“Because I think I’m going to need legal advice.”
“I think so too, unless this is some kind of joke.”
Well, that was exactly what it was in its own way, but I didn’t think I could explain that to a stranger to the craft, so I just said, “My hope is that you will agree to represent me. If you believe me.”
“If I represent you it won’t matter whether or not I believe you,” Alice said. “And on the basis of what I’ve learned about spooks in the last hour, I have no reason not to believe you. Everything you’ve told me is so crazy that it doesn’t even matter if it’s the truth. But there are problems. For one, the case doesn’t exactly fall within my area of expertise.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“What do you care about?”
“Your smarts. Your courtroom manner. Your knowledge of me.”
“But I just found out I don’t know anything about you.”
“No, you just found out that there was something about me you didn’t know. Big difference.”
“There’s another issue,” Alice said.
“Is there some kind of ethical question because we’ve slept together?”
“No. But I’m emotionally involved,” Alice said.
I was thrilled by her words. Even though I knew I would probably never sleep with her again, I said, “You are? That’s wonderful.”
“Isn’t it, though? In your interests I should recuse myself. I can find you an excellent lawyer.”
“Thank you, no. No Ole Olsens. It’s you or no one.”
“If it’s no one, you’ll end up as dog food. A competent lawyer can at least raise enough doubt to keep you alive.”
“That’s the optimum outcome?”
“You be the judge,” Alice said. “Do you have any proof that this creature you call Burbank is the traitor you say he is? Documents, tape recordings, witnesses, anything at all?”
“No witnesses. Tape recordings of everything except Chen Jianyu whispering Luther Burbank’s name in my ear.”
“So that includes what?”
“Every meeting with Burbank, every meeting with Lin Ming, with Chen Qi, with Mei and Chen Jianyu three days ago, everyone involved in the operation.”
“Where is this material?”
“In the mail, addressed to you.”
“Tape recordings are iffy things.”
“Maybe to judges, but they’re catnip to the FBI.”
“Meaning what?”
“If the Bureau investigates me, they’ll have to investigate Burbank,” I said. “Even if I go down, he goes down with me. He can’t be allowed to go on selling the country out to Guoanbu.”
“That’s the plan, stopping him?”
“More like a forlorn hope,” I said. “But it might work.”
“And if it does, everything will be right with the world?”
“Maybe not quite everything. But I’ll settle for what we can get, as long as we get Burbank.”
“The simplest thing for these enemies of yours to do is to kill you,” Alice said. “People get murdered for no apparent reason all the time.”
“Headquarters doesn’t do that kind of thing.”
“Tell that to al Qaeda,” Alice said. “What about Burbank or Chen Qi or Guoanbu?”
“My sudden death is not enough for Chen Qi. He wants me to die by inches.”
Alice drew a deep breath, then another, as if oxygen was an antidote to exasperation. “Even if the plan works, the government will pursue the charges against you,” she said. “You will have caused them too much trouble for them to do otherwise. Given the evidence you’ve laid out tonight, you’d need twelve twisted minds on the jury to get acquitted. In fact the jurors will be normal people to whom the activities you take for granted will sound like a day in Satan’s workshop. In the end the jurors will think one of two things—either you’re the vile traitor the prosecution will say you are and you’re trying to save yourself by destroying your innocent boss, or you’re insane. In any case, you’ll be locked up. Forever.”
I already knew that. I told Alice I just wanted to get the facts, deformed as they might be, on the record. In the short run, Headquarters might protect Burbank and sacrifice me to cover its own fanny. But the possibility that I was right about him would not go away. It would flit from mind to mind, inside Headquarters and inside the news media, and sooner or later, the hornets’ nest would wake up. Burbank would be kicked out of Headquarters. Even if he didn’t go to jail, even if Chen Qi didn’t have him assassinated to make sure of his silence, he would do no more harm to his country. That was an outcome I could accept.
“You really mean that?” Alice asked.
“Yes. If I don’t have a chance of beating the charges, and I know I don’t, then I’ll settle for getting the bastard in the end.”
Alice thought it over, her eyes boring into mine. Then she said, “Okay, I’ll take the case, but much as I might wish to do so, the firm probably won’t let me do it pro bono. Given the complexity, the essential hopelessness of your situation, you’re looking at maybe a couple of million dollars. Can you cover that, leaving aside the Chinese money, which the government will seize?”
“I can come close,” I said. I had the house in Connecticut, the apartment in the city, and the stocks and bonds and jewelry Mother had left me.
“Okay,” Alice said. “You may even have something left over in case of a miracle. Give me a list of your assets and I’ll draw up the papers posting them as collateral. Are you all right with that?”
