It was a typical Virginia summer night, temperature and humidity both in the nineties. Fireflies blinked. Mosquitoes bit. I crushed them when I could reach them instead of slapping them because I feared to make a noise. My mind wandered and when it came back into focus, the lights were off in the house. I heard the front door open. Burbank emerged. He still wore his white shirt, so I could make him out in the darkness. A second, smaller white blur moved beside him. I heard a sound I couldn’t quite identify, but then, as Burbank’s movement triggered the floodlights, I realized that what I had heard was the inquisitive whine of a dog that smells something it does not recognize. The smaller white blur—not so very small on closer examination—was a pit bull. Where had it come from? No dog had ever before been part of this picture. The pit bull barked—a long string of baritone woofs. It growled deep in its throat, then barked again, louder.
Burbank could see me as plainly as I saw him. He said, “You. Stand up with your hands above your head or I’ll turn the dog loose.”
At this moment Burbank’s dance partner came outside, also still wearing her dancing costume. She carried the gun-nut machine pistol Burbank had put under my pillow on my first visit to this house. She handed the weapon to Burbank, who handed her the dog’s leash in return and pointed the weapon at me. I stood up and put my hands above my head.
“Approach,” Burbank said. “Slowly.”
I was, say, a hundred feet away. Though I have good eyesight I couldn’t quite make out Burbank’s face. The floodlights had switched on and were so dazzlingly bright that they hindered vision. After I had taken maybe twenty steps, Burbank and the woman came into focus. At the same moment so did I, apparently, because the woman told the pit bull to lie down, and it obeyed her instantly. I looked at the woman. For a fraction of a second I saw her as if she were captured in a freeze frame. Then she turned her back, whirling as if executing a tango step, and rushed into the house, taking the pit bull with her.
Quick as she was, different as she looked in her dancing clothes and her new hair color, I made her. I knew who she was. There was no mistake. By this time I was beyond surprise, but wasn’t it odd, wasn’t it intriguing, wasn’t it extraordinary, the way I kept on catching glimpses of Magdalena in the strangest places?
43
Burbank led me through the dark house to a tiny study. An antiqued print of Old Ironsides under full sail, ensign blowing the wrong way, hung on one wall. A print of the Godolphin Arabian, a foundation sire of the Thoroughbred breed, was displayed on the opposite wall.
“Sit ye down,” Burbank said. “I’ll be right back.” A moment later I heard the pit bull’s toenails clicking on the bare floor, then heard the front door open and close and the Range Rover’s throaty engine start up and the car drive away. Soon after that Burbank reappeared, now wearing pajamas and carrying two bottles of artisanal beer. He handed one bottle to me and took a long pull from the other.
“Thirsty work, doing the tango,” he said. “I thought you were on R and R.”
“I am, but I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Is that why you’re here at this ungodly hour? It’s after two.”
I said, “This won’t take long.”
“Then spill it,” he said. “Some of us have to get up in the morning.”
“I was out of town for a while,” I said, “and when I got back yesterday I checked my bank balance.” I paused.
“And?” Burbank said.
“And I discovered that something called the Hanyu Consultants Group had deposited two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in my checking account.”
Now I had his attention, but he was still Mr. Cool. He sipped his beer, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and said, “In return for what?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What’s the Hanyu Consultants Group?”
It would have been untruthful for me to say that I had no idea, so again I shrugged. I said, “Never heard of them.”
“Never consulted for them?”
“No.”
“Then why are they dropping a quarter of a million dollars into your checking account?”
“I don’t have a clue. I thought you might be able to help me figure it out.”
“Why me?”
Burbank was looking at me as if I might be carrying a concealed weapon.
I said, “Because you’re my superior officer, my only friend at Headquarters, and I don’t know who else to report this to. Because I think the deposit may be an attempt to ruin me.”
“‘Ruin’ you?’” He whistled softly. “How? Why? Who?”
Head cocked, he was smiling in a worried sort of way. Had I lost it altogether?
I went on. “I think the FBI or the IRS or both will investigate as soon as they get word of this. So will CI as a matter of reflex. I think the results of such an investigation could be unfortunate for me and embarrassing for Headquarters and for you as the man I work for.”
“Why unfortunate for you if you’re innocent of wrongdoing? Have you considered just reporting this to the FBI?”
He actually said this—bluffed on the first card dealt. Now his smile was soothing, his tone of voice infinitely reasonable, as though he might be humoring a wife who was working herself up to accuse him of adultery.
I said, “No. I’m reporting it to you.”
“Why not go straight to the Bureau, if you think there’s something fishy about it?”
“Because Headquarters wouldn’t like that. Because whatever illusions may exist about American justice, nobody is ever considered innocent by the Bureau after being taken into custody. Because very few people arrested by the FBI have ever been proved innocent. Because nobody accused of the kind of crime this payment suggests I committed has ever had a friend in the world.”
