by Adam Brookes
They really did listen. The fax really was unsafe. It really was.
And tonight, God, he’d almost forgotten, he was to meet Charteris. He left Ting in the bureau sorting through receipts and went from the compound in a dark, freezing drizzle. Jianwai Avenue was jammed, long lines of buses packed with office workers and shop girls, lumbering stop-start through the rain, the wet petroleum smell.
They met—it had become a reassuring habit—at Hot and Prickly, a small, clattering Sichuan place with plastic tablecloths and crackling red chilies strewn on the dishes. The legend in the window in red, haphazard English lettering read, “Hot and Prickly Cuisine of West China,” and the name had stuck.
Charteris was already there, still in his work suit, one arm draped across the back of the chair next to him, frowning at the menu.
“Tea-smoked duck, I think, Philip. And the lazi ji ding.” The diced chicken, in a sea of glistening chilies to shatter the sinuses. “And the pea sprouts in garlic, yes?”
Mangan ordered cold mugs of beer, and they sat, quiet for a moment. The late autumn evening had people bustling into the restaurant blowing on their hands.
Charteris began.
“So, the Jiangxi trip a triumph?”
Mangan thought for a moment.
“On balance, yes. But we’ve used up some capital.”
“Ting okay? She’s handling the flak, I assume.”
“She’s handling it. I do worry.”
“You’re right to. She’s quite, exposed.”
“I know, I know. And she knows, too. But she sticks with it.”
“Why, do you think? Why does she stick with it?”
“Because she cares. Because she’s too cautious to dissent openly, but she won’t buy into the system. So working for me, well, she has distance, and perhaps it isn’t entirely pointless. She feels she’s finding things out and telling about them.”
Charteris paused, and the duck arrived. He stuffed a napkin in his collar to protect what looked to be a very good silk tie, and seemed suddenly Edwardian. Mangan smiled, and Charteris raised his eyebrows and clicked his chopsticks together. They ate, picking out the soft, pink flesh, the crispy, aromatic skin.
“I’m not trying to tell you how to run things, Philip, but they could use her to get at you.”
“That’s true, but she can make her own decisions. Don’t patronize her.”
“Patronize her? I think I’m in love with her.” Charteris put the back of his hand to his forehead, mock dramatic.
“You and the rest of expatriate Beijing,” Mangan said. They laughed, Mangan’s laughter a touch forced, perhaps.
They talked about the fallout from the Jiangxi story and passed on political gossip, what to make of a recent Central Committee meeting, the new emphasis on stability in all the editorials. Occasionally Charteris asked something of Mangan, some detail, something he’d seen, and Mangan knew he was listening. And as they divided the bill Mangan dropped it in.
“Oh, and I think I’ve been dangled.”
Charteris, thumbing grimy yuan notes, looked up.
“Really? Very glamorous. How?”
“Yup. Grubby old man. Fat. No, big. Looked like a migrant, but sounded very Beijing. Just outside the compound. He said he was an old friend of the paper.”
And it was there, just for an instant, Mangan thought he saw something flicker through Charteris’s eyes. Mangan pushed on.
“Said, in portentous fashion, that information was coming.”
Charteris was looking at the bill.
“Nothing I should worry about, right? Happens all the time.”
Charteris nodded. “Yes. Yes, pretty common. If you’re worried I can flag it in the embassy, with those who, um, know.”
“Who’s doing it?”
“Well, not my trade. But probably MSS, State Security, just testing you. Wanting to see if you’ll bite. Did he offer specific information? Documents or anything? Sometimes they do.”
“No, but he said one other thing, David. He talked about birds. Night herons. The night heron is hunting.”
Charteris smiled now, amused. “My. Very mysterious. But don’t forget, Philip, that chap at the Los Angeles Times had someone offering him bio-weapons secrets. So yours, I’m afraid, seems rather innocuous by comparison.”
