The Ghost Shift (25 page)

A tray was thrust through a slot in the door with a clang, and she twisted around to see. It hung in midair and she heard nothing from the other side of the door. She put her feet on the floor, which felt warm under her soles, and walked over to take it. There was nowhere to sit apart from the bed, and she perched it on her knees, prodding dubiously. The meal looked as hermetically sealed as the room—two tepid and rubbery pancakes, a little tub of maple syrup, a pat of butter in foil, a plastic knife, a container of orange juice, and a cup of pitch-black coffee.

She remembered driving at night, in a convoy of two Escalades, through the lights of Washington and out over a bridge into darkness—suburbs and woods, then a highway, then an expressway. She saw little through the tinted windows, and the two CIA keepers in the front hardly spoke. There was only the faint crackle of a radio, then, some time after midnight, the moan of country music. She had slipped into a doze as they passed highways, sometimes bumping across the meridians on rough tarmac. It was a low-key, efficient journey, with none of the high-speed drama of Guangdong.

It was impossible to tell the time—her watch had been removed, and there was an unchanging light from the window. When she’d eaten what she could of the breakfast and washed her face in the basin, she lay down and stared at the ceiling. Her last glimpse of Lockhart had been through the windows of the Capital Grille, as she’d sat in the Escalade, waiting for the other car to arrive for the journey. She’d watched him sitting with Margot, talking.

A couple of hours seemed to have passed and the light had faded a little when the door opened. A guard came to take her, leading her along a low corridor with his head just inches from the ceiling. He put her in another cell, at a table with two chairs, and left again. There was nothing in it but the furniture and a matte panel on one wall. After a while, the man she’d seen with Lockhart entered and sat opposite. He looked tired, not just of Mei, but of the whole thing, as if she’d just been expelled from an expensive college. He put a file on the desk, unopened.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“You brought me.”

“Don’t be clever, Ms. Song. You came into this country two days ago, on a U.S. citizen’s passport, and broke into a private home. You work for a government agency in China associated with the Communist Party. Right there, there’s enough to detain you for espionage and keep you inside for a very long time. Even if they wanted you back, we’d demand a higher price than they’d pay. So you don’t have much on your side, except my goodwill, which has been strained by the games you’ve played with a bereaved woman who’s my friend.”

Margot’s not your friend,
Mei thought.

“Shall we start again?” Sedgwick said.

Mei nodded.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came here to see Margot Lockhart, the mother of my adopted sister. I want to go back to her.”

Mei had spent the previous night in Lizzie’s bed. After they’d talked, Margot had fetched her some towels and a pair of her daughter’s pajamas. They fit exactly, and she lay there, warm and comfortable for the first time in days, looking at the paintings on the walls and a photograph of Lizzie playing soccer for her school, surrounded by her friends. It had been her parallel life, on the far side of the world.

Sedgwick’s expression of vague irritation hardened into something more specific. “Well, that’s not possible, is it, Ms. Song? I don’t think Margot wants to take a murder suspect into her home. The authorities in Guangdong have placed an alert for you on their borders for the killing of”—he paused to consult the file—“Zhang Yao. That means you’ve committed felonies on two continents, and you belong in jail. You can stay in this one, or we can return you, in which case your life will get worse.”

“I don’t want to go back,” Mei said.

“Then you’d better think of a way to help us,” Sedgwick said, picking up the file and leaving.

Two days and
nights passed before she saw Sedgwick again. Life slowed to a trickle in her cell. It became a kind of torture, just existing, sometimes using the toilet or putting water on her face, lying down and watching the ceiling, trying and failing to see something through the window. They didn’t play loud music or waterboard her. They left her alone.

At dusk, the window darkened, but the rest of the cell remained identical—the same color, the same temperature, the same slight hissing sound. The light turned off later and came on again at dawn, taking its lead from nature but adding little. She slept in fitful bursts, dreamed lurid dreams—a rail journey through red hills, a luminous cavern, the sea beyond the river, black as night.

