by Adam Brookes
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For the journalists of Ethiopia
The British Empire is supposed to have more or less disappeared by the 1960s. This is incorrect. The formal British Empire may have collapsed, but the British-led offshore world is alive and kicking… Formalities aside, we should treat the City of London, Jersey, Cayman Islands, BVI, Bermuda and the rest of the territories as one integrated global financial center that serves as the world’s largest tax haven and a conduit for money laundering.
Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy and Christian Chavagneux,
Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works
PROLOGUE
Winter, 1967. Beijing
They had taken a leather belt, bound his wrists behind his back, forced him to kneel.
In the hall, the smell of damp, of unwashed and stale clothing. The muttering of the crowd. Rain drumming on the roof. A cold rain.
They hung a chalkboard on a chain around his neck. On the chalkboard they wrote the character for his surname, Fan. They chalked an X across the character to negate everything he had been. They began to shout and scream slogans. He saw the vapor from their breath billow and rise on the air.
Tell us the names of your conspirators.
Conspirators.
You have conspired. Tell us their names.
He forced his head up, looked out from the stage. How many of them here? A hundred? Two hundred? Some of them screamed their hatred of him. Others seemed bewildered, looked around themselves, mouthed the slogans. He tried to catch the eye of those he knew, but they looked away, all of them.
You conspired to subvert the revolution. You fought in the Nationalist army of the traitor Chiang Kai-shek. You favor the capitalist road. Name your conspirators.
They jerked him to his feet. One of them brought a bucket, overturned it to shower broken glass on the stage, shattered beer bottles, pickle jars. A momentary silence from the crowd. One of them arranged the glass into a pile with his foot, the chink chink sound of the fragments. They made him kneel on it.
Who can I give them? he thought.
The man Chen, who fought with you in the traitorous Nationalist army. Is he a conspirator? Name him!
Can I give them Chen? That gentle boy, toting his books in his knapsack, prattling about Lu Xun and Voltaire? We called him Chen Wen, Literary Chen.
He thought of the two of them on a freezing hillside, thirty years earlier, whispering in the dark, siphoning petrol into bottles, the clank and rumble of Japanese armor in the valley. He thought of the boy, blowing on his fingers, tearing the mantou into pieces to share, the bread cold and glutinous in his mouth.
The pain, now. The blood leaking through his trousers. They yanked his bound wrists upward behind him, bent him double, forced his weight forward, onto his knees, onto the shards of glass.
He gave them Literary Chen.
They became frenzied. He wondered what they would do to his old friend. He wondered if Chen would ever know, and if he did, whether he’d ever understand.
He wondered how long this sin would endure, imagined future generations scrabbling and clawing at it like dogs at a dry, jagged bone.
One of them tied a blindfold on him, and he saw nothing as he was led away.
PART ONE
The Approach.
1
Hong Kong
The recent past
She moves well, thought the watcher.
She moves so that her size seems to diminish. She conceals her strength. She flits by a wall, a storefront, and she is gone before you give her a second glance. You don’t notice her, he thought.
You don’t notice how dangerous she is.
The wind was quickening, the sky the color of slate. The woman was well ahead of him now, making for the park’s lurid front gate. The watcher quickened his pace, reeling himself in.
She wore a scarf of beige linen that covered her hair and left her face in shadow. She wore a loose shirt and trousers in dull colors, and sensible shoes. From a distance, her silhouette was that of a woman from the Malay Peninsula or Indonesia, one of Hong Kong’s faceless migrants, a domestic, a housekeeper on her day off, perhaps. So, a trip to Ocean Park, for the aquarium, candy floss, a rollercoaster. A treat! Even on this bleak day, with a typhoon churning in from the South China Sea. The woman hid her eyes behind sunglasses. Her skin was very dark.
She made for the ticket booth. The watcher stopped and searched passersby for an anomaly, the flicker of intention that, to his eye, would betray the presence of hostile surveillance.
Nothing.
He reached into his pocket and clicked Send.
“Amber, amber,” he said. Proceed. You’re clean.
Patterson heard the signal, sudden and sharp in her earpiece. She responded with a double click. Understood.
She ran her hand over her headscarf, tugged it forward a little, eased her face farther into its recesses. She walked to the window, turned her face down.
“One, please,” she said.
The girl at the ticket counter looked at her, confused.
“Typhoon coming,” she said. She pointed at a sign taped to the glass. It read: “Typhoon Signal Number 3 Is Hoisted.”
“Yes, I know,” said Patterson.
The girl raised her eyebrows, then looked to her screen and tapped. Patterson paid in cash, turned and walked to the turnstiles.
She took the famous cable car up the headland, hundreds of feet above the rocks and crashing surf, sitting alone in a tiny car that bucked and jittered in the wind. Unnerved, she gripped the bars, looked out at a venomous green sea and watched the freighters fading in the gloom.
