Spy Games (4 page)

“All right. All right. While you retain the confidence of your Head of Controllerate, you will remain in your operational role. I will expect to see performance reviews that reflect that confidence.”

Hopko was nodding, listening to him with a fixed, admiring smile, one which Patterson had long ago learned to read, and which, when correctly decrypted, meant
you swivel-eyed, patronizing husk of a man.

Mobbs turned to Bastable of Human Resources, leaning close to her to whisper, a little too loudly.

“And for pity’s sake, less talk of
background
, if you please. You’ll get us all sued.”

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

In Kaliti prison, the inmates were not incarcerated in cells. Rather, they were warehoused in vast, corrugated iron structures that rattled under the rain and baked under the sun. Eight zones to the prison, several thousand inmates in each, the whole complex riddled with tuberculosis, it was said.

Mangan sat in the jeep by the side of the main road. He looked out at the prison walls. The late afternoon had turned overcast, the light a smoky purple. There’d be rain later, turning the sidewalks to mud, leaving the city misty and cool.

Kaliti housed criminals for sure, murderers, psychopaths, petty pilferers. But it served also as a political waste disposal, into which the ruling party dropped opposition leaders, judges, journalists, activists, trade unionists and persons of unreliable ethnicity should they prove troublesome.

He’d been waiting two hours. Hallelujah had gone in clutching some clothes and bundles of food, some money to smooth the way. It was delicate. He was to interview an inmate. The inmate was a sallow forty-year-old woman named Habiba Yusuf who had, she said,
been distributing alms to destitute Somali Muslims in the east when she was dragged from her car by men in plain clothes. She was in fact smuggling funds to extremist organizations, she learned, and was locked up in Kaliti under Ethiopia’s generous anti-terrorism laws. But her case had become something of an international cause célèbre, and the authorities were grudgingly allowing glimpses of her to demonstrate that she was, at least, alive. Mangan, the foreign correspondent, one of the handful based in Addis, hadn’t been allowed in, so Hallelujah was doing duty for both of them, would share his notes, and hopefully a photo, and Mangan would file for the paper. Habiba had a lump in her breast. The authorities weren’t allowing her to see a doctor.

Mangan checked his watch. What the hell was Hal doing? He stretched, breathed. The evening air smelled of ozone, kerosene, baking
injera
, some subtle sweetness beneath it all.

It was almost dark by the time Hallelujah emerged from the prison gate, shoulders hunched, eyes down. Mangan watched him pick his way along the muddy track in his trainers, his thin, dark frame, his air of anxiety. Hallelujah climbed into the car, put his head back and closed his eyes.

“What took so long?” said Mangan.

Hallelujah lit a cigarette, made a cursory attempt to exhale out of the window.

“I am stupid,” he said.

“Tell me.” Mangan started the car, pulled out onto the road.

“So they take me in. The guards sit there in the room with us. She’s terrible, Philip. Crying. So sick, she says. I ask the questions. She answers, but the guards keep interrupting, cutting her off. She keeps saying she needs a doctor, she has this lump. She’s terrified. I got a little bit about the conditions. But, really, it was a mess.”

“Any photo?”

“Yes, but… well, you’ll see it.”

“It doesn’t sound too bad.”

“It gets worse. After fifteen minutes they say, that’s it. Finish. And they take her from the room. They push me out, and as I’m walking back to the gate I snap some pictures of the prison. The courtyard is just… people everywhere. Filthy. No order. Well, the guards see me and get angry and they take me to the guardroom and yell at me for one hour.”

“Just yell?”

“Yes.” He shook his head, ruefully.

“And the pictures?”

“They took the camera.
Your
camera.”

Mangan swerved to the side of the road as a truck hurtled by, weaving, its horn blaring.

“I’m really sorry,” said Hallelujah.

Mangan sighed.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “But the picture of her? Is that gone, too?”

“No, I took that on my phone. We have that.”

“Well, that’s something.”

Hallelujah drew on his cigarette and shook his head again. Mangan pulled back onto the road. The traffic had slowed. They passed corrugated iron shanties lit by naked bulbs, alleyways an oblivion of shadow, women roasting corn over charcoal stoves by the side of the road. Rain spattered the windscreen.

They climbed to Mangan’s flat, dumped their things, then went downstairs again to the First Choice café. They ordered
tibs
—the spiced, sticky beef—with
injera
, French fries and cold St. George’s beer. Hallelujah was nervous and fidgety; he lit a cigarette.

