by Adam Brookes
“One car only,” he said. Mangan parked, and as he did so, he thought he saw a streak of blue across his rearview mirror. He walked to the Toyota and climbed into the back seat. Rocky looked back at him and gave him a high-wattage, anticipatory smile. The driver was of Chinese appearance and said nothing.
The guards raised the barrier and waved them through.
To enter the compound was to enter a different realm. Here, the asphalt was smooth and flat. The verges were of well-kept grass. No rubble, no mud, no weeds. Hundreds of potted plants, ferns and geraniums, lined the roadway. The hangars were vast and identical, the walls a pale yellow, the roofs blue.
Beside Mangan on the back seat lay a piece of paper. A receipt? AA Car Services, Djibouti Street, Addis Ababa. The customer’s name, phone number.
They drove to the hangar furthermost to the left, pulled in before steel double doors where a youngish Chinese man in a white shirt awaited them, hands on hips. As they climbed from the car, Mangan lingered for a fraction of a second in the back seat, folded the car rental receipt and pocketed it before getting out.
Effusive introductions followed. Rocky spoke Mandarin, gave the line about his fund, his exploratory visit to Ethiopia. Mangan was introduced as a reporter, eager to witness the fulsome fruit of Chinese investment.
The young man nodded and gestured and led them briskly onto an enormous factory floor. Spread out before them, extending into the recesses of the hangar, a production line, manned by hundreds of Ethiopian workers. The air was warm and smelled of cooking rubber, glue, oil. The clatter and hiss of machinery. To his right, Mangan saw lines of presses of some sort, then row upon row of women at oversized sewing machines. Their guide was leaning in to them, speaking loudly.
“This line produces footwear for the European and US markets. You can see.” He held up a woman’s flat shoe, pointed at the label stitched in the tongue—the brand name of a high street chain. Rocky nodded appreciatively. Mangan looked about him. The workers were all repetitive, directed motion. Some of them gazed up at the visitors, their eyes lingering on the tall red-headed Englishman as they worked. The factory was spotlessly clean and overhead hung red banners with slogans. Together Lay The Foundation For Sino-Ethiopian Cooperation and Prosperity! The guide gestured and they walked slowly along the production line. Next, a classroom. A hundred or so Ethiopians faced a Chinese lecturer and a screen. On seeing the visitors, the students immediately stood and began to clap.
“They are welcoming you,” said the guide. Rocky nodded and held up a hand in acknowledgement. At a sharp command from the lecturer, the students sat. On the screen, in English, were the words “Discipline” and “Responsibility.”
“Here,” said the guide, “the workers study our corporate values.”
It was, to Mangan, as if a factory complex had been surgically transplanted from southern China, its ethos and expectations entirely intact.
Rocky whispered into Mangan’s ear.
“They’ll employ fifty thousand Ethiopian workers here. Automotive production, agricultural processing, all kinds of things.” He beamed.
They walked back across the factory floor and out to the cars. Rocky professed himself astounded, delighted. He assured the guide he would report to his superiors at the earliest opportunity.
Mangan followed the white Toyota in the mauve evening light. They drove farther from Addis Ababa, into the quiet town of Debre Zeit. Rocky, it transpired, had booked them rooms at a hotel. Mangan’s, yellowed peeling walls, a lightshade filled with desiccated insects, looked out on a courtyard of orchids. The driver disappeared, and Mangan and Rocky ate, the only diners in a dark and cavernous dining room, kebabs, wot, beer. The food was lukewarm and sickly. Mangan watched Rocky across the table.
“So,” said Mangan, “what was all that about?” He was speaking English.
“All what?” said Rocky.
“What was I supposed to learn today? At the market. The factory.”
“Didn’t you find it interesting? I find it all very interesting.”
Mangan waited.
“I hoped you would see possibility,” said Rocky. He gestured with his hand, as if grabbing for something in the air. “I want you to see what China can do, what we could be.”
“I don’t need to be taken on publicity tours.”
