The Ghost Agent

by Alex Berenson

  No. Even if Li was right, he couldn’t be allowed to take such insane risks. Cao pushed the pedal to the floor. He didn’t have much time.

  Wells dialed a number he’d never called before, a 415 area code. Exley answered on the first ring. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Jennifer?’

  ‘Jim.’ His cover name sounded strange in her mouth. She kept her voice steady, but still he could hear the tension. ‘Was your flight okay?’ In the background he heard CNN.

  ‘Everything’s fine. The hotel’s great. Might as well be Paris.’ Wells wanted to keep this conversation as banal as possible. No doubt the Chinese were monitoring every phone call into and out of the St. Regis tonight.

  ‘What time is it there?’

  ‘Two a.m. But I’m wide awake. Jet lag. Is anything happening? Anything I should know about?’ This would be her only chance to tell him if his cover was blown.

  ‘No. The kids are fine. Everyone misses you.’ An all-clear, or as close as he would get.

  ‘Tell them I miss them too. How’s my niece?’

  ‘Still hasn’t called. Your brother’s worried sick.’ So the mole was still gone.

  ‘Well, tell him not to worry. Listen, honey, this call’s costing a fortune, so . . . I just wanted to check in, say I love you.’

  ‘I love you too, honey. Stay safe, huh? You’re on your own this time.’ A reference to the way she’d saved him in New York. Her voice cracked, and before he could say anything else, she hung up.

  THIRTY

  ‘SIR.’ THE CONCIERGE, a small man in a three-button suit, waved frantically as Wells strode toward the St. Regis’s front door. ‘Good morning, sir. A moment, please. We are asked to give this to our American guests.’

  The concierge handed Wells a paper embossed with the State Department’s logo and headlined ‘Notice to Americans.’

  ‘Last night the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou was informed that an American couple visiting China for an adoption had been attacked. The incident was apparently motivated by anger at deteriorating American–Chinese relations.’ Bureaucrats and diplomats loved the word incident, Wells thought. It avoided touchy issues, like what had really happened and who was to blame.

  ‘So far this incident appears isolated. However, U.S. citizens should keep a low profile and avoid anti-American demonstrations’ – good call – ‘and large groups of Chinese.’ With 1.5 billion people in the country, that might be tough. ‘The situation is fluid and updates will be issued as conditions warrant.’

  ‘Maybe you stay in the hotel today, sir,’ the concierge said.

  ‘And miss my chance to see Beijing?’

  ‘Where to, sir?’

  ‘Tiananmen Square.’

  The St. Regis doorman looked unhappy. ‘No cars in Tiananmen today, sir.’

  ‘Just have him get as close as he can. I want to see the Forbidden City’ – the former Chinese imperial palace, north of Tiananmen. ‘Forbidden City is open, right?’ It better be, Wells thought. He was supposed to meet Cao Se there.

  ‘Yes.’ The doorman waved a taxi forward, but his frown didn’t disappear, not even after he palmed Wells’s tip.

  Wells wasn’t surprised to see that the cabbie had a soldier’s close-cropped hair. Everyone who left the St. Regis today would be watched. He’d have to assume that Cao had planned for the surveillance. Trying too hard to ditch his watchers would only draw more attention. Though if he could lose them without seeming to work at it, he would.

  ‘So what do you think about this mess?’ Wells said to the cabbie. ‘I think we’ll work it out. In two years it’ll be like it never happened.’ Jim Wilson was an optimist. Wells wasn’t so sure.

  ‘No English.’

  ‘Oh. Not that many Chinese speak English, I’m noticing. Course, I don’t speak any Chinese, so there it is. The language of the future, everyone says.’ The driver just shrugged.

  As they moved west toward Tiananmen, the traffic slowed to a standstill. Ahead the road was blocked and police were diverting cars off the avenue. Around them a steady flow of Chinese walked west. Wells saw his chance. He handed a hundred-yuan note to the driver and popped out, ignoring the cabbie’s sputtering.