Mangan, back in the cold apartment, left the lights off and stood by the window with a rare cigarette and a tumbler of vodka. He had a pair of binoculars, and sometimes scanned the windows of the Jianguomenwai apartments for activity in the dark. He did now. An Indian second secretary was being served dinner on a small metallic dish by his loving wife. The Colombian family opposite were hanging their washing to dry: trousers, a slip. Philip Mangan, observer of life from a distance, of small figures engaged in mundane tasks. He lay on the sofa, watched the orange light from Jianwai Avenue quiver on the ceiling. He called Milam of the Los Angeles Times.
“You didn’t tell me you’d been dangled.”
“Dangled? Is that, like, a professional term?” Milam, the dark Californian, nonchalant, smart, on his mobile phone somewhere, the signal breaking into digital squelch; music, laughter in the background.
“What happened?” said Mangan.
“Actually, I’m not supposed to say.”
“What? You’re a journalist. Of course you’re supposed to bloody say.”
“Nope. The folks in Spook City told me.” Spook City. The brown windowless, concrete monstrosity on the old U.S. Embassy grounds, widely assumed to be the home of the CIA, NSA, DIA and every other A. “Say nothing, they said. So here I am, saying nothing.”
“But was it just once, or did it go on?”
“Few weeks. The guy kept turning up with all this secret shit.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“Fuck off, spook man.”
“Simple as that?”
“Sure.”
Charteris had waved Mangan off, hailed a taxi in the drizzle, then changed his mind. He crossed Jianwai Avenue and walked quickly north, back to the embassy. At the gate, a curt nod to the guard and he was buzzed through, leaving his mobile phone in the rack. Mid-evening, the building was silent now. An elevator, and at the end of the third-floor corridor, a heavy, silver steel door. A swipe and a punch code opened it with a click and a sigh.
Charteris entered the windowless space that was the exclusive domain of the Secret Intelligence Service.
The gray walls and blue carpet gave way to stranger features: a glass conference room slightly elevated from the floor with its own heavy door; computer screens that rested atop large metallic cases, a console of illuminated keys facing the user; telephones wired into the console; a server blinking in one corner, its hum against the deadening silence of the room; a row of black safes.
Charteris settled at a desk and turned on his screen.
The date. A reference number.
FM CX BEIJING
TO LONDON
TO TCI/29611
TO P/64815
FILE REF C/FE
FILE REF R/84459
FILE REF SB/38972
LEDGER UK S E C R E T
ROUTINE
/REPORT
1. BEI 2 met Philip MANGAN, UK journalist, Beijing-based. The meeting was pre-arranged and routine. MANGAN is well known to BEI 2, and, while freelance, holds a current accreditation and files regularly for a major London title and for a small television news agency.
2. MANGAN informed BEI 2 of what he suspected was an approach from BEI 72. MANGAN said he suspected he was being “dangled.”
3. MANGAN described contact as middle-aged, male, heavily built, Beijing accent, but with the physical appearance of migrant, understood by BEI 2 to mean shabby, poorly dressed, down at heel. Contact approached MANGAN outside compound where MANGAN resides, gave no name, introduced himself as “an old friend of the paper.” Contact told MANGAN “information was coming.”
4. Contact used what appeared to be a recognition signal: “THE NIGHT HERON I
S HUNTING.”
5. Given the atypical nature of contact, the history of the title’s Beijing bureau and its past affiliation with FU, BEI 2 recommends further action.
6. Grateful for traces on keywords: NIGHT, HERON/HERONS, HUNT/HUNTS/HUNTING.
/ENDS
Charteris saved the telegram and punched a series of keys on the console. Some red LEDs blinked on the server, and the telegram, encrypted, was gone.
The telegram arrived in London late afternoon ZULU, or UK time. Decrypted, it was directed to a section of the Secret Intelligence Service known as P/C, which stood for Production/China. In the P section the telegram was read by an Intelligence Officer, who sat straight-backed in a gray cubicle before two computer screens angled in such a way that the wandering gaze of a passing colleague might not see what was displayed upon them, and a computer tower that had been carefully modified to ensure no electromagnetic leakage.
Patterson marked the telegram for distribution and attention the following day. Then she read it again and sat back in her chair.
