Spy Games (19 page)

Mangan tried to appease him, holding up his hands.

“Thank you. Perhaps another time,” he said.

“She doesn’t mind.” Blue Suit put his hand on the girl’s buttock and shoved her and she staggered toward Mangan, began to topple into his lap, then caught herself, spilling the coffee down his front.
Mangan felt her hair against his face, smelled the sweat from her underarms. Blue Suit began shouting.

“Go. The bedroom is there. Go, go.”

Mangan said nothing, put a hand on the girl’s arm to help her stand upright. She looked at him, tried to smile an inviting smile, reached for his hand.

This is how it works. The ambiguous threat, the humiliation. In the vile room, by the men who’ve done it a thousand times before.

“What is his name, Mr. Mangan?” said Spectacles.

Mangan didn’t understand, the girl pulling at his hand.

“What is his name?” Spectacles repeated.

“I… whose name?”

“His.” Blue Suit was pointing at Rocky.

“Shi. You know his name. You used it.”

“If,” said Blue Suit, his voice raised again, urgent, “if we are to go into business with someone, we must be confident of their identity. What is his name?”

Rocky sat mute, blinking. Mangan struggled for an answer.

“Shi. Shi is his surname and I know him by his English name, Rocky.”

Spectacles was rubbing his chin.

“It says on his passport that his name is Shi Haining. Is that his real name?”

“I must confess, I don’t know his Chinese given name. I just know him as Rocky.”

Spectacles looked surprised. Blue Suit shook his head.

“But you are such good friends.”

The girl had let go of his hand and just stood there, miserable. Mangan started to speak, but Spectacles talked over him.

“You were in China before you came to Ethiopia, Mr. Mangan. Is that right? You were a reporter there?”

Mangan swallowed.
I was a reporter, until the world split open and I fell through the fissure.

“Yes. I was based in Beijing.”

“Did you know Mr. Shi when you were in China?”

“No. No, I did not.”

“What other work did you do in China?”

“None. I was a journalist.”

“No collaborations there? No business?”

Mangan thought of a cold, shabby hotel room, the taps in the bathroom turned on to beat the listening devices, a flash drive disguised as a car key, passed from hand to hand. A tingle of alarm.
Jesus Christ, what do they know?

“No, none.”

“So you met Mr. Shi here in Ethiopia, yes? Where did you meet, please?”

Rocky spoke.

“We met in the beautiful city of Harer.”

“In Harer. Is that right, Mr. Mangan? Please?”

“Yes, we met in Harer. I was on a trip there.”

“So you were.” Spectacles shrugged. “But we are puzzled, you see, because we did not ever see you meet with Mr. Shi in Harer. So we were wondering when you did so.”

Mangan exhaled quietly, tried for calm.

“You were following my movements in Harer?”

Blue Suit looked at him.

“What of it?”

“Well, I am a reporter. I work openly. There is no need to follow me.”

Blue Suit was bristling.

“Tell us when you met Mr. Shi. Please.”

“I went for a walk. Late at night. I left my guest house and walked through the old city, and I met him then. We got talking.” Rocky was nodding in agreement.

“I see. And the girl who works in the guest house. Fatima, her name. She will confirm this, will she? If we ask her?”

Panic, rising, fomenting in the base of his stomach.

“I’m sure she will,” he said.

Blue Suit stared. There was silence in the room. Then he stood, put his hands in his pockets.

“Let us hope so,” he said.

There was movement in the room now. Spectacles stood and gestured to Mangan and Rocky. The girl started clearing away the cups. Blue Suit approached Mangan, stood close to him, studied him. Mangan saw the pores in his face, smelled his breath.

“If you are some sort of amateur, Mr. Mangan, this is not the place for you.”

“I don’t know what…”

But he was turning away, making a dismissive gesture. Mangan glimpsed Rocky’s back disappearing into a hallway. Spectacles took Mangan by the arm and walked him from the room, out of the villa, to the car.

