by Adam Brookes
Then came exile to an English boarding school outside Stoke, where, displaying a mix of Slav doggedness and Levantine flair, dark, stocky Val mastered the sodden hockey pitch, the calamitous diet, the dreary timetable. Her admiring housemistress would have been taken aback when Val had insisted on Leeds University. Leeds? My dear girl, we were thinking of Girton for you. No, Leeds. For Val wanted to study Chinese under Skinner, in the Leeds Chinese department, lodged in its little Victorian house adrift in a sea of campus concrete, where languid, incisive Bob Skinner would have taught her to read and immersed her in history and forced her to think about dictatorship, and power.
On weekends she would drive a senile Austin Princess up into the Lakes, it was said, and march for hours across the fells.
And when the Service clapped eyes on her, it fell, no doubt, into a swoon.
Then, of course, the picture went dark. Glimpses of Hopko as an operational officer—rumors of a stint in the Gulf running an agent deep inside OPEC. Negotiating positions. Production quotas. Oil futures. Product that could save the British exchequer billions. And where she was rumored to have recruited a skittish Arab general, who, while screaming in public for Israel’s annihilation, played geopolitical footsie under the table with Val and her quiet, predatory Service.
Later a China posting under diplomatic cover. Hong Kong. Then the Middle East again. Visiting Case Officer, London-based. And then, well, something. Something that, if it were known what transpired, might explain why Roly Yeats sat in the seat marked Head of Controllerate and Valentina Hopko did not. Or was Val merely guilty of that very particular offence: serving while female? Patterson did not know.
She left the motorway, drove down a silent, dark back road, hemmed in by beech woods.
Patterson, the little girl from the council estate in Nottingham, had never had a mentor. There had been teachers at her shabby secondary school, good, tired, harassed people, who had pushed her. But hers was not an upbringing in which watchful elders offered grooming and patronage. She remembered showing her parents the university admissions forms, asking them their advice. They’d been in the sitting room, looking at the television. She remembered them fingering the forms, their blank, almost fearful expression, their eyes skittering back to the screen, her own embarrassment. She’d taken the forms to her bedroom and filled them out alone in ballpoint pen, and was dumbfounded when Coventry offered her a place.
In her second year, she’d started taking courses in Chinese, and surprised herself. The rote learning, the endless study of characters, piles of flashcards teetering on her desk, spilling from her backpack, suited her temperament.
And in her third year an army recruiting team visited the campus, bluff, solid men in polo shirts and fleeces. They showed her brochures and asked her what her plans were. One, a warrant officer, came to watch her at the judo club. She laid it on thick in the randori, brought a girl down hard with her hip throw, put her in a choke till she submitted, showed the warrant officer her speed and litheness, her capacity for aggression. When she bowed and left the mat, adjusting her belt, he gave her a round of silent applause. His look said, I’m impressed. They went to the student union bar, sat at a plastic table, and he bought her a shandy. He asked her about 9/11, what she thought, and he listened without patronizing her. He asked her if she’d ever thought about Sandhurst. She felt seen.
She emerged from the beech woods on to sudden, open uplands, the frost heavier here, lacing the hedgerows in white. Ahead of her, its tower rising through a stand of trees, gold in low sunlight, an abbey.
She pulled in before a half-timbered cottage in the center of the village, its thatch low over mullioned windows, stone boxes spilling some flower of searing blue. The village of Brightwell, silent, soaked now in afternoon winter light. Patterson stretched in the crisp air, took it in. A pub—The Black Boy, for heaven’s sake. A post office, a green. Notices tacked to a telephone pole declared a coming winter festival and choirs at the abbey, and urged Brightwell to compost. She knocked at the cottage door to no response. A piece of notepaper lay on the step.
I’m over at the abbey! The Cloister Tea Room!
She walked to the abbey, negotiating the cobblestones in her heels. The abbey’s interior was vast, ancient and plain, filled with hushed activity. A scaffold stood next to an expanse of whitewashed east wall. On its platforms of wooden plank, three women in overalls kneeled or lay on their stomachs. Under light from a powerful halogen lamp, they picked at the plaster with tiny steel implements. Where the plaster had been removed, Patterson could see a faint reddish outline on exposed wall, some ancient fresco revealed inch by agonizing inch.
