The Quantum Spy

by David Ignatius

  Chang called John Vandel’s cell phone again. This time he answered.

  “This is Harris. You’re not going to believe this, but Denise Ford just made a covert rendezvous in a grocery store. She wants to meet me in ten minutes. What should I do?”

  “That depends on whether you’re a patriotic American.”

  “Of course, I am. That’s why I called you. I didn’t want you to find out about this some other way.”

  “Then go meet with her. Record it if you can. But remember it, so you can testify about it when she’s indicted. Can you do that, Harris? You sound frazzled. You okay?”

  “Yes, sir. More than frazzled, actually. Should I ask her about the Chinese?”

  “Hell, no. And don’t tell her anything she doesn’t know already.”

  “Do I have immunity for all this? I don’t want to get burned for doing what you just told me to do.”

  “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t grant immunity. But as the deputy director for operations, I’m telling you to go. We’ll sort the rest out later.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” Chang closed the connection.

  Chang walked one block up Fourteenth Street and sat down in the outdoor patio of a French restaurant, wondering what to do. He would have called Mark Flanagan, if he were still alive. Chang liked to imagine that he had friends. But in this moment, he felt entirely alone.

  Chang rose from the barren café and walked back toward P Street. He found the tavern across the street from the grocery and entered warily, looking for a setup. There was an old-timey bar on the right, backed by a mirror and fifty bottles of booze. On the left beyond a big common table was an array of booths. Most of them were empty, but in the last one, behind the wooden divider, facing away from the door, he could see a blonde head.

  Chang pushed the record button on his phone and put it in his breast pocket. He walked back and took a seat opposite the woman. She had a martini glass in front of her. It had the light pink tint of a Cosmopolitan. It was untouched.

  “You’re late,” said Ford, “but I won’t hold that against you.”

  “I came. I told you in the market that I didn’t know who you were, but that wasn’t true. You’re Denise Ford. You work in the front office at S&T. You said you needed to tell me something. Why all the mumbo jumbo with the message at my house and the brush pass?”

  “Do you have a phone with you?” she asked. “Take out the battery, please.”

  “It’s an iPhone. It doesn’t have a removable battery.”

  “Then turn it off and put it in this bag.” She removed from her purse a small phone case that blocked the phone from sending or receiving signals.

  Chang handed the phone to Ford, who put it in her quarantine case. She appraised him as he moved.

  “Do you always carry a weapon?” she asked, looking at the bulge under his shoulder.

  “Not usually. You’re special.”

  “Call me Denise,” she said, extending her hand. “You were a friend of Mark Flanagan’s weren’t you?”

  “Yup. We worked together sometimes. I liked him a lot. I miss him.”

  “Such a nice man. My deputy, too briefly. What happened to him, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe someone tried to kill him. What do you think?”

  “I think he was unlucky. He made a mistake coming to work for me, probably. It was a strain. He was letting people use him. That’s always a mistake, isn’t it? Being used.”

  “I loved Mark. He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Of course not. Nobody does. We went to California together. Did you know that?”

  “He told me. He said it was pretty interesting. Computer stuff.”

  “Quantum computing. I’m not sure that Mark understood it very well. Mechanical engineers are like that. If they can’t take something apart and look at the wiring, they don’t trust it. Poor man.”

  Chang stared at her. The blonde wig made her look like a Russian. She had the icy precision that the instructors described in the Career Trainee program, when they were explaining how a case officer should behave. Chang wanted to draw her out; he would have to explain each moment of this conversation to Vandel later.

  “Why did you want to see me so badly? You said I was in trouble. What kind of trouble?”

  “The worst kind.” She laughed, once. “Your trouble is that you don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in.”

  “Can you help, Ms. Ford?”

  “I don’t know. But you’re here. That’s a good start. You need to get your head straight.”

  She took a tiny sip of her Cosmo. Chang asked for a beer. She steadied her gaze. She was beautiful in the low light of the bar: round, sculpted face, high forehead, intense and nimble eyes. She leaned toward him and whispered.

