Spy Games (15 page)

The restaurant was empty but for one other table, a silent, elegant Ethiopian family. Hopko tore off a piece of
injera,
worked it neatly into the stew, folding it around the meat, and popped it into her mouth. Patterson’s fingers were greasy and her throat burned.

“And what happened to Literary Chen?” she asked.

“The memoir doesn’t dwell on it, which is not a surprise. But other accounts have it that he was hounded. Sent to one of the cadre schools. They called them schools—they were punishment camps, really. And he died there, apparently.”

Patterson didn’t know how to respond, worked stolidly at the lamb.

“But old man Fan survived the whole thing. He was rehabilitated. He even got his old job back. By the late seventies he’s a vice minister, no less, dreaming of fax machines and satellites. The kids have been to university and are doing very nicely. Son number one, Fan Rong, is working his way up the Party Organization Department. He’ll end up royalty, on the Politburo. Son number two, Fan Ping, is getting a master’s in electrical engineering. He’ll work in a military research institute on radar. And then in the eighties he’ll start
up a little company importing switching and routing equipment, taking it apart, figuring out how it works, making a cheaper Chinese version. The company does rather well. Today we know it as China National Century, CNaC. The world’s largest telecoms manufacturer, sidelines in satellites, radar, missile components, avionics, processors. He’s the one with the son at Oxford. See where this is going, do we, Trish?”

Patterson just nodded.

“The daughter is Charlotte Fan. Goes by her English name. She’s based in Hong Kong and London and dabbles in business.”

Hopko was looking at her wineglass.

“So the Fan children have every angle covered, you see. Fan Rong, from his perch in the higher reaches of the Party, manages the politics, patronage networks, protection. Fan Ping generates the colossal wealth through CNaC. Charlotte Fan keeps one foot conveniently out of the country, manages the properties and the offshore accounts. But then… then she goes and buys oil wells she shouldn’t from crooked officials.”

“A thoroughly modern Chinese story,” said Patterson.

“Yes,” said Hopko. She leaned forward, put her fork down, tapped the wicker table with her index finger. “Yes, it is, as long as you remember where they’ve come from. The poverty, the war, the struggle sessions. The Fans didn’t just pass their exams and learn nice table manners like we did, Trish. They fought, they bled, they despaired. And then they survived. And they carry it all with them, the stories, the memories, the sins, all forged into identity and obligation and loyalty. And Charlotte has put the entire edifice, everything they’ve bled for, at risk.”

Patterson understood now.

“And someone’s using it, gunning for them,” she said.

“I think we’ve found a fault line, a place where two plates meet.” Hopko made a joining, eliding gesture, bringing her hands together. “And there’s enormous energy and tension stored up there, just waiting for release.”

They sat in silence for a minute or two. Hopko had barely eaten. She laid twenty-pound notes on the table.

“Mangan must do more than just bring us offerings from these people,” she said. “He must find out who, and why. Why us? What are we to them? What do they want of us?”

“I know.”

“Be careful, Trish,” said Hopko. And then she stood and swept from the restaurant, en route to some distant and obscure obligation, Patterson assumed, in a secret Whitehall corridor, or a clubroom paneled in oak, or a Kensington drawing room.

Patterson took the Tube, the air in the station close and thick and scorched. She waited on the platform, feeling the hot wind from the tunnel against her face.

When she emerged at Archway, the evening was warm, past nine and still light. She walked home through the traffic, past the small Victorian terraced houses, the silent dog walkers.

Her flat was dim, the blinds drawn. She took her clothes off and walked naked to the bathroom. She turned the shower up hot, let the water rush against her scalp, let it soothe her. The adrenaline was starting to flow, nerves kicking in. She tried to think of nothing.

She dried herself and put on a cotton dressing gown. She unpacked her case, repacked it, took her travel documents from the safe in the wardrobe. She took the phone, sat cross-legged on the sofa and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Mum, it’s me.”

“Oh, it’s you. Hello, my darling.”

“I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, no, my darling. I’m just sitting up in bed.”

Patterson heard the lingering fleck of Caribbean to her speech, the television in the background.

“How are you? How’s Dad?” she said.

“Oh, we’re fine. Dad is, well, you know. His hip is bad.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“What? When?”

“When you went to see him.”

“Oh. Well, ask Maggie. She knows about it.” Maggie, her sister, who had a hair salon in Nottingham.

“All right. I’ll ask her. Mum, I’m just calling because I’m going away again for a bit.”

“Again? Where this time?”

