Olen Steinhauer - An American spy

That single act of violence proved sufficient, for as they wound north through Haidian District, Shen An-ling taking the long way, sticking to dark streets and doubling back on himself occasionally, Dongfan Beisan abruptly broke the silence with “She’s an American.”

“You better not be talking about his wife,” Shen An-ling said.

“No, no. Mary Caul. She works at the American consulate in Guangzhou.”

Zhu lowered his sun visor to peer into a small mirror at the boy. “Go on.”

“I met her at the New Get Lucky.”

“The what?”

“Chaoyang District,” Shen An-ling said. “They serve German beer.”

“How long ago was this?” Zhu asked.

“When I met her? Five, six months ago. She’s from New York City. Pretty. She liked me.”

“Did you have sex with her?” asked Zhu.

He was surprised to see embarrassment break through the boy’s mask. “When she was in town,” he said, almost a whisper.

“At your place?”

Dongfan Beisan shook his head. “Never. Her hotel.”

“Which one?”

“Crowne Plaza.”

Shen An-ling whistled. “Must’ve thought you’d hit the jackpot.”

The boy frowned but said nothing.

“And she asked you to check on my wife?”

“Last week. Thursday. Mary said that Sung Hui was an old friend of hers. She said she was worried about her, because she had…” He trailed off.

“Don’t stop now,” said Zhu.

“She said that Sung Hui had married a brutal man who kept her imprisoned. She had no way to contact her, unless she could meet her by accident. So she wanted to know what her daily schedule was.”

“Bai chi,” said Shen An-ling.

“He’s not retarded,” Zhu corrected. “He’s just in love. The two are very similar.”

Dongfan Beisan said nothing.

Zhu said, “How did you know to talk to a relative of my wife’s seamstress?”

“Mary told me.”

“She didn’t know how to run casually into my wife, but she knew the name and family of my wife’s seamstress?”

“I… I didn’t think of that,” he said. The kid really was an idiot.

Despite Shen An-ling’s protests, they returned to the Blim-Blam and let Dongfan Beisan, stunned and wobbly, leave. Then they went to the office and learned from the files that Mary Caul was indeed attached to the American consulate in Guangzhou as part of the Foreign Commercial Service-or she had been, until last Friday, when she returned to the United States for good. She had left, Shen An-ling pointed out unnecessarily, the day after asking Dongfan Beisan to collect information on Sung Hui. Also unnecessarily, he reminded Zhu that Leticia Jones’s visit overlapped with Mary Caul’s final days in China.

By then it was after midnight, so Zhu called home to learn from the maid that Sung Hui was asleep, then had Shen An-ling drive him to the Crowne Plaza. He spent the next three hours with the head of security, a round-faced Uighur who kept sending for pots of Long Jing tea as they sorted through audio recordings from rooms and video files from the public areas. Zhu had approximate days, and he knew one name for sure-Mary Caul-and had her file photo. The other-Rosa Mumu, a.k.a. Leticia Jones-had stayed at the Hua Thai, but he had her photo to guide his hunch. On a video file marked Tuesday, May 6, when the time code indicated 3:12 in the morning, they found it. Leticia Jones and Mary Caul sitting close together on a leather sofa in the lobby, talking animatedly, almost intimately.

“You have sound?”

“Apologies, comrade,” said the Uighur.

Despite the extra care he took in making such decisions, Zhu made a mistake when, the next morning, Sung Hui asked what the rock and roller had been up to. After staring at the gray sky through the kitchen window for about four seconds, he decided on honesty and told her that the source of his questions was an American intelligence agent. Sung Hui moved slowly to the table and sank into a chair. She said, “They want to kill me.”

“Why would they want to kill you?” he asked, reaching for her hand.

She didn’t answer, just stared at his large hand enclosing hers.

“Because of your considerable efforts against them?” he asked.

She shook her head, smiling, knowing how funny that sounded. Since their marriage, she had ceased all Party work. She’d become, by her own admission, a capitalist slug, yearning to live in a fashion magazine. Finally, she said, “I don’t know why they want to kill me.”

“Because they don’t.”

She raised her head, the smile gone, clutching at his fingers with her other hand. “Then it’s you they want to kill.”

The problem, he knew, was that she’d lived and breathed radical Party doctrine too fully and for too long. For her, Western intelligence agencies sought only one thing-the destruction of Chinese communism-and would stack up as many Chinese bodies as they believed necessary in order to accomplish this.

“Maybe they don’t want to kill anyone,” Zhu told her, but she didn’t look as if she believed that. He wasn’t sure he did, either.

Zhang Guo had booked a private sea-view room at Yijing Lou, one of the top Qingdao restaurants, and before sitting down they toured the aquariums with the waiter and pointed out their preferences. “That one looks like Wu Liang,” Zhang Guo said, nodding at a tired-looking gray eel on the floor of one tank.

Zhu bent to look closely into its black eyes, then straightened. “Close enough. I’ll have him fried,” he told the waiter, who bowed with exaggerated formality.

It was nine by the time their food arrived, and the table was already littered with four empty beer bottles that the waiter soon swept away. Through the open window they watched ships light the surface of the calm water and, above, the snuffing out of stars as clouds drifted in. “How did it feel?” asked Zhang Guo.

“How did what feel?”

“Wiping out the Department of Tourism,” he said in his heavily accented English. “That’s what they call it?”

“They don’t call it anything now.”

Zhang Guo snorted, then took another bite. “This trout is delicious. Want some?”

Zhu didn’t answer.

“How’s your eel?”

Zhu said, “They were the most terrifying two days of my life. Afterward, I slept for twenty hours.”

Zhang Guo chewed thoughtfully, waiting.

Zhu said, “By the time I woke up, I’d lost my doubt. I’m not a maniac, you know. I knew as I sent out the order that what I was doing would be controversial. I knew why I didn’t ask for permission-I would have been denied it. But we’ve sat back for too long, congratulating ourselves on our economic miracle and not ensuring its future. You well know that we have an agreement with the Chinese people. They will hold their tongues and allow us to do as we please only as long as they see progress. Steady progress in their daily lives. As soon as some agency like the CIA succeeds in its plots to undermine our progress, Chinese citizens will be faced with stagnation or, worse, a reversal of their fortunes. Unlike Jiang Luoke’s deal with al Qaeda, this one is written in blood. A few bad years, and they will be out for ours.”

“So you’re thinking of the future. A young wife will do that to you.”

“You’re damned right I am!” Zhu said, louder than he’d said anything that day. He took a breath. “Think, Zhang Guo. One-child policy. In twenty years the average family structure will be one child caring for two parents and four grandparents. How are we going to support that if the Americans are picking at our economy? Think, too, of the fact that we have sixteen percent more boys than girls. How many millions of unmarried men will that make? Men with unsatisfied libidos, crippled by poverty. That’s the next generation, Zhang Guo. Those are the disaffected men who, in twenty years, will hang us in the streets.”