The Shanghai Factor

by Charles McCarry

  “That’s kind of him.”

  “Kindness has nothing to do with it. He has been brought up to be truthful and to keep me informed about his friends. Through him and others I have been aware of you for some time.”

  I said, “Really?”

  “Yes, almost since you first came to Shanghai,” Chen Qi said. “Not many foreigners get on in China as well as you do, let alone penetrate our life as you have done.” He inserted a barely perceptible pause before the word penetrate.

  “I’ve been fortunate in my friends.”

  “Indeed. And you had the right introductions. That’s very important. Also you speak Mandarin very well—almost too well, some might say. Do you get on as easily with Americans and other Westerners as you do with the Chinese?”

  “Mostly,” I said. “But I’ve also met people everywhere who didn’t exactly fall in love with me.”

  The smile. Chen Qi switched to English. “So have we all,” he said. “Now I would like to come to the point.”

  Thereupon he offered me a job in his company. He explained that he did a lot of business in America, which, even though he was speaking English, he called by its Chinese name, Meiguo, the beautiful country. I was startled by the offer. Chen Qi saw this and said he had long been in search of a young but experienced American who knew both China and the United States and could move comfortably between the two and help him and his corporation to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings with its U.S. partners and other Westerners. He understood I spoke good French and fair German and thanks to the army, a certain amount of Dari, was this correct? I would work directly for Chen Qi, taking orders from no one but him, and if I succeeded, as he fully expected I would, the rewards would be appropriate. My starting salary would be $100,000 a year before bonuses and stock options, with a substantial raise after a six-month period of probation. I would have free occupancy of an apartment in Shanghai owned by the corporation and an expense account. The corporation would cover the full cost of medical care for any illnesses or injuries that might occur anywhere in the world. I would have six weeks of vacation a year but no Chinese or American holidays except October 1, National Day, which celebrates the Foundation of the People’s Republic of China, Christmas, and lunar New Year’s. This job, Chen Qi said, was a position of trust, and he would expect my full professional loyalty.

  9

  “So what was your response?” Burbank asked.

  “I told Chen Qi I needed a week to think his offer over and I’d give him my answer when I got back from the States.”

  “How did he react to that?”

  “He seemed to be okay with it,” I said. “He asked why I was going home.”

  “And?”

  “I told him I was going to visit my aged mother.”

  “Then you’d better make sure you visit her,” Burbank said. “The eyes of China are upon you.”

  I had gotten off an airplane less than an hour earlier and had spent every moment of that time giving Burbank a detailed report of my conversation with Chen Qi. Burbank and I were seated in a Starbucks in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The place was almost empty at this time of day.

  Burbank sipped his milky coffee and made a face. It must have seemed insipid after green tea. Disdainfully he slid the paper cup across the tabletop until it was out of reach. My news had had a visible effect on him. This was something new. Clearly this bolt from the blue gave him something to think about, and I supposed that thinking was what he was doing now. He had fallen into one of his mini-meditations. I waited for him to come back to this world.

  After a minute or two, a shorter interval than usual, Burbank revived and said, “What was your reply to the bit about full professional loyalty?”

  “I asked if my loyalty to him was supposed to supersede my loyalty to the United States.”

  “And he said?”

  “That that particular issue would never arise.”

  “Even though it has already arisen. You are no longer a dangle. You are a penetration agent. He’s taken the bait.”

  Or maybe we had. I left this thought unspoken.

  Burbank said, “What questions did he ask you about your background, your qualifications?”

  “None. I assumed he must already know everything he needed to know.”

  “A reasonable assumption. They’ve been assessing you for two and a half years—maybe longer, seeing that you majored in Chinese and your teachers were Chinese, no?”

  “Some of them were,” I said. “Neither they nor anyone I met in Shanghai ever asked me a personal question.”

  “Of course they didn’t,” Burbank said. “Chen Qi, or whoever in the background put him onto you, probably had some New York law firm run a background investigation on you. Perfectly legal, forever confidential under American law—attorney-client relationship.”

  “Why would they be interested?”

  “Because you’re a catch. You’ve got potential. Especially for them.”

  “A multibillion-dollar Chinese corporation wants to pay a hundred thousand a year for potential?”

  “They do it every day. To them, if in fact it’s them paying the bill instead of some shadowy third party, a hundred grand is chicken feed.”

  “You think Chen Qi is a puppet?”

  “I think Chen Qi is a loyal Party man who has done extremely well for himself and would roast his own mother on a spit to keep what he has.”

  “In short, we’re dealing, in your opinion, with Guoanbu.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Burbank said.

  I was lost. Burbank was going to order me to take this job. He was going to order me to go to work—actually, pretend to go to work—for Chinese intelligence. I knew this before the sound of his voice died. I needed a moment to get myself together. I could tell by the look of him that Burbank wanted to get out of Starbucks, wanted to go to some bleak location, park the car, and condemn me to my fate. I had long since drunk my double espresso. After the flight, after forty minutes of Burbank, I needed more caffeine. I said, “I’m going to get another coffee. Want anything?”

  He said, “God, no. Order the coffee to go. We can’t continue this conversation here.”

