Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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“I am astounded by your memory.”
“You can have it,” Burling said. Flattering your intellectual capacity was one of Mac’s more obvious ploys.
“Shortly after September 11th,” MacAllister explained, “one of our illegals in the PRC was contacted by a group that runs dissidents out.”
“What kind of group?”
“Religious right, ties to Asian churches.”
“I’m familiar with those people,” Burling said.
“Well, the paper our man got was the work of a physicist. Seemed under stress, a bit rambling, but it referenced Abdul Khan, and the development of a missile sounded very much like Silkworm.”
“The paper was Yong’s?”
MacAllister’s nod was full of bad implications.
“You’re sure it was genuine?”
“Yong’s a strange character. He’s been in jail or under house arrest on and off for a dozen years, but he’s got a long history with the Party. He’d know enough with us back in Afghanistan that things would be touchy with Pakistan. Hell, with Iran.”
Burling couldn’t resist filling in, a tendency that had plagued him since grade school: “So he makes it look like he’s going to pull a Dr. Khan and skip out with China’s technology?”
The downward set of MacAllister’s mouth suggested a tension between distress and strategic enjoyment. “It’s an awful mess, Lucius. As God is my witness, I’m no liberal, but these maroons who are running the Agency now can’t tell the Taliban from the Dalai Lama. I just testified to this fact yesterday before the House Intelligence subcommittee. There’s barely a single Dari speaker at Langley anymore.”
“Dari.” Burling watched a cement truck arrive at the construction site across the highway, its egg-shaped mixer turning gradually in the sun. The last time he himself had testified on the Hill was about April’s death, and he’d had no trouble evading the truth then because he had thought that the subject was personal, none of their goddamned business. The real lie had come months before—before Samarkand, before Wes Godwin died. He and April wound up together at a scrimmage of the Afghan basketball team. The weather surprisingly similar to this: April had just played tennis, and the hollow of muscle along her thigh swelled gradually closer to his against the hard, painted wood of the bleacher. Between them, he’d sensed a looming intimacy, a boundary about to be crossed. As the scrimmage increased in intensity, players loping up and down the wooden court, Burling had realized that he was about to refer to his wife as a third person. Thinking back on it since, he had marked that betrayal of usage as a greater sin than the night he and April had spent in Samarkand. For him, words were important, and after he had pushed his wife out of the first person plural—the “we” that he and Amelia had made, the extension of his Victorian fantasy—his evasions on the Hill seemed allowable, honorable even. “I take it you want Yong out, or do you?”
“Things are just too sticky right now,” MacAllister told him. “I had to go outside the Agency on this one.”
A blade of grass tickled Burling’s ankle above his sock. He smiled with alacrity in spite of himself. “You didn’t answer my question.”
MacAllister started down the slope toward the parking lot.
“I have to confess I can’t pick the angle on this,” Burling said. “Maybe I’m getting old.”
At the bottom of the hill, MacAllister waited, sweating, for him to come up. “Getting? We’re both old, Lucius, which is why we can’t afford to take chances. We’ve got to think of our kids.”
Burling’s smile was arrested by a chill.
“I’m not asking for your involvement,” said MacAllister, starting toward his car, “because I’ve got that end covered. I just wanted to make you aware.”
“Now you’re pissing me off. Aware of what?”
“If this thing enters your sphere, I need someone I can trust.”
“You need someone with a reason to keep the thing quiet.”
“That’s a factor,” MacAllister said across the roof of the Suburban.
The car was driven by a young Jamaican man with tight coils of hair and a tracery of scars on his cheeks. He reminded Burling of the Afro-Caribbean men they had used in Cuba in the early 1960s. In the mirror, his venomous features watched Burling slide onto the seat.
MacAllister held Burling’s eyes for a moment as the tires spun on gravel and caught on the road. “If you remember Yong’s name, you must remember the name of his superior officer?”
Burling watched the signs pass overhead, places—Herndon, Vienna, Front Royal—small towns swallowed by highways and strip malls that might have held memories for him if he had led a more circumscribed life. Such memories, he thought, would have given his children reasons to care for him more.
“You know that I do, Mac.”
MacAllister looked out the window. A paver the size of a battleship moved down the shoulder of the widening road to the airport, flying the flag of the Commonwealth.
“His name was Zu Dongren.”
“Was?”
“Is. He was a PLA colonel.” He could see Zu leave the hotel in Samarkand, look this way and that before walking toward a black Lada, parked on the side of the square behind the bench on which he and April were sitting, talking about the Viet Cong, the mujahedin. Why did Burling equate their kind of fervent commitment with love? “I didn’t know Zu had made it off that runway until I met Yong in Princeton. At the time I thought that might have been why you asked me to talk to him. I was grateful to you for that.”
MacAllister’s face was reflected in the tinted window beside him. Yong had not been able to give him the same, or any, news about April. “You know that if the press got wind of the little deal you had going with Zu then, they’d fry us both for sure.”
“Colonel Zu is General Zu now,” Burling said.
“You keep in touch?”
“I wouldn’t go anywhere near him, but I’m sure he knows I’m there. He’s the head of the Internal Security Service.”
“What about Alan Rank?”
Burling felt the car sinking beneath him, then rising again, leaving his stomach behind. “Name’s familiar. Some kind of academic in Nanjing.”
“You were always a terrible liar.”
“Ironically, yes, but discretion isn’t prevarication, Mac. On this point you and I can disagree.”
“Your girlfriend works with him.”
MacAllister had been married for forty-some years to the same woman, and his use of the term “girlfriend” was derisive, at least it sounded so to Burling.
“Charlotte and I have been seeing each other in Shanghai, it’s true, but I wouldn’t say she works with him. The public diplomacy people have some programs with the center Rank runs.”
“Well she, Charlotte, had better be careful. Programs are not all Rank runs. He just got a visa for a man named John Tan, applied through some sort of fundamentalist outfit in Georgia that’s in with the China Christian Council, the outfit that certifies churches.”
“And spies on them, too.”
“I didn’t know that. To be honest, I was hoping you could help me out with this Tan character.”
“I’m sorry, Mac.” Long ago, Burling had found a proper way to refer to his fallen position. He breathed deeply and explained. “It’s well known in this administration that I don’t happen to agree with engagement. They’d like to get rid of me, but they’re afraid