Spy Games

by Adam Brookes

  Mangan, it was decided, would proceed alone to Harer. Much the best idea, with deniability built in.

  And now Patterson was late for an evening drink that she’d arranged weeks previously and was, she realized, the last thing she needed or wanted. An old army friend, in town, keen to catch up, compare notes on civilian life. She cleared her desk, locked her safe and leaned over to turn off her computer.

  At the top of the screen was a small notification. What now? she thought. She peered at it. A ping from the Police National Computer. She clicked on it, brought it up.

  A Chinese student, in Oxford, had his laptop stolen.

  What? She skimmed the report.

  The student, a Mr. Fan Kaikai, had been marked as of intelligence interest. All interactions with authority, police, border control and what-have-you to be passed on. And Mr. Fan had had his laptop nicked. So Thames Valley Police was dutifully passing it on.

  And why is he of interest?

  He is the pampered son of a corporate titan and nephew of a Communist Party bruiser of rare seniority.

  Oh, that Fan family, she thought.

  The burglary of Mr. Fan’s college rooms had been accompanied by a search of said rooms, conducted, in the opinion of Thames Valley Police, in such a way as to suggest the perpetrator was more than a common thief, perhaps having an investigatory motive.

  Patterson frowned, then shut down the computer, turned off the screen, did a final check of her desk top and hurried out of the office.

  The taxi was slow, the driver swearing in whispers. She got out at the end of New Row in watery evening sunlight, a breeze, and walked up the cobbles to the wine bar. It was packed and loud, voices clattering off exposed brick walls, tourists bellowing at wooden tables. In the corner, frantically waving, Joanie. Joanie Linklater, formerly of the Royal Signals. Patterson girded herself and pushed through the crowd.

  “Trish Patterson! As I live and breathe. Trish, Trish, Trish!”

  They embraced. She’s put on weight, Patterson thought. She’d always been big. She’d been a rower, played women’s rugby. They stood back and looked at each other. Joanie was smiling her big, generous smile in a face a little more rounded, a little more lined.

  “Well, don’t look at me like that. It’s parenthood that does it,” Joanie said. Patterson chided herself for her own overdeveloped capacity for observation, for judgment, felt immediately guilty. Joanie was as close a thing as she had to a friend. The two of them had bonded as lieutenants in Iraq. They took long morning runs around Basra air base, Patterson the quicker, Joanie the stronger. Patterson remembered the dust in the dawn light, the smell of aviation fuel, Joanie’s hair darkened with sweat, plastered to her scalp as they pounded along. Joanie had left the army and married, working for a telecoms developer in Manchester.

  They ordered a bottle of Rioja and Joanie recounted the travails of parenting. Patterson listened dutifully, and when her mind wandered to the question of why the scion of one of the most powerful families in China had had his laptop stolen and his room gone through by a pro, Joanie stopped talking and grinned.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve become a bore. Turned into Mumzilla.”

  “No,” said Trish, chiding herself once again. “No, no. I must come up and visit. Really.”

  Joanie laughed.

  “So tell me all. How’s the, um, Foreign Office?”

  “It’s fine,” said Patterson. “It’s, you know, routine.”

  “Right. I do still have a security clearance.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. It’s the same as ever. Administration, logistics.”

  Joanie picked up her wineglass, considered.

  “It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. I was hoping we might have a real conversation.”

  Patterson gave a tight smile. Joanie was leaning forward.

  “Why don’t I hear from you?” she said. “I mean I know you’re busy and there’s the travel, but I miss you and I want… you know… I want you to come and see us and see the kid, and spend some time with us. But you’re not there.”

  Patterson sighed.

  “I’m sorry.” She thought of what on earth she could add, what pallid excuses she could bring to bear, came up with nothing, so she just stopped talking.

  Joanie smiled.

  “Do you remember…” she said, “do you remember finding the knickers of mass destruction? You remember that day?”

  Patterson nodded, thought of the blistered highway north of Basra, the Merlin they’d put down to block it off, the whump whump of the rotors, a platoon of Fusiliers tearing the trucks apart, slitting open boxes with their bayonets. They’d been so sure. The composite and timers, the ammunition, the money, all of it was somewhere in those trucks and on the road to Baghdad. But what they found was reams of Chinese-made underwear, underpants, brassieres, stockings blowing across the highway in the hot wind. She and Joanie had stood and watched the operation descend into farce.

  “You were so angry,” said Joanie. “Bloody incandescent, you were. Clenching your fists. This has to be worth it, you said. It has to.”

  “What’s your point?” She sounded curt.

  “My point is, Trish, darling, what you’re doing now. Is it worth it? I have this awful picture of you getting home after work every night by yourself and saying, ‘It has to be worth it.’”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “And then telling half-truths to the people who love you, and saying on your way out the door, ‘It has to be worth it.’”

  Patterson didn’t respond. They talked about other old army friends for a while, some home and settled, some off with the big military contractors, but Joanie had done her reaching out for the evening. They embraced, and Patterson left.

  As she walked to the Tube, she thought of Mangan, on his way to eastern Ethiopia, with nothing, no one checking his back. And she found herself hoping it was worth it.

