by Adam Brookes
There’s an agent, she thought. BOTANY is an operation with an agent at its heart, an agent in China. And BOTANY product was shared with the Americans, who called it DTCREEKSIDE. And it’s corporations, commercial secrets. So there’s money and investors and shareholders and fund managers, all the people governments are terrified of, all baying for blood. It’s China’s future—its renaissance—that is at stake.
And Monroe saw the BOTANY product. And stole it.
Polk was reading her mind.
“Don’t get spun up, Patterson. DTCREEKSIDE product was all scrubbed. No names, no pack drill. So if there is an agent, and I know that’s what you’re thinking ’cause it’s written all over your scary little face, he ain’t blown by Monroe.”
Patterson imagined the operation collapsing, the black Audis in Beijing pulling up outside an apartment block or a courtyard or some faux-Tudor house in a distant grey suburb, and everything that would follow. And just for a moment, Patterson’s self-loathing gave way to a surge of anger.
“So is that what I tell London, Frankie? Don’t worry, it’s all fine. Monroe looked right up our skirt, at one of our most precious operations, but he didn’t see anything, and even if he did all the private parts were covered. And we don’t even know if he was a spy anyway. Oh, and by the way, he shot himself in his car, so we’ll never know what he saw or what he said or who he said it to. Are you bloody serious?”
She thought she saw a flicker of surprise on Polk’s face.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch. You’ll tell your people the files were there but they were scrubbed.”
But she was angry now, and picked up her bag and stalked from the room, wrenching the door open.
The day after, a Saturday, Patterson found an invite pushed under her door. Emily and Esteban from downstairs were grilling burgers—that very evening! Everyone in the building to come! She thought about it for a moment, then looked out a nice pair of jeans—capris that showed off her legs—and a green silk blouse.
She sat in her living room, looking out at the fire escape, drinking instant coffee, and thought about the previous day: the strange exchange with Polk in the SCIF, and then the monstering from Tipton in the afternoon. He’d wanted every detail. She gave him the bare essentials, unsure why she was protecting Hopko. Perhaps she was just less frightened by him than by her.
In the early afternoon, she went for a run, a long one, up to Rock Creek Park, deep into the woods on a muddy trail that wound and rose and dipped, waving away the clouds of gnats that swarmed in shafts of sunlight. Then back, by the river, the warm, wet air pawing at her. She pushed hard, opened up a little on the flat, let her mind wander. She was back in Iraq, pounding around the base perimeter with Joanie Linklater in ninety-five degrees and the reek of fuel and plastic from the burn pits, sweat pouring off the two of them.
She slowed a little, made way for another runner, a tall guy with muscled calves who wanted to show off to her. Then she was off again, the track skirting the river and its tumble of rock. And she was standing by a river in Thailand, waiting for her agent. An interminable wait, that one, sitting in the reeds while mosquitoes ate her alive and she worried about the malaria. And when Mangan had come, after hours in a fetid, stinking compartment in the bottom of the boat, he was soaked and befouled and shattered and angry and close to tears, and he stood there shaking and dripping on the jetty, yet he was still keen as a tack, still had about him the acuity of mind that she so admired. He had leaned on the car as the MSS dragged the other guy, the Chinese colonel, away for interrogation and slaughter.
China makes exiles of us.
The memory came barrelling up in her like a huge sea creature breaching the surface. Her breath caught and she had to stop. She bent over double by the river, her shoulders heaving.
Another runner, an older woman in a headband, slowed and called to her.
“Hey, you okay, hon?”
Patterson couldn’t speak, just held up a hand. The woman jogged over to her, leaned down, touched her shoulder.
“You okay, girlfriend?”
Patterson nodded, steadying now, grateful for that touch.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Hey, no problem.” The woman nodded, gave her a last look and jogged away. Patterson knelt on the grass, stayed there for some minutes, her sense of dissociation overwhelming her, dissociation from home and family, from work, from others, from herself. From her agent. We are exiles.
