Spy Games (32 page)

“No… I…”

“Kai, do
not
let them take you.”

The line went dead.

He crept out from behind the tree, looked back toward the road. The bike was still there, its headlamp on, its engine idling. But there was no one on it.

He felt as if he were reduced to childhood, to a blind, uncontrollable, infant fear. He ran, arms flailing, aware of a mewling noise
escaping his mouth. Suddenly he was in open parkland, the shelter offered by the trees far behind him. He stopped, crouched in the dark. Another engine, a headlight streaking up the far side of the park.

Two of them, now? More? A new flood of panic, and he was off and running again.

To his left, more trees, and beyond them street lamps. A way out? He turned and ran for them. The darkness seemed to be full of engine noise, flickering headlamps nosing along the edges of the park, closing on him.

He made the trees. A gateway led out of the park and onto a narrow, dimly lit street, the park’s vegetation spilling over into it, lending it a wooded, overgrown feel. He stopped and crouched, looking in both directions. He was breathing heavily and in his mouth the saliva had turned thick, pasty. Then, a weird moment of clarity. He took out his phone and, with a trembling finger, opened the maps application. Cheney Lane. He was on Cheney Lane.

He dialed her number.

“Where are you?”

“Cheney Lane. There. I’m… in the bushes.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re… oh god… they’re all around. They’re on motorbikes. I can hear them.”

“Three minutes,” she said.

He looked up: at the far end of the wooded street was a headlamp, moving slowly toward him. He backed into the bushes, crouched, then lay flat, smelling the cool earth, the night damp. The bike was zigzagging down the street, letting the beam from its headlamp play along the verges.

He dug his fingers into the earth, held his breath.

The bike came closer. Opposite the gateway to the park, it stopped, the engine slowing. Kai could see the feet of the rider resting on the tarmac, clad in black boots. He imagined the rider sniffing the air, like some scenting animal. He forced himself down into the leaves.

His phone vibrated.

He dared not move, so let it buzz. And now—
shit
—the ringtone, a stupid train whistle sound. Could the rider hear over the bike’s engine? He watched the booted feet on the tarmac, unmoving.

And then the rider gave a flick of the wrist and the engine growled briefly and the booted feet lifted and the bike nosed slowly, warily, away.

He lifted one hand and pulled aside the leaves. More headlamps, but a car this time. Was that her? It was a red Mini, coming on fast. No time to dial her now. He eased himself up onto one knee and looked the other way. The bike’s red taillight seemed to be receding. As the Mini got closer he readied himself, and then, when it was almost on him, he launched himself up and out into the road, arms up, waving. The tires screamed against the asphalt and the car turned slightly in the skid and lurched to a halt. She was gesturing at him from behind the wheel, her eyes wide. He ran for the passenger side door, jerked at the handle. It was locked and he thumped on the window, bent down, mouthing at her
open the fucking door, please open it.
She was staring straight ahead through the windscreen. He followed her line of sight.

The motorbike was turning back.

The door unlocked with a
chunk
sound, and he wrenched it open, got in, slammed it shut and the Mini accelerated, Nicole’s hands white on the wheel. The bike had turned and was heading toward them. He looked over at her, saw light sliding across her face, light from the rear-view mirror. He turned. Behind them, another bike, very close. She shifted slightly in her seat.

“Put your belt on,” she said, quietly.

The bike in front of them was veering crazily across the road and came to a stop, side on, thirty meters ahead.

“You’re going to hit…” he said. But she had already clipped the front wheel, the
thunk
from the driver’s side. He turned to see the bike spiraling away. He couldn’t see the rider. He wanted to shout,
scream at her, but nothing would come. He was grasping the safety belt in one hand, his seat with the other, his feet rigid against the floormat. The bike behind them was swerving, staying with them. Nicole accelerated suddenly, pulled away from it.

“Hold on to something,” she said. She stamped on the brakes, threw the car into reverse, turned in her seat leaving one hand on the wheel, and gunned the Mini backward down the street, its engine whining. The bike behind them slowed and veered to the side. Nicole wrenched the wheel around and hit the accelerator. The Mini lurched at the bike. They shuddered to a halt in bushes, tree branches scraping the roof of the car. Kai saw a gloved hand against the rear window, then nothing.

Nicole, calm, jaw set, jammed the car back into drive and they took off down the street, Kai rigid and gasping with fright. They turned back onto the main road into the city center. Nicole brought her speed down, took a deep breath.

