An American Spy (36 page)

Instead of pressing, she turned it into a taunt. “So you’re an expert on China, are you?”

“I know a thing or two about a thing or two.”

“Is that so?” she asked, tugging off the panties she had just squeezed into.

Jackson and his family returned from Pennsylvania on Tuesday, and when he called her the next day he sounded upset. “I can’t stop thinking about you. When can we meet?”

This time, she delayed. Her uncle was in town, staying with her until Friday. The uncle, of course, was He Qiang, who was only staying the day to check on her and to liaise with Sam Kuo. On Saturday, June 21, as Milo Weaver celebrated his birthday, Jackson arrived mad with sexual excitement, and they ignored the bed, ending up on the old hardwood floor and tearing one of the paintings in their tussle. Afterward, the talking began. He was under incredible stress, he explained elusively. The family? she asked. “Yes, but no. Not that. Work.” Some extremely difficult maneuvering was going on with that project he had mentioned before.

“Something to do with China?” she asked and immediately kicked herself for being so obvious.

But he didn’t hesitate. “Yes. It’s . . . look, I’m not young anymore—you can see that. Once, I was able to deal with these things, but that was a long time ago. Now, I’m more of a politician than anything else. I know how to charm, I know how to lie, I know
people.
But when these sorts of things happen, you realize how little control you really have over your world.”

“I don’t understand.”

He paused, stroking her arm, perhaps wondering how much he could say. “I’m not a spy, not anymore.”

She sat up at that, because it was the only plausible reaction. “Who says you’re a spy?”

“No one, no one,” he said, waving it away. “Forget it.”

She pretended to forget, her only reference to it being the additional kindness she lavished on him when he returned for two hours on Monday afternoon, and again on Wednesday, June 25, the same day Milo Weaver went to Washington to meet Nathan Irwin and Dorothy Collingwood. What Liu Xiuxiu didn’t know was that Jackson had chosen to spend the afternoon with her rather than sit with his coconspirators as they vetted Weaver, though Xin Zhu put this together easily enough. It certainly meant something important, but even more important was what he told her. He again brought up his work-related anxieties, and Liu Xiuxiu posed the question, “Why do you feel like a spy? It’s none of my business, but I hate to see it tear you up.”

He labored over his answer before saying, “Because I’m sitting there looking at information we’re getting out of China, and it’s obvious that this isn’t just regular intelligence. It’s too good to be that. We’ve got someone right in the Chinese government giving us reams of excellent information.”

According to her report, she kept her composure, but who knew what the truth was? She asked, “So what’s the problem with that? That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Sure, but it’s too much information, too much and too good. I’m told all this is because our source’s wife, some ferociously ambitious bitch, is getting him to sell off as much intel as possible before they disappear from China with their financial security blanket. So our guy is being reckless,” Jackson said, stroking her bare hip.

“That’s his problem,” she said after a moment. “You’ll benefit from his mistakes, won’t you?”

He stared at her, maybe wondering about her level of cynicism, and said, “The
real
problem is someone else, another official who’s onto him. With the amount of intelligence we’re getting it’s just a matter of time before this bastard catches our man. You see?”

She nodded.

Jackson took his hand from her hip. He rubbed his eyes and sighed. “Xin Zhu, that’s what they call this bastard, and when he catches our man he’ll string him up and gut him. We’ll have nothing, and our one friend in their government will be dead.
That’s
the problem. These young guys only care what intelligence they can get out of him right now, but what about next month? Next year?” He shook his head. “Xin Zhu,” he said, his repetition of her boss’s name making her quiver, “is our problem, and we’ve got to get rid of him.”

That there was a threat against him was not news, but three words—
ferociously ambitious bitch
—told Zhu more than he had hoped for. He only knew of one high-ranking ministry official whose wife matched that description.

2

Xin Zhu had come into the office at five in the morning to decode and read Liu Xiuxiu’s report, and he felt he needed more sleep to be able to understand its ramifications. Instead, though, he sent out for breakfast. He had just ordered a bowl of congee with duck eggs when his cell phone began to chirp with incoming messages. These were from He Qiang, but they were forwarded reports from his favored agent, Xu Guanzhong, who had been assigned to watch the Weaver home.

