The Shanghai Factor

by Charles McCarry

  “A fellow can change his mind.”

  “Can he now?” Burbank said. “Even if what Chen Qi is offering us almost exactly what we wanted?”

  “Especially because that’s true.”

  “You have a peculiar mind,” Burbank said.

  No argument.

  Burbank said, “You think what just happened changes things?”

  “Profoundly.”

  “It’s a rare operation in which anomaly doesn’t show its face. It’s the law of the craft.”

  How Kiplingesque, that choice of words. But then, if Burbank hadn’t been a Kipling character at heart he wouldn’t now be the man of mystery and power that he was. Nor would I be sitting across a desk from him, not quite in full possession of my senses, while he offered me the chance of a lifetime to become the king of Kafiristan.

  There was no place left to go with Burbank except in circles. For the next couple of hours, around and around we went. By then we began to hear voices outside the door as people began to arrive.

  Burbank picked out a safe, opened it, went unerringly to the correct folder, and pulled it out. He had known exactly where this particular file was, exactly what it contained, exactly what the combination of this particular safe was. He handed me the file. It was not a very thick file. “The female in question,” he said. “Your eyes only. Bring it back the next time I buzz.” Burbank’s clockwork day had begun. Every fifteen minutes, from now until closing time, he would have something pressing to do, someone to see, some gnarled issue to decide. There was no way of guessing when he might have time to buzz me again.

  The file was labeled WILDCHILD. There was no mention of a true name. I began to read, fast, even before I sat down. Most of the file on WILDCHILD was rank speculation—and so was my conviction that the woman therein described was the Mei I had known and no other. Like Mei, WILDCHILD had gone to high school in Concord, Massachusetts, and later attended Shanghai University. She spoke fluent English. She dressed like an American, acted like an American, had acquired the bad habits of Americans. Her father, true name redacted, called KQ/RUFFIAN in our files, was said to be a figure of consequence in the Party. As a kid of eighteen he had been an activist during the Cultural Revolution and established the reputation for ruthlessness that had carried him upward. WILDCHILD had become sexually active in her later teens, while in America. She had been withdrawn from her American high school and sent back to China when the family with which she lived complained that she and their teenage son had been discovered in bed together in his room, naked, joined, after the household was awakened in the wee hours of the morning by WILDCHILD’s “ecstatic outcries.”

  After this summary introduction, several pages in the file were missing. These were followed by my own e-mail reporting the bicycle accident to Tom Simpson. Attached was an outraged footnote from admin about the cost of the bike I bought for Mei. Admin wanted to deduct the money from my salary. Burbank had ordered it reimbursed as an operational expense. I was surprised that this exchange hadn’t been redacted because it confirmed that Mei and WILDCHILD were the same person, and that Burbank had seen an opportunity in our getting to know each other, and that he had encouraged our relationship from the first. And that I had been left in the dark like an unwitting asset. As the relationship ripened, Headquarters’s interest in WILDCHILD—that is to say, Burbank’s interest in her—intensified. He ordered the officer in charge of CI operations in Shanghai—his man, not Shanghai’s—home for consultations. They met in private. No account was given of what was said, but shortly after the man from Shanghai got back to Shanghai, the file began to be enlivened by reports on WILDCHILD’s movements. These were paper documents, mostly written in Mandarin in several different hands, none of them in Mei’s dashing calligraphy. They had been sent by pouch for Burbank’s eyes only. Burbank’s man in Shanghai was an industrious fellow. His sidewalk people were always with WILDCHILD. One or another of them, apparently, had been stationed at all times outside my door to log the times on her comings and goings. They photographed her, listened in on her cell phone, listened in on our sex life through bugs and cameras they planted in my rooms—just as I had suspected, although I had suspected the wrong suspects. Naturally the file did not reveal who these sidewalk people were or where Burbank’s man got them or how they got away with what they did under the all-seeing eye of Chinese counterintelligence. Obviously they were Chinese. But were they Chinese Chinese or Chinese-Americans or Taiwanese or one of half a dozen other types favored by our own China people? Whoever they were, they were always there. Just like the ones who shadowed me in New York, just like the acrobats.

