The Quantum Spy

by David Ignatius

  “Give me a break with the communist crap. And seriously, you’re making this up.”

  “You think so? Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still not sure why you brought me here. This is all bullshit. You haven’t asked me anything yet.”

  Carlos Wang raised his eyebrows. He gave a thin smile and shook his head.

  “I have no questions. You are free to leave anytime you want.”

  “Thanks.” Chang moved forward in his seat, about to stand. “How about now?”

  “First, maybe you would like to hear about your mother’s family. That is a very complicated story. It will interest you, I’m sure.”

  “Good luck. My mother didn’t talk much. She was from San Francisco. ‘It’s Chinatown, Jake.’ ”

  Carlos Wang was quizzical. “Who is ‘Jake’?”

  “It means, ‘forget it.’ It’s a line from a movie called Chinatown. A cop tells Jack Nicholson to forget about something, because the truth never comes out in Chinatown.”

  “Ah, but it does, when people aren’t afraid. The problem for your mother was that she knew too much.”

  Chang was exasperated. Despite himself, he was being pulled deeper into Wang’s narrative. He couldn’t help himself.

  “My mother didn’t talk about her father because he was a gangster. I always figured that. Big deal.”

  “That is not quite right. Your mother’s maiden name was Rose Kwan. Am I correct?”

  “Yup. Her father was Henry Suh Kwan. My mother showed me the fancy Chinese building where he used to go sometimes as a young man, on Stockton Street in Chinatown.”

  “The Fung Yee Tien Association,” said Wang.

  “Yeah. That’s right. Fancy balustrade. Red-tiled roof. There’s a sign in the masonry that says it was built in 1925. I used to see it as a kid. Just went back, the other week.”

  “Ah, yes, a building. Very nice. But do you know what this ‘association’ was? It was a tong, a radical organization for self-defense, created to honor four heroes from ancient times, from the time of the Three Kingdoms. Those four heroes were named Kwan, Liu, Chang, and Chu. So it was your mother’s family that was part of this association, this band that was pledged to fight the warlords.”

  “Like I said, we assumed they were a gang. The Chinese Mafia. That was why my mother wouldn’t talk about her father. You’re telling me what I already know.”

  “I don’t think so. The line between criminal activity and radical politics is a fuzzy one, don’t you think? When people are scared by a movement, they say it’s an illegal gang. Or a terrorist group! That was what happened with the Fung Yee Tien Association. But your grandfather and your mother were smart. They found another way.”

  “The more you talk, the less I believe,” said Chang. But his eyes remained fixed on the man in the beret, whose face was half-illuminated in the light of the flickering fire. Chang poured them both another drink.

  “Your grandfather Kwan knew that trouble was coming. It was the 1950s. There was a ‘Red China Scare.’ But the police were cracking down on the associations, too, the tongs. Everyone was waving Kuomintang banners and saying to fight for Chaing Kai Shek. But your grandfather Kwan knew that Chinese people were being used by everyone. Police, politicians. He’d had enough.”

  “My mother said once that her father got in trouble, but she wouldn’t explain. What did he do?”

  “He tried to be an American. Ha-ha, think of that. He went to the Six Companies, the elders of Chinatown, who formed the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, and said that Chinese people should not be mistreated in this way; they had their rights. But the elders were too scared in that time. He was not scared. You want to see his picture?”

  Carlos Wang removed from his satchel a copy of a picture. It showed a handsome young Chinese man, clear-eyed, with a great shock of black hair, wearing a gray cardigan sweater. He was smiling.

  “I’ve never seen this picture,” said Chang. “What did my grandfather do?”

  “He fought for the truth. He helped start a reform group called The Correct Path. That meant the honest, clean way without the tongs or political bosses. People said it was a radical organization, but your grandfather didn’t care. Then, in the 1960s, he and some friends started a bookstore for Chinese people. Just books! It was called ‘All-American Bookstore.’ They sold books from the Mainland. Even the ‘Little Red Book.’ Ha-ha.”

