The Ninja and the Diplomat, page 12
part #2 of The Chinese Spymaster Series
“I demand to speak to somebody.” The shout came out hoarse and weak. But Viktor sensed someone approaching, unhurriedly. He himself rolled away, beyond the range of a kick from the door, to a wall against which he propped himself. The door opened. A man very much like himself, except younger and stronger, stood there with cold and cruel eyes. “Your boss must know my boss. I am sure we are in the same business. I want to speak with somebody. And I want some water.”
Without a word, his jailer left. Viktor tried to make himself comfortable and curled up on the floor to think and to sleep. He was not particularly good at thinking and was entirely unsuccessful in his attempt to find sleep.
“You are a stoic,” said the young medic who had stitched him up after he had been rescued from the mujahideen. “You did not make a sound for the last three hours,” the medic explained,” even though what the enemy did to you was horrendous and repairing what was damaged must have been very painful.”
The enemy had spent twenty-four hours removing every nail from his fingers and toes. They also branded him with hot iron in several parts of his body including his groin. Viktor had cried, howled and bellowed then. But when his unit finally reached him and brought him back to base, he was utterly spent. Unfortunately, though otherwise well-equipped, their medical personnel had run out of pain-killers. They offered him a smoke of opium which he refused. After the three hours of medical repairs, however, Viktor mumbled, “I think I’ll have that smoke now.” He did not care that he had not known the meaning of the word stoic.
His jailer appeared with a small bottle of water. “Drink slowly,” came the instruction in an unexpectedly high-pitched but menacing voice. “You will get one every half hour. The Boss will see you but first you will clean up. Not now.”
Viktor had started to stand when his jailer left the room and locked the door.
***
Three hours later, scrubbed and buffed under the prodding and supervision of men like his jailer, Viktor appeared before the Boss. It was someone he had only heard spoken of in hushed tones. Over the decades, he had spoken with him only three or four times times and only once had he felt the necessity to telephone the Boss. Now he gazed at a man sitting behind a desk in a room like that in a business hotel. He was blond but balding, not fat, and seemingly mild-mannered.
“Sit down, Viktor. You deserve to know why you are here. I was going to have you killed in the bar fight but I changed my mind. I want to help you understand why this must happen. After all, you have served your country well, in Afghanistan I believe, and then around the world in your true calling.” A waiter brought in a tray with champagne, cigars and caviar as well as the obligatory vodka. “I hope you don’t mind Kauffman. Indulge me, I know you prefer the Snow Queen.”
“This feels like my last supper,” whispered Viktor who surprised himself by his own calm.
“It is, so we should not rush this,” noted the Boss. “Please, help yourself. Nothing has been poisoned.”
“Except for your trust,” said Viktor as he drained his glass of vodka in a single gulp and helped himself to the caviar, expertly ladling a small mound onto a piece of toast with a slice of lemon.
“Alas, Viktor,” replied his host, “I cannot tell a lie.”
“It would have been acceptable had the Chinese not intervened,” suggested Viktor.
“It appears that they were looking for an excuse. It is a good question why that should be so. But they were prepared and now some part of our operations is in their database. Kim did not call them somehow, did he?”
“I don’t think so,” declared the honored guest at his own funeral. “I have never suspected him of being so resourceful.”
“Perhaps the Chinese observed or heard about your performance in the parking lot the night before,” accused the Boss. “Certainly, they would have been watching the hotel security monitors.”
He spoke softly but Viktor knew the evening would not end with forgiveness. The cameras! Why hadn’t he thought to do something about the hotel cameras? He was angry with himself but philosophically accepted the futility of crying over spilled milk.
“A last cigar? I believe you favor the Hoyo Epicure.”
Viktor accepted one of Castro’s gifts to the old Soviet. It was a rare treat for him. His mind had slipped into a strange calmness at the inevitability of the final curtain. He accepted a light and a glass of champagne from the waiter.
“The breach of discipline introduced an unacceptable element of uncertainty and risk into our mission and exposed our operations, I hope you understand that,” concluded the Boss. Viktor merely nodded. “Will you excuse me, Viktor? I must attend to the usual pressing matters. Please stay to finish all this, if you wish.”
Viktor helped himself to more caviar as the Boss walked out. Was there a way out of this, he idly wondered. No, he concluded realistically that the waiter himself could subdue him and guessed there were at least two other men just outside the door. He looked at the cigar and decided that he would smoke at least half of it, to the pepper and coffee in the aroma, before he faced those men. He was a hit man but he did know about fine cigars.
***
Thousands of miles away, the reports sent by those who had monitored his movements were analyzed. “Where is he?” demanded Owyang as Wang, Ma, and Gong circled around her office.
Wang noticed that Gong smiled with a particular intensity. The head of the analysis was radiant, with a perfectly proportioned oval face and eyes large for a Chinese woman. A true beauty. Her boy-friend, Wang had learned, was a bookish schoolteacher with a passion for the old Europe and the Middle East. The head of analysis had, however, many secret admirers. Her colleague Gong, was particularly stricken. He answered her question, “St. Petersburg. The natives call it Piter.”
