At last Canning switched off the polygraph and said, “Yuan is not the man we want. He doesn't know anything at all about Dragonfly or trigger men.”
General Lin said, “You are certain? The machine could be wrong.”
“That's not likely.”
“He seems like a crafty old man,” the general said doubtfully.
“Not crafty enough to deceive a computer,” Canning said. “Printed circuitry and microtransistors aren't susceptible to guile.”
The general nodded. “Very well. What is the name of your second agent? We are wasting time here.”
“I agree that we ought not to waste time,” Canning said. “This is a very grave matter. On the other hand, Dragonfly has been ready for activation for months and hasn't yet been used. I don't understand your great impatience, General.”
General Lin frowned. “I do not understand it either. But I
Andrew Rice was surprised to hear the President's voice on the other end of the line. “Is something wrong, sir?”
“Yes, Andy, I'm afraid that something is very wrong. The Soviet ambassador paid me a visit a few minutes ago. He outlined their reaction to the Dragonfly project if it should be carried out.”
His heart suddenly racing, Rice said, “I see.”
“I'm sending a limousine around for you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It'll bring you to the Pentagon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Why not the White House? Rice wondered. But he did, not ask, for he knew they had said all that could be said on an open phone line.
“See you within the hour, Andy.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Rice hung up, cursing the goddamned Russians. He expected that they would invade China from the west once the plague had struck in Peking. That was acceptable. That could be dealt with in due time. But this sounded like something much more ominous. Had the Russians given Washington some ultimatum? Were those crazy goddamned Bolsheviks siding with the Chinese? They hated the Chinese! Why would they line up with them? It was craziness!
He dressed hurriedly and was standing in front of his town house, crunching LifeSavers two at a time, when the limousine arrived.
The second CIA deep-cover agent was a sixty-four-year-old man named Ku K'ai Chih. Like Yuan, he had been a follower of Chiang, and he had lost his entire family and his business in the revolution. Another natural for the CIA. He had returned to the mainland in the spring of 1951, and he had rapidly established himself as an ardent Maoist, organizing a Party unit among the dock workers and seamen in the great eastern ports like Foochow, Shanghai, and Tsingtao. Today he was one of the twelve members of the board of managers of China's merchant marine.
The interrogation went as it had with Yuan: Canning asked the questions in English; Lee Ann rephrased them in Chinese, the subject replied, and the computer analyzed the responses. The purple line seldom wavered.
At the end of fifteen minutes of intense questioning, Canning said, “This one's clean too.”
Lee Ann explained to Ku that he would remain at the embassy, would later be flown to the United States for debriefing in full, and then would be returned to Taiwan.
“We are left with the conclusion that the trigger man for Dragonfly must be your third agent,” General Lin said.
“It certainly looks that way,” Canning said.
“His name?”
Canning hesitated for an instant, then said, “He is Sung Chu'ung-chen. As you may know, Sung is in charge of a branch of your Internal Security Force.”
General Lin's yellow-brown face darkened perceptibly. He was extremely mortified by the news that one of his own subordinates was a CIA deep-cover agent. “I know Mr. Sung all too well.”
“Shall we go find him?” Canning asked.
“I shall go find him,” the general said. “I will not require your assistance this time, Mr. Canning. Since Sung is obviously the trigger agent for Dragonfly, the crisis is past. We can arrest him and get to the truth in our own fashion, without your marvelous computerized polygraph.” He smiled coldly. “And later, of course, he might also wish to tell us what misguided citizens of the People's Republic cooperated with him in the passing of secret information.”
Getting swiftly to his feet, Webster said, “General Lin, may I say that this is a most uncooperative—”
“You may say what you wish,” Lin assured him. “But I have no time to stand here and listen.” He turned and strode out of the drawing room.
Webster was nonplused. He sputtered helplessly for a moment and finally said, “Well, I told you he was a cunning little man. In spite of all your precautions, your network is blown.”
Lee Ann began to laugh.
Canning smiled.
Amazed, Webster said, “I fail to grasp the comic element.”
Stifling her laughter, Lee Ann said, “David foresaw just this situation as he was drifting off to sleep last night in Tokyo — that neither of the first two agents we interrogated would be the trigger for Dragonfly. He got up and put through a call to Bob McAlister and asked him to dig up a good fourth name.”
“A fail-safe name to keep General Lin honest,” Canning said.
Webster nodded slowly. “So… Mr. Sung is not one of ours. He's an innocent.”
“Exactly,” Canning said. “General Lin will arrest him. And I'm afraid that Sung will be tortured for several hours. But eventually the general will realize that Sung is no more a CIA operative than he is himself. Then he will be back here, demanding the name of the real third agent.”
“And you'll give it to him?” Webster asked.
“Oh, sure.”
“But when he has the right name, why should he play by the rules any more than he's doing now?”
“Because,” Lee Ann said, enjoying herself immensely, “he won't be absolutely certain that the next name David gives him is the real article. He'll have to suspect it's another ringer, a double fail-safe. He'll have wasted so much time on Sung that he won't dare waste more on what might be another hoax— expecially not when he's having these nightmares and feelings of imminent disaster. So he'll bring our man here for confirmation, and we won't let him take our man back again.”
“Mr. Canning, you have a splendid oriental mind.”
“I know. I cultivate it.”
“And now what do we do?” asked Webster.
“How about dinner?” Canning asked.
“Certainly. But what a letdown after the tension of this afternoon!”
“I can assure you,” Canning said, “this is going to be the tensest dinner of my life.”
SIX
The office in E Ring belonged to one Lionel Bryson, a full admiral in the United States Navy, one-time
