Ten hours later, Agent Lim and I were sitting together in the interrogation room at JFK where he’d first detained me. I dialed Bo’s number and he picked up on the third ring.
“Hey, Michael. How did your meeting with Yang Xujun go? Will he work with us?”
“Unfortunately, no,” I said. “I did everything I could to convince him but he said it’s too risky for him right now. Because of the witch hunt. One of his closest friends in the Computer Science Department just got placed under house arrest. You were right, everyone is on high alert.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. I let Bo sit in his disappointment for a few seconds.
“That’s too bad,” Bo said. “Well, that’s alright, come back to Beijing. We can talk about what to do next here.”
Agent Lim shook his head. I gave him a hard look and paused for two seconds before continuing.
“Actually, I have another update for you that you might like,” I said. “At the fifteen-year alumni tent I spoke to the head of the golf program, James Wilkinson. I brought up your son’s case. He was impressed by Kevin’s recent tournament performance and I messaged that you were interested in making a significant contribution to the golf program this year. Wilkinson said there might be a spot for Kevin on the team this fall and that he was willing to have a meeting with you and Kevin to discuss it. Unfortunately, this kind of meeting has to be in person, and he also said we’d have to do it before next week as we’re already late in the athletic recruiting season. What do you think?”
For an agonizing three seconds, the line was silent. “Hold on, let me talk to my wife,” he said. Bo covered the microphone for about a minute and I could hear rapid muffled Mandarin in the background. Then he came back on. “Well done, Michael. I will not forget this. I can be there the day after tomorrow. Will that work for Mr. Wilkinson?”
“Yes, leave it to me,” I said. “Send me your flight details and I’ll escort you to the meeting from the airport myself to make the introduction in person.”
“How should I prepare for this meeting?”
“I would bring a copy of Kevin’s highlight reel on a portable drive. And for the donation, I would come with a number in the nine digits,” I said authoritatively.
“Sounds good. Thank you for making time for this.” Then he hung up.
I looked over at Agent Lim, whose eyes were gleaming.
“Michael, Michael,” he said, shaking me by the shoulders. “You absolute devil. Bringing the kid into this? I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Bo was on Cathay Pacific flight CX335 from Beijing to JFK, touching down at 2:58 P.M. At two o’clock, I sat waiting by the window in the United Lounge. Agent Lim had told me I could watch what happened next from here.
At 2:55 P.M., three minutes ahead of schedule, Bo’s plane touched down, then came to a stop in the middle of the runway. A truck towing a set of passenger stairs slowly pulled up to the front cabin exit. Then, a caravan of black Chevy Suburbans swarmed the aircraft on both sides. Agent Lim and Agent Reddy stepped out of the lead vehicle and ascended the stairs. Two minutes later, they emerged with Bo and his son handcuffed and loaded them into the back seat of the lead vehicle. Kevin was visibly shaking as Reddy guided him down the steps while Bo kept his head down. The caravan dispersed, and after a few minutes, the plane continued to taxi to the gate.
A few minutes later, I watched the arrest replay on TV in glorious helicopter footage. The headline read: CHINESE SUPERSPY ARRESTED AT JFK. Voicing over the clip, the newscaster announced that Yuanhong Wang, a top-ranking Chinese intelligence operative, had been arrested by federal authorities who had lured him to New York on the false pretense of arranging a “side door” admission to Princeton for his son, Kevin Song. Bo, the newscaster explained, was personally responsible for the theft of American secrets worth more than $100 billion over multiple decades. I wondered where they got that number from. Then the program cut to a two-panel view where a different reporter was interviewing Agent Lim on the runway. Lim had taken off his sunglasses and looked handsome on-camera in his dark blue suit with American flag pin.
“The arrest of Yuanhong Wang marks a significant victory in our multiyear campaign against Chinese state-sponsored corporate espionage,” he said. “We want today to send a powerful message to all those who would attempt to steal American secrets. The FBI is opening a new counterintelligence investigation into China every twelve hours. If you have spies in our country, now is the time to bring them home, because we are confident we will catch every last one.
“Lastly, this was really a team effort involving multiple federal agencies. A special thank you to US Attorney Richard Scully from the Northern District of California for his visionary leadership here.”
