The Shanghai Factor

by Charles McCarry

  In this place and time it was midnight, the weather was warm. The windows were wide open. The curtains stirred. I heard a telephone ringing—not the one in the front hall, but a phone outside the house. It had a novelty ring, like the horn of a Jazz Age car: Ah-OO-ga! Ah-OO-ga! I had left the special cell phone Burbank had given me in Mother’s Mercedes, which was parked in the driveway and had never before heard it ring. In bare feet and pants and a T-shirt I walked to the car, started it up, and drove about five miles north—out of range of the gizmos in the walls. I parked, got out of the car, and dialed the number of the missed call. Naturally Burbank didn’t answer. After the fifth ring I switched off.

  Burbank replied almost instantly with a text message composed entirely of wild cards that translated as: “Report to Washington immediately. Do not repeat do not go back to the house or the apartment. Make contact when you get here.”

  It is a greater bother than you might think to travel in bare feet. For one thing, your feet get very dirty very quickly. For another you keep stubbing your toes and stepping on sharp or unclean things (it’s no fun to pump gas or enter a public restroom). For yet another, going barefoot in public is frowned upon in bourgeois America. It is no easy matter for the unshod to buy shoes. Most stores post signs forbidding the barefoot to enter. Stores don’t open until ten in the morning. When I got Burbank’s message it was about half past midnight. You cannot get on a train or a bus, let alone an airplane, without shoes. I stopped at the first rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike. The convenience shop didn’t even carry flip-flops. I bought a roll of paper towels and a bottle of soap and washed my feet in the restroom. This drew disgusted glances, but by then I didn’t care.

  The Mercedes’s top speed was about fifty miles an hour, so I heard lots of horns on the turnpike. I regarded this as an advantage, because I figured that few drivers, whether under Guoanbu discipline or not, would be so foolhardy as to drive slow enough to tail me in this bat-out-of-hell traffic. To my surprise the car made it all the way to the Metro station in Vienna, Virginia. I parked it in the lot, wiped it for fingerprints, and abandoned it. Whoever towed it away would trace it to my late mother, whose last name was different from mine. I sent an encrypted text message to Burbank. Rigmarole intervened, but at last Burbank himself picked me up in his Hyundai at the third Metro station to which he directed me. How like the movies was the world I had wandered into.

  I hadn’t stopped to eat. I was very hungry. This time Burbank had brought no sandwiches. I was tired. Driving a clunker for four hundred miles, thinking every minute that the wheels were going to fall off, had been a fatiguing business. Even with all the windows and the roof open, I had inhaled enough carbon monoxide to euthanize a horse.

  I said, “I can’t stay awake. Let me know when we get there.”

  Later—how much later I don’t know because I had left my father’s Rolex on the bedside table in Connecticut—I was awakened by Burbank pinching my lower lip. We were in the countryside, at the same converted barn we had visited before. Crickets chirped. We went inside, me limping slightly more than usual. The god-awful paintings were still there. The caretaker-painter was still absent, so Burbank must have had the same housekeeper. I tried to picture her, but the woman I saw in my mind’s eye was Magdalena. I wondered what she would make of my sudden departure—$20,000 watch left on the table, shoes on the floor, socks and underwear strewn on the rag rug made by my grandmother and her sisters, razor and toothbrush in the bathroom.

  Burbank brewed tea. He said, “You’re quite informally dressed tonight.”

  “Your fault,” I said.

  He said, “Meaning what?”

  I told him. I told him about the break-in and the bugs. I told him about Magdalena in her many guises mean and mellow. I described the seduction scene. Taken together, this made her sound like a suspicious character—a simple accomplishment, as any character assassin knows. Burbank listened impatiently, obviously controlling his face with an effort.

  He cleared his throat and said, “You do seem to have a way with the ladies.”

  “With a little help from my friends.”

  “Well, let’s hope this Magdalena is still a friend.”

  “She’s not the type.”

  “Oh?” Burbank said. “What type would you say she is?”

  “Hard to tell,” I said.

