Night Heron (22 page)

“But they are very senior officers, and they want you to succeed,” said Mangan.

“This has become quite a big operation,” said Peanut.

“Yes, it has. Let’s make it work,” said Mangan.

“Oh, I will.”

Mangan watched Peanut pull the scarf up over his face against the smog and slip out of the door. The landing was empty and Peanut made quickly for the stairs and was gone.

Mangan settled down to wait for an hour before he left. He lay on the bed, lit a cigarette. One more of these meetings and it was done. The entire weird episode would be over.

Beijing

The sky over Beijing was a filthy gray brown in daylight, orange at evening. One’s fingers and lips cracked, grit in the mouth. And the dust had a dry mineral odor that Peanut would forever associate with the
hutong
homes of elderly relatives, where it worked its way into cupboards and linen year after year. It lingered on books.

He remembered his father on his knees in their apartment, picking up the books that the Red Guards had hurled to the floor. He had bent to help. They put the books into a brown trunk. After a few minutes his fingers were gray with the dust. His father had wiped his nose with the back of his hand. His mother had been in the next room, kneeling over an electric ring, trying to cook cabbage in a little oil.

Yin stood at the salon window, cold, clutching herself. They had shut up shop, bolting the doors. Each morning the sinks, the hairdryers were coated with dust. Dandan Mama sat cracking sunflower seeds in her teeth. The television showed the dust swirling across north China, its origins in Mongolia.

He stood.

“I’m going out for a bit.”

Yin shook her head.

“What for? It’s horrible.”

“Just some business.”

He unbolted the door.

He lingered at the end of the thoroughfare, his hood up. The smog was a bitter shroud, wiping the features from the tower blocks. The streets were all but empty.

He had chosen a rattletrap cinema in Fangzhuang, a late-afternoon showing of a risible action film, its shirtless star in a jungle somewhere, oiled and subtitled into poor Mandarin.

The professor was sat exactly where he’d been told, high up at the back, no one behind him. Peanut climbed the steps, sat beside him, leaned in and whispered.

“I could do better than this,” said Peanut. Wen Jinghan stared at the screen. “What do you think, Jinghan, you and me, with our ill-gotten gains. We’ll produce a movie. A spy story.”

The professor said nothing. Peanut looked at him, shook his head, then reached into his pocket and took out a small pouch of a suede-like material. It was sealed with a drawstring, which Peanut pulled open. Inside was a car key, its head black, plastic and boxy, a key of the sort that might permit a driver to open or start a vehicle from a distance.

“Look at me, Jinghan.”

The professor turned, his gaze blank.

“It’s a car key,” said Peanut. “For your shiny Japanese car. You put it on your key chain.”

The professor looked, expressionless.

“But,” said Peanut, and, his thumb exerting pressure on the shoulder of the key, a
snick
. The shaft came away, revealing a rectangular plug protruding from the black plastic head, a plug of the sort one might insert into a port on a computer.

The professor looked away.

“Very clever,” he said.

“It is, isn’t it?” said Peanut.

“The system’s alarmed,” said the professor. “It’s alarmed against any external hardware. I told you this. When I plug that in, the alarms go off. And security puts an electric baton up my arse. Or in my mouth. They do that, you know. It doesn’t leave marks.”

Peanut leaned in very close now.

“Do not tell me about electric batons, Jinghan.”

The professor shrank away.

“You do not tell me about electric batons, do you know why? Because electric batons have featured in my life the way that shiny Japanese cars have featured in yours. In that I encountered them frequently. Do you understand?”

“I didn’t mean…“

“Shut your fatuous, condescending mouth and listen.”

The professor closed his eyes, then opened them and turned, not meeting Peanut’s gaze. He pointed at the key and spoke in a furious whisper.

“This will not work. It cannot work.”

“Listen. This is what they have told me to tell you. They understand alarmed networks. And this will not set off any alarm. It’s… it’s, what… stealthed.”

“You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, have you?”

“These are clever people.” Peanut could feel the poverty of his responses. The professor was meeting his gaze now, and there was a sneer.

“Jinghan, this is what you will do. You insert the plug in the port. Then you watch this little green light here.” Peanut pointed to a diode on the key’s head, his chipped, dirty nail against the plastic.

