An American Spy (9 page)

Wu Liang spoke up. “So what do you suggest, Sun Bingjun?”

“I’m suggesting nothing. I’m only pointing out that, if the visit of this agent is really a sign that a CIA department is engaging in some operation on Chinese soil, then the reasons are far more complicated than a hatred of Xin Zhu here, or even of Chinese intelligence.”

Silence again. Wu Liang seemed temporarily lost in the face of Sun Bingjun’s flawless logic, and Yang Qing-Nian looked embarrassed. Zhang Guo said, “Is there someone we can consult on this? Someone within their agency?”

Feng Yi said, “The Second Bureau has a few CIA sources, but they’re not ranking enough to know about this. Wu Liang?”

Wu Liang set down his teacup. “Possibly. I have one source that may be able to dig deeper.” He took a long breath. “Xin Zhu may be the one to talk to.”

Finally, they looked at him. He chewed the inside of his left cheek. He’d once had a wonderful source, but not anymore—James Pearson, aide to Senator Nathan Irwin. “I will ask,” Zhu said, and bowed his head. “I thank the committee for bringing this troubling news to my attention, and I will do my best to make sure it is explained to everyone’s satisfaction.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Wu Liang. “Further, I hope that when you receive information you will share it with all of us here in the committee. Which brings us to the other subject of this morning’s discussion.”

Yang Qing-Nian shifted in his chair, preparing to speak, but Wu Liang shot him a look. The young man had botched one item already; he would take care of the other one himself.

Wu Liang said, “I think all of us here are familiar with Xin Zhu’s April 15 memo, a copy of which I hold here.” He waved a single sheet of paper. “In it, he stated that the Ministry of Public Security was no longer secure enough to contain his office’s intelligence. Naturally, this committee—the whole committee—demanded more explanation, and on Friday, April 18, the committee received a twelve-page collection of specific pieces of intelligence that, we were told, resided in the files of the Department of Tourism. By triangulating these nuggets of information, Xin Zhu explained, he could reach no other conclusion than that the Department of Tourism itself was running a high-level source within the Ministry of Public Security. Thus, his intelligence would be withheld until the leak was plugged.”

Everyone in the room watched Wu Liang, who continued, “Now, upon receiving the initial memo, I admit that I was skeptical. Xin Zhu and I have often resided in different rooms in the house of socialist philosophy. I saw this as further evidence of his paranoia. Then I examined the twelve-page report and felt less sure of myself. The ministry is, as you all know, close to my heart, and the facts Xin Zhu had collected, when viewed together, shook me deeply. I spent the weekend having very difficult conversations with ministry comrades, and I even viewed some of them with suspicion. Investigations were begun. I was—and I’m hesitant to admit this, but it’s true—in a panic. What if Xin Zhu was right, and we were bleeding information to the Americans? Catastrophe!”

Zhu closed his eyes to listen better. He could feel where this was heading, could hear it in Wu Liang’s exaggerated innocence and emotion. You build a tower in order to tear it down, and the tower Wu Liang was building was enormous.

“By that Monday, four weeks ago, I had a list of suspects. Nineteen. I worried so much, you see, that nearly anything could admit one to that list. Yang Qing-Nian and I began more intense interviews. We took them from their homes, placed them in separate cells on East Chang’an Avenue, and began talking. At this point, there was no reason to treat them as prisoners, so they kept their clothes and were fed and treated well—only their phones were confiscated.

“The interviews, though, were not going well. By Wednesday we had talked to each of them twice, and so I decided to visit Xin Zhu at his office in Haidian and share what little I had. I thought that, as good comrades, we could work together. I was, I now know, mistaken.”

Zhu remembered that day. Wednesday, April 23, 2:00
P
.
M
. Wu Liang and a hard-looking secretary filled the office with foul Russian tobacco smoke, going over his twelve pages one line at a time, fighting over veracity, asking for documentation and demanding the connections that had brought Zhu to suspect the Ministry of Public Security.

