she was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was used to operating alone, after all.
“So this guy Wen came over the day before yesterday?” Shafer said.
“Correct. The Brits have been debriefing him more or less nonstop ever since. You know the drill, check what he says against the available evidence. Treat him with respect but not too much, make sure he knows we’re doing him a favor and not the other way around. Get everything out of him while he’s still fresh off the boat, so to speak.”
“We have anyone in the room?”
“Not yet. Wen’s been making noise about wanting to talk to us, but the Brits say he’s on their soil. Their country, their case. Et cetera. We’ll get a crack at him eventually, under their watchful eyes, of course. But I’ve asked Duto not to press the Brits too hard on this. It may actually be to our advantage to leave Shubai with them.”
“Why?” Exley said.
“I promise all will become clear. Let’s get to more of Mr. Wen’s greatest hits.”
Tyson fast-forwarded the DVD. Exley watched, fascinated, as cigarettes magically appeared in Wen’s hands, shrank to nothing, and then reappeared fresh. She hadn’t wanted to smoke this much in months.
“Ahh — here.”
“WHY DID YOU DEFECT?” the interviewer was saying.
For the first time, Wen appeared flummoxed. “When I came from Beijing two weeks ago, I decided.” He took a drag on his cigarette and said nothing more.
“But why now? After all these many years.”
“I wanted to speak freely. In China, that’s impossible.”
“Come now, Mr. Wen. We’re not making a publicity video for Taiwan. You don’t expect us to believe that you defected so you could hold up placards in the streets. You’re a fifty-two-year-old man, not a college student. How much freedom do you need?”
Wen squeezed his hands together. “You already know, so must I answer?”
“Please.”
“I am due to return to China. I don’t want to go. I love a lady here. And now I find out my wife, who lives in Beijing, has relations with my superior officer there.”
“Relations?”
Wen shook his head tiredly. “Sexual relations.”
TYSON PAUSED THE DVD AGAIN. “‘How much freedom do you need?’ I love that. The Brits.”
“Best friends to your Confederate forebears,” Shafer said.
“True enough. Neither we nor the Brits can confirm the bit about his wife. But he has been sleeping with a woman here, a lawyer at a British export-import company. Monica Cheng’s her name. He met her a few months back at a trade show to promote Chinese exporters. The Brits found her yesterday, asked her, and she confirmed. She’s under twenty-four-hour watch.” Tyson passed around pictures of the woman. She was Chinese, in her early thirties and pretty.
“Is it possible she’s fake?”
“Possible, sure. But she was born in London. She looks genuine and she says they were serious. He was, at least. And there’s something else.”
Tyson pressed play and the DVD spun.
“ARE THERE ANY OTHER REASONS you decided to defect?”
Wen reached for another Dunhill. Only after accepting a light did he speak.
“There are no penalties to me for what I say?”
“Mr. Wen. You are a guest of the British government. An invited guest. How you treated your former employer is of no concern to us. Honesty is the best policy.”
“May I speak to a solicitor?”
A pause. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t be practical at this time.”
Wen appeared unsurprised. “Let me say, then, that the PLA checks—” Wen broke off. Looking left, off- screen, he said a word in Chinese. “Audits,” a voice replied in English. Wen nodded. “The Army audits my spending. One of the people, the auditors, raised a question.”
“You were accused of theft?”
“There was a certain account in my name. For operational purposes.”
TYSON STOPPED THE DVD AGAIN.
“This part he absolutely refused to put on camera. Mr. Wen Shubai seems to have been stealing from the PLA with both hands. He’s got an account with two million dollars at UBS. Says it was to fund covert operations inside Europe.”
“Sounds like it was funding Operation Move My Girlfriend Monica to Barcelona,” Shafer said.
“He says the PLA’s auditors refused to accept his perfectly legitimate answers about the account. So he did what any of us would do.”
“He fled into the arms of a foreign power.”
“Precisely, Mr. Shafer.”
“Did you two practice this routine?” Exley said. “You could take it on the road. Big bucks. Shafer and Tyson, CIA vaudeville.”
Shafer and Tyson looked at each other in mock be fuddlement. “I don’t know what she’s talking about, Ellis,” Tyson said. “Anyway, it would have to be Tyson and Shafer.”
“So do we believe Mr. Wen?”
Tyson folded his hands together, raised his index fingers to his lips. “Well. Here’s the thing. We do.”
“We think he’s the genuine article, not a fish thrown our way by the Chinese to confuse us, as our old friends at the KGB used to do.”
“We and the Brits both. Reasons—” Tyson counted them out on his fingers.
“One: If he’s a fish, he’s a very big fish. He’s extremely senior. That’s a lot to give up, and we don’t know why they would. Two: Monica’s real. Three: The money in his UBS account is real and he’s been putting it there for a while. Four: The Chinese government is conducting, shall we say, urgent inquiries as to his whereabouts. And five: The Chinese have never liked those KGB-style counterespionage ops.”
“They love to spy.”
“Not the chess match kind of spying. The simple kind. The pay-the-engineer-get-the-blueprints-for-the- fighter-jet kind.”
“The kind that works,” Shafer said.
Again Tyson fast-forwarded through the DVD. “And then there’s this,” Tyson said. “You can watch the whole tape if you like, of course, but I promise these are the highlights.” He clicked the DVD.
“DOES CHINA HAVE AGENTS WITHIN the Central Intelligence Agency?”
“Yes. Until last year, two. Then one was dismissed.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know precisely. He hardly showed up on my”—again Wen said something in Chinese and the unseen voice translated—“on my radar screen. He was in what the Americans call the division of intelligence.”
“The Directorate of Intelligence.”
“Yes. The analysts. He translated Chinese newspapers and similar things. He was not very senior.”
“What about the other agent?”
“He was in the other division — directorate. Operations.”
“Was he also low-level?”
“Not at all.” Wen sat up in his chair as he said this, Exley noticed. Though he was now betraying China, he was still unconsciously proud that his service had infiltrated Langley. “He had access to many operations. Not just
