by Adam Brookes
Hopko sat. “Shall we?”
“I would draw your attention to two things.” Patterson could feel her tone of voice slipping into military. Calm down, she thought, it’s not a bloody O-group. She cleared her throat. “Charteris requested traces on keywords ‘night’ and ‘heron.’ Those terms are associated with a network known as PAN GLINT. Long defunct. It was an emergency signal, to be delivered by phone or letter.”
Hopko was skimming the papers in front of her with a pen.
“Second, we all know the newspaper Philip Mangan represents, and we all know that its Beijing bureau for a while played host to an officer of this Service, operating under natural cover. PAN GLINT was handled by that officer.”
Silence. Which Patterson looked to fill.
“Hence, perhaps, the contact’s insistence he was an old friend of the paper.”
“Perhaps.” Drinkwater of Security, looking at her. “Sorry, Trish, can we be a bit more specific? When, exactly, was this PAN GLINT network in operation?”
“From 1985 to 1989.”
“Bit of a blast from the past, isn’t it? Who were they?”
“PAN GLINT targeted China’s aerospace research. They were aerospace engineers. Five of them. All graduate students at the big academies in Haidian. Rocketry, telemetry, metallurgy. The lead agent, and cut-out for the rest of them, was codenamed WINDSOCK. The ‘night heron’ code was WINDSOCK’s emergency signal. He handled the product and contacts with the case officer.”
“Officers, plural, surely,” murmured Hopko.
“And do we know who that officer was? Or officers?” said Drinkwater.
“No.” Initial traces had taken Patterson no further than cover names.
Hopko turned to Drinkwater, took off her glasses. “But I’d warrant, Simon, it was Sonia and Malcolm Clarke.”
“Really? Good lord.” Drinkwater seemed wrong-footed. The temperature in the room had risen a notch, but Patterson had no idea why.
Waverley, of Requirements, began. “Obvious question, what happened to PAN GLINT?”
“PAN GLINT fell apart in late eighty-eight and into eighty-nine,” said Patterson. “Less and less active. No contact reports after March eighty-nine. WINDSOCK was reported disappeared in mid-eighty-nine. One of them killed himself. The others stopped responding.”
Hopko swiveled on her chair. “After the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and June fourth, everything came to a halt, I think. The Clarkes left that year, a few months after the shootings. So.”
“And Mangan. What do we know about him?” This from Drinkwater of Security, impatiently.
“Not much.” Patterson gave herself a mental kick for not having a biography. “You’ll have seen his copy. Reliable journalist. Some way from greatness in his profession.”
“But decent, though, isn’t he?” Hopko leaned forward, looked expectant. “I think his stuff is rather good.”
“Why, Val? Why’s it good?” said Drinkwater.
Hopko sat back, dangling her glasses. “Because he’s thoughtful. Some investigative pieces of his in the paper told me things I didn’t know. And those arrests in Jiangxi, all those poor bloody Followers. He was the only journalist who got himself there, I think. Rather resourceful of him. And the pictures were extraordinary.”
“No previous with the Service?” said Drinkwater.
“None,” said Patterson.
“All right, everyone. Can we go round, please?”
Hopko’s Fancies, they called her insistence on hearing every possible explanatory narrative, no matter how far-fetched, wringing each one dry before throwing it away. “Trish?”
“Well, let’s take this man at face value,” began Patterson. “Let’s say he was an asset, twenty years ago, more. He’s back. We don’t know where he’s been, what he wants or what he’s got. But the approach to the bureau and the recognition code tell us he’s real.”
Hopko was jotting notes. “But twenty years?”
“Any number of reasons. A new opportunity. New needs. Middle age.”
Hopko looked at her. “So age makes traitors of us, does it?”
“No. He was a traitor already,” said Patterson. “Age makes us want to revisit. Doesn’t it?”
Hopko nodded. “Point. Tom?”
Waverley, Requirements Officer, would write up and distribute the product from any operation, Patterson knew. R officers stripped away the nonsense, the delusions, deflated the grandiosity of the agent, the credulity of the agent runner. She watched him balance skeptical with collegial.