  Wells picked his way through the soot-belching trucks, packed minibuses, and shiny black Mercedes limousines jammed together on the wide avenue. The sweet smell of benzene mixed with the stink of unburned diesel. He joined the Chinese heading west on the sidewalk, following the human current toward Tiananmen, and peeked back at the cab. The driver had a radio to his mouth, no doubt warning other agents to watch for Wells. Which wouldn’t be easy in this crowd. Mostly men, they had the same buoyant mood he’d sensed the day before. They waved Chinese flags and didn’t seem to mind having Wells among them. Two men traded a camera back and forth, snapping pictures, holding their hands high in a V-for-victory salute. Though Wells knew from his years in Afghanistan that under the wrong circumstances a crowd like this could become a mob in seconds.

  He felt a tug on his elbow. ‘American?’ A tall man in a fraying blue sweatshirt pointed an angry finger at him.

  ‘Canada,’ Wells said. No need to start a riot. He was taking enough risks today. His questioner pushed by and was swallowed in the crowd. After the next intersection the road was clear. Men surged onto the pavement. Police clustered around cruisers and paddy wagons, watching for trouble but not interfering with the flow.

  Farther on, a herd of television trucks sat close together, Chinese channels that Wells didn’t recognize, along with CNN, Fox, BBC, NHK. The whole world is watching. A company-sized detachment of soldiers massed near the trucks, to protect the reporters, or maybe to intimidate them.

  For ordinary Chinese – and their rulers – this moment had to be thrilling and frightening, Wells thought. Every person in this crowd was both a spectator and a participant in the action. They wanted to remind the world, and themselves, of that most easily forgotten fact: that they existed. Wells half expected to see Gadsden flags – the yellow banners flown by colonists during the Revolutionary War, emblazoned with a coiled rattlesnake and the words ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’ The crowd was delivering that message to America. But their rulers in Zhongnanhai would have to hear it too.

  And yet . . . after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, ordinary Chinese had given up politics and focused on the economy. Maybe this demonstration, big as it was, would be forgotten in a few weeks. Or maybe –

  ‘Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,’ Wells murmured. He’d been in China not even twenty-four hours, didn’t speak the language, and now was forecasting the country’s future. Classic American arrogance. He ought to spend less time making predictions, more time figuring out if anyone was watching him.

  Past the television trucks, the crowd quickened. They were close now. Just ahead the avenue opened into Tiananmen like a river pouring into a lake, and Wells saw the astonishing breadth of the square. He’d expected something like the Washington Mall. A manicured space, carefully maintained. Instead Tiananmen was a fixer-upper, a hole in the middle of a giant city, all the more powerful for its rawness.

  From its northeast corner, where Wells had walked in, Tiananmen stretched south a half-mile, west a quarter-mile. The thick red walls of the Forbidden City marked its north side. The hall housing Mao’s body sat in the southern half of the square, behind a tall granite obelisk, a smaller version of the Washington Monument.

  As Wells oriented himself, protesters flooded by, joining the hundreds of thousands of people already huddled in the center of Tiananmen. Shouts came in bursts from the loudspeakers around the square. Warnings or exhortations to the crowd? Wells didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know today. All his life he’d felt privileged, and sometimes cursed, by what he’d been allowed to see. But he had never, not even on his first day in Afghanistan, been so much of an outsider. He was in the eye of a human hurricane, watching a maelstrom whose physics were beyond his understanding, a force of nature uninterested in him, yet with the power to tear h
im apart.

  The security forces had left the center of Tiananmen to the protesters. But at the northwest corner, where an avenue led toward the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, a green wall of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder before a phalanx of armored personnel carriers. Hundreds more soldiers blocked the entrance to the Forbidden City, where a giant banner of Mao hung from the outer wall of the palace.

  Wells turned right, toward the banner, where the police had opened a path for any tourists brave or dumb enough to come to the Forbidden City today. An archway cut through the outer palace wall, directly under the portrait of Mao. This was the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the southern entrance to the palace complex.

  And as Wells walked through the gate, it lived up to its name. The crackle of the Tiananmen loudspeakers faded away. ‘Open?’ Wells asked the sweet-faced girl inside the ticket booth. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But she nodded.

