The Spy Across the Table

by Barry Lancet

  The end of the world.

  An escalating sense of dread crept into my nervous system. Physically and geographically, I was in uncharted territory. Adrift in a vast expanse of rural China. I looked over at Zhou. The master spy had closed his eyes. He dozed.

  I turned back to the scenery for a clue to our destination. The shadowy mountains that had accompanied us at the start of the ride had given way to hunched loping hills, which gradually flattened to dusty highlands. Farther on, crops appeared briefly, with endless rows of bright green sprouts. But the land looked anything but fertile and the tilled fields were short-lived. The last blue-gray hues of the night succumbed to the first yellow rays of dawn, which bathed the brittle brown scrublands in a pale flax-colored wash.

  At the DMZ, I’d seen a vision of the end of the world, Korean-style. Was I getting my first hint of the Chinese version?

  * * *

  The driver sped by a manned tollbooth with a nod.

  Without slowing.

  We rolled onto an expressway stretching like an endless pathway into an unforeseeable future. We drove for two hours at a reckless 120 miles an hour.

  The Geely shook and rattled and protested but didn’t come apart, which I chalked up more to luck than a miracle of modern technology. The car was designed for country folk to tool along country lanes and for suburbanites of modest means to totter along on an outing to the local public pool. That it was the current police vehicle of choice was so outlandish as to alarm me—it was too far removed from the norm.

  When we finally exited the highway, Zhou stirred, stretched, and looked my way. “You did not sleep?”

  “What are you charging me with?” I asked.

  Zhou smirked. “Surely you know better than that. This is China. First we lock you up, then we find a charge.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, one last time, where is she?”

  “Long gone.”

  “The route, then.”

  On the flight to Jilin, Pak had said the trip to the Mongolian border would take at least four days and conceivably as long as six. The journey would be roundabout and its length would depend on how smoothly the extraction had gone. In anyone’s book, bodies in the street did not constitute a smooth extraction.

  I said, “You never told me why you are chasing after the North Koreans. You guys despise them.”

  “How well you know us. Our neighbors to the east are indeed churlish, but that does not mean we would not pay attention should they stumble onto a toy we think we might enjoy.”

  “So you always knew about Anna?”

  “We discovered they had found a backdoor into the NSA data centers the day before the Kennedy Center killings, but not their way in. When Anna Tanaka was taken, we had the means.”

  “Which is why you showed up in San Francisco and Tokyo.”

  “Yes. When you gave me the tattoo and the gang name, I knew where to start looking. But you beat us to the gang leader, so we sat on you. The Tanaka woman is the whole game. Always has been. Now it is your turn.”

  “Haven’t I given you enough?”

  “Not nearly. It’s time to play or pay. I strongly suggest the former. The alternative is not pleasant.”

  CHAPTER 78

  ZHOU was right.

  Where they were taking me looked like the end of the world.

  A confinement center rose up in front of us, massive and daunting. There was a mile of containment wall on each side. Rows of multistory cellblocks paraded in long straight columns within. I was looking at a warehouse of human bondage on a colossal scale. A penitentiary behind high stone walls with double-stacked coils of razor wire and lit up from above by countless spotlights.

  “What do you think?” Zhou asked.

  I didn’t bother to answer.

  Zhou shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. The People’s Police have other plans for you.”

  The black ribbon of asphalt narrowed from two lanes to one as we approached the compound. As if to say, Beyond this outpost nothing of import exists. Life itself comes to an end. The road continued on for three hundred yards to the entrance of the prison complex, where it dead-ended. A minor branch, probably a maintenance road, swept off to the right.

  The driver surprised me by veering onto the fork.

  “This is unexpected,” I said.

  “If you only knew.”

  Paved roadway gave way to an unpaved track. The small Geely did not take well to the dirt path. It rocked and roiled. Its chassis protested with groans. The suspension screeched.