  “They think you’re a Chinese spy. It’s just racism, probably. Chinese boy. Chinese spy. But that’s what they think.”

  Chang was startled. “Where did you hear that?”

  She gave him a wink.

  “Corridor talk. Everyone knows that you and Vandel have been out looking for a Chinese penetration. And now they think it’s you. Crazy, maybe. But the fact is, you’re in trouble, and I can help. That’s what I wanted to say. I can be of assistance, if you’ll let me.”

  “How can you help me, Denise?”

  “All sorts of ways. But for starters, I know for a fact that you’re not the Chinese spy they’re looking for. They’re mistaken.”

  “How would you know that, Denise?”

  She sat back in the booth and turned away from him for a moment, arching her graceful neck so that the skin was taut, and then turned back toward him.

  “Because you’re a good boy. You do what you’re told. But you should reconsider. It’s obvious that your loyalty isn’t reciprocated. You need someone to catch your fall.”

  “Like you?”

  “Yes, just like me. I want you to think about things, that’s all. Open your mind. It’s one world! That’s what I told Mark Flanagan, poor man. Open up! It’s a big world out there. Stop holding onto the past. Think for yourself.”

  “The Chinese killed Mark. That’s what I think.”

  She was startled. Her regal face seemed to sag, as if it had lost its inner pressure. She shook her head.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said. “How cruel.”

  She was done, suddenly. She took her wallet from her purse and dropped forty dollars on the table. She removed Chang’s cell phone from the case and handed it back to him. Chang was mystified.

  “Cruel to whom? To Mark? It doesn’t matter to him. He’s dead.”

  “No. Cruel to me. Think about what I said. If you want to talk again, do it carefully.”

  Denise Ford rose from the booth and walked quickly out of the bar. Chang sat motionless for a moment, trying to sort what had happened, and then rose to follow her. By the time he reached the street, she had vanished. He wondered what to do, but not for very long. He was in serious trouble now, and there was only one exit.

  32.

  MCLEAN AND ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  Harris Chang walked back to his apartment on Twelfth Street. A homeless drunk was sitting on his front stairs, screaming about Jesus. He asked Chang if he was saved. Chang walked around him and opened the door. The man was still moaning, talking now about the “chinks” and “kikes” who were out to get him. Chang had seen him in the neighborhood before. He wasn’t dangerous, just crazy. Chang pulled out his wallet. He held a twenty-dollar bill in front of the man, just out of reach, and said he would give him the money if he got off the stoop and spent it on food rather than booze. The man’s eyes were as wild as before, but he stumbled toward Chang and took the bill in his hand. He touched it to his lips.

  “Thank you, Jesus,” he said, walking down the stairs.

  When Chang got upstairs, he put his head in his hands. What was happening to him? Why were the timbers of his life collapsing? None of it made sense. The Chinese intelligence service
had tried to recruit him and then pretended it had succeeded. His partner had been poisoned. The Chinese mole he had been chasing had just tried to pitch him. Harris Chang, the person who never made a mistake, had stumbled into a snare that was tightening around him. And the worst of it was that his colleagues, the people on whom he depended, no longer seemed to trust him.

  When Chang was a young boy in Flagstaff, he had run away from a fight with a big Navajo boy in middle school who had insulted his family. When he got home, his father beat him with a belt and said it was better to lose a fight than be a coward. Chang had never run away from anything again. But in this moment, the temptation to do so was acute. He thought for a moment about where he would go if he tried to escape, and then put the thought out of his mind.

  Chang dialed John Vandel’s mobile phone. The call went over to voicemail immediately.

  “This is Harris,” Chang said into the phone. “I need to talk to you right away.”

  Chang feared that Vandel wouldn’t return the call. He was in the office now, if his cell phone was off. When he picked up the message, he might tell someone from the Office of Security or the FBI that he had been contacted by the subject of an investigation, and eventually someone would return the call on Vandel’s behalf, with a tape running.

  Chang couldn’t wait; a weight had been attached to his body that would drag him to the bottom unless he could get himself free.

  He called Vandel’s office number and told his executive assistant, Melanie, that he needed to speak to the boss, urgently. She had always been friendly with him when he was on his way up and regarded as Vandel’s protégé.

  “Hey, I hope everything is okay,” she said, hearing the anxiety in his voice. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Melanie came back on the line thirty seconds later and apologized that it wasn’t convenient for Mr. Vandel right now. She didn’t say so, but Vandel had evidently refused the request.

  “Tell him I’m coming anyway,” said Chang. “I’ll be at Headquarters in thirty minutes. He can throw me out, or have me arrested, or do whatever he wants. But I have to try to see him.”

  Vandel’s voice broke in. He had been listening on the extension.

  “Jesus, Harris, what the hell is wrong with you? I’ve got it, Melanie.” His assistant clicked off the line.

  “Nothing is wrong with me, sir. But I need to see you, right now. No bullshit.”

  “Talk to Kate Sturm. I’m in the middle of a shit storm here.”

  “No. I need to see you personally. You have to deal with this. It’s about the meeting I just had. I can’t talk about it on the phone. But I promise, you will regret it if you say no.”

  “Whoa! A threat. And from a former U.S. Army major. I’m scared.”

  “Not a threat at all, sir. A warning. You really need to say yes. Otherwise I’m coming to Headquarters. It’s the only way I can protect myself.”

  “You are a pain in the ass, Harris. You know that?” He put the phone on hold while he made another call on his cell and then came back on the line.

  “I’ll meet you in an hour at that Persian restaurant off Route 123. ‘Karim’s.’ ”

  “Are you sure that place is private enough?”

  “What? You want a Chinese restaurant? This will have to do. I’m not booking a meeting room for you here. Sorry. Too many boxes to check. Too long a paper trail. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but you’re under investigation.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” said Chang. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

  The restaurant occupied a corner of a low-rise shopping mall in McLean Town Center. It had the ambience of a kabob restaurant in Tehran: tile floor, cherry wood tables and chairs with vinyl backs, lace curtains tied at the bottom, the smell of saffron and cardamom permeating the small dining room. Chang parked his car in a supermarket lot a hundred yards away. He knocked on the back door, hoping to conceal his arrival from anyone watching the main entrance, but nobody answered so he went around to the front.

  Vandel was sitting at a table in the rear, talking to the owner. The restaurant was nearly empty in late afternoon. Vandel and the owner conversed like old friends; of course, they were. The restaurateur must have been on the payroll once; maybe he still was. Vandel never went anywhere he didn’t have a measure of control. He looked up as he saw Chang approach.

  The owner retreated. “Nobody will bother you, Mr. John,” he said. He locked the door and flipped the “open” sign so that it showed “closed.”

  “This better be good,” said Vandel. “I blew off the national security adviser for you. What did your squirrely girlfriend have to say?”

  “Denise Ford tried to recruit me. She said we should work together. She told me I needed a friend, because the agency suspected I was a Chinese spy. How did she know that? Did the MSS tell her? Someone did, because she’s targeting me. I need help.”

  “Calm down, Harris. Did you get this on tape?”

  “I tried. But she took my iPhone and put it in a pouch that blocked signals. I want to dictate an affidavit right now, while it’s all fresh in my mind. Can I do that? Otherwise, nobody’s going to believe me.”

  Vandel thought a moment. “Yes, but keep it in-house, with Kate Sturm. The FBI already thinks you’re a Chinese spy, so if you tell them you had a recruitment meeting, they’ll have a fit.”

  “If you can’t turn off the FBI, then I’m calling a lawyer.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Harris. You’ll screw everything up. We need to keep this case rolling.”

  “How? The lady is dangerous. She’s working for Beijing. You have to shut her down.”

  Vandel absentmindedly rolled the salt shaker back and forth on the tablecloth while he pondered the situation. He kneaded his scarred cheeks.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said eventually.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that? Because so far, John, your ideas just keep getting me in deeper trouble.”

  “You should frighten Ford. Miss Ice Water. Tell her that we’re about to arrest her and that she needs to run.”

  “What’s the point of that? She has to assume she’s under investigation already. She must know we put Mark on her tail.”

  “But she’s still in place, and our evidence is crap. Make her so scared that she’ll go to the big boss in Beijing. Bait the trap and then, snap! We’ve got her, and the Chinese, too. If we do it right, we’ll hit the MSS so hard it will splinter, what’s left of it, anyway, and we’ll have one less collection of assholes to worry about.”

  “But John, I’m the bait. You’re telling me to tip off a Chinese agent that the CIA is onto her. But to the FBI, I’m a Chinese asset, too—and I’ll be sharing highly classified information with another Chinese asset. That means I’m screwed if this goes wrong. I want something in writing from the Bureau.”

  “We can’t tell them. There would be a three-alarm fire. I already told you that.”

  “Then I want it in writing from you. And the Director. Otherwise, no deal.”

  “The Director is out of the question. I haven’t briefed him on anything for two weeks. He wants it that way, so he won’t get blamed later. And for god’s sake, Harris, stop pretending that you have leverage in this situation. You don’t. I am offering you a way out of the mess that you got yourself into. Nobody made you do anything. Take it or leave it.”

  “I want it in writing from you, as DDO. A written record, copied to Kate Sturm.”

  “You can have a memo from me.”

  “And Kate. Otherwise, I’m not playing. Seriously.”

  “Christ! What a pussy. Okay, I will copy Sturm. Not that it will make any difference. She’ll tear it up if I tell her to. But I won’t. Do we have a deal?”

  Vandel extended his hand. Chang waited. In that moment, he truly disliked John Vandel, the man who had once been his hero. Did he have another choice? Not a good one. Vandel would do his best to ruin Chang’s career, and probably far worse, if he didn’t play along.

  Chang thought one last
moment and then shook his boss’s hand.

  Vandel gave him a tight grip and a thin smile. Had that glint been in his eye, back in Iraq?

  “I’ll call Sturm now,” said Vandel. “An Office of Security representative will come take your affidavit, except it will actually be a memo, but so what? You dictate everything that you remember about your meetings with Ford. The Security guy will take it back up the road to Disney World and get it transcribed, pronto, and bring it back here for you to sign and date.”

  “I can’t go to Headquarters myself?”

  “No! I told you. You’re under investigation. Eat something. You need it. You look like shit.”

  “Thanks, John. I wonder why that is.”

  “Save the self-pity for someone who appreciates it, Harris. We are on a short clock. I need to go now. I’ll get an ops plan ready overnight.”

  “Where do we go next? After my affidavit, I mean.”

  “Meet me tomorrow morning at 10:00 at the office in Ballston.”

  “Am I allowed back in the clubhouse?”

  “Not exactly. I’m going to say in the log that I’m interrogating you. But Kate will be there.”

  “Good. She can be my character witness.”

  “Dream on. Nobody’s going to say anything nice about Harris Chang until you deliver your Chinese brothers and sisters. That’s a fact. Sorry if it sounds politically incorrect, but it’s true. Be smart. Eat some Persian food. Got to go.”

  Vandel rose and left. Chang ordered the mixed kabobs. Forty-five minutes later, an officer with a tape recorder arrived from the Office of Security. He suggested that they record the “memorandum” in his car outside, so Chang had to leave the rest of his food on the plate.

  33.

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  Harris Chang sat on a bench the next morning in a little park near the Ballston metro station, waiting for the meeting to begin. The park was surrounded by office buildings with flat, Virginia-sounding names: Jefferson, Stafford, Avalon. Who knew what happened inside a place with a name like that? Many of the nearby tenants were government contractors; their chief job qualification was that they had security clearances and could send classified information to other people with security clearances.