by Adam Brookes
Peanut felt himself becoming annoyed at the Englishman’s pained, pale stare.
“I cannot make any such arrangement. I am a journalist,” said the Englishman.
“Screw journalist. You just tell them, Mang An. That’s your job.”
“Christ.”
“Tell them.”
“Listen. I have questions.”
“All right. Ask your questions.”
“The document you left with me. The cover sheet and table of contents.”
“What about it?”
Mangan licked his lips. God in heaven, he thought.
“Right. Where does it come from?”
“It said on the cover sheet. It’s a report for the Leading Small Group on Military Affairs, a technical report. It’s very secret. It’s so secret it’ll break your balls. Here’s the rest of it, by the way. A show of good faith.”
Peanut reached into the plastic carrier bag and pulled out a pile of photocopied pages, and thrust them towards the Englishman.
“Oh, Christ.” Mangan had his hand on his forehead.
“What do you think of that, then?”
“Just. Stop. For one minute.”
Peanut said nothing.
“Where did you get this document?” said Mangan.
“Who’s asking? Who cares where I got it? There’s more and I can get that, too.”
“I’m asking.”
“You don’t—”
Mangan spoke over him. “They’re asking. Understand? They want to know the source.”
Peanut looked at the Englishman, his flaming hair, flushed face, green eyes. He looked like a piece of fruit.
“Tell them I have a sub-source. Like before.”
“A sub-source.”
“He is… collaborating with me.”
“And you got the document from him?”
“Yes.”
“And who is he, if I may ask?”
“I’m not telling you. He’ll get some of the money.”
“But this sub-source has access to the documents?”
“Yes. And to the networks.”
The Englishman took a breath. He seemed to be calming down.
“And who are you?” Mangan asked.
“What do you mean who am I? They know who I am. I gave you a photograph, for heaven’s sake.”
“But I don’t know who you are.”
Peanut breathed out. God, for a cigarette.
“Perhaps better you don’t know.”
“Do you have a name?”
Li Huasheng. Counter-revolutionary spawn. Night heron. Traitor. Peanut. Prisoner 5995. Song Ping.
“Quite a few.”
“Give me one I can use,” said Mangan.
“They called me Peanut.” The “Peanut” in English, carefully pronounced.
“Peanut,” the Englishman repeated, looking levelly at him now. “Do you have a family?”
For a moment Peanut was unable to respond. He looked at his hands. Was it rage? This tide rising in him?
“No, I do not have a stinking family.”
The Englishman said nothing, gave a questioning look.
“I have not been in a position to have a family,” said Peanut.
“Why?”
“I was in a fucking labor reform facility. Next question.”
“Why were you in the labor reform facility?”
“I hit someone.”
“You must have hit them pretty hard.”
“I did.”
“When was that?”
It was when everything ended. It was when our hopes proved as easily crushed as the skull of that little soldier.
“Liu si,” said Peanut. The fourth of June, 1989.
“Where do you live now?”
“Never you mind.”
“How long ago were you released?”
“Never mind.”
“Had you served your sentence?”
“Let’s just say my path to this point has been unorthodox,” Peanut said.
The Englishman thought for a moment.
“You’re on the run, aren’t you?” he said.
What? Peanut thought. How the hell did we arrive here quite so quickly?
“That’s enough—”
They froze.
Feet on the stairs. Peanut grabbed the Englishman’s arm, held up a silencing hand.
Light footsteps. Slow.
Coming towards the altar now. Peanut could hear the Englishman’s shallow, fast breathing.
The footsteps stopped. Muttering. Peanut felt his own blood pulsing in his clenched jaw, behind his eyes. Hello, fear. You’re back.
Then a voice, a woman.
“You ren ma?” Anyone there?
Silence.
“You ren ma? Kuai guan menr le ya.” We’re closing soon.
A longer silence. Then the footsteps receding, back down the stairs.
“Kuai guan menr le ya.”
The Englishman had his hand over his mouth and exhaled slowly.