In the silver wash of the screen, Patterson watched the pulsing red orb leave the villa complex and turn onto the road back to Addis Ababa, its progress through the grid squares picking up pace. She reflected on the fact that Mangan’s handheld had not been turned off, but continued to broadcast his position, suggesting that his unscheduled jaunt out of the city in the dead of night aboard an unknown vehicle was voluntary. Or, if it wasn’t, that his unidentified captors were quite happy for the circumstances of his abduction to be visible to whomever might be watching. She had resisted the temptation to call Mangan and ask him what the hell was going on. She had persuaded London to restrain themselves similarly.

Now she watched the red orb float quickly across the map, heading back to the city.

But then the orb slowed, and hesitated. Patterson leaned into the screen. The vehicle appeared to be turning off the highway. The little orb pulsed, motionless.

The car had come to a halt on a building site. Spectacles told Mangan to get out, shoved him in the lower back. He stumbled across clods of
earth, through rustling grassy weeds, in a clouded, diffuse moonlight. He was out of breath, panic weakening him, his movements infantile.

This is how it works.

“Stop,” said Spectacles.

He stopped, breathing heavily, his thoughts spiraling out of control. Spectacles was several paces behind him.

“Kneel down.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Kneel.”

“You cannot do this. You
cannot
.”

Spectacles was silent. Then a snort of laughter. Mangan heard his footsteps approaching from behind, felt him close. Then his voice, quiet in Mangan’s ear.

“You seem to think that Ethiopia is a
stage
for you to perform on. A
backdrop.
Do not think that. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Mangan’s knees were in the mud, cold water soaking through his jeans, his thighs shaking.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Many white people are like you. They come and they think Ethiopia, Africa, anywhere, is for them a place to
perform
some story, some script.”

“No.”

“Shut up. Listen to me. Whatever your story is, Mr. Mangan, whatever it is, be careful how you tell it now. Because we have
agency
, Mr. Mangan. We are players, too.”

He said nothing, just nodded. He was shivering.

“Be very, very careful.”

He nodded.

He heard Spectacles walking away, heard the car door slam, the car bump away toward the road. And he was alone, kneeling, in the darkness and a night breeze that smelled of mud and animal dung, fear and relief knotting his gut, pulsing in his skull.

Mangan sat at the table in the safe flat, eating instant noodles. He was shaken, Patterson could see, really shaken, but he was pushing through it. He had slept an hour, and showered, and his red hair stood in damp tufts. He wore a brown T-shirt and jeans.

“Why didn’t you come to get me?” he said.

“We could have done,” she replied.

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because they were watching.”

He didn’t respond, shoveled noodles into his mouth.

“Better to let you tramp along the road, make your own way back.”

He had walked for more than an hour, then flagged down a van and paid the driver to bring him back into the city, then jumped taxis, ducked and dived. He’d done well, she thought.

Patterson had relayed the guts of it to London: NISS, the weird stuff about all of them going into business together, the underlying threat to all of it, Mangan’s sense that they were shaking the tree, that Blue Suit knew something was up but he didn’t know what.

He had told her in short, clipped sentences as he drew on a cigarette. She noted how coherent he was, how he deployed detail despite the exhaustion and the shock of it. He told her the numbers of the
cars, gave her details of the villa, recounted Rocky’s composure, the fact of the false name on his passport.

He had done very well.

Oxford

Madeline came to Kai’s room in the middle of the night again, the creak of the staircase, a soft knock at the door. She was agitated, her face flushed. He took her hand and she let him, and they sat cross-legged on the bed in darkness, their knees touching. For a moment they said nothing, and when she spoke, it was almost a whisper.

“I shouldn’t be here.”

“But you are,” he said.

She nodded slowly, took her hand back and stretched her arms upward. She was lithe, flexible, the sort of girl who could cartwheel, pirouette.

“Nobody ever sent me poetry before,” she said. “How very literary of you.”

“Your reply was a masterpiece of ambiguity.”

She interlaced her fingers with his again.

“They won’t let us go, you know.”

“Perhaps we shouldn’t give them the choice.”

