Eye for an Eye (3 page)

Meixiu had opened all of them, and the back terrace was cluttered with gifts: bright sweaters, jewelry, toys, shoes, flowers, and a hundred other items large and small, stacked on tables for the guests to admire.

A half mile away, a dark blue delivery van pulled up to Xinhua Gate. The driver lowered the window and handed his ID to one of the armed soldiers guarding the entrance.

The soldier inspected the identification. The driver was from the Ministry of State Security.

“Who is it for?”

“The girl,” said the driver. “A present from Minister Bhang.”

The soldier passed his ministry ID back to him and nodded to another soldier to let the van through the gates.

The van moved at a placid speed through the massive multibuilding compound that served as central headquarters for the Chinese government, including the Communist Party and the State Council. Pretty trees and manicured lawns separated the ancient, beautifully maintained buildings. Every few hundred yards stood an armed soldier or two. The van stopped outside Li’s residence. The driver climbed out of the van as a pair of armed soldiers in paramilitary gear crossed the front lawn of the house.

The driver opened the back of the van. All three men stood and stared inside. Sitting in the back was a lone object, a large brown shiny-new Louis Vuitton trunk with a pink ribbon wrapped garishly around it, then tied in a bow.

“It’s heavy,” said the driver. “Give me a hand, will you?”

The three men lifted the trunk and carried it across the lawn. Another guard, this one in plain clothes, opened the front door.

They carried the trunk through the house. At the door to the outside terrace, Li’s wife caught the sight of the three men, then let out a delighted laugh.

“What have we here?” she yelled in a high-pitched giggle.

“From Minister Bhang, madam,” said the driver.

“Oh, delightful,” she said, waving them toward the door. “Just delightful.”

They carried the trunk to the back lawn amid excited
ooh
s and
aah
s. Meixiu, still atop the pony, let out a squeal as she suddenly saw the present being set down on the lawn. She practically jumped from the pony and ran across the grass to the trunk.

A bright yellow envelope was taped to the top of the trunk.

“To Meixiu,” said Meixiu, reading the note aloud as Li and his wife stood at the young girl’s side, surrounded by the rest of the children and adults. “On this, the happiest of days, happy birthday to you, from Minister Fao Bhang.”

Li glanced at his wife, a slightly confounded smile on his face.

“Who is that, Grandfather?” asked Meixiu.

“Just someone I work with,” said Li.

“What a kind gesture,” said Li’s wife.

“May I open it?” asked Meixiu, a huge smile of excitement on her face.

“Of course,” bellowed Li, gleefully.

The girl pulled one end of the ribbon and let it fall to the ground. She unclasped the two buckles on the front of the trunk, then lifted it up.

At first there were smiles and shouts of delight, as many people didn’t understand what it was they were seeing. Then came the silence, as smiles disappeared. Finally, there was the scream, the first one, from Meixiu herself, a piercing yelp of a scream that ripped the air. Her scream was soon joined by others from her grandmother, schoolmates, and everyone else within sight of the trunk.

Inside the trunk was the body of a dead man, stuffed unnaturally into the trunk, dressed in tennis shorts, a tennis shirt, covered in a flood of dried blood and mucus. In the middle of the man’s head was an ax, which had been hacked deep into the skull.

As Meixiu suddenly vomited and everyone else scrambled to leave amid a chorus of quiet hysteria, Li turned calmly to one of the plainclothed security men.

“Return this to the ministry,” said Li as he reached for his chest and tried to control his anger. “Then tell Fao Bhang I want to see him immediately.”

4

MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY
BEIJING

“Do you recognize him, sir?”

Fao Bhang, China’s minister of State Security, the top intelligence official in China, stared at the mangled corpse. It was stuffed like a side of beef into the Louis Vuitton trunk. The smell was overwhelming, but the pungent aroma didn’t stop Bhang from looking. The dead man had on tennis sneakers, shorts, and what had been a white tennis shirt. A long gash had been cleaved into the torso, at least a foot long and four inches wide. His ribs were visible. The skin around the gash was swelled up, septic and rotting. From the man’s skull, a large ax jutted out, the ax head embedded deep into the dead man’s forehead. At the nape of the neck, a silver Star of David lay still, attached to a thin necklace.

