by Adam Brookes
“Might need your SCIF at this point, Franklin.”
He brought his fist down with a crash on the table. She managed not to jump, just watched him. At other tables, customers were looking over at them.
“What else?” he hissed.
“Best get some of your chaps down there with the crime-scene tape.”
“What. Else.”
She shifted register, dropped the facetiousness.
“Nothing. I took a quick look in. It’s a wreck. There had been a search.”
“You touch anything?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing.”
Polk had narrowed his eyes, breathing heavily.
“You sure about that, Patterson?”
She stared him down, heart accelerating. But she had the sense that his anger was directed less at her and more towards some predicament of his own that she couldn’t fathom. She wasn’t unnerved by him, for all the bluster.
“And this guy? Keeping watch?” he said.
“I just glimpsed him as I was pulling away. Slim guy, in a hoodie, just crept out of nowhere.”
“Age? Ethnicity?”
“No idea.”
“You touch any fucking thing in that house?”
She didn’t reply, just picked up her wine glass, sipped.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Frankie?”
“Don’t you dare ask me shit.”
“Share, Frankie. What else have you got on the woman? Monroe’s love interest?”
Polk sat back, pulled on the beer again.
“Tell me, Frankie.”
“Nothing. We don’t know who she is. Was. Whatever.”
“You must be able—”
“There’s no case.”
“No case?” She was incredulous.
“What do you want us to do? Monroe’s dead. His wife isn’t implicated. The Asian lady’s mystery meat. We don’t have a suspect. What am I talking about? We don’t even have an allegation. No case.”
“You’re dropping it?”
“What’s to drop?” he said. “Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart. I’m law enforcement, remember. You bring me evidence of an operation and I’ll be on it like fleas on a beagle. Until then, fuck you.”
She didn’t know what to say. He finished his beer, the mouth of the bottle making a plock sound as he pulled it from his lips. He was readying to leave.
“You saw the wife, in the hospital,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How’d she look?”
“Not good.”
“That is not a well woman.”
“Do they know what’s wrong with her?” she asked.
“No. They were talking about stress, and then about a virus, and Guillain-Barré. You know what that is?” He had calmed down a bit, and Patterson thought she glimpsed empathy in him, kindness even, behind those crystalline eyes.
“No. What is it?”
He shook his head. “It’s like a post-viral thing. You get neuropathy, pain in your hands and feet.” He wiggled his fingers. “Then it spreads. She’s complaining of pain in her legs and arms. So they think maybe that, but they don’t know.”
He was watching her closely now.
“What do you want me to say, Frankie? I’m not a doctor.”
He nodded as if he’d confirmed something.
“You always such a hardass, Patterson?”
The question surprised her.
“Only around other hardasses.”
He snorted. “Jesus. What’s that, an offer of friendship?”
“In your dreams. Don’t stop talking to me, Frankie.”
“Don’t tamper. I mean it.”
“Nothing to tamper with. You’ve dropped—”
But he was up and gone. She sat a while longer, ordered another glass of red and let the noise of the pub wash over her, its sticky tables and air-conditioned reek, the haggard after-work drinkers, eyes bright with exhaustion, reaching for the bottle.
Someone, probably Jonathan Monroe, deceased intelligence doyen and adulterer and liar, had a secret bank account in one of the least accessible offshore secrecy jurisdictions in the world. And it was linked to a PO Box in Suriname.
She liked Polk.
And now she’d lied to him. The lie, light and pretty as a petal.
She left the pub, turned onto 19th and walked north. It was almost dark, still warm. The traffic had thinned and the sidewalks were empty. She walked past a restaurant—Oysters! Steak!—and glimpsed candlelight, tulips of red wine in the fists of grey-haired men who leaned and murmured. Polk’s kind of place, she thought. Big, meaty, white. A Washington restaurant, where the dishes are accompanied by noiseless, flavourless swirls of power and information. Where blandness is cover. A city of silent corridors, of keypads, of special access, of vast digital mazes. Rome behind bulletproof glass, muffled and suffocating in the SCIF.
A helicopter was overhead, its running lights winking, its whump whump thickening the air.
A spy-riddled city.
And it was as she crossed N she felt it, the ripple on the surface, the catch in the street motion, that those in the trade watch for.
Two men, one Asian, one white, lingering at the mouth of the metro station, a rigidity to them, looking at her, looking away; one, the Asian, reaching for the phone. Their shitty tradecraft, she thought. She jogged left, made to cross the street suddenly towards a bar called The Front Page, looked both ways for traffic and there was the third man in the corner of her eye, fifty feet behind her. She walked unhurriedly into the bar, into the air conditioning, the rattle of the televisions sets, the baseball game. She bought a beer and took a stool that gave her a view of the street. The third one had stopped, looking over at her, craning his neck. The one on the phone was gesticulating.
Absolutely no doubt. Absolutely bloody brazen. Who?
She slipped through the bar, down some stairs into the basement, past pool tables. Kitchen flit. She pushed through double doors into bright neon, steam, the stench of cooking fat, gouts of flame rising from the range and someone in chef’s whites shouting at her in Spanish. She pretended to be talking on her phone, and half ran to an exit that led to stinking trash cans and an iron staircase to street level on the other side of the block, hidden from view. She kept close to the wall, waited for a cab.
