by Adam Brookes
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Adam Brookes
Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio
Cover art by Arcangel Images, Terry Aigner/ImageBrief
Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Redhook Books/Orbit
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Originally published in Great Britain by Sphere in 2017
First U.S. Mass Market Edition: October 2017
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ISBNs: 978-0-316-50349-5 (mass market), 978-0-316-50350-1 (ebook)
E3-20170802-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
PART ONE: The Possible Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
PART TWO: The Approach Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
PART THREE: The Tell Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
PART FOUR: The Break Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Acknowledgments
Meet the Author
By Adam Brookes
Praise for Adam Brookes
Newsletters
For Susie, Anna and Ned
In the past, espionage activity was typically directed towards obtaining political and military intelligence. These targets remain of critical importance but in today’s technology-driven world, the intelligence requirements of a number of countries are wider than before. They now include communications technologies, IT, energy, scientific research, defence, aviation, electronics and many other fields. Intelligence services, therefore, are targeting commercial as well as government-related organisations. They sometimes do this on behalf of state-owned or sponsored companies in their own countries.
MI5.org.uk
We are talking here of an elaborate, comprehensive system for spotting foreign technologies, acquiring them by every means imaginable and converting them into weapons and competitive goods. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. The system is enormous, befitting a nation of one point three billion, and operates on a scale that dwarfs China’s own legitimate S&T enterprise.
Chinese Industrial Espionage, William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon and Anna B. Puglisi
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Philip Larkin
PROLOGUE
Great Falls, Maryland
The recent past
The sound of the shot made the outdoor diners at a nearby restaurant lift their eyes and turn, wondering, from their conversations. They looked across the parking lot, towards the trees. There, partly hidden by azalea bushes and undergrowth, a car rocked momentarily on its suspension. Startled birds rose in the warm air.
The first intrepid soul to leave his table and approach the vehicle was a former Marine of broad back and strong stomach. He picked his way past the vegetation and peered through the windscreen, then backed away shaking his head—whether in sorrow or disgust it was hard to say. A single body, he reported, male, in the driver’s seat, the back of the head shot away, suggesting a self-inflicted wound. Blood all over the place. The hand holding the weapon was limp and curiously positioned, turned back on itself in the well between the seats.
The diners called their children to them. Some paid their bills and left hurriedly. The police and paramedics arrived, then a detective, then a forensic investigator from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The male in the driver’s seat was declared dead. The investigator picked his way around the car, leaned into it, made copious notes. Photographs were taken, and evidence bagged and tagged. Finally, the body was manoeuvred from the car and laid upon a gurney.
The dead man was of sixty-some years. He wore a well-cut suit and a silk tie for the day of his death. He appeared prosperous, trim, fit, lightly tanned. He wore a silver beard, trimmed close to the jaw. On his right wrist was an extremely expensive watch, a Breguet. This was odd, thought the forensic examiner, since it would suggest left-handedness, yet the weapon, a Sig .357, was in the right.
The forensic examiner pondered the strangeness of it all—out here on the edge of the city, in the trees, near a popular restaurant and a pretty canal, a place for day trips, for hikes; the suit and tie, the sense of orderliness and authority they hinted at. And as he did so, the FBI arrived, as he knew they would. For the man’s identity—quickly established from his wallet and the federal government identification tag in his inside pocket—was already sending tremors through Washington, DC. He was, apparently, a senior official of the State Department—not a diplomat, but an intelligence analyst by the name of Jonathan Monroe. And when such people—the holders of security clearances that allowed them into the most secret compartments of this most secretive of cities—took their own lives, all the worst assumptions frothed and bubbled around their cadavers. Was it corruption? Sex? Was he coerced, compromised, cuckolded? Was he, God help us all, a spy?
Two FBI special agents waited politely to talk to him, and for a moment the examiner looked skyward at the circling birds, felt the sun on his face. Such a death was not uncommon in Washington: the pressure, the secrecy, the sheer viciousness of the place ate away at people.
But
such a death was rarely uncomplicated.
PART ONE
The Possible
1
Beijing, China
The recent past
Granny Poon came in dry as a bone, this time.
She carried no handheld, no tracker. Nothing to leak a signal, however faint. She would leave no signature, no spoor. She would float through the digital medium like a dust mote in dark, quiet air.
