An American Spy Read online

  The interrogation was also fascinating because Andrei Stanescu had only spent an hour or so in the company of the Chinese officer. What could he know about Xin Zhu? Leticia Jones hadn’t known this before their talk began. She only knew that Andrei had been handed a pistol in Brooklyn by a member of the Chinese embassy whom Andrei called Li. She knew that Li had been told by Xin Zhu to give Andrei the gun, and so it followed that Xin Zhu, or one of his representatives from China’s foreign intelligence service, the Guoanbu, had been in personal contact with Andrei. Jones showed him a series of photographs until he identified Li as a man named Sam Kuo.

  They’d finished dealing with the actual events leading to the attempted murder of Milo Weaver after just a few hours, and then Jones focused on the person of Xin Zhu. A physical description that began with that uncomfortable word “fat,” then grew more detailed, his small eyes, his blunt nose, his full lips, the thin hair on the top of his head and the thicker black locks over his ears. His quiet way, as if by silence he could sap the air of indecision—“He is very convincing,” Andrei said. “A thing in space. Hard . . . no, solid.”

  Their meeting had been preordained, Andrei believed. He had not been looking for it, nor even wishing it. He’d been a bitter man before Rick came into his life, full of hatred for all his fares and all the faces he saw on the street, and it was Rick who unexpectedly offered him a kind of salvation.

  “He believes in order.”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “He said, I believe in order of thing.”

  “He believes in the order of things?”

  “Yes. Exact.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “When I ask if he is religious.”

  Knowing of Andrei Stanescu’s Orthodox faith, part of Xin Zhu’s argument had been to quote the Bible, lines of which—Erika knew from experience—could be pulled out to justify most anything. Zhu hadn’t dug too deeply, though, sticking with the old standard. “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”

  “Is he religious?”

  “He did not say.”

  “What do you think?”

  Andrei stared at Leticia Jones deeply, then touched the bottle of water in front of him but didn’t drink. “Maybe,” he said, but refused to commit himself further.

  Leticia Jones did not bother to tell him that the man he had shot was not his daughter’s murderer. It was beyond Leticia Jones’s mandate—which was, as far as Erika could tell, to find out everything about the person of Xin Zhu from people who had met him personally, even briefly. What this told Erika was that the CIA knew embarrassingly little about the man, and it was desperate to learn anything.

  Leticia Jones saved the most crucial question for the second day, and when she asked it, her tone was exactly as it had been the previous day: calm, welcoming, almost seductive.

  “Why do you think he did it?” A pause. A gentle smile. “Why do you think he helped you—a stranger—take revenge for the murder of your daughter?”

  Andrei didn’t need to think about that; he’d thought about it ever since March 28, when he’d picked up the big Chinese man from the airport and listened—at times exasperated, other times hypnotized—to his story. “Rick, his son was murdered. He know what it can do to a father. He know how going back to the murderer can make a father good when he is terrible. No, not good. Better.”

  “Better than good?”

  “Better than terrible. He know this man that kill my Adriana. He sees injustice, he wants order. He believes in order of thing.”

  “So Rick is a man who makes order where there is no order.”

  “Exact.”

  “You like him.”

  “He give me gift. He don’t know me, but he give me gift.”

  A gift, Erika thought, that will ruin you once you’ve gotten past this wonderful high.

  Before calling the interview finished at 1:18 P.M. on Thursday the twenty-fourth, Leticia Jones rested her hands on the oak table that had separated them all this time, palms down so that each of her long, red-painted nails glimmered under the ceiling lamp, and said, “Herr Stanescu, after hearing all this, it strikes me that you really like Rick. Am I right?”

  Andrei nodded. “He is very good man, for me.”

  “Which makes me wonder,” she said, “why you would be so open with us. Certainly you realize that we don’t mean your Rick much good. We’re not his friends. In fact, he’s done some terrible things to us, and we don’t forgive easily.”

  Andrei nodded.

  “Don’t you worry you’re betraying him?”

  Andrei smiled, then intoned, “Give to Caesar what thing is for Caesar, and to God the things what is for God.”

  You just take what you like from that book, thought Erika.

  She walked Jones out to her car, and from beyond the trees they heard traffic humming down the highway. “So what did he do to you?” Erika asked in English. When Jones didn’t reply, she clarified. “Xin Zhu, I mean. Kidnapping people off of foreign streets is no small thing.”

  Jones still didn’t reply, only smiled, her feet crunching twigs.

  “Tell Alan Drummond that if he wants to be a little less secretive, then I could have a look in our files. We might have something.”

  “Drummond?”

  “Your boss.”

  “You haven’t heard,” Jones said, shaking her head. “Alan Drummond’s out of a job.”

  “That’s why they cleared out the offices of the Department of Tourism?”

  To her credit, Jones didn’t flinch. “All I know is he’s in the unemployment line. Anything else is above my pay grade.”

  “Like what Xin Zhu did to you people?”

  Jones shrugged; then Erika put a hand on her elbow, finally understanding. They looked at each other.

  “He destroyed it, didn’t he? The department. That would be . . .” Erika took a breath, wondering what this could mean, and how it might have been done. It was quite nearly awe-inspiring. A legendary department that had struck fear in the hearts of spies all over the planet for at least a half century, felled by a single angry man in China.

