Spy Games

by Adam Brookes

  The first of the two cars was slowing, coming to a halt about thirty meters away. The driver and another man got out. Both of them appeared to be Chinese. Both wore sunglasses. They just stood by the car, left the doors open. The second car pulled in behind.

  Cliff walked Rocky a few yards toward them, then let him go, gave him a shove that sent him a few steps toward the men in sunglasses, the cars. Rocky stumbled slightly, then stopped, looked back at Cliff, realization dawning.

  Cliff turned and started walking quickly toward the SUV. Rocky was running after him, shouting something. The New Zealander turned back to him and held a hand palm out.

  “No,” he barked. “Not you.”

  Patterson was out of the SUV quickly.

  “What the fuck!” she shouted. But Mac was in front of her, shaking his head. She pushed past him. He made to take her arm but she rounded on him with a snarled “Don’t.” He backed away, half-smiling. The men in sunglasses were still standing by their cars, waiting patiently.

  Mangan had dragged himself from the SUV and was leaning against the driver’s side. Rocky shouted to him, his voice quavering.

  “Philip. Tell them. I have very much. I am request to defect. I have treasure, Philip. Tell them.”

  Mangan mouthed something, but Patterson couldn’t hear what it was. She was approaching Cliff, stood in front of him, hands on hips.

  “Why?” she said.

  He just shook his head.

  “Orders.”

  She could hear Rocky shouting about defecting, information.

  “Why was I not told?”

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t shrug at me. Who gave you these orders? Why?”

  He leaned down and put his face close to hers, whispering.

  “I don’t know why. Do the calculation. Someone doesn’t want him. And they couldn’t depend on you.” He straightened, turned back to Rocky, made an off-you-go gesture, dismissive, offhand. Rocky just stood there, and Patterson saw him put one arm across his front in a protective gesture and then dig his fingernails into the other forearm. He looked as if he were about to cry. The men in sunglasses waited.

  Mangan leaned on the bonnet of the SUV. The metal was warm beneath his hands. Rocky, his joe, stood alone in a no man’s land between the two cars. The men in sunglasses stood very still, watching. Cliff was barring Rocky’s way. Patterson stood behind him, hands on hips, raging.

  His mouth was sticky and dry. He tried to raise his voice.

  “They’ll shoot him. If you do this.”

  But no one seemed to be listening.

  Rocky was appealing to him. Philip, I have treasure! I wish to defect! He raised a hand and pointed first at Mangan and then at himself. You and me, Philip! Mangan pictured him in the Paddington safe house, grinning his elastic grin, leaping from affect to affect—See my wry humor! And now my gravitas! And here is intimate, confiding me!—spilling secrets as the smoke from his cigarette curled in the afternoon light.

  Cliff had turned and was walking back to the SUV. Time to go, he was saying. Patterson was rigid. He had never noticed her height before, how tall she was, how physically powerful. In her fury, all her physicality leaped out, her powerful arms, the cords in her neck, the way she held her space. But in her eyes, shock, vulnerability.

  Rocky was shouting at him.

  “Okay, Philip, okay. I come with you now, yes?”

  And then he was rushing for the SUV, darting past Cliff, toward Mangan. But Mac was on him hard, wrestling him backward, then with a short, fissile punch to the side of the neck. Rocky staggered, his face dissolving into pain, but kept his eyes on Mangan. The two men with sunglasses took a step forward. Mac, grunting, once again forced the colonel away from the SUV, back toward them. Rocky looked behind him, saw the two men advancing on him, looked back.

  And then Philip Mangan made the move, the move that, much later, would validate all Hopko’s faith in him, the move which would always shock Patterson in its operational clarity of mind, its calculation.

  Mangan took several steps towards Rocky. He spoke in Mandarin.

  “You can still hurt them,” he said, quietly.

  Rocky was looking at him

  “You can still hurt them. Give it to me,” said Mangan.

  Rocky turned and looked once more at the two men in sunglasses, and when he turned back his expression was one of pure malice.

