The Ambler Warning

Adrian nodded soberly, hairs pleasantly raised on the back of his neck. I’m counting on it. That sounded almost like I’m counting on you.

  An hour later, a large, compressed digital file arrived from the system at Parrish Island. After decompressing and decrypting, the main component turned out to be some sort of audio file.

  “You know how this thing works?” Caston grunted.

  He did. “This bad boy is a twenty-four-bit data file, formatted into the professional audio-recording integrated system. That’s PARIS format. Looks to be a five-minute-long audio clip.” Adrian shrugged, modestly disavowing praise that didn’t actually come. “Hey, I was president of the audiovisual club in high school. I’m an ace at anything to do with this kind of thing. You ever decide you want to host your own TV show, I’m your guy.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  After making a few software adjustments, Adrian set the PARIS file to play on Caston’s computer. Apparently it had been recorded at a psychiatric session with Patient No. 5312 and represented his current state of mind.

  Patient No. 5312, they knew, was a trained government operative. An HVA of two decades’ standing and therefore in possession of two decades’ worth of operational secrets—procedures, ciphers, assets, informants, sources, networks.

  He was also—the recording made plain—stark raving mad.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this guy,” Adrian ventured.

  Caston scowled. “How many times have I got to tell you? You want to talk to me about logic, information, evidence, I’m all ears. When you’ve got a considered judgment, please let me know. Degrees of belief is our stock-in-trade. But don’t talk to me about ‘feelings.’ I’m happy you’ve got feelings. It’s possible I’ve got ’em, too, though that’s disputed. It’s just that they don’t belong in the office. We’ve been through this.”

  “Sorry,” Adrian said. “But having a piece of work like that on the loose . . .”

  “Not for long,” Caston said, mostly to himself. Then he repeated, in a still quieter voice, “Not for long.”

  BEIJING, CHINA

  As chief of the Second Bureau of the Ministry of State Security—the bureau devoted to foreign operations—Chao Tang visited Zhongnanhai on a regular basis. And yet his heart always raced a little when he arrived. So much history was concentrated in this place: such hopes and such disappointment; such achievement and such failure. It was a history Chao knew well, and that seemed to shadow his every step.

  Zhongnanhai, sometimes known as the Sea Palaces, was a capital within the capital. The immense, heavily guarded complex where China’s top leaders lived and ruled had been a symbol of empire ever since the Mongol overlords had walled it in during the Yuan dynasty of the fourteenth century. Subsequent dynasts rebuilt the area over the centuries, razing and raising mighty edifices; some were dedicated to the pursuit of power, others to the pursuit of pleasure. All the edifices were arrayed among vast man-made lakes in the sylvan splendor of an artificial arcadia. In 1949, the year that Mao attained absolute control over the country, the complex, which had fallen into disrepair, was once more rebuilt. In short order, the country’s new rulers had a new home.

  What was once a carefully landscaped simulacrum of nature had to yield to the practical requirements of pavement and parking lots; the extravagant finery of yore gave way to a grim and graceless Eastern bloc décor. But those were cosmetic matters merely; the revolutionaries proved entirely faithful to the older and deeper traditions of secrecy and seclusion. The question, in Chao’s view, was whether the sway of those traditions would give way before a man who was intent on overturning them: China’s youthful president, Liu Ang.

  It had been, as Chao recalled, the president’s decision to reside here. His immediate predecessor had lived not in Zhongnanhai proper but on a nearby guarded estate. Yet Liu Ang had reasons of his own to live in the same complex as the rest of the leadership. He believed in his powers of personal suasion, put much stock in his ability to win over pockets of resistance by means of informal visits, strolls through the ornamental copses, unscheduled teas.

  The meeting tonight, however, was neither informal nor unscheduled. It had, indeed, been foisted upon Liu, and not by his opponents but by his loyalists. For what was at stake was nothing less than Liu’s own survival and the future of the world’s most populous nation.

