by Adam Brookes
And as she cocked her head at him, the candlelight on her skin, he thought he saw, over her shoulder, a silhouette he knew: a wide face, eyes of dark pewter—eyes with no whites. And then it was gone.
Mangan half-stood, searched the bar, but the Clown was nowhere to be seen. He felt a nervous ripple in his belly.
“What is it?” said Maja.
“No. Nothing,” he said, smiling, shaking his head.
Abraha leaned over to him, speaking quietly. “Philip, come and see me. I have something for you.”
11
Hong Kong and London
Dr. Keung was to be cremated and interred at Diamond Hill columbarium; a daughter was flying in from Canada to oversee the arrangements and to dispose of her father’s effects. The coroner was examining the cause of death before releasing the body. A team in Singapore had been put on standby in case a burglary of the doctor’s apartment in Mid-Levels was deemed necessary. What sign of his betrayals had he left on his laptop, his mobile phone? Were there contact numbers, emails? A diary? Or, heaven forbid, a private journal?
The Hong Kong police had found video footage, taken by a surveillance camera on the platform, of the moment Dr. Keung tumbled to his death beneath the MTR train. The police had sent the footage to the coroner’s court, and Patterson pondered how to get hold of it, what she might see there that others didn’t.
But the coroner agreed with the police and ruled the death a suicide, and, to the relief of VX, ordered no inquest. The Singapore team was stood down. The daughter hired an estate service to clear out the apartment. The doctor’s electronics went quickly to a recycling center. No guarantee of oblivion, perhaps, but it was decided at VX that no further action was necessary. The offshore account into which the doctor’s earnings had been paid was closed, and a substantial amount of money recouped, its disbursement to the doctor’s heirs deemed impractical and insecure.
Patterson went to the cinema by herself on a damp Friday night. She considered asking Damian from downstairs to go with her, but it felt unnatural. She watched a maudlin film about a dying French woman and her loyal husband, and wished she’d chosen something easier. Afterward, she ate at a little Lebanese restaurant. Table for one, please.
She thought of Dr. Keung’s daughter, cleaning out her father’s closets, throwing away his shoes.
When an agent dies, she thought, their truest self dies unknown.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Saturday morning. The connection at Mangan’s flat was down, so he walked out to an internet café on Mauritius Street. The place was grimy, smelled of generator fuel, sweat, coffee. He sat at a crusted terminal beneath a poster of Michael Jackson on a peeling yellow wall. The connection was excruciatingly slow, but extant, at least. An email from Abraha, suggesting a time to meet at his favorite pastry shop. A vague query from the paper regarding Mangan’s progress on the Ogaden story, which he deleted.
Then, something else.
An address he didn’t recognize, with attached files, photographs. He almost deleted it, but the subject line caught his eye. It said simply: “Mangan.”
He opened the message. No text, just four photographs. The first was of Mangan at the jazz bar, taken from a distance, but recognizably him, Hallelujah at his side, back to the lens. The second was closer and pictured him in conversation with Maja. The third showed him leaving the bar, emerging onto the street, blurry, no flash, but there he was, all six feet of him, his face a bit hollow, his red hair a scrape of color in the night. The last photograph was of Mangan in Dire Dawa, in the hotel restaurant, the Americans behind him, engrossed in his book. That was it.
He met Abraha at Enrico Pastry, an Addis favorite for its faded Italian grandeur and its cakes, which could be procured only through an impenetrable system of queuing and tokens. Abraha had secured a scarred table, and a plate of millefoglie and cream puffs, no small success this late in the day. They ordered macchiato and Mangan watched the milk swirl like smoke in its black depths.
“We hated the Italians,” said Abraha. “My grandfather was an arebegna, a resister, shot at Italians all the way along the Djibouti railway. He was in an Italian prison in, what, thirty-eight. They beat him on the soles of his feet. And look at us. Today, we remain captive to their pastries.” He licked cream from a thumb.
