Free The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry Page A

organic dinners (vegetarian). I was looking at the demented paintings again when Burbank came back, a six-pack of microbrew lager in one hand and a bag from a sandwich shop in another. I smelled hot tomatoey American food. He put his packages on the kitchen table and said, “One tofu with sprouts, arugula and roasted red pepper, one meat-ball with provolone, red onions, hot peppers, and black olives. Which do you want?”
    “The meatballs.”
    “Sit ye down,” said Burbank.
    To the prodigal home from China, the meal was at least as delicious as the mixture of canned pork and beans and canned spaghetti that Nick Adams, just back from epicurean Paris, mixed together, as I remembered it, over a campfire in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” Fearful that the beer would put me back to sleep, I drank the water, stealing the second tiny bottle for good measure.
    When we finished, Burbank tidied up, putting the debris back into the sandwich bag, washing his beer bottle and my water bottles with soap, presumably to erase our fingerprints, brushing the crumbs into his hand, then into the bag, wiping the tabletop with a sponge, then with a paper towel. He looked happy. Apparently the indoor picnic had been as much of a treat for him as for me.
    He brewed some green tea for himself. I drank instant espresso. We remained at the kitchen table. I was glad not to be in the same room with the caretaker’s paintings. Burbank waited for his tea to cool, then drank it in a single thirsty gulp.
    He said, “What really do you make of this offer of Chen Qi’s?”
    We had already discussed this in mind-numbing detail, but I went along, as I was paid to do. I said, “As you said, Guoanbu comes to mind.”
    “Why? Do you suspect that girl who’s teaching you Mandarin?”
    The answer, of course, was yes, but I didn’t want to betray Mei to the likes of Burbank. If betray was the word. More than once the thought had crossed my mind that she was being run not by Guoanbu but by Burbank. Her objectives were his objectives: be my crammer in Mandarin, put me in touch with young Chinese who might someday be useful, fuck me cross-eyed to keep me away from sexual technicians from Guoanbu. Just as often, I told myself she could not be working for anyone but Guoanbu. If the usual rules applied, she had been setting me up all along for Chen Qi’s recruitment pitch. Only at certain moments did I think she was nothing more than a lusty woman who just happened to have a thing about hairy Americans.
    To Burbank I said, “What do you think?”
    “I think it’s a golden opportunity,” Burbank said.
    “For whom? To do what?”
    “For us. To do what we do.”
    “You don’t think it’s a trap?”
    He snorted in amusement. “Of course it is, in the opposition’s calculations,” he said. “But that can be an advantage for our side. Some of the best operations we’ve ever run involved walking into a trap—or, to be more exact, by pretending to be stupid enough to do so. The idea is to demonstrate your low IQ, move the trap, change the bait so the trapper goes looking for his missing trap and steps on it himself and has to chew off his own leg to escape.”
    Burbank’s face positively glowed as he imparted this wisdom. As the animal for whom the trap was being baited and set, I found it hard to join in his enthusiasm. And yet I was learning something. He was showing me his mind, or more likely the fictitious mind he had invented for the purposes of this conversation.
    Burbank said, “What do you think the opposition’s purpose might be?”
    The answer that sprang to mind was, Same as yours — to own me, to ruin my life. What I said was, “To recruit me, to compromise me, to double me, to expose me, to pump me out for the utterly trivial things a nobody like me knows. To embarrass the United States, and if I’m lucky, to swap me in due course for some Chinese agent of greater value.”
    “To surround us, in short. Do you play