by Adam Brookes
Mangan said nothing.
“Well, what we think is: it may be you. You. Maybe he told you something, and you are planning to use this one little thing to do the fucking. Some little thing. Maybe you don’t even know what it was he told you. I mean, that’s possible, right? He tells you something and you don’t even know its significance. Sure, that’s possible.”
The ember arcing in the darkness, its pulse and hiss.
“But then … then we see you take off. Whoosh. You’re gone. We see you, like, running all over the place, getting as lost as you can, all through Indonesia. Ending up in this shit hole. You’re watching your back. You’re buying burners. You’re using all this encryption. And we think, Well, this guy is not moving like a journalist. This guy is moving like a spy.”
Silence for a moment. Mangan was aware of the chee-chat of a gecko somewhere up in the rafters.
“So that’s what we think. We think, Holy crap, Philip Mangan is pretending to be a journalist, as usual, but actually he still thinks he’s a spy.”
Mangan sensed that the person to his right—was it a man?—had come closer to the bed, was standing right next to the mosquito net. The voice was still talking.
“Which means that Philip Mangan has some reason to think he’s a spy. Maybe he’s got some reason to be all operational, some reason for all this—what do you call it?—skulking.” An exhale. “So that’s why we’re here, Mr. Mangan. We would like to know what got said.”
In Mangan’s chest, corrosive fear. But in his mind, a signal.
The questions are wrong, he thought. They’re not directed. They’re reaching, but they don’t know what for. They don’t know what I know, or if I know anything. So they mean to intimidate.
So be intimidated.
“Look, I really, really don’t know what you’re talking about. I just … I just … whatever, okay? I’m sitting here with no clothes on and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and just, please, leave me alone. Okay?”
The mosquito net to his right was pulled up roughly. He saw a pair of jeans, a black T-shirt on a muscled torso. And then a shower of white specks exploding in his eyes, and a concussive wave rolling through his face and head and he felt himself falling back, his head on the pillow, and blood in his mouth. The man had hit him, but how? With what? He raised his hands to his face and let out a sound he didn’t recognise.
The voice came faster now, excited, turned on.
“So, really, if anything got said, Mr. Mangan, that we don’t know about … I mean, you are not equipped for this, okay? You are not equipped for this. We are not here to hurt you, but you are doing this wrong. In way, way, way over your head. You should go away now. Go somewhere nice. Get a regular job. Get a girl. Get a dog.” The voice was rising in pitch, tripping over its words. “And stay away from all the sluts, and all the spooks, and the drives that you don’t know what they are or what’s on them, and stay the fuck away from China. Really. Just fucking do that.”
Mangan heard the sounds coming from his own mouth, a thick, nasal, moan. There was blood everywhere. He could feel it slippery and wet on his fingers. He could sense the second man looming over him. He stayed still.
One of them was speaking in Mandarin quietly, a little performance for Mangan’s benefit.
“Ta tingdong le ma?” Has he understood?
“Bu zhidao.” Don’t know.
“Wo zai gei ta jieshi yi xia.” I’ll explain it to him again. Mangan tensed.
The second blow was harder, delivered with something the man was holding, something short and black, falling across the bridge of the nose, and sending everything into darkness for a moment, but then he was back, and the two men were still standing there looking at him.
“Zhe yang ni jiu hui shale ta.” You’ll kill him like that.
The second man just sniffed and turned away. And they left.
6
Eileen Poon, carrying now, moved deftly across Beijing in a morning turned thick and grey. A taxi to Fangzhuang, a wander through a forest of high-rises, their tops lost in the haze, her carry-on bag rattling behind her. She walked past scrubby concrete parks, the old folk out stretching and chatting. Then the metro, so jammed with silent commuters she couldn’t see a thing. She jabbed and shoved her way through, ducking, tacking. At a mall, she sat in a coffee shop where she ordered a hot chocolate, caught her breath and watched, sensed the flow of the crowd.
Nothing. She was sure of it.
At the train station, they were checking IDs. Wujing paramilitary police, armed, a dog with them, circling and whining. They had extra cameras, mounted on wheeled platforms, the cables snaking away.
She looked down, walked doggedly ahead, pulling her carry-on. A hand in a black glove stopped her.
“Shenfenzheng.” Identity card.
“I’m from Hong Kong,” she said.
He said nothing, just held out his hand. He wore body armour, and had a stubby automatic weapon slung across his chest. She fussed in her purse, poking and riffling. He watched her. After an age, she pulled out her passport and the travel permit for China’s mainland. He took them, turned them over, frowned.
“Where are you going?”
“Oh, Tianjin. My brother’s niece is there and they’ve just had a baby, and it came three weeks early. Three weeks! And everything is chaotic. He was away at work—he fixes computers, he was in Anhui, I think. Anyway, he had to rush home and nothing is ready and it’s luanqibazao—chaos in eight directions. So I’m going to go and see them and help. If they’ll let me. Which they won’t. She’s got a face like a slapped arse, that woman. But you can’t blame the baby, so—”
“What were you doing here in Beijing?”