“I’ll leave first,” Peanut said. “Remember what to tell them.”
He made to get up, then stopped, looked hard at the Englishman.
“You’re a clever bastard, Mang An. Do not let me down.”
The technician ran the video GODDESS 3 had shot on the mobile phone. Granny Poon waved inanely at the lens, then a quick move away to glimpse the contact walking across the temple courtyard, the rolling, aggressive gait, the brush cut, the frown. A slight pan, and the shot fell on RATCHET, stooped, in jeans and a green waterproof, a few yards behind the contact, matching his pace and direction. Following him, in other words. The two disappeared into the second courtyard and the shot returned to Eileen Poon, looking over her shoulder, then went to black.
“The contact was holding a bag.” This from Yeats. “I thought it looked like documents in it.”
“Could have been, Roly,” said Hopko, who sat, her legs stretched out and her arms folded, eyes fixed on the screen showing the incoming lines.
Mangan sat hunched under the eaves. He ran his hand across the wooden floor. It was smooth. He imagined generations of cloth slippers with straw soles lending the floorboards their patina, centuries of monks, devotees, scholars in silks, ladies of the court, eunuchs, merchants of tea and opium, fortune tellers, hucksters, the sick, the lame, the panoply of traditional China.
The photocopied report lay by his feet. The man who mumbled about birds and who had black paint on his hands and called himself Peanut had left it there, gesturing briefly to it as he’d left.
Never accept classified documents. Read them? Fine. Take notes on them? Just about okay. But don’t take possession.
Nimble, that man, for his bulk. Something fluid and muscular to his movements. He was a man used to physical work. But his eyes ticked with calculation. How did he live? Where did he get his money? How did he buy that atrocious blue jacket with the shiny buttons?
The photocopied report still hadn’t moved.
In the gloom Mangan could make out the characters in the title at the top of the first page.
DF-41 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Programme: History, Objectives, Parameters.
What if he just left it lying there? Someone would find it. The ticket collector would be interrogated. The authorities would pull the footage from the cameras on all nearby intersections. And there would be Mangan, on a jerky, digital path to a Chinese prison, while the diplomats wrangled for years over his fate.
He was cold. A sliver of sunlight appeared between the wooden door and its frame, slicing through the murk. He watched the dust motes float through it.
And then Philip Mangan shed his illusion that he was working in the name of journalism, of a story, of a little collaboration, and became operational. He picked up the pile of photocopied pages, opened his windbreaker and placed the pages under his sweater, tucking them into the top of his trousers.
He zipped up the windbreaker, crawled through the doorway and moved quickly towards the stai
rway.
“GODDESS 1 on the line.”
“Wei? Keren zoule. Wo ye yao zou. Keren geile liwu.” The guest has left. I’m leaving, too. The guest gave a gift.
Hopko sat forward.
“Shenme liwu?” What gift?
“Geile huar.” Flowers. Meaning documents.
“Hao. Xiexie.”
Hopko turned to the Beijing Station screen.
“David, RATCHET’s carrying.”
Charteris looked up, startled, then was gone.
Mangan was clammy, despite the cold. The heat rose up his back, into his neck and cheeks. It was nearly dark. He came from the alleyway almost at a run, forcing himself to slow, on to Jinbao Jie, snarled traffic, blinding headlights. A woman stood at the street corner with a cart, selling baozi. A taxi slowed, the driver gesturing at him from the window. The pages dug into his stomach. The flat? Could he take the document pages back there? Walk through the gates into the compound, past the guards and the State Security hoods in the little gatehouses? To his bugged flat? Could he call Charteris? Should he? He turned north, away from home, and walked fast.
“GODDESS 4 on the line.”
“Wei? Pengyou bu hui jia li qu. Dao biede difang le.” Our friend’s not going home. He’s going somewhere else.
“Hao. Ni pei ta qu ma?” Are you going with him? Hopko, biting her lip.
