第2章 ONE

1

Those who keep an eye on me think I have a weakness for Chinese women. This is true as far as it goes, but it goes both ways. I am a hairy man, and certain East Asian women like that. My first Chinese girl called sex with me "sleeping with the chimpanzee." Her name was Mei, easy for a chimp to pronounce and remember. We met cute. One day, as I pedaled along Zhongshan Road, she crashed her bicycle into mine. In those days I was new to the life of a spy, so my paranoia wasn't yet fully developed, but I immediately suspected that this was no accident. My first thought was that Chinese counterintelligence had sniffed me out and sent this temptress to entrap me. Then I took a look at the temptress and wondered why I should mind. She was lying facedown, miniskirt awry, next to the wreckage of our two bikes-curtain of blue-black hair, slender legs the color of honey, snow-white virginal panties covering her round bottom. She was in pain-writhing, moaning, sucking in air through her teeth. I crouched beside her and in my stumbling Mandarin asked the usual stupid question. She turned her head and looked at me-starlet's face, unblinking dark eyes filled with tears. I asked the same question again, "Are you all right?" First she heard me, now she saw me. And smelled me. It was a hot, muggy day. I needed a haircut. I hadn't shaved. Chest hair tufted from the open neck of a shirt I had been wearing for three days. Her lips twisted, her eyes blazed. All expression drained from her face. She said nothing. I might as well have been attempting to communicate in American Sign Language. Then she sat up. Her face, her whole person radiating anger, as if I had pinched her in her sleep. Her eyes went cold. She shouted at me. At length. In Shanghai dialect. I understood almost nothing she said, but had no difficulty grasping her meaning. A little crowd gathered. They understood every word, and it made them laugh. When she stopped talking, the crowd drifted away.

The girl got to her feet. Her knees were scraped. She bled from an elbow. She cradled the wounded arm in her other arm, as if in a sling.

Taking great care with the tones, I attempted to say, "Please speak Mandarin so I can understand the insults."

Daggers. She kicked her bike-the front wheel was as bent out of shape as she was-and said, "Your fault."

I said, "You hit me."

"My machine is ruined. Look at the front wheel."

"That proves you hit me. If I had hit you, my bike would be the one with the broken wheel."

"You speak this language like you ride a bicycle. Ugly Chengdu accent. Was that clear enough for you to understand?"

"I think so."

"It thinks!" she said. "I think it had better give me some money for a new bike before I call the police. They'll be here any minute anyway, so hurry up."

"Good. The police will see who was at fault."

"Ha."

In the middle distance I saw a knot of witnesses leading a policeman to the scene of the crime. The girl saw them, too.

"Now you will find out about China," she said.

I didn't doubt that she was right. Getting mixed up with the police was the last thing I was supposed to let happen to me. I was in Shanghai to speak Chinese, not to get the cops interested in me.

I said, "I'll go with you to a bicycle shop and pay for the repairs. But no money."

"New bike."

The cop and the witnesses were getting closer. I said, "Let's talk about it on the way."

She smiled triumphantly, lips pressed together. "I ride. You carry my bike."

I picked up the wreckage. She vaulted onto the saddle of my machine, a four-thousand-dollar one bought on the expense account, as if she were leaving Lourdes after being cured by the patron saint of lady bicyclists. I watched her go-her legs and the rest of her, in motion now. She was even better to look at. Dutiful to my vocation, I wondered why would she wear a miniskirt and that skimpy top instead of jeans and long sleeves if she had planned this collision or had it planned for her? Paranoia 101, as taught to novices in a secret installation in Virginia, answered the question: precisely because her handlers knew that her tiny wounds, her lovely face, her shining hair, her sweet body, her sharp tongue, her crackling intelligence, would cause me to think with some other organ than my brain. It was obvious that this girl had been born knowing this.

Oh, she was wily. So were her handlers. Nevertheless-couldn't help it-I thought poor kid as she weaved her way through the river of bicycles. Her figure grew smaller and smaller as she pedaled faster and faster. She turned recklessly across traffic into a side street, leaning the bicycle within centimeters of the horizontal, sprocket, pedals and feet a blur. I kissed my bike good-bye. I thought I'd never see it or her again.

I was wrong. A short way down the side street, she waited in front of a bicycle shop. Band-Aids now covered her wounds. She must have had them in her backpack just in case. Inside the shop, bicycles hung from the ceiling.

She pointed. "That one."

The proprietor got it down. It was the very best bicycle available in China, therefore in the world, he said, the only one of its kind in the store, and perhaps in all of Shanghai, since this model flew out of the shops and the manufacturer was in despair because he could not keep up with demand. He named the price. I flinched.

I still held her wrecked machine in my arms. I said, "Wait a minute. What we want is to have this one repaired."

"New bike," she said.

To the proprietor, I said, "How much to fix this bike?" He looked at me blankly but did not answer.

She said, "This man does not do repairs."

"Then we'll find someone who does."

The girl said something to the proprietor in Shanghainese. He went to the door of his shop and shouted. In seconds a very stern policeman appeared.

In English the girl said, "Shall I tell him you assaulted me?"

"And if you do?"

"Investigation."

I didn't reply. She studied my face and apparently saw what she had been hoping to see-profound anxiety. In Mandarin she said to the policeman, "This man is new to our country. He wants to know if this is a good bike."

"The best," the policeman said. "Very expensive. Worth the price."

He left without even asking for my passport. Another little thrill of suspicion ran through my mind. How did this policeman happen to be nearby? Why did he turn himself into a sales assistant? Where was his officiousness? The girl did not trouble to read my mind. She was bargaining with the proprietor. Or seemed to be. They were speaking Shanghainese, a language I didn't understand. Long minutes passed. The volume rose. At last they stopped talking. Proudly the girl told me the staggering price she had negotiated-a month's pay for a rookie spook. Fortunately, I had just been to the money changer, so I had enough yuan in my pocket to pay the bill. I got out my wallet. She smiled happily, but at the bicycle, not me.

Outside, she said in Bostonian English, "What made you hire a teacher from Chengdu?"

"It was all Chinese to me. Where in the States did you go to school?"

"Concord-Carlisle High School, in Massachusetts."

"Exchange student?"

She nodded.

"Cheerleader?"

"Volleyball."

"College?"

"I came home for that."

"To which college?"

"Questions, questions. What are you, an American spy?"

She was watching my face. I asked her name. "Mei," she said, and in Mandarin asked if I could remember that. She asked my name. I provided an alias. It was a difficult name, Polish with many syllables and odd diphthongs, that belonged to a Hessian running back who played my position for my school while I sat out my senior year on the bench.

She said, "I'm supposed to take that seriously?"

"Why not? Are you some kind of racist?"

"Of course I am-I'm Han. We look down on everybody. I'll call you Dude. It suits you."

"We're going to be friends?"

"Up to you, Dude."

"Fine," I said. "Let's give it a try. One thing I insist upon. Never speak English to me again. You can have your way in everything else."

Apparently this was okay by her. She called me Dude for the next two years. I called her by the only name I knew, Mei. I never asked-never-what her real name might be. Who cared?

On the day of the bicycle wreck, I took her to lunch, then showed her where I lived. Later I took her dancing and, at her suggestion, to a rave where I was the only foreigner. We went for rides on our new bikes, picnicked in parks, found a group to join for morning calisthenics. Soon we were making love three times a night, twenty-six times a month, and sometimes, when the coast was clear, in the daytime. I was twenty-nine. She was five or six years younger, so we were both indefatigable. It was not part of her assignment, or in her nature, to love me. In that we were alike. In bed she was a comic. Everything about copulation, my simian body especially, struck her as funny, and laughter excited her almost as much as fur. She giggled during foreplay, guffawed with joy after her orgasms and made funny noises during them. When we were not going at it, she loved to talk about books and movies and television shows. So did I, so we had a lot to talk about. We watched television and went to the movies, sitting in different rows. She read to me in Mandarin and required me to do the same and get it right before we got into bed. She insisted that I make phone calls to numbers she provided-friends of hers, she said-on the theory that no one really understands a foreign language unless he can understand it over the telephone. For the same reason she taught me songs in Mandarin, and we sang them to each other. Many laughs about my mistakes at first, but my Mandarin improved as my ear quickened in a hopeless attempt to keep up with her. I even learned to flounder around in Shanghainese, a Wu language that is incomprehensible to speakers of most other Chinese tongues.

I was sure from the start that she was on duty, that she reported everything, that she had bugged my room. The funny thing was, she never asked for information, never probed. She showed no curiosity about my family, my education, my politics, my first love, or the girls I had slept with in high school and college and afterward. Probably this was because she had been briefed about these matters by the folks at Guoanbu, the Chinese intelligence service (within Headquarters called "MSS," short for Ministry of State Security) and had no reason to ask. I never questioned her, either. She dressed well, she glowed with health, she had money, she disappeared in the daylight hours, so presumably she had a job or another lover. She explained nothing, never mentioned her primary life, not a single detail, though I did learn that she had gone to Shanghai University, where I was auditing a couple of courses, when I ran into someone who knew her and this person seemed to know about us. Just another inscrutable encounter. I didn't bother to be suspicious. Either Mei was an agent or she was a lunatic. If the former, we were both on duty. If the latter, the benefits were terrific. Besides, I was fulfilling my mission. I had been sent to China to learn to talk like a native, and I was certainly making progress with that. Mei insisted on living entirely in the here and now. That was okay by me. In time we got to know each other very well indeed.

The learning process was wonderful. Liberating. I had never before lived in the total absence of emotional clutter, let alone complete sexual gratification. Nor had I ever imagined it was possible to know a woman this well while knowing next to nothing about her, or that the key to such hidden knowledge was to know nothing about her except what the five senses told you. I wondered if any other American boy, living or dead, had ever been so fortunate. If I did not love Mei, I liked the hell out of her, and I was as mesmerized by her smooth, perfect body as she seemed to be by my Paleolithic one. I certainly did not even want to think about saying good-bye to her and going back to the land of the crazy women.

2

While in Shanghai I was, in the jargon, a sleeper, meaning that I was supposed to wait for instructions, lead a transparent, predictable life, and do nothing that would call attention to myself-such as messing around with a girl like Mei, or buying her a bicycle with a thousand dollars of the taxpayers' money, or getting hammered with strangers at parties where everyone except me was Chinese. I had no contact with anyone in the local base of U.S. intelligence and didn't even know for sure if such an office existed. I hardly ever talked to a Caucasian, though I was accosted by many. I was under orders to avoid Americans, but they were everywhere, and could never discipline themselves to just walk on by when they saw what they thought was a fellow countryman. "You American?" Then came the standard student center quiz. It was no different in this exotic place than it had been back home-where was I from, where had I gone to college, how liberal was I? What was my major, did I hate my parents ("You don't? Wow!"), was I, um, straight or gay, where did I live, what was my phone number, my favorite band, movie, song, author, microbrew? As Mei and my training had taught me, I provided no answers, asked no questions in return. At first I pretended to be a Canadian, anti-American to the bone and proud of it. This worked too well. Most American expatriates detested the U.S.A., too, so my progressive gibberish made them want to strike up a friendship. I learned to say I had to run-that cheap Chinese food!

My only American friend was a fellow who went by the fictitious name of Tom Simpson, a nobody like me who worked in Headquarters. Once a month he and I exchanged e-mails. Simpson seemed to have nothing better to do than keep up our correspondence, and it was easy to see he put a lot of work into his messages. Probably he wanted to be a writer when he retired thirty years down the line. Many spies are aspiring novelists, and Headquarters values a way with words above almost everything else. Partly because he was so eager to do well at something that did not matter, I supposed Simpson was low man on the China desk. As time went by, we developed an old drinking buddy joviality, and the correspondence was a pleasure in its way. More important, it told me I had not been forgotten, though someone smarter than me might have hoped for the opposite. The idea-I should say the hope-at Headquarters was that Guoanbu's hackers would read my mail and conclude that I was just another American clod they could safely ignore, maybe for the rest of my life. This is called building cover. In fact it is giddy optimism. Like much else in the practice of espionage, it is built on hope, denial of reality, wishful thinking, ignorance, the tendency to look upon insignificant results as important outcomes, and the Panglossian belief that those who spy by the rules don't get caught.

