The first piece of corroborating evidence that something had shifted in the macro environment came from Christine, a few days after Ferris told me about our new deadline. We had started to have dinner together every week or so, and were eating at a hot pot restaurant in Guomao.
“By the way, Michael, have you noticed anything different about Bo recently?”
“What do you mean?”
“He seems a little on edge recently. Canceling a lot of his meetings last minute. He and his wife are usually very social, but they haven’t asked for my help entertaining in quite some time.”
“Maybe it’s a busy period at work,” I said.
“No, I don’t think it’s that,” she said, lowering her voice to almost a whisper. “Three days ago two men with government IDs came into Bo’s office without an appointment and spoke to him with the door shut for two hours. That never happens.”
I paused. “Are you sure you should be telling me this?”
“I know. I shouldn’t be telling you. But I’m scared and I don’t know who else I can talk to about this.”
“Listen, Christine. The next time something like this happens, can you let me know?”
She nodded.
The next time I saw Bo, the changes that Christine described were immediately obvious. He seemed gaunter and yellower, like he hadn’t been sleeping, and his eyes, usually jovial, had taken on a much blacker tone. During our weekly meetings, I felt his mind was occupied elsewhere. Every time I brought up the possibility of meeting Yang in person, he seemed to deflect onto another subject.
The color from Ferris was that there appeared to be a general freezing out within the Chinese intelligence community. We didn’t know whether or not it was connected to the hawkish US response to the corn tariffs. Many of Ferris’s assets had stopped delivering meaningful information and one had cut communication entirely. It was becoming dangerous for us to make a move.
Despite his warnings, I pressed Ferris to send as many high-value profiles to me as possible in the little time we left. Each time, he cautioned me about the dangers of pushing Bo too hard. Powerful people behaved unpredictably when threatened, he said. Being discovered by Bo would result in much more serious consequences than standing trial in the United States.
Still, with time running out, I continued to lobby hard with Bo. Once, I think I pushed him too far. I was in the middle of telling him about an MIT AI researcher who wanted to meet him in Brussels when he suddenly lifted his hand and cut me off.
“Michael,” he said softly. I noticed his hand was shaking. “This is all good progress. But I have a question for you. Why do so many of these scientists suddenly want to meet me outside of the country?”
I froze. Bo’s black eyes bored into mine. This was the first time he seemed to be really listening during the entire meeting. Perhaps he’d already figured everything out; would it be better to just tell him everything now and expose the FBI conspiracy against him? Maybe if I promised to be his fall man with the DOJ, he’d show some leniency.
“I was confused too at first,” I said. “It’s definitely been happening more lately. I think it’s due to more extensive media coverage of unfair DOJ prosecution of Chinese-born scientists under the China Initiative. There are now many examples of academics at Harvard, MIT, being put on watch lists simply for visiting China. And speaking to many academics myself, I’m keenly aware of how quickly these rumors are running through the whisper networks. While I’m always happy to establish and work the relationships, I don’t have the stature myself to secure a commitment on my own. You should understand that at some point, we may need you to get involved personally.”
As I finished speaking, Bo shifted his gaze off of me, giving no indication as to whether or not he believed my explanation.
“Perhaps you are right about the changing climate in the US. Nonetheless, it’s not a good time for me to be leaving China right now.”
In this way, three weeks passed with very little progress. As time ran out, I started to feel mired in hopelessness. There was something quite absurd, maybe even funny, about the situation I now found myself in. I, Michael Wang, who was not politically savvy enough to even procure an eating club guest pass for ninety percent of my weekends at Princeton, was now expected to lure a seasoned Chinese intelligence operative out of hiding. Expected, perhaps, was probably not the right word, though, since it seemed no one really believed I had a chance of succeeding. After debriefing the last meeting with Ferris, the stream of profiles started to slow. So now I was left with nothing but time and the obligation to spend it. I began to reflect more on my short life and the series of small disappointments and large overcorrections that had led me to this point.
