by Adam Brookes
“This will not work. It cannot work.”
“Listen. This is what they have told me to tell you. They understand alarmed networks. And this will not set off any alarm. It’s… it’s, what… stealthed.”
“You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, have you?”
“These are clever people.” Peanut could feel the poverty of his responses. The professor was meeting his gaze now, and there was a sneer.
“Jinghan, this is what you will do. You insert the plug in the port. Then you watch this little green light here.” Peanut pointed to a diode on the key’s head, his chipped, dirty nail against the plastic.
“The light will start to flash. After about five or six seconds it will stop flashing and will show a continuous green. When it does that, you pull it out, immediately. Then you wait thirty minutes. Then you do the same thing again. Insert it, wait for the green to stop flashing. It will take longer this time, maybe twenty or thirty seconds. When it goes to continuous green you pull it out again.”
The professor was still silent.
“So just remember, when it goes to continuous green pull it out.”
Silence.
“That’s all. And then you just reassemble the key.” The snick as the shaft locked back into place. “Take it, Jinghan. Practice opening it up.” He held out the key.
Wen Jinghan sighed.
“Look, let me find another way, all right? I mean, this is crazy. This is just… it’s crazy. I’ll think of something different.” He patted the air, as if to calm Peanut down and to indicate the conversation was closed. He turned back to the screen. Peanut could see something fiery out of the corner of his eye. The cinema rumbled to the movie’s explosions. Peanut sniffed.
“No, this is how it’s going to go. And then it’s over.”
“Do you believe that, Huasheng? I mean, really?”
“When it’s done, Jinghan, call me at this number and leave a message. Any message, doesn’t matter.” Peanut handed the professor the little bag and a piece of paper with the Blue Diamond’s number written on it.
He had chosen the restaurant for its reek of Washington, of power, of quiet murmurings in paneled rooms. It was in Georgetown, and its middle-aged waiters would bring you mounds of fresh oysters on crushed ice, good champagne. She took his arm lightly as they went in. Monroe tried to stifle the adolescent thrill he felt. They sat. She ordered a champagne cocktail, for heaven’s sake.
“Taiwan,” said Monroe. “Do you know I’ve never been?”
She considered.
“It’s more cosmopolitan than you might imagine these days,” she said.
“I’m sure it is. You seem very cosmopolitan.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said.
“But as an employee of the U.S. government, I have to get authorization to go. Isn’t that a shame?”
“We’ll have to get you invited,” she said. “I’m told that can be done.”
“Oh, really?” said Monroe.
She giggled, held a hand up to her mouth.
“Oh, I know a few people, Jonathan. My family is old army, old KMT. Taipei is a village.”
It surely was. And Monroe had run her name past a couple of the village’s wiser inhabitants, just to make sure, to be told, she is exceptional, Jonathan. Father was an aide to the Generalissimo at one point. Grandmother related to the Song sisters, a distant cousin. Aristocracy, really. And the databases had nothing recorded against. She was just what she said she was—a doctoral candidate at Harvard, with very good connections.
“And what will be your role in that village, do you think?” he said.
“After my doctorate? Oh, I don’t know. Washerwoman. Whore.”
Monroe must have let his shock show, because she was laughing again, a little incredulous.
“I’ve embarrassed you. Jonathan! We’ll have to unbutton you a little.”
Unbutton me? he thought.
“But let me answer you,” she said. “I am thinking about diplomacy. Or perhaps something less formal, something in international affairs. We Taiwanese depend on quiet, informal friendships, don’t we? We depend on them for national survival, even though we are not deemed a nation.”
“You surely do. I must say I admire the way you exist there, in China’s shadow, the way you comport yourselves. You are very, very effective,” said Monroe.
“But you seem to feel things are about to get more complicated for us. With China.” She hesitated, then spoke. “I felt you hinting at this, in your talk at Harvard. You mentioned the launch vehicles. Do you mind if I ask you what that was about?”
Monroe loved these moments.
“What will you do with my answer?”
“Keep it very, very quiet. Just for me. Or perhaps, with your say so, I may share it informally with one or two friends in Taipei, friends who are equally discreet.”
Monroe affected deep contemplation for a moment, then deep seriousness.
“On one condition, Nicole. You will tell me how your friends respond.”
She nodded, gave him her half-smile. He spoke very softly and she craned her long pale neck to hear.
“We have indications that China is moving ahead with the DF-41, and that it will have MIRV capability.”
He paused for effect, took a morsel of bread.
“Now, they’re having technical problems. In April a prototype second-stage blew up on an underground test stand, killed eight technicians, two senior engineers. They’re calling it the ‘April sixteenth incident.’ But they’re unperturbed. So.”
She nodded, considering, her eyebrows raised.
“That, I think, will be news to my friends,” she said. Then she looked straight at him, and reached over and touched his hand.
“Thank you, Jonathan. Really, thank you.”
And later, in the car, she confessed to being a little drunk, and, her perfume enveloping him, kissed him in such a way—suddenly, hard, nails in his shoulder—as to leave him in absolutely no doubt.