Rocky shook his head, adopted a sad frown.
“But imagine, Philip. Imagine projects like that all over Africa!”
“I’m trying,” said Mangan.
Rocky was silent. Then he wiped his mouth with a napkin, gestured at Mangan, spoke in Mandarin, and for the first time, Mangan thought he felt an undertow in the man, some current of anger running beneath.
“You, you Western people. Your naivete. For you everything must fit in the easiest story, the neatest narrative. And for you China is a monolith, just a big, nasty, authoritarian factory, full of people you don’t know, can’t know. But you know nothing about our struggles. Nothing of our disappointments. Our successes. China can be a force for good, Philip. No more sitting in the corner, silent, pliable. We can change things. We can create new conditions. It might be a little… shocking. But that is the China we want. Really.”
Mangan saw the opportunity, took it.
“Who is we?”
“But…”
“Who is we?”
Rocky looked to be considering.
“We, Philip, are a small group of patriotic Chinese.”
“Forgive me, but patriots do not usually engage in the activities you have recently engaged in.”
“We have our reasons.”
“I need to know what they are.”
Rocky grinned, said nothing. Mangan spoke very quietly now.
“Why do you want to discredit CNaC?” he said.
Rocky sipped his beer, ignored the question.
“You saw the surveillance?” he said, quietly.
“A blue Mercedes, with us all day,” said Mangan.
“Is it yours?”
“No.”
Rocky made a wry face.
“I think we may not have very much more time.”
“If that is true, it is all the more urgent that you start speaking openly and clearly with me.”
Rocky gave his best puckish, twinkling grin.
“Did you ever study Confucius, Philip?”
Mangan thought back to college days, a course in classical texts, the hopeless slog through The Analects.
“A little.”
“So you know. You know that we Chinese have always valued the humane. Ren, we call it. Humaneness. Very important. Not because some god tells us so, but because Confucius understood that society works when we are humane. And the true ruler is humane, like a parent to a child.”
Mangan waited.
Rocky picked at his food, spoke carefully.
“There is a man. A very decent, patriotic man. A soldier. When he speaks you know you are hearing truths. He believes in these virtues, real Chinese virtues. Many of us admire this man very much. He shows us the way. We answer to him.”
“Does he have a name, this virtuous soldier?”
Rocky shook his head, put down his fork, sat back.
“So that is what we are, Philip. Ren. Humane. That is our motive. You can tell them this.”
Rocky raised a finger and wagged it.
“And you may tell them one more thing. Tell them that I am a soldier, too. An officer of the People’s Liberation Army. Tell them that I served as a military observer in the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt, in 1998.”
When Mangan awoke in the morning, Rocky had already left. But an envelope had been pushed under the door.
At the Jupiter Hotel, Patterson had lain awake much of the night, tried to read, watched some television—a vile movie on a satellite channel featuring mawkish man-children who made their cars skid and spin to no apparent purpose, sumo wrestling, an ancient, saccharine rom-com. For a while she paced the room. From her window, she watched the damp, dim cit
y, the streets mostly silent now, the sprawled and ragged figures by the roadside. She went early to the safe flat, brewed coffee, tested and retested the equipment.
Mangan arrived at eleven, unshaven, unhurried, sat on the crackling sofa, rubbed his eyes.
“The surveillance is there. It’s real,” he said. “And it’s not his.”
“Was it with you this morning?” she said.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see it. I left the car at home, took three different taxis to get here.”
“Mobile phone?”
“At home.”
“My, what a pro,” she said.
He gave her a quizzical look, then reached in his pocket, took out the pen and handed it to her. She unscrewed the barrel to reveal a socket which she cabled to the laptop. A short upload, and they were looking at images of Rocky Shi. Patterson studied the screen, watched the compact figure in its ludicrous photographer’s vest walking through the market, listened to the reedy voice, the forced laughter, saw immediately the elusiveness of the man, the outward layers of obfuscation.
“That is very good,” she said.
“There’s more,” he said.
