Night Heron (23 page)

They came fourteen minutes later, two of them, opening the door at the far end of the office tentatively, scanning the empty desk spaces. Then one saw the lights on in Wen’s office and
pointed. The other smiled. They walked across the open area to the professor’s office, knocked on his door. He waved them in.

“Good afternoon, Professor. Sorry to disturb you. We’re from Network Security.” He was young, spectacled, in a short-sleeved check shirt.

“Yes, yes. Here’s my ID.” He held out the card on the lanyard.

“Thank you, Professor. So.” He gestured to the papers. “What are you busy with on a Saturday?”

“I’m behind.”

“Behind with what, if I may ask.”

“My work.”

Silence.

“Look, it’s a complex movement of personnel through the testing areas out in Shaanxi. I’m trying to piece it all together. It’s difficult. Now, please.”

The man’s eyes flicked to the screen, the papers on the desk. “Of course. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

Check Shirt looked for a moment as if there were something else he wanted to ask. But he just nodded and turned to leave, ushering the other man before him.

Wen Jinghan waited another hour and a half, tinkered with the personnel lists on screen. He left his office and walked. The corridors were silent. In the men’s lavatory he stood in front of the mirror and ran the tap, then cupped his hands and let the water pool and spill over his fingers. He bent and dashed the water on his face.

At the canteen he took a styrofoam cup and filled it with hot water from an urn. He opened a sachet of green tea and poured it on to the water, watched it balance on the surface tension, move lazily in a circle.

Check Shirt was there, with his companion. They sat at a table on the far side of the empty canteen. Check Shirt was opening a metallic lunch box carefully, peering into it as if the contents
might pose a security risk. Wen Jinghan gestured to them, a backward tip of the head. Check Shirt raised and lowered a pair of chopsticks in faint acknowledgement, then returned to his lunch box. The professor turned and left the canteen, walking back to his office, quickly now.

He sat at his desk and unclipped his key ring, withdrawing from it the black, boxy car key. The
snick
as the shaft came away. His breathing, he realized, was shallow and fast, like a sprinter preparing for a race. His fingers were leaving damp prints on the plastic. The computer tower was at his feet. With a last look towards the door, he leaned, probed with his fingers for the port, and pushed the drive in.

Hong Kong

They often made her wait. They would say, so sorry to keep you, Miss Yang, so sorry. Or sometimes they wouldn’t. And now she stood at the window, looking from the twenty-eighth floor down across Mid-levels—the apartment blocks were slender as pencils, or incense sticks—to Hong Kong harbor. She had been waiting for two hours now in this miserable safe flat, its mid-century air-conditioning moaning, spatters of rain against the window.

It was, of course, part of their power game. Their intent was to instill in her a mix of fright and reassurance. Nicole understood this perfectly. But it annoyed her, and made her less, not more, amenable. And she had her onward flight to catch to Taipei.

So who would it be today? The beetle-browed one, with the thinning hair and the Hunan accent? Or the athlete, tall and angular, with his condescending Beijing demeanor? Or her favorite, whom she had named “Gristle,” for his leanness, the tautness of the tendons beneath his skin, and his air of scarring, survival. Gristle was sixty if he was a day and had been around the block, clearly. He spoke quietly, played fewer games, asked good questions.

And when the knock on the door came, it was, to her relief, Gristle, with a younger one she’d encountered only once before. New generation, clearly. Pop-eyed old Gristle might hack and spit, suck on a Great Wall cigarette held peasant-fashion, claw-like between second and third fingers; this one smiled, wore fashionable boxy black shoes and slick eyewear, stared at his handheld device a good deal. He looked like a Hong Kong kid, but he spoke the Mandarin of the far north. Such a giveaway. But that was the point, wasn’t it? We are from Beijing, said the accent. And when you’re talking to State Security we want you to know you’re talking to State Security. Wireless, she’d call him. They didn’t wait for her to open the door, they just walked in.

She was seated, cross-legged in jeans and cowboy boots, waiting. Wireless bobbed his head. Gristle gave her a tight smile, and sat.

“Miss Yang,” he said.

She just nodded. Wireless opened a laptop and placed a small digital recorder on the table.

“You’re looking, prosperous,” said Gristle.

“I’ve been waiting two hours.”

They both looked at her, let a beat pass. Gristle sat back, left it to Wireless.

“Please do not be upset. We have a very full schedule,” he said.

“I have a flight to catch.”

Another beat.

“Should you miss your flight, we will ensure you get another one.” Not as toothless as he looked.

“Tell us first, please, of your current situation,” Wireless said. “You flew in from the United States yesterday evening?”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary as you left the United States? At immigration?”

“No.”

“Were you asked any questions by the airline or by any officials?”