Needless to say I told Simpson only the barest details where Mei was concerned-the accident, the new bike as an expense account item, that was it. Even to a babe in the woods like me, it was obvious that discovery of my indiscretions would not be good for my career. Yet somehow, the folks back home got wind of Mei. Maybe one of those Budweiser guys I met at the wild Chinese parties Mei dragged me to knew someone I didn't know-such as a case officer from the local Headquarters outpost. It was Simpson who clued me in. He and I seeded our e-mails with code phrases we called wild cards. "Horny as hell," for example, meant that everything was just fine. "Pain in the ass" meant get me out of here fast. In theory I had committed all these phrases and their real meanings to memory, but even when you're not trying to learn Mandarin, the brain in its infinite playfulness will, as we all know, move memories from one part of the frontal lobe to another. Therefore when I read the words "It's raining possums and rednecks in the Old Dominion" in a message from Tom, I drew a blank. I knew it was a wild card because such phrases were always signaled by a semicolon in the preceding sentence. That archaic punctuation mark was never otherwise used in our correspondence. Of course that made the code easier to spot if you were a snoop, but if you didn't know what the following wild card meant, you couldn't figure it out. It was undecipherable because it wasn't a cipher. Or so the catechism insisted.

Mei arrived moments after I received Simpson's e-mail-a happy coincidence, since what followed for the next two or three hours cleared my mind like nothing and nobody else could do. Mei liked foreplay games. Usually these consisted of a feat of Mandarin recitation performed by myself (with my eyes closed) while Mei messed around. No penetration allowed until my feat of memory was perfectly executed, though unlimited cock teasing was okay under the rules, and that's what Mei liked about the game. A couple of days earlier, she had given me these lines, composed around 200 b.c. by the poet and statesman Qu Yuan:

廣開兮天門 紛吾乘兮玄雲

令飄風兮先驅 使涷雨兮灑塵

In English, the poem, called "Da Si Ming," reads something like this:

Open wide the door of heaven!

On a black cloud I ride in splendor

Bidding the whirlwind drive before me,

Causing the rainstorm to lay dust.

It reads better in the original language. I had memorized these lines as ordered, suffering the usual flashes of agony, and now, while Mei rubbed her unclothed body and fingertips against my Esau-like pelt, I recited it in Mandarin. "Flawless!" Mei said. "You're getting too good. Make mistakes so we can go slower!" I said that rules were rules. Midway through the third act of our daily scenario, my mind awakened and I remembered that "raining possums and rednecks" meant that I was summoned to a meeting with someone from inside the apparatus, and "Old Dominion" meant that Headquarters had reason to believe that I was under surveillance. Of course it did. I had reported this to Tom Simpson weeks before. Instructions would follow.

"Shit," I said.

Between outcries, Mei said, "Speak Mandarin."

Tom's e-mail had told me nothing I didn't already know. I had noticed that I was being watched months before, or soon after the surveillance began. I assumed it was routine, not worth reporting, because I had been forewarned that Chinese eyes would be watching me as a matter of course. I had been told to keep my tradecraft sharp by exercising its rules at all times, so I did what I could to be the Mr. Goodspy I was being paid to be. I studied faces in the crowd in case I ever saw one of them again. This might seem like a hopeless undertaking in China, but in fact the Chinese look no more alike-and no more unalike-than any other people with the exception of Americans, whose five centuries of interbreeding has produced an almost infinite number of countenances. The French, for example, have eight or nine faces to go around, the Germans, the Italians, the Indians, and the Arabs roughly the same number. The Han have only a few more than that. There are subtle variations, of course, but in order to remember a face you have only to recognize its category and remember a variation or two in order to know whether you are looking at a person you have seen before.

It was soon after Mei and I got together that I noticed men and women whose faces I soon began to recognize had taken up positions outside my apartment building. There were twelve of them who worked two-hour shifts as three-person teams. The group watching me was composed of professionals. Seldom did I see the same three faces on the same team, and when they followed me, or followed Mei and me when we were together, the faces changed as they were replaced every block or two by folks from the other two teams. Like almost everyone else in Shanghai, they talked nonstop on cell phones, presumably to each other or a controller. As I was not engaged in espionage and had nothing to hide except a Han girlfriend who had little interest in hiding, I did not mention the surveillance to Mei and she did not remark on it, though it's hard to believe that anyone as wide-awake as she was could have failed to notice. If she wasn't worried, I supposed I had nothing to fear. It was fun in its way.

Headquarters took it more seriously. I heard from Tom again within the week. He told me that the Cardinals were burning up the National League central division, and were in first place with a 7.5-game lead. This hand of wild cards decoded as an instruction to meet a Headquarters man ("first place") who wore a red necktie ("burning") at noon (7 + 5 = 12) on Wednesday next ("central division") at the bar of the Marriott Hotel ("National League") and to use a certain recognition phrase ("game.")

I was followed to the rendezvous as usual, but as far as I could see, no one followed me inside the hotel. At 12:17 P.M. on Wednesday, seventeen minutes after the meeting time dictated by the wild card, a man in a wrinkled blue blazer and a red necktie approached me in the bar of the designated hotel. He was fortyish, tall, skinny, balding, bespectacled, unsmiling. He wore a Joe Stalin mustache.

He said, "Ever been to Katmandu?"

"Not yet," I said. "But I'm hoping to get there someday."

That nonsensical exchange was the recognition code I had been told to use in case of a clandestine meeting with one of our people. The stranger shook hands with me, pressing a fingernail into my wrist. If this too was part of the ritual, nobody had forewarned me, but I responded by squeezing his hand until I saw pain in his eyes. He let go. Dead eyes. The bartender approached. I had already drunk my Coke. The stranger waved him away and said, "Follow me. Don't walk with me. Follow me."

He was a fast walker, so I did follow him as he led me through jammed back streets that smelled of sweat and bad breath and rang with shouts to get out of the way. At last we came to a restaurant and went inside. It was almost as noisy and crowded as the streets. He was well known to the host and the waiters, who greeted him with happy grins and bursts of Shanghainese. I was a little shocked by this reception because in my newborn way, I had the idea that seasoned operatives kept themselves to themselves and faithfully practiced tradecraft at all times. For all I knew, that was exactly what this guy thought he was doing.

When we were alone, I said, "What do I call you?"

"Try Steve."

"I'm-"

"Nameless."

The host showed us to a table. He hovered for quite a long time while a smiling Steve bantered with him, ordering lunch for both of us. His mood changed as soon as the fellow departed. He looked me over with his unwavering lifeless eyes, which were slightly magnified by the lenses of his glasses. Beer was brought, then an appetizer. The food was very good. Figuring that Steve didn't care whether I was enjoying my lunch, I didn't bother to comment. Nor did I ask any questions or otherwise say a word. It was obvious that Steve was not happy to be wasting his time on an üntermensch like me. Skinny or not, he was an industrious eater, and when the host came by after each course to ask how he had liked it, Steve reverted to his jollier self, smiling through his mustache. He spoke not a word to me.

At last we came to the end of the meal. I expected that we would now retire to a soundproof room hidden inside a safe house and have a serious talk, but instead, Steve decided to have the discussion right where we were. He had a really loud voice, the ear-splitting kind you hear bellowing at the umpire at baseball games. He talked freely, as if we were indeed in an unbuggable bubble in the basement of an American embassy. The adjoining tables were inches away. This didn't really matter, since everyone else was shouting, too, and maybe because the adage that no one eavesdrops on a loudmouth but strains to hear a whisperer applied in this place. The restaurant was ostentatiously humble but in truth it was upscale, full of sleek, expensively dressed Han who almost certainly went to college in the United States and spoke excellent English.

He said, "So you think you're being watched."

"You could say that."

"It's your job to say it, kid. Yes or no?"

"Yes."

"Why?" He spoke with his mouth full.

"Because I see the same twelve faces every time I go out."

"Twelve?"

"Four rotating teams of three."

"Wow. You can remember twelve Chinese faces? Describe them."

I did as he asked. He went back to his fish, all the while staring at me out of that mask. Flecks of carp had lodged in his mustache.

This man was an ass, or for some reason wanted me to think that he was an ass. His behavior, I knew, was meant to discomfit, to intimidate, to gain the upper hand. I had learned about the technique at training camp from a teacher of interrogation and agent-handling methods who took these tricks as seriously as Steve seemed to do. The instructor believed it was a good idea on first contact to let the agent think he was smarter than his case officer. This made it easier to manipulate the agent. I wanted to get out of there, to get myself fired, to go back to Mei. I could teach English like the other Americans did. I was tempted to throw some money disdainfully on the table as my share of the bill and leave with dignity. But even then, green as I was, I had more sense than that. Why would Mei be interested in an English teacher? And even if she was interested, she would be lost to me because her handlers would certainly assign her to another, more productive case.

Finally Steve spoke. "I am instructed to ask you a question and give you a message," he said. "The question is, Why do you think your dirty dozen are watching you?"

"Who else would they be watching?"

"Very good question," he said. "You should think about it, turn it over in your mind, see if there's anyone in your life who's more interesting than you."

I said, "I'll work on that."

Steve ignored me. I took this as permission to speak. I said, "If that's the question, what's the message?"

"Good news," he said. "CI is interested in you."

He waited-intent, almost smiling-for my reaction. I probably blanched. CI? Counterintelligence was interested in me? My bravado wavered. CI was Headquarters's bad dream. Its job was to know everything about everybody. However, nobody was allowed to know anything about it, including its methods and its success rate. Night and day, in peace and war, the men and women of the counterintelligence division were on the lookout not only for enemy spies, but also for traitors, for sleepers, for the inexplicably nervous, for spendthrifts who couldn't explain where their money came from. They tailed guys who chase women, women who sleep around, homosexuals, neurotic virgins. Their job was to finger the bad guy inside every good guy and banish the sinner to outer darkness. For CI, no holds were barred, no one was above suspicion except themselves, and nobody had the power to do unto them as they did unto others.

Now Steve was letting me know these demons were after me. Was it because I had committed fornication? Or was it something I had omitted to do? I was unlikely to find out tonight. Steve continued to hold me in his contemptuous gaze.

I said, "Gee, that's interesting. Did they tell you why they're interested in some Insignificant McNobody like me?"

"Interested in some what?" Steve said.

"A joke. Forget it."

"You think this is a joke?"

"No, but you're making me nervous. When I'm nervous I make jokes." I thought I owed him that much obsequiousness.

"You should try to overcome that," Steve said. "Answer the original question. Why do you think it's you who's being surveilled?"

"I thought I'd already explained that. Because these people follow me wherever I go."

"You haven't gotten beyond that simple explanation?"

"I guess not. What's the complex explanation?"

"You've got a girl, right?"

"Yes."

"Name?"

"Mei."

"Mei what, or I guess I should say What Mei. I want her full name, or the name she said was her name."

"I don't know."

"You don't know. Have you asked?"

"That's not the way we work. We ask each other no questions."

"She doesn't know your name either?"

"Unless she's a Guoanbu asset on assignment, no."

"How did you meet?"

"She crashed her bike into mine."

"How long ago?"

"Months."

"You saw no need to report this?"

"I reported the accident to my pen pal and submitted an expense account item for the new bike I bought her."

"How much?"

"About a thousand, U.S."

Steve whistled. "But not a word since?"

"No."

"You really are something, kid. No wonder CI is interested in you."

He was sneering. The temptation to make things worse was great, but I resisted it. No response from Steve, but I was used to that by now. The silence was heavy, Steve's manner was disdainful, and Steve such a shit that summary dismissal from the service did not seem to be an unlikely next move.

I said, "So what now?"

"Carry on," Steve said. "Change nothing. Be your usual harmless self. But be careful, my friend. You've got yourself into something you may not be able to get yourself out of."

"And let me guess. I'll get no help."

He pointed a forefinger. "You got it. Lucky you."

He called for the check, paid it with a big tip, kidded around with the host. Then he stood up as if to go. I stood up too. I was taller than Steve, and angrier.

I said, "Is that the message you said you were instructed to give me?"

"No, that was just me taking pity," Steve said. "The message is, you may be traveling soon. Your pen pal will provide the details."

And then he walked out.

3

I had cycled to my meeting with Steve and when I emerged from the hotel garage, wheeling my bike, there they were, well back in the crowd, two men and a woman, ready to leap into the saddle. It was five or six kilometers from the hotel to my place, so they switched riders every click or so. In their clockwork way they always did this just as I turned a corner and they were out of sight for the moment. Then they would pop up again in my mirrors. The bikes were always the same, so a keen-eyed operative like myself was able to keep track of the familiar faces in my wake. Taking advantage of Steve's expert advice to just be my dim-witted fictitious self, I made no attempt to shake them.

