The Shanghai Factor

by Charles McCarry

  We ordered at the counter, a Greek salad with chicken for Lin, a yero and oily Greek fries for me, two beers. He paid both tabs, holding up a warning hand to prevent me from even thinking about reaching for my wallet. When our number was called over the loudspeaker, Lin Ming fetched the tray, as if all of a sudden he was the lesser person. We ate in a businesslike way, making almost no conversation. About halfway through the meal Lin Ming remarked that the lamb in my yero had a funny smell. Very greasy. Did it taste the way it smelled?

  “Pretty much,” I said. “You’ve never eaten lamb?”

  “Never,” Lin Ming said with feeling.

  Just as we finished, the lights went out. A female voice screeched in the darkness. Lin Ming said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  I didn’t like this situation at all. The streetlights, the traffic lights, the shop windows were dark. I hadn’t experienced such pitch darkness since Afghanistan. You could half-see snowflakes falling and hear the snow squeak when you stepped on it. By now it was ankle deep. We walked—slogged—for what seemed to be about half an hour. Lin Ming must have been sweating inside his coat. Because the falling snow stuck to its fur collar, he was faintly visible in the darkness. This was not a particularly dangerous neighborhood, but what a laugh it would be if we were mugged—two blind desperadoes handing over their valuables with knives at their throats. Even a master of martial arts—I didn’t doubt that Lin Ming was just such a master—would have difficulty taking a blade away from an assailant if he could see neither the knife nor the assailant.

  Lin Ming cleared his throat loudly and spat into the snow. A few steps afterward, he did it again—the aftereffect of smelling the lamb, maybe. Or, who knew, a signal to the assassin who awaited us in the blackness that had descended on the city. This was the most aimless clandestine meeting I had ever had. All the usual stuff—the signals, the double-talk, the solemnity, the darting eyes—was missing. We walked on, neither of us speaking a word although we could have chattered in Mandarin to our hearts’ content and the odds were ten thousand to one that no lurker would have understood a word. Lin Ming was mute for reasons unguessable. I kept my mouth shut because I wasn’t going to be the first to break the silence. My feet were wet. I was edgy for other reasons. I should have used the urinal before leaving the restaurant, but it was just as dark inside Zorba’s as it was outside.

  By now my eyes had adjusted. I could see Lin Ming quite plainly—not just as a shape in the darkness, but the man himself, his face inside the hood, his gleaming teeth. Apparently he could see me, too, because he put a hand on my arm and said, “Stop. I think we’re here.”

  He turned on a flashlight, a blindingly bright one, and swept the building before us. He read the number on a door and said, “We’ve passed it.”

  We turned around. After fifty steps or so, Lin Ming again switched on his flashlight and this time found the number he was looking for. He lighted our way into a doorway. The door was ajar. No elevators were in operation, of course, so we used the fire stairs. Through the darkness Lin Ming moved upward almost as fast as Burbank. On the fifth landing he switched on the flashlight again, located the door, and shone us through it. This on-and-off business with the flashlight destroyed my night vision, so I practically had to hold on to Lin’s belt to find my way down the corridor.

  At last we came to a door that showed a thread of yellowish light around its edges. Lin Ming pushed it open—it was unlocked—and stood back to let me go first. An inner door stood open, and through it I could see candles burning—many candles. Lin Ming was behind me, almost pressed against me, like one of the acrobats.

  I walked through the door, and there in a puddle of buttery candlelight sat Chen Qi with a glass in his hand. I smelled scotch. I was not surprised. Of course it was Chen Qi, the most unlikely man in the world to be here all by himself. Who else would it be? He stood up, he smiled, he extended a hand and shook mine firmly. He spoke my name. I looked around to see if anybody else was lurking in the shadows, if there were other doors, other ways out. The answer to all these questions was no.

  I said, “Good evening, CEO Chen. What a pleasure.”

  “I agree,” Chen Qi said. “Sit down, please. We have things to talk about.”