He left it until Saturday, reasoning that there would be fewer people in the office. Now he stood, retching, in his bathroom. Lili was banging on the door.
“Jinghan, are you all right?”
“Go away.”
She was silent. He could sense she was still outside the door.
“I’ve just eaten something.” He was shivering. He splashed water on his face. “I’m all right.”
He opened the door and brushed past her. She watched him put on a coat and pick up his keys. He turned.
“I have to go to work for a little while.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll be back late this afternoon.”
She said nothing. Wen Jinghan walked out of the house. His house. His new house, in a barren development on the edge of the city, white-walled, an iron fence enclosing a lawn, even. Some of the other houses in the development remained unoccupied; some were unfinished, gray and skeletal. The professor unlocked his car with a blip, and pulled away.
He followed the fifth ring road for a while, then cut into Beijing. The smog and dust rendered visibility poor, the traffic sluggish behind ponderous buses, overloaded trucks. It was more than an hour before he arrived at the main gate, where he showed his pass and was waved through. He parked and left his hands on the wheel for a moment, breathing deeply.
As he approached the building his throat caught, and he felt the urge to retch. His breath hissed through his teeth. The foyer was empty but for two security officers in gray uniforms. They waved him forward towards the barrier. The professor took off his coat, bundled it and dropped it on the belt. He took his mobile phone and his keys from his pocket and dropped them in a plastic tray, which he also put on the belt. One of the two guards sat on a stool and watched the scanner’s screen. The other guard beckoned to him. He put out his arms and the guard casually passed a wand over his legs, his waist.
As it approached his hips the wand squealed.
The guard gestured wo
rdlessly to Wen Jinghan’s trouser pocket.
The professor looked down, as if to say, what could that be, Officer?
The professor reached in his pocket and pulled out a small framed photograph. It was no bigger than a matchbook, the frame of intricate silver filigree. The professor smiled and shook his head.
Sorry, Officer.
The guard looked down at the photograph. It showed a girl, nineteen, perhaps, in a mortar board, her head back, laughing.
“My daughter,” said the professor.
The guard smiled and nodded. The other guard came from the scanner to look.
“I want to put it on my desk,” he said.
“Is she at university?” asked the guard.
“Yes, she is. In America.”
“Harvard,” said the guard.
“No, no. She’s at a college in California. A small place. Nothing special.”
“You’re very lucky.”
“Not so lucky to be working on a Saturday to pay the fees!”
“All of us!” said the guard. They laughed.
The professor went to the scanner to pick up his coat. The plastic tray was next to the coat on the rubber belt. He reached down and took his mobile phone and his keys.
“Mobile phone on the rack,” said the guard.
“Of course.”
He walked to a wire mesh rack bolted to the wall, laid his mobile phone on it.
“Better get to it,” he said.
The guard gave a wave, friendly and dismissive at once, then sat heavily and reached for a newspaper.
The professor swiped the card that hung from a lanyard around his neck and went through a set of double doors. He walked down a long corridor, to the men’s lavatory, where he stood in a stall and retched again and again.
He placed the photograph on his desk. It stood there, reproach and talisman both. His office was a glassed-in cubicle. Outside the glass lay a larger open-plan space that was mercifully empty today. From his desk he could see across the space to the door.
He unlocked a drawer and took out a file, something related to personnel and budgets. He strewed papers around his desk and placed a yellow pad of paper atop them. Paperwork! The price of leadership! His computer was on. He took a second card hanging from the lanyard and inserted it into a reader. Then he placed his thumb on the keyboard scanner and typed a password. The screen brought up a menu. People’s Liberation Army General Headquarters. Do not proceed unless authorized to do so. Do not attempt to access areas for which user is not cleared. Report unauthorized access.
Wen Jinghan scrolled down to General Armaments Department. He clicked through to Comprehensive Planning Department, brought up some personnel lists. Then he waited, a riot in his belly.
They came fourteen minutes later, two of them, opening the door at the far end of the office tentatively, scanning the empty desk spaces. Then one saw the lights on in Wen’s office and pointed. The other smiled. They walked across the open area to the professor’s office, knocked on his door. He waved them in.
“Good afternoon, Professor. Sorry to disturb you. We’re from Network Security.” He was young, spectacled, in a short-sleeved check shirt.
“Yes, yes. Here’s my ID.” He held out the card on the lanyard.
“Thank you, Professor. So.” He gestured to the papers. “What are you busy with on a Saturday?”
“I’m behind.”
“Behind with what, if I may ask.”
“My work.”
Silence.
“Look, it’s a complex movement of personnel through the testing areas out in Shaanxi. I’m trying to piece it all together. It’s difficult. Now, please.”
The man’s eyes flicked to the screen, the papers on the desk. “Of course. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
Check Shirt looked for a moment as if there were something else he wanted to ask. But he just nodded and turned to leave, ushering the other man before him.
Wen Jinghan waited another hour and a half, tinkered with the personnel lists on screen. He left his office and walked. The corridors were silent. In the men’s lavatory he stood in front of the mirror and ran the tap, then cupped his hands and let the water pool and spill over his fingers. He bent and dashed the water on his face.
