The Shanghai Factor (17 page)

These thoughts were in my mind as Burbank, having dealt with the question of my likely assassination, moved on to the next issue, the one that really interested him—namely how to handle Lin Ming by leading him to believe he was handling me. Burbank did not like to wing it—better to be ready in our minds before we acted, to have a plan, to avoid improvisation, to shun impulse. For Burbank, if something did not take years it wasn’t real. If it moved too swiftly, it wasn’t an operation. As he explained all this yet again, I fought the urge to fall asleep.

Burbank said, “Are you awake?”

I twitched. “Not really,” I said. “Can we continue this in the morning?”

“Unfortunately, no. I’m catching a plane early tomorrow. You’ve got to stay awake.”

He went to the refrigerator, drew a glass of ice water, and carried it back to me. I held it in a nerveless hand. He took a pill bottle out of his coat pocket and shook a tablet into my other hand. “Take this,” he said.

I said, “What is it?”

“A wake-up pill.”

I saw and heard Burbank as if through a gauze bandage. I had never been so sleepy in my life. But why? This had been a day like any other. Had Magdalena poisoned me after all? Slow-working poisons, Burbank had said. Suspicion moved within me.
The hell with it,
I thought. Anything was better than this. I took the pill.

“Drink the whole glass of water,” Burbank said. “It’ll take a couple of minutes to kick in.” He watched me as if counting the passing seconds on a mental stopwatch. Immediately I began to wake up. Burbank brought me a mug of instant espresso, black. I drank it down. All of a sudden, I was wide-awake, as if adrenaline had been injected into my heart.

I said, “Wow. What is that stuff?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Burbank said. “But it works.”

It sure did. I was even hungry again and said so. Burbank got a supermarket pizza out of the freezer and put it in the microwave.

As we ate the pizza we mapped out the Lin Ming operation. Thanks to the pill, my mind was clear, my spirit tranquil. This was the sequence of the plan: very soon I would move back inside Headquarters and work closely with Burbank. I’d be given a title and Burbank’s enthusiastic trust. This would put noses out of joint at Headquarters, but it was necessary cover. I would give Lin Ming information—real but not vital information. Over time I would give him more information. And then, when the dirty trick had been done and the key had been turned in Lin Ming’s mind, I would give him the false information that would blow Guoanbu to smithereens. It was a brilliant plan. It was a game of surround. It would change the balance of espionage. We would be the aggressors, the pranksters, the ruthless ones. The winners. Both Burbank and I felt wonderful—in his case, presumably, without a chemical stimulant.

“The key element—always remember the key element—is that nobody,
nobody
can know what we are doing until it’s over except you and me,” Burbank said yet again. “Just the two of us. No one else.”

I was not insensible to the risks of this operation. To begin with, it was crazy, but then so were all really good operations. This one had the potential to put an end to me. If Burbank was killed in a plane crash or developed early Alzheimer’s or turned out to be a bastard or a traitor, I was lost and gone forever. No one would believe that Burbank, one of the most trusted and steady figures in the apparatus, had ordered me to do the things I was going to do. My own country would be my nemesis. I would be crushed, locked up, delivered to Magdalena or her equivalent. Even while still feeling the exhilarating effects of Burbank’s pill, I didn’t in my heart want to do this. Burbank, studying my face, saw this.

“You’ll be in danger, no question,” Burbank said. “But you’ve been in danger before and come out the other side. The payback will be that for the rest of your life you will live in a state of satisfaction for having done what you will have done for this country that we love.”

This meeting was all but over. Formalities remained. Burbank had yet another new contract for me to sign. I signed it. Just like that I was a staff agent again—but no promotion this time. At dawn, Burbank departed. He left a spare car, an environmentally correct electric one, for my use. I could stay in the house until he got back. No one would bother me. Burbank and I and the caretaker and no one else knew this house existed. The caretaker was on vacation in the Seychelles. After Burbank returned I’d move into something more suitable, more secure, and report for duty at Headquarters.

