MA PO EGGPLANT IN GARLIC SAUCE
Mix ground pork with rice wine vinegar, chili sauce, cornstarch, and soy sauce. Refrigerate. Cut Asian eggplants in half lengthwise, brush with peanut oil, season with salt, and broil cut side down on baking sheet until charred and tender. Whisk chicken stock with sake, sugar, sesame oil, bean paste, and soy sauce. Stir-fry minced scallions, garlic, and ginger until fragrant, add pork and brown, then add chicken stock mixture and bring to a boil. Simmer until sauce thickens. Place eggplants cut side up on a platter and spoon over with pork. Garnish with sliced scallions. Serve with steamed rice.
29
Your Chakra Is Showing
Dominika had arrived in Hong Kong several days earlier after a day of ceremonial courtesy calls in MSS Headquarters at the Ministry of State Security. General Sun stayed in Beijing for consultations, so Dominika was turned over to an English-speaking captain of the Guangzhou MSS office, named Yuán Chonghuan. He had chosen the inexplicable Western business name of “Rainy,” yu tien in Mandarin, which was phonetically close to Yuán and lyrical, or so he thought. Rainy Chonghuan was exceedingly short and thin, with all the built-in malignancies of the physical runt. He had the toxic temper of a low-level officer who one minute relishes mistreating subordinates, and shamelessly toadies to superiors the next. He had caramel-colored teeth and stubby fingers with nails bitten to the quick. The halo around his head and shoulders was caramel-colored too, the color you get when the yellow of conniving treachery mixes with the browns of sloth and envy. Dominika knew she had to be careful around him.
Colonel Dominika Egorova of the SVR was an alien being to Rainy—the leggy, busty Slav with the high cheekbones might as well have been from another planet. His English, learned at MSS Officer’s school, was just fluent enough to discuss strategy with her in the operation to trap the American. Rainy Chonghuan had, however, immediately seen that this Russian was held in high esteem by General Sun and MSS leadership, which meant he would butter her remorselessly. He moreover saw that she had long experience working American targets. Her suggested amendments to the entrapment-phase plan, including tweaking Zhènniǎo’s personal history to appeal to the Yankee’s operational instincts, were impressive. Anything that would ensure success and bring him credit and promotion was welcome. Rainy provided a translated copy of Zhènniǎo’s service docket for Colonel Egorova’s review, and suggested the two women meet to discuss nuances of the nectar bait. To his surprise, the Russian demurred, explaining that Sparrows in the Russian Service operated most effectively with fewer distractions. Rainy hurriedly agreed, complimenting the colonel on her foresight and wisdom.
Zhen Gao’s personnel file was fascinating to Dominika. The autobiography she had recited to Nate was mostly fiction, with some nuggets of truth. She had not lost her parents, she was not adopted, and she never went to hotel school. She was never taught yoga by a wizened yogini when she was twelve, she learned it only later, as a way to stay in shape and help her seduce targets.
Zhen Gao was the daughter of a minor State-school teacher from Anxin, in Hebei Province, on the reed-choked shores of Lake Baiyangdian. Already a stunning beauty at age sixteen, Zhen caught the eye of a provincial administrator who appraised the woman’s body under the schoolgirl’s smock. He used his influence to install the young girl as a housekeeper in a State-controlled villa, took her virginity, and occasionally shared her with other municipal jacks-in-the-office to curry favor. When Zhen was eighteen, the administrator was caught taking bribes and was tried, convicted, and executed for corruption. With no patron, and an undeserved reputation as a “pleasure girl,” she was sent to Tianjin, a teeming city of fifteen million on the northeastern coast two hours south of Beijing, and enrolled in State School 2112, a training academy run by the MSS that, the file obliquely explained, trained young women in “intelligence techniques,” which included seduction, elicitation, recruitment, and blackmail. Graduates were known as Yèyīng, Nightingales.
Based on academics, performance, and an assessment of ideological aptitude, a handful of Nightingales were chosen for continued study at Institute 48 in Beijing, a classified facility in the northeastern Shangjialou District where students were trained in the use of firearms, exotic weapons, and poisons. At age twenty, Zhen was sponsored by a storefront Sino-Anglo friendship society controlled by MSS for study in the United Kingdom, both to master English and to be exposed to Western ways. Four years later, she graduated as a full-fledged seductress-assassin of the State, known as a Zhènniǎo, the poison-feather bird. Because of her excellent English and British manner, Zhen was quietly placed in a cover position as assistant general manager at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, available for assignments as required.
Bozhe, thought Dominika, reading the file, a young girl defiled by a swine, passed around the pigsty, then forced into the Chinese version of Sparrow School. Her pulse raced as she read Zhen’s life history—it was like her own. But Russian Sparrows don’t kill people, Dominika told herself, but you have, haven’t you?
Throughout the second volume of the file, Zhen now was referred to as Zhènniǎo. Dominika asked Rainy what a poison-feather bird was, and he haltingly described the mythological bird, with coal-black plumage, that fed exclusively on serpents, and whose feathers as a result were highly poisonous. One could stir a glass of wine with a single such feather to make it mortally toxic, he said. Only in China, thought Dominika.
The file documented fourteen assassinations credited to Zhènniǎo—the most recent being a drug-dealing Burmese police chief who had been poisoned with a distillate of the monkshood bloom. There had been no witnesses and no blowback connection to Beijing. Dominika turned to a pharmacological annex in the file that listed monkshood as a poisonous plant that produces aconitine, a lethal tetrodotoxin readily absorbed through the skin. Even slight contact with the delicate, purple bell-shaped flower would, between two and eight hours later, induce cardiac arrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation leading to respiratory paralysis or cardiac arrest. Zhènniǎo had applied the poison on the skin of the police chief blended with ylang-ylang, a fragrant essential oil used in aromatherapy.