Spy Games (23 page)

“I like it. Liked it. The feeling of not being attached, settled. Always sort of falling forward into something, something new.”

She took a breath as if to speak, then checked herself.

“What?” he said.

“No, nothing.” That’s not true, she thought. You don’t like the not being attached. You want more, said so yourself. You’re looking to invest yourself, to commit. You want to feel that there’s a single truth you can march toward, just around the bend in the road, through the trees.

You’re like me.

They paid. She walked to the Tube. Mangan gave her his slow smile and turned away in the twilight. She watched him go. It was the most intimate conversation she’d had in months.

And Hopko wanted to know all about it.

“How’s his morale, would you say, Trish? What’s his understanding of what’s happening to him?”

“I’d say his morale is high and he understands that he is now an agent of the Service.”

Hopko leaned forward, her hands palm down on her table.

“How very cryptic,” she said, deliberately.

“I mean, he has his eyes open. He’s reflective. I think he’s psychologically committed.”

“And why is he so committed, in your view?”

Patterson swallowed.

“His own reasons. He has a need, we meet it.”

Hopko sat back. Her fingers played with a bead necklace, tiny nuggets of coral, lapis. “Please, do me one favor.” Hopko had the look of a hawk. “Remember that he is not your friend. He is your agent.”

A theme rammed home at the ops meeting.

Patterson was unnerved by the cast of characters in attendance, not having realized how much attention
WEAVER
was attracting. She loitered in the corridor, her stomach turning somersaults. Mobbs, the Director of Requirements and Production, strode into the windowless, secure room, a minion carrying a black legal briefcase hard behind him. Hopko stood by her chair, sipping coffee from a paper cup, gazing benignly at the assembled group; limbering up, Patterson could tell. Chapman-Biggs of Requirements was there, and the senior P officer for China, dour-browed Claudia Mallory, who, Patterson knew, was snappish about the case, feeling sidelined. And, of course, Drinkwater, simmering at the head of a small phalanx of Security Branch officers. Patterson went in, sat in a chair by the wall. She noted that all the Africa Controllerate and Global Issues/Counterterrorism people had vanished.

Hopko opened.

“The objectives of Operation
WEAVER
,” she said, “are threefold. One, the penetration of China southwestern military command. Two, the penetration of 2PLA, military intelligence. Three, the mapping of factional rivalries at high level, with a focus on the complex of political and economic interactions surrounding China National Century Corporation. We have reason to believe that
HYPNOTIST
and those he refers to as his associates can deliver on all three objectives.”

She paused, looked over the top of her spectacles at the room. No challenges, yet.

“The initial encounters, as you know, took place in Ethiopia, and
HYPNOTIST
has already generated for us significant, actionable intelligence. We propose to reestablish and develop
HYPNOTIST
as an asset in place in China’s southwestern military command.”

Another look. Silence. They’re waiting till they can see the whites of her eyes, thought Patterson.

“To this operational end,
HYPNOTIST
will be supplied with the means of closed, covert communication. And he will be managed and tasked, where possible, at third country meetings by our access agent, codename
BRAMBLE
, working in turn to Patterson as case officer.”

Patterson felt the eyes of the room on her, the gaze of Claudia Mallory in particular.

“All with me so far?” said Hopko.

The door opened, abruptly. A gray-suited figure stalked across the room to the table, folded himself into a chair, sat cross-legged, chin in one hand. Through rimless spectacles he regarded Hopko.

“Please carry on,” he said.

“How very nice to see you, sir,” said Hopko. She’s masking her surprise, thought Patterson—C, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, has just walked unannounced into her ops meeting. Hopko allowed a sliver of a moment to pass before she recommenced, a marking of her territory.

“We anticipate that
HYPNOTIST
’s product will be transmitted through these closed, covert channels, and in third country meetings. The darknet link will be used for operational communication only, and sparingly. The access agent is equipped to manage that link securely.”

Drinkwater leaned forward on the table.

“Yes. I wonder if we might discuss the access agent a little. I’m sure we all have questions.” He ducked his head in the direction of C.

“Please,” said Hopko.

“We are aware of Philip Mangan’s operational history, of course,” said Drinkwater. “And, speaking for Security Branch, and I’m sure for others present”—a motion in the direction of C again—“I think
we would all like to understand the operational rationale for using him again in this case.”

“Trish?” said Hopko.

