Free The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry Page B

weiqi?”
    He meant the Chinese game called Go in Japan and in the West. In Mandarin weiqi means “the game of surrounding.” I had often played it with Mei, who always skunked me. I said, “After a fashion.”
    “Work on it. You can’t understand them if you don’t understand weiqi.”
    “Do you know the game?” I asked.
    “No one does unless he’s Chinese. I play it. It’s hard to find partners. Chen Qi is a weiqi man. The game is a passion with this guy. We know that about him. Work on it. Get a teacher, get good enough to play him. Beat him if you can. He’ll think all the more of you if you do.”
    These were orders? What next? Who knew but what weiqi was the basis of Burbank’s technique as a counterspy. Certainly I felt surrounded. It was time to change the subject.
    I said, “I’m curious about something.”
    Burbank lifted his eyebrows. I took this for permission to go ahead.
    I said, “Why do you have all those safes in your office?”
    He thought this over. He saw what I was trying to do and decided to humor me.
    “You think I should digitize all that information and store it in a computer?”
    “Why not?”
    “Because safes are safe,” he said. “Because they contain things I need to know, need to keep in secure storage, one copy only.” He was spacing his words as if teaching me some arcane truth in a language I did not fully understand. He continued, “Think about the origins of the word safe, the meaning of that term to the collective subconscious, think of what the concept of being safe has meant to mankind over millennia. We are weaker than the other carnivores. We fear other tribes of our own kind with all our hearts and souls. Our existence depends on our being safe from the Others, capital O. We are obsessed by it. The lust for safety is the reason why clubs and spears and gunpowder and nuclear weapons were invented. If experience has taught us anything in recent times, it is that computers are not safe. Computers are gossips, they are compulsive talkers. Touch them in the right place, with the right combination of digits, and they swoon and spread their legs. That’s what they’re designed to do—disgorge, not safeguard. That’s what they do. Safes have no brains, no means of communication, therefore no such vulnerability.”
    I said, “They can’t be cracked?”
    Burbank ignored the question. He said, “You have reservations about this opportunity.” No question mark.
    “Serious ones,” I said. “Don’t you?”
    “Of course I do. There are always reservations. Think about landing on the moon in that LEM. It might as well have been made of papier-mâché and it was built to fly in a vacuum, but Armstrong and Aldrin showed that it could be done.”
    Excellent analogy for the equipment for this mission, I thought. I said, “I have no wish to be an Armstrong or an Aldrin.”
    “You won’t be. Others have gone before.”
    Yes, and never came back. I said, “Suppose we go ahead with this, whatever it is. What would it accomplish?”
    “Nothing, maybe. But maybe a lot more than we imagine.” Burbank said. “There are no certainties. There never are. But you’d be on the inside, and….”
    “Inside what? A corporation.”
    Burbank said, “A corporation, please remember, that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guoanbu.”
    Burbank sounded as if he had taken it for granted that I would be as enthusiastic about this operation as he seemed to be, that I would be as unconcerned as he was about the risks that I, not he, was going to take. To myself, I was one of a kind, new to the world, never to be born again or otherwise duplicated. To Burbank, I knew, I was just one stone, black or white, it didn’t matter which, waiting on one of the 361 squares on his weiqi board for his finger and thumb to move me.
    “Penetrate the corporation and we penetrate Guoanbu?” I said.
    “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”
    “And I would do what to make that happen? Please tell