“What I learned that day, after hours of rigorously confronting each item in those twelve pages, listening to and then challenging each of Xin Zhu’s explanations, was a simple fact. Each of these items—and there are one hundred and twelve in all—is simply that: an item on a piece of paper. Each is an item connected to a piece of information gathered by his agent, the American senatorial aide, James Pearson. For each he has either an e-mailed report with attachments or a handwritten one, accompanied sometimes by flash drives—all from James Pearson. But where, I found myself asking, is this golden source, this James Pearson? We know the answer. He was picked up by the CIA trying to flee the United States. He is unavailable. And the place where James Pearson found these so-called truths? That would be the office of the Department of Tourism, on West Thirty-first Street, in Manhattan. The department Xin Zhu so hastily destroyed, the offices of which have now been gutted by the CIA. I have photographs of the offices if any of you wish verification.”

He’d talked a long time, but talking had always been Wu Liang’s strong point. He danced with facts and manipulated them to showcase his modesty and erudition. With a mouth like that, and a wife like Chu Liawa, there was no end to what he could accomplish.

But he wasn’t done yet.

“As I say, I entered his office convinced of Xin Zhu’s honesty, ready to make our ministry secure again. I entered contrite, but I left angry. Furious, in fact. I had spent the previous days grilling good comrades on the strength of what now looked to me like a self-serving deception. My anger, however, had not reached its apex, for upon returning to East Chang’an, I was informed that Bo Gaoli, who some of you may know from his sterling history helping to run the counterterrorism department, was dead. Faced with the shame of this unfounded suspicion, he had used his belt to hang himself in his cell.”

Wu Liang let silence speak for him now. The committee knew of Bo Gaoli’s suicide, but the details had never been released. There had been a rumor of a sexual predilection, another of financial indiscretions. No one—certainly not Zhu—had known that he’d been in a ministry cell when he did it. Now that Wu Liang had shared this fact, everyone turned to examine Zhu’s reaction, and he did his best to control himself. Was he successful? He wasn’t sure. He thought that he could ask Shen An-ling later, but his assistant could only see the back of his head.

Xin Zhu wondered if anyone was going to ask the obvious, and obligatory, question: Was it possible that Bo Gaoli’s suicide was an admission of guilt? He himself could not ask it—it was up to someone else, perhaps Zhang Guo. But no one asked anything, and Zhang Guo only stifled a yawn with his cupped hand.

Since no one else seemed interested in speaking, Zhu opened his mouth. “I certainly regret the death of Bo Gaoli, but it does not alter the facts as I read them. The intelligence listed on my report did, in fact, originate in the Department of Tourism, and the only conclusion I can come to is that its source was within the Ministry of Public Security.”

Wu Liang sighed audibly. “This is like burning down a man’s house and
then
accusing him of keeping illegal merchandise inside it. You burned their house down, Xin Zhu. You torched yourself in the process.”

“I would like to think that my long service to the Party would justify a measure of faith.”

Sun Bingjun set down his cup. “I would ask a question of Wu Liang, if I might.”

Wu Liang nodded.

“Why,” he asked, shifting in his chair, “do we hear about this now? The suicide of Bo Gaoli occurred nearly four weeks ago. If Xin Zhu is such a danger, then why have you left him a month to spread his plague?”

Zhang Guo smiled into his fist; Feng Yi raised his head, saying, “That’s a good question.”

Wu Liang lost none of his poise. Again, he sighed. “For the reason Xin Zhu brings up: his long service to the Party and the People’s Republic. Though I was angry—though I suspected deceit in order to attack a rival organization, or perhaps to attack me personally—I wasn’t about to institute disciplinary action until I could prove that Xin Zhu’s accusations were false. That only occurred when we discovered the presence of the aforementioned Tourist, this Leticia Jones, on Chinese soil.”

“I don’t follow,” Sun Bingjun said patiently.

“It’s very simple, comrade, and at this point I would like to ask Xin Zhu a simple question, a question that we could only pose at this point in time.”

Zhu looked at him.

Stone-faced, Wu Liang said, “If the CIA has a source within the Ministry of Public Security, then why would it send someone here to find out your wife’s daily schedule?”

Zhu knew that the question was not finished.