“Aside from the normal security questions, no.”

“And when you arrived in Hong Kong did you go straight to the Mandarin Oriental?”

“Yes,” she said. Gristle was smirking at mention of the fancy hotel.

“Have you seen anyone you know since you have been in Hong Kong?”

“I met a group of friends last night.”

“Where?”

“At the Calypso Club, in Happy Valley.” She saw Gristle mouthing the word, Calypso.

“Name them, please.” Wireless tapped on the laptop as he spoke. Gristle lit a cigarette, coughed, looked at her. She named them: the broker, his young socialite wife, her Taiwan friends who ran the design company, the lawyer she knew from Harvard.

“Why do they think you are in Hong Kong?”

“I’m breaking up the journey home, doing some shopping.”

“What did you talk about with them?”

“Gossip. Money. Houses. They’re not interested in what I do.”

Gristle sat forward.

“Everyone’s interested in you,” he said.

She didn’t reply.

“They are, though, aren’t they? Have you told anyone about your, what shall we call it, your
relations
with Monroe?”

“No.”

“Has anyone found out about them?”

“I don’t think so. We are very discreet.”

“Discreet? My people saw you sucking him off in a parking lot.”

“No, they did not.” She tamped down her anger.

“Oh, I’m sure they did.”

“Your people are making things up. You should keep a tighter grip on them,” she snapped.

Gristle smiled, sat back, drew on his cigarette. Wireless veered off on another tack. They went back to the States, through contacts at Harvard and around Boston; the Chinese students on campus, who was doing what, who had got a job where, which kids were going into biotech, processing; who might be heading out to work at the big Massachusetts weapons factories; the American Chinese; new names on faculty.

That was exhausted soon enough, as she knew it would be. Gristle stared at her.

“So get on with it,” he said.

“I’ve seen him four times now. I would say he’s hooked.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I can tell.”

“How?”

She looked at the ceiling.

“How do you think? Because he looks at me like a teenager. Because he calls me and whispers. Because he can’t keep his hands off me.”

They went through each meeting she’d had with Monroe. They wanted the physical details, but she stayed sketchy, stringing them along, which annoyed them.

“Stop being so coy. We need to know what stage you’re at with him,” said Gristle.

“Consider it foreplay,” she said. She looked at Wireless. “Do you know what that is?”

Wireless did not respond. Gristle slowly lifted a finger and pointed at her.

“You’ve got something, and you’re not telling us,” he said.

“Do I?”

He lit another cigarette.

“He said—” but Gristle cut her off.

“When?”

“Ten days ago.”

“Where?”

“When I flew down to see him in Washington. At the restaurant in Georgetown.”

“What was his mood like?”

“He was excited, all lit up. Dangling his secrets at me, like he does.”

“And?”

“So I asked about the launch vehicle reference at the talk.”

“What did he say?”

“He said they had indications, that was his word, indications, that China was proceeding in the development of the DF-41 missile. And he spoke about an ‘April sixteenth incident,’ an explosion, ten dead.”

Gristle was looking towards the window, exhaling slowly.

“Never heard of it,” he said.

“Well, he seemed to think it was important.”

“Never heard of the missile, never heard of the incident.”

“Well, he has.”

“He wants to screw you. He’ll tell you any shit. And you believe it.”

“No. He thought it was important.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he was entrusting me with it. He thinks I’m going to back-channel it to people in the know in Taipei. He wants collateral. He wants to know what the Taiwanese know. So he wants me to get an ever-so-quiet response. And he wants to be my mentor.”

“What do you mean, mentor?” said Gristle.

“He has some fantasy of leading me into important, dangerous places. He wants to reveal truth to me, show me the real workings of power, explain it all to me beneath the duvet.”

Gristle was very still, listening.

“He is my mentor and lover, my fierce, illusionless guide; I am the gorgeous Asian naif, waiting to have my creativity and power unleashed and shaped by him.” She made a mock-theatrical gesture.

There was a moment of silence.

“The eternal white man,” said Gristle.

She put her head back and laughed. Gristle smiled, twinkled a little.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” she said, smiling.

“Oh, I would,” said Gristle. “But he’s not going to lead you into those places, is he? You’re going to lead him.”

She cocked her head at him.

“Tell me why I should.”

He smiled, reached for another cigarette and lit it slowly, the grainy scratch of the lighter once, twice.

“Well, I could say money. Because you are costing us a fucking fortune. But that’s not it, is it?”

He paused, drew on the cigarette.

“I could say pressure, couldn’t I? Those old aunts and cousins of yours in Shanghai. We threaten to make their life miserable, but you don’t give a shit.”

He looked out of the window. Rain was starting to fall in earnest, long, steel rails of it. He looked at his watch.

