Spy Games (6 page)

Dire Dawa, Ethiopia

Mangan stood in a graveyard of trains. Rolling stock as far as he could see, weeds sprouting through the bogies, track sinking beneath sandy soil. Here a wagon-lit with crusted windows, there an old Fiat engine that had pulled Italian infantry up and down the line in the 1930s, rusted out now, but the driver’s seat still there, reddish and flaking. In the long afternoon shadows, it was cool, chilly even, at this elevation. He walked along the track toward the disused station platform, the elderly guide gesturing and muttering in French.

Le Chemin de Fer Djibouto-Ethiopien had run for a century, then coughed and expired. It had been four years since its last scheduled service and since then the station and marshaling yards had simply been left, a few remaining staff pottering about, goats tethered in the sidings. Mangan had a vague plan to use the scene as color in a piece about Ethiopia’s economic turnaround.

“Why do the trains not run any more?” he said, in strained French.

The elderly guide looked grave.

“
C’est un problème d’argent, monsieur
,” he said. A problem of money. He walked stiffly toward a pullman, the brown paintwork of
which was peeling, and indicated that Mangan should climb aboard. Inside were compartments with leather banquettes, resplendent with leaf residue, dust and bird droppings.

“
Entrez dans le premier classe
,” said the guide with a flourish. The banquettes in first class pulled out into beds, the smell of rubber and decay rising off them.

They walked up to the disused station. Along the platform the signage was all still displayed in a beautiful deco font,
Bagages. Facteur-Chef Renseignements.
And above, the Amharic script, its letters unanchored, dancing.

“And now,” said the guide, “the Chinese are to build a new railway, all the way to Djibouti and the sea.”

“I have heard that,” said Mangan. “Will you go to work on the new railway?”

“No,
monsieur
. I will remain here,” said the old man.

From inside the station building, Mangan was sure he heard the hiss of static. He walked, footsteps echoing, into an ancient, decrepit office of yellowing walls and fluttering birds. The static came from an old radio receiver jury-rigged with antenna and rusting microphone, a frequency dial glowing. It sat atop a wooden table, a power cable winding off into the gloom.

“In case we are needed,” said the guide.

History is not curated here, thought Mangan. It is strewn about, waiting for you to happen across it.

At the hotel that night, Mangan ate alone. He ordered steak and St. George’s and read a book, a blood-soaked memoir of life under Ethiopia’s military dictatorship, the Dergue. In the lobby, two Ethiopian men sat quiet and unmoving, their backs to a corner, facing the door. Mangan watched them from the corner of his eye.

After seven or eight minutes, they stirred. Three perspiring Americans had entered the lobby pulling their luggage. The Ethiopians greeted them solemnly, stood by them as they checked in, and escorted them into the lift.

Later, the American men came down to the restaurant and walked past Mangan’s table. They smelled of shower gel, toothpaste. Two of them were young, in polo shirts and jeans. An older, ruddy-faced man wore tan cargo pants and a shirt with a corporate logo stitched on the left breast. They sat and ordered Cokes. Mangan listened to their murmured conversation. They talked about software. Just as they were about to order food, a fourth man wearing sunglasses and a gold chain joined them. There were introductions, first names only, Mangan noticed. The new arrival said he was “in from Bagram.” The older man asked what he’d been up to there.

“Oh, I process stuff,” the man said, smiling.

“Right,” said the older man, “we fix stuff.” And they all laughed quietly.

What is this? wondered Mangan. Americans, “contractor” written all over them, flitting in from Afghanistan? Hard-eyed Ethiopian minders? This smelled of something military, or clandestine. A drone base? Some tiny outpost sucking up signals intelligence from Somalia? Or perhaps a link in the vast surveillance net the Americans had cast across the Sahara, the covert flights out of Djibouti, twin-engined Bombardiers crammed with listening equipment tracking chatter and movement from Sudan to Mali. The men were leaning into each other across the table, talking in low voices. Mangan watched them and experienced a sudden, gnawing sense of loss, of a life closed to him.
Old, blown agent sits in far-flung backwater, enjoys pathetic sense of yearning.

He turned, looking for the waitress, and realized that the two Ethiopian men were now sitting not far behind him, watching him. He paid his bill quickly and left.