  Fear galvanized five of the six men gathered around the black lacquered table on the second floor of Liu’s residence. Yet the president himself refused to take the threats seriously. Chao could read Liu’s clear gaze: frightened old men was what he took them for. Here, in a small granite compound in the shadow of the Palace Steeped in Compassion, it was hard for Liu Ang to grasp his extreme vulnerability. He had to be made to grasp it.

  The intelligence reports were shadowy, yes, and still indistinct, but when reports from Chao’s colleagues in the First Bureau, which specialized in domestic intelligence, were combined with those from Chao’s own bureau, the shadows deepened into something black indeed.

  A narrow-shouldered, soft-spoken man, seated to Liu Ang’s right, exchanged glances with Comrade Chao and began to address the president. “Forgive me for speaking forthrightly, but what good are all your plans for reform if you are not alive to carry them out!” the man said. He was Liu’s advisor on security matters and, like Chao, had a background in the MSS, though with the domestic bureau. “One must remove the snapping turtles from the pool if one hopes to swim unmolested. One must dredge the koi pond if one wishes to clarify the waters. One must uproot the poison ivy from the chrysanthemum garden if one wishes to pluck the flowers. One must—”

  “One must scythe the thickets of metaphor if one wishes to harvest the grain of reason,” Liu interrupted with a small smile. “But I know what you are trying to say. You have made the case before. And my answer remains what it was.” His tone grew resolute. “I refused to be paralyzed by fear. And I refuse to take action against people based solely on suspicion, not evidence. To do so would make me indistinguishable from my enemies.”

  “Your enemies will destroy you while you sit perorating about your high-minded ideals!” Chao interjected. “And then you will be easily distinguished from them indeed—they will be the victors, and you will be the vanquished.” He spoke with candor and with heat. Ang had always insisted upon the candor; the heat came with it.

  “Some of those who oppose me are men and women of principle,” Liu Ang said, without raising his voice. “Men and women who cherish stability and regard me as a threat to it. When they see that they have been in error, their opposition will subside.” Here, he had often insisted, time was on his side. He could win his argument about the pace of reform by going ahead with his plans and showing that no social chaos had resulted.

  “You mistake a knife fight for an exchange of analects!” Chao countered. “There are powerful men—even within the inner councils of state—for whom the real enemy is change, any kind of change.” He scarcely had to elaborate. Everyone knew about hard-liners who were opposed to any movement toward transparency, fairness, and efficiency, having prospered from their absence. These hard-liners were the ones who had made the Palace Steeped in Compassion a mockery of its name. Especially dangerous were the hard-liners on the governing committee—all too well represented in the People’s Liberation Army and the bureaus of state security—who had grudgingly acquiesced to his appointment in the belief that he could be controlled. It was said that Liu’s patron, the vice chairman of the Communist Party, had given such assurances. As they discovered that Liu was nobody’s puppet, their discontent flared into a sense of betrayal. So far, none had dared to move publicly against him; to take on someone so popular really could stir up seismic forces of social rebellion. But they had watched, and they had waited, and they had bided their time, and they were growing impatient. A small cadre of hard-liners had decided that Liu was only growing more powerful over time—that they had to act soon, before it was too late.

  “Y
ou who proclaim your loyalty to me—why would you turn me into the very thing I despise!” Liu Ang protested. “They say that power corrupts, but they don’t say how. Now I know: this is how. The reformer starts to listen to the counsel of fear. Well, I refuse to do so.”

  It was all Chao could do not to pound the table. “Are you invulnerable?” he demanded, his eyes flashing. “If someone fires a bullet at your reformist brain, does the bullet bounce off? If someone takes a sword to your reformist throat, does the blade give way? The counsel of fear, you say? How about the counsel of sanity!”

  Chao’s devotion to the young president was as personal as it was professional, and there were many who were perplexed by both elements of it. As someone who had spent decades deep within China’s bureaus of intelligence, Chao did not fit the usual profile of Liu’s fervent supporters. But even before Liu’s elevation two years ago as general secretary of the National People’s Congress and chairman of the Standing Committee of the NPC, Chao respected the man’s combination of agility and integrity. In Chao’s view, it embodied the very best of the Chinese character. Nor had a career dealing with the party cadres left Chao with any illusions about the apparatus that Liu had hoped to dismantle. It did not merely foster idleness, self-dealing, and insularity; it fostered self-deception, and to Chao there was no greater sin.

