entered contrite, but I left angry. Furious, in fact. I had spent the previous days grilling good comrades on the strength of what now looked to me like a self-serving deception. My anger, however, had not reached its apex, for upon returning to East Chang’an, I was informed that Bo Gaoli, who some of you may know from his sterling history helping to run the counterterrorism department, was dead. Faced with the shame of this unfounded suspicion, he had used his belt to hang himself in his cell.”
Wu Liang let silence speak for him now. The committee knew of Bo Gaoli’s suicide, but the details had never been released. There had been a rumor of a sexual predilection, another of financial indiscretions. No one-certainly not Zhu-had known that he’d been in a ministry cell when he did it. Now that Wu Liang had shared this fact, everyone turned to examine Zhu’s reaction, and he did his best to control himself. Was he successful? He wasn’t sure. He thought that he could ask Shen An-ling later, but his assistant could only see the back of his head.
Xin Zhu wondered if anyone was going to ask the obvious, and obligatory, question: Was it possible that Bo Gaoli’s suicide was an admission of guilt? He himself could not ask it-it was up to someone else, perhaps Zhang Guo. But no one asked anything, and Zhang Guo only stifled a yawn with his cupped hand.
Since no one else seemed interested in speaking, Zhu opened his mouth. “I certainly regret the death of Bo Gaoli, but it does not alter the facts as I read them. The intelligence listed on my report did, in fact, originate in the Department of Tourism, and the only conclusion I can come to is that its source was within the Ministry of Public Security.”
Wu Liang sighed audibly. “This is like burning down a man’s house and then accusing him of keeping illegal merchandise inside it. You burned their house down, Xin Zhu. You torched yourself in the process.”
“I would like to think that my long service to the Party would justify a measure of faith.”
Sun Bingjun set down his cup. “I would ask a question of Wu Liang, if I might.”
Wu Liang nodded.
“Why,” he asked, shifting in his chair, “do we hear about this now? The suicide of Bo Gaoli occurred nearly four weeks ago. If Xin Zhu is such a danger, then why have you left him a month to spread his plague?”
Zhang Guo smiled into his fist; Feng Yi raised his head, saying, “That’s a good question.”
Wu Liang lost none of his poise. Again, he sighed. “For the reason Xin Zhu brings up: his long service to the Party and the People’s Republic. Though I was angry-though I suspected deceit in order to attack a rival organization, or perhaps to attack me personally-I wasn’t about to institute disciplinary action until I could prove that Xin Zhu’s accusations were false. That only occurred when we discovered the presence of the aforementioned Tourist, this Leticia Jones, on Chinese soil.”
“I don’t follow,” Sun Bingjun said patiently.
“It’s very simple, comrade, and at this point I would like to ask Xin Zhu a simple question, a question that we could only pose at this point in time.”
Zhu looked at him.
Stone-faced, Wu Liang said, “If the CIA has a source within the Ministry of Public Security, then why would it send someone here to find out your wife’s daily schedule?”
Zhu knew that the question was not finished.
“Why would they risk sending one of their own people-which, we agree, is a great risk to them-if they owned one of us? Your wife’s schedule is not classified information. It’s something that anyone within the ministry could find out with a simple phone call. If they have, as you contend, a source within the ministry, then getting one of their own people to ask questions in the middle of Beijing is not only stupid, it’s incredibly redundant.”
Zhu bit the inside of his mouth to stifle a nervous smile. The logic was beautiful, more so because he could not point out its one flaw: Mary Caul, the consular officer who had convinced Dongfan Beisan to pose his questions, left the country before she could hope to get any answers. She had never cared about the answers. Of course, to bring this up would be admitting that he had already lied about what he knew. So he said, “I don’t know, comrade. However, I remain convinced that the Americans do own someone within the ministry, based on the evidence I submitted.”
“What I think,” said Wu Liang, “is that you are tenacious to a fault. You’ve embarked on a mission to smear the ministry with lies, and now that you’ve been caught with the lies in your hand you’re pretending your hands are empty. I’m angry about this, but more than that I’m disappointed that someone with such a history of socialist endeavor would sink so low. When Hu Jintao talks of the Eight Virtues and Shames, he reminds us to be united, help each other; make no gains at others’ expense. Xin Zhu, I fear, has ignored that one with all the greed and ambition of a Hong Kong stock trader, and we should seriously consider bringing his dismissal to the entire committee for a vote.”
Noticing how wet his palms were, Zhu couldn’t help but admire the mouth on Wu Liang. Perhaps to remind himself of the insignificance of what was happening in this room, he thought, Fifty thousand dead. What could stand up to that?
He thought, This, and you, mean nothing.
5
Two hours later, along a tree-lined residential street north of the Haidian Theater, Shen An-ling opened the door for him, and he climbed out of the car. They’d both been silent during the ride, because Shen An-ling had left his car with the guards at the Great Hall, and there was no telling if someone had slipped a microphone into the cushions. This, Zhu now thought, is getting ridiculous.
The first barrier to their offices was an unassuming door behind which an old woman smoked at a foldout table, looking like a bathroom attendant. While in front of her lay a newpaper with more Sichuan headlines and an open Sudoku puzzle book, just under the table were an intercom, a cell phone, and a Type 77B pistol that was kept loaded with nine hollow-point rounds. He’d had to work to track one down, as the gun was made only for export, and his requisitions had gone unanswered; in the end, He Qiang stumbled across one in South Korea. Now, the old woman put out her cigarette and smiled, her face full of involuntary winks, and took out the intercom, saying, “Seven and eighty-eight here.”
From inside, two guards unlocked and opened the next door, a heavy steel affair that had been carefully painted to look rusty. In their white room, they manned an X-ray machine and a metal detector, both of which Zhu and Shen An-ling sidestepped. Finally, another guard opened the last door, which brought them to a long, semiunderground office gridded with desks and desktop computers, Ethernet cables winding like lifelines up narrow columns to the suspended ceiling panels. Seated at the desks were the twenty-six clerks of his department, sorting through the news events of the day, through agent reports and intercepted communications sent from the Fourth and Seventh Bureaus. Zhu’s department, officially called the Expedition Agency (unofficially referred to as Xin Zhu’s Pit), was an outpost of the Sixth Bureau that had over the years gradually expanded its mission to overlap at least four different bureaus of the Guoanbu. Like the Second, it recruited foreign agents; like the Seventh, it prepared policy reports based on gathered intelligence; like the Foreign Affairs Bureau, it developed relationships with certain foreign intelligence agencies. And as part of the Sixth Bureau, it kept an eye on foreign activity aimed at undermining the stability of the People’s Republic.
This expansion had been gradual and purposefully quiet, and by the time it had been noticed in 2002 by none other than Wu Liang, Zhu had produced too many critical reports to be considered expendable. This had not been Wu Liang’s first attempt to undermine Zhu’s rise in power using the Supervision and Liaison Committee, but it had been the most explosive, bringing members of all the Guoanbu’s bureaus into a fistfight that was only quelled by the intervention of the head of the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, who held both men up for reprimands.
Since 2002, Zhu had doubled his staff and trebled his field agents, and until the massacre of the Tourists, he had felt nearly invincible.
“We’re dead,” Shen An-ling said once they were inside his office at the far end of the floor. “Wu Liang has been building up to this for a long time.”
“Nothing’s done yet,” Zhu told him, lighting a Hamlet as he settled behind his desk.
It was true. Sun Bingjun had refused to settle on a course of action, and Feng Yi had agreed. Zhang Guo, disappointingly, had remained neutral during the discussion, which was perhaps an attempt to position himself as