Another two hours of this at least, she thought. More. Surveillance detection runs are sent by the intelligence gods to try the soul. Dogging her steps since morning was the wiry little man with the baseball cap and wispy goatee, his speech incised with the clipped sing-song of the Pearl River delta—her street artist, her watcher. They had come together through Kowloon on foot, then taken the Star Ferry across the heaving waters of Hong Kong harbor. She’d walked the deck while he scanned the eyes of the passengers. More footwork, then a bus. He sat near the door, monitoring the comings and goings.
Amber, amber. His voice thin in her ear, distant, yet intimate.
Proceed.
The cable car slowed, deposited her on a platform. The watcher was there ahead of her. How had he managed that? He sat on a bench smoking a cigarette, looking at a map of Ocean Park’s recreational delights. She walked on, past the Sea Jelly Spectacular, the Rainforest Exhibit. The watcher inscribed wide arcs around her as the wind hissed in the palm trees. After this there would be another bus to take them through the Aberdeen Tunnel, followed by a taxi, then more pavement work in the rain, hour after dreary hour of it until the watchers pronounced her utterly, definitively, conclusively clean.
For this was China, where the streets were so saturated with surveillance that agent and case officer moved with the caution of divers in some deep sea, silent, swimming slowly toward each other in the dark.
The agent’s distress signal had come into London at 2:47 a.m. on a Tuesday: an email from an innocuous address purporting to be an enquiry concerning the sale of a second-hand book. I am in jeopardy, it sa
id. I request a crash meeting. But the Hong Kong station of the UK Secret Intelligence Service, the officers of which usually handled this particular agent’s needs, offered a tepid apology and declined. Too difficult, they said. Too much Chinese surveillance of the consulate building on Supreme Court Road where the station resided. Too few officers. Nothing to be done. Sorry, and good afternoon.
So it fell to Patterson, who was dragged from sleep and isolation in her north London flat by the juddering of her secure handheld. She had dressed quickly in the darkness, opened a small safe in her wardrobe, checked a preprepared list of clothing and accoutrements. She crept down the stairs and slipped from the house by the back. It was May and the night air was cool and damp, washed with fragrance from gardens and window boxes. Two streets away, a car waited for her.
In the SIS headquarters building at Vauxhall Cross, or VX as they called it, Patterson drew documents that underpinned a useful, current and very familiar identity: passport, business cards, pocket litter, a wallet handed to her in a yellow envelope by a nervous, tired boy from the second floor. She was an accountant, one with regular business in Hong Kong, backstopped by an association with a local company long friendly to the Service. Maria Todd. Hello, Maria.
The car drove at speed to Heathrow. In the ladies’ lavatory, she checked her pockets one last time. And then again. She consumed a bacon sandwich and a coffee at a loathsome faux pub in Departures, and boarded the long flight to Hong Kong.
“Amber, amber,” said the watcher.
She crossed the street, the traffic sparse now as the typhoon bore down, the rain clattering on the pavement. A stairway led her into an MTR metro station, and on into a damp underground shopping precinct, garishly lit corridors of sunglasses, shoes, magazines, sullen shop girls staring at their phones. And there, a bank of elevators, their steel doors scratched and greasy. Up, to the fifteenth floor of a vast apartment complex above and a preliminary pass of the door to apartment 1527. No cameras here, she’d been assured, but might something have changed? She moved quickly along a claustrophobic corridor of neon and linoleum, passed the flat, walked on.
Around her the background noise of cramped humanity. A television. A crying child. A smell of sesame and cooking fat was cloying on the humid air.
She stopped and walked back. The key turned and she was in. The safe flat appeared to be inhabited, though no one was here now. Patterson closed the door quietly, pulled the scarf from her head and went from room to room. A living room with a sofa in peeling green vinyl, a television, dusty surfaces. Kitchen, the remnants of a breakfast, congee with shredded chicken, tea. A bedroom with a futon, a pink duvet lying askew, blinds down. A bathroom, a woman’s underwear hanging limp on a rack, a frosted glass window. Hair in the sink. The flat smelled of sleep, unwashed laundry.
Who lives here? she wondered. An officer? An access agent?
Well, she’s a bloody slob.
Patterson stopped, took a breath, steadied herself.
In the army there would have been two of them, steadying each other. One to debrief the agent, the other hanging back, listening, maintaining situational awareness.
But the Service sent you in alone.
Two’s insecure, said the trainers. Oh, and in the army she would have had enough weaponry concealed about her person to destroy half a city block should the need arise. But weapons are insecure, said the trainers. So she carried a device that looked like a pen, which when activated would administer to an assailant an electric shock, one barely sufficient, Patterson reckoned, to knock out an apathetic hamster. Would she get used to it, this naked feeling, this solitude? The Service valued those who worked well alone. She had yet to show she was among their number.
She put her hand in her trouser pocket and clicked Send.
“Tricycle, tricycle,” she said. I am at the rendezvous.
A double click came back.
She sat and went over the agent’s record in her mind. Codename CAMBER. Fifty-eight years of age. Keung, his name. Dr. Keung was how he liked it; he had a Ph.D. in econometrics from an Australian university. Patterson had looked up the term econometrics.
