Red Cell

CHAPTER 4

The evening was warmer than average for a Beijing winter, ten degrees Celsius, which had brought the tourists and lovers out in force. Crowds were always expected on such pleasant nights in the Shichahai neighborhood north of Beihai, where the bars and lakes clustered. Pioneer welcomed them. The crush of foreigners would stress the surveillance teams. If the MSS were following him, they would be looking for actions out of the ordinary, which became problematic as the mobs of alien visitors grew in size, with every person looking and acting far out of the Chinese view of ordinary. They engaged in innocent behaviors that drove paranoid security officers mad — taking photographs of government buildings, talking with PLA soldiers and bartering for pieces of their uniforms, wandering down little-used side streets and alleyways outside the usual tourist lanes. In this locality, the MSS would have to ignore those who appeared ordinary, and Pioneer had never harbored any illusions that his appearance was more than that. It was nature’s one blessing in support of his true profession. So he sat on his park bench, content to watch the water and bore anyone watching him. His operational act for the night was finished. There would be nothing for them to see now and it was always an easy thing for Pioneer to lose himself in his own thoughts.

Some nights he wished that they would come for him. It was a miserable thing, being a traitor to one’s country for ideological reasons. Such men were found in every country, he suspected, and they all had the same idea in common, that they were fighting their own private revolutions against those who were the real traitors to the countries they loved.

A political revolution is a living animal, he thought, conceived in outrage, fed with anger, and born in blood more often than not. In its early life, there comes a moment when its parents must decide what kind of animal their child will be. Some are allowed to run free and become wild predators that can only be killed by rising tyrants. Others are restrained to become loyal guardians who protect their children’s lives and liberties until those children can protect themselves. Washington, Lenin, Mao, Gandhi, Castro, and Khomeini each raised their own, and those revolutions, like all things in nature, looked and behaved like their parents.

Pioneer had watched as the Second Chinese Revolution was killed during delivery by its grandparents on June 4, 1989, in the streets around an open ground called Heaven’s Gate — Tiananmen Square.

Pioneer had been a student then. In the spring of 1989, the Iron Curtain in Europe was crumbling, rusted out from the inside by corruption and a half century of oppression. The Soviet Union, having built the Warsaw Pact through violence, was forced to watch its handiwork come apart at the political welds and economic rivets. The Chinese leaders in Zhongnanhai were determined to avoid the Russians’ mistakes.

The students had to come mourn Hu Yaobang, a reformer purged by the Party two years before his death. On the eve of his funeral in April, a hundred thousand people came to the square and many never went home. When Gorbachev came to China that May to discuss his programs of perestroika and glasnost, the student leaders anxious for democracy saw a singular opportunity to push their cause on the party elders. For his part, Deng Xiaoping wanted the world to see a summit where the two great Communist powers were going to close ranks. He opened Beijing to the foreign media and they came with their portable satellite dishes and microwave links by the hundreds. It was a mistake. The student leaders began a hunger strike before Gorbachev’s arrival. They made their way to Tiananmen Square and before the day was over the number of strikers had grown to three thousand. Within days, over one hundred fifty thousand people filled the square, some protesting, some there only to see the protests, but even that was an act of courage.

Pioneer was one of the latter at first. He was not one of the true believers in the beginning. At first he came and went, not staying in the square but going home to his soft bed each night. But he did come back. The more he saw and heard, the more he began to believe. By the end, Pioneer was sleeping on the ground with the rest, chanting slogans during the speeches, and wondering whether he could become a leader in the movement. With no resistance from the government, it was easy to cultivate that seed of faith planted as a new convert to the cause.

It went on for weeks and the Politburo began to grow nervous. They knew a revolution when they saw one. Many of them remembered Mao’s revolution. Many of them had helped stage it. If Communism had drilled only one precept into their old, corrupt heads, it was that revolutions were inevitable when the masses were oppressed by the bourgeoisie, which the party leaders had become. Now they were losing control of everything in full view of their own country and the world. Protests were emerging in other cities far from Beijing, and it seemed like the whole world was behind the students. The Politburo’s meetings devolved into vitriol and invective.

The crowd in Tiananmen Square surged to over one million.

