After the call, they heard a television sitcom. Then, a few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Tina Weaver said to her daughter, “Don’t break that,” as she walked to the limit of the microphone’s range and opened the door. “Hey,” was the last word she said. There was the soft thump of a body hitting the floor. Stephanie Weaver’s voice, “Mom? Who is it?” A grunt.
Movement. Heavy steps out to the front door. Silence. The footsteps returned, paused, then left again. Silence. Footsteps crossing the apartment, then the television was silenced. Back to the front door. The catch of the door being shut.
He Qiang called to discuss the sounds, and they considered options. He Qiang felt the only option was to send Xu Guanzhong over to the apartment, but Zhu was unsure. That was when He Qiang said, “Hold on. He just sent a message-someone’s going in. I’ve got a picture here. It’s Milo Weaver’s father.”
Zhu listened to this live, for by now Xu Guanzhong had patched his microphones through to He Qiang’s laptop, and He Qiang had turned his phone so that Zhu could hear everything. Yevgeny Primakov knocked on the Weavers’ door, calling, “Hello? Ladies?” Nothing. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and then left. After some seconds he returned with what sounded like two more men and walked inside quietly, moving through the whole apartment. A single Russian curse-“ Sukin syn ”-and then, in English, “Anything. Any sign.”
After a minute, a South American accent said, “It was quick. No struggle.”
“Here’s a note,” said an Eastern European voice.
Another Russian curse from Primakov. They left, and Xu Guanzhong saw the old man exit the apartment building with two younger men. A Chevrolet Malibu station wagon pulled up to the curb, and Primakov got inside with the other two, while a man and a woman took positions outside, as if keeping guard. Within ten minutes, it was over. Primakov and his men got out, the car drove off, and Primakov’s men left in separate directions, as did the man and woman. Yevgeny Primakov, however, reentered the apartment building.
On the microphones, his distress was recorded. He poured himself a drink from the refrigerator, then walked from room to room, muttering to himself, sounding like the confused old man he must have been. Walk, stop, walk. Finally, a longer stop, and louder muttering in Russian. All Zhu could make out was the phrase “… if not here.. ”
A glass set down. Heavier steps out the front door and, distantly, banging. Hand against a neighbor’s door. In English: “You’re in there! I know you’re in there!” Silence. More banging, then silence.
When Yevgeny Primakov returned to the apartment, closing the door behind himself, what he said in Russian was clear. “Idiot. Old, damned idiot.” He was angry with himself, ashamed. He went to the bathroom and turned on the water in the sink. Splashing.
From the angle of the microphone, Zhu and He Qiang and Xu Guanzhong were able to hear what Yevgeny Primakov could not: namely, the front door opening and closing again.
The water was shut off, and muted grunting came from Primakov, the sound of someone muttering into a thick towel as he walked into the living room.
Then the unmistakable thk-thk of a suppressor-equipped pistol. The thud of a body hitting the floor. The front door opening and closing again.
“Xu Guanzhong is not going in,” Zhu told He Qiang as soon as the sounds ended. “Someone over there knows exactly what he’s doing, and I’ll not have any of you killed. Not today, at least.”
So they waited, and as they waited Zhu thought about Yevgeny Primakov, feeling an overwhelming sadness, not unlike the sadness Erika Schwartz felt, that this man had ended his days in a Brooklyn apartment. Unlike Schwartz’s, however, Zhu’s sadness was less for Yevgeny Primakov-who, really, he hardly knew-than for himself. Would Xin Zhu end up dead on some foreign floor? Or might his death be even less noble, the slow deterioration of political squabbles-or, eventually, the easy escape that Bo Gaoli had chosen?
Xu Guanzhong reported Milo Weaver’s arrival at seven forty, not long after Zhu’s steaming bowl of congee arrived. Together, they listened to Weaver in the apartment. Zhu had no idea who had taken his family and killed his father, but he knew there was only one possible move for him now if he didn’t want to end up like Yevgeny Primakov-if not dead, then dead in the water. He picked up the phone and dialed.
“Where are they?” was how Milo Weaver answered the call, making this easier for him.
“Out of the way,” Zhu answered, which was technically true.
Shen An-ling arrived a little after eight, and Zhu began by talking him through Liu Xiuxiu’s revelations. “Our philandering conspirator has admitted that there’s a mole.”
Shen An-ling stared hard at him. He looked as if he, too, hadn’t gotten much sleep, his hair matted and dirty. Perhaps realizing this, he ran fingers through his strands. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Well.”
“Yes?”
Shen An-ling stared at the desk, then raised his eyes. “Do you believe him?”
“It fits our theory. Additionally, there was one clue the senator mentioned. He referred to their mole’s wife, calling her…” He lifted a piece of paper from his increasingly disordered desk. “Here. He called her a ‘ferociously ambitious bitch’.”
Again, Shen An-ling stared. Of the five members of the committee that was making their lives difficult, only Wu Liang’s wife truly matched that description. Chu Liawa was more famous for her ambition than she was for her powerful husband. For once, though, Shen An-ling didn’t bother stating the obvious. He only said, “Is she really that good?”
“Liu Xiuxiu? I think she is.”
“But that good? Good enough that a CIA man would share such classified information with a Chinese girl?”
“I don’t know,” Zhu admitted, then, to change the subject, told him about the rest. Milo Weaver’s meeting with the conspirators, then the disappearance of his family and the murder of his father. That left Shen An-ling- again, uncharacteristically-speechless. “This changes a lot,” said Zhu.
“There’s another player.”
“Two other players,” Zhu corrected. “Yevgeny Primakov came with others, probably his United Nations people, assumedly to take the family into custody. Yet someone else actually took the wife and daughter, and then killed Primakov. It’s extremely messy.”
By then, an e-mail had delivered all of Xu Guanzhong’s photographs, which included clear shots of three men and one woman who had helped Yevgeny Primakov in Brooklyn. They ran the faces through the system, coming up with three matches. One, presumably the South American accent they had heard over the microphones, was Francisco Soto Gonzalez, a Chilean who had worked for three months in Yevgeny Primakov’s financial section of the UN Security Council’s Military Staff Committee, before being let go for no apparent reason two years ago and dropping out of the records. The woman and the man who had lingered on the street were known field agents for the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND.
By seven that evening-seven o’clock Thursday morning, New York time-He Qiang reported that Milo Weaver had left the apartment for his meeting with Leticia Jones. He Qiang asked for permission to go into the apartment, which Zhu denied. “Consider the place radioactive,” he said. “We don’t know who’s watching it.”
They tracked Jones and Weaver, despite the Mexico City evasion, and Zhu was back in the office the next morning when he learned of Milo Weaver’s attack on the Therapist. Despite his growing anxiety, Zhu laughed at the news. “How is the Therapist?” he asked.
“His ego’s a mess,” He Qiang told him. “He believes that we kidnapped Weaver’s family, and he’s angry that we didn’t warn him.”
“Let’s keep it that way. We’ll put someone in Frankfurt and someone else in Jeddah. I’d like you to go back to Washington, meet with Liu Xiuxiu, and then pack up.”
“We’re going home.”
“She will stay another week. Let’s not blow her cover too soon.”
“A vacation.”
“She’s earned it.”
“And the Therapist?”
“Give him a bonus and tell him he should be happy Weaver let him live. We’re done with him.”
He Qiang paused for a moment too long.