“Why would they risk sending one of their own people—which, we agree, is a great risk to them—if they owned one of us? Your wife’s schedule is not classified information. It’s something that anyone within the ministry could find out with a simple phone call. If they have, as you contend, a source within the ministry, then getting one of their own people to ask questions in the middle of Beijing is not only stupid, it’s incredibly redundant.”

Zhu bit the inside of his mouth to stifle a nervous smile. The logic was beautiful, more so because he could not point out its one flaw: Mary Caul, the consular officer who had convinced Dongfan Beisan to pose his questions, left the country before she could hope to get any answers. She had never cared about the answers. Of course, to bring this up would be admitting that he had already lied about what he knew. So he said, “I don’t know, comrade. However, I remain convinced that the Americans do own someone within the ministry, based on the evidence I submitted.”

“What I think,” said Wu Liang, “is that you are tenacious to a fault. You’ve embarked on a mission to smear the ministry with lies, and now that you’ve been caught with the lies in your hand you’re pretending your hands are empty. I’m angry about this, but more than that I’m disappointed that someone with such a history of socialist endeavor would sink so low. When Hu Jintao talks of the Eight Virtues and Shames, he reminds us to
be united, help each other; make no gains at others’ expense
. Xin Zhu, I fear, has ignored that one with all the greed and ambition of a Hong Kong stock trader, and we should seriously consider bringing his dismissal to the entire committee for a vote.”

Noticing how wet his palms were, Zhu couldn’t help but admire the mouth on Wu Liang. Perhaps to remind himself of the insignificance of what was happening in this room, he thought,
Fifty thousand dead
. What could stand up to that?

He thought,
This, and you, mean nothing
.

5

Two hours later, along a tree-lined residential street north of the Haidian Theater, Shen An-ling opened the door for him, and he climbed out of the car. They’d both been silent during the ride, because Shen An-ling had left his car with the guards at the Great Hall, and there was no telling if someone had slipped a microphone into the cushions.
This
, Zhu now thought,
is getting ridiculous
.

The first barrier to their offices was an unassuming door behind which an old woman smoked at a foldout table, looking like a bathroom attendant. While in front of her lay a newpaper with more Sichuan headlines and an open Sudoku puzzle book, just under the table were an intercom, a cell phone, and a Type 77B pistol that was kept loaded with nine hollow-point rounds. He’d had to work to track one down, as the gun was made only for export, and his requisitions had gone unanswered; in the end, He Qiang stumbled across one in South Korea. Now, the old woman put out her cigarette and smiled, her face full of involuntary winks, and took out the intercom, saying, “Seven and eighty-eight here.”

From inside, two guards unlocked and opened the next door, a heavy steel affair that had been carefully painted to look rusty. In their white room, they manned an X-ray machine and a metal detector, both of which Zhu and Shen An-ling sidestepped. Finally, another guard opened the last door, which brought them to a long, semiunderground office gridded with desks and desktop computers, Ethernet cables winding like lifelines up narrow columns to the suspended ceiling panels. Seated at the desks were the twenty-six clerks of his department, sorting through the news events of the day, through agent reports and intercepted communications sent from the Fourth and Seventh Bureaus. Zhu’s department, officially called the Expedition Agency (unofficially referred to as Xin Zhu’s Pit), was an outpost of the Sixth Bureau that had over the years gradually expanded its mission to overlap at least four different bureaus of the Guoanbu. Like the Second, it recruited foreign agents; like the Seventh, it prepared policy reports based on gathered intelligence; like the Foreign Affairs Bureau, it developed relationships with certain foreign intelligence agencies. And as part of the Sixth Bureau, it kept an eye on foreign activity aimed at undermining the stability of the People’s Republic.

This expansion had been gradual and purposefully quiet, and by the time it had been noticed in 2002 by none other than Wu Liang, Zhu had produced too many critical reports to be considered expendable. This had not been Wu Liang’s first attempt to undermine Zhu’s rise in power using the Supervision and Liaison Committee, but it had been the most explosive, bringing members of all the Guoanbu’s bureaus into a fistfight that was only quelled by the intervention of the head of the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, who held both men up for reprimands.

Since 2002, Zhu had doubled his staff and trebled his field agents, and until the massacre of the Tourists, he had felt nearly invincible.