I said, “Go ahead. I’m assuming everything I’ve told you tonight or will tell you in the future will be protected by lawyer-client confidentiality.”
“Correct. That’s why it’s costing you so much money. Now let’s talk some more.”
She opened her purse and rummaged around in it. “Want an energy bar?” she asked, tossing one onto the table for me. I unwrapped it and ate it. Somehow Alice ate hers without spilling a single crumb.
The rest of the conversation was Q & A. She was an even tougher customer than I had thought. It was very reassuring to imagine Burbank, who had been immune to questions for such a long time, trying to stand up under cross-examination by this remorseless inquisitor. For me it was liberating to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for the first time in years, to hide nothing, to remember lies and crack them open to get at the facts within, and to do this because it profited me and advanced the operation. It was a strange process, baring the soul. I had been told about defected spies weeping with relief, wetting their pants, clinging in gratitude to their interrogators as if to a priest after spilling everything they knew, so great was their relief to cleanse their consciences.
At eleven o’clock the club closed. No gong sounded, Alice just knew what time it was. As we walked down the stairs together, the last two people in the place except for the watchman, Alice said, “We’re hungry, no?”
“Yes. Want to go to Subway?”
“Let’s go to my place and order a pizza,” Alice said.
A last sleepover. My heart sang.
At the bottom of the steps that led from the sidewalk to the door of the club, two persons in black baseball caps and matching warm-up jackets waited. One of them flashed ID and said, “FBI.” He then spoke my name as a question. I said yes, that was me. The other agent, a female, also flourishing a badge, repeated my name and said, “You are under arrest on suspicion of espionage under the provisions of 18 U. S. Code, section 793.” She then read me my Miranda rights. The other one shackled me, wrists and ankles.
Alice said, “I am this man’s attorney. Where are you taking him?”
They told her.
“I’ll follow,” she said. To me she said, “You know what to do. Say nothing to these people, repeat nothing, apart from stating your name, which you have already done. There is no need to be polite or congenial. Do you understand?”
Before I could do so much as nod in agreement, I felt a hand o
n my head as Special Agents XX and XY put me into the backseat of a large black Ford that smelled of Lysol. The plan had worked, but far more quickly than I had imagined. Being taken into custody by America’s equivalent of the secret police was like slipping into unconsciousness after being wounded in combat. Would I ever wake up again? To my utmost surprise I suddenly felt bottomless fear, worse than anything I had known in Afghanistan or in the dreams I had brought home with me from that godforsaken place.
45
Eventually I got over being terrified. Thanks to Alice Song’s skills and a criminal justice system that was more interested in big fish than in small fry like me, I did better than Dreyfus. About a year after my arrest, only dimly aware of how Alice had managed to lead the government to the fundamental, undeniable truth that Luther Burbank was the real traitor and I was merely the babe in the woods, I pleaded guilty to a single felony charge. I was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. As ritual dictated, I expressed my heartfelt remorse for my crime though I wasn’t sure what exactly I was being charged with. With credit for the time I had already spent in jail, I served two weeks less than two years in a minimum-security federal prison camp in Tennessee. The experience was something like ROTC summer camp except that the guards were less drunk with power than the instructor NCOs had been and I didn’t get nearly as much exercise. Otherwise, all was familiar—barracks that smelled faintly of dirty socks and armpits, good guys and bad guys, dumb jokes, tight routine, unseasoned food, time oozing by. My Timex had been confiscated. I never looked at the clock in the recreation room, just listened for the announcements to tell me when to eat, when to sleep, when to be counted. Gradually I regressed to a Stone Age consciousness in which measurement scarcely existed, knowing only day and night, long and short, rain and shine, cold and warmth, hunger and food, sexual arousal and self-help. After a spell in the kitchen scrubbing pots and pans, I worked on the paint gang, an enjoyable job.
Meanwhile the case moved toward conclusion, inch by inch. Alice called me when there were new developments, but isolated as I was, it was hard to splice the pieces together. I felt that I was watching through the window of my cell as disconnected snatches of an eight-millimeter movie based on the true story of my life flickered on a distant screen. At last came the moment when the climactic scene played, the screen went to black, the music stopped, and a series of captions detailing the after-the-movie life of the characters appeared:
Burbank was indicted on eighty-six counts of espionage, but he was not tried on these charges because he declined to do the patriotic thing and plead guilty and the evidence against him was too sensitive and too damaging to U.S.-China relations to be revealed in open court.
He was also indicted for evasion of income taxes on the millions Chen Qi had banked for him in Singapore, and a trial was scheduled.
Burbank, who was under house arrest while awaiting trial, was found dead, seated at the dinner table in his home in rural Virginia with the crumbs of a piece of key lime pie, his favorite dessert, on the plate before him.
