Preston Allender relaxed in the backseat of the Suburban as he was driven back to the Farm through the dense evening traffic. So far, so good, he thought, fairly sure now that he had his candidate. She’d dropped into character without a hitch and she hadn’t badgered him with premature questions. She was being surprisingly professional for just two years in the field, and she’d certainly had the desired effect on Chiang Liang-fu. Carson McGill would be pleased. Hell, even he’d felt like a teenager who’d scored a dinner date with the best-looking girl in school.
There had been that one question about his knowing Chiang. He smiled mentally at the memories that inquiry had provoked. His father, an electronics engineer, had been a rising star at Westinghouse in the field of medical imaging when he’d met and married Allender’s future mother, an exchange student from Taiwan, who was finishing a Ph.D. in molecular biology at MIT. Young Preston had been five when they left the Boston area for Taipei.
They rented a house in the Songshan District and Preston attended the prestigious Taipei American School in the Shilin District. In the twelve years they spent in Taipei, Preston grew up as an only child in a household that spoke both upper-class Mandarin and English. Following a management shakeout at Westinghouse after a big contract went to another company, Preston’s father had left the company and brought the family back to America. They bought a house in the prestigious Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His father had taken an assignment as a consultant to the Agency for International Development, while his mother became a department head at the National Institutes of Health. Preston was admitted to the premed curriculum at George Washington University. With his mother’s connections, he was easily admitted to GWU Medical School, and he graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. Having chosen forensic psychiatry as his ultimate specialty, he underwent four years of residency training in psychiatry and then a two-year internship in forensic psychiatry before sitting for his licensing examinations. Throughout his medical education, his ability to speak Mandarin fluently brought additional networking opportunities, as his various schools tapped him to attend seminars, workshops, and other official functions at which visiting Chinese doctors would be present. This in turn attracted the attention of a CIA recruiter, who enticed Allender to join the Agency, which was just then coming to grips with the scope of the People’s Republic of China’s espionage programs in America.
That pattern continued once he’d been with the Agency’s training directorate for a while. He would regularly attend diplomatic functions in Washington that included Chinese officials, because they presented an opportunity to put an intelligence-trained psychiatrist alongside a senior or otherwise interesting Communist Party member. As Allender rose in the Agency’s operative-development program, the Chinese Ministry of Security Services became aware of him, which meant that when he did appear at State Department receptions or other top-level functions involving Chinese officials, they had all been briefed to beware of the American doctor with the upper-class Mandarin accent and the unsettling amber eyes. A Russian official who’d been warned about Allender would have limited his conversation to the weather, but Chinese officials seemed to enjoy a little mental sparring: I know who you are, and you know who I am, so let’s put that aside for a moment and just see who can mess with whom. The generous spectrum of meanings and maybe-meanings of Mandarin made that game even more interesting, and Allender had a huge advantage over the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute–trained American officials of having been speaking Mandarin since he’d learned to talk.
He’d first encountered Chiang at a UN-sponsored antiterrorism conference in New York. The US ambassador to the UN had requested linguistic support and the State Department had requested Allender. Chiang had been just a lieutenant colonel at the time, but Allender had noticed how the other members of the People’s Republic delegation were deferring to this intense army officer, so he’d casually closed in and made his acquaintance. Chiang had been astonished to hear an American speaking university-level Mandarin and they’d ended up spending more than a little time conversing on the margins of the conference. Chiang had presented himself as a midlevel police bureaucrat in Beijing, and Allender had adopted the role of an NIH psychiatrist specializing in the modalities of terrorist recruitments. By the third and final night of the conference, they’d reached the ganbei stage at a private banquet hosted by the Chinese delegation. Allender, anticipating the inevitable exchange-of-shooters challenges, had taken an Agency compound before the encounter which changed alcohol into sugar. It gave you a bit of a stomachache, but you stayed pretty much sober while your drinking opponent went blotto, which was when Chiang let it slip that he was perhaps more than just a run-of-the-mill policeman.
The next morning Allender debriefed the diplomatic intelligence officials at the US embassy to the UN, where he learned that Chiang was most likely an up-and-comer in the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence and counterintelligence arm of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the PRC. The officials had told Allender that since the MSS was like an amalgamation of America’s CIA, NSA, and FBI, Chiang was definitely someone to cultivate if the opportunity ever arose. They also warned him that he, Preston Allender, had probably entered the MSS database, if only because of his Mandarin.
“Somebody will be assigned to research you and your family history in Taipei; where you went to school, what your father did, will all be discovered. They’ll eventually assume you’re with us, so if you do encounter Chiang again, it’s going to be a different game.”
That prediction had been spot-on, as Allender discovered two years later at a reception held at the PRC embassy in Washington. At the pre-briefing for the reception, the Chinese desk officer had told Allender that Chiang was now a senior officer at the MSS, specializing in the coordination of the dizzying array of Chinese intelligence networks operating in the US, covering academia, the banking system, industrial technology and R&D, military affairs, diplomatic affairs, the national infrastructure, medical science, counterterrorism, the Internet, and, last but not least, the Agency itself.
“Don’t kid yourself,” he’d been told. “The rise of Chinese intelligence operations in the United States has resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. Period. Go into any advanced technology laboratory in the country—computer science, astronomy, medical research, energy, and biochemistry—and count the number of Caucasian faces. Then count the Chinese. Three to one, on average. Go to any high school graduation in America where they have a half-decent academic program, and see who the valedictorian is; you’ll find the top graduates are either Chinese or Southwest Asian. They own us. The only thing holding them back from world domination is their delusion with Communism.”
“What time in the morning, sir?” his driver asked, interrupting his musings. They’d arrived at the Residence.
“Eight will do it.”
He went into the Residence and walked up to the desk. “Is the SCIFF available?”
“Yes, sir, it is,” the lobby clerk said. “Let me get this hour’s key codes.”
Once in the secure communications vault, Allender sent a brief e-mail message to Carson McGill, the deputy director for operations. “Sloan will do. Tell the controller to call me.”
An hour later, a Mr. Smith was on the secure line seeking instructions.
“Activate the clone” was all Allender said, and hung up.
He went upstairs to his room, which was a small suite in deference to his rank as a member of the senior executive service. He cracked a bottle of Scotch from the minibar and then stood by the window, with its view of nondescript government buildings scattered everywhere.
Ms. Melanie Sloan in full war paint had been quite a sight this evening. He’d had to work hard at not getting a little bit more personal with her at dinner, but he’d learned long ago that every budding romance had ended once the lady got a good look into those dragon eyes of his. Now that he was fifty-five, there didn’t seem to be much point in pursuing attractive women, so now he was pretty much accustomed to being a professional odd duck. Being a senior odd duck helped, though.