Patterson jumped.
Christ. How about some warning?

“Well, he knows the asset,” said Patterson. “He is mobile, has excellent cover and strong judgment. And he’s willing. He’s ours. He considerably enhances our capacity in East Asia, to fulfil this and other operational needs.”

“There. Mangan is the face and the voice,” Hopko said. “He’s the reassurance, the humanity. And, crucially, he’s the cutout. How’s that?”

Drinkwater wore a half-smile and nodded patronizingly at Patterson.

“So you have plans for Mangan?” he said.

“We do,” said Hopko.

C looked bored. The Director of Requirements and Production was starting to look alarmed.

“Yes, I see,” said Drinkwater. “I am sure we would all be interested to know how and why Mangan has wormed his way quite so firmly into your affections.”

“Sorry,” said C. “I’m not interested.” He was looking at Hopko.

“Ah. Well—” said Drinkwater. C spoke over him.

“What I’m interested in,” he said, “is what Valentina Hopko feels is at stake in this operation.”

The room was silent. Patterson sat, rigid. Hopko smiled at the aggression.

“I’m not sure I quite understand.”

C spoke louder now, enunciating in an exaggerated way.

“What do you think he’s about, Val? Who are these associates he keeps banging on about?” He leaned forward, a questioning look.

What the hell is this? thought Patterson.

“It does appear,” said Hopko, slowly, “that
HYPNOTIST
is not acting alone. This fact, while complicating the case operationally, also brings with it great potential. Many spies are better than one.”

Silence. Which C refused to fill. Hopko let it stretch out.

It was Drinkwater who finally blundered in.

“Well…” he was shaking his head, smirking, “one
does
rather wonder at the logic of employing an access agent and an extended network of resources to service an asset, or assets, who are, in effect, an unknown quantity.”

Mobbs rolled his eyes. C gave a shake of the head. Everyone in the room seemed to know what was coming, except Drinkwater. And Patterson.

Hopko was poker-faced. She addressed Drinkwater slowly.

“My logic
is
that if we are to ascertain
HYPNOTIST
’s true motives, and those of his associates, we must proceed with the operation. That is, after all, how we will find them out.” She gave a quizzical tilt of the head. “No?”

Yes, obviously, thought Patterson.

C sighed noisily, then spoke deliberately.

“Val,
do
you think you might deign to share with the company your view of what we are dealing with here?”

Hopko sat back, looked at the table for a moment, then spoke carefully.

“My suspicion, sir, and it is as yet just a suspicion, is that
HYPNOTIST
may represent some element in a factional conflict among China’s elites.”

Well, it would have been nice if you’d shared that particular suspicion, thought Patterson, before realizing that Hopko had shared it, over Ethiopian food on the Horseferry Road.
A fault line, Trish.
She forced her resentment in another direction.
Why must you always be so bloody oblique, woman?
Hopko was still talking.

“We know there are factions in the Communist Party, of course we do. But we barely glimpse them. We don’t really know of whom they are comprised, or why they coalesce, or around what, do we? We don’t know the geography of it. Who stands where, who’s loyal to whom, who’s ready to cut throats.”

She stopped, allowing a sense of climax to build.

“My suspicion is… that
HYPNOTIST
may be trying to use us to his own advantage in a factional conflict. And by doing so he will reveal to us a great deal.”

C was still, his watery, clinical stare. Hopko went on.

“We have a chance to see right into China—not its institutions, not its structure, but its biology, its guts. We’ll see it
working
.”

C was brusque.

“I do not like cabals. I like agents whom we can run. I do not like plots. I do not like fantasies that may disrupt our relationship with China and undermine our interests there.”

Hopko nodded. C wasn’t finished.

“You will use Mangan. And you will ensure that we do not become enmeshed in something that we cannot control.”

He stood and left the room.

Oxford

Kai found her sitting on the staircase, waiting for him. He unlocked the door to his rooms and Madeline slipped inside. She was nervous, waited in the middle of the room. He started to make tea, but she stopped him, took his arm.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

“What do you have to tell me?”

“Something’s going to happen.”

“What? What thing?”

“Someone’s coming.”

His stomach lurched.

“They’re here? Now? Your father’s people?” he said.

“No… no. I mean, something’s going to happen. Not now, but soon.”

She took hold of his hand, began to work it back and forth childishly, as if the movement might impress upon him the importance of what she had to say.

