MEXICO CITY
“Hello, James Bond,” began the voicemail message to the Peter Tong alias telephone number in the Operations Center. The woman spoke slowly and carefully in Chinese-accented English. She said she had a “big difficulty from the consulate.” She implored Peter Tong, who had been so kind and had volunteered to help, to please call her back. “You are so strong. Can you take care of me now?” Her last words were silk. She left a number in Vancouver.
Harris Chang listened to the message on a secure circuit. The voice was unmistakably that of Li Fan, Jasmine, the mistress of the late Dr. Ma Yubo. The message arrived just before noon, Washington time. Chang’s heart raced for a moment when he heard the voice. He bit his lip.
Chang’s first move, after digesting her seeming plea for help, was to contact John Vandel. The deputy director for operations was eating lunch at his desk; he had food in his mouth when he said hello.
“My Tong voice-drop just got a message from Dr. Ma’s girlfriend,” said Chang.
“I know. She’s hot for your bod, Harris. Did you fuck her?”
Chang felt a flush of embarrassment. Of course, Vandel had listened to the tape first. He was the boss.
“We established some rapport. Good tradecraft.”
“Well, you little sidewinder, you. You left that out of the cable. And now she wants to talk. For openers. Frankly, I’m delighted.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Call her back,” said Vandel. “Tout de suite.”
“What if it’s a trap?” asked Chang.
“It’s almost certainly a trap. We want to know who’s running it, and why.”
“What if she asks me to go somewhere to meet her?”
“Then say yes. Mr. Bond is at your service.”
“Okay,” said Chang dubiously. “What if she wants to meet somewhere that isn’t Canada or the U.S.?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go to Beijing. But otherwise, yeah, sure. Why not? You could suggest Iraq.”
“Ha, ha,” said Chang. “You’re not taking this very seriously.”
“To the contrary. I am more invested in your rescue mission than you might realize. This is what we want. Keep pulling on the thread.”
“What am I pulling? What intel am I after?”
“We want to see their cards. They’re running a mole and they’re scared we know who it is. They just lost a senior adviser to their service. They must be suspecting that we recruited him. And even more, they must be worrying that he blew their secrets before he died. Like I said, pull on the thread. Eventually, no more sweater.”
“And what do they want?”
“Who cares? Watch and learn. That’s all you have to do. They’re not going to shoot you. The Chinese don’t do that. Just listen. Whatever happens, it’s all good.”
Chang swallowed hard and brought the telephone close to his mouth.
“Level with me, boss: This is what you wanted all along, right? That’s why you sent me to see this woman in Vancouver in the first place, and then had me go to Stanford, handing out my card. You were chumming the water.”
“Guilty as charged,” answered Vandel. He rang off, leaving Chang to return the call to the young Chinese woman in Vancouver.
Li Fan sounded more than grateful when she received Harris Chang’s phone call. She needed him. She choked back a sniffle when Chang finally said he had to go.
The damsel in distress had been well briefed. She told her rescuer that it was too dangerous to meet in Vancouver and that America wasn’t possible because she had no visa. She proposed instead that they meet in Mexico City in two days. She had even picked out a rendezvous: Gran Hotel Cuidad de México.
“Good hotel. Best in town. I made a reservation. Is that alright, my dear? I am so frightened. I will be waiting.”
Harris Chang said he would meet her at the hotel in two days at 4:00 in the afternoon. He would call up to her room, and if Jasmine answered with the address of her apartment building in the Burnaby suburb of Vancouver, he would come up and meet her. Any other greeting and he would abort the meeting.
Li Fan repeated the address coolly. This was a setup, stone cold, on both sides. Chang stopped by Kate Sturm’s office that afternoon to request Support to make arrangements. She wasn’t encouraging.
“We’re not well staffed in Mexico, I’m afraid,” said Sturm. “It seems like everyone has better operational resources there than we do. Not our turf.”
“Well, find some, please,” said Chang. “I’m going to need some watchers in two days, no matter whose turf it is.”
Carlos Wang slipped into the Chinese Embassy in Mexico City. The front entrance on Avenue San Jeronimo was simply a gatehouse, a façade with five Aztec carvings, the middle one crested with the Chinese seal, and the red flag flying behind. It was covered by constant U.S. surveillance. But the street behind the compound had a back entrance through a big office building.
Carlos checked in with the MSS resident at the embassy when he arrived. He was the head of the American Operations Division—visiting royalty, in effect. Carlos informed the Mexican intelligence liaison officer, too. The MSS wanted to maintain the comradely environment of Mexico City, a city where Chinese money was augmenting the “fraternal ties” of leftist solidarity.