From the villa outside Chiang Mai, Patterson watched it begin with a fascinated horror, piecing it together from the net. She sat in her room staring at her laptop, Cliff looking over her shoulder, Mac on the sofa, silent and hostile.

There would be no troops crashing down the alleyways of Beijing, because Fan Ping, the poorly tailored chairman of the high-tech behemoth and whorehouse, China National Century, she saw, was on tour in China’s far southwest, Yunnan Province, dangerously close to the plotters’ stronghold. He was due to tour a new manufacturing facility some eighty miles from the provincial capital, Kunming. The facility manufactured cellular repeaters, which, CNaC hoped, would speckle the buildings of all Southeast Asia as the corporation’s networks spread across the continent. The factory’s managers stood, nervous and fidgety, in rows beside a red carpet.

But a Hong Kong journalist, representing an impudent web-based business publication and hoping for a fleeting moment with Mr. Fan, remarked indecorously on social media that CNaC’s chairman had
not arrived, that the managers were perplexed and milled about, and a planned luncheon had been abandoned.

Fan Ping, chairman of all CNaC, progenitor of China’s digital future was, in some fashion, indisposed.

His elder brother, Fan Rong, whose presence on the Politburo guaranteed the political fortunes of the clan, was also out of the capital, according to the papers. The previous day, said the
Chengdu Daily
, he had addressed the Party School there and had undertaken a tour of the factory at which the J-20 fighter was built, and was due to address a conference on organizational work in the national defense industry.

So where was he now? And the boy, Fan Kaikai?

She stood, pushed past Cliff, went to the window, reaching for anything, any course of action. But her sense of agency had left her, and the feeling of redundancy was overwhelming.

Oxford

Fan Kaikai was in Nicole’s bedroom, the curtains drawn.

He had wanted to resist, but he had not known how. Her manner made him powerless. She was very cold, very calm as she drove them back through the city. He had tried to protest and she had spoken to him very quietly.

“What do you wish to do, Kai? Do you want to call the police again? Do you hope that the British police will come to help you? To protect you? The little detective? That black woman? Whoever the hell she was. Do you know who she was, Kai?”

He just shook his head.

She had forced him into the house, a hand on his back, in through the front door, the lock snapping into place behind them, two dead bolts which looked to be newly installed, he noticed. Then, up the stairs to the bedroom.

“You will stay here, without speaking, or moving, until I say you can come out.”

“What happened to Madeline?” he said.

She was looking at a handheld.

“Madeline went away,” she said absently. “Anyway, she was too smart for you.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Me? I didn’t do anything, Kai.” She gave him a smile of such intensity, such beauty, that he was rattled, and she turned away, making to close the door.

“Is she dead?”

She stopped, gave him a long look, as if she were making some sort of concession.

“No, Kai, she’s not dead.”

It was dark. There were locks on the windows. He lay and shivered under a blanket, dozed a little. Sometime before dawn, he tiptoed to the door and opened it a crack, and she was sitting on the top stair, wrapped in a blanket, unmoving. Next to her, on the wooden floor, lay her handheld.

“Shut the door,” she said. “It won’t be long now.”

By the middle of the afternoon, Chapman-Biggs had composed a brief, pungent CX report. The report was reviewed, edited and cleared by Hopko and the Director, Requirements and Production, and C, the head of the Service himself. It was titled “Indicators of Imminent Political Crisis in the People’s Republic of China.”

It was, Chapman-Biggs remarked to Hopko, one of the most important CX reports that the Service had produced in years, and Hopko did not disagree.

The report was read immediately in the Cabinet Office by the National Security Adviser and several members of the Joint Intelligence Committee. A crash meeting of the Current Intelligence Group for China set about drafting an assessment which expanded upon and contextualized its content. At the Foreign Office, the Director for China readied herself to interrupt the Foreign Secretary’s evening. A Cabinet-level meeting was called for first thing in the morning. The report was sent to Langley, Ottawa, Sydney and
Auckland. A stripped-down version, scrubbed almost into invisibility, went to the European Union Situation Centre in Brussels.

Patterson lay awake in the hills outside Chiang Mai, her mind racing.

She threw the sheet off, padded in her underwear to the bathroom, splashed her face with water, drank from a plastic bottle. The ghastly limbo of the operational officer awaiting a decision, an order, an outcome.

She checked the website for further communications from Mangan. Nothing. From London, just:

She lay down again.

