by Adam Brookes
Hopko was waiting for her, morning sunlight streaming in her office window, coffee steaming on her desk.
“Trish,” she said, looking over her glasses.
“Val.” She sat heavily on Hopko’s couch. Hopko stood and walked around her desk. She wore, to Patterson’s disbelief, a leather skirt, boots.
“I want the guts of it now,” said Hopko.
“I’m ready,” said Patterson.
“Keung’s state of mind?”
“Panicked. Genuinely fearful.”
“Not ill? Drunk?”
“No. Very alert.”
“And the men who came to his apartment. He was certain they were mainland? Not local thugs testing in some way? Debts or something?”
“He said he was certain at least one of them was a mainlander, a northerner, by his accent.”
“But not State Security nasties?”
“Unclear.”
“And it was a message for us.”
“A message for his ‘contacts,’ which he interpreted to mean us.”
“Could have meant someone else altogether, silly bugger.”
“Could have. But… unlikely,” said Patterson.
“Why?”
Patterson shrugged.
“Everything points to professionals.”
“And this mysterious message?”
“He said they wanted him to attend some sort of meeting. The message would be delivered there. But that’s all I got. We had to scramble.”
Hopko considered.
Patterson watched this formidable woman, with her Mediterranean looks, her blunt figure, her small hands clad in silver, jade. Valentina Hopko, Controller Western Hemisphere and Far East, lately risen to such grand estate. In her fifties now, but dressed, to Patterson’s austere eye, a few years young.
“And this bloke you left mangled in the lift. Who was he?”
“I think he was one of them. But what he wanted with me? No idea.”
“I can’t help wondering if you might have asked him.”
Patterson didn’t reply.
“I am frankly relieved, Trish Patterson, that we are on the same side,” said Hopko.
But you’d never do anything as stupid as getting stuck in a lift with the opposition, thought Patterson.
“Have we heard anything from CAMBER yet?” she said.
Hopko walked back to her desk, sat.
She knows something, thought Patterson.
“Nothing good.”
Patterson waited.
“He fell under a train,” said Hopko. “After the meeting.”
Patterson felt the adrenaline shock, felt her chest constrict.
“The police say it was suicide.” Hopko’s eyes were on her.
Patterson grimaced, said nothing.
Hopko spoke quietly.
“There will have to be an internal inquiry. The board’s been convened. They’ll see you next week. You are to write the encounter report now. Then you are to go home and stay there.”
“I’m suspended?”
“You could say that.”
Patterson blinked, opened her mouth to speak, closed it again.
Hopko took off her glasses, leaned forward.
“An agent is dead, and they must decide why. Now, write the report and go home.”
Patterson stood, made for the door.
“Trish,” said Hopko. Patterson stopped, turned.
“If someone in Chinese intelligence wants to send us a message, why don’t they just use the usual channels? Declared officers in Beijing or Hong Kong? Liaison?”
“Because,” said Patterson slowly, “someone wants to talk to us outside the usual channels.”
“I must confess, I’m intrigued,” said Hopko.
Patterson took a taxi home to Archway, dragging her carry-on bag, bumping it up the stairs to her flat. The place was as she had left it, the bed hastily made, drawers shoved shut. She checked that the safe in the wardrobe was undisturbed. She opened some windows, let the afternoon air waft in, some late sun, some atmosphere to break the silence and the stillness. Footsteps on pavement, traffic, somewhere a child practicing a halting major scale on a piano.
He fell under a train.
She sat heavily on the bed and pulled off her shoes, let the knowledge of it diffuse through her.
He was not the first agent she’d lost.
She thought of the Iraqi boy she’d run in Nasiriyah, a beacon on his moped as he putt-putted between insurgent safe houses. He used to flirt with her, call her my habashi, my Ethiopian, my black woman. She thought of the rubbish tip where they found him one smoky dawn, the crows overhead.