“Dangran. Yihuir zai shuo.” Of course I am. We’ll talk again in a while.
“Translate, please. Where are we?” Yeats sounded tense.
“Granny Poon is staying with the contact. But whatever the contact was carrying when he went into the temple, he no longer has, so the assumption is he’s given it to RATCHET, who’s now carrying.” Hopko stood, dangling her spectacles in one hand. “And RATCHET is not heading back to his flat, he’s heading elsewhere, so one of the boys is staying with him. Charteris will track him down, won’t he, Trish?”
The elderly woman boarded a bus. She wore a green scarf now, and thick glasses. The target had made some sorry and revealing attempts at dry-cleaning—some hammy business in a shoe shop, a public toilet, again—but nothing to trouble her. The target now sat, six rows in front, staring from the filthy window as they ground eastward down Jianwai Avenue. So noisy, so cramped these buses! So slow! The woman would believe in China’s economic renaissance when public transport approached the silken speed of Hong Kong’s. Not till then. Two seats behind her GODDESS 3, eyes half-closed beneath the brim of a baseball cap, sat with a shopping bag on his lap, the leaves of a cabbage visible. Still all clear.
So who was he, this man? She liked to play guessing games with her targets, spin out her own versions of the stories she’d never know. He was educated, but down at heel. A crudeness to him, but fiery. No congruence in his appearance and his bearing. He wore a smart jacket but walked as if he meant to tear someone’s lungs out. No congruence. And that, to the woman’s practiced eye, made him conspicuous. He needed to change.
And his efforts at counter-surveillance, dear God. She’d put a stop to that.
The bus began to empty as it left the city center. The elderly woman descended at a poorly lit intersection and made her way into the back streets of brick and neon as if she had lived there all her life. Here, in snatches of talk on the night air, she heard less of the soft Beijing speech and more of the choppy, sibilant south, her own speech. Anonymous, this place. She kept the target on the edge of her vision, reeling herself in a little closer when he twisted and turned. She could sense more than see her boy, GODDESS 3, behind her.
And then, as she turned a corner, the target was gone. She kept her pace steady. There he was. Yes. In the window of, what was this, a beauty salon? He was speaking to an orange-haired girl, who put her hands on her hips, leaned forward to him. He was taking off his jacket and seemed to be laughing. Was he a client? No, something else. Proprietor?
And at that moment Granny Poon’s mobile phone rumbled. She reached into her bag fussily and pulled it out, staring at the screen. No number. She keyed answer. But there was only silence.
What was that?
She moved thirty paces further, then abruptly crossed the street. She turned and looked for, for what? A flicker, a hint. Movement out of the flow. Some tension of gait or look, fleeting as a shadow, visible only to one who had spent decades on the streets of China. They were good, these people, when they tried. Were they out there tonight? Were they on her?
The street was quiet.
And here was GODDESS 3, coming in for a second pass of the target’s destination.
Some beauty salon. Pervert.
Mangan, walking hard towards Dongzhimen, felt the stirring of panic. His mobile phone rang.
“Philip, good lord, where on earth are you?”
Mangan reached for a biting response to Charteris’s languid tone, couldn’t find one, and told him.
“Keep walking, I’ll pick you up.”
It was eight minutes before a taxi drew up. Charteris was slumped low in the back, wearing a baseball cap and a scarf. Mangan got in, made to speak, but Charteris shook his head and gestured to the front of the vehicle. A microphone protruded from the dashboard. The driver looked straight ahead and pulled out into the traffic. Mangan gave a questioning look. Charteris returned a sardonic smile and settled back in the seat, eyes half-closed. He had a blue backpack on his lap.
“Let’s go and have a drink,” he said.
They got out at the mouth of a hutong near the Drum Tower. Charteris paid the driver, while Mangan turned and avoided the driver’s look. The street was crowded with students, some tourists. The bars were warming up.
“Slowly does it, Philip. Just walk.”
They walked in silence past the junk art shops and noodle restaurants. Charteris stopped outside a bar, put a hand on Mangan’s arm.
