The Shanghai Factor (31 page)

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” I said. I was a little surprised at how steady my voice was, how reasonable my tone. Burbank, apprehensive but cold-eyed, playing the man of stone, waited for me to go on.

“The original assignment,” I said, “was to identify half a dozen Guoanbu agents who were giving us trouble and then find a way to denounce them to Beijing as American spies, yes?”

No response from Burbank. Maybe he wasn’t listening—probably he wasn’t listening. He didn’t really have to listen because every word I spoke was almost surely being recorded. I was fine with that. I wanted this encounter to be on record. I was recording it myself with the spy-ware cell phone in the pocket of my shorts.

“However,” I said, “what we wound up with was six B-list princelings who have never done America harm and probably never will. You seemed to be satisfied with that result. Why?”

Again no response. I lifted Burbank’s desk a couple of feet off the floor and dropped it. The keepsakes on its surface flew off in all directions.

Outwardly at least, Burbank remained calm. Unperturbed. As if nothing unusual had happened to his desk he said, “Because you struck out.”

“So why didn’t you fire me?”

“Compassion. Patience. I thought that was not quite the best you were capable of doing and that we might as well see where it led us.”

“But you thought I had failed.”

“Everyone falters from time to time,” Burbank said. “In this business, a lot of things don’t work out. As I’ve told you over and over, it can take years to put an operation together. Your spoiled brats might not be dangerous now, but who knows what they might grow up to be? As often as not an operation never really comes together. It almost never turns out exactly the way we thought or hoped. But I supposed you’d learn from this experience and do better next time. After all, the operation was still alive. There might be a breakthrough, a game changer if you kept at it, believing you had a chance of coming through. I thought you should be given time and space to make something happen. I believed you could do that. That’s why I gave you a free hand and the chance to be creative. Even now I think you can amount to something in this business. I really do.”

So Burbank had had nothing but avuncular intentions toward me all along, and still had them even after I had revealed the real me to him in the last ten minutes. To give him his due, benevolent uncle had always been the part he played best. He was just staying in character.

I didn’t ponder the alternatives. After an interval of heavy silence I said, “Are you familiar with the Dreyfus affair?”

Burbank’s eyes widened, an unfeigned reaction at last. In a flat voice he said, “The what?”

I said, “The Dreyfus affair.”

“I read Zola when I was a kid.”

I said, “What’s your recollection of the details of the case?”

“What does that have to do with the price of anything?”

“Indulge me.”

He shrugged. If I insisted on being humored, he’d humor me. He summarized the Dreyfus case. Naturally he aced the details—the false (Burbank used the word
mistaken)
accusation that Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew from Alsace, therefore the perfect patsy, had passed military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. He knew all about Dreyfus’s court-martial on a charge of treason, about his five years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, about the attempts of the French army command to quash new evidence that showed him to be innocent, about the final vindication. He knew about Esterhazy.

“So now that you know I know all that, what do you think you know?” Burbank said.

I said, “I know that I’m Dreyfus. That you’re Esterhazy.”

I’d like to report that Burbank reeled in guilt and surprise. But his face betrayed nothing, his voice did not change, no muscle moved.

He said, “You’re serious?”

“Absolutely. That’s what this masquerade is all about. You’re a spy for China. If the allegation is ever made, you’ve got a fall guy. He gets to wear the handcuffs, he goes to jail or the guillotine, you go right on doing what you do.”

Burbank’s smile broadened with every sentence I uttered. He said, “Ingenious. I was right about you. You really do have the knack.”

“Thank you.”

“However, you poor bastard, you’re demented. Anyone can see that.”

He got to his feet. “As of this moment you’re on indefinite administrative leave,” he said. “You are relieved of all duties. Your clearance is suspended. Your access to Headquarters is terminated, your ID is canceled. However, your salary will continue and your medical insurance will still be good. The Headquarters shrinks will be in touch with you first thing in the morning with the names of outside psychiatrists who are cleared to handle cases like yours. Unless you’ve got an imaginary Chinese submarine waiting for you offshore, it would be futile to attempt to leave the country. Now I’m going to bed. Get out of my house. Go home.”