By midafternoon the pill wore off. I was exhausted again. Burbank had shown me my room. When I put my head on the pillow I felt something beneath it. I slid my hand under the pillow and pulled out a fully automatic ten-millimeter pistol with one of those extra-long gun-nut magazines sticking out of the butt. If nobody knew this barn existed why did I need this thing? I fell asleep before I could answer my own question.

Part 3

23

I realized after a day or two
as Burbank’s house guest that I could live no longer with the caretaker’s psychotic paintings. When I was awake they depressed me—angered me. In dreams I came downstairs in the dishwater light of early day and found mammoth portraits of Chen Qi or Steve or the tenor or sometimes the Hessian in his muddy football suit, silent and still, waiting for me. The house itself was so isolated, so surrounded by forest, so empty of life—not even an insect lived in it with me—that I became pathologically watchful. I half expected to wake up some night and see Magdalena at the foot of the bed, syringe in hand, having just injected the venom of the Dahomey viper between my toes. I moved to a cheap motel in Manassas, and on the next nights to other motels in other towns. I went to the movies. I ate junk food, so I nearly always tasted scorched grease at the back of my throat. On the fourth morning, while I was having a superheated breakfast at a McDonalds, Burbank texted me. We would meet at the barn at ten that evening.

I got there a little early. I did not turn on the lights in the room where the paintings were. Though surely he knew about it, Burbank didn’t mention my absence from the house.

He handed me the ID card suspended on a chain that would get me through the gates at Headquarters and into the building in the morning. It was a lot like the one I wore around my neck in Shanghai when I worked in the tower for Chen Qi.

“The daily meeting is at seven-thirty,” Burbank said. “Be there at seven on Monday. Use the main entrance. Sally will be there to greet you.”

He told me the number of my parking space and gave me a parking sticker. He asked if I had any questions. I didn’t. He was brusque. He said, “Let’s go. Do you have a credit card or a checkbook on you?”

Both, I said. He dropped me off at an all-night car dealership that sold used and new cars at low but nonnegotiable prices. “Nothing fancy,” he said, never one to eschew the obvious. “No bright colors.” Using my debit card I bought a gray Honda Civic with eighteen thousand miles on the odometer and not a scratch on it and drove it away. There was some difficulty about the registration because I had no local address, so I had to rent the car for a week to give me time to find a place to live. One of the first things I was told when I joined Headquarters was that espionage was a capital crime in every country in the world, so it was vital to be up-to-date in all your papers, for everything to be strictly legal, even in the United States, so as not to give the cops a pretext to mess with you.

The next morning I rolled through the gates as if the guards had known my Civic and my face since childhood. As promised, Sally was waiting for me in the lobby. She led me through the color-coded labyrinth of doors to a blue one that was new to me. At seven o’clock exactly, Burbank joined us. Sally awaited orders but received none. He left her standing there and pushed open the door. A big room. About a dozen people in suits sat at a polished conference table. Heads turned. All but two chairs were occupied—Burbank’s, which was a sort of high-backed throne at the center of the table, and an ordinary one just beside it. He gestured me into the ordinary one. Those attending had an air of entitlement about them—gray heads and bald ones, and in the case of the women, mostly dyed ones. Everybody except me wore reading glasses perched on the bulbs of their noses. I recognized none of these people, but why would I? The silent question they seemed to be asking in unison was, What is this unwashed person doing in this holy of holies?

Burbank explained. “For some time I have felt I needed a younger mind closer to me, and I have decided that this young man is the person I have been looking for,” he said. He told them my true name. “He will be my right hand,” Burbank said. “He will sit in the office next to mine, which has been unoccupied since Suzie Kane left us. He has my confidence. He reports to me, takes his orders from me and no one else, and is to be regarded as a full and equal member of this group. He has done good work in the field and has just completed an exemplary three-year tour under deep cover in denied territory. He will do more good work in Headquarters.”

