An American Spy (7 page)

She smiled modestly and placed her hands in her lap beneath the edge of the table, and he noticed in this different light of the restaurant that her skin was like opaque glass. It made him think that, if enough illumination were applied, he would be able to see through the skin to her organs and blood vessels. In very competent English, she said, “I came six years ago, to study nursing at Jiao Tong, but . . .” She faded out. “Academics did not suit me.”

“You have residence papers?”

She nodded but did not elaborate.

“And how do you know He Qiang?”

Another smile. “His cousin was a schoolmate in Xinyang, and when I came here I got in touch. He Qiang has been very kind to me.”

Zhu wondered how kind, and how many rules He Qiang had bent for this pretty girl. He still hadn’t gotten a proper meal, though, and until then he would continue to be magnanimous. “It must be difficult.”

“It has been,” she admitted, bowing her head. “Without friends like He Qiang, it would have been much more difficult. But now, I’ve . . .” Again, she faded out, then raised her head. “I’ve adjusted.”

There was something piercing about that two-word sentence that, even in English, made Zhu want to weep. He understood why He Qiang had set them up together for this fictitious date. She was lovely, and she would, if asked, go to bed with him, but her true value lay in the fact that she had
adjusted
to the hard life of Shanghai. She could adjust to anything, even working for a man as problematic as Xin Zhu.

In addition to her fluency in English, which she had first studied and then perfected through her job, she knew a smattering of German. When he quizzed her about Shanghai, he found that she could recall the most insignificant details—the color combinations of shop signs, the names of most of Shanghai’s doormen, as well as their wives—and that nothing he said was forgotten by her. Most importantly, she had—also, no doubt, because of her job—the uncanny ability of making him feel comfortable in his own skin, which was no small feat.

The food was delicious and restorative, but she barely touched her rice, though when he ordered the fruit platter for dessert she ate ravenously. She showed no hesitation when he suggested they go up to his room, but in the elevator, she seemed unsure about what to do, so she left her hands by her sides. He unlocked the door and let her in first, and it was she who first spotted He Qiang, standing in the bathroom doorway, gesturing for her silence. That, remarkably, did not throw her off. She walked to the dressers and, hands clasped in front of her stomach, waited. He Qiang smiled at Zhu.

Taking off his jacket, Zhu said, “You are a very beautiful woman.”

Smiling now, too, Liu Xiuxiu said, “You’re too kind.” Then she said, “Let me help you with your shoes.”

“Thank you,” he said, but when she stepped forward, he waved her back and went to the bed, sat down, and took off his own shoes. “That feels nice,” he said.

Seductively, she said, “Mmm.”

“Come here,” he said, then pushed himself onto the bed so that it squeaked. “Mmm,” he groaned.

Liu Xiuxiu covered her smile with a small hand.

As if he were alone, Zhu fluffed a pillow and closed his eyes, then opened them. He gestured to Liu Xiuxiu, pointed at his watch and held up one finger, then waved her away. She nodded. To He Qiang he showed two fingers, then closed his eyes again. He Qiang led Liu Xiuxiu to the bathroom and quietly closed the door behind them.

As instructed, Liu Xiuxiu left at one in the morning, conspicuously holding her high-heeled shoes in her hand until she was outside his door, where she crouched and slipped them on. In the lobby, as she would later report, she noticed a few different men watching her but was unable to discern who among them had only professional interest.

At two, He Qiang woke Zhu and made him tea; then they sat together at the desk. Each had a sheet of paper and a pen, and they talked in the written word. Specifically, French. Zhu wrote in an elegant script, He Qiang in the block capitals of someone with far less education than he had. Zhu wrote:

The things one does to be unheard
.

He Qiang smiled and nodded.

I like her. She’s available?

ABSOLUTELY. HATES HER JOB, LOVES HER COUNTRY.

Relationships?

EX-HUSBAND, CRIMINAL. NO PROBLEM.

Criminal class?

GREEN GANG. COLLECTS PROTECTION MONEY, CUTS TENDONS.

Divorce?

He Qiang nodded.

I want her in Beijing tomorrow—Monday. Possible?

