The Shanghai Factor (18 page)

I said, “May I ask how much time that gives me?”

“I don’t know. And stop saying ‘may I ask.’ The whole point of this arrangement is that yes, you may ask. So just fucking ask.”

Burbank was not usually given to such language. He really must have had a bad day. He finished his tea and got to his feet. He said, “That’s all.”

As Burbank had warned, the files were a hard slog. The content was mostly gossip, unsubstantiated and nine times out of ten hardly worth substantiating. Many, even most files are like that. On opening them you ask yourself,
What’s so secret about this?
But every now and then something catches the eye. The natural reaction to such a find is not to cry hallelujah, but to be twice as skeptical as usual. If it’s plausible, it probably isn’t true. One of Burbank’s famously demented predecessors was so controlled by this idea that he could never bring himself to believe that any defector from an enemy service could possibly be genuine. He refused to listen to them, refused to give them shelter. In his youth he had been badly burned by a turncoat, a secret Communist, whom he had trusted absolutely, whom he admired and emulated, even loved, and when the man turned out to be a Soviet agent, he never got over it. Thereafter he slammed the door in the faces of all defectors from the other side. If he was overruled, as sometimes happened, he would do his best to destroy the defector and discredit his sponsors. In the end he thought everyone in Headquarters was a potential turncoat if not an actual traitor and had the delusions to prove it. In the opinion of some, this made him better at his job. His crotchety spirit still stalked these hallways. I felt him at my back as I read.

The next afternoon, Burbank buzzed on the stroke of four. He seemed to be more like himself today. I waited thirty seconds for him to say something. He remained silent, so I spoke.

“It’s no picnic to find something in these files that fits the requirement you laid out for me yesterday,” I said. “But I have two or three possibilities for you.”

I was still on my feet. Burbank said, “Sit down, you’re giving me a stiff neck.”

While combing the files I had borne in mind that what he wanted was something that would pique Lin Ming’s interest. The first two items I mentioned would not necessarily have had that effect. They certainly did not interest Burbank. I slid over them quickly. Then I described a report about a meeting between a man whom Headquarters knew to be an officer of a Taiwan intelligence service and a second person the source said he knew to be an official of the Chinese embassy in Cairo.

To my astonishment, this was news to Burbank. The perplexed look on his face could not be read in any other way. He said, “Names.”

We didn’t yet know who the person from the Chinese embassy was. I named the Taiwanese. Burbank nodded, as if he knew the fellow.

“How fresh is this?” he asked

“The report, twelve days. The sighting, not specified.”

“I’ll ask Cairo to take an interest.”

I was dismissed.

Cairo took Burbank’s request to watch the Taiwanese case officer seriously. Soon he was never alone. Relays of sidewalk men were with him wherever he went. Either he did not notice them or did not care. He was a trawler who caught what he could when he could. He made his rounds as if he hadn’t an enemy in the world. He met other foolhardy people from the Chinese embassy. He loaded and unloaded dead drops. In photographs taken at diplomatic receptions he was a tall handsome Manchu with a tall beautiful Manchu wife. Besides several of China’s languages they spoke the polished East Coast American English that was standard for their class. The wife had been overheard speaking fluent French at a dinner party. The situation was somewhat embarrassing for us because the Manchu had liaised with our stations in several different countries. He was by no means an asset of ours, but over the years he had traded scraps of information with us. He had given us good stuff and we had kept him posted on matters of interest to him. He was regarded as a reliable source, a friend.

As reports from the Cairo station dribbled in I made their contents known to Burbank. His interest in the case, strong from the start, grew stronger. But he took a wait-and-see line. This was something we could work with, but we would bide our time. He explained his decision. We didn’t want to compromise our old friend the Manchu. Who knew what he might lead us to? We had to be careful not to step on Cairo’s toes or the toes of our own Middle East people. At least not right now, not until we knew more, not until the time was right. There was no deadline. We were learning things it was good to know. That was an end in itself. Locking the product in a safe would be a good enough outcome. Maybe it was the impetuosity of inexperience, but I didn’t agree.