Two months later, a tourist for whom she had once catered a dinner in New York sighted Magdalena in Suzhou, People’s Republic of China. She was never seen again by American eyes.
Nor was Mei.
The captions dissolve into a final scene. Alice Song meets me outside the gates of the prison camp on the day I am released after serving my sentence—or if you prefer, after completing my penance for inconveniencing my betters. She is wearing shorts and sneakers and a Chinese red T-shirt with , the character for “double happiness,” printed on it, her hair cut shorter than before but otherwise looking just the same. I am thinner, calmer—the result, maybe, of 716 days of staring fixedly like a Zen monk at a certain invisible stain on the wall. We drive away, Alice at the wheel. It is late morning on a sunny day in spring—songbirds in flight, crows cawing, blue skies, puffy white clouds, and after we reach the Interstate, flowering trees in the grassy median strip. Somehow all this awakens the memory of Burbank and Magdalena dancing in the dark. And I wonder if Burbank, who knew so many things that nobody really needed to know, ever realized until he took his last bite of key lime pie, who his caretaker, his Ginger Rogers, his matchless chef really was.
“So how was it?” Alice asks.
“Not so bad,” I reply.
“Your thoughts?”
“Mostly I thought about the power of coincidence,” I say. “The bomb not killing me in Afghanistan. Mei crashing into me on her bike. Her father being the psychopath he was.”
“And still is, don’t forget,” said Alice.
I pretend not to hear her. I go on with my thought: “Chen Qi’s connection to Burbank. Burbank’s connection to my father. Bumping into Lin Ming on a dark street in Manhattan. Running into you the first time I walked into the club. I could go on. People may scoff, but if you think about it, the unforeseen is what makes the world go around.”
Alice takes her eyes off the road and looks me up and down, as if she had known me up to now only in a photograph.
“Say again? What makes the world go around?” she says.
“Coincidence.”
“Ah, the white man’s word for fate,” says Alice.
About this Book
AN AMERICAN SPY IN CHINA.
STATUS: SLEEPER.
NAME: UNKNOWN.
The practice of espionage is built on hope, denial of reality, wishful thinking, ignorance, the tendency to look upon insignificant results as important outcomes, and the belief that those who spy by the rules don’t get caught.
This is a lie.
In fact at any moment you can be pulled under, captured, tortured, imprisoned, perhaps killed, or left in the heaving darkness until there is nothing left of you…
And that is what happened to me.
Reviews
‘If you read no other spy thriller this year – read this one.’ —Daily Mail
‘A grand master of espionage.’ —Guardian
‘There is no better American spy novelist.’ —Time Magazine
‘Charles McCarry is better than John le Carré. Which makes him perhaps the best ever. And this is his first long-form fiction in years. Excited yet? You should be. The Shanghai Factor is hypnotic, engaging, subtle, and deeply, deeply satisfying.’ —Lee Child
‘Only someone who has been a player can write about the Great Game of Espionage the way Charles McCarry does. In The Shanghai Factor, we are lured, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, into a fictional Heart of Darkness populated by a succubus straight out of the Gehenna of our nightmares. A great read by a master of the art and craft of espionage novels.’ —Robert Littell
‘Charles McCarry is a master of intelligent, literate spy fiction. And that is why I believe you will like, really like, The Shanghai Factor.’ —Alan Furst
‘Charles McCarry, the reigning grand master of American spy thriller writers, delivers one of his best novels in years with The Shanghai Factor, a compelling page turner thatpropels its characters through McCarry’s complex plot and reveals our real world of shadow powers better than most ”factual” reporting. McCarry captures the hearts and minds of the mere mortals we call spies.’ —James Grady
‘The Shanghai Factor is a brilliant espionage novel by the master of the form. It is also terrifying and astonishingly timely, dealing with the ominous threat of an undeclared – and victorious – Chinese cyberwar with the U.S.’ —Joseph Finder
‘Ranks up there with le Carré in a select class of two.’ —Daily Mail
Also by Charles McCarry
Ark
Christopher’s Ghosts
Old Boys
Lucky Bastard
Shelley’s Heart
Second Sight
The Bride of the Wilderness
The Last Supper
The Better Angels
The Secret Lovers
The Tears of Autumn
The Miernik Dossier
About the Author
Charles McCarry ser
ved as a CIA operations officer in Europe, Asia and Africa. He is the author of twelve previous novels, as well as numerous works of non-fiction.
A Letter from the Publisher
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First published in 2013 by Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, New York
This ebook edition first published in the UK in 2013 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Charles McCarry, 2013
The moral right of Charles McCarry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781781855096
ISBN (XTPB): 9781781855102
ISBN (E): 9781781855089
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