The civilian side of the table had less firepower. Fanning out from the MSS leaders were representatives of the Ministry of Public Security, which handled domestic security matters, a representative of the Science and Technology Ministry of the State Council, and the chief of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, which sought to coordinate acquisition of foreign technology.
In the outer seat on the civilian side, head bowed sheepishly, sat a delegate of the Academy of Science. His body language reflected remorse for the unfortunate actions of the deceased academician, Dr. Ma Yubo.
“You are late, I believe,” said Dr. Xu from the head of the table.
Heads nodded in tart disapproval. They waited for Li Zian to apologize, but he said nothing. His demeanor announced that he had not lost face in being late; they had lost face in waiting for him.
There was a long silence, broken by General Fang, the senior military representative.
“The members of the leading group have gathered following the unfortunate death of one its advisers, the academician Dr. Ma Yubo, who was assigned to the Ministry of State Security,” the general began. “The members of the leading group fear that the integrity of the program has been compromised. At the suggestion of our PLA comrades, we request a prompt and full report from the Ministry of State Security.”
Li Zian, long and sharp as a straight razor, let the silence build again, and then began to speak.
“Dr. Ma committed suicide. He had been compromised by a member of the Central Intelligence Agency, who accused him of keeping money offshore illegally in a fund administered in Luxembourg and run in Taiwan and Macao.”
There were gasps around the table, as people pretended shock at the very thought of high-level bribery. It was a fine piece of theater. Every one of them had illegal accounts overseas in the name of a family member. “It is a glorious thing to be rich,” Deng Xiaoping had proclaimed nearly forty years before, and certainly nobody in this room dissented.
Li Zian resumed, before anyone else could capture the momentum.
“Although Dr. Ma’s actions were shocking, we believe that he chose to end his life to protect one of the most precious secrets of the state. I am not permitted in this setting to disclose all the details, but I believe it is known to senior members of the leading group that the Ministry of State Security is running an operation that gives us unique visibility into decisions of the leading adversary as regards development of Project Xie and the technology known as ‘quantum computing.’ It is this operation that Dr. Ma sacrificed his life to protect, we believe.”
Li paused a moment to take a breath, which was long enough for General Wu from 2PLA to interrupt. He was a tough, box-headed general. In uniform, his upper body looked as big and firm as a refrigerator. He spoke with the sharp, guttural tone that was at once that of a military commander and a Party boss.
“This is a fairy tale,” said General Wu, looking to each member of the civilian team other than the two MSS men. “Dr. Ma was set up and recruited by the CIA. They sent a case officer from Washington and a technician from Tokyo. Whatever secrets Ma possessed are gone. The rationale that for many months has been given by the Ministry of State Security for its senior role in Scorpion—that it has special ‘access’—has been shown, by this incident, to be false.”
General Wu bowed, stiffly, toward the State Councilor.
“In light of these developments, I have a request,” continued General Wu.
“State the request,” answered Dr. Xu, the councilor. The 2PLA leader almost shouted back his response.
“I request that the senior role in this leading group be transferred from the Ministry of State Security to the People’s Liberation Army, Second Department, because of the evidence of gross incompetence and corruption.”
The demand produced a momentary uproar. Li and Wang, the two MSS representatives, rose from their seats in protest. Several other civilians shuffled papers or moved their chairs.
A bureaucratic coup was in motion. If the MSS could be purged from this sensitive spot, its hold on power was fragile indeed. There were whispers that the Party’s general secretary wanted to abolish the Ministry altogether.
“Order, please,” said Dr. Xu. “I ask my co-chair, General Fang, for his view of this matter.”
The senior general was a little man, dwarfed by his uniform; he was truly skilled in one thing, which was the political infighting that had characterized the PLA since the revolution. The CMC liaison department that he ran was one of the hidden power centers of the new China. He understood that when an animal was wounded, it was time to go for the kill.
“We are among friends, so let us be honest,” said Fang. “If this were the first instance in which we had cause to doubt the leading role of the Ministry of State Security, I would say that this incident in Singapore was a matter of bad luck. Just that. Ill fortune.”
He paused to look around the room.
“But comrades, it is not bad luck,” the diminutive general continued. “There have been too many other instances. This month, for the third time, a vice minister has been removed at Xiyuan. The Discipline Commission is investigating numerous other cases of corruption involving the cadres of the Ministry of State Security. I say ‘cadres,’ but is that an accurate description? Do these comrades even remember their Party loyalty?”
Several of those around the table muttered comments about disloyalty. The lynch mob atmosphere was growing, but Minister Li Zian, angular and austere, barely moved a muscle.
“We are one country, and yet . . . ,” General Fang paused for effect. “And yet, even today, we hear from the capitals of many of our regions a deep resentment at the dominance of the Shanghai clique that persists in the Ministry of State Security. So I am afraid that I cannot see this as bad luck or one mistake. There is a pattern here. It must end.”
“What is your proposal?” asked Councilor Xu, in his role as chairman of the meeting.