“Oh, nowhere very interesting. Just around and about.”

“When will you be back?”

“A week or two.”

“Can you call this time?”

“It’s a bit hard, Mum. Like usual. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m back.”

“They should let you call. Why won’t they let you?”

She closed her eyes, leaned her head back on the sofa.

“It’s just a bit hard from some of these places. But don’t worry. I’ll be back in no time.”

“You’re so far away all the time.”

“I’ll come up and see you in a few weeks. Promise.”

“Dad would like that.”

“It’ll be fun.”

A pause. She could hear her mother’s breathing on the line, the laugh track from the television.

“It’s getting dark now,” said her mother. “Getting dark outside.”

“It’s late. You get to sleep. Give Dad a hug from me.”

“He’s downstairs. Sitting there.”

“All right. Lots of love now.”

“You sound all wound up. Wound tight as a fiddle.”

“I’m fine. I just have a lot to do. Lots of love, Mum.”

“You better get on, then. Be careful, my darling, in those places. Call when you get back.”

“I will.”

She replaced the receiver, its plastic
clack
obtrusive in the silence. Patterson sat still, rubbed her thighs, suddenly chilled.

She thought of the last time she’d seen Mangan, at Changi airport in Singapore after the debrief, more than a year before, his quiet, the anger damped down behind those clear eyes. They had stood on the pavement at drop-off.
China makes exiles of us
, he’d said, and touched her on the arm. Then he’d turned and walked toward the terminal, his rumpled jacket and red hair fading into the crowd.

Her agent.

Oxford

Kai sat at his desk watching motes of dust in sunlight on their tiny voyages.

You will have no further contact with the Chen girl.

He reached down and opened a drawer. In it, his brushes, ink, some rice paper. He unrolled the rice paper on the desk, weighted it down, ground some ink. He hadn’t touched the brushes in months and now he picked them up gingerly, feeling them in his hand.

His first few attempts were clumsy, the characters weak and tentative. But the fifth sheet was better, the strokes taut and moving.

The poet was Yan Shu, writing in the eleventh century. A quiet prodigy, Yan Shu, studious, liked a drink, wandered in his garden. Kai wondered if he should affix his seal, but thought of the bloodred ink on the rice paper. Someone would see it, know who’d written it.

When the calligraphy had dried, he folded it carefully and left it in her pigeonhole.

He sat alone in the cafeteria eating chicken curry with rice. Afterward, he went to the grimy student bar in the basement and drank two beers, the music thumping in his ears. What would happen, he thought, if I just threw everything off? Gave it all up. If I went home, worked in a store, or a gallery? If I rented a room, learned to make furniture and cook with
ma
peppercorns and cumin and star anise, great bowls of noodles slathered with chilli, a layer of oil keeping the heat in. I’d cook for my friends, if I were to have some of those, at some point.

What if I learned to paint? What would happen? What would my father say, the annihilating tone bleeding through his voice? What part of my anatomy would Uncle Checkbook take hold of?

Kai walked up the creaking staircase and opened the door to his room. A piece of lined paper lay on the floor, folded in two. He picked it up. The strokes were written hurriedly, in blue ballpoint pen.

Li Shangyin, the poet. Dark, impossible, impassioned Li Shangyin, signaling, in her rejection, a whole world of complexity—and possibility.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Addis Ababa’s airport, Bole, had a gimcrack air, half-finished bits of renovation, a powdery dust on the floor. Confused travelers stood looking around themselves for signs or aid. The tall British woman waiting in the queue for a visa, the importer of art and curios—Juliet Dobson, the name on the passport—was already late, a technical fault associated with the plane’s doors having delayed departure for a full two hours, while engineers first fussed and then stood silently awaiting a part.

Patterson shifted from foot to foot as the queue inched forward to a window where a harassed woman took her seventeen euros and, without a word or a look, stamped her passport with a tourist visa, the well-rehearsed cover story proving utterly unnecessary.

When they take a sniff of you
, Hopko always warned,
it will be in the hotel.

She emerged into morning sunlight, her mouth sour, eyes dry and grainy. She felt the altitude immediately. It lent the air, the light, a crispness. She took an airport taxi to the Jupiter Hotel at a vastly inflated price. The driver asked her polite questions about her visit.
She gave vague answers and took in the city, its wide, crumbling avenues redolent of plans discarded, of grand schemes forgotten, the shacks drifting into every available space. At the Jupiter, smiling staff checked her in. She went to her room, waited five minutes, then went back down to reception and requested the room be changed. Something quieter, perhaps. Or on a higher floor. The staff conferred in murmurs, complied.

