An American Spy

3

He’d spent more than a month with them. That, perhaps, had been a mistake. He’d slept among them and eaten with them and cleaned with them and, through an interpreter, joked with them. He’d met their women and babies camped out in the forest, and he’d listened to stories of injustices that were so massive in their waste of human lives that he couldn’t bring himself to share his own. He was a child of misery compared to their fully fleshed adulthood, and at times, he felt ashamed of the self-pity that had brought him so far.

Yet there really was no way out of it now. Upon arriving, he’d told their leader, Li Qide, that it had to be done soon, but “soon” was a different concept in the woods. Besides, they saw no point in doing it before the Games, when an action, even a failed one, would be so much more effective. He’d tried to argue with Li Qide, but, knowing their stories, how could he say aloud that he just wanted to get back to his wife?

He’d had no contact with anyone outside their camp for the past month, and by now their anger had supplanted his own. He was no longer exacting vengeance for his own insult but for the insult of the people he’d briefly joined. The smells they were familiar with were now familiar to him: the pungent cooking oil, the horse manure and the shabby outhouses, the aroma of human sweat mixed with pine and fir trees, the stink of sour pickles and fire-burned chicken.

Now, finally, it was the eighth of August, and he’d been traveling for nearly three days. A horse to Leishan, and then catching a ride to Guiyang, where he was introduced to a guide who drove him as far as Zhengzhou. There, he picked up this clattering old Mercedes and continued on his own with the aid of a map notated in English. He’d made it through three roadblocks populated by nervous soldiers, but his American passport, in the name of George Miller, and gift packages of Marlboro Reds made his progress smoother.

On the other hand, the roads were anything but, choked with holes and ridges like tiny mountain ranges, and he feared for his tires. They held, though, and he stuck to his route leading inexorably toward the capital.

“Me journalist!” he told a soldier at the last roadblock before Beijing’s outer ring road as he held out his passport. The soldier, a short man with a wide face, looked confused as he examined the document. Alan pointed at his own chest. He was wearing the suit he had brought into the country and not worn again until yesterday, cleaned and pressed. He was painfully conscious of how loose it hung on him now. “Journalist! New York Times!”

For this, too, he had a press card and a forged slip of paper from the Foreign Ministry, both under the name of George Miller. Also, in a gutted catalytic converter, attached by two bolts under the car, were the disassembled pieces of a Chinese M-99B sniper rifle and scope, good for a distance of up to six hundred meters, though he wouldn’t need that much range.

The soldier, still looking confused, went to confer with his comrades.

There was a second line at the roadblock, where trucks were checked over with mirrors on wheels and eager Kunming Wolfdogs. Though he didn’t see how it started, he looked over at the sound of shouting to see a man being wrestled down from a truck with canvas walls so sooty that Alan couldn’t make out the characters written on them. The young man was silent, though he fought against the two soldiers holding him-they were the ones who were shouting, possibly for help. Then one of the soldiers stumbled back and fell on his rear end, and the truck driver broke free, running madly away, in the direction of Beijing. Rifles were unslung, warnings shouted, then, when the driver was about a hundred yards away, the soldiers began shooting. The driver weaved, thinking he could swerve out of the way, but what he didn’t know-and what occurred to Alan-was that soldiers the world over are bad shots. There’s no point slowing yourself with evasive maneuvers, because there’s no greater chance of them hitting a straight line than a swerving one.

After about ten seconds, the driver fell onto his face, as if diving into the road, and his left arm flopped for five more seconds before it also dropped.

Alan’s soldier ran back and, breathing heavily, handed back his papers and started shouting. Alan stared back. The soldier slapped the roof of his car and pointed straight ahead. “You go! You go!”

Alan started up the car and drove ahead, past the corpse surrounded by five soldiers, all of whom seemed unsure what to do.

