Fortunately, Chen shared loose organizational overlap with
his colleagues two blocks away at the Ministry of Public Security, whose
ostensible role was administering the country’s two- and a quarter-million
strong domestic police force, by far the world’s largest. The Ministry of
Public Security administered surveillance that generated much of the data
subsequently pored over by MSS officers. MPS had amassed a dossier for each of
China’s one- and one-half billion citizens on a Cray XMP supercomputer and
tracked their movements within and across their 20,000-kilometer border. Known
by Chen and a handful of others, it was just this asset which last week had
carried the day when within a period of minutes his office was bombarded by
protests from the Premier, the vice chairman of Military Affairs, the office of
the General Secretary and others on the Standing Committee including the state security
minister. In these earliest moments of the physicist’s disappearance, it was
clear to Chen that all matters including the capture would eventually pale
beside the assignment of blame. Even with the Army’s help, Public Security had
only narrowly succeeded in determining the whereabouts of the physicist and his
wife—allowing Chen’s officers to step in and make the arrest. The debacle
called for culling some unfortunate cadre from the ranks of China’s
counterintelligence corps. By consensus of the Personnel Bureau, later approved
by the General Secretary, this time the axe had been chosen to fall on the
ministry’s chief provincial officer.
The security minister had been firm that Chen involve himself
directly in the interrogation, ordering that no other responsibility could be
allowed to interfere with the counterintelligence effort to determine whether
or not the physicist had passed information, and if so, how much and to whom. It
was a rare opportunity that Chen could indulge himself in the technical craft
of his trade, the roots of his career. Chen ascended the stair to his suite
with a restored sense of vigor. His two interrogating officers had crossed the
underground tunnel from Zhongnanhai and were already there.
By four the next morning, the bronze ashtray awarded Chen
Ruihan as a Youth League mentor over-flowed with cigarette butts; the carafe of
hot tea thrice emptied. The deputy minister sat slumped with his head in his
hands and stared down at the table as he focused on the prisoner’s recorded
garble of words. It had been the second consecutive sleepless night for the
interrogating officers; the prospect of an increase in grade did not deter the
junior of the two from repeatedly bobbing his chin to his chest. Beside the
small Sony recorder, Chen’s personal assistant sat poised over a laptop waiting
to transcribe the next round of analysis.
For perhaps the tenth time, Chen asked his
mishu
to
reset the digital recording to the beginning. Their job was made easier by
comrade physicist’s voice; often rambling and weary, Dr. Zhao was nonetheless
Han and spoke the same dialect as the intelligence officers. Chen listened to
the admission that his wife had handled virtually all of the arrangements for
their defection. This she had apparently done through the open-air markets,
retrieving forged danwei travel documents wrapped in plastic and hidden within
layers of carp; their falsified passports retrieved from between leaves of
cabbage, along with instructions for what and when to buy next as preparations
evolved. China’s ubiquitous merchant bazaars were troubling to Chen, this
exchange of information especially so, because it involved an intermediary, the
prisoner’s wife, who would have provided them answers were she not still deep
in the coma slipped into during the hours that followed her capture.
As he listened again to the tape, the faint outline of a
pattern slowly emerged. Chen turned to his senior officer. “The prisoner
changed his story for why they headed north from Xichang?”
“Yes.” The man pulled the unfiltered stub from his lips and
ran his hand back over his hair. “First he tried to imply she had always been
too sick to hazard the rugged terrain into Thailand. Then he dropped that story
and admitted that their original plans actually did call for taking them south.
According to Zhao, the plans changed suddenly without explanation. You can hear
the frustration in his voice over the evident delay that it caused. Of course
we learn this after the stinking traitor admitted his wife was in on the
planning after all.”