Owyang nodded and asked, “Does our asset there have any idea who is in charge of his operations?”
“Our asset is not talking, even though we must consider the possibility that he and Viktor are both in the same activity or organization.”
“Then we are no closer to finding out the link between the arms deal for the Filipino and the nuclear devices.”
“Do you think that Chen went to Manila for nothing?” Gong had no confidence in the mission himself but he wondered what the analyst thought. Owyang paused, reflecting on Chen’s recent return and debriefing, then offered her opinion,
“I don’t think the answer to our main question lies in Manila. Traces of radiation were picked up by the mini scanner he had. It does not seem to be any more than was found in the warehouse in Macau. Besides, twelve nuclear devices constitute a fearful combination but are completely inadequate for armed rebellion in the Philippines. I wonder if that was Hashim’s plan.”
“What about the export permit that Cousin Yu obtained?” asked Wang. “Has it been used?”
“It has,” Owyang reported, “though the ship manifest suggests the crate was too small to carry more than two missile launchers or nuclear devices.”
“Where is the crate headed?” asked Ma.
“Chen told me he has not yet found any documents regarding the destination of the crate,” replied Owyang. “The ship itself is scheduled to call on the port of Manila before proceeding to Myanmar and India.”
Wang was pleased with her progress even though he was impatient for the answers. “I would like very much to know about the possible connection between the Boss and the Yakuza.”
The head of the department got up to find the analyst with the slim but growing file on the Yakuza. She reviewed in her mind the characters that had paraded through to date. The Filipino and his purchase of missile launchers from the North Korean, the assistant quartermaster who stole from the army, the man who purchased from him and his connection to Cousin Yu, the ninja at the warehouse and his connection with the Yakuza. Now she had to factor Viktor and the Boss into this equation. Did they all belong in this puzzle? Who else should be considered that had not come forward to be identified? She stopped when a thought struck her.
“While the cost of the MANPADS was trivial, the nuclear devices were not cheap. It is clear that the Yakuza had the funds and the willingness to spend them. It is also clear that he knew about Cousin Yu and the sourcing of material that the latter’s assistant in Beijing accomplished. The logistics manager himself was only a pawn. They would have used anyone.
“The players not known to be connected or manipulated by the Yakuza are the Filipino and the North Korean. We will comb the records of the Japanese connections, and I imagine that we will find a link to the Filipino. I would be very surprised to find any link to Kim, considering ancient hostility between the Japanese and the Koreans. Therefore, this situation requires someone to connect the Filipino to Kim. I nominate Viktor.
“Since he and the Yakuza are not on the same floor, so to speak,” she concluded. “I would guess that the Yakuza was dealing with Viktor’s superior.”
“Bravo, Owyang,” commented Wang as Ma nodded in vigorous agreement. “But if Chen has found that only one nuclear device has been exported and we know that one has been detected in Manila, that leaves ten or eleven unaccounted for.”
“Ten or even eleven would certainly be inadequate for rebellion against China,” Ma said. “Although, I think they could obliterate a major area like Beijing, Shanghai, or the Pearl River Delta.”
Wang felt their eyes on him as he paused to think. “Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the devices might not be used together.” He looked around at his staff and continued, “More damaging to China than the physical devastation would be the sense of empowerment that having a nuclear device would bestow on a group of dissidents or separatists. What if the Yakuza found such groups and sent them each such a present?”
“I shall have our analysts look for such connections in the Yakuza’s phone records,” responded Owyang. “Bravo yourself, Spymaster.”
Contents
CHAPTER 14
The third Thursday in Beijing
It was an impressive building. Though not so large as to be imposing, it had the middling but unmistakably dignified proportions of the elite institution that it was, a hospital providing the very best of care for the most highly regarded of the nation’s cadres. Wang arrived for his weekly meeting with the senior commissar and winced as he stepped from his air-conditioned car into the city’s blighted air; grey and noxious seemed to have become the new normal. He walked rapidly into the sanitized atmosphere of the cancer ward. There, however, he discovered that not all the disinfectants of East or West could dispel the indecent stench of illness or lift the pall of death.
“Old Wang,” Cai greeted him as he entered a comfortable room in which care had been taken to balance efficiency with discretion, the requirements of modern medicine with the feelings of a man approaching seventy and conscious of his mortality. He had resisted the Party’s fashion police efforts to get him to dye his hair black before the bout of illness. Now he had the excuse that all his hair had fallen out.
“Senior commissar, you are well, I trust. Perhaps you will have black hair soon.” Wang teased the older man who rewarded him with a look of disgust.
“They are doing the best they can and tell me that my prospects of recovery are good despite my disreputable past,” replied Cai. “As for coloring my hair, we know the Chinese saying about how one ages first in the hair. Well, I have never feared growing old or showing it. And I don’t believe that coloring the hair makes any difference in how fast one ages.”