A tall Nigerian couple in colorful desert wear. Russians in tracksuits, singing. Australian tourists-spinsters-gawking. Drunk Argentineans waving soccer scarves. Austrian girls in traditional mountain dress, blond hair in Heidi braids, followed by short, immaculately dressed Sri Lankans walking mute. American shoppers creeping into crowded hutongs. Red Guards on Tiananmen, looking out of their depth among the hordes of foreigners. The Bird’s Nest stadium, Gothic twisty modernism floating in a city of cubes. Painted cars, blaring horns, traffic police with white gloves waving desperately. Bicycles, thousands of bicycles.

Yet he kept thinking of a truck driver, and a left arm twitching.

He knew where he was going, but it was only noon. He drove carefully, taking in as much as he could before night fell and he would have to flee this place, never to return.

The problem with conspiracies-with functional ones, at least-is that each individual is only responsible for one small part of the overall plan. Trust is imperative. He had learned to trust the Youth League, even though their trust in him was misplaced. However, not even trust could ensure that the boy they had assigned to bring the truck of explosives into the city had succeeded. For all he knew, the dead driver he’d seen had been the one. So, more than trust, it took faith. Faith in events proceeding as planned, and the extreme faith that human error would not be an issue.

Of course, there wasn’t only one truck; there were four. Each would enter through a different compass point, and if only one made it through there would be enough munitions to complete their task: four buildings, simultaneously. Nothing so grand or impossible as the Bird’s Nest or the Great Hall, but important buildings that were nonetheless lightly guarded. Simultaneity was the key. “Like al Qaeda,” Li Qide had said, eager to show his knowledge, as if Osama bin Laden had invented the concept of parallel attacks.

There were at least three more like Alan, men with nothing more than guns and scopes who, like him, would wait in prearranged apartments across from the main targets in order to catch the survivors. Alan had insisted on this. “Bombs are passive,” he explained. “With this we show that the Youth League is not afraid to stay and fight. They won’t be expecting it.”

After an hour of battling traffic, he felt that he had absorbed enough of Beijing’s new face. He headed over to the district called Haidian.

It wasn’t easy finding the street, even with the help of Li Qide’s notations, but eventually he found the Haidian Theater, with its broad, flat face and Chinese characters running down the side, and followed Zhongguancun north, past the ring road, to reach a leafy street whose sign matched the pictograms on the map. The apartment, as promised, was painted green, and an open archway led to a courtyard, where he parked among a scattering of old cars. An old woman slowly crossed the courtyard, carrying a paper bag blackened by grease. He waited until she was gone, then reached under his seat for the wrench. He slipped out and sank to the concrete, his cramped legs shouting back at him, and slid as far as possible under the filthy car. He worked on the bolts and soon held the blackened catalytic converter shell in his hand. He pulled it out, got up, brushed off his clothes, and locked the car door. Carrying the long cylinder like an architect with his plans, he climbed the iron stairs to the fourth floor and used a key to open the door to number 41.

He looked around the small, dusty apartment, with its cracked-tile kitchen, carpets rolled up into logs against a wall covered in water stains, the decade-old television, and the windows that looked across the narrow street to view the front of another low apartment building that Li Qide had been shocked to find on his target list. “What is this?”

“It’s an office.”

“No, you have bad CIA maps, like when you blew up our embassy in Belgrade. That’s an apartment building.”

“This isn’t from maps, Li Qide,” he said, then stretched the truth. “It’s from direct observation. In the basement level is a special Guoanbu center.”

“But those are homes over it.”

“Why do you think they installed it there? It’s that important.”

“What do they do in this special center?”

“They plan murders around the globe.”

“For example?”

“I know of thirty-three.”

“You don’t want to share specifics?”

“I’d be happy to,” he said and began to recite their names and the locations of their murders. “Sandra Harrison, Tallinn; Pak Eun, Daegu; Lorenzo Pellegrini, Cairo; Andy Geriev, St. Petersburg; Mia Salazar, Brasilia…”

Li Qide had accepted it, just as he’d accepted the other targets on the list: the recently completed Koolhaas-designed Central Television Headquarters on Guanghua Road, the Dongchen branch of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau in the Daxing Hutong, and one Olympic venue, the main building of the Shunyi Aquatic Park.

