by Adam Brookes
And, for the pièce de résistance, Jeff and Michael waited till late on a Friday afternoon, then brought out a bottle of sparkling wine from the fridge and made Mangan sit down and close his eyes. Jeff tap-tapped on the keyboard, and told Mangan he could look and there was his brand spanking new website. The front page held plenty of white space and a black-and-white photograph lifted from God knows where of Mangan looking tanned, rugged, squinting toward sun-stippled mountains in some godforsaken place, Xinjiang, maybe, or Qinghai. And in a large serif typeface:
at the border: reporting transition in asia and beyond
philip mangan is a reporter of the borderlands, the spaces where language, ideology and power intersect; where transition—border-crossing—is a transgressive yet necessary act; where journalism inscribes possibility.
“the exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional.” edward said.
“Bloody hell,” said Mangan. “What happened to me?”
“Like it?” said Jeff. “We were rather chuffed with it.”
“Have they done away with capitalization, in these borderlands?”
“You have become a progressive writer, Philip. You will tell stories others do not, liberated from the false framing and corrupt discourse of the corporate media.”
“Don’t look at me. I don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Patterson.
Mangan looked at the screen, wondering.
“The trick of it,” said Jeff, “is that it doesn’t tie you to conventional news coverage. It keeps you out of the mainstream, away from other reporters. I mean, with a website like that, you’re not going to many press conferences, are you? Or natural disasters. You don’t have to explain why you’re not running to the big story.”
“But,” said Michael, “it does allow you to go exactly where you want to go and ask whatever questions you want to ask.”
“And there’s a budget,” said Jeff. “Not a very big one. But it will allow you to commission the odd story from others, to keep things turning over. You’ll need to write, but you can do it all on your own terms. And we’ll make sure you have a readership, or the appearance of one. And that’ll scare up some advertising and funding.”
The two tech wallahs looked expectantly at Mangan.
He could see the virtue of it. But there was no escaping the lie.
They spent hours with him on passive surveillance detection. Look, Philip, look all the time, but seeing is not discerning. Look beyond your expectations. Look for the incongruity, the misplaced gaze, the awkward movement. Look for self-consciousness. But if you see it, do nothing. When you employ countersurveillance measures, they’ll know. So don’t duck. Don’t dive. No getting in and out of lifts or slipping out of back doors. If you do, they’ll know.
And if they know, it’s over.
They gave him a surveillance detection route and he trudged through the streets of Paddington, Bayswater and Notting Hill on a humid Saturday afternoon. He thought he spotted some of them. A woman in a launderette who looked straight at him and turned away. A kid on a moped who passed him repeatedly. A telephone engineer kneeling at a junction box, who, at Mangan’s approach, seemed implausibly fascinated by his work.
The best cover, they told him, is natural cover. The best cover is to be who you are, the traveler in economy class, the progressive web journalist posting his transgressive copy, living in the cheap hotels, sitting in cafés. Don’t duck, don’t dive. Be who you are. But be watchful. And when you think you glimpse surveillance, and you will, you come to us.
The kid on the moped was just a kid on a moped. No one knew anything about a woman in a launderette. But he was right about the telephone engineer.
Oxford
Kai wished he hadn’t obeyed the summons.
He knocked on the door to Miss Yang’s house in Jericho and she opened it, wearing a figure-hugging blue dress, with bare feet, holding a glass of wine.
He followed her into the living room and she stood over him with a smile on her face that could cut marble, speaking her sibilant Mandarin.
“Forgive me, Kai, but I think the instructions were quite specific, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” he said, miserably.
“No contact with the Chen girl.”
He looked down.
She glanced away, as if preoccupied.
“Well, this is unfortunate,” she said. “What do you think we should do?”
He waited.
“Kai?” She was bending over him, trying to make eye contact. “I mean, what if your father found out? Or that awful lawyer. What do you call him?”
“Uncle Checkbook.”
“Yes, Uncle Checkbook. What if he were to find out?”
He stayed silent.
“How many times have you seen her?”
“Three or four.”
She frowned as if an unpleasant thought had struck her.
“Kai, you’re not screwing her, are you?”
He swallowed, shifted in his chair.
“No,” he said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said.
She put down her glass of wine and knelt in front of where he sat, placed her forearms in his lap and leaned against him. He could feel the swell of her breasts against his thigh. It was sensual, threatening.
“Well, how about this?” she said. “We’ll endeavor to make sure that your father and his minions do not become aware of your weird little tryst. And you tell me everything that she has said to you.”
He could smell her perfume and see the flecks of amber and hazel in her irises.
“I don’t understand why this is—”
She cut him off, leaned in farther to him, spoke very quietly.
“You are not required to understand. You are required to tell me what she said.”
“We just talked about, stuff. Our families, a bit.”
“I’m waiting, Kai.”
“She said she’s scared.”
“Why?”
“Her father has people here. They drive her around, do stuff.”
“What stuff do they do?”
“I don’t know. She just said—”
“Where are they, these men? Are they at her house?”
“No, they’ve rented some place…”
“What place?”