  “She’s good at what she does? Apart from the sex.”

  “No end to her skills. Terrific cook, frugal housekeeper, world-class gardener, very smart. I wouldn’t be surprised if she can make pottery or fly a helicopter or read Sanskrit. She was very observant, almost like a trained investigator, in picking up clues about the break-in. I told her she was a born detective, and meant it.”

  “That also fits.”

  “Fits what?”

  “Our files,” Burbank said. “But you left something out. Magdalena, as she told you to call her, is a professional assassin.”

  Oh, was that all? I had to suppress a laugh. At the same time I felt a little sick. I was supposed to believe this? I said, “Are you serious?”

  He said, “She has seven kills we know about. Just as you say, she cooks like Escoffier, she leaps from scorn to lust, she screws the target regardless of gender, she crawls on her belly like a snake. She does her thing. The target dies. She disappears. We don’t even have a picture of her.”

  “What’s her method?’”

  “Poison. Untraceable poison. That’s why she’s never been caught. That and her all-around talent.”

  “Which talent?”

  “What better profession for a poisoner than chef? What better way to build trust than sex?”

  Now I was the one who meditated. Burbank wouldn’t kid around about something like this—unless he had an operational reason—or, most unlikely, a personal one—in which case he might very well make up whatever fairy story suited the purpose. I made room in my mind for doubt even though I was under oath to believe anything he might say.

  This didn’t fool Burbank. He said, “You’re skeptical. Good. I wouldn’t think much of you if you weren’t. But you’d better believe what I’m saying to you. Magdalena always gets her man. Others have tried to escape. In the end she always made the kill.”

  I said, “Who does she work for?”

  “If you’ve got the money, she’s got the poison.”

  “You think she’s been paid to do me in?”

  “In the context, it’s not such a wild surmise.”

  “The next line in the script is, ‘Who put out the contract?’”

  “If we knew that,” Burbank said, “we’d know who wants you dead, wouldn’t we?”

  He seemed to savor his words.

  22

  By the time federal agents got to the house in Connecticut the following morning, Magdalena was long gone. There was nothing Burbank or anyone else at Headquarters could do about this. Bogeyman fantasies notwithstanding, the U.S. intelligence service has no power of arrest or police authority of any kind, and it is prohibited by law from running operations on American soil against American citizens. It has to rely on other feds who carry guns and badges, like the FBI, to apprehend people like Magdalena. I could imagine her springing into action on finding me gone when she arrived at break of day. She would have seen the signs that I had got wind of her—the abandoned heirloom Rolex on the bedside table, the dirty clothes and all the other telltale signs of a sudden departure. She would immediately have done the professional thing and dematerialized. Sooner or later, somewhere else on the planet, she would pull her molecules together again and continue the hunt. If Burbank could be believed, she took her work seriously. She was under contract. Her reputation, her future, her business prospects, even her sex life, depended on fulfilling the contract. I would see her again—or more likely, not see her again. One evening I would come home from the office, microwave a leftover, swallow a mouthful of it and suddenly the world would go dark, this time for real. Or maybe I’d feel a pinprick through the se
at of my pants while standing at a urinal at the movies, and then in the mirror see the last thing I would ever see—Magdalena’s face over her shoulder as she walked out, disguised as an undersized male. As I drew my last breath would she wink and smile that decimal of a Magdalena smile?

  These thoughts were in my mind as Burbank, having dealt with the question of my likely assassination, moved on to the next issue, the one that really interested him—namely how to handle Lin Ming by leading him to believe he was handling me. Burbank did not like to wing it—better to be ready in our minds before we acted, to have a plan, to avoid improvisation, to shun impulse. For Burbank, if something did not take years it wasn’t real. If it moved too swiftly, it wasn’t an operation. As he explained all this yet again, I fought the urge to fall asleep.

  Burbank said, “Are you awake?”

  I twitched. “Not really,” I said. “Can we continue this in the morning?”

  “Unfortunately, no. I’m catching a plane early tomorrow. You’ve got to stay awake.”

