by Adam Brookes
The kapten took the oars and pulled away from the jetty. Mangan sat in the bow of the boat, hunched over, putting the kapten between himself and the line of sight from the jetty. The car was crawling closer. Mangan sat still, listened to the lap of the water, the thunk thunk of the oars.
The boat was anchored close in, stolid and silent on the water. She was about eighty feet, the bow long and flared and standing high in the water, two masts, the superstructure ramshackle and painted an anaemic green.
Mangan thought the car had stopped by the jetty. The sunlight on the water was dazzling, making it difficult to see. The kapten rowed to the stern of the boat, putting them out of sight. He tied up the dinghy and pointed to a rusting ladder. Mangan climbed aboard, and the kapten followed. Mangan dropped his kitbag and squatted by the rail, squinting back at the jetty. The black car had stopped and a man had got out, and he was standing with his hands on his hips, looking around. Someone in the car seemed to be saying something, because he turned around and spoke back to them, sharply. Mangan could not tell what language they were speaking. The man looked from side to side, scanning the water. Mangan, on hands and knees, withdrew from the rail. The kapten was watching him.
“Ada problem?” he said.
“Tidak ada,” said Mangan. No.
The kapten opened a hatch that led into what must have been the crew quarters, and gestured at Mangan to take his flip-flops off. Mangan ducked inside. The cabin had a wooden deck and windows to the sea. It smelled of cigarette smoke and peanut oil and fried fish. A wooden crate held an ashtray and a deck of cards. The kapten took Mangan’s duffel bag and threw it on a metal-framed bunk.
“See?” he said. “No touris.”
“It’s fine,” said Mangan. “Really.”
The kapten nodded, then pulled a packet of cigarettes from his shorts, offered one to Mangan, lit it for him. The kapten looked at the bruises spreading under Mangan’s eyes, gestured to them again, but this time in concern. Mangan gave a shrug. And as the dark, clove-infused smoke curled upwards between the two of them and as they regarded each other, Mangan felt relieved, untethered, the fear in his belly momentarily diffusing.
They got underway at noon, the engine causing the warm deck to pop and vibrate beneath Mangan’s bare feet, the boat turning into the wind under a ferocious sun. They had taken on sacks of nutmeg and a little lumber. Mangan watched the kapten in the wheelhouse. He seemed to make no use of radio or depth finder or even a chart, just pushed the pinisi boat away from the jetties, out into the chop heading west. A Javanese first mate in a bandana named Widodo stood at the bow with binoculars. The rest of the crew, six or seven of them, Mangan thought, hovered around the galley waiting for food.
When it came, he accepted the meal gratefully, the cook’s boy grinning at him, gaping at the bruising, and chiding him in some unknown language. A mound of white rice, a tiny dry chicken leg, a few greens and a blistering sambal. Mangan ate all of it, but when the boat turned south and started to roll he threw the lot up, hanging over the side. Widodo dug out an ancient pack of meclizine tabs. He took one, lay on the bunk, slept and felt better.
That evening, he sat at the bow, his skin prickling in the spray and the wind, and drank a warm Anker beer and watched the sun set. He had had no contact with Vauxhall Cross in over two weeks, hadn’t reported the trouble with the woman in the phone shop, or the visitation in the hotel room. He felt free, unbound. The boat pitched and creaked and the horizon disappeared in a cerulean dusk, and he watched the stars begin to show. And for a moment, once again, he contemplated letting it all go, telling London it was over, telling Hopko to fuck off. He had a little money—enough for a room somewhere, for a while, somewhere he wasn’t known. He could teach, maybe write. Maybe even report again, rebuild his reputation.
But there was that hard little bead of possibility, still, present, drawing him back. The boat ploughed on, into the night.
