An American Spy

2

Xin Zhu had come into the office at five in the morning to decode and read Liu Xiuxiu’s report, and he felt he needed more sleep to be able to understand its ramifications. Instead, though, he sent out for breakfast. He had just ordered a bowl of congee with duck eggs when his cell phone began to chirp with incoming messages. These were from He Qiang, but they were forwarded reports from his favored agent, Xu Guanzhong, who had been assigned to watch the Weaver home.

Xu Guanzhong had taken a room across the street from the apartment, just over the Garfield Farm Market, listening to the microphones they had installed. He listened to Tina Weaver order Chinese food, receive it from a deliveryman and, around five, speak to her husband on the phone. Light, unconcerned.

After the call, they heard a television sitcom. Then, a few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Tina Weaver said to her daughter, “Don’t break that,” as she walked to the limit of the microphone’s range and opened the door. “Hey,” was the last word she said. There was the soft thump of a body hitting the floor. Stephanie Weaver’s voice, “Mom? Who is it?” A grunt.

Movement. Heavy steps out to the front door. Silence. The footsteps returned, paused, then left again. Silence. Footsteps crossing the apartment, then the television was silenced. Back to the front door. The catch of the door being shut.

He Qiang called to discuss the sounds, and they considered options. He Qiang felt the only option was to send Xu Guanzhong over to the apartment, but Zhu was unsure. That was when He Qiang said, “Hold on. He just sent a message-someone’s going in. I’ve got a picture here. It’s Milo Weaver’s father.”

Zhu listened to this live, for by now Xu Guanzhong had patched his microphones through to He Qiang’s laptop, and He Qiang had turned his phone so that Zhu could hear everything. Yevgeny Primakov knocked on the Weavers’ door, calling, “Hello? Ladies?” Nothing. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and then left. After some seconds he returned with what sounded like two more men and walked inside quietly, moving through the whole apartment. A single Russian curse-“ Sukin syn ”-and then, in English, “Anything. Any sign.”

After a minute, a South American accent said, “It was quick. No struggle.”

“Here’s a note,” said an Eastern European voice.

Another Russian curse from Primakov. They left, and Xu Guanzhong saw the old man exit the apartment building with two younger men. A Chevrolet Malibu station wagon pulled up to the curb, and Primakov got inside with the other two, while a man and a woman took positions outside, as if keeping guard. Within ten minutes, it was over. Primakov and his men got out, the car drove off, and Primakov’s men left in separate directions, as did the man and woman. Yevgeny Primakov, however, reentered the apartment building.

On the microphones, his distress was recorded. He poured himself a drink from the refrigerator, then walked from room to room, muttering to himself, sounding like the confused old man he must have been. Walk, stop, walk. Finally, a longer stop, and louder muttering in Russian. All Zhu could make out was the phrase “… if not here.. ”

A glass set down. Heavier steps out the front door and, distantly, banging. Hand against a neighbor’s door. In English: “You’re in there! I know you’re in there!” Silence. More banging, then silence.

When Yevgeny Primakov returned to the apartment, closing the door behind himself, what he said in Russian was clear. “Idiot. Old, damned idiot.” He was angry with himself, ashamed. He went to the bathroom and turned on the water in the sink. Splashing.

From the angle of the microphone, Zhu and He Qiang and Xu Guanzhong were able to hear what Yevgeny Primakov could not: namely, the front door opening and closing again.

The water was shut off, and muted grunting came from Primakov, the sound of someone muttering into a thick towel as he walked into the living room.

Then the unmistakable thk-thk of a suppressor-equipped pistol. The thud of a body hitting the floor. The front door opening and closing again.

“Xu Guanzhong is not going in,” Zhu told He Qiang as soon as the sounds ended. “Someone over there knows exactly what he’s doing, and I’ll not have any of you killed. Not today, at least.”

So they waited, and as they waited Zhu thought about Yevgeny Primakov, feeling an overwhelming sadness, not unlike the sadness Erika Schwartz felt, that this man had ended his days in a Brooklyn apartment. Unlike Schwartz’s, however, Zhu’s sadness was less for Yevgeny Primakov-who, really, he hardly knew-than for himself. Would Xin Zhu end up dead on some foreign floor? Or might his death be even less noble, the slow deterioration of political squabbles-or, eventually, the easy escape that Bo Gaoli had chosen?

Xu Guanzhong reported Milo Weaver’s arrival at seven forty, not long after Zhu’s steaming bowl of congee arrived. Together, they listened to Weaver in the apartment. Zhu had no idea who had taken his family and killed his father, but he knew there was only one possible move for him now if he didn’t want to end up like Yevgeny Primakov-if not dead, then dead in the water. He picked up the phone and dialed.

“Where are they?” was how Milo Weaver answered the call, making this easier for him.

“Out of the way,” Zhu answered, which was technically true.

Shen An-ling arrived a little after eight, and Zhu began by talking him through Liu Xiuxiu’s revelations. “Our philandering conspirator has admitted that there’s a mole.”

Shen An-ling stared hard at him. He looked as if he, too, hadn’t gotten much sleep, his hair matted and dirty. Perhaps realizing this, he ran fingers through his strands. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Well.”

“Yes?”

Shen An-ling stared at the desk, then raised his eyes. “Do you believe him?”