He gave her the Toyota’s license plates, the car rental receipt. Patterson felt a flicker of excitement, a half-smile forming. He watched her.
And then—finale!—he laid the envelope on the table with a flourish.
“You managed to restrain yourself from opening it?” she said.
“As ordered.”
Patterson put on a pair of surgical gloves, picked up the envelope, opened it and removed a document of some thirty pages. Together they looked at the title page.
Juemi.
Mangan’s Chinese was marginally better than Patterson’s.
Instructions to Responsible Military Officers and Cadres Regarding Oversight of Procurement Contracts in the Case of China National Century Corporation.
Patterson worked quickly with a handheld scanner. Once the document and the car receipt were uploaded, she pushed the files through an encryption program. She wrote a short covering telegram and encrypted that, too. The laptop was connected to a handheld satellite phone and the files went in short digital bursts.
Mangan lay on the sofa, closed his eyes. Patterson left him alone, went to the fetid kitchen to make more coffee, came back into the living room to see him sitting bolt upright on the sofa, eyes wide.
“I almost forgot,” he said.
“Forgot what?” she said, alarmed.
“He said I was to tell you that he is an officer of the PLA and that he served in Sinai in 1998. He was an observer. One of the UN observers.”
Patterson stared at him, bit back an angry response.
“That’s important,” he said, blankly.
“For Christ’s sake, wake up, Philip,” she said. “He’s telling us who he is.”
37
Patterson waited, stunned with boredom in the safe flat. The surveillance had left London nervy and it was deemed risky for her to be out, even to build cover. She read, watched satellite television, tested the equipment, thought up elaborate operational scenarios, and in an act of boldness and rebellion, removed the plastic covering from the sofa, so that it no longer crackled when she sat on it.
Hopko came up on secure video link for housekeeping and to, as she put it, “keep the engine running.” VX, Hopko informed Patterson, had granted Rocky Shi the cryptonym by which he was to be known. He had become HYPNOTIST. For Mangan, BRAMBLE. And as such would they be known in all traffic henceforth.
“They’re breathing very heavily,” she said, through the clutter and pixellation. “Over at Assessments, at Treasury, even in the Cabinet Office. HYPNOTIST has got their attention. They want everything on CNaC. The lot. Links to the Party, the military. CNaC’s presence in Africa, Latin America, projects, contracts. Is every CNaC router a bug? Are there backdoors in CNaC encryption? Little CNaC black boxes in every switching room? Malware on every CNaC smartphone? After all, we do these things, so why wouldn’t they? Is CNaC colonizing cyberspace? they ask. Is it poisoning the digital well?”
“And you think HYPNOTIST can answer all that?”
Hopko looked at the camera over the rim of her spectacles.
“Perhaps. If we run him well enough.”
“Are you unsure about him?”
Hopko paused.
“What concerns me, Trish,” she said, “is that HYPNOTIST is pointing us in a certain direction, forcing us to look a certain way. It’s as if he’s throwing meat to the dogs, keeping our noses to the ground. Why is he doing that? I wonder.”
After the call, Patterson put away the equipment, locked it in the flight cases. Stir crazy, she disobeyed orders and went for a walk in a headscarf, sunglasses. She mapped several blocks around the safe flat, fixed egress routes in her mind, watched the traffic, the people, looked for the tension, the pulse that might give away the presence of surveillance. But in a city this chaotic how the hell do you ever see it? How do you see it amid the crowds, the shanties, the ragged, stunned beggars, the young men who just seemed to float, directionless, across the city? How would you ever know?
NISS could have sixty people on her, right now.
She turned, walked quickly away from the safe flat, took a taxi back to the hotel, surprised, unnerved by her own disquiet.
Mangan lolled around Addis, waiting for instructions. He filed a desultory piece on the investigation into the bombing, to little effect. He wrote an elaborate celebration of Ethiopian quarterly growth figures. In the Horn of Africa, a Bullish Economy!
He called the Danish and she was caustic with him, and then, to his surprise, proposed a trip out of town.