  As she handed him a ticket, a man grabbed his elbow. ‘You American? I student. Beijing University. Name is Sun.’

  ‘Sure you are,’ Wells said. Cops looked the same everywhere. This guy could have been the brother of the cabbie Wells had ditched two hours before. His shoes – black lace-up boots – were polished. Had any student anywhere ever polished his shoes?

  ‘I take you,’ Sun said. ‘Practice my English. Free.’

  ‘I’ll pass. I’m kind of antisocial.’ Wells held up the audio guide, which, weirdly, was narrated by Roger Moore. ‘Besides, I got the tour and everything.’

  Wells handed over his ticket to the guard and walked through the front entrance. When he looked back, he wasn’t surprised to see Sun about a hundred feet behind, conspicuously tailing him. What would Jim Wilson do? Wells turned around.

  ‘This is my only day sightseeing and I don’t know why you’re bothering me.’

  ‘Not bothering,’ Sun said. ‘Just watching out. Not good day for American here.’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  But Wells decided not to argue further. It was only 9:45 a.m., and the meet was supposed to be at noon, so he had two hours to lose this guy. He wandered through the palace, doing his best impression of a half-bored, half-awed American tourist. Which wasn’t difficult. The Forbidden City wasn’t a European-style palace like Versailles, a mansion filled with decorated rooms. Instead, the complex consisted of empty courtyards divided by ceremonial halls. The Hall of Complete Harmony. The Hall of Preserving Harmony. The Hall of Supreme Harmony. The emperors had been big on harmony. They wouldn’t have been happy today, Wells thought.

  To the north, the inner palace held the emperor’s living quarters, elaborately carved wooden pavilions, painted deep red to symbolize the emperor’s power. The average Chinese had been barred from the complex on pain of death – hence the palace’s name. But over the years, the palace had been ransacked so many times that today its buildings were mostly empty. Without Roger Moore to guide him, Wells wouldn’t have known what he was seeing.

  Besides the audio tour, he’d brought his own pocket-sized guide to the Forbidden City. He thumbed through it as Sun trailed behind, the world’s slowest chase. Wells shooed him off a couple times, to no effect. The complex got slightly busier as the morning went on. At 11:00, a dozen nervous-looking American tourists walked past, watched by two bored police officers. Wells guessed they’d come through the palace’s northern gate, not the Tiananmen entrance. He wondered what they were making of this. Joe and Phyllis from Sacramento probably hadn’t expected war when they signed up for seven nights in China.

  Finally, at 11:45, in the northwestern corner of the palace complex, where narrow cobblestone corridors connected irregularly shaped courtyards, Wells found a way to lose Sun. He reminded himself not to run.

  Wells ducked through a group of Japanese sightseers and into a wooden pavilion housing a display of court costumes. As the Japanese clustered at the entrance, blocking Sun for a precious few seconds, Wells jogged through the pavilion and hopped over a railing into an alley, then sprinted along the side of the building. Thirty yards down, the building ended and the alley formed a T-intersection with another pathway. Wells swung right, ran a few feet along the pavilion, then hopped over another railing and back inside the building.

  He flattened himself against a display case and peeked out. Sun reached the intersection, panting. He twisted left and right, looking for Wells. Finally he trotted left, toward the center of the complex. Perfect. Wells waited a few seconds more, then walked out the pavilion’s front entrance. He felt as though he’d rid himself of a piece of gum stuck to his shoe. Losing Sun wouldn’t matter if the cops were watching the meeting site, but Wells was glad to be rid of the guy anyway.

  He made his way into the palace’s northeast corner, a quiet area filled with narrow pavilions and gardens. Over the years, emperors had competed to build the most beautiful spaces, adding narrow cypress trees whose bodies twisted like flames and the Buddhist rock gardens more common in Japan. The meeting with Cao was supposed to happen in a garden famous for a sculpted piece of rock known as ‘The Stone That Looks Like Wood.’ All morning Wells had wondered if he’d recognize it. But when he stepped into the garden where the stone stood, he knew he was in the right place.

