Free The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry

another coffee. Want anything?”
    He said, “God, no. Order the coffee to go. We can’t continue this conversation here.”
    At least he was predictable. While I was at the counter, Burbank made a phone call. It lasted maybe five seconds. Inside the immaculate Hyundai he said nothing. Now he seemed to be meditating and driving at the same time. I slept, waking up when he braked or made a sharp turn, then going under again. We took country roads, one after the other, and somewhere west of Leesburg, he pulled up to an isolated barn that had been converted into a house. It had a keyboard lock. Burbank entered the combination and we went inside. It was cool, nicely furnished, the walls hung with large hyperrealistic paintings that looked like the next stage of photography. All were depressing—mournful swollen pregnant girls whose fetuses were visible as in sonograms, curly-haired, beautiful brown children wearing prostheses, ruddy workers in hard hats, faces frozen in terror as if watching a mushroom cloud in the last nanosecond of their lives.
    “Not very cheerful,” Burbank said. “The caretaker is the painter. Believe it or not, she sells this stuff for good money.”
    By now it was early evening. To my surprise he poured drinks—single malt scotch—and shook unsalted nuts from a can into a bowl. Like the methodical spy he was, he turned on the stereo to defeat listening devices that one really would not expect to be present in a safe house. All the more reason, according to the unwritten manual, to take precautions. Believe nothing. Trust no one. Every lock can be picked, every flap unglued, every seal counterfeited, every friend suborned.
    Burbank crossed his leg, thin ankle resting on bony kneecap. He said, “Can you stay awake?”
    “Possibly.”
    “Try. This meeting may go on for a while. We have a lot to talk about. Let me know if you get to the point where you can’t concentrate.”
    “If I fall sleep, that’s the signal.”
    Burbank did not acknowledge the pleasantry. “For starters,” he said, “let me ask you what you think of Chen Qi’s offer.”
    “I think it’s genuine in its way,” I said. “He has some reason for hiring me. His offer was bizarre. I think he knew that I saw what he was up to, or wondered what he was up to, and that he wanted me to draw certain conclusions from it.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like the offer actually came from Guoanbu, that he was Guoanbu, that I was caught in the flypaper.”
    “He was threatening in manner?”
    “Far from it. He was as civilized as they come, on the surface. He reminded me of my father.”
    Burbank lifted a palm. “Explain.”
    “There are physical and other resemblances.”
    Burbank gave me a quizzical look but asked for no details. I wondered if I had been wise to feed him this psychic clue. Burbank seemed to be wondering the same thing, using his own unique terms of reference. I was too tired to regret my words or worry about their effect on him.
    At 6:00 P.M. exactly Burbank stopped asking questions, turned off the stereo, and tuned into the evening news. Drinking scotch and chomping on nuts, he was absorbed by today’s recycling of yesterday’s stories. I hadn’t watched American television for a long time, and almost never the news, so I recognized neither the anchorperson nor the hot topics. In minutes I went to sleep. An hour later, when Burbank switched off the set, I woke up and stumbled into the bathroom. When I came back I saw no sign of him. Was he in another bathroom? A long time passed. I looked in the master bath. He wasn’t there. I called hello. No response. I turned on the outside lights. The Hyundai was gone. It was raining, sheets of it. Well, if he didn’t come back, I could always go back to sleep. I was hungry. I looked in the refrigerator. Lettuce, celery, carrots, low-fat yogurt, red and yellow Jell-O, a lemon with a strip of peel removed, an unripe melon, two minibottles of water. In the freezer, two frozen