A Drop of Chinese Blood (3 page)

The woman looked out the window and smiled faintly.

I stopped at the door. “Dinner will be at the usual time, uncle, unless you have other plans.”

My uncle gazed for a moment at Madame Fang, the tide of memory tugging at him. “No, I’m sure there will be no other plans.”

Chapter Two

“Your uncle called.” The officer on duty pushed aside a magazine he was reading and consulted the logbook as I approached the front desk. “He said to tell you that he wouldn’t be home for dinner.”

“He called the duty office number to tell me that?”

“If there’s trouble, I’ll send someone over right away to check on him.” This was a new officer, transferred from Shanghai and already painfully eager not to stay any longer than necessary here in the backwaters of the northeast. After reviewing his personnel file, which had appeared suddenly a few days ago, I had come away with a feeling that he was too close to the chief of the Shanghai office. That put him in a deep hole right from the start as far as I was concerned. I tolerate most human failings, but being close to the Shanghai office chief is a bridge too far, broken in the middle, and burning at both ends.

“Your name is Jang.” I leaned toward him, lowering my voice in order to give our exchange an air of intrigue.

He observed me closely.

“Well, Little Jang, we can’t send someone if we don’t know where to send them, can we? And for your information, my uncle isn’t in trouble. My uncle can take care of himself. He probably just wanted it on the record that he was going out to dinner with a beautiful woman, possibly the most beautiful woman in the world, eh?” I gave him a quick smile.

Instantly, Jang took on the mien of a tiny palace dog sensing a favored eunuch up to no good. His face twitched; he looked to be calculating whether to bite me or to run barking an alarm to the emperor.

“I didn’t know, sir,” he said at last, having decided to do nothing. “I’m pleased to learn that everything is all right.”

“If my uncle happens to call on your line again, put him through to my office right away, will you?”

Jang made a note in the logbook.

“How do you like it here in our fair city of Yanji, Jang? Quite a change from the bright lights of Shanghai, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure I’ll get used to it, sir. Part of a well-rounded Ministry career. The Second Bureau has to be ready to serve wherever the need is greatest. That’s what they say.”

I recoiled slightly. “They say that in Shanghai, do they? It’s the sort of thing that would roll off their silver tongues.”

“Yes, sir.” Jang looked concerned, worried that he’d said something to set me off.

“Well, here we’re right on the border, busy guarding the frontier, not spending our time shopping at swank stores.”

“I’ve noticed, sir.”

“Good, keep noticing.” I picked up the magazine he’d been reading and threw it into a trash can across the room. “Who are you assigned to work with?”

Jang looked quickly at the trash can, his eyes smoldering for an instant before he pulled himself under control. “Next week I’m paired with a Lieutenant Fu Bin, according to the roster. I haven’t met him yet. He’s on temporary assignment, apparently; no one knows where.”

“No one knows where? Has anyone asked? He’s in Changchun. It’s not a secret, for heaven’s sake. Have you been to Changchun?”

“Once or twice.” I sensed his internal GPS shouting at him to recalculate. “I mean, only briefly, when the train stopped.”

“Lieutenant Fu goes there to see a girl, maybe two girls. He can do that. You can’t. Don’t forget, Jang.”

“No, sir, I won’t forget.”

I waited to see from his eyes if I’d lit a fuse I’d have to worry about later. There was nothing. “And take that call from my uncle out of the logbook.”

“I can’t, sir.”

“Sure you can, I just told you to do it.”

“It’s in pen.”

2

On my desk was a folder stamped
READ ONLY.
This was a new stamp. It had been sprung on us a few weeks ago, and the explanatory instructions still hadn’t made their way here to the outer reaches of the empire. That meant none of us in the office was sure exactly what it meant. Were we not to nibble on the paper? Not to mark on it? No duplicating? Not act on it operationally? Not forward it to anyone else? Not use it as down payment on a car? Not sell it to a foreign service? No one knew. Maybe they had already figured out
READ ONLY
in Shanghai, but here in the forgotten northeast we remained in the dark. That was normal. Yanji was an afterthought, in a section of the country that hadn’t been part of the ancient core of the central kingdom. In fact, the northeast had joined the empire late in the game and, worse, had for centuries been home to barbarian tribes, one of which had marched into Beijing and stayed for a few hundred years. It wasn’t as if we were being punished for old sins, but Beijing had not forgotten or, I sometimes suspected, forgiven.

