The Shanghai Factor

by Charles McCarry

  The rain was letting up. Lin Ming shifted his gym bag from one shoulder to the other. He looked at his watch. “I’d better go or I’ll miss my time,” he said. “It was nice to run into you. Big city, small world. Long odds.”

  “Odds can be odd,” I said.

  He walked away.

  Feigning impulse, I called after him, “Wait up. I could use some exercise.”

  An hour later, panting and drenched in sweat, I owed Lin Ming three dollars even though I was five inches taller and years younger than he was. Under the basket he was quick, deceptive, a deadeye shooter. He played in the same way that he walked—fast, silent, no expression whatsoever on his face, no movement of the eyes or body to tip off his next move. Besides, I had let him win.

  I went home to shower, and as hot water washed away sweat and unknotted muscles, I wondered where and when I would run into my new friend next. And how long it would take him to pop the question.

  16

  Every week or so I cleaned out the mailbox. The usual yield was a large accumulation of junk mail addressed to my mother, sometimes a bill her executor had forgotten to pay, and almost always, several appeals from dodgy strangers who wanted her to give them money. Mother subscribed to the New Yorker and National Geographic and most of the other genteel slicks that people of her generation and kind displayed for a while, then threw away after looking at the pictures. She also received a couple of beefcake magazines as well as some soft-porn publications. Rifling Mother’s mailbox I learned secrets she never meant me to know, and this evidence of her humanness caused me to love her a little more. It also brought back those long-ago female howls from the master bedroom.

  A few days after I ran into Lin Ming under the marquee, I found a small envelope addressed to me in a nymphet hand—the kind in which the letter i is dotted with a little circle. This puzzled me, since no one knew I was here except the doormen, Lin Ming, and maybe Burbank in his omniscience. I waited until I was alone in the apartment to open the envelope. Inside was an invitation from Dr. Brook Holloway and Mr. Henry Smithers to the christening of their infant son, Stanley Austin Holloway-Smithers, at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields on Hudson Street at ten o’clock in the morning of the coming Friday. Business attire, no gifts, please. Friday was two days away. As I had never known anyone called Holloway or Smithers, I surmised that this was a summons from Burbank. That meant that the place named was a cover name for another place, the day and time likewise. The problem was, I didn’t know what the wild cards meant, and therefore I couldn’t possibly get to the right place at the right time. There was no RSVP phone number. The return address was a post office box with an Upper West Side zip code. Of course I had the number for the phone that Burbank never answered, but even if someone picked up, I could hardly ask to be told over an open line, in plain English, what “the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields” stood for, what the actual time of the meeting was, and what was the significance, if any, of those tin-ear aliases. I looked in the envelope again and found a smaller card inviting me to a reception following the baptism at an address on Washington Square. Was it possible that at some point in my life I had known a Holloway or a Smithers, or both, and that the invitation was puzzling because it was genuine? After playing a few hands of solitaire on my new laptop, I decided to go to Saint Luke in the Fields at the time indicated and see what happened.

  Wearing one of my Shanghai suits and a shirt and tie and buffed-up leather shoes, I showed up at the church at the precise time indicated. The doors were locked. I lingered for a few minutes, another breach of protocol, since the unmet agent is supposed to consider himself under observation by the adversary and to slink away without delay. No one approached me. I took a cab to an imaginary address on Eighth Street, loitered until the hour of the reception, and tried to find the address on Washington Square. It did not exist. The amount of time wasted every day by spies of all nations on comedies of errors of this kind would provide hours enough for a terrorist cell composed of two illiterate brothers and a cousin living in a cave to build a nuclear device. By now it was well past eleven. I decided to take a walk around Greenwich Village. Maybe someone would follow me, tap me on the shoulder, and explain this fiasco. It would be easy to keep me in sight. It was Friday, so I was almost the only guy on the street wearing a suit, and as usual, I was taking no noticeable countermeasures.

