Olen Steinhauer - An American spy

For this, too, he had a press card and a forged slip of paper from the Foreign Ministry, both under the name of George Miller. Also, in a gutted catalytic converter, attached by two bolts under the car, were the disassembled pieces of a Chinese M-99B sniper rifle and scope, good for a distance of up to six hundred meters, though he wouldn’t need that much range.

The soldier, still looking confused, went to confer with his comrades.

There was a second line at the roadblock, where trucks were checked over with mirrors on wheels and eager Kunming Wolfdogs. Though he didn’t see how it started, he looked over at the sound of shouting to see a man being wrestled down from a truck with canvas walls so sooty that Alan couldn’t make out the characters written on them. The young man was silent, though he fought against the two soldiers holding him-they were the ones who were shouting, possibly for help. Then one of the soldiers stumbled back and fell on his rear end, and the truck driver broke free, running madly away, in the direction of Beijing. Rifles were unslung, warnings shouted, then, when the driver was about a hundred yards away, the soldiers began shooting. The driver weaved, thinking he could swerve out of the way, but what he didn’t know-and what occurred to Alan-was that soldiers the world over are bad shots. There’s no point slowing yourself with evasive maneuvers, because there’s no greater chance of them hitting a straight line than a swerving one.

After about ten seconds, the driver fell onto his face, as if diving into the road, and his left arm flopped for five more seconds before it also dropped.

Alan’s soldier ran back and, breathing heavily, handed back his papers and started shouting. Alan stared back. The soldier slapped the roof of his car and pointed straight ahead. “You go! You go!”

Alan started up the car and drove ahead, past the corpse surrounded by five soldiers, all of whom seemed unsure what to do.

A tall Nigerian couple in colorful desert wear. Russians in tracksuits, singing. Australian tourists-spinsters-gawking. Drunk Argentineans waving soccer scarves. Austrian girls in traditional mountain dress, blond hair in Heidi braids, followed by short, immaculately dressed Sri Lankans walking mute. American shoppers creeping into crowded hutongs. Red Guards on Tiananmen, looking out of their depth among the hordes of foreigners. The Bird’s Nest stadium, Gothic twisty modernism floating in a city of cubes. Painted cars, blaring horns, traffic police with white gloves waving desperately. Bicycles, thousands of bicycles.

Yet he kept thinking of a truck driver, and a left arm twitching.

He knew where he was going, but it was only noon. He drove carefully, taking in as much as he could before night fell and he would have to flee this place, never to return.

The problem with conspiracies-with functional ones, at least-is that each individual is only responsible for one small part of the overall plan. Trust is imperative. He had learned to trust the Youth League, even though their trust in him was misplaced. However, not even trust could ensure that the boy they had assigned to bring the truck of explosives into the city had succeeded. For all he knew, the dead driver he’d seen had been the one. So, more than trust, it took faith. Faith in events proceeding as planned, and the extreme faith that human error would not be an issue.

Of course, there wasn’t only one truck; there were four. Each would enter through a different compass point, and if only one made it through there would be enough munitions to complete their task: four buildings, simultaneously. Nothing so grand or impossible as the Bird’s Nest or the Great Hall, but important buildings that were nonetheless lightly guarded. Simultaneity was the key. “Like al Qaeda,” Li Qide had said, eager to show his knowledge, as if Osama bin Laden had invented the concept of parallel attacks.

There were at least three more like Alan, men with nothing more than guns and scopes who, like him, would wait in prearranged apartments across from the main targets in order to catch the survivors. Alan had insisted on this. “Bombs are passive,” he explained. “With this we show that the Youth League is not afraid to stay and fight. They won’t be expecting it.”

After an hour of battling traffic, he felt that he had absorbed enough of Beijing’s new face. He headed over to the district called Haidian.

It wasn’t easy finding the street, even with the help of Li Qide’s notations, but eventually he found the Haidian Theater, with its broad, flat face and Chinese characters running down the side, and followed Zhongguancun north, past the ring road, to reach a leafy street whose sign matched the pictograms on the map. The apartment, as promised, was painted green, and an open archway led to a courtyard, where he parked among a scattering of old cars. An old woman slowly crossed the courtyard, carrying a paper bag blackened by grease. He waited until she was gone, then reached under his seat for the wrench. He slipped out and sank to the concrete, his cramped legs shouting back at him, and slid as far as possible under the filthy car. He worked on the bolts and soon held the blackened catalytic converter shell in his hand. He pulled it out, got up, brushed off his clothes, and locked the car door. Carrying the long cylinder like an architect with his plans, he climbed the iron stairs to the fourth floor and used a key to open the door to number 41.

He looked around the small, dusty apartment, with its cracked-tile kitchen, carpets rolled up into logs against a wall covered in water stains, the decade-old television, and the windows that looked across the narrow street to view the front of another low apartment building that Li Qide had been shocked to find on his target list. “What is this?”

“It’s an office.”

“No, you have bad CIA maps, like when you blew up our embassy in Belgrade. That’s an apartment building.”

“This isn’t from maps, Li Qide,” he said, then stretched the truth. “It’s from direct observation. In the basement level is a special Guoanbu center.”

“But those are homes over it.”

“Why do you think they installed it there? It’s that important.”

“What do they do in this special center?”

“They plan murders around the globe.”

“For example?”

“I know of thirty-three.”

“You don’t want to share specifics?”

“I’d be happy to,” he said and began to recite their names and the locations of their murders. “Sandra Harrison, Tallinn; Pak Eun, Daegu; Lorenzo Pellegrini, Cairo; Andy Geriev, St. Petersburg; Mia Salazar, Brasilia…”

Li Qide had accepted it, just as he’d accepted the other targets on the list: the recently completed Koolhaas-designed Central Television Headquarters on Guanghua Road, the Dongchen branch of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau in the Daxing Hutong, and one Olympic venue, the main building of the Shunyi Aquatic Park.

It was one thirty, an hour before the moment. He unscrewed the pipe and laid out the rifle pieces. Outside, bicycles filled the street as people took care of last-minute errands before rushing home or to bars to watch the Games on television.

“It has to be before the Games,” Li Qide had said.

“The whole idea was to humiliate them on the world stage, wasn’t it?”

“That was before we knew you wanted to blow up an apartment building. No, we’ll do it a few hours before the Games start, so that the civilian deaths will be minimal.”

Not only were most people out of their apartments at this hour, but the crowds on the street would camouflage the young men and women with canvas backpacks full of C-4 who dropped them in calculated spots along the buildings’ walls. Even Alan, as he tested the scope by examining the perimeter of the building, had trouble keeping track of people. Nor could he find those telltale backpacks against the corners of the building, but with an hour to go he knew better than to panic.