It was one thirty, an hour before the moment. He unscrewed the pipe and laid out the rifle pieces. Outside, bicycles filled the street as people took care of last-minute errands before rushing home or to bars to watch the Games on television.

“It has to be before the Games,” Li Qide had said.

“The whole idea was to humiliate them on the world stage, wasn’t it?”

“That was before we knew you wanted to blow up an apartment building. No, we’ll do it a few hours before the Games start, so that the civilian deaths will be minimal.”

Not only were most people out of their apartments at this hour, but the crowds on the street would camouflage the young men and women with canvas backpacks full of C-4 who dropped them in calculated spots along the buildings’ walls. Even Alan, as he tested the scope by examining the perimeter of the building, had trouble keeping track of people. Nor could he find those telltale backpacks against the corners of the building, but with an hour to go he knew better than to panic.

He’d gotten the rifle together when the rat-a-tat on his door started and an old woman’s voice asked a hesitant, measured question. He ignored it, rechecking the scope, but the woman tapped again, then banged with her fist, prattling on and then, to his terror, trying the door handle. For an instant, he couldn’t remember if he’d locked it, but he had.

There was a pause, during which she perhaps considered her options, then she banged again, following with a grating Mandarin singsong-some kind of demand. There was a definite sense of entitlement to her unintelligible prattle.

He got up and placed the rifle inside a creaky wardrobe, then stood beside the door. He interrupted her stream with a “Wo ting bu dong”-I don’t understand.

Silence.

He gave up on his phrasebook Chinese and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Mandarin. Do you speak English?”

She began with a long, surprised, “Oooh,” then started up again, louder, angrier. He used the key on the door, pulled it open a crack, and as he moved his face to the opening the door crashed against him. It wasn’t the force of an old woman but of a young man’s boot. The handle struck him just below the sternum, knocking the air out of him as he stumbled back onto the floor, trying to catch air, and when he looked up at the four uniformed soldiers rushing in, shouting in mangled English for him to Stay dair! he saw the old woman between their forms, outside his door, against the railing, arms crossed tightly as if holding her old, heavy body together, and her face was filled with hate.

Then the bag was pulled over his head and they began to move.

He was dragged across concrete and dirt, thrown into a truck and driven through streets full of voices and car horns and smells of food that made him queasy, the stink of car exhaust and burning rubber, and then, surprisingly, the smell of fresh grass, and then concrete dust. Again he was dragged, this time into a building and up stairs, before being thrown onto a floor. The hood was removed, and he blinked in the sudden light of an overhead bulb, slowly adjusting to the sight of a small, dirty, windowless room. Concrete walls, concrete floor and ceiling. The soldiers left him there, then closed and locked a simple wooden door.

After about fifteen minutes, he still hadn’t moved from his awkward position on the floor, and he started to laugh. His whole life, he thought, had led to that apartment window and that rifle. It was funny, really, that something you’d worked your whole life toward could be so easily made pointless.

There were tears, too, and he knew he really had spent too long with those amateurs in the mountains. It was the same old story. One or two of them had been letting the police know everything, and they had all made the long journey to Beijing only to reach an ambush. No one had made it through. The mistake had not been theirs, for this sort of thing had to be expected. The mistake had been his, giving them an operation he knew they weren’t ready for, and the whole folly had been the result of his desperation. The only reason he was still alive was because Xin Zhu would want some information from him. The others, the four in their trucks, the other three with their rifles-they were dead. The others who had been assigned to support the operation were probably dead, too, or soon would be. Twenty? Thirty? Thirty-three?

His hysteria had ebbed by the time a soldier opened the door and Xin Zhu came inside and told the soldier to leave them alone.

He really was enormous. All the reports had said this-Henry Gray had talked on and on about it, and Andrei Stanescu had been in awe of it-but that didn’t prepare him for the way the Chinaman seemed to fill the small room, making Alan feel as if he should press himself against the wall. Yet the anger kept him from showing anything. Thirty-three spots turning from red to blue encouraged him to climb to his feet, step forward a little, and consider how to take the man down with his hands. It was possible, and once he’d even done such a thing in a pomegranate orchard west of Kandahar in the Arghandab district. It had been hard and long and brutal, but he’d done it and after getting sick in the dirt he’d slept that night without dreams. Anything was possible.