It was almost dark when I reached my building. I was warmed by the thought that Mei would soon be home. It had been a hot day. I was sweaty but Mei liked me that way, or so she said-every once in a while she took one of my smelly T-shirts home with her as a nightgown-so I decided not take a shower. She usually arrived at about seven for my Mandarin lesson, and then we would have supper and a couple of beers, and then Mei would test my Mandarin again, and tonight we would watch a DVD of Destry Rides Again I had bought on the street because, as I planned to tell her, no one can understand U.S. English properly unless she can unscramble the lyrics when Marlene Dietrich sings "See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have." That was the routine. I liked everything about it. I liked everything about the life that Mei and I were living-even the tiny pre-Mao apartment I had rented as an element of my cover as a poor, feckless if somewhat overage student. The walls bulged, the concrete floor had waves in it so that the furniture tipped, the sputtering plumbing had air pockets, the electricity came and went.

Waiting for Mei, listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing the blues, I fell asleep. I woke at nine. No Mei. This was a disappointment, but I felt no stab of panic. Sometimes, as when her period started or she had an impulse to skip me for a night, she just didn't show up. I had no phone number for her, no address, no true name, no hope of finding her in a city of twenty-three million in which maybe a million of the females were named Mei and the Mei I knew was almost certainly not named Mei. I waited another hour, spent repeating my memorization for the day (a passage from Laozi's Daodejing) into a recorder. By now I was hungry. Because I had no refrigerator, Mei always brought supper with her, collecting exactly my half of the cost before we ate, and since I had eaten the leftovers for breakfast, there was no food in the house. I decided to go out. It would serve Mei right if she arrived and found me gone, though I fervently hoped she'd hang around until I got back.

The night was almost as suffocating as the day had been. Chemical odors, so strong that you could almost see their colors, wafted on a sluggish breeze. The endless waves of humanity rolled by more slowly than usual. On this night they looked a little different, smelled a little different, as if wilted after a day in the glare of the sun. Something else was different-there were no familiar faces. I searched the crowd to make sure I had not missed them. They just weren't there. Why? My watchers had been with me earlier in the day. They had never before deserted me. Had they decided I wasn't going anywhere tonight, and gone home? Had they been replaced by a new bunch whose faces I would have to learn? Were they shadowing Steve? I felt a certain unease. Breath gathered in my lungs. Life as a spook under cover in a hostile country is nagged by the fear that the other side knows something you don't know and cannot possibly know no matter how well you speak the language or how much at home you tell yourself you feel. You are an intruder. You can never be a fish swimming in their sea, you are always the pasty-white legs and arms thrashing on the surface with a tiny unheeded cut on your finger. Meanwhile the shark swims toward the scent of blood from miles away. At any moment you can be pulled under, eaten, digested, excreted, eaten by something else and then something else again until there is nothing left of the original you except a single cell suspended in the heaving darkness.

Oh so melancholy, and no Mei to laugh at me. However, the fact remained that I was hungry, so I set off into the night and walked, only half conscious of where I was going, until I found myself in front of a noodle place Mei and I liked. She called it the Dirty Shirt after the proprietor's soup-stained singlet. I ordered a bowl of noodles and slurped them down. One doesn't savor fast food in China, where everyone except the Westernized elite, seldom seen in this neighborhood, takes care of bodily needs as unceremoniously as possible and gets right back to business. I paid and left and went into another place a few blocks away and gulped a tepid beer. Still no sign of my watchers. When I emerged I saw a face or two I might or might not have seen earlier. I memorized these possibles and decided to take a longer walk to see if they were still with me when I got to where I was going. My plan was to travel in a circle that would bring me back to my building in about an hour. Because there was little elbow room on the street, I had to travel at the same speed as the shouting, spitting multitude in which I was embedded. Nor was there much chance of using shop windows as rear-view mirrors because there were few shop windows and most of them were dark. Now and then I crossed the street so I could look behind me, and sometimes I thought, though I did not really trust my eyes, that I spotted one of the suspects passing through the glow spilling out the door of the open door of an all-night shop. The street lighting on main arteries in this part of Shanghai was dim, and even dimmer in the side streets, which appeared as mere slits of darkness between the gimcrack buildings. I gave them a wide berth. The Chinese plunged into them as if they were wearing miner's caps.

I was almost home when they-whoever they were-made the move. Two men in front of me slowed their pace, the two on either side moved in and seized my arms. They were big fellows for Chinese, not as tall as me but solid meat. There were four of them until suddenly, as I stepped back, thinking to make a break for it, I realized they were six as the two behind me moved heavily against me. I felt a mild sting in the vicinity of my right kidney, then the heat of an injection. I lurched as if trying to break free. The phalanx squeezed in tighter. I might as well have been nailed in a box and there was as little point in shouting for help as if I really were in a coffin. I began to feel faint as the injection took effect. Would it kill me? It seemed possible. I was losing my senses one by one-first to go was touch, then hearing, then sight, and finally taste as my tongue and lips went numb. I could still smell. How odd, I thought in the instant before I lost contact with my brain. In Afghanistan, the last time I thought I was dead, everything stopped at once. I had never imagined that there might be more than one way to cease to exist.

I smelled cigarette smoke. But I was still in darkness, still in silence, still blind. I felt motion, bumps, mild pain as my kidneys jounced. I began to hear-a whining motor, the sound of the bumps coming quickly one after the other, as if water were slapping the bottom of a boat. I was lying on my back. I was conscious but not really awake. Opening my eyes I saw darkness, spotted with moving green lights and red lights, and the stronger glow of small white lights. Finally I smelled water-foul water. I was on a boat, the boat was moving, I saw stronger lights sprinkled along the shore, heard tinny faraway music and knew the boat was on the Yangtze. Otherwise my mind slept on. I tried to look at my watch and discovered that my hands were bound. Also my feet. If I was taking inventory in this way I must be alive. I wasn't sure.

In Shanghainese someone with a tenor voice said, "He's awake." The tone, somewhere between la and ti on the diatonic scale, surprised me-a deeper, gruffer timbre would have suited the situation better. Somebody kicked me in the ribs, not really hard but hard enough to make me grunt. This person bent over me and opened my eyes with his fingers. I smelled his breath, cabbage and tofu. My clothes were wet. They smelled of filth. I wanted to urinate-proof positive that I lived.

In American English the tenor said, "Are you awake?"

I wasn't sure I could speak, so I didn't try to answer. My eyes remained open. He said, "Wide-awake?"

He and another man stood me on my feet. I fought to keep my knees from buckling but did not succeed. The tenor said, "Oops-a-daisy," and tightened his grip. I staggered toward the gunwale. They understood I wasn't trying to escape and helped me. I vomited over the side. Now that I was fully conscious the water smelled even worse. In the thin light of the stern lantern I saw or hallucinated drowned rats and other nasty things churned up by the prop. The Yangtze smelled like something that had been dead for a long time.

The tenor held a bottle of maotai to my lips. I took a sip, then spit it out. He said, "Better now?" His voice was pleasant, his manner easy. There was just enough light to identify him by race (Han), but not enough to make out his features. He sounded like he had grown up in Southern California. His family must have been in Orange County a long time if nineteenth-century baby talk like oops-a-daisy came to him so naturally. The boat bucked. I staggered. The tenor grabbed my arm and steadied me. No special effort was made to restrain me. There was no need. The only move possible for me was to topple overboard into this running sewer with my wrists and ankles chained together.

The tenor put the cork back in the maotai bottle and handed it to the other man. Then he said, "You're pretty relaxed. That speaks well for you, given the circumstances."

"Thanks." My voice stuck in my throat.

"No problem."

I gagged, turned my head, hawked, spat. The tenor waited politely for me to finish.

He said, "Can you swim?"

"Yes."

"Good," the tenor said. "Before we go any farther, I want to give you a heads-up. In a few minutes something is going to happen. It will not be enjoyable. However, nobody is going to shoot you or stab you or strangle you or hit you on the head with an ax. You will be given an opportunity to save your own life. That's it. The idea is to teach you a lesson, nothing more."

The tenor's tone was reasonable, sympathetic even, like a friendly hand laid on the shoulder of someone less fortunate than he. He seemed to want me to understand that he was not personally responsible for whatever he was going to do to me next. I wondered what I had done to deserve Steve and this guy in a single twenty-four-hour period, but here I was.

I said, "May I ask a question?"

"I probably won't know the answer. But go ahead."

"Are you sure you've got the right man?"

He spelled my full name and recited my Social Security number. "Is that you?"

I didn't say no. I did say, "Another question-two, actually. What have I done and who have I done it to?"

"I have no idea. Everyone says you're smart, so it shouldn't be hard for you to figure it out."

"Who's 'everyone'?"

"I have no idea."

I said, "Where are we?"

"On the river."

"Yes, but where on the river?"

"Upstream."

"How far upstream?"

"We've been under way for maybe an hour," the tenor said. "Time to get you out of that rig."

He knelt and swiftly unlocked the shackles on my ankles. "Now the wrists," he said. "Please don't do anything foolish."

Doing something foolish was exactly what I had in mind. There were only two of them, and by now I had most of my strength back. I thought I had a chance to fight my way out of this situation. Then the tenor raised his voice and said something in a dialect I did not understand. The other four fellows suddenly appeared. Apparently they had been relaxing belowdecks. That explained the cigarette smoke. Two of them grasped my arms, two more my legs, and the fifth grabbed me around the waist.

Then, as if they were one creature with ten arms and a single brain, they lifted me above their heads, grunted in unison like the acrobats they were, and threw me overboard.

4

The Yangtze was the temperature of body fluids. It was full of dead things and other foul matter. It moved swiftly, it seized me and pulled me under. If, as the tenor had said, this was an opportunity to save my own life, I was in trouble. I am a good swimmer for a man with heavy bones, but as I sank I realized that swimming had little to do with what was happening to me. I kicked, I clawed the soup of turds and piss and the hundreds of condoms that fluttered in the current like schools of albino worms. I willed myself to rise to the surface as I had done hundreds of times before, but I was being pulled down, as if something alive had hold of my foot. I was drowning. I knew this, my eyes stung, I saw nothing but darkness. The acrobats had taken me so completely by surprise that I hadn't had time to take a full breath before I hit the water, and I knew that I would not be able to hold that tiny gulp of oxygen in my lungs long enough to find my way to air. I was dying. Again. Clearly it was my destiny to do that over and over, but there had to be a last time and surely this must be it. I was not frightened. I took this notion as a good sign. Crazily I thought, Fright is part of the survival instinct. It means you still think you can live, that at the last minute some immortal hand or eye will get you out of this. But I was damned if I would die just because some nameless son of a bitch had decided I should. I swam harder, counting the strokes like I used to count the steps when I ran the football. Breath leaked from my nose, I could not see the bubbles but I felt them leave my body and knew I could not stop the rest from escaping, too.

My head broke surface. Something hard and heavy struck me on the skull. Seeing stars, I reached for it and grabbed hold and hugged it. In the darkness I could tell it was a metal sphere about the size of a medicine ball. I knocked on it. It was hollow, it rang. A container, a mine, a clever Oriental safe full of money or ancient texts? I wondered if my scalp was bleeding, but I was too wet and slimy to tell. I considered the consequences of an open wound in this world of microbes. My sight cleared. There was no moon, there was never a moon over Shanghai. All around me I saw feeble green and red and yellowish white boat lights. It was too dark to see the boats. On one of them the tenor and the acrobats were looking for a man overboard. I tried to put the sphere between me and everything upstream but the sphere was spinning, so I knew I was popping into view every few seconds like a mechanical figure on a steeple clock. There were more lights along the riverbanks now and more switched on in the windows of a wilderness of identical slablike apartment buildings. Using the second hand of the Rolex skin diver's wristwatch I inherited from my father after he shot himself, I estimated that the Yangtze was flowing at about twelve miles an hour. It was five-twenty. I should be in Shanghai proper around six. A splinter of light appeared along the eastern horizon. A slice of the sun followed it, coloring the blanket of smoke and poisonous fumes that overhung the city. A dead baby, white and bloated and wide-eyed, floated by, then something that might have been another. The sun, a misshapen parody of itself, strengthened. Its cantaloupe rays crept across the river. The water shone dully like the rainbow in an oil slick.

In the distance I could see the glittering towers of downtown. A little wind came up. My sphere had been floating in midstream, but now it drifted closer to shore. Up ahead I saw the great Yangtze Bridge. I was as close to dry land as I was likely to get. I let go of the sphere and trod water. I started to swim. Three strokes facedown in this cesspool were all I could manage, so I turned over and backstroked to shore. Several men were fishing near my landing point. Like time travelers from the coolie past they wore big straw pancake hats. Half a dozen plump fish quivered on the mud, slapping their tails as they suffocated. The fishermen gave me barely a glance as I staggered by, vomiting as I went: just another crazy foreigner.