She asked in a stage whisper, “The Tea Room?”
One of the women, portly, wearing a red headscarf, smiled and gestured to a sign. The Cloister.
The Tea Room was quiet, with a scattering of elderly couples dressed in hiking gear, murmuring. It was cool, the air smelled of stone. Patterson, in her business suit, sat before a table spread with fruit cakes, torte, macaroons. A tall, pale matron in half-moon spectacles poured her a cup of tea the consistency, it seemed to Patterson, of a light crude.
“Just take what you like, and tell us what you had at the end, and we’ll tot it up. I’ll tell her you’re here,” said Half-moon. Carrying the teapot, she went to a doorway and lent in.
“Your visitor is here, Sons darling.” And then more quietly, “She seems very… metropolitan.”
Patterson waited. From the doorway came a woman untying an apron. She wore her gray hair clipped short, and a blue cardigan over a white shirt. A hint of stiffness in her walk, Patterson noticed, but elegant. A thin mouth, deep creases to her face, and the watchfulness that never quite leaves those in the trade. Her eyes found Patterson, then flickered to the door and back, before settling on her, taking her in. Then a terse nod.
“We should go back to my place, I think.” She turned and barked through the doorway. “Vivvy, I’m off.” It came out “orf.” “I should be back later on.” Patterson left too much money tucked under a plate. Half-moon watched them walk out into the cold cloister.
Sonia Clarke kneeled and pushed a burning spill into the fireplace. The fire caught quickly. A clock chimed softly in another room. There was more tea on a tray, and Patterson positioned a digital recorder among the china and sat primly on a sofa patterned with roses. She reached into her briefcase and took out a brown envelope.
Sonia stood and turned.
“Hadn’t you better show me some identification?”
“Of course, Sonia. Here we are.” Patterson handed over her Service identity card, the real one, with the diagonal red stripe, to be used only with officialdom and nosey policemen. She gave a bright, reassuring smile. “And you can call your routine contact number if you need to be sure.”
“No, that’ll do.” Her eyes were on Patterson now. “So what’s this all about?”
“Well, I want to take you back a little way.” She drew from the envelope a sheaf of photographs, all of them middle-aged Chinese men, some of them images snapped in the street, others passport photos, blown up for clarity.
“Would you mind just taking a look at these? And tell us whatever comes to mind.”
Sonia reached behind her to the mantelpiece for a pair of glasses on a gold chain. She put them on and took the photographs. She went through them, slowly, one by one. And then stopped, held one—a passport photo of a bristle-haired, sharp-eyed character—up to catch the fading light.
“Well, well,” she said. “Hello, Peanut.”
Peanut stood, mute, fascinated, furious, in the cold neon-lit night. Beyond his own reflection in the glass, a car. Lambo… a foreign word. Several of them. They were yellow, boxy and spiderish, made him think of whip-quick insects on the desert floor. A salesman held a door open, nodding appreciatively as a woman in suit and shades lowered herself, skirt riding up long legs, into the driver’s seat. She gripped the wheel and shook her hair out. An older man looked on, the smile of
ownership. Over his arm a coat of silver-gray fur, which he held for her.
Peanut watched it play out, the theater of the unattainable in the Beijing night. He had taken to coming here from time to time, when trade was quiet and Dandan Mama gave him an evening off, to Jinbao Jie, Golden Treasure Street, to watch China sell itself a new fantasy.
Earlier that cold afternoon, at a filthy underpass in Hepingmen, he had purchased a knife from a ruddy-faced, green-eyed Uighur man. It was a lethal thing, the blade narrow and double-edged, with a fuller for strength. The knife had a rubber handle and a black nylon sheath, military issue.
The Uighur, unsmiling, had taken his money and counted it twice.
“Be careful who sees it.” The man’s breath had steamed in the cold air.
“Oh, I will.”
“They don’t like it, the cops.”
“I know.”
“Don’t use it on anyone.”
“What are you, the Discipline Inspection Commission?”
The Uighur had looked at him.
“Don’t be clever. You don’t look like you can run very fast.”
Peanut had shaken his head, turned away. As he had walked off, he saw the graffiti again, sprayed on the underpass, the woman in the hideous goggles. THREATEN. The stencil was perfect, the image urgent.