  On Fifth Avenue, a young man was handing out leaflets, but only to men. With each leaflet he shouted, “Here you go, dude, get laid! Only twenty bucks.” I gave him a wide berth. This offended him. He yelled “Hey!” and ran after me, then walked backward in front of me, red-faced and shouting, spit flying. Was I too effing good to read a leaflet about the crimes of the secret elite? Was I some kind of effing right-winger? Did I effing love it when some effing American assassin murdered innocent Muslims with an effing Hellfire missile? I stopped in my tracks. He walked toward me, crazy-faced. When he was close, he murmured, “This one is special for you.” He handed me a leaflet. I took it. Up close he was a nice, clean kid with freckles who smelled of shampoo and whose loving parents had paid for about ten thousand dollars worth of work on his teeth. He said, “Read this, it will show you the way to the Lord.”

  As I walked away, I read the leaflet. It was a plain piece of paper on which was printed, in block letters, “LOBBY OF ALGONQUIN. NOW.” I was back in touch.

  I folded it up and placed it in the inside pocket of my jacket, which closed with a button. On the way uptown, I reflected for the thousandth time on the absurdity of the life I was leading. I asked myself why I stayed with it, how all this nonsense could possibly lead to a result that would change the fate of the world by so much as a milligram, why I had wanted to get involved in the first place. Of course I knew the answers to all these questions. As much as I was tempted to put an end to this farce, to quit, to forget it and try despising some other walk in life, the truth was that I had become a secret agent because I could not bear for another minute the pointlessness of life in the real world. To go back to it would be no escape. It would be a surrender to the destiny I fled when I went on the lam. If the craft meant nothing, at least it was done in something like absolute privacy, as if everything was happening in another time, another universe, another state of consciousness. Its joys were palpable. For years I had been left alone to enjoy the pleasures of learning to speak and read an ancient and beautiful language and the company of a brilliant woman who loved sex. If that wasn’t a blessed state of being, what was? What difference did it make if the work I did meant nothing, accomplished nothing, burned up money on an epic scale? What human endeavor was any different?

  As the cab pulled up to the curb on Forty-fourth Street, I knew I was kidding myself, but at least I knew that escape was a dream and knowing that for certain was a terrific joke on me, on everybody, and for the moment I was a happy man. Of course, I hadn’t yet gone inside.

  17

  It was lunchtime, so every seat but one was taken in the shadowy lobby of the Algonquin. My stepfather, a New Yorker enthusiast who loved this place, used to tip the waiter who worked the room fifty dollars per visit to make sure there would always be a table for him and the people he brought in to commune with the ghosts of the Round Table. I looked around for Burbank. No sign of him. He was the quintessential gray man you might not see in a crowd the first time you looked, so I looked again. This time I recognized the person who was waiting for me. He lifted a hand and smiled. He was dressed like a diplomat in a dark pinstriped suit and the rest of the rig, including cuff links. No wonder I had missed him at first glance. Not only was he not the man I had been looking for, but this Lin Ming didn’t much resemble the Lin Ming in jeans or sweats I had known before this moment.

  He must have laid a satisfactory tip on the waiter, because the man was at our table before either my host or I had had time to speak a word. I ordered mineral water. Lin Ming was drinking tea. He wore round rimless glasses.

  I said, “How come you shoot basket
s so well if you’re nearsighted?”

  “Contact lenses. It’s kind of you to come on such short notice.”

  “The invitation was imaginative,” I said.

  “I’m glad you thought so.”

  People were finishing their drinks and drifting toward the dining room across the lobby. The din of their conversation made it difficult to hear Lin Ming. He waited until the people at the next table vacated. Then he said, “I apologize for the charade.” He pronounced charade as a French word, an odd little flourish.

  I said, “No problem. I wonder, though, why you went to so much trouble when all you had to do was waylay me the next time I went to a theater.”

  “Do you have a theory about that?”

  “I have an idea, but I’d like to hear your story.”

  “Very simple,” Lin Ming said with perfect composure. “You have avoided tradecraft so assiduously for the whole time I and certain friends have been interested in you”—that word again—”that you have made these people want to know you better. One would have to know tradecraft and know it well in order to fake its absence. Or so my friends assumed.”