Mangan waited, sipping his coffee. Abraha was complex and deft. His work—in agricultural policy, of all things—forced him into vicious, rocky terrain: land rights, the grabbing of huge fertile tracts by international investors, corrupt officialdom, abrupt and brutal resettlements, ethnicity, food security, poverty, water. A minefield, all of it.
“So, Philip. I know your vague interests have extended to the China story. So, what about this? And don’t you dare quote me, yes?”
“Of course,” said Mangan.
“At the institute, we are installing new computers, all Chinese, of course. A technician comes to set up the routers or something, a Chinese guy. He works for this huge corporation, China National Century, you know them?”
“CNaC. Yes, I know them,” said Mangan, quietly.
“Well, this technician gets a little talkative. And he tells us, very grandly, that he’s been doing security work here in Addis. We probe and he tells us that he’s been doing work at INSA.” The Information Network Security Agency, Ethiopia’s own signals intelligence and cyber surveillance outfit. “And he starts smirking and dropping all these hints. ‘Ah, yes, social media sites, you want to be careful of those from now on. Oh, your handheld? Well, you might want to leave that at home.’ And so on.”
Abraha’s eyes were wide, the alarm on his face real.
“They’ve got Chinese engineers in there, and they are building a real surveillance agency, Philip, all hooked into the phone and computer network. All the internet and mobile traffic. All the metadata. Our very own little Ethiopian NSA, courtesy of the Chinese.”
“He said this?”
“Well, no. But that’s what he meant.”
“Seriously? What for?”
“Oh, come on, Philip. This is Addis Ababa. We are the political capital of East Africa, maybe of all Africa. Every African country has an embassy here. The African Union is here.”
In a huge, glistening headquarters—newly built by China, Mangan thought.
“Everything flows through Addis. Power, diplomacy, ideas, influence. The African renaissance does start here, underwritten by China. They are building, Philip. Not just roads and railways, but the real thing. The future infrastructure. Networks. The arteries of power in the twenty-first century. They flow to and from China, my friend. And Ethiopia is plugging in. That is the story, and you as a journalist might stir yourself to find a way of telling it, no?”
Mangan shifted in his chair, felt a familiar flush of defensiveness.
“I need a bit more than a hearsay conversation with a Chinese technician.”
Abraha shook his head.
“You are useless, you people. You won’t commit to anything. Soon the west won’t be here anymore. You’ll have left behind some language, a few aid projects, and embassies with high walls.”
He ran his finger across the plate, searching for the last of the sweet cream.
“Just like the Italians left behind their pastries.”
Mangan, on his way back to Gotera in the twilight, pondered the meeting. He had found Abraha’s lecture self-important, a touch flaky even. China’s ambitions in Africa laid bare! How can you be so blind?
But the INSA tidbit was interesting, if true. Mangan wondered what he should do with it, how he could confirm it.
Could he take it to Hoddinott?
The traffic was stop-go, the mauve dusk suffused with fumes. At every junction the drivers gesticulated, argued, nudged and ground their way through the chaos while knots of boys stood by the roadside, barefoot amid the rubble and the mud, eyes skittering across the city’s churning surface.
Whatever will they do, these boys? Mangan wondered. How will they live?<
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12
Oxford
His first thought was that the burglar was back, and he sat up in bed, listening. Rain on the window, the hiss of the trees. He put one foot on the floor.
There. A scratching at the door. Kai got up slowly from the bed, tiptoed into the sitting room, stood by his desk, held his breath, listened again. A fingernail against the wooden door.
“Shi shei ya?” Who’s there?
And then a low voice.
“Wo.” Me.
He turned on the desk lamp, went to the door. He could sense the person on the other side, their tension. He opened the door a crack.
Madeline Chen wore a dark blue raincoat with the hood up. She was carrying something in a bag. He had no idea what to do.
“It’s two in the morning,” he said.
She looked around herself, peered down the staircase.