Another nod.

She’s not coming back
.

UNDERSTAND.

You come, too
.

He Qiang had begun to smile again. Since the killing of the American agents two months ago, he had been left to wander, which was no good for him. The call to fly to Shanghai and again impersonate his boss had been a welcome respite from his aimless days. Now he was being called back to the pit. He wrote, GOOD.

Zhu considered that word,
bon
, then wrote,

Tomorrow the committee will try to get rid of me. I will hold them off, but in the meantime, you and Liu Xiuxiu will work on another project. The Americans are preparing their retaliation
.

He Qiang read carefully, then looked Zhu in the eyes before writing again.

AGAINST YOU?

Maybe. They’re looking at my wife
.

Another stare. He Qiang had only met Sung Hui once, at an official gathering where he’d been assigned protection duty, but he’d been visibly taken by the girl.

MAKES NO SENSE.

It makes sense. We need to find out what kind of sense
.

Sung Hui had left the television on when she opened the door for him that Sunday afternoon, and when he settled on the sofa, he was greeted by images of a collapsed middle school in Juyuan that had trapped nine hundred students. Government teams, with the occasional local, picked through the dusty crags, but a week had passed, and the energy the whole country had witnessed just after the earthquake was fading. A female commentator praised the resilience and strength of the Sichuan people.

His phone rang—it was Zhang Guo. “Xin Zhu, I hope you had a restful time in Shanghai.”

“Thank you, I did.”

“I’m afraid I’m walking into walls, though. Concerning tomorrow.”

“Well, it was worth a try,” Zhu said and realized that even this failure told him something important. If Zhang Guo couldn’t learn the details of a meeting that he, too, was scheduled to attend, it meant that Wu Liang was running it with an unusual level of secrecy.

“As for the other,” Zhang Guo said, referring to Leticia Jones, “I’ll need a few days.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then.”

Sung Hui came in with a platter of pork dumplings, apologizing as she turned off the television and the images of disaster. “I know it does no good,” she said, “but I can’t help watching. It makes my own worries insignificant.”

He didn’t like to hear that, even if it mirrored his own thoughts. “You have no worries.”

“Do you want to eat here?”

“I don’t think I can make it to the dining room.”

“Shanghai was difficult?”

He shook his head. “A weekend of reflection isn’t easy for someone as slow-witted as me.”

That provoked a musical laugh, and she settled next to him.

“The flight home was the problem. I should’ve bought two seats.”

“Next time you will buy two seats. You’ll bring me along. I’ll help you with your reflection.”

Like others, he had once been suspicious of this girl’s affection for an old, obese man, but he’d slowly discovered that these were the very characteristics that she enjoyed most. Sung Hai hated the boastful men her own age, and his size gave her a feeling of protection. What, then, had she seen in Delun? This was a subject she had avoided so many times that he was no longer able to ask the question, no longer wanted to. Truth is not always the way.

She pulled her legs up beneath herself and lifted the platter. Using a pair of porcelain chopsticks, she guided a dumpling to his mouth. It was delicious.

As she fed him, she recounted the two days they’d spent apart, which had been filled with drinks and dancing at Vics with a couple of girlfriends, unsuccessfully shopping for new rugs for the foyer, and worrying about Sichuan schoolchildren. During the periods in between, she was reading
The Boat to Redemption
by Su Tong, a bestseller about a Party official expelled for lying about his revolutionary parentage. “Do you know what he does?” she asked.

“What?”

A pause. Her eyes grew. “He tries to
castrate
himself!”

“Unbelievable!”

“I believe it,” she said. “You really should read it.”

“When I get time.”

“Have you ever had time?”

He exhaled, waiting for the inevitable.

“Time off,” she said. “Someplace with clean air and sun chairs. You can sit by the water and read Su Tong.”

Holding back a grin, he said, “I hear Trier is nice,” then coughed when she punched him in the ribs. Package tours to Karl Marx’s birthplace were advertised in agency windows all over Beijing.