Early the following morning, in darkness, Mangan left the hotel in a hired Land Cruiser with a sullen local driver. They drove east out of Dire Dawa into the Somali regions, Mangan hoping for a glimpse of the insurgency, of the military’s vicious response. If nothing else, some descriptive color, some photos. They drove into flat, rocky terrain studded with acacia trees, baboons staring from the outcrops in
the dawn. By ten it was hot, the light flat and hard. They passed Jijiga, turned south. On the plain, Mangan started to see the encampments of Somali nomads, the rounded tents like turtle shells scattered amid the scrub, young blank-eyed boys standing with AKs slung over their shoulders. They drove on. In the early afternoon, on the outskirts of a small town, Mangan told the driver to pull over. He sat watching the compound’s metal front gate, some comings and goings, a guard with an AK squatting, waving away flies.

He got out of the car, walked purposefully to the compound and waved cheerily at the guard.

“I am here to see Miss Maja,” he said.

The guard frowned.

“Maja. Danish lady. A nurse.”

The guard got slowly to his feet, gestured for Mangan to stay. He disappeared into the compound. Mangan waited, watched the goats nuzzling the dust, the barefoot boys loping, twirling sticks. The guard waved him in.

Maja stood in a bloodstained smock, arms wide in ironic welcome.

“Philip. Welcome. You just missed the excitement.”

A breech birth, apparently, an extraction. Maja was energized, her eyes bright. She took off the smock and surgical gloves, washed. They went and sat in the courtyard and a young man brought coffee. Maja closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun, basked for a moment. Her hair was travel blonde, lay untidily on the shoulder. She was tanned, broad-boned and strong-shouldered.

“So don’t imagine you’re going to get much farther,” she said, her English lilting.

He’d lit a cigarette, exhaled.

“How bad is it?”

“Pretty bad. Checkpoints about fifteen kilometers from here. They won’t let you through.”

“And on the other side?”

“We hear a little from the women. Sweeps, arrests. Some beatings, some shootings.”

“Do you know where?”

She gave him a wry look.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

She sighed.

“That is not why I am here, Philip. I am a midwife, not an informant.”

He smiled.

“I know. Sorry.”

“They watch everything we do. Everyone we see, they know.”

“I won’t stay long.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“You never do,” she said. She reached for Mangan’s cigarettes, took one. “I’m getting a break for a few days, though. I’ll come up to Addis for a while.”

“I’ll buy you dinner.”

She nodded.

“Then we can talk a bit more, maybe,” she said.

They stood and she walked him to the gate, touched him on the arm, left her hand there.

“See you soon, okay?”

“Sure.”

They drove a few more miles south, the driver nervous. They passed military transports, old Russian four-ton trucks next to battered American Humvees.

Then, a checkpoint.

The driver wanted to turn around but Mangan made him continue, slowly, both hands on top of the wheel. Mangan laid his hands on the dashboard. Soldiers were beckoning at them, pointing at a place on the road. The driver made a hissing sound through his teeth, slowed and stopped, wound the window down. The soldiers looked in, demanded papers. They were lean, dark men, moved like professionals, quietly, economically, their battledress faded, weapons clean
and oiled, Mangan noted. One of them saw him, murmured to the others, walked around the car, tapped on the window.

“ID,” he said, in English.

Mangan slowly reached into his breast pocket, took out his accreditation, passed it to the soldier.

“What you do here?”

“I am a journalist.”

“No, no. You go back.”

“Can I get out of the car?” He gestured. The soldier stood back a foot or so, and Mangan opened the door, gingerly, got out.

“Cigarette?” he said. He offered the pack. The soldier did not respond.

“I want to go a little farther down this road. Can I do that?”

“No, no. You go back.” The soldier gestured down the road the way he had come.

Mangan smiled, nodded.

“What are you guys here for? Is it dangerous down the road?”

“No, no. Not dangerous. No problem. But not permitted. You go back.”

“I just…” But the soldier was losing patience, stepped toward him, shoved him back toward the car, then leaned down and shouted at the driver in Amharic. The driver, very frightened now, nodded frantically.

Mangan sighed, got back in the car. The driver, without waiting for instructions, turned it around and started heading back up the road, muttering to himself.

Mangan lit a cigarette. Another pointless day, he thought. Another stretching of my reason for being here.
Hardened correspondent Philip Mangan makes insipid attempt to get story, fails.

He looked out over a plain speckled with thorn bushes, the light lowering, turning to gold.

Feels persistent regret at loss of other, less respectable, line of work.