“Whoa,” Burbank said. “Hold on, there. Have you considered the possibility that the deposit is a mistake? Banks make them all the time. What bank are we talking about?”
I told him. He asked how much I had in my account. I told him that. If he thought that half a million dollars was an unusual amount for a GS-13 making $89,023.00 a year before payroll taxes and deductions to have in a checking account, he did not say so. I was certain that he already knew everything I had just told him. Even so, a sign of surprise, however tiny, would have been a seemly gesture. Burbank made no such sign.
He said, “I see your problem. I think you may be giving it a little more weight than it can bear.”
“I’m paranoid? Wow, that’s a load off my mind.”
Burbank was displeased by the sarcasm and he amended his performance to let this show. His reaction—a frown, a sad shake of the head—resembled spontaneity, a quality I had not previously observed in him. I felt I was making progress. He was human after all. It was possible to get to him. I thought I had the key to opening him up, I thought I was in luck. I thought that my latest glimpse of Magdalena was the key. So far tonight nearly everything that had happened was unexpected. I had come here with the intention of penetrating Burbank’s shell if I had to waterboard him to do it, but with no plan in mind. I was winging it. I had no idea what I was doing or what might happen next. This was no great change from the life I had been living for months—years, even—and maybe, I thought, the whole dog’s breakfast of this operation, the whole inside-out life into which I had stumbled, was a training exercise for the new Afghanistan in which I was now waking up, wondering where I was.
All during this train of thought, Burbank stared over my shoulder, as if there were someone behind me (Magdalena, syringe in hand?) who was going to tell him in sign language what to do about this psychopath who had somehow gotten into the house. He looked a little wan. He looked, yes, unsure of his next move or mine.
I said, “I’ve been thinking about the obvious.”
Burbank swiveled his gaze and looked into my eyes. He was looking wary but trying to conceal it.
“So far you haven’t sounded that way,” he said. “But
tell me more.”
I said, “I know it has occurred to you that the ideal way to penetrate an intelligence service is through its counterintelligence division.”
“And why would that be?”
I said, “CI is above suspicion by definition because suspicion is its turf. It has the need to know everything about everyone, but no one else has the need or the right to know anything about it.”
“That’s true in a twisted sort of way,” Burbank said. “As you know, we’ve had some experience with being penetrated. We learned from the experience. It can never happen again.”
“You believe that?”
“I know that.”
“How do you know it?”
“Because the last fellow was a clown doing a clown’s work and we now know how to take clowns seriously.”
“Then one of the clowns is still inside the little trick car in the center ring, because I think it has happened again.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that I have reason to believe that Guoanbu has an agent within Headquarters, within CI.”
“Do you now?” Burbank said.
He smiled a dead-eyed smile. He looked at the clock on his desk. He yawned. He turned the clock around so I could see it. Too many gestures, too much disinterest.
I said, “Will you listen?”
“All right,” he said. “Tell me more. Five minutes, my friend.”
He pronounced five as fahv, in an LBJ drawl.
Scientists have established the existence of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that is transmitted from the feces of cats to human beings, rats, and other mammals. T. gondii invades the brain and rewires it, rerouting the connections among neurons. It impels rats to run toward the cat that is hunting them instead of fleeing as instinct would command. In humans, the parasite causes its host to behave in wildly reckless ways, leading to such self-destructive actions as reckless adultery, deliberately crashing cars, or shoplifting. It is suspected of triggering schizophrenia. I had never gone anywhere near a cat turd if I could avoid it, but in Burbank’s study I had a T. gondii moment. Something leaped in my brain from one neuron to another, and in the nanosecond this took I was transformed into a nutcase who didn’t know the meaning of the word consequences. Had I been standing on a balcony thirty floors above the ground I probably would have leaped onto its parapet and gone for a walk.
I said, “This will take a little more than five minutes.”
Burbank glared at me—how dared I contradict him?—and pushed back his chair with a squeal. He started to get to his feet.
I said, “Sit down.”
Burbank, who probably hadn’t been given a direct order in twenty years, looked startled. I was bigger than he was and years younger and my forearm was larger than his calf, and possibly I had a look on my face that gave him pause. In any case he sat down. Maybe he had a panic button under the desk that would bring a goon squad into his study in a matter of minutes, or some kind of concealed weapon that would fire an instantaneous knockout dart designed for tigers and suicide bombers into my body. I didn’t care. I just wanted this whole masquerade to end—now and not a minute later. Enough was enough. Burbank sat down.
“Let’s go back to the beginning,” I said. I was a little surprised at how steady my voice was, how reasonable my tone. Burbank, apprehensive but cold-eyed, playing the man of stone, waited for me to go on.
“The original assignment,” I said, “was to identify half a dozen Guoanbu agents who were giving us trouble and then find a way to denounce them to Beijing as American spies, yes?”