  He went to the refrigerator, drew a glass of ice water, and carried it back to me. I held it in a nerveless hand. He took a pill bottle out of his coat pocket and shook a tablet into my other hand. “Take this,” he said.

  I said, “What is it?”

  “A wake-up pill.”

  I saw and heard Burbank as if through a gauze bandage. I had never been so sleepy in my life. But why? This had been a day like any other. Had Magdalena poisoned me after all? Slow-working poisons, Burbank had said. Suspicion moved within me. The hell with it, I thought. Anything was better than this. I took the pill.

  “Drink the whole glass of water,” Burbank said. “It’ll take a couple of minutes to kick in.” He watched me as if counting the passing seconds on a mental stopwatch. Immediately I began to wake up. Burbank brought me a mug of instant espresso, black. I drank it down. All of a sudden, I was wide-awake, as if adrenaline had been injected into my heart.

  I said, “Wow. What is that stuff?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Burbank said. “But it works.”

  It sure did. I was even hungry again and said so. Burbank got a supermarket pizza out of the freezer and put it in the microwave.

  As we ate the pizza we mapped out the Lin Ming operation. Thanks to the pill, my mind was clear, my spirit tranquil. This was the sequence of the plan: very soon I would move back inside Headquarters and work closely with Burbank. I’d be given a title and Burbank’s enthusiastic trust. This would put noses out of joint at Headquarters, but it was necessary cover. I would give Lin Ming information—real but not vital information. Over time I would give him more information. And then, when the dirty trick had been done and the key had been turned in Lin Ming’s mind, I would give him the false information that would blow Guoanbu to smithereens. It was a brilliant plan. It was a game of surround. It would change the balance of espionage. We would be the aggressors, the pranksters, the ruthless ones. The winners. Both Burbank and I felt wonderful—in his case, presumably, without a chemical stimulant.

  “The key element—always remember the key element—is that nobody, nobody can know what we are doing until it’s over except you and me,” Burbank said yet again. “Just the two of us. No one else.”

  I was not insensible to the risks of this operation. To begin with, it was crazy, but then so were all really good operations. This one had the potential to put an end to me. If Burbank was killed in a plane crash or developed early Alzheimer’s or turned out to be a bastard or a traitor, I was lost and gone forever. No one would believe that Burbank, one of the most trusted and steady figures in the apparatus, had ordered me to do the things I was going to do. My own country would be my nemesis. I would be crushed, locked up, delivered to Magdalena or her equivalent. Even while still feeling the exhilarating effects of Burbank’s pill, I didn’t in my heart want to do this. Burbank, studying my face, saw this.

  “You’ll be in danger, no question,” Burbank said. “But you’ve been in danger before and come out the other side. The payback will be that for the rest of your life you will live in a state of satisfaction for having done what you will have done for this country that we love.”

  This meeting was all but over. Formalities remained. Burbank had yet another new contract for me to sign. I signed it. Just like that I was a staff agent again—but no promotion this time. At dawn, Burbank departed. He left a spare car, an environmentally correct electric one, for my use. I could stay in the house until he got back. No one would bother me. Burbank and I and the caretaker and no one else knew this house existed. The caretaker was on vacation in the Seychelles. After Burbank returned I’d move into something more suitable, more secure, and report for duty at Headquarters.

  By midafternoon the pill wore off. I was exhausted again. Burbank had shown me my room. When I put my head on the pillow I felt something beneath it. I slid my hand under the pillow and pulled out a fully automatic ten-millimeter pistol with one of those extra-long gun-nut magazines sticking out of the butt. If nobody knew this barn existed why did I need this thing? I fell asleep before I could answer my own question.