“The light will start to flash. After about five or six seconds it will stop flashing and will show a continuous green. When it does that, you pull it out, immediately. Then you wait thirty minutes. Then you do the same thing again. Insert it, wait for the green to stop flashing. It will take longer this time, maybe twenty or thirty seconds. When it goes to continuous green you pull it out again.”

The professor was still silent.

“So just remember, when it goes to continuous green pull it out.”

Silence.

“That’s all. And then you just reassemble the key.” The
snick
as the shaft locked back into place. “Take it, Jinghan. Practice opening it up.” He held out the key.

Wen Jinghan sighed.

“Look, let me find another way, all right? I mean, this is crazy. This is just… it’s crazy. I’ll think of something different.” He patted the air, as if to calm Peanut down and to indicate the conversation was closed. He turned back to the screen. Peanut could see something fiery out of the corner of his eye. The cinema rumbled to the movie’s explosions. Peanut sniffed.

“No, this is how it’s going to go. And then it’s over.”

“Do you believe that, Huasheng? I mean, really?”

“When it’s done, Jinghan, call me at this number and leave a message. Any message, doesn’t matter.” Peanut handed the professor the little bag and a piece of paper with the Blue Diamond’s number written on it.

He had chosen the restaurant for its reek of Washington, of power, of quiet murmurings in paneled rooms. It was in Georgetown, and its middle-aged waiters would bring you mounds of fresh oysters on crushed ice, good champagne. She took his arm lightly as they went in. Monroe tried to stifle the adolescent
thrill he felt. They sat. She ordered a champagne cocktail, for heaven’s sake.

“Taiwan,” said Monroe. “Do you know I’ve never been?”

She considered.

“It’s more cosmopolitan than you might imagine these days,” she said.

“I’m sure it is. You seem
very
cosmopolitan.”

“So I’ve been told,” she said.

“But as an employee of the U.S. government, I have to get authorization to go. Isn’t that a shame?”

“We’ll have to get you invited,” she said. “I’m told that can be done.”

“Oh,
really
?” said Monroe.

She giggled, held a hand up to her mouth.

“Oh, I know a few people, Jonathan. My family is old army, old KMT. Taipei is a village.”

It surely was. And Monroe had run her name past a couple of the village’s wiser inhabitants, just to make sure, to be told,
she is exceptional, Jonathan. Father was an aide to the Generalissimo at one point. Grandmother related to the Song sisters, a distant cousin. Aristocracy, really.
And the databases had nothing recorded against. She was just what she said she was—a doctoral candidate at Harvard, with very good connections.

“And what will be your role in that village, do you think?” he said.

“After my doctorate? Oh, I don’t know. Washerwoman. Whore.”

Monroe must have let his shock show, because she was laughing again, a little incredulous.

“I’ve embarrassed you. Jonathan! We’ll have to unbutton you a little.”

Unbutton me? he thought.

“But let me answer you,” she said. “I am thinking about diplomacy. Or perhaps something less formal, something in
international affairs. We Taiwanese depend on quiet, informal friendships, don’t we? We depend on them for national survival, even though we are not deemed a nation.”

“You surely do. I must say I admire the way you exist there, in China’s shadow, the way you comport yourselves. You are very, very effective,” said Monroe.

“But you seem to feel things are about to get more complicated for us. With China.” She hesitated, then spoke. “I felt you hinting at this, in your talk at Harvard. You mentioned the launch vehicles. Do you mind if I ask you what that was about?”

Monroe loved these moments.

“What will you do with my answer?”

“Keep it very, very quiet. Just for me. Or perhaps, with your say so, I may share it informally with one or two friends in Taipei, friends who are equally discreet.”

Monroe affected deep contemplation for a moment, then deep seriousness.

“On one condition, Nicole. You will tell me how your friends respond.”

She nodded, gave him her half-smile. He spoke very softly and she craned her long pale neck to hear.

“We have indications that China is moving ahead with the DF-41, and that it will have MIRV capability.”

He paused for effect, took a morsel of bread.

“Now, they’re having technical problems. In April a prototype second-stage blew up on an underground test stand, killed eight technicians, two senior engineers. They’re calling it the ‘April sixteenth incident.’ But they’re unperturbed. So.”

