An American Spy (12 page)

He Qiang did understand.

“I’m going to America?” Liu Xiuxiu asked, then, embarrassed, bit her lips.

“You and He Qiang will be leaving tonight on separate flights. To Washington, D.C. A contact will set you up with a place to stay.”

“Sam Kuo?” asked He Qiang.

Zhu nodded. “He’s not ideal, but we’re pressed for time.” He turned back to Liu Xiuxiu and was pleased to find the doubt gone from her face. His instinct about this girl was not unfounded. “Once you’re settled, He Qiang will go to New York to begin a second part of the operation, but you will always be able to call him for advice, and after a few days he’ll return to Washington. By then, though, you should have made progress on your operation, which will be to seduce one of two men—both, if it’s possible—and gain information from them.”

She nodded but asked nothing. He wished that she would, because he preferred his agents to be curious, to demand to be completely informed, even when he was unable to tell them everything. He turned back to He Qiang. “You remember the Therapist?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll employ him full-time on this. Tell him it’ll be at least two weeks’ work, his regular payment plus a bonus if it goes well.”

“He’ll like that. The Therapist only speaks money.”

“You’ll get more details before your flight.”

He Qiang nodded, satisfied.

“Comrade Colonel,” said Liu Xiuxiu.

“Yes?”

“May I ask the purpose of this operation?”

“The purpose?”

She paused, her lips tightening. “I know the outline of my particular job, but may I know how it fits into your larger aims—and what those larger aims are?”

“No,” he said, but was pleased that she had asked. “You’ll focus solely on your operation. When He Qiang returns from New York, you will not question him about what he’s done. Is that understood?”

There was no sign of insult when she said, “Of course, Comrade Colonel.”

Zhu opened his briefcase, took out a folder with photographs, and spread them out on the table. Each was labeled with a name, some with more than one. “These are the players we know about. You’ll remember their faces and names, memorize the biographical details typed on the reverse side, and before you leave here at seven o’clock you’ll burn them.”

Liu Xiuxiu pushed the photographs around, pausing on Leticia Jones/Rosa Mumu. Zhu said, “That woman is extremely dangerous. If you do see her, do not engage. You report her presence to He Qiang.”

The other woman, Dorothy Collingwood, was lightly airbrushed in her official portrait, wiping away the soft wrinkles collected during her years in government service. The other two, Stuart Jackson and Nathan Irwin, sported large, false smiles. “I want you to focus on the men, of course. A week ago these three met with Jones and this man,” he said, pulling over another photo, “Alan Drummond. He’s the former head of a secret CIA office that we had a hand in destroying. What I want to know is the subject of their conversation. I know it concerned China, because Jones had just returned from a trip here, but I don’t know the details. It’s imperative to all of us that we find out.”

Though she seemed to comprehend the difficulty of the assignment, Liu Xiuxiu showed no hesitation. “Are the two men married?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “Married men are generally easier to seduce than single ones.”

He Qiang smiled at Zhu, as if to say,
See what I told you?

“This man here,” Zhu said, sliding over a sidewalk surveillance photo of Hector Garza, who was darker than the others, with a narrow face, a small mustache, and black eyes, “is a question mark. We know he met with Alan Drummond in New York, but we don’t know who he is, or if he even has any connection to what we’re doing.”

“He could be a Tourist,” He Qiang pointed out. “We never had their pictures, just their codes.”

“Tourist?” asked Liu Xiuxiu.

Zhu wished He Qiang had kept his mouth shut, but it was too late. “Agents,” he told her. “Agents run by Alan Drummond’s old department. They called them Tourists. For a time, they were legendary.”

Liu Xiuxiu acted as if this were the kind of conversation she had every day. “May I ask what happened to the department?”

“We destroyed it,” Zhu said again, not willing to go into the details that might shake her faith in her new employer. He looked at He Qiang. “Your focus will be Drummond, and you’ll use the Therapist for this. We suspect that Drummond is the epicenter, so to speak, and once you’ve learned what he’s doing you have to be ready to act. I’ll get five more people to help you out.”