When I got home, I found Mei in bed. She lay on her back, covered to her waist by a sheet, pretty breasts visible, childlike feet with red toenails sticking out below. She seemed to be sound asleep but as I tiptoed toward the bathroom she said, "Why do you smell like that?"

I said, "I fell into the river."

Her face was sleepy. "Ah," she said. "Better take a bath." Catching my full scent, she made a throaty sound of disgust. "Take two baths."

In the tiny bathroom I emptied my pockets of money and passport and keys, took off my clothes and shoes, rolled them into a ball, and threw them out the window. The hot water, all ten liters of it, lasted long enough to rinse away some of the oily filth that clung to my skin. Then, shivering, I soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed again and again and again, washed between my toes and inside every orifice just as many times, and kept on until the pipes shuddered and the water lessened to a rusty trickle. When I went back into the bedroom Mei awaited me, a bottle of alcohol in her hands.

"Lie down," she said. She rubbed every square centimeter of my body except the male parts, which I protected with cupped hands. As she worked she asked no questions, made no jokes. There was no accusative female "Where have you really been all night?", no jocular "Did you enjoy your swim?" She asked for no explanations whatsoever. She did ask if I had memorized today's material, 春日醉起言志 ("Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day"), by the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai, who drowned when he tried to kiss his own image in a moonlit river. I told her I had not got around to it. "Then we can't have our lesson," said Mei. "Go to sleep."

She got dressed and left. No word, no kiss, no smile, no scent except for the alcohol fumes that filled the room. Perhaps I am inventing memories, but it seems to me now that I sensed at that moment that something was unfixably wrong, that things were no longer as they had been, that the Mei I knew was going to change into another Mei, perhaps even the real Mei whom I had never known, that she had a new secret, that she was going to put an end to something, perhaps to everything, that she was wrapped in melancholy. So was I.

Why then, you may wonder, did I not ask her a single question, if only a simple "what's wrong?" or "what's going on?" Why didn't we fight, scream, threaten, accuse, demand explanations? Why didn't we do something instead of pretending that nothing was happening?

Well, Mei was Mei, whoever Mei really was or whoever she was about to become. And my mind was elsewhere. As soon as she was out the door I e-mailed Tom Simpson, no easy matter because there were no wild cards that described my night on the Yangtze. Evidently I came close enough, because Tom told me by return e-mail to get out of China the next day on a certain Delta flight, and to take nothing with me but my passport and the clothes I stood up in.

That evening, to my surprise, Mei arrived on time and brought a better dinner than usual and a bottle of cheap truly awful Chinese chardonnay that we drank warm. I recited Li Bai's poem-I had had all day to memorize it-and the foreplay went as usual. Afterward as she lay on top of me I told her I was going away for a while. That I was leaving the next day. Her body clenched. She rolled off me. I saw something in her eyes I had not seen before. To my surprise, she asked questions-peppered me with them. All of a sudden she burned with curiosity. I had never seen her like this, never known she could be like this.

Where was I going? why was I going? when would I return?

I answered with the truth-America, business, I didn't know.

What kind of business?

Family business.

Was I meeting someone I knew?

Yes, but it was a business trip. No doubt I'd be introduced to strangers.

She turned over on her face, covered herself scalp to toes with the sheet. I went into the bathroom to get a glass of water.

"One more question," Mei called out from the other room. "Exactly how much does this person you're going to meet weigh?"

In my delight on hearing Mei, who never asked questions, ask such a question, I wanted to laugh. Instead I pretended not to hear her. I sensed, rather than saw, that she was putting on her clothes. Because she wore only three garments-skirt, T-shirt, underpants, plus sandals, this took only seconds. When I came back, she was gone.

5

At Dulles International Airport I was met by a pale freckled young redhead. She wore a wedding band on the wrong finger of her left hand. Pointing to herself with that hand, she said, "Me friend. Welcome home. Good flight?" I said, "Dehydrating. A little bumpy over Alaska."

Sotto voce, as if we were down the rabbit hole, the redhead said, "I'm Sally. Follow me."

In the parking lot we piled into a cluttered old Mazda. The load of soda cans and coffee containers and McDonald's and Popeye's boxes and CDs and old newspapers in back shifted and tumbled every time Sally turned a corner or stepped on the brakes. She dropped me off in front of a brick row house on a cul-de-sac just off Spout Run, in Arlington. "Same recognition phrase," she said.

I climbed the steep stairs and rang the bell. The door, gleaming with brass and varnish, opened before the chimes stopped ringing and I was greeted by a rotund, bespectacled Chinese who wore the regulation meritocrat chinos, tennis shirt, blazer, and Docksiders. No socks. He was a little guy, a foot or so shorter than me, and he had to lean back to get a look at my face. I waited for the magic words Sally had told me to expect, but instead of speaking them he let loose a torrent of Mandarin. I answered, briefly, in the same tongue. In the flat English of the Ohio-born he said, "Please repeat in Mandarin what I just said to you." I did so as best I could remember. He said, "That takes care of that. But we've got to go through the motions. Come on in and we'll talk some more. Then you'll meet Mr. Polly."

Apparently this fellow did not bother with cover names, because he neither offered me one nor asked me to supply one. We sat down at the tiny kitchen table. I had the impression that we were alone. The house smelled like a safe house-dusty, untended, empty. Quiet. You could hear the whoosh of traffic on Spout Run, but little else. It was one o'clock in the afternoon. The doorbell rang again. He went to the door and came back with a pizza box. He opened the box. Peppers, mushrooms, black olives. "You hungry?" I nodded. For the next couple of hours, we conversed in Mandarin, the level of difficulty rising as the minutes passed. He spoke the language beautifully. At last he looked at his watch and said, "Almost time for Mr. Polly. Let's knock it off." Obviously this chat had been some sort of test. I asked him how it had gone. "You get an A," he said. "Heavy Shanghai accent, though. But you have an ear, so it'll go away if you hang out with a different crowd." He picked up the pizza box and took it and its fingerprints and traces of DNA with him as he left without saying good-bye.

"Mr. Polly" turned out to be a homophone, a polygraph operator carrying his magic machine, an Apple laptop. He went through the whole rigmarole of recognition phrase, phony name ("Ed"), all the while semaphoring that he knew things I could never know. He wore a necktie on a Saturday, along with a glen plaid suit that didn't fit around the neck or shoulders and was too tight across the stomach. He sent me into the next room while he set up his apparatus. When I came back, the window shades had been drawn, the lights extinguished. He sat behind me, so I couldn't see his face or his gear.

Being polygraphed ("boxed," in the jargon) is a mixed experience-part Frankenstinian medical exam, part simulated torture, part mesmerism, part fraternity initiation. It bothers most people, which may reflect the truth in the cliché that everybody has something to hide. This was certainly true of me, since I was sure this whole exercise was about Mei, my chief guilty secret. Otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, I was clean. I had never stolen anything or cheated on a wife or sold out to the enemies of my country or felt sexual guilt or believed in God, so they could ask me about anything but my Chinese lover without making the needles jump. I thought that the best thing to do was to think of something besides Mei. I thought about combat-not a good choice, apparently. The polygraph examination went on somewhat longer than usual while Mr. Polly asked his mindless questions.

When the ritual was over, I didn't remember a single thing he had asked me. After he packed up his equipment-it seemed to be okay for me to look at the forbidden object now that it knew my secrets-he handed me a manila envelope, sealed with a two-inch strip of Scotch tape that an enemy agent could have peeled and then resealed without leaving a trace. "Memorize, burn, and flush," he said. "You leave first. I'll lock up."

I walked for a while through the unpeopled neighborhood, then sat down on a bus-stop bench and opened the envelope. It contained a typed note that gave me a phone number to call at precisely 0743 EDT the next morning, a confirmed reservation in a cover name at a motel in Rosslyn, a Visa card in a name that matched the one on the reservation, a cell phone, and twenty crisp new fifty-dollar bills.

6

At 0743 the next morning I dialed the number. A man answered on the first ring and instead of saying hello, recited the number back to me in regulation style. I knew this was the routine, but wondered, Now what? He then gave me the same recognition phrase Sally had used. I supplied the response. He said, "Be out front at eight-thirty reading the Wall Street Journal." Click.

The driver of the mud-splashed Chevy that picked me up took me to Headquarters. The destination surprised me. I was not asked for ID at the gate, a good thing because I had none-no plastic card with photo and hieroglyphics to hang around my neck, no nothing. Undocs-undocumented agents like me-never carry official ID. This absence of proof that they're up to no good is their protection. Otherwise, they are warned, they're on their own. If they get themselves into trouble, they'll get no help. If they do well, they'll get no thanks. That formula is, of course, catnip to romantics.

I was dropped at a side entrance where Sally the redhead awaited. Unsmiling, wordless, not quite frowning but by no means aglow, she led me to an elevator. There were no numbers on the buttons. She pressed one of them-no wedding band today-and up we went. We debouched into a brightly lit corridor and then turned left, walking past color-coded doors, Sally in the lead. No one had ever told me what the colors indicated. I still don't know. Sally walked rapidly, heels drumming. I checked her out as a matter of course. She was whippet-thin as was the American style, but after eighteen months of ogling Chinese bottoms, hers seemed broad. She knocked on an unmarked door, opened it, and stepped aside. I walked in and found myself in a space the size of the inside of a small house with the interior walls removed. This vast room was windowless but brightly lighted by buzzing fluorescent ceiling fixtures. Government gray file-cabinet safes lined the walls. Other safes were piled on top of them, smaller ones on top of those. Rolling ladders of the kind used in libraries stood in the narrow aisles. I tried to calculate the collective weight of the safes and failed, but wondered why they had not long since plunged through the concrete floor and onto the heads of the bureaucrats in the offices below. I saw no sign, smelled no odor of human occupancy. The possibility that Sally had locked the door behind me passed through my mind.

Then, as if from very far away, a deep resonant actorish voice-you could imagine it singing "Old Man River" at a class reunion in the old frat house-called out, "This way."

I stepped farther into the room and saw at its far end a desk at which a man was seated. He was gray of hair and skin. He was bony, even skeletal. His skull was unusually large, with a sloping forehead. He wore horn-rimmed reading glasses with round lenses. He was in his shirtsleeves: red-striped shirt with a white collar and cuffs, bow tie. He wore a steel watch and on his right hand, a class ring. A single thick file folder rested at the exact center of his desk blotter. I assumed that this was my own file, plucked for the occasion from among thousands stored in the safes. Otherwise the desk was bare except for a very bright halogen lamp. No pictures of the wife and kids, no cup of pencils and pens, no appointments pad, no coffee cup-not even the smell of coffee, the signature aroma of American offices. Behind him, on the only segment of wall that was clear of safes, hung portraits in oils of old men I recognized as former directors of the organization.

A single chair stood in front of his desk. In the vestiges of a southern accent, he said, "Please. Sit down."

I did as commanded and almost slid out of the chair. Gripping the seat, I leaned over and looked at the chair legs. The front legs had been sawed off so they were a couple of inches shorter than the back legs.

The man at the desk noted my scrutiny and said, "You are a student of details, I see. Good."

I held my tongue. I was finding it surprisingly difficult not to slide out of the chair. The seat seemed to be waxed. You had to think every minute about keeping your backside in place. This made full concentration on anything else difficult. It was petty, a schoolboy prank, ridiculous. But effective. I realized who this man was. He could only be Luther R. Burbank, Headquarters's head of counterintelligence.

He opened the file, a surprisingly thick one for a small fish like me, and studied it for a long moment, as if absorbed in a novel. At length he looked up-or rather, looked over my left shoulder, and said, "We don't know much about you-yet." His voice, so like a tuba, fell strangely on the ear.

After Steve, after Sally, after Mr. Polly, after all the others except the plump, apparently sane Chinese gentleman I met at the safe house, I really had had enough of this nonsense. I said, "Then tell me please what else you want to know. That might save you some time."

As if a joystick had been manipulated, his eyes swiveled from his mountain of safes to the view over my other shoulder. He said, "I think you misunderstand the situation."

"In that case I'm eager to be enlightened, sir."

"No need to call me sir," Burbank said. "A simple 'you' will do. Relax. I'm interested in you, not suspicious of you."