  “‘Tradecraft?’” I said, as if the word were new to me. This was an amateurish move.

  Lin Ming thought so, too. He was deaf to the interruption. “Today,” he said, “tested our assumption.”

  “And did I pass or fail?”

  “Well, here you are. Why don’t we have some lunch?”

  We were seated at a good table. Clearly they knew Lin Ming at the Algonquin. He ordered a salad composed of many raw vegetables. On the twenty-year-old recommendation of my stepfather, I had a club sandwich—my first, as far as I could remember, since he took me to lunch here when I was sixteen. Strangers were inches away from us on all sides. Lin Ming talked no business. He had been to a Knicks game since the last time we met. It was enjoyable even though the Knicks lost. Basketball was better when you could hear the players cursing at each other, when you could see the sweat fly off their bodies and smell it. Did he particularly enjoy the smell of sweat? At basketball games, yes. The smell of each race was different. Also the sweat of men and women. Had I noticed?

  Lin Ming paid the bill in cash, with a knowing but not showy tip. He played by the rules, as an operative is supposed to do as part of the camouflage. We went back to the lounge. It was deserted now. The waiter brought us coffee and disappeared. “Everyone has gone back to work,” Lin Ming said. “So we have the place to ourselves.”

  He sipped his coffee. Lin Ming noticed that I wasn’t drinking mine. He asked if I would prefer something else.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Then I will come to the point,” he said in Mandarin. “You speak our language with remarkable fluency. You know our country.”

  “Only Shanghai.”

  “No one knows the whole of China. Anyway, that’s not a requirement of the job.”

  “What job? I was just fired from a job in China.”

  “That’s not really the case. Better to look at your situation as a transfer.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I want to offer you a position. The salary would be somewhat higher than your former position paid—and perhaps, depending on results, much higher, and totally tax free. It would require a change in your lifestyle.”

  I thought, Here it comes.

  I said, “Like what?”

  “You wouldn’t be living in China. At least, not right away. Perhaps in the future, if the job requires it.”

  Lin Ming was going slow. Why, if he was so sure of me? Or sure enough, at least, to organize this morning’s charade. Of course it hadn’t cost much—little more than whatever his people had paid the crazy kid to hand me the message. Probably they had shown him a photo of me and given him his leaflets and a fifty-dollar bill. Or more likely, a twenty. Or maybe he was an unpaid true believer.

  “I don’t mean to be pushy,” I said, “but what exactly is this job, and who exactly would I be working for?”

  Lin Ming said, “Let me tell you that as a whole, rather than in fragments.”

  “Fine. But you’re making me nervous. I think the moment has come to lay the cards on the table.”

  “Or the stones on the board. We must have that game of weiqi. Soon.”

  We seemed to be having it now. If his purpose had been to take me by surprise, he had succeeded. I could hardly have felt more surrounded, even though this scenario was playing out as though Burbank had written the script. Lin Ming seemed to read my thoughts—with something like a twinkle in his eye. He drank a little more coffee. I didn’t think he liked the stuff any better than I did.

  Lin Ming said, “Let’s be frank. I think you know what the job is. You know what I am and what I am doing, and therefore you know who you would be working for.”

  He was telling me that this was the moment to break off this conversation if I wasn’t interested in what was coming next. It was the moment to save him from embarrassing himself.

  I said, “Go on.”

  “Very well,” Lin Ming said. “Here is the proposal. We believe that you are sympathetic to China and interested in China’s future in the world as it is intertwined with the future of the United States. You have unusual skills and useful contacts.”

