An American Spy

6

In the morning, he sent word to He Qiang that Liu Xiuxiu should visit a photo booth, then had Shen An-ling personally buy tickets on two separate flights to Washington, D.C., under names connected to passports they kept in their floor safes. For the rest of the morning, they discussed the little that Zhu had learned from Hua Yuan and the information Shen An-ling had collected on Leticia Jones. The story of Jones meeting Abdul Khalik could not be verified by any of their sources, but Wu Liang had helpfully sent the details of their meeting in a barren workers’ bar, originating from a low-level ministry informer: A black woman talking foreign-accented Mandarin to a long-haired man clutching tea, a man the source later ID’d from ministry mugshots.

Although Leticia Jones had evaded surveillance after the meeting in Georgetown, since Friday Zhu’s agents had been tracking the movements of Alan Drummond. There was little to report. On Friday, Drummond had lunch a block away from his Manhattan condo at the Parlor Steakhouse with a man named Hector Garza (that was the name he’d given the restaurant’s maitre d’). A single clear photograph had been taken of the man as he exited the restaurant, but no positive match had been made yet.

“On that same evening,” Shen An-ling said, “he and his wife, Penelope, went to 203 Garfield Place.”

Zhu chewed his lower lip unconsciously. The last time he’d heard that address, he’d been in Berlin, saying it aloud to a Moldovan man whose daughter had been killed by the Central Intelligence Agency. “You mean he met with Milo Weaver.”

“It was a couples’ dinner, but the two men went to the roof for a private talk. We have no way of knowing what they discussed.”

“And Weaver?” Zhu asked. “How is he?”

“Remarkably well. Andrei Stanescu is a terrible shot. He damaged Weaver’s small intestine, but not critically. A week in the hospital. He’ll be fine.”

Zhu thought about that a moment before voicing his thoughts aloud. “We can be sure that Alan Drummond is sharing his plans with Milo Weaver, but I don’t think we have to worry about Weaver, at least not yet. If I read him right, he won’t be interested in anything but convalescing in peace. I don’t think he really likes his old employers.”

“Still, we should keep an eye on him.”

“Oh, of course! Not at the expense of Drummond or his coconspirators, though. What occupies him these days?”

Shen An-ling scanned the sheet in front of him. “Looking for a job, apparently.”

“Good man,” said Zhu. “Something quiet.”

A little after ten that morning, Xin Zhu left the office in one of his employee’s cars and took the Fourth Ring Road south to the G106, straight into Daxing District. He followed some basic evasive maneuvers along the way, changing direction by bumping over cracked medians and shuttling over to alternate routes before returning to the main streets, so that what should have been a half-hour journey ran more than an hour. Finally, he reached a street with rows of middle-class apartment blocks six stories high. He Qiang’s apartment was on the top floor of one of the central buildings, and in the elevator, Zhu tried to decipher two thick-marker scribbles on the wall, graffiti tags. It was a relatively new phenomenon in Beijing, something he’d heard complained about at too many parties, but inside this rusting elevator he had the feeling that they brightened up the drab, functional machine.

When He Qiang let him into the apartment, he found the television playing another Bollywood tearjerker, and Liu Xiuxiu at a typewriter, practicing some code He Qiang had been teaching her. All the lighting here was artificial, for He Qiang had closed the blinds.

Liu Xiuxiu ceased her typing and came over with her head bowed, wearing jeans and a thin white blouse. She looked surprised when Zhu reached out to shake her hand. Then she relaxed, going to make tea as He Qiang shut off the television. Zhu, looking at his agent, pointed at the ceiling.

“Our first lesson,” He Qiang said as he handed over four passport photos of Liu Xiuxiu. “We cleaned the whole place.”

“Anything?”

A shake of the head.

“Good.” Zhu settled on the sofa and waited until the tea had arrived, then watched Liu Xiuxiu serve it with the grace of a courtesan. “Please,” he said when he realized she wasn’t going to sit with them, and patted the sofa. She settled down beside him, and he spoke slowly. “Liu Xiuxiu, the first thing you should understand is that you are here because you are, I believe, of equal value to any of my agents. Or as soon as you’ve gained some experience you will be. So, thank you for the tea, but do not feel it’s your role here to serve us. That is not how I run my section.”

