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      “Is. He was a PLA colonel.” He could see Zu leave the hotel in Samarkand, look this way and that before walking toward a black Lada, parked on the side of the square behind the bench on which he and April were sitting, talking about the Viet Cong, the mujahedin. Why did Burling equate their kind of fervent commitment with love? “I didn’t know Zu had made it off that runway until I met Yong in Princeton. At the time I thought that might have been why you asked me to talk to him. I was grateful to you for that.”

      MacAllister’s face was reflected in the tinted window beside him. Yong had not been able to give him the same, or any, news about April. “You know that if the press got wind of the little deal you had going with Zu then, they’d fry us both for sure.”

      “Colonel Zu is General Zu now,” Burling said.

      “You keep in touch?”

      “I wouldn’t go anywhere near him, but I’m sure he knows I’m there. He’s the head of the Internal Security Service.”

      “What about Alan Rank?”

      Burling felt the car sinking beneath him, then rising again, leaving his stomach behind. “Name’s familiar. Some kind of academic in Nanjing.”

      “You were always a terrible liar.”

      “Ironically, yes, but discretion isn’t prevarication, Mac. On this point you and I can disagree.”

      “Your girlfriend works with him.”

      MacAllister had been married for forty-some years to the same woman, and his use of the term “girlfriend” was derisive, at least it sounded so to Burling.

      “Charlotte and I have been seeing each other in Shanghai, it’s true, but I wouldn’t say she works with him. The public diplomacy people have some programs with the center Rank runs.”

      “Well she, Charlotte, had better be careful. Programs are not all Rank runs. He just got a visa for a man named John Tan, applied through some sort of fundamentalist outfit in Georgia that’s in with the China Christian Council, the outfit that certifies churches.”

      “And spies on them, too.”

      “I didn’t know that. To be honest, I was hoping you could help me out with this Tan character.”

      “I’m sorry, Mac.” Long ago, Burling had found a proper way to refer to his fallen position. He breathed deeply and explained. “It’s well known in this administration that I don’t happen to agree with engagement. They’d like to get rid of me, but they’re afraid I might squawk if some reporter happened to notice that the consul in Shanghai hasn’t been changed since Bush One. It seems like nepotism. Truth is, I’m out to pasture there.”

      “You heard nothing at State? NSC?”

      In spite of himself, Burling gulped. He looked for space in the field by the road, in the sky, but found none. The stockade fences of a subdivision crowded his sight. “What about your man in Shanghai? Ryan?”

      “A group has been smuggling dissidents off the mainland,” MacAllister said, ignoring the question, “taking them out using drug-smuggling boats and black market export shipments from Shenzhen. Sometimes they’ll throw the poor suckers on tramp steamers headed for New York, give the triads a shot at ’em. It seems to have started as a right-thinking venture, but someone got the idea there might be money in it. We’ve been trying to trace it back to the source for years, thinking it may be a way in, but every time we open the door, no one’s home. Organized crime in Hong Kong, those ancient import-export concerns in Taipei. We’ve even had the Bureau lean on the Chinatown gangs. Nothing. Where we’ve never gotten any help is the White House itself.”

      “It’s gossip in Shanghai,” Burling told him, feeling the strength of some authority, “but one thing didn’t change between old George and Clinton and this one: the White House turns a blind eye.”

      MacAllister leaned toward him, arm across the back of the gray cloth seat. The car was getting warm, bringing out a smell of cigarette smoke. Beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead. “I’m telling you, Burl, I’ve never seen it quite like this, and it’s worse since last September. They’ll do just about anything for money. I’ve got nothing against banks, but they’re a hell of a place to deposit your conscience.”

      “The world is a fire sale,” Burling said, “and the wind seems to be turning in our direction. You don’t think that Rank’s man might walk into something?”

      MacAllister arched his back and took a sporran flask from his jacket’s inside pocket. He tipped it back and exhaled. “Yong has disappeared, Lucius, gone from the house where we thought they were keeping him.”

      Suddenly Burling felt the need of air. He lowered his window, but a yellow cloud of pollen blew into the car. The airport hovered in the distance like a pair of concrete wings.

      “Gone?”

      “As of five days ago, according to our man in Beijing.”

      The driver offered him a bottle of water. He took a drink and looked away. An artificial lake marked the outskirts of the airport, the curving roadway lined with weak trees trained by guy ropes and stakes: the terminal expanding again. This had once been a magical place for him, the airport named after John Foster Dulles—who, as JFK said, had been secretary to the Chinese delegation to The Hague at the age of nineteen. If other families had homes in those places on the green signs—the suburbs, the cul-de-sacs and split levels, the flat green patches of backyards in northern Virginia—to remember, Burling, Amelia, Betsy, and Luke had this airport, its raw concrete and polished ramps and soaring buttresses, the mobile lounges prowling the runways like something prehistoric and futuristic all at once, dedicated by President Kennedy in a happier time. MacAllister’s driver lowered his window and plucked a ticket from the parking machine.

      “Do you think Zu has him, or did he escape?”

      “When you get back, pay a visit to Nanjing. Talk to Alan Rank. Or better yet, have your girlfriend do it.”

      The car’s engine ground to a terrible idle, and Burling watched an elegant woman cross the asphalt. Sunlight shimmered on the back of her skirt as she gained the near curb in her heels. Something vaguely reptilian stirred in him—lust, love? He was tempted to think that the world ran on these things more than power or money. But he felt a more sinister force—love’s removal, its absence, betrayal—that was closer to him. The beautiful woman had stopped on the sidewalk to dig in her bag.

      “Where will I find you if I need you?” Burling asked.

      MacAllister was smiling: the look of a shabby operation to be dealt with somewhere else. The driver clicked open the electric locks.

      “Don’t you fret,” MacAllister said, massaging Burling’s shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but he seemed to feel through Burling’s diminishing muscle for his bones.

      Taking his suitcase, Burling passed behind the woman through the terminal doors.

      Li xin pedaled his bike along the boulevard beside Temple Park, his shadow fleeing before him on the plum-colored wall. A bus swayed dangerously close, belching smoke in his face, and Li swore through the windows at the forest of torsos and arms. The traffic was bad for a Saturday, and he had to meet his general СКАЧАТЬ