“Is Xu Guanzhong available?”

“I’ll find out.”

“Thank you.”

Zhu reached into his briefcase again and took out two plane tickets, marked with new names. “Someone will meet you at the airport with your passports.”

“Who’s this?” Liu Xiuxiu asked, reaching for a photo that was close to sliding off the edge of the table. In it, a man of about forty stared back with heavy eyes, below, the names Milo Weaver, Sebastian Hall, and Charles Alexander.

“One more question mark,” Zhu said. “Milo Weaver has been meeting socially with Alan Drummond, and he was another employee of the department. He was injured recently and should be out of the game, but given his close relationship with Drummond, we can’t know for sure. He Qiang will have to look into that as well.”

Liu Xiuxiu set the photo back down.

“Are you excited?” Zhu asked.

Liu Xiuxiu considered this, staring at Milo Weaver’s gloomy face. “I’m sorting through my feelings, Comrade Colonel.”

“How are they leaning?”

She smiled, then raised her eyes to meet his. “There is one thing I have no doubt of.”

“What’s that?”

“That I was right to change careers.”

“Why?”

“Because I was tired of serving only myself,” she said before averting her gaze.

Zhu let that sit a moment, then leaned closer, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Liu Xiuxiu, if all of China could speak such poetry as that, then we would be the greatest nation in history.”

At the office, he and Shen An-ling assembled a list of five agents to assist He Qiang in Manhattan, and though Xu Guanzhong was engaged in a long-term operation in Toronto, Zhu decided to bring him in as well. Later, after Shen An-ling had left for the airport with the finished passports, Zhu went back over the files. He started with the surveillance reports on Alan Drummond, then moved gradually back, so that he saw a man in reverse. An unemployed man moving backward into an office on the twenty-second floor of 101 West Thirty-first Street and watching, on computer monitors, the systematic killing of thirty-three of his agents, his Tourists, in all the corners of the globe. In this reversed life, Drummond’s misery fades as he watches the screen, so that after he’s seen the massacre he is a new man, full of confidence and even a lust for life. Like Zhu, he is married, and, like Zhu, he’s in love with his wife. Unlike Zhu, he has never had children, and that, perhaps, makes all the difference.

It was a year ago when Xin Zhu learned that his son, Delun, had been killed with other Chinese workers doing repairs on the Sudan pipeline from Leal to the Red Sea, and while he was barely able to comprehend his own emotions his instinct took over, and he began to adjust his sights. He aimed first at the wild riot of desert people who had attacked his son’s truck. Questions were asked—specifically,
why
. Their answer: the murder of their beloved cleric, Mullah Salih Ahmad, who had been agitating against Chinese companies digging into Sudanese sand and taking Sudanese oil. Zhu was in a position to know that China had had no hand in the murder. Who had? Not the al-Bashir government, because it knew the wrath his death would provoke. Then, with information provided by a source he’d acquired a few years before in the office of Senator Nathan Irwin, he learned that one particularly nasty department of the CIA had killed the cleric, in order to turn the populace against Chinese oil development. This action led directly to the death of Delun, Zhu’s only child.

Though he spent months taking aim, the actual shot was, like so many important things in life, not witnessed by him. He remembered sitting in his office, in this office, right under the portrait of Hu Jintao, wreathed in smoke from his Hamlets, waiting for word. Waiting for anything. The first word had come from Sam Kuo—“James Pearson has been caught.” This sentence told him that all the cards were finally on the table, and there was no reason to hold back anymore. By then, he had learned the whole Tourism communications procedure and knew precisely how to use it to his advantage. He ordered most of his office staff home, and in the nearly silent office, he told the remaining ones to send the first wave of text messages. Thirty-seven in all, one to each so-called Tourist. A go-code followed by the instructions to travel somewhere and kill someone—in each case, another Tourist—and to maintain complete silence until the job was finished.

He couldn’t depend on the Tourists to simply destroy themselves, though, so a second wave of messages went out to Zhu’s own agents, who had been waiting for days in their respective cities. Throughout the world, men and women who worked for the Expedition Agency stirred.