  “Where was it? I’ve never seen it. Never heard of it.”

  “It was on Walter U. Lim Place. All the good things in Chinatown were there. All the organizations that fought for Chinese people, so they could be real Americans. Like you.”

  Chang shook his head. He was uncomfortable. It was as if someone else had taken possession of his life story. He tried to fend off the Chinese officer.

  “Nice try,” said Chang. “You’re making this up. Why wouldn’t my mother talk about her dad starting a bookstore? Give me a break.”

  “Because it was too painful. Too dangerous for you.”

  “Why? What’s dangerous about a civil rights organization and a bookstore?”

  Carlos Wang spoke very quietly.

  “Your grandfather Kwan served time in prison. They said he was a communist. He spent five years in a federal penitentiary. Here, I will show you the record of his sentencing. And here’s the discharge picture of him when he left prison.”

  Carlos handed two sheets of paper to Chang. As he took them, Chang’s hands trembled slightly. He lowered his head. The photograph showed a man who looked like he hadn’t slept in his five years of captivity. The eyes that once sparked with confidence were now hollow and rimmed in black.

  “Uh-huh.” That was all he said at first, as he tried to recover his balance. Then a low mutter: “This is crap.”

  “It was a matter of great shame in those days, never to be talked about. Your family arranged a marriage. They had distant relatives in the Chang family in Arizona. That is how Rose Kwan went to Flagstaff. To meet and marry your father. He was poorer, less educated. But it was an escape. Her own father had just been sentenced. Children were calling her names in school. She had to leave.”

  “My mother would have told me later. He was her father. My ancestor. Part of my story.”

  “How could she, Harris? You were on the football team. You were going to West Point. You were a war hero. Now you’re in the CIA. It wouldn’t have helped you to know that your grandfather had been a communist. It wouldn’t help you now. It’s a secret because it has power. It’s dangerous.”

  Harris Chang sat back in his chair and put his glass of wine aside. His face fell into deep shadow. He held the photographs and other documents in his hands and then let them drop to his lap. He closed his eyes. He wasn’t an introspective man; his whole life had been about control of emotion. But in this moment of personal revelation, he felt deep sadness, even remorse, for the pain that his mother and grandfather had experienced.

  Chang brushed a teardrop with his sleeve. He hated giving Wang Ji, his interlocutor, what he wanted. But sitting there, immensely lonely, suddenly, he knew that this would be a very hard story to explain to his colleagues back home.

  “This is bullshit,” Chang said again. But his voice betrayed a different emotion.

  “You must be hungry,” said Carlos. He rose and went to the pantry. His slim form, seen in shadow, might well have been that of the revolutionary he admired.

  “I have prepared meat and bread and cheese,” Wang said. “And a little more wine, perhaps. And then you can sleep. Tomorrow, you can go home. There’s a taxi stand down in the villa. They can take you wherever you want.”

  Chang struggled to recover his identity as a CIA officer.

  “What do you want to know about Singapore?” asked Chang. “I’ll bet you’re wondering what Dr. Ma told me. That’s why you brought me here. Not all this Chinese crap. Come on, play your cards. Ask your questions.”

  Carlos Wang shook his head. He patted t
he American on the hand.

  “We know enough about Dr. Ma. It was you that we wanted to understand. And now, we do.”

  “You bastard,” said Chang. “Maybe you think you have power over me, but you don’t. This is a rookie play. I have nothing to hide. From anyone. My whole life story is about loyalty.”

  “Of course,” said Carlos. “It’s just a more complicated story than you realized. Now that you know, you must explain it to others. To your agency. To the FBI, maybe. What consequence that will have, I cannot say.”

  “Nice try. A non-pitch, using precious facts of my life, if they are facts. But honestly, it won’t work. As good as you are, I’m better.”

  Carlos Wang set a plate of bread and cheese and cold sausages before Chang.

