The Mandarin Club (29 page)

“So you want the Defense Ministry importing brides? You are abandoning your senses, Lee.”

“No, I am just tired of these pathetic little military diversions. I see them for what they are.”

“Maybe you need a long vacation.”

“You know, the device is so transparent. Like when the American president who couldn’t keep his pants on kept bombing Iraq whenever he feared impeachment. It’s an old trick, not worthy of the Chinese.”

“Lee, you are hopelessly bourgeois. The decadence of the West will lead ultimately to their ruin.”

“It is not about ideology.”

“No, it is about cultural supremacy,” Chen said. “America will fall like the Roman Empire someday, in an ocean of debt, one big Disneyland in ruins, infested with stray cats like the Colosseum.”

They had pulled up by a small fence encircling a duck pond. There was a squawking at the center as two females fought over a tidbit. Chen and Lee waited to see who would strike the last blow. They watched the ducks’ tussle as first one bird, then the other seemed to get the better of it. The morsel frayed and fell back into the water, where the ducks snatched at the remains.

As they observed the thrashing ducks, Chen spoke somberly. “I need to remind you that individuals serve the people. We’re all expendable.”

“What are you trying to say?” Lee asked, working hard to read his face.

Chen would not give him his eyes. “You are at risk,” he said after a time, muttering it softly, as if offered in apology.

Lee sighed, gazing into the distance. “Yes. Thank you, old friend. Actually, I have been at risk since the day I first went off to America. I was always suspect of having been contaminated by Western thought.”

“Don’t be a fool!” Chen pleaded. “You mustn’t grow comfortable with your peril. You will fly too close to the flame, like Icarus in the Greek myths. Your wings will not hold.”

“I love my country as much as the next man. Maybe more. The zealots have no monopoly on patriotism.”

“I know that.
They
don’t.”

“They? Who? The wild boys in the PLA who want to spark a fire?”

“Comrade Lee, I’ve always admired your father. You have his guts, too. But you have become reckless, full of false bravado. There are some who will try to make an example of you.”

“I won’t let them silence voices of reason just because we—”

“Choose your own path. I’ll say no more. But you’d better do so without illusion. Actions have consequences.” Then Chen turned away a last time.

The two men walked slowly back to work, a silence fallen between them. Over the course of the tense afternoon, they would eye each other warily as they sat reviewing the plans for the upcoming Taiwan maneuvers. Their tense lunchtime conversation lingered within, burning like the aftertaste of a bitter stew.

M
ickey Dooley would make a great spy. His capacity for compartmentalizing his affairs had long ago convinced him of the proposition.

As the years went by, he grew ever vigilant in his deceits. His skill at dissembling enabled a whole series of contradictions to co-exist. Where the occasional rough edge protruded, there was always Scotch and his gift for blarney to smooth things over.

With Telstar, Mickey was the omnicompetent wheeler-dealer, the go-to guy for all things Chinese. His Beijing customers liked him, too. His confident attitude, combined with his father-in-law’s connections, ensured reliability. At home with his children, Mickey was the model dad. Fatherhood provided a sound anchor in a life otherwise adrift. Toward Mei Mei, he was unfailingly correct, yet always cautious. She had become the enemy and he labored to dodge her frequent rages.

The secrets of his complicated life would be mercilessly laid bare by the lie detector. The polygraph was a Langley pre-condition to his assignment. Mickey knew it that June morning as he sat, focused and sober, in a holding room in Langley. He felt like a guy who’d messed up the interview at St. Peter’s Gate, then been referred Down Below for a follow-up interrogation.

The room was small and windowless, on the third floor of the main building on the CIA campus. The Agency personnel were curt, exuding all the warmth of harried medical lab technicians. There was no immediate sign of Branko, though it was unclear who lurked behind the smoked glass in the fluttering room. The hardware experts resembled the IT guys at Tel-star, earnest young men with pocket pens and beepers, more interested in machines than people. Nobody seemed to engage Mickey as they tinkered with the wires and the dials that would measure his veracity.

He grew anxious, though he knew it was his heart, not his brain, they were testing. He had only to tell the truth to pass; they knew most of the bad stuff already.

The pre-examination began innocently enough, with a lot of legal waivers to execute. At an elementary school desk, the kind with the right-handed arm rest used when you get stuck with a needle at the doctor’s office, he sat and signed away his rights.

“I’m not giving blood, am I?” Mickey said.

“Depends,” the technician dead-panned as he tightened a velcro wrap onto Mickey’s right bicep. Then they signaled to him that they were ready to begin, to explore his various transgressions against God and country.

As they moved along, he found it oddly liberating, this business of telling only the truth. The farther they went, and the more tired he grew, the easier it became to unburden himself, to let go and watch all those balls he had juggled for so long come crashing down.

Some of the questions were uncomplicated.
Drug habits
? No, actually. Like most of the guys from college days, he had given up pot for whiskey shortly after leaving campus—the quest for respectability in vices outweighed possible liver damage.

Tax fraud?
Clean there, too. He’d always been careful with his bookkeeping, not wanting to jeopardize his perks and his company-subsidized travel. Besides, he always told himself, his taxes paid veterans benefits, and his dad had earned every nickel of his pension the hard way.