Submissively, she nodded.

Zhu turned to He Qiang. “You will follow her to Washington and act as her support. She will have to make decisions on the ground, and unless you know for certain that she’s making a decision based on false information, you will back her up completely. Understood?”

He Qiang did understand.

“I’m going to America?” Liu Xiuxiu asked, then, embarrassed, bit her lips.

“You and He Qiang will be leaving tonight on separate flights. To Washington, D.C. A contact will set you up with a place to stay.”

“Sam Kuo?” asked He Qiang.

Zhu nodded. “He’s not ideal, but we’re pressed for time.” He turned back to Liu Xiuxiu and was pleased to find the doubt gone from her face. His instinct about this girl was not unfounded. “Once you’re settled, He Qiang will go to New York to begin a second part of the operation, but you will always be able to call him for advice, and after a few days he’ll return to Washington. By then, though, you should have made progress on your operation, which will be to seduce one of two men-both, if it’s possible-and gain information from them.”

She nodded but asked nothing. He wished that she would, because he preferred his agents to be curious, to demand to be completely informed, even when he was unable to tell them everything. He turned back to He Qiang. “You remember the Therapist?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll employ him full-time on this. Tell him it’ll be at least two weeks’ work, his regular payment plus a bonus if it goes well.”

“He’ll like that. The Therapist only speaks money.”

“You’ll get more details before your flight.”

He Qiang nodded, satisfied.

“Comrade Colonel,” said Liu Xiuxiu.

“Yes?”

“May I ask the purpose of this operation?”

“The purpose?”

She paused, her lips tightening. “I know the outline of my particular job, but may I know how it fits into your larger aims-and what those larger aims are?”

“No,” he said, but was pleased that she had asked. “You’ll focus solely on your operation. When He Qiang returns from New York, you will not question him about what he’s done. Is that understood?”

There was no sign of insult when she said, “Of course, Comrade Colonel.”

Zhu opened his briefcase, took out a folder with photographs, and spread them out on the table. Each was labeled with a name, some with more than one. “These are the players we know about. You’ll remember their faces and names, memorize the biographical details typed on the reverse side, and before you leave here at seven o’clock you’ll burn them.”

Liu Xiuxiu pushed the photographs around, pausing on Leticia Jones/Rosa Mumu. Zhu said, “That woman is extremely dangerous. If you do see her, do not engage. You report her presence to He Qiang.”

The other woman, Dorothy Collingwood, was lightly airbrushed in her official portrait, wiping away the soft wrinkles collected during her years in government service. The other two, Stuart Jackson and Nathan Irwin, sported large, false smiles. “I want you to focus on the men, of course. A week ago these three met with Jones and this man,” he said, pulling over another photo, “Alan Drummond. He’s the former head of a secret CIA office that we had a hand in destroying. What I want to know is the subject of their conversation. I know it concerned China, because Jones had just returned from a trip here, but I don’t know the details. It’s imperative to all of us that we find out.”

Though she seemed to comprehend the difficulty of the assignment, Liu Xiuxiu showed no hesitation. “Are the two men married?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “Married men are generally easier to seduce than single ones.”

He Qiang smiled at Zhu, as if to say, See what I told you?

“This man here,” Zhu said, sliding over a sidewalk surveillance photo of Hector Garza, who was darker than the others, with a narrow face, a small mustache, and black eyes, “is a question mark. We know he met with Alan Drummond in New York, but we don’t know who he is, or if he even has any connection to what we’re doing.”

“He could be a Tourist,” He Qiang pointed out. “We never had their pictures, just their codes.”

“Tourist?” asked Liu Xiuxiu.

Zhu wished He Qiang had kept his mouth shut, but it was too late. “Agents,” he told her. “Agents run by Alan Drummond’s old department. They called them Tourists. For a time, they were legendary.”

Liu Xiuxiu acted as if this were the kind of conversation she had every day. “May I ask what happened to the department?”