The party declared martial law in Beijing. The protests in the other cities were smaller and easily handled, but the Tiananmen Square mob refused to disperse. Journalists were banned from the square and forced to stop their broadcasts. The students were ordered to evacuate. The PLA ordered divisions into the city, totaling more than one hundred eighty thousand soldiers.

The students built barricades to stop vehicle traffic around the square. Where they couldn’t build barricades, they lay down in the roads. The PLA responded with tear gas. Pioneer still remembered how his own eyes and mouth had burned when a canister had landed near him, a million needles in his throat pushing out. He had picked it up and thrown it back at the soldiers but not before inhaling a full dose of the gas. He had gagged his breakfast onto the concrete. He had wanted to claw his own eyes out of his head as his lungs burned, a feeling that was refreshed every time he drew breath.

His new friends held him on his feet. One, Jianzhu, was a student from Qinghua University like himself, a senior in the school of journalism who thought that facts could change the world. Another, Changfu, was a Foxconn drone who had worked the assembly line and walked out, giving up his job for the revolution. There will be better jobs when there is a better China, he said. He had almost no education and no money, but his faith in the future was infectious. A third, Xishi, was a beautiful girl two years younger than Pioneer, a talented calligrapher who taught him a bit during the boring stretches sitting on the Tiananmen cobblestones. It was a strange little group they formed. Pioneer knew they would never have met if not for the protests, and the pressure of Tiananmen began to forge that bond that soldiers built on the battlefield.

The stalemate held. The Politburo and the students each squabbled amongst themselves as to the next move. The threat of military force seemed to fade, and over the long days the number of protesters dwindled. The students finally decided it was time to go home and settled on June 20 as the day to walk away.

The great irony of the Tiananmen Square massacre was that the party decided to use force to break up a protest that was in its waning days.

Mao once said that political power flowed from the barrel of a gun, and the party held that gun. On June 1, it declared that the students were engaged in a counterrevolutionary plot against the state. The order was given: the PLA and the People’s Armed Police were to clear Tiananmen Square by any means necessary.

Soldiers began moving through Beijing to the square, and the citizens of Beijing flooded into the streets, throwing rocks and debris at the marching formations. The Twenty-Seventh and Thirty-Eighth Armies fought their way to the square, arresting and killing citizens. Mobs erupted, pulling soldiers into them and tearing them to pieces. Students threw Molotov cocktails, and PLA vehicles burned in the street, filling the air with the smoke and stench of burning rubber, but flaming vodka bottles are a poor match for machine guns. The soldiers turned their weapons on the crowd and fired with abandon.

Pioneer heard later that PLA troops had even fired on other army units that got in their way. With tens of thousands running in all directions, neither the student leaders nor the army commanders had been able to maintain order. The battle raged for three days and it was a slaughter. At least hundreds died, maybe thousands. If the party had ever tallied a count, it hadn’t made it public, and Pioneer had never been able to find it even in the secret records.

To his unending shame, Pioneer had fled the chaos. He’d never found comfort in the thought that thousands of others did the same thing.

He remembered the supersonic crack of one bullet that passed close to his head and the wet noise it made as it punched through Xishi’s soft body. It severed her aorta and spilled the teenager’s blood in great gushes onto the cobblestones. A second round took Jianzhu’s face and life in the same instant with a gory display that had cost Pioneer at least a year’s sleep over the years since he’d seen it. The last time he saw Changfu, the older man was rushing toward PLA soldiers, who raised their guns, and then the mob blocked Pioneer’s view. His nerve and faith broke in that instant and he abandoned his friends on their field of battle.

The PLA lines broke and the protesters flooded the streets. Soldiers started firing in self-defense to protect themselves from a mob that was far beyond obeying orders. Pioneer had jumped over the fallen bodies of trampled soldiers and revolutionaries alike, even climbed over a tank to get out.

The protest was broken. The PLA controlled Tiananmen Square and the streets of Beijing.

The authorities never identified Pioneer as being present in Tiananmen Square. The party could never identify everyone who had been a part of the event, but that wasn’t considered a problem. It didn’t need to punish everyone. True leadership is a rare skill; they only had to punish those who had shown that talent. Many of the student leaders had died in the battle, and the party hunted the rest for years after. The government handed out lengthy sentences to many after trials that lasted only hours.

