A Drop of Chinese Blood (32 page)

“Typical,” said the noodle king. “We send aid, they give us back shit.”

At that my uncle reached under his jacket and came out with a 9 mm pistol, no mother-of-pearl handle. “If I had on boots, I’d make you lick them.” He stood up. “I ought to put a bullet between your eyes, but what good would that do?” He tucked the pistol back in his belt. “Instead, I’m going to tape your mouth, put a flour sack over your head, and wish you good luck. The MSS representative here will observe and attest that everything is done according to international human rights standards.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” The noodle king had slid back as far as he could against the wall. “I told you, there’s a lot of money if you let me out of here.”

My uncle turned to me. “You interested?”

I shook my head.

For an old man, my uncle moved like lightning.

3

Once we were clear of the train and onto the dock, my uncle slowed to a leisurely pace. “If anyone stops us, let me do the talking,” he said.

“What about the Black Guards and the dogs?”

This drew a short laugh. “No such thing.”

“What happens when they find the noodle king?”

“Depends on who gets to him first. If the stevedores find him, they’ll haul him into a room with the Chinese gang leader, an ill-tempered sort named Tun Fan-xi who controls the docks. Our friend there will come out not long afterward neatly packed in several suitcases, one of which will be sent to Mike. If my old MPS colleagues find him first, they’ll argue about what to do and then turn him over to Mr. Tun. Different road, same destination.”

“More body parts. This is incredible.”

My uncle shrugged. “It’s the trend.”

“You know, he heard us talking.”

“Good for him. He won’t live to tell anyone. Incidentally, if I ever mention the urge for noodles, shoot me.”

“Speaking of guns, what are you doing packing so much firepower? All of a sudden you’re Hopalong Cassidy? What happened to that cute pistol you used to shoot Wong with? And where did you get that 9 mm?”

“The little one is on the floor of the warehouse. Don’t worry, they’ll figure a jilted girlfriend finished off Wong. It doesn’t have any prints on it. As for the other one, I know a few people in Harbin who deal in this and that.”

We came upon a guard post at the entry to the pier. The guard barked an order. My uncle barked back and flashed a pass. “Keep walking,” he said to me in Chinese. “Look important. Wait a second or two, then sneer, just a little, like everything within sight is beneath you, distasteful, pitiable.”

I sneered.

“Enough,” said my uncle. “More than enough. Chinese around here sneer when they think they’re almost out of sight of the locals.” We walked for a few more minutes, turned down a street, up a small hill, and ended up on a weathered bench facing the port. “You said you had another hypothesis. Let’s hear it.”

I was about to explain when two cars—one black, one brown—barreled past going in the direction of the wharf. We could hear a commotion, then the black car tore by going in the other direction. The brown car followed a few minutes later, two uniformed police in the front seat looking out their windows, searching the area. The car slowed to a crawl as it pulled abreast of us. The driver’s eyes drilled into me. I stared back, unsure whether or not to sneer. The car drove on. My uncle was sitting back the whole time, relaxed.

“Idiots,” he said. “They were waiting for us to break and run. That would have made their life easy. You should have given him a good sneer.”

“Do we want to stay here talking?”

“Sure. If we move now, they’ll want to know where we’ve gone. When they drive by again and we haven’t moved, they’ll figure one of us is paying off the other. The noodle king didn’t give them a description; otherwise we wouldn’t still be here. What’s your new hypothesis?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“Straight lines are way overvalued,” he said.

“So far we’ve been dealing with a lot of different threads. Some of them have crossed, some of them haven’t. I think it might be good to start at the beginning, at the point of origin.”

My uncle took a piece of wood from his pocket. “It’s elm,” he said. “Good for the concentration. Want a piece? Go ahead, pull a thread.”

“My predecessor—his true name, as you probably know already, was Lu Xin, but we found out subsequently that the North Korean Operations Department called him ‘Y’—had a central role in creating this mess. Lu wanted to come home, but he didn’t know how to do it. For sure, his employers in Pyongyang wouldn’t let him go with all that he’d learned about their operations. We already know what happened when he finally did leave. They kept him on a leash as best they could. He bided his time and pretended to be content.”