“We destroyed it,” Zhu said again, not willing to go into the details that might shake her faith in her new employer. He looked at He Qiang. “Your focus will be Drummond, and you’ll use the Therapist for this. We suspect that Drummond is the epicenter, so to speak, and once you’ve learned what he’s doing you have to be ready to act. I’ll get five more people to help you out.”

“Is Xu Guanzhong available?”

“I’ll find out.”

“Thank you.”

Zhu reached into his briefcase again and took out two plane tickets, marked with new names. “Someone will meet you at the airport with your passports.”

“Who’s this?” Liu Xiuxiu asked, reaching for a photo that was close to sliding off the edge of the table. In it, a man of about forty stared back with heavy eyes, below, the names Milo Weaver, Sebastian Hall, and Charles Alexander.

“One more question mark,” Zhu said. “Milo Weaver has been meeting socially with Alan Drummond, and he was another employee of the department. He was injured recently and should be out of the game, but given his close relationship with Drummond, we can’t know for sure. He Qiang will have to look into that as well.”

Liu Xiuxiu set the photo back down.

“Are you excited?” Zhu asked.

Liu Xiuxiu considered this, staring at Milo Weaver’s gloomy face. “I’m sorting through my feelings, Comrade Colonel.”

“How are they leaning?”

She smiled, then raised her eyes to meet his. “There is one thing I have no doubt of.”

“What’s that?”

“That I was right to change careers.”

“Why?”

“Because I was tired of serving only myself,” she said before averting her gaze.

Zhu let that sit a moment, then leaned closer, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Liu Xiuxiu, if all of China could speak such poetry as that, then we would be the greatest nation in history.”

At the office, he and Shen An-ling assembled a list of five agents to assist He Qiang in Manhattan, and though Xu Guanzhong was engaged in a long-term operation in Toronto, Zhu decided to bring him in as well. Later, after Shen An-ling had left for the airport with the finished passports, Zhu went back over the files. He started with the surveillance reports on Alan Drummond, then moved gradually back, so that he saw a man in reverse. An unemployed man moving backward into an office on the twenty-second floor of 101 West Thirty-first Street and watching, on computer monitors, the systematic killing of thirty-three of his agents, his Tourists, in all the corners of the globe. In this reversed life, Drummond’s misery fades as he watches the screen, so that after he’s seen the massacre he is a new man, full of confidence and even a lust for life. Like Zhu, he is married, and, like Zhu, he’s in love with his wife. Unlike Zhu, he has never had children, and that, perhaps, makes all the difference.

It was a year ago when Xin Zhu learned that his son, Delun, had been killed with other Chinese workers doing repairs on the Sudan pipeline from Leal to the Red Sea, and while he was barely able to comprehend his own emotions his instinct took over, and he began to adjust his sights. He aimed first at the wild riot of desert people who had attacked his son’s truck. Questions were asked-specifically, why. Their answer: the murder of their beloved cleric, Mullah Salih Ahmad, who had been agitating against Chinese companies digging into Sudanese sand and taking Sudanese oil. Zhu was in a position to know that China had had no hand in the murder. Who had? Not the al-Bashir government, because it knew the wrath his death would provoke. Then, with information provided by a source he’d acquired a few years before in the office of Senator Nathan Irwin, he learned that one particularly nasty department of the CIA had killed the cleric, in order to turn the populace against Chinese oil development. This action led directly to the death of Delun, Zhu’s only child.

Though he spent months taking aim, the actual shot was, like so many important things in life, not witnessed by him. He remembered sitting in his office, in this office, right under the portrait of Hu Jintao, wreathed in smoke from his Hamlets, waiting for word. Waiting for anything. The first word had come from Sam Kuo-“James Pearson has been caught.” This sentence told him that all the cards were finally on the table, and there was no reason to hold back anymore. By then, he had learned the whole Tourism communications procedure and knew precisely how to use it to his advantage. He ordered most of his office staff home, and in the nearly silent office, he told the remaining ones to send the first wave of text messages. Thirty-seven in all, one to each so-called Tourist. A go-code followed by the instructions to travel somewhere and kill someone-in each case, another Tourist-and to maintain complete silence until the job was finished.

