by Adam Brookes
They parked three floors below ground, and Mangan found his door opened from the outside by a thick, sandy-haired man in a fleece, who didn’t meet his eye, but scanned the rows of cars.
“This way, Philip,” he said, and they walked towards the elevators, Patterson behind him. The air was cool and smelled of exhaust fumes, and their footsteps echoed on the concrete; Mangan realised he had become hyper-attentive. Fear again, he thought. As they waited for the elevator, he turned to Patterson.
“Tell me something, anything,” he said.
She just shook her head, looking away.
They went up six floors, to an apartment that looked out over eight lanes of traffic, a long blurred streak of brake lights in the rain. The sandy-haired man drew heavy curtains, turned a lamp on and motioned to a couch for Mangan to sit. The room was blank, wallpapered in pale green, with an empty bookcase. It smelled of emptiness, disuse, old coffee, cardboard. These rooms, Mangan thought. These arid, empty rooms, where we sit and wait for it all to start. Patterson stood by the door.
“What is this, Trish?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Drop the bloody mystery. What’s going on?”
But as he spoke, the sandy-haired man was opening a door, and Hopko was walking into the room, and over to him, holding her arms out as if for an embrace. He stood up, towering over her, then bent and hugged her, feeling her blocky frame, her thick, strong shoulders under his hands. Over her shoulder, he glimpsed the interior of the room from which she had come. It was brightly lit, several laptops sitting on a table, a tangle of wires cascading to the floor, open flight cases, blinking LEDs. Hopko stood back and looked at him, as if at a successful young relative.
“Philip!” she said.
“Val.”
He could smell her perfume. She wore a mannish white shirt, the collar turned up, and brown leather jeans over flat shoes, and jewellery of hammered silver, a great glistening bracelet, ingots in a necklace. Her hair, a deep rich black, was big, teased up.
“Sit, sit,” she said. “Good heavens, you look frightful. Was it a very heavy night?”
“I wasn’t expecting—”
“Of course you weren’t. I do apologise. We’re terribly sorry, aren’t we, Trish?” Patterson stood in shadow by the door, silent.
This is it, he thought. It’s all over. The last two years. Everything I’ve done. This is the end of it. He was, he realised, angry at Hopko, and full of regret at the same time—regret at having failed in her eyes, regret at being unable to master the world she had pulled him into. He felt himself tipping into petulance, but pulled himself back. That’s her trick, he thought, she dangles her approval at you—and knows how to make you seek it.
“This is Brendan,” she said, indicating vaguely to her right. A younger man had entered the room. He wore a suit that was a little too large for his slight frame, had clever, mobile eyes, thin lips.
“Now, we’ve lots to talk about. Don’t worry, we’re very secure. This is our little Washington hideaway, one of them, anyway. We come here on the rare occasions when we don’t want our esteemed American partners to know exactly what it is we’re dreaming up.” She had sat in an armchair opposite him, crossing her legs and leaning back. “Now, you’ll forgive me for expressing mild surprise, Philip.”
“You’re forgiven,” he said, but she wasn’t listening.
“I mean, your wandering South America, your communications with this little girl. What on earth are you hoping to achieve?”
“She’s desperate. She wants our help.”
“We’re not bloody therapists,” said Hopko, laughing—a harsh laugh. He thought he glimpsed contempt there, or her own anger.
“She’s a line in.”
“A line in? To what, though? That’s my question, Philip, what sort of ghastly places are you leading us, unasked, unbidden? Where on earth might we all end up?”
“That’s what we’ll find out. I thought that’s what you chaps did. Find things out.”
Hopko’s eyes glittered a little.
“Indulge me,” she said.
He waited for a moment.
“Are you sacking me?” he said.
She cocked her head.
“I think that rather depends on what you say next.”
“Oh, stop the fucking fan dance. You know what I’ve said to Pearl Tao. You know what she’s said to me. We have a line to her, and, I am certain, into a Chinese network. She is ready to talk to me. I can … I may be able to bring her over.”