“It fits our theory. Additionally, there was one clue the senator mentioned. He referred to their mole’s wife, calling her…” He lifted a piece of paper from his increasingly disordered desk. “Here. He called her a ‘ferociously ambitious bitch’.”

Again, Shen An-ling stared. Of the five members of the committee that was making their lives difficult, only Wu Liang’s wife truly matched that description. Chu Liawa was more famous for her ambition than she was for her powerful husband. For once, though, Shen An-ling didn’t bother stating the obvious. He only said, “Is she really that good?”

“Liu Xiuxiu? I think she is.”

“But that good? Good enough that a CIA man would share such classified information with a Chinese girl?”

“I don’t know,” Zhu admitted, then, to change the subject, told him about the rest. Milo Weaver’s meeting with the conspirators, then the disappearance of his family and the murder of his father. That left Shen An-ling-again, uncharacteristically-speechless. “This changes a lot,” said Zhu.

“There’s another player.”

“Two other players,” Zhu corrected. “Yevgeny Primakov came with others, probably his United Nations people, assumedly to take the family into custody. Yet someone else actually took the wife and daughter, and then killed Primakov. It’s extremely messy.”

By then, an e-mail had delivered all of Xu Guanzhong’s photographs, which included clear shots of three men and one woman who had helped Yevgeny Primakov in Brooklyn. They ran the faces through the system, coming up with three matches. One, presumably the South American accent they had heard over the microphones, was Francisco Soto Gonzalez, a Chilean who had worked for three months in Yevgeny Primakov’s financial section of the UN Security Council’s Military Staff Committee, before being let go for no apparent reason two years ago and dropping out of the records. The woman and the man who had lingered on the street were known field agents for the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND.

By seven that evening-seven o’clock Thursday morning, New York time-He Qiang reported that Milo Weaver had left the apartment for his meeting with Leticia Jones. He Qiang asked for permission to go into the apartment, which Zhu denied. “Consider the place radioactive,” he said. “We don’t know who’s watching it.”

They tracked Jones and Weaver, despite the Mexico City evasion, and Zhu was back in the office the next morning when he learned of Milo Weaver’s attack on the Therapist. Despite his growing anxiety, Zhu laughed at the news. “How is the Therapist?” he asked.

“His ego’s a mess,” He Qiang told him. “He believes that we kidnapped Weaver’s family, and he’s angry that we didn’t warn him.”

“Let’s keep it that way. We’ll put someone in Frankfurt and someone else in Jeddah. I’d like you to go back to Washington, meet with Liu Xiuxiu, and then pack up.”

“We’re going home.”

“She will stay another week. Let’s not blow her cover too soon.”

“A vacation.”

“She’s earned it.”

“And the Therapist?”

“Give him a bonus and tell him he should be happy Weaver let him live. We’re done with him.”

He Qiang paused for a moment too long.

“What?”

“I just wish we knew who took the family.”

It was Saturday, noon, when the call came. He was at home, having just finished a late breakfast with Sung Hui, who was turning on the television. He had spent so long looking westward that when the clerk from the Third Bureau, which dealt with the territories of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, said, “Comrade Colonel, we’ve come across one of your foreigners,” Zhu assumed he was calling about someone in Germany or Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it wasn’t even that he’d been looking westward, but that he’d spent the morning watching Sung Hui, wondering about Milo Weaver’s missing wife over in America. Either way, it was a surprise when the clerk on the line said, “You put a flag on Sebastian Hall, American. He’s about to land in Hong Kong. Would you like us to hold on to him?”

A gift from heaven. Alan Drummond was coming to him.

“Let him pass through, but put at least six men on him. Don’t lose him.”

“Understood.”

Two hours later, he was told that Sebastian Hall-a Caucasian man who fit Alan Drummond’s description-had checked into the Peninsula Hotel, room 212. He was dwelling on his pleasure when he received another call, this one from Sun Bingjun. “Xin Zhu,” he said slowly, sounding like he already had a few drinks in him, “Wu Liang just gave me some interesting news.”

“Yes?”

“He tells me Alan Drummond is in Hong Kong.”

How information traveled. “It’s true, Comrade Lieutenant General. He’s in a room in the Peninsula.”

“So you’ll be arresting him?”

“I’m not sure I will.”

“Good. I was going to suggest we take care of this more quietly.”

“Not that either,” Zhu said, for he didn’t want Alan Drummond dead. Not at this point, at least.

“Then what are you planning to do, Xin Zhu?”

It took him a moment to think it through, watching his wife smiling vaguely at something on television, but Sun Bingjun was waiting. He hated making decisions like this. “Alan Drummond expects us to detain him, or to attack him. Thus, we will do neither.”

“Are you sure, Xin Zhu? This could be your only chance to clean up your mess.”

“I understand that, comrade, but if we kill him, nothing will be cleaned up. If we arrest him, we’ll be forced to play the game the way he wants us to play it. No. The only solution is to wait and watch.”

“Maybe he wants to talk.”

“In that case, he can pick up the phone. He knows how to get in touch with me.”

Sun Bingjun said nothing.

“I’ve already recalled some agents from America. They’re familiar with the situation. In the meantime, I’ll send Shen An-ling with some men to assist the Third Bureau’s surveillance.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Xin Zhu.”

“So do I, Sun Bingjun.”

“And if you need anything, anything at all, do not hesitate to call on me.”

“Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant General,” Zhu said, thinking that things, finally, were turning his way. “Let’s hope I don’t need anything.”