by Adam Brookes
7
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
They walked slowly across the Inner Harbor holding hands, the champagne doing its work, softening the sea breeze, softening their words, their feelings. She wore a blue silk blouse, a light cashmere shawl, Chanel. He seemed to like her in this classic look. A sign of his age? Or some fantasy of privilege? She went along, of course, wearing the Hermes scarves he bought her duty free, the Cartier bracelet, even though it made her feel like a country club hag.
Later, there was dinner at Mancuso’s, sea bass for her, crab cakes for him, a bottle of Napa Chardonnay. He was a man of predictable tastes, she thought. And predictable appetites, as when, later still, he undressed in the motel room off I-95 and folded his spindly, sixty-year-old body against hers and told her, predictably, of her beauty and her youth and her litheness and the delicacy of her Asian face, breasts, fingers. And when she jabbed her fingernails in his back to remind him of what lay beneath, of her unpredictability, she felt him pull back and look at her, momentarily bewildered.
“Nicole!” he exclaimed, breathing heavily.
She leaned in to him and bit him on the lip.
“Yes?” she said.
“You are like a bad-tempered cat.”
Her legs were wrapped around his waist.
“I will be much more bad-tempered if you don’t give me what you’ve got,” she said.
He smiled, his pompous ownership smile, she thought.
“Oh, really?” he said. He made to pull away from her, get up from the bed, but she kept her legs locked tight about him. He affected an injured look.
“How… how can I give you what I’ve got, if you don’t let me go?” he said, enjoying it.
She waited a beat, then released him. He stood and walked across the room to his briefcase, bent to pick it up. She watched him from the bed, his smooth hairless back, the hollows in his buttocks.
“Nobody saw you on the way here?” she said.
He had opened the briefcase and was feeling inside.
“Of course not.”
“You’re sure?”
He didn’t respond, just held up a memory stick, raised his eyebrows, dangled it at her, tantalizing. She didn’t react.
“Just for you?” Their little ritual.
“Just for me.”
“You are being careful, aren’t you, Nicole?”
She smiled, narrowed her eyes at him, and held out her hand.
“What’s on it?” she asked.
“Some policy papers. Some estimates. Things you should know.”
“Policy papers. Estimates. Jonathan, how you excite me.”
“Trust me.”
He shot her a mock warning look. Did he know what he was doing? His capacity for self-delusion appeared bottomless. Their charade—that he was “helping” her with her post-doctoral research—had lasted for more than a year already. She lay back on the bed and stretched.
“Time for me to go,” he said, looking at his watch. “Are you going back to Boston tonight?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll drop you at the airport.”
She waited a moment. He turned to look at her, expectantly. She lay back, showed him her nakedness for an instant.
Now.
“No.”
He hesitated, not understanding.
“But how will you get back, then?” he said.
“I’m going away, Jonathan,” she said.
He looked blankly at her.
“Going away?”
And then there came, from the door, a mechanical hiss and click as someone inserted a key card from the outside, and the door opened, and Jonathan Monroe craned his neck to see who was entering uninvited, and then he turned back to look at Nicole Yang, his lover, his brilliant Taiwanese protégé whom he had mentored and advised and helped toward her Harvard doctorate, and the first poisonous seeds of understanding began to germinate, a tendril of fear curling through him.
She had risen from the bed and put on a robe.
“Nicole?” he said.
She walked across the room to him, looked at him very dispassionately.
He said, “Where… are you going?” As if she could protect him.
“Britain. Oxford. For a year. A post-doctoral fellowship.” She reached out and gave his arm a squeeze. “Goodbye, Jonathan.”
Three men were standing behind him now—two were Chinese, one of Western appearance. They parted to let her through. She picked up her clothes and her purse from a chair, and left the room, closing the door behind her.
“Mr. Monroe,” said one of the Chinese men. “Please sit.”
He swallowed.
“I demand you leave immediately. I will report this to the proper agencies. Your behavior is absolutely unacceptable,” he managed.
The Chinese man was nodding. He was elderly, had a kindly demeanor, a dampness to the eye above soft cheeks, a weary old hound in a trench coat. He didn’t look unsympathetic.
“Mr. Monroe. You have been seeing Nicole Yang for more than a year now, and you have been supplying her with information, much of it classified.”
“That is outrageous. We have been conducting an academic partnership. Who are you anyway? Identify yourselves.” He was reaching for trousers, underpants, anything.
The man sighed, made a placatory gesture with his hand.
“Mr. Monroe, I think it is best you sit down.” He spoke as if he bore bad news, a crime, a death. The man with Western features reached into the bathroom and brought out a bathrobe, which he handed to Monroe.
“Mr. Monroe, you are a senior intelligence analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the US State Department. For the last year, you have been engaged in an… an intimate affair with Nicole Yang. And you have supplied classified information to her.” He held out his hands. “We know this is fact. It is very clear. And, if I may say, very understandable. Please. Let us not deceive ourselves.”
“Identify yourselves. If you are law enforcement, I demand to see identification, and I demand a lawyer.”
The man looked sad, shook his head.
“No lawyers, Mr. Monroe.”
Monroe sat, unmoving.