Hopko exhaled. Brendan, who hadn’t said a word, had opened a laptop and was squinting at it.
“Do you enjoy this, Philip? This … life you have?” Hopko said. “Grubbing around, living your cover. Spying for us. Getting the living daylights beaten out of you. You seem very invested in it, if I may say.”
Patterson was very still, leaning against the wall, watching him. And he understood that Hopko was feeling him out, was readying herself to take a decision.
“Do you not think you might have done enough?” she said. Her tone had softened a little. “China was rough on you. Ethiopia and Thailand were rougher. You’ve done a lot. More than most.”
“You are being very patronising,” he said.
“Am I?” She seemed genuinely startled.
“Do you want me to meet the Tao girl or not? Do you want to penetrate this network or not?”
Hopko took off her glasses.
“Tell him,” she said.
Patterson came over from where she was standing and leaned against the back of the sofa. Brendan looked up at her.
“There’s another side to this whole thing, Philip,” Patterson said. “There was a man, an American intelligence analyst at State. Bigwig. It seems he was the target of an operation. He was coerced, blackmailed by a woman he was having an affair with.”
Mangan saw her stiffen at the mention of the affair, as if she could barely contain her disgust at the idea, and he almost smiled. God, she’s a prude, he thought. She went on.
“He shot himself. They found evidence in his house—very incriminating evidence—of clandestine activity.”
Mangan wasn’t sure where this was going and shrugged.
“His wife was murdered, Philip. With poison.”
He shifted in his seat.
“Well, that’s very John Buchan,” he said.
“Not really,” she said. “Her hair fell out, she went into convulsions and took two weeks to suffocate in an intensive care unit.”
“Oh.”
“The FBI are treating it as a murder. They say they don’t know who did it. But our assumption is that it was the opposition.”
“I thought they didn’t do that kind of thing, the Chinese.”
Hopko leaned forward.
“They gave you quite a kicking, I hear,” she said.
Patterson tried to keep control.
“The point here, Philip, is that Monroe—that was his name—is linked to a bank account in the British Virgin Islands—administered from Suriname.”
Mangan swallowed.
“So, point one,” said Patterson, “is that this network—if it is one and the same network, or at least administered by the same structure—is big, and it is powerful. Point two: someone is willing to defend it. In ways we haven’t seen before. Very aggressive, unpleasant ways.”
“Point three,” said Hopko, “the Americans don’t know.”
“And we’d rather like to keep it that way,” said Brendan.
Mangan tried to piece it together.
“Why don’t you want the Americans to know? Surely they have to know, don’t they? Frightened they’ll muscle in or something?”
There was a stony silence in the room. He pushed on.
“In fact, why not just hand it all over to them? It’s their country. Their stuff that’s being stolen. Their agencies that are being compromised. Their people being murdered. In fact, should you be operating here at all?”
But Mangan noticed Patterson looking to Hopko for an answer, too. She didn’t understand either.
Hopko was wearing her patient smile.
“There are other operational contingencies in play,” she said.
“Fuck does that mean?” Mangan retorted.
“Are you trying to get something off your chest, Philip?”
“I’m trying to gauge what this thing is, what it’s about.”
“Do you know, for a business that revolves around betrayal, ours is awfully dependent on trust, isn’t it?”
Mangan didn’t answer. Hopko put her glasses back on.
“If we are to continue, I require that you demonstrate trust. No more freelancing. No more pootling off on your own. And please, for God’s sake, spare us the theorising. You will do what we need you to do, when we need you to do it. Can you live with that?”
“How did you know I was in Suriname?”
Hopko gave a little barking laugh.