Unarrested, unmolested, Pioneer’s cowardice had bought his life and freedom when his friends’ bravery had bought them prison and death.

Two years later, Pioneer earned his Qinghua University degree, and the day before the ceremony, the MSS summoned him to a meeting. At first he had thought that the party had finally connected him to the protests. It took him a moment to realize that had it been so, the People’s Armed Police would have dragged him from his apartment instead of issuing him a polite request, really an order, for a private meeting.

The party didn’t know about his part in the protests, but it did know about his then-rare skill with computers. Qinghua University was China’s MIT. The school offered guanxi, personal connections and influence, more potent in China than Harvard could offer graduates in America, and the faculty had connections to people who needed to solve certain military problems. The Americans had just finished a war in Iraq using precision bombs, stealth planes, and other weapons whose efficiency frightened the PLA. The Iraqis had assembled the world’s fourth-largest army, supplied it with Soviet equipment, and trained it in Soviet military doctrine, very much like the PLA’s own forces. The United States tore that army to shreds in weeks and suffered almost no casualties doing it. Computers had changed warfare to a degree that the PLA and the MSS had not appreciated before. Guns in large numbers weren’t enough, and that was a problem that needed rectifying.

Listening to the MSS bureaucrat talking about the glorious career he would have in the service of the party that had gunned down his friends, Pioneer wanted to come across the desk and choke the man. Then, to his shame, the emotion passed, his cowardice reasserted itself, and he agreed to the request he was not free to turn down anyway. The conversation ended and he left the office.

Perhaps his dead friends had talked to him or maybe the unknown God he’d read about in Western books had whispered to his soul. Whatever the source, a thought entered his mind. There would be a better time and way to exact revenge than killing a bureaucrat who could be replaced without a second thought. He had to learn patience and recognize that revenge truly was a dish best served cold.

The first contact had been the most difficult part. Pioneer spent his first years building his career as a model servant, which earned him the party’s permission to attend conferences abroad. They were so anxious to learn about new computer technologies coming from the West that it did not require much prodding. On one trip to Tokyo, he slipped away from his handlers and translators during a keynote address attended by a few thousand programmers and made his way unseen from his hotel to the US embassy, where he offered his services to the CIA. They were suspicious of him, of course. “Walk-ins,” people motivated by conscience to volunteer themselves as spies to a foreign power, made the best assets. But often they were “dangles,” double agents being held out like bait on a hook. However, the chief of station was a bold man willing to gamble. It took them more than an hour to find someone who spoke Mandarin, but the COS needed less than ten minutes to judge that the anger in the young Chinese man suggested he could be authentic. The station chief himself had divorced an adulterous wife the year before and knew that true agony of the soul is not easily faked.

A young CIA case officer named Clark Barron contacted Pioneer on his return to Beijing. The early requests he made were simple and small and Pioneer filled them without question or complaint. Every successful brush pass was a victory, every dead drop or package delivered through a cutout was a knife in the party’s back. He learned the use of simple disguises and microfilm, then digital cameras and encryption. He became methodical and never took a stupid gamble. Barron spent five years teaching him tradecraft, and Pioneer was a brilliant student.

At the same time, the MSS promoted him. The scope of Pioneer’s access to the most secure networks increased, which he reported to the case officers who had succeeded Barron. In return, they expanded the scope of their requests to him. When September 11, 2001, came, Pioneer feared that the CIA would forget about him in their zeal to hunt terrorists, but the pace of requests never slackened. His case officers never told Pioneer that CIA considered him their most productive asset in a Communist country since Oleg Penkovsky in the 1960s. The MSS and every other body it touched, including the Politburo Standing Committee itself, was hemorrhaging secrets in a steady gush to the West.

Twenty-five years came and went and he still hadn’t found peace. His friends still haunted him. Pioneer hadn’t set foot in Tiananmen Square in all that time, but he pressed on for the cause his friends had started there. If he had earned nothing else, the cowardice had been burned out of his soul. So, if he could not have peace, he had decided that his inevitable execution would be well deserved. There was an excellent chance that someday the PLA would stand him before a brick wall and shoot him. So be it. Maybe then his friends would accept him as worthy to stand with them again.