  “Where we are headed is off the map,” Zhou said.

  I pointed upward. “Nothing’s off the map these days.”

  Zhou cut me a narrow look. “You sure about that?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  In the distance, I could make out the looming shadows of a new set of hills. To the rear, the penitentiary dropped from view.

  “Our destination appears on no map. Not in China or anywhere in the world. It is absent from even the best satellite photographs your intelligence agencies have gathered.”

  In the days of orbiting eye-in-the-sky spy technology, his was an exceptional claim. Even when underground facilities existed—in Iran, Russia, North Korea, and elsewhere—we knew they existed from the aboveground activity and reports. Was it possible the Chinese could have a complex completely off the radar? I doubted it.

  The dirt path grew rougher. The tangerine hatchback bounced and swayed. It emitted a new range of mechanical groans and creaks. The drive became a constant dance around ever-larger ruts and rocks. A film of new dust settled on the old.

  The car had been here before.

  The cop with the gun said something to Zhou, who nodded. The weapon disappeared.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He asked for permission to holster his firearm, because out here, even if you escaped, there is no place for you to go.”

  The jostling continued. The organs under my ribs began to ache. Some ruts had grown so large they could not be avoided. And volleyball-size rocks now pocked the roadway. One or two every minute needed to be swerved around. Not enough to make the road impassable, but enough so the neglected route appeared to be of little importance. As if the dirt trail we were on was so infrequently used, it was not worth clearing.

  “Not my favorite part,” Zhou said.

  “So you’ve done this before?”

  “As seldom as possible, and never by choice.”

  “So this is an international detention center?” Zhou specialized in overseas operations.

  “On occasion, as needed. It’s a kind of one-way clearinghouse for undesirables. Do not the volume of potholes and stones speak to you?”

  “ ‘One way’?”

  “Yes.”

  Off the map . . . a one-way clearinghouse . . . A chill gripped the back of my neck. The dusty sidetrack was not neglected. Nor lacking in maintenance. Nor scheduled for a paving. An upgrade would never be ordered. Because it was an access road meant to draw as little attention as possible—leading to a prison beyond a prison. For people who will cease to exist. Zhou had not been exaggerating for effect.

  He said, “I see you have figured out our little puzzle.”

  “A black site.”

  The master spy grimaced. “The blackest.”

  The road began to rise.

  CHAPTER 79

  THE Geely did not like inclines.

  It huffed and strained as the pitted dirt drive rose steadily. The peaks of the hills drew closer and reared up. Then the tops of two silos split the sky. The terrain topped out on a high plain.

  “Are those cows?” I said, taking in the scene a quarter of a mile down the road.

  “Yes.”

  “On a working farm?”

  “Yes, my friend. That is precisely what your satellites see, and that is precisely what it is not.”

  * * *

  Two minutes later we rolled to a halt in a farmyard.

  �
��Welcome to the Farmhouse,” Zhou said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  I looked around and didn’t see much of anything. A squat stone farmhouse stood in front of us, and a weathered barn to the rear. The house was built of the same stone scattered over land and road. It was tucked up against the hills, which stretched back in waves in progressively taller mounds, like children lined up by age from youngest to oldest, one head higher than the last.

  I looked toward the barn. Seated on an ancient Chinese tractor was an ancient Chinese farmer. The tractor was red and boxy and rusted where the paint had fallen away. The old man was shriveled and weather-toughened and wore a frayed straw hat.

  “Lean forward,” Zhou said, and when I did he removed the cuffs. “For the eye in the sky.”

  “They might still know.”

  The master spy reached into the cargo bay behind the seat, came up with a battered straw hat, and jammed it on my head. In the front, the police guards slipped out of their uniforms. Underneath they wore indigo farmers’ overalls.

  “Last chance to tell me where she is,” Zhou said, reverting to Japanese, which clearly, unlike English, our escort in the front could not follow.

  “Not going to happen. Tell me how you found out about her so soon.”