The Chinese had built their embassy not in the fancier, northern districts of the city but in Coyoacán, the place of the coyotes, the historic home of the Mexican left. The Autonomous University was nearby, and just north was the “Blue House,” the home of the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, red priest and priestess.
For Carlos Wang, there was another spot of veneration nearby, one that he didn’t dare mention to his colleagues at the embassy. Carlos left his leather jacket and beret in the closet. He wore a proper blue blazer with brass buttons, pulled his long hair back into a pony tail, and slipped out the back way onto Rio de la Magdalena.
Wang walked northeast. He knew the way by heart because he had made the pilgrimage before. He took side streets and paused occasionally to look for surveillance in the storefront windows. But who would be following him, except for other Chinese? Those he could spot in a heartbeat. He ambled down the alleyways, listening to an old Cuban recording from the Buena Vista Social Club through the ear buds of his iPhone.
He approached the shrine on a frontage road parallel to Avenida Río Churubusco. The house was a museum now, painted bright red with a red picket fence: “Museo Casa de León Trotsky.”
Wang entered the courtyard of the old house, unchanged since the day in 1940 that Trotsky was murdered. It was a pleasant villa but topped with a crude masonry watchtower for Trotsky’s bodyguards. Trotsky had known they were coming for him; they had tried to kill him once before. But still, he had stayed on, feeding his chickens and rabbits and writing his biography of Stalin that would expose all the secrets of the red monster.
Carlos Wang lingered in every corner of the house. The dining room, with its black-and-yellow tables and chairs, painted like bumblebees—the simple whitewashed quarters for his comrades and bodyguards, the “family” that had braved machine guns in the attack three months before his assassination and had stayed.
And then the study. Carlos Wang was not a religious man, but he did venerate the ancestors. Nothing on Trotsky’s desk had been moved since the day the assassin plunged an icepick into his head. His reading glasses were on the table; his typewriter was behind him, awaiting the final revisions of the Stalin exposé; a crude Dictaphone stood next to the desk to record his words.
And the books of his little library, arrayed just so: Marx and Engels, of course, and also several volumes of a Russian encyclopedia. Carlos Wang studied the Cyrillic writing on the spines of the books. Lev Bronstein was a revolutionary theorist, certainly, but also a man of meticulous fact. That was what Carlos Wang remembered, every time he visited this shrine and thought of his own intelligence agency, encrusted in bourgeois wealth and aspiration, and their rivals in the PLA even worse. Like Trotsky, he hated watching a revolution decay.
It was getting near the time Wang should leave for his meeting. He made one last stop in the garden out back. Trotsky’s ashes were buried under a granite stone, bearing his name and the hammer and sickle, below a red flag flapping stiffly in the fall breeze. Carlos Wang looked at the marker and remembered a line of Trotsky’s he had read years before, when even to say the man’s name in China was the rankest heresy. It had been written by the young Trotsky in 1924, before the unraveling, when revolution was still a white sheet of consciousness and the dreamer was trying to imagine the future:
“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”
Carlos Wang bowed, imperceptibly, before the tomb. He reminded himself what the stakes were in the project he had embraced. They were seeking a quantum computing machine that would replicate the very essence of human thought, a machine as subtle and ambiguous as the human brain, whose fruits would rise even above the peaks that his secret mentor had imagined. The idea that a venal, corrupted America would possess this thinking machine first was an abomination.
Harris Chang approached the Gran Hotel from the wide expanse of the Zocalo plaza. Behind him, a hundred yards distant, was the splendid façade of the National Palace. In the southwest corner was the turreted tower of the hotel.
Chang was dressed in a pale blue windbreaker over a turtleneck. His eyes were covered by wraparound shades with mirrored lenses. He was wearing a backpack with the gear he had brought with him on the flight from D.C. He had traveled light, unsure how long he would stay. His instructions from Vandel were as skimpy as his kit.
Chang had stopped earlier that day at a safe house near the U.S. embassy on the Paseo de la Reforma. The local operations chief said he had stationed six watchers at the Gran Hotel. He was grumpy: A big station like Mexico City was like a hot-sheet motel; guests in and out, no questions asked.
Chang thanked the ops chief for arranging surveillance, but the team wasn’t large enough to do much good if someone wanted to grab him.
Chang fell in behind a group of Chinese tourists gathered in the Zocalo. The Chinese were just off a bus, forming an orderly queue behind their guides. Chang accompanied them toward the southwest corner of the Zocalo and then slipped away. He waited for a knot of visitors arriving at the entrance to the hotel and followed in their wake. Inside, it was as if he had entered another century. Vaulting above the lobby was a delicate ceiling of stained glass.