The segment ended and cut to a report on the subway system in New York City. I looked around the lounge; no one seemed to have been paying attention. I took a few shaky breaths and ordered a whisky sour at the bar. My cell phone rang from a 415 number and I picked up immediately.
“Well done, Michael,” Richard Scully said. “Listen, you played your cards well, and my office is true to its word. Go on and enjoy your freedom. All your problems just rode off into the sunset with Agent Lim in the back seat of that Suburban. May I give you some unsolicited advice? Try to avoid traveling to China.”
I granted him an awkward chuckle.
“Listen, the reason I’m calling you right away is to remind you that your participation in this plan is top secret. The Chinese will be investigating what happened here today and we don’t want any loose ends. We’ll need you to come to San Francisco tomorrow to sign an NDA. We can talk more when you’re here, I’m happy to answer any questions that you have. Can you be on a plane in the next few hours?”
“Yes, sir, of course,” I said.
At JFK, I found the clip of Bo’s arrest on YouTube and watched it over and over again. On the fifth or sixth rewatch, the vengeful thrill of seeing Bo handcuffed and shoved into the back seat gave way to something else. Maybe it was despair. Because even though he’d condemned me and changed the course of my life forever, it still hurt to betray somebody. And I believed—and still, to this day, believe—that although the premise was false, there were moments of genuine connection between Bo and me. Nothing is ever completely real, and nothing is ever completely fake.
As the adrenaline wore off on my way to San Francisco, I became subsumed with anxiety over what life would look like in the aftermath of this case. In the extreme case, would I need to go into witness protection? How would I ever find another job? For some reason, the drastic stuff like witness protection filled me with less dread than just the prospect of returning to the directionless void of the way things were.
My flight landed at around eleven o’clock in the evening and I took an Uber to my old apartment in Chinatown. I walked through the moon gate of Club Mandarin and found the restaurant empty, no sign of Daniel, Tony, or Jeffrey anywhere. I opened the door and surveyed the landscape of the things I’d so easily left behind—the remnants of something that at this point felt more like a past life. The plants had died and everything was covered in a thin layer of dust. Something about the scene broke my heart; maybe it was the impossibility of mentally inserting myself back into this space, of simply going back to the way things used to be. There’d been a splintering in my soul I couldn’t suture. In the kitchen, I found a carton of purple FPMO cigarettes still sitting on the counter. I took out a pack and smoked them by myself in the alley outside of Club Mandarin.
After a fitful night of sleep, I met Scully the next morning at his office in a modest two-story government building in Potrero Hill. He came outside personally to get me from the waiting room, then shook my hand warmly and asked me to take a seat.
“Congratulations again, Michael. These things usually don’t work out so well. Now, what questions do you have for me?”
I started by asking whether or not I would need to go into witness protection, and how I would ever find another job. Scully laughed.
“Oh, Michael. You’ve been watching too much Narcos. Things aren’t okay between China and the US right now, but they’re certainly not sending assassins over to murder civilians. I wouldn’t worry about that. As for job stuff, you’re in luck. Here’s what you’ll put on your resume…”
He slid over a piece of paper that looked like an excerpt from a fake resume. The main bullet read PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES: SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER, JUNE 2017–JUNE 2018.
“We’re giving you that promotion you always wanted!” he said cheerily. “The FBI partners with Palantir to provide job references for people like you who have helped us out in various unmentionable ways. You’ll find the names and email addresses of your references, real Palantir employees with top-secret clearance, at the bottom of the page. We’ve instructed them to speak vaguely but glowingly. Are you planning on jumping right into the job search?”
“Not really. I need a bit of a break to process everything that’s happened.”
“Fair enough. Makes sense. What are you thinking for your time off?”
I thought for a second about how much I should tell Scully. “When I first went to Beijing at the beginning of this ordeal, one of my goals was to find my dad. He disappeared around the time I was nine or ten years old. Somehow I just knew in my gut that if he was anywhere, he’d be in Beijing. And then Bo told me that he’d actually recruited my dad many years ago to work at a secret research facility in the mountains outside of the city. I know I can’t go back to China, but I’m hoping there’s still some way for me to look for him.”