“This one’s loud.” Red lanterns hung against the gray hutong brick. Pink neon spelled out the name, Funky Time. They went in. Charteris took a booth at the back. The music was Shanghai synth-funk, screechingly loud. Charteris took out his phone and gestured with it. Mangan took out his own and, under the table, removed the battery. Charteris leaned across the booth.
“Are you carrying something, Philip?”
Mangan nodded, looked down at his stomach.
“Leave it for now. What happened? Keep it oblique.”
Mangan told him. “Well. We met. He told me to call him Peanut. Just Peanut. No other name. He has an offer, he says. One time. Like in the letter. Access to networks. David, I…“
“Slow down. One thing at a time. Did you ask him where the proof came from?”
“He has a collaborator. Like before, he says. He got it from this collaborator.”
“Say who?”
“I asked. He wouldn’t say.”
“But you asked him.”
“Yes. He called it a… a what… a sub-source.”
Mangan saw Charteris’s blink. A waitress came to the table, ponytailed and sullen. She wore a dress plastered with the brand name of a famous beer that hugged her figure. Charteris ordered a Coke, Mangan a vodka.
“And what about him, Philip? Did you ask about him?”
“He’s on the run. Been in a labor reform facility since eighty-nine, the demonstrations. He said he assaulted someone. I think maybe he killed them.”
“How do you know he’s on the run? Give me everything he said, Philip.”
“He said he used unorthodox methods to get out of prison. I asked him, are you on the run? and he looked surprised, like I’d rumbled him.”
“But he didn’t say so.”
“He might as well have done. For Christ’s sake, David.”
“Don’t get agitated, please. What else?”
“He wouldn’t tell me where he lived, or his circumstances. He just wanted to talk about this offer. He said you already knew him, knew he’d deliver.”
“And the offer, tell me quickly.”
Mangan placed his hands palm up on the table, shook his head.
<
br /> “David.”
“Tell me.”
Mangan looked down. And Charteris waited for him to take another step.
“Come on, Philip, you’re nearly done. Tell me what the offer was.”
Mangan shook his head, rolled his eyes. It was, thought Charteris, a gesture intended to convey resigned acquiescence. Take the step, he thought.
“Stand-alone networks at the General Armaments Department and the Launch Vehicle Academy,” he said.
An offer of access to China’s secret heart.
Charteris nodded, gave nothing away.
“All right, that’s enough. For now. You’ve a ticket booked for Seoul tomorrow afternoon. Do not take your phone. Go to the Plaza, wait for a contact.”
Mangan gaped. Charteris ignored him.
“Now take the backpack. Go to the lavatory and put whatever you’re carrying into the pack. Go.”
Mangan stood up slowly, his gaze not leaving Charteris. The lavatory was next to the bar’s entrance. The music was pounding. Two girls in tight halter tops and glitter eyeshadow sat at the bar drinking cocktails through little straws. They watched him and whispered. He stopped by the entrance to the men’s lavatory and looked over to the front door. Out in the street a western family was strolling past the shops. The shopkeepers gestured and smiled at them, cooing over the blonde kids. Diplomats? English teachers? Mangan had a sense of the world receding. He turned back. Charteris was resting his elbow on the table, chin in hand. He nodded, and gestured with his eyes towards the lavatory.
Mangan pushed open the lavatory door, the reek of piss. He entered the stall and lowered the lid of the toilet, sat. He pulled the pages from under his clothing. They were damp. He pushed them into the backpack. Philip Mangan, observer of events from a careful distance, becomes participant, meddles in history. Jesus Christ, I am out of my mind. He rubbed the back of his neck.
He stood, flushed and walked out of the lavatory, back to the table.
“You really are a shit, David.”
“I’m a shit in a good cause. And now you are, too.”
Charteris reached under the table for the backpack, stood and leaned in one last time to be heard over the music.
“That was very, very good, Philip.”
“Piss off, David.”