Free An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer Page B

had a list of suspects. Nineteen. I worried so much, you see, that nearly anything could admit one to that list. Yang Qing-Nian and I began more intense interviews. We took them from their homes, placed them in separate cells on East Chang’an Avenue, and began talking. At this point, there was no reason to treat them as prisoners, so they kept their clothes and were fed and treated well—only their phones were confiscated.
    “The interviews, though, were not going well. By Wednesday we had talked to each of them twice, and so I decided to visit Xin Zhu at his office in Haidian and share what little I had. I thought that, as good comrades, we could work together. I was, I now know, mistaken.”
    Zhu remembered that day. Wednesday, April 23, 2:00 P . M . Wu Liang and a hard-looking secretary filled the office with foul Russian tobacco smoke, going over his twelve pages one line at a time, fighting over veracity, asking for documentation and demanding the connections that had brought Zhu to suspect the Ministry of Public Security.
    “What I learned that day, after hours of rigorously confronting each item in those twelve pages, listening to and then challenging each of Xin Zhu’s explanations, was a simple fact. Each of these items—and there are one hundred and twelve in all—is simply that: an item on a piece of paper. Each is an item connected to a piece of information gathered by his agent, the American senatorial aide, James Pearson. For each he has either an e-mailed report with attachments or a handwritten one, accompanied sometimes by flash drives—all from James Pearson. But where, I found myself asking, is this golden source, this James Pearson? We know the answer. He was picked up by the CIA trying to flee the United States. He is unavailable. And the place where James Pearson found these so-called truths? That would be the office of the Department of Tourism, on West Thirty-first Street, in Manhattan. The department Xin Zhu so hastily destroyed, the offices of which have now been gutted by the CIA. I have photographs of the offices if any of you wish verification.”
    He’d talked a long time, but talking had always been Wu Liang’s strong point. He danced with facts and manipulated them to showcase his modesty and erudition. With a mouth like that, and a wife like Chu Liawa, there was no end to what he could accomplish.
    But he wasn’t done yet.
    “As I say, I entered his office convinced of Xin Zhu’s honesty, ready to make our ministry secure again. I entered contrite, but I left angry. Furious, in fact. I had spent the previous days grilling good comrades on the strength of what now looked to me like a self-serving deception. My anger, however, had not reached its apex, for upon returning to East Chang’an, I was informed that Bo Gaoli, who some of you may know from his sterling history helping to run the counterterrorism department, was dead. Faced with the shame of this unfounded suspicion, he had used his belt to hang himself in his cell.”
    Wu Liang let silence speak for him now. The committee knew of Bo Gaoli’s suicide, but the details had never been released. There had been a rumor of a sexual predilection, another of financial indiscretions. No one—certainly not Zhu—had known that he’d been in a ministry cell when he did it. Now that Wu Liang had shared this fact, everyone turned to examine Zhu’s reaction, and he did his best to control himself. Was he successful? He wasn’t sure. He thought that he could ask Shen An-ling later, but his assistant could only see the back of his head.
    Xin Zhu wondered if anyone was going to ask the obvious, and obligatory, question: Was it possible that Bo Gaoli’s suicide was an admission of guilt? He himself could not ask it—it was up to someone else, perhaps Zhang Guo. But no one asked anything, and Zhang Guo only stifled a yawn with his cupped hand.
    Since no one else seemed interested in speaking, Zhu opened his mouth. “I certainly regret