Power and Empire

Chen held to the notion that two people could keep a secret, so long as one of them was dead. At the same time, there were large portions of his job that required the efforts of more than one man. He needed assistance, but he needed it from people he could trust. Of course, his handlers within the PRC knew this. In the beginning, he’d been part of several teams, learning from some of the best Beijing had to offer on operations from Taiwan to Los Angeles. Eventually, he’d been selected to work on his own and ordered to stop reporting to his regular handler in Beijing. His new handler, a man he knew only as Kevin, was a moderately high-ranking member of either the Chinese military or some facet of the country’s murky intelligence apparatus. Chen didn’t know exactly which organization or branch, and he didn’t care, so long as the missions and the money kept coming his way.

In the beginning, Kevin had told him to submit eight names of operatives with whom he’d worked before to be part of his team. Trust was an often bandied word but a seldom felt emotion in the intelligence business. Those who engaged in such work were trained to be untrustworthy, and so expected the same behavior from others. Vincent Chen knew full well at least half the men and women assigned to work with him were sent to spy on him. It was the way the PRC did things — give someone a job, assign two people to make certain that job was completed under the guidelines of the party, and then assign at least one other to watch the watchers. At some point, all involved knew they were watching and being watched. With the right incentives — in the form of money and actual rather than forced camaraderie — all the internal spying became a laughable house of cards.

It took almost two years — and the unfortunate deaths of four less loyal members of his team — before Chen felt he’d weeded and pruned his operational cadre into a group of three men and one woman he could trust — or, at least, on whom he could depend ninety-five percent of the time. Each of these four wanted the money he paid them, and each of them had some sort of weakness that he could exploit if the need arose — gambling debts, an adulterous affair with a ranking party member’s wife. In Chen’s experience, everyone on earth had something of a tender white underbelly. Eventually, he’d picked up a handful of other operatives he used around the world who worked on a contract basis.

Over the past several years, the sheer size of Chen’s payments had led him to realize he’d become an operative for some faction of the PRC government that most of the party knew nothing about. He began earning large “bonuses” at the completion of each assignment. As team leader, he made sure almost five hundred thousand U.S. dollars a year flowed into the offshore accounts belonging to each of the other members of his cadre. One hundred thousand of that was distributed by Chen himself from the bonuses he received. A yearly income of half a million U.S. dollars appeared to be a magic number. Any less and the danger a competing entity might lure a person away became exponentially greater. Too much more than half a million and one began to feel financially independent. It became easier to sock away a little here and there, making the dream of disappearing to some remote corner of the world too much of a reality. Chen’s handlers had not seemed to snap to this reality. Expensive cars, fresh young women, constant business-class travel, and five-star hotels were all enormously expensive, but the sensitivity of his missions and the sheer genius with which he pulled them off had made him a very rich man.

And the rest of his team had been handpicked because they were much like him. Sure, he had leverage. But more than threat of exposure or even the money, the members of Coronet’s team preferred their new lives to their old ones. They were all in their mid-thirties, fit, and adventurous. Vincent Chen had worked insidiously to make certain that the men and women who worked for him were thoroughly and completely addicted to the excesses of their jobs and the frequent massive adrenaline spikes. He’d turned them into junkies. Their habit kept them loyal to him, because nowhere else could they find anything remotely close to the life of working with Coronet.

Vincent Chen himself was an addict, and he knew it. He had enough money in various offshore accounts that he could have easily retired and lived the seventy years in modest comfort without ever working another day.

But like the members of his team, modest was not something he ever wanted to experience again.

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