  “Give it to me, Rocky. Give me the thread. The thread that will lead me to the networks.”

  Rocky spoke, his Mandarin a furious, urgent rasp.

  “I give you this. You use it. Suriname. Paramaribo. 76 Prins Hendrikstraat. Lawyer, surname Teng. Find him, Philip.”

  “If I find him what will I find?”

  Mac was shoving him away. Mangan shouted at him.

  “What will I find?”

  Rocky stood there in the heat, the insects, hair awry, dripping sweat, forsaken.

  “You’ll find the thread. Use it, Philip.”

  The two men in sunglasses were still biding their time. But Mac and Cliff had Mangan by the elbows and he was suddenly face down on the back seat. Doors slammed. The engine started. Cliff put the window down, shouted at Patterson.

  “Coming?” he said.

  She looked at her feet for a moment, then went to the SUV, got in the back without saying anything.

  “Right decision, boss,” said Cliff. And he jammed the stick into reverse and hurled the vehicle backward and into a turn. Mac rounded on Mangan.

  “What did he say, at the end, there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he fucking say?”

  Mangan looked away from him, back to where the colonel stood in the road.

  The two men were on Rocky now, and as the SUV sped away, Mangan saw them taking him, forcing his arms behind him, his head down. His mouth was open and he seemed to be tensing up, resisting them, and then Mangan saw him go hard to his knees in the dust.

  71

  They drove hell for leather for Chiang Mai, did it in just over four hours, Mac wrestling the vehicle through sheets of rain, riding the shoulder at one point to get past traffic jams, Cliff watching the mirrors. Patterson signaled “Clear” from her secure handheld, sat back, closed her eyes. No one spoke. Mangan slept. They stopped just once, next to a river. Cliff took Mangan’s pistol and threw it into the water.

  At the Banyan guest house, Patterson took the street, while Mac kept the vehicle running. Cliff walked Mangan quickly up the stairs. In the room, Mangan washed and changed quickly, took his luggage, retrieved the passport and money from behind the cistern, and the two of them were back in the vehicle in eight minutes. They ducked and dived through Chiang Mai, watched their back, headed for the airport.

  Mac pulled in at Departures, let them out, stayed behind the wheel, wordless. Cliff got out, helped them with their bags, stood there, tall, his easy posture, running a hand through his long hair.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” he said.

  “Wish I could say the same,” Patterson replied, turning away, the disappointment eating at her.

  “It’s just work,” he said, to her back.

  She rounded on him, but Mangan put a hand on her arm, turned to Cliff.

  “You’ve killed him. You know that,” he said.

  Cliff shrugged.

  “I haven’t. They will. Anyway, he wasn’t ours. He had his own agenda.”

  Mangan nodded.

  “And we had our own agenda, it seems.”

  Mac was knocking on the window, gesturing to Cliff to get back in the car. Cliff nodded, held up a hand for him to wait a minute. He looked at the two of them.

  “You two,” he said, pointing first at her, then Mangan, then back at her. “You’re doubters. You infect each other. Make each other weak.” He nodded, then turned abruptly and got in the car, put the window down as Mac started the engine, gave them a last look.

  “Doubters,” he said, and he patted the outside of the car door. Mac pulled
away, headed, Patterson assumed, to some safe house in a darkened Thai town somewhere, some tourist place where they’d blend in, the house squatting behind high walls, with its cheap furniture and window blinds, mattresses with plastic covers, its empty fridge and mismatched crockery, the weapons cache beneath the floorboards, the comms equipment in black flight cases. And there they’d sit, cleaning and oiling the MP7s in the lamplight, stowing the body armor, watching the football on satellite television, before flitting away to their next mission. She watched the car disappear in the afternoon light.

  She booked herself onto a flight for Bangkok due to leave in an hour. She’d just make the overnight to London. Mangan wandered away, and she found him in the restaurant, sitting at the bar, drinking a beer. He seemed exhausted, a gaunt, collapsed look to his face.