“I have to be quick,” she said.
He stood back and opened the door wide for her, and she stepped inside, dripping, and pulled her hood down. She had tied her hair up, wore no make-up. She looked even younger than before, slighter, her expression unreadable.
“What do you want?” he said.
She held out the bag.
“I brought this for you.”
He didn’t move, just looked at the proffered gift.
“What is it?”
“It’s a book. You should read it.”
“Why should I read it?”
“To understand,” she said.
He took the bag, slid the book out. A paperback, in Chinese. The title: Reaching in the Sea, Drawing up the Moon: My Life in War, Revolution and Reform. And staring up at Kai from the cover, a photograph of his own grandfather.
“Have you read it?” asked Madeline.
“It’s my grandfather’s memoir,” said Kai.
“I know. Have you read it? Really read it?”
“Well, no. Not really.”
“We all have, in my family,” said Madeline. She had taken off her coat and sat, drew her knees up, patted her hair.
“You have? Why?”
“My father, the General. He makes us read it. It reminds us, he says, keeps the anger burning.”
Kai turned the book over in his hand, flicked through it, looked at its self-satisfied title, the shabby little photographs. Grandpa as a boy in uniform. Grandpa in the same room as Deng Xiaoping. Grandpa with some forgotten East European, gesturing at a primitive piece of electronics, a teleprinter, perhaps, or an early computer, Kai couldn’t tell.
“Is this some sort of test, or riddle or something?” he said.
“No. You said you wanted to talk. Well, here I am. Talking.” Then she stood up, reached out and touched his arm. “Read it.”
She picked up her raincoat and, her eyes down, walked from the room, closing the door behind her.
He lay in bed, the wind rattling the window, and read.
I was a child of the yellow earth. My village lay in the northern part of Shaanxi province, to the east of the city of Yulin. The village was known as Five Mile Reach. Only a few families lived there. The soil was poor and the water supply erratic. In winter the land froze. In summer it baked, and in spring the wind came down from the Gobi desert and whipped up the yellow dust so that it got in your mouth, ears and eyes. My father had a smallholding. We grew millet and kept some chickens and a goat. Our house was built of mud bricks and had windows of paper. Outside our wooden door hung great bushels of dried red chilli peppers. Inside, the furniture was made of hewn wood, and the family slept on the kang for warmth. As the youngest, it was often my job to get up in the freezing winter nights and feed the fire that warmed the kang. I remember kneeling there in the fire glow, watching my family sleeping, my grandmother, my mother and father and my two sisters. Keeping them warm was a great responsibility, and I would kneel for hours on the cold floor, feeding sticks into the fire.
This sense of responsibility never left me, and I have always put caring for the Fan family above all else. I have instructed my children and grandchildren to do the same. Family is everything, and not even the most misguided ideas of China’s turbulent years can change that reality. Today, China is reclaiming its old, and correct, understanding that family is the most cherished institution of the nation.
My father, as well as farming, worked as a porter for a business distributing grain through the valley. The business was owned by a merchant in a nearby township. My father was illiterate, but he saw that reading and counting were important to the merchant and he made it his business to ensure that I got an education.
There was no school in the village, but there was an itinerant teacher who would wander through the valley, giving lessons for cash. The teacher was a gaunt, pale man who wore a long, shabby gown. He taught us our numbers and our characters, yelling at us in a high, raspy voice. We had no books, or paper, or brushes, or ink. We sat in the forecourt of the little Daoist shrine above the village and scratched out our characters with chalk on a slate. As the years passed, the teacher became thinner and frailer. He wheezed when he talked and his skin turned yellow.
One day, when I was eleven, my father said the teacher would not come anymore. The old man had died while smoking opium in a brothel in Yulin city. My father laughed and said at least he had died happy. But I was very troubled, and I wondered how a man of learning could live such a base life and die such a humiliating death. I resolved never to give in to the temptations of opium, the drug foisted on us by imperialists and exploiters, and to live a life of service to my motherland.