During this interim period, the artifice of my life in Beijing started to become more noticeable. When I first came to China I thought, perhaps naïvely, that it would be a place where I could lead a life that would be closer to my “true self,” unencumbered by whatever it ultimately was that kept me at a distance from others in America. By contrast, everything here felt staged. I had everything I needed inside the benevolent ecosystem of my apartment compound—gym, green space, even some restaurants and grocery stores. Whenever I used the facilities, the attendants would give me the same smile, greet me by my name like in a country club, and record my comings and goings. Everything felt designed for me to stay within Bo’s carefully calibrated boundary conditions. When I did venture outside the compound to bars and restaurants, it seemed like the staff at restaurants and bars were already half expecting me; they knew my name and my connection to Bo, and somehow always had a table open for me. It was quite the opposite of being invisible, yet in a way somehow more alienating. Was it really possible Bo didn’t already know of my plan? I was certain that my apartment had been bugged. I turned my place inside out looking for hidden cameras and microphones; my failure to find any only made me more convinced they’d been cleverly hidden. I started to think of myself as instance number 798 of a large-scale simulation programmed by Bo. Random coincidences appeared mysteriously connected, imbued with deeply encrypted meaning. I discovered that the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 was enacted on October 11—my birthday. One day I saw the Club Mandarin in the background of a TV news story about fires in San Francisco. I kept thinking of the Girl and Camera painting I’d spotted at the Hugo Gallery on my day in the country.
The money that automatically appeared every other week in my Bank of China account also seemed virtual, since there was no way I could move it out of the country or expect to hold onto it after the simulation came to an end. Since it was not realistic for me to assume that I, instance number 798, would be the one to break the boundary conditions, it fell upon me to simply enjoy my remaining runtime as much as possible. Every night I booked VIP tables at nightclubs and lounges in Sanlitun and invited Hans and Christian to join me. The hostesses would come with bottles of potentially counterfeit foreign vodka that tasted like numbing agent and plates with sliced-up pineapples and watermelon with mini plastic umbrellas sticking out of them. Who wanted to eat watermelon at a club? I started smoking again, this time a copious amount, and always had the Yunnan tobacco aftertaste in my mouth.
Christine and I kept up our weekly dinner date, but each seemed to go worse than the last. To me, she was part of the simulation as well. This was because her entrance and continued presence in my life was completely contrived. Bo had plucked her out of MSS Central Casting and cast her in a boilerplate role, bait and switched her for Vivian without explanation. As we got closer to Scully’s deadline, I started to realize that I was and had been deeply angry about this. She was so ordinary and we had no special chemistry; I wouldn’t have risked everything and cut myself off from my life for a woman like Christine. Every time she did something thoughtful for me, like dropping home-cooked food by my apartment, it felt programmed and impersonal, like an email drip campaign. My anger was directed not just at Bo but also toward myself, for simply accepting it without complaint. Still, some of it inevitably found its way to Christine. One evening we were having dinner on the candlelit terrace of Malaparte, an Italian restaurant in Dongzhimen. I didn’t care much for the spaghetti, which was too sweet and getting cold. Neither of us had said anything for five minutes before she finally broke the silence.
“What’s going on, Michael?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been acting so distant lately. Did something happen?”
“Of course not. Everything is great,” I said. I spooled a few strings of spaghetti with my fork and gestured at the terrace. “Look at this beautiful food on such a beautiful evening. What could possibly be better?”
“It’s just me, Michael. You can talk to me.” She looked at me imploringly and rested her hands on the table. I leaned back in my seat and rotated my wine glass.
“I’m not sure what you want,” I said curtly. “Bo sent you to me to be my companion, maybe even keep a bit of an eye on me, though we never talk about that, and that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? So if you don’t mind, let’s just keep going through the motions.”
Christine exhaled sharply and refolded her napkin across her lap. For a second I thought she would leave. “When we first met, Bo told me to text you once a month and see if you needed anything,” she said flatly. “Everything else was me.”
Throughout all of this I continued with Bo’s suggested practice regiment of three times per week at the golf simulator. It was a good way for me to pass the hours I’d otherwise have spent dwelling on how little time I had left. In the end, I was glad I practiced, because one day Bo called out of the blue and asked if I was ready for the real thing. He took me to a private course in one of the outer rings of the city. Even though we were thirty-seven miles from the city center, the smog was still thick, and I found myself huffing and puffing between holes. I focused on playing fast over playing well to avoid slowing down Bo, who seemed pleased by the progress I had made. I noticed an overall uplift in his spirits. The bags around his eyes had softened, and his movements were less stiff. We finished our eighteen holes at around the four-hour mark and Bo patted me on the back.
“Very good performance today, Michael, especially for your first time on a real course. I can tell you’ve been practicing.”
“Thank you—that means a lot to me. The real thing is way more enjoyable.”
“It’s good to have a love for the game, especially a game like this that you can still play even when you’re well past your prime like I am. To be honest, the courses we have in Beijing are not world-class. One day, I’ll take you to my favorite course in Scotland.”
I allowed myself the momentary satisfaction of imagining Agent Lim slapping handcuffs around Bo’s wrists right at the arrivals gate in Heathrow. As we made our way to the parking lot, I pulled out my phone to call a cab home.
“Hold on, Michael. Would you like to join me for dinner with my family? Our house is not far from here.”