Olen Steinhauer - An American spy

To their right, a peninsula reached out into the water, marking the halfway point of their journey around these mountains, pointing in the direction of South Korea. Zhu said something.

“What?”

Zhu turned back. “We’ve had this conversation before. Theirs is a causal responsibility. They killed an opposition figure in order to disrupt civil order in Sudan. Therefore, any deaths that result from that disorder are their fault.”

“You can’t treat a bureaucracy like an individual. Imagine if we were treated that way.”

“I’d expect no less from the fathers of our victims,” Zhu said, knowing as he said it that they would all be dead if that really came to pass. He waved at a parking area up ahead, a scenic outpost. “Pull over.”

As they slowed and parked, two cars passed. One had Laoshan plates, the other Beijing. Zhang Guo nodded at them. “You don’t think

…”

“I have no idea,” Zhu said, then gazed out the open window. Sea, horizon. He said, “It wasn’t just revenge, you know. Everyone thinks that’s what it was-the committee, you, probably even the Americans. Revenge factored into it, but it was also a practical decision. That’s something I’ll have to explain on Monday morning. By eradicating one of their secret departments, we have sent a serious message to the Americans, the same message we want to send with the Olympic Games. That we are the primary force in the world. We are a nation that has suffered long enough-that’s the past. The present is this: We are a superpower of unfathomable riches, and we will not stand for interference, particularly from a country on the other side of the planet that still refers to itself as the world’s only superpower.”

Zhang Guo let that sit a moment before shaking his head. “Then they see fifty thousand die in Sichuan. Is this how a superpower takes care of its people?”

Zhu didn’t answer, because he’d had this thought himself. Instead, he turned in his seat as best he could, reaching toward the bag he’d left in the back, but his hand only batted air inches from its handle. An involuntary grunt escaped his lips.

“Just sit back,” Zhang Guo said, sighing.

Zhu did so, and, without looking, Zhang Guo reached his long right arm back and deftly snatched the bag. He tugged it up to the front and handed it to Zhu.

“Thanks.”

Zhang Guo watched another car pass, then got out and walked around to where slanted trees framed the view of the sea. Inside the car, Zhu unlatched the strap and fingered at a thin file inside, finding a 4R-sized blowup of a passport photo. Here was the real reason for this meeting. He sat staring at it a moment, at the black woman, midthirties, before opening his door and placing his feet on dirt. The freshness of the salty breeze was a shock after the car’s smoky interior. Down below, surf raged. “Come look at this.”

Zhang Guo wandered back and took the photo. “Pretty,” he said after a moment, “for one of them.” He passed it back.

“You’ve seen her before?”

“Should I have?”

There was no sense being coy with Zhang Guo. “She’s one of the ones who survived.”

“One of the Tourists?”

“She went by the name Leticia Jones. We never did learn her real name.”

“Why are you carrying around her photograph?”

Zhu sniffed. “A week ago she landed in Shanghai on another passport-Rosa Mumu, Sudanese.”

A bang sounded as Zhang Guo hit the roof of the car with his fist, then walked away, feeling his chest for another cigarette. Once he had it lit, he turned back. “Where is she now?”

“She left Beijing last week, flying to Cairo. As for the week she spent here, we’re just starting to piece it together.”

“But why would she be here? An agent on her own can’t expect to do anything, particularly one that’s blown.”

“She did elude us for a week, all by herself. I only found out that she’d been here once she was gone. A border guard heard her speaking English to another Sudanese. The Sudanese tried to speak Arabic with her, but she didn’t know it. It wasn’t reason enough to hold her, but the guard noted her name for later examination. Someone from Sun Bingjun’s department passed it on to me, as a query. I recognized her photo from my Tourism files.”

Zhang Guo cursed loudly.

“It means little at this point,” Zhu said, as much for himself as for Zhang Guo, “but she wouldn’t be here without a reason; something operational, or just to scout opportunities.”

“Opportunities for what? For an act of revenge against the great Xin Zhu?”

Zhu slipped the photo back into his bag. “I have no idea. I don’t even know if she works for the CIA anymore.”

“She had a forged Sudanese passport.”

“The CIA doesn’t have a monopoly on forged passports.”

“Perhaps she’s working for Wu Liang,” Zhang Guo suggested.

“I’ve considered that.”

“It was a joke, Xin Zhu.”

Zhu gave a smile, but it wasn’t a joke to him. None of this was. Wu Liang and the Supervision and Liaison Committee, the CIA, or any number of agencies he’d given trouble to over the last decades could be after him. After enough years, the idea of “the other” becomes faceless and broad, its tentacles ubiquitous enough to hide in every crevice.

“So what do you want from me, Xin Zhu?”

“I’d like to know what I’ll be facing on Monday morning. Specifics. The precise examples they will use against me.”

Zhang Guo nodded. “You’ll have it by Sunday.”

“As for the woman, I’ll need to know if the Ministry of Public Security has anything on her.”

This time Zhang Guo hesitated. He took a long drag and exhaled smoke that was instantly swept away by the wind. “Xin Zhu, two months ago you claimed that the Ministry of Public Security was harboring a Western mole, and then you cut it off from your intelligence product. When asked to show your evidence, you handed the committee notes detailing Chinese information owned by the Department of Tourism, information you said could only have been gathered by an inside source. The information could not be verified because the CIA had closed the Department of Tourism after your assault, but did that stop you? No. You demanded that the committee freeze the ministry’s entire administrative section until someone had been arrested.”

“I was ignored,” Zhu pointed out.

“But not forgotten. You don’t run the Guoanbu. You don’t even preside over a core department. You’ve always been on the fringe, and you’ve always made enemies. My suspicion is that, on Monday morning, you’ll be sent to preside over some township collective near Mongolia while your office is closed down to make room for an elementary school. You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

“Does that mean you won’t ask if they have anything on the woman?”

Zhang Guo stared at him, eyes large, then threw down his cigarette. He started to laugh. “Okay. I’ll talk to the Ministry of Public Security. I’ve got someone who might help, just as long as he doesn’t know that it’s for you.”

“Thanks.”

“And you have no idea what this Jones did during her week here?”

“We have the hotel. We have one night at the hotel restaurant,” Zhu said, which was not necessarily a lie, only a misleading omission. “What we need is help.”

“What you need is to prepare a defense for Monday morning.”

“What I need is a drink. Shall we?”

Zhang Guo approached and placed a hand on Zhu’s thinning scalp. “You are one ugly, fat bastard. Sung Hui must be blind.”

“Finally, we’re in agreement.”

Sung Hui was from Xinyang, a Young Pioneer and then a member of the Youth League whose enlightened proletarian worldview had earned her, at the age of twenty-three, a trip to Beijing for the Fifteenth National Representative Conference in 2003. Delun had met her first, him only twenty-one and full of fire for this beautiful provincial girl with the fierce Party line. Because his mother had been dead more than a decade, he showed off his girl to his father, and sometime during the next few years the lines blurred. Delun shipped off to Sudan to work for Sinopec. A riot of dark-skinned men hacked him up with machetes. That was April 2007. Three months later, Sung Hui moved in with Xin Zhu, and at first theirs was a home of shared mourning. Then, inexplicably, she asked him to marry her.