by Adam Brookes
“No.”
“Have you been recruited by a foreign intelligence organization?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yes or no.”
“No.”
“Do you have a sexual partner?”
“Not sure.”
“Do you have a sexual partner?”
“Maybe. It’s not clear to me if she’s a partner or not.”
“Do you have a sexual partner?”
“No.”
“Do you have sex with men?”
“Don’t make a habit of it.”
“Yes or no.”
“No.”
“Do you engage in deviant forms of sexual activity?”
“Whenever possible.”
“Answer the question seriously, please.”
“What the hell is deviant?”
“Any form of sexual activity that goes beyond the norms of a healthy relationship.”
“I haven’t the first clue what you mean.”
“Are you homosexual?”
“Nope. Not for now.”
“Do you look at pornography?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you like to look at pornographic images of children?”
“Jesus Christ. No.”
“Have you ever had sex with a child?”
Mangan stood. The empty case that had contained the machine lay on the floor by the side of the table. He kicked it hard, sending it flying across the room as the examiner flinched. Then Mangan pulled off the cuff and the chest band and the oximeter and dropped them on the table, and walked out.
He ignored the waiting car and took a taxi back to the Paddington house, the day warm, clammy, overcast. He went inside and lay on the bed, turned the television on. Patterson showed up after an hour. A decent interval, he thought.
He opened the door to her. She stood hands in pockets, gave him a sideways look.
“That went well, then,” she said.
“I’m not doing it.”
“Can I come in?”
“Spare me the lecture.”
“No lecture,” she said, and went inside, following him upstairs.
“Who the hell was that ghoul?” he said over his shoulder. “How can it be remotely relevant what my sexual proclivities are?”
“You showed signs of deception on the sexual partner question.” She was suppressing a grin.
“Bloody intrusive wanker. I didn’t sign up for that crap.”
“You can spare me the lecture, too, if you like,” she said. “I get fluttered every two years.”
Mangan just shook his head.
“Anyway,” she said, sitting, “you’re a journalist, so we already know how deviant you are.”
He stopped and let his hands fall to his sides.
“Have I screwed it all up?” he said.
“No,” she replied. “You passed the counterintel test and that’s all anyone was interested in.”
He breathed out, letting his relief show. Why such relief? she wondered.
Because he doesn’t know what’s coming.
Nicole and Madeline met two days later in a wine bar in Little Clarendon Street. The evening was sunny and still. Nicole wore an airy dress of white cotton, heels, more Tiffany, set herself against the other girl’s jeans, lycra top. They sat on stools by the window drinking a slightly-too-expensive white, slightly too fast. Nicole crossed her legs, let the dress fall to reveal her long, smooth thighs, twirled the glass in her fingers. She asked Madeline about the other Chinese students. Who was who? Who belonged where? From which families? Who mattered?
Madeline thought, mentioned some names. Not Kai’s.
“But who’s interesting? There must be some exciting people here!”
Madeline shrugged.
“No one I know,” she said.
Not a hint, not a glimmer, of the fabulously wealthy telecoms heir, Fan Kaikai.
Nicole asked her about home and she answered obliquely. Nicole prodded her to talk about her professors and she was diplomatic. Nicole recounted an entirely fabulist version of her own years in the States, the wonders of Harvard, and the girl listened politely. The wine bottle emptied.
“So,” said Nicole. “What about men?”
Madeline made a snorting sound.
“Does that mean no?”
Madeline was looking at her nails.
“That means no.”
“Must be somebody interesting.”
“No!”
Nicole laughed.
“Name hai xiu!” So coy! She ran a finger down the girl’s arm.
“The boys here are just that. Boys,” said Madeline.
“What about all those handsome English boys? Big boys, pale skin, all so charming, so assured.”
“Pfft. Not for me. Nothing doing.”
“Why? Are you saving yourself?”
Madeline turned and looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“Aren’t you the curious one?”
“What about that other Chinese boy, what’s his name? The really rich one.”
“Who?”
Nicole tried to remember.
“Father is head of some big telecoms corporation.”
Madeline said nothing.
“Fan. That’s his name,” said Nicole. “Fan Kaikai. What about him?”
“You know him?”
Nicole shrugged.
“No. What’s he like?”
Madeline was looking at the ends of her hair, pulling the strands apart.
“Rich. Kind of awkward.”
“Oh! You’ve talked to him, then?”
But Madeleine was looking straight at her with a very level, wondering look.
“Not my type,” she said, deliberately.
Nicole calculated. Push on, or pull back?
“Ooh. I see,” she said, playing intrigued, a bit scandalized. “What don’t you like about him?”
“I really don’t know him.”
“But, wouldn’t your family want you to…”
The hostile target was looking hard at her now.
“Who’s asking?”
Nicole held her hands wide, a show of innocence.
“Just me, sweetheart.”
Madeline spoke very deliberately.
“And who are you, exactly?”
The mood had changed. And as Madeline got up and reached for her bag, Nicole considered the girl’s quiet awareness, her sense of self, and thought that this seduction might not be as simple as others she had effected in the past.