Pioneer stared out at the lake, shaken from his thoughts by a very cold gust of wind that got inside his coat. Time to go home. Time to start watching for surveillance again.

The man from the Fangshan had not reappeared. If he was from the Ministry of State Security, his superiors would have been fools to use him again, and they tolerated very few fools in the ranks; most were in the upper management, where a man’s political connections could protect him from his own stupidity and corruption. Pioneer was forced to deal with such people daily.

Last night’s aborted meeting nagged at him for reasons he couldn’t piece together yet, but missing a single meeting was not a significant problem. He was smart enough to know what information the Americans would request. The CIA would want to know whether the MSS had assembled a list of the men and women detained in Taipei, which were MSS officers and assets, which were not, and what the MSS was doing to protect its other operations in Taiwan. The list hadn’t been hard to find and he’d left it in a package at the dead drop site.

Pioneer knew about the Taiwan arrests, of course. The People’s Daily had dutifully published the official line that the detained Chinese citizens were innocent victims caught in a dragnet of President Liang’s personal ambition and corruption and were not working for the security services. It was a lie, of course. He had the truth from internal sources, though even the common citizens without such access knew better. The Chinese mainland natives that the Taiwanese had arrested were exactly what President Tian had denied they were. Aside from the one dead American defense contractor, all the Taiwanese who had been arrested were bureaucrats and politicians, with a member of Taiwan’s own security services thrown in for good measure, and all had been considered excellent assets, several trusted as far as the MSS trusted any turncoats. The loss of one, a high-ranking aide to a minister in President Liang’s cabinet, was a disaster of the highest magnitude. MSS careers were ending and an unlucky few would be fortunate if they escaped prison terms levied in secret as punishment for incompetence. Losing an asset to the Taiwanese was embarrassing enough. Getting one killed while releasing some toxic chemical that killed locals and required a hazmat unit to clean up was a national humiliation. He didn’t know what the asset had been handing over to the MSS, but certainly the CIA would ask.

Tonight’s dead drop site was the bathroom of a small market known for its excellent stock of shellfish and superb mapodofu recipe. He had never used the location to pass a dead drop before and never would again. He had entered the market, ordered a half pound of prawns wok-seared in black bean garlic sauce with vegetables, and then stepped into the tiny one-stall bathroom and left a USB drive of encrypted files in a sealed plastic bag taped behind the gas heater. The remains of that dinner sat on the bench next to him.

Pioneer waited twenty minutes before standing to leave. He had given the MSS nothing to see. He was a humble government servant who had bought dinner and eaten it in a park where he could enjoy the rare warm sunset in winter. Still, he would run another surveillance detection route on his walk home as he always did. No matter how good the planning and careful the execution, any operation run long enough would suffer mistakes owed to chance. Pioneer had been an asset long enough for bad luck to finally get its turn to play in the game.

Mitchell was partial to the classier British term “dead letter box,” but dead drops were his preferred operation. Trying to intercept one was a counterintelligence nightmare and Pioneer had a talent for choosing good sites that gave his case officers the short time needed to retrieve a package even under surveillance. Beijing’s alleys were an embarrassment of riches that gave him time to spare to do his work, especially at night. Figuring out from a distance what a man is doing with his hands at a given moment was almost impossible without the sun’s help.

Mitchell gave himself better-than-even odds that someone was behind him tonight. The MSS hadn’t played rough this time, but one man had shown himself in two places far enough apart to reduce the chance that it was mere coincidence. Mitchell was tall enough that the crowds didn’t give him enough help, so he played with his adversaries, donning a hat, doffing his coat, changing his gross profile from time to time. His overcoat was black, his slacks charcoal gray, and there was no moon, so the shadows cast by buildings and parked cars swallowed him and spit him out every few seconds. Every so often he wandered directly under a streetlight to destroy whatever night vision a surveillance team had managed to preserve.

The little market was not so different from dozens of the stores where he had shopped at home in New York City. Fresh foods sat out on open stands, boxed foods on shelves, cooked meals behind long serving counters. Mitchell made his way through the aisle toward the back. Several men in rumpled clothing sat on bar stools before the counter or a few round tables, eating hot food and reading newspapers. Mitchell couldn’t read the Chinese script handwritten on an old chalkboard pinned to a ceiling rafter that published the menu, but he’d been here enough to know the fare and prices.