By the time she got back to 18th Street, it had clouded over and heavy, thick raindrops were spattering the pavement. Emily and Esteban cancelled.
16
Albina, Suriname
Mangan walked away from the boat, up the muddy beach. The town was only starting to wake, so he sat outside a Chinese supermarket and waited. It was a Saturday, market day, and the stalls were going up: hair-braiding stands, sellers of fish and bush meat, women with spices and arrays of twigs and leaves for use in medicine and winti, balls of white clay for adornment. He caught the smell of cannabis in the air. A man was setting up bottles on a stall. They were filled with rum, but also with wood chips and leaves. One had an armadillo’s tail in it. The man saw Mangan watching and pointed at the bottles.
“Wilt u proberen?” he said in Dutch.
“Bit early for me, thanks,” said Mangan.
The man waved him over. “Good for man things,” he said. He made a gesture with his forearm, fist clenched—an erection. “Good for this.”
“Not much need for that just now, but thanks.”
The man looked Mangan up and down, evaluating him. He was lean, dark, eyes bloodshot from the smoking. He wore a black T-shirt, and a ring in the shape of a skull.
“America?” he said.
“Something like that,” said Mangan.
“Where you go now?”
“I need to go to Paramaribo.”
“Paramaribo, okay. You get taxi, my brother he has.”
“Well, all right then,” said Mangan.
The taxi was a white Toyota station wagon, with six passengers and their bags all crammed into it. Mangan had made a bid for the front seat but had been shouldered out of the way by an elderly woman in a headdress. He sat in the very back now, leaning against the window, rigid with fright. The driver had them at seventy or eighty miles an hour on the wrong side of the road, slowing and pulling in only in the face of oncoming traffic, his reluctant concession to physics. The suspension had been replaced with something much harder and every ripple in the road surface sent shock waves up Mangan’s back. Secret agent plans complex operation, dies of fright brought on by inexplicably dangerous driving. The car careened past an immense eighteen-wheeler carrying an earth mover and it was all he could do not to cry out. Jesus Christ, no.
They stopped at a place called Moiwana and the men got out to piss. Mangan took his duffel bag and went to the driver’s window.
“You know what? I think I’ll just stay here for a bit. Thanks, though,” he said.
“Where you stay Paramaribo?”
“I don’t know yet.”
The driver looked him up and down, then shrugged. The car pulled away.
Moiwana was a few newly built houses set back off the highway and beyond them, deep, thick forest. Mangan picked up his bag and began to walk in the direction of Paramaribo, then stopped.
To his right, in a roadside clearing, stood a monument of some sort. A central pillar, concrete at the base, then iron as it tapered upward. Atop it, in iron, there were symbols—pictographs?—that Mangan couldn’t identify. More strangely, around the pillar were littered small plinths in concrete and rusting iron, on each a nameplate—Sonny Ajintoena, Difienjo Misidjan—the incomprehensible symbols curling underneath. People had laid tokens on each plinth: flowers, shells and rocks. They looked like altars scattered through the clearing, reminding Mangan of Holocaust memorials.
He found an explanation on a panel. There had been a massacre here. In 1986, during Suriname’s vicious civil
war, troops loyal to the government had descended on the village, shot everyone they could find—women and children included—and burned the houses. The villagers, the soldiers believed, were supporters of the rebel Ronnie Brunswijk and his Jungle Commando. And they were black, descendants of slaves who had fled the plantations and their Dutch overseers. Maroons, they were called, from the Spanish cimarron, “runaway.” Thirty-five had died, maybe more.
Mangan lingered, drinking from a water bottle. Who built the memorial? What other massacres? He lit a cigarette and leaned against the pillar, smoking. The air was hot and still, and birdsong echoed around the trees.
Around the houses, he saw movement. He walked across the road towards them. Two boys were kicking a ball on cracked, weedy concrete. An old woman sat in a hammock, low to the ground, very still. Scattered around her were empty plastic containers and some grimy blankets. She wore nothing but a sheet wrapped about her middle. As Mangan approached, he took off his sunglasses, and she crossed her arms to cover her breasts.