“No, he didn’t just bide his time. He got word to Fang Mei-lin at least a year ago.”

“Ah,” I said. This filled in a gap in my hypothesis, sort of like an avalanche can fill in a small valley.

“They used to be lovers, but she got tired of him. I won’t give you all of her complaints.”

“Ah.” Another valley of doubt disappeared. “That helps with a few loose ends. She told you this, that he got word to her?”

“Knowing him a little, and knowing her a lot, I’m willing to bet he used her to deliver the news to MSS Headquarters that he was ready to come home.” My uncle smiled. “I only bet on sure things.”

“Then it isn’t gambling, is it? Not to rake over old coals, but whom did she leave the note with? The one you claimed you didn’t have and never saw.”

“As a matter of fact, I never did see it, but there are two excellent possibilities. She might have given it to your Lieutenant Li, who apparently lived a life of intrigue beneath his dull, loyal exterior. Or she gave it to that old crook Gao. That would explain why she went there, I suppose. But Gao worked for Mike, you might object. Sure, Gao worked for Mike, and he worked for Pyongyang, and he no doubt worked for your Third Bureau, but most of all, he worked for himself. He would have calculated where Mei-lin’s note would give him the most advantage, and if putting it in two places at the same time looked like a good way to double his profit, he would have done that.”

“Shall I continue with my hypothesis?”

“I wish you would.”

“Lu Xin, we might suppose, judged the time was ripe to try to move when he learned that Beijing had put in play an elaborate operation to discredit the South Koreans and clear the way for China to take control of most, if not all, of Mongolia’s resources—rare earth deposits, coal, uranium, and timber.”

My uncle’s eyebrows went up.

“Just wanted to make sure you were listening. Except for the trees, this is pretty much your theory, but it fits, and I’ll buy the whole thing from you.”

“Consider it a gift.”

“The key was a phony ROK government seal—made by the now-deceased Du, an expert Chinese forger working for a Fujian gang, which for some reason assumed this was a North Korean operation, exactly as Beijing hoped. At this point, we don’t know who Beijing employed to put a North Korean gloss on the operation, but it wouldn’t have been that hard to do. Like that Kazakh woman said to me, people believe what they want to believe. When Lu Xin got wind of the operation—and that’s why this is still a hypothesis, because I don’t know how he would have done so—he decided the storm it would produce, especially if the seal were to disappear for a short time, could supply cover for his own plans. With a few minor alterations, using a storm in the east to move in the west is standard MSS procedure. It probably goes back a few thousand years to some smart scholar in the Three Kingdoms, but who cares? The question was, how to create the storm?”

“Maybe when he learned that the gang had ‘lost’ the seal before handing it back to MSS, he made up a story and somehow passed the word to MSS that the seal had been moved to Mongolia, where the North Koreans intended to use it to embarrass Beijing.”

“You’re telling me you think he never had the seal?” If I’d been wearing a hat I would have taken it off to my uncle. “How’d you come to that conclusion, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“It fits nicely in the hypothetical bag, that’s all. Also fits with what you call standard operating procedure.”

“Three Kingdoms, almost certainly.”

“I’d guess there might be a hole or two in your overall theory, but nothing ever fits perfectly in these episodes. Leave that aside for now. How do you suppose he passed word to MSS about the Mongolian angle?”

I had already thought about that. “Madame Fang.”

“No, no, not likely.” My uncle waved the thought away impatiently. “He might have used her to pass on to Beijing his plea to come home, but he wouldn’t give her anything that sounded too operational. For this to work, it would have to get to MSS through a believable reporting channel, an existing agent with a record. It couldn’t be traceable to him; otherwise they’d wonder why he was giving this sort of information to them at the same time he said he wanted to come home.”

I groaned. Mrs. Zhou’s missing pages. I knew where they were. “Handout. He must have been working Handout for all of these years, saving him for the right moment. Lu Xin is the one who originally recruited Handout. When he got to Pyongyang, he must have figured out a way of keeping in touch with Handout. He took all of the relevant information in the case file with him, except for the fact that he was the one who recruited Handout.”