  Hence his heated words at this evening’s meeting. Despite the president’s protests, he did not want Liu Ang to transform himself; he simply wanted Liu Ang to survive. Aggressive preemption might strike the president as despotism, but it would be despotism in the service of a larger good.

  “You know that Comrade Chao and I have disagreed about many things,” said a fifty-year-old man named Wan Tsai, his large eyes further magnified by his wire-rimmed glasses. “Yet about this we are in agreement. The precautionary principle must be upheld.” Wan Tsai was an economist by training and one of Liu’s oldest friends. It was Tsai who had first persuaded Liu, as a young man, to work within the system; a blow against the status quo would be all the more powerful if it came from inside. Unlike other members of Liu’s personal council, Wan Tsai had never worried about the speed of the young president’s reforms—had, in fact, been impatient to do even more, even faster.

  “Let us drop the euphemisms,” Liu reproached. “You want me to launch a purge.”

  “Just weed out the disloyal!” cried Wan Tsai. “It is a matter of self-defense!”

  The president gave his mentor a sharp look. “As the sage Mencius asks, what good is self-defense if it comes at the expense of the self?”

  “You wish to keep your hands clean,” Chao said, coloring slightly. “I say, soon everyone will admire those clean hands of yours—at your funeral!” Chao took pride in his self-control, but now he was breathing hard. “I claim no expertise about law, economics, philosophy. But I do know about security. I’ve spent my career at MSS. As Mencius also said, when a donkey speaks about donkeys the prudent man listens.”

  “You’re not a donkey,” Liu Ang tossed off with a half smile.

  “You’re not a prudent man,” Chao returned flintily.

  Like the others at the table, Chao had not only recognized Liu’s extraordinary potential early on; he had helped Ang to realize it. They had a personal stake in his welfare. There had been men like Liu before in Chinese history, but none had ever succeeded.

  It was a mixed blessing that the youthful president—at forty-three, he was far younger than any others who had occupied the position, and he looked even younger than his years—was so beloved by the multitudes beyond the Zhongnanhai’s gates. For their adoration, like the Western media’s enthusiastic coverage, only heightened the hard-liners’ reflexive suspicion toward him. Yet Liu’s actions would have earned their enmity anyway. After only two years in his position, he had already established himself as a vigorous force of liberalization, variously confirming the fears and hopes of those around him. It made him a deeply inspiring figure. But among many hard-liners, what he mainly inspired was loathing and apprehension.

  Members of the Western media, of course, were quick to ascribe his policies to his background. They made much of the fact that he had been a onetime Tiananmen Square protester, the first of that cohort to rise within the Party ranks. They noted that he was the first Chinese head of state to have studied abroad, ascribing exaggerated significance to the year he spent taking engineering classes at MIT. They further conjectured that his pro-Western sentiments had been reinforced by friendships he made during that time. His resentful comrades, in turn, worried that his judgment had been clouded by the same factors. Chinese people who had spent time in the West were nicknamed hai gui—a term that meant “sea turtle” but also punned on “returner from the sea.” Suspicious Chinese who were hostile to the hai gui’s cosmopolitanism defiantly called themselves the tu bie, the local turtles. For many tu bie, the struggle against the influence of the hai gui would be a struggle to the death.

  “Do not mistake me,” Liu said gravely. “I’m not discounting the worries you raise.” He gestured toward the window, toward an ornamental island on the South Lake, now a drab acre of snow, glowing with artificial illumination. “Every day I look out there, and I see where my forerunner, the emperor, Kuang-hsü, was imprisoned. His punishment for launching the Hundred Days of Reform. Like me, the imprisoned emperor was motivated by both idealism and realism. What befell him a century ago may befall me. There isn’t a moment when I forget this.”