The others listened with blank faces. I detected no enthusiasm for discussing in my hearing the profound, the unutterable secrets known only to this exalted committee. But they spoke freely, and I learned some things I quite possibly might never have known if Luther Burbank had not come into my life. Most of these family jewels seemed trivial to me, as the deepest and darkest secrets often do. I listened, not too intently, and kept my mouth shut. When the meeting broke up, after an interminable hour, nobody shook my hand and bid me welcome. No one smiled. Nobody paid any attention to me at all. I might as well have been an inflatable doll that Burbank had placed in the seat beside him to make the highway patrol think he wasn’t alone in his car as he drove in the HOV lane. Burbank gestured for me to follow him into his office, the one with all the safes, where we could talk. He said, “What did you think of the Gang of Thirteen?”

“Is that what it’s called?”

“Not by you, if you’re wise,” Burbank said. He paused, waiting for me to answer his question. When I didn’t answer he said, “Well?”

I said, “I sensed no great enthusiasm for your new assistant.”

“Nothing surprising about that,” Burbank said. “I sprang you on them. They didn’t see it coming. They believe they have a right to see things coming. They can’t fit you into the picture. They’ll freeze you out, isolate you, put you in Coventry.”

“Coventry?”

“Old schoolboy word for the silent treatment. Shunning. Be a man and you’ll be fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘Luther’ when we’re alone, but that’s the spirit,” said Burbank.

I nodded.

“Sometime tomorrow you will be provided with a computer password,” Burbank said. “It will give you access to all CI files. Or almost all. Only myself and the people you met this morning have that level of access.” He pointed a finger. “Your office is through the door behind my desk. Come through it only when I buzz.”

The tiny windowless office was a far cry from the glass stage set I had occupied when working for Chen Qi. It was about the size of a walk-in closet, a cubbyhole into which were crowded a desk and chair, a computer, a see-through burn basket, a safe. Had I been an inch taller or ten pounds heavier I would not have been able to squeeze my body into the remaining space. Burbank buzzed at four o’clock that afternoon. My day had been idle. I had been given no work to do, so I surfed the Web on my cell phone to pass the time. I read the
Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
and the Chinese newspapers and looked up facts at random, establishing among other things that Luther Burbank, the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century American horticulturist who created some eight hundred hybrid plants, had had no children and so could not possibly be a direct ancestor of the Luther Burbank I knew. A century and a world apart, the two Luthers used similar techniques to tweak nature—grafting, crossbreeding, happy accidents. Plums (113 new varieties) and most other kinds of plants and Shasta daisies in the case of the original Luther, spies and traitors for my man.

The end of the day, a very long one, was near. The promised password had not been issued. Evidently it had been a frustrating day for Burbank, too. His voice was hoarse, his eyes red-rimmed. He slumped. He sipped green tea and held it in his throat for an instant before swallowing. I was standing up. He pointed at the chair. I hesitated because it looked just like the one with the sawed-off front legs. He said, “Different chair. Trust me. Sit down.”

Burbank said, “There was some resistance to opening the files to a newcomer. Tomorrow you will have full access. This is a turf thing. Nothing of great importance is in the computer. If that were otherwise it would be a great folly, given the ability of geeks in Nigeria and Nepal, let alone our more dangerous adversaries, to hack into any known system and read the mail. But we’ve covered that ground already.”

Burbank looked at me expectantly, as if he knew I was bursting with curiosity. The higher-ups were talking about me. Why wasn’t I asking what they were saying? It wasn’t difficult to guess. But I did have one unaskable question, namely why was Burbank antagonizing these people and turning them against me if he wanted me to be useful to him? I could just as well have been another Sally, no threat to anyone. Even if you’re dealing with a Burbank, a master of evasion, you learn more by letting the other guy fill the silences. I waited for whatever was coming next.

“What I want you to do for the next few days is go through some of this computerized stuff at random and cut and paste whatever interests you into your brain,” Burbank said. “A lot of the data is iffy—
all
unprocessed information is iffy and so is a lot that has been processed—but I want you to find something that intrigues the mind, a lure that a fish named Lin Ming would take, maybe something from a friendly intelligence service that can be attributed to that service, and then I want you to find a second and a third such piece of plausible junk. Include at least one item about Taiwan. And discuss this with me next time I buzz.”