by Adam Brookes
Rocky looked exaggeratedly shocked, put a hand to his mouth, at Mangan’s callous disregard for his fragile legend. How could you suggest such things? The knee was still jiggling, up-down. But behind the theatrics, Mangan sensed implacability.
“Mr. Mangan, these things will become clear in time. For now, take the information. Then you can see my credibility, yes?”
He held out the memory stick. Mangan waited a beat, then took it. An enormous smile illuminated Rocky’s face.
“I will see you in Addis,” he said. He stood, made to leave but stopped as if he were remembering an elusive detail.
“Mr. Mangan, one more thing. Please give them my apologies for Hong Kong. I had no intention of it ending that way.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” said Mangan.
“No, maybe not. There were mistakes. Please tell them that it was a suicide. Really. The poor man. Oh, and tell them, too, that our operative was wrong to lay his hands on your case officer. But he paid the price. That, Mr. Mangan, is a very aggressive woman.”
“What woman?”
“The case officer. A black woman. Tall. Mandarin speaker. My goodness. Very formidable. Our man must have surgery on his hand. Very expensive. But the injury to his… what do you say, his ego was greater.” Rocky looked as if he were consumed with concern.
Mangan felt something like a smile creep to the corners of his mouth. It’s her, he thought. It must be.
“Anyway, please convey my apologies and assure them of our professionalism from now on.”
He gave Mangan a long look.
“How are we to communicate?” Mangan said.
“You are not hard to find, Mr. Mangan.”
And with that he turned and disappeared through one of the darkened doorways.
Mangan stood, realizing with a sinking heart that he had been played. He had nothing but a surname, a description and a threadbare legend. The man’s stated motive—money—felt implausible.
But he had a memory stick.
He was carrying, with no idea where he was going. He waited for a moment, wondering what to do. Well, move, at least.
He had wandered the alleyways for six or seven minutes, before the gaunt-eyed Ethiopian fell silently into step with him. They had been checking his back, he supposed. And back at the guest house, the girl, sleepy-eyed, let him in. He thanked her and she gave him a half-smile. He went to his room, closed and locked the door, drew the curtains, left the light off. He sat on the platform bed that made him think of a Chinese kang, listened.
He held the memory stick in his hand. What the hell to do with it?
He booted up his laptop. He laid the memory stick on the table. He lit a cigarette, stared at its knowing orange ember in the darkness, pondered elementary cyber security. Do not, in general, when in receipt of a memory stick donated by a largely anonymous representative of the Chinese intelligence services, plug said memory stick into your laptop. A good rule. Prudent.
He plugged it in.
The sneck as it lodged in the port, the electronic two-toned bongbong as the laptop found it and began to read.
Mangan sat in the dark, the smoke from his cigarette winding and curling in the glow from the screen.
Not much, this time. Fifteen documents. He opened the first one.
It was a scan of an original hard copy, the text slightly misaligned on the page, a grainy look, the characters shrunken, hard to read. Clear enough, though, at the top of the page: juemi, top secret.
The familiar dryness in the mouth, now, the quickening. Mangan felt his way through the first couple of paragraphs. It was a neican, an internal report for the eyes of senior Party leadership, written somewhere in the depths of the Xinhua News Agency, but very definitely not for public consumption.
A trial, somewhere in southwest China. A corruption trial, by the look of it. An unfortunate official of the state-owned petroleum corporation. Something about wells, drilling. He’d declared certain oil wells were empty when they weren’t, was that it? Mangan skipped to the end. The official had received a sentence of execution by lethal injection.
And?
He closed the document, moved to the next one.
Central Discipline Inspection Commission. The Party’s corruption hunters, half of them bent as a gimlet themselves.
Juemi.
The same case, but a much more detailed report. Dates, times, numbers. Technical vocabulary Mangan couldn’t penetrate. The unfortunate official had been responsible for the evaluation of the oil wells’ production capacity and he had greatly understated it. Bad decision, for sure, but wherein lay its significance?