“I…”
“What place, Kai? Tell me exactly what she said, or so help me.”
“She said it was a safe house. They called it a safe house.”
Nicole paused, knelt back on her heels.
“Go on, Kai.”
Kai just closed his eyes, put his hand to his forehead.
“They talked about an operation.”
“What operation, Kai?”
“I don’t know. She said it had to do with me. Look, that’s all. That’s enough. There’s nothing more.”
She had stood up, placed her hands on her hips. “One more question, Kai. And you need to think very hard before you answer. Do you understand?”
He gave a faint nod.
“Did you say anything to her about… Uncle Checkbook? About who he is, what he does?”
“He’s just the family lawyer, why would she—”
She shouted at him.
“Did you?”
Kai shrank in his chair.
“No! No, honestly.”
“What do you know about him? Do you know where he lives? Where he works?”
“I… somewhere in the Caribbean, isn’t it? Why is everyone so obsessed about Uncle Checkbook?”
“What do you mean? Has someone else asked about him? Who?”
“Well, Charlie Feng, the Cambridge boys, they all know about him. They asked me at that dinner.”
He thought he saw a flicker of disbelief on her face. And then she was all movement.
Copenhagen, this time. A last-minute flight, rain streaking the windows of the plane.
Gristle met Nicole in a silent airport hotel room, ignoring the No S
moking signs. She stood at the window, he sat on the bed, hunched over.
“So, tell me all about her,” he said, face set like a stone. “Is she cute? Nubile?”
“What were you hoping for?”
“Oh, anything. My life is devoid of sensuality.” He drew on the cigarette.
“Whose fault is that?” she said.
“My wife’s,” he said. “The Ministry of State Security’s. Everybody else’s. Stop pussyfooting around and tell me what happened.”
“Not enough happened. But she knows… something.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“How are you so sure?”
“She’s been warned not to talk. She was ready for everything I asked her.”
“You are absolutely sure.”
“Yes.”
“We’re out of time.”
“Wait, wait. There’s more.”
He took a long pull on the cigarette.
“Go on.”
“She squealed to the Fan boy. She told him to get out. Something’s about to happen.”
“She what?”
That got his attention, Nicole thought.
“I know. They’ve been seeing each other, secretly. Now that’s cute, isn’t it?”
“Like what? What the hell’s about to happen?”
“That’s all. Something’s going to happen and the Fan boy is to get out for his own safety.”
“To get out? Get out where? Why? Screw them and all their forebears. And what the hell did he squeal to her? I wonder.”
“I don’t know. But I think the lawyer may be blown.”
Gristle closed his eyes.
“That settles it. Get back there and… find out. What she knows.”
“You really want me to?”
He gave a brief, tired nod.
“I need proper authorization,” she said. “I need you to order me to do it.”
“I’m ordering you to do it.” He looked exhausted, the lines deep in his cheeks, under his eyes. A tired, frightened old spy.
“We have to,” he said. And she could feel the revulsion in his tone. “So do it.”
He looked up at her.
“I’ll take responsibility.”
“I believe you, for once,” she said. And she walked across the room, leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. He didn’t move.
She ordered vodka at an airport bar, let it numb the thought, to push away what was coming. She was back in England by the late afternoon.
As Mangan’s departure date drew closer, Patterson felt his restlessness, the desire to be moving. He’d pace barefoot around the mews house, reciting contact numbers, protocols, procedures for her. He saw a doctor, who made sure his shots were up to date. In the evenings he’d go for walks, pounding the pavement through Hyde Park into the West End. The walks made Patterson nervous, so Hopko approved a watcher to keep an eye, and a thirtysomething Irish woman with mousy hair and a sad, slow smile wandered imperceptibly in his wake and reported on his tramping through Kensington and Knightsbridge, his lingering in coffee shops. What’s he doing? they asked her. He’s not doing anything, he’s just watching, she said. Watching what? Everything, she said, the streets, the cars, the Arab women in hijab outside Harrods, the groups of gangly Chinese kids bouncing around in their BMWs, the pale Russians in sports gear sat outside cafés, their eyes on the middle distance, the men in rows, smoking sheeshah. He went book-browsing on what remained of Charing Cross Road. He stopped outside a “gentlemen’s club” near Euston, then thought better of it and walked on as the dusk gathered. He never met anybody, or spoke to anybody beyond a bartender or a waitress. Did he detect the surveillance? If he did, he didn’t say. The Irish woman spoke of an instant when he stopped, in Bond Street, and looked about himself, looked in the windows of the boutiques at the shoes, the handbags, the jewels. “And for a moment,” she said, “he just looked completely lost, like he was in some foreign city.”
Patterson observed, also, a compartmentalization. He didn’t refer to the China operation of the previous year, and asked no further questions of her about it. She did not believe that it had ceased to matter to him, quite the opposite. She wondered if WEAVER was to be for him some sort of amends, a second chance. But a second chance for what? And amends to whom?
She sat stiffly in her cubicle at VX, attended the ops meetings, watched Hopko assemble around their Chinese colonel the silent operational structure that would protect and exploit him.