“Hello,” he said.
She didn’t respond, just swayed slightly in the hammock. The boys stopped kicking the ball.
“Do you live here?” said Mangan, gesturing to her and to the houses.
The woman frowned. One of the boys walked over.
“She here,” he said.
“She lives here?” said Mangan.
The boy nodded, not comprehending. Then he pointed to her, and to the monument.
“She,” he said, and made a gun gesture, shooting, a pah pah sound with his lips.
“She was here? When there was the killing?”
“Yes, yes,” said the boy. “She … children.” And he waved something away in the air, so as to say, all gone.
The woman, understanding now, looked to Mangan. The boys stood, waiting.
Mangan didn’t know what to do, what was expected. He’d been here often, as a reporter, at the edge of someone else’s abyss, peering in. He just gave a nod, to show he’d heard. The woman’s eyes were still on him.
He took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, leaned down and tucked it beneath one of the grimy plastic containers, gave an awkward smile. The woman was expressionless, just gazing at the money as Mangan walked away.
About half a mile down the road, dense forest on both sides, the temperature into the nineties, he got a ride. An older, dapper man in a polo shirt and spectacles pulled over. He was of Javanese descent, Mangan guessed. He offered the man fifty dollars for the rest of the way to Paramaribo. The man smiled and opened the car door.
The man was a teacher. And yes, of course he could drop Mangan near Prins Hendrickstraat, in the old centre of the city. He chatted amiably about Paramaribo, its famous stately houses of weathered wood in white and green, the beauty of their ornamented doorways, the lively Waterkaant—the waterfront. But the politics. Well! Such a dyugu-dyugu.
“A what?” said Mangan.
The man smiled.
“A dyugu-dyugu. It’s a word we use in Sranan, our Creole. It means, a big …” He held up a finger. “Wait, there’s an English word. Yes, yes, I have it. A kerfuffle. Yes.” He was pleased, then began to slow the car down.
“Are we stopping?” said Mangan.
“Yes, yes, for the checkpoint. You need your passport.”
Oh, shit.
“A checkpoint? For what?”
“Yes, yes. Check for drug smugglers coming in from French Guyana without going through border checkpoints.”
The man looked at him.
“You have stamp in your passport, yes?” he said, worried.
Mangan just smiled at him.
The car came to an abrupt halt. The checkpoint was just in sight, perhaps 200 metres away.
“Out,” said the man.
Mangan got out, took his duffel bag from the back seat and ducked into bushes at the side of the road. The car drove off. He stood there, midges swarming him, the whistles and whoops of the forest birds rising in his ears. With a sinking heart, he realised that if he was to avoid the checkpoint, he’d have to go round it, through the forest. He began to walk, or rather to push his way into the undergrowth, his duffel bag on his shoulder. Within a minute he was drenched in sweat. He had no water, he realised. British operative bravely skirts rural police checkpoint, fearing immigration irregularities. Dies of dehydration. Jesus Christ.
It took him the better part of two hours, and at one point he was calf deep in swampy water. He saw parrots in the trees, and an extraordinary lizard, two feet long, a streak of luminous green as it shot past him. But there was the road. He emerged onto it exhausted, dripping, his arms and shins bleeding from thorns, his feet sopping. The checkpoint was a half-mile behind. The first car to pass him tooted its horn and the driver made a finger-wagging gesture. Mangan started to walk.
It cost him another fifty dollars in the end to get a truck to stop and the driver to ignore his mud-spattered clothing and leaking shoes. What a dyugu-dyugu, he thought. They drove in silence to Paramaribo. Mangan watched the towns flit past, saw the grey dogs lying in the road in the afternoon heat, felt inside himself for the hard bead of possibility—and there it was, warm and ready.
17
Washington, DC
Polk picked her up in a car this time, a giant American thing, a Buick or something. It was black and idling 200 metres up the road from the Embassy. She got in. Polk said nothing, put the car in gear and drove to a backstreet next to a playground in Tenleytown, and parked.
