by Adam Brookes
That was exhausted soon enough, as she knew it would be. Gristle stared at her.
“So get on with it,” he said.
“I’ve seen him four times now. I would say he’s hooked.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I can tell.”
“How?”
She looked at the ceiling.
“How do you think? Because he looks at me like a teenager. Because he calls me and whispers. Because he can’t keep his hands off me.”
They went through each meeting she’d had with Monroe. They wanted the physical details, but she stayed sketchy, stringing them along, which annoyed them.
“Stop being so coy. We need to know what stage you’re at with him,” said Gristle.
“Consider it foreplay,” she said. She looked at Wireless. “Do you know what that is?”
Wireless did not respond. Gristle slowly lifted a finger and pointed at her.
“You’ve got something, and you’re not telling us,” he said.
“Do I?”
He lit another cigarette.
“He said—” but Gristle cut her off.
“When?”
“Ten days ago.”
“Where?”
“When I flew down to see him in Washington. At the restaurant in Georgetown.”
“What was his mood like?”
“He was excited, all lit up. Dangling his secrets at me, like he does.”
“And?”
“So I asked about the launch vehicle reference at the talk.”
“What did he say?”
“He said they had indications, that was his word, indications, that China was proceeding in the development of the DF-41 missile. And he spoke about an ‘April sixteenth incident,’ an explosion, ten dead.”
Gristle was looking towards the window, exhaling slowly.
“Never heard of it,” he said.
“Well, he seemed to think it was important.”
“Never heard of the missile, never heard of the incident.”
“Well, he has.”
“He wants to screw you. He’ll tell you any shit. And you believe it.”
“No. He thought it was important.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he was entrusting me with it. He thinks I’m going to back-channel it to people in the know in Taipei. He wants collateral. He wants to know what the Taiwanese know. So he wants me to get an ever-so-quiet response. And he wants to be my mentor.”
“What do you mean, mentor?” said Gristle.
“He has some fantasy of leading me into important, dangerous places. He wants to reveal truth to me, show me the real workings of power, explain it all to me beneath the duvet.”
Gristle was very still, listening.
“He is my mentor and lover, my fierce, illusionless guide; I am the gorgeous Asian naif, waiting to have my creativity and power unleashed and shaped by him.” She made a mock-theatrical gesture.
There was a moment of silence.
“The eternal white man,” said Gristle.
She put her head back and laughed. Gristle smiled, twinkled a little.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” she said, smiling.
“Oh, I would,” said Gristle. “But he’s not going to lead you into those places, is he? You’re going to lead him.”
She cocked her head at him.
“Tell me why I should.”
He smiled, reached for another cigarette and lit it slowly, the grainy scratch of the lighter once, twice.
“Well, I could say money. Because you are costing us a fucking fortune. But that’s not it, is it?”
He paused, drew on the cigarette.
“I could say pressure, couldn’t I? Those old aunts and cousins of yours in Shanghai. We threaten to make their life miserable, but you don’t give a shit.”
He looked out of the window. Rain was starting to fall in earnest, long, steel rails of it. He looked at his watch.
“It’s because, Miss Yang, you are interested in power. And power flows to us now. And you want to be with us. Where the power is.”
It was as good an explanation as any she could think up herself.
Wen Jinghan counted off the seconds. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. The diode stopped flashing and turned to a continuous green. He leaned and wrenched the drive out of the computer tower, almost overbalancing on his chair. He clenched his fist around the key and sat still, listening. Could one hear the alarms they talk about? Are there bells? He looked across the office. Everything was still. He looked at his watch and noted the time. Nothing to be done now. The tension in his back and neck was a hot pain, his head pounded. He forced himself to breathe. He clipped the key shaft back on to the head and reattached the assembled whole to his key ring. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all.
He looked at his screen. Nothing had changed. What was it doing now, in there? The drive had, presumably, downloaded some sort of application that was busy in the guts of the network. Thirty minutes.
Another walk. Yes, some tea in the canteen, a certain cure for a mouth this dry, a stomach this turbulent. He forced himself to his feet, his knees weak and threatening to disobey.
The canteen was empty. No sign of Check Shirt or his silent partner. He resisted the impulse to go and find them, engage them in conversation, stay with them while the alarms rang and the lights blinked red and people screamed into telephones, and the corridors filled with pounding feet and electric batons. And dogs, probably.
He filled another cup with hot water, dropped another sachet of leaves into it, then placed it on a table and simply stood there.
Eight minutes gone.
Nine.
Voices in the corridor outside the canteen. His stomach lurched and he turned, his feet, he noticed, doing something like a little jig on the floor. His body was behaving childishly. He reached for the cup and took a sip, the sodden leaves smooth against his teeth.
And then, the door. He flinched.
The door was pushed hard from the other side and flew open. Two security guards in gray uniform walked in. They were talking together, something about Guo An, the football team, transfers.