“What is this?” he said.
“Mr. Monroe, have you reported your meetings with Nicole Yang through the appropriate channels? As a foreign contact? As required under the terms of your security clearance?”
“What is this?”
“No. We thought not.” The man looked troubled. The other two had faded into the background. Monroe pulled the robe tight about him, as if it could armor him. He was aware of the man’s watery eyes, the tangled sheets, the whiteness of his own legs and feet. Someone had turned on the overhead light and the room’s intimacy and coziness had vanished.
“Have you disclosed to the appropriate security organs the interest that Nicole Yang, a foreign national, has displayed in certain matters of national security policy? During your conversations?”
Monroe looked at the man, tried to quell the surge of warm, paralysing nausea in his gut.
“No. Well. Fortunately, Mr. Monroe, we are not law enforcement. We are friends of Miss Yang’s. Good friends.”
“You are from Taiwan,” said Monroe.
The man looked regretful.
“No. No, I am afraid not.” He held out his hands in a plea for acceptance. “We are from Beijing. From China.”
Monroe jolted backward as if he had been struck, an involuntary spasm of shock. He felt his mouth open and work soundlessly.
“And we simply wish to continue the relationship you had with Miss Yang,” said the man.
For an absurd moment, Monroe envisaged walks along the harbor with these three men, intimate dinners with them, crab cakes, Chardonnay, and afterward…
“What?”
“I mean, we wish to continue the informational transactions. And we are prepared, of course, to compensate you very generously.”
But the man’s reassuring words were lost, b
ecause Monroe was up and running. He tried for the door, but the two others were there, the one with Western features blocking him. His robe had come open. He changed direction, bare feet stuttering on the carpet, made a rush for the French window which led onto the balcony, batting away the drapes, but they were there too and, one to each arm, they took him and led him to the bed and sat him down gently.
“I’m sorry. I know this is a bit of a shock. But I assure you, we are professionals. Everything will be very well managed.”
Monroe was spluttering, wild-eyed.
“It is absolutely impossible. I will not cooperate with representatives of the Chinese state under any circumstances.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Mr. Monroe. Please. Consider your position. You have been cooperating with us for a year already.”
Monroe shook his head, aghast.
“Nicole is…”
The man just nodded.
Nicole, in a bathrobe, was guided quickly down the corridor to another room by one of the team, a lean young woman who looked at her with a hungry admiration. She went into the bathroom, dressed in jeans and a shirt of green silk, picked up her bag and checked her phone.
A car was waiting, a wordless driver in the darkness. So. The airport. Back to Boston, pack, clean out the apartment. Then, next week, Britain, damp little island of self-regard in a sea of change.
She looked out at the headlights on I-95, wondering what would happen to Monroe, the man she had run for a year. Her case officers believed that he was conscious, that he knew what he was doing from the start, but she wasn’t sure. Men lie to themselves so completely, so deeply, she thought.
At least she wouldn’t have to wear those hideous scarves anymore.
8
Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
Mangan stood in a graveyard of trains. Rolling stock as far as he could see, weeds sprouting through the bogies, track sinking beneath sandy soil. Here a wagon-lit with crusted windows, there an old Fiat engine that had pulled Italian infantry up and down the line in the 1930s, rusted out now, but the driver’s seat still there, reddish and flaking. In the long afternoon shadows, it was cool, chilly even, at this elevation. He walked along the track toward the disused station platform, the elderly guide gesturing and muttering in French.
Le Chemin de Fer Djibouto-Ethiopien had run for a century, then coughed and expired. It had been four years since its last scheduled service and since then the station and marshaling yards had simply been left, a few remaining staff pottering about, goats tethered in the sidings. Mangan had a vague plan to use the scene as color in a piece about Ethiopia’s economic turnaround.
“Why do the trains not run any more?” he said, in strained French.
The elderly guide looked grave.
“C’est un problème d’argent, monsieur,” he said. A problem of money. He walked stiffly toward a pullman, the brown paintwork of which was peeling, and indicated that Mangan should climb aboard. Inside were compartments with leather banquettes, resplendent with leaf residue, dust and bird droppings.
“Entrez dans le premier classe,” said the guide with a flourish. The banquettes in first class pulled out into beds, the smell of rubber and decay rising off them.
They walked up to the disused station. Along the platform the signage was all still displayed in a beautiful deco font, Bagages. Facteur-Chef Renseignements. And above, the Amharic script, its letters unanchored, dancing.
“And now,” said the guide, “the Chinese are to build a new railway, all the way to Djibouti and the sea.”
“I have heard that,” said Mangan. “Will you go to work on the new railway?”
“No, monsieur. I will remain here,” said the old man.
From inside the station building, Mangan was sure he heard the hiss of static. He walked, footsteps echoing, into an ancient, decrepit office of yellowing walls and fluttering birds. The static came from an old radio receiver jury-rigged with antenna and rusting microphone, a frequency dial glowing. It sat atop a wooden table, a power cable winding off into the gloom.
“In case we are needed,” said the guide.
History is not curated here, thought Mangan. It is strewn about, waiting for you to happen across it.