“I regret that a change of status is necessary. To rescue the essential program that we call Scorpion, on which the future security of the state depends, we must assign the supervisory role in this leading group to the People’s Liberation Army, Second Department. I say that not as a member of the Central Military Commission, but as a Chinese patriot.”
There were groans and murmurs, and another shuffling of papers, so people at first didn’t see the figure of Li Zian rise from his seat. He had the hard, narrow face of one of the early communists.
As Li stood, he opened his briefcase and took out a folder that contained a dozen copies of a document in English, stapled to a companion that was a Chinese translation. He handed a half-dozen to his left, and then to his right, and they were passed around the table.
“Comrades, I regret this breach of normal security procedures,” Li began. “But I fear there is no other way to save the program that has been entrusted to me and the Ministry of State Security from imminent destruction. Please look at the documents before you.”
The figures around the U-shaped table looked at the pages. The older ones with poor vision held the document close to their eyes. General Wu, the head of 2PLA, gave it a quick scan, immediately recognized what it was—and what it meant—and laid it down, exhaling quietly.
Li Zian continued, holding the document aloft as if it were a torch that might illuminate the room.
“As you can see, this is a document created by a program manager at the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. In the document, this manager assigns a new top-secret, Specially Compartmented Intelligence contract number, S204GV-71-P-2067, to a quantum computing project that previously had been unclassified. Check the number on your copies, please.”
The members grouped around the U-shaped table duly noted that they were reviewing document number S204GV-71-P-2067. Nods, clucks of approval, and Li continued.
“Let me explain, comrades: After careful study, our analysts have determined that this project involves the so-called ‘ion-t
rap’ pathway to creating a quantum computer. The academicians can explain another day how this works. This document tells us that the CIA and NSA believe this pathway is so valuable that it must be protected from the People’s Republic of China. Thanks to the heroic work of the Ministry of State Security, we are able to see the very development that was meant to be hidden from us.”
General Fang, who could see the mood in the conference room changing, moved to intervene.
“How do we know this is real?” Fang demanded, quivering with indignation. “This could be the work of MSS forgers. Where does it come from, other than your briefcase?”
Li nodded. They had taken the bait.
“Where does this document come from? That, as General Fang says, is the only question that matters. I cannot give you a detailed answer, for reasons that you will all understand in a moment. But the simple answer, which must never leave this room, is that it comes from our penetration of the CIA. We have for several years been running an asset, yes, a ‘mole,’ inside the highest circles of the CIA. This agent allows us to monitor their progress in the most sensitive areas of supercomputing.”
“Wo cao,” muttered one man. “Diao Niao,” said another. These were coarse, graphic expressions.
“The code name of our penetration agent is ‘Rukou,’ because this operation is the doorway through which we have walked into the most private sanctuary of the leading adversary. We believe we will receive much more information from our special source. Very much more. I regret that for security reasons, we thought it wise to inform only one other person in this room. That is General Wu, the head of our brother service.”
“Yes,” said Wu quietly.
“I must apologize to others, and most especially to General Fang, the representative of the Central Military Commission, that they were not briefed on the Rukou operation. But please be assured, General Fang, that the chairman and the vice chairman of the commission were fully briefed. I am sorry they could not share the details with you.”
That was the coup de grâce. Fang rose from his seat and exited the room. He had been humiliated in an especially shameful way and been shown to be unaware of the secrets known to his superiors.
Some of the civilians looked up toward the looming figure of Li Zian and began to clap. Others followed, including most of those in uniform. Dr. Xu, the chairman of the leading group, stood and shook Minister Li’s hand and whispered something in his ear. All the while, Carlos Wang, watching this exquisite performance, remained impassive, the thinnest trace of a smile on his lips.
Li turned to the group and raised his hands for quiet.
“For obvious reasons of security, I must ask all members of the leading group to return their copies of the document to me for safekeeping. We will soon have a detailed report on its implications for our programs, budgets, and collection efforts.”
The papers shuffled back toward the MSS chief. It was over. Minister Li shook hands all around and escorted the members of the leading group to their limousines outside. The last to leave was General Wu, the head of 2PLA, Li’s only match as an intelligence officer.
They shook hands. General Wu was about to say something and then thought better of it. Li walked him down the stairs to his car. As the door opened, Li leaned over and whispered in the general’s ear: “I tolerate much from my brother. We are a family. Please don’t ever do that again.”
19.
OLD TOWN, ALEXANDRIA
Denise Ford mixed herself a cocktail when she returned home the night after her surprise meeting with John Vandel. It was a drink she had learned to love during her too brief stay in Paris, called a “kir,” mixing a swirl of crème de cassis with white wine. She took off her heels and put up her feet on the ottoman. As tired as she was after the long flight the night before from Seattle, and the traumatic moments that had preceded it, she felt a deep satisfaction. She put a Vivaldi oboe concerto on the music system and sipped her drink. When she finished the first one, she made another, redder with the blush of the blackcurrant liqueur.