And the woman in Helmand who washed the tin plates at a roadside café, spotting license plates, faces, from behind her burqa, phoning them in to Patterson, Captain Patterson by then. She’d disappeared, and one winter evening they’d found the café shuttered and chained.
All these stories, she thought, the endings that resolve nothing.
She undressed, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, poured a glass of Cabernet, a big one. She remade the bed, refolded the clothing in a drawer that hadn’t shut properly. She vacuumed and ran a damp cloth along the window sills. She scrubbed the kitchen counter.
CAMBER’s death isn’t an ending, she thought. It’s a beginning. Of something.
In the intervening days, she read, fretted and watched Chinese movies on her computer; the vast, blood-soaked epic of war and revolution; the tiny, silent chronicle of love and death in a village of yellow dust. She loved the films and tried to follow the Mandarin without looking at the subtitles. She went running on Hampstead Heath and shopped at a supermarket. In the evenings, she heated up frozen dinners, ate them from the tray as she watched television, a chicken pot pie, enchiladas. She spoke to nobody, apart from Damian, who lived downstairs. He knocked on her door in his skinny jeans and high tops and insisted they go for a drink. They walked to a pub on Highgate Hill in warm sunlight and talked about the football and what was happening in the reality shows. Damian worked in advertising, prided himself on his populist tastes. He bought pints and a packet of crisps and asked her about her administrative job at the Foreign Office, how it was going, where she’d traveled to. He knew her just well enough to tell that something was wrong, and he probed a little, but she answered vaguely, turning the conversation back to him, and after a while they walked back home and said goodnight.
On the Monday, she wore a gray suit and flats, pulled her hair back into a tight bun, as she had worn it under her beret in the army. She got into VX early, sat in her cubicle drinking coffee, composing herself. The board convened at nine-thirty. Patterson was shown in to a fifth-floor conference room and found herself facing Mobbs, the Director, Requirements and Production, his dark suit, a tie of primary colors verging on the frivolous, as if to emphasize by contrast the vulpine features, the aquiline nose, deep-set eyes, the whiff of mercilessness to him. Next to him, Hopko, in a billowing pink silk scarf, silver hoops in her ears, her dark hair full, teased. She looked up, wrinkled her nose and smiled. Next to her, Mika Bastable of Human Resources, known throughout the Service as Bust-your-balls, a tall, sculpted woman, younger, who had come to the Service from a corporation. Fine detailing, thought Patterson: highlights, lip gloss, manicure. She looked expensive, and by comparison Patterson felt dowdy, reduced.
“We have read the encounter report,” said Mobbs, patting a file in front of him. Patterson nodded, sat straighter.
“This was the first time you had encountered CAMBER, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you feel you were adequately prepared for the meeting?”
“I was as well prepared as I could be, given the circumstances.”
“That’s not the same as adequately prepared, is it?”
“I was adequately prepared.”
“You informed CAMBER of his egress procedures should the meeting be interrupted?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t he f
ollow them?”
“I can’t answer that, sir. I don’t know.”
Mobbs opened the file, scanned the page.
“He left the flat all right. He found the lifts, all well and good, down he goes to the MTR station, but then he goes to the wrong platform. Our blokes can’t find him. Why the blazes does he do that?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Perhaps you got it wrong. You told him to go to the wrong platform.”
“Absolutely not, sir. I told him to take a train to Admiralty. Which was correct.”
“And then he’s dead. Police say he jumped. Did he?”
“He was panicked, very frightened. He thought he was blown. I could see him deciding to… do something drastic.”
Mobbs looked at her.
“Then why didn’t you calm him down, reassure him, for God’s sake? Why’d he leave the meeting worse off than when he went in? That’s not what we do, is it? Let our agents run off in a panic.”
Patterson swallowed, took a breath. Stay calm, she thought.
“I was in the process of talking him down. I needed to establish if he was blown. I was questioning him when the signal came through, and we had to go to emergency procedures.”