  “We’ll see,” he said. He lit another cigarette. The gentle look disappeared from his face. Even in the flickering shadows, the anger in his eyes was clearly etched.

  “I don’t know what will happen to you when you return home, Mr. Chang. But really, sir, after what you did to Dr. Ma Yubo, you deserve whatever comes. This man was weak, but he was a scientist, a graduate of your own universities. His mistake was that he wanted to be rich and have a pretty girlfriend, like an American.”

  “He knew what he was doing.”

  “Not really, sir. You took him apart, like a doll made out of paper and thread. He did the honorable thing, which was to kill himself. I wonder about you.”

  Chang stared at the plate. He didn’t want to engage in the conversation with Carlos Wang anymore. In truth, he had no answer for him.

  “Eat,” said Wang. “You’ll need your strength. Tomorrow will be a long day. And long days after that, too.”

  Wang left the room. A door slammed shut, and then a car engine fired. Chang looked around the small chalet. There was a bedroom and a bathroom, in addition to the living room and pantry. He was alone, it seemed.

  Chang put another log on the fire and ate the little meal that his host had provided. He had no phone to call anyone, and he wasn’t sure yet what he would say. He finished the bottle of wine and fell asleep undisturbed in the single bed.

  Harris Chang awoke at dawn. His head hurt. In the living room, he saw the pictures that Carlos had given him of his grandfather Kwan and the villagers back in Baisha and his great-grandfather’s railroad records, still on the floor by the chair. He thought about burning them, but that seemed wrong. He put them in his jacket pocket, gently so they wouldn’t crease.

  He walked down to the village of Mineral del Monte and found a taxi outside the Hotel Paradiso. The driver gave him a wink, as if he knew the story. “It is a senorita in the hills, isn’t it? Now, very early, you must leave her.”

  “Yes,” said Chang. “How did you guess?” The way back seemed a lot longer than the ride up had been.

  Chang booked a flight for that afternoon back to Dulles but then canceled it and reserved another flight, twenty-four hours later. He needed time to think. He composed a brief operational message for John Vandel about his trip to the mountains and left the rest for later. He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain the hours he had spent with Wang Ji, the head of the American Operations Division of the Ministry of State Security, and he wished that it were possible to say nothing at all.

  24.

  LANGLEY AND ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  Mark Flanagan slept badly the night before his first day as deputy to Assistant Deputy Director Denise Ford. There were circles under his eyes and a dull cast to his usual ruddy complexion. He didn’t like spying on colleagues, even when they were suspected of disloyalty to the agency. He looked out of place. He wore a gray suit instead of his usual rumpled tweed jacket and khaki pants. He didn’t know where to park. He went to the old Headquarters building instead of the new one. On the elevator, he couldn’t remember the names of two S&T colleagues he’d known for twenty years.

  Flanagan had been assigned a small office just down the hall from Ford’s. When he unlocked the door, he found a little stack of books on his chair and a note from his new boss. “To get you started,” she had written. The books were about computing. The two on top looked almost accessible: Quantum Computing Since Democritus and Schrödinger’s Killer App: Race to Build the World’s First Quantum Computer. The rest were textbooks, filled with algorithms and equations that Flanagan couldn’t have read even when he was an engineering student at Cornell.

  Denise Ford rapped on his door thirty minutes after he arrived, while he was setting up his computer profile. She might have been a middle-aged professor at a smaller Ivy League school, better dressed than her colleagues; the spark of intelligence in her eyes but a wariness, too. She was carrying two cups of coffee. She handed one to Flanagan.

  “Settling in?” she asked.

  “Totally,” he said, casting off his weariness. “I’ll have to brush up on my math and physics, though.” He nodded at the pile of books.

  She picked up the top book in the stack and leafed through its diagrams of quantum rabbits and coins that were in two positions at once.

  “I warned you I’m a quantum computing freak,” she said. “The world is about to be turned upside down. That’s why I left the books. So you can prepare.”