She nodded, considering, her eyebrows raised.

“That, I think, will be news to my friends,” she said. Then she looked straight at him, and reached over and touched his hand.

“Thank you, Jonathan. Really, thank you.”

And later, in the car, she confessed to being a little drunk,
and, her perfume enveloping him, kissed him in such a way—suddenly, hard, nails in his shoulder—as to leave him in absolutely no doubt.

He left it until Saturday, reasoning that there would be fewer people in the office. Now he stood, retching, in his bathroom. Lili was banging on the door.

“Jinghan, are you all right?”

“Go away.”

She was silent. He could sense she was still outside the door.

“I’ve just eaten something.” He was shivering. He splashed water on his face. “I’m all right.”

He opened the door and brushed past her. She watched him put on a coat and pick up his keys. He turned.

“I have to go to work for a little while.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll be back late this afternoon.”

She said nothing. Wen Jinghan walked out of the house. His house. His new house, in a barren development on the edge of the city, white-walled, an iron fence enclosing a lawn, even. Some of the other houses in the development remained unoccupied; some were unfinished, gray and skeletal. The professor unlocked his car with a
blip
, and pulled away.

He followed the fifth ring road for a while, then cut into Beijing. The smog and dust rendered visibility poor, the traffic sluggish behind ponderous buses, overloaded trucks. It was more than an hour before he arrived at the main gate, where he showed his pass and was waved through. He parked and left his hands on the wheel for a moment, breathing deeply.

As he approached the building his throat caught, and he felt the urge to retch. His breath hissed through his teeth. The foyer was empty but for two security officers in gray uniforms. They waved him forward towards the barrier. The professor took
off his coat, bundled it and dropped it on the belt. He took his mobile phone and his keys from his pocket and dropped them in a plastic tray, which he also put on the belt. One of the two guards sat on a stool and watched the scanner’s screen. The other guard beckoned to him. He put out his arms and the guard casually passed a wand over his legs, his waist.

As it approached his hips the wand squealed.

The guard gestured wordlessly to Wen Jinghan’s trouser pocket.

The professor looked down, as if to say, what could that be, Officer?

The professor reached in his pocket and pulled out a small framed photograph. It was no bigger than a matchbook, the frame of intricate silver filigree. The professor smiled and shook his head.

Sorry, Officer.

The guard looked down at the photograph. It showed a girl, nineteen, perhaps, in a mortar board, her head back, laughing.

“My daughter,” said the professor.

The guard smiled and nodded. The other guard came from the scanner to look.

“I want to put it on my desk,” he said.

“Is she at university?” asked the guard.

“Yes, she is. In America.”

“Harvard,” said the guard.

“No, no. She’s at a college in California. A small place. Nothing special.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“Not so lucky to be working on a Saturday to pay the fees!”

“All of us!” said the guard. They laughed.

The professor went to the scanner to pick up his coat. The plastic tray was next to the coat on the rubber belt. He reached down and took his mobile phone and his keys.

“Mobile phone on the rack,” said the guard.

“Of course.”

He walked to a wire mesh rack bolted to the wall, laid his mobile phone on it.

“Better get to it,” he said.

The guard gave a wave, friendly and dismissive at once, then sat heavily and reached for a newspaper.

The professor swiped the card that hung from a lanyard around his neck and went through a set of double doors. He walked down a long corridor, to the men’s lavatory, where he stood in a stall and retched again and again.

He placed the photograph on his desk. It stood there, reproach and talisman both. His office was a glassed-in cubicle. Outside the glass lay a larger open-plan space that was mercifully empty today. From his desk he could see across the space to the door.

He unlocked a drawer and took out a file, something related to personnel and budgets. He strewed papers around his desk and placed a yellow pad of paper atop them. Paperwork! The price of leadership! His computer was on. He took a second card hanging from the lanyard and inserted it into a reader. Then he placed his thumb on the keyboard scanner and typed a password. The screen brought up a menu. People’s Liberation Army General Headquarters. Do not proceed unless authorized to do so. Do not attempt to access areas for which user is not cleared. Report unauthorized access.

Wen Jinghan scrolled down to General Armaments Department. He clicked through to Comprehensive Planning Department, brought up some personnel lists. Then he waited, a riot in his belly.