*   *   *

Bhang had met Dillman more than a decade before. Bhang had been sent to Israel to kill a Chinese dissident hiding out in a Jerusalem tenement. The operation had gone flawlessly; it would be a one-day hit; in and out, bragging rights back at the ministry. But it had gone awry at the airport. They’d stopped him; his cover had been blown somehow.

Within hours Bhang was tied up and sweating in a Mossad interrogation house, located in a quiet Tel Aviv suburb called Savyon. Dillman was his interrogator. He was Mossad’s deputy chief operating officer, and Bhang recognized him immediately.

“Welcome to Israel, Fao,” Dillman had said. “Did you finish the job on the old man? A seventy-four-year-old with arthritis. That must have been pretty hard, yes?”

Then, the words that changed it all, that changed everything. And they came from Bhang’s mouth, as if from a ventriloquist.

“We’ll pay you fifty million dollars to spy for China,” Bhang had said to Dillman. “Agree, promise to set me free, and it will be wired within the hour.”

He’d guessed, correctly as it turned out, that it needed to be an awe-inspiring number. Anything less, and the Israeli wouldn’t have done it. The ministry had paid Dillman the $50 million and at least another $50 million over the years. In return, Dillman had been a virtual treasure trove of information, not only about Israel, but America too.

The turning of the high-ranking Israeli had propelled Bhang upward within the ministry. He bathed in the reflected glory of the mole’s revelations.

*   *   *

“Dillman,” said Bhang, looking at the corpse, at rest in the trunk.

“Are you sure, sir?”

Bhang did not answer or show any emotion, as he stared at the dead Israeli.

*   *   *

Fao Bhang did not like idle talk. In fact, on the day when Bhang was elevated to his leadership post of the Ministry of State Security, leapfrogging over more than a dozen more senior officers who were, on paper, more experienced than him, Premier Zicheng had remarked, “Fao, you seem more like a librarian than a spy.”

Bhang, in typical fashion, had not responded, except to nod a humble thank-you. Premier Zicheng then presented him the Order of the Lotus—the ministry’s highest honor. Bhang was appointed, at the age of forty-three, to arguably the third most powerful position in China.

Only Bhang knew that Zicheng’s remark really could not have been further from the truth. It demonstrated a critical lack of understanding about him, another underestimation of his abilities, his strengths, and his cunning. In order to claim the ministry’s top office, Bhang had engineered a bold, highly ruthless plot. Over the course of a year, he had systematically destroyed the one man standing in his way, Xiangou, his boss, mentor, and caretaker. Machiavelli himself would have cringed in fear.

It had all begun with a phone call from Bhang’s half brother. Bo Minh was an electrical engineer by training, who’d started at the ministry at the same time as Bhang. But whereas Bhang had political ambitions, Minh was more interested in the obtuse recesses of abstract technology. Minh became a mid-level functionary within the ministry’s electronic espionage and surveillance directorate, designing devices used to listen in on enemies and allies alike, helping to arm agents with increasingly tinier, more-potent tools, which could be deployed in different environments across the globe and used to eavesdrop on any sort of conversation.

Minh had called Bhang past midnight, awakening him in a hotel room in Cairo, where he’d been sent to kill someone.

“I have discovered something,” Minh had whispered conspiratorially.

“Why are you whispering?”

“I can’t talk,” whispered Minh urgently. “Listen to me. There is to be a change at the top echelon of the ministry.”

Bhang had rubbed his eyes, then looked at his notebook, lying next to the bed. The word
CAIRO
was written out in bold letters. It was a habit he’d formed early on, so that in the jumbled chaos of hotels and cities he traveled to, he could wake up and know immediately where he was.

“What time is it?”

“What time is it? Did you not hear me?”

“How do you know?”

“I was testing a listening device. I had placed it in a bathroom on the seventh floor. The minister himself spoke. He must have gone into the bathroom near the cabinet room. He was alone, on a phone call. He has cancer. He is to resign within the year.”

“Did he say who he would pick as his successor?”

“Xiangou.”

