Olen Steinhauer - An American spy

Stephanie let her mother go, and once they were in the hallway, heading back to the stairs, Tina said, “I could fucking kill you.”

Penelope said, “He’s trying to save us, Tina,” which he knew wouldn’t help.

No one said anything else until they were downstairs. Hoang had stepped outside. Tina turned on him in the middle of the living room. “He told me you were crazy. He told me-but I didn’t believe him. You, ” she said, drilling a finger into his chest. “You’re the one who got him involved. You’re the reason we’re stuck in the goddamned woods.”

He wanted to tell her to shut up, but that was the wrong move here. Instead, he said, “Yes. It is my fault. All of this.” Once he said it, it occurred to him that she didn’t know about Yevgeny Primakov. Neither of them did. “Now,” he continued, “I’m trying to clean it up. Milo’s in trouble. The Chinese are threatening you and Stephanie in order to control Milo.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because they did the same thing to me,” he said, noticing a look of surprise cross Penelope’s face. “What I’ve done is remove all of you from harm. Now, I need to do the same thing for Milo.” That was a lie, but when you build a lie off a truth, the difference is hard to notice.

Proving, however, that she had an eye for such differences, Tina said, “I don’t believe you. I won’t believe it until I hear it from Milo.”

“Don’t call,” he said. “You call him and his life will be in danger. Then they’ll trace the call, and you and Stephanie will be next.”

“You people lie so well.”

What to say to that? Nothing, really, except “Of course we do. So do they. Everybody lies, Tina, so grow up. Don’t risk your daughter’s life by being rash.”

That cooled her off, but only a little. “Then what’s your glorious plan?”

“To get your husband back to you.” Another lie.

She breathed loudly through her nose, then waved an arm around. “So we get kidnapped, and that’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“Yes, Tina. That’s all I’m telling you.”

She crossed her arms over her stomach and walked away, shaking her head.

“You’re going to be left alone for a few days, so please just keep to yourselves. Either Milo or I will come back here, and by then it should be settled.”

It was a kind of explanation, a sort of plan for the future, though when Penelope walked outside with him, she said, “What does it mean if Milo comes back and not you?”

He knew what she was getting at. “It means I’m not done with my job.”

“Or that you’re dead.”

“Doubtful,” he said and kissed her small, upturned nose.

They left Hoang’s rental behind for emergencies, and on the road back to Denver, Alan said, “We’re going to Hong Kong.”

Hoang didn’t seem to care.

“I’m going to check into a hotel, but I’m not going to the room. You are.”

“How long until the Chinese come for me?”

“Not long, so prepare your escape.”

“And you?”

“I’ll be elsewhere. Just make sure they think I’m in that room.”

After another mile, Hoang said, “So you’ve got an arrangement with the Youth League?”

Alan nearly lost control of the car. He hadn’t mentioned a thing about them to Hoang, or to anyone. Their name had come up during the initial planning stage but had been cut because the group was too unpredictable. Alan considered bluffing his way out of it, but Hoang valued his words too much to waste them on idle speculation. “How did you know?”

“They were the only ones left, weren’t they? At least, the only ones who would be desperate enough to raise arms. You walk in, to one of their old paymasters, and tell them the time has come to rise against Beijing.” He paused, staring at leafy trees blur past. “It’s intoxicating for people like them, even when they know it’s doomed to failure.”

“History is the only thing that’s doomed.”

“Man, did you read that in a book? ” For the first time in Alan’s experience, Hoang sounded exasperated. “You think any of them have thought more than five minutes past a successful revolution? They’re suicidal, all of them. Maybe they want freedom, maybe not, but what unites them is that they want to be part of something enormous to make their lousy lives mean something. Hand them a country and they’ll probably just go shoot themselves. What they want is martyrdom, Alan. And that’s what you’re going to give them, because it’s going to blow up in your face.”

After another half mile, still stunned by the unprecedented flow of words, Alan finally found his tongue. “Then why are you helping me?”

The rarest of all of Tran Hoang’s expressions: a smile-a big, open smile that displayed a row of large teeth, two of them crooked. “You think I don’t want martyrdom, too?”

Alan blinked at the road that was darkening with the descending sun. Two days later, even after flying to Hong Kong, checking in, and in the stairwell of the Peninsula, switching coat and hat with Tran Hoang and leaving again, after meeting with a stern Chinese woman he knew as Hu, waiting for dark and boarding a small fishing boat headed for Xiayong-even after all that, he thought that Tran Hoang, perhaps, was more insane than he was.

He’d spent more than a month with them. That, perhaps, had been a mistake. He’d slept among them and eaten with them and cleaned with them and, through an interpreter, joked with them. He’d met their women and babies camped out in the forest, and he’d listened to stories of injustices that were so massive in their waste of human lives that he couldn’t bring himself to share his own. He was a child of misery compared to their fully fleshed adulthood, and at times, he felt ashamed of the self-pity that had brought him so far.

Yet there really was no way out of it now. Upon arriving, he’d told their leader, Li Qide, that it had to be done soon, but “soon” was a different concept in the woods. Besides, they saw no point in doing it before the Games, when an action, even a failed one, would be so much more effective. He’d tried to argue with Li Qide, but, knowing their stories, how could he say aloud that he just wanted to get back to his wife?

He’d had no contact with anyone outside their camp for the past month, and by now their anger had supplanted his own. He was no longer exacting vengeance for his own insult but for the insult of the people he’d briefly joined. The smells they were familiar with were now familiar to him: the pungent cooking oil, the horse manure and the shabby outhouses, the aroma of human sweat mixed with pine and fir trees, the stink of sour pickles and fire-burned chicken.

Now, finally, it was the eighth of August, and he’d been traveling for nearly three days. A horse to Leishan, and then catching a ride to Guiyang, where he was introduced to a guide who drove him as far as Zhengzhou. There, he picked up this clattering old Mercedes and continued on his own with the aid of a map notated in English. He’d made it through three roadblocks populated by nervous soldiers, but his American passport, in the name of George Miller, and gift packages of Marlboro Reds made his progress smoother.

On the other hand, the roads were anything but, choked with holes and ridges like tiny mountain ranges, and he feared for his tires. They held, though, and he stuck to his route leading inexorably toward the capital.

“Me journalist!” he told a soldier at the last roadblock before Beijing’s outer ring road as he held out his passport. The soldier, a short man with a wide face, looked confused as he examined the document. Alan pointed at his own chest. He was wearing the suit he had brought into the country and not worn again until yesterday, cleaned and pressed. He was painfully conscious of how loose it hung on him now. “Journalist! New York Times!”