“You look grim, Frankie. Why the cloak and dagger?”
“Whatever I tell you, Patterson, it’s going straight back to the right people, isn’t it? The operations people, the case people.”
“Yes, it is.”
“It’s not going to sit in some bullshit report on Tipton’s hard drive while he cleans it up for style, right?”
“No. I am talking direct to London.”
“Well, things just got a little more complicated.” He sniffed, looked straight ahead out of the car windscreen.
“Oh?”
“And I’m telling you because it turns out your guys may need to act after all, okay?”
“Okay.” She spoke quietly, waited for him.
“I am authorised to tell you this, but this is all you’re getting for now. That’s it, you understand me?”
“Okay.”
“They’ve been checking Monroe’s shit. Tracking back his movements. Bank accounts, credit cards, phone use, whatever.”
“And?”
“And stuff is coming up.”
“Stuff.”
Polk was all but writhing in his seat, hating to articulate what was coming next. Patterson could feel the fury in him. He exhaled.
“It’s the normal fucking stuff. He thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. No one will suspect him. No one will ever find out. Counter-intel is just jumped-up beat cops with bad shoes and facial hair. We won’t notice shit, ’cause he’s way smarter.”
Again, she just waited.
“There’s credit card bills for pricey meals he didn’t have with his wife and he didn’t expense. There’s jewellery. There’s a thousand bucks dropped in Tiffany’s in Taipei, for Christ’s sake. Last year. He wasn’t even supposed to be in Taipei. He never declared a trip to Taipei. Who the fuck was he buying jewellery for in Taipei?”
Patterson made to speak but he cut her off.
“No, no, we searched the house, there’s no Tiffany jewellery. Wife says he never bought her Tiffany jewellery, didn’t know he’d gone to Taipei.”
She decided to play devil’s advocate.
“Well, that says affair to me, Frankie. Doesn’t say spy.”
The look he gave her, the cold anger in those chemical-blue eyes—to be interrogated by him would be terrifying.
“Oh, really? It says liar to me. No. It screams pants on fuckin’ fire. And it whispers, ever so quietly, honey trap.”
“That’s a lot of assump—”
“There’s more.”
He took another deep breath.
“So he’s in Baltimore, like, five months ago. We got credit card stubs from some fancy restaurant, two people, sea bass, crab cakes, whatever. And then he’s at some sorry-ass motel off the interstate. Double room. So we go up there, and praise be to St. Joshua, they still got the surveillance tapes. It’s evening. He checks in, he’s got an unidentified female with him, of Asian appearance. They go to the room, they do what they do. But after an hour or so, a big group, like six people, all check in. All in baseball caps, shades, usual shit. Five of Asian appearance, one Caucasian. One of them is a woman. These guys are in a big hurry, not much luggage. They go to their rooms. And then, like, fifty minutes later, an interior camera catches the woman from the big group, and she’s hustling Monroe’s love interest down a corridor, between rooms. Love interest is in a bathrobe. Just three seconds of footage but it’s there.”
“I’m not following. What are you saying?”
He shrugged. “No clue. No fuckin’ idea. Something went down, is all.”
“IDs on the people who checked in?”
“Not a one. Paid cash, showed driver’s licences, no record of them. Names, addresses lead nowhere.”
“And when they all left, what then?”
“Yes. Indeed. What then? Well, Monroe’s love interest leaves by herself, dressed and with luggage. The six leave in pairs over the next forty minutes. And Monroe, he’s out of there like a scalded cat, running through the car park, fumbling with his keys. The guy’s in a panic.”
Patterson just held her hands out, shook her head.
“Something happened,” said Polk. “Between Monroe and his gal, and the six others. Was it a burn? Were they putting the muscle on him? What?” He handed a folded piece of paper to her. It was a terse timeline of Monroe’s final months. Journey to Taipei. Return from Taipei. Check into motel. Exit motel. Body found in car. Declared dead at scene.
“That’s the tick-tock. Your guys should check, see what they see.”