They walked towards the professor, who stood, his feet melded with the floor. They approached him and then stopped. One of the guards gestured with an open hand just past him. Wen looked dumbly in the direction the man had indicated. The urn. The urn! He took a step back and the guards reached for cups, tea. He felt his eyes begin to moisten, some incontinent sense of gratitude welling up. He felt himself raising his own cup in their direction as if in a pathetic toast. Get a grip, he thought. The two guards ignored him. He turned and walked woodenly from the canteen, back into the silent corridor.
Twelve minutes gone.
His screen still had not changed. He leaned down. No sound came from his computer except for the usual hum and click of the hard drive. He sat, laid his hands on the desktop, tried to stop the shaking.
Only once before had he felt like this. And it was then, as now, Li Huasheng’s doing. The bastard. It must have been, what, 1987? The first protests in the universities had begun and the authorities were apoplectic. The police were all over campus, lingering amid the cherry blossom. Behind them you could see the State Security people, quiet, sitting in cars, watching you walk by. There were conversations in faculty offices. And if you were working in a sensitive area, defense technology, for example, perhaps rocketry and telemetry, you were called in for a chat. How did you feel about all this? Were you sympathetic to the demands of the protesters? Had you by any chance participated? Just a little?
He’d decided a measure of frankness was sensible. Well, it would be nice to have better conditions, better food, some light at night in the dormitories, and I think you should not limit the students’ ability to express themselves in peaceful demonstration. And no, I did not participate. The State Security officer opposite—he wore a white shirt, had the skin and hands of a fighter—made notes. His faculty adviser
sat, paralyzed with fear.
And any contact with foreigners, the source of the bourgeois liberalization that was infecting so many young minds?
No.
Which was, strictly speaking, true. Because it was Li Huasheng who met the British journalist woman and passed on every scrap of privileged information they could lay their gullible, idiotic hands on. In return for which they had received a nebulous promise of a visa to that distant, damp country, a promise that somehow never came good.
When he sat there beneath the fighter’s dead gaze, and in the days following, he knew this same bowel-loosening, retch-inducing fear. Nothing that came later had been as bad as that.
Eighteen minutes gone. His phone rang.
“Wei? It’s me. Get something to eat on the way home. Get something from Xiao Wang Fu. Get that lamb thing with the coriander.” Lili, in her dressing gown probably, the soap operas on in the background.
“All right.”
“Is your stomach better?”
“Yes.”
“You sound weird.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Well, come home.”
He clicked the call away. He wanted to talk, but he sounded weird. Where was their daughter? What was she doing? She was asleep now probably, in that little apartment outside San Diego that she’d told him about, with the highway outside, the cars flashing past in the darkness.
He took the key from the ring, opened it. A deep breath, and as he exhaled he heard himself producing a strangled humming noise in the back of his throat, the sort of noise one might make when lifting an object of great weight, or anticipating pain.
He slid the drive back into the port and the diode began to flash. He counted off the seconds. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Still it flashed. Forty. Dear God, stop. A minute, for heaven’s sake. And just as he reached to pull it out, it turned to a continuous green. He yanked it from the computer, clipped the key back together, his fingers rigid and fumbling, and reattached it to the key ring.
All business, now. He cleared the papers from his desk, locked them in the drawer. Logged off the network. He stood up, made himself straighten. Down the corridors towards the main entrance, holding the key ring, letting it jangle. Nothing to see. A janitor watched him pass. He turned towards the double doors and the main entrance hall.
“Professor.” The voice came from off to his left and was accompanied by rapid footsteps. Wen did not slow down.
“Professor, a moment, please.” It was Check Shirt. The professor felt his throat constrict. Fear was sickening. It really was.
Check Shirt came towards him, making an effort to be quick, breaking into a moderate jog.
“Professor, sorry to keep you. May I ask, have you had any problems with your computer terminal this afternoon?”
Have I? he thought.
“No. Not that I noticed.”
“Oh.”
“Perhaps it was running a little slowly.”
“I see. Well, you were looking at a great deal of data, weren’t you?”
Was I?
He shrugged.
“It’s just, well, no matter, it all seems fine now,” said Check Shirt.
Wen Jinghan nodded and gave a tight smile.
“Have a good weekend, Professor.”
From a dark, silent perch deep inside himself, Wen wondered if he would make it to the front desk, or whether his legs would go and he would sit on the floor, absurd, a silver-haired charlatan.
They held. He walked across the parking lot, started his car and pulled out into the street, tears running down his cheeks.
26
Beijing
The signal from Hong Kong was marked URGENT. It arrived in Beijing at the intake station of the Ministry of State Security’s 2nd Bureau, Foreign Operations, towards evening, at a moment when the setting sun poured through the Bureau’s windows, and the frosted trees and lakes of the Summer Palace were washed in indigo and tangerine. It arrived as the night watch was coming on, and the corridors were filled with the smell of food, pork with garlic bolts, potato shreds in chili.
The signal concerned an agent debriefing that had taken place in Hong Kong that same day and appeared to have been written in haste. It called for immediate evaluation of the agent’s product by personnel in the 7th Bureau, Circulation and Analysis.