“What have you got for me?” Sedgwick said. He looked as disenchanted with her as before.

“I can’t think of anything.” It was true. After so long alone, it felt as if her brain had ceased working.

“Tell me about this man,” Sedgwick took a photo from the file and turned it on the table between his fingertips so that it faced her. It was a grainy image of the Wolf, taken from across a street in Guangzhou, near the PLA headquarters. It looked a few years old.

“This is Lang Xiaobo, secretary of the Guangdong Discipline Commission.”

“Known as the Wolf. Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

He stared at her and put the photo back into the file, then got up from the seat, as if to leave. She couldn’t let him depart—she feared another two days of gray isolation.

“He was arrested,” Mei said. “I saw him once—I was taken to see him. He was in a military base somewhere.”

“In Guangdong?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me about your sister.”

“Secretary Lang brought me to the place where she died, near Dongguan. I saw her body. It looked as if she’d drowned.”

Sedgwick sighed. “The problem is, I already know these things, and I know more than you’ve told me. She worked at Long Tan and she wasn’t the only one to die. Twenty others have too. We know that he was investigating and that you helped him. Now, he is in
shuanggui
, and so would you be if you had not killed the man they sent to fetch you. None of this is hard to discover.”

“If you know it all, what do you want from me?”

“Make me an offer,” Sedgwick said, leaving.

When Lockhart came,
they let her outside. The guard gave her a pair of boots and a jacket and led her through the hallway to the end of the block, where he opened a door and she saw the sky. It was like the lid of a box had been removed, letting light flood in. He stood thirty
feet away, on an expanse of green lawn, waiting for her to adjust to the glare.

“Come on, let’s walk,” he said.

It was a bright fall day. The sun was high in the sky, glinting off the foliage on the birch forest that stretched around them on all sides. She looked at her prison. It was a low block, finished in cedar wood and shingle, like a summer house without windows, at the edge of a wide lawn that led into the trees. It didn’t look threatening.

“Where are we?” she said.

“Virginia. Camp Peary.”

Her legs felt shaky from lack of exercise, and he slowed to let her catch up to him as they walked toward the woods. The lawn was mown, and the path between the trees was cut precisely and strewn with wood chips, maintained with rigor. The undergrowth had been cleared, leaving a yellow and brown carpet of fall leaves amid the trunks. They walked down a slope past a tennis court; the path ended at a lake. There was no one in sight, but Mei heard a faint echo of vehicles, as from another territory.

“How do you feel?” Lockhart asked.

Mei shrugged. They reached the edge of the lake and stood by the water. Two canoes rested on the shore, overturned for shelter. There weren’t any boats on the water, only a view of trees.

The answer was: She was lost. No matter how imperfect her sister’s life and its brutal end, she’d gained parents, family, identity. Mei was stateless and rootless, a child alone. She was in
shuanggui
, locked away anonymously beyond the reach of law, and it was oddly familiar. As a child, she’d been dumped in an orphanage, a nonperson in a nonplace.

Now, she was there again.

Lockhart returned the next day, and the guard gave her a raincoat to walk with him. He was in the same place on the lawn, water dripping off the hood of his jacket and his hands in his pockets. She’d been awake most of the night, wondering if she’d ever get out. When she walked up, he offered her an awkward hug, their coats rustling together. His face was pale, and it didn’t look as if he had shaved that morning. They made a fine pair, she thought.

The lawn was soggy, and when they reached the end of the prepared path, by the side of the lake, he turned onto a narrow, muddy section by the water’s edge and started to walk around it. She followed him in silence. The coat they’d given her was military—green camouflage, too long in the sleeves.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’m okay.”

“They’re not mistreating you?”

“The food is horrible.”

Lockhart gave a brief laugh. “It’s the only torture they’re allowed.”