Perhaps aware of how he was making Alan feel, Xin Zhu didn’t come close. He remained standing at the door and regarded him with resignation. Then he said, “You’re a lucky man.”

“Not as lucky as you, apparently.”

Xin Zhu didn’t bother replying to that. He said, “The bombs have been tracked and disposed of. Your comrades have been rounded up. Your little operation has been swept clean.”

“Yet here you are. A chancy move.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about myself. Not regarding you, at least. The men on the other side of this door will hurt you before you could ever hurt me.”

It didn’t sound like a bluff.

Xin Zhu said, “Before you go, I wanted to meet you. I wish I could apologize, but we both know I wouldn’t mean it. I did as I thought best at a certain moment, and it’s the nature of things that we have no choice but to live with the repercussions of our actions. I’ll be living with mine for years to come. You’ll probably have to do the same.”

Philosophy in a cell, Alan thought. “Enough, okay? We’re not here to make friendly. Just get it over with.”

Xin Zhu nodded, looked a moment at his fat fingers, then said, “The favors are finished. I’m not going to live my life giving things to him.”

“Who?”

“He hasn’t earned it.”

“Who?” Alan asked again, but Xin Zhu wasn’t interested in explaining anything. He turned and opened the door and walked slowly out without another word. As he was shutting the door, though, Alan noticed that the corridor beyond it was completely empty. Xin Zhu had been bluffing after all.

By the time they came for him, he’d spent hours going through everything again. He saw his mistakes, saw how his emotions had gotten the best of him, but perhaps it was his military training that convinced him that regrets are to be buried. That which cannot be changed should not be changed. More philosophy in a prison cell. He did not think about what would come next, for that, too, could not be changed. Xin Zhu had made his decision, and everything else was beside the point.

One thing remained with him: his belief that when he was finally declared dead, either with or without the evidence of a corpse, Penelope would suffer the most, and he wished he could send word to her. He wished he had at least asked Xin Zhu for that.

Three men in plainclothes came for him. Two were armed with pistols, while the third only led the way through what he now saw was a bare apartment building. Outside, a nighttime field, the broken teeth of new buildings rising not so far away. The building he’d been in, he now saw, was an unfinished ten-story. Off to the left, over the city, he saw a distant display of fireworks opening the Olympic Games.

They drove him around the city, where the traffic was sparse. Not caring anymore, Alan asked the men if someone was videotaping the Games for them. He asked in English, French, German, and Arabic but received no reply.

Another field, a dirt road rough with holes, and a white twin-engine plane on a hidden runway. His three guides left him at the bottom of the stairs and drove off, and only as he was climbing toward the hatch did he truly understand that he wasn’t going to die. A large, heavily muscled black man was waiting for him.

The man never introduced himself, but he was friendly. He offered Alan a drink and served the water Alan asked for with a modest smile. He had an African accent that Alan couldn’t place, but when he asked the man said, “I’m from the dark continent. That’s all you need to know.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

The man smiled in a way that made him want to laugh. “Strap yourself in.”

While they were airborne, he washed as best he could in the small bathroom, then accepted a charcoal suit and pink tie that fit him perfectly.

He never saw the pilots, and when they landed in Hong Kong, the cockpit door remained shut. The man led him down to the tarmac, and they crossed to another twin-engine, a gray Lockheed Martin with French markings. The procedure there was the same-this time, a plate of salmon and mixed vegetables was offered-and he never saw these pilots either.

By then, morning had risen, and he could chart their movement westward over water and mountains. When they descended again it was to a runway half-obscured by red sand in what he thought from his vague navigation might be Pakistan. When he asked where they were, his host smiled and said, “You know? I’m not entirely sure myself. But I think we’d better get on the next one before it leaves without us.”