“Meetings. Meetings. I have a business. Well, it’s a family business.” She opened her purse again, her fingers probing the pockets. She produced a card, thrust it at him. He took it and she jabbed a finger at it.
“Yip Lo Exports. That’s us. We do plastic novelties. Party gifts, wristbands, hair notions, all sorts. Meetings with suppliers. We needed to talk about—” The policeman had looked away and was holding out her documents. She took them and put them deliberately back into her purse.
She stood there for a moment, fiddling with her bag, muttering, looking around as if trying to reorient herself, thinking of the cameras, the facial recognition software, the behaviour analysis. She pushed the thought of White Rabbit candy as far from her mind as she could, burying it deep beneath the contrivances of cover. She took hold of her carry-on, walked to the platform, and boarded.
The fastest train in the world to Tianjin—one last dog-leg—then a plane to Hong Kong. Easy now, she thought. I’m on my way, Val. Just for us.
TOP SECRET STRAP 2 BOTANY—UK EYES ONLY
ANNEXE B COPY 4/8
//REPORT
1/ (TS) Source FULCRUM addressed a letter to C/FE. It is printed below in full.
Beijing
To: Controller, Far East and Western Hemisphere,
United Kingdom Secret Intelligence Service,
Vauxhall Cross, London
Dear Friends,
I am in a very precarious situation, and I must explain some things to you.
Three times now I have provide most valuable items to your Service, which can allow great and powerful understanding of my country’s Deep State. Never forget this, my friends. I do not only give you information. I give you power. I give you some of my power.
I require that you are most careful with the materials provided to care of my safety. Distribution MUST be limited, number of people familiar with operation MUST be limited. I know you are most professional and you understand importance of this.
The items I choose to share with you are of utmost importance, and can show you that I am in very senior position, with great access to China’s intelligence secrets. You can see this.
My situation is precarious because of anti-corruption campaign. Many senior officers, even Central Committee cadres, are arr
ested. This is very serious. I have nothing to fear for corruption accusations. But the atmosphere is very suspicious, investigators are everywhere. They check my records, my bank account. Even my wife’s bank account is investigated! She is most upset and the life in my house is tense. My family are unable to understand the difficulty of my work, and are panic and flighty. I can make no mistakes now. We must be very careful in our contacts and I must rely to your professionalism.
This time, please find provided materials defining high-priority commercial targets in USA. As you know, tasking of my organs places emphasis on long-term growth and security of China’s economy. Intelligence requirements include agent/cyber penetration of companies with expertise in following fields:
• Defence technology. Avionics. Night vision. Rail gun. UAV. Plasma stealth.
• Nanotechnology. Nano-manipulation and positioning technology. Scanning probe microscope. Nanolithography system.
• Genetics. Genetically modified organisms. Especially rice, wheat. Rice research Institute at Stuttgart, Arkansas, is high priority target.
• Transport. High-speed rail. Hyperloop. Silent propulsion. Space launch systems.
• Artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms. Evolutionary computation. Swarm intelligence.
A complete list of target companies is on this drive. All materials I send you are marked JUEMI/TOP SECRET and are most valuable. I choose these materials as ones which will most strengthen your understanding while not pointing to me directly.
Now for your kind suggestions made in your last communication:
1/ There can be NO meeting outside country. It is inconvenient. Travel to another country bring many questions from family and friends and government. I must say also that I will NOT reveal my identity to you. It is not necessary and most threatens my security.
2/ There can be NO electronic communication channels. Computer security here is very weak, very dangerous. Everything I do online, someone can see it. Everything is monitored. Our communications will stay like this, based on courier. Congratulations on excellent work of courier, by the way.
3/ I know you do not really place payment in a foreign bank account, except for accounting purposes. We do same thing. Anyway, I will NOT defect to you, so how would I ever receive the money? It is impossible. I have considered, and suggest you can send diamonds to me. This could be most useful.
Finally, it is most important you understand what are my MOTIVES, and act accordingly. I find my organisation very corrupt and many senior officers are not competent or professional. All the time, significant plans are crushed, great ideas ignored. I am shocked at how poor and bad the work standard is. Only a few officers like me can manage affairs properly, and I require you to help me. Give me successes, and I can strengthen my position and rise to significant leadership position here. You must do this as part of our bargain, my friends. I know you can make strong, professional suggestions.
Next communication will be in eight/8 weeks exactly, according to COWBELL protocol. Please reply to my points, and my thanks and best wishes to you,
Z
///END REPORT
7
Baltimore, Maryland
The drones, twenty-four of them, held steady in a perfect lattice formation. They hovered some five feet from the floor, whining, jittery, each correcting its position with a nervous tip of its rotors. They made Pearl think of dragonflies, or hummingbirds.
As she watched, the drones, without warning, burst into movement. They swung away from their positions in the lattice, arcing and sweeping inward again to form, this time, a long line two abreast. A moment’s suspension in the air, and all twenty-four began to move in perfect unison, a ghostly, floating march through space. They moved towards an obstacle, two posts six feet high, the space between them only inches wide. The drone column approached the posts.
