Denise Ford hired a very good lawyer from the same firm that had represented her Uncle Cyril. He managed to negotiate a plea agreement that would give her the opportunity for parole before she turned sixty-five. The Justice Department approved the bargain after the CIA warned that it might be impossible to argue the case at trial without disclosing national security secrets.
Ford’s lawyers insisted that the evidence was ambiguous: Ford hadn’t taken money from China, and much of the information she had shared was published in scientific and technical journals. She claimed that she had disclosed information that belonged to the world and had not acted as an agent of a foreign power.
Before her sentencing, Ford visited the best cosmetic surgeon in Washington; she looked youthful and almost glamorous at her sentencing. The newspapers found her story irresistible. “Sexy Mole!” was the headline in one tabloid. A long magazine profile examined the mysterious woman who was the first high-level female penetration agent in modern intelligence history. A Facebook page created by her supporters had over one hundred thousand “likes.”
The FBI was disappointed that Ford was not more cooperative. But Ford did agree, as part of the plea agreement, to prepare for the CIA a manual on tradecraft, in which she would share what she had learned about Chinese operations. She wrote it in the form of a novel, which captured what she had come to understand about intelligence, not simply in her work with Li Zian but through her career at the CIA as well.
Ford’s book was circulated widely within the intelligence community. It gave Ford what she had sought through her career but had only achieved after she became a foreign spy, which was a reputation as a brilliant and intuitive operations officer. She was a traitor, but not to herself.
John Vandel summoned Harris Chang a month after their return to Washington to offer him a promotion. Vandel was too smart to try to squeeze the one person who knew the entire story. The Seventh Floor seemed to have forgotten about the past accusations of disloyalty. The awkward moments at the theater in Amsterdam were history, too. Vandel wanted to keep Chang quiet and safely out of his way.
Chang arrived at Headquarters in a new suit, stylishly cut, the trim jacket and tapered waist showing off his physique. He had a new haircut, too, fuller than the military look he had favored for a decade after leaving the Army. He’d spent a few days back home in Flagstaff, visiting his family and skiing. His face was tanned and the lines and creases that had begun to form in recent months seemed to have disappeared.
“I owe you an apology,” said Vandel. His manner was cheerful, but he looked worn at the edges, like a piece of paper that has been folded too many times.
“Thank you, sir,” said Chang. “Apology accepted.”
“I don’t just mean about doubting your loyalty. I never did, really, but the Bureau was antsy and I had to play that out. No, what I mean is that I owe you an apology for not realizing how tough you are. I’m not used to people saying no to me. But you probably saved my ass in Amsterdam. If I’d tried to haul in Minister Li, I might have gotten fried. So you were right. I was wrong. Does that make you happy?”
Chang bowed his head a moment, then looked up.
“I did what I thought was right. That makes me happy. The rest, I don’t care.”
Vandel pursed his lips. He usually was good at sweet-talking people. He didn’t like having his moment of generous self-criticism dismissed so abruptly. But he pressed on. Vandel had only a forward gear.
“I want to offer you a new job as head of National Resources. It’s one of the best jobs in the agency. You’ll run our collection from traveling professors and businesspeople. You’re perfect for it.”
“Why am I perfect?” asked Chang, with a wry smile. “Always good to have a Chinese face dealing with intellectuals and tech entrepreneurs, I guess.”
“Stop it,” said Vandel. “You don’t know how to take yes for an answer.”
“I have something to tell you, sir, if you don’t mind,” said Chang.
“Sure. Whatever. So long as you take my job offer. Otherwise, you’ll hurt my feelings.”
“I am resigning from the agency. I’d like it to be effective as soon as the paperwork can be processed. I wanted to tell you personally, but I’ve already gone over the procedures with Kate Sturm.”
“Why? Are you nuts? This is a top job. If you do it well, you’ll be in line to succeed me.”
A look of sadness came over Chang’s face.
“Working at the CIA was the only thing I ever wanted to do, sir, after I met you. But something got broken on this case, and it can’t be put back together. It’s like falling out of love. You can’t talk yourself back into it. Sorry.”
“That’s bullshit,” said Vandel. “You’re either in or out.”
“Then I’m out, sir. I’m sure that sounds stupid to you, but it’s what I’ve decided.”
Chang extended his hand to say good-bye. Vandel wouldn’t shake it at first, but he did after a moment. Vandel was staying in the game, after all. He didn’t need new enemies. If someone wanted to turn down a great job on a supposed stand of principle, well, that was their problem.