Friday came at last.

24

Over the weekend
I rented a town house a few miles from Headquarters. It was a clone of hundreds of others in the neighborhood, but it had its surprises. At dawn and twilight herds of white-tailed deer, dozens of animals, grazed outside my window as if the fringe of saplings that separated my “community” from the one behind it was a pre-Columbian wilderness. The cul-de-sac on which I lived showed few other signs of life. With one picture window in the front wall and three small ones at the back, the house was dark, but because I went to work at six in the morning and came home late at night, the murky atmosphere didn’t matter. The deer were mute, no birds sang when the sun came up, so all in all there were few noises from outdoors except the distant murmur of traffic, no signs of life except the occasional sound of a car motor starting or someone shooting baskets in a driveway. I liked the silence. I didn’t miss the uproar of Shanghai or the sirens of Manhattan. Living in this suburb was like living in a science fiction movie in which telepathic aliens have taken over the bodies of human beings. Even the kids made no noise, coming home as silent as manikins in their soccer uniforms, leaving just as wordlessly in the morning with bulging book bags on their backs.

On Monday morning when I got to my computer, I found that a breakthrough of sorts had occurred. The Cairo station had identified the man from the Chinese embassy who was meeting with the Manchu as a Guoanbu officer who used the pseudonym Xu Anguo.
Anguo
means “protect the country.” He was a counselor to the embassy, big game. He and the Manchu met more frequently than is usual in clandestine relationships, always at night at an odd time like 4:27
A.M.,
always in a poor out-of-the-way neighborhood, always very, very briefly. The station tried picking up their conversations with a listening device and caught a few words. They spoke to each other in Hokkien, the language used in Taiwan. I reported this to Burbank.

“So what do they talk about?”

I handed over a transcript of the disjointed exchanges our techs in Cairo had managed to record. Burbank ran his eye over the Chinese characters. “Not much here,” he said.

“But it’s interesting in its way,” I said. “The guy from the embassy has been telling the Manchu that everything has to be word of mouth only. Every paper is guarded. No one is ever alone with an embassy document. The Manchu says he has a camera that can be concealed in a ring. The other guy says he’d be shot if he showed up wearing a new ring.”

“We don’t want that to happen,” Burbank said. “Draft a cable for my signature telling Cairo to tread softly and keep up the good work.”

As the weeks passed, the case file fattened. We learned nothing much that was new and had no idea what secrets Xu Anguo was handing over to the Manchu, but the mere fact that we were aware of something that was none of our business justified the trouble and expense.

One morning after the daily meeting I walked down the hall as usual with Burbank, but instead of leaving him at the door of his office and continuing on to my cubbyhole, I followed him, uninvited, into the room of safes. He sensed that I was right behind him. His shoulders hunched slightly, he walked a little faster—but made no comment. When he got to his desk he sat down and went right on ignoring me. I waited, standing. It would have been presumptuous to sit down, and I didn’t want to give him an advantage beyond the ones he already had.

Finally he said, “Yes?”

I said, “I have a proposal.”

“Make it.”

“I think I should go to New York, wait for Lin Ming to stumble over me in the street, and give him a hint about the Cairo stuff—without mentioning Cairo or the target’s name or any of the details.”

“Why?”

“First, because it’s sensational material and he’d soon confirm that, and that would plant the seed of curiosity.”

Burbank looked at his watch. “Go faster,” he said.

“It would give us the initiative.”

“Why?”

“Because we’d only give him a sniff,” I said. “He’d have to give something back before he got the rest of it.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because if there’s one traitor in one of their embassies there might be others in the same place or in other embassies. Just like you hoped.”

Burbank said, “You realize this might blow our whole primary operation before it gets started?”

“That’s one possibility,” I said. “Another is that it would jump-start it.”

“Why do you think that?

“Because sometimes taking a chance is worth it.”

“A thrill seeker,” Burbank said. “Just what we need.”

