“It’s been interesting talking to you, Ms. Dunfee,” Li said.
“Fiona, please,” she said.
He shook his head. “Not in a million years.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
A whole load of heartache and a case of the clap, Li thought. He said, “Oh, I’m sure I do. Good evening to you, Ms. Dunfee.” He turned to rejoin Winterflood at the helm.
He’s not interested,” Fiona Dunfee whispered to the Asian man beside her at the fantail bar twenty minutes later.
“Maybe you’re losing your touch,” the man said. He was a member of the Chinese delegation to New Zealand, an economic adviser on paper. Off paper, he was an undeclared intelligence officer. The shoulder of Fiona’s yellow sundress was up now, still indecent, but not deliberately so.
“Come on,” she said. “Would you say no if I offered myself to you?”
The man looked around at the other guests milling on the deck, then leaned in shoulder to shoulder. “Are you offering?”
She didn’t answer, taking a long drink of vodka instead.
The man sat up straight again, apparently abandoning the idea of a fling. “Perhaps you came on a little too strong?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.” She lit a cigarette and watched the smoke blow away on the wind. “That one is an oak. He’s an old man, but he has the look of a newlywed in his eyes.”
“Very well,” her handler said, his voice far away. “I do not trust our other option. That person is, what is the word you use… odd… weird…?”
Elbows on the bar, Fiona turned just her head to stare at him. “Flaky?”
“That’s it,” the Chinese man said. “We will have to use the flaky asset, though this way would have been much cleaner.”
Fiona laughed out loud, swirling the ice in her glass. “You think photos of this geezer naked on top of me would be clean?”
“I said cleaner.” Her handler shrugged. “The other way will surely be messy, especially for Dr. Li.”
“I hope so,” Fiona muttered into her glass. “I don’t trust a man who won’t look at my tits.”
13
David Huang was sitting in his study when he heard his wife scream. Her shrieks came from the patio, loud enough to reach the opposite end of their house in the rural neighborhood outside Annapolis. It was a home fitting a Canadian lobbyist.
The scream came again. More emphatic this time.
The uninitiated might think that wild animals were ripping the poor woman apart, but Huang was happy for the interruption. Laurie was well aware of his job, knew the possibilities, guessed the probabilities — but never asked him about it. It was better that way. It protected her from the dirty details. She knew he was seeing someone else, but not who. When he came home late, she accused him of feeling sorry for the other woman. And how could he not? Even spies were human beings, and sleeping with someone for months… well, the exposure went both ways.
His initial meeting with Chadwick had, of course, been arranged, highly choreographed to look accidental. It took a great deal of work to make something look serendipitous. Fortunately for Department Two — the intelligence directorate of the People’s Liberation Army, Chadwick virtually bled information about her personal life. The Americans called it TEMPEST — spying on the electronic emissions that leaked from virtually every building, vehicle, or pocket. Wi-Fi routers, smart devices, and cell phone signals could be cloned. A man-in-the-middle attack revealed incoming and outgoing information that passed over the Internet. What they couldn’t find out that way, they simply purchased.
Advertising companies spent billions developing algorithms and artificial intelligence programs to tailor person-specific ads. Huge sums of cash were traded for information on consumer interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes. Much of it freely given by mindless millions who answered surveys on social media or downloaded free apps on their phones or computers. As the saying went, if something is free, then the consumer is the product. And the people who Huang worked for were more than happy to buy that product. That same information — particular tastes, down to the fact that a person preferred the color azure — could be extremely valuable in the social-engineering aspects of espionage.
David had demurred at first, at least as much as one could when officers from PLA Department Two darkened the door. He told them he had no training in such things, but they’d assured him he had all the training he needed. Senator Chadwick was a powerful woman, more like a male, they said. Seduction of a person in power was all too easy. All one had to do was make them feel like it was their idea. In other words, all he had to do was show up and let her do the seducing.
And that was exactly what had happened.
The entire thing was at once fascinating and sad, to watch this otherwise strong woman yield to him so freely, to allow herself to be so vulnerable, so exposed. She would, no doubt, be a casualty of this battle, completely broken and unable to trust anyone ever again. Huang felt no joy at the thought of her fall. On the contrary. He felt pity. Michelle had learned secrets about him, too, things that were difficult to hide under intimate circumstances. He’d given up nothing mission-related, of course, but his wife could tell. She saw it in his face every time he left the house. For now, she was too worried about a spider.
Huang pushed back from the open laptop on his desk and gave a low groan.
He did not mind his wife’s irrational fear of spiders. It gave him frequent opportunities to swoop in for the rescue and make up for the rest of the terrible actions required by his job. Such rescues usually involved smashing the spider into oblivion before Laurie threw out her back trying to clobber it with a shoe. She’d thought of him as a knight when they first met, but it took frequent acts of derring-do to keep up that mystique. He lied for a living and she knew it. It took a lot of heroics to redeem himself from the truth. Fortunately, northern Virginia had plenty of golden orb weavers.
Huang padded quickly down the hall, past the family photos of him and Laurie and their little girl. Barefoot, he wore khaki shorts and a loose white T-shirt — what Laurie preferred him to wear at home. At a hundred and ninety pounds, he was a trim six-foot-two, well muscled from many hours in the gym. He was only thirty-eight, but silver already encroached on his dark hair — surely a product of the stress brought on by so many lies. At least he wasn’t going bald. Better to turn gray than turn loose — a quaint Virginia saying, but true enough.
Huang reached the dining room to find his wife on the other side of the sliding glass door, holding Claire on her hip. She brandished a gardening trowel in her free hand, as if to ward off an attacker. No matter how often he told her to the contrary, she could never shake the notion that spiders could fly.
His first choice would have been to relocate it, but Laurie wanted to kill every spider she met with fire. They settled on something in the middle and used a rolled magazine he’d brought with him for that purpose to swat the hapless creature.
Three-year-old Claire hugged his neck and, having not inherited her mother’s phobia, said they should go bug hunting.
“Daddy has to change for work,” he said.
He put the little girl down to play in the grass and leaned in to kiss his wife, avoiding looking directly into her eyes. It didn’t matter. Her face fell into a sullen pout.
“I love you,” she said. “But I hate what you do.”
“Someone has to take care of the spiders,” he said, and got ready to go ruin Michelle Chadwick’s life.