Olen Steinhauer - An American spy

He Qiang read carefully, then looked Zhu in the eyes before writing again. AGAINST YOU? Maybe. They’re looking at my wife.

Another stare. He Qiang had only met Sung Hui once, at an official gathering where he’d been assigned protection duty, but he’d been visibly taken by the girl. MAKES NO SENSE. It makes sense. We need to find out what kind of sense.

Sung Hui had left the television on when she opened the door for him that Sunday afternoon, and when he settled on the sofa, he was greeted by images of a collapsed middle school in Juyuan that had trapped nine hundred students. Government teams, with the occasional local, picked through the dusty crags, but a week had passed, and the energy the whole country had witnessed just after the earthquake was fading. A female commentator praised the resilience and strength of the Sichuan people.

His phone rang-it was Zhang Guo. “Xin Zhu, I hope you had a restful time in Shanghai.”

“Thank you, I did.”

“I’m afraid I’m walking into walls, though. Concerning tomorrow.”

“Well, it was worth a try,” Zhu said and realized that even this failure told him something important. If Zhang Guo couldn’t learn the details of a meeting that he, too, was scheduled to attend, it meant that Wu Liang was running it with an unusual level of secrecy.

“As for the other,” Zhang Guo said, referring to Leticia Jones, “I’ll need a few days.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then.”

Sung Hui came in with a platter of pork dumplings, apologizing as she turned off the television and the images of disaster. “I know it does no good,” she said, “but I can’t help watching. It makes my own worries insignificant.”

He didn’t like to hear that, even if it mirrored his own thoughts. “You have no worries.”

“Do you want to eat here?”

“I don’t think I can make it to the dining room.”

“Shanghai was difficult?”

He shook his head. “A weekend of reflection isn’t easy for someone as slow-witted as me.”

That provoked a musical laugh, and she settled next to him.

“The flight home was the problem. I should’ve bought two seats.”

“Next time you will buy two seats. You’ll bring me along. I’ll help you with your reflection.”

Like others, he had once been suspicious of this girl’s affection for an old, obese man, but he’d slowly discovered that these were the very characteristics that she enjoyed most. Sung Hai hated the boastful men her own age, and his size gave her a feeling of protection. What, then, had she seen in Delun? This was a subject she had avoided so many times that he was no longer able to ask the question, no longer wanted to. Truth is not always the way.

She pulled her legs up beneath herself and lifted the platter. Using a pair of porcelain chopsticks, she guided a dumpling to his mouth. It was delicious.

As she fed him, she recounted the two days they’d spent apart, which had been filled with drinks and dancing at Vics with a couple of girlfriends, unsuccessfully shopping for new rugs for the foyer, and worrying about Sichuan schoolchildren. During the periods in between, she was reading The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong, a bestseller about a Party official expelled for lying about his revolutionary parentage. “Do you know what he does?” she asked.

“What?”

A pause. Her eyes grew. “He tries to castrate himself!”

“Unbelievable!”

“I believe it,” she said. “You really should read it.”

“When I get time.”

“Have you ever had time?”

He exhaled, waiting for the inevitable.

“Time off,” she said. “Someplace with clean air and sun chairs. You can sit by the water and read Su Tong.”

Holding back a grin, he said, “I hear Trier is nice,” then coughed when she punched him in the ribs. Package tours to Karl Marx’s birthplace were advertised in agency windows all over Beijing.

“Oh!” She hopped up and went to a cabinet. “I forgot. I ran into Shen An-Ling at the store. He gave me this for you.” She opened a drawer and took out an unmarked brown envelope. Shen An-Ling had scrawled his signature across the seal. It hadn’t been opened.

Zhu kept a small office in the back of the apartment, and after thanking Sung Hui for the meal, he took the envelope, closed the door behind himself, and settled at the desk that overlooked the city from thirty floors up. It had been her idea to move into this Chaoyang District tower, and only she could have convinced him to willingly place himself so high up. He’d asked the most basic question- What happens if the electricity shuts down? — and she’d stared at him, as if she’d never experienced a power outage, which in Beijing was an impossibility. The problem was that she’d fallen in love with the apartment and, more particularly, the vision of the two of them floating above the city. How could he deny her that?

He tore open the end of the envelope and shook the letter into his palm. It was a short letter, written in an obscure naval code that dated from 1940, and after decoding it, he read it through twice. He paused, considering the revelations Shen An-Ling had assembled here, read it through again, then cracked open the window and used matches to light the envelope, the letter, and the decoded message. As they shrank, he placed them into an ashtray and lit a Hamlet, its strong scent filling the small room.

According to their sources, Leticia Jones changed to another name after landing in Cairo, then flew to London for a connecting flight to Dulles International in Washington, D.C. After two nights in the One Washington Circle Hotel, on Monday the twelfth, the same day as the earthquake, she went to a house in Georgetown owned by a real estate company called Living, Inc, and met with four people: Alan Drummond, former head of the Department of Tourism; Senator Nathan Irwin, Minnesota Republican; Dorothy Collingwood, ranking officer in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, department unknown; and Stuart Jackson, retired CIA, Directorate of Operations (which, by 2005, was absorbed into the National Clandestine Service), now a private consultant.

The meeting lasted nearly seven hours, and lunch was delivered by an aide of Dorothy Collingwood’s. Shen An-Ling’s sources had been unable to listen to anything. They left one by one, at twenty-minute intervals, first Senator Irwin, then Jackson, Collingwood, Jones, and finally Alan Drummond-the youngest of the ringleaders, only thirty-nine-who walked two blocks and took a taxi to Union Station, where he boarded a train to Manhattan, and his home at 200 East Eighty-ninth Street.

Shen An-Ling’s assessment at the end of the note was, like Shen An-Ling, simple and to the point: Something must be done, now. I await your orders. You couldn’t buy loyalty like that-not anymore, at least.

Fifteen minutes before his meeting, Xin Zhu ascended the steps in front of the Great Hall of the People. Twelve enormous columns slanted at him, and he saw schoolchildren in sun visors lined up at one of the entrances. Six wore facemasks against the dust that was predicted to rise throughout the day. Green-clad soldiers stood at the main door, watching him enter. Breathing heavily, he waited until he was inside the marble lobby to wipe the sweat off his cheeks with a handkerchief. A voice said, “Xin Zhu!”

It was Shen An-ling, he of the soft skin and thick glasses that magnified his puffy eyes. Unlike Zhu, Shen An-ling was burdened by a shoulder bag stuffed with thick folders.

“What’s that?” asked Zhu.

“The background. Offer them this, and they’ll get off of your back.”

“For as long as it takes for them to read it all. How many pages?”

Shen An-ling, too, was covered in perspiration, but it was the sweat of anxiety, and it stank. “I have no idea. A thousand?”