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PROLOGUE
 
There is a little alarm that goes off in us, a small inner voice that senses danger, and on Thursday, June 30, 1983, on a busy commercial street in Paris, Bernard Boursicot, an attaché in the French Foreign Service who had always dreamed of being a man of distinction, is hearing that alarm in his head.
 
He heard it earlier that week, returning from his post in Belize, when a man he had known for fifteen years at the Foreign Affairs office on the Quai d’Orsay had been cold to him. It is giving him the old problems: He is drinking too much and smoking too much and he cannot sleep.
 
It is odd. Usually Bernard returns to Paris as a hungry man sits down at the table. Old friends, good food, all-night bars, the possibility of a little late-night adventure—he approaches it all with cheerful greed. In the arena of love, he tends to get what he wants, too. It is not, at thirty-eight, that he is a handsome man by Parisian standards: His face is a bit too round; at five seven, a hundred and eighty pounds, his belly, he sometimes thinks, is a little too round also. But his shoulders are broad, his hips narrow, and he has a grin—when his energy is high—that announces to the world that whatever the sport, he is game.
 
But this morning, walking down Avenue Bosquet on the Left Bank, dressed for his holidays in loafers and jeans, all Bernard feels is the tension.
 
He tries fighting it, telling himself he has every reason in the world to feel good:
 
He has a new post in Scotland, which will keep him just close enough to and just far enough away from Paris. He has a new car awaiting him at a shop that caters to diplomats. And best of all, after years of struggle, Bernard has been able to get his sixteen-year-old son, Shi Du Du, or as he prefers to call him, by his French name, Bertrand, out of China. Tomorrow Bernard will take Bertrand down to his family in Brittany and show him off.
 
Bernard is terribly proud of Bertrand. You can see at a glance that he is of mixed blood, but it is clear to Bernard the boy has his own wide face, his brown eyes, his adventuresome nature. He rushed back to Paris when Bertrand arrived from Beijing nine months earlier and introduced him to his friends. He is less proud of Bertrand’s mother, Shi Pei Pu.
 
“She has gotten old,” Bernard thought when Pei Pu came to greet him at the airport in her usual guise, dressed as a man. Though she wants very much to be included on this outing to meet Bernard’s family, she is not. She is his old love, he will provide for her, but it is finished between them. Already, over the years, he has given too much: television sets, tape recorders, Grundig radios, four Rolex watches, because Madame must have only the best. He is the only spy in the history of the world, Bernard often thinks, who paid to spy. Even now, he is paying: Pei Pu has heard of an apartment on Boulevard Saint-Germain, owned by a wealthy Chinese friend, which might be had very cheaply, and Bernard has agreed to go with her early this evening and look.
 
“I will meet you as planned,” he told her the night before, calling her at home from a phone booth near his borrowed studio.
 
And she answered as she had since even before they had become lovers in the spring of 1965.
 
“You are still my best friend.”
 
Her best friend—her best resource—but no matter, he has Bertrand; four boys in his family, two married with children, and he is the only one to provide his mother with a grandson. Bernard still remembers how happy she had been to meet him, coming up from Brittany with a breakfast mug with “Bertrand” stenciled on the side. Bertrand recognized her the moment she got off the train.
 
“Grandma!” he yelled.
 
There is something to blood.
 
Then suddenly, on the busy shopping street of Avenue Bosquet, they hit him. One man in sneakers tackles him from behind, another from the side. Bernard thinks it is a holdup and in his panic flings his wallet and address book down the street. Then, as they try to drag him into a car, Bernard grabs a tree and holds on. People are stopping to stare.
 
“What are you doing to that man?” one yells.
 
Now two more of them are on him and one is flashing a badge with his picture on it, and at last Bernard realizes who they are.
 
“Come with us, we just want to talk to you,” one says, and the moment he gets into the Renault they slip on the cuffs.
 
“Say nothing,” he tells himself as they tear up the street, north toward the Seine. “Nothing, like Sorge.”
 