Xu Guanzhong had taken a room across the street from the apartment, just over the Garfield Farm Market, listening to the microphones they had installed. He listened to Tina Weaver order Chinese food, receive it from a deliveryman and, around five, speak to her husband on the phone. Light, unconcerned.

After the call, they heard a television sitcom. Then, a few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Tina Weaver said to her daughter, “Don’t break that,” as she walked to the limit of the microphone’s range and opened the door.
“Hey,”
was the last word she said. There was the soft thump of a body hitting the floor. Stephanie Weaver’s voice, “Mom? Who is it?” A grunt.

Movement. Heavy steps out to the front door. Silence. The footsteps returned, paused, then left again. Silence. Footsteps crossing the apartment, then the television was silenced. Back to the front door. The catch of the door being shut.

He Qiang called to discuss the sounds, and they considered options. He Qiang felt the only option was to send Xu Guanzhong over to the apartment, but Zhu was unsure. That was when He Qiang said, “Hold on. He just sent a message—someone’s going in. I’ve got a picture here. It’s Milo Weaver’s father.”

Zhu listened to this live, for by now Xu Guanzhong had patched his microphones through to He Qiang’s laptop, and He Qiang had turned his phone so that Zhu could hear everything. Yevgeny Primakov knocked on the Weavers’ door, calling, “Hello? Ladies?” Nothing. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and then left. After some seconds he returned with what sounded like two more men and walked inside quietly, moving through the whole apartment. A single Russian curse—“
Sukin syn
”—and then, in English, “Anything. Any sign.”

After a minute, a South American accent said, “It was quick. No struggle.”

“Here’s a note,” said an Eastern European voice.

Another Russian curse from Primakov. They left, and Xu Guanzhong saw the old man exit the apartment building with two younger men. A Chevrolet Malibu station wagon pulled up to the curb, and Primakov got inside with the other two, while a man and a woman took positions outside, as if keeping guard. Within ten minutes, it was over. Primakov and his men got out, the car drove off, and Primakov’s men left in separate directions, as did the man and woman. Yevgeny Primakov, however, reentered the apartment building.

On the microphones, his distress was recorded. He poured himself a drink from the refrigerator, then walked from room to room, muttering to himself, sounding like the confused old man he must have been. Walk, stop, walk. Finally, a longer stop, and louder muttering in Russian. All Zhu could make out was the phrase “. . . if not here . . .”

A glass set down. Heavier steps out the front door and, distantly, banging. Hand against a neighbor’s door. In English: “You’re in there! I know you’re in there!” Silence. More banging, then silence.

When Yevgeny Primakov returned to the apartment, closing the door behind himself, what he said in Russian was clear. “Idiot. Old, damned idiot.” He was angry with himself, ashamed. He went to the bathroom and turned on the water in the sink. Splashing.

From the angle of the microphone, Zhu and He Qiang and Xu Guanzhong were able to hear what Yevgeny Primakov could not: namely, the front door opening and closing again.

The water was shut off, and muted grunting came from Primakov, the sound of someone muttering into a thick towel as he walked into the living room.

Then the unmistakable
thk-thk
of a suppressor-equipped pistol. The thud of a body hitting the floor. The front door opening and closing again.

“Xu Guanzhong is not going in,” Zhu told He Qiang as soon as the sounds ended. “Someone over there knows exactly what he’s doing, and I’ll not have any of you killed. Not today, at least.”

So they waited, and as they waited Zhu thought about Yevgeny Primakov, feeling an overwhelming sadness, not unlike the sadness Erika Schwartz felt, that this man had ended his days in a Brooklyn apartment. Unlike Schwartz’s, however, Zhu’s sadness was less for Yevgeny Primakov—who, really, he hardly knew—than for himself. Would Xin Zhu end up dead on some foreign floor? Or might his death be even less noble, the slow deterioration of political squabbles—or, eventually, the easy escape that Bo Gaoli had chosen?

Xu Guanzhong reported Milo Weaver’s arrival at seven forty, not long after Zhu’s steaming bowl of congee arrived. Together, they listened to Weaver in the apartment. Zhu had no idea who had taken his family and killed his father, but he knew there was only one possible move for him now if he didn’t want to end up like Yevgeny Primakov—if not dead, then dead in the water. He picked up the phone and dialed.