10
Silver Spring, Maryland
Pearl worked at everything, but hardest at sleeping. She would wear an eyeshade, bed socks, clutch a hot-water bottle, drink a vile tea of artemisia and liquorice that her mother ordered from Taiyuan. None of it made any difference. The hours after midnight became hours of pacing and roaming the house, of the silvered glow of the screen. Sometimes she simply lay in the darkness and let the equations unspool in her mind, imagined the physics of the swarm, the tiny silver beings swooping and glinting in sunlight. Sometimes she reread the books of her childhood: Harry Potter, The Hobbit, Wimpy Kid.
And sometimes she would sit on the stairs and listen to her parents, their cryptic late-night whispers—her mother’s submissive, her father’s urgent and domineering—the soft rasp of the Mandarin. She’d catch some of it, talk of people she didn’t know, what seemed to be arrangements, dates, times. Money? Sometimes they’d be tapping away at a laptop, the computer her father kept in his office, in a drawer, the one she never saw him use—only heard him, late at night. Once, years before, her mother had emerged from the living room and caught her there on the stairs, and had hissed at her, furious, to go to bed. But her father was there, too, and held her by the arm, too tight. And he had hit her, wordlessly, a stinging slap to the side of her head. She had been too stunned to cry.
The hours beyond midnight were a place full of betrayal.
Morning would drag her from whatever depth she had sunk to, her mother pulling back the curtains, sitting her up, bringing her warm soy milk in a mug with a lid, brushing her hair. She’d sit on the bed, thick with exhaustion, try to remember what the day was supposed to hold.
And today it was a trip with Dad, who had insisted on taking her, refusing point blank to let her drive herself.
Pearl loathed her father’s driving. They were on the Beltway in his Camry, slaloming between lanes at seventy without signalling. He didn’t believe in it. He said that if you signalled before changing lanes it was more dangerous because the other cars would just close up to prevent you cutting in. The traffic was heavy and bad-tempered and the sun was blisteringly hot. But he didn’t believe in using air conditioning in the car because it wasted gas. So she sat and jammed her feet against the floor, clutching the side of her seat as the car careened along, her father with one hand on the wheel, blathering on about the importance of what was about to happen, how she mustn’t mess it up, how she was a good, intelligent girl but she had no experience and no common sense and it was lucky he was there to help her.
“I’m not a girl, Dad.”
“When you go in, don’t be arrogant. Only speak when they ask a question.”
“That’s really not the way it works.”
“You always ask questions.”
“Yes, I do. They want us to ask questions.”
“Listen first. Maybe I should come in with you.”
“No! God, Dad.”
He looked exasperated, pointed at her with his free hand.
“You are not so independent yet. You think you are, but you are too young.” He held his hand palm out, moved it side to side, the Chinese gesture for negation, dismissal. She looked at his hands, the bitten nails, and at the perspiration on his forehead, the cheap, ill-fitting shirt darkened by sweat. He was still talking.
“You must listen to us, because you never face any challenge. You are a weak girl.”
“I can do this. You don’t have to—”
“You can’t do anything! You can’t even manage live like an adult. Your mother still wash all your clothes, clean your room. Your parents do everything! Everything! Without us you have no chance.”
It was the bluntness of his speech that always took her aback. If he said it in his native Mandarin, might it be gentler? More nuanced? She hated this immigrant speak that battered her with its blunt truths.
Probably not, she thought. And she hated herself for hating the way he spoke.
They had turned off the Beltway into northern Virginia, passed the huge intelligence centre at Liberty Crossing, and now moved
through a silent, motionless landscape of office parks. No, “campuses,” they were called, to suggest academe and rigor and cutting-edge research. Tech was here in force, and the big weapons corporations and telcoms providers in sparkling asymmetric boxes of glass and concrete and steel, corporate logos pinned to them like jewels. The campuses were landscaped with azalea bushes and grass verges. They had vast car parks. Pearl saw no movement, not a living soul.
As they approached the Telperion campus, her father was muttering to himself in Chinese, something about parking and expense. They stopped at a security gate where a uniformed guard in shades checked their IDs and the car’s plates against a list, before waving them through. Mitchell parked, and Pearl got out. She crossed the warm tarmac towards the building, her father watching her from the car.