“What?” He leaned down, tried to look her in the eye. “I don’t know what you mean. What’s coming?”

“They’re getting ready for something.” Her voice was small, thin. “The men.”

With his free hand he made a questioning gesture.

“Why? What have you seen?”

“There are more of them. They’ve taken to driving me around, shadowing me. They say it’s for my protection. They’ve rented a house somewhere. I heard them talking in the car. They called it a ‘safe house.’ They talked about ‘the operation.’”

He shook his head, baffled.

“What makes you think it has anything to do with me?”

“Everything is to do with you. Everything.”

“What are you saying?”

She was withholding, he could tell.

“You have to go, get somewhere safe. Something’s coming,” she said.

She leaned against him, put her arms around him, and he breathed in the smell of her hair.

“Please,” she said. “Go.”

And then he felt himself falling, or more sort of toppling, onto the bed, and her face was very close to his and the thought occurred to him that it was the danger of what they were doing that so aroused them both, and then the thought fell away, replaced by the startling sensation of her hands in his hair, her mouth on his.

London

Communications took up the next few days. Michael and Jeff brought Mangan a new hardened laptop. They showed him the darknet sites, made him log on again and again, made him learn the passwords and the protocols forward and backward. How to encrypt; how to use secure email; the digital dead-letter boxes, planted deep in the tunnels and sewers of the web where he could leave them things he wanted them to find.

“And where you’ll find
us
. This is how you talk to us,” said Jeff.

“And security, Philip,” said Michael. “Security is just as important out there in cyber world as it is on the street. Stay aware. If something looks wrong, get out, stay away. Find another route. Or do nothing at all.”

“What if someone steals the laptop?” Mangan asked.

They showed him. They provided lessons as to how to log on from a public computer, from an internet café. How to use a stolen handheld. Phone numbers in case of dire emergency only.

“And never on your usual mobile phone. Never. Or a hotel phone, god forbid. Buy a burner. Steal one, use it once, drop it in a river.”

Recognition signals, duress codes, digital keys.

This is how it works.

Patterson watched him as he sat at the conference table in a T-shirt, barefoot, hair a mess. The journalist’s lips moved as he memorized, as if he were cramming for an exam. She tested him, caught him out, and he’d go back and memorize all over again.

And, for the pièce de résistance, Jeff and Michael waited till late on a Friday afternoon, then brought out a bottle of sparkling wine from the fridge and made Mangan sit down and close his eyes. Jeff tap-tapped on the keyboard, and told Mangan he could look and there was his brand spanking new website. The front page held plenty of white space and a black-and-white photograph lifted from God knows where of Mangan looking tanned, rugged, squinting toward sun-stippled mountains in some godforsaken place, Xinjiang, maybe, or Qinghai. And in a large serif typeface:

“Bloody hell,” said Mangan. “What happened to me?”

“Like it?” said Jeff. “We were rather chuffed with it.”

“Have they done away with capitalization, in these borderlands?”

“You have become a progressive writer, Philip. You will tell stories others do not, liberated from the false framing and corrupt discourse of the corporate media.”

“Don’t look at me. I don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Patterson.

Mangan looked at the screen, wondering.

“The trick of it,” said Jeff, “is that it doesn’t tie you to conventional news coverage. It keeps you out of the mainstream, away from other reporters. I mean, with a website like that, you’re not going to many press conferences, are you? Or natural disasters. You don’t have to explain why you’re not running to the big story.”

“But,” said Michael, “it does allow you to go exactly where you want to go and ask whatever questions you want to ask.”

“And there’s a budget,” said Jeff. “Not a very big one. But it will allow you to commission the odd story from others, to keep things turning over. You’ll need to write, but you can do it all on your own terms. And we’ll make sure you have a readership, or the appearance of one. And that’ll scare up some advertising and funding.”

The two tech wallahs looked expectantly at Mangan.

He could see the virtue of it. But there was no escaping the lie.

They spent hours with him on passive surveillance detection. Look, Philip, look all the time, but seeing is not discerning. Look beyond your expectations. Look for the incongruity, the misplaced gaze, the awkward movement. Look for self-consciousness. But if you see it, do nothing. When you employ countersurveillance measures, they’ll know. So don’t duck. Don’t dive. No getting in and out of lifts or slipping out of back doors. If you do, they’ll know.

And if they know, it’s over.