“Where are they?” was how Milo Weaver answered the call, making this easier for him.

“Out of the way,” Zhu answered, which was technically true.

Shen An-ling arrived a little after eight, and Zhu began by talking him through Liu Xiuxiu’s revelations. “Our philandering conspirator has admitted that there’s a mole.”

Shen An-ling stared hard at him. He looked as if he, too, hadn’t gotten much sleep, his hair matted and dirty. Perhaps realizing this, he ran fingers through his strands. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Well.”

“Yes?”

Shen An-ling stared at the desk, then raised his eyes. “Do you believe him?”

“It fits our theory. Additionally, there was one clue the senator mentioned. He referred to their mole’s wife, calling her . . .” He lifted a piece of paper from his increasingly disordered desk. “Here. He called her a ‘ferociously ambitious bitch’.”

Again, Shen An-ling stared. Of the five members of the committee that was making their lives difficult, only Wu Liang’s wife truly matched that description. Chu Liawa was more famous for her ambition than she was for her powerful husband. For once, though, Shen An-ling didn’t bother stating the obvious. He only said, “Is she really that good?”

“Liu Xiuxiu? I think she is.”

“But
that
good? Good enough that a CIA man would share such classified information with a Chinese girl?”

“I don’t know,” Zhu admitted, then, to change the subject, told him about the rest. Milo Weaver’s meeting with the conspirators, then the disappearance of his family and the murder of his father. That left Shen An-ling—again, uncharacteristically—speechless. “This changes a lot,” said Zhu.

“There’s another player.”

“Two other players,” Zhu corrected. “Yevgeny Primakov came with others, probably his United Nations people, assumedly to take the family into custody. Yet someone else actually took the wife and daughter, and then killed Primakov. It’s extremely messy.”

By then, an e-mail had delivered all of Xu Guanzhong’s photographs, which included clear shots of three men and one woman who had helped Yevgeny Primakov in Brooklyn. They ran the faces through the system, coming up with three matches. One, presumably the South American accent they had heard over the microphones, was Francisco Soto González, a Chilean who had worked for three months in Yevgeny Primakov’s financial section of the UN Security Council’s Military Staff Committee, before being let go for no apparent reason two years ago and dropping out of the records. The woman and the man who had lingered on the street were known field agents for the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND.

By seven that evening—seven o’clock Thursday morning, New York time—He Qiang reported that Milo Weaver had left the apartment for his meeting with Leticia Jones. He Qiang asked for permission to go into the apartment, which Zhu denied. “Consider the place radioactive,” he said. “We don’t know who’s watching it.”

They tracked Jones and Weaver, despite the Mexico City evasion, and Zhu was back in the office the next morning when he learned of Milo Weaver’s attack on the Therapist. Despite his growing anxiety, Zhu laughed at the news. “How is the Therapist?” he asked.

“His ego’s a mess,” He Qiang told him. “He believes that we kidnapped Weaver’s family, and he’s angry that we didn’t warn him.”

“Let’s keep it that way. We’ll put someone in Frankfurt and someone else in Jeddah. I’d like you to go back to Washington, meet with Liu Xiuxiu, and then pack up.”

“We’re going home.”

“She will stay another week. Let’s not blow her cover too soon.”

“A vacation.”

“She’s earned it.”

“And the Therapist?”

“Give him a bonus and tell him he should be happy Weaver let him live. We’re done with him.”

He Qiang paused for a moment too long.

“What?”

“I just wish we knew who took the family.”

It was Saturday, noon, when the call came. He was at home, having just finished a late breakfast with Sung Hui, who was turning on the television. He had spent so long looking westward that when the clerk from the Third Bureau, which dealt with the territories of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, said, “Comrade Colonel, we’ve come across one of your foreigners,” Zhu assumed he was calling about someone in Germany or Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it wasn’t even that he’d been looking westward, but that he’d spent the morning watching Sung Hui, wondering about Milo Weaver’s missing wife over in America. Either way, it was a surprise when the clerk on the line said, “You put a flag on Sebastian Hall, American. He’s about to land in Hong Kong. Would you like us to hold on to him?”