“I’ll go for nasty,” he said. “It’s Ministry of State Security. They’ve found out about PAN GLINT. Or maybe they knew all along. They’ve sweated WINDSOCK for his tradecraft, and now they’re pushing someone back at us.”
“What for?” said Patterson.
Waverley shrugged. “Mischief-making. Disruption. Distracting us from other things. Why does anyone ever run a counter-intelligence operation?”
“And why would it be someone else, Tom? Couldn’t they have just turned WINDSOCK? They could be pushing him back at us,” said Hopko.
“They could indeed. But normally they just shoot them, don’t they, rather than try to turn them. MSS tends to feel they’re trouble, double agents.”
Hopko was silent. Waverley cocked his head at her.
“Val, I have the worrying impression you would like to pursue this,” he said.
Drinkwater snorted. Hopko turned to him and crossed her legs.
“Simon. Please. Save me from myself.”
Drinkwater shook his head and adopted a tone of patient explanation.
“It’s just the usual. The locals are trying to flush out natural cover officers among the foreign journalists. Or at least they’re looking for links between the journalists and the local stations. Smoking out freelancers or whatever. So they throw out a marker—some cute little recognition code, for example—to see where it goes.”
Hopko was poker-faced and said nothing. So it fell to Patterson, who abhorred a vacuum.
“That doesn’t really explain the fact that the recognition code was valid, though, does it?” she said.
Drinkwater didn’t look at her, spoke directly to Hopko. “Well, I dare say it’s like Tom said. They got something out of WINDSOCK. Years ago, probably.”
The meeting dragged on. If Security Branch had its way, thought Patterson, the Service would not run operations because all operations were by definition threats to Service security. Drinkwater was like a man trying to drown a kitten. Patterson decided not to give up.
“We have nothing to lose,” she said. “Let me at least establish the identity of the contact. In any case we can’t approach him. He’ll come back to Mangan in his own good time.”
Drinkwater, speaking past her again, shook his head and smirked.
“Val, can we just put this out of its misery, please? Security Branch will not sanction Beijing Station chasing around after some MSS dangle.”
Hopko looked at her notes. Then, ignoring Drinkwater, turned to Patterson.
“Might I suggest we issue them both P numbers, Mangan and the contact. Put them in the system. Charteris to pay attention, signal us if the contact reappears. Let’s see what develops.”
Hopko shuffled papers and looked about her brightly. “Thank you so much, everyone.” Dismissed.
It took until late afternoon for Patterson to apply herself to WINDSOCK, or whoever he might be. She applied to Registry for two five-digit P numbers.
P77395: MANGAN, Philip. UK citizen. Age thirty-six. Beijing-based journalist as of current date. Holds a foreign correspondent’s accreditation with the Beijing authorities. Reports approach, contact unidentified, suspected BEI 72. Reference: P77396; PAN GLINT; WINDSOCK.
P77396: UNKNOWN. Presumed PRC citizen. Age unknown, reported late forties. Approached P77395 with offer of information. Possible BEI 72. Reference: P77395; PAN GLINT; WINDSOCK.
Into the system. Seeds planted.
10
&
nbsp; Beijing
Peanut bided his time in Beijing’s gray chill. He found a second-hand bookshop off the third ring road, on the ground floor of a brick apartment block. It was little more than someone’s living room. A handwritten cardboard sign pointed to it from the street. The proprietor was a bespectacled elderly man, bald, in zhongshanzhuang, the blue cotton jacket buttoned up to the throat, a throwback to socialism. Yet he was, it appeared, a man who read classical Chinese and valued the eclectic. In piles, in boxes, the Shi Jing, the Analects of Confucius, Ming dynasty novels. An electric heater in a corner lent the room a smell of scorched dust. The old man looked up at Peanut, a dim smile, then returned to the People’s Daily. A ginger cat sat on his lap and watched Peanut shuffle amid the musty classics.
He found what he wanted: a copy of the Chu Ci, the Songs of the South, in a blue paper cover stitched with cotton thread. An old friend, Qu Yuan. The ancient thinker, strategist to kings, rejected and tortured by exile. Killed himself in a river. Scraps of the poems floated to the surface of Peanut’s memory.