They’ll not be able to, Pearl thought. The gap is too tight.
As she finished the thought, the first two drones sped up. One drone gave way to the other, and the lead drone, moving at speed now, flipped itself onto the vertical and posted itself elegantly between the two posts. It turned a full somersault before righting and hovering, then moving away at a sedate pace. The second drone followed, slicing through the gap and falling back into formation with its leader, and within half a minute all twenty-four were through and had returned to formation.
Pearl smiled and looked over at Cal, who mouthed, No hands! He held out both palms to show they were empty. The drones were stationary now, bobbing in the air, awaiting orders. Cal asked for different formations in three dimensions, the drones deciding for themselves how best to organise, each proceeding to its allotted place with what Pearl saw as intention and certainty. But one, she noticed, had drifted away from the formation and was moving towards the hangar wall. She looked at Cal, and pointed. He held up a just-wait-a-moment finger. She watched the solitary drone, alone now in space, pursuing some individual quest while the humming collective waited. The drone was losing height, and came to rest on a low black platform at floor level, just below where Pearl stood. Its rotors ceased turning, and it squatted, still now. On the platform, a red diode had lit, and Pearl realised that the drone had taken itself out of formation to charge its battery. And, she saw, the formation had rearranged itself to take account of the solitary drone’s absence.
Cal was smiling. Still no hands!
And then the formation began lowering itself to the floor. The drones touched down, and all the rotors stopped, and the hangar fell silent.
“You like?” Cal shouted across to her. “They’ll bring you tea. Make you noodles.”
He jumped down to the hangar floor and picked one up, strolling over to her, his long-legged gait under the white lab coat. Why did he wear that coat? He reached up, handed the machine to her, smiling. She bent down and took it from him and held it in her hand. It was a beautiful thing, silver, its casing smooth and aerodynamic, its rotors slender and finely machined. It was warm from its flight, and she felt as if she were holding a living thing, as if there could be a heart beating inside. On its underside was a small claw-like apparatus.
“For payload,” said Cal. “Could be a sensor. Could be a tool. Could be a weapon.”
She raised her eyebrows, nodding.
“Throw it,” said Cal.
“What?”
“Just throw it.” He curled his wrist back and then released it, as if hurling something away into space.
She leaned out over the railing and threw it upwards, towards the ceiling, ten feet or more. The drone tumbled upward in the air, reached its apex and hung for a fraction of a second. As it began to fall the rotors buzzed into life and the little vessel righted and hovered, turning slowly on its own axis as if looking to orientate itself.
“Watch,” said Cal.
The drone darted downward, to where the rest of the swarm sat immobile on the hangar floor. It circled for moment, and then landed at the same place in the formation it had occupied before Cal picked it up.
“We teach them to find their way home,” he said.
“Teach?” she said, amused.
“Feels like teaching,” he said.
She shook her head.
“No, it doesn’t,” she said.
“What does it feel like, then? It’s more than programing.”
She thought for a moment.
“It feels like imbuing them with something.”
“With knowledge?”
“No. It’ll be more than that.”
He laughed.
“When? When will it be?”
She looked at him.
“When I’m done,” she said.
He cocked his head to one side.
“And when will that be?”
She shrugged.
“We are all waiting, you know.”
She smiled. He shifted his weight, put his hands in his pockets.
“Are you coming on Saturday?”
“Am I invited?
” she replied, startled.
“Of course you’re invited!”
“Oh. Well, I don’t know. My dad …”
“It’ll be nice. We’re making baozi. There’ll be people you know.”
She looked regretful. “I just …”
“Pearl, you are nineteen. You are a junior.” He was speaking gently, but she could tell he was exasperated.
“I know these things, Cal, but it’s like …” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Why’s he like this? It’s a party. With baozi. And physicists. And engineers. Chinese physicists and engineers, mostly. I mean, seriously. It’ll be the least sexy thing that ever happened. The threat to your integrity is, like, so small as to be immeasurable in conventional mathematics. There is no scale where it is non-negligible. I mean, like, you’d have to use non-standard analysis.”
He held up his forefinger and thumb in a pincer shape, one eye closed, to indicate something infinitesimally small. She laughed.
Cal’s English name had been California Cheung, his parents hoping and plotting from their dank Hong Kong apartment that he would make it to sunny Stanford. Instead, here he was at Hopkins, in this tough, eastern town with its raddled streets and harsh winters. And he’d changed his name to Cal. Now he stood, tall, sallow, eyebrows raised, questioning. He was six years older than her, deep into his Ph.D. He was a study buddy, and a shoulder to lean on. He saw her, listened to her. He admired her; they all did, but he actually liked her, too, she felt. Maybe a little more, even. One day.
“Maybe I should invite your mom and dad, too. You could all come.”
She put her hands to her cheeks.
“Oh my God, no. Please. That would be embarrassing.”
“Why?”
“He’ll interrogate everybody. And hand out business cards. And insist on doing the cooking. And it’ll just be, like, ugh. And then he’ll find someone whose great-grandparents were from the same province as his and he’ll start singing songs or something.”