After we showered, Lin Ming said, “Shall we go for a walk?”
“Why not?”
We found a park—“found” in quotes because clearly Lin Ming knew exactly where we were going—and sat down on an empty bench. In English he said, “You played much better today.”
I shrugged. “Bad days and good days.”
He said, “So you are back inside Headquarters as we discussed.”
As we discussed? When was that? I said, “Well, I’m back inside, anyway.”
“Are you still being completely truthful with Mr. Burbank?”
“Invariably.”
“So what does he think of our friendship?”
“Maybe you should judge that for yourself, Mr. Lin.”
“No names, please,” he said in Mandarin. “Names are bad luck.”
“Whatever you say.”
Lin Ming smiled at last. The smile was tighter now. Possibly this was just the humiliation of losing at basketball. Maybe, though, it was the particle of doubt about where we stood that I was hoping to plant.
He said, “It is now time for me to ask you if you have considered the offer we discussed the last time we met.”
“I considered it when you made it.” I said. “I gave you my answer.”
“You were serious?”
“Of course I was. So were you, I thought.”
“Then why are we meeting today?”
“Because I have a counteroffer.”
“A counteroffer? You think we can bargain?”
“Do you want to hear what I have to say?”
Lin Ming absorbed this affront. He said, “I am a listener by profession, my friend.”
I told him that a man from one of their embassies was meeting regularly and secretly with a man we knew to be a senior officer of the National Security Bureau, the intelligence service of Taiwan. That we had recorded conversations between the two. That we had photographs. Then I stopped talking. He listened with such an absence of reaction that I knew he was shaken. Heavy silence. No eye contact.
Finally Lin Ming said, “And?”
“And we will give you the details if you will give us something in return.”
“This is outrageous,” Lin Ming said.
“Just business.”
A long pause, then Lin Ming said, “What do you want?”
I told him: the complete Guoanbu file on Chen Qi’s only son, Jianyu.
Lin Ming was shocked. His face reddened, his mask slipped—not much, but enough. He truly was outraged—a good sign, I thought. Two men I recognized as sidewalk people who used to follow me around were playing cards a few steps away. A gym bag rested on the table. I didn’t doubt that it contained a camera, pointed at us, that recorded sound as well as video.
Abruptly, Lin Ming got to his feet and started to walk away. I stood up with my back to the card players, blocking their view with my bulk. I handed Lin Ming a fortune cookie. He resisted what I saw as the temptation to throw it on the ground and step on it.
“In case you want to shoot a few baskets,” I said in a whisper, in English. No wink. Then I walked away. If he opened the fortune cookie he’d have my throwaway phone number. In the dusty trees starlings landed, squawked, and took off.
Thereafter, to make things as easy as possible for Lin’s sidewalk crew in case they should come back into my life, I adopted a predictable schedule, going out for a morning run at seven, shopping always at the same grocery on the way home, going to the same gym at the same hour every other day, buying the same sandwich at the same shop at the same hour. It was a metronomic existence, and if Lin Ming was truly annoyed because I had put him on the spot, a chancy one. I did remember the tenor and the acrobats, and watched for them. What they had done in Shanghai, they could do in New York, where they had two rivers to choose from.
The possibility of something worse than a dunking happening was remote. Hollywood and Magdalena notwithstanding, assassination is not routine among spooks. There is no point in killing an agent of the opposition because the opposition will merely replace the dead operative with a new agent you don’t know, and then there you are, back at the beginning, trying to identify the new man. Totalitarian types, like the Chinese and the Cubans and the Nazis and the Soviets in the good old days, mainly kill their own people—usually the ones they suspect of treason or even more dangerous crimes such as questioning revolutionary scripture. That was why Lin Ming was annoyed with me. I had put him in a position in which his home office might think it a good idea to reassess him. No doubt he had enemies within Guoanbu. So did I, apparently, though it was early in my career for this to be so.
I felt the need of a refuge, somewhere I could go and not be followed —someplace where I was inaccessible if not protected. There were such places. My university had a club in New York. In theory, if you didn’t belong, you could not enter unless you came as the guest of a member. Up to now I hadn’t been tempted to join, but I decided it might be a good idea to do so. After supplying the necessary credentials and paying the initiation and membership fees, I was admitted.
On the day I received my membership card I dropped in during happy hour and went immediately to the bar. I had been there years before as the guest of a faculty member. The bar itself was a magnificent mahogany thing, as massive as the poop of a whaling ship. Behind it hung a mirror that was installed when there were a lot of penniless immigrants available to polish it. Apparently there still were, because the thick glass sparkled. Alumni of all ages bellied up to the bar and nearly all of the tables were taken. This was a world I did not know. I had gone straight from graduation to the army and straight from training to Helmand province—and then, as you know, to hospitals, to spookdom, to China, to where I was now—one hermit’s cave after another. I was no longer used to good fellowship, but I found a space between two brokers or lawyers or bankers and ordered a single malt whisky, spring water on the side. I studied the crowd—good fellows having a good time together. I imagined that they had all kept in touch from college days, as almost certainly they had, because most people soon discover that the chief benefit of going to a good college is that it provides you with a cohort for life—people you can make money with, people who talk your language, people who know the secret handshakes, people who sound alike. People who will usually help you out even if they don’t particularly like you.