  As of old, I did as I was told. Chen Qi did not quite snap his fingers at Lin Ming. But without turning his head he said, “Single malt.” To me he said, as if he had some reason to be nice to me, “I think you’ll like this whisky. Eighteen years old. Very smoky.” Lin Ming, obsequious as a waiter, brought my whisky—two ounces, one ice cube.

  Chen Qi was in affable mode, as on the night we dined together in Shanghai and he offered me a job. He hoped that I had been well. He brought me greetings from my former colleagues in the tower. My good work, my American humor were missed.

  He said, “I hope you’re enjoying your new posting.”

  “It has its moments.”

  “It must be stimulating, working so closely with your new chief. So famous for being infamous,” Chen Qi said. “You have a way of finding your way to the top. I think you will have a very interesting life. I have always thought so.”

  “Not nearly so interesting as your own life,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be so sure about that. You should be on the lookout. Opportunities hide, then leap at a man,” Chen Qi said. “I’m sure you remember the young woman you knew in Shanghai.”

  “Zhang Jia?”

  “Zhang Jia has married and is pregnant. A boy, according to the sonogram, so she’s a fortunate person.”

  “I’m glad for her,” I said. I was.

  “I wasn’t asking about Zhang Jia,” Chen said. “I meant the earlier one, the first woman you had. What did you call her?”

  “Mei.”

  “Yes, Mei. Now I remember.”

  “She’s well and happy, I hope.”

  “As far as I know she’s well,” Chen said. “But happy? Probably not.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. I took hold of myself and said, calmly I thought, “What’s the problem?”

  Chen Qi said, “You’ve finished your whisky. Did you enjoy it?”

  “Very much.”

  “Then you shall have another.”

  He gave no order, not even a gesture, but his words were enough to bring Lin Ming and a tray at the trot. He poured one finger of the amber fluid into each of our glasses, and deftly handling silver tongs, added an ice cube.

  Chen Qi said, “There’s something about your friend Mei—several things in fact—that you may not know.”

  “There is an infinity of things I don’t know about Mei,” I said. “She never supplied a single fact about herself. Not even her true name.”

  “Really? And you never asked for facts? Why not?”

  “I thought she was entitled to her privacy.”

  “How sensitive. Especially for an officer of U.S. intelligence.”

  His voice roughened. His eyes hardened. That much showed, if only for an instant. Had he been a softer man, his face might have been flushed. I put down my whisky glass. The moment was not right for a friendly drink. Chen Qi noted the gesture and put his glass on the table as well.

  “Why were you so incurious?” he asked.

  “In her case, at the time in question, who she was was irrelevant. I thought I understood what she was.”

  “And what was that?”

  “A woman who lived her own life as she wanted to live it.”

  “Like an American woman. Do you know what Chairman Mao said about that? ‘Never trust an American girl.’”

  I said, “He knew American girls?”

  Chen Qi brushed away my words with a gesture. It was Mei he wanted to talk about. “Consorting with an American spy is never irrelevant to the people who may now have this Mei of yours in their hands,” he said. “They insist on facts. Believe me, she will supply them. Anyone who is her friend would urge her to supply them.”

  “In this case, what I was, or was suspected of being, is b
eside the point,” I said. “I thought it was possible that Mei was an agent whose job was to observe what I did and report. I also thought any woman in China would do the same—would have no choice.”

  Chen Qi blinked—actually blinked. I had crossed the line. I was guilty of disrespect. His affability evaporated. I was not dismayed by this mood swing, though a saner man might have been.

  I said, “So how long has Mei been in the hands of Guoanbu?”

  “Guoanbu?” Chen Qi said, as if the term were new to him. “She was placed under protection shortly after you and Lin Ming, here, had your most recent conversation.”

  “Do you know where she’s being held?”

  “If I did why would I tell you? What can you do for her?”

