of soft drinks.
Taking off his jacket, Canning said, “You must think I'm a real boozer.”
“I like to drink, myself.”
“The agency never bought me whiskey before.”
“You haven't been playing it right.” She sat down in one of the armchairs and folded her hands in her lap. “You like the room?”
Hanging his jacket in the foyer closet, Canning said, “Well, it isn't as nice as the George V in Paris or the Sherry-Netherland in New York. But I suppose it'll do.”
She was looking quite pleased with herself. “We've got to spend the next sixteen or seventeen hours in here. Can't take a chance of going out to dinner or breakfast and being spotted by your friends from the Imperial. We'll have food sent up. So… If we're going to be imprisoned, we might as well have all the comforts.”
He sat down in the other armchair. “We're going to Peking in a French jet?”
“That's right.”
“Tell me about it?”
“Didn't Bob McAlister tell you about it?”
“He said you would.”
She said, “It belongs to Jean-Paul Freneau, a very classy art dealer who has headquarters in Paris and branch offices throughout the world. He deals in paintings, sculpture, primitive art — everything. He's a valued friend of the Chairman.”
Canning made a face. “Why would the Chairman maintain a close friendship with a rich, capitalistic French art dealer?”
Lee Ann had the rare habit of looking directly at whomever she was talking to, and now her black eyes locked on Canning's. A shiver went through him as she spoke. “For one thing, now that China is at last moving into the world marketplace, she needs contacts with Western businessmen she feels she can trust. Freneau has helped to arrange large contacts for the delivery of Chinese handicrafts to the Common Market countries. More importantly, Freneau has helped the Chairman to buy back some of the priceless Chinese art taken out of the country by followers of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. Every time some wealthy Nationalist puts a piece or a collection on the market, Freneau is there with the highest bid. He's the agent for Red China in its attempt to keep the Chinese heritage from being spread throughout the private collections of the West.”
“And why is Freneau so willing to cooperate with the CIA?”
“He isn't,” she said. “He's cooperating with Bob McAlister. They've been friends for years.”
“When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow morning at nine.”
He thought for a moment. Then: “I guess the only other thing is the list of names. The three agents we have in China.”
“You really want me to go through that now?”
He sighed. “No. I guess tomorrow on the plane is soon enough. But I do want to know about you.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”
“You're a surprise.”
“How?”
“When McAlister described Tanaka… Well, I didn't think…”
Her lovely face clouded. “What are you trying to say? That you don't like working with someone who isn't a nice lily-white WASP?”
“What?” He was surprised by the bitterness in her voice.
“I am as American as you are,” she said sharply.
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. It isn't your ethnic background that bothers me. I just wasn't expecting a woman.”
Gradually her face unclouded. “That's exactly Bob McAlister's sense of humor.”
“So tell me about yourself.”
“If we're going to sit here and jabber much longer, I want a drink.” She stood up and took off her trench- coat. She was wearing a red silk blouse and a long black skirt, and she looked better than any woman he had ever seen. “Can I get you something?”
“Whatever you're having,” he said.
She came back from the bathroom a few minutes later and handed him his glass. “Vodka and orange soft drink.”
He clinked glasses with her in a wordless toast. After he had taken a good swallow of the concoction, he said, “Once in the car and then again just a few minutes ago, you got very hot under the collar when you thought I was questioning your Americanism. Why so sensitive?”
Hesitating for a moment, pausing to sip her drink she finally said, “I'm sorry. It's a problem I have, a psychological problem I understand but can't lick.” She took another drink. She seemed unwilling to say anything more, then suddenly explained it with a rush of words that came almost too fast to be intelligible: “My mother was Japanese-American, and my father was half Japanese and half Chinese. He owned a small shop in San Francisco's Chinatown. In 1942, about the middle of May, they were taken from their home and put in a concentration camp. You must know about the camps where Japanese-Americans were kept during World War Two. They called them 'assembly centers' but they were concentration camps, all right Barbed wire, armed guards, machine-gun posts guarding them… They spent more than three years in the camp. When they got out, after V-J Day, they found my father's store had been stripped of merchandise and rented to someone else. He received no compensation. They had also been evicted from their home and lost their personal possessions. They had to start all over again. And it wasn't easy — because banks and businessmen just weren't in the mood to help any Japanese-Americans.”
Leaning forward in his chair, Canning said, “But you aren't old enough to have lived through that.”
“I'm twenty-nine,” she said, her eyes never wavering from his. There was a thread of fear woven through those black irises now. “I wasn't born until well after the war. That's true. But I was raised in an emotionally torn hoursehold. My parents were quietly proud of their Asian ancestry, but after their ordeal in the camp they were anxious to prove themselves 'native' Americans. They became over-Americanized after that. They even stopped writing to relatives in the Old World. They taught me Chinese and Japanese in the privacy of our home, but they forbid me to speak it outside the home. I was to speak only English when I was out of their company. I was twenty-four before anyone but my mother and father knew I was multilingual. And now I seem to have this need to prove how American I am.” She smiled. “About the only good thing to come of it is a very American drive to achieve, achieve, achieve.”
And she had achieved a great deal by the age of twenty-rune. While she was still twenty she had graduated from the University of California. By twenty-five she'd obtained a master's and a doctorate in sociology and psychology from Columbia University. She had done some speech-writing for a successful Vice-Presidential candidate, and it was in that capacity that she had met and become friends with Bob McAlister and his wife. When she was twenty-six she had applied for a position with the CIA, had passed all the tests, and had backed out at the last minute when she'd accepted a proposal of marriage from one of her professors at Columbia. The marriage had failed a few months ago, and she had been more than available when McAlister had asked for her help in the Dragonfly investigation.
“I took the oath and signed the secrecy pledge the first time I applied for work with the agency,” she said. “So there was really no technical reason why Bob couldn't tell me everything and ring me in on this.”
Canning stood up and said, “Another drink?”
“Please.”
When he came back with two more vodka atrocities, he said, “I'm damned glad he did ring you in. You're the most efficient partner I've ever worked with.”
She didn't blush or demur, and he respected her for that. She just nodded and said, “That's probably true. But enough about me. Let's talk about you.”
Canning was not the sort of man who liked to talk about himself, and especially not to people whom he had just met. Yet with her he was talkative. She sat with her head tilted to the left and her mouth slightly open as if she were tasting what he said as well as listening to it.
Around seven o'clock they stopped drinking and talking long enough for her to order their dinner from room