  Flanagan took a sip of his coffee. How was he supposed to respond to that? He had been briefed about his mission by Miguel Votaw, the deputy director of the FBI, who had offered some general guidelines: Flanagan should shadow his new boss, monitor who she was visiting and calling, and report any sign that she might be planning to flee. He should pay particular attention to any activities that involved quantum computing, on which, it was believed, she was focusing her espionage on behalf of China.

  Flanagan was perplexed. He had assumed that his target would be elusive. But here she was, on his first day in the office, confiding—no, advertising—her interest in the very topic that the investigators thought was most sensitive. Flanagan dangled a question.

  “How did you get so interested in quantum computing? That’s more an NSA and IARPA thing, right? S&T is still the gadget shop, not the computer science lab.”

  She took a seat on the arm of Flanagan’s guest chair. She wasn’t resisting his inquiry. She wanted to talk.

  “I couldn’t avoid it! Part of my job is reviewing IC paperwork that doesn’t interest Grayson. And these quantum projects are everywhere. I just visited one last week in Seattle with Kate Sturm. I wanted to know everything about it because of all the other work we’re approving.”

  “Was it interesting?”

  “Fascinating! Maybe I overdid it, asking questions. But I want to, you know, spread the gospel. This stuff is important. My only worry is that with so many projects going black, we’ll kill the science.”

  She was laying an alibi. That was Flanagan’s first thought, listening to her explain her interest in quantum computing. All these conversations could be cited later by a lawyer, if it ever came to that.

  Flanagan kept the ball in play.

  “There’s no way to stop stuff going black, is there? I mean, that’s what we do.”

  “But it’s stupid. When we put things in compartments, it’s like trying to suck up the ocean with a soda straw. Quantum mechanics isn’t an intelligence compartment. It’s life. It’s the way the universe operates. We can’t own it. That would be like trying to own the air.”

  She stopped, pushed a strand of her auburn hair off her forehead, and took a breath.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “Don’t mind me. I do my job. If they say it’s black, fine, into the box it goes. But sometimes . . . .”

  “Sometimes what?”

  She laughed and flipped into a different gear.

  “Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey. Did you ever read that? I did, in college. Wonderful book.”

  “You were talking about quantum computing?”

  “Was I? Maybe so. Well, I have to go to work. There’s a world out there, waiting for the competent woman. That’s what my father always said. How wrong was that? Wha
t are you doing later this week?”

  “Nothing. I mean, anything. What did you have in mind?”

  “How about a field trip? I have to go to California to talk to some of our grantees. They’re in the quantum space, too. They took government money, and now they’re unhappy about disclosure rules. I have a little rebellion on my hands. It’s one I sympathize with, but don’t tell anyone that. The thing is: I need a wingman. Grayson won’t come. Why not you? Come on! It’s a great boondoggle.”

  Flanagan played coy. “I don’t know. I just got here. Where is it?”

  “I’m meeting the scientists in Newport Beach. It’s ridiculously beautiful. I need some company, even if he’s an old has-been from S&T. Come on: You can listen to the rebels.”

  “What’s the rebellion?” pressed Flanagan. “What are the scientists upset about?”

  “Us! The government. They think we’re trying to fence off the world. Sometimes I think they may be right, but I’m a softie. That’s why I need an agency veteran to come along. To keep me inside the chalk lines.”

  “Chalk on your cleats,” said Flanagan with a laugh. It was a line that had been used by a former CIA director. She was brilliant. All this talk about openness and sharing. She had made him as an informer the moment he walked in the door. She was weaving her tapestry of defense. Either that or she was innocent.

  “Are you sure it’s wise for me to go?” asked Flanagan. He worried that he was falling into a trap, racing off with her to a meeting on the subject about which she was supposedly stealing government secrets.

  “What a silly question. Of course, it is. We’re just doing our jobs.”

  John Vandel nodded appreciatively several times when Flanagan recounted the conversation with Ford and her travel invitation. They met that night at the hideaway office on North Glebe Road.

  “She’s good,” he said.