He lifted his eyes as if to catch my reaction.

Burbank riffled the pages of my file. I expected him to ask me about my swim in the Yangtze, to be hungry for details about this bizarre happening. Instead, he said, "You're not exactly a stranger to me. I knew your father at school. Fine mind, excellent athlete. Great quarterback. All everything in track, scratch golfer, did you know?"

"I don't remember him mentioning it."

A smile. "He wouldn't, of course. Modesty was his style. Must have kept him busy. Handsome devil, gift of gab. Handy with the girls. His death must have been difficult for you. You were how old?"

"Eight and a half. I hardly knew him."

"Meaning?"

"I seldom saw him. He worked at the office all day and well into the night and played golf on weekends."

"You resented that?"

"No. He was the same as everybody else's father, he took the train before I got up, came home after I was asleep. His death was just another absence. My mother wasn't broken up about it. She remarried a year and a day afterward."

"What did you think of that?"

"I was fine with it. My stepfather was a nice guy."

"You look like your father. Taller."

"So I'm told. You knew him well?"

"From a distance. We were classmates, but we were in different categories at school-captain of the team, member of the poetry club. There were no Hessians in those days, and even if there had been they'd have been no competition for him."

Ah, so he knew about my downfall as a starter on the prep school eleven. This was inside dope indeed. He was letting me know he knew a lot more about me than I thought. His school was my school, too, and he was listed as a trustee on the masthead of their begging letters, so he would have been privy to the gossip. My file contained a lot of details. Knowing only the little that I already knew about files, I wondered how much of it was true. By the time our interview was over, I had a better idea. Maybe half of his data were more or less accurate-a surprisingly large proportion, as these rough drafts of reality go. At bottom, a full field investigation is a compendium of gossip, a way of seeing some hapless person as many unnamed others see him. Having heard what they have to say, what to believe? What to doubt? Burbank's snoops had covered the waterfront-my marks in school and college, eight or nine of the girls I had known as Adam knew Eve and one I had impregnated at sixteen in one of the many scrapes my stepfather got me out of with a last-minute five hundred in cash; my male friends, teachers both hostile and fond (mostly hostile), military service, what I read, what my politics were assumed to be, where I hung out, who I hung out with, what I drank, what I smoked, what I tended to say in the candor of intoxication. This had been a far broader and deeper investigation than the standard background check, which hardly ever turns up anything that is worth spit on the sidewalk. Evidently Burbank was interested in me, probably because he was so interested in my dead father. I assumed he had flown me back from Shanghai with the intention of telling me something that would knock my socks off. But what? Fire me, hire me, see what I had to spill? I picked up no hints. He played his cards close to his vest-the effect would have been comical had he been somebody else-under the pretence that he was not Torquemada and all this Q & A was just a conversation between two guys who had everything in common except age and wisdom.

"You went to college on a ROTC scholarship," Burbank said at one point. "Why was that? How did you do it? There was no ROTC program at your university."

"I got up early on certain days and put on my uniform and drove to the state university for class and drill."

"Why go to all that trouble?"

"There was no reason my stepfather should have to pay my tuition."

"You didn't really want to be an army officer?"

"Actually, I wanted to go to West Point. Didn't make it."

"Interesting. Not many Old Blues go in for the military life. How did your stepfather take your decision?"

"Stoically. It saved him a lot of money, and he had no reason to care where I went to college, so why would he be disappointed?"

"Well, in its way it was a rejection. He'd raised you. He liked you. He had plenty of money. He expected to pay."

Really? How would Burbank know? He had not asked me a question, so again I did not reply even though clearly he expected a rejoinder. When he didn't get one, he went on as if nothing had happened. He kept up the pretense that we were two preppy old boys chewing the fat-but in fact this was an interrogation. I wished he'd stop demonstrating his omniscience and come to the point. All my life I have hated to be questioned, hated to confide, hated even more to be euchred into pretending to confide.

Burbank said, "Bad luck, your reserve outfit shipping out so soon after you graduated."

"That was the understanding. You took the money and if you were deployed you shut up and went where they sent you."

"Afghanistan in your case."

Again I sat silent in my trick chair. I was getting a little tired of being told what I was and where and what I had been. At this point in our chat Burbank had assigned any number of admirable qualities to me. Few of them applied. It was like listening to an old queen trying to ingratiate himself with the straight kid sitting next to him at the bar.

He said, "You were wounded."

"Yes."

"What were the circumstances?"

"Forgive me," I said, "but what possible bearing can that have on this discussion?"

Burbank sighed. He was not used to having his patience tried. He said, "I am trying to know you."

To what purpose? In fact, he was assessing me and we both understood that.

"Then this line of questioning won't get you home," I said. "I remember almost nothing about it."

"I'd be interested in what you do remember."

"I saw the explosion but didn't hear it. It was so close I lost consciousness halfway through the first second. My identity dissolved. I went under believing I had been killed. When you wake up in a hospital after a bomb goes off in your face, you think you're coming back from the dead."

"You were in the hospital for how long?"

"Seven months."

"You survived and kept your arms and legs," Burbank said. "Do you ever wonder why and for what purpose?"

"Blind luck. Zero purpose."

Burbank looked like he was going to say something, maybe about God's purposes. He looked the type, and he certainly had the voice for it. He was said to know the Bible by heart. Behind me I heard china rattling. Burbank's eyes lifted. Sally appeared, carrying a tray on which she balanced two small bowls, a pottery teapot, and a plate covered with a paper napkin. Apparently it was coffee-break time. It was plain that this was not the part of Sally's job that she enjoyed most, but I didn't think there was anything sexist about it. No doubt you had to have a top secret code word clearance to enter this room and she was junior, so she was it. She put down the tray and went away.

"Have some green tea," Burbank said, pouring the acrid stuff into the bowls. "It's a good pick-me-up." He lifted the white napkin. "We have carrots and celery. And what's this? Tangerine segments."

Was he a vegetarian? For me, this was breakfast. The bitter tea did in fact shock the nervous system and clear the mind. Burbank ate the crunchy tasteless food with real appetite. For some reason, this was sort of touching. To my surprise, I realized that I was beginning to like him. We chewed and drank in silence, a great blessing. After the repast, -Burbank-how can I put it?-withdrew into himself. I don't want to fancify. He didn't exactly go into a trance, but he was no longer fully present. His eyes were open but unseeing. I thought he might be meditating-it fitted in with the vegetarianism. He remained in this suspended state for several minutes. I didn't want to stare at him, so I looked at the pictures on the wall, and thinking hard, remembered the names of three or four of the ex-directors in the portraits. I counted the safes. There were 216 of them-three triple-deck rows of 72 each. Did they all have the same combination? Unlikely. But how could even Burbank remember all the different ones, and why didn't he just store his data on thumb drives, and lock them all up in a single safe?

Burbank opened his eyes and closed my file with a thump and came to the point. He said, "Tell me exactly what happened on your night on the Yangtze. No detail is too small."

I complied, leaving nothing out.

When I was done, he said, "Have you asked yourself the reason why?"

"Of course I have."

"And?"

"I haven't a clue."

"But you do. They said they were teaching you a lesson."

"Yes."

"On somebody's else's behalf, yes?"

"That was the implication."

"Does this not suggest that you have offended someone?"

"That's one of the possibilities."

"What are the other possibilities?"

"That the guys who did this don't like foreigners, especially Americans. That they're crazy or under discipline. That they were just having fun on their day off. That they had made a bet. That they were high. That it was a case of mistaken identity. That all of the above apply. Shall I go on?"

Burbank, gazing into space, considered my words for a long moment. Then he said, "In other words, the whole thing makes no sense."

I shrugged.

"You shrug," Burbank said. "Shrugs are the sign language of defeat. They get you nowhere."

True enough. I said, "So what's the alternative?"

He tapped on his desk with a forefinger. "In this work there's only one requirement, and it always applies. Take everything seriously. There is always a reason."

"Always?"

"Always. Our job is to look for the reason, discover the reason, overcome the threat."

"To what purpose?"

"Usually the issue is tiny," Burbank said. "But in certain cases it is an acorn that contains an oak. I don't know how these acrobats, as you call them, could have made that any plainer, or how they could have had any purpose apart from making you understand that this was your last chance, and the next time they come for you, you'll die. Don't you want to know why before it's too late?"

The answer was, Not really. What I wanted to do was go back to Shanghai, find the tenor, and throw him in the river. This did not seem to be the right answer, so I said nothing. Neither, for the moment, did Burbank. He looked beyond me, apparently lost in thought. I guessed that this was part of the technique. The stillness accumulated. Certainly this man had no need to gather his thoughts or choose his words. Even on short, uncomfortable acquaintance I thought his mind was quicker than his behavior suggested, and far more capacious. I was quite sure that mental copies of everything stored in the 216 safes were filed away in the appropriate pigeonholes in his brain. I waited. This interview had already gone on for more than an hour. The strain of keeping myself in the tilted chair was taking its toll. My legs quivered. Abruptly I stood up, staggered a little.

Burbank registered no surprise. He said, "Why don't you take a little walk to the end of the room and back?" Limping slightly at first, I did as he suggested. When I was back in front of his desk, he said, "Do you need a break?" I shook my head, turned the chair around and straddled it, my arms folded across the back. This made it much easier to keep from sliding off. Burbank's expression did not change. He made no comment.

As if the conversation had never been interrupted, he said, "You haven't answered my question."

"I'm not sure there is an answer."

Burbank said, "You don't like questions. This has shown up in your polygraphs."

"And what does that suggest to you?"

"It suggests, among other possibilities, that you aren't easily intimidated. That you're your own man. That you see no need to impress others."

Was he trying to be clumsy?

Burbank smiled as though he read the thought. "That seems to be your most noticeable characteristic," he said, pouring it on. "Nearly everyone we interviewed remarked on it." He pointed at the chair. "For example, no one else has ever turned that stupid chair around as you just did, even though it's the obvious thing to do."

I was surprised no one had ever hit him over the head with it, but again I was discreet enough to keep what I hoped was a poker face. Burbank was doing the same, of course, because his masklike mien seemed to be pretty much the only facial expression he had.

"Now I want you to put cynicism aside for the moment," he said, "and listen to what I have to say to you."

I lifted a hand an inch or so: be my guest. It was a disrespectful gesture. Burbank ignored the lèse-majesté and went on.

"I want to put an idea into your head," he said. "What happened to you in Shanghai is significant whether you think so or not or will admit it or not. This is just a proposal for you to consider, no need to say yes or no right now. I have something in mind for you. If you decide to do it, you alone will be the agent of your fate. You will have to be smart enough to get the job done and strong enough, callous enough to live with it. People might die, I will not lie to you. And in a sense you would have to give your life to it also. I don't mean that it's likely you'd die like the others, just that this project would take years, almost certainly many years."

"May I ask who the ones who are going to die might be?"

"Enemies of mankind. You may think what happened the other night is trivial, but believe me when I tell you it is the seed of something that can be large indeed."

"Like what, exactly?"

"You'll know more when you need to know it. Nobody but you and me-nobody-will have knowledge of this operation. Ever. You will work for no one but me, report to no one but me, answer to no one but me."

I didn't know what to say to all that, so for once I wasn't tempted to say anything.

For a long moment, neither did Burbank. Then he said, "Do you know what a dangle is?"

"You bait a hook and hope the adversary takes the lure."

"Exactly."

"And I'm the lure?"

"I've been looking for a long time for someone I thought could handle this, waiting for the opening," Burbank said. "I believe you can handle it, and I also think no one else can."

He did? Talk about the chance of a lifetime. I said, "Why?"

"Because you're a good fit," Burbank said. "Because you keep interesting company. Because mainly you tell the truth if you know it, you're brave even if you choose to deny it, you have a good ear for difficult languages, you're arrogant but you try not to let it show. People trust you-especially a certain kind of woman. Most importantly, if I understand what you've half-told me, you seem to have died at least twice, or thought you did, and you didn't care. That's a rare thing. There's one more reason, out of your past."

"Namely?"

"You want to be the starting running back, as you deserve to be."