“Oh!” She hopped up and went to a cabinet. “I forgot. I ran into Shen An-Ling at the store. He gave me this for you.” She opened a drawer and took out an unmarked brown envelope. Shen An-Ling had scrawled his signature across the seal. It hadn’t been opened.

Zhu kept a small office in the back of the apartment, and after thanking Sung Hui for the meal, he took the envelope, closed the door behind himself, and settled at the desk that overlooked the city from thirty floors up. It had been her idea to move into this Chaoyang District tower, and only she could have convinced him to willingly place himself so high up. He’d asked the most basic question—
What happens if the electricity shuts down?
—and she’d stared at him, as if she’d never experienced a power outage, which in Beijing was an impossibility. The problem was that she’d fallen in love with the apartment and, more particularly, the vision of the two of them floating above the city. How could he deny her that?

He tore open the end of the envelope and shook the letter into his palm. It was a short letter, written in an obscure naval code that dated from 1940, and after decoding it, he read it through twice. He paused, considering the revelations Shen An-Ling had assembled here, read it through again, then cracked open the window and used matches to light the envelope, the letter, and the decoded message. As they shrank, he placed them into an ashtray and lit a Hamlet, its strong scent filling the small room.

According to their sources, Leticia Jones changed to another name after landing in Cairo, then flew to London for a connecting flight to Dulles International in Washington, D.C. After two nights in the One Washington Circle Hotel, on Monday the twelfth, the same day as the earthquake, she went to a house in Georgetown owned by a real estate company called Living, Inc, and met with four people:

Alan Drummond, former head of the Department of Tourism;

Senator Nathan Irwin, Minnesota Republican;

Dorothy Collingwood, ranking officer in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, department unknown; and

Stuart Jackson, retired CIA, Directorate of Operations (which, by 2005, was absorbed into the National Clandestine Service), now a private consultant.

The meeting lasted nearly seven hours, and lunch was delivered by an aide of Dorothy Collingwood’s. Shen An-Ling’s sources had been unable to listen to anything. They left one by one, at twenty-minute intervals, first Senator Irwin, then Jackson, Collingwood, Jones, and finally Alan Drummond—the youngest of the ringleaders, only thirty-nine—who walked two blocks and took a taxi to Union Station, where he boarded a train to Manhattan, and his home at 200 East Eighty-ninth Street.

Shen An-Ling’s assessment at the end of the note was, like Shen An-Ling, simple and to the point:
Something must be done, now. I await your orders
. You couldn’t buy loyalty like that—not anymore, at least.

4

Fifteen minutes before his meeting, Xin Zhu ascended the steps in front of the Great Hall of the People. Twelve enormous columns slanted at him, and he saw schoolchildren in sun visors lined up at one of the entrances. Six wore facemasks against the dust that was predicted to rise throughout the day. Green-clad soldiers stood at the main door, watching him enter. Breathing heavily, he waited until he was inside the marble lobby to wipe the sweat off his cheeks with a handkerchief. A voice said, “Xin Zhu!”

It was Shen An-ling, he of the soft skin and thick glasses that magnified his puffy eyes. Unlike Zhu, Shen An-ling was burdened by a shoulder bag stuffed with thick folders.

“What’s that?” asked Zhu.

“The background. Offer them this, and they’ll get off of your back.”

“For as long as it takes for them to read it all. How many pages?”

Shen An-ling, too, was covered in perspiration, but it was the sweat of anxiety, and it stank. “I have no idea. A thousand?”

“More, I’d guess. I’m not sure I want them looking at all that.”

“Okay,” he said, “but I’ll bring it along in case you change your mind.”

It was a fair enough proposition, and Zhu accepted it. “Where do we face our doom?”

The Beijing Hall was not far away, down a long corridor past bas-reliefs of glorious times that were either historical moments Zhu had never witnessed or hopes for the future. A guard stood outside the room itself but didn’t check their papers, and inside they found fourteen low upholstered chairs arranged in a half oval, so that one side could face the other. Behind them were eight more wooden chairs, arranged in parentheses. Thick carpet covered the floor, pushed this way and that by the morning’s vacuum cleaner, and though the walls had been meticulously cleaned, the green paint was fading in spots. Someone would be in trouble for that.