  I started to interrupt. Lin Ming cut me off. “Please. We wish to work with you. We believe you already have a job, a confidential job, and that is the job you have been doing for the past few years, including all your time in Shanghai. We want you to go back to that job, to go inside and work closely with Mr. Burbank. We will make sure that Mr. Burbank has good reason to be pleased with your work. We will help you. We will provide you with information that will be of great interest to Mr. Burbank and his organization. It will be reliable, truthful, valuable information. In return we would hope that you would offer us your services as a consultant, including the provision of certain information that is likewise interesting and trustworthy. We would handle your situation with great care. Very likely you will be promoted and honored by your agency—and honored and rewarded, with the utmost discretion, by us also. By me. We would work together. For the good of both our countries.”

  I said, “‘Us’ being who—Guoanbu?”

  At the sound of this word, Lin Ming winced. He said, “The moment has not yet come to discuss details.”

  I said, “You must be crazy.”

  “You think so?” Lin Ming said. “No one else has ever suggested that.”

  “Listen to me. I bled for this country. I’m an American to the bone, descended from generations of Americans. Under no circumstances, none, would I ever consider betraying the United States of America. Or worse, betraying my ancestors.”

  That outburst, as I intended, was theatrical. But Lin Ming had been acting, too. He still was. Now he exhaled, as if expelling his surprise at my rudeness. As the book of tradecraft prescribed (the manual is the same in every language and in every epoch), he waited for me to calm down. He was a professional, keeping his head, playing the game, doing his thing.

  “I understand,” he said. “Mei will be very disappointed.”

  I said, “She will? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The plan was that she would come back to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she wants to be with you. Because she would be helpful.” He smiled. “Because she would give you the opportunity to speak Mandarin with an intelligent person.”

  Ah, the bribe of bribes. The thing I wanted most in the world! The clumsiness, the nerve, the contempt, the “Roll over, Rover!” The bastard! But oh, what an opportunity. Using the Method like a Brando, I summoned things that had made me mad in the past—Wojciechowski the Hessian, the brainless coach who recruited him, my father’s selfish death—until my face reddened with anger. In a furious silence, I walked out of the Algonquin. Minutes later, as I was turning onto Fifth Avenue, Lin caught up. Walking along beside me, looking up at my profile, he said, “You haven’t said no.”
r />   “Then I’ll say it now. No.”

  “I can’t hear you over the traffic,” Lin Ming said. “Wait. Think. Take your time. Let’s meet for a game of weiqi when you’ve had more time to consider this new opportunity, and talk some more.”

  He stopped walking. We were in front of Brooks Brothers. As I strode away, I looked into the store window and saw Lin Ming’s reflection. He was lighting a cigarette.

  What insouciance. Or, more probably, a signal to his sidewalk people.

  18

  Counterintuitive though it may seem in a time of terrorism, most employees of Headquarters who still have landline home telephones are listed in the directories for Washington and its suburbs. True, you have to know their names or their wives’ or husbands’ or bedfellows’ names before you can look them up or call them up or blow up their houses or cars, but once you’ve identified them, the next move is yours. Therefore, walking in on Burbank wasn’t an impossible mission. I looked up Burbank, Luther R., in the anywho.com white pages. There he was on Forest Lane in McLean, Virginia, complete with driving directions. I knew there was no point in calling him at the number listed, so I changed into jeans and a sweater, stuffed a book and a sandwich and a bottle of water and a change of underwear into my backpack, then took the bus to Broadway and the subway to Forty-second Street, walked to the Port Authority bus terminal, and took a bus to Washington, last passenger aboard.

  It was about midnight when I arrived on foot at Burbank’s house. Dark sky, sleeping neighborhood. The downstairs lights were on. I assumed that a state-of-the-art alarm system and surveillance cameras would be in operation, so I just walked up to the front door and rang the bell. No one answered. But I heard someone inside the house, a young woman from the light-footed sound she made, running rapidly up or down stairs. Through the glass above the door, I saw a moving shadow. I heard a dial tone, a low female voice. In an astonishingly short time, two McLean police cruisers pulled up at the house, strobes flashing. Four large cops got out of the vehicles and approached me. All carried nightsticks, each had the other hand on a holstered handgun. Whoever was in the house switched on the outside lights. These included several powerful floodlights that bleached the cops’ skin.