7

I was out of Burbank's office in seconds, out of the building in minutes. It was a Friday. Sally had told me as she took me down in the elevator that Burbank had mentioned that I might want to spend the weekend with my mother in Connecticut, then on Tuesday call a different number at a different hour. I called Mother on the way to the airport. Her voice rose by a tone or two when she heard my voice. For her this was the equivalent of a shriek of delight. She collected me at the train station. I was glad of the chance to be back in the country. Summer was coming in, everything was in leaf and color. I breathed more deeply than usual, as if inhaling my native air awakened some earlier self. Mother seemed glad enough to see me. She smiled at me, rose on tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled, as always, of expensive perfume and makeup. In the car she behaved as if I were home from school, asking no questions about where I had been or what I had seen in the last year and a half. She drove her coughing twenty-year-old Mercedes with competence. She talked about her forgetful sister, about the wretched political slough America had become with everyone, even the children, turning into bloody-minded bigots, about a grocery store ("It couldn't be nicer!") she had discovered across the state line in Massachusetts that had wonderful produce and excellent fish and very nice cheeses. She was still pretty and slim and dressed by Bergdorf. She had no news. She knew only six people in town by first and last name. Nearly everyone she had known had died or been locked up in a nursing home. She had lived alone since my stepfather died. His name did not arise. Nor did my natural father's name, but he had been absent from her conversation for many years. It had taken her about three days after the funerals to forget her late husbands-probably even less time in my father's case. Men died and ceased to be useful, women lived on. Once a protector could no longer protect, though he was still expected to provide, what was the use of thinking about him? As far as I knew she did not have lovers, but how would I know? Remembering the sounds of frolic that issued from the master bedroom when she and my stepfather were together, I reserved judgment.

I soon fell in with Mother's routine. By day I went for walks so as to breathe as much of the crystalline air as possible. In the evening we read a lot-companionably, each of us in a favorite chair under a good lamp, Mother with her Kindle, me with a thriller from long ago I found in my room. Since my stepfather's departure, Mother had had no television set or radio. She disliked the news, abominated sitcoms and cop shows, thought that pop music was noise. The food was excellent. We made our own breakfasts, always the rule in this house, and a taciturn young woman, a recovering crack addict who had been a chef before she crashed, came in and made the other two meals and put the dishes in the dishwasher. A second woman, a cheerful Latina, came in daily, even on Sunday, and did the housework. On Monday, when Mother and I said good-bye, she patted my cheek. Her eyes were misty. This was not exactly a surprise. Though she had never said so, I knew she had affection for me in spite of the fact that I was my father's child.

Late Tuesday afternoon, from Reagan National Airport, I made the call I had been instructed to make at the minute I was supposed to make it. Same routine at the other end, but this time in Sally's voice. She told me exactly where to wait for my ride. The car that came for me was a gleaming black Hyundai, the luxury model. Remembering the battered motorpool Chevy and Sally's motorized garbage can, I didn't think this could be my ride, but it was and it was as shipshape inside as out. The driver was Burbank himself, who maneuvered through rush-hour traffic to Arlington National Cemetery without speaking a word and parked in an isolated lot. It was too hot to walk among the headstones on this day in early June. Leaving the engine running so that the air-conditioning would go on working, he cleared his throat and in his rumbling basso asked the question.

"Yes or no?"

I said, "Yes."

Burbank said, "You understand what you're getting yourself into?"

"I know what you told me."

He handed me an envelope. I didn't open it.

He said, "Go back to Shanghai. Finish your language immersion. Will a year be enough?"

"A lifetime probably wouldn't be enough, but my Mandarin should get better if I can keep the teacher I have."

"On the basis of the benefits so far, why would you do anything else?"

From another, larger envelope he handed me a blue-backed contract. "This changes your status from staff agent to contract agent," he said. "From now on you'll be working outside, under cover, on your own except for your case officer, me. The contract provides for a one-grade promotion, so you'll be making a little more money. You'll still receive overseas pay and the same allowances, so you should be rolling in dough. If you continue to do well, more promotions will follow. You can also be summarily dismissed, but that's always been so. Read before signing."

The contract was addressed to me in my funny name, the one I had been assigned for internal use only after my swearing-in. I asked about retirement and medical benefits.

"Nothing changes except the title. Contract agents cannot mingle with the people inside. In theory they cannot go inside. It will be as I told you. No one but me even has a need to know who you are or what you're up to. You'll be alone in the world."

Just what I always wanted. I said, "One small question. What about the tenor and his friends?"

"Next time you'll see them coming."

"And?"

"Evade or kill."

"Are you serious?"

"Everyone has a right to defend himself."

"I am unarmed and outnumbered."

"That may not always be the case. Buy what you need and expense it as taxi fares."

I read the contract twice and signed it. We talked a bit more. Burbank told me to stop e-mailing Tom Simpson and write to him, Burbank, instead, on the seventeenth day of every month. His name for this purpose was Bob Baxter-impromptu cover names like this one, don't ask me why, almost always began with the same first letter of the owner's true surname. In the envelope I found a list of new wild cards. Also my e-ticket and ATM and credit cards on a bank different from the one I had been using. I was to go back to Shanghai tonight and go on as before, living the life I had lived, playing the amiable dumb shit, hanging out with the Chinese, absorbing as much Mandarin as possible, staying away from other Americans and Europeans, especially Russians and Ukrainians and people like that.

"Speaking Mandarin as well as you do, with your war experiences and the resentments they'll assume those experiences generated, you'll be a natural target, so somebody, even an American, may try to recruit you. Just laugh and tell them to get lost. And let me know in the next e-mail if this happens, with full wild card description of the spotter and his friend who makes the pitch."

"Any exceptions?"

"Listen with an open mind to any Chinese who approaches you."

"And?"

"Let me know immediately. The person who hired the tenor and the acrobats may try to befriend you. Will try, probably."

"And I'm supposed to welcome the overture?"

"'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished," said Burbank.

With that Burbank gave me a searching look, our first prolonged eye contact, and backed out of the parking space. It was a silent ride to the nearest Metro station, a silent parting. No wasted handshake, no "Good luck!"

It wasn't until Burbank had dropped me off and driven away that I realized I had neglected to ask what happened, what I was supposed to do, if he died before I did. He had transformed himself, I realized, into my only friend.

8

When I got back to Shanghai, I found no sign or scent of Mei. A ripple-come on, a tsunami of anxiety passed through me. I could tell she had been in my room after I left. The bed was made and all signs of bachelor disorder had vanished. She had sprayed the room with air freshener, a new touch. Did that mean she'd soon be back or that she had gone a step beyond wiping off her fingerprints and was erasing her own scent and that of the two of us, and this was good-bye forever? The second possibility seemed the more likely. Mei had a talent for exits. After six days without her I was very horny. But maybe she simply had had enough of the hairy ape. These thoughts were uppermost, but also I longed to speak Mandarin and had no one to talk to. My instincts told me she was gone. I'd never see her again. I had always expected this to happen-all those unasked questions, and maybe too much lust, had broken the back of our relationship. There would be no second bicycle crash. We could live in this teeming city for the rest of our lives and never bump into each other again. There was nothing to do but go out for a bowl of noodles and get on with my life. After eating the noodles and passing the time of day with the woman who sold them to me, I went home, read as much of the stoutly Communist Jiefang Daily as a political agnostic could bear, and fell asleep. About an hour after I drifted off, Mei-her old merry wet naked self-woke me up in the friendliest fashion imaginable. It was possible, even probable now that I had begun to see the world as Burbank saw it, that she was just carrying out her assignment as a Guoanbu operative, but if this was the case, 'twas a consummation, etc.

I spent the next twelve months in Shanghai unmolested by the tenor or anyone like him, exploring Mei's body and as much of her mind as she chose to reveal. We still arrived separately at parties, almost never dined in a restaurant or showed ourselves together in public, never sat together at the movies. We saw the local company of the Peking Opera-same performance as usual. I met more of her friends. Always, I was the only American at the party. Only one category of Chinese attended, taizidang as they were called-"princelings," the children of the most powerful of China's new rich. Strictly speaking, the title applied to the descendants of a handful of Mao's closest comrades in China's civil war, but Mei's friends, the B-list, children of the new rich, qualified for the honorific, though in quotes.

It took me a while to figure this out. Most of these people were smart in all senses of the word, brainy and absolutely up-to-the-minute when it came to fashion of any kind-clothes, movies, slang, books, ideas, dangerous opinions, music, dances. They behaved as if freedom of speech was revered and encouraged by the Communist Party of China. How could they feel so invulnerable? Easy-they were the children of the high leadership of the Party who were the new capitalists. As long as their fathers were in favor, they were immune from the police, from informers, even apparently from the most powerful components of Guoanbu, since they were openly living la dolce vita and denouncing the stupidity of the Party instead of building communism in a labor camp. Since Mei was one of them, she too must have a power dad. Like Mei, they had all done well at good schools and universities, in China and abroad. At least half of them were Ivy Leaguers. They all spoke English, often very rapidly, to one another, as if it were a kind of pig Latin that only they could understand. They never spoke English to me-Mei's rules, I guessed. In their cultishness they reminded me of American elitists, but less narcissistic and romantically paranoid. Unlike their Western counterparts, they did not have to pretend that they lived in a bogey-man, crypto-fascist, totalitarian state whose ruthless apparatus could mercilessly crush them the moment their fathers fell out of favor, or for no apparent reason at all. They understood that the absolute power and the absolute corruption of their rulers was their reality, knew as a birthright that the worst could happen tomorrow or an hour from now. So they ate, drank, and were merry.

Not that they didn't have serious moments or hidden agendas. The princelings didn't address one another by true name in the usual Chinese way, but instead used nicknames. I was called Old Dude, in English. Mei's nickname was Meimei, or "little sister." That nickname can also mean "pretty young thing," but in the next lower stratum of slang it translates as "pussy," so I didn't really get the joke or the insult. Just before my last year of living Chinese came to an end, a member of the cohort who was called Da Ge, or "big brother" took me aside. Mei was particularly friendly with Da Ge. He was as handsome as she was beautiful-in fact they looked a little alike. Naturally they paired off. They spent hours together in corners, giggling and confiding and holding hands. This looked a lot like flirtation, though they never danced together or made eyes at each other or nuzzled. In the back of my mind I thought he might be her case officer. Or the lover I suspected she saw when she wasn't with me.

One night, out of the blue, Da Ge asked me, while everybody else was dancing to the din of Metallica, if I would like to meet his father, who was CEO of a Chinese corporation that did a lot of business with American and European multinationals.

I was taken by surprise. I asked Da Ge why his father wanted to meet me. He said, "He is interested in you." Where had I heard those exact words before? Was Burbank at work here? Was this the first phrase of a recognition code to which I had not been told the response? Not likely. There was only one way to find out what was going on. With as much nonchalance as I could summon, I said, "Sure, why not?"

After all, I was following orders, because Burbank had told me what to do in a situation like this. Da Ge named a date and time and said a car would come for me. He didn't have to ask for my address. Next day I ordered a good suit and a couple of white shirts from a one-day tailor and bought a necktie and new shoes. I told Mei nothing about this.

The car turned out to be a stretch Mercedes shined to mirror brightness, Da Ge in the backseat. We were driven through traffic at a snail's pace to a grand private house in a posh neighborhood I had never before visited. Da Ge made the introduction-"My father, Chen Qi."-and disappeared. Chen Qi's appearance took me aback. I saw in him, to the life, the father who had died a quarter of a century ago. Ethnic characteristics were erased. I did not know how a Chinese could so strongly bring to mind a dead WASP whom I barely remembered, but the resemblance was startling. Chen Qi was the same physical type as my late parent-tall, muscular, handsome as an aging leading man, possessed of a smile that pleased but gave away nothing, abundant dark hair with streaks of gray, skeptical brown eyes projecting wary intelligence, perfect manners, bespoke clothes, an almost theatrical air of being to the manor born. Of course both men were the recent descendants of peasants, so maybe that was the key to their patrician manner. Before dinner Chen Qi and I drank four-ounce martinis-three apiece. These, in larger quantity, had been my father's favorite cocktail. The gin quickly made me drunk. The dinner itself, served by a drill squad of servants in tuxedos, was not the endless parade of Chinese banquet dishes I had anticipated, but instead the sort of twentieth-century faux French meal one gets, if one is rich enough, in a three-star restaurant in Paris or London or New York-four courses artfully presented, small portions, terrific wines. My host led a conversation that in its good-natured triviality mimicked banter. Again like my departed father, Chen Qi smiled his concocted smile seldom, but to great effect.

Over espresso and brandy in what I think he called the drawing room-a Matisse on one wall, a Miró on another-he came to the point. "My son speaks highly of you," he said.

"That's kind of him."

"Kindness has nothing to do with it. He has been brought up to be truthful and to keep me informed about his friends. Through him and others I have been aware of you for some time."

I said, "Really?"