She took a bus from the airport. She paid in cash and turned her face from the cameras that monitored her boarding. The bus crawled into the city and she watched the tower blocks creep past, the concrete rendered gold in the late summer sunlight.
Bone dry. Alone.
That was the way of it, she thought. She looked down at her hands, their liver spots, veins rising from the dry, papery skin. She wondered if this might, perhaps, be the last time.
Let’s see what this stupid old woman can do.
The restaurant was packed with market traders and migrant workers, the air clattering and heavy with grease, the reek of sorghum spirit. They came here for the Shanxi food, the bowls of fatty lamb and shaved noodles. She had come in good time to watch from the scrubby park across the street, sitting still in the warm twilight, clutching a walking stick and her purse. She had made two passes before entering, tottering along the sidewalk in dark glasses, wheezing. Now she occupied a corner table. The waitress smiled at her, called her ayi, auntie, a sweet girl. She ordered Cat’s Ear Noodles heaped with garlic bolts and tomatoes, the broth thick with cumin, laced with black vinegar. The girl caught her accent, the sibilant sing-song of the south, and smiled, tilting her head questioningly. Eileen Poon just nodded.
And now Eileen waited, and watched. She waited for a particular moment, one rapidly approaching, whose exact location in time had been determined months previously, perhaps years. She watched for the anomaly, the ripple on the surface of the crowd.
Not long now.
The girl came and placed before her a steaming bowl, plastic chopsticks wrapped in a napkin. A glass of tea. She picked at the noodles, letting the seconds tick down. She allowed her gaze to float and settle, float and settle.
Nothing.
Nothing but the bark and clatter of the restaurant, steam rising from the bowls and curling in the afternoon light, the ruddy-faced men leaning into their food, pouring the sorghum spirit from the little green bottles, tossing it back.
Time, now.
She laid her chopsticks down, got shakily to her feet, one hand leaning on the table, the other clutching her purse. The sweet waitress was there, asking if she needed anything.
“Cesuo,”she said. Toilet.
The girl gestured to the back of the restaurant, a corridor. Eileen Poon tottered past the busy tables, down the corridor, past stacks of greasy chairs, an empty fish tank. The noise receded.
The door to the toilet was of plywood and stood half open. She went in, felt for a light switch, locked the door behind her and stifled her breathing against the ammonia stench. From a squat toilet a pipe snaked up the wall to the cistern. She took a pair of latex gloves from her purse and put them on. She ran her hand up and down the pipe, feeling behind it. Nothing there. She opened the toilet paper dispenser. Nothing. Beneath the hand washbasin, she found a cupboard. She opened it and ran her hands around the inside.
And just there, deep in the cupboard’s filthy recesses, taped to the underside of the basin, a packet of White Rabbit milk candy.
Eileen worked the packet free, peeled the tape from it, and put it in a plastic bag. She threw the tape and the latex gloves into the toilet and put the plastic bag containing the candy in her purse.
She waited for a moment, steadied herself. She flushed the toilet and washed her hands, unlocked the door and made her way back down the corridor.
A little flutter of relief. Well, that’s that part done, she thought.
Now the difficult part.
She emerged into the restaurant and stopped. The roar of talk and laughter and the rattle of crockery broke over her. She reached beyond the sound and the visual clutter. Was he here, the bringer of White Rabbit candy? Was he watching? Or she? She felt around the room for a gaze, for a look a little too laden with meaning, for the tilt down of the head, the turn away.
Nothing.
She walked slowly back to her table, sat, drank her tea.
The sweet girl brought her bill.
“You didn’t like the noodles?” she said.
“Too much,” said Eileen.
“I’m sorry,” said the girl.
“Mei shi.” No matter. She raised her frail old hand, waved away the girl’s concern. She peered at the bill and counted out yuan notes from her purse, her frugality on show. The girl smiled, waited patiently. Eileen put on her dark glasses and stood to leave—the egress protocol was complicated, calling for some quick street work and a weave through the subway system, alone. She took her stick and walked to the front door. The waitress was there, holding the door, lovely girl, saying, “Manman zou.” Go carefully.
Eileen stepped out of the restaurant into the warm evening. She stood on the sidewalk, fussing with her purse, her stick, scanning the street, the pavement, counting, watching: a boy in a Chicago Bulls cap, staring at his phone, moving slowly west; a silver SUV, and behind it a Yamaha motorbike, yellow, the boy riding it in a white T-shirt, moving quickly; a couple, deep in conversation, with shopping bags and a purple backpack.
