An American Spy Read Online Free PDF

for himself as for Zhang Guo, “but she wouldn’t be here without a reason; something operational, or just to scout opportunities.”
    “Opportunities for what? For an act of revenge against the great Xin Zhu?”
    Zhu slipped the photo back into his bag. “I have no idea. I don’t even know if she works for the CIA anymore.”
    “She had a forged Sudanese passport.”
    “The CIA doesn’t have a monopoly on forged passports.”
    “Perhaps she’s working for Wu Liang,” Zhang Guo suggested.
    “I’ve considered that.”
    “It was a joke, Xin Zhu.”
    Zhu gave a smile, but it wasn’t a joke to him. None of this was. Wu Liang and the Supervision and Liaison Committee, the CIA, or any number of agencies he’d given trouble to over the last decades could be after him. After enough years, the idea of “the other” becomes faceless and broad, its tentacles ubiquitous enough to hide in every crevice.
    “So what do you want from me, Xin Zhu?”
    “I’d like to know what I’ll be facing on Monday morning. Specifics. The precise examples they will use against me.”
    Zhang Guo nodded. “You’ll have it by Sunday.”
    “As for the woman, I’ll need to know if the Ministry of Public Security has anything on her.”
    This time Zhang Guo hesitated. He took a long drag and exhaled smoke that was instantly swept away by the wind. “Xin Zhu, two months ago you claimed that the Ministry of Public Security was harboring a Western mole, and then you cut it off from your intelligence product. When asked to show your evidence, you handed the committee notes detailing Chinese information owned by the Department of Tourism, information you said could only have been gathered by an inside source. The information could not be verified because the CIA had closed the Department of Tourism after your assault, but did that stop you? No. You demanded that the committee freeze the ministry’s entire administrative section until someone had been arrested.”
    “I was ignored,” Zhu pointed out.
    “But not forgotten. You don’t run the Guoanbu. You don’t even preside over a core department. You’ve always been on the fringe, and you’ve always made enemies. My suspicion is that, on Monday morning, you’ll be sent to preside over some township collective near Mongolia while your office is closed down to make room for an elementary school. You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
    “Does that mean you won’t ask if they have anything on the woman?”
    Zhang Guo stared at him, eyes large, then threw down his cigarette. He started to laugh. “Okay. I’ll talk to the Ministry of Public Security. I’ve got someone who might help, just as long as he doesn’t know that it’s for you.”
    “Thanks.”
    “And you have no idea what this Jones did during her week here?”
    “We have the hotel. We have one night at the hotel restaurant,” Zhu said, which was not necessarily a lie, only a misleading omission. “What we need is help.”
    “What you need is to prepare a defense for Monday morning.”
    “What I need is a drink. Shall we?”
    Zhang Guo approached and placed a hand on Zhu’s thinning scalp. “You are one ugly, fat bastard. Sung Hui must be blind.”
    “Finally, we’re in agreement.”

2
    Sung Hui was from Xinyang, a Young Pioneer and then a member of the Youth League whose enlightened proletarian worldview had earned her, at the age of twenty-three, a trip to Beijing for the Fifteenth National Representative Conference in 2003. Delun had met her first, him only twenty-one and full of fire for this beautiful provincial girl with the fierce Party line. Because his mother had been dead more than a decade, he showed off his girl to his father, and sometime during the next few years the lines blurred. Delun shipped off to Sudan to work for Sinopec. A riot of dark-skinned men hacked him up with machetes. That was April 2007. Three months later, Sung Hui moved in with Xin Zhu, and at first theirs was a home of