  Leticia Jones wasn’t going to affirm or deny a thing. She said, “You’ve been very kind, and the American people appreciate it.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Jones opened the door, then, as an afterthought, placed a hand on Erika’s shoulder. “Well, I appreciate it.”

  “Not enough to tell me what Xin Zhu did to deserve this personality analysis?”

  Jones got into her car and rolled down the window. “Xin Zhu did nothing, and everything, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  A shrug, then Leticia Jones drove away.

  By evening, both she and Hector Garza were on flights to New York. Erika asked a team to watch them, but somewhere on the road between New York and D.C., the two agents vanished into the cool American night.

  PART ONE

  IN THE HOUSE OF SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY

  FRIDAY, MAY 16 TO

  TUESDAY, MAY 20, 2008

  1

  The time Xin Zhu spent trying to be unheard could have added up to an entire life. Hours driving extra laps through a city, watching the rearview; accumulated minutes gazing into street-window reflections and standing in queues for bread or soup he didn’t even want because his stomach was in knots. Sitting behind desks, thinking through cover stories and diversions and wondering how long ago his office was last scoured for bugs. Visits to cemeteries and bars and churches and empty warehouses and parking garages, only to find that his date wasn’t going to show up. Meals lost sitting for hours in dark rooms, in airports and train stations and wet public squares, waiting.

  Then today, driving the dull hour and a half from Beijing to Nankai along the G020, ditching his ten-year-old Audi and taking a taxi to the train station in tree-lined
Xiqing. Waiting on the platform until the Qingdao train started to roll before heaving his large body and small gray overnight bag onto the last car. Hovering in the doorway as the station passed, watching for latecomers. All this, even though this same train began life in south Beijing, not so far from where his journey began. All this, just to meet someone who, like him, lived and worked in Beijing.

  The story, which his assistant could be depended on to proliferate, was that Xin Zhu was on a weekend trip to Shanghai to gain 665 miles of perspective and consider his dwindling options. By the time the masters in Beijing realized—if they realized—that the big, silent man checking into Shanghai’s Pudong Shangri-La was not Xin Zhu, it would be too late.

  As the train headed southeast on its five-hour itinerary, he worked his way toward the front. He was a conspicuously fat man, and when he came upon others either he or they had to squeeze into a spare seat to allow space to pass. Newspapers, covered with photos of devastation—Sichuan province, annihilation by earthquake—were folded noisily to let him by. Occasionally, when coming upon young women with children, he offered a smile of sympathy as he raised his bag above his head, and they wedged themselves past each other. Finally, he found a pair of free seats in the front row of a clean, beige-paneled car. Zhu lifted the armrest between them and settled down gratefully before spotting more photos on more newspapers, rubble and weeping.

  There was no other subject in the country, which almost made him feel guilty for this excursion. Four days ago, an earthquake had struck Wenchuan, in eastern Sichuan province, powerful enough to be felt more than a thousand miles away in the capital. The nation had mobilized. Nearly a hundred thousand soldiers were deployed, two thousand Health Ministry medical staff, a hundred and fifty aircraft. The confirmed dead totaled twenty thousand, but the published estimate was at least fifty thousand, which was probably low. In the face of that, what did the future of one fat spy matter?

  It didn’t.

  As he waited for his breathing to ebb and the fine layer of sweat over his blunt features to evaporate, the ash-colored outskirts of Xiqing passed. The air was better here, and would only grow cleaner as they neared the coast. He, too, felt cleaner, being out of the capital. He always felt better in the field.

  The conductor, a pleasant-looking woman in an immaculate blue uniform, darkened when he said that he wanted to buy a ticket from her. “You boarded with no ticket?”

  “Last-minute change in plans. I had no choice.”

  “We always have a choice.”

  He could have ended the discussion by producing his Guoanbu ID, but instead he said, “My choice was to board the train or let my mother die.”

  “She’ll die if she doesn’t see your face?”

  “The Qingdao hospital is out of blood. She’ll die if I don’t give her mine.”

  He could tell from her eyes that she didn’t believe him—at least, she didn’t want to believe him. She finally said, “You think you can move into one seat?”

  Zhu opened his hands to display his girth. “Plainly impossible.”

  “Then you’ll have to pay for two seats.”

  She was modern in her hairstyle and speech, but Zhu recognized her lineage in the millions of petty dictators China had produced during the Cultural Revolution. Rules as badges, laws as weapons. He said, “Then I will pay for two seats,” and reached for his wallet.

  As the hours and the sinking landscape passed, he tried to put both Wenchuan and his personal troubles out of his head and watched the young couples that boarded and disembarked at each stop. They looked nothing like the peasant couples of his youth—they had clean teeth, fine clothes, modest jewelry, cell phones, and the sparkle of life about them, as if they could very clearly see what tomorrow looked like and were undeterred. He admired such optimism, even as the newspapers denied it with grisly photographs of collapsed buildings and helmeted workers digging through rubble to find corpses. The whole nation, perhaps the whole world, was watching as hope faded, and Xin Zhu was riding a train to the coast, rather than westward, to work alongside the volunteers. The first step toward helping others, he reflected with only a touch of self-consciousness, is to ensure your own survival.