The cook was an elderly man named Zhang Rusi. The American had gone out of his way to make friends with Rusi, and not for operational reasons. The old man’s culinary talents were more worthy of the Fangshan than this ramshackle eatery. Rusi had formal training but had abandoned that career to run the market that his family had owned for three generations. The other men sitting around the counter were childhood friends poor enough that they couldn’t afford better than the free food he shared with them. He cared nothing for politics and loved Americans. He had taught Mitchell the game of mahjong, the tuition for which was English lessons, and their matches were still one-sided. Rusi was clever and refused to play below his skill, but the cook appreciated the humility the younger man demonstrated in defeat. Mitchell was improving quickly, and Rusi would be proud when he finally lost a match to the American someday.

“Carl, good evening. How are you?” His accent was harsh but Mitchell had nothing but respect for a man in his seventies who was willing to tackle English as a second language.

Mitchell replied in Mandarin. “Hai hao. Ni ne?” I’m well. And you?

“Hai hao. Will you have dinner with us tonight?”

“I regret that I cannot,” Mitchell replied, keeping his language simple, slow, and formal. Rusi’s comprehension was still lacking. “I would like a bowl of your mapodofu to go, please.”

Rusi nodded his head. He held up a handful of fingers. “Five minutes. And you come tomorrow and play or it will be ten minutes.”

Mitchell smiled and nodded. “I will.” Rusi nodded back, his head dipping low, and threw black bean paste and chopped scallions into his wok.

Mitchell walked past the mahjong tables to the tiny restroom hidden behind a high row of stocked shelving. It was a dirty closet that barely offered a tall man room to squat over the toilet without bumping his knees against the wall. The dark space was lit by a dim bulb, for which Mitchell was grateful. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to see the room under full light lest he lose his appetite. It was hardly Rusi’s fault. The room was as old as the rest of the building, grubby to the point that no amount of scrubbing would ever make the worn concrete and tile floor look clean again.

Mitchell closed the door and reached behind the heater. He felt nothing, suppressed a curse, reached into his coat, pulled out a tiny Maglite and turned the head until it lit. The flashlight had a red lens that dimmed the bulb, though he doubted that anyone outside would have seen any light leaking out from the door. He pointed the Maglite down behind the grating.

Mitchell froze. He swept the beam through the space again and confirmed that he hadn’t just missed the expected package in the low light. The space was empty. He killed the Maglite and sat in the near dark to think.

Pioneer had given the signal that he had loaded this dead drop. The chalk mark on the alley wall had been clear and Pioneer wouldn’t have drawn it before completing his half of the operation. There had been no miscommunication about which site he’d used, but there was nothing here.

The possible explanations were limited. The first was that someone had removed the package. Either that person worked for Chinese security or they did not. If they did, the MSS could be waiting outside the bathroom to grab Pioneer’s handler. If that person did not work for the government, there was an excellent chance they wouldn’t know what they had removed, the package wouldn’t make its way into government hands, and Mitchell would get to walk out of the market with his dinner in hand. In either case, this site was compromised and Mitchell would never play mahjong with Rusi again, or even see him.

The second possibility, that Pioneer was working for the MSS, was worth a moment of panic. The arrest of a station chief would be embarrassing and end Mitchell’s career, but the finest Chinese asset in the Agency’s history turning out to be a double agent would be disastrous on a scale that he wasn’t paid enough to even consider.

The tiny bathroom suddenly felt smaller and he didn’t want to open the door, as though the flimsy wood could protect him from anyone standing outside. He stopped his breathing to listen and did not hear voices of any kind, but that did nothing to reassure him. Had the men playing games outside simply stopped talking, lost in thought over some brilliant lie of the tiles? Could he have heard them anyway? He’d been stupid for not paying attention to that detail the other nights he had come here. Or had Rusi’s friends been hushed by the sight of armed soldiers moving into their private little game parlor? Mitchell could not see the shadows of feet through the small crack at the bottom of the door.

