On Fire

by Thomas Anderson

Hui Lee stares out the open bank of windows on the other side of the bright, spanking clean employee cafeteria. He stands in line behind several others near the service counter for his first thing in the morning coffee. This gives him the opportunity to think further about how to line up his day. Then his cell goes off.

  It is Tao Deng, the Director of Counterintelligence, calling from the Minister’s office. He can tell all this because the system is designed to give locators for all professional calls within the MSS. He feels a surge of caustic acid suddenly roar into his stomach. It burns him and there is accompanying it a small but sharp pain. He grimaces as he puts the phone to his ear and clicks the line open.

  “Hello,” is all he says.

  “Get up here. Now,” says Deng in a low voice before Lee hears the phone click.

  Hui Lee hasn’t even been to his office yet. He looks around the cheerful cafeteria, young and old employees, male and female, taking a moment to gab over their coffee a few minutes before heading to their offices. Grouped around the bar counter’s high spinning chairs or in bunches of cushioned seats in primary colors centered around varnished wood coffee tables, their voices rise and fall, break into laughter, explode in hoots and shouts. Large panel TV’s are positioned overhead, ignored, sound drowned out.

  There is only one more person ahead of Hui Lee in line. If he has to go directly to the new building he can at least get his coffee, he decides. Lee looks wistfully down the long counter running the length of the room with the high chairs lining either side, shiny silver canister lights hanging above it, the adjacent bank of outside windows welcoming a distracted view of the sky outside, and sighs. Coffee finally in hand, Lee turns and passes through a doorway in the glass coffee shop wall, decorated with white semi-transparent circles of different sizes.

  Abrupt calls from above are a rarity, but an official taking notice of his team’s work is flattering. He tries to remind himself that these are opportunities to shine to his superiors, to garner their good will and support.

  “Rise to the occasion!” he encourages himself.

  Lee takes the elevator down to the sub level. From here he finds the underground pedestrian connection to the new MSS tower. A preschool playground for the children of MSS employees was sacrificed to make room for the tower’s construction. The underground connection is busy with office people going between the buildings, but unfortunately, on this particular morning some are not in much of a hurry. Lee picks up the pace and skirts around them until he reaches the bank of elevators at the base of the MSS Tower. He has to find the right elevator of course, one that will take him express to the highest floors.

  Hui Lee watches the floors go by and texts Huiliang Tai about his sudden meeting. He is surprised that the text seems to work in the elevator. When he gets out he steps into an impressive and vaulting space at the top of the building. Here, half of two sides of the blue glass tower extend on top of the building until they intersect, creating a six story pyramid at the apex. This office, the Minister’s office, is in the sixtieth and highest story.

  Immediately Hui Lee notices that the sunlight on the thick off white carpet is bisected everywhere by the shadows of the big rectangular window frames through which it falls. Spidery steel buttresses support a tangle of high, white cross bracings. Lee looks across the room and sees only a desk with a flat black wall behind it and not far away a conference table where several men are seated. Lee walks a death march, resigned, from the elevator to the table, during which time there is no acknowledgment from any of the men seated there. He stops a short distance away, hands at his sides.

  There is Geng Huichang, the Minister of State Security, the titular head of the agency, and of course Tao Deng, his direct boss, who has called him to this meeting. Lee doesn’t know the third man.

  “Join us, why don’t you?” asks Huichang without looking up.

  Lee tentatively sits and looks around. There are other offices on this floor, but they are sequestered behind cool, aquamarine tinted glass and placed off to one side, in what is evidently some kind of open floor plan of their own.

  It’s become a windy day. Cirrus rush quickly by, the clouds casting moving shadows around the room. This part of the building is famous within the ministry for its peculiar Faraday screening, intended to prevent eavesdropping. Tiny electrically charged filaments too small to be seen are spread throughout the glass walls, blocking transmissions. The building’s window walls are opaque to the outside, burnished gold and highly reflective mirrors. No satellite can penetrate them. The men in the room know about these protections. They take them for granted.

  “This is Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli,” states Geng.

  “I am honored,” replies Hui Lee, bowing his head slightly.

  “Ah, Mr. Lee! Good to meet you.” Zhang has a broad and open smile, transparent in fact. He speaks as if he somehow knew something of Hui Lee before this, but Lee thinks this very unlikely. How many people have misinterpreted the man’s friendliness and misjudged his apparent openness only to later regret it, Lee wonders?

  “Sorry to bother you this fine morning,” Gaoli continues, obviously not sorry at all. “We were just discussing this strange American aberration known as ‘Burning Man’.”

  Lee nods, his glasses glinting back at them in the sunlight.

  “Yes. I activated our MSS stateside resource, Li Bin and his people.”

  “And it was Bin who caught up with Miller and company at Burning Man. Bin uses a small team?”

  “That’s right. Bin runs a financial services company as a front and these people, they work for him. Burning Man is very crowded. They were stretched.”

  “And you have been tracking this man using agency resources?”

  “We have scrubbed the metadata. We know everyone he has called or emailed to in the past. Using this, we have been able to drill down to identify and track the movements of everyone he knows. They have begun using programs to mask their IPs, but there are always other ways to find out about them, who they are and where.”

  “Is there any possibility that this Miller has shared any important information with anyone?” the Vice Premier asks.

  “Not without us knowing, electronically at least. He could be making endless copies of a USB device with an air gapped machine and there’s nothing anybody could do about it. And then physically pass a tiny device to others? It would be impossible for us to know. That’s why we track everyone, including any packages that they might receive.”

  “Who is Megan Palmer?’

  “We are still vetting her. She has led something of a nomadic existence. No pattern has emerged that would indicate the purpose of them contacting her.”

  “What do our Friends think of all this?” By this the Premier evidently means the Americans.

  “Signals is indicating chatter. A diplomatic official …”

  “Gray. Christopher Gray?”

  “…Was forced to leave the country.”

  “He was there? When Wang the dissident departed this world? In the Imperial Gardens of all places! How do you know he has left the country?”

  “Because we can’t find him. It is a reasonable deduction.”

  Premier Gaoli sits back and looks at the others.

  “Is this really a cause for alarm? After all, what do we really know about Wang?”

  Hui Lee doesn’t hold back.

  “There has been a full investigation. We have searched Wang’s possessions. We have enough information from his personal data sources to raise real concern with the Service’s senior staff. If he was not a vital source of intel to outside foreign elements, it would have been difficult to understand the purpose for which he had obtained certain kinds of information. Wang had to be working for someone,” Lee offers.

  “Would you care to speculate?”

  “No. I have no idea who it could be. But the Guoanbu is supposed to have two million agents around the world. We could
run an opinion survey and see what everyone thinks.”

  Vice Premier Gaoli doesn’t blink. He grins and turns to Minister Huichang.

  “I like this guy. A sense of humor is always important in a government line of work, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Chapter 37