A good many women were present, mostly in twos, mostly at tables, mostly attractive, all of them pictures of chic. I reimagined them as kids just out of high school. Freshman year had been a sexual circus, and even though my ROTC connection repelled the more political women, who were usually the ones most interested in mindless sex, I found partners. I looked from face to face hoping to recognize someone about my age, someone perhaps I had known, as the Bible puts it. No luck. Lately I had been thinking a lot about women. There had been no one after Magdalena, and no one for quite awhile before her, so I was in the market for companionship. I was not such an optimist as to think that I would find it here. But it seemed possible that I might. It would be nice for a change to sleep with a woman who was not just doing her job.
I smelled perfume. A woman, almost as tall as I was, stood beside me. She was Chinese. She was striking. The bartender hurried to her without being summoned, a glass of white wine in his hand. With a smile that must have made the poor fellow weak at the knees, she signed the chit in an undecipherable scrawl and said, “Thanks, Guillermo.”
Clutching her chardonnay, she started to go, then met my eyes in the mirror, then turned and looked at me. Bright obsidian eyes, thick brows, arched nose. She spoke my name followed by a question mark. I didn’t remember her, but I nodded.
She said, “The student soldier. The athlete. The Mandarin major. I used to watch you play tennis. Great backhand. Terrific serve. Incredible match against that guy from Dartmouth.”
True, I had been on the tennis team. Searching for her name, I said, “Freddy something. Ponytail. Very good player.”
A n
ice, not quite eager smile. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
I said, “I didn’t know anyone came to the matches.”
“What power of concentration. The stands were always full.” She had amazing diction, each syllable, each letter perfectly audible. She lifted her glass to me. No rings on her fingers. We drank.
She said, “You don’t have a clue who I am, do you?”
“I should be ashamed.” I meant it. How could I have forgotten this goddess? Before I could ask her name, she gave it.
“Alice Song. We were in some of the same classes, but I was a couple of years and a couple of rows behind you.”
Now I remembered. Hair in braids wound round her head, no makeup. Shy. Silent in class. Aced every exam. A little gawky. Slumped to hide her breasts inside her baggy shirt. All that had changed except the brain.
“Now I remember,” I said. “Are you meeting someone?”
She hesitated. Who could blame her? I said, “Well, maybe another…”
But she said, “Come on. My friend is a one-drink girl. Then she hurries home to the kids.”
Following her to a table where a thin blonde awaited, smiling happily until she saw me. She didn’t stay long. After she left, Alice Song asked me a question in Mandarin—something about one of our old professors. I answered in the same language. She said, “My God, listen to you!” We went on in Mandarin during dinner in the club dining room. She spoke it like a native, but with a very slight Queens intonation. She ate with appetite, an excellent thing in a woman, and drank sparingly. Wanting my wits about me, so did I. Like an old-fashioned girl who took her dating advice from Cosmo, she got me talking about myself. I told her about my time in Shanghai—not all about it, but enough. She asked why I wasn’t still in the army. I told her. She was a lawyer, a litigator. She named the firm. Even I had heard of it. She was single. She had a young daughter from a failed marriage. She hadn’t visited the club for more than a year. So talk about coincidences.
The conversation was the standard getting-to-know-you stuff—old times, books, movies, stories, did I remember so-and-so. We spoke English now, so the banter had different dimensions. Alice was a brilliant talker even when she was being careful what she said. I was drawn to her. I thought it conceivable that the evening might not end with the signing of the check and that what happened after that might not be the end of things. It was Friday. Her daughter was spending the weekend with her father, she said. On our way to the front door we switched back to Mandarin. “It’s amazing how well you speak the language,” Alice said. “If you were Chinese my mother would be crazy about you.”
Visions of sugarplums danced in my head. And then I woke up and realized I couldn’t possibly accompany her outside and let her, a Chinese woman unsuspecting and alone, walk into Lin Ming’s surveillance. So I shook hands and said how nice it had been to run into her after all these years, and moving swiftly, went out the door ahead of her and still walking fast, drew my watchers away. It was late, the street was almost empty, I could see them move, hear one of them cough.
26
At one o’clock the next morning, using maximum tradecraft for a change, I took a bus to Washington, then the Metro, then shank’s mare to my town house. Nobody was behind me at any point in the journey, but then why should anybody be? Only in New York was I under surveillance. Whoever was watching me already knew what I did when I was in Virginia, or thought somebody in the government must be keeping an eye on me and didn’t want to walk into somebody else’s surveillance and find themselves being watched as they watched me. After a shower and a shave and a change of clothes, I went to work.
At Headquarters I intercepted Burbank on his way upstairs—he always used the fire stairs, not the elevator, and ran up the steps. I ran along beside him. He barely gave me a glance. At the top, to my surprise, Burbank steered me into my office instead of his own. With two people in it, my cell seemed even smaller. It had no chair for a visitor, so Burbank sat in my chair. I stood before him in front of my own desk. There was barely enough room for my shoes between the desk and the wall.