  At least he was predictable. While I was at the counter, Burbank made a phone call. It lasted maybe five seconds. Inside the immaculate Hyundai he said nothing. Now he seemed to be meditating and driving at the same time. I slept, waking up when he braked or made a sharp turn, then going under again. We took country roads, one after the other, and somewhere west of Leesburg, he pulled up to an isolated barn that had been converted into a house. It had a keyboard lock. Burbank entered the combination and we went inside. It was cool, nicely furnished, the walls hung with large hyperrealistic paintings that looked like the next stage of photography. All were depressing—mournful swollen pregnant girls whose fetuses were visible as in sonograms, curly-haired, beautiful brown children wearing prostheses, ruddy workers in hard hats, faces frozen in terror as if watching a mushroom cloud in the last nanosecond of their lives.

  “Not very cheerful,” Burbank said. “The caretaker is the painter. Believe it or not, she sells this stuff for good money.”

  By now it was early evening. To my surprise he poured drinks—single malt scotch—and shook unsalted nuts from a can into a bowl. Like the methodical spy he was, he turned on the stereo to defeat listening devices that one really would not expect to be present in a safe house. All the more reason, according to the unwritten manual, to take precautions. Believe nothing. Trust no one. Every lock can be picked, every flap unglued, every seal counterfeited, every friend suborned.

  Burbank crossed his leg, thin ankle resting on bony kneecap. He said, “Can you stay awake?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Try. This meeting may go on for a while. We have a lot to talk about. Let me know if you get to the point where you can’t concentrate.”

  “If I fall sleep, that’s the signal.”

  Burbank did not acknowledge the pleasantry. “For sta
rters,” he said, “let me ask you what you think of Chen Qi’s offer.”

  “I think it’s genuine in its way,” I said. “He has some reason for hiring me. His offer was bizarre. I think he knew that I saw what he was up to, or wondered what he was up to, and that he wanted me to draw certain conclusions from it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the offer actually came from Guoanbu, that he was Guoanbu, that I was caught in the flypaper.”

  “He was threatening in manner?”

  “Far from it. He was as civilized as they come, on the surface. He reminded me of my father.”

  Burbank lifted a palm. “Explain.”

  “There are physical and other resemblances.”

  Burbank gave me a quizzical look but asked for no details. I wondered if I had been wise to feed him this psychic clue. Burbank seemed to be wondering the same thing, using his own unique terms of reference. I was too tired to regret my words or worry about their effect on him.

  At 6:00 P.M. exactly Burbank stopped asking questions, turned off the stereo, and tuned into the evening news. Drinking scotch and chomping on nuts, he was absorbed by today’s recycling of yesterday’s stories. I hadn’t watched American television for a long time, and almost never the news, so I recognized neither the anchorperson nor the hot topics. In minutes I went to sleep. An hour later, when Burbank switched off the set, I woke up and stumbled into the bathroom. When I came back I saw no sign of him. Was he in another bathroom? A long time passed. I looked in the master bath. He wasn’t there. I called hello. No response. I turned on the outside lights. The Hyundai was gone. It was raining, sheets of it. Well, if he didn’t come back, I could always go back to sleep. I was hungry. I looked in the refrigerator. Lettuce, celery, carrots, low-fat yogurt, red and yellow Jell-O, a lemon with a strip of peel removed, an unripe melon, two minibottles of water. In the freezer, two frozen organic dinners (vegetarian). I was looking at the demented paintings again when Burbank came back, a six-pack of microbrew lager in one hand and a bag from a sandwich shop in another. I smelled hot tomatoey American food. He put his packages on the kitchen table and said, “One tofu with sprouts, arugula and roasted red pepper, one meat-ball with provolone, red onions, hot peppers, and black olives. Which do you want?”

  “The meatballs.”

  “Sit ye down,” said Burbank.

  To the prodigal home from China, the meal was at least as delicious as the mixture of canned pork and beans and canned spaghetti that Nick Adams, just back from epicurean Paris, mixed together, as I remembered it, over a campfire in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” Fearful that the beer would put me back to sleep, I drank the water, stealing the second tiny bottle for good measure.

  When we finished, Burbank tidied up, putting the debris back into the sandwich bag, washing his beer bottle and my water bottles with soap, presumably to erase our fingerprints, brushing the crumbs into his hand, then into the bag, wiping the tabletop with a sponge, then with a paper towel. He looked happy. Apparently the indoor picnic had been as much of a treat for him as for me.

  He brewed some green tea for himself. I drank instant espresso. We remained at the kitchen table. I was glad not to be in the same room with the caretaker’s paintings. Burbank waited for his tea to cool, then drank it in a single thirsty gulp.

  He said, “What really do you make of this offer of Chen Qi’s?”

  We had already discussed this in mind-numbing detail, but I went along, as I was paid to do. I said, “As you said, Guoanbu comes to mind.”

  “Why? Do you suspect that girl who’s teaching you Mandarin?”