“I thought you told me that Fu Bin controlled Handout.”

“I never told you anything of the sort. Where did you hear that?”

“Who can remember where one hears things these days? So much information piling up.”

“How much do you know that you aren’t telling me?”

“Probably as much as you know that you are holding back. Want to put some cards on the table?”

”I thought you said gambling rots the mind.”

“It does. Nevertheless, if we are going to get something believable back to Miss Du before she bulldozes your house and we’re left with nowhere to live, we need to understand one or two more minor points.”

“Like how her father ended up working for Dr. Mike?”

“Among other things.”

The thought of my house in rubble overcame my training in security. Besides, we were sitting on a bench in North Korea. “At some point, Handout also became a Third Bureau bird. That may explain why Fu Bin disappeared so quickly once Handout passed him the message about the counterfeit seal. If there was ever a review of this seal fiasco, Third Bureau didn’t want to be anywhere around. That’s probably also why Li Bo-ting didn’t want me to get rid of Handout right away; someone in MSS wanted to keep him in play a while longer.”

My uncle didn’t reply, other than to pocket the piece of elm that he’d been smoothing. Finally, he sighed. “I’ll admit, I badly underestimated Y. He gave MSS just enough information to get them worried, but not enough for them to know exactly where to move next. He always seemed an odious type to me.” That little bomb exploded on target. My uncle gave me a moment to recover. “You knew, of course, that he’d been working for Pyongyang for a long time before coming over.”

“Ah, actually, no. I didn’t know that.” Things were starting to unravel faster than I could gather the threads up again.

This gave my uncle a shot of energy. He seemed reinvigorated at the idea of piling on surprises. “In 2007, someone tipped off your man Lu that a special investigating team sent by Beijing had discovered that he had helped Pyongyang to identify and kidnap a team of four South Korean military intelligence agents on the border. That episode went back to 2005 or 2006, when this particular agent team was setting in place a plan to entice North Korean generals to defect. Beijing obviously didn’t care what happened either to North Korean generals or ROK agents, not in the abstract, anyway, but it didn’t like the idea of Seoul using Chinese territory as a playground. It liked even less the chief of Yanji Bureau helping out North Korean counterintelligence.”

“And?”

“And after a rough couple of weeks of interrogation, the North executed three of the four South Koreans, along with several high-ranking army officers who had been in touch with them.”

“Number four?”

“The fourth signed a confession and was moved to a safe house where he was kept in isolation for a year or so. Eventually he became an instructor for the army’s Reconnaissance Bureau. He was very effective, from what I heard, until he developed a drinking problem.”

I’d heard almost more than I could absorb. I stopped talking and watched the ship being loaded at the pier. The cranes lifted the shipping containers from the train, swung them over the open hold in the ship, and lowered them.

“You know a lot that you’ve been holding back. We need to put all the pieces together. Not a few, not some, but
all
of them.”

“In that case, I don’t know any of this, and I’m not telling it to you.”

“Fortunately, I never listen to a word you say.”

“You should have already figured out that when Lu or Y—”

“Or K.”

“Or whatever we decide to call him realized that he was about to be arrested, he disappeared with two briefcases of files filled with the coded names of agents and operations against the North. These were from files from your office, need I remind you. Didn’t anyone do an inventory?”

“I wasn’t there for the year after he left. I didn’t do the damage evaluation. My own headquarters didn’t even tell me any details about the defection until recently.” I hadn’t known anything, but Lieutenant Li did, and so, I’d wager with no fear of losing, did Mrs. Zhou.

“When he bumped into me in Pyongyang and announced he was defecting, we actually already knew each other slightly. In those days, I went through Yanji once in a while on liaison trips. Lu always turned up at whatever restaurant I wandered into and struck up a conversation. He was a desultory conversationalist, had a limited number of topics and didn’t make those very interesting. I waited, but he never made a recruitment pitch. Didn’t even buy me a drink. Anyway, as I told you, I tried to get him to go home when he showed up in Pyongyang, but he wouldn’t budge. Of course, at the time I didn’t realize he had such a persuasive reason for staying.”