 317¾ days. Here. I’ll show you.”
Carlos passed a copy of a faded ledger book page. Chang found the name of his ancestor, Chung.
“The record does n
ot say how much he was paid, but it was probably thirty-one dollars a month. That was the going rate for a Chinese man on the railroad then. In a year, he would have made $372, if there were no accidents. Not so much. But it was better than starving back home.”
“How did you find that? My family looked for those railroad records for years.”
“Please, Harris, if I may call you by your Christian name. Please: We are very expert at this work. And we have so many Chinese people to help us. Everyone shares this story, you see. You should not fight it so hard.”
“I’m not fighting. I’m listening. But if this is the best you’ve got, it’s not working.”
Carlos smiled.
“Your great-grandfather was part of the great Chinese railroad workers’ strike in 1867. Did you know that?”
“No. My father told me about the strike but never about his grandfather’s involvement. I guess he didn’t know.”
“Oh, yes, he was one of them. They were proud men, you see. Working in those high mountain passes, blasting tunnels one hundred feet below the surface, for a quarter mile. And in the winter, too, with the snow and the wind, these poor Chinese boys from Guangdong.”
“They wanted more pay.”
“They wanted dignity. Crocker had raised their pay from thirty-one dollars each month to thirty-five dollars, so they knew that the boss needed them, high up in the Sierra, to dig those tunnels and blast the rocks. They demanded forty dollars a month! Yes, and ten hours a day instead of eleven, and only eight hours in those terrible tunnels. But Crocker said no.”
Chang nodded. “So Crocker called out the cops. I read about the strike.”
“More cruel. He cut off food and water to the Chinese camp, high in the mountains, bitter cold. For eight days, they starved. Crocker finally said he would take them back, same pay as before, thirty-five dollars, if they stopped causing trouble. Your great-grandfather was one of them. He lived to be ninety, I believe.”
“Quite a story.”
“Yes. Brave men. Do you know there was a famous strike, right here in these mountains, too, in 1776? The Spaniards mined their silver here. They treated people like dogs, too. But the workers fought back. They weren’t Chinese, these ones, they were slaves and Indians. But they were human beings. They went on strike! It’s universal.”
The Quantum Spy Page 20