Spy Games

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by Adam Brookes


  Cui bono? Who benefits?

  She felt childish, gullible.

  She took a taxi back to Archway and once in the flat she dropped the bags, undressed, pulled on jeans and a baggy T-shirt. She opened a bottle of cheap red, sat on the sofa, drank and watched the light dim as the afternoon clouded over. She went to the silent bedroom, got beneath the covers, pulled her knees up to her chest and held herself.

  What should she have done? What should she do now?

  She should have told Hopko that Mangan had a lead.

  She should have told her that the Fan boy wanted to talk.

  But she hadn’t.

  After Patterson had made her shaky exit, Hopko had risen from her desk, crossed the room, and closed and locked the door to her sanctum. She went to one of three black safes that lined the wall behind her desk, kneeled, and on the safe farthest to the left entered a combination on a digital key pad. From inside she took a plastic envelope that held a secure handheld and an index card. Hopko placed the envelope on her desk, took out the handheld, turned it on, checked to see that the battery had some charge to it, and dialed a number written on the index card. The number had attached to it the prefix of a Caribbean country. She waited a moment. The number rang and was answered, not with a greeting, but with an accented male voice reciting a short list of numbers and letters. Hopko responded in kind.

  “Ja?” came the voice.

  “The situation is resolved,” she said.

  “Dankjewel.” And then a digital pip, and silence.

  Sumatra, Indonesia

  Mangan was aware of the faint glimmer of dawn, a gentle persuasion of azure in the eastern dark. He listened to the waves on the beach. Far off in the night, he could see the lights of tankers in the Straits of Malacca, imagined the throb of engines over the black, churning water.

  He had boarded a flight to Medan at the last minute, found a rattletrap taxi to drive hours through the night, stopping to eat at a roadside warung, nothing more than canvas stretched over a bamboo frame, plastic stools, a hurricane lantern reeking of kerosene. He ate gulai with his fingers, a scrawny chicken stewed in coconut milk, turmeric, garlic, caraway. The proprietor brought him an Anker beer, offered him a kretek, which he took and lit, the sugar on his tongue, clove-laced smoke hanging on the air.

  It had been three in the morning when they reached the place, a speckling of splintered huts on a stony beach he knew, and he shamelessly roused the owners, pressed a wad of rupiah on them, and they gave him a mosquito net and water, waved him to a cabin in the darkness. His ribs ached, and his hands were discolored and numb.

  The silver flicker of lightning in cloud, high above the sea.

  They want me to come in, he thought.

  The hiss of water on shingle.

  But I won’t. Not yet.

  He thought of Rocky, wild-eyed, sweating, hissing at him a name, a lead, a thread to pull on. He thought of an unraveling, an unblinding. He felt the draw of it, a taut wire in his veins.

  I am present at the hatching of my choices.

  He watched the lights of the ships across the relentless, heaving sea, watched them recede into the warm dark.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As ever, my profound thanks go to Catherine Clarke, Michele Topham, Caroline Wood and all at Felicity Bryan Associates. My thanks go in equal measure to Ed Wood and Iain Hunt and their colleagues at Little, Brown. I am very fortunate indeed to be working with all of them.

  I was introduced to Ethiopia by two remarkable journalists, one who showed me Addis Ababa and its environs, and another who took me to Dire Dawa and Harer. Their insight, generosity and commitment to their craft made a very deep impression on me. They showed me their beautiful, haunting country as it teeters on the brink of change, and they introduced me to extraordinary people, thinkers who are charting Ethiopia’s future and pondering China’s role in it. They bought me coffee, too, the like of which I have never tasted. I wish I could name them, but recent events in Addis Ababa make that impossible. I am so very grateful to them. They reminded me that journalism as practiced in many countries requires of its practitioners a kind of cold courage unfamiliar to most of us.

  As I imagined a world of contemporary espionage, I took advice from a number of people, some of whom know the trade and also can’t be named. They know who they are and my heartfelt thanks go to them. The book Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernization by William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon and Anna B. Puglisi has been an invaluable reference, as has the work of Peter Mattis. However, the world depicted in the novel is my creation and mine alone.

  During the writing, help and support came from David Abramson and Kelly Hand, Robert Bickers, Warren Coleman, William Davison, Mike Forsythe and Leta Hong Fincher, Kim Ghattas, Paul Hayles, Ronen Palan, Jeff Wasserstrom, and the wondrous folk at Goldsboro Books in London. My warm thanks, too, to the staff of the public libraries in Takoma Park, Maryland, and Takoma, DC, especially Ellen Arnold-Robbins and Patti Mallin.

  Finally, I am grateful for the generous portions of inspiration, advice, love, humor, perspective and solace provided daily by Susie, Anna and Ned.

  By Adam Brookes

  Night Heron

  Spy Games

  Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE: The Approach. Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PART TWO: The Hook. Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  PART THREE: The Blind. Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  PART FOUR: The Fall. Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Acknowledgments

  By Adam Brookes

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

 
Copyright © 2015 by Adam Brookes

  Jacket design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Redhook Books/Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  orbitbooks.net

  orbitshortfiction.com

  First ebook edition: August 2015

  Redhook is an imprint of Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group.

  The Redhook name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-316-39988-3

  E3

 

 

 


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