"Yes, almost since you first came to Shanghai," Chen Qi said. "Not many foreigners get on in China as well as you do, let alone penetrate our life as you have done." He inserted a barely perceptible pause before the word penetrate.

"I've been fortunate in my friends."

"Indeed. And you had the right introductions. That's very important. Also you speak Mandarin very well-almost too well, some might say. Do you get on as easily with Americans and other Westerners as you do with the Chinese?"

"Mostly," I said. "But I've also met people everywhere who didn't exactly fall in love with me."

The smile. Chen Qi switched to English. "So have we all," he said. "Now I would like to come to the point."

Thereupon he offered me a job in his company. He explained that he did a lot of business in America, which, even though he was speaking English, he called by its Chinese name, Meiguo, the beautiful country. I was startled by the offer. Chen Qi saw this and said he had long been in search of a young but experienced American who knew both China and the United States and could move comfortably between the two and help him and his corporation to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings with its U.S. partners and other Westerners. He understood I spoke good French and fair German and thanks to the army, a certain amount of Dari, was this correct? I would work directly for Chen Qi, taking orders from no one but him, and if I succeeded, as he fully expected I would, the rewards would be appropriate. My starting salary would be $100,000 a year before bonuses and stock options, with a substantial raise after a six-month period of probation. I would have free occupancy of an apartment in Shanghai owned by the corporation and an expense account. The corporation would cover the full cost of medical care for any illnesses or injuries that might occur anywhere in the world. I would have six weeks of vacation a year but no Chinese or American holidays except October 1, National Day, which celebrates the Foundation of the People's Republic of China, Christmas, and lunar New Year's. This job, Chen Qi said, was a position of trust, and he would expect my full professional loyalty.

9

"So what was your response?" Burbank asked.

"I told Chen Qi I needed a week to think his offer over and I'd give him my answer when I got back from the States."

"How did he react to that?"

"He seemed to be okay with it," I said. "He asked why I was going home."

"And?"

"I told him I was going to visit my aged mother."

"Then you'd better make sure you visit her," Burbank said. "The eyes of China are upon you."

I had gotten off an airplane less than an hour earlier and had spent every moment of that time giving Burbank a detailed report of my conversation with Chen Qi. Burbank and I were seated in a Starbucks in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The place was almost empty at this time of day.

Burbank sipped his milky coffee and made a face. It must have seemed insipid after green tea. Disdainfully he slid the paper cup across the tabletop until it was out of reach. My news had had a visible effect on him. This was something new. Clearly this bolt from the blue gave him something to think about, and I supposed that thinking was what he was doing now. He had fallen into one of his mini-meditations. I waited for him to come back to this world.

After a minute or two, a shorter interval than usual, Burbank revived and said, "What was your reply to the bit about full professional loyalty?"

"I asked if my loyalty to him was supposed to supersede my loyalty to the United States."

"And he said?"

"That that particular issue would never arise."

"Even though it has already arisen. You are no longer a dangle. You are a penetration agent. He's taken the bait."

Or maybe we had. I left this thought unspoken.

Burbank said, "What questions did he ask you about your background, your qualifications?"

"None. I assumed he must already know everything he needed to know."

"A reasonable assumption. They've been assessing you for two and a half years-maybe longer, seeing that you majored in Chinese and your teachers were Chinese, no?"

"Some of them were," I said. "Neither they nor anyone I met in Shanghai ever asked me a personal question."

"Of course they didn't," Burbank said. "Chen Qi, or whoever in the background put him onto you, probably had some New York law firm run a background investigation on you. Perfectly legal, forever confidential under American law-attorney-client relationship."

"Why would they be interested?"

"Because you're a catch. You've got potential. Especially for them."

"A multibillion-dollar Chinese corporation wants to pay a hundred thousand a year for potential?"

"They do it every day. To them, if in fact it's them paying the bill instead of some shadowy third party, a hundred grand is chicken feed."

"You think Chen Qi is a puppet?"

"I think Chen Qi is a loyal Party man who has done extremely well for himself and would roast his own mother on a spit to keep what he has."

"In short, we're dealing, in your opinion, with Guoanbu."

"If we're lucky," Burbank said.

I was lost. Burbank was going to order me to take this job. He was going to order me to go to work-actually, pretend to go to work-for Chinese intelligence. I knew this before the sound of his voice died. I needed a moment to get myself together. I could tell by the look of him that Burbank wanted to get out of Starbucks, wanted to go to some bleak location, park the car, and condemn me to my fate. I had long since drunk my double espresso. After the flight, after forty minutes of Burbank, I needed more caffeine. I said, "I'm going to get another coffee. Want anything?"

He said, "God, no. Order the coffee to go. We can't continue this conversation here."

At least he was predictable. While I was at the counter, Burbank made a phone call. It lasted maybe five seconds. Inside the immaculate Hyundai he said nothing. Now he seemed to be meditating and driving at the same time. I slept, waking up when he braked or made a sharp turn, then going under again. We took country roads, one after the other, and somewhere west of Leesburg, he pulled up to an isolated barn that had been converted into a house. It had a keyboard lock. Burbank entered the combination and we went inside. It was cool, nicely furnished, the walls hung with large hyperrealistic paintings that looked like the next stage of photography. All were depressing-mournful swollen pregnant girls whose fetuses were visible as in sonograms, curly-haired, beautiful brown children wearing prostheses, ruddy workers in hard hats, faces frozen in terror as if watching a mushroom cloud in the last nanosecond of their lives.

"Not very cheerful," Burbank said. "The caretaker is the painter. Believe it or not, she sells this stuff for good money."

By now it was early evening. To my surprise he poured drinks-single malt scotch-and shook unsalted nuts from a can into a bowl. Like the methodical spy he was, he turned on the stereo to defeat listening devices that one really would not expect to be present in a safe house. All the more reason, according to the unwritten manual, to take precautions. Believe nothing. Trust no one. Every lock can be picked, every flap unglued, every seal counterfeited, every friend suborned.

Burbank crossed his leg, thin ankle resting on bony kneecap. He said, "Can you stay awake?"

"Possibly."

"Try. This meeting may go on for a while. We have a lot to talk about. Let me know if you get to the point where you can't concentrate."

"If I fall sleep, that's the signal."

Burbank did not acknowledge the pleasantry. "For starters," he said, "let me ask you what you think of Chen Qi's offer."

"I think it's genuine in its way," I said. "He has some reason for hiring me. His offer was bizarre. I think he knew that I saw what he was up to, or wondered what he was up to, and that he wanted me to draw certain conclusions from it."

"Like what?"

"Like the offer actually came from Guoanbu, that he was Guoanbu, that I was caught in the flypaper."

"He was threatening in manner?"

"Far from it. He was as civilized as they come, on the surface. He reminded me of my father."

Burbank lifted a palm. "Explain."

"There are physical and other resemblances."

Burbank gave me a quizzical look but asked for no details. I wondered if I had been wise to feed him this psychic clue. Burbank seemed to be wondering the same thing, using his own unique terms of reference. I was too tired to regret my words or worry about their effect on him.

At 6:00 p.m. exactly Burbank stopped asking questions, turned off the stereo, and tuned into the evening news. Drinking scotch and chomping on nuts, he was absorbed by today's recycling of yesterday's stories. I hadn't watched American television for a long time, and almost never the news, so I recognized neither the anchorperson nor the hot topics. In minutes I went to sleep. An hour later, when Burbank switched off the set, I woke up and stumbled into the bathroom. When I came back I saw no sign of him. Was he in another bathroom? A long time passed. I looked in the master bath. He wasn't there. I called hello. No response. I turned on the outside lights. The Hyundai was gone. It was raining, sheets of it. Well, if he didn't come back, I could always go back to sleep. I was hungry. I looked in the refrigerator. Lettuce, celery, carrots, low-fat yogurt, red and yellow Jell-O, a lemon with a strip of peel removed, an unripe melon, two minibottles of water. In the freezer, two frozen organic dinners (vegetarian). I was looking at the demented paintings again when Burbank came back, a six-pack of microbrew lager in one hand and a bag from a sandwich shop in another. I smelled hot tomatoey American food. He put his packages on the kitchen table and said, "One tofu with sprouts, arugula and roasted red pepper, one meatball with provolone, red onions, hot peppers, and black olives. Which do you want?"

"The meatballs."

"Sit ye down," said Burbank.

To the prodigal home from China, the meal was at least as delicious as the mixture of canned pork and beans and canned spaghetti that Nick Adams, just back from epicurean Paris, mixed together, as I remembered it, over a campfire in Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." Fearful that the beer would put me back to sleep, I drank the water, stealing the second tiny bottle for good measure.

When we finished, Burbank tidied up, putting the debris back into the sandwich bag, washing his beer bottle and my water bottles with soap, presumably to erase our fingerprints, brushing the crumbs into his hand, then into the bag, wiping the tabletop with a sponge, then with a paper towel. He looked happy. Apparently the indoor picnic had been as much of a treat for him as for me.

He brewed some green tea for himself. I drank instant espresso. We remained at the kitchen table. I was glad not to be in the same room with the caretaker's paintings. Burbank waited for his tea to cool, then drank it in a single thirsty gulp.

He said, "What really do you make of this offer of Chen Qi's?"

We had already discussed this in mind-numbing detail, but I went along, as I was paid to do. I said, "As you said, Guoanbu comes to mind."

"Why? Do you suspect that girl who's teaching you Mandarin?"

The answer, of course, was yes, but I didn't want to betray Mei to the likes of Burbank. If betray was the word. More than once the thought had crossed my mind that she was being run not by Guoanbu but by Burbank. Her objectives were his objectives: be my crammer in Mandarin, put me in touch with young Chinese who might someday be useful, fuck me cross-eyed to keep me away from sexual technicians from Guoanbu. Just as often, I told myself she could not be working for anyone but Guoanbu. If the usual rules applied, she had been setting me up all along for Chen Qi's recruitment pitch. Only at certain moments did I think she was nothing more than a lusty woman who just happened to have a thing about hairy Americans.

To Burbank I said, "What do you think?"

"I think it's a golden opportunity," Burbank said.

"For whom? To do what?"

"For us. To do what we do."

"You don't think it's a trap?"

He snorted in amusement. "Of course it is, in the opposition's calculations," he said. "But that can be an advantage for our side. Some of the best operations we've ever run involved walking into a trap-or, to be more exact, by pretending to be stupid enough to do so. The idea is to demonstrate your low IQ, move the trap, change the bait so the trapper goes looking for his missing trap and steps on it himself and has to chew off his own leg to escape."

Burbank's face positively glowed as he imparted this wisdom. As the animal for whom the trap was being baited and set, I found it hard to join in his enthusiasm. And yet I was learning something. He was showing me his mind, or more likely the fictitious mind he had invented for the purposes of this conversation.

Burbank said, "What do you think the opposition's purpose might be?"

The answer that sprang to mind was, Same as yours-to own me, to ruin my life. What I said was, "To recruit me, to compromise me, to double me, to expose me, to pump me out for the utterly trivial things a nobody like me knows. To embarrass the United States, and if I'm lucky, to swap me in due course for some Chinese agent of greater value."

"To surround us, in short. Do you play weiqi?"

He meant the Chinese game called Go in Japan and in the West. In Mandarin weiqi means "the game of surrounding." I had often played it with Mei, who always skunked me. I said, "After a fashion."

"Work on it. You can't understand them if you don't understand weiqi."

"Do you know the game?" I asked.

"No one does unless he's Chinese. I play it. It's hard to find partners. Chen Qi is a weiqi man. The game is a passion with this guy. We know that about him. Work on it. Get a teacher, get good enough to play him. Beat him if you can. He'll think all the more of you if you do."

These were orders? What next? Who knew but what weiqi was the basis of Burbank's technique as a counterspy. Certainly I felt surrounded. It was time to change the subject.

I said, "I'm curious about something."

Burbank lifted his eyebrows. I took this for permission to go ahead.

I said, "Why do you have all those safes in your office?"

He thought this over. He saw what I was trying to do and decided to humor me.

"You think I should digitize all that information and store it in a computer?"

"Why not?"

"Because safes are safe," he said. "Because they contain things I need to know, need to keep in secure storage, one copy only." He was spacing his words as if teaching me some arcane truth in a language I did not fully understand. He continued, "Think about the origins of the word safe, the meaning of that term to the collective subconscious, think of what the concept of being safe has meant to mankind over millennia. We are weaker than the other carnivores. We fear other tribes of our own kind with all our hearts and souls. Our existence depends on our being safe from the Others, capital O. We are obsessed by it. The lust for safety is the reason why clubs and spears and gunpowder and nuclear weapons were invented. If experience has taught us anything in recent times, it is that computers are not safe. Computers are gossips, they are compulsive talkers. Touch them in the right place, with the right combination of digits, and they swoon and spread their legs. That's what they're designed to do-disgorge, not safeguard. That's what they do. Safes have no brains, no means of communication, therefore no such vulnerability."

