Power and Empire

He’d placed the NFC sticker almost three hours before, just after the girl had set up her lemonade stand. Roughly an inch square, the drab, off-white adhesive paper blended perfectly with the plastic folding table on which the lemonade girl set up her wares. The glare from a string of overhead lights provided plenty of shadows in the night, rendering the small sticker invisible to all but the most discerning eye. Coronet considered putting the NFC tag under the counter, but the memory of the bombing was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Applying it would have drawn no notice, but his contact would have certainly garnered plenty of attention when he came along and attempted to read it by putting his mobile phone under the counter. No, better to keep movements normal, ordinary. A mobile phone set flat on the plastic table would read the NFC in an instant and raise concerns with no one.

Coronet loved the tradecraft even more than he loved the exotic travel. Dead drops, social engineering, disguises — he reveled in them all. He did SDRs — surveillance detection routes — even when there was no need to do so, though the longer he stayed in the business the more necessary they became. On the road, he kept to a strict regimen of push-ups and sit-ups, every morning in his hotel room. At home, he was in the gym five days a week, doing a “fight gone bad” workout or on the mat sparring with one of the many white-collar boxers who lived in his area. He’d studied kung fu from the time he was a small boy, but migrated to the harsher styles of hapkido and American boxing. Unlike James Bond, he shied away from rich food and too much booze. He limited himself to the occasional girl, always young, and always paid for.

Like Bond, he enjoyed working alone, but he was smart enough to know when he needed help. He had a small crew of operators who worked for him, all of them young and, like him, in it for the excitement and money over any misguided idealism. Ideals were whimsical. Policies shifted and regimes toppled, leaving operators too closely aligned with any one side out in the cold.

Coronet wasn’t particularly enamored of communist China. He could just as easily have been spying for his native Taiwan or even the United States. As a matter of fact, the ChiComs paid shit. But in order to be a provocateur for the West, one had to live in the East. That’s where the work was. Even with China’s burgeoning middle class and new social freedoms, it was still rife with the problems of a communist state. It was one thing to visit Beijing for a quick meeting or zip in and out of Kashgar to chat up some enraged Uyghur separatists. Coronet sure as hell didn’t want to live there on anything close to a permanent basis. He wanted his Internet browser free from the Great Firewall and his indiscretions overlooked, thank you very much. He’d had a gutful of communist overwatch during his six months in Suzhou while he attended satellite classes run by the Institute of Cadre Management — the Ministry of State Security’s spy school.

He’d endured five separate polygraph examinations and countless hours of interrogation — some of it bordering on torture — all while trying to attend a school that his handler had invited him to. Other MSS methods were more insidious. Once a pretty girl had approached him in a bar and offhandedly remarked how stupid it was that there were people in the government who held fast to the Two Whatevers Policy — the political statement that “we will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” Coronet had read enough concerning modern Chinese foreign policy to know that not even everyone in the politburo still believed in this archaic notion. He was, however, bright enough to know that no matter how handsome he was, attractive women did not approach strangers in bars and discuss politics, especially in China.

The girl was in her mid-twenties, older than he preferred, so he’d called her an idiot and moved to another table.

The next day he was subjected to a three-hour interview in a very cold room with a woman who said she was a psychologist. Her job, she explained, was to make the final decision as to his devotion to the state. He pointed out that it was a member of MSS who had recruited him, but the woman had just sat there, blinking at him behind her thick round glasses and smiling a bloated smile as if she had indigestion.

In the end, she gave him a passing grade and provided instructions on where to report. Had he failed, he was told later, he would have been an unwitting class project for those already in the program and would have ended up at the bottom of Taihu Lake.