In those days, we knew little of the turmoil that engulfed China, of the battles of the warlords and the Nationalists. We heard talk of a strange new movement called Communism that was arriving in our province from far away, but when I asked about it, my father clouted me around the head and told me not to talk of it in front of the village elders.
My father, a hardworking and honest man, gained full-time employment with the merchant. He earned enough money to send me away to school. I enrolled at a small military college in Yulin city. We were taught drill and rudimentary tactics, reading and writing and mathematics, by elderly soldiers. Here, for the first time, I saw a wireless. I listened, transfixed, to the signals from Shanghai and from Japan. I begged to be allowed to unscrew the back and look inside, to see its mysterious workings. I was never allowed to do so, but here began my lifelong interest in communications technology, a passion that would take me to the highest levels of government.
But the road before me was to prove long and full of bitterness. And nothing I learned at the military academy was to prepare me for what was to come.
Kai stopped reading, rubbed his eyes. The memoir was vile, its sanctimonious half-truths dripping from the page. He knew his grandfather as a venal, calculating man. If there had been a radio at the military academy, he would have stolen it. The part about instructing his children and grandchildren on the centrality of family was true enough, although such instruction consisted largely of threats. As for his “hardworking and honest” great-grandfather, Kai knew his forebear had been muscle for the local loan shark. He wondered what he should be looking for, what Madeline Chen saw in the tatty little book. He read on.
In the late summer of 1937, the Japanese invaders began their frenzied assault on China’s heartland. Japanese divisions pushed west, smashing through the Chinese positions, driving stunned and tearful refugees before them. All patriotic Chinese were united with one voice. Resist Japan! In the military academy, we discussed the situation until late into the night. I declared that our duty was to fight. The other cadets demurred, saying we had no weapons or experience. Only one agreed with me, a close friend who always seemed more of a bookworm than a soldier. He read so much that we called him Chen Wen, Literary Chen. He professed a deep love for the writings of Lu Xun, and for those of Voltaire and Goethe, which he had read in translation. He argued that the true source of China’s weakness was its lack of democracy and a modern education syste
m. But now all patriotic Chinese should do their duty.
Literary Chen and I made a plan. We packed knapsacks with bedding and warm clothing, and we stole into the kitchens and appropriated cornbread which we wrapped in paper. Then, late at night, we climbed through a window and ran away to join the war.
13
United Kingdom
Nicole landed at Heathrow, the English summer sullen, damp and cool. She waited in the aisle for the struggles with luggage in the overhead bins to subside. She made her way into the terminal, the interminable walk across the airport to the border control officers who eyed her, asked her business in strange, angular accents she found hard to understand, all the consonants in the wrong places, the weird lack of inflection that made the speech sound so passive-aggressive. She smiled her best smile, asked them to repeat themselves as she looked them right in the eyes, saw them soften a little.
Outside the terminal it smelled of cigarette smoke and cooking fat. She sat on a tiny bus that crawled to the car rental place. She took possession of a red Mini, and then, suitcases on the back seat, she was bowling down the motorway toward Oxford.
They had arranged a flat for her in Jericho. At her last briefing, in a brown airport hotel room in Madrid, her case officer, the one she called Gristle, had thrown the keys on the table, gestured to them with his chin.
“There you are,” he’d said.
She’d named him Gristle for the way the years of secret work were etched on his face, his body sinewy, the skin cured by weather and cigarette smoke and the vile sorghum spirit he liked to drink. He was sixty if he was a day and spoke the Mandarin of a Hunanese peasant and was, in all, a duplicitous shit, but Nicole had come to know him and in an unfathomable way, love him. For beneath the keen insults, the manipulations, she saw constancy to him and a perceptiveness that she admired. That and his ruthlessness. Gristle had sat with his cigarette clutched between the second and third fingers, the hand in a claw, trying to unsettle her.