Olen Steinhauer - An American spy

“Why not?” Sun Bingjun asked. “I’ve given them most of my adult life, and now I’m giving them my replacement. They’re not as irrational as you make them out to be.”

“Of course they are. I am, you are. Everyone is. All they are is a collection of irrational individuals, just as we are.”

“What is your favorite doctrine of the Chairman?”

Zhu stared, trying to get him into focus.

“Yes, I remember,” Sun Bingjun said. “Perpetual revolution.”

Zhu said nothing.

“You have a decision to make, Xin Zhu.”

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 TO SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2008

He sat across from George Erasmus Butler, the director’s assistant-his “iron gut”-in a windowless room in the bowels of Langley. Irwin had said, Remember that the operational flaws were in place before you even took over. Remind them of that. However, he knew that such words would be wasted on someone like Butler.

So he cleared his head and stared across the table, wondering at what level in an organization’s hierarchy a member’s position began to change him physically. One expected it of Butler’s boss, CIA Director Quentin Ascot, but under these fluorescent lights, he noticed the sheen to Butler’s flesh, as if he were gradually becoming shrink-wrapped for the cameras. The politicization of the soul.

He was wandering again. Focus!

Butler leaned back in his chair, tapping an open file with his knobby forefinger. “Now, listen, Alan. Usually when something like this happens the conversation is essentially genial. Mistakes occur, but they’re mistakes of flawed procedure, and our aim becomes fixing procedure. Here, though,” he said, looking down at the papers and shaking his head, feigning exasperation. “Now, here it looks like we had the wrong man at the helm. Shoddy security. Opening your files to a goddamned mole. Instigating a contact procedure so rigid that even when you realized the Chinese were running every one of your people there was nothing you could do about it. I mean… hey, look at me. I’m not the enemy here. The enemy is yourself. Two months at the helm of a ship that’s sailed for sixty years, and you run her right into the reef. You sunk it, man. You know how much we’ve spent on your unlikely little department over the years? Boggles the mind. The perks-the limitless credit cards, the first-class flights, the fucking clothing — it’s just staggering how much you guys ate up. And this?” He lifted a single sheet of paper. “An art heist to add to the departmental coffers?”

“That was before I came on.”

“Sure, that’s convenient. However, it speaks more to the kind of operation you guys had going on West Thirty-first, doesn’t it? I mean, here at Langley we’ve got to sign in triplicate for a new box of pens. See what I mean? Your cowboy bullshit has never gone over well with us simple desk commanders. We work for a living. We fly only when we have to. And as for shopping on the Company dime,” Butler said, a smile flashing across his face as he lifted another sheet of paper showing a credit card statement with a balance of $22,927.58. He read, “One afternoon’s shopping in Paris: Dior, Prada, Louis Vuitton. I mean, am I just an old fogey here? Or have you people been living like kings off the Company’s tit?”

Like plastic, he thought. I can almost see myself in the man’s cheek.

The twinkle of lights, computerized. Red shimmers into blue. With each change the rumble of something in his stomach, growing sharper. Four lights, and it’s like the point of a pencil trying to squirm its way out. Ten, and it’s a pickax.

“What is it?” Penelope asked when he woke.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me it’s nothing, dear. I’m not one of your empty-headed bimbos.”

The smile he gave her wasn’t humor so much as the recognition of humor. She deserved at least that. In fact, she deserved a lot more, and he couldn’t help thinking that their marriage, in sum, had been a little less than she’d hoped for.

Sensing that his trip to Langley was going to be a disaster, she had already reserved them four nights at a cottage in Croton-on-Hudson, close to the river, and they’d spent their days reading books and their evenings at expensive restaurants. He wasn’t up for it, though. She knew better than to ask for details, but her patience was running out. “You know I can’t.”

“They canned you, Alan. You don’t owe them anything anymore.”

“I owe them everything,” he said after a moment, because he sometimes did that. He would take a seemingly rational statement, then reverse it completely to test its validity. The surprising thing was that it worked. “They put me in charge of something important. It might not be my fault that it failed, but if I’d been paying attention I might have avoided the disaster.”

“What do you mean, ‘disaster’?”

He’d said too much, he realized, and leaned over to kiss her. She pulled back. “Come on. Out with it.”

She really was beautiful, and the intensity of her stare only magnified her exceptional features. He said, “Give me some advice.”

“Not that you’ll take it.”

“I will. Really, I will.”

“Okay, then.”

He wondered how to phrase it, then settled on “In my work, I came across something that was dangerous to America, and-”

“To America?”

“Yes. Not possibly dangerous but actually dangerous. It’s already caused destruction… disaster.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“Now, even though it’s no longer my job, I think I can figure out how to neutralize it. It would take a lot of effort on my part, and require a little skullduggery, but I think it could be done-with proper planning.”

She waited.

“Well?”

“Oh! You want me to tell you if you should do it or not.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, is it dangerous? For you.”

“No,” he said, the lie coming out before he had a chance to wrestle with it.

“Then, yes. I mean, if it’s about saving America, you know I’m all about that,” she said, grinning. “Is that the answer you wanted?”

He leaned forward to kiss her again, and this time she didn’t pull away.

He’d known Dorothy Collingwood for three years; they’d met through his in-laws. Penelope’s family had always gotten a rush mingling with America’s power brokers, and with Democratic members of the Senate and the House to its credit, the Collingwood clan qualified. Dorothy, however, had chosen a different path from her relatives, using their connections to get herself placed within intelligence. When they first met, she’d been working in the support staff of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. She had higher ambitions, though, and once she realized that she could trust Alan, she promised that he would be part of her rise. “You’re a smart guy, Alan. Solid. And you don’t speak Beltway. Besides, your wife shows well at social functions.” When she did move up, becoming an NCS staff operations officer, planning and running global counterintelligence and intelligence collection operations, she found herself faced with a new world-“a parallel world,” she called it over drinks. “You wouldn’t believe it, Alan.”

“Of course I would,” he’d said, for he had always played the unflappable war veteran with her. When she told him that there was an opening for the directorship of a hush-hush department on the fringe of the Langley beast, he’d tried not to show excitement. “What happened to the previous director?”

“Right now Senator Nathan Irwin’s got one of his puppets in place, but he can’t make that stick.”

“The one before that, I mean.”