“We encountered him first at English corner.” Sonia Clarke sat back in her chair and looked at the fire as she spoke. Patterson sat still, allowing the memories to come, only occasionally prodding. Outside the winter dusk was setting in, and the room was darkening.
“Beijing used to have these places, in parks sometimes, or just on streets, where people would gather to practice their English. English corners, they were called. Learning English was everything. They’d watch a television program called Follow Me and then go to English corner and practice. It was allowed by then. Encouraged, even. Well, for us, it was a goldmine. A couple of journalists, helping out the locals with their English, chatting them up a bit at the same time. All very above board. There were snitches there, of course, but it didn’t matter. It was a way of building acquaintance, you see, which was very hard to do in China back then. I told Malcolm, I said, we’ll find people there, targets. He didn’t think so, but I told him. And I was right.”
“Which year was this, Sonia?”
“Eighty-four. There was an English corner in Ritan Park. It was just a short walk from Jianwai, where we had that bloody flat. I’d go down there and chat with whoever turned up. We met Peanut in October, gorgeous Beijing autumn. I know that because it was just after National Day, the huge parade that year, through Tiananmen. Thousands of troops, tanks, these ghastly floats celebrating hydro-electricity or sorghum production or what have you. Deng Xiaoping was up there on the gate taking the salute. Anyway, a few days after that was the first time I saw Peanut at English corner. Li Huasheng. He was sparky, intense. A bit fat, which was unusual. He was trying his damnedest to enthuse about the parade in English. I said to him, ‘What did you like best? The tanks? The floats?’ And he shook his head and wagged his finger at me, and he said, ‘The students. The Beida students.’ ”
“And what did he mean?”
“The Beijing University students. They were marching in the parade, two, three hundred of them. But no float or anything. They were just ambling along. They were wearing those big green army overcoats everyone wore, and they looked exactly how Chinese intellectuals ought to look—weedy, big glasses, a straggly beard. Tubercular. Suffering for wisdom. They had a few hand-painted banners, black characters on a bed sheet. And one of them read ‘Xiaoping, ninhao!’ ” She paused, a hand held in mid-air in the gloom as if framing the banner, its blotchy characters.
“Can you imagine? Calling the most powerful man in the Communist Party by his given name? Not Comrade Deng. No. Xiaoping. And ninhao!, ‘hello!’ But with the honorific, nin, as you’d speak to a teacher, you see? It achieved both intimacy and respect. It said, we understand you. We’re with you. And then they did the most amazing thing. As they passed Tiananmen Gate, with the entire Politburo up there watching, they just broke ranks, and ran. They just ran, laughing, their pathetic banners flying around and their army overcoats flapping, all those engineers, and biologists and theorists and economists, just running, all flat feet. No marching, no saluting, nothing. They looked… unbound. I remember thinking that. You’re unbound. Mao’s gone. All that intellectual cringing and dissembling has gone. Thinking is back. You’re the future. And you know it.” She stopped and sighed. “Anyway, Peanut loved it. He counted himself in that class, you see, the zhishifenzi. The intelligentsia. Oh yes, always telling us how brilliant he was, the technical subtleties of his field. And he was right, he was in the intellectual class, but somehow not of it.”
“Why not?”
“He was… resentful. Loved the idea of reform, and China resurgent and all that, but he had this gimlet eye for it. Hated the slippery bastards who’d come through the Cultural Revolution intact. The shits who’d killed his father. I see them every day, Sonia, strutting around campus. Mouthing all the new slogans. Reform and opening up is all tops! Mind out for spiritual pollution! The same ones as locked his father in a… what was it, a broom cupboard or something—now saying hello to him in the dining hall. God, Peanut was angry. But he held all that anger in. And I thought, I’ll have some of you.”
“Why the name, Sonia? Why Peanut?” asked Patterson.
Sonia Clarke smiled. “His given name was Huasheng. It means something like China Rising. Just the sort of name you’d expect for someone born when he was. Lots of little East Winds and Red Dawns running around. But if you take those two words, hua and sheng, and say them on different tones, you get the word for peanut. So we called him Peanut. Which he liked, he said.”
“He seemed to have taken to you.”