At the hotel that night, Mangan ate alone. He ordered steak and St. George’s and read a book, a blood-soaked memoir of life under Ethiopia’s military dictatorship, the Dergue. In the lobby, two Ethiopian men sat quiet and unmoving, their backs to a corner, facing the door. Mangan watched them from the corner of his eye.
After seven or eight minutes, they stirred. Three perspiring Americans had entered the lobby pulling their luggage. The Ethiopians greeted them solemnly, stood by them as they checked in, and escorted them into the lift.
Later, the American men came down to the restaurant and walked past Mangan’s table. They smelled of shower gel, toothpaste. Two of them were young, in polo shirts and jeans. An older, ruddy-faced man wore tan cargo pants and a shirt with a corporate logo stitched on the left breast. They sat and ordered Cokes. Mangan listened to their murmured conversation. They talked about software. Just as they were about to order food, a fourth man wearing sunglasses and a gold chain joined them. There were introductions, first names only, Mangan noticed. The new arrival said he was “in from Bagram.” The older man asked what he’d been up to there.
“Oh, I process stuff,” the man said, smiling.
“Right,” said the older man, “we fix stuff.” And they all laughed quietly.
What is this? wondered Mangan. Americans, “contractor” written all over them, flitting in from Afghanistan? Hard-eyed Ethiopian minders? This smelled of something military, or clandestine. A drone base? Some tiny outpost sucking up signals intelligence from Somalia? Or perhaps a link in the vast surveillance net the Americans had cast across the Sahara, the covert flights out of Djibouti, twin-engined Bombardiers crammed with listening equipment tracking chatter and movement from Sudan to Mali. The men were leaning into each other across the table, talking in low voices. Mangan watched them and experienced a sudden, gnawing sense of loss, of a life closed to him. Old, blown agent sits in far-flung backwater, enjoys pathetic sense of yearning.
He turned, looking for the waitress, and realized that the two Ethiopian men were now sitting not far behind him, watching him. He paid his bill quickly and left.
Early the following morning, in darkness, Mangan left the hotel in a hired Land Cruiser with a sullen local driver. They drove east out of Dire Dawa into the Somali regions, Mangan hoping for a glimpse of the insurgency, of the military’s vicious response. If nothing else, some descriptive color, some photos. They drove into flat, rocky terrain studded with acacia trees, baboons staring from the outcrops in the dawn. By ten it was hot, the light flat and hard. They passed Jijiga, turned south. On the plain, Mangan started to see the encampments of Somali nomads, the rounded tents like turtle shells scattered amid the scrub, young blank-eyed boys standing with AKs slung over their shoulders. They drove on. In the early afternoon, on the outskirts of a small town, Mangan told the driver to pull over. He sat watching the compound’s metal front gate, some comings and goings, a guard with an AK squatting, waving away flies.
He got out of the car, walked purposefully to the compound and waved cheerily at the guard.
“I am here to see Miss Maja,” he said.
The guard frowned.
“Maja. Danish lady. A nurse.”
The guard got slowly to his feet, gestured for Mangan to stay. He disappeared into the compound. Mangan waited, watched the goats nuzzling the dust, the barefoot boys loping, twirling sticks. The guard waved him in.
Maja stood in a bloodstained smock, arms wide in ironic welcome.
“Philip. Welcome. You just missed the excitement.”
A breech birth, apparently, an extraction. Maja was energized, her eyes bright. She took off the smock and surgical gloves, washed. They went and sat in the courtyard and a young man brought coffee. Maja closed her
eyes and turned her face to the sun, basked for a moment. Her hair was travel blonde, lay untidily on the shoulder. She was tanned, broad-boned and strong-shouldered.
“So don’t imagine you’re going to get much farther,” she said, her English lilting.
He’d lit a cigarette, exhaled.
“How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad. Checkpoints about fifteen kilometers from here. They won’t let you through.”
“And on the other side?”
“We hear a little from the women. Sweeps, arrests. Some beatings, some shootings.”
“Do you know where?”
She gave him a wry look.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
She sighed.
“That is not why I am here, Philip. I am a midwife, not an informant.”
He smiled.
“I know. Sorry.”
“They watch everything we do. Everyone we see, they know.”
“I won’t stay long.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You never do,” she said. She reached for Mangan’s cigarettes, took one. “I’m getting a break for a few days, though. I’ll come up to Addis for a while.”
“I’ll buy you dinner.”
She nodded.
“Then we can talk a bit more, maybe,” she said.
They stood and she walked him to the gate, touched him on the arm, left her hand there.
“See you soon, okay?”
“Sure.”
They drove a few more miles south, the driver nervous. They passed military transports, old Russian four-ton trucks next to battered American Humvees.
Then, a checkpoint.
The driver wanted to turn around but Mangan made him continue, slowly, both hands on top of the wheel. Mangan laid his hands on the dashboard. Soldiers were beckoning at them, pointing at a place on the road. The driver made a hissing sound through his teeth, slowed and stopped, wound the window down. The soldiers looked in, demanded papers. They were lean, dark men, moved like professionals, quietly, economically, their battledress faded, weapons clean and oiled, Mangan noted. One of them saw him, murmured to the others, walked around the car, tapped on the window.