  Part 3

  23

  I realized after a day or two as Burbank’s house guest that I could live no longer with the caretaker’s psychotic paintings. When I was awake they depressed me—angered me. In dreams I came downstairs in the dishwater light of early day and found mammoth portraits of Chen Qi or Steve or the tenor or sometimes the Hessian in his muddy football suit, silent and still, waiting for me. The house itself was so isolated, so surrounded by forest, so empty of life—not even an insect lived in it with me—that I became pathologically watchful. I half expected to wake up some night and see Magdalena at the foot of the bed, syringe in hand, having just injected the venom of the Dahomey viper between my toes. I moved to a cheap motel in Manassas, and on the next nights to other motels in other towns. I went to the movies. I ate junk food, so I nearly always tasted scorched grease at the back of my throat. On the fourth morning, while I was having a superheated breakfast at a McDonalds, Burbank texted me. We would meet at the barn at ten that evening.

  I got there a little early. I did not turn on the lights in the room where the paintings were. Though surely he knew about it, Burbank didn’t mention my absence from the house.

  He handed me the ID card suspended on a chain that would get me through the gates at Headquarters and into the building in the morning. It was a lot like the one I wore around my neck in Shanghai when I worked in the tower for Chen Qi.

  “The daily meeting is at seven-thirty,” Burbank said. “Be there at seven on Monday. Use the main entrance. Sally will be there to greet you.”

  He told me the number of my parking space and gave me a parking sticker. He asked if I had any questions. I didn’t. He was brusque. He said, “Let’s go. Do you have a credit card or a checkbook on you?”

  Both, I said. He dropped me off at an all-night car dealership that sold used and new cars at low but nonnegotiable prices. “Nothing fancy,” he said, never one to eschew the obvious. “No bright colors.” Using my debit card I bought a gray Honda Civic with eighteen thousand miles on the odometer and not a scratch on it and drove it away. There was some difficulty about the registration because I had no local address, so I had to rent the car for a week to give me time to find a place to live. One of the first things I was told when I joined Headquarters was that espionage was a capital crime in every country in the world, so it was vital to be up-to-date in all your papers, for everything to be strictly legal, even in the United States, so as not to give the cops a pretext to mess with you.

  The next morning I rolled through the gates as if the guards had known my Civic and my face since childhood. As promised, Sally was waiting for me in the lobby. She led me through the color-coded labyrinth of doors to a blue one that was new to me. At seven o’clock exactly, Burbank joined us. Sally awaited orders but received none. He left her standing there and pushed open the door. A big room. About a dozen peopl
e in suits sat at a polished conference table. Heads turned. All but two chairs were occupied—Burbank’s, which was a sort of high-backed throne at the center of the table, and an ordinary one just beside it. He gestured me into the ordinary one. Those attending had an air of entitlement about them—gray heads and bald ones, and in the case of the women, mostly dyed ones. Everybody except me wore reading glasses perched on the bulbs of their noses. I recognized none of these people, but why would I? The silent question they seemed to be asking in unison was, What is this unwashed person doing in this holy of holies?

  Burbank explained. “For some time I have felt I needed a younger mind closer to me, and I have decided that this young man is the person I have been looking for,” he said. He told them my true name. “He will be my right hand,” Burbank said. “He will sit in the office next to mine, which has been unoccupied since Suzie Kane left us. He has my confidence. He reports to me, takes his orders from me and no one else, and is to be regarded as a full and equal member of this group. He has done good work in the field and has just completed an exemplary three-year tour under deep cover in denied territory. He will do more good work in Headquarters.”

  The others listened with blank faces. I detected no enthusiasm for discussing in my hearing the profound, the unutterable secrets known only to this exalted committee. But they spoke freely, and I learned some things I quite possibly might never have known if Luther Burbank had not come into my life. Most of these family jewels seemed trivial to me, as the deepest and darkest secrets often do. I listened, not too intently, and kept my mouth shut. When the meeting broke up, after an interminable hour, nobody shook my hand and bid me welcome. No one smiled. Nobody paid any attention to me at all. I might as well have been an inflatable doll that Burbank had placed in the seat beside him to make the highway patrol think he wasn’t alone in his car as he drove in the HOV lane. Burbank gestured for me to follow him into his office, the one with all the safes, where we could talk. He said, “What did you think of the Gang of Thirteen?”