I said, “I’ll leave, but I won’t go away.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Burbank said.

He walked me out. Not a pinpoint of light fell through the windows. He opened the door for me and stood back to give me room, as if I were a guest departing after a good dinner and an interesting conversation. For a moment I thought he was going to shake hands with me, but that did not happen.

44

Alice Song listened intently
while I told her all this. I had booked a private dining room at the club, so we were alone and Alice’s elocution was not the factor it might have been in a crowded dining room. Like Burbank the night before, she was absolutely still. Nothing moved—not her eyelids, not her hands, not the muscles in her face. Her body did not shift in her chair. After a while the waiter arrived, looked at our untouched plates, and asked if everything was all right.

“Everything’s lovely,” Alice said. “Could you clear the table, please?”

As soon as the waiter was out of the room, Alice said, “Is that all of it?”

“So far.”

“And the crux of the matter is that this mysterious character called Chen Qi wants to destroy you because you knocked up his daughter, and that this same Chen Qi is a Chinese spymaster who is spying on U.S. intelligence through the eyes of the man who is the chief of U.S. counterintelligence?”

“Yes.”

Alice, still frozen in place, said, “Then I guess it’s time to ask why are you telling me all this.”

“Because I think I’m going to need legal advice.”

“I think so too, unless this is some kind of joke.”

Well, that was exactly what it was in its own way, but I didn’t think I could explain that to a stranger to the craft, so I just said, “My hope is that you will agree to represent me. If you believe me.”

“If I represent you it won’t matter whether or not I believe you,” Alice said. “And on the basis of what I’ve learned about spooks in the last hour, I have no reason not to believe you. Everything you’ve told me is so crazy that it doesn’t even matter if it’s the truth. But there are problems. For one, the case doesn’t exactly fall within my area of expertise.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“What do you care about?”

“Your smarts. Your courtroom manner. Your knowledge of me.”

“But I just found out I don’t know anything about you.”

“No, you just found out that there was something about me you didn’t know. Big difference.”

“There’s another issue,” Alice said.

“Is there some kind of ethical question because we’ve slept together?”

“No. But I’m emotionally involved,” Alice said.

I was thrilled by her words. Even though I knew I would probably never sleep with her again, I said, “You are? That’s wonderful.”

“Isn’t it, though? In your interests I should recuse myself. I can find you an excellent lawyer.”

“Thank you, no. No Ole Olsens. It’s you or no one.”

“If it’s no one, you’ll end up as dog food. A competent lawyer can at least raise enough doubt to keep you alive.”

“That’s the optimum outcome?”

“You be the judge,” Alice said. “Do you have any proof that this creature you call Burbank is the traitor you say he is? Documents, tape recordings, witnesses, anything at all?”

“No witnesses. Tape recordings of everything except Chen Jianyu whispering Luther Burbank’s name in my ear.”

“So that includes what?”

“Every meeting with Burbank, every meeting with Lin Ming, with Chen Qi, with Mei and Chen Jianyu three days ago, everyone involved in the operation.”

“Where is this material?”

“In the mail, addressed to you.”

“Tape recordings are iffy things.”

“Maybe to judges, but they’re catnip to the FBI.”

“Meaning what?”

“If the Bureau investigates me, they’ll have to investigate Burbank,” I said. “Even if I go down, he goes down with me. He can’t be allowed to go on selling the country out to Guoanbu.”

“That’s the plan, stopping him?”

“More like a forlorn hope,” I said. “But it might work.”

“And if it does, everything will be right with the world?”

“Maybe not quite everything. But I’ll settle for what we can get, as long as we get Burbank.”

“The simplest thing for these enemies of yours to do is to kill you,” Alice said. “People get murdered for no apparent reason all the time.”

“Headquarters doesn’t do that kind of thing.”

“Tell that to al Qaeda,” Alice said. “What about Burbank or Chen Qi or Guoanbu?”

“My sudden death is not enough for Chen Qi. He wants me to die by inches.”