Carla from Telperion Integrity was waiting in the lobby for her. Carla was tall and auburn and wore a beautifully cut suit in a tan cotton that seemed to allude to travel and adventure, the skirt above the knee and slender. Her nails were carefully manicured, painted in salmon pink. Pearl, short and rumpled in a faded blue Hopkins T-shirt and jeans, thought of her own poor, pale complexion, her crappy glasses, stringy hair.
“Pearl! Welcome. So great to see you. Come right this way,” said Carla, handing her a badge on a lanyard.
Pearl followed, through the security gates into an atrium that extended all the way to the roof and skylights. Telperion employees in their lanyards sat at wrought-iron tables among pot plants. They drank coffee, leaned into laptops.
“And Pearl, phone in here, please,” Carla held open the door to the strong room. She put her phone in a locker that doubled as a Faraday cage, and Carla closed the door behind them.
They sat in a windowless conference room and Carla pushed piles of paperwork at her.
“And this,” she said, “is the big one.” The form was labelled “SF86.” It had a hundred and twenty-one pages.
“This is the one,” said Carla, “where they ask for all, and they mean all relatives, living or dead.” She paused, waited for Pearl to react, but Pearl said nothing. “So you’ll have to check with your folks, okay, Pearl? We need all names, addresses, everything, of everyone in China. Aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, you name it. The lot. All of them, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. She flicked through the pages. Education, employment, citizenship, convictions, every address for the last ten years. Have you engaged in acts of terrorism? Were you contacted by, or in contact with, foreign intelligence organisations? Counter-intelligence? Persons interested in you or your job? Coerced? Alcohol, cocaine, rock, freebase, weed, ketamine, PCP, mushrooms, juice, the clear, toluene? Mental competence?
“And because we’re looking at a Top Secret clearance, there’ll be an interview,” said Carla. “We’ll help you prepare, of course.”
“But if I have all these relatives in China, won’t that make them … well, won’t that make it harder?”
“It won’t make it easier, but as long as you are completely open and give them everything they ask for, it should be okay. Telperion’s on your side, and we know how to do this, trust me.” She smiled, and Pearl relaxed a little.
Dr. Katz came by and they went over her coursework and plans for the year. He was tall and jovial, in tan pants and a baggy denim shirt, and he listened to her, took her seriously. He showed her some work he’d been doing on advanced collision avoidance algorithms, and she bent over it and ran a finger down the screen and found workarounds for computational expense right there, pointing them out to him, and he couldn’t help but smile.
“So, Pearl, just fill out the form,” he said, “and make sure you get everything on there, okay? Let’s get that clearance and then we can start inducting you into some of the more, um, let’s say, interesting work we do here at Telperion.” He was grinning broadly at her, and so was Carla.
“Sure,” she said.
Back at the car, her father was waiting.
“What did they say? You apply for the clearance?”
“I have to fill out this form. And it’s, like, huge.”
“No problem. I’ll help you.”
“We have to enter the whole family on it. Everyone, all the relatives.” She thought of her grandmother and aunt in the concrete apartment in Taiyuan with its filthy windows, running water down to two hours a day, the mealy rice, plates of sodden baicai and fatty pork smothered in pickled bean curd.
“Yes, yes. We can do it.” He was pulling out of the car park, passing the security gate. “What level of clearance they want for you?”
“Top Secret/SCI.”
“Good.”
Pearl looked at him, and it occurred to her that he had already considered all these eventualities.
When they got home, her mother was standing in the kitchen holding a plate of baozi, the pork mince and chives still warm inside the bread. Pearl took one and wolfed it, noticed the interrogatory look her mother gave her father, who replied with a nod, and went to his office in the basement.
Why all this? Is so much really at stake for them? But then, she thought, I am their only daughter.
The thought burdened her as she lay awake long past midnight, deep in the treacherous hours. What are my obligations? What are my duties? To them? To me?