Burbank said, “Fill me in.” I had sent him bare-bones letters about each development, but now I gave him the details. He listened, asking no questions until I finished.
“How do you read this?” Burbank said. “What’s your gut feeling?”
“That it’s going to take a long time for this grain of sand to become a pearl.”
“Maybe not,” Burbank said. “They know they’ve got a problem with one of their people but they don’t know which one. That’s a motivator.”
Hadn’t I mentioned that when last we talked? I said, “True, but they might just investigate everybody, everywhere. They’ve got plenty of manpower.”
“You’re discouraged?”
“Impatient. Bored. Idle. Everything takes forever. You’ve said so yourself.”
Burbank lifted his eyebrows. Evidently he thought I needed encouragement. “You’re questioning your own idea. You’re frustrated by a lack of progress after two weeks?”
“I think Lin Ming is going to have trouble selling this in Beijing. Guoanbu is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracy exists to prevent things from happening.”
“Is that what you think?” Burbank said. He walked out of the room. Was the conversation over, had I taxed his patience once too often? But a couple of minutes later he came back carrying a bowl of green tea and sat down again in my chair.
“Forget about how long it takes,” he said, as if there had been no interruption. “List the possibilities.”
“We can wait forever. We can back off and let the Manchu run his asset in peace and hope he’ll share the product,” I said.
“What else?”
“We can fold the operation.”
“Forget that. It’s barely begun.”
“We could grab the Manchu’s friend and talk to him in private. He may know other malcontents.”
“They’d put everybody the suspect knows on a watch list the minute he disappeared,” Burbank said. “Besides, it would really piss off the Manchu and his service, neither of whom we want to piss off.”
Burbank said, “Let me ask you something. Who does your ex-girlfriend know?”
“You mean Mei?”
“Who else?”
“In Shanghai, pretty much everybody.”
“Inside the corporation, in the tower?”
Why was he always asking for information he already possessed? I said, “I ran into people she had introduced me to in the tower’s elevators.”
“What kind of people?”
“Wild by night, spoiled brats of the Party hierarchy.”
“Wild in what way?”
“Alcohol, marijuana, loud music, punk clothes, outspoken disdain for the Party leadership. Sex, I suppose, but I wasn’t an eyewitness to that.”
“They trusted each other?”
“They grew up together, for whatever that’s worth. At bottom they were just playing games. By day, they were very serious junior functionaries, and they seemed to take the work seriously.”
“Strange,” Burbank said. “It makes you wonder.”
“About what?”
“Everything. For example, this Mei of yours. If she’s who she seems to be, the child of someone who counts in the Party, why would Guoanbu use her as they do.”
“Maybe she’s not Guoanbu.”
“You think she loved you?”
I didn’t answer.
Burbank said, “Did she over time?”
I said, “She was always herself.”
“No change at all? Mood, behavior, habits?”
“Toward the end she was less ebullient.”
Burbank meditated, but very briefly. He said, “And you never knew who her father was, never asked?”
“No. I’ve never put that particular question to anybody.”
“Is it possible she has something to resent at home? Something serious?”
“Anything is possible.”
Burb
ank finished his tea. He looked at his watch. He stood up and sidled by me on his way out. For an instant we were breathing on each other.
I said, “Why do you ask me these questions?”
“Because resentment has been a factor, usually the key factor, in ninety percent of the defections of foreign assets in the history of this organization,” Burbank said. “Somebody doesn’t get promoted or doesn’t get the respect he thinks he deserves or can’t forgive an insult. Or hates his daddy because the old man did him so many kindnesses or has the wrong expectations. He decides to get revenge. Resentment is the open sesame of our business. It’s also the demon when it comes to our own people. It hides, it evades, it smiles at you as if nothing is wrong.”
Was he talking about Mei? Or was he talking about me, putting me on edge? Certainly I had my resentments. So probably did Mei. Who didn’t? I said, “So?”
Burbank said, “So be aware of the possibilities.”
27
It was midwinter before the phone call came, early on a Sunday morning. The familiar female voice told me that I was invited to dinner at six o’clock the following evening at Zorba’s Café near Dupont Circle, not far from the Chinese restaurant where Lin Ming and I had met for the first time. I accepted. Around three, snow began to fall. I called the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue and booked a room for the night. By the time I parked in the hotel garage and checked in, two or three inches of snow had accumulated, and it was falling even more heavily than before. It didn’t take a weather prophet to know this was going to continue. Washington, whose snow removal capabilities are next to nil, would be paralyzed by midnight. It also meant that the U.S. government, including Headquarters, would shut down for at least a day.
I had just enough time to walk to Zorba’s. Inside, I saw myself in a wall mirror. I looked like a snowman, my parka whitened by the stuff. Usually at this hour the place was thronged, but tonight even neighborhood people were staying home, so it was all but deserted. Lin Ming, wearing a puffy, down-filled, made-in-China winter coat with a fur collar, waited at one of the half-dozen occupied tables. He waved. He smiled. He leapt to his feet. No gestures could have been more unexpected. He threaded his way among the tables, shook my hand with yet another smile, and said, “It’s good to see you again, my friend.”
The Shanghai Factor Page 15