The Shanghai Factor (32 page)
Read The Shanghai Factor Online
Authors: Charles McCarry
Eventually I got over being terrified.
Thanks to Alice Song’s skills and a criminal justice system that was more interested in big fish than in small fry like me, I did better than Dreyfus. About a year after my arrest, only dimly aware of how Alice had managed to lead the government to the fundamental, undeniable truth that Luther Burbank was the real traitor and I was merely the babe in the woods, I pleaded guilty to a single felony charge. I was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. As ritual dictated, I expressed my heartfelt remorse for my crime though I wasn’t sure what exactly I was being charged with. With credit for the time I had already spent in jail, I served two weeks less than two years in a minimum-security federal prison camp in Tennessee. The experience was something like ROTC summer camp except that the guards were less drunk with power than the instructor NCOs had been and I didn’t get nearly as much exercise. Otherwise, all was familiar—barracks that smelled faintly of dirty socks and armpits, good guys and bad guys, dumb jokes, tight routine, unseasoned food, time oozing by. My Timex had been confiscated. I never looked at the clock in the recreation room, just listened for the announcements to tell me when to eat, when to sleep, when to be counted. Gradually I regressed to a Stone Age consciousness in which measurement scarcely existed, knowing only day and night, long and short, rain and shine, cold and warmth, hunger and food, sexual arousal and self-help. After a spell in the kitchen scrubbing pots and pans, I worked on the paint gang, an enjoyable job.
Meanwhile the case moved toward conclusion, inch by inch. Alice called me when there were new developments, but isolated as I was, it was hard to splice the pieces together. I felt that I was watching through the window of my cell as disconnected snatches of an eight-millimeter movie based on the true story of my life flickered on a distant screen. At last came the moment when the climactic scene played, the screen went to black, the music stopped, and a series of captions detailing the after-the-movie life of the characters appeared:
Burbank was indicted on eighty-six counts of espionage, but he was not tried on these charges because he declined to do the patriotic thing and plead guilty and the evidence against him was too sensitive and too damaging to U.S.-China relations to be revealed in open court.
He was also indicted for evasion of income taxes on the millions Chen Qi had banked for him in Singapore, and a trial was scheduled.
Burbank, who was under house arrest while awaiting trial, was found dead, seated at the dinner table in his home in rural Virginia with the crumbs of a piece of key lime pie, his favorite dessert, on the plate before him.
Two months later, a tourist for whom she had once catered a dinner in New York sighted Magdalena in Suzhou, People’s Republic of China. She was never seen again by American eyes.
Nor was Mei.
The captions dissolve into a final scene. Alice Song meets me outside the gates of the prison camp on the day I am released after serving my sentence—or if you prefer, after completing my penance for inconveniencing my betters. She is wearing shorts and sneakers and a Chinese red T-shirt with
, the character for “double happiness,” printed on it, her hair cut shorter than before but otherwise looking just the same. I am thinner, calmer—the result, maybe, of 716 days of staring fixedly like a Zen monk at a certain invisible stain on the wall. We drive away, Alice at the wheel. It is late morning on a sunny day in spring—songbirds in flight, crows cawing, blue skies, puffy white clouds, and after we reach the Interstate, flowering trees in the grassy median strip. Somehow all this awakens the memory of Burbank and Magdalena dancing in the dark. And I wonder if Burbank, who knew so many things that nobody really needed to know, ever realized until he took his last bite of key lime pie, who his caretaker, his Ginger Rogers, his matchless chef really was.
“So how was it?” Alice asks.
“Not so bad,” I reply.
“Your thoughts?”
“Mostly I thought about the power of coincidence,” I say. “The bomb not killing me in Afghanistan. Mei crashing into me on her bike. Her father being the psychopath he was.”
“And still is, don’t forget,” said Alice.
I pretend not to hear her. I go on with my thought: “Chen Qi’s connection to Burbank. Burbank’s connection to my father. Bumping into Lin Ming on a dark street in Manhattan. Running into you the first time I walked into the club. I could go on. People may scoff, but if you think about it, the unforeseen is what makes the world go around.”
Alice takes her eyes off the road and looks me up and down, as if she had known me up to now only in a photograph.
“Say again? What makes the world go around?” she says.
“Coincidence.”
“Ah, the white man’s word for fate,” says Alice.
AN AMERICAN SPY IN CHINA.
STATUS: SLEEPER.
NAME: UNKNOWN.
He’s meant to be laying low, polishing his Mandarin and awaiting further instructions from Washington. But Shanghai is a difficult city to sleep in, especially when his nights are taken over by the seductive but enigmatic Mei – a woman with secrets he’d rather not hear.
Then he is tasked with a delicate operation. Infiltrate the core of the Chinese intelligence service. Distinguish friend from foe. Report to a single contact at HQ. Trust no one. Tell no one.
Pushed out into the cold, in a city of millions he’s suddenly very, very alone.
But in Shanghai city you’re never truly alone. Faceless strangers linger in the shadows, watching your every move. No one is safe from the Guoanbu. Not even a spy with no name…
‘Ranks up there with le Carré in a select class of two.’ —
Daily Mail
‘There is no better American spy novelist.’ —
Time Magazine
‘Charles McCarry is better than John le Carré. Which makes him perhaps the best ever. And this is his first long-form fiction in years. Excited yet? You should be.
The Shanghai Factor
is hypnotic, engaging, subtle, and deeply, deeply satisfying.’ —
Lee Child
‘Only someone who has been a player can write about the Great Game of Espionage the way Charles McCarry does. In
The Shanghai Factor
, we are lured, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, into a fictional Heart of Darkness populated by a succubus straight out of the Gehenna of our nightmares. A great read by a master of the art and craft of espionage novels.’ —
Robert Littell
‘Charles McCarry is a master of intelligent, literate spy fiction. And that is why I believe you will like, really like,
The Shanghai Factor
.’ —
Alan Furst
‘Charles McCarry, the reigning grand master of American spy thriller writers, delivers one of his best novels in years with
The Shanghai Factor
, a compelling page turner thatpropels its characters through McCarry’s complex plot and reveals our real world of shadow powers better than most ”factual” reporting. McCarry captures the hearts and minds of the mere mortals we call spies.’ —
James Grady
‘
The Shanghai Factor
is a brilliant espionage novel by the master of the form. It is also terrifying and astonishingly timely, dealing with the ominous threat of an undeclared – and victorious – Chinese cyberwar with the U.S.’ —
Joseph Finder
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The Last Supper
The Better Angels
The Secret Lovers
The Tears of Autumn
The Miernik Dossier
Charles McCarry served as a CIA operations officer in Europe, Asia and Africa. He is the author of twelve previous novels, as well as numerous works of non-fiction.
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