Never take the first room they offer you.

She undressed, chained the door, laid snares around her secure handheld—a hair, a fragment of tissue paper—and slept.

For the meetings, Hoddinott, through a front company, had sublet a flat in a new block off Tunisia Street, one peopled by a number of young expats whose coming and going at strange hours was to be expected. A countermeasures officer was brought in from Nairobi station to sweep it. The flat was pronounced clean. It had tiled floors and neon overhead lighting and was bleakly furnished with a black sofa covered in its plastic wrapping, a dining table of smoked glass and a vast television.

As to the surveillance Mangan claimed to have seen, well, was it Rocky Shi’s own people taking a look at Mangan? Or NISS issuing a routine reminder to a foreign reporter to take care? Its intermittent nature and obvious clumsiness ruled out the worst option—that it was a Chinese State Security team monitoring Mangan. Perhaps it was nothing at all. If it was there, Patterson would see it. All in good time.

She spent the late afternoon living her cover, visiting the teeming Merkato in a light rain, picking her way through the handicrafts stalls, buying samples, asking what she hoped were pertinent questions of the stallholders. What saint is this? Where does one source these paintings, these icons? What kind of paint is used? The answers she received confirmed that every icon was painted with only the most natural of pigments, out of ecstasies of devotion in island monasteries that rose from sparkling lakes, pure and unsullied
expressions of an ancient, wise and forgiving religiosity, and all available for export. Patterson twisted and turned, boarded a taxi, got out too soon, hailed another one, paid off the drivers with filthy fifty-birr notes.

Now she stood slightly breathless, damp, in the living room of the safe flat, marveling at its inhospitable nature. She tried to collect herself, took off her waterproof jacket. She wore jeans, hiking boots, a sensible shirt which had been ironed a little too well, she realized. When she sat on the sofa the plastic wrapping crackled. They would sit at the table, she decided.

A quiet knock.

She went to the door, looked through the peephole.

He looked straight back at her, his features distended by the fish-eye lens. She opened the door and he entered silently and she closed the door, and he stood there. He was thinner, the pale skin she remembered more tanned now, the hair a little longer, unruly. He retained his air of creased indifference to his surroundings, his level look.

And now, she saw, he was smiling a crooked half-smile.

“Hello Trish Whatever-your-name-is,” he said.

“Hello, Philip.”

Mangan half-raised his arms, as if for a hug. She turned away and walked to the dining table, motioning to him to sit. He let his arms fall and joined her, scraping his chair on the tile as he sat.

“First things first,” she said.

“Oh, always,” he replied.

“Do you think you are under surveillance now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“When was the last time you believe you saw surveillance?”

“Three days ago. The car, outside my flat.”

“If for any reason we are interrupted, you leave first. You leave by the stairwell and you take the rear exit from the building at the base of the stairs. Walk across the courtyard, hop the wall and you are in a park, with multiple paths and exits. Is that clear?”

“Crystal.”

“Are you clear on this?” She was speaking too loudly, she realized, adrenaline flooding through her as she thought of a small damp man in a raincoat tumbling under train wheels.

Mangan spoke calmly.

“Yes. Yes, I’m clear. Stairwell, exit, park. Got it.” He smiled.

“Is there anything you need to tell me straightaway? Or anything you need from me?”

“Nope.”

“All right, let’s get started.” She took her secure handheld, opened the application that would record and encrypt their conversation.

“Before you turn that on,” he said, “how have you been?”

You must run him, Trish
, Hopko had said
. Do not allow him to frame your relationship in terms of the past
.

“Not bad,” she said. “You?”

He looked at her, expecting more, waiting. She remembered now, this taut stillness in him, this ability to wait and listen, taking you in, seeing you.

“Philip, we are not here to chew over old times.”

“That’s not what I was asking. I was wondering if you were okay. But, fine. Proceed.” He gestured to the handheld. She looked down, turned it on, started recording.

They started on Rocky Shi. His appearance, manner, his tone of speech. His bearing, his accent. Any clue as to his identity, his background, his access, his reliability. Anything at all.
Be a reporter. Give us the lot.

Mangan talked, sketching the man out in words as he might write it.

“He comes over as confident, a professional. He looks like a hard man gone a bit soft on the surface, a bit thick around the middle. He speaks in a knowing tone, as if he’s sharing a joke with me. He aspires to… to goodness, I think. Or so he says. He’s big on rectitude, as an end, if not as a means. He’s so very keen to be my friend, to build a sort of shared recognition of the world. He’s ingratiating. But then he shares very little. He turns calculating.”