  30

  Harer, Ethiopia

  In Harer, Mangan saw Christian Ethiopia begin to give way to Islam. And in the labyrinthine old city, at night, between the whitewashed walls, spotted hyenas wander. They feed on the city’s refuse. The hyenas stand as tall as a man’s waist and are possessed of powerful jaws. The hyena’s back slopes downward, away from the strong forelegs and shoulders, lending the animal the air of a cringe, of cowardly submission. The eyes are dark lamps, and the hyenas are utterly silent in their movements. They dart and pace.

  Mangan sat in the courtyard of the guest house amid flowers in pots, listening to the doves coo-cooing, the call to prayer. A girl, in a crimson headscarf, knelt over a brazier to make tea. Then she stood, walked to him holding a cup with both hands, the scuff of her sandals on the flagstones.

  “So do people in Harer mind the hyenas?” he asked her.

  She smiled shyly.

  “The hyena is good. Harer people like him, they say.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “When the jinns come in the city, the hyena chase them.”

  “The hyenas chase away jinns?”

  The girl giggled. “Also, people do not want to anger the hyena. The hyena hears everything. So people say nice things about him.”

  “What will happen if the hyenas are angry?”

  The girl made a mock scary face.

  “Oh! He will come, take your children. Very bad.”

  She gave him a little wave, went to her room, where her mother was. They sat on a platform bed, reading the Koran together as the darkness came down. Mangan listened to their murmur, the girl’s soft, piping voice feeling out the Arabic. A bat swooped and veered, a dark flitter against the blue night. Mangan sipped his tea, thought of the hyenas in the alleyways, and waited.

  It was after ten when he came. A soft tap-tapping at the locked metal gate. The girl slipped from her room, swathing herself in her headscarf, walked slowly, loose limbed, across the courtyard, a ferrous scrape as she opened a peephole. Mangan heard a man’s low voice, her question, a muff
led response. She turned to look at Mangan, indicating he should come. He went to the peephole, tried to make out a face in the darkness. The visitor was a slender Ethiopian man, dark, gaunt in the cheeks, tense, his eyes skittering and bloodshot. He spoke in broken English.

  “Mr. Mangan. Your friend waiting.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I take you. Come.”

  “How far?”

  “Not far. Just walk. You come now.”

  The girl was watching him.

  “You come now,” said the man.

  Mangan stood in the silence, calculated. The two of them, the man and the girl, were looking at him. He felt the adrenaline pulse, the needling of anxiety, the thickening in the mouth. The man shifted and looked behind him, and back, expectant. Reading Mangan’s hesitation, he spoke quickly in Amharic to the girl, who frowned.

  “What did he say?”

  “He say you come back soon, one or two hours maybe. He tell me I can wait for you.”

  Mangan swallowed, then nodded to the girl, made an unlocking gesture.

  She frowned again, cocked her head questioningly to one side, the key around her neck. He nodded and pointed to the gate. She leaned in and unlocked it.

  He stepped out into the darkness. He wanted to stop to allow his eyes to adjust, but the man was already starting off down the alleyway. Mangan followed him, moving uncertainly in the dark.

  The night air was cool. The man walked quickly, but Mangan stumbled on the angled, jutting cobbles. Their footsteps echoed off the white walls. The path was taking them down, deeper into the center of the old city. They passed a woman bent over a charcoal brazier, a tin pot of soup atop it, and a broken-toothed man slumped amid sprigs of chat. They passed an open doorway and inside Mangan glimpsed a single bulb above a wooden table, a tiny child, an icon of a saint with an upturned face and a woman in a brown robe who returned his look. The tableau stained his eye as he looked away.

  The man turned to the right. They were moving upward now along a long, narrow passage, stone steps disappearing into total darkness. The man stopped, Mangan almost running into his back, breathing hard. The man was knocking softly on an iron door, which let out a metallic sob as it opened. He went in, turned and beckoned to Mangan to enter. Mangan stepped through the doorway.

  Another life.

  “You wait now,” the man said.

  He was in a courtyard. Two red lanterns and strings of white fairy lights gave the place a weirdly festive feel. A stunted, gnarled tree stood at its center. Three doorways led off, all of them dark. Mangan looked around him. He was alone, suddenly. No sign of his guide, nor of whoever had opened the door. It was very quiet.

  He sat on a weathered wooden chair, listening hard, senses heightened. He heard only his own breathing, the ticking of some insect, a dog barking in the distance, the moment taut with possibility. Can I play this? he thought. How will I play it?

  He stayed like this for some time. He played through scenarios in his mind, how to get out, how to run. He took a cigarette from a packet in his jacket pocket, lit it, the snick of the lighter. He had money and passport in a pouch at the base of his back. More money strapped to his thigh. He realized he had no idea how to get back to the guest house. Jesus Christ.

  And then, from one of the darkened doorways, a footstep. Mangan didn’t move. A figure emerged into the light. A Chinese face, male, middle-aged, a face suggestive, to Mangan, of a capacity for humor, of a wry joke, the eyes anticipatory. The hair neatly parted, dusted with silver. The figure walked across the courtyard. He was of middling height, rounded shoulders, a slight paunch. He wore a blue polo shirt, slacks. The man stood before Mangan now, hands in pockets, smiling. He spoke in good English.