At the canteen he took a styrofoam cup and filled it with hot water from an urn. He opened a sachet of green tea and poured it on to the water, watched it balance on the surface tension, move lazily in a circle.
Check Shirt was there, with his companion. They sat at a table on the far side of the empty canteen. Check Shirt was opening a metallic lunch box carefully, peering into it as if the contents might pose a security risk. Wen Jinghan gestured to them, a backward tip of the head. Check Shirt raised and lowered a pair of chopsticks in faint acknowledgement, then returned to his lunch box. The professor turned and left the canteen, walking back to his office, quickly now.
He sat at his desk and unclipped his key ring, withdrawing from it the black, boxy car key. The snick as the shaft came away. His breathing, he realized, was shallow and fast, like a sprinter preparing for a race. His fingers were leaving damp prints on the plastic. The computer tower was at his feet. With a last look towards the door, he leaned, probed with his fingers for the port, and pushed the drive in.
25
Hong Kong
They often made her wait. They would say, so sorry to keep you, Miss Yang, so sorry. Or sometimes they wouldn’t. And now she stood at the window, looking from the twenty-eighth floor down across Mid-levels—the apartment blocks were slender as pencils, or incense sticks—to Hong Kong harbor. She had been waiting for two hours now in this miserable safe flat, its mid-century air-conditioning moaning, spatters of rain against the window.
It was, of course, part of their power game. Their intent was to instill in her a mix of fright and reassurance. Nicole understood this perfectly. But it annoyed her, and made her less, not more, amenable. And she had her onward flight to catch to Taipei.
So who would it be today? The beetle-browed one, with the thinning hair and the Hunan accent? Or the athlete, tall and angular, with his condescending Beijing demeanor? Or her favorite, whom she had named “Gristle,” for his leanness, the tautness of the tendons beneath his skin, and his air of scarring, survival. Gristle was sixty if he was a day and had been around the block, clearly. He spoke quietly, played fewer games, asked good questions.
And when the knock on the door came, it was, to her relief, Gristle, with a younger one she’d encountered only once before. New generation, clearly. Pop-eyed old Gristle might hack and spit, suck on a Great Wall cigarette held peasant-fashion, claw-like between second and third fingers; this one smiled, wore fashionable boxy black shoes and slick eyewear, stared at his handheld device a good deal. He looked like a Hong Kong kid, but he spoke the Mandarin of the far north. Such a giveaway. But that was the point, wasn’t it? We are from Beijing, said the accent. And when you’re talking to State Security we want you to know you’re talking to State Security. Wireless, she’d call him. They didn’t wait for her to open the door, they just walked in.
She was seated, cross-legged in jeans and cowboy boots, waiting. Wireless bobbed his head. Gristle gave her a tight smile, and sat.
“Miss Yang,” he said.
She just nodded. Wireless opened a laptop and placed a small digital recorder on the table.
“You’re looking, prosperous,” said Gristle.
“I’ve been waiting two hours.”
They both looked at her, let a beat pass. Gristle sat back, left it to Wireless.
“Please do not be upset. We have a very full schedule,” he said.
“I have a flight to catch.”
Another beat.
“Should you miss your flight, we will ensure you get another one.” Not as toothless as he looked.
“Tell us first, please, of your current situation,” Wireless said. “You flew in from the United States yesterday evening?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary as you left the United States? At immigration?”
“No.”
“Were you asked any questions by the airline or by any officials?”
“Aside from the normal security questions, no.”
“And when you arrived in Hong Kong did you go straight to the Mandarin Oriental?”
“Yes,” she said. Gristle was smirking at mention of the fancy hotel.
“Have you seen anyone you know since you have been in Hong Kong?”
“I met a group of friends last night.”
“Where?”
“At the Calypso Club, in Happy Valley.” She saw Gristle mouthing the word, Calypso.
“Name them, please.” Wireless tapped on the laptop as he spoke. Gristle lit a cigarette, coughed, looked at her. She named them: the broker, his young socialite wife, her Taiwan friends who ran the design company, the lawyer she knew from Harvard.
“Why do they think you are in Hong Kong?”
“I’m breaking up the journey home, doing some shopping.”
“What did you talk about with them?”
“Gossip. Money. Houses. They’re not interested in what I do.”
Gristle sat forward.
“Everyone’s interested in you,” he said.
She didn’t reply.
“They are, though, aren’t they? Have you told anyone about your, what shall we call it, your relations with Monroe?”
“No.”
“Has anyone found out about them?”
“I don’t think so. We are very discreet.”
“Discreet? My people saw you sucking him off in a parking lot.”
“No, they did not.” She tamped down her anger.
“Oh, I’m sure they did.”
“Your people are making things up. You should keep a tighter grip on them,” she snapped.
Gristle smiled, sat back, drew on his cigarette. Wireless veered off on another tack. They went back to the States, through contacts at Harvard and around Boston; the Chinese students on campus, who was doing what, who had got a job where, which kids were going into biotech, processing; who might be heading out to work at the big Massachusetts weapons factories; the American Chinese; new names on faculty.