  “That is not important. What is important is that Anna Tanaka can engineer entry to all of America’s secrets. It’s as simple as that. Since you Americans are foolish enough to allow domestic spying, why shouldn’t we take advantage of it as well?”

  “I could think of a few reasons.”

  Zhou sneered. “You Americans are a careless people.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You have forgotten how good you have it. Tens of thousands of Chinese have demonstrated and died over the centuries in attempts to gain a fraction of the freedoms you enjoy. Even now, demonstrations take place weekly, though the incidents are not reported. People are beaten or imprisoned or killed fighting for a sliver of the liberty you take for granted. Your founders created unprecedented freedoms, but today leaders in Washington are in the process of snatching them all away to ‘protect America from terrorism.’ The NSA has been given the power to spy on all Americans. Your country is turning into what China has been for decades: a surveillance state. Communism was the ideal, surveillance is the reality. Surveillance means control. That is a bad road to travel, my friend.”

  “Hello, Mr. Brodie,” the secretary of Homeland Security had said. “What’s your personal opinion of the NSA?”

  “Do they have information on me, my daughter, and my friends?”

  “I imagine they do.”

  “Then I hate it. I want my private life to remain private.”

  In effect, from the other side of the fence, I’d expressed a similar thought only a few days ago.

  The driver said something in Chinese, and Zhou turned to me. “It’s time to go. You have your own road to travel. Last chance to tell me where the girl is headed.”

  “The answer’s the same.”

  Zhou sank into himself, seeming to grow smaller, which for him was saying a lot. Silence spread deep and dark between us. After a long moment, in an uncharacteristically subdued voice, the master spy said:

  “Then this is good-bye. Allow me to give you a piece of advice before we part. Give them what they want.”

  “ ‘They’? Don’t you mean you?”

  “No. I don’t. I wanted the girl, not you. Give them what they ask and I will . . . push to mitigate . . . what is to follow. Meanwhile, I will work on a story to spare our mutual friend the pain.”

  “What pain is that?”

  “You were caught red-handed at a murder scene, Brodie. A policeman saw you drag a dead body into the shadows. For that you must pay.”

  CHAPTER 80

  WE stepped from the car.

  On the tractor the old man swiveled in his elevated perch to watch.

  The farmhouse door, painted forest green, creaked open. We stepped through into a large rectangular room. A woman as ancient and as browned as the old man stood just inside. She bowed but did not speak. In a modest kitchen along the right wall was a wood-fired stove made of brick, and next to it a decades-old refrigerator with rounded corners and stilt legs. A sagging black vinyl couch was positioned in front of a boxy black-and-white TV, the picture running without sound. Alongside the couch stood six prison guards, with weapons drawn.

  No more pretense.

  My new and expanded guard detail now numbered eight.

  They marched me into the basement. Zhou waited in the car. The farmer’s wife stayed upstairs. In the basement was a second forest-green door. A guard swung it wide to reveal a long dimly lit tunnel—and the entrance to a secret subterranean complex built under the hills behind the farmhouse.

  The Farmhouse.

  No eye in the sky here.

  * * *

  With a fleet of guns at my back, I stepped into the long, unpainted cement entryway. It stretched for some two hundred yards and smelled of bleach and mildew. A cloying dampness hung in the air.

  Solitary sixty-watt bulbs set in the ceiling fixtures every twenty yards punctured the darkness of the passage. At the other end, an iron grille, painted institution white, blocked our way. The bars of the grille were a crosshatch of horizontal and vertical pieces, the ends embedded in the cement.

  I was looking at an indestructible door to an unknowable cage.

  A pair of guards, pale and bored, stepped from an office on the other side. The older of the two unlocked the gate. The younger thrust a prison uniform into my hands and with gestures ordered me to change in a small chamber behind the office. The garments were blue and made of cotton. The jersey had long sleeves and two pockets. The pants had an elastic band and no pockets.