Chen next focused on that period of the interrogation after
the prisoner was duped by their use of a cadaver’s finger into believing his
wife, actually untouched by torture, would be hauled piecemeal before him
unless he confessed. Passports used by the fugitives to board the China
Southern flight out of Chongqing had provided the first solid lead during the
manhunt. The numbers matched the falsified travel documents, but a search of the
danwei’s database failed to turn up a match. This in turn prompted Public
Security to confirm them as forgeries. Yet the numbers were valid, the forging
quality superior.
From where and by whom were the numbers obtained?
A point equally troubling to Chen was whether or not, and
if so when, Zhao’s handlers really did change plans by deciding to go north. Was
it simply to throw off the pursuit? Chen shook his head; so many possible links
in the chain.
Chen had his
mishu
advance the recording to the
confession detailing the role of the prisoner’s wife. Comrade physicist’s words
were spaced unevenly, heavy with emotion, his desire to protect her yielding
uneasily. They listened again to the slurring of words, the anguish, the
railing against the Party for condemning his wife to her drawn-out suffering,
the physicist’s capitulation followed by his chronology of events.
“All at once,” Chen said, narrowing his eyes, “it seems
they quit badgering him for bona fides
and
word came to instead go north
and
they set the date for his defection.” Chen sensed this might be
somehow important, perhaps indicating a discreet packet of actionable
intelligence had been delivered to Zhao’s handlers. “Did you happen to ask him
about that? Whether these events all culminated in one communication to his
wife?”
Chen’s
mishu
softly tapped the exchange into the
laptop as his men looked at each other. They looked at Chen and shook their
heads.
IT HAD TAKEN LONGER
than
expected for the guards to rouse the prisoner, and fully two hours transpired
before the weary trio trudged back through the tunnel from Zhongnanhai and
returned to Chen’s office. An amphetamine injection had ensured that the physicist
was fully awake, and would be for several hours. Shaken by the presence of a
confident man spitting orders, and beholden yet to the prospect of his
dismembered wife, the prisoner had proceeded to relay his wife’s correspondence
in every detail.
Chen sent the other men home and had his
mishu
order
him breakfast, boiled turnips and pork with a fresh glass of orange juice and a
hot mug of tea, then sent him home as well. It was a little before nine when he
finally sat down to organize his thoughts and prepare his report. Outside his
window, the daily profusion of commuters on bicycles was fully apace. Further
away, the glints of automobiles were visible skirting the congested Beijing
interior.
The earlier hint of a pattern in the prisoner’s confession
had strengthened. It was now Chen’s belief that a single source of information
may have prompted Zhao’s handlers—undoubtedly MI6 or CIA, judging by the sophistication
of the attempt—to simultaneously confirm the traitor’s bona fides, advise a
change of route to the north, and establish the date of departure. At this time
he had no evidence to suggest that sensitive classified information had been
divulged, by either the traitor or any of the dozens of others interrogated in
the aftermath of the defection attempt.
In the closing paragraph of Chen’s report to the state
security minister, which he planned to deliver himself, Chen made two
recommendations. “First,” he wrote, “insofar as the investigation was still
underway and, apparently, the risk of a breach of security tantamount to a
national security disaster, all personnel associated with the classified Fourth
Line Project in which the traitor was involved should be placed under
twenty-four hour surveillance—regardless of cadre rank, class, security
clearance, or Party stature. Second, a purge of the nation’s security apparatus
might be in order, as there exists the possibility of a highly-placed informant
within Beijing. A joint review of this matter should be conducted by the
appropriate organs of the Second Department, the ministries of State and Public
Security and the Political Leading Legal Committee to determine the correct
course of action.”
Chen drew another hot mug of tea to his lips and gazed out
over a Tiananmen Square teeming with people. He knew it was a bad time to
rattle the bureaucracy with rash allegations. Things were already unsettled over
the upcoming succession of power. Depending upon whose toes he might step during
the next few days, he could find himself either postured well for the change,
or peddling a bicycle to work every day.