“I think you lost control. CAMBER didn’t listen to you.”
“That is not the case, sir. The meeting was compromised at a crucial moment and I put emergency procedures into effect.”
“Well, there’s a corpse says it is the case.”
“That’s unfair,” said Hopko, bluntly. “CAMBER had emergency procedures. He elected not to follow them. Agents, on occasion, make idiotic decisions. All on their own.”
A pause, as Mobbs appeared to contemplate being lectured by his subordinate.
Bastable of Human Resources spoke.
“What we are trying to ascertain here…”
She turned over a page, slowly, let the silence hang for a beat.
“… is whether you mishandled this meeting, and, by extension, whether you are adequately equipped to continue in your present role in operations.”
Equipped?
“One can’t help but notice that this is not the first time you have been party to a… a what should we call it, I wonder?”
“A flap,” said Hopko.
Patterson stayed silent.
“Quite,” said Bastable. “Last year. Operation STONE CIRCLE.” She licked a finger, turned another page. She’s attempting gravitas, thought Patterson. “Says here you were responsible for exfiltrating two agents from China by means of an extremely dangerous contingency operation. Rather blotted your copy-book, as I recall.”
“The inquiry found not.”
“All undertaken without the necessary authorizations and permissions.”
“The inquiry found that I acted… excusably.”
“Sod the inquiry. What on earth were you doing?”
“I’ll tell you, if you like. We were spying. Operation STONE CIRCLE got us inside classified Chinese computer networks. It worked. For once. We used a Chinese asset, and a British journalist as cutout and courier. The two of them did everything we asked of them, and the entire operation bled gold. Then some cretin on the seventh floor of this Service decided to hand over operational control to an external player. To a private company. And the whole thing went belly up. Read the report.” Patterson felt the shock of memory, thought of sitting alone in the P section watching the operation die, watching her agent run. She thought of Mangan’s voice on the phone, rigid with fear, and of the ruthless, sharp-eyed bastard around which the whole operation had revolved. They’d called him “Peanut.” She wondered for a second what had happened to him, where he was.
Hopko was looking at her, a there-you-go-again look. Bust-your-balls’s face was reddening.
“People died,” she said.
“People do.”
“There was a girl involved, wasn’t there. What happened to her?”
“Ting. She was the journalist’s assistant in Beijing. They were… having an affair. She was arrested.”
“Charming.”
Human Resources tucked a stray lock of blonde hair behind her ear, smirked at Patterson.
“You do seem to be a sort of Typhoid Mary of espionage, don’t you? People expiring left and right. Getting carted off to the Lubyanka. Or its Chinese equivalent.” She glanced at Mobbs. Looking for approval, thought Patterson. The Director of Requirements and Production was reading the file, doggedly. Hopko was looking at the ceiling.
“I must say,” Bastable went on, “I sense that the Controllerate has been very accommodating, has allowed you every chance, but from my perspective, I have to ask if your… your background really has prepared you for operations.”
There it is, thought Patterson. There it is. Background.
Hopko was leaning back in her chair, eyes half-closed. Patterson wondered if she was smiling.
“Well?” said Bastable.
“I’m not sure I heard a question,” said Patterson.
Bastable’s eyes flickered with irritation.
“Well, let me make it very clear, then. I sense an impulsiveness and a lack of judgment in you, as evidenced by your role in STONE CIRCLE, and in your handling of the lately departed CAMBER. Please tell me why you should retain your operational role.”
Patterson shifted in her chair, but it was the D/RP who spoke.
“Out of interest, what happened to the journalist, the access agent in STONE CIRCLE? What was his name?”
“Philip Mangan,” said Hopko.
“Mangan, that’s right. He was a rather clever bloke, as I remember.”
Bastable was regarding him with a frozen expression.
“He’s marinading in East Africa,” said Hopko. “Keeping his mouth shut in this life and the next.”