“We never really even pitched him.” She turned to Patterson. “Would you mind turning the lamp on, luvvie.” The lamp was dim and cast part of the older woman’s face into shadow, etching the lines deeper. The fire was low, and outside it was nearly dark. “He just sort of came to us.”
“Why did he do that?”
“Oh, there was a complex bargain, you understand.” Clarke raised an admonishing finger, then let her arm slump back into her lap. “We offered him the moon. In the shape of a visa. We said we’d get him placed for a doctorate in Britain. Well, the look on his face. The sheer hunger. All he had to do was talk to us, help us understand. Lots of euphemisms, but he knew exactly what we wanted.”
“How on earth did you have these conversations, Sonia? Where? It was impossible to talk to a foreigner without attracting attention, wasn’t it? Back then?”
“Isla was still a baby. I’d take her out in the pram, wander around Ritan Park. Peanut would break away from English corner and fall in beside me. We could manage a few minutes.”
“And where was Malcolm in all this?”
“Oh, grandly managing the operation. Liaising with London. Planning. He designed the whole thing. Sold it to Head Office. Nobody expected it would yield much in the short term. But Requirements was mustard for missiles. You see, we all knew rocketry was China’s pass to strategic power, Taiwan, satellites, the lot. And we seemed to have stumbled on the next generation of designers. And we wanted to hook ‘em. And we did. For a while.”
“And what did Peanut deliver?” said Patterson.
“Well, I assume you saw it in the files. He wrote these letters, by hand. Some of it was campus gossip. Which, in hindsight, we should have paid more attention to, given what happened. And there was quite a lot of self-aggrandizing stuff. Peanut’s analysis of such and such a Party meeting. Peanut’s take on the economy. Guff, really. But there was real meat, too. He wrote these lists. Long lists of names, specializations, equipment, projects, offices, committees, everything associated with the academic side of the missile program. The WINDSOCK product allowed us to start building a picture of the structure. Who sat where. Who gave the orders. Who
paid. Didn’t help us with the military side of it, but we thought, Well, in time that might come.”
“And the others?”
“It was Peanut’s idea. He said he thought he could recruit sub-agents. Well, he didn’t say that, of course. He said he had friends who he thought he could persuade discreetly to help, if the visa offer were to apply to them, too. There was a lot of hemming and hawing. Head Office didn’t like the security risk. But Head Office was liking the product.”
“And?”
“He went to his best friend. Gu Hua, he was called. Sold him some rot about a foreign scientific journal looking for quiet insights into China, in a position to sponsor him for a visa to the UK. Gu Hua signed up with gusto. Voilà, sub-source TANGO. He gave Peanut a bloody great inventory of machine tool factories run by the military, which Peanut dumped in the pram. Deadly dull. But awfully secret.” She grinned a hangman’s grin. “I had to stroll nonchalantly to the embassy to get rid of the bloody thing. God, I was sweating.”
“I imagine you were, Sonia. And so PAN GLINT came into being.”
“That’s right. Peanut kept adding people. It took a couple of years.”
“How did you service the network?”
“Lovely dead drop at the Summer Palace. Malcolm found it. I’d take the baby and go out there every four weeks or so, wander about, check my back. A chalk mark in one of the pavilions by the lake told me the drop was loaded. And then I just had to reach into one of those litter bins shaped like a panda. So I’d faff around with nappies and what have you and go to chuck them away, and there they’d be. Peanut’s lists, snug in a film canister and wedged inside the panda’s ear. I’d leave behind instructions. A little cash.”
“So by the end of, what, 1986, PAN GLINT was at full strength.”
“Insofar as it ever had much strength. I mean some of Peanut’s early stuff was very useful. There was another chap. Sub-source CURTAIN. His stuff was good. Very technical. But PAN GLINT became unreliable. It would go dormant for months at a time, and then up would pop Peanut with a new clutch of documents, demanding to know when he was off to London. And then something changed. The demonstrations started on the campuses. Late eighty-six, early eighty-seven. It was all rather shocking. They started in Hefei, which is the middle of bloody nowhere if you’re from Beijing. And the Beijing students felt shown up by these hicks, so they started their own. New Year’s Day eighty-seven. In the snow. They walked all the way to Tiananmen, sang the ‘Internationale,’ got arrested.”