She listened to the hum and hiss of insects in the night.

The sudden import and complexity of the operation terrified her, sapped her will, even as her role in it shrank. She could feel the grinding of the machinery of national power, the abrupt gaze of powerful men, who, she was certain, would examine her and find her wanting, in her youth and amateurishness, her outsiderness, her
background
. The thought sent her stomach writhing. She sat up, hugged her knees.

Why was she so frightened of these people?

She hated herself anew for the self-doubt.

The Cabinet meeting was unusually short. The running was made by the Foreign Secretary, whose doughty certainties reassured the others at the table.

“It is clear to us,” said the Foreign Secretary, elbows on table, leaning forward, “that any move by a group of military officers against prominent Chinese political and corporate leaders constitutes a serious threat to Chinese stability.” He paused. “It is concomitantly clear that the interests of the United Kingdom, as well as those of UK corporate entities, will
not
be served by such instability. Nor will those of the global financial system as a whole.”

He took a sip of water.

“I have, by the by, spoken to my colleagues in the Treasury, in the financial regulatory apparatus and in the Corporation of the City of London, and they have made it
abundantly
clear that revealing the disposition of the Fan family jewels is neither possible nor desirable, nor legal, probably.”

The Foreign Secretary looked around the table.

“It
is
however, my view, that we should avail ourselves of this
opportunity to relay to the Chinese leadership what we know of this impending political crisis.”

A short document was drafted.

Within the hour, the National Security Adviser and C made their way to a secure communications facility in the Cabinet Office building, where they oversaw the encryption of the document and its transmission as an email to China. The email went by way of a dedicated, secure line which led directly to the Communist Party Headquarters in Zhongnanhai. The Chinese account was managed by senior staff of the Ministry of State Security, who, by common agreement with the British, possessed an encryption key.

It has been brought to the attention of the government of the United Kingdom.

Her Majesty’s Government takes the view.

The document named General Chen and Colonel Shi, both of 2PLA, as suspected conspirators.

It suggested a possible location for Colonel Shi, supplying GPS coordinates, lifted from the last known location of Mangan’s phone.

The Service and cabinet office fully expected, and were prepared for, a barrage of questions and demands from the Chinese in response to their message. They were utterly unprepared for what came back.

It read:

It was about two hours later—barely any time at all—that Patterson saw the monitoring report from Hong Kong.

On a Hong Kong website, a blurred photograph snapped in the business class lounge at Beijing airport. An elderly man in a business
suit held his hands out for the cuffs and glowered at the camera. A Chinese general, gushed the copy. Detained! In full view! A General Chen, along with several members of his retinue, were led away by paramilitary police and operatives of the Ministry of State Security, just before they boarded a flight to southwest China. On what charge, no one knew.

Minutes later Reuters came through with a two-line flash.

Patterson felt the entire operation lurch and stagger, felt the chill of failure creeping into her stomach.

She dialed Hopko on the secure handheld, knowing full well she hadn’t thought it through, a voice in the back of her head whispering,
Don’t do this
.

“Hopko.”

“Val? Trish. The General’s arrest. Is it confirmed? How did they find out? Did we—”

“Calm down.”

“
Did we…?
”

“Did you expect otherwise?”

“I expected—” but she caught herself. “I’ll go and get him, Val. I’ll go. I’ll get both of them.”

Hopko sounded distant.

“Mangan is a cutout, Trish.”

“Meaning?”

“I mean that he is on his own. For now.”

Mangan, exhausted, lay in a foul and roiled sleep as the day wore on, the mosquitoes whining in his ears. He had been bitten on his eyelids and they had swollen. The cell was fetid and sweltering. His hands beneath the cuff had regained their ugly, dark color.

Earlier, they had come, Rocky and the Clown, and made him log on to the darknet site to check for messages.

Mangan, astonished, disheartened, looked at them, unspeaking. Rocky rubbed his chin, and the Clown shook his head and looked accusingly at Mangan. They snapped the laptop shut and left.

Later, the Clown had come with a bottle of water and plate of sandwiches that contained a vile pulpy meat paste.

Mangan tried to engage him.

“Tell me what the situation is,” he said. “Let me message them again.”

The Clown said nothing, went to close the door.

“We should message them again,” called Mangan after him, and he could hear the pleading tone in his own voice. They took him to the bathroom, and he had diarrhea. He walked unsteadily back to the cell, weak, depleted.