In spring, the orchid; in autumn, the chrysanthemum;
Eternally thus, till time’s end.
Peanut handed ten yuan from operational funds to the old man, who took it in a veined, quivering hand. Then he gestured, as if to make Peanut wait a moment.
“This is good. If you like a challenge.” The bookseller’s voice was a dry rustle. He reached slowly for a brown volume and held it out. “I was given a whole box. Take one, if you like.”
Peanut took the book. Tai Bai Yin Jing. The Hidden Book of Venus. No, not smut, military affairs, a Tang dynasty treatise. Peanut nodded, faintly disappointed.
“Well, thank you.”
“It’s quite a work.” The old man was regarding Peanut intently, and now made an effort to stand, palms flat on the desk, pushing himself up. “Forgive me, but do I know you?”
Peanut turned away, flustered, then was gone, back on to the street. He looked back just once. The bookseller was at the window, watching. Peanut moved quickly in the twilight.
To a photo shop. Where he paid fourteen yuan and posed against a white background, and an acned, spike-haired boy told him to hold still.
“Is it for a passport?”
“You could say that,” replied Peanut as the flash died in streaks of color across his retina.
Then back to Fangzhuang, and the department store, where, tentatively, Peanut bought a mobile phone, the cheapest one he could find. Just as Yin had briefed him, he queued at a newspaper kiosk outside the Metro station and bought a little blue coupon to cover fifty yuan’s worth of calls.
By the time he arrived back at the Blue Diamond, trade was picking up, and Dandan Mama greeted him wordlessly with open palms, as if to say, where have you been? Yin sat before a mirror, brushing her hair. Peanut walked, unhurried, to the storeroom, took off his coat and dropped the two books on the mattress. Then he took up his position, on the stool by the beaded curtain. He lit a cigarette. Yin brushed past him, avoiding his eye, a young man in a baseball cap shuffling behind her.
And so on, into the night. The girls lounged in the salon or sometimes walked for a moment or two along the tiled steps outside, their breath steaming on the air. The rattling television showed a soap. A chiseled tycoon in a tuxedo argued passionately with his simpering, ringletted lover, mouth like a rosebud, the set a Shanghai mansion with Grecian statues and high gates.
Peanut, silent, watched the migrant workers slouch through the curtain. Some were in twos and threes, reeking of sorghum spirit. More of them were alone.
Peanut composed, in his mind, another letter.
And later, when he’d locked the front door, turned off the neon lights and cleaned the ashtrays, he watched Yin insert the battery and plug the phone in to charge. Slowly, as if to a recalcitrant child, she explained to Peanut the significance of the coupon, how to activate his account. She looked disdainfully at the little device.
“You’re not going to impress anyone with that,” she said. He took notes as she told him how to make a call, how to answer one.
It was Sunday morning and Mangan spooned coffee from a tin. The “bureau” was silent and chilly. Pajamas, again, and he sat at the desk looking through the Xinhua News Agency copy, pawing the papers, wondering if anything might do for his Monday edition. Top Chinese official urges transformation of economic development mode! Or perhaps Vice Premier urges Gansu cadres to stress stability! No?
A key rattled in the front door and Ting bustled in, red-cheeked. She wore a silvery padded jacket and long leather boots with heels.
“It’s almost winter, Philip! Dongtian, a!” She set down a shopping bag and stood breathing heavily, smiling. She always took the stairs. “I smell coffee?”
He pointed to the kitchen. “Fresh. Why are you here? It’s Sunday.” Ting studied Kunqu, classical opera, on Sunday mornings, a big, gossipy class of socialites wrestling with The Peony Pavilion.
She wagged a finger at him as she went to the kitchen. “I’ll tell you.”
She came back and perched on the edge of the desk, hands wrapped around a steaming mug. “Go and put some clothes on.” She pointed at the wall, then her ear, mouthed just in case.