Chang walked out of Vandel’s office with a more buoyant step than he had felt in many months. He was finished with trying to be the person John Vandel would admire. He shook hands with Melanie in the outer office and went down the hall to say good-bye to Kate Sturm. He took the elevator down to the main lobby, looked at the stars on the wall, the eagle’s crest embedded in the marble floor, and the other totems of America’s secret world, and kept on walking out the front door. His whole adult life, Harris had carried on his body, and in his mind, the words “Duty. Honor. Country.” He had tried so hard to be faithful to those three values that he had almost forgotten to keep faith with himself. The Army had another slogan he hadn’t paid enough attention to: “Be. Know. Do.”
Harris Chang wasn’t a zero or a one. He occupied a space where things are ambiguous, where people are simultaneously friend and foe, loyal and disloyal, impossible to define until the moment when events intervene and force each particle, each heart, to one side or the other. A binary separation between black and white might be the human condition, but it wasn’t the natural order of things.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In researching this novel, I was aided by many people who generously shared their knowledge.
Craig Mundie at Microsoft, one of the nation’s wisest technologists, responded to my request for help by gathering some of his company’s best experts on quantum computing, including Michael Freedman of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Krysta Svore and Burton Smith of Microsoft. I can’t do justice to the subtlety of their work, but I hope I shared their passion for the big issues that are ahead in computer science.
A quantum “annealing” machine actually exists today, in the D-Wave 2X. Vern Brownell, the CEO of D-Wave, arranged for me to visit the company’s founder, Geordie Rose, and see some of the machines they’ve built in Vancouver, B.C. Colin Williams, D-Wave’s director of strategy and development, kindly read and critiqued portions of the manuscript.
Despite this real-world background, I should stress that all the companies and people in this book are entirely fictional, as the researchers I consulted know better than anyone. I hope they will forgive my mistakes.
This novel explores how the U.S. government oversees technology. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) arranged visits to their offices in Maryland, and I am especially grateful to project manager Dave Moehring, who explained IARPA’s unclassified investments in quantum computing and took me to the University of Maryland to see one of the technologies that may be a pathway to a real machine.
Maryland has become a world-class center for computer science; the university’s brief fictional cameo in my book is a hint of their remarkable work. Norbert Mathias Linke, a senior researcher on the ion-trap project at Maryland, read portions of the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions.
The heart of this book is about the long-running spy war between the CIA and its Chinese counterpart, the Ministry of State Security. My mentors were several of the best-informed people on this subject outside China. At their request, they remain anonymous here, but they know my debt to them is immense, especially for reading and critiquing a draft of the book. I’m grateful to my old friend Lena Sun, former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, who read the manuscript and offered wise comments.
A sincere warning to the reader: This is a work of fiction. When I mention agencies, companies, technologies, or other bits of information, these references are to a fictional world of my imagination. Readers will make a serious error if they assume that anything in this book is “real.” The people, places, and institutions exist only in the writer’s mind.
Online resources are invaluable to a novelist these days, and my list of Internet citations could go on for pages, but I owe a special debt to Stanford University’s “Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.” I also drew on Iris Chang’s narrative history, The Chinese in America, Philip Choy’s guide to San Francisco Chinatown, Arthur Dong’s Forbidden City, USA, and Eric Liu’s memoir, A Chinaman’s Chance.
During the course of research for the book, I visited Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Singapore in Asia; Amsterdam in the Netherlands; and Seattle, Newport Beach, Mexico City, and Vancouver, B.C., in North America. Thanks to my hosts in all those places. A shout-out to the superb online archive at the Leon Trotsky Museum in Mexico City.
Comments from family and friends shaped this book. I would like to thank my beloved computer scientist wife and first reader, Dr. Eve Ignatius; my father Paul Ignatius; my friend Garrett Epps, whose advice for this book was, as always, inspiring; and finally Lincoln Caplan, another close friend of more than forty-five years, who gave the book two subtle final readings and suggested some very helpful changes.
Special thanks to my editor at Norton, Starling Lawrence, and my literary agent for nearly forty years, Raphael Sagalyn. I am also deeply grateful to Bruce Vinokour and Matthew Snyder at Creative Artists Agency. W. W. Norton has been my publisher now for six books. A writer cannot have better luck than to be a Norton author.
The Washington Post has been my professional home for more than thirty years. I have been lucky enough to see the greatest handoff in journalism history, from Don Graham and his family, sublime newspaper owners, to Jeff Bezos, a visionary and iconoclast whose investment has given the Post new energy and readership. Thirty years ago, when Norton published Agents of Innocence, I thought I had to choose between being a journalist and a novelist. I’m glad that I didn’t.
ALSO BY DAVID IGNATIUS
The Director
Bloodmoney
The Increment
Body of Lies
The Sun King
A Firing Offense
The Bank of Fear
Siro
Agents of Innocence
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by David Ignatius
All rights reserved
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Ignatius, David, 1950– author.
Title: The quantum spy : a thriller / David Ignatius.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017015373 | ISBN 9780393254150 (hardcover)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Spy stories.
Classification: LCC PS3559.G54 Q36 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015373
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