The folder itself consisted of a few pages of anodyne observations by what appeared to be a low-level source based in Tumen. From the summary on the cover sheet, I saw that the source had little credibility and access to even less, but was paid regularly—too much, in my view—in hopes that one day he might stumble onto something worthwhile. Cutting away this flotsam was nearly impossible. No one wanted to authorize letting an agent go in case someday before the sun burned out, it might be discovered that a terminated agent had been connected to someone who knew something.

This agent was code-named “Handout.” Code names were assigned from a central office, supposedly at random. In this case, it seemed too apt to be random.

Handout, according to the file, had recently made a trip across the river into North Korea and seen the usual: people here, cars there, thus and such number of trains crawling in this or that direction, the price of shoes at one market below what similar shoes cost at another market. He had made the acquaintance of a certain “K” who was engaged in moving “things” across the border. What these “things” were was not explained in the report. The unstated—but glaringly obvious—subtext was that giving a good deal more money to Handout would help us get in better with K, though why we should want to be in bed with K was left to our imagination.

I reached for the phone on my desk and punched a button. “Li, I’ve had enough. Get Handout off our rolls. Immediately. Yesterday. I’m going to start trimming the fat.”

Li Bo-ting was my deputy. He was levelheaded and knew how to get things done. He had spent most of his career in this region, had a map in his head of every back alley in every town in our sector, and could move around without leaving a trace when he had to. As the deputy in the office, Li handled personnel matters, assignments, most of the evaluations, and almost all the annoying instructions from Headquarters. I made final decisions if there were any to be made. Otherwise, I was supposed to supervise from a cloud, watching for dangerous trends along the border. It wasn’t how MSS had always done business, but Headquarters thought it needed a new management style, and someone decided this let-the-banana-peel-itself-approach was just the ticket.

Li laughed. “You want him off the rolls? I hope your luck is better than mine. We can’t seem to get rid of him. Believe me, it’s been tried. He must be joined at an important body part to someone in Beijing.”

This was news to me, but then again, Li was aware that I didn’t always want to know everything he learned, at least not right away. In the new management theory this worked the other way, too, though it was rare I knew anything before my deputy did. “There’s a Headquarters reference to Xiang Feng Bao in this file,” I said. “Any idea what that is?”

“No.”

“Well, scratch around. Maybe Handout is in trouble. If not, we’ll have to find something, manufacture something, doesn’t matter which. It hints on the cover sheet that he likes to live beyond his means.” I thought of the mountain of bills on my desk at home. “Apparently he floats around sipping nectar from the flowers. He’s waving another one of those worthless sources in front of us, and he’s holding us up for a lot of cash.”

“Believe me, he’s not alone.” Li paused. “If it’s a he.”

The possibility hadn’t occurred to me. For some reason, I’d pictured Handout as a short man, sticking to the shadows, quick-footed with a ready, slippery smile.

“Whichever,” I said, “he or she, a little finesse would be nice occasionally from an agent. We pay them enough, don’t we?” Li knew this was a rhetorical question. He let me continue. “Who’s going out to debrief Handout? Have them take a farewell envelope and a medal of appreciation, shake whatever sort of limp hand it is, and tell the owner of it to get lost. Who is in charge of Handout these days?” I flipped through the pages. “It isn’t in the file. In fact, the entire contact sheet is gone. That leaves an awfully thin record for all the money we’ve probably shoveled out. If there is an audit, how are we supposed to explain the expenses?”

“Handout has been Fu Bin’s agent for the past four years. It must be noted in the file somewhere.” There was a longish silence.

“You still there, Li? A problem with these phones again?”

“No and yes. No, I’m here. Yes, there’s a problem, but it’s not the phones this time. Fu Bin is gone.”

“He’s not gone. How many times do I have to tell people? Fu Bin is in Changchun visiting a woman. Two women, maybe, if he can afford it. Maybe he’s been dipping into the payments to Handout.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to think.”

