“I know. I’m sorry. And I still haven’t told you everything.”
The tension in the car sparked like a downed electric line in the rain. I wanted to grab him and shake him and say, Come on Joe, cut the crap. It’s me. This is US.
If only.
If only he hadn’t kept so much from me.
I looked at him really hard. I wanted to see through the deep lies and casual disinformation. How could I know who he was? The man was a spy. Triple threat. Hard-core.
How could I believe anything he told me?
Still, the unasked question shot out of my mouth.
“Where were you the last two and a half weeks, damn it? Why didn’t you call me?”
He shook his head. He pounded the steering wheel with his palms. He was strapped into his seat. We were moving at sixty miles an hour. There was no getting away without answering me. I was sitting right there.
“Linds, I’ve always been committed to doing what needed to be done. For the country and ultimately for us. But you have to believe this.”
He stopped talking. We were crossing over a bridge with the Salish Sea to the left and the cliffs of the highway rising high on our right. But I didn’t know if there was a bridge strong enough to bridge the gulf between Joe and me.
“What, Joe? What do I have to believe?”
“That I love you. I love you and Julie so much. More than I ever thought possible. You have every reason to doubt me, but don’t. Because I swear to you, I’m telling you the truth.”
CHAPTER 87
I’D ALWAYS FOUND Joe open, accessible, honest— and real. My God, it was why I loved him. And now the truth was out. He’d lied deliberately and constantly all the time that I’d known him.
So why, when he told me he loved me, did I lean toward him? The answer was as simple as three little words. Despite the lies and deceit, I wanted to trust my husband. I loved him.
I said, “Don’t stop now, Joe. Tell me about Alison Muller. From the beginning.”
There were no other cars on the road at all. It was as if we were in a tunnel chasing two cones of light at high speed toward the edge of the world.
Joe was talking, telling me again that he’d lost touch with Alison until he’d come back to the CIA nine months before. He said it was around that time that the CIA became aware of Michael Chan, a naturalized American citizen who was spying for the Chinese. They’d learned about Chan: that he’d been born in China, had come to the USA as a student, had lived and worked in Palo Alto for the last eight years, and was now teaching history at Stanford.
Joe told me that just a few months ago, Muller volunteered to work a honey trap on Chan to learn what he was passing on to Chinese intelligence and to flip him to our side if she could. And according to Joe, because of his work history with Muller, he was asked to run the operation.
Joe said now, “I told you I thought Chan had fallen hard for Alison. Of course, he didn’t know that Ali was CIA and that he was her target. He believed her cover, her job, and the business trips that enabled them to get together. But Chan was going through a stressful time, and finally, he told Muller all about it.”
“And she reported this back to you.”
“Exactly. About a month ago. Chan told Muller that a Chinese intelligence honcho was about to defect to the United States. He said this defector had powerful and deep information that could take down the Chinese government.
“Muller told me that what was driving Chan crazy was that the defector was his father. Chan Senior was planning to come to California to be with his son. He’d gotten false documents using Michael Chan’s name and address and so on, and Chan was very worried. He’d heard that some Chinese-American men living in San Francisco had been assigned to kill his father as soon as his plane arrived in the States.
“Chan was just talking to his lover, you know, Linds? He was questioning his own loyalty to the Chinese government. He was desperately concerned for his father. And he had no idea that Muller was feeding this information to us.
“And still, the information was incomplete. Chan didn’t know what plane his father would be taking to the States. Muller was going to try to get this critical detail from Chan that evening in the Four Seasons—and then, as you well know, it all hit the fan.”
My mind reeled. Chan Senior had been traveling as Michael Chan on WW 888. It was his body that had disappeared. Even as I was having this breakthrough, Joe was unwinding the story as he knew it.
Joe said, “Michael Chan was killed. Bud and Chrissy were killed. Muller disappeared, and then, the worst thing imaginable. That passenger jet went down. I’m pretty sure that the men you and your SWAT took down in Chinatown were the ones who were supposed to kill the defector: one high-profile government man.
“So what happened?” Joe asked rhetorically. “Were they cocky? Were they stupid? Did they have a shiny new toy? I don’t know why they decided to hit the plane—with a god-damned missile—but they did it.”
“My God. You t