46
London
Chapman-Biggs brought Danish pastries in a paper bag. Mangan made coffee and sat at the conference table feeling like a home-schooled teenager. Lesson time. “A single-source CX report, Philip, is what we live for.” He took a laptop from his bag, booted it up, opened a file, some sort of template. “And I’m going to show you how to write one.”
Mangan listened. Chapman-Biggs walked him through the format he would use.
“All times in ZULU, please, Philip. We call it ZULU, not GMT. So 6 p.m. is 1800Z. Classification will be UK S E C R E T. Addressee here. That’ll be your case officer.”
Chapman-Biggs spoke primly, making Mangan think of a classics teacher in tweed, the whiff of the common room, rugby pitches and mentholatum.
“We’ll not want great scads of analysis or interpretation in the report. We do want just the facts. And attributable to a single asset. Don’t go cramming product from multiple sources in one report, please. It gets jolly confusing. And if you must add a gloss to what you have learned, you will put it in an appendix and make it clear that it is you who is speaking, not the source. Is that quite clear?”
Yes, sir.
“I am a Requirements Officer, Philip, so everything that your source or sources supply comes via your case officer to me. And I’m the chap that writes it all up, cross references it and pushes it out of the door to the consumer. With me?”
Mangan, bemused, nodded and sipped his
coffee.
“And I want every last shred. Everything.”
Mangan didn’t respond.
“Is everything quite all right?” asked Chapman-Biggs.
“I just hadn’t imagined spying would mean being evaluated on my report-writing skills.”
Chapman-Biggs looked affronted.
“Oh, yes, ’fraid so. Oh, dear me, yes. It’s awfully important.”
Mangan forbore from asking why, but Chapman-Biggs carried on speaking as if he had, the classics teacher explaining the ancient certainties of school to the recalcitrant, tearful new boy.
“Because, Philip, in the end, the purpose of intelligence agencies is to gather intelligence.” He paused, allowing the insight to linger in the air. “To find things out. And while we’ve been treated to quite the spectacle in the last twelve years and more, what with drones and renditions and valiant chaps on horseback galloping down from the Hindu Kush or wherever, that’s not what we are about, in the end. Not at all. We assemble knowledge, Philip. Where no knowledge is readily available, we hunt it. And we steal it.”
He sat back, satisfied.
“And then we put it in a single-source CX report.”
47
A spell of heat, the sun a mild shock, turning London’s brown-gray stone to amber and gold in the morning. Mangan left the mews house and took the Tube to Highgate, and walked through Waterlow Park. He found a bench, lit a cigarette, watched the white-skinned girls in shorts and bikini tops and sunglasses lying on the grass, reading, texting. No one acknowledged him or spoke to him.
The park was filled with people, but was so quiet he could hear a dove cooing in a tree, the attenuated roar of the city just beyond. He smelled freshly cut grass and thought suddenly of the garden at Burger House, the nails, shards of iron, the feel of packed earth under his hands. Jarred, he threw his cigarette away, stood, walked quickly.
Addis, lying fraught just beneath the surface of memory.
And just a little deeper, a little darker, China, a cold highway at night, the unexpected heft of a knife in his hand.
Hardened operative Philip Mangan encounters inconvenient recollections, courageously ignores them.
He thought of Rocky Shi, his agent. His joe. And now, keeper of his future. For everything, Mangan was coming to understand, depended on Rocky’s next moves. Far from running his agent, he was in thrall to this man’s decisions, and his nervous tics and chewed nails, his envelopes under the door with their lethal, cryptic messages, the smile stretched fit to burst, the hyperextended personality of the man. His ingenuous, conniving joe.
In a café with red awnings, he ordered an omelette and coffee. The waitress, young, east European, lips pink and glossy, served him wordlessly.
Rocky loathed women, Mangan realized. He was foul to the weak, dolled-up girls in the nightclub, wary of the tall woman who had bested his goon in a lift, dismissive of his own mother. And he was fascinated by men with power.
So what fascinating man was he serving? Certainly not himself. What fascinating, powerful man was he in thrall to?
Mangan sat and ate, paid, ran his hands through his hair, then walked more, his long stride devouring the pavement in the warm, windless afternoon. He walked for two hours, meandering southward through silent swathes of Victorian north London, through Holloway and Barnsbury. He had a sense of gathering himself in, of shaping an understanding of what was to come.
In Islington, a poster outside a small cinema caught his eye. He went in, bought a ticket for the matinee. It was a Chinese film, a new retelling of the fall of Nanjing, a huge black-and-white wail of pain and fury, Japanese officers in puttees beheading Chinese soldiers by a river, tiny children screaming in bombed-out streets, the camera eking out their trauma.
He came out in the early evening, crossed the street to a pub and sat outside, putting away three beers fast, one after the other.
Back in Paddington, Patterson was waiting for him, sitting in the darkening studio flat. He hadn’t known that she had a key. He stood, swaying slightly.
“There’s a message,” she said, quietly.
hello my friend. Thailand chiang mai. next month twentieth for three days. You stay at palm pavilion hotel. You be contacted. You confirm soon>
“Christ. That’s only three weeks away,” said Patterson. They were sitting side by side at the conference table, Jeff at the keyboard.