Scully looked at me blankly and blinked several times. “Michael, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“It’s true that Bo recruited your father in the year 1997. But he’s not working in some top-secret Chinese government research lab. He’s an inmate at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, 35 miles east of here.”
I shook my head. “No, that can’t be right. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure—I put him in there myself. Your father was found guilty of economic espionage in 2002 and sentenced to seventeen years. I was an assistant US attorney at the time. To be honest, the similarities and differences with yours are fascinating. From the interviews, I got the impression that your father was motivated primarily by some bizarre desire to help his birth country, and only secondarily by the titles and recognition Bo used to tempt him. In fact, he never made any money off of this. I do remember he asked me during his sentencing not to share the story with you or your mother; I guess he wanted to spare you the shame. Look where that got us, eh? I guess the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree. It’s good you weaseled your way out of this one, otherwise we could’ve been in store for quite an awkward family reunion in Santa Rita.”
Scully had a bemused look on his face, like he’d been waiting to drop this information on me since the first time we spoke. I wouldn’t give him a show. I clenched my jaw and my knuckles whitened over the armrest.
“Alright then,” Scully said. “Anything else you want to ask me?”
“No, not at this time,” I said icily. “Thank you for arranging the references. I’ll be on my way now.”
A sly smirk spread across Scully’s jowly face. “Really, Michael? Aren’t you wondering about what happened to Vivian?”
For a few seconds, it felt like every cell in my body was screaming for oxygen.
“I don’t blame you for not being upfront with us about Vivian,” he said. “I can see how from your perspective, it could seem like something that would be embarrassing to admit. Though I’ve got to say, we did ask you pretty directly to tell us everything about what happened up until that point. That definitely docked you a point or two in integrity. But no matter, all’s well that ends well.
“So let me tell you what we know, or think we know, about Vivian before you spend the rest of your life looking for her too. She isn’t some rich heiress or art collector. And Bo certainly isn’t her uncle; he’s her commanding officer. Needless to say, Vivian isn’t her real name, which we don’t actually know. What we do know is that she’s a rising star at the MSS, part of a new guard that sees things in a fundamentally different way than Bo’s generation. Bo and his inner circle are committed to the original strategy of unscrupulous IP theft to advance development at all costs. The new guard believes, I think correctly, that this strategy will eventually result in armed conflict between the two most powerful nations in history. Therefore, a courageous few have established a secret channel between the agencies to try and facilitate a sort of détente and slow the escalation of hostilities.
“Vivian is a key leader in this effort. And so is Ferris Guo, your handler. The two have been in contact since at least 2008. We believe Vivian was the principal reason why Ferris survived the purge of CIA assets in 2010; she found a way to take his name off the list.
“The long and short of it is, Bo’s imprisonment will create a vacuum, which gives Vivian an opportunity to increase her influence within the MSS and shift the agency toward this new strategy. Spying will always be a fact of life in international relations, and we don’t know if we can fully trust her, but she’s someone we can at least work with to prevent tensions from spilling over into something disastrous. So I suppose what I’m saying is that you can feel good, Michael, about playing a role in making the world a safer place.”
“So where is she now?”
“That I can’t tell you,” Scully said. “Obviously the strategy she just pulled off came at enormous risk to herself. If Bo’s inner circle found out, they’d probably have her court-martialed for treason. For her own safety, we’re no longer in contact with her. In fact, she cut off contact with us the moment she flagged you to us.”
“She flagged me?”
“Yes, of course she flagged you,” Scully said, a strain of impatience in his voice. “Like we told you from the very beginning—the technology that you ‘stole’ on behalf of the Chinese had no scientific or commercial value whatsoever. And we’re opening up a new case every twelve hours. How do you think you jumped right to the top of the queue? Vivian insisted for some reason that you, of all the contacts she’d developed, had the potential to lure Bo out of hiding and catch him in a mistake. I’m going to be honest, Michael, at first I didn’t see what she was talking about. I still don’t. But thankfully for all of us, it looks like Vivian’s faith in you wasn’t misplaced.”
Of all the contacts she’d developed. Given the totality of the new information, I’m not sure why that phrase stung so much. I excused myself and headed to the door.