  “Mr. Mangan.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for coming. You are alone, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am a little puzzled by that.”

  Puzzle away, thought Mangan. He said nothing.

  “I thought that perhaps you have some… support.”

  “Perhaps you had better tell me who you are.”

  The man smiled a generous smile.

  “Yes, of course.” He sat down in a chair next to Mangan’s, which meant Mangan had to turn awkwardly to face him.

  “My surname is Shi. Once, long time ago, I was in an English class. We had an American teacher! Very exotic person, back then. She made us choose English names. So I tried to be clever and find one that means the same as my Chinese surname. You know the meaning of Shi.”

  Mangan thought of the word, shi, said as something like shurr, to rhyme with purr, on a rising tone. He thought of the Chinese character.

  “Stone,” he said.

  The man held his hands out, palms up, in appreciation.

  “Exactly. So I tried to think of an English name which means ‘stone.’ But I could think of nothing. And then the American teacher thought of ‘Rocky.’ And all my classmates laughed and they started to call me Rocky. And so I am Rocky. Rocky Shi.” He shrugged. The gesture seeming to be playing a part, speaking lines of its own. What can I do with such foolishness?

  “And where are you from?”

  “Where I am from. Yes. My father was a soldier, so we lived in different places. But my ancestral home, my jiaxiang, is in Hebei. Not so far from Beijing. Perhaps you know it.” Mangan thought of the north China plain, dry, winter gray to the horizon the last time he’d seen it.

  “And what are you?” he said.

  “Mr. Mangan, I am a businessman. A Chinese businessman, in Ethiopia looking for opportunity.”

  His face cracked into a grin.

  “I represent a small investment fund, based in a southern Chinese city. A few tens of millions of dollars, looking for a profitable purpose.” Who could believe such a thing?

  Mangan watched him closely, took in the geniality, the practiced charm, the well-ironed clothes, the good haircut. He noted the compact physique gone slightly to softness, the wide forearms, the hands that looked as if they had known physical labor. He noted, too, the slight tremor in the man’s left leg, a nervous jiggle, the knee up, down, up, down. He noted the fingernails bitten to the quick. And what appeared to be a scar on the jawline, just below the right ear.

  “And what purpose is your money finding in Ethiopia?” Mangan said.

  Why this dance? he thought.

  “Oh, such opportunity in Africa,” said the man, Rocky, his face alight with humor. “We are considering bold ventures in the leather and garment sectors.”

  Mangan waited.

  “So when we meet, in the future, Mr. Mangan, which I hope we will, that is how we shall meet. You, the curious reporter, and me, the… the… what is the word you use? Swishing? Something to do with pirates, I think.”

  “Swashbuckling.”

  “Yes! Yes! Me, the swashbuckling Chinese businessman.”

  “I see.” He has just given me his cover, he thought. “And do you spend a lot of time in Africa?”

  “Oh, yes. My business takes me to many places in Africa. But I am not based here. I am based in China. In Kunming. Down there. You know China very well, of course.” He had raised a finger, as if to emphasize an important and amusing point.

  “I was based there, as a journalist.”

  The man’s face shone with suppressed laughter.

  “Yes! A journalist. Of course.”

  He stopped and his face settled into a more thoughtful expression. He brought his finger to his lips, considering.

  “But it is your, erm, other career I wish to talk about with you.”

  He raised his eyebrows, as if expecting reassurance that such a career did indeed exist and was a worthy topic of discussion, reassurance that Mangan did not give. He pushed on.

  “I hope that the information my associate passed to you was enough to prove my good intentions.”

  “I am sure it was gratefully received, but it said very little about your intentions.”

  “It was certa
inly acted on very quickly. Frighteningly so. Your agencies are very efficient. And I hope you recover from your experience. The bombings. Very terrible.”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Mangan. “So what are your intentions?”

  “Yes, yes. My hope, Mr. Mangan, is to build a relationship of trust with you and those you are associated with.”

  “To what end?”

  “Mutual benefit.”

  “What sort of benefit?”

  “For you, informational benefit. For me and a small group of associates who assist me, well, financial.” The warmest of smiles. Such strange places our motives bring us!

  Well, that is a reason, thought Mangan.

  “And here,” went on Rocky, “is something to demonstrate further my good faith and, of course, my access.”

  He was holding a memory stick.

  “I hope that this can ensure acceptance of my proposal and the satisfactory arrangement of financial considerations.” The lines sounded as if he had learned them by heart.

  “What is it?” said Mangan.

  Rocky nodded, looked down at the stick, cradled it in his hand, as if pondering how adequately to explain the nature of its contents.

  “Things we have found, Mr. Mangan. The trails money leaves.”

  A grin. So much to be learned!

  Mangan found himself suddenly bored by the enigmatic nature of the conversation, wanting to be blunt.

  “The reason I am here alone, of course, is that they don’t know you and they don’t trust you. They wouldn’t come, so I came alone. You are not a businessman, that we know. What are you? Party? Ministry of State Security?”