“Do you have that in you?” she said. “To ignore them? Your father? Your family? All their weird retainers and hangers-on?”

“I don’t know if I do. I don’t know.”

“What would you do?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know. Leave here. Go home. Find a job. Live.”

“But what would you actually
do
?”

“I’d like to work in one of those art shops. Sell ink and brushes. You know the ones, in Beijing. Everyone’s an artist and they sit around and smoke and look haunted. I’d learn to carve characters.” He mimed working a piece of stone. “That’s what I’d do. Live in elegant poverty in some tiny courtyard, with pot plants and cracked flagstones. Crickets chirping in a wicker cage.”

She was smiling, shaking her head.

“When I was a child,” she said, “my father used to give us these lectures at the dinner table. Very stern. He’d quote bits of Confucius at us, stuff about humaneness and filial piety.” She turned down the corners of her mouth to make a po-face, spoke in a deep masculine tone. “Moderation! Rectitude! ‘Yu was frugal, but exhausted his strength in irrigation!’”

They were both laughing. She brought her hand up to cover her mouth.

“Really? He knows Confucius? All that stuff?” said Kai

“Really. He admires the… austerity of it. The cold honesty of it. It’s who he is.”

“And did you learn to be righteous and frugal?”

“Me? I was too busy listening to Korean pop.”

She paused.

“He always argues that the world should be ordered a certain way. That the corruption in China isn’t just wrong, it’s… unnatural. That China has this deep, ancient moral system. That we all understand it at some profound level. And there are a lot of people—army people—who believe him. Believe
in
him.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” he said.

She sighed and let herself fall back onto the bed. She lay, looking away from him, twirling a strand of hair.

“What?” he said. She pushed herself up on one elbow, as if to speak, but then changed her mind, just shook her head and lay back on the bed again. She took a breath.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to break the rules,” she said.

“Madeline… I…”

“I have to go,” she said, and he felt his heart fall.

“Why?”

“Because it’s impossible.”

“Madeline…”

She held a warning finger up, looked toward the door, made a
hush
gesture.

His stomach turned over, an acrid jolt of fright.

They sat silent, very still. Eventually, he stood and crept to the door, listened. Then to the window. The quad was dark and silent, the night sky tinged orange. He turned back to her, and she was standing, readying herself to leave. She looked frightened, but she walked over to him and stood on tiptoe to kiss him slowly on the lips.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“No! God, no calls. No texts.”

He opened his mouth to remonstrate. She just shook her head urgently.

“They’ll
know.
”

As she hurried across the quad, he watched from the window, wondered.

Addis Ababa

Mangan’s brush with NISS was more than enough for Hopko. She ordered immediate withdrawal, do not pass go. Patterson to pack and scram, Hoddinotts to clear the flat. “I mean it, Trish,” she’d said. “Out of there. Today.” And Mangan? Mangan was to stay put for a polite interval and then he was to scram, too.

“Why the polite interval?” he said.

“Because it must look like your decision to leave,” said Patterson. “Take two or three days. That’s all. Book tickets. Stay low. Say some casual goodbyes, give an account of yourself. You’re going back home for a bit. A new opportunity. But get out, and soon.”

He was looking into the cigarette smoke as it curled toward the ceiling.

“Are you okay, Philip?”

He exhaled.

“What about Rocky?” he said.

“He’ll have to look after himself for the time being.”

“Is it over?” he said.

Patterson was packing the laptop, the comms equipment.

“Would you be sorry if it was?”

“Oh, bereft.”

“Would you?”

He didn’t respond. She carried cases to the door, then came back and sat opposite him at the table.

“They’ll want to talk to you back in London. Be careful.”

“Why?”

She paused, wondered about his frame of mind, about her responsibility to him.

“Because they are going to ask you to take a step further,” she said.

He cocked his head at her and she felt his look, his green eyes searching for more. She looked away.

“Think about what happened tonight,” she said, “before you answer them. Think hard about why you would go on with this.”

“I’ve probably done that already, thought hard about it. A bit. Isn’t that possible?”

