The Shanghai Factor (21 page)

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 labor 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?”

“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.