They gave him a surveillance detection route and he trudged through the streets of Paddington, Bayswater and Notting Hill on a humid Saturday afternoon. He thought he spotted some of them. A woman in a launderette who looked straight at him and turned away. A kid on a moped who passed him repeatedly. A telephone engineer kneeling at a junction box, who, at Mangan’s approach, seemed implausibly fascinated by his work.

The best cover, they told him, is natural cover. The best cover is to be who you are, the traveler in economy class, the progressive web journalist posting his transgressive copy, living in the cheap hotels,
sitting in cafés. Don’t duck, don’t dive. Be who you are. But be watchful. And when you think you glimpse surveillance, and you will, you come to us.

The kid on the moped was just a kid on a moped. No one knew anything about a woman in a launderette. But he was right about the telephone engineer.

Oxford

Kai wished he hadn’t obeyed the summons.

He knocked on the door to Miss Yang’s house in Jericho and she opened it, wearing a figure-hugging blue dress, with bare feet, holding a glass of wine.

He followed her into the living room and she stood over him with a smile on her face that could cut marble, speaking her sibilant Mandarin.

“Forgive me, Kai, but I think the instructions were quite specific, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” he said, miserably.

“No contact with the Chen girl.”

He looked down.

She glanced away, as if preoccupied.

“Well, this is unfortunate,” she said. “What do you think we should do?”

He waited.

“Kai?” She was bending over him, trying to make eye contact. “I mean, what if your father found out? Or that awful lawyer. What do you call him?”

“Uncle Checkbook.”

“Yes, Uncle Checkbook. What if he were to find out?”

He stayed silent.

“How many times have you seen her?”

“Three or four.”

She frowned as if an unpleasant thought had struck her.

“Kai, you’re not screwing her, are you?”

He swallowed, shifted in his chair.

“No,” he said.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said.

She put down her glass of wine and knelt in front of where he sat, placed her forearms in his lap and leaned against him. He could feel the swell of her breasts against his thigh. It was sensual, threatening.

“Well, how about this?” she said. “We’ll endeavor to make sure that your father and his minions do not become aware of your weird little tryst. And you tell me everything that she has said to you.”

He could smell her perfume and see the flecks of amber and hazel in her irises.

“I don’t understand why this is—”

She cut him off, leaned in farther to him, spoke very quietly.

“You are not required to understand. You are required to tell me what she said.”

“We just talked about, stuff. Our families, a bit.”

“I’m waiting, Kai.”

“She said she’s scared.”

“Why?”

“Her father has people here. They drive her around, do stuff.”

“What stuff do they do?”

“I don’t know. She just said—”

“Where are they, these men? Are they at her house?”

“No, they’ve rented some place…”

“What place?”

“I…”

“What place, Kai? Tell me
exactly
what she said, or so help me.”

“She said it was a safe house. They called it a safe house.”

Nicole paused, knelt back on her heels.

“Go on, Kai.”

Kai just closed his eyes, put his hand to his forehead.

“They talked about an operation.”

“What operation, Kai?”

“I don’t know. She said it had to do with me. Look, that’s all. That’s enough. There’s nothing more.”

She had stood up, placed her hands on her hips. “One more question, Kai. And you need to think very hard before you answer. Do you understand?”

He gave a faint nod.

“Did you say anything to her about… Uncle Checkbook? About who he is, what he does?”

“He’s just the family lawyer, why would she—”

She shouted at him.

“Did you?”

Kai shrank in his chair.

“No! No, honestly.”

“What do you know about him? Do you know where he lives? Where he works?”

“I… somewhere in the Caribbean, isn’t it? Why is everyone so obsessed about Uncle Checkbook?”

“What do you mean? Has someone else asked about him? Who?”

“Well, Charlie Feng, the Cambridge boys, they all know about him. They asked me at that dinner.”

He thought he saw a flicker of disbelief on her face. And then she was all movement.

Copenhagen, this time. A last-minute flight, rain streaking the windows of the plane.

Gristle met Nicole in a silent airport hotel room, ignoring the No Smoking signs. She stood at the window, he sat on the bed, hunched over.

“So, tell me all about her,” he said, face set like a stone. “Is she cute? Nubile?”

“What were you hoping for?”

“Oh, anything. My life is devoid of sensuality.” He drew on the cigarette.

“Whose fault is that?” she said.

“My wife’s,” he said. “The Ministry of State Security’s. Everybody else’s. Stop pussyfooting around and tell me what happened.”