She wondered whether to say anything, whether to tell him about the living of a life in secret, about the accumulating burden of silence over time, the closing off of expectations.

“Just think about it,” she said, standing up, making a move of finality.

“Do you think I’m not up to it?” he said. She didn’t hear defensiveness, just an earnest question.

“I didn’t say that.”

Her back was to him when he spoke suddenly, as if expressing something pent up.

“I find that the relationship I have with you is now the only honest relationship I have.”

“You’re starting to see how this works,” she answered. But she said it quietly, so he couldn’t hear her.

After Mangan had gone, she mopped and scrubbed, cleaned the cups, vacuumed the sofa, wiped down the surfaces, a token attempt at leaving no DNA. By early afternoon she was done.

She stood in the echoing living room, smelled the chlorine in the air. Mangan’s declaration of trust had shaken her somehow, sapped her confidence, and she did not understand why.

She closed the door quietly behind her, walked to the stairwell, made her way quickly, quietly to the ground floor. She took the rear exit, hopped the wall to the park, walked briskly. A man on a bench wearing a tan raincoat said something to her in Amharic. She ignored him. He stood up as she passed, repeated what he’d said, loud, angry. She quickened her pace. He was following her. She came out of the park on a broad boulevard in weak afternoon sun and the acrid roar of Addis. She looked back toward the apartment block and saw a van parked in front of it, a man in a suit leaning idly against the driver’s door. She hailed a taxi, the man in the raincoat still gesturing at her, offering her something.

A careful stop at the Jupiter Hotel to pay her bill, pick up her bag. She used the lobby, loitering, checking her back. She told the doorman to get a taxi for an address in Jakros, but then, safely aboard, ordered the driver to turn round and head for the airport.

Cairo was the only ticket she could get. So, Cairo it was. She paid in cash and waited three hours, much of it in the ladies lavatory, to board. The plane lifted off from Addis at dusk and she sat in the compressive hiss of the cabin watching the disordered, promiscuous city below give way to gray-purple mountains, wondered at her own sense of lightness, unbelonging.

But for Mangan, it was a more complicated departure. He put it about that it was time for a break. London for a bit, see some friends. A sniff of a new job. He paid the rent on his flat three months in advance.

Building cover, he realized. Shaky cover.

He met Abraha and Hallelujah at the jazz bar in Piazza and they put away a fair few in the candlelight to a jittery seven-piece ensemble, and Hal looked quite stricken.

“But you will be back, yes?” he said.

“Yes, I’ll be back. I’m keeping the flat on. Just some people I need to see in London.”

“Well, are you reachable?”

“Yes, of course.”

Abraha was looking hard at him.

“What has happened, Philip? I thought you were getting settled here.”

“There’s the possibility of a job.”

Abraha nodded and Mangan could see that he smelled insincerity. And Mangan wondered if he was giving it off, like some bodily effusion.

“May we know what the job is?”

“Not yet,” said Mangan.

And then, to make it all worse, Maja turned up. She gave him a sad smile.

“So our Ogaden trip will have to wait,” she said.

“It will, I’m afraid,” he said.

She dropped her eyes and he realized she was fighting tears.

“Don’t let it wait too long,” she said.

When they parted, standing outside on the cracked pavement, Abraha shook his hand and turned away. Hallelujah hugged him, and Maja leaned against him and kissed him on the neck.

“It might have been nice, I think,” she said.

“But it might still happen…?”

She kissed him again and then looked up at him.

“Everything about you says you have left and the rest of us are not invited. I look at you and I see a closed face.” She ran a hand down her own face as if a shutter were falling. “Closed for business. Or for things more fun. Where have you gone?”

“I can’t answer you.”

She gave him a push, turned away.

“Inauthenticity, you know, in your character, that’s an awful thing. Especially for you, someone who looks and thinks and writes.”

He said nothing. She made a waving gesture.

“Bye, Philip.”

This is how it works.

Back at the flat in Gotera an envelope lay by the front door. In it were a web address and a password.