A wave of electricity went down Bhang’s spine. Xiangou was Bhang’s boss, the head of the ministry’s clandestine paramilitary services bureau. He ran the kill teams. In its own way, this was good news. It meant the minister would be selecting a killer over a functionary as the next head of the ministry.

Unfortunately, Xiangou was only forty-eight years old. He would have a long career as minister, which meant Bhang’s chances of running the ministry would effectively be over.

A stark realization occurred to him then. This whole thing was, in fact, his death knell. For while Bhang was Xiangou’s protégé and the most effective assassin within the clandestine bureau’s ranks, Xiangou feared him. There wasn’t a more vicious man alive than Xiangou. As soon as he found out he was to become China’s next minister of State Security, Bhang would be dead within the hour.

“When will it happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t tell
anyone.
Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Fao.”

And so it had begun.

*   *   *

Bhang knew he would have to design the operation outside of the architecture of the ministry. The ministry was everywhere, and any action he might contemplate involving Xiangou would be detected.

Bhang realized as he sat in that Cairo hotel room that next morning, he would need to do this one off the grid.

He picked up the phone.

“Dillman.”

“Mikal, it is me, Fao.”

“Good morning, Fao. Who will the ministry be putting a bullet in today?”

“I need to see you. It’s urgent.”

“I’ll be in Brussels tomorrow. Meet me at noon at the Metropole. The room will be under Seidenberg.”

In an opulent suite at the Metropole, Bhang laid out his dilemma to Dillman. Not only did Bhang need Dillman’s ideas on how to remove Xiangou, he needed Dillman to actually do it. He needed Mossad to terminate Xiangou. Bhang couldn’t be involved. He’d asked many people to do many things over the years, but always with the threat of violence or the promise of money behind the request. It was the first time Bhang had ever asked anyone for a favor.

“I’ll do it for you,” Dillman had said, placing his hand on Bhang’s knee and patting it. “Anything for you, my good friend.”

*   *   *

Dillman fabricated a cover story to explain why Israel needed to assassinate Xiangou. He doctored a photograph of Xiangou dining with a high-level Hamas operative in Budapest. For his madhouse compatriots, that was more than enough paper to approve the kill.

Mossad began by infiltrating Xiangou’s personal life and looking for vulnerabilities. He was married but kept a mistress in Macau. He liked to gamble. It was decided that they would strike Xiangou during one of his monthly visits to the sprawling city, China’s version of Las Vegas.

Macau, Dillman knew, would be a challenge. Chinese intelligence was everywhere, particularly inside the big casinos, layered throughout the staffs and monitoring cameras, looking for suspicious or even just interesting Westerners to spy on. The casino where Xiangou would be gambling was the most logical place to hit him. But there were thirty-two casinos in Macau, and trying to guess which one Xiangou would throw away his money at was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Then there was the building where his mistress lived, a modern glass skyscraper in the central business district. Her apartment was on the penthouse floor, fifty-six stories up. The building was highly secure, with armed guards at the entrance. More important, Xiangou always brought a two- or three-man detail with him. If the casinos were going to be difficult, the apartment building would be next to impossible.

Dillman’s overarching concern was the possibility Xiangou’s death might be traced back to Mossad. It had to look like an accident.

From public construction records, they studied the apartment building at its various stages. A British structural engineering firm had been hired as a subcontractor, and part of their purview had been the scope and plan for the elevators. A phone call to London was made.

Three weeks later, on a sun-splashed Thursday afternoon, Xiangou landed at Macau International Airport. He went directly to the StarWorld Casino, where he spent several hours playing craps and drinking vodka, with three ministry agents hovering over his shoulders. At dinnertime, he went to his mistress’s apartment. At just before 9:00
P.M.
, Xiangou and his mistress stepped into the elevator. As the doors shut, Xiangou winked at the young girl, reaching for her hand. Then, as a pair of cables attached to the roof of the cabin failed, the elevator dropped fifty-six stories. Screams from Xiangou’s mistress could be heard at various points by people waiting for an elevator, as the couple rocketed down the air shaft to their violent deaths.

The following June, after the current minister of State Security surprised almost everyone with his resignation, for personal reasons, Fao Bhang was named China’s next minister of State Security.