“Oh Philip, honestly. Sometimes you’re such a wily operator, and sometimes you’re innocent as the day you were born. Posthumus is one of ours, for heaven’s sake. Has been for years. At least on weekdays. Weekends and high holidays, well, I have no idea who he works for. He can spot people like you a mile off. We got a rather amusing note from him. In it, he described a tall, red-headed, odiferous Englishman with cover skimpier than a whore’s knickers. Did it ring any bells? To which we said, Ah, it’s Philip Mangan, last heard of fleeing a flap in Thailand with a bad case of the sulks. What’s he doing? To which Posthumus replied, He’s sniffing around T. Y. Teng, lawyer to the global kleptocracy and suspected channeller of covert funds to Chinese intelligence networks.”
Patterson had shrunk back, and Mangan could see, beyond Hopko’s glassy glibness, her capacity for contempt.
“I got this far,” he said.
“Oh, you did. We’re just wondering what you might have broken in the process. Those goons in Paramaribo were chasing you for a reason. You exposed yourself by talking to the girl, Philip. You showed too much leg. Teng got a peek of you. That means everyone else associated with this network now has wind of you. Might I ask how you feel about that, knowing what the same people have done here in Washington? With poison, for heaven’s sake. Poison! Bloody ludicrous.”
“Are you asking me if I’m too concerned for my own safety to go on?”
“Well, believe me you’ll be signing something that limits our liability if you do, dear.”
And Mangan saw, in her look, that she knew exactly how much he wanted it.
There was the usual business about communications. Brendan took his laptop, installed encryption software on it, walked him through new protocols, took him down into darknet and made him work them, for practice. Hopko sat very still, listened. Mangan forced himself to concentrate. The sandy-haired man brought ham and cheese sandwiches and a bag of pretzels, and coffee, which Hopko sampled and declared unpalatable. “Honestly, Micky, can’t we do a tiny bit better?” Patterson ingested hers rapidly and without complaint, caught Mangan smiling at her stolid, soldierly chomping, and made a what are you looking at? face. Sheets of rain thrashed the window.
The timing and location of the meeting with Pearl would be up to him. He’d be reserved, diffident, even, letting her come to him. Get her talking, Philip. Do what you do, be the reporter. Listen. Listen with every strand of your being. Listen for every word, every inflection, every little current of anxiety running through her speech. Don’t look for answers; she won’t have any. Look for possibility. Look for where she might take us, what she might offer. Don’t rush her; walk her slowly, slowly towards the summit.
They came close to an argument over Patterson’s role. Hopko deemed her non-operational, that she would have a communications and liaison role only, but he insisted she be available for him, that she walk through it with him. They went back and forth on it, and then Hopko suddenly relented, as if she’d meant to all along, and Patterson gave him a look that said, Thank you, and I’m slightly surprised.
“Do I tell her who I am, who we are?” he’d asked.
“You tell her that you are exactly who she needs you to be,” said Hopko.
Patterson drove him back into DC, winding around the Beltway and cutting up through town, along Independence, across the mall and north, watching the mirrors. It was afternoon, and he was drained. The rain stopped and the sky cleared to a metallic blue, and as they drove, Mangan looked out at the vast, grey federal buildings, saw them as monuments, eulogies to a senile state, to a kind of power that was leaking away into a digital abyss.
At Brookland, near the flat, she pulled over.
“What’s the backstory, Trish?” he said.
“What do you mean? What backstory?”
“What’s Hopko not saying? Will you tell me?”
“Is she not saying something?”
“Yes, of course, for God’s sake. She’s holding back. You know perfectly well she is. What the fuck is other operational contingencies?”
He saw her sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Do you remember what I said to you, in Addis?”
She was looking straight ahead, watchful.
“I told you that you were the only person with whom I had an honest relationship,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“It’s still true,” he said. “I lie to everyone else.”
“Yet you choose the life. Here you are, again.”
“I know, I know.” He shrugged. “Isn’t that just the strangest fucking thing? Why is that?”
She turned to look at him, and he found those dark eyes locked on him, full of wariness.
“Why?” she said. “Because you’re looking for your own story, full of sound and fury. All tragic and manly and full of meaning. And you think you get redeemed at the end.”