I said, "They can't be cracked?"

Burbank ignored the question. He said, "You have reservations about this opportunity." No question mark.

"Serious ones," I said. "Don't you?"

"Of course I do. There are always reservations. Think about landing on the moon in that LEM. It might as well have been made of papier-maché and it was built to fly in a vacuum, but Armstrong and Aldrin showed that it could be done."

Excellent analogy for the equipment for this mission, I thought. I said, "I have no wish to be an Armstrong or an Aldrin."

"You won't be. Others have gone before."

Yes, and never came back. I said, "Suppose we go ahead with this, whatever it is. What would it accomplish?"

"Nothing, maybe. But maybe a lot more than we imagine." Burbank said. "There are no certainties. There never are. But you'd be on the inside, and…."

"Inside what? A corporation."

Burbank said, "A corporation, please remember, that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guoanbu."

Burbank sounded as if he had taken it for granted that I would be as enthusiastic about this operation as he seemed to be, that I would be as unconcerned as he was about the risks that I, not he, was going to take. To myself, I was one of a kind, new to the world, never to be born again or otherwise duplicated. To Burbank, I knew, I was just one stone, black or white, it didn't matter which, waiting on one of the 361 squares on his weiqi board for his finger and thumb to move me.

"Penetrate the corporation and we penetrate Guoanbu?" I said.

"Mighty oaks from little acorns grow."

"And I would do what to make that happen? Please tell me."

"Build a network. Let them discover it."

"Who would be crazy enough to sign up?"

"The friends of your girlfriend." His voice was calm, his manner urbane, and he showed other signs of madness.

I said, "You're serious?"

"It doesn't have to be a real network. The Chinese just have to think it's real and eliminate it."

Yes, he was serious. I said, "And how do you propose I create this thing that does not actually exist?"

"The usual methods," Burbank said. "Befriend, befuddle, betray."

We studied each other's faces for a time. Finally I said, "Guoanbu will kill those people."

"Very likely," said my new chief. "I told you that from the start. But Guoanbu will never know if they killed everybody. Think about it. They'll lose face on a catastrophic scale. They'll be looking over their shoulders till the end of communism, which may be quicker in coming if we pull this off."

I said, "May I ask what gave you the idea I would go along with something like this?"

"Well, for one thing, it's what you're trained to do and paid to do," Burbank said. "Besides that, you have a chance, a reasonable chance, to slay the dragon. That would be a great service to your country. To China and all its people. To mankind. You will be remembered."

Remember by whom, I wondered, if only Burbank knew what I had done? I said, "I am at a loss for words."

After a long pause he said, "So?"

I know, I knew then what I should have said. But a new Faust is born every minute, so what I did say was, "I'll sleep on it."

10

I slept for two days in my old bedroom in my mother's apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. On her sixty-fifth birthday, a summery night, I took her to dinner at the Four Seasons. She had been to the hairdresser that day. She looked lovely. She wore a new dress, her large but not too showy diamond rings, her jewel-encrusted Cartier watch, her ruby and sapphire necklace, her sable coat. My late stepfather had been a generous expense-account tipper, so the ma?tre d' remembered her and gave us a good table. The waiters fussed over her. She had a lovely time. Oysters, lobster bisque, grilled sea bass, Roederer Cristal throughout, dessert that made the liver thump, not a serious word spoken.

Mother was thinner, much thinner, than she had been the year before-pancreatic cancer, she told me the next morning with her usual absence of affect. The oncologist couldn't be nicer. I wasn't to bother about the situation. Her executor, my stepfather's old partner, would handle arrangements-cremation, no clergy, no eulogy, "just a simple brief sniffle at graveside," she told me. I needn't come all the way from China to be present, if that was where I was when it happened. I wept, dumbstruck that she was mortal. Mother watched tears roll down my unshaven cheeks with a faint sympathetic smile, but did not touch me or speak to me. Just like old times.

For a couple more days I walked the streets or wandered through the Metropolitan Museum-thinking of Mother, yes, but mostly grappling with the Chen Qi/Burbank dilemma. It was almost impossible to believe that I was dealing with reality, but the fact is, I was in the grip of temptation, with all the fears and hesitations that go with it. I had felt this way before when, for example, I contemplated seducing the hot new wife of a clueless friend. She had married what she could get, not what she wanted, and reading her signals I knew she wouldn't say no if I made the move. But what about afterward? What about the tricks of fate, the unpredictability of women? What about remorse? What about death-my death, final and real for a change, at the hands of the man I had betrayed? Then as now, I had no one to talk to. Mother was not a candidate for confessor and wouldn't have been even if she had been in the best of health. The urge to confide in someone, to spill everything, to make this chimera go away by drawing a picture of it, was very strong. Standing before a Titian in the Met, I felt a compulsion to turn to the stranger beside me, confess my dark secret, and ask for advice. I restrained myself-this poor guy from Iowa, in the city for the weekend, would think, more rightly than he knew, that I was a nut case. A bartender would do-in one ear, out the other, another wacko on his fifth scotch. Nobody could possibly believe the grotesque truth. Passing a Catholic church on Saturday evening, I decided to go inside. People, mostly women, were lined up for confession. I joined the queue. I had seen confessional boxes in the movies but, not being a Catholic, had never entered one. Except for weddings and funerals, I had seldom before been inside any church or even heard prayers spoken aloud, let alone whispered them to the Almighty. As a child I was given no religious instruction. The name of Jesus was unfamiliar to me until I went to school. When I asked questions, Mother advised me to make up my own mind about God. She herself didn't think there was one. The fairy tales in the Old and New Testaments couldn't possibly explain the grandeur of the enterprise-just look at the stars, just imagine the infinite and eternal universe rushing across time and space to who knew what destination. (Her exact words: she talked to me like that when I was seven years old.) She hadn't baptized me, a fact that created misgivings years later in Headquarters when I was being cleared for employment by friends of the Savior. Did this guy have a comsymp for a mother, or what?

Outside the confessional, my turn came. In the dimness on the other side of the box (is that where the nickname of the polygraph came from?) sat a priest with bushy black eyebrows. I cleared my throat, but I didn't know the drill, so I said nothing. Sounding like a gruff cop near the end of his shift, the priest said, "Speak!" I just couldn't do it. The safe was locked, there was no key. I said, "Sorry." The priest said, "No doubt you should be. What have you done?" I said, "I can't do this. I took an oath." In a weary voice the priest said, "Then hell is your destination. Beat it."

On my way out I remembered something helpful. Mother, thinking no doubt of my father's peccadilloes and maybe of her own, liked to say that people did what they wanted to do. Always. They might say they did what they had to do, or that they had no choice, or that they were helpless in the grip of circumstance. They might even struggle against the inevitable. But the truth was, they did what they wanted to do even knowing that it would end in self-destruction. It was as simple as that. It was in the DNA.

In my case, at least, she was right. On the steps of the church, I called Burbank on my cell phone and said, "The answer is yes." The next morning, early, I said good-bye to Mother and received the two air kisses I knew would be the last she would ever give me. Smelling her Chanel No. 5 and noting the threadlike wrinkles beside her eyes that she probably would have had fixed by a plastic surgeon if terminal cancer had not intervened, I felt the fond amusement that was her idea of love instead of the pointless grief she would not have forgiven.

11

I went back to Shanghai. No Mei was there to greet me, there was no sign or scent of her in my room. This time her absence was permanent, but I had expected that. Her work was done.

Chen Qi, now the boss, no longer the genial host, welcomed me to my new job with a hard handshake but no smile. When I accepted his offer, his eyes were cold. He had bought me. From now on, like everyone who worked for him, I would address him and speak of him as Chen Zong, or when speaking English, "CEO Chen." There was no longer any need for him to be charming. I was given an office with glass walls on the same floor as his, a great honor. Thereafter, on the first day of every month, the sum of $8,333.33 was deposited to my account in the Bank of China. As Chen Qi had promised, I moved into a fully furnished apartment a dozen floors below the corporate offices, and commuted by elevator. It was a nifty but sterile place, something like a suite in the Hilton, with maid service and a fine view of the boundless city floating in its pall of smog. Of course the apartment was wired just as my office was wired, and probably equipped with cameras. I didn't incriminate myself by looking for bugs and lenses. Anyone who wished to do so could observe me to his heart's content. Why should I mind? It was nice, in a way, to be of interest, to be present in someone else's imagination, as Mei was in mine. I caught glimpses of her ghost every day.

At first I was given trivial work to do. Pointless though they might have been, these assignments were heavy with importance because they came directly from Chen Qi's office by hand of messenger. I hardly ever saw Chen Qi himself, and almost never saw him alone. Sometimes when he was receiving an American visitor, he summoned me. The other American was usually disconcerted to see the likes of me working in a place like this for a man like Chen Qi. Though they all smiled and shook hands and repeated my name in hearty tones, few such visitors were friendly. What was an American doing here? It was okay to do business with these greedy Communists, money was money, but work for them? Be their underling? Once or twice a week in the elevator or the corridors I ran into a princeling Mei had introduced me to. It was the same with them, and there were quite a few of them. They averted their eyes. They didn't speak, nor did I. Needless to say I was no longer invited to their parties. I never had been invited by them, of course, Mei had just brought me along as a curiosity. Without her, I was isolated, of no interest, and besides that, a potential menace because I saw Chen Zong, heard his voice, and if I did not actually touch him, I touched papers that he had touched. Did this bode well or ill for the fictitious network of agents and assets that Burbank imagined? Who knew?

I had expected to be used as an interpreter, but there was no need for my services because Chen Qi spoke serviceable English. Besides, he had a whole corps of interpreters. One of them, a jolie laide named Zhang Jia, worked in the office next to mine. At first she ignored me, then she was indifferent, then sometimes she nodded when we passed in the corridor. Gradually this mock foreplay escalated. Meaningful looks were exchanged through the glass wall that separated us. When I asked her to dinner she accepted without hesitation and spent the evening with me in a restaurant on a lower floor of the tower. Judging by the stares, interracial couples were uncommon in the restaurant. This did not seem to bother Zhang Jia. We spoke English to each other. Hers was flawless and ladylike, something like Mother's Miss Porter's elocution with a faint Chinese counterpoint. Unlike Mei, Zhang Jia talked about herself, providing her entire curriculum vitae as if reading from a script. This was regarded in CI circles as the likely sign of an agent regurgitating a cover story. No surprise there. Zhang Jia said she was from Beijing, the daughter of workers who had wanted a son but being kindhearted, refrained from drowning her when she was a baby. When she was twelve and a star pupil, the revolution discovered her and took her to its bosom. She went away to a boarding school in another part of China, where she learned English. She was an alumna of Wellesley College and Beijing Foreign Studies University. We dined alone in her apartment. She was an excellent cook, a pleasant companion. We played tennis on the courts in the basement. She was a fine player. I was out of practice and out of shape. She sometimes beat me and probably could have beaten me more often than she did. She had been good enough to play on the Wellesley varsity. We went to the movies in the tower's theaters and sat together. We played weiqi. She was unbeatable. Through all this chaste fraternization we mostly spoke English. One night, in her apartment, we got into bed, Jia leading me by the hand, and switched to Mandarin. She was a more decorous lover than Mei, but skilled.

After that first night together, we never spoke English again. As time went by, my Mandarin got better and better. Zhang Jia taught me etiquette, a subject Mei had neglected. For a long time I learned very little besides that and Mandarin and weiqi, but millimeter by millimeter, second by second, that changed. Zhang Jia was like a wife. She dominated, or thought she did, by submitting. Her job, apparently, was to manage me. She was diligent. We began to see Chinese couples socially--encouraging news for Burbank. They all lived in the tower and worked for the corporation. They were different from Mei and her friends-more real, more serious, more sober. Nicer. Clean as whistles politically. Children of the proletariat. They seemed to like me, but they could not possibly have trusted me. In accepting me, or making believe they accepted me, they were almost certainly doing what they were told. How could such behavior be otherwise explained?

Except for Zhang Jia, I was never alone with any of them. But in its way my friendship with her was almost beautiful. So was she, I realized, as her face gradually became as familiar as my own.