  As they left Jinan, one of his cell phones buzzed. “Shen An-ling,” he said into it, his tone one of a man on vacation, “Shanghai is beautiful.”

  “So I’ve heard, Xin Zhu,” came his assistant’s thin voice. “I have also heard that, while you’ve checked into the hotel, you’ve barricaded yourself in the room. Might I suggest taking in the sights?”

  Shen An-ling was pushing the cover a little too hard, which meant that he wasn’t alone. “For the thinking I have to do, distractions will just get in the way.”

  “Nature, time, and patience are the three great physicians,” Shen An-ling said, banally—and uncharacteristically—quoting proverb. “Don’t think it can be rushed. You should get some air.”

  “I’ll open the window. Is the office running smoothly?”

  “We’ve been honored by a visit from Yang Qing-Nian.”

  Of course—Yang Qing-Nian, the right hand of Wu Liang. Who else would have asked why Xin Zhu was not leaving his hotel room? “Does he bring good news from the Supervision and Liaison Committee?”

  “He brings good wishes . . . and a request for you to visit the committee at nine o’clock on Monday morning.”

  “I look forward to it,” Zhu said with as much conviction as he could muster. “Make sure Yang Qing-Nian is comfortable. The best tea for Yang Qing-Nian.”

  His thoughts now utterly derailed, he hung up and took from his bag a small box of rice balls his young wife had prepared. He began to eat them, one by one, imagining Yang Qing-Nian in his Haidian District office, sniffing and touching everything, storing every detail away for his report to Wu Liang. The place is a mess. They work like English clerks, noses to their screens. Stuffy, no open windows, and it stinks of cigarettes and peanut sauce. The place could do with a good cleaning.

  The irony was that Yang Qing-Nian and his master, Wu Liang, believed that they, in themselves, were enough to inspire fear. They believed that the appearance of Yang Qing-Nian, or anyone from the Ministry of Public Security, the domestic intelligence service, could throw him off his game, or leave him worrying all weekend in Shanghai about a Monday morning scolding. Were they his only worry, he actually would be in Shanghai, at a rooftop bar, enjoying a cognac and a Hamlet. Instead, all he could do now was ask a passing uniformed girl for one of her overpriced bottles of water.

  It was nearly five when they pulled into Qingdao Station, which had been renovated for the Olympic boating competitions that would descend in the coming months. As he wandered the platform, bumping into hunched men lighting cigarettes, he gazed up at the freshly ubiquitous spiderweb ceiling of steel and glass. How much had it cost? With all the bribes and evictions that had riddled the great cities’ expensive facelifts, no one knew for sure. Then, across the hall, he saw a long but orderly queue leading to a temporary Red Cross counter, handing over donations. Yesterday, the newspapers reported that donations for the earthquake victims had reached 1.3 billion yuan. Zhu walked toward the counter, paused, then approached a wet-faced old woman near the front of the line and gave her ten hundred-yuan notes, about 150 dollars, to add to her offering. She was speechless.

  Outside, a bright late-afternoon sun was tempered by the Yellow Sea breeze. He set down his bag, took out a cigar tin, and lit a filtered Hamlet before joining a crowd of young people crossing Feixian Road. They passed two bright, packed restaurants—Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s—on their way to Bathing Beach #6. The teenagers raised their voices and hurried down to the water, while he remained on the sidewalk, smoking and watching their lean, young bodies prance across the sand and dive into the sea.

  Though his own people had been from the mountains, he had always felt sympathy for coastal people. They shared the pragmatic objectivity of their mountain brothers. He watched the out-of-towners flop in the wa
ter while the stoic locals looked on and sold them fried things from steaming carts.

  The #501 bus was half empty, and he took a pair of seats in the back for the hour-long journey. An entire life could be filled doing these things.

  The sun was low in the west when he got out in front of a high-rise on a broad avenue in Laoshan, at the foot of Laoshan Mountain. He was one of five passengers to disembark: two old women, a nervous pregnant woman, and a teenaged boy in a camouflage T-shirt. The old women left the bus stop together, the teenager was met by his mother, and the pregnant woman was met by no one. She sat on the bench, an empty polypropylene bag clutched to her large stomach, and lowered her eyes to the ground. She was, he suspected, crying.

  Behind the high-rise he found the inconspicuous dirty-white Citroën Fukang in a small lot full of a variety of makes in a variety of conditions. Behind the wheel, a fifty-six-year-old man smoked with his eyes closed.

  “Wake up, Zhang Guo,” said Zhu.

  Zhang Guo didn’t jump; he was too full of himself for that. It was one of his most wonderful traits. Instead, he cracked his eyes and said, “You’re late.”

  “Not by much.”

  “This whole thing is ridiculous, you know.”

  “So you’re doing well, Zhang Guo?”

  “The doctor says my prostate is preparing to explode.”

  Zhu tossed his overnight bag through the open rear window, then went around to the passenger’s door. As he climbed in, the car groaning on its shocks, he said, “So things are about normal for you.”