Hallelujah joined them and they drove three hours to Ambo to visit the university. Maja was wondering about nursing programs there. They wandered around the pitted, muddy campus, chatted to the students outside their crumbling concrete classrooms. They sat in a law class and listened to an Indian lecturer explain the Ethiopian pension system in English that Mangan found hard to fathom. The students sat silent and uncomprehending. Many of them, Hallelujah explained, were Oromo and spoke little Amharic, and only rudimentary English.
“It’s our biggest problem,” he said with a hopeless shrug. “No one in Ethiopia understands anyone else.”
Maja shooed them away and sat at a rusted metal table outside the student services building, talking to a group of girls about their nursing course, what they knew of midwifery, trying to gauge what they were being taught. Hal and Mangan played table football with a knot of raucous boys, and Mangan felt taken out of himself for a moment, laughing and roaring with the rest of them as the tin ball rattled and snapped about the table.
In the late afternoon, they set out on the return journey to Addis, Mangan driving cautiously, concentrating fiercely on the road.
Twenty minutes out of Ambo, he slowed, just to see. A white Isuzu truck roared past him, horn blaring. A Nissan pickup, a bus.
But the blue car—was it a Mercedes?—a quarter of a mile behind, did not overtake. It slowed too.
He turned off the main road and drove for half a mile down a bumpy, cobbled track that wound through fields and into a village of thatch and chickens. Mangan watched his mirrors as the other two looked out of the windows.
They stopped, and stepped out of the car into sudden, deep quiet. They watched boys driving cattle home through the haze. Girls with babies on their backs came shyly from the huts and approached them. Hallelujah knelt and joked with them, asked them slow questions in Oromiffa and they answered in whispers. Maja went and kneeled next to Hallelujah, held out her hand, and one of the girls took it in her tiny, dusty fingers.
She’s so gentle, Mangan thought.
The girls touched her hair, wondered at the color of it, tried to braid it. Maja sat cross-legged in the dust, letting them run their fingers through it, her eyes closed, smiling, listening to the children’s breathy giggles, their sing-song chatter.
Mangan walked a littl
e way away, on his own, smelled the wood smoke and vegetation on the air. The fields stretched away for a mile to a jagged escarpment. Children in a village, cooking smells, the tinkle of a cowbell. Such places always felt to him intimate yet unattainable. He watched the thunderheads piling up above the dark rock, silver sunlight angling through the pillars of cloud.
Maja spoke from behind him.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I think so. Coming to places like this helps.”
She threaded her arm through his.
“Helps what?” she said.
“Oh, you know. Everything.”
“You mean the bombing?”
“That, and… yes, that.”
“I’m only just starting to feel as if I could ever be normal again, but you seem as if you have already left it far behind,” she said. “Where are you going? It feels like you are looking over your shoulder at me.”
When they got back on the road, there was no sign of the blue Mercedes.
Mangan called her the next day and they went for an Addis walk together, into the Merkato in a dank sunlight, up the hill at What-Do-You-Have? where the metal beaters knelt in the filthy street amid the potholes, the mud laced with oil and chemicals, reconditioning ancient, battered aluminium pots, kettles, bowls, their hammers tap-tapping out the dents, the women scouring, rendering them new, stacking them in dull, silvered piles. Where the boys sat amid stinking piles of old shoes, stitching, patching, renewing, bringing them back to life. The air was full of clanging and shouting, the toil of machinery, showers of sparks. Mangan saw ashtrays and grinding cups made from old shell cases, mortar rounds, sandals cut from reeking mounds of old tires, rakes, fences, doors fashioned from scrap iron.
“Why do they call it that?” said Maja.
“The trucks come in from out of town, with all this”—Mangan gestured to the mounds of scrap, refuse. “And the buyers shout, ‘What do you have?’ And the name stuck.” The air was clotted with smoke, decaying rubber, burning. The men watched them pass, bloodshot-eyed, hard-handed, blistered, lean men, their clothes spattered with oil, rotted with acid.