Mangan stopped and thought.

“And beneath it all is a current of… something.” He described the jigging of the leg, the bitten nails, the scar. The sense of his being
directed
in something, some endeavor.

“Anxiety?” she said. “Is he anxious?”

Mangan shrugged.

“You should have heard what he said about you.”

“What’s that mean?” Patterson asked, frowning. It came out too sharp, she realized. Mangan was laughing silently.

“He said you were a very aggressive woman. Formidable, apparently. You did something to someone in Hong Kong that impressed him. I have no idea what he meant. But he’s marked you.”

Jesus Christ
.

“And motive, Philip? Anything on motive? Any idea why this man seems so keen to dump secrets on us ? No expression of anger? Or grudge?”

“The opposite. He seems deeply patriotic. Proud of China.”

Then, suddenly, noise from the street: a shout, a car accelerating away. They both stopped and looked toward the window. Patterson went over, pulled the blind back an inch, watched for a moment.

“And tell me again, the financial motive?” she said, walking back to her chair.

“That was all he said. Financial compensation, for him and his ‘associates.’ Didn’t say it like he meant it. Didn’t tell me why he needed it.”

She pressed him on the associates. Who does he mean? How many did Mangan know of? The Clown, who else? The gaunt Ethiopian in the alleyway in Harer. Any more?

“No idea. But I assume so.”

“What is this, Philip, do you think? What are we buying here, if we buy? Is this a network? A cabal?”

He didn’t answer straightaway.

“You want facts or hunch?” he said.

“Facts.”

“Well, I don’t have any.”

“All right, hunch.”

“I don’t think Rocky is in charge. I think he’s following orders,” said Mangan.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure I could say. He seems to be weighing what he says and does against a scheme or an agenda. Or something.”

This is a plan, Trish.

“And,” Mangan went on, “what access would one man have that could get him material like that, so timely, so accurate?”

She looked at Mangan. He’s engaged, she thought. He’s already committed himself psychologically.

Now.

“And you, Philip, why are you here?”

He stopped, wrong-footed.

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you want back in, Philip?”

He didn’t answer. He’s reaching for a response, she thought. She broke the silence, pushed her advantage.

“Because, you see, there’s a bit of trepidation, frankly, about using you again.”

She paused, let it sink in.

“And there’s a bit of bafflement about why you would want to be used. Given everything that happened.”

“Oh, are we allowed to talk about that now?”

“Answer the question.”

“Rocky Shi chose me, I didn’t choose him.”

“Don’t be cute, Philip. You bloody well leaped at the chance.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said softly.

“Yes, you did. I’ll ask you again. Why are you here?”

He stood up and walked the length of the room to where the television hung on the wall.

“I was rebuilding my life,” he said. “Or trying to. I really was. After China.”

“And?” she said.

He raised a hand, let it fall.

“I’ve seen now,” he said. “I’ve seen you, what you do. I can’t un-see you. I have this knowledge. I can’t see the world without thinking of you, of everything that’s… that’s below the surface.”

He raised a hand, as if reaching for something.

“I need it,” he said. “I need to be
in
it.”

They talked for two hours. She felt the tension in her neck and shoulders grow, a stress headache coming on. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, listened.

“Get a name, a photograph, a mobile phone number. Anything. A license plate, an email address, a credit card receipt. Anything that gives us traction on him,” she said. Then they’ll work outward, she thought. They’ll plant him in the databases, watch his network take shape, grow, like feathers of crystal in a solution.

“You’ll use this,” she said, pushing a small black plastic flight case across the table to him.

Exhausted, talked out, she went to the fridge. Hoddinott had left roast beef sandwiches in foil and St. George’s beer. She took two of the bottles, looked in the drawers for an opener, couldn’t find one. She took a spoon, rested it against her knuckle and popped the caps off neatly. He motioned applause.

“Tradecraft,” she said, handing him a bottle.

“Are we still recording?” he said.

“Yes.”

He sighed, looked at the ceiling.

“Can you tell me anything at all about… you know. China. Everything.”

“Not much,” said Patterson.

“Was there ever any news of her?”

“No,” said Patterson.

He gave a tight nod.

Look at him, playing the good soldier, she thought.

“Get used to it, Philip. Our stories don’t end. They just sort of hang there, unresolved.”

She sat.

“When you see him,” she said, “remember to turn the thing on, won’t you?”

“You are even harder than I remember,” he said.