He said it nicely, giving no sign that he was displeased. He had been given something to think about and he was thinking about it. I let him think.

After a while he said, “You realize that if you take this to its logical conclusion you’re pronouncing a death sentence on that fellow in Cairo?”

“Yes.”

A flicker of something—pride in a protégé?—came and went in Burbank’s eyes. “Also that you’re messing with the Manchu, who has been such a help to us in the past.”

“That I regret. But what the Manchu is doing is just a diversion.”

Burbank relaxed. This was a visible thing, his muscles unknotted, his eyes focused in a new way. He said, “You’re coming along. Remember, keep this between the two of us. Keep thinking.”

I said, “What about New York?”

Burbank held up a hand in case I was going to say more. He had no more time to spend on me. He said, “Okay, give it a go. But don’t go too far.”

25

I traveled to New York
like an honest man—the shuttle to LaGuardia, a taxi to the apartment, a chat with the doorman. I found nothing of interest in the mailbox. After taking a nap and showering I walked downtown, thought about looking for a woman in a singles bar but decided against it because I didn’t know of any singles bars. I had never been inside one. What were the rules? How many drinks did you have to buy for a lady before making your move? I didn’t really know Lin Ming’s rules, either. Surely he had noticed that I was no longer roaming the streets. Maybe he wasn’t roaming the streets, either. I decided to show myself and see what happened.

In the Sichuan Delight the cashier on duty was the same young man who had shown me upstairs the last time I was here. He glanced at me, registered nothing, and said, “Any table, sir.” I chose one in a corner and sat with my back to the wall. The food was good, but not in the same class as the feast Lin Ming had ordered the last time I dined from this kitchen. Another familiar face appeared—the waiter was the same wiry man who had carried the laden tray upstairs to Lin’s safe room. If he recognized me he gave no more sign than the cashier had done. However, the latter had vanished. When he came back half an hour later, entering through the kitchen door, I was working on my chili hot pot. He stopped for a moment to ask me how everything was. When I said it was just fine, he complimented me for having ordered the specialty of the house. With a broader smile he said, as if offering me some exotic delicacy reserved for the restaurant’s most sophisticated customers, “Fortune cookies very nice tonight.”

Normally I am too conscious of my image to crush fortune cookies, let alone eat them, but on this occasion I slipped them into my shirt pocket. On the subway I cracked them open. The first told me I would have true friends, the second that Confucius say a traveling man and his girlfriend are soon parted. A Manhattan phone number was written on the back of that one. I waited until I got home to call because I wanted Lin Ming to know where I was and the GPS on my cell phone would give him that information. A female voice answered. Without preamble, in Mandarin, the speaker said, “Basketball at the same gym as usual, same time, day after tomorrow.”

I arrived at the gym five minutes late. I was not followed, but as I approached the door, a man loitering on the opposite side of the street made a phone call. Lin Ming was waiting for me inside. He was not his usual smiling self.

“You’re late,” he said, as if I were already under discipline.

“Am I? Then we’ll have to play fast.”

We did. This time I beat him. Badly. I had different purposes than I had had in our first encounter. He was pretty good, but he had few moves and only two shots, a pretty good hook and a wobbly jumper. He was smaller, slower, older, and he had learned the game as a grown-up, which meant he relied too much on his intellect instead of letting his body do the thinking. I got a little physical—not to the point of bullying, but enough to make him look behind him for another me. The scores were lopsided. At the end he was drenched in sweat, breathing hard. He had lost face. He didn’t like it. However, we were in America, so Lin Ming shook my hand like a good sport and said, “Nice game.” I couldn’t really read him—probably few people could—but I had wanted to make him wonder why I did what I did. By the look of him, I had succeeded. Lately I had made an enemy of everyone I met except Burbank, and who could tell what exactly was going on with him?

After we showered, Lin Ming said, “Shall we go for a walk?”

“Why not?”

We found a park—“found” in quotes because clearly Lin Ming knew exactly where we were going—and sat down on an empty bench. In English he said, “You played much better today.”