by Adam Brookes
Charteris was watching Hopko intently. She leaned forward, her eyes hard.
“Isn’t that the question?” Hopko said.
It had been a hotel room, this time, just across the river in Virginia. He’d left already, and Nicole lay in a tangle of sheets. On the table an envelope. Just for you, Nicole, as usual. Love, Jonathan.
She pushed herself up on to her elbows and reached for the envelope. Inside, a document, thirty pages or so, marked SECRET/NOFORN. National Intelligence Estimate. The Political Future of Taiwan.
She slid the envelope into her bag, lay back, turned off the light.
First day at the office.
And what an office. A discreet, white Georgian mansion just off Pall Mall. A private lift to a secure floor, thickly carpeted, decorated with contemporary art. His own secretary, his own SCIF, and a staff of very quiet Americans. A dining room, he discovered at lunchtime. He had been on his way out to get a sandwich when he was taken by the arm and guided to a lunch of crayfish salad and iced tea, made to his taste by a silent catering staff.
The salary dwarfed his Service pension, and the welcome given him by the quiet Americans was respectful.
Horizon Intel Solutions Inc. is delighted to welcome Roland Yeats to the London team. Roland has seen many years in the service of his country and brings to Horizon a unique and profound knowledge of the contemporary intelligence terrain, as well as formidable language and analytic skills. As a Vice President for Asia, Roland will focus on collection solutions and government liaison with regard to the China target, and will play a pivotal role in formulating the Horizon offer to European governments. He will also be available in a consulting capacity as we strengthen corporate synergies across the Shady Creek Group. Welcome, Roly! It is a privilege to have you with us as we build robust, adaptive strategies for clients across the intelligence cycle, and strengthen our global operations in a fast-changing, challenging intelligence environment.
Horizon Intel Solutions Inc.
“Intelligence for Leadership, for Life”
A Shady Creek Group Company
They were sending him to Singapore first, then on to Seoul. He had asked for his flight schedule, but it transpired he would be flying in the corporate Gulfstream. So it was up to him, really.
Peanut knew he had to move fast. The target was slipping through a welter of food stalls, down towards the brown, viscous Chao Praya river. Would he take a water taxi? That would fuck everything up.
Peanut hopped a railing, on to a boardwalk, the target just in sight, cutting off to the left, disappearing in a shaded passageway, emerging again into the light. So, not the river. A tea house, with golden Chinese characters atop its gables, the Thai beneath. The man disappeared through the front entrance. Peanut stopped, caught his breath, looked around for somewhere to wait. Over there, a stall with tin pots of curry, platters of fruit. A woman waved a fan to keep the flies away. He bought a bowl of shaved ice with coconut milk and syrup and sat at a little table.
Who was this man, anyway? Was this drugs, or something else? For his first two months they’d had him working drugs, as far as he could tell, the Chinese connections spilling down from Yunnan Province, through Burma, into Thailand. Late night surveillance ops in Bangkok’s Chinatown, hanging around outside brothels and nightclubs, some listening. There was more to it, he was sure, but when he’d asked they’d told him to concentrate on the job at hand.
And not such a bad job, considering. It paid, for a start. Enough for a little flat over a quiet courtyard. He grew flowers in pots on a balcony. And the woman downstairs—she was a widow, she said—had taken to cooking for him: curries, noodles with basil, mangos dipped in sweet chili sauce.
She spoke some language he’d never learn, something from the Shan states, and fragments of Chinese. He struggled with the infernal speech of Thailand, and somehow they communicated, and then, well.
She’d bathe him and dry him off and rub him with white powder from a tin that smelled of mentholatum. And she’d lie next to him and punch his arm, feeling his strength, and chuckle, and when they walked out in the street she’d hold on to him. She liked his size, how people stepped out of his way.
He kept his eyes on the tea house. Please God the man doesn’t go out the back. He mopped the sweat from his forehead with a napkin. He turned his face towards the river for a moment, hoping for breeze and finding none. He’d wanted warm, and warm was what he’d been given.
They’d left Taiwan quickly, at night, on the smallest aeroplane he’d ever seen. He had run his hands over the leather seat covers. He hadn’t seen the Englishman again. It was Singapore first, where he was sequestered in an apartment on his own with two poker-faced guards who refused to speak except to tell him he was “drying out.” Two other Europeans came with questions each day. They seemed poorly informed, and their Mandarin was atrocious. They tried to walk him through the operation, everything that had happened. Please, Mr. Li, describe the Ministry of State Security operatives. How many? What did they say? And he sat and smoked and demanded his money and his papers, and eventually they seemed to give up and asked him to sign a piece of paper, which committed him to silence in this life and the next. Then they brought him to Bangkok, gave him a passport after all, and a bank account that contained less than he had hoped for, though perhaps a little more than he had expected, and they introduced him to a group of hatchet-faced Thais, patted him on the shoulder and left.
And so he’d work at this for a while, see what presented itself. And he’d put away a little more cash each month. And he’d see the widow, and he’d go and play majiang in that little dive with the thief Lau and the others and he’d forge what looked and felt suspiciously like friendships, fending off their questions about where he was from and who he’d been by cracking some joke and washing the majiang tiles with their beautiful clack clack sound.
The target was coming out of the tea house. He was carrying a bag that he hadn’t been carrying before, a black clutch bag with a strap for the wrist, which seemed to Peanut likely to contain valuable items. He held the bag under his arm. The target stopped and looked about him.
Don’t stand still, thought Peanut.
Stillness is the enemy.
Move.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My profound thanks go to my agent, Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan Associates, who nurtured Night Heron almost from its inception with great patience and generosity. I am also grateful to Karen Godfrey, whose insights improved the manuscript greatly. The team at Little, Brown, including editors Ed Wood, Iain Hunt, and Tim Holman, made it something special. I count myself very lucky to work with them. For crucial encouragement given along the way, thank you to Chris Booth, Simon Wilson, Jon Whitney, Kim Ghattas, Paul Forty, Amanda Brookes, Sally Brookes, Richard Lawrence, and the much loved and missed Melissa Spielman. Professor Philip H. J. Davies of Brunel University provided important guidance, as did his extraordinary book, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying. I received help and advice from a number of people who can’t be named here, one in particular in whose company I remember passing a long, dank night in a certain Texas car park. My thanks go to all of them. I owe most to my wife Susan, whose love and wisdom carry me along, and to my best advisers, Anna and Ned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Brookes grew up in Oxfordshire and studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He has spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC posted him to China twice, as well as to Indonesia and the United States. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and many other countries in Asia and the Middle East. He lives with his family in Takoma Park, Maryland.
By Adam Brookes
Night Heron
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Epigraph
Part One: The Contact. Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two: The Op. Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part Three: The Product. Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgements
About The Author
By Adam Brookes
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2014 by Adam Brookes
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: May 2014
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ISBN 978-0-316-39985-2
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