The next plane was larger, an Airbus A320, with more than a hundred seats, but, as before, they were its only passengers. This time, Alan slept for a few hours before his guide woke him with a gentle shake of the shoulder. “We’re here.”

When he looked out the window, he realized they had already landed on a strip of old runway lined with overgrown grass and boulders. Around them were mountains. Instead of another plane, a red, windowless van awaited them, and it had Italian plates. Two grimy-looking men sat in the front with the engine idling, and he and the African got into the rear through a sliding door on the side. There were two benches, one against either side, and a wall between them and the drivers. When the man closed the door, they were in blackness. The blackness began to move.

“It’ll be a long trip,” he heard the man say. “Just try to bear it in style, okay?”

“Yet you still don’t want to tell me where we’re going?”

“He prefers security over comfort.”

“He?” Alan said, thinking of the he to whom Xin Zhu wanted to give no more favors.

“Just a few hours,” said the man; then a small light illuminated the dirty interior as he turned on his telephone. The man made a call, saying in French, “We’re on our way.” Pause. “Yes. Everything.” Pause. “Okay.” He hung up and, back in darkness, said, “He wants you to know everything’s fine. I’m supposed to make sure you know that. Don’t be scared.”

“Why does he care what I feel?” Alan asked after a moment.

“I don’t know if he does, but he seems to think that you’re very good at escaping if you want to.” Pause. “Is that so?”

“Probably the only thing I’m good at.”

As promised, the drive did take a long time-more than four hours-and he felt the van shake over every bump and pot hole along the way. Sometimes they sped down highways, while other times they slowed for traffic, perhaps in cities, and by the time they finally stopped his legs were asleep. The man said, “Are we ready?”

Alan punched at his tingling thighs. “Sure.”

The man pulled open the side of the van and stepped out. Alan squinted painfully, raising his hand to stop the flood of sunlight. All was white for a moment, then it faded to reveal a bank called BHI on a slice of stone sidewalk. “Come, please,” said the man, reaching out a hand.

Alan didn’t want to touch anyone, so he stepped down on his own and smelled water in the air. To the right and left an old European street ran wobbly along the edge of a harbor, and only when the man took him to a carved door beside the bank, the van now fleeing to expose buildings on the other side of the water, did he recognize that he was in Geneva.

His guide rang a bell and waited until it buzzed before pushing in and leading Alan up a narrow flight of stairs. A landing with two doors, then another flight of stairs. They took five sets of stairs to the top level, and on the way up another figure trotted down. As he neared in the semidarkness Alan had to squint to make out the face. When he did, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. The man said, “Hello, Alan.”

“Hoang,” Alan said, catching his breath. “What are you doing here?”

Tran Hoang placed a hand on his shoulder, reminding him of his sentimental question in Ferndale. Is that what you have with your wife? Then he was gone, and the pain in Alan’s chest spread like a cardiac arrest before fading. Hoang, he suspected, was the reason Zhu had been prepared for him.

At the top, there was only one door. The African knocked on it, and a familiar voice said, “Come in.”

Even though he could place the voice, he was still unprepared for the sight of Milo Weaver standing, just beyond a cramped foyer, in a living room full of sunlight. Around him, on the floor, were boxes full of files, and more files spread in a mess across a coffee table, a sofa, and two chairs as well as resting on top of a small television. A radio in the corner of the room was quietly playing French pop music. Milo didn’t seem aware of the incongruity of the scene as he walked quickly over, saying, “Thanks, Dalmatian,” and grabbed at Alan’s hand, shaking it. “It is good to see you in one piece.”

The black man-Dalmatian-said, “The street’s covered,” as he withdrew to the door.

“Good,” Milo said over Alan’s shoulder. “We’ll have this cleaned up by midnight.”

Dalmatian left the apartment.

“Come on,” Milo said, pulling Alan into the room. “Sorry about the mess.” He cleared one of the chairs, then guided him to it. Alan felt like an automaton, having over the last twenty-four hours only made moves dictated by others. Milo said, “Drink?”

Alan nodded.