He couldn’t think of any response.
“But you don’t,” she said. “There aren’t any endings. There never were. And there’s no audience, Philip. It’s just you and me.”
Pearl,
I would like to meet you on Saturday, three days from now. Do you like frozen yogurt? Perhaps you could be at the Sweet Frog frozen yogurt store, off New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, at 3:40 p.m. I’d like you to take a seat and wait for me, even if I am late. If I haven’t come by 4 p.m., you should leave, and I will contact you again to make a different arrangement. Is that okay?
I hope everything is all right with you, and I’m looking forward to seeing you again, and hearing about everything that’s been going on.
All the best,
Philip
37
Patterson had been on the road since ten in the morning, checking her own back. She was in a swept Service car. She’d had her flat swept. She’d changed her secure handheld for a new one. She’d sat in a rattling metro car for an hour, far out into Maryland, bobbed and weaved, taken cabs. Where was the surveillance now? In the days since she’d encountered the fatuous watchers downtown, she’d not seen them again.
Perhaps they were no longer there.
Perhaps that’s an assumption that gets operations blown, that invites a dusting of thallium on your pancakes, a spoonful in your tea. She felt a clenching in her chest, the surge of heat on her skin, her breaths coming faster. For God’s sake, stop it. She put her hands on the wheel, controlled her breathing. Am I really losing it?
She’d taken up this static post at two. She’d shopped in a drug store and a grocery, buying a paper cup of thin, bitter coffee, and then sitting in her car, watching the weekend hours play out in a suburban strip mall: the SUVs disgorging bright-eyed children in soccer strips, ballet costumes, martial arts kits, herded by mothers in sunglasses and yoga pants, laden with tote bags. A Latino family headed for the bowling alley, the kids capering and jumping. A woman on a mobility scooter argued with a man on a motorbike. A homeless man sat on a milk crate holding a saucepan.
For a moment she thought she’d seen something, a young
couple, dishevelled, tattooed, who’d lingered in a way that wasn’t right—too much movement to them, too much awareness, anxiety. But in the end, having watched them pace and slouch and shiver for twenty minutes, she’d realised their demeanour was chemically induced, and they were waiting for a deal, or a mark, maybe. They walked to a black camper van and drove away.
She exhaled and signalled, Clear. They’d brought in two other watchers, but she couldn’t see them, only hear the clicks in her earpiece as they signalled back. Clear. She’d asked for more, planned a full three-sixty, but Hopko had said no. A light footprint, as light as possible, she’d said. And if that made them vulnerable, so be it. The locals must not notice a thing, and if they did, the consequences were too awful to contemplate, apparently, though Hopko was not disposed to explain why.
At 3:17 p.m., a woman of Asian appearance entered the frozen yogurt store, but she did not resemble Mangan’s description of the girl, and she emerged immediately with her purchase in a paper cup, and Patterson signalled, Not her, then took another walk around the parking lot. She moved the car, parking it in a space some sixty feet from the entrance to Sweet Frog Frozen Yogurt. The store was an odd, unpractised choice on Mangan’s part—too small, not sufficiently anonymous for her taste. But, well, here they were, the operation small, full of holes, her stomach a churning pit.
At 3:38 p.m. precisely, a young woman of Asian appearance emerged from a red Honda Civic, looked both ways and crossed to the sidewalk, heading for Sweet Frog. Patterson sat up, eyeing her. She was dressed in a light blue fleece and faded jeans and a pair of pink sneakers. Her hair was shoulder length, tied in a ponytail. She wore thick, silver-framed glasses. To Patterson’s austere, over-observant eye, she appeared unfit—not overweight but untoned, soft, a little ungainly, round shouldered; a pale complexion, suggestive of an indoor life, artificial light. A woman who did not care greatly for appearances, or who perhaps had never mastered the art of creating them. She was walking towards the store now, and towards Patterson’s car. Patterson got a good look at her face, and saw there mobility, a quickness of expression, and apprehension, too.