Her mentor at Yale had told her to have the big ambition, always, and she had tried to stay faithful to that advice. And now perhaps she was coming closer, though not in the way that anyone around her would dare imagine. She put on her headphones, so that she could hear the music louder, and closed her eyes.
Her senior colleagues, Vandel and Sturm, valued the fact that a few years before, she had been able to identify a damaging mistake that Russian scientists had made in their quantum computing research. Did they really think that her work was a mere accident of intuition, as she sometimes liked to claim? Or did they suppose that it was just a product of a machine-learning algorithm applied to Russian physics and computer science journals? Even smart people could often be very stupid. That was the fact of life on which successful intelligence operations, in the end, depended.
It had begun as an improvised experiment. She hadn’t planned it, really, it just happened. But as the French say, il n’y a que le provisoire qui dure. Only the temporary lasts.
She had been traveling to a technical meeting of global computer science professionals in The Hague, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The CIA had approved her trip, mainly because nobody else wanted to go. These people were dull. They were too intellectual to be interesting. The meeting offered a rare chance, Ford thought, to exercise the skills of rapport that her tradecraft instructors had admired. And she did, although not just as she had imagined.
At a dinner the first night of the conference, Denise sat next to a tall, well-mannered Chinese man. He spoke perfect English and seemed to have some kind of government position, which he never precisely revealed. Denise imagined that she had spotted him, but life is always more complicated than we think.
They had stayed up late that night drinking in the hotel bar. That was the reason people came to such events, to socialize with people whose work secrets they want to know and with whom they might develop relationships for the future. Denise had an advantage. She was an attractive, divorced woman. Everyone wanted to talk with her, but the Chinese man drifted back several times, always well-behaved, funnier and more relaxed as he drank.
The man spoke about China’s future, its need to connect with the world of knowledge and technology. He detested the closed, communist past, he said. When he looked at a country like Russia, rotten with corruption, talented only at belligerence, he was ashamed. The more passionately he talked, the quieter his voice became. Denise felt an excitement that she had almost forgotten. This gifted Chinese man spoke almost as if he wanted to be recruited.
Denise pretended that she didn’t notice when well past midnight, among the dwindling crowd still at the bar, the elegant Chinese man slipped a note into her handbag.
When she read the message a few minutes later in her room, she had trouble breathing for a moment. He had proposed in his note that they take a trip the next afternoon, when the conferees had “free time,” to another destination in the Netherlands. The gentleman had suggested an unlikely rendezvous, a grand spot in a famous Dutch city, where they could talk without being seen. He said that he was placing his life in her hands. He begged her not to tell anyone from her “company.”
Denise lay awake half the night wondering if she should message Headquarters. Normal procedures required that she seek authorization for such a meeting; it was forbidden for a case officer to do otherwise. But she wasn’t a case officer anymore. If she contacted Headquarters, they would assign someone else to make the approach to the Chinese man. She was on the shelf. She would be excluded, again. They might even be angry at her, simply for having talked to him. No, it was better to take a risk and ignore the procedural rule; better to have the larger ambition than the smaller.
They met in a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic palace, near the banks of a canal. The Chinese man spoke as if he was making a confession. He could not bear the closed horizon of life in Beijing. He needed to believe in something larger. He k
new that Denise Ford worked for the CIA, even though her conference identification described her as a senior researcher for a consulting firm. That was why he had sought her out at the conference, the Chinese man said, because he knew that she could help him.
“I believe in one world,” he said. “I believe that scientific knowledge must be shared. I believe that technology belongs to everyone.”
“I believe that, too,” she answered. “That’s the world I want to live in.”
The Chinese man took her hand. He was a handsome man, thin-boned, with delicate features and the manners of a natural aristocrat. What she felt for him wasn’t sexual attraction but an intellectual bond. That, and the thrill of the chase, returning after so many years.
“I can help you,” he said. “I can give you secrets. About Russia, about China, about many things that you will want to know. But you must protect me. Otherwise, I will be a dead man.”
She asked how she could keep him safe, and he answered that there was only one way. She must not tell the CIA about their contact.
“I know that you have said nothing to your company so far,” he explained. “That is why I trusted you. That is why I came to our meeting today. If you had contacted them, I would not have come.”
She looked up into his eyes. He was tall, for a Chinese man, but he leaned toward her, closer than people do usually, in a way that made every word and gesture seem intimate.
“It’s true,” she said. “I didn’t tell them. But how did you know that?”
“Because I checked. I am very careful. If you had sent a message, I would have known.”
Perhaps that should have frightened Denise, but it didn’t. It deepened the connection. Their sharing of information would be kept in a secret box, opened only by them. She believed him, too, when he said that if she broke her word, he would know. He was a man who seemed to possess such power, more convincing because he didn’t explain its source.
They returned separately to The Hague. Before she left the country, he gave her instructions for how he would contact her in the future. He would send her information that would help her, he said. He wanted only what she wanted, which was one world. That was his promise.
The Quantum Spy Page 17