  The answer was “nothing.” To Chen Qi I said, “Let me ask you a question.”

  A gesture—go ahead if you must.

  “What’s your interest in Mei?”

  Chen Qi said, “I have her interests sincerely at heart.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But why? Is she related to you?”

  No flicker of a reaction from Chen Qi. No sound. Lin Ming, somewhere behind me, moved—twitched. I could feel it.

  At this moment the power came back on, fluorescent tubes flickering and buzzing. Chen Qi paid no attention. The bluish electric glare was less flattering to him than the candlelight had been. With no shadows to conceal the reality, he looked just like the heartless bastard he was. I hoped that I didn’t look as sick to my stomach, as strangled by anxiety, as I actually was—Mei in prison, confined, silent, learning, session by session, the Kama Sutra of pain and fear that was secret interrogation.

  I made the feeling worse with my next guess about her identity. “Your mistress?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Chen Qi said.

  But Chen Qi, the invulnerable man, looked caught. He looked as if he wished Mei’s mother had drowned the girl in a bucket on the day she was born. How else would he feel? If she actually was his relative, however close or distant, and she was under investigation for sleeping with an American spy, he would be under suspicion himself, because how could she commit such crimes without his approval? Chen Qi got to his feet. Lin Ming rushed to help him into his overcoat.

  “Our time together is over,” Chen Qi said. “You and Lin Ming will have a chat after I go. But before I leave I have a suggestion to make to you.”

  Chen Qi looked me in the eyes. “You must do what’s best for yourself,” he said. “But if you are concerned about this girl—Mei? Is that what you call her?”

  “Yes.”

  “The situation may not be hopeless. Obviously she is in difficulty,” Chen Qi said. “But if you were to create an opportunity, so to speak, by reconsidering the offer of employment Lin Ming has made to you, then that might give this Mei an opportunity of her own to make amends, to improve her situation.”

  His eyes were still locked on mine. I said, “How would she do that, and what would it have to do with me?”

  “She is said to be willing, even eager, to return to you, to marry you, even,” Chen Qi said. “If you were with us and she were with you, she could be a help to you and you to her. It is an opportunity, a rare opportunity, to have what you want by doing a good thing. In my opinion, it is not impossible that a similar thought might occur to the people who are now deciding what should happen to her. She could come to America, become a citizen, live as an American. Make her own life as you say she wants to do. I see no other way this, or anything like it, could happen.”

  Lin Ming opened the door. Chen Qi walked through it.

  28

  Burbank went straight to the obvious question.

  “What do they gain from this?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” I said.

  “Come on!” he said. “Think, then answer the question.”

  I had already thought—all night long in my overheated hotel room, all the next day and another night while I waited for thirty inches of wet snow to be scraped off the streets and highways, and all during the inchworm drive along the one plowed lane of the George Washington Parkway. I arrived at Headquarters at 6:00 A.M. on Tuesday. Burbank was already at his desk—showered, shaved, wide-awake, crisp clean shirt. He had slept in the office. His folding cot and rolled-up sleeping bag stood between the rows of safes. He asked about the weather, unable to check it out himself because his office, like mine, was windowless. I told him it was snowing again. Government workers do not drive in the snow. Before the last straggler arrived we’d probably be alone for hours, maybe all day, maybe longer.

  I really didn’t want to rephrase my answer to Burbank’s question. “Who knows?” was the answer. Nobody ever knew Chen Qi’s purposes for certain. To Burbank’s mind, however, the answer I had just given him had merely obscured the real answer, which was, of course, the hidden answer.

  I said, “Try this. Chen Qi has enemies he wants to get rid of. Or wants us to think so.”

  “And he wants us to get rid of them for him.”

  “Meaning he knows or guesses what we want to do, namely set up a fictitious network inside Guoanbu, and wants to make sure his enemies are on the list of traitors.”

  “Or wants us to walk into a trap.”

  “What makes him think we’d be dumb enough to do that?”