Milo got up and went to a cabinet-also covered with files-and opened it to reveal a row of glasses and a lush variety of alcohols. After a month in the forests of Guizhou, Alan felt guilty sitting in the same room as them. Milo took out a limited edition Macallan, blew out the insides of two tumblers, and soon they were each holding a finger of amber liquid, neat. “To…” Milo began, then shrugged. “To.” He tapped Alan’s glass and sipped at his own.

Alan drank his in one swallow. Against the far wall, wide windows framed the not-so-distant mountains.

“Okay,” Milo said, grabbing the bottle and refilling Alan’s glass. He set the bottle on the floor and shifted enough folders on the sofa to make room to sit. He settled down and said, “Don’t ask, Alan. Don’t ask anything. I’ll just tell you what I can, and by then you’ll be ready to ask your questions.”

Alan nodded, dumb.

“The only thing you really need to know is that he was ready for you. That was necessary. If he hadn’t been, you would be dead now. I hope that’s clear.”

“Who told him?”

“Wait,” Milo said, pointing. “What you did to me and my family was unforgivable, but Hoang has tried to argue your case. He’s been partly successful. I understand why you made your mistakes. Irwin, Collingwood, and Jackson kept you in the dark, and from your perspective, there was only one way to finish this. Listen and believe: You were wrong. Xin Zhu is in a worse place now than if you had killed him.”

“He looked all right to me.”

“He’s not,” Milo said, all signs of pleasure gone from his features. “He’s no longer in control of anything, least of all himself. And when the time comes, if it comes, he can be finished off with a simple leak of information. But it’s not time for that yet.”

Anger slipped into Alan’s stomach, mixing with the hot whisky. “People are dead, Milo. Dozens probably. Because you told him. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“No one’s going to be killed,” Milo said, shaking his head. “I have assurances.”

“Assurances? Assurances? Are you really so naive?”

“Calm down, Alan.”

Alan had been calm for too long. He’d been shuttled from one end of the planet to the other; his dreams had been smashed, the dreams that had justified his betrayal of so many people; and the world as he knew it was gone. Now, he was faced with this smug man who believed that, because of all these files, he understood everything, but he was wrong. Milo Weaver couldn’t understand even a fraction of what he was feeling at this moment. “You

don’t know what you’ve done! You say you can bring him down with information. What information? From all these files?” he said, scanning a pile on the table. One label read AHMADINEJAD, MAHMOUD.

“No, this is all old intelligence. I’m catching up.”

“Catching up to what? And why the excellent fucking mood?”

Milo shrugged in a way that only infuriated him more, then said, “Penelope’s in Paris.”

The anger subsided. Now, he only felt cold, the whisky barely even there. “What? Why?”

“I asked her to stay there.”

“Is she all right?”

“Of course,” Milo said. “She’s with Tina and Stephanie.”

Alan set his glass on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and rubbed his face until stars appeared.

“Take it easy,” he heard Milo say. “They’re fine. Alex is with them.”

“Alex?” Alan said, then figured it out. “Alexandra.”

“We can go see them tomorrow,” Milo said. “Unless you don’t want to. I won’t pretend to know what’s on your mind, so it’s your decision. If you don’t want to see her, I’ll cover for you however you like.”

“Of course I want to see her.”

“Good.”

“But… why?” Alan asked, finally realizing the true source of his confusion. “Why are you helping me?”

“Aren’t we friends?”

Alan blinked at him. “I wasn’t sure.”

Milo took a breath and rocked his head. “I haven’t forgotten anything, if that’s what you’re wondering. I’ve got a lot of things going on now, and I don’t think I can do it alone. Your help would go a long way toward repairing some of what you’ve done.”

“Help?”

“Help,” Milo repeated. “The question is, are you in or are you out?”

Alan stared at him.

“Don’t be scared. It’s a simple question.”

“In or out of what?”

Milo smiled, his heavy eyes brightening for an instant. “I’m asking if you’d like a job.”

Despite the smile, Milo wasn’t joking. Alan leaned back in his chair and turned to look out at the mountains. Clouds were moving in. On the radio, a French girl was singing a hit from 1965. Christ, but he was tired.