  The beatings began as soon as the preliminaries were finished.

  * * *

  A guard detail of two led me through a labyrinth of cement corridors into a torture chamber two levels down.

  As we descended, the dampness increased. Mold and mildew had conquered the lower corridors. The torture chamber was a cement cell with brackish streaks of fungi on the walls and a drain in the center of a cement floor. From all sides, the floor slanted downward toward the drain.

  At gunpoint, my guards gestured for me to lie on a large steel table, then shackled my wrists and ankles. Each manacle was attached to a chain, which was threaded through an iron loop at the corner of the table and pulled tight until I lay stretched out in a taut X.

  The guards exited and thirty seconds later two men in their forties entered. They were pale and stringy and tense. One was tall and angular and grinning, the other short and hunched and morose.

  The tall one said, “Today is beginning fun between us. We start simple. See how smart you be, mister.”

  While he talked, the morose short one went over to a three-tiered shelf stocked with tools of the trade and came back with an electric prod.

  “You are called Brodie Jim,” the taller one said. “This is right, I think.”

  Giving my name in the Asian order, last name first.

  I nodded.

  “You speak when question come. Okay?”

  I glared at him and said nothing. His partner fired up the electric baton. It came to life with a buzz. A blue light danced at its tip.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Where going girl?”

  I shook my head. Which earned me a jab with prod. My body bucked and convulsed. The jolt raced through every nerve in my body. I held back the scream that rose in my throat.

  “No screaming sound. You strong. For now. You want another poke for dessert?”

  His partner raised the weapon and I said no.

  “You learning. I say question, you say answer. Always say answer. This simple asking is rule number one. Your name Brodie Jim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where going girl?”

  “I don’t know.”


  “Rule number two. No lie. Speaking lie bringing shock. Where girl going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With the next charge, my bones seemed to rattle as my body thrashed about on the steel tabletop, straining against the shackles. Still I didn’t scream.

  The tall spokesman grinned. “You strong strong man. We changing that soon. Where going girl?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Clever answer. Maybe true one. But no answer I like. You know name this table?”

  “No.”

  “Death Bed. Why you think it call Death Bed?”

  “It’s not friendly, like you.”

  His perpetual grin stretched. “You give much clever answer, Brodie Jim. For that I tell you. Many men die on it. Even strong men.”

  “I see.”

  “Soon you see more.”

  He nodded at his shorter companion, who touched the prod between my ribs and held it there. My eyes bulged. Consciousness flickered. Then the electricity was withdrawn and the questioning began in earnest. They asked about how I’d arrived in China. What time? What airline? How many of us? Then they backed off and asked about previous trips. When, where, how. They were training me. Coaxing me into the habit of answering.

  The tall one nodded and grinned as I answered. The grin never fully disappeared. It shrank or lengthened, like a rubber band between a child’s fingers.

  The stream of questions continued. As long as I supplied an answer, they spared the baton. Initially they didn’t call me on my answers. They were establishing what passes for a rapport in their world. But inevitably the questioning circled back around to Anna Tanaka and her escape route. Inevitably I gave them answers they didn’t like and received shocks that sent my body into spasms. The manacles carved rings into my wrist and ankles.

  Still I swallowed the pain and again my grinning torturer said, “You strong man.”

  The appraising gleam in his eye caused me to revise my strategy.

  I was in peak physical condition, my core strength firm. They would work to break it down. My pain threshold was high, but I decided I could hide behind the illusion of pain. When they came at me again, I started with low moans I seemed unable to contain, then gradually worked myself into screaming mode. My dramatics lowered the bar of my perceived pain threshold, which pleased the morose one and gave the pair a sense of progress. Which meant they were less likely to amp up the power of the juice stick. So far the shocks only jarred my nervous system. There were no burns or blisters. Which gave me a buffer zone. But, even so, I eventually sank into unconsciousness.