  Unfortunately, the stone wasn’t the reason.

  Until now, Wells had seen no Chinese tourists in the palace today. Understandable, considering the protests in Tiananmen. But this garden was the exception. Five Chinese had decided it was a perfect place to relax. A young couple sat side by side on a bench, holding hands. Three men in their early twenties sketched a cypress tree, their hands flying over their pads.

  Why here? Why now? Wells knew. The agents were good, nonchalant, and yet their nonchalance was a tip-off as obvious as Sun’s polished shoes. Two hours before, when he’d walked through the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he’d stepped into the open maw of the People’s Republic, and yard by yard he’d slipped into its gullet. The game he’d played with Sun seemed absurdly childish now.

  Maybe Cao had been set up too. Or maybe Shafer and Exley had been right all along, and Cao was part of the trap. But the bad guys knew about the meeting for sure. Somewhere nearby a squad of secret police was waiting to arrest him.

  Wells kept walking. Turning and running wouldn’t help. He had nowhere to go. He might as well see who showed up. He stopped beside the stone that looked like wood. It did, too, like a piece of flotsam sculpted smooth by waves. Wells checked his watch – 12:00. In a minute, or two, he would walk on, casually, leave the garden. Then –

  ‘Hey, mister!’ A kid scuffled into the garden, waving at him. A kid?

  Per Cao’s instructions, Wells was wearing a green T-shirt, the contact signal. The kid, also wearing a green shirt, walked over. ‘Mr. Green,’ he said.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ Wells couldn’t help himself. Was this part of the setup? Why didn’t they just arrest him?

  ‘You Mr. Green, right? I meet you at stone like wood.’ The kid seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘I know code word,’ he said.

  Somewhere over the walls of the courtyard, a man shouted in Chinese. The students dropped their sketch pads and walked toward him.

  ‘Tell me,’ Wells said.

  ‘Ghost.’

  ‘You’re crazy, kid.’

  ‘For you.’ The kid reached into his pocket for a package hardly bigger than a pack of Juicy Fruit. A flash drive. He handed it to Wells and ran away. He didn’t get far. The students grabbed him roughly. Then footsteps clattered behind Wells.

  He turned to see two men, the biggest Chinese he’d ever seen, as tall and muscular as NBA power forwards. They reached for him, wrapped their meaty hands around him. He didn’t try to fight. Another man followed. And as the power forwards twisted Wells’s arms behind his back, the third man reached into his pocket for a black canvas hood.

  ‘Wait –’ Wells said. But the world went black, and around his neck the string drew tight.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE DARK BLUE buoy, about the size of a b
asketball, popped to the surface of the East China Sea and fired an electronic burst into the atmosphere. A fraction of a second later, the Bei, a satellite 22,000 miles overhead, registered the buoy’s electronic signature and responded with an encrypted transmission of its own.

  Just that quickly, the Xian, the newest submarine in China’s fleet, was in contact with its masters onshore – all the while remaining five hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, connected to the buoy by a fiber-optic cable. The technology was the most advanced in the world, a generation ahead of similar systems on American submarines. The Xian could even get real-time video imagery of ships all over the western Pacific, thanks to a network of Chinese satellites in low earth orbit that were connected to the Bei through a control center near Beijing.

  Of course, the Xian had to be careful not to stay connected for too long. The United States monitored Chinese satellites, and after a few seconds, American signals-intelligence equipment on Guam, Okinawa, and Alaska could begin to target the buoy’s location. To protect itself, the Xian made contact with the Bei only twice a day.

  Still, the satellite link had proven extraordinarily useful, Captain Tong Pei thought. Especially now, with American ships searching for Chinese subs. Thanks to the link, the Xian could get orders while staying hidden at the bottom of the thermocline – a layer of water where the ocean’s temperature dropped quickly, distorting sound waves and making the Xian much harder to find.

  Before taking over the Xian, Tong had commanded attack submarines for almost two decades. He was the most experienced commander in China’s fleet. But he had never commanded a boat remotely like the Xian. And he had never been on a mission like this one.