Her parents were still up. She could hear them moving around downstairs. She got out of bed, patted the night table for her glasses, and walked down the stairs barefoot, listening. They were arguing in stressed whispers. Her mother said something she didn’t catch, then her father.
“No.”
“We should. They said all the relatives.”
“No. We can’t.”
“But if they find out, then she won’t get the clearance.”
A pause.
“How will they find out? They can’t. Even we really don’t know him any more.”
“We need to ask.”
“They’ll say no.”
Her mother was silent for a moment.
“This is a mistake.”
“Stop being a stupid bitch. We don’t put Jiachong on the form. She doesn’t even know him. So she wouldn’t put him down. So we don’t.”
Jiachong? Who is Jiachong?
She turned and crept back up the stairs. She reached the landing, heard the living-room door open, a footfall in the hallway, then stillness, as if someone had stopped to listen. She froze.
“Pearl?” It was her father, his voice subdued, quiet.
She didn’t answer, just stood, her fists at her mouth.
“Pearl?”
She did not breathe.
Her father murmured something. The door closed. She moved very slowly along the landing into her room, slid silently into her bed and lay in the darkness, wondering at her own fear, then reining it in and forcing herself to think.
Jiachong means “beetle,” she thought. A nickname, then. Who is Beetle?
Why will we not enter Beetle’s name on the form that demands that all relatives, and I mean all, must be entered?
And why are they so invested in this?
11
In Wahai, Mangan slipped ashore at dusk. The crew waved him off, the galley boy taking his hand and shaking it solemnly. Widodo, the mate, pressed the remaining seasickness tablets on him and everyone laughed. Mangan felt hollow, regretful. The days on the boat had healed his face and cleared his head and he’d come to look forward to the evenings sitting alone at the bow, and to the raucous card games and lousy food and beer and kretek, the incomprehensible banter in multiple languages. He climbed over the stern into the dinghy. The evening was quiet, just the lap of the water and the thunk of the oars as the kapten pulled. He looked across the water to the lights of the town, wondering what awaited him.
The kapten brought the dinghy alongside a slime-covered concrete jetty, rusted metal spokes protruding from it. Mangan stood and threw his duffel bag up, the dinghy wobbling on the water, and the kapten held his hand out for Mangan to shake.
“Beruntun
g, Pilip,” said the kapten. “Luck to you. You need, I think.”
Mangan nodded, acknowledged him, then clambered up the concrete, and stood there and watched the kapten pull the dinghy away. Then he turned and walked into town.
The night was warm, the town quiet but for the whine of a motorcycle, the barking of a dog. He found a warung where a woman was grilling fish over glowing coconut coals. He sat, and she gave him a bowl of rice with three long, slender, white-fleshed fish, all charred and soused in lime juice, covered in scallions, chillies and tomatoes. The woman was young and wore a halter top and jeans, her hair up. He asked for a beer and she wandered off lazily down the street and came back with two tins of Anker. He asked her if there was a losmen, a guesthouse, and she gestured vaguely to the west of town.
“Many visitors? Here in Wahai?” he asked her, fumbling in Indonesian. “Touris?”
She waggled her hand in the air. Not so many.
“Many Chinese coming?” he said.
She shrugged. “Sometimes they come. Groups. But they don’t stay.”
“Have you seen any Chinese people the last few days? Men? Maybe in big cars?”
She looked amused, made a driving gesture, her hands on an imaginary wheel. Mangan smiled. “Have you seen any?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Tidak. If I see them, Chinese men in a big car, I tell them you are here.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake.
“No. No, don’t do that.” He was peeling rupiah notes off a wad, handing them to her. She was startled. “You tell me if you see them, okay? Can you do that?”
She shrugged, unsure. He picked up his duffel bag, smiled to reassure her, and left, walking west in the direction of the guesthouse, feeling her eyes on his back. Philip Mangan, secret agent, attempts to recruit watcher on spur of moment, practises laughable tradecraft.