  “They want you back in London,” she said. “They want you to come in.”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Soon, though.”

  He just nodded. She sat on a stool next to him.

  “What did you mean?” she said.

  “When?”

  “When you said to Cliff, we had our own agenda.”

  He shifted on his seat.

  “I’m so naive, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “I was laboring under the impression that I was doing a job, performing a function. But I wasn’t, was I?”

  He took a pull on his beer. Patterson waited.

  “They knew it was a lure: Hopko, all of them. They just needed a warm body to go out and bite on Rocky’s hook. A deniable warm body.”

  Patterson shook her head.

  “She intended you to run him. And she worked very, very hard to get you out.”

  “Rocky got me out.”

  They sat in silence for a few seconds.

  “Who benefits?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “From all this. Who benefits? Cui bono?”

  She felt a wave of exhaustion.

  “I don’t know, Philip. You, me, the money men, Western civilization. I don’t know. Signal when you’re coming in. And make it soon.”

  She reached for her bag, made to go, but he took her arm, spoke quietly.

  “He gave us a lead.”

  “What lead?”

  “Right at the end, just before we left him there. A lead into a network.”

  “What fucking lead?”

  He was gazing at her, the level look, the one that saw you and didn’t miss things, the one that was curious and generous, that waited for a response in kind. She felt a pricking in her throat, behind her eyes.

  “Philip, don’t,” she said.

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “Don’t do anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And don’t be long.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  She reached out to him and he took her hand. She felt the pressure of his fingers, his skin, the intimacy of it.

  “Doubters,” he said, “the two of us.”

  And then it was her turn to walk away, into the airport concourse, towards the gate.

  Who benefits?

  72

  London

  Charlotte Fan had been found, the detective inspector reported to Hopko. Chen’s people had been holding her at one of their safe flats in Watford, but they’d done a runner. Madame Fan had climbed, half-naked, through a window, run down the street to a newsagent’s babbling about a plot to destroy China. Someone had called the police.

  Her captors were god-knows-where by now. The police had taken her to a doctor, who pronounced her tired but unharmed, and then to the Kensington apartment, where family retainers had fussed over her, and she made tearful calls to China. And when the detective inspector had been able to get a word in, her nephew, the boy Fan Kaikai, had woodenly repeated, as if from a script, that everything was fine and there was nothing for UK law enforcement to concern itself with and no charges would be brought, even if her kidnappers were found. And Madame Charlotte Fan would be leaving the country as soon as possible for rest and recuperation in Hong Kong and possibly Macau and, no, it was highly unlikely she would be able to appear in court should such an opportunity arise. And at this point a fresh gout of tears engulfed Madame as she ascertained that her beloved brother, a great titan of Chinese industry, had been found in the city of Kunming—locked in an upstairs room at a military guest house—and returned to the bosom of the family, and the well-being of his person was no longer in doubt, and Madame sat and sobbed and shrieked as the cook and the maid wrapped her in blankets and brought cups of ginseng tea.

  And the boy just stood there, with this stunned look on his face. Like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. As if he were utterly disgusted with something.

  The detective inspector paused, let his memory work.

  There was, he said, another woman present. She stayed close to the boy, hovered behind him, watched him, made sure he stayed on script. Rather striking, youngish, beautifully turned out. The expensive sheen of a woman who knows her way around Knightsbridge, Manhattan, the first-class lounge.

  Just a family friend, she’d said, no name.

  But the detective inspector saw on her the knowingness of one who has the full measure of events. And when he’d tried to talk to her, she had flitted away. Disappeared.

  When the police had gone, and Aunt Charlotte had been escorted wailing to bed, Kai put on a baseball cap and shades and slipped from the apartment and walked to Park Lane. It took him a little while to find a public telephone. He dialled.

  “This is DC Busby.”

  “It’s me. You talked to me, in my college.”

  There was a short silence.

  “I remember, yes.”

  “I couldn’t talk freely.”