Curious, this one, she thought. Nothing here that fitted the protocols of any current or recent operation, or at least none she was aware of. And what’s clever, sardonic Charteris doing tarting about with a journalist?
She stood and stretched to her full, considerable, height, flexed her shoulders.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll do the traces.
She logged off, cleared her desk, slid her files into a black safe, and, to satisfy one of the Service’s more absurd rules, double-checked that her worktop was clear of even a single scrap of paper.
She walked from the building into a cool, fine drizzle, a dull London twilight, quickly falling to darkness. She walked fast across Vauxhall Bridge, the rain beading on her wool coat, the river black beneath her.
The Tube was packed and leadenly slow and she stood the whole way, and changed carriages twice, just to make sure, as was her habit. She was alone.
At Archway, the little terraced house was silent, and she climbed the stairs in darkness to her flat, let herself in. The place was cold. She turned the heating up and stood for a moment, looking from the kitchen window. London was spread out before her, bathing in its orange sodium glow. She dropped her bag, turned the light on, walked through to the bedroom. The flat was warming now, ticking and creaking. She stood in front of the mirror and took off her black business suit, the cropped jacket, the sensible trousers, and hung them up carefully. She pulled her halter top over her head, smoothed her hair, pulled it back off her forehead and crimped it tight into a bun, the way she’d worn it in the army, beneath her beret. In her underwear she surveyed herself, looked for failings, loss of muscle tone, slackening in those wide shoulders, creeping flab beneath the taut dark skin. Her army years had given her core and upper body a power that was hard to maintain now. The punishing pace of life as an Intelligence Officer of SIS did nothing to help, its unpredictability, its long hours in the glow of the screen, the jolts of stress from unexpected directions. She bent from the waist, tried to touch the palms of her hands to the floor, hung there exhaling, then dropped to front support position and attempted a few half-hearted press-ups. She had a sense of something leaking away from her, something to be gathered in, regained.
She showered and pulled on a blue toweling dressing gown, put a frozen quiche in the microwave, poured a glass of rioja to the brim. She ate standing in the kitchen, the fork rattling against the plastic tray. She reflected on her day. She had reviewed an approach by officers of Tokyo Station to a Chinese diplomat with a view to possible recruitment; she had distributed a brief report on the fate of a Chinese general found passing documents to Taiwanese intelligence: he was shot; and she had read the odd telegram from Beijing Station, which nagged at her.
7
Beijing
Peanut put on his jacket and shirt and slacks and shoes and overcoat and worried in front of the bathroom mirror. The clothes were new and synthetic against his weathered, fibrous skin. They looked unnatural. It was twenty-six days since he had emerged dripping from the gravel pit.
He proceeded down the corridor and through the beaded curtain that would, he knew, expose him to further examination. Sure enough, Dandan Mama and Chef were there, sat warming their hands around mugs of tea. It was a bright cold morning, the metallic surfaces of the salon gleamed in the sunlight and the steam rose from the mugs. Their eyes followed him through the salon as he headed for the door. Chef smirked, his rheumy eyes shining.
“Is it a wedding?”
Dandan Mama laughed. But he was through the front door and gone quickly. The street was uncomfortable and he kept his eyes down. Move.
A longish walk to a subway station, made longer by his cutting back on himself twice and stopping at a fast food joint, to see if anybody stopped with him. No one did, that he could tell. He moved with the morning crowd down the steps into the Metro station. At the kiosk he fumbled. Change? How much? Fare card? A few stares. A blowsy uniformed attendant with bright lipstick and tattooed eyebrows, frowning, jostled him to the turnstiles. Peanut sensed his own lack of congruence, the new clothes, the missing assurance, and knew others sensed it too.
He stepped on to the escalator, the slow, even descent, monitored, he now noticed, by a camera mounted on the ceiling, each and every face passing slowly through its field of vision. Look down? Too late.
Forty minutes on the subway. He changed carriages repeatedly.
