He dressed hurriedly and was standing in front of his town house, crunching LifeSavers two at a time, when the limousine arrived.
The second CIA deep-cover agent was a sixty-four-year-old man named Ku K'ai Chih. Like Yuan, he had been a follower of Chiang, and he had lost his entire family and his business in the revolution. Another natural for the CIA. He had returned to the mainland in the spring of 1951, and he had rapidly established himself as an ardent Maoist, organizing a Party unit among the dock workers and seamen in the great eastern ports like Foochow, Shanghai, and Tsingtao. Today he was one of the twelve members of the board of managers of China's merchant marine.
The interrogation went as it had with Yuan: Canning asked the questions in English; Lee Ann rephrased them in Chinese, the subject replied, and the computer analyzed the responses. The purple line seldom wavered.
At the end of fifteen minutes of intense questioning, Canning said, “This one's clean too.”
Lee Ann explained to Ku that he would remain at the embassy, would later be flown to the United States for debriefing in full, and then would be returned to Taiwan.
“We are left with the conclusion that the trigger man for Dragonfly must be your third agent,” General Lin said.
“It certainly looks that way,” Canning said.
“His name?”
Canning hesitated for an instant, then said, “He is Sung Chu'ung-chen. As you may know, Sung is in charge of a branch of your Internal Security Force.”
General Lin's yellow-brown face darkened perceptibly. He was extremely mortified by the news that one of his own subordinates was a CIA deep-cover agent. “I know Mr. Sung all too well.”
“Shall we go find him?” Canning asked.
“I shall go find him,” the general said. “I will not require your assistance this time, Mr. Canning. Since Sung is obviously the trigger agent for Dragonfly, the crisis is past. We can arrest him and get to the truth in our own fashion, without your marvelous computerized polygraph.” He smiled coldly. “And later, of course, he might also wish to tell us what misguided citizens of the People's Republic cooperated with him in the passing of secret information.”
Getting swiftly to his feet, Webster said, “General Lin, may I say that this is a most uncooperative—”
“You may say what you wish,” Lin assured him. “But I have no time to stand here and listen.” He turned and strode out of the drawing room.
Webster was nonplused. He sputtered helplessly for a moment and finally said, “Well, I told you he was a cunning little man. In spite of all your precautions, your network is blown.”
Lee Ann began to laugh.
Canning smiled.
Amazed, Webster said, “I fail to grasp the comic element.”
Stifling her laughter, Lee Ann said, “David foresaw just this situation as he was drifting off to sleep last night in Tokyo — that neither of the first two agents we interrogated would be the trigger for Dragonfly. He got up and put through a call to Bob McAlister and asked him to dig up a good fourth name.”
“A fail-safe name to keep General Lin honest,” Canning said.
Webster nodded slowly. “So… Mr. Sung is not one of ours. He's an innocent.”
“Exactly,” Canning said. “General Lin will arrest him. And I'm afraid that Sung will be tortured for several hours. But eventually the general will realize that Sung is no more a CIA operative than he is himself. Then he will be back here, demanding the name of the real third agent.”
“And you'll give it to him?” Webster asked.
“Oh, sure.”
“But when he has the right name, why should he play by the rules any more than he's doing now?”
“Because,” Lee Ann said, enjoying herself immensely, “he won't be absolutely certain that the next name David gives him is the real article. He'll have to suspect it's another ringer, a double fail-safe. He'll have wasted so much time on Sung that he won't dare waste more on what might be another hoax— expecially not when he's having these nightmares and feelings of imminent disaster. So he'll bring our man here for confirmation, and we won't let him take our man back again.”
“Mr. Canning, you have a splendid oriental mind.”
“I know. I cultivate it.”
“And now what do we do?” asked Webster.
“How about dinner?” Canning asked.
“Certainly. But what a letdown after the tension of this afternoon!”
“I can assure you,” Canning said, “this is going to be the tensest dinner of my life.”
SIX
The office in E Ring belonged to one Lionel Bryson, a full admiral in the United States Navy, one-time lightweight boxing champion of the Naval Academy, father of seven children and one of the twenty most knowledgeable amateur numismatists in the country. None of these achievements, all-American as they were, had earned him a forty-foot-square office in E Ring. He could also captain any nuclear submarine currently in service. But that ability had not won him his very own secretary with her own connecting office. Bryson was a very special kind of engineer-architect, a doctor of marine design. It was his talent for designing magnificent machines of death, rather than his ability to pilot them, that had earned him the wall-to-wall plush carpeting, the leather couch and armchairs, the executive desk, the private telephone line, the mahogany bookcases, the trophy case, the soundproofed walls and ceiling, and the heavy blue-velvet drapes at the window-with-a-view.
Bryson was not here tonight. Which was just as well. He would not have liked the idea of his office being turned into an interrogation chamber.
There were four people in the room. An armed marine guard, cleared for top-security matters, was standing to the right of the door; the holster at his hip was unsnapped and the revolver in it looked like a howitzer to McAlister. Major Arnold Teffler, night-duty physician at the Pentagon, was sitting on the couch with his black bag; he was also security-cleared all the way up to eyes-only material. Bernie Kirkwood was slumped in an armchair, his feet propped up on a coffee table, his eyes closed, and his hands folded in his lap. McAlister sat behind Admiral Bryson's desk and played with a scale model of a Trident submarine. No one spoke. They had nothing in common and no reason for being here until the fifth man arrived.
Rice.
McAlister still had a bit of trouble believing it.
The telephone rang.
McAlister grabbed it. “Yes?”
“This is the door sergeant at the Mall Entrance,” the man on the other end said. “Mr. Rice just came through here.”
“Thank you.”
McAlister hung up, got to his feet, and came around from behind the desk. “Gentlemen, we're about to begin.”
The marine and the doctor remained where they were.
Bernie Kirkwood stood up and stretched.
A minute passed. Then another.
Someone knocked sharply on the door.
The marine opened it.
Two other marines stood in the corridor, and Andrew Rice stood between them. Rice came into the office and the two marines stayed in the hall and the marine already in the room closed the door behind the President's chief advisor.
Rice looked at the doctor and then at McAlister and then around the room. He seemed perplexed. “Where's the President?”
“He couldn't make it,” McAlister said.
“But he called me less than an hour ago!”
“He had some important reading to do.”
“What about the Russian—”
“There is no Russian problem,” McAlister said.