Mangan put on a hideous dressing gown decorated with giraffes, and they went out on to the balcony. It was cold. Ting took out her diary, spoke quietly. “I was at a party last night and there was a journalist in from Yunnan. Surnamed Ma. Yunnan Daily. He said he knows a village that is all Followers, some little lost place in the mountains, whole families who gave everything to the movement.” She tapped a page of hastily written notes, some phone numbers.
“Anyway, the police came and took away the young men, all at once. He spoke to some families, and the men are being held in some sort of camp. They’ve been there for months now. He told me where. I have it written down. He can’t use it, of course, so he said he’d put us in touch. As long as we keep him out of it.” She looked at Mangan, expectant.
Yunnan. A long way away. But this little scrap of hearsay had an urgency to it. It was a story.
“Better rip that page out of your diary.”
“Do you like it?”
Her look was searching.
“Of course I like it. I really like it.”
She tore the page out, handed it to Mangan as if awarding a prize, then turned away from him and went back into the apartment, arms raised in victory, fists clenched.
“But, Philip, you’ll have to make the calls on this one, yes?” She bent to gather up her bags. The sunlight caught her black hair and Mangan thought he saw other colors, greens and blues, flecked through its blackness.
“Of course,” he said.
She was reversing towards the door. “You should come to Kunqu. It’s fun. Lots of rich girls. And the glorious culture of China, obviously.”
“Why would I want lots of rich girls?”
Ting gestured to the room, its shabbiness.
“Because, in the end, poverty is not very sexy, Philip.”
Mangan smiled and made a Go! gesture, and heard the door slam and her feet clattering down the stairs. Silence again.
The knock, when it came, was soft.
Mangan stood and crossed to the door, pulling his dressing gown tight. Through the peep hole he saw a man dressed in dark-blue coveralls splashed with paint. He carried a pot of paint and a brush, and had his back to the door, so Mangan could not see his face. Mangan opened the door and the man turned.
“Mr. Mang An. Sorry to trouble you. You remember me?”
Mangan took in the bulk, the bristled hair.
“I believe I do.”
The man went into Mandarin. He smiled and made deferential movements, the half-bow, the open hands.
“Sorry again to trouble you. I would like to speak to you very briefly. May I come inside?”
Mangan stalled. “I am afraid we don’t really have anything to talk about. I am very busy.”
The man’s eyes flickered quickly dow
nward over the absurd dressing gown, the bare, enormous feet.
“Of course. I am sorry. But Mr. Mang An, events are moving very fast. It’s important you know what is happening. This affects you.” With this the man straightened up and pointed at Mangan. “These events affect you, Mr. Mang An.”
“What events are you talking about?”
The man took a half-step forward and gestured to the inside of the apartment. “Inside, please.”
Mangan reluctantly moved to one side. Oh, mistake, he thought.
The man moved quickly into the apartment. Mangan closed the door. The man took a white envelope from inside his coveralls. His hands were smeared with black paint.
“Mr. Mang An. I am giving you an envelope.” He spoke quietly, barely above a whisper. “Inside is one letter, one photograph and a document, two pages. The letter will explain everything. Please read it. And understand, Mr. Mang An, that I deal only with you. Nobody else.”
“You are not dealing with me. I cannot accept anything from you.” Mangan held his hands up. “You must leave now.”
The man just smiled. He walked across the room and put the envelope on the desk. Mangan had the sense of having lost control. “Leave now, please.”
The man was already at the door, and then was gone. The entire exchange had taken under two minutes, yet Mangan felt manipulated, almost physically, as if the man had picked him up bodily and turned him around. Annoyed, he turned, and went to the balcony. He saw the coveralled figure with its powerful, rolling gait, carrying its paint pot, moving fast towards the north gate, walking past the guards and back on to the street. How did he get in?
On the desk was the envelope, a smear of black paint on it. Mangan picked it up and dropped it in the waste bin. Then bent and took it out. The envelope was blank and sealed with tape. Are there consequences if I open this? he thought.
He held the envelope to his nose and smelled it. Paint.
Yes. I will know something that I do not know now. That is a consequence.
He waited. Then opened a desk drawer and took out a pair of scissors.