  The answer, of course, was yes, but I didn’t want to betray Mei to the likes of Burbank. If betray was the word. More than once the thought had crossed my mind that she was being run not by Guoanbu but by Burbank. Her objectives were his objectives: be my crammer in Mandarin, put me in touch with young Chinese who might someday be useful, fuck me cross-eyed to keep me away from sexual technicians from Guoanbu. Just as often, I told myself she could not be working for anyone but Guoanbu. If the usual rules applied, she had been setting me up all along for Chen Qi’s recruitment pitch. Only at certain moments did I think she was nothing more than a lusty woman who just happened to have a thing about hairy Americans.

  To Burbank I said, “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a golden opportunity,” Burbank said.

  “For whom? To do what?”

  “For us. To do what we do.”

  “You don’t think it’s a trap?”

  He snorted in amusement. “Of course it is, in the opposition’s calculations,” he said. “But that can be an advantage for our side. Some of the best operations we’ve ever run involved walking into a trap—or, to be more exact, by pretending to be stupid enough to do so. The idea is to demonstrate your low IQ, move the trap, change the bait so the trapper goes looking for his missing trap and steps on it himself and has to chew off his own leg to escape.”

  Burbank’s face positively glowed as he imparted this wisdom. As the animal for whom the trap was being baited and set, I found it hard to join in his enthusiasm. And yet I was learning something. He was showing me his mind, or more likely the fictitious mind he had invented for the purposes of this conversation.

  Burbank said, “What do you think the opposition’s purpose might be?”

  The answer that sprang to mind was, Same as yours—to own me, to ruin my life. What I said was, “To recruit me, to compromise me, to double me, to expose me, to pump me out for the utterly trivial things a nobody like me knows. To embarrass the United States, and if I’m lucky, to swap me in due course for some Chinese agent of greater value.”

  “To surround us, in short. Do you play weiqi?”

  He meant the Chinese game called Go in Japan and in the West. In Mandarin weiqi means “the game of surrounding.” I had often played it with Mei, who always skunked me. I said, “After a fashion.”

  “Work on it. You can’t understand them if you don’t understand weiqi.”

  “Do you know the game?” I asked.

  “No one does unless he’s Chinese. I play it. It’s hard to find partners. Chen Qi is a weiqi man. The game is a passion with this guy. We know that about him. Work on it. Get a teacher, get good enough to play him. Beat him if you can. He’ll think all the more of you if you do.”

  These were orders? What next? Who knew but what weiqi was the basis of Burbank’s technique as a counterspy. Certainly I felt surrounded. It was time to change the subject.

  I said, “I’m curious about something.”

  Burbank lifted his eyebrows. I took this for permission to go ahead.

  I said, “Why do you have all those safes in your office?”

  He thought this over. He saw what I was trying to do and decided to humor me.

  “You think I should digitize all that information and store it in a computer?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because safes are safe,” he said. “Because they contain things I need to know, need to keep in secure storage, one copy only.” He was spacing his words as if teaching me some arcane truth in a language I did not fully understand. He continued, “Think about the origins of the word safe, the meaning of that term to the collective subconscious, think of what the concept of being safe has meant to mankind over millennia. We are weaker than the other carnivores. We fear other tribes of our own kind with all our hearts and souls. Our existence depends on our being safe from the Others, capital O. We are obsessed by it. The lust for safety is the reason why clubs and spears and gunpowder and nuclear weapons were invented. If experience has taught us anything in recent times, it is that computers are not safe. Computers are gossips, they are compulsive talkers. Touch them in the right place, with the right combination of digits, and they swoon and spread their legs. That’s what they’re designed to do—disgorge, not safeguard. That’s what they do. Safes have no brains, no means of communication, therefore no such vulnerability.”

&nb
sp; I said, “They can’t be cracked?”

  Burbank ignored the question. He said, “You have reservations about this opportunity.” No question mark.

  “Serious ones,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. There are always reservations. Think about landing on the moon in that LEM. It might as well have been made of papier-mâché and it was built to fly in a vacuum, but Armstrong and Aldrin showed that it could be done.”

  Excellent analogy for the equipment for this mission, I thought. I said, “I have no wish to be an Armstrong or an Aldrin.”

  “You won’t be. Others have gone before.”

  Yes, and never came back. I said, “Suppose we go ahead with this, whatever it is. What would it accomplish?”

  “Nothing, maybe. But maybe a lot more than we imagine.” Burbank said. “There are no certainties. There never are. But you’d be on the inside, and….”

  “Inside what? A corporation.”

  Burbank said, “A corporation, please remember, that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guoanbu.”

  Burbank sounded as if he had taken it for granted that I would be as enthusiastic about this operation as he seemed to be, that I would be as unconcerned as he was about the risks that I, not he, was going to take. To myself, I was one of a kind, new to the world, never to be born again or otherwise duplicated. To Burbank, I knew, I was just one stone, black or white, it didn’t matter which, waiting on one of the 361 squares on his weiqi board for his finger and thumb to move me.

  “Penetrate the corporation and we penetrate Guoanbu?” I said.

  “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

  “And I would do what to make that happen? Please tell me.”

  “Build a network. Let them discover it.”

  “Who would be crazy enough to sign up?”

  “The friends of your girlfriend.” His voice was calm, his manner urbane, and he showed other signs of madness.

  I said, “You’re serious?”