“That he’s been running around on Handout’s money?”

“No, that he’s in Changchun with a woman. That’s what you’re supposed to think.”

“Oh?”

“He’s working for the Third Bureau, actually. I only found out by mistake.”

Of course by mistake. No one finds out about what the Third Bureau is doing on purpose. Not even the Third Bureau. Their job is to make sure those of us in the lesser sections of the Ministry of State Security are not working for the “other side,” haven’t been bought off by the triads, haven’t fallen into sloughs of chicanery or forms of corruption not officially approved and relabeled as acceptable. If Third Bureau rats cannot find anything, they lure the unsuspecting into traps; if they cannot lure, they embellish whatever might turn up from under long-discarded rocks.

It would have been better if I’d stumbled on the truth of Fu Bin’s real job by myself and much earlier, of course, but Li knew I hadn’t, which meant there was no sense pretending I was ahead of him on this. Still, I wasn’t trailing that far back. As soon as Li told me, odd pieces tumbled into place, pieces that should have jumped up and pulled my nose long before this. Fu Bin had always walked more softly than anyone else in the office, almost on tiptoe. His desk was always clean, but he was always months behind on his paperwork. He went to the best restaurants and loved to take photographs with the fanciest new camera.

Usually, Third Bureau officers sent out to localities were easy to spot, that’s why they rarely stayed more than a few months. Other than his curious walk, though, Fu Bin hadn’t stood out. By itself, that should have tipped me off. People who don’t have obvious quirks, have all the rough edges smoothed off, fit in like shadows on a peaceful summer afternoon, they’re the ones who need the most careful watching.

Fu Bin had been in Yanji, supposedly under my supervision, for four years. Four years in one place for someone from the Third Bureau was a long assignment, too long, and that did not bode well. There were a lot of possible explanations, but the most likely one was that a decision had been made to clamp the jaws of internal investigation on my office—or my throat, to be accurate—and not let go. Why? What had I done? No one followed all the rules all the time; otherwise we’d never get anything accomplished. Gambling wasn’t encouraged, but I didn’t use anyone else’s money, and I wasn’t in debt to any shady characters. All right, I had been a little lucky, once, but that wouldn’t keep a Third Bureau rat hanging around for four years.

That Fu Bin had operated so long without my noticing might also lead some at Headquarters to say that I didn’t have a sense of my own people. It was the sort of charge that would be easy enough to refute if someone brought it up to my face, but this sort of low-frequency criticism tends to get slipped into a part of the personnel file that we weren’t allowed to see. It could rumble for years, and you’d never be able to locate the source. In retrospect, I realized that Fu Bin’s regular trips to a “girlfriend” were probably bogus. They must have been concocted in order to file reports and compare notes at the Third Bureau’s regional office, which was rumored to be disguised as an old age home on the outskirts of Changchun. Then again, maybe he did have a girlfriend or two there. Fu Bin was a ladies’ man, I would have bet on that.

“When will he be back?” I asked.

“He won’t. It’s a permanent move, rather sudden apparently. He didn’t clean out his desk drawers or even pay his final month’s apartment rent. I’ve been tidying up after him. Headquarters won’t want bad press about MSS not paying its rent.”

“Don’t use office funds! Let the Third Bureau pay for whatever he owes.” I fell to light brooding. “You didn’t bother to tell me sooner? I don’t live on Mars, you know. I am reachable at all times by phone.”

“Don’t worry, you were going to learn about it as soon as orders arrived tomorrow from Headquarters for you to take over his agents. I mean, his agent, Handout. He only had one.”

“He only had one. In all these years?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What was he doing the rest of the time? Never mind, I don’t want to know. You handle personnel, I don’t interfere. That’s the way they want it, that’s the way they get it.”

“OK by me.” There was a pause. “Listen, you’d better brace yourself. My information is that Headquarters is insistent that you pick up running Handout. I know you don’t like running agents, but I don’t think you can cut the cord right away. Maybe after a few months when things blow over. My advice is go ahead with a regular meeting, at least one or two for appearance’s sake. Let’s set up the contact, anyway. If Handout doesn’t show, it’s not your fault.”