“Why’s that a problem?” said Mangan.
Patterson rubbed her eyes, looked at him.
“My, you’re keen,” she said. “Well, we have a lot to do—if we even get the authority to move. Your cover. Your preparation.”
“But now I have been introduced to the correct template for the, what do you call it, the single-source CX report, how can I possibly be considered unprepared?”
Patterson was uncomfortable with the deadpan. Hopko did it, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t find it funny. She found it aggressive. It was intended to leave her at a loss. She decided to ignore it.
“Tell him yes. To be confirmed,” she said.
Mangan was frowning at her.
“Is there a chance the answer might be no?” he said.
Patterson had been wondering the same.
“There are battles still to fight, Philip.”
Yes. To be confirmed very soon. Goodbye my friend>
That surely could not be considered overstepping her authority, she thought.
But it could.
“What the hell do you mean, you said yes?” This from Drinkwater, of Security Branch, an iron-faced, gray-haired pressure cooker of a man. To Drinkwater, Patterson thought, all operations threatened the security of the Service and should be abandoned forthwith.
“I said yes, to be confirmed.”
They sat in Hopko’s sanctum, beneath her Ming dynasty landscapes, gentle birds fluttering on spring branches, Hopko delphic behind her desk, Drinkwater going off like a fire hydrant.
“Thereby intimating that we would confirm. This is… outrageous.” He accompanied his speech with a tight, wide-eyed shaking of the head, designed to project exasperation, speechlessness. They act out, Patterson reflected.
“What would you rather I had replied to him?” she said, which brought a direct look from Hopko.
“What I would rather,” said Drinkwater, “is that you had come to a grown-up.”
“It was eight on a Saturday evening,” she said. “Are grown-ups available and sober at that time?”
“I certainly wasn’t,” said Hopko, amiably. Drinkwater’s face was puce against his lightweight gray suit, his steel-wire hair.
“I will be raising Security Branch’s concerns at the ops meeting,” he said, grandly. He stood, regarded Patterson for a moment. She met his look. He turned and left the room.
“It’s a mistake to humiliate them, Trish,” Hopko said.
“What, then? Tell me what I should do.”
“Well, my strategy was always to try and sort of smother them with respect. But I can appreciate that you might find that hard.” She smiled over her glasses. Dismissed.
Patterson stood, wanting to salute, instead inclining her head in Hopko’s direction. She left the sanctum and walked down the corridor to her cubicle. At her desk, she reached into her bag and withdrew a tupperware container. She spread a paper napkin on the desk, opened the container and laid out a bagel, a slice of cheese, a yogurt and a banana.
As she ate methodically, she reflected on Operation WEAVER, for so it had been dubbed by Hopko from her throne. Hopko appeared intent on managing the enterprise herself.
Why?
Why would an officer as senior as Hopko, a Controller, assert day-to-day management of an op?
What was it in Rocky Shi, the round-shouldered colonel with the unfathomable motives, that Hopko saw?
Oxford
Madeline’s house was just off St Clement’s, a brick two-up two-down painted pale blue, dustbins in the front yard, a bicycle. Nicole walked the length of the street twice
, then stopped and waited at the corner. It was nearly twenty-five minutes until the girl appeared. She wore a jean jacket and earphones, and was carrying a heavy-looking tote bag. Books? Returning them to the library, perhaps. Madeline turned, locked the front door and began walking in the direction of town. Nicole kept her distance until the bridge, then caught the girl up, tapped her on the shoulder. Madeline turned, startled, pulled the earphones out abruptly.
“Hello, stranger,” said Nicole.
Madeline blinked.
“Oh. Hi,” she said.
“Look,” said Nicole, “I just wanted to apologize. For the other night. I didn’t mean to… make you uncomfortable. I’m sorry. I just wanted to say that.” She gave her best contrite smile.
“Okay,” said Madeline, evenly.
“I was prying. I shouldn’t have. It’s just… you seem to be such a…” But Madeline was looking past her, and as Nicole turned she cursed herself, her own stupidity, her shitty tradecraft.
The man stood perhaps six feet away from her, holding up a smartphone. Nicole registered his wrinkled shirt, lank hair, then the click of the digital shutter. And again. Click.
The man lowered the smartphone and stood, unmoving, looking at her.
Nicole turned back to Madeline.
“What’s that for, might I ask?” she said.
“Precautions, I think,” said Madeline.
Nicole just smiled. Enough of this shit, now.
“I’ll see you soon, Madeline.” She turned and walked away.
“I don’t think so,” she just heard Madeline say, to her back.
“Have you ever handled a weapon, sir?”
“No,” said Mangan.
The sergeant was barrel-chested, shaven-headed, braced in his movements. A Royal Marine, someone had said. The shooting range had a corrugated iron roof, the rain drumming on it, neon lighting rendering Mangan even paler than usual. Between him and the sergeant, on a table, lay a mournful little pistol. Patterson watched.
“No. Well, all right then.” The sergeant scratched his cheek. “Well, sir, I’m told that we are going to go over some basics today, give you an idea of how to operate the weapon.”
He picked up the pistol.