  There were no reports on WILDCHILD’s activities except when she was with me. If, as I had suspected, she had another lover, if she reported to a Guoanbu case officer, if she had any kind of life at all when we were apart, if she slept in her coffin, Burbank had not been interested. He cared only about Romeo and Juliet. How strange that would have seemed in anyone but him.

  29

  There were two possibilities. Either someone had slipped something into my scotch and I was hallucinating, or I was truly paranoid. Make that three possibilities. The third was that Chen Qi and Burbank knew each other and were working together, had been doing so all along on some perverse operation and needed an unwitting go-between who could be the fall guy in case things went wrong. If so, I was the designated fall guy. That thought tipped the scales toward paranoia. I knew this. I did my best to dismiss suspicion from my mind. Those who have learned what they think they know about the craft from deluded zealots are convinced that it is a world of deception and distrust in which no positive human emotion or sense of decency is involved. In reality the opposite is true. The entire basis of espionage is trust. Spying could not exist without it. If such trust is imperfect or not quite complete, then it is like all other varieties of trust. Ask yourself—do you, does anyone trust absolutely his spouse, his doctor, his lawyer, his best friend, his employee, his mother? Trust is selective. In practice, the agent trusts his case officer to protect him, to keep secrets that are a threat to his life and the lives of his entire family, to make the promised payments in full, in cash, and on time. In return the case officer trusts the agent not to set him up for capture, torture, imprisonment, and perhaps death at every clandestine meeting, and to provide reliable information or perform certain acts when called upon to do so. Within an intelligence service, colleagues may dislike one another and often do, but they trust one another absolutely. It is part of the contract, part of the mystique. It is the indispensable element. Its perversion makes treason possible and all but undetectable among professional spies, but when uncorrupted it is the code that drives the system. Everyone inside an intelligence service has been investigated to a fare-thee-well and is polygraphed on a regular basis. By these means doubt has been caged, even though every professional knows exactly how unlikely are most investigations, and especially the polygraph, to discover the truth, the whole truth—and most unlikely of all, nothing but the truth.

  The idea that our side or their side might kill me never crossed my mind. If I became a problem, Burbank and Chen Qi (I had gone so far as to begin thinking of the two of them as a unit before I buried the thought) would just cut me loose. I could do them no harm. Fox News or the New York Times would hang up on me if I called and babbled the truth. A psychiatrist would put me on drugs. I’d live in a virtual world—or in the real one in case I had already been living in a virtual one. No one in Headquarters or Chen Qi’s corporation or Guoanbu or any other intelligence service in the world would have anything to do with me. Hardly anyone at Headquarters even knew me. Those who did (remember the Gang of Thirteen) did not wish me well. They would be the Greek chorus: “There was always something funny about the guy. We all saw it even if the shrinks and the box missed it.” I certainly couldn’t count on the brave support of my few remaining friends on the outside. And wait a minute. “No fear of sudden death?” Did I not remember Magdalena? Oh, yes, I remem
bered her. But if she had been under instructions to kill me, she had already had a hundred opportunities. Had I been the target, I would not now be alive and trying to figure out what she was up to and whom she worked for. She got next to Mother, then next to me because she wanted access to someone I could get next to. But who? And why?

  I told myself a lot of things. The fact was, when it came right down to it, I would go on doing the job no matter what, simply because I didn’t want to walk out before this movie was over, no matter how bad it was. Not that there weren’t worrisome signs I was loath to discuss with myself. For example, resentment was taking up more and more space in my mind. And you know what Burbank had to say about that.