No response from Burbank. Maybe he wasn’t listening—probably he wasn’t listening. He didn’t really have to listen because every word I spoke was almost surely being recorded. I was fine with that. I wanted this encounter to be on record. I was recording it myself with the spy-ware cell phone in the pocket of my shorts.
“However,” I said, “what we wound up with was six B-list princelings who have never done America harm and probably never will. You seemed to be satisfied with that result. Why?”
Again no response. I lifted Burbank’s desk a couple of feet off the floor and dropped it. The keepsakes on its surface flew off in all directions.
Outwardly at least, Burbank remained calm. Unperturbed. As if nothing unusual had happened to his desk he said, “Because you struck out.”
“So why didn’t you fire me?”
“Compassion. Patience. I thought that was not quite the best you were capable of doing and that we might as well see where it led us.”
“But you thought I had failed.”
“Everyone falters from time to time,” Burbank said. “In this business, a lot of things don’t work out. As I’ve told you over and over, it can take years to put an operation together. Your spoiled brats might not be dangerous now, but who knows what they might grow up to be? As often as not an operation never really comes together. It almost never turns out exactly the way we thought or hoped. But I supposed you’d learn from this experience and do better next time. After all, the operation was still alive. There might be a breakthrough, a game changer if you kept at it, believing you had a chance of coming through. I thought you should be given time and space to make something happen. I believed you could do that. That’s why I gave you a free hand and the chance to be creative. Even now I think you can amount to something in this business. I really do.”
So Burbank had had nothing but avuncular intentions toward me all along, and still had them even after I had revealed the real me to him in the last ten minutes. To give him his due, benevolent uncle had always been the part he played best. He was just staying in character.
I didn’t ponder the alternatives. After an interval of heavy silence I said, “Are you familiar with the Dreyfus affair?”
Burbank’s eyes widened, an unfeigned reaction at last. In a flat voice he said, “The what?”
I said, “The Dreyfus affair.”
“I read Zola when I was a kid.”
I said, “What’s your recollection of the details of the case?”
“What does that have to do with the price of anything?”
“Indulge me.”
He shrugged. If I insisted on being humored, he’d humor me. He summarized the Dreyfus case. Naturally he aced the details—the false (Burbank used the word mistaken) accusation that Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew from Alsace, therefore the perfect patsy, had passed military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. He knew all about Dreyfus’s court-martial on a charge of treason, about his five years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, about the attempts of the French army command to quash new evidence that showed him to be innocent, about the final vindication. He knew about Esterhazy.
“So now that you know I know all that, what do you think you know?” Burbank said.
I said, “I know that I’m Dreyfus. That you’re Esterhazy.”
I’d like to report that Burbank reeled in guilt and surprise. But his face betrayed nothing, his voice did not change, no muscle moved.
He said, “You’re serious?”
“Absolutely. That’s what this masquerade is all about. You’re a spy for China. If the allegation is ever made, you’ve got a fall guy. He gets to wear the handcuffs, he goes to jail or the guillotine, you go right on doing what you do.”
Burbank’s smile broadened with every sentence I uttered. He said, “Ingenious. I was right about you. You really do have the knack.”
“Thank you.”
“However, you poor bastard, you’re demented. Anyone can see that.”
He got to his feet. “As of this moment you’re on indefinite administrative leave,” he said. “You are relieved of all duties. Your clearance is suspended. Your access to Headquarters is terminated, your ID is canceled. However, your salary will continue and your medical insurance will still be good. The Headquarters shrinks will be in touch with you first thing in the morning with the names of outside psychiatrists who are cleared to handle cases like
yours. Unless you’ve got an imaginary Chinese submarine waiting for you offshore, it would be futile to attempt to leave the country. Now I’m going to bed. Get out of my house. Go home.”
I said, “I’ll leave, but I won’t go away.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Burbank said.
He walked me out. Not a pinpoint of light fell through the windows. He opened the door for me and stood back to give me room, as if I were a guest departing after a good dinner and an interesting conversation. For a moment I thought he was going to shake hands with me, but that did not happen.
44
Alice Song listened intently while I told her all this. I had booked a private dining room at the club, so we were alone and Alice’s elocution was not the factor it might have been in a crowded dining room. Like Burbank the night before, she was absolutely still. Nothing moved—not her eyelids, not her hands, not the muscles in her face. Her body did not shift in her chair. After a while the waiter arrived, looked at our untouched plates, and asked if everything was all right.
“Everything’s lovely,” Alice said. “Could you clear the table, please?”
As soon as the waiter was out of the room, Alice said, “Is that all of it?”
“So far.”
“And the crux of the matter is that this mysterious character called Chen Qi wants to destroy you because you knocked up his daughter, and that this same Chen Qi is a Chinese spymaster who is spying on U.S. intelligence through the eyes of the man who is the chief of U.S. counterintelligence?”
“Yes.”
Alice, still frozen in place, said, “Then I guess it’s time to ask why are you telling me all this.”
The Shanghai Factor Page 24