Alice drew a deep breath, then another, as if oxygen was an antidote to exasperation. “Even if the plan works, the government will pursue the charges against you,” she said. “You will have caused them too much trouble for them to do otherwise. Given the evidence you’ve laid out tonight, you’d need twelve twisted minds on the jury to get acquitted. In fact the jurors will be normal people to whom the activities you take for granted will sound like a day in Satan’s workshop. In the end the jurors will think one of two things—either you’re the vile traitor the prosecution will say you are and you’re trying to save yourself by destroying your innocent boss, or you’re insane. In any case, you’ll be locked up. Forever.”

I already knew that. I told Alice I just wanted to get the facts, deformed as they might be, on the record. In the short run, Headquarters might protect Burbank and sacrifice me to cover its own fanny. But the possibility that I was right about him would not go away. It would flit from mind to mind, inside Headquarters and inside the news media, and sooner or later, the hornets’ nest would wake up. Burbank would be kicked out of Headquarters. Even if he didn’t go to jail, even if Chen Qi didn’t have him assassinated to make sure of his silence, he would do no more harm to his country. That was an outcome I could accept.

“You really mean that?” Alice asked.

“Yes. If I don’t have a chance of beating the charges, and I know I don’t, then I’ll settle for getting the bastard in the end.”

Alice thought it over, her eyes boring into mine. Then she said, “Okay, I’ll take the case, but much as I might wish to do so, the firm probably won’t let me do it pro bono. Given the complexity, the essential hopelessness of your situation, you’re looking at maybe a couple of million dollars. Can you cover that, leaving aside the Chinese money, which the government will seize?”

“I can come close,” I said. I had the house in Connecticut, the apartment in the city, and the stocks and bonds and jewelry Mother had left me.

“Okay,” Alice said. “You may even have something left over in case of a miracle. Give me a list of your assets and I’ll draw up the papers posting them as collateral. Are you all right with that?”

I said, “Go ahead. I’m assuming everything I’ve told you tonight or will tell you in the future will be protected by lawyer-client confidentiality.”

“Correct. That’s why it’s costing you so much money. Now let’s talk some more.”

She opened her purse and rummaged around in it. “Want an energy bar?” she asked, tossing one onto the table for me. I unwrapped it and ate it. Somehow Alice ate hers without spilling a single crumb.

The rest of the conversation was Q & A. She was an even tougher customer than I had thought. It was very reassuring to imagine Burbank, who had been immune to questions for such a long time, trying to stand up under cross-examination by this remorseless inquisitor. For me it was liberating to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for the first time in years, to hide nothing, to remember lies and crack them open to get at the facts within, and to do this because it profited me and advanced the operation. It was a strange process, baring the soul. I had been told about defected spies weeping with relief, wetting their pants, clinging in gratitude to their interrogators as if to a priest after spilling everything they knew, so great was their relief to cleanse their consciences.

At eleven o’clock the club closed. No gong sounded, Alice just knew what time it was. As we walked down the stairs together, the last two people in the place except for the watchman, Alice said, “We’re hungry, no?”

“Yes. Want to go to Subway?”

“Let’s go to my place and order a pizza,” Alice said.

A last sleepover. My heart sang.

At the bottom of the steps that led from the sidewalk to the door of the club, two persons in black baseball caps and matching warm-up jackets waited. One of them flashed ID and said, “FBI.” He then spoke my name as a question. I said yes, that was me. The other agent, a female, also flourishing a badge, repeated my name and said, “You are under arrest on suspicion of espionage under the provisions of 18 U. S. Code, section 793.” She then read me my Miranda rights. The other one shackled me, wrists and ankles.

Alice said, “I am this man’s attorney. Where are you taking him?”

They told her.

“I’ll follow,” she said. To me she said, “You know what to do. Say nothing to these people, repeat nothing, apart from stating your name, which you have already done. There is no need to be polite or congenial. Do you understand?”

Before I could do so much as nod in agreement, I felt a hand on my head as Special Agents XX and XY put me into the backseat of a large black Ford that smelled of Lysol. The plan had worked, but far more quickly than I had imagined. Being taken into custody by America’s equivalent of the secret police was like slipping into unconsciousness after being wounded in combat. Would I ever wake up again? To my utmost surprise I suddenly felt bottomless fear, worse than anything I had known in Afghanistan or in the dreams I had brought home with me from that godforsaken place.