And a man on a bench.
The very same bench, the one that afforded a clear view of the restaurant, that Eileen Poon had taken advantage of earlier in the day.
The man wore a cream, short-sleeved shirt and grey cotton slacks. He sat with his knees together. He held a folded newspaper in his lap, but looked straight ahead. His hair was grey and thinning and combed back from the forehead. Some oil or pomade may have been used.
Eileen Poon absorbed these details in an instant, fixed them in her mind.
And who are you?
She surveyed him from behind her dark glasses. Even at this distance she saw that the hands that lay in his lap were small and smooth. His cheeks and chin were smooth, too, as if scrubbed with pumice. He evinced cleanliness. A fastidious man, this. One with well-kept nails, shiny shoes. He sat very still. And it was his stillness, she realised, that had drawn her eye to him. He sat as if in prayer, and his eyes were small, dark stones.
She looked both ways, made to cross the street. A bus drew up, obscuring her view of the park, the bench, the man. When it pulled out and away again, he was gone.
In her hotel room, later, after the streets and the subway and the sidewalks, Eileen Poon sat on the edge of the bed in darkness and removed her shoes, massaged her aching feet for a moment. The visage of the smooth-cheeked man lay fixed just behind her retina, and now she worked it deep into her memory.
During half a lifetime of secret work on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, Eileen had built within herself a vast mental vault peopled with places, faces, postures, gaits, voices, accents, atmospheres and encounters, every one of them specific and immediate to her, every one available for instant recall. For, when it came down to it, the practitioners of secret intelligence working along Asia’s Pacific Rim were relatively few in number. Oh, the listeners and cyber sleuths and local security thugs numbered in the millions. But the professionals—the agent runners, the handlers, the watchers and the street artists—not so many. And Eileen, of anyone, could spot them. To Granny Poon the street artist—the finest in Asia, Hopko said—the skills of recall and connection were central to intelligence work, and her astounding capacity for both was the reason that the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service had kept faith with the Poon family for forty years. Hopko valued Granny Poon’s gifts. You’re my eyes, Eileen, she had once said. You’re my memory.
But of Fastidious Man, Eileen found nothing.
She held the image of him in her mind, allowed it to drift and move. She made demands of it. Tell me why you
sat on the bench, at that time, in that way. Tell me what it was in your look that hinted at awareness, of resources available to you. Tell me about intention, how it manifests in a person. Tell me why I know you, even though I don’t. Tell me about White Rabbit milk candy.
She stood, walked to the desk, turned on the lamp and pulled the curtains closed. She went to her suitcase and took from it a second pair of latex gloves and a face mask, and put them on. She took also a rubber mat wrapped in cellophane. She unwrapped the mat and laid it on the desk. She walked to the bathroom, and took from her sponge bag a box containing a pair of nail scissors and a pair of tweezers, both in sterile wrap.
She sat at the desk, her purse before her.
Using the tweezers, she removed the bag containing the White Rabbit candy from the purse, then used the nail scissors to cut it open. With the tweezers, she took twelve pieces of candy from the packet, each individually wrapped in waxy red and blue paper, with twists at each end. She laid them out side by side on the mat. Carefully, she began to unwrap each one, delicately working the gobbets of chewy white candy from the paper.
When she reached the seventh, she knew she had found it. She felt its different density, the uniformity of its shape. She unwrapped the waxy paper. Inside, no milk candy, but a white plastic capsule, hard and smooth. Upon closer examination, the capsule revealed a join at its middle, as if it were in two parts. Eileen pulled gently and with a snick the two halves came away to reveal a foam centre, and encased in the foam was a tiny drive, no bigger than a finger nail. She held the drive in the tweezers for a moment, wondering.
Movement in the corridor.
Eileen looked around, towards the door, sitting very still. A burst of laughter, then nothing.
She listened. More movement, in a room down the corridor, perhaps.
Nothing there, she thought. Why so jumpy? Stupid old woman.
She pushed the drive back into its foam recess, clicked the two sides of the capsule together. She rewrapped the capsule in its candy wrapper, replaced it in the packet with the others, put the candy back in the bag, the bag back in the purse.