They headed back to Dire Dawa, Mangan stopping the car only
once, in the evening, when he caught sight of a vast construction project, Chinese engineers with theodolites, high-visibility vests and helmets, the yellow dust billowing skyward. The new railway, China inscribing itself into the very ground of Africa.

That night, in the dim hotel bar, he made up his mind to take a run at the Americans. Just to see. They were sitting in a corner, the four of them. One had a laptop open. They seemed to be watching a football game. Mangan walked to the bar and ordered a beer, waited for a moment, then strode over to their table.

“Hi, guys,” he said.

They looked up at him blankly.

“Sorry for interrupting. Just wondered what the game was.”

There was a pause. Then the older man spoke.

“It’s recorded. Nothing recent.”

“Oh. Okay,” said Mangan, standing his ground. “Are you with the embassy?”

The man with the gold chain had taken off his sunglasses and was looking at him hard. He had sun-darkened skin, sunken cheeks, Mangan saw.

“Yes. We’re embassy. And you are?” he said.

“I’m a journalist. British. Just wondered what brought you all to town.”

“A little bit of official business,” said the older man, in a tone that said this conversation is ending. The two younger men had looked back down at the laptop and were murmuring to each other, pointing at the screen.

“Only, I’d heard the US military had something going on at the old air base outside town, and I wondered if you were part of it. All off the record and everything.”

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” said the man with the gold chain.

“Mangan. Philip Mangan.”

“Well, Philip, I’m sorry to say we have to draw our brief
acquaintance to a close. We don’t mean to be rude, but we’re just not in a position to have that conversation right now. So, ah, goodnight to you.” He smiled and turned away.

Mangan raised his hands in an I’m-just-trying-to-be-friendly gesture, then walked back to the bar, sat on a stool, pulled on his beer, tamped down his annoyance.

“Interesting, aren’t they?”

The voice came from Mangan’s right, quiet, accented.

He turned. A man of Chinese appearance was sitting three stools away from him, holding a glass of whisky, looking straight ahead.

“You see,” the man went on, “they come to Africa, and they bring drones and bombs and monitoring bases. But China comes to Africa and brings railways, phones and hospitals. Don’t you find that interesting?”

“Have we met?” said Mangan.

The man turned to face him, put his drink down, the
clop
of his glass on the bar. He wore a white shirt and gray slacks. His hair was to the collar. His face had a strange cast to it, wide, high cheekbones, eyes with no whites to them, immobile, lacking affect. A broad, supple mouth. A startling face, shocking almost. Mangan thought of a marionette, of a clown.

“No, we have not met,” said the man. Then he stood and leaned towards Mangan, a fulsome smile, the eyes like coal.

“But perhaps we will,” he said. He walked from the bar. Mangan watched him cross the lobby and leave the hotel.

What was that? he thought.

Though somewhere in an earlier self—a clandestine self—he knew.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Fan Kaikai stumbled through the graveyard, as bidden. When he reached the requisite headstone, one which marked the plot of an obscure statistician, he stopped, and as club rules demanded, raised the silver cup to his lips. The concoction it held was of sickly liqueur topped with champagne to form a vile, frothing swill. In a circle around him stood a group of undergraduates, all male, shouting, jeering in the darkness. Some of them wore masks and tailcoats. He could hear the traffic going past on the street. Why am I here? he thought. What am I to them?

He drank, letting some of the liquid run down his chin and spill down his front. His stomach lurched. The club’s other members, all well lubricated themselves, yelled encouragement. Kai dropped the silver cup to the ground and walked away, bent over and heaved up a warm, foul gush.

He felt hands on his elbows amid inchoate laughter. They all spilled from the cemetery onto the street, reeled back to college in the darkness.

As they approached the gate, Kai saw her. She was standing under a street lamp in a long silver-blue gown, closing a purse. Waiting for someone? She saw him at the same time, regarded him from across the street.

He stopped and looked back at her. She turned away. He walked through the college gate, and then they were up in someone’s rooms, and there was more champagne and a lot of noise, shouting. And he looked up and there she was again in that incongruous gown that showed pale, slender shoulders. He considered for a moment, then went over to her, leaned into her, spoke in Mandarin, but felt the words thick and slurring.

“I’m Fan Kaikai,” he said.

“I know who you are,” she responded.

“And you are Madeline Chen. We should be friends,” he said.

She leaned away from him, as if from a bad smell, her eyes flickering down to his damp gown.

“We could,” he said. “We could, you know, get past all this stupid stuff.”

“What stupid stuff?” she said.