17
THE SUM OF MANY
small
things allowed Deng Zhen to cherish the evening with family and to forget the
trials of day. Tonight, the windows were open into the courtyard to a warm
southerly breeze, which instead of the Gobi’s irritating dust carried the
ebullient chatter of children. Guangmei, Deng’s daughter-in-law, had prepared a
sumptuous meal consisting of fresh carp caught locally and cooked his favorite
way, steamed rice, boiled cabbage, turnip salad and fried pork fat—there would
be no hunger in this house. His younger son had traveled across town with his
pregnant wife to announce his promotion in grade and housing assignment at
Polytechnologies Corporation. Unlike the many less fortunate employees of the
State—millions of whom were caught in the downdraft of what seemed eternal
reform—the chemical engineer would be moving his growing family to a four-room
flat. Having finished luxuriant portions of mint-flavored sorbet and chowchow,
the entire family congregated around the old oak table for banter and
storytelling.
Deng sat with his hands wrapped around a mug of green tea
and listened to his two sons share a joke. Peifu, his elder son, tilted his
head back in laughter and hurled clouds of smoke into the air. If anything
threatened to darken Deng Zhen’s mood, it was his elder son’s tendency to lapse
into spewing his unpatriotic dogma. Presently the radical Beijing University
music professor rocked back on the legs of his chair, puffing Cambodian tobacco
between sips of maotai. Like the roof over his head, the expensive indulgences
were provided through the toils of his father.
There was a reason Deng tolerated his son’s intransigence,
and he was seated to his grandfather’s immediate left. Presently the small
round face of Deng’s five-year old grandson was set in resolute determination,
tongue protruding between teeth, his delicate hand gripping the fountain pen
like a club as he struggled to master the art of calligraphy. Every few minutes
the boy stopped, head cocked, bewildered by his inability to duplicate the
orderliness of his grandfather’s hand. Deng thought the tortured ink characters
had evolved admirably in recent weeks. But it was the boy’s fits of pouting
frustration with the rate of his own progress that most satisfied the old
cadre.
“The answer is not on my nose,” Deng gently said. “You can
do it. First, you must try.”
Ping looked into his face and probed for signs of approval.
Deng wondered at the child’s silk-smooth skin, fine fringe of eyelashes
adorning the chestnut-brown eyes that shone with the promise of intelligence. Ping
had inherited his grandmother’s eyes,
my wonderful Chingling’s eyes
—the
woman whose eyes now visited Deng only in his dreams, where they projected a
love so tangible and powerful as to affirm for him the eternity of individual
existence.
The boy smiled back at him. Deng reached out and tousled
his hair when Guangmei’s din of hanging pots and pans in the pantry suddenly
ceased. He turned to find her looking as if she had just witnessed a murder.
“Military men have entered the courtyard,” she said softly,
“and they are heading this way.”
Deng Zhen frowned. There were standing orders to approach
him any hour of the day or night should a problem develop. The failure of an
important test would qualify, but he could not recall any such tests scheduled
tonight. In any case, it was normally a civilian contingent that escorted him
to work. There was one other troubling possibility.
Deng glared at his son. “What is it this time, Peifu?”
Peifu withdrew his pipe and stared indignantly at his
father.
Several hard raps sounded at the front door before it swung
open. Two soldiers emerged from the darkness and entered the foyer with an air
of authority.
An officer of the People’s Liberation Army scanned the
room. “Forgive the intrusion, Comrade Deng. Would you please come with us?”
Deng noticed his grandson’s eyes blossoming wide. “Is there
some sort of problem?” He patted Ping’s tiny forearm.
“Fortunately, no.” The officer glanced self-consciously at
the family members. “Your presence at Zhongnanhai is requested.”
“Zhongnanhai? By whom?”
“The Vice Chairman of Military Affairs.”
Deng’s first impulse was to order the men from his home. Three
times during the past week Deng had requested time with Rong Peng—all three
times Deng had been snubbed. Why would Rong feel that
he
can summon
me,
as if some kowtowing lap dog, from the comfort of my family?