The signal, numbered and marked juemi, Top Secret, found its way to the desk of a young man surnamed Ouyang who hailed from Liaoning Province, China’s icy north-east, and who had trained as an electrical engineer. Analyst Ouyang, a gentle, spindly young man with an abiding love for Japanese graphic novels, knew missiles. He knew who made them, how, and where China needed to look to acquire missile technology. And he knew, or believed he knew, how to distinguish between real intelligence, even of the most technical kind, and dross.
But this, this was something different. The DF-41, well, everyone would know about that sooner or later. But the April 16th incident? What was that? An asset operating in the United States had heard mention of it from an American intelligence analyst. How did some American intelligence analyst know all about it, when Analyst Ouyang did not? He sat back in his chair, reluctant to read further, and bit his lip. This was not a matter for Ouyang. The signal smelled dangerous. It smelled of a foreign operation. This was a counter-intelligence matter, and the signal needed to be directed, speedily, to the 9th Bureau, Anti-Defection and Counter-Surveillance, a region of the Ministry that Ouyang preferred to avoid, where possible.
In this case, however, it was not possible. And, at three o’clock in the morning, Ouyang found himself sitting across a table in a conference room from a granite-eyed investigator of the 9th Bureau.
“Have you mentioned the contents of this signal to anybody?” said the investigator.
“No,” replied Ouyang.
“Has anybody spoken about it to you?”
“No.”
“Are you aware of anybody in the 7th Bureau who knows the contents of the signal?”
“Well, it was routed to my desk from the intake station, so someone there must have read it and responded to its contents.”
“Why must they?”
Ouyang was stumped.
“Well, they must have read it to know where to send it.”
“Must they? Is that an assumption or do you know that someone on the intake station read it?”
“It’s… it’s an assumption.”
The investigator was middle-aged, with a skin of tanned leather and his hair combed over his head from a parting an inch above his left ear.
“Is it also an assumption,” said the investigator, “that no one in the rest of the 7th Bureau has read it?”
“Well, I can’t know for sure.”
“You don’t know for sure? I’ll ask you again. Did you show it to anybody?”
“No.”
“Analyst Ouyang, why are you presenting me with assumptions dressed up as facts?”
“I… I… that was not my intention.” Ouyang was beginning to feel his grip on the situation loosen.
“Why did the intake station send the signal to you?”
“Well, I am the duty officer on the Science and Technology Desk.”
“But why to you? Why not to the Americas desk?”
“I… I don’t know. You must ask them.”
“Must I?”
A pause.
“Analyst Ouyang, why did you send an alert to the 9th Bureau?”
Ouyang swallowed. The investigator was watching his every move, his every tic, he could feel it.
“Because I judged this to be a counter-intelligence matter.”
“Why?”
“The signal suggested that an asset operating in the United States had unearthed state secrets from China in the hands of an American intelligence analyst. I assumed you ought to know. I mean, I thought you ought to know.”
“Why?”
“Well, because, could it not be possible that we have a leak?” Oh, God.
&
nbsp; There was a silence. Then the investigator spoke again.
“Analyst Ouyang, are you suggesting that some unidentified person is giving China’s state secrets to a foreign power?”
“I don’t know, I…“
“That is a very serious accusation.”
“I’m not accusing… I just thought you should know.”
“Analyst Ouyang, thanks to your… intervention, this is now a counter-intelligence investigation. You will remain in this building until our investigation is complete. You will be escorted to quarters where you will remain for the duration, and you will be monitored by officers of the 9th Bureau. We will be speaking again.”
Ouyang gaped. The duration? He felt a hand on his shoulder, pressuring him to move. He stood up shakily, tried to summon the nerve to protest, but the investigator was looking down at the file, making notes. Ouyang turned and walked to the door.
The investigator watched him go. Frightened shitless, he thought. How are we raising such spineless children these days?
The investigator sighed. Four in the morning, and this. He would go now and have a cigarette, some tea, think about his next move.
The little twerp was quite right, of course. Spineless, but smart. The revived DF-41 program was common knowledge across the military-industrial establishment. No surprise that was out. But knowledge of the April 16th incident, the investigator reflected, was closely held. And the investigator knew exactly how closely held, because he himself had been instrumental in ensuring that no one shot their mouth off about it, and that it never made its way into the press, or into any document with a classification lower than juemi. Weeks out in dreary Shaanxi, reminding, cajoling and finally threatening the families, the staff, anyone who knew anything.
So how in hell did an American know all about it?
There were official reports, of course, which had been circulated in six areas only: the Central Military Commission, the PLA General Staff, the Launch Vehicle Academy, the General Armaments Department, the Leading Small Group on Military Affairs, the Second Artillery.
But.
Most of that reporting did not mention casualties. The casualty numbers were sequestered in a series of numbered reports with a much more limited distribution. They went to two places only: the Central Military Commission and the Leading Small Group on Military Affairs.