Mobbs closed the file, placed his hands on the table and spoke directly to Patterson with an air of finality.
“All right. All right. While you retain the confidence of your Head of Controllerate, you will remain in your operational role. I will expect to see performance reviews that reflect that confidence.”
Hopko was nodding, listening to him with a fixed, admiring smile, one which Patterson had long ago learned to read, and which, when correctly decrypted, meant you swivel-eyed, patronizing husk of a man.
Mobbs turned to Bastable of Human Resources, leaning close to her to whisper, a little too loudly.
“And for pity’s sake, less talk of background, if you please. You’ll get us all sued.”
5
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
In Kaliti prison, the inmates were not incarcerated in cells. Rather, they were warehoused in vast, corrugated iron structures that rattled under the rain and baked under the sun. Eight zones to the prison, several thousand inmates in each, the whole complex riddled with tuberculosis, it was said.
Mangan sat in the jeep by the side of the main road. He looked out at the prison walls. The late afternoon had turned overcast, the light a smoky purple. There’d be rain later, turning the sidewalks to mud, leaving the city misty and cool.
Kaliti housed criminals for sure, murderers, psychopaths, petty pilferers. But it served also as a political waste disposal, into which the ruling party dropped opposition leaders, judges, journalists, activists, trade unionists and persons of unreliable ethnicity should they prove troublesome.
He’d been waiting two hours. Hallelujah had gone in clutching some clothes and bundles of food, some money to smooth the way. It was delicate. He was to interview an inmate. The inmate was a sallow forty-year-old woman named Habiba Yusuf who had, she said, been distributing alms to destitute Somali Muslims in the east when she was dragged from her car by men in plain clothes. She was in fact smuggling funds to extremist organizations, she learned, and was locked up in Kaliti under Ethiopia’s generous anti-terrorism laws. But her case had become something of an international cause célèbre, and the authorities were grudgingly allowing glimpses of her to demonstrate that she was, at least
, alive. Mangan, the foreign correspondent, one of the handful based in Addis, hadn’t been allowed in, so Hallelujah was doing duty for both of them, would share his notes, and hopefully a photo, and Mangan would file for the paper. Habiba had a lump in her breast. The authorities weren’t allowing her to see a doctor.
Mangan checked his watch. What the hell was Hal doing? He stretched, breathed. The evening air smelled of ozone, kerosene, baking injera, some subtle sweetness beneath it all.
It was almost dark by the time Hallelujah emerged from the prison gate, shoulders hunched, eyes down. Mangan watched him pick his way along the muddy track in his trainers, his thin, dark frame, his air of anxiety. Hallelujah climbed into the car, put his head back and closed his eyes.
“What took so long?” said Mangan.
Hallelujah lit a cigarette, made a cursory attempt to exhale out of the window.
“I am stupid,” he said.
“Tell me.” Mangan started the car, pulled out onto the road.
“So they take me in. The guards sit there in the room with us. She’s terrible, Philip. Crying. So sick, she says. I ask the questions. She answers, but the guards keep interrupting, cutting her off. She keeps saying she needs a doctor, she has this lump. She’s terrified. I got a little bit about the conditions. But, really, it was a mess.”
“Any photo?”
“Yes, but… well, you’ll see it.”
“It doesn’t sound too bad.”
“It gets worse. After fifteen minutes they say, that’s it. Finish. And they take her from the room. They push me out, and as I’m walking back to the gate I snap some pictures of the prison. The courtyard is just… people everywhere. Filthy. No order. Well, the guards see me and get angry and they take me to the guardroom and yell at me for one hour.”
“Just yell?”
“Yes.” He shook his head, ruefully.
“And the pictures?”
“They took the camera. Your camera.”
Mangan swerved to the side of the road as a truck hurtled by, weaving, its horn blaring.
“I’m really sorry,” said Hallelujah.
Mangan sighed.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “But the picture of her? Is that gone, too?”