The other documents told versions of the same story, as far as Mangan could see, mostly shorter, less granular. One seemed to contain bank account numbers.
There’s something in here, he thought. Something to be forged into a weapon. To touch someone, undermine them, blind them, ruin them.
Mangan closed the documents, removed the memory stick. His computer did not seem to have melted down. He ran a virus scan which came up clean but that, he knew, meant little. He felt a tremble in his hands, a ringing in his neck and head, reminiscent somehow of the sensation that followed the explosion. He wondered if he had some new weakness in him, as if his store of strength were finite, each weird episode contributing to its depletion, never to be restored.
Fear is born of loneliness and exhaustion. Someone had said that to him.
Loneliness first, then fear.
And something else, some inexplicable kindling of purpose.
He put the memory stick in the money belt he kept strapped to the base of his back. He closed up his pack and put it by his bed. Fully clothed, shoes on, he pulled the covers over himself and tried to sleep.
The next day, all flights to Addis were overbooked, leaving Mangan with twenty-four hours to kill—to live his cover and check his back.
The girl brought him breakfast, tea and pancakes in honey, which he ate sitting cross-legged on rugs and cushions in a reception room, the doors and windows open, morning light flooding in. He walked through the old city, down the Street of the Tailors, the old men working on Singer sewing machines, pins in their mouths, their bolts of saturated red and gold fabric against the white stone walls. He grinned, took photographs, asked questions, ostentatiously made notes. A small herd of children followed him, and behind them, an older man, in a red shirt and sandals. The man stood, arms folded, a short distance away.
He walked out of the old city at its main gate, stopped at a café up a green iron staircase, ordered macchiato so rich it was like drinking dark velvet.
The man in the red shirt and sandals dawdled on the street below.
He walked to Arthur Rimbaud’s house, where the boy poet lived the latter part of his short, wracked life. An expansive courtyard wrapped around with wooden balconies, an odd library, a dusty exhibition of photographs. Rimbaud the precocious schoolboy, the winner of prizes, stared flintily past the camera, tie askew, the boy who wrote “shit on God” on the walls of starchy Charleville, who wrote the founding verses of modernism before he was twenty.
Rimbaud had fled, renounced his explosive poetry in disgust and come here to Harer, to trade in gems and guns.
I am present at the hatching of my thought, he had written.
Mangan stood on a balcony, looking out over the old city, smelling the breeze coming from the hills, the smell of sun on rock and dust. He thought about escape, about watching himself hatch his own decisions. I am deciding to spy. Here I am, spying.
The man in the red shirt and sandals had gone. But his relief was there: a boy in a green T-shirt with a phone, looking up at him from the alleyway.
Ignore it, he thought. Live your cover.
But something was scratching at the back of his skull and he descended to ground level, found a door to a neighboring courtyard and forced it, slipping through a gate back onto the street, walking slowly away, peering at his guidebook. And as he turned uphill
towards the main square and the church, an approach…
“Yes, please, mister. How are you? I can be your guide. Where do you like to go?”
All delivered in an aggressive monotone by a beefy, gray-bearded individual who stood too close and let his hands dangle at his sides.
“I don’t need a guide, thank you,” Mangan said.
“Yes, yes, we can go,” said the man.
“Thank you. I’m going back to my guest house,” said Mangan.
“Yes, we go there. We can talk.” He reached out and took hold of Mangan’s arm, tried to steer him off the main drag. People on the street were turning away, Mangan saw. The man was pushing him toward a storefront, no, an alleyway.
“Fuck off,” Mangan shouted. He wrenched his arm away, then gave the man a two-handed shove in the chest. The man barely moved, stepped back a foot, maybe. He was looking at Mangan directly in the eyes, his hands open by his side, fingers curled.
“Who you are meeting today?” said the man. “Where you go?”
Mangan ignored him, walked away fast, heart thumping. The man was shouting at his back.
