Battlefield 4: Countdown to War (10 page)

‘I hope you’ve got a good pension, pal. Your family’s going to need it.’

The knifeman spat something back but with all the blood and saliva accompanying his words it defied translation. Agonisingly slowly the blade started to turn, but Kovic could feel his strength going. Wu, finally free of the other guy, grabbed the man’s head and lifted it. At last Kovic had control of the blade even though it was still in the knifeman’s hands. He forced it towards his assailant until it was pointed under the chin. With perfect timing, Wu thrust the head downwards. The tip of the blade entered the soft tissue just between his throat and his Adam’s apple. Wu drove the head down until the knife was embedded right up to the hilt. Blood bubbled out of his mouth as the knifeman went limp and rolled over on to the ground.

Kovic slowly got to his feet. Wu knelt, his chest heaving from the exertion, wiping the palms of his bloody hands on his thighs. Kovic unpeeled the dead man’s fingers, which were still wrapped round the knife, and with the tip of the blade lifted his coat cuff. The tattoo went halfway up his arm. Three snake heads on a trident clutched by a flaming fist.

Wu leaned over and looked.

‘Any ideas?’

Wu shook his head.

‘Think I’d like to show that to someone.’

Several men had emerged from the butcher’s to help their colleague. Kovic went up to one who was holding a cleaver.

‘May I?’

Something in Kovic’s face decided the owner against protesting. He handed him the cleaver. Kovic went back to the knifeman and with one decisive swing, severed the forearm below the tattoo. He passed the cleaver back to his dismayed owner.

‘Thanks, do you have a bag?’

15

Shanghai Old Town

The room was smoky and the yellow paper shade round the low single bulb projected a warm golden glow on to the scrubbed wooden walls. Xiang reminded Kovic of a new-born baby. The wisp of hair, the sheen on his forehead and sparkly inquiring eyes. Kovic was momentarily propelled back to a nativity scene at his elementary school. But there wasn’t anything holy about Xiang in the ninety-seven years that had passed since the occasion of his birth.

After toasts with sorghum liquor, which Kovic likened to a liquid firecracker, he unwrapped the forearm and laid it on the table like an offering. Xiang didn’t show the slightest alarm, which said a lot about the world he had inhabited and why Kovic was consulting him.

Xiang looked round to the boy standing in the doorway.

‘My glass, please.’

The boy disappeared then reappeared holding the largest magnifying glass Kovic had ever seen.

Xiang slowly raised it to his face and bent over the arm. He moved it up to the three snakeheads and back down to the flaming fist.

He let out a series of hen-like clucks, which Kovic eventually deciphered as laughter.

‘You Americans, your appetite for trouble is insatiable.’ He clucked some more, put down the glass and nodded. Kovic started to wrap up the arm. Xiang gestured at the tattoo, then took another pull on his long, thin pipe and exhaled.

‘Very showy.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Xiang swatted the air gently with his fingers, then tugged at his
sleeve and revealed a simple cross with splayed ends, faded almost to invisibility on his leathery walnut coloured skin.

‘Very simple, you see.’

Kovic knew better than to hurry the old man. They were seated in the back room of the bar his grandson now ran on Danfeng Lu Street. Xiang had been born in the room upstairs, had formed his first gang from this room in 1931, killed his first man, a rival gang leader, on the front step while he was still a teenager, severed his head with a machete to show who was boss, and also brokered a truce with the four main Shanghai gangs right here as the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. As well as being a distinguished member of the resistance, Xiang was also the CIA’s first Chinese recruit. Kovic only knew all this because he had sought out the old man’s archived file in Langley.

‘They gave me my own aeroplane, very generous. A German Junkers Ju 52 with floats so we could land on any water. And fuel. We did a regular run to Hokkaido to pick up arms and opium. Terrible shortages after the war. We did what we could to stop the Reds but—’

He let out a sigh so long that Kovic worried for a moment it was his last. Perhaps he was silently mourning the passing of Shanghai’s previous crazy era before Mao came in and spoiled all the fun. The city had been the vice capital of the East and gangs like Xiang’s passed for legitimate businesses.

‘We had our own notepaper; we used trained accountants. It was very professional.’ There was something almost touching about Xiang’s badges of respectability.

Curiosity had originally brought Kovic to Xiang’s door. He had assumed the legendary gangster turned CIA asset had rotted away in some gulag decades ago. Just out of curiosity he had tracked down the bar, only to find Xiang alive and well in this back room. How he survived the worst of Mao’s purges was a miracle. Not only was he a criminal, he had backed the nationalist Kuomintang in their losing battle against the Reds before they retreated to Taiwan, never to return. Even worse, Xiang was in the