There is an organization in France called the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, which seeks out internal threats to national security, and in the winter of 1982, operating, as they would later report, they found “within the normal surveillance of the activities of the Chinese diplomatic representation in Paris” something that piqued their interest: the relationship between Bernard Boursicot, identified in their files as “a civil servant at the Ministry of Exterior Relations posted abroad,” and “a Chinese national living in Paris, later identified as Shi Pei Pu.”
 
Shi Pei Pu, according to D.S.T. intelligence, was a man of forty-five who made his living as singer, writer, and voice teacher. He had arrived in France from Beijing with his teenage son on October 8, 1982, at the invitation of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, a government-funded research institute for social studies, to give lectures on Chinese opera. Shi Pei Pu had once been a star of the Beijing Opera, and in France was having great success, starring in two network television shows. A delicate man who was only a few inches over five feet tall and had strikingly tiny hands, Pei Pu, as was traditional in Beijing Opera, performed both men’s and women’s roles. In one TV production, “The Messenger from Beijing,” he appeared as a shepherdess awaiting news of her lover in a dreamlike fog beside a bridge.
 
“Watching the ocean, I guard my sheep and wait for a messenger to bring me news,” Pei Pu sang in a high-pitched voice. “Oh, wait! My eyes see a horse at gallop!”
 
Backstage, Pei Pu had played the prima donna. He complained of fatigue and spoke often of a heart condition. He reappeared once, after an absence of a week, with scars around the eyes. When the producer asked if Pei Pu had had a face-lift he was, as usual, vague: Pei Pu just laughed. But after all, Pei Pu was a star. His teacher before the Cultural Revolution, had been Mei Lanfang, the greatest Beijing Opera actor in China. Mei was so exquisite in the female roles that made him famous that his students spent months mimicking the smallest details of his style: the movement of his wrist as he executed any of the fifty gestures of a kimono sleeve symbolizing feelings from love to subterfuge to pain; the proximity of his knees and sway of his body as he portrayed an empress taking tiny steps on bound feet.
 
The D.S.T. had the opportunity to learn a good deal about Beijing Opera as Shi Pei Pu went about his work on “The Messenger from Beijing”:
 
They had tapped the phones.
 
It was impressive to be the subject of a one-hour television show nine months after arriving in a new country. Even more impressive was Pei Pu’s circle of friends. He was seen going several times to the embassy of the People’s Republic of China. He attended dinner parties with some of the highest-ranking members of the French diplomatic community. One evening the man who had served as ambassador to China only the year before had personally dropped Shi Pei Pu off at his apartment.
 
Most interestingly to the D.S.T., Shi Pei Pu’s home, a sixth-floor studio in a weathered old building on Boulevard de Port-Royal on the Left Bank in Paris, was owned by a Foreign Service employee named Bernard Boursicot. Boursicot was a loose cannon in the organization, a working-class kid with a tenth-grade education who was viewed by his superiors as something of a maverick. It was never anything serious, nothing even that solid, just talk that followed him post to post around the globe: black-market dealings in Mongolia, his contract dropped at least once in his career, an enthusiastic drinker, a Romeo. He had been posted in the French embassy in China in 1964 for one year as an accountant and later spent three years there as an archivist. He had defense secret clearance, giving him access to some classified documents. He had also—for reasons unknown—twice visited the Chinese embassy in Paris.
 
 
He was posted in Belize, but since the arrival of Shi Pei Pu in Paris in October 1982 he had made two trips back to Paris. In mid-June 1983 he returned again.
 
“The surveillance under which Shi Pei Pu was placed,” reads a D.S.T. report of July 2 from Commissaire Divisionnaire Raymond Nart, “revealed that Bernard Boursicot was living with Shi Pei Pu. The decision was made to call in Bernard Boursicot in order to receive explanations concerning this situation. The service suspected a cooperation between Bernard Boursicot and the Chinese intelligence services through the intermediary of Shi Pei Pu. Bernard Boursicot was arrested on June 30, 1983, at 11:40 on the street during a surveillance operation.”