“Why you are here? What you have?”
Mangan turned a corner, made for the guest house.
I have been warned. By someone.
That night he took a taxi to a restaurant called Fresh Touch and sat alone at an outside table, ate pizza, tried to keep it normal. He walked in the murmuring dark to the edge of the old city, where an elderly man threw offal down in the dust, and the hyenas emerged from the brush and pawed and scuffed for the meat, their feral reek hanging on the air.
The flight back to Addis the next day was horrible, the plane bucking and yawing on the turbulence, passengers gripping their seats and muttering. They landed in rain, the city concrete gray, flecked with green, dripping vegetation, the streets jammed, heaving, sodden, pooling with water, the dogs crouching still, shivering.
On Ethio-China Street, his taxi crawled, the wipers straining and squeaking. Mangan leaned forward and gave the driver the full fare, but slipped out into the traffic. He ran down a side street of shanties and stalls that narrowed, its surface turning to mud. Women watched him from doorways as he hurried past. Children pointed. One man, sparked and jittery on chat, stepped in front of him, made to grab him, but Mangan shoved him out of the way and ran on. The man yelled at his back, something indistinguishable. He came out onto a thoroughfare he didn’t recognize, hailed another taxi, sat low in the back. He felt for the pouch at his waist, the smooth bulge of the memory stick. He told the driver to head for Comorros Street and the British embassy.
31
Oxford
Nicole had gone to his musty rooms in college. She wore a strappy dress of duck egg blue that lifted her breasts, a whisper of perfume, her hair down. The clothes made her feel girlish, light. But beneath, she was hard, operational.
Kai sat in a scrofulous armchair in T-shirt and shorts, barefoot, gazing at her.
“So,” she said, “you’ll be here all summer.”
“I have to cram. There’ll be a tutor.”
He spoke in a monotone, awkward, mawkish, even. She looked sympathetic.
“Not much of a summer.”
He nodded.
“Well, perhaps we can keep each other company.”
He nodded again.
“And will anyone else be around?” she said.
“No. Everyone is leaving for the summer. They’ll all be gone soon.”
She considered.
“And the Chen girl. Is she leaving for the summer, do you know?”
He shifted in his seat. Anxious, weak, she thought.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s she like?” she said.
“Madeline Chen?”
No, the Empress Wu.
“Yes, Madeline Chen. What sort of person is she?”
He shrugged, raised a hand and let it drop feebly to the arm of the chair.
“I don’t know. She’s smart.”
“Who does she hang out with?”
“Girls from her college. Some other Asians. I don’t know.”
This was a lead?
“So, when you’ve spoken to her… what did you talk about?”
“Well, like I said, I made the suggestion, which my parents apparently don’t appreciate, that she and I could communicate, put aside some of the anger.”
“Perhaps you should trust your parents when they tell you that—”
He cut her off, which surprised her.
“I have heard this, already. Really, I know what you are going to say.”
She just nodded.
“So…” he said, suddenly. “You’re from Taiwan.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Taiwanese girl.” She held up her bare arms, gestured to herself. That’s me! His eyes flickered over her. “But I’ve been in the States the last few years. For my doctorate.”
“So… I wondered, why my family… how they know you.”
She frowned, adopting a thoughtful pose.
“Hmm. Let’s see. Well, it’s through friends. Friends who trust each other. We have to look out for each other, don’t we? Chinese people? Out here in the world.”
The dumb nod again. No future captain of industry, this one.
32
Late afternoon at Vauxhall Cross, and Patterson sat at her cubicle, palms flat on the desk before her. She took four deep breaths, exhaling slowly, trying to loosen the tension that had built around her shoulders and deep in her neck. Then she stood, gathered the files from the desk in front of her and made her way to the conference room.
Vezza of Africa Controllerate was there before her and flapped a hand idly as she walked in. A moment later, Requirements appeared, in the form of the straight-backed, gray-haired figure of Chapman-Biggs, his charcoal suit and regimental tie. He flashed a smile at Patterson, the two of them complicit in their army backgrounds. He sat heavily, stretched.