  Most of the above were night thoughts fueled by single malt whisky. In daylight I controlled my fantasies and waited for instructions. These were not long in coming. Late on a Friday afternoon, as everyone else headed for the parking lots, Burbank buzzed. It was the first time he had done so since we had our discussion about my meeting with Chen Qi and Lin Ming two weeks before. When I entered his office to return Mei’s file, I found him bent over a small refrigerator. He extracted two frosty bottles of beer. He gave me one. “Cheers,” he said. We clinked bottles and drank.

  After a medium-long pause Burbank said, “You still have a phone number for your friend the basketball player?”

  “If it still works, yes.”

  “Call him up on your way home and set up a meeting for this weekend. In New York.”

  I said, “What about Chen Qi?”

  “He’s in Cairo.”

  Chen Qi was in Cairo? Burbank read my thought, not that there was anything difficult about that.

  “It’s probably just a coincidence,” Burbank said. “Business. But if it isn’t, he’ll walk into our surveillance and we’ll know something new.”

  I asked what I was supposed to tell Lin Ming.

  Burbank said, “What do you think you should tell him?”

  “‘No, thanks.’”

  “Why should we do that?”

  “Because what they offer is of no use to us.”

  Burbank lifted his beer bottle in another toast. “Right,” he said. “Isn’t it interesting how seeing the obvious makes things so much simpler?”

  I said, “So now what?”

  “So now you go to New York, meet Lin Ming, change the climate of your relationship with him.”

  “How? In what way?”

  “You say Chen Qi treated Lin Ming like a servant on the night of the blizzard, humiliating him. You saw that Lin Ming resented it.”

  “And?”

  “Remember what I told you. Resentment makes things happen.”

  Burbank’s lip lifted ever so slightly. He pointed a forefinger at me and clucked his tongue. I took this as positive reinforcement, as a reward for good thinking, as a sign of camaraderie. Or condescension.

  I said, “You really think it’s possible to turn Lin Ming?”

  “Didn’t you just suggest that it was?” Burbank said. “Maybe not this weekend but if you play him right, you can get the process started. As I hope you’re beginning to realize, these things take time. You know how to do it. Would you say that you and Lin Ming have the embryo of a relationship?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you sure? Will it grow, will its heart begin to beat, will it create its own brain and liver and arms and legs? Will it in time create others like itself?”

  His face was a mask of earnestness. What was he up to? I laughed.

  He said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t know you had a metaphorical side.”

  “Everyone has a metaphorical side. The question is, can you rattle his bones with a single question? Are you two friendly enough for that?”

  He was grinning—a sight I had never seen before—and watching my reaction.

  I said, “Maybe.”

  “That’s the right answer,” Burbank said. And then, as if granting me permission to do something I absolutely longed to do, he said, “Okay, go. Go to it. Don’t fly. Take the next train. It will give you time to think.”

  30

  By the time the Metroliner pulled into Penn Station I knew everybody in my car by sight. Walking out of the gate, I scanned the crowd: a buck-toothed girl hopping up and down in excitement, a Hasid who greeted another Hasid who had been sitting in the fifth-row window seat, a very short man with gym-rat biceps and a boxer’s flattened face. And at the back of the crowd, Lin Ming. Our eyes met. He turned around and walked fast across the waiting room. I followed him up the escalators and into the street, then uptown on Seventh Avenue to the Forties. He kept track of my reflection in store windows. I saw no one worth worrying about behind us or across the avenue or ahead of us, and no sign of the sidewalk crew. I wondered if we were headed for the Algonquin, but before we got there Lin Ming for some unfathomable reason walked into an all-night sporting goods store. He headed straight for a rack of warm-up jackets at the back of the store and got behind it. From there he had a good view of the door. The display window was a sheet of light. A stalker could look in, but Lin Ming could not look out. This made him nervous, very nervous. This person was not the relaxed Lin Ming I knew. How pleased Burbank would have been at this sudden change in behavior. I stationed myself on the other side of the clothes rack, facing Lin, my back to the door, as if screening him from a defender while he took his shot at the basket. I took a cheap Mets jacket off the rack, held it against my chest, and raised my eyebrows in inquiry. How do I look? Lin Ming paid no attention. He said, “Take the uptown local to Seventy-second Street and walk down to the river.” Then he left. I looked at two more jackets and tried on a Giants cap, then did as I had been instructed.