They reached a wooden hut, filled with rods and fishing nets, and he walked to a bench by the water. Mei waited for him to ask some more questions, but he just sat on it, staring at the lake. His body was clenched as the rain fell; he exuded misery. She felt sorry for him.

“Tom,” she said. “Where did I come from?”

His hood rustled as he angled his face toward her, but she could
only see the tip of his nose. “I don’t know. It’s an enormous country. Hundreds of millions of kids, lots of them in orphanages.”

“You knew I was her sister.”

Lockhart sighed and shook his head. “That’s not a mystery, is it? You look the same.”

“It was more than that.”

“Was it?” He turned and stared into the distance, where a patrol boat skidded across the water, leaving a white trail.

“Margot said they didn’t tell her about me in Guilin. They gave her my sister. Why did they hide me?”

“Look, Mei, it’s your country,” Lockhart snapped. “You work for the Party. You know more about how they do things than I do. I lived there for five years, and I never figured it out.”

She’d expected to be interrogated, but she was asking questions and he hadn’t stopped her yet.

“Tell me about Lizzie,” she said.

“Lizzie? She was wonderful. It’s hard to say that. ‘Was,’ not ‘is.’ I can’t make sense of it. You know, you hear of kids in those orphanages having something wrong with them.” He paused. “I’m sorry—”

She shook her head, not wanting him to stop.

“Anyway, she was perfect. Smart as a whip, very funny. She loved the U.S.—her life, I mean. I don’t feel as if she missed China. She always wanted to go back, that’s natural, but she did well here. Scholarships at school, a place at Princeton, she was terrific. Margot was great, like I knew she’d be. I was the problem.”

She let her eyes ask the question.

“Margot must have told you. We’d had a great time together in Beijing, then we came home. She was happy here, but they stuck me on a desk in Langley, made me a case officer. I had to sit while the ops officers did the interesting stuff in the field. It wasn’t a good time. I was drinking too much, and I had an affair.” He grimaced. “Lizzie gave me such a hard time about it when she grew up—worse than Margot. I went abroad, I was in Nairobi and Hanoi for her teens. I was a poor excuse for a father. You didn’t miss much.”

“I would have had a sister. And a mother.”

Lockhart patted his knee. “You’re right. And it didn’t hurt Lizzie.
She did fine. She was interested in international relations, and she spent a year in London at graduate school. I was so proud, even though I didn’t have much to do with it. I used to visit her, in a cold apartment on the Pentonville Road.”

“She was like you.”

“I thought so. I took pride in it, stupidly, as if she was her father’s daughter, despite my fuckups.” The rain had eased, and Lockhart pushed his hood back and ran a hand through his hair. “One of her projects was on migrant workers in China. She wanted to go back, to make a difference. She had perfect Mandarin, and she joined a workers’ rights NGO in Hong Kong. I thought that was a great idea, I didn’t think she’d be in danger, except.…”

He stopped talking and, when she looked across, Mei saw a tear on his cheek. He didn’t feel to her like her interrogator or the man who’d deceived her in the marsh, not anymore. He was the man who would have been her father, if Wing had made another choice.

His hand was still on his knee, and she put hers upon it. “Except for what?” she said.

“I’d left—” His voice croaked and he coughed. “I’d left the agency and become a consultant. There’s so much work for people in my line now, you wouldn’t believe. I was on contract with a company that paid off the Saudis on a weapons deal and got hit by the DOJ. They’d just settled when a lawyer called me. Poppy was going crazy over what was going on at Long Tan and needed someone. These kids were throwing themselves off buildings. It was bad publicity.

“I spoke Mandarin, I’d worked in Beijing, I knew people there. I was a good fit. I went to visit with Henry Martin, and he said he’d do anything to stop the deaths, but it was beyond his control. His phones and tablets were built there, but he didn’t run the place. A Hong Kong guy called Cao Fu owned it. He’d told them he’d handle it, but he didn’t do anything.