Two days before Mangan was due to leave, he did some shopping at a mall in Shepherd’s Bush, a cathedral of a place in ice white neon, air tinged with disinfectant, the groups of silent teenagers, faces down and silvered in phone glow, fingers hovering. He bought clothes in unobtrusive colors, lightweight walking boots, luggage, a padded backpack for the laptop, a sponge bag. He bought some sunglasses. He took it all back to the Paddington mews house.
The night before his flight, Patterson, Hopko, Chapman-Biggs and the tech wallahs all came round. Hopko had ordered in some expensive catering. They ate rack of lamb on a risotto, and Chapman-Biggs declaimed on the wine and insisted on gathering everyone’s opinions and Mangan nodded and said he liked it, and so did Patterson, and they gave each other a private look. Hopko had decreed that no one could talk about work, and that made it a stilted affair, the conversation meandering through books, films, London and how no one in the Service could afford to buy a property any more, a point on which Michael the tech wallah became quite animated.
“It’s all the Russians. And the Chinese. And Kazakhs and what have you. They come over and buy up all the property as an investment because they don’t have to pay tax, and that’s sending property prices through the roof. And no one in government seems to give a shit.” He sucked on a lamb bone. “Property in this city has become a global currency. It has. You mark my words.”
The evening was warm and the room hot and stuffy, but they wouldn’t open the windows for privacy’s sake. Patterson, with a familiar jolt of annoyance, found herself doing the clearing up. But Mangan stood up and helped, slightly ineffectually, in Patterson’s stern view.
When it was over, the tech wallahs shook hands with him and Chapman-Biggs gave him a clap on the back. Hopko paused on the doorstep and regarded him, smiled, squeezed his arm and left. He lit a cigarette and smoked on the cobbles in the dusk.
“Nightcap?” said Patterson. But he didn’t want to go to the pub, and so she said goodnight, and he took her hand in his, her skin deep and dark against his freckled white.
He looked up at her and nodded, an affirmation. She slowly withdrew her hand and backed away from him with a regretful waving gesture and was gone.
PART FOUR
The Fall.
49
Chiang Mai, Thailand
The Palm Pavilion Hotel stood close to the old city wall, what was left of it, an extrusion of ancient stone above a green and vaporous moat, the traffic racing past in the night, tuk-tuks infusing the air with purple fumes.
Mangan arrived late, bumping up from Bangkok on a budget airline. He wheeled his luggage into the hotel lobby’s air-con chill, its gardenia smell. He went to the bar, sat, ordered a cold beer. The laptop was a slender, almost weightless thing encased in white, as if it were coated in pure intention. He signaled, “Arrived.”
He lay awake for hours, slept late the next morning, ate congealed eggs, drank watery coffee and walked out into a formidable wet heat. The streets were littered with tourist traps, garish, blurred signs offering trips to the mountains, to the Hmong villages, to the “long-necked Karen,” to zip lines in the forest canopy, to crocodile shows, elephant camps, butterfly and orchid farms. A place, a city, can become a simulacrum of itself, Mangan thought, the reconstituted object of a Western, moneyed gaze. There’s a piece for the website. Transgressive journalist lays bare neo-colonialist dynamic of tourist industry, fracturing of post-colonial identities!
No telephone engineers.
No inco
ngruences, no looks that carried a moment’s too much purpose. Just clusters of golden-limbed girls in cut-off jeans, loose cotton shirts slipping from the shoulder, murmuring in Swedish, French or German as they fingered the racks of textiles, or turned pieces of pottery and jewelry slowly in their hands.
Mangan, by contrast, was pasty, red-haired, sweating and overdressed. He marched on.
Chinese tourists were everywhere, alighting from coaches in front of temples of dazzling white and gold, carrying umbrellas against the sun. There had been a hit movie, star-crossed Chinese lovers careening through sensual Thailand, and the tour companies were capitalizing on it, bringing in busloads of fans. Mangan watched the Chinese girls strike coy poses before orchids and buddha images, the back of the hand to the cheek, the upward gaze, as their men drilled at them with cameras.
Nothing.
He took refuge in a crumbling temple, the Wat Mengrai, walked slowly across a silent, weed-strewn courtyard to a bodhi tree. The tree’s trunk was vast, ridged, rising from the earth in a gnarled, distended swirl, its limbs smothered with gold leaf and propped up with decorated wooden poles. He sat in the tree’s shade on a concrete step and listened to birdsong echoing off the temple walls. The air smelled of jasmine. A monk in saffron robes shuffled along the edge of the courtyard, ignoring Mangan, but stopping briefly to greet another visitor.
The visitor was of Chinese appearance and walked slowly, palms out in greeting toward him. A fungible grin, black eyes, the wide face that Mangan knew.
The Clown stopped in front of him, then sat heavily beside him, mopped his forehead with a handkerchief.
Mangan sat very still, said nothing, looked straight ahead. The Clown turned to look at him, then spoke quietly.
“He wants to thank you. For coming.”
Mangan gave a tight nod.
“Tonight. Go to the boxing at Loi Kroh. Get a VIP ticket.”
Mangan shook his head.
“It’s too public.”