He cleared his mind and forced himself to think about nothing. Lord, help me to accept the things I cannot change, he thought. Mitchell stood, flushed the unused toilet, and washed his hands anyway. He faced the door and turned the knob. The light flooded in.

There were no soldiers, no plainclothes MSS officers. The old men playing mahjong didn’t even look up from their tiles as the bathroom door creaked on its ungreased hinges.

Rusi waved Mitchell over. The mapodofu was ready, boxed to go, and the elderly cook held the brown paper bag out to the man.

“Thank you, Rusi.” For everything. I’m sorry, my friend.

“It is my pleasure, Carl. I look forward to our game tomorrow.”

“I will be here,” Mitchell lied, and it hurt. Good-bye, Rusi. He took his dinner, paid the cashier at the door — Rusi’s granddaughter, attractive but a Chinese national and too young for him, both factors preventing her from becoming a temptation — and made his way out to the street. He felt tired. Another friend lost to his job. That list was getting long.

What just happened? he wondered.

James Hsueh tossed his cigarette stub onto the gravel, where it glowed briefly in the dark before fading. The engineer slipped his wrench into his toolbelt, then fumbled for the diagnostic laptop that he’d left on the ground after putting another tobacco stick between his lips and lighting it with the last bit of butane in his Zippo. Last night’s storm had brought lightning with it and one of the flashes had struck a substation tower. It hadn’t worried him at the time. A lightning strike wouldn’t damage the equipment while the arresters were working. The surge arresters saved the voltage transformers, but the mainframe insisted that the power flow was now twitchy. He didn’t believe it despite what the computers insisted, and so he had to make a trip to the station to see the equipment for himself.

James finally admitted to himself that he really just wanted to be home. He didn’t mind the overtime, but there was a young lady in the picture now. He’d met Ju-hsuan at the Taipower human resource office the month before when he’d marched in to argue about a discrepancy in his paycheck. The woman’s smile had disarmed his venom in an instant. He hadn’t thought about anything else for a week until he finally went back and asked her to dinner.

The engineer stared down at the laptop screen in the darkness. Still with the power fluctuations, it said. He made a rude gesture toward the machine that refused to let him leave for the night and leaned back against the steel pylon behind him. He would finish the cigarette to buy time to think before he made another move.

The high-pitched sound caught his ear for a brief second. He looked around, then up, but could see nothing. The lights of Jincheng washed out virtually all the stars and the moon was absent. The substation lights prevented him from seeing most anything beyond the chain-link perimeter fence. Still, he looked back to the street beyond, trying to identify the sound. Nothing was moving inside the perimeter. He was quite sure that he was alone.

The explosion erupted fifty meters behind him at the other end of the substation, far enough that the structures between James and the compression wave gave some protection, but not enough. The wall of air was supersonic for an instant, then slowed and began breaking up as it passed through the now-crumbling obstacles presented by the substation. The part of the remaining wave that struck James blew out his eardrums before it picked up his body and threw him against the chain-link fence along with the shrapnel created from the now-shredded metal parts of the station. His larger bones shattered and his eyes were saved only because he was facing away from the blast.

The fence collapsed in a fraction of a second, and the engineer resumed his own tumble along the ground for another half-dozen meters. The largest of the flying razors had missed him while he was pinned off the ground, but a few dozen smaller pieces tore into his back and legs. Surgeons would remove them in a few hours in a failed effort to save his life. The pieces that would kill him were the six that punctured his lungs. He was fortunate that he wasn’t conscious to feel them ripping into the soft tissues in his chest cavity.

The heat came next, hot enough to curl the paint off the few substation signs that were bolted to the pieces of metal infrastructure still holding together. The exposed edges of the shredded pylons and equipment casings closer to the expanding crater glowed brilliant in a second as they turned white hot. The fireball, cooling as it rushed through the air, had dropped in temperature enough that the engineer didn’t catch fire when it reached his prone body. It was hot enough only to blister his skin and burn off the exposed hair on his head. It also cruelly preserved his life by fusing the cloth of his overalls into the open holes in his back, cauterizing the exterior wounds and saving him from bleeding out.

James Hsueh opened his eyes a moment later for the last time. He could hear nothing. He had just enough time to notice that the Kinmen skyline was entirely dark before the merciful pain knocked him unconscious again for the last time.