Back at the flat, she left the lights off, sat at the window for a long time, watching the street, wondering what had started, how bad it was—how bad it was going to get.
27
Paramaribo, Suriname
At the Regal Hotel, Pearl came down to breakfast late. She had stayed up a long time, working her way through one of Tononi’s papers on Integrated Information Theory, her parents muttering and whispering in the adjoining room. Her father had staggered in drunk after spending hours at some club. What kind of club? He never went to clubs. The thought of him at a club was laughable, repulsive. Did he dance? What did he do there? When she had asked him, he had told her to shut up and go to bed. He had stood there, swaying, vicious, flecks of white spittle at the corners of his mouth. Her mother had been sitting up in bed, pretending none of it was happening.
The entire three days had been beyond bizarre. The trip to the zoo, the weird encounter with her father’s “business partner,” her mother tiptoeing around, rigid with anxiety.
This morning, it was to be a butterfly farm, apparently. They’d be out in the blazing heat, the three of them silent, closed to each other. Her father’s presence weighed on the very air around them, making it hard to breathe. She thought of Cal, imagined a father who was reassuring—what that might be like.
She took a table in the hotel coffee shop and the waitress brought her water and pointed her towards the buffet. She helped herself to pineapple and bananas and a pastry, some coffee, and then there he was, standing right beside her, dunking a tea bag in a little cup, all six foot something of him with the instantly recognisable ha
ir the colour of copper. He wore shabby jeans and a rumpled jacket of white linen over a T-shirt. He saw her looking at him, did a sort of double take and gave her a crooked grin.
“The water’s never hot enough,” he said apologetically. “For the tea.”
He was looking at her, expectantly. Pearl couldn’t think of anything to say, just stared at him.
“Perhaps I should just stick with coffee,” he said. “Is it any good?”
She shrugged.
“Well, that’s what I’m going to do,” he said, and theatrically laid the teacup down. “So. How’s Paramaribo for you?”
“Fine, I guess,” she said, standing, holding her plate.
“My, that’s a ringing endorsement,” he said. “Been to the fort? That’s awfully interesting.”
“Why?” she said.
“Oh, it has … exhibitions, all sorts of things.” He was smiling, as if he knew she clearly had better things to be doing. She noticed his eyes. They were green, the colour of a jade pendant. Eyes that didn’t miss things. He was looking into her now, seeing her. Why?
“You were at the zoo,” she said.
He looked surprised.
“Yes. Yes, I was. Good heavens, you’re observant. Are you one of those people who see a face and then never forget it? I bet you are.”
“Not really.” He is, however, making the common mistake of taking me for a child, she thought. He was running a hand through his hair, pondering the buffet.
“Do they have eggs, do you think?”
“I have no idea,” she said, and started to move away towards her table. His voice came from behind her.
“Would you mind terribly if I joined you, just for a moment?”
She turned back to him. He had a pleading look.
“I’m a journalist,” he said. “I’m doing some travel writing, and I’m trying to get a sense of what brings people here. I mean, Suriname, right? Why come here at all?”
She shrugged, and he came and sat opposite her. “My name’s Michael. Barclay.” He had an accent she thought was probably British.
“So, are you from the States?” he said.
She nodded. “Maryland. Just outside DC.”
“And what do you do, if I may ask?”
“I’m in school.”
He nodded. “Studying?”
“Applied math.”
“Wow. Really? And what are you going to do with that when you graduate?”
I am going to do things that I could not explain to you in words, she thought. I am going to delineate the operations of consciousness and express them in a mathematical language so precise and so profound that our very idea of what it means to be human will wither, and fall away, and be reborn.
“Go and get a job, I guess.” She took a mouthful of pastry, studying him.
“And … you’re here on vacation?” He seemed oddly interested.
She nodded again, her mouth full, and then swallowed.
“We were going to Aruba, but decided to come here instead.”
“You have friends here?” He had taken out a little notebook, and the question struck her as strange, and then in the corner of her eye she saw movement, and heard the clatter of heels on the tiled floor and suddenly her mother was bearing down on the table, a look of alarm and anger on her face, and Pearl felt her mother’s nails digging into her upper arm, heard her hissing in her ear.
“Gan ma, ni?” What do you think you’re doing?
Pearl shrank back. Her mother wrenched at her arm.
“Who is he?”
“He’s just … he’s a journalist. Ma, stop, please.”
The Englishman had raised a hand to interrupt, but said nothing.
“Ma, we were just talking—” But her mother had let go her arm and slapped her, an open-handed cuff that caught her too high on the cheek and knocked off her glasses. They fell on the table.
“Stop! Ma. Please!” She felt herself give a choked sob. Now the man had stood up and come around the table, moved to interpose himself.
“Really, please, this is not necessary.”
Her mother turned and snarled at him.
“You. Get away. Go. Now.”
He was standing over her.