  Forty minutes later, when I sighted Lin Ming, he was still on edge. You could sense a churning within him. A light breeze came off the Hudson. I could smell the river, glimpse New Jersey’s polluted sky, faintly hear its clamor over the monotonous hum of the West Side of Manhattan and the counterpoint of its many sirens. After a couple of blocks, Lin Ming turned into the park and found an empty bench. I sat down beside him. He didn’t flee.

  In a voice I could barely hear he said, “Why are you here?”

  “Because we have something to talk about,” I said.

  “This is not good.”

  “How do you know? We haven’t talked yet.”

  “It’s impromptu.”

  Inasmuch as Lin Ming himself was nothing if not a devotee of the impromptu, this should have made the contact more interesting to him, but what did I know? No matter how good my Mandarin might be, I wasn’t Han and could not think like a Han no matter how hard I tried. We simply had different ways of thinking about thinking.

  I said, “If you don’t want to do this, I can leave.”

  “Too late,” Lin Ming said. “Say what you came to say.”

  I did as he asked. Beside me in the half-dark, Lin Ming flinched. In the wash of the streetlamp he looked pale. He grew even more ashen as he listened to my words. Afterward he fell into a stillness. I waited for him to speak, to make a gesture, to leap to his feet and stalk away in anger, to pull out a stiletto and attempt to bury it in my heart or brain. Instead he remained as he was—speechless, inert. He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs. His hands dangled between his knees. This pose of despair was as much out of character as the rest of his behavior. Was he acting, playing a scene? Making a joke of the whole thing? And if all this was genuine, how could Lin Ming of all people have believed that I had come to give him an answer different from the last one I had given him?

  He muttered something. I said, “What? I didn’t hear you.” I spoke a little louder, a little more peremptorily than was absolutely necessary. This was method, one infinitesimal move in the reconfiguration of our relationship. He had to know this. It was a humiliation, however tiny. I felt a flicker of regret. I liked this man. I didn’t like what I was doing to him. He had had enough humiliation lately.r />
  Lin Ming gave me a sidelong look. After a minute he leaped to his feet and walked, fast, toward the next streetlight. I caught up to him. Another empty bench came in sight. I took his arm, thinking that he would shake off my hand, but he let himself be steered to the bench. He sat down and turned his head to stare at me.

  “Speak,” he said.

  I told him what we wanted. Names, résumés, assessments of six high-quality targets within China, within the elite—perhaps within Guoanbu, though neither one of us would know about that. These people were so exalted that nobody less trustworthy than the ghost of Zhou Enlai would be cleared to possess such knowledge. Lin Ming did not flinch. What I had asked was too outrageous to register while my words still hung in the air.

  Lin Ming laughed. In English he said, “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. Just as a matter of curiosity, what do you propose to give us in return?”

  “The same valuable goods already on offer.”

  “You’re crazy. You know who these people are—who their fathers are. They are untouchable.”

  True. I didn’t even nod but waited for Lin Ming to go on.

  He said, “What you’re offering us is chicken feed. One man in one embassy in return for the Party jewels? Be serious.”

  “How do you know the man we are offering to you is the only one like him?” I asked. “How do you know it’s just one embassy? How do you know it’s not a network? How do you know what we know and you don’t know?”

  “How do we know you know what you say you know?”

  “You don’t. You won’t, either, unless you start playing ball.”

  He smiled—you might have called it a twisted smile, but even so it made Lin Ming look more like himself. “I have already played basketball with you,” he said.

  Without thinking I said, “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I know you are better than you pretend, that you can fake it when you feel like it,” Lin Ming said.