“This is America’s gift to the world.”
Though she made it clear that she lived alone, she made no attempt to bring him back to her place. “If someone is sitting on a fence,” she explained to Zhu, “pushing never helps.” So the night ended chastely, them sharing a taxi to her place and her standing on the sidewalk, waving as the car took him home. He had her phone number, though she had made it a point not to ask for his.
Jackson called her on Monday the ninth, the same day Alan Drummond left for Seattle, and asked if she would like to have dinner with him on Wednesday. A quick check told Zhu that Jackson’s family was out of town for the week, and he passed that information back to Liu Xiuxiu. “This is good,” he told her during one of their rare telephone conversations.
“Yes,” she answered, then paused.
“What is it?”
“It’s too fast.”
“You said he likes you. You said you got along.”
“He does like me, but he’s also careful. He’s from the world of intelligence. I expected to have to run into him at the coffee shop again.”
“His family’s out of town. He sees it as his only chance.”
“Maybe,” she said, and he liked that, despite her confidence, she was suspicious of her successes. She was going to develop into an excellent agent.
It was on Wednesday, after dinner at a small French restaurant outside the Beltway, that she invited him up to her apartment for a drink. He seemed amused by her small place and confused by the paintings, which she refused to interpret for him. “Art is communication,” she told him, “and if it doesn’t communicate on its own, it’s a failure.” However, she could sense his excitement, having been welcomed into the bohemian art world, and when she poured him a second Scotch he said, “Would it be all right if I kissed you?”
She laughed at this, and when she saw the dismay in his face she said, “I’ve been waiting for you to kiss me ever since Elektra. ”
He left in the morning with a bounce in his step. She could tell that this was new for him; he hadn’t realized how freeing it would make him feel. When she wrote out her report, she even noted that he was generous in bed, ensuring that her orgasm was taken care of before focusing on his own. Despite himself, Zhu thought of his own sex life with Sung Hui, wondering how she would report on him.
Jackson was busy all Thursday, but on Friday, after attending a reception, he arrived at her apartment at one o’clock in the morning, slightly drunk. They spent much of Saturday together, until he had to leave for rural Pennsylvania to join his family. On that same day, in London, Alan Drummond disappeared.
It was going amazingly well. Liu Xiuxiu had not yet broached the target subjects with him, but Zhu trusted her, and knew that this was an area that she understood better than he ever would. Jackson had, however, discussed some of the projects he was working on with various politicians and congressional committees. His role was adviser, he told her, for he had a breadth of experience “that these youngsters can’t even fathom. Sometimes I think that they’d sink if I wasn’t there to plug up the holes in their boats.” Then he mentioned that he even used his vast experience to advise on some project “that deals with issues related to China.”
Instead of pressing, she turned it into a taunt. “So you’re an expert on China, are you?”
“I know a thing or two about a thing or two.”
“Is that so?” she asked, tugging off the panties she had just squeezed into.
Jackson and his family returned from Pennsylvania on Tuesday, and when he called her the next day he sounded upset. “I can’t stop thinking about you. When can we meet?”
This time, she delayed. Her uncle was in town, staying with her until Friday. The uncle, of course, was He Qiang, who was only staying the day to check on her and to liaise with Sam Kuo. On Saturday, June 21, as Milo Weaver celebrated his birthday, Jackson arrived mad with sexual excitement, and they ignored the bed, ending up on the old hardwood floor and tearing one of the paintings in their tussle. Afterward, the talking began. He was under incredible stress, he explained elusively. The family? she asked. “Yes, but no. Not that. Work.” Some extremely difficult maneuvering was going on with that project he had mentioned before.
“Something to do with China?” she asked and immediately kicked herself for being so obvious.
But he didn’t hesitate. “Yes. It’s… look, I’m not young anymore-you can see that. Once, I was able to deal with these things, but that was a long time ago. Now, I’m more of a politician than anything else. I know how to charm, I know how to lie, I know people. But when these sorts of things happen, you realize how little control you really have over your world.”
“I don’t understand.”
He paused, stroking her arm, perhaps wondering how much he could say. “I’m not a spy, not anymore.”
She sat up at that, because it was the only plausible reaction. “Who says you’re a spy?”
“No one, no one,” he said, waving it away. “Forget it.”
She pretended to forget, her only reference to it being the additional kindness she lavished on him when he returned for two hours on Monday afternoon, and again on Wednesday, June 25, the same day Milo Weaver went to Washington to meet Nathan Irwin and Dorothy Collingwood. What Liu Xiuxiu didn’t know was that Jackson had chosen to spend the afternoon with her rather than sit with his coconspirators as they vetted Weaver, though Xin Zhu put this together easily enough. It certainly meant something important, but even more important was what he told her. He again brought up his work-related anxieties, and Liu Xiuxiu posed the question, “Why do you feel like a spy? It’s none of my business, but I hate to see it tear you up.”
He labored over his answer before saying, “Because I’m sitting there looking at information we’re getting out of China, and it’s obvious that this isn’t just regular intelligence. It’s too good to be that. We’ve got someone right in the Chinese government giving us reams of excellent information.”
According to her report, she kept her composure, but who knew what the truth was? She asked, “So what’s the problem with that? That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Sure, but it’s too much information, too much and too good. I’m told all this is because our source’s wife, some ferociously ambitious bitch, is getting him to sell off as much intel as possible before they disappear from China with their financial security blanket. So our guy is being reckless,” Jackson said, stroking her bare hip.
“That’s his problem,” she said after a moment. “You’ll benefit from his mistakes, won’t you?”
He stared at her, maybe wondering about her level of cynicism, and said, “The real problem is someone else, another official who’s onto him. With the amount of intelligence we’re getting it’s just a matter of time before this bastard catches our man. You see?”
She nodded.
Jackson took his hand from her hip. He rubbed his eyes and sighed. “Xin Zhu, that’s what they call this bastard, and when he catches our man he’ll string him up and gut him. We’ll have nothing, and our one friend in their government will be dead. That’s the problem. These young guys only care what intelligence they can get out of him right now, but what about next month? Next year?” He shook his head. “Xin Zhu,” he said, his repetition of her boss’s name making her quiver, “is our problem, and we’ve got to get rid of him.”
That there was a threat against him was not news, but three words- ferociously ambitious bitch — told Zhu more than he had hoped for. He only knew of one high-ranking ministry official whose wife matched that description.
2
Xin Zhu had come into the office at five in the morning to decode and read Liu Xiuxiu’s report, and he felt he needed more sleep to be able to understand its ramifications. Instead, though, he sent out for breakfast. He had just ordered a bowl of congee with duck eggs when his cell phone began to chirp with incoming messages. These were from He Qiang, but they were forwarded reports from his favored agent, Xu Guanzhong, who had been assigned to watch the Weaver home.
Xu Guanzhong had taken a room across the street from the apartment, just over the Garfield Farm Market, listening to the microphones they had installed. He listened to Tina Weaver order Chinese food, receive it from a deliveryman and, around five, speak to her husband on the phone. Light, unconcerned.