“I’ve upset you in some way and I’m genuinely sorry for that. But you must stop this. Now. Please.” He glanced down at her, the deep mineral green in those eyes, to make a last connection with her, to reassure her.
“When you need to talk …” he said. And then he backed away, and was gone.
Pearl fumbled her glasses back onto her nose; he had left a piece of paper on the table with his name and an email address on it. She took it, stuffing it in the pocket of her jeans as her mother dragged her away.
Mangan made his way quickly along Wilhelminastraat. In his mind, this sleepy city had shifted its shape, its texture, to something harder, more formidable. Whatever time he thought he had left, he now calculated, had been halved.
At an internet café, he searched.
The name Mitchell Tao appeared only twice in the Washington, DC, area. One ran an auto repair company in Spotsylvania, Virginia. Need a Tow? Call Tao!
The other was a systems engineer at a biotech company located near Rockville, Maryland. He made a note of the search result, logged off and left the café.
A little later, he sat on a bench in a shopping mall. It was brand new, the smell of paint and plaster still sharp. Chinese investors underwrote its construction, European luxury brands would populate its storefronts to sell goods manufactured in China. Mangan felt the place as an outpost of the global nowhere, the air-conditioned, deracinated, monetised space that blooms on the executive floor, in the business-class lounge, the boutique, the marina, in the pages of the seatback magazine.
He watched for a good fifteen minutes. Would his untrained eye see anything, if it were there? Would it make any difference if he did?
A woman walked slowly past him. She pushed a stroller. Behind her, a young man with shoulder-length hair and a yellow T-shirt lingered, then turned suddenly and walked away, gesturing.
Mangan walked to the one public phone in the mall, near the restrooms, and dialled.
“Posthumus.”
“It’s Philip Mangan. You were kind enough to say I could call.”
“Of course. How can I help you, Philip?”
“Can we meet? I need … guidance.”
There was a short pause on the line as if he were consulting a diary.
“Tonight. Let’s say, ten. At the following address. Ready?”
He gave a street and a house number.
“Just knock. I’ll see you then.”
And that was it.
28
Washington, DC
“I think the moment might be approaching where you and I should have a chat in private.”
Hopko, fresh off the plane, pounded the floors of the Embassy in a cloud of lactonic perfume and a jangle of silver. She wore a tight, olive-green silk suit, and her stubby frame looked squarer than when Patterson had last seen her, the shoulders broader. Her hair was teased up and Patterson found herself looking for threads of silver in the rich, dull black but found none. Hopko’s weird, ageless quality unnerved her. The Embassy staff looked and looked away as she stomped past. Patterson punched the code and pushed the Station’s steel doors open.
Anthony Tipton was waiting for her, and there was politesse, one espiocrat to another, and offers of coffee and a purposeful move to Tipton’s office. Patterson made to sidle away, but Hopko’s eyes were on her and she was mouthing, In a moment.
Patterson went to her desk and drank from her water bottle. A soldier’s greatest enemy is dehydration, she thought uselessly. What’s a spy’s greatest enemy? Betrayal? Exposure? A superior officer who turns on you? She made herself focus on the blizzard of requests on her screen, waiting for the inevitable.
It was a long, dreary time coming—late afternoon when Hopko loomed over Patterson’s desk.
“
Come on,” she said. They went to the secure conference room, and Hopko shut and locked the door. Patterson clutched her water bottle like a rifleman in the desert and sat down. Hopko stood, looking at her.
“You are not operational, you realise this, Trish, don’t you?”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Please don’t get defensive.”
“I’m not being defensive, Val.”
Hopko sighed, gave an indulgent smile.
“As it happens, your little foray down to … what’s the place called?”
“Wachapreague.”
“Yes, there. Well, it was very revealing, I’ll concede.”
Patterson said nothing.
“But you risk frightening the horses.”
“What horses are those?”
“Tipton and Markham, your immediate bosses. Polk.”
“I can handle Polk.”
“Can you?”
“Yes.”
“Have you told him about the bank account?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
Hopko had perched on the edge of the conference table, her hands in her lap.
“Still seeing shadows, are we?”
Patterson opened her mouth, then shut it again.
“Hooded figures. Little men on the streets, valiantly tailing you to the pub.”
“They’re not shadows, Val.”
“You think you’re under surveillance.”
“I know I’m under surveillance.”
Hopko frowned. “Right. I mean, are you sure? I don’t mean to doubt you. I just find it all a tad unlikely.”
“So you are doubting me.”
“Well, yes. Yes, I suppose I am. Is it possible some of Polk’s chaps are just keeping an eye?”
“A Washington-based FBI counter-intelligence team? Behaving like that? No. No. Not a chance. This is someone else.”
“You think it’s China.”
“I didn’t say that, but …”
Throughout this exchange, Hopko had remained very still, her brown eyes unmoving, her blunt hands still folded in her lap.
“What’s your best guess, Trish? About the whole thing. Walk me through it again.”
“You know everything.”
“I want to hear it in person. That’s why I’m here in DC. I gave Tipton all sorts of guff, but really I’ve come to see you. See how you’re getting on. And you’ve gone and surprised me with this strange tale. So let’s hear it, please.”