Marital infidelity?
That one required substantial detail, taxing his memory. His story was straightforward; there had been no blackmail attempts or foreign agents involved, at least any he was aware of, though he sometimes wondered about his dear Jin in Hong Kong, and was relieved to have finally had the guts to end it with her.

Mickey’s relations with foreign intelligence services were also of interest. Yes, he ran errands for the Defense Ministry guys in Beijing, Telstar’s best customers. Yes, he knew some of his contacts were in the espionage business. In fact, he assumed most everybody he dealt with was, in one fashion or another—it made things easier for him. To Mickey, it had all just been business—favor-banking to bring in more Telstar sales.

No, he had not trafficked in classified documents with intelligence sources. Yes, he had helped run some disinformation games on Taiwan, though often unwittingly. He told how he had greased some side sales for his Beijing pals on stuff like krytron buys and electronic countermeasures sales, the significance of which he never fully understood. He had learned not to ask too many questions.

They spent almost an hour on his relations with his now retired father-in-law, and then, on Lee. He tried to help them as much as he could, willingly speculating on connections and subplots. He stumbled to explain who had orchestrated the planting of the krytron deal story with its Taipei nuclear angle—a story it took him some time to figure out himself. He gave up everything he had on his smuggler buddy Rashid with an ease he thought would make him uncomfortable. It didn’t.

In the end, he found a way to get back to basics, even when the confessional was not called for by the question at hand.

Yes, he freely entered into his new commitment with the Agency. He loved his boys. He loved his country. He repeated the pledges he had made to Branko at the ballpark. By now, he sensed his friend was certainly behind the one-way mirror. No more drinking. No more foreign sales. Success or failure, no mention ever to anyone about the mission.
I can do this
, he thought.

When they finally unstrapped him, it felt like being unwrapped from a dive suit. He could breathe freely once more. He flexed his arm and smiled up weakly at Branko, who joined him, appearing very much the parent come to collect his charge from Day Care.

They walked in silence down the hallway, then up an elevator to the top floor. Mickey followed Branko down a short corridor until they entered another stuffy room, this one lit by a skylight and recessed track lighting. At its center, a small table was set for lunch.

“So. . . ?” Mickey asked.

“So?”

“So, how’d I do? Like, did I pass?”

“Did you pass? Sure,” Branko said, “you did fine. Answered all their questions, for today. No lies. Even gave us some stuff on the krytron business that confirmed some of our suspicions.”

“So, we’re on? The mission, I mean?”

“Yes, we’ve been granted authority to proceed. For now.”

“I thought you had the last word on that.”

“I’m in charge of Asia analysis for the intelligence community. I don’t run agents. That’s Operations.”

“Does that mean we need some kind of congressional finding? Those damn Hill committees leak like a sieve.”

“Relax, Mickey. We’ve made this a special case, and there’s ample precedent. I got a waiver to be directly involved in this one since it is not exactly standard operating procedure.”

“It’s not going to get out that, that—”

“You’ve had a long morning. Eat some lunch.”

Mickey found he was famished—and the food surprisingly good. As they ate, Branko began a methodical exposition, walking him through the mission, the contact methods, and the fallbacks. He was clear on the decision points, both for the boys and for Lee. Branko was brutally direct on the consequences of failure. The more explicit he was on the assignment—to get to Lee and convince him to defect—the more anxious Mickey became about the details.

“What’s the evidence there’s an imminent threat to the summit?” Mickey pressed.

“Some conversations we’ve been picking up. People over there talking as if they assume it will be cancelled. Or end in some fiasco.”

“Like what?”

“Unclear.”

“Wouldn’t an incident make it harder to get Lee out later?”

“Of course it would.” Branko was reluctant to indulge him, pausing to choose his words carefully. “But that is a choice we cannot make for him.”

“But where is the threat coming from?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t say? Or don’t know?”

“Mickey. . .” Branko was shaking his head now, “we really don’t know.”

“What? You’re the fucking CIA, Branko. I thought you guys had a solid read on this kind of stuff.”

“The truth is, there are lots of things we don’t know. Sometimes, the best we can do—all we can do, in fact—is ask the right questions, then make some calculated speculations. Get used to it.”

Their table had been cleared, and it was nearly two o’clock when Branko began to wrap up. “I am having an escort come up to take you back through the gate in a van.”

“You don’t want to be seen with me?”

“Standard op. You were never here. No need to take a chance you’re recognized by somebody waiting in Reception.”

“So, this is goodbye?”

“Goodbye? Yes, I suppose. But only for awhile, hopefully.”

But now, fatigued as he was, Mickey needed to say more. He felt an urgent desire to defend himself, to justify his choices—to sum up.

“Branko,” he began haltingly, “I haven’t really thanked you properly.”

“I haven’t done anything yet—except get you strapped to a polygraph.”

“No. I mean, thanks for taking a chance on me. Thanks for sticking your neck out here.”

Branko fiddled with the buttons on his coat. Then he mumbled something Mickey thought he might have misheard. “It’s just business.”

Branko looked up again, lecturing him now. “This summit is going to play a critical role in the ongoing Chinese succession struggle. They have a new guy in charge, but he still has significant internal challenges. They’ve got a big Party Congress soon and they’re facing a lot of popular discontent. They’re at a fork in the road. If guys like the Red Dragons prevail, things could get real ugly. So, we’re willing to take some chances.”