Al thought it over. “What do you know about your father?”
“Not much, really. Why? Do you think Winthrop Enterprises has something to do with this?”
“Probably not. Your father is just a middleman. A very good one. Very savvy. He knows a lot of people.”
“I’m not following you.”
“All right. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you have a product you need to have manufactured. You go to someone like your father, and he arranges for you to see different factories and facilities. You name the location.”
“So he just sets up meetings and acts as the intermediary.”
“Yes. And, depending on the deal, he gets a cut of the profits. He could even finance some of the deal for a bigger cut of the profits.”
Al was still thinking about Marilyn, trying to put the seemingly unrelated pieces together while carrying on his current conversation.
“So what’s the story with the Wei Ling girl?”
“She’s in Saipan on a work visa. It was renewed this June. Good for a year. She’s still in Saipan. No record of her leaving the island. On a personal note, she is twenty-three, five-foot-three, one hundred and ten pounds. She is from a small town in the Guangzhou province. No siblings, not surprising as China has a one-child policy unless you are wealthy enough to pay a steep fine for additional children. Blood type O.”
“Now how do you know what blood type she has?”
“A magician never reveals his secrets.”
“You said she hasn’t left the island?”
“No. She is still there. Why do you ask?”
“My father said she went back to China.”
“So your father is hiding something.”
“Hiding a few things I imagine,” Jake said. “Speaking of hiding, you said you would tell me about my father working as a spy for the CIA.”
“A spy? Hell no, Jake. He wasn’t employed by the CIA—he provided information to the CIA, via yours truly.”
“You were a spy?”
“An Official Cover Operative.”
“What the hell is an Official Cover Operative?”
“A CIA employee working under the safe umbrella and diplomatic immunity of the State Department. A perfectly legitimate spy, if there is such a thing.”
“A spy who spends his whole life telling everyone that he works for the State Department.”
“Not just telling everyone, actually working in the State Department, with State Department personnel. The only difference was that my boss was located at Langley.”
“So if my father wasn’t a spy…”
“He didn’t work for the CIA, but he fed the CIA information, for money. A very subtle difference.”
“I don’t think my father needs the money.”
“Jake the snake, when you’re right, you’re right. It wasn’t a matter of money with your father.”
“Then why did he do it?”
“For the chance to be a big shot. We are talking twenty some years ago. Your father had started Winthrop Enterprises and was traveling the globe making connections, signing deals and hobnobbing with the international elite.”
“That’s what he’s doing now.”
“Yes, but aaaaah, the world was a lot smaller twenty-five years ago. There weren’t a lot of westerners running around Tokyo and Beijing. Your father stood out. A young, successful, globetrotting American businessman.”
“I still don’t see the connection with the CIA.”
“Connection. Good choice of words. Your father was a connection.”
“How?”
“We paid your father to report on what he saw in Tokyo and Beijing. Who was talking to whom about what business. Deals in the works, activities of interests. Protests, if there were any. Incidents of bribing. Whatever he could tell us.”
“Wouldn’t the CIA know all of this?
“Sure, well, some of it anyway. But it cost a lot of money to get intelligence through formal channels. Renting real estate, setting up front companies, implementing electronic surveillance, these things aren’t free and believe it or not the CIA does have a budget. Paying American citizens to tell us what they know is cheap.”
“So what did he tell you?”
“Your father was a good source of intelligence for a few years. He tipped us off to the sale of certain illegal hi-tech goods in Asia that we weren’t aware of. Some technology that ended up in a North Korean sub that washed ashore in South Korea years later. You can learn a lot from drunken businessmen in Roppongi. Hell, you can even get their business cards.”
“Okay,” Jake said, stretching out the second syllable.
“But after a few years we suspected your father of fabrication. We compared a lot of the intelligence from your father, and people like him, with our own intelligence. It is a good checks-and-balances measure. We started to see large discrepancies in the information from your father and the intelligence generated by the CIA through other means.”
“Are you saying my father was lying to the CIA? I find that hard to believe.”
“Not lying…exaggerating. But we couldn’t really prove it either. And even if we did, there was nothing the CIA could do. The CIA is not a law enforcement organization. We are actually an organization designed for the sole purpose of breaking the law, just not American law. Your father is an American, he wasn’t selling U.S. secrets to anyone, he wasn’t in the military or in a position to have sensitive military information, and he was gathering intelligence for us. It wasn’t a matter of national security.”
“What happened?”
“We told him his services were no longer needed and that we suspected some of the information he gave us had been inaccurate. We turned his name over to the FBI, to have his information added to a watchlist, and that was the end of my involvement with him. There was nothing else we could do.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“So you know my father?”
“I worked in Asia during the same period that your father supplied us information. I was the one who discovered the discrepancies. I was the one who arranged for him to be recruited.”
“Recruited?”
“Yes. The recruitment was finalized in a sauna in Tokyo, after several less-than-chance meetings I had arranged.”
“The sauna?”
“A great place to recruit. Everyone is naked and the temperature is hundred and thirty degrees Celsius. No one is going to be eavesdropping. No one is going to be wearing a wire. And although I have no concrete scientific evidence to back me up, I think the heat makes people more susceptible to influence.”
“How much did you pay him?”
“Oh I don’t remember exactly, and if I did I couldn’t tell you. Off the record, we probably paid him a couple of thousand a month. He was usually debriefed in D.C. when he got back in the U.S. That’s how I met Marilyn. She was always by his side. Always very pleasant.”
“If my father no longer fed you information, why did you keep in touch with her?”
“Marilyn? Pure coincidence, really. After my family passed, I moved into Potomac Falls Condominiums. Marilyn was my neighbor.”
The mystery around the great Peter Winthrop just got deeper. For Jake, life as an English teacher was looking more appealing every second. “What’s our next move?” Jake asked, half-afraid of the answer.
“Jake, why do you want to help this Wei Ling?”
“Because it is the right thing to do.”
Al, homeless cover operative, stuck out his dirty paw. Jake looked at Al’s hand and then extended his own.
“Then you and I are going to be pals, Jake. Spike Lee hit the nail on the head. Do the right thing.”
“So what do we do?”
“You need to decide what you want to do, Jake. I just agreed to get you the information.”
“You’re not going to help?”