He couldn’t depend on the Tourists to simply destroy themselves, though, so a second wave of messages went out to Zhu’s own agents, who had been waiting for days in their respective cities. Throughout the world, men and women who worked for the Expedition Agency stirred.

He was later fed reports that he spent days reading and rereading, for he had asked his people to give him all the details so that his imagination would not feed him lies. It was a necessary part of perpetual revolution, the reassessment and self-critique.

After nearly two months of intimacy with those reports, Zhu saw a street in Phnom Penh, where He Peng waited on Sisowath Quay. He was a twenty-eight-year-old whose parents both died soon after his birth in the 1981 Dawu earthquake, crushed by a concrete roof. The infant was dug out of the wreckage and transferred to the care of the state. Another life, and he would have grown up a farmer and probably never set foot outside the ever-shifting Sichuan province. Now, he was a young man who had traveled extensively, a young man with education and sharp wits, a man of the world with a Cambodian hotel key card in his pocket and a pistol hanging by a shoelace against the center of his back, its long suppressor tickling the base of his spine.

Guided by the details in his text message, He Peng had identified the American they referred to as #1 as he had entered the Amanjaya Pancam Hotel, then followed him inside. He Peng’s secondary target-#2-was on the second floor, waiting to kill #1.

He had tried to keep it simple for all of them. Each had a #1 and a #2. Each knew that his pair would initially try to kill one another, and each knew that his only job was to make sure that both Americans succeeded. Zhu had explained to some of them, “We are not committing the act, we are its midwives.”

In He Peng’s case, midwifery proved insufficient. When he reached the second-floor room, he discovered a closed door and voices behind it, speaking English. One, he could tell, was injured, while the other was tending the wound. He Peng waited. When a male voice said, “I’ll get more water,” and a faucet hissed loudly, he unlatched the pistol from under his shirt, then used the key card to open the door. Inside, he found a woman sitting on the floor, against the bed-Japanese, he guessed from her features, though all these people were in fact American-bleeding from the shoulder all over the carpet. She barely had time to register surprise before he shot her once through the neck, then once through the heart.

The faucet turned off, and the man he’d followed inside appeared holding a glass pitcher steamy with hot water. That was the first casualty, shattering as He Peng’s initial wild shot went through it and into the man’s liver. The man stumbled backward into the bathroom, and He Peng followed, catching him as he reached for a pistol on the wet counter. A shot to the chest threw him back against the toilet. Another to the head stopped him for good.

What did He Peng think at that moment? Did he only think of his service to the people, or did he, when faced with a man and a woman dead by his hand, think about Sichuan fields that could have been his to tend?

No, He Peng was a good boy, and that afternoon was the natural culmination of his life thus far. Zhu had less conviction when it came to Liang Jia in Vancouver, who had left a man bleeding in the West End, to be picked up by a kind stranger and brought to Vancouver General. It had taken a stern call from him to get her to leave the airport and head to the hospital to finish her job.

There had been one loss, Wang Shi in Buenos Aires, a mistake that was either Zhu’s or Wang Shi’s-he still wasn’t sure. All he knew was that while one target American, his #1, was found in a hotel room, his #2, whose work name was Jose Santiago, got out of Argentina. Wang Shi’s body was found by the police, beaten and shot once through the left eye.

Nearly two months later, he couldn’t help but picture them all again, hotel rooms and pistols in Phnom Penh, in Jerusalem and Buenos Aires, in Bern and Johannesburg and Delhi. He saw a drowning in Tehran, a hospital bed in Vancouver, another in Brasilia, and bodies in fields in Tashkent and Cairo and Moscow. He saw sudden falls from great heights in Mexico City, Seoul, Dhaka, and London. He saw dogs picking over corpses in Hanoi and Tallinn, and in Tokyo he saw a bloated dead woman in a sushi restaurant, killed after hours. He saw an explosion in Afghanistan. Each was its own story, and his curse was that he knew them all. Together they became a great, violent narrative, his hand guiding thirty-three murders across the planet.

Now, he worried as he got up from his desk and prepared to go home to Sung Hui, all those corpses were coming to find him. Yet he felt more alive than he had in months.