At the Pingguoyuan terminus in the city’s far west, he emerged into the cold, glistening morning, the Western Hills rising up in front of him. A rattletrap white minibus—FINE TOURISTIC AND BEAUTY TEMPLES stenciled in red on the door—for twelve yuan would drop him at the Jie Tai Temple, the driver beckoning from his window. But he took public bus 931, slower, less memorable.
By nine, he was climbing the stone steps into the temple complex. A weekday, and cold, so few visitors. Deep ocher pavilions amid gnarled trees, dank moss cascading down the walls, paths of flagstones sprouting weeds, but all in much better repair than he remembered. The last time he was here the temple was a curiosity, a place for picnics, a long bicycle ride from the university campus. He remembered baozi and warm beer from the bottle, the whirring cicadas of summer. Now, however, the temple seemed to be regaining its original purpose. He entered a dark pavilion. Inside, atop an altar, a golden Maitreya, pungent pink sticks of smoldering incense and some oranges. He stepped out into the courtyard. No one. Silence, wind in the trees.
On, to the north-west corner of the complex. Through a shadowed gateway, a glimpse of a huge marble altar. The Temple of the Ordination Altar, he remembered, where monks of the Pure Land School had been ordained for centuries. And, good heavens, there was one now. Peanut caught a glimpse of an orange robe and a shaved head, half-running towards a shabby low brick structure by the temple wall, sandals flapping, clutching a styrofoam lunch box. He wondered at the return of monks, of belief.
He stood for a moment. In front of him was the rear gate. It led out into pine trees on the sloping rocky hillside. Peanut walked a way into the trees, and, not far from a soaring, ancient pine, sat down, lit a cigarette and waited.
He sat for an hour or so on the soft pine needles. Until, hurrying along the temple wall, just this side of furtive, came a man with a distinguished look, the billowing silver hair a little less fulsome now, perhaps, but still to the collar. Those finely drawn features, the delicate mouth, a mouth made for the expression of subtlety, for fine distinctions.
Perhaps twenty meters from Peanut, the man stopped and bent at the base of a pine. From his bag he removed a packet of incense sticks, some peaches, some packets of red spirit money and what appeared to be an entire roast duck. Peanut sat still and watched the man. Then, slowly, Peanut drew from his pocket the little plastic bag cinched at the top with a rubber band that he had carried all these years. He took out the yellowed newspaper clipping with its mottled, smeary image, as if to confirm what he already knew.
The man in the
ancient photograph was now kneeling a short distance away from him, taking a lighter, igniting a fistful of incense sticks, planting them in the ground amid the pine needles. Beside the incense he placed the fruit, and next to the fruit, reverently, the duck. He clasped his hands before him and bowed three times. He mouthed something Peanut couldn’t hear. He lit the spirit money, which burned and tumbled across the forest floor, the smoke acrid on the cold air. As the spirit money smoldered and died, the distinguished man sat back on his heels, a half-smile on his face. He looked reflective.
Now, thought Peanut. He stood.
“Wen Jinghan!” he called.
The distinguished man, startled, looked up, started to get to his feet. Peanut walked towards him, arms out in welcome, his best imitation of astonishment and gratification all over his face.
“Jinghan, you came.” Peanut kept moving forward. The distinguished man was looking hard at him, frowning, standing straight now, assertive.
“I’m sorry, who is it?”
“It’s me. Li Huasheng.”
The distinguished man reeled, almost physically, but recovered fast.
“Huasheng! Good God. Is that you?”
“Yes! I knew I would find you here. Today.” Peanut grinned like a madman, gestured towards the incense, the duck.
“You remembered. My father.”
“Of course I remembered. I came here with you to scatter his ashes, didn’t I? You said you’d always come. Every year. And here you are. I admire that, Jinghan, very much. You are truly a good son, a filial son.”
The silver-haired man was gathering himself, Peanut could see. They stood perhaps six feet apart, Peanut with his arms out, as if on the verge of attempting to embrace Professor Wen Jinghan, his old, treasured friend. Or perhaps to crush the life out of him. The distinguished man was tensed, ready to retreat fast.