“Unbelievable!”
“I believe it,” she said. “You really should read it.”
“When I get time.”
“Have you ever had time?”
He exhaled, waiting for the inevitable.
“Time off,” she said. “Someplace with clean air and sun chairs. You can sit by the water and read Su Tong.”
Holding back a grin, he said, “I hear Trier is nice,” then coughed when she punched him in the ribs. Package tours to Karl Marx’s birthplace were advertised in agency windows all over Beijing.
“Oh!” She hopped up and went to a cabinet. “I forgot. I ran into Shen An-Ling at the store. He gave me this for you.” She opened a drawer and took out an unmarked brown envelope. Shen An-Ling had scrawled his signature across the seal. It hadn’t been opened.
Zhu kept a small office in the back of the apartment, and after thanking Sung Hui for the meal, he took the envelope, closed the door behind himself, and settled at the desk that overlooked the city from thirty floors up. It had been her idea to move into this Chaoyang District tower, and only she could have convinced him to willingly place himself so high up. He’d asked the most basic question- What happens if the electricity shuts down? — and she’d stared at him, as if she’d never experienced a power outage, which in Beijing was an impossibility. The problem was that she’d fallen in love with the apartment and, more particularly, the vision of the two of them floating above the city. How could he deny her that?
He tore open the end of the envelope and shook the letter into his palm. It was a short letter, written in an obscure naval code that dated from 1940, and after decoding it, he read it through twice. He paused, considering the revelations Shen An-Ling had assembled here, read it through again, then cracked open the window and used matches to light the envelope, the letter, and the decoded message. As they shrank, he placed them into an ashtray and lit a Hamlet, its strong scent filling the small room.
According to their sources, Leticia Jones changed to another name after landing in Cairo, then flew to London for a connecting flight to Dulles International in Washington, D.C. After two nights in the One Washington Circle Hotel, on Monday the twelfth, the same day as the earthquake, she went to a house in Georgetown owned by a real estate company called Living, Inc, and met with four people: Alan Drummond, former head of the Department of Tourism; Senator Nathan Irwin, Minnesota Republican; Dorothy Collingwood, ranking officer in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, department unknown; and Stuart Jackson, retired CIA, Directorate of Operations (which, by 2005, was absorbed into the National Clandestine Service), now a private consultant.
The meeting lasted nearly seven hours, and lunch was delivered by an aide of Dorothy Collingwood’s. Shen An-Ling’s sources had been unable to listen to anything. They left one by one, at twenty-minute intervals, first Senator Irwin, then Jackson, Collingwood, Jones, and finally Alan Drummond-the youngest of the ringleaders, only thirty-nine-who walked two blocks and took a taxi to Union Station, where he boarded a train to Manhattan, and his home at 200 East Eighty-ninth Street.
Shen An-Ling’s assessment at the end of the note was, like Shen An-Ling, simple and to the point: Something must be done, now. I await your orders. You couldn’t buy loyalty like that-not anymore, at least.
4
Fifteen minutes before his meeting, Xin Zhu ascended the steps in front of the Great Hall of the People. Twelve enormous columns slanted at him, and he saw schoolchildren in sun visors lined up at one of the entrances. Six wore facemasks against the dust that was predicted to rise throughout the day. Green-clad soldiers stood at the main door, watching him enter. Breathing heavily, he waited until he was inside the marble lobby to wipe the sweat off his cheeks with a handkerchief. A voice said, “Xin Zhu!”
It was Shen An-ling, he of the soft skin and thick glasses that magnified his puffy eyes. Unlike Zhu, Shen An- ling was burdened by a shoulder bag stuffed with thick folders.
“What’s that?” asked Zhu.
“The background. Offer them this, and they’ll get off of your back.”
“For as long as it takes for them to read it all. How many pages?”
Shen An-ling, too, was covered in perspiration, but it was the sweat of anxiety, and it stank. “I have no idea. A thousand?”
“More, I’d guess. I’m not sure I want them looking at all that.”
“Okay,” he said, “but I’ll bring it along in case you change your mind.”
It was a fair enough proposition, and Zhu accepted it. “Where do we face our doom?”
The Beijing Hall was not far away, down a long corridor past bas-reliefs of glorious times that were either historical moments Zhu had never witnessed or hopes for the future. A guard stood outside the room itself but didn’t check their papers, and inside they found fourteen low upholstered chairs arranged in a half oval, so that one side could face the other. Behind them were eight more wooden chairs, arranged in parentheses. Thick carpet covered the floor, pushed this way and that by the morning’s vacuum cleaner, and though the walls had been meticulously cleaned, the green paint was fading in spots. Someone would be in trouble for that.
Sun Bingjun was already seated in a chair on the left side, which was a surprise. A known drunk, the frail, thin old man was usually late to meetings, if he attended at all. Zhu approached, and they shook hands. “How was Shanghai?” Sun Bingjun asked, red-faced and baffled-looking.
“I can’t keep anything a secret, can I?”
Sun Bingjun smiled. Looking at him, it was easy to forget he was a lieutenant general, a decorated veteran of Vietnam, and a Hero of the Cultural Revolution. Years and vice had undermined him, but his illustrious history, as well as a brief but successful tenure as the minister of state security, protected him and his current position in the Politburo from most attacks.
“Shanghai was a place to clear my head.”
“That should be useful today.”
“Absolutely.”
Zhu bowed his head and retreated to the right side, settling in the center seat. Shen An-ling took a wooden chair behind him and began rummaging through his bag.
The Supervision and Liaison Committee had been formed in 1992 as an offshoot of the Central Committee’s Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, whose six members had felt overburdened by the scope of overseeing the entire spectrum of Chinese law enforcement. So they created a separate committee, with a membership of twenty-six, to deal primarily with interministry conflicts, which had ballooned during the nineties. This year’s secretary was a Central Committee hotshot named Yang Xiaoming, from Sichuan, who was usually more interested in his oil concerns than in attending committee meetings. It was his deputy secretary from the Ministry of Public Security, Wu Liang, who shouldered most of his responsibilities. Though he had been invited many times to face the committee’s questions, Xin Zhu had never been invited to become a member.
Yang Qing-Nian, the youngest of this committee’s members, strolled in with tall, white-haired Wu Liang, who was the same age as Xin Zhu. Both came over and offered hands, and Zhu was surprised to find no hint of gloating in Wu Liang’s behavior. Wu Liang had worked hard to set up this morning’s meeting and keep its agenda secret, but by his demeanor, it could have been a gathering to discuss traffic lamps in Lhasa.
“How is Sung Hui?” Wu Liang asked.
“She’s very fine.”
“I’m glad to hear that. A lovely woman.”
“And Chu Liawa?”
Wu Liang’s wife was older than both of them, a storybook rearguard tigress, or so the rumors suggested. She had pushed her husband up through the ranks, angling him against foes in Yunnan, then in Nanning, and finally in Beijing, where over the last decade he had risen to the top of the food chain while insufferable absolutists like Xin Zhu remained in their dusty outlying offices, collecting intelligence but little else. “Very healthy,” Wu Liang said finally, and from his lips, it sounded like a threat. Yang Qing-Nian said nothing; he didn’t have to. His face took care of the gloating his sage was too cultured to show.