  “I rather assumed that was the case.”

  “The woman, with you.”

  The detective hesitated.

  “What about her?”

  “Tell her I… I will talk to her. I’m ready.”

  “What makes you think she would want to talk to you?”

  “Tell her. Please,” said Kai. And he put the phone down.

  Who benefits?

  A question that Hopko, coiffed and steely, all in black today, tight black shirt open at the collar, a leaf of silver at her throat, black pencil skirt, black boots, was only too willing to address with her customary obliqueness.

  “Mangan wants to know who benefits? Well, I suppose we all do, don’t we? China is saved from itself, quietly, and is grateful. We are saved from the prospect of China’s unraveling. The status quo benefits, wouldn’t you say?” She forced a smile, but it did not spread to her eyes. “I’m told there was considerable relief in the City of London and the major financial centers of Europe and the United States. Instability in China gives them the collywobbles.” She made a flourishing movement with her hand.

  Patterson was muzzy-headed from the flight, lack of sleep.

  “I’m not sure that answer would satisfy him.”

  “Well, he shall have to remain unsatisfied. At least until we can talk to him directly. Where the hell is he, anyway? And when is he coming in?”

  “He needed time.”

  “Don’t we all,” said Hopko. She reached for a file on her desk, pulled from it a printout, a newspaper article.

  “He’ll see this, I imagine,” she said.

  It was from the Bangkok Post.

  “Chinese Officer Dead in Laos Casino”

  They’d found him in his room, sprawled on the bed, white foam at his mouth, skin bruising. Local police sources hinted at an overdose. The casino was a few miles upstream from where they’d left him head down, kneeling in the dust.

  Patterson sat heavily, smoothed her hair.

  “We could have brought him out,” she said.

  Hopko didn’t speak.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Patterson said.

  “Knew what?”

  “That he wasn’
t coming out. You thought that he and Mangan… that neither was coming out.”

  Hopko was silent, then pursed her lips and spoke.

  “Trish, I’m sorry to say you are being taken off the China beat.”

  Patterson felt a flush of heat in her face, the prickling of shock.

  “You will leave the P section and you are to be posted.”

  “Posted?”

  “To Washington. It’s a Requirements position. Not operational, I’m afraid. You’ll assist in the conduct of liaison, intelligence sharing.”

  Patterson looked down.

  “It’s not such a bad outcome,” said Hopko, slowly.

  “Do I get to ask why?”

  “Human Resources, in two words.” She smiled. “She will be happy to explain, no doubt.”

  “Could you not have stopped it?”

  “Possibly. But I didn’t.”

  Hopko paused, then spoke, her tone understanding.

  “Trish, an intelligence officer is not a soldier. Your agents are not the objects of your empathy, the way soldiers under your command might be.”

  Patterson stood on shaking legs.

  “Have I failed? How?”

  Hopko sighed.

  “Human Resources thinks that you are… unreliable. That you are a little too singular, was the word she used.”

  “Singular? And do you share this opinion?”

  “I think that you have yet to… to fully encompass this work. I think you have yet to understand fully what it is we do. And besides, we all have to live out a period or two of exile.”

  Patterson held up a hand to stop her speaking, walked from the room.

  She went back to her cubicle, through the silent corridors.

  On her handheld, a voice mail, from the policeman in Oxford. DC Busby.

  Our friend says he wants to talk. And you never heard it from me.

  She picked up her bags, took the lift, swiped herself out of VX. She walked to the bridge, leaned on the railing. The Thames was full of chop, glittering in a stiff breeze, hard sunlight. She looked across to the other bank, up toward Westminster.

  And for a moment Patterson saw not a country but something else. Something adorned with the trappings of country, for sure, the Union Flags billowing from the rooftops, the curve of the river, the grandiose architecture of the state. But, in that instant, these things seemed merely a surface, a patina, and she felt the movement of some deeper musculature running beneath, the pulse of power and intention, its horizons far beyond the Thames, beyond London, elusive, virtual.