“But you should have paid more attention to the needs of your body,” scolded Wang good-naturedly.
“We are not all intended to become spymasters,” responded Cai defiantly.
Wang laughed and avoided further confrontation on health matters, asking instead, “I trust you are sleeping well.”
“Ah, the first two weeks I was here, I could not tell if I was asleep or dead. It has been better since. I now have three or four good days in each cycle of treatment.”
Wang nodded to a pile of briefing papers on a small table beside Cai’s bed. “Is there anything in those papers in particular that keeps you up at night?”
The senior commissar, a member of the standing committee of the politburo, sighed, letting out his breath softly and slowly, within the limitations of his stage four lung cancer. His face was lined with pain, not physical but ideological. “Corruption,” he pronounced at last. “It is not supposed to happen under socialism.”
“No socialist paradise for us,” muttered Wang.
“The nation losing its supplies is an embarrassment, but the idea that anyone is motivated to do this by personal gain shakes me to the core,” declared Cai. “That it should happen within the army is simply vile.”
“Senior commissar, we can recognize human weakness and still not lose faith in the revolution,” stated Wang. “Even if the capitalist world laughs at us, it is better that we should be considered inept than suspected of consciously and maliciously sending weapons into certain countries.”
“You are referring to the North Korean arms dealer’s message, no doubt. I found his imagination intriguing. He could be right in implying that what may have been an arms deal involving goods stolen from China’s inventories might be interpreted as a clandestine attack by our nation.”
Wang nodded in agreement with Cai’s assessment of the “optics” of the situation and added, “It will make the work of the MFA harder. Even though the realists in all nations will grasp the truth, they will gleefully let our media embarrassment spiral, possibly to a crisis. For some countries, in particular the Philippines, the news might even confirm some of their fears.”
Cai nodded his agreement. They were two friends thinking their views on various matters out loud, testing ideas and perspectives with each other. He remarked, “It is not a good time to lose minister Yu.”
“I hope we don’t lose our top diplomat. It is hard to see who will help frame our thinking and statements to the international community. I know some in the Party believe China can and should be indifferent to what other countries think or say about us. It used to be said of another big country that there was an arrogance of power among its leaders.” The former spymaster paused to observe the older man’s reaction. Was that a shadow of pain that clouded his face or a pang of sympathy for the former ambassador whom they both admired?
The older man asked, “Has the interrogation of his cousin yielded anything helpful?”
Wang knew that Cai had received the latest report on this matter. He also knew the senior commissar knew, there being no intentional secrets on matters of state between them, that he might have received a more recent word from deputy commissioner Wen.
“No. It is remarkable how different the cousins are. Did you know their fathers?”
“Only by reputation, though I met the ambassador’s father once at a gathering to honor veterans of the Long March. He was very impressive and knew all about me even though I was a young, small fish. His passion for reunification with Taiwan was well-known and his son has not kept his own a secret. That dream is fast fading, I believe.”
“Both sides fervently believed in One China for decades. Anyway, I believe his story,” stated Wang simply. “He is not a thief and would not knowingly condone or contribute to such activities as his cousin engaged in.”
“But he accepted his cousin’s bribe. No. I know that was not what he did or how you or I see it, but that is inevitably how it will be viewed by the investigators.”
“He did not keep the money,” stated Wang, unsure of how further disclosure to the inquisitors would proceed.
Cai raised an eyebrow, asking, “You have special knowledge regarding this, I see.” The story Wang had heard from Hu was briefly retold.
Cai nodded and questioned rhetorically, “Who can say how this will be interpreted?”
Wang agreed and added, “Perhaps the most dramatic aspect, to me the most dangerous angle, is the theft of nuclear devices.”
“I understand the logistics manager’s wife was quite a distraction on the television coverage of the events. For my sins, I was still in the shadows of my initial medications.” He chuckled then inquired politely, “Is it correct to say that we have no idea where they have been taken?”
“Alas, yes, except for possibly one that we think has been delivered to the Filipino rebel. That device, or perhaps another, is likely to have been exported with a license authorised by Old Yu. We don’t know where, but the ship it is on is headed to Manila, Myanmar and India.”
The senior commissar grimaced. “Manila seems to be a diversion, but the other two destinations…” He left his thought unspoken, secure in the knowledge that Wang understood. “Does the intelligence agency have a theory?”
“It does,” stated Wang as he and the senior commissar were beyond the stage of being coy with each other’s information and guesses. “Led by Analyst Owyang, we have concluded that the greatest utility for the weapons would be inside China.”
Cai looked severe but not surprised.
“The nuclear devices are not enough to overthrow the government of the Philippines or that of China. But in the hands of our dissidents and separatists they could inflict a great deal of damage, in physical, human, and propaganda terms,” Wang stated, pausing to check the reaction on Cai’s face before continuing. “If used by Filipino rebels against their government, it would only strengthen sympathies for the state. Assuming the rebels are rational, our analyst believes they did not take the devices, or they only have one of them.