“It’s because, Miss Yang, you are interested in power. And power flows to us now. And you want to be with us. Where the power is.”

It was as good an explanation as any she could think up herself.

Wen Jinghan counted off the seconds. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. The diode stopped flashing and turned to a continuous green. He leaned and wrenched the drive out of the computer tower, almost overbalancing on his chair. He clenched his fist around
the key and sat still, listening. Could one hear the alarms they talk about? Are there bells? He looked across the office. Everything was still. He looked at his watch and noted the time. Nothing to be done now. The tension in his back and neck was a hot pain, his head pounded. He forced himself to breathe. He clipped the key shaft back on to the head and reattached the assembled whole to his key ring. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all.

He looked at his screen. Nothing had changed. What was it doing now, in there? The drive had, presumably, downloaded some sort of application that was busy in the guts of the network. Thirty minutes.

Another walk. Yes, some tea in the canteen, a certain cure for a mouth this dry, a stomach this turbulent. He forced himself to his feet, his knees weak and threatening to disobey.

The canteen was empty. No sign of Check Shirt or his silent partner. He resisted the impulse to go and find them, engage them in conversation, stay with them while the alarms rang and the lights blinked red and people screamed into telephones, and the corridors filled with pounding feet and electric batons. And dogs, probably.

He filled another cup with hot water, dropped another sachet of leaves into it, then placed it on a table and simply stood there.

Eight minutes gone.

Nine.

Voices in the corridor outside the canteen. His stomach lurched and he turned, his feet, he noticed, doing something like a little jig on the floor. His body was behaving childishly. He reached for the cup and took a sip, the sodden leaves smooth against his teeth.

And then, the door. He flinched.

The door was pushed hard from the other side and flew open. Two security guards in gray uniform walked in. They were
talking together, something about Guo An, the football team, transfers.

They walked towards the professor, who stood, his feet melded with the floor. They approached him and then stopped. One of the guards gestured with an open hand just past him. Wen looked dumbly in the direction the man had indicated. The urn. The urn! He took a step back and the guards reached for cups, tea. He felt his eyes begin to moisten, some incontinent sense of gratitude welling up. He felt himself raising his own cup in their direction as if in a pathetic toast. Get a grip, he thought. The two guards ignored him. He turned and walked woodenly from the canteen, back into the silent corridor.

Twelve minutes gone.

His screen still had not changed. He leaned down. No sound came from his computer except for the usual hum and click of the hard drive. He sat, laid his hands on the desktop, tried to stop the shaking.

Only once before had he felt like this. And it was then, as now, Li Huasheng’s doing. The
bastard
. It must have been, what, 1987? The first protests in the universities had begun and the authorities were apoplectic. The police were all over campus, lingering amid the cherry blossom. Behind them you could see the State Security people, quiet, sitting in cars, watching you walk by. There were conversations in faculty offices. And if you were working in a sensitive area, defense technology, for example, perhaps rocketry and telemetry, you were called in for a chat. How did you feel about all this? Were you sympathetic to the demands of the protesters? Had you by any chance participated? Just a little?

He’d decided a measure of frankness was sensible. Well, it would be nice to have better conditions, better food, some light at night in the dormitories, and I think you should not limit the students’ ability to express themselves in peaceful demonstration.
And no, I did not participate. The State Security officer opposite—he wore a white shirt, had the skin and hands of a fighter—made notes. His faculty adviser sat, paralyzed with fear.

And any contact with foreigners, the source of the bourgeois liberalization that was infecting so many young minds?

No.

Which was, strictly speaking, true. Because it was Li Huasheng who met the British journalist woman and passed on every scrap of privileged information they could lay their gullible, idiotic hands on. In return for which they had received a nebulous promise of a visa to that distant, damp country, a promise that somehow never came good.

When he sat there beneath the fighter’s dead gaze, and in the days following, he knew this same bowel-loosening, retch-inducing fear. Nothing that came later had been as bad as that.

Eighteen minutes gone. His phone rang.

“
Wei?
It’s me. Get something to eat on the way home. Get something from Xiao Wang Fu. Get that lamb thing with the coriander.” Lili, in her dressing gown probably, the soap operas on in the background.

“All right.”

“Is your stomach better?”

“Yes.”

“You sound weird.”

“I’m just tired.”

“Well, come home.”

He clicked the call away. He wanted to talk, but he sounded weird. Where was their daughter? What was she doing? She was asleep now probably, in that little apartment outside San Diego that she’d told him about, with the highway outside, the cars flashing past in the darkness.

He took the key from the ring, opened it. A deep breath, and as he exhaled he heard himself producing a strangled humming
noise in the back of his throat, the sort of noise one might make when lifting an object of great weight, or anticipating pain.