Weekes arrived, resentment inscribed on his pale features, his skin shiny, suit creased. He dropped his files on the table, the slap of paper on tabletop designed to signal disapproval, to discomfit. A propensity to act out, thought Patterson, is not a useful trait in a spy.
Weekes gave her a deadpan look. “So where’s the mother ship?” he said.
Patterson returned his look.
“What, or who, might that be?” she said.
He rolled his eyes.
“Your fearsome leader, Valentina Hopko, God bless her and all who sail in her.”
“I’m sure she’ll be along.”
Enter Hopko, brusque, all in black, a chunky necklace of coral and lapis, something Afghan or Tibetan, heels.
“Sorry to keep you all,” she said. “Let’s get started, shall we? Trish, please bring us up to date.”
Forward.
“Well, as you know, Mangan delivered the memory stick to Addis station. It went by secure bag straight to Cheltenham. They’ve disinfected it and downloaded the contents, which you should have in front of you in hard copy, with translation.”
Weekes piled in.
“And please, please, tell me why this obscure Chinese corruption case should be of any interest whatsoever to the rest of us?”
Patterson didn’t respond, just waited. Chapman-Biggs of Requirements raised his eyebrows. Vezza spoke.
“Just run us through it, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said. Patterson swallowed, pushed on.
“Oil wells, in west China, the concessions all owned and run by the state-owned oil corporation. One official decides he’s going to get smart. He rules that certain oil wells are exhausted, used up, pumped dry. Then he sells those wells off at bargain basement prices to his friends. Surprise! The wells are not exhausted after all, but seem to have come back to life. So the friends pump away and generate a small fortune.”
Weekes was sighing, writhing in his seat with impatience, but Vezza was more thoughtful.
“So who gets to buy the supposedly dried-up wells? Is that
it?” he said.
“Thank you,” interjected Hopko, appreciatively. “Trish?”
“Document number seven gives us names. One of the buyers, and she made millions, no doubt, was a woman named Charlotte Fan. And that is the Fan family.”
A blank look from Vezza. Patterson cleared her throat.
“The Fans are as close to royalty as you can be in China. They are an old revolutionary family. The patriarch was with Mao in the war years. Charlotte Fan is his daughter. One son is on the Politburo. The other is the boss of China National Century, the telecoms and tech corporation. You know who they are?”
“Yes, thank you. Even those of us marooned in Africa Controllerate are dimly aware of CNaC,” said Vezza.
“Yes. Right. There’s a kid over here, at Oxford. Heir to the CNaC fortune. He’s a bit weedy, apparently, and not terribly bright.”
“So the Fans are well-connected, and bent,” said Vezza. “So what?”
Hopko stepped in and for a moment Patterson saw what Hopko saw, felt herself balanced on a fulcrum of understanding.
“Our Rocky Shi, whoever he may be, has made us a gift,” said Hopko. “He has showed us the system at work. You see, everyone in China suspects that the princeling families have their noses in the trough. But it’s hard to figure out quite how. Or how much. The Party ensures that nobody knows, doesn’t it? And the Party decides who gets busted and who doesn’t. And if you’re the Fans you’re off-limits, aren’t you?”
She looked around the room, head tipped forward, peering over the top of her glasses.
“But what we have here…” she went on, tapping the document in front of her, “is a weapon. CNaC is a tool of Chinese power in the world. Our Rocky Shi has given us the means, should we choose to use them, to disrupt it.”
She sat back, grinning her hangman’s grin.
Chapman-Biggs ran a hand through his hair, and when he spoke for the first time, it was quietly, deferentially.
“But why, Val? And who the hell is Rocky Shi?”
“Time to find out, don’t you think?” said Hopko.
Patterson, like any self-respecting intelligence officer, held an innate suspicion of coincidence, and believed that a strong memory was a potent operational tool.