He gestured in a way that felt slightly wild. Someone had put music on, complicated, sinister-sounding, with a bass like an industrial roar. Kai tried to focus.

“All the… history. All the family history, the anger. It’s their fight. Not ours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He blinked.

“What? Of course you know. We should talk about it. Couldn’t we do that?”

She was looking around herself, as if searching someone out. Who? he thought. A friend? A minder?

“Why would I want to talk to you about my family?” she said.

“I didn’t mean… I just…”

He stopped, took a breath.

“I’m sorry. We’re supposed to avoid each other, I know. We are
supposed to mistrust each other. I just thought I would like to make my own decision, that we could make our own decisions.”

She was still leaning away from him, lips pursed, eyebrows arched. The music was a distended roar, a thumping in his chest.

He shrugged.

“Sorry,” he said, and made to walk away. She spoke to his back.

“Are you always this earnest?”

He turned back, struggled to find something to say. She was looking at him as if he had just vomited a magnum of champagne. Which, come to think of it, he had.

“Only when I’m drunk,” he said. “I’m a sober sceptic.”

“Earnest drunks are the worst. What is this ridiculous drinking club you’re a member of?”

“It’s called ‘The Amnesiacs.’ I don’t know what it is, really. They just asked me to join. We have to wear these clothes.”

“And drink a lot.”

“And drink a lot.”

“They don’t want
you
in the club. They want your money,” she said. He felt as if she were testing him.

“I think you may be right.”

She was still looking at him askance. Neither of them said anything. Kai pondered the notion that she had creamy skin and elegant, wide eyes, and spoke a soft, educated Mandarin, like an actress. She was slight, elfin almost—not the harridan he had been warned about. She was rather beautiful, close up. Now she was speaking quickly.

“If they see me talking to you I’m in the shit.”

“What? Who? If who…”

“Do you have any idea
why
we are ordered not to talk to each other? Do you?”

“I know some of it. I think.”

She sighed, shook her head and, with a brief, disbelieving glance at him, was gone.

Kai returned unsteadily to his rooms, thinking about her, her self-possession. He walked up the darkened staircase. The door to his rooms was ajar.

He stood on the step, wondering. He pushed the door open. The room was dark.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“
You ren ma?
” Is anybody there?

Nothing, just the creaking of the wooden boards beneath his feet, a burst of drunken chatter from the quadrangle below.

He felt for the light switch, his hand fluttering against the wall.

The room was still. He walked to his desk. His laptop was gone, but they had left the power cord, for some reason. He felt sick, shaky. He looked quickly in the bedroom, which seemed untouched. But on the sink in the corner, his flannel was draped over a tap and his toothpaste tube was empty. He looked more closely, not trusting his senses. His shoes were jumbled up. And a textbook,
Photonics: Principles and Practices
, was closed, when he knew he had left it open at the section on Fresnel equations.

He went back down the staircase and crossed the quad to the porter’s lodge.

The police arrived in the form of two uniformed constables and a young, stocky detective constable in jeans and a sports jacket who chewed a piece of gum and looked at him quizzically. He introduced himself as DC Busby. Kai showed him where the laptop had been.

“Anything else missing?” said Busby, walking slowly around the room.

“No. No, but…”

The detective turned and looked at him.

“No but what?”

Kai found his English drying up, as it often did when he needed it most.

“I think, maybe, somebody search. Something.”

“Somebody searched the room?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Just, things maybe have been moved.”

“Hm,” said Busby. “And why might they do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because, you see, in your room search usually, the thief, he’ll turn the room upside down. Pull out your drawers, turn your mattress over, that sort of thing.” The detective smiled, spoke deliberately. “He doesn’t tidy up.”

Kai nodded, and then one of the uniformed officers was standing in the bedroom doorway and dangling from his hand was a single latex glove.

And when DC Busby, a conscientious man who viewed the travails of drunken students as every bit as worthy of his attention as any other, returned to the station and entered the details of the case—burglary, accompanied by a search conducted to an almost professional standard, as evidenced by the presence of a discarded latex glove—on the Police National Computer, he was intrigued to see Fan Kaikai’s name return a ping. He leaned into the screen. The ping came from the intelligence services, who, it seemed, were possessed of an interest in Mr. Fan Kaikai, as they required immediate notification should he be in contact with the police.

Intrigued, the detective filled out the brief explainer form and hit Send. He wondered where the message would go, to whom, what strange unseen mechanism he was setting in motion.