Chang headed for the concierge desk. He asked the uniformed attendant in halting Spanish to be connected to Miss Li. The concierge answered in English: He asked for identification and Chang handed over his Peter Tong passport. The man at the desk called up to the room, announced the visitor’s name, nodded, and then handed the phone to Chang.
“Hello,” Chang said. “I want to make sure I have the right room. What is your address?”
“I have missed you, James Bond,” the Chinese woman said. “I live on 4200 Lougheed Highway in Vancouver. I am happy that you want to see me again. Will you come upstairs please?”
The concierge, with a knowing wink, pointed Chang toward the elevator.
Chang knocked on the door. Young, helpless Miss Li was standing just inside. She was wearing a form-fitting silk dress. It exposed the curves of her breasts, but she had gathered a shawl around her shoulders. She looked guilty and embarrassed.
Chang entered warily. It was a setup; it had to be. When she closed the door, Chang could see that she had in her hand an envelope.
“A Chinese man was here before you,” she said. “He wants to meet you. He said to give you this. I am sorry.”
Chang stared at her until she dropped her gaze.
“Maybe I am a bad woman to make you come all this way. But I am Chinese, you understand.”
She handed Chang the envelope. It was addressed to “Harris Chang.” He opened it and read the computer-printed note inside:
“Dear Mr. Chang: I have a message concerning Dr. Ma Yubo. Please meet me this afternoon in Pachuca district, fifty miles north of the city. It is not safe here for our conversation. For that same reason, I cannot give you the address in Pachuca. A car is waiting for you downstairs, at the corner of Palma and 16 de Septiembre. It has a blue pennant on the passenger-side window. The car will bring you to me. Come alone. If you are followed, the meeting will not take place.”
The note was signed in Chinese characters. Below that, the sender had typed “Wang Ji, Ministry of State Security.”
“You need to go now,” said Li Fan. “They will be waiting.”
The car was on the corner, just as the note said, a block from the hotel entrance, next to a Nike Outlet Store. A muscular Mexican man was sitting in the driver’s seat, his head nearly touching the car’s upholstered roof. Chang read the license plate and then stepped away into the shadows on Calle de la Palma, several dozen yards away, and called Vandel on his secure cell phone.
“I’m at the meeting place, down in the street, outside. Nobody was in the hotel room other than the fairy princess. She handed me a note addressed to me in my real name, not the Tong identity. It was signed by Wang Ji. It says he wants to meet outside the city. If I’m followed, no meeting.”
“Should I go? There’s a car here waiting to take me someplace up north in Pachuca, toward the Sierra Madre. Or so the note said. What should I do?”
“Go! Vaya con dios,” said Vandel. “I wish I could come along.”
“Can anyone cover me up there? I don’t know where we’re going.”
“Not to worry, Harris. The Chinese won’t hurt you. They aren’t ISIS. They don’t operate like that. Let’s just see what the play is. We’ll have you overhead. I have a drone up on loan from the DEA. We’ll follow you out of Mexico City. We can jump in if you get in trouble. But you won’t.”
“Thanks, bro,” said Chang, sarcastically. “I think the Chinese care more about my ass than you do.”
“Don’t say that, Harris. Not even in jest. Let them lead. This is their show. If they ask any questions, say you have to check with Headquarters and request another meeting.”
Chang sighed. He looked at the car and driver from his perch. “All in.” That was what his commander in the 101st Airborne liked to say at the commander’s morning huddle every day in Mosul.
“You want the license plate number?”
“Sure. What’s the tag?”
“The number is ZHB-43-36. The car is a black Lexus.”
“Got it,” said Vandel. “Have fun.”
Chang went back into the hotel. He put his secure cell phone into his backpack and checked that he was carrying only Peter Tong identification and pocket litter. He asked the concierge to check his backpack, gave him a twenty dollar bill, and took the ticket. He went back on the street and found the black Lexus, still idling on the corner. The blue pennant was fixed to the right window, as promised.
Chang leaned toward the driver to say who he was, but the Mexican just nodded and pointed toward the back seat. He had already gotten confirmation from someone that the Chinese-American in the blue windbreaker was the designated passenger. Chang opened the back door and took a seat. A lock clicked, and Chang found he couldn’t open his door. The driver went to the trunk, took a new set of license plates and, after removing the previous tags, fastened the new ones in place.
“All in,” Chang told himself.
The Lexus pulled away from the corner and headed north toward Avenida de los Insurgentes and the slow crawl of afternoon traffic. Chang scanned the forest of billboards that skirted the slum neighborhoods on either side. “Will you choose good or great?” asked a whiskey ad. Chang would settle for “alive.”
When the car reached Route 85, the main route north, the driver pulled off the road and loosely bound Harris Chang’s hands, blindfolded him, and made him lie down flat on the back seat before continuing toward Pachuca.