He was later fed reports that he spent days reading and rereading, for he had asked his people to give him all the details so that his imagination would not feed him lies. It was a necessary part of perpetual revolution, the reassessment and self-critique.

After nearly two months of intimacy with those reports, Zhu saw a street in Phnom Penh, where He Péng waited on Sisowath Quay. He was a twenty-eight-year-old whose parents both died soon after his birth in the 1981 Dawu earthquake, crushed by a concrete roof. The infant was dug out of the wreckage and transferred to the care of the state. Another life, and he would have grown up a farmer and probably never set foot outside the ever-shifting Sichuan province. Now, he was a young man who had traveled extensively, a young man with education and sharp wits, a man of the world with a Cambodian hotel key card in his pocket and a pistol hanging by a shoelace against the center of his back, its long suppressor tickling the base of his spine.

Guided by the details in his text message, He Péng had identified the American they referred to as #1 as he had entered the Amanjaya Pancam Hotel, then followed him inside. He Péng’s secondary target—#2—was on the second floor, waiting to kill #1.

He had tried to keep it simple for all of them. Each had a #1 and a #2. Each knew that his pair would initially try to kill one another, and each knew that his only job was to make sure that both Americans succeeded. Zhu had explained to some of them, “We are not committing the act, we are its midwives.”

In He Péng’s case, midwifery proved insufficient. When he reached the second-floor room, he discovered a closed door and voices behind it, speaking English. One, he could tell, was injured, while the other was tending the wound. He Péng waited. When a male voice said, “I’ll get more water,” and a faucet hissed loudly, he unlatched the pistol from under his shirt, then used the key card to open the door. Inside, he found a woman sitting on the floor, against the bed—Japanese, he guessed from her features, though all these people were in fact American—bleeding from the shoulder all over the carpet. She barely had time to register surprise before he shot her once through the neck, then once through the heart.

The faucet turned off, and the man he’d followed inside appeared holding a glass pitcher steamy with hot water. That was the first casualty, shattering as He Péng’s initial wild shot went through it and into the man’s liver. The man stumbled backward into the bathroom, and He Péng followed, catching him as he reached for a pistol on the wet counter. A shot to the chest threw him back against the toilet. Another to the head stopped him for good.

What did He Péng think at that moment? Did he only think of his service to the people, or did he, when faced with a man and a woman dead by his hand, think about Sichuan fields that could have been his to tend?

No, He Péng was a good boy, and that afternoon was the natural culmination of his life thus far. Zhu had less conviction when it came to Liang Jia in Vancouver, who had left a man bleeding in the West End, to be picked up by a kind stranger and brought to Vancouver General. It had taken a stern call from him to get her to leave the airport and head to the hospital to finish her job.

There had been one loss, Wang Shi in Buenos Aires, a mistake that was either Zhu’s or Wang Shi’s—he still wasn’t sure. All he knew was that while one target American, his #1, was found in a hotel room, his #2, whose work name was José Santiago, got out of Argentina. Wang Shi’s body was found by the police, beaten and shot once through the left eye.

Nearly two months later, he couldn’t help but picture them all again, hotel rooms and pistols in Phnom Penh, in Jerusalem and Buenos Aires, in Bern and Johannesburg and Delhi. He saw a drowning in Tehran, a hospital bed in Vancouver, another in Brasilia, and bodies in fields in Tashkent and Cairo and Moscow. He saw sudden falls from great heights in Mexico City, Seoul, Dhaka, and London. He saw dogs picking over corpses in Hanoi and Tallinn, and in Tokyo he saw a bloated dead woman in a sushi restaurant, killed after hours. He saw an explosion in Afghanistan. Each was its own story, and his curse was that he knew them all. Together they became a great, violent narrative, his hand guiding thirty-three murders across the planet.

Now, he worried as he got up from his desk and prepared to go home to Sung Hui, all those corpses were coming to find him. Yet he felt more alive than he had in months.