  “Because he has a low opinion of us,” I said. “Because he wants us to think we’re counting on a coup. Because he thinks we’d calculate that doing his dirty work will rid the world of certain people who are enemies of the United States and are stealing its secrets. Because we’d think it would make our organization look good to the White House. Because it would help on the Hill at budget time.”

  Well, yeah. The usual drawn-out Burbankian pause followed. I waited in silence for it to end.

  Finally he spoke. “So should we refuse or accept?”

  “Refuse.”

  This was not the answer he had been looking for. “Explain,” he said.

  I said, “I don’t want to be the go-between in this business.”

  “Really? Why the sudden change of heart?”

  “It’s dirty,” I said.

  “We’re paid to be dirty so that the virtuous may be immaculate,” Burbank said. “What else?”

  “I’m personally involved. Emotionally involved.”

  “You’re talking about the woman?”

  “Yes, and the fact that I used to work for Chen Qi and the whole world knows that.”

  “Start with the woman,” Burbank said. “You have feelings for her?”

  “You might think that. We had sex every day for two and a half years.”

  “Every day?”

  “No. We took five days a month off.”

  “Why did the two of you split?”

  “She disappeared.”

  “Because she had carried out her mission and was moving on?”

  “That’s one possibility. She could have been kidnapped or drowned or locked up by Guoanbu just as Chen Qi told me. For whatever reason, she vanished. I went to work in the tower. Another woman was supplied. You knew all this.”

  “Not about the annual sixty days of abstinence.”

  Burbank was amused, an interesting thing to see.

  I said, “I’m going to ask you a question about Mei.”

  He waited.

  I said, “I’ve searched the files. I found nothing to suggest that anyone in this building or in any of the stations knows Mei’s true name. Do you know it?”

  Burbank hesitated. He gestured at his safes. “Somewhere I have a name for her that isn’t a funny name,” he said. “The person named fits her description, more or less. Whether or not it’s her true name is another matter.”

  “What is the name?”

  “I don’t remember,” Burbank said. “But I’ll find it for you.”

  Maybe he would. That didn’t mean that I’d find Mei among the multitude of Chinese women who had the same name. Burbank was right about that. She was gone, lost, probably in a lab
or camp in Inner Mongolia. They would never let her out.

  Burbank showed no sign of wanting to end our chat. I would have been more than glad to do so. But we did have a lot more to talk about, and thanks to Mother Nature, he had no one else to talk to. The prospect of being snowbound and alone with my chief in this airless, sterile building for two days and nights made the heart sink. It was impossible to know what line of action Burbank might decide on, if any. It might even, for once, end with Burbank doing the rational thing, like refusing to fly into Chen Qi’s butterfly net.

  Burbank was meditating again. I used the time to look back on the events that had led me to this day. My upbringing. Football. Sex. My show-off decision to take an ROTC scholarship rather than accept my stepfather’s generosity. That patrol in Afghanistan when my men—bunched up because I had not done my job and kept them spread out as I was supposed to do—had taken the force of the blast and saved my life because I happened to be crouching behind them when the bomb went off. And everything since. I had been scouted, spotted, selected, trained and conditioned and screwed and tattooed by two intelligence services for the suicidal job they were both offering me, as if they had cooked my fate by mutual agreement. And maybe they had. Both Burbank and Chen Qi had drawn certain conclusions about me, probably the same ones. They thought that I cared so little for myself, cared so little for life, for consequences, for shame, for my ancestors, that I would accept this poisonous offer. Did they have me dead to rights? I wasn’t sure.

  More quickly than usual, Burbank regained his focus. He said, “Are your reservations about carrying out this mission written in stone?”

  Anyone with a brain in his head would have said yes in a loud voice. I said, “Why do you ask?”

  “Because there’s something in this for us. I’ve always thought so. You’ve always thought so.”

  “Have I?”

  “Does memory deceive or were you the one who came up with the idea?”