“Not enough happened. But she knows… something.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“How are you so sure?”

“She’s been warned not to talk. She was ready for everything I asked her.”

“You are absolutely sure.”

“Yes.”

“We’re out of time.”

“Wait, wait. There’s more.”

He took a long pull on the cigarette.

“Go on.”

“She squealed to the Fan boy. She told him to get out. Something’s about to happen.”

“She
what
?”

That got his attention, Nicole thought.

“I know. They’ve been seeing each other, secretly. Now
that’s
cute, isn’t it?”

“Like what? What the hell’s about to happen?”

“That’s all. Something’s going to happen and the Fan boy is to get out for his own safety.”

“To get out? Get out where? Why? Screw them and all their forebears. And what the hell did he squeal to
her
? I wonder.”

“I don’t know. But I think the lawyer may be blown.”

Gristle closed his eyes.

“That settles it. Get back there and… find out. What she knows.”

“You really want me to?”

He gave a brief, tired nod.

“I need proper authorization,” she said. “I need you to order me to do it.”

“I’m ordering you to do it.” He looked exhausted, the lines deep in his cheeks, under his eyes. A tired, frightened old spy.

“We have to,” he said. And she could feel the revulsion in his tone. “So do it.”

He looked up at her.

“I’ll take responsibility.”

“I believe you, for once,” she said. And she walked across the room, leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. He didn’t move.

She ordered vodka at an airport bar, let it numb the thought, to push away what was coming. She was back in England by the late afternoon.

As Mangan’s departure date drew closer, Patterson felt his restlessness, the desire to be moving. He’d pace barefoot around the mews house, reciting contact numbers, protocols, procedures for her. He saw a doctor, who made sure his shots were up to date. In the evenings he’d go for walks, pounding the pavement through Hyde Park into the West End. The walks made Patterson nervous, so Hopko approved a watcher to keep an eye, and a thirtysomething Irish woman with mousy hair and a sad, slow smile wandered imperceptibly in his wake and reported on his tramping through Kensington and Knightsbridge, his lingering in coffee shops. What’s he doing? they asked her. He’s not doing anything, he’s just watching, she said. Watching what? Everything, she said, the streets, the cars, the Arab women in hijab outside Harrods, the groups of gangly Chinese kids bouncing around in their BMWs, the pale Russians in sports gear sat outside cafés, their eyes on the middle distance, the men in rows, smoking sheeshah. He went book-browsing on what remained of Charing Cross Road. He stopped outside a “gentlemen’s club” near Euston, then thought better of it and walked on as the dusk gathered. He never met anybody, or spoke to anybody beyond a bartender or a waitress. Did he detect the surveillance? If he did, he didn’t say. The Irish woman spoke of an instant when he stopped, in Bond Street, and looked about himself, looked in the windows of the boutiques at the shoes, the handbags, the jewels. “And for a moment,” she said, “he just looked completely lost, like he was in some foreign city.”

Patterson observed, also, a compartmentalization. He didn’t refer to the China operation of the previous year, and asked no further questions of her about it. She did not believe that it had ceased to matter to him, quite the opposite. She wondered if
WEAVER
was to be for him some sort of amends, a second chance. But a second chance for what? And amends to whom?

She sat stiffly in her cubicle at VX, attended the ops meetings, watched Hopko assemble around their Chinese colonel the silent operational structure that would protect and exploit him.

Two days before Mangan was due to leave, he did some shopping at a mall in Shepherd’s Bush, a cathedral of a place in ice white neon, air tinged with disinfectant, the groups of silent teenagers, faces down and silvered in phone glow, fingers hovering. He bought clothes in unobtrusive colors, lightweight walking boots, luggage, a padded backpack for the laptop, a sponge bag. He bought some sunglasses. He took it all back to the Paddington mews house.

The night before his flight, Patterson, Hopko, Chapman-Biggs and the tech wallahs all came round. Hopko had ordered in some expensive catering. They ate rack of lamb on a risotto, and Chapman-Biggs declaimed on the wine and insisted on gathering everyone’s opinions and Mangan nodded and said he liked it, and so did Patterson, and they gave each other a private look. Hopko had decreed that no one could talk about work, and that made it a stilted affair, the conversation meandering through books, films, London and how no one in the Service could afford to buy a property any more, a point on which Michael the tech wallah became quite animated.