  It had happened in 1898, a legendary reversal, and one that had ultimately paved the way for the massive upheavals in the century that followed. The emperor, inspired by national setbacks and by the counsel of the great scholar and governor Kang Yu Wei, had done something as bold as any of his predecessors had ever done. In the course of a hundred days, a series of decrees was issued that would have transformed China into a modern constitutional state. The grand hopes and lofty aspirations were soon dashed. After three months, the dowager empress, backed by the governors-general, had the emperor, her nephew, imprisoned within the ornamental island on the South Lake and restored the old order. Entrenched interests found the reforms all too threatening, and those interests had prevailed—at least until the shortsighted conservative restoration was displaced by forces of revolution far more sweeping and ruthless than anything envisioned by the deposed emperor and counselor.

  “But Kang was a scholar without popular support,” a weedy-looking man toward the end of the table said, his eyes downcast. “You have both intellectual and political credibility. Which makes you that much more threatening.”

  “Enough of this!” said the youthful president. “I cannot do what you want me to do. You say that this is a way to protect my own position. Yet if I resort to purges—destroying my opponents because they are my opponents—my administration will not be worthy of protection. People may go down this road for the loftiest of reasons. Yet this road has no branches—it leads to one place only. It leads to tyranny.” He paused. “Those who oppose me for reasons of principle I shall endeavor to persuade. Those whose motives are less wholesome, well, they are opportunists. And if my policies succeed, they will do what opportunists always do. They will see which way the wind is blowing, and realign themselves accordingly. Just you see.”

  “Is this the voice of humility or hubris?” asked a man at the other end of the table. The man, Li Pei, had white hair and a face as wrinkled and veined as a walnut shell. He was a generation older than the others and in some ways was the most incongruous of Liu’s allies. Li Pei came from hardscrabble origins in the provinces and was known by the not unadmiring sobriquet jiaohua de nongmin, or “wily peasant.” A consummate survivor, he had kept a place in the Zhongnanhai compound, either in the State Council or in the Party itself, through Mao and Mao’s various successors—through the Cultural Revolution and its dismantling, through massacres and crackdowns and reforms and a thousand ideological course corrections. Many assumed Li Pei was simply a cynic who adjusted to whoever was in charge. Tha
t was only part of the story. Like many of the most corrosive cynics, he was a wounded idealist.

  At the head of the black lacquered table, President Liu Ang took a sip of green tea. “Maybe I am guilty of both hubris and humility. But not ignorance. I know the risks.”

  Another voice at the table spoke quietly. “We should not only look within. It was Napoléon who said, ‘Let China sleep. For when she awakes, let the nations tremble.’ Among your enemies are foreigners who do not wish the Middle Kingdom well. They fear that under your watch, China will indeed slumber no more.”

  “These are not theoretical concerns,” Chao Tang said, exasperated. “The intelligence reports I refer to are deeply worrying. Have you forgotten about what happened to Wai-Chan Leung in Taiwan? Many viewed the young man as a kindred spirit of yours, and you see what became of him. You may be facing some of the same enemies: the kind who fear peace more than war. The dangers you confront are real. Indeed, as I say, it would appear that some sort of conspiracy is already in motion.”

  “ ‘Some sort’?” Liu echoed. “You warn me of an international conspiracy, and yet the truth is that you have no idea who the principals are or what their aims may be. To speak of a conspiracy without knowing its nature is to bandy words only.”

  “Is it certainty you want?” Chao asked. “Certainty is what one has only when it is too late. A plot whose details we knew would be a plot we had already foiled. But there are too many whispers, hints, oblique references to ignore any longer—”

  “The merest conjecture!”

  “Plainly, members of your own government are involved,” Chao said. It took an effort to keep his voice level. “Nor can we disregard evidence suggesting that certain elements in the U.S. government may be involved as well.”

  “Your intelligence is not actionable,” Liu protested. “I appreciate your concern, but I do not see what I can do that is consistent with the example I wish to set.”