For years, under British rule, the doctor had toiled in the colonial government’s finance department, but when the colony was blithely handed to China in 1997, Dr. Keung had taken his leave of government and joined a bank. A very quiet, very wealthy, very privately owned bank. Dr. Keung assisted in managing the bank’s government relations. To his surprise, he found himself courted by officials of the Chinese Communist Party. The officials appeared anxious to placate and reassure the inhabitants of their new, wealthy, stroppy possession in the south. Dr. Keung found himself on trips to Beijing. He attended private dinners at the State Guest House, held confidential conversations with men whose names were unfamiliar.
Dr. Keung came to know the men with unfamiliar names. He came to know their needs. Dr. Keung came to know a lot.
And Dr. Keung discovered a further, equally surprising side to this new life. He found that, if he were occasionally to assist in some delicate task, as a favor to some senior Beijing official, or their son or daughter—help with an overseas account, say, in London or New York or the Caymans, or the quiet management of some funds, transfers for school fees or a new property abroad—he was rewarded. A nice watch. An expensive restaurant. Dr. Keung, you must come to Macau with us! A suite at the Lisboa! We insist! Dr. Keung had not previously experienced such things, but he surprised himself by the speed at which he developed a taste for them. He discovered the casino floor, the sauna, the “little friend” waiting sleek and pouting and perfumed in the air-conditioned blankness of the hotel room.
To Patterson, the rest of the story read like one of the case histories from her Intelligence Officer New Entry Course, a study in execrable choices and male idiocy. The doctor had got in a little deep at the tables. The little friends had become a little too demanding. The requests from Beijing kept coming, and seemed to grow less polite with each passing year. His wife divorced him. His children left for Canada.
And just as Dr. Keung sweated at the edge of ruin, the Service stepped in, pulled him back from the brink of disgrace, covered some debts and warned off some little friends. And in return, well, some favors for his erstwhile masters in Her Majesty’s Government.
To the Service’s surprise, Dr. Keung responded with enthusiasm. He began providing regular—if dull—intelligence on Hong Kong’s finance and economics. And he provided occasional—and very interesting indeed—intelligence on the quiet doings of China’s power elite with regard to their bank accounts, intelligence that provided a view of rifts and points of vulnerability in China’s ruling class, the sort of intelligence the Service prided itself on, the sort that satisfied its predatory instincts.
Dr. Keung spied for seven years without incident, retaining his position in society, and in the casinos and saunas of Macau. A succession of case officers reported him businesslike, methodical and, very occasionally, brave.
All of which, Patterson reflected as the doctor stood dripping in the doorway of the safe flat, made the expression of near-hysterical panic on his face so surprising.
She reached into her pocket and clicked Send three times, then twice more. The meeting is underway.
“Amber, amber,” came the voice.
She ushered him into the flat, moving to take his coat. He pulled away from her.
“Who are you?” he said. “Where’s… where is he?”
He stood with his back to the wall. His eyes searched the room behind her.
“It’s just me here,” she said.
She gestured for him to sit. Let him settle, she thought. He sat on the green sofa and took off his coat. His hands were trembling.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“Your usual contact was unable to come to this meeting, so I have come. It’s safer this way. Much safer.”
His eyes rested on her, uncomprehending.
“Where have you come from?” he said
.
“Best I don’t tell you that.”
“Why do they send… you?”
Me, she thought, why not me? She smiled at him, this trembling little man, hair plastered to his scalp, an ageing child with a suit that wrinkled and pooled on his sparse frame, his pouchy cheeks.
“Dr. Keung, I know your case very well. I have been a great admirer of your work for a long time.” She paused to look at him in a way she hoped was reassuring. He shrank back slightly on the sofa.
“Now, first let me ask you: do you think you are under surveillance now? Right now?”
“I… I don’t know. That’s why I need to meet… I…”
“All right. Listen to me, Dr. Keung. If this meeting is interrupted, you will leave first. You will turn right out of the front door of the apartment and walk to the elevators on the west side of the building. There’s a big sign. It says, ‘West Elevators.’ Do you understand?”
He nodded, his mouth slightly open.
“We will be with you, watching your back. You will take the lift down to the second floor, then the staircase down to the MTR station.”
His face was creasing.
“You will board a train to Admiralty.”
He was waving his hand in the air, looking down.
“Stop. Listen… please.”
“Dr. Keung, I will listen to everything you have to say, and we will resolve this situation. But first we must discuss emergency procedures and fallbacks. Just as normal.” She could feel herself starting to speak fast. She slowed, tried to take the urgency from her voice. “Let’s just—”
“Stop!” he shouted. “You can’t! You don’t know!”
Patterson swallowed. This was not supposed to happen—the spindly, diminutive agent yelling at her, the encounter spiralling out of her control. She took a breath. In case of panicking and noncompliant agents, said the trainers, bring a sense of reassurance and calm. Take their fears seriously. Suggest that the full resources of the Service are being brought to bear on their case.