Two years later, Pioneer earned his Qinghua University degree, and the day before the ceremony, the MSS summoned him to a meeting. At first he had thought that the party had finally connected him to the protests. It took him a moment to realize that had it been so, the People’s Armed Police would have dragged him from his apartment instead of issuing him a polite request, really an order, for a private meeting.
The party didn’t know about his part in the protests, but it did know about his then-rare skill with computers. Qinghua University was China’s MIT. The school offered guanxi, personal connections and influence, more potent in China than Harvard could offer graduates in America, and the faculty had connections to people who needed to solve certain military problems. The Americans had just finished a war in Iraq using precision bombs, stealth planes, and other weapons whose efficiency frightened the PLA. The Iraqis had assembled the world’s fourth-largest army, supplied it with Soviet equipment, and trained it in Soviet military doctrine, very much like the PLA’s own forces. The United States tore that army to shreds in weeks and suffered almost no casualties doing it. Computers had changed warfare to a degree that the PLA and the MSS had not appreciated before. Guns in large numbers weren’t enough, and that was a problem that needed rectifying.
Listening to the MSS bureaucrat talking about the glorious career he would have in the service of the party that had gunned down his friends, Pioneer wanted to come across the desk and choke the man. Then, to his shame, the emotion passed, his cowardice reasserted itself, and he agreed to the request he was not free to turn down anyway. The conversation ended and he left the office.
Perhaps his dead friends had talked to him or maybe the unknown God he’d read about in Western books had whispered to his soul. Whatever the source, a thought entered his mind. There would be a better time and way to exact revenge than killing a bureaucrat who could be replaced without a second thought. He had to learn patience and recognize that revenge truly was a dish best served cold.
The first contact had been the most difficult part. Pioneer spent his first years building his career as a model servant, which earned him the party’s permission to attend conferences abroad. They were so anxious to learn about new computer technologies coming from the West that it did not require much prodding. On one trip to Tokyo, he slipped away from his handlers and translators during a keynote address attended by a few thousand programmers and made his way unseen from his hotel to the US embassy, where he offered his services to the CIA. They were suspicious of him, of course. “Walk-ins,” people motivated by conscience to volunteer themselves as spies to a foreign power, made the best assets. But often they were “dangles,” double agents being held out like bait on a hook. However, the chief of station was a bold man willing to gamble. It took them more than an hour to find someone who spoke Mandarin, but the COS needed less than ten minutes to judge that the anger in the young Chinese man suggested he could be authentic. The station chief himself had divorced an adulterous wife the year before and knew that true agony of the soul is not easily faked.
A young CIA case officer named Clark Barron contacted Pioneer on his return to Beijing. The early requests he made were simple and small and Pioneer filled them without question or complaint. Every successful brush pass was a victory, every dead drop or package delivered through a cutout was a knife in the party’s back. He learned the use of simple disguises and microfilm, then digital cameras and encryption. He became methodical and never took a stupid gamble. Barron spent five years teaching him tradecraft, and Pioneer was a brilliant student.
At the same time, the MSS promoted him. The scope of Pioneer’s access to the most secure networks increased, which he reported to the case officers who had succeeded Barron. In return, they expanded the scope of their requests to him. When September 11, 2001, came, Pioneer feared that the CIA would forget about him in their zeal to hunt terrorists, but the pace of requests never slackened. His case officers never told Pioneer that CIA considered him their most productive asset in a Communist country since Oleg Penkovsky in the 1960s. The MSS and every other body it touched, including the Politburo Standing Committee itself, was hemorrhaging secrets in a steady gush to the West.
Twenty-five years came and went and he still hadn’t found peace. His friends still haunted him. Pioneer hadn’t set foot in Tiananmen Square in all that time, but he pressed on for the cause his friends had started there. If he had earned nothing else, the cowardice had been burned out of his soul. So, if he could not have peace, he had decided that his inevitable execution would be well deserved. There was an excellent chance that someday the PLA would stand him before a brick wall and shoot him. So be it. Maybe then his friends would accept him as worthy to stand with them again.
Pioneer stared out at the lake, shaken from his thoughts by a very cold gust of wind that got inside his coat. Time to go home. Time to start watching for surveillance again.
The man from the Fangshan had not reappeared. If he was from the Ministry of State Security, his superiors would have been fools to use him again, and they tolerated very few fools in the ranks; most were in the upper management, where a man’s political connections could protect him from his own stupidity and corruption. Pioneer was forced to deal with such people daily.
Last night’s aborted meeting nagged at him for reasons he couldn’t piece together yet, but missing a single meeting was not a significant problem. He was smart enough to know what information the Americans would request. The CIA would want to know whether the MSS had assembled a list of the men and women detained in Taipei, which were MSS officers and assets, which were not, and what the MSS was doing to protect its other operations in Taiwan. The list hadn’t been hard to find and he’d left it in a package at the dead drop site.
Pioneer knew about the Taiwan arrests, of course. The People’s Daily had dutifully published the official line that the detained Chinese citizens were innocent victims caught in a dragnet of President Liang’s personal ambition and corruption and were not working for the security services. It was a lie, of course. He had the truth from internal sources, though even the common citizens without such access knew better. The Chinese mainland natives that the Taiwanese had arrested were exactly what President Tian had denied they were. Aside from the one dead American defense contractor, all the Taiwanese who had been arrested were bureaucrats and politicians, with a member of Taiwan’s own security services thrown in for good measure, and all had been considered excellent assets, several trusted as far as the MSS trusted any turncoats. The loss of one, a high-ranking aide to a minister in President Liang’s cabinet, was a disaster of the highest magnitude. MSS careers were ending and an unlucky few would be fortunate if they escaped prison terms levied in secret as punishment for incompetence. Losing an asset to the Taiwanese was embarrassing enough. Getting one killed while releasing some toxic chemical that killed locals and required a hazmat unit to clean up was a national humiliation. He didn’t know what the asset had been handing over to the MSS, but certainly the CIA would ask.
Tonight’s dead drop site was the bathroom of a small market known for its excellent stock of shellfish and superb mapodofu recipe. He had never used the location to pass a dead drop before and never would again. He had entered the market, ordered a half pound of prawns wok-seared in black bean garlic sauce with vegetables, and then stepped into the tiny one-stall bathroom and left a USB drive of encrypted files in a sealed plastic bag taped behind the gas heater. The remains of that dinner sat on the bench next to him.