“So will you file?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, maybe,” said Mangan, absently.

“Okay. Me too.” Hallelujah reported for an Addis weekly, but moonlighted for Mangan, translating, fixing. Mangan watched him, this lean, earnest boy, his dirty shirt, worry like a stain in his eyes.

“What’s eating you, Hal?”

“Oh, nothing. They won’t like it, that’s all.”

“Who won’t? The paper?”

“No, no. The paper will hold its breath and run it. The government, I mean. And NISS.”

“If they’re so worried about the coverage, why did they give us access to her?” Mangan said.

Hallelujah looked at him.

“How long have you been in Ethiopia now?”

“A year, a bit less,” said Mangan.

Hallelujah stubbed out his cigarette.

“So you know they like to play with us, lure us out. We interview dissidents, publish their views, write about their situations, we become vulnerable. They can use it against us whenever they choose. Shut us down.”

The
tibs
arrived, and the beer. Mangan took a long, cold pull on the bottle, and ate. The beef was sizzling, the
berbere
—chilli and spice—leaving his throat pulsing with aromatic heat.

“Do you ever see them? Talk to them? NISS?” he asked.

“No. They send messages. Through other people. You have to listen.”

Hallelujah tore the
injera,
moulded it in the stew with his fingers. “A businessman takes you for lunch. Or an old professor calls you up. Very interesting piece in the paper last week, they say.
Lots
of people talking about it. Have you thought about a vacation? Somewhere far away?”

Mangan smiled.

“Sounds like China,” he said.

“African problems, Philip,” said Hallelujah, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “African problems.”

Hallelujah took a taxi home. His nervousness and his talk of the National Intelligence and Security Service—Ethiopia’s tough, effective intelligence agency, with its vast web of informers modelled on the old East European practice—had put Mangan on edge. He
labored back up the sour concrete stairwell to his flat, four floors above Gotera, his buzzy neighborhood. He stepped onto his balcony, the night air cool. It was late, but the streets around his block were filled with cafés, tinny music, the smell of grilling meat, coffee. He watched the couples strolling along the weed-strewn pavement, the girls done up in tight jeans, heels, the glint of gold from their necks, their slender wrists.

He went back inside, poured himself a belt of vodka and lay on the sofa in the dark. He thought about Habiba, squatting in the corner of some prison shed, the noise and squalor of it, her fingers probing the lump in her breast hopelessly.

He thought about going home, and where that would be, and how. About how loneliness was not something he was given to—in his years as a foreign correspondent, he had been alone many times. About how when it did find him, it came on as a physical sensation, a flood in the veins. He sat up and put his head in his hands. Loneliness came, he knew, from silence, from the inability to speak of what had happened.

Secrecy breeds loneliness.

And after loneliness comes fear.

He thought, as he did every night, when the cafés closed and the darkness thickened and the streets went silent but for the gray dogs in their skittish patrols, that they hadn’t talked to him for months.

Surely they must check on me soon.

So when, the very next day, they did finally check on him, it felt like an anticlimax. It came in an email from the Second Secretary, Commercial, Embassy of the United Kingdom. A small dinner, two days hence, very casual, at the house in Jakros village. Do come by.

Mangan filled the time. He prized from Hallelujah the notes of the interview at Kaliti prison, forced himself to write them up and filed a story. “In Ethiopia, Islamic Charity Worker is Emblem of Anti-Extremist Crackdown.” It ran, cut down, deep in the international
section of the website, Habiba’s face peering from a tiny, bleary photo.

After some consideration, he roused himself, called the desk and half-heartedly pitched a story on unrest and uncertainty in Ethiopia’s south and east. Dogged insurgency in the Ogaden, spillover from the war in Somalia, the bitter traffic in
chat
, guns, humans, zealotry and war that pulsed along Africa’s sunbaked Indian Ocean coast. The foreign editor sounded preoccupied:
send me a summary, Philip
.

He bought a new shirt, took a jacket to the cleaners.

On the appointed night, he showered, his lanky body pinkening in the steam, ran a comb through his red hair, dressed and took a taxi to Jakros—the gated community that catered to diplomats, the aid industry and, at the higher end, Ethiopia’s wealthy runners. An Olympic gold medalist resided in one of its larger mansions, Mangan knew.

The car pulled up outside the Second Secretary’s house, a modest place of brick and concrete walls, creeping plants with orange flowers spilling over them, and an iron gate. Mangan got out of the taxi. The streets were quiet here. No music, no food stalls, no men slumped barefoot on the asphalt, their eyes glassy from
chat.
Expatriate life the world over, he thought. Lived at a hygienic remove.

Hoddinott was the man’s name, a pale thirty-something, prematurely bald, a doughy frame in a Marks and Spencer suit. He and his wife, Joanna, were keen to appear stoic and cheerful in their hardship posting.

“We love Addis,” said Joanna. “We absolutely love it here. How do you find it, Philip?”

She told a long story of squatter families on the edge of the city, kicked out of their shanty and forced from the land by developers, the women gathering up children, plastic buckets, a coffee pot, a blanket, walking away through the muddied building sites.

“Well, we did what we could. I took them clothes and some formula for the babies,” Joanna said. “But, honestly.”

As it dawned on Mangan that he was the only guest, Joanna stood and announced brightly that she’d better make the salad. Hoddinott gestured that he and Mangan should go out into the garden, where a grill was lit and smoking.

Hoddinott carried a bottle of chilled white wine and two glasses. He set them down on a garden table. Mangan eyed them while Hoddinott put on an apron, opened the top of the grill, peered in through a billow of smoke, then closed it again, sat and rubbed his hands together.

“Right then,” he said. He poured the wine. Mangan watched the glass mist.

“So how are you, Philip?” he said. “Are you settled? Are you well?”

They are checking, thought Mangan.

“I’m fine, I think,” he replied. “Who’s asking?”

Hoddinott looked concerned.

“Well, I am, for starters,” he said. “But you’re right. Others are interested, of course. They want to know you’re in fine fettle, sound of wind and limb, that sort of thing.”

“I’m fine.”

“Getting out much?”

“No. Not really.”

“Got a girl?”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“Sorry, sorry, don’t mean to pry.”

Hoddinott’s expression was very level.

“Heard anything from China?” he said.

“Who would I hear from?”

“Old friends. Associates. Anything?”

“Sometimes.”

“How do they contact you?”

“Email. Social media.”

“What do they say?”

“Normal stuff, they… you know.”

“Philip, don’t be coy, now. What do they say?”

Mangan sighed.

“For a while they asked me what had happened, why I left Beijing so abruptly, where I’d gone. I gave the right answers, what was agreed. That happens less these days. They ask how I am, what I’m up to. They see stuff I’ve written, they comment on it.”

“No one being more persistent? Asking about the girl? What was her name, Ting?”

“One or two. But I asked them to stop.”

“I’ll need names.”

Mangan said nothing. Hoddinott sat, arms folded, and spoke very quietly.

“Does anybody, in your view, harbor any suspicion of your involvement in the operation?”

Mangan shook his head.

“You are sure, now?”

“As sure as I can be. If any of the crowd in Beijing had caught a whiff of it they wouldn’t have let go. They’re serious journalists.”

“Would you say you’re still friendly with any of them?”

“Not really. Many of the old crowd resent me. They blame me for Ting’s arrest.”

“I don’t have to tell you to keep your distance, I know that,” said Hoddinott. “And have you had any contact at all from the Chinese state?”

“Nothing,” said Mangan.

“Really? No visits? Messages? Chaps on a street corner watching you go by? You’re sure.”

“Nothing I’ve seen.”

Hoddinott paused as if considering.

“What?” said Mangan.

“Nothing. That’s good news, of course. And I know you’ve been told before, but I will tell you again. There is a great deal of respect and gratitude for what you did. A great deal.”

“Even though it ended the way it did,” said Mangan.

“Even though.”

Mangan drained his wine, slid the glass across the table for more. Hoddinott refilled it, the wine gold in the twilight, its murmur in the glass.

“And financially, Philip? Not bankrupt? Not about to sell your story to the Sundays out of desperation?”

“Not quite that bad.”

“Paper paying the bills?”

“Just.”

“Well, all right then.”

And at that awkward moment, Joanna skipped from the kitchen. She carried a bowl of clever-looking salad.

“Now that’s enough shop, you two. Let’s eat,” she chirped.

She knows.

“Anything out of the ordinary, Philip,” said Hoddinott. “Anything at all. You let me know, yes?”