“Welcome to Opus Nine, Ms. Rockefeller,” the maître d’ gushed. “Such a pleasure to have you join us for dinner.”
This time Melanie did see reactions from other diners nearby at the mention of that fabled name. She nodded and smiled at him but didn’t say anything. Menus were placed discreetly on the table and then they were left alone. Melanie surveyed the room, which was crowded and somewhat noisy. She looked sideways at Allender as if to ask, Well?
He’d put his glasses back on but it was obvious he was impressed—and pleased. “Stunning,” he said. “I saw one poor guy miss his mouth and drop a forkful of mashed potatoes into his lap, and another one poured wine all over his table. The bartender overfilled a glass of beer and two waiters tried for the same door at the same time, fortunately with empty trays. Well done, indeed, Ms.—Rockefeller.”
“What did you tell them,” she asked, as the waiter approached with an ice bucket and some champagne.
“Only that I had an important guest coming for dinner who would appreciate some discretion because she was a Rockefeller. Twyla certainly did you justice.”
“I’m terrified I’m going to spill something on it,” she admitted quietly, after the waiter had poured out the champagne and backed away.
“Don’t be,” Allender said. “After all, this little Kabuki certainly beats sitting bare-assed naked in a straight-backed wooden chair in my office, yes?”
She almost dropped her champagne flute, although he didn’t appear to notice. Good Lord, she thought. Those were her exact words. In the car. She’d thought exactly those words. No way. No. Freaking. Way.
The waiter returned, took their orders, topped off the champagne, and set the almost empty bottle to one side. He’d ordered the fish of the day; she’d gone for beef. After two years in Europe, she craved American beef.
For the next ten minutes he led the conversation, mostly asking her about her life in Boston and then in Washington, before the Agency. She realized he was trying to put her at ease. She wondered how old he was. If he was an assistant deputy director, fifties, probably. He was entirely composed, with no fidgeting or adjusting of his body’s position on the banquette. One elegantly long hand for his champagne flute, the other in his lap, reminding her of one of those sitting Buddha statues. Since they were sitting side by side in the European fashion, they made minimal eye contact, especially with those Onassis eyeglasses. His voice was calm and devoid of any identifiable accent, pleasant but professionally neutral. He was making no attempt to initiate intimacy between them, remaining well out of her personal space. It was almost like talking to someone you happened to sit next to on the bus, she thought. She was tempted to ask him about his background and service with the Agency, but then thought better of it. It wasn’t a date, not with all the Ms. Rockefeller BS, or Kabuki as he’d called it. What are we doing here, she wondered?
“Do you see the Chinese family, third table on the left from our vantage point?”
Not moving her head, she looked. There were four of them. One older man with an authoritative bearing and obviously the paterfamilias. Next to him was a plain, round-faced Chinese lady, probably his wife. The other two were younger, looking like son and daughter-in-law, or vice versa. As she looked away, she thought she saw the older man stealing a surreptitious look in her direction.
“Yes,” she said, looking now into the middle distance, as if unaware there was anyone else in the busy restaurant.
“Depending on who leaves first, us or them, I want you to give the older man a secret smile. Just a quick look. Acknowledge his interest. Let him know that you’re aware of him. That’s all. If his wife is watching you or him, don’t do it, but do look for an opportunity to make eye contact without her seeing you do it. Even if he just takes a last look as they’re going out the door.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Try it on me.”
She did.
“A tiny bit too long. I want him wondering if it even happened. Again.”
She looked away and then back.
“Much better, but don’t let your gaze linger like that. A quick flash, then a demure look away and down.”
The waiter showed up with dinner. Allender asked if she’d like some wine, but she said no. The champagne had gone to her head a little more than she would have liked in these circumstances. He ordered a single glass of red and then they enjoyed Opus Nine’s justifiably famous cooking. As they were finishing, the Chinese family got up and headed for the door. The “wife,” chattering away with the “son,” was paying no attention to her husband, and just before the group entered the hallway to the front door, the older man looked back at Melanie. She managed a quick glance in his direction. There’d been nothing subtle about his look, and then he was gone.
“Contact?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, I’d say so,” she said, with a small smile. Like an eagle looking at a baby bunny, she thought.
“Good. Now describe him to me, please.”
She waited until the plates were cleared and coffee ordered. “Mainland Chinese, I’d think,” she began. “Bigger and taller than the average Chinese I’ve met. Early fifties. Military bearing, lots of authority, so I’d guess PLA, probably a general or maybe even a commissar.”
“What’s unique about the face?”
“Those black, flyaway eyebrows that make him look like he’s about to pounce. Not the usual round, fleshy face I associate with older Chinese party officials. More oval, with a strong nose and cheekbones. Thick, black hair. No eyeglasses. Not a man who smiles much.”
“Very good,” he said. “Especially from twenty feet away. You must have excellent distance vision. What was he wearing?”
She drew a complete blank. She simply couldn’t remember. How odd.
“You can’t remember because you were focused on his face, which, admittedly, is his most interesting feature. I can relate to that.”
She turned her head to look directly at him and thought she saw the trace of a smile, although with those birth-control glasses she couldn’t be too sure. It was the first thing he’d said to her that was even remotely personal, but if it had been a “moment” it quickly passed.
Coffee came and dessert was declined.
“So,” she asked once the waiter had withdrawn. “May I ask who that man was?”
“I’ve determined two things this evening,” he said, appearing to ignore her question. “One, you can rock a room just by walking in, especially when you’re properly adorned. And, two, the chief of the Ministry of Security Services office at the People’s Republic of China embassy in Washington, Major General Chiang Liang-fu, was at least somewhat smitten.”
Wow, she thought. “What in the world is someone like that doing in the Williamsburg area?” she asked.
“Vacation? Seeing some of the United States with his family? Meeting with whatever network they have in place in this area that covers the Farm or the military bases here in the Tidewater area? Possibly all of the above, although I doubt it’s really an operational visit. We know who he is, what he is, and where he is at all times. It’s not like he sneaks around undercover. He doesn’t have to.”
“Does he know who you are?” she asked.
“Probably,” he said, but did not elaborate. That surprised her.
“And he likes the ladies?” she asked.
“Indeed he does,” he said. “And, of course, official Washington is positively a groaning board of attractive women. Or so I’ve been told.”
She laughed out loud. The purported ratio of nine attractive women to every eligible man was a well-known urban legend in Washington. “Or so you’ve been told?” she teased.
“Time to go,” he said, glancing quickly around the room. “You go to the powder room; I’ll wait out front. When you come out walk directly to the front door. Your car will be ready. We’ll say our good-byes, and then you’ll leave. The cultural-indoc section will expect you at nine tomorrow.”
“Got it,” she said, beginning to slide si
deways on the banquette. The waiter, who’d been hovering nearby, rushed to move the table aside and offer a hand up. She had a thousand questions, but realized that he’d tell her what she needed to know when she needed to know it. It would be unprofessional to get ahead of that curve right now.
Five minutes later she was escorted by the maître d’ through the front doors to the waiting Mercedes. She saw one of the dark-windowed Agency Suburbans parked nearby. Allender was standing by the Mercedes. He took her right hand and helped her into the sedan, babbling something about a delightful evening and hoping she’d enjoy the rest of her time in Williamsburg. As she put on her seat belt, she resisted an urge to look back as the big Merc rumbled away from the restaurant. This time she didn’t bother to hold off the shoulder strap.
She’d had some fun tonight, a nice change from the tedious business of yet more training. The clothes and the rest of her costume had been a treat and she was proud to have been able to pull it off. And Allender: What a fascinating man. When he’d had those protective glasses off, anyone who could see his face had been staring. She could well believe people thought he was a mind reader. And yet, he wasn’t a cold fish. She’d gotten the impression of tight control more than intellectual arrogance. She felt herself blushing at the thought of going to bed with a man like that. She saw her driver glancing back at her in the shadow of the backseat and composed her face.
THREE
Preston Allender relaxed in the backseat of the Suburban as he was driven back to the Farm through the dense evening traffic. So far, so good, he thought, fairly sure now that he had his candidate. She’d dropped into character without a hitch and she hadn’t badgered him with premature questions. She was being surprisingly professional for just two years in the field, and she’d certainly had the desired effect on Chiang Liang-fu. Carson McGill would be pleased. Hell, even he’d felt like a teenager who’d scored a dinner date with the best-looking girl in school.
There had been that one question about his knowing Chiang. He smiled mentally at the memories that inquiry had provoked. His father, an electronics engineer, had been a rising star at Westinghouse in the field of medical imaging when he’d met and married Allender’s future mother, an exchange student from Taiwan, who was finishing a Ph.D. in molecular biology at MIT. Young Preston had been five when they left the Boston area for Taipei.
They rented a house in the Songshan District and Preston attended the prestigious Taipei American School in the Shilin District. In the twelve years they spent in Taipei, Preston grew up as an only child in a household that spoke both upper-class Mandarin and English. Following a management shakeout at Westinghouse after a big contract went to another company, Preston’s father had left the company and brought the family back to America. They bought a house in the prestigious Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His father had taken an assignment as a consultant to the Agency for International Development, while his mother became a department head at the National Institutes of Health. Preston was admitted to the premed curriculum at George Washington University. With his mother’s connections, he was easily admitted to GWU Medical School, and he graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. Having chosen forensic psychiatry as his ultimate specialty, he underwent four years of residency training in psychiatry and then a two-year internship in forensic psychiatry before sitting for his licensing examinations. Throughout his medical education, his ability to speak Mandarin fluently brought additional networking opportunities, as his various schools tapped him to attend seminars, workshops, and other official functions at which visiting Chinese doctors would be present. This in turn attracted the attention of a CIA recruiter, who enticed Allender to join the Agency, which was just then coming to grips with the scope of the People’s Republic of China’s espionage programs in America.
That pattern continued once he’d been with the Agency’s training directorate for a while. He would regularly attend diplomatic functions in Washington that included Chinese officials, because they presented an opportunity to put an intelligence-trained psychiatrist alongside a senior or otherwise interesting Communist Party member. As Allender rose in the Agency’s operative-development program, the Chinese Ministry of Security Services became aware of him, which meant that when he did appear at State Department receptions or other top-level functions involving Chinese officials, they had all been briefed to beware of the American doctor with the upper-class Mandarin accent and the unsettling amber eyes. A Russian official who’d been warned about Allender would have limited his conversation to the weather, but Chinese officials seemed to enjoy a little mental sparring: I know who you are, and you know who I am, so let’s put that aside for a moment and just see who can mess with whom. The generous spectrum of meanings and maybe-meanings of Mandarin made that game even more interesting, and Allender had a huge advantage over the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute–trained American officials of having been speaking Mandarin since he’d learned to talk.
He’d first encountered Chiang at a UN-sponsored antiterrorism conference in New York. The US ambassador to the UN had requested linguistic support and the State Department had requested Allender. Chiang had been just a lieutenant colonel at the time, but Allender had noticed how the other members of the People’s Republic delegation were deferring to this intense army officer, so he’d casually closed in and made his acquaintance. Chiang had been astonished to hear an American speaking university-level Mandarin and they’d ended up spending more than a little time conversing on the margins of the conference. Chiang had presented himself as a midlevel police bureaucrat in Beijing, and Allender had adopted the role of an NIH psychiatrist specializing in the modalities of terrorist recruitments. By the third and final night of the conference, they’d reached the ganbei stage at a private banquet hosted by the Chinese delegation. Allender, anticipating the inevitable exchange-of-shooters challenges, had taken an Agency compound before the encounter which changed alcohol into sugar. It gave you a bit of a stomachache, but you stayed pretty much sober while your drinking opponent went blotto, which was when Chiang let it slip that he was perhaps more than just a run-of-the-mill policeman.
The next morning Allender debriefed the diplomatic intelligence officials at the US embassy to the UN, where he learned that Chiang was most likely an up-and-comer in the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence and counterintelligence arm of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the PRC. The officials had told Allender that since the MSS was like an amalgamation of America’s CIA, NSA, and FBI, Chiang was definitely someone to cultivate if the opportunity ever arose. They also warned him that he, Preston Allender, had probably entered the MSS database, if only because of his Mandarin.
“Somebody will be assigned to research you and your family history in Taipei; where you went to school, what your father did, will all be discovered. They’ll eventually assume you’re with us, so if you do encounter Chiang again, it’s going to be a different game.”
That prediction had been spot-on, as Allender discovered two years later at a reception held at the PRC embassy in Washington. At the pre-briefing for the reception, the Chinese desk officer had told Allender that Chiang was now a senior officer at the MSS, specializing in the coordination of the dizzying array of Chinese intelligence networks operating in the US, covering academia, the banking system, industrial technology and R&D, military affairs, diplomatic affairs, the national infrastructure, medical science, counterterrorism, the Internet, and, last but not least, the Agency itself.
“Don’t kid yourself,” he’d been told. “The rise of Chinese intelligence operations in the United States has resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. Period. Go into any advanced technology laboratory in the country—computer science, astronomy, medical research, energy, and biochemistry—and count the number of Caucasian faces. Then count the Chinese. Three to one, on average. Go to any high school graduation in America where they have a half-decent academic program, an
d see who the valedictorian is; you’ll find the top graduates are either Chinese or Southwest Asian. They own us. The only thing holding them back from world domination is their delusion with Communism.”
“What time in the morning, sir?” his driver asked, interrupting his musings. They’d arrived at the Residence.
“Eight will do it.”
He went into the Residence and walked up to the desk. “Is the SCIFF available?”
“Yes, sir, it is,” the lobby clerk said. “Let me get this hour’s key codes.”
Once in the secure communications vault, Allender sent a brief e-mail message to Carson McGill, the deputy director for operations. “Sloan will do. Tell the controller to call me.”
An hour later, a Mr. Smith was on the secure line seeking instructions.
“Activate the clone” was all Allender said, and hung up.
He went upstairs to his room, which was a small suite in deference to his rank as a member of the senior executive service. He cracked a bottle of Scotch from the minibar and then stood by the window, with its view of nondescript government buildings scattered everywhere.
Ms. Melanie Sloan in full war paint had been quite a sight this evening. He’d had to work hard at not getting a little bit more personal with her at dinner, but he’d learned long ago that every budding romance had ended once the lady got a good look into those dragon eyes of his. Now that he was fifty-five, there didn’t seem to be much point in pursuing attractive women, so now he was pretty much accustomed to being a professional odd duck. Being a senior odd duck helped, though.
FOUR
Melanie Sloan sat back at her table in the Residence bar and enjoyed the warm buzz from her first drink since dinner with Allender. She’d spent the last week at the cultural indoctrination school on the Farm, getting acquainted with all things Chinese. She’d made it a rule not to drink during the workweek, which made Friday evening at the Residence bar even more appealing. The bar itself wasn’t that large, and it looked like the bar in just about any military officers’ club, which it had once been. Subdued lighting, an actual mahogany bar stretching across one entire wall, mementos and military plaques on the walls, with waitresses wearing black slacks and white shirts flitting efficiently among the tables, keeping the all-important booze flowing. The ratio of men to women was about four to one, but she didn’t recognize any of the men. She herself was wearing jeans and a lightweight Harvard sweatshirt, and drinking a double Bombay gin over crushed ice with a lime wedge. Mark in Portugal had introduced her to Bombay, telling her it was the perfect antidote to the heat of Portugal’s summers, among other things. She’d elicited a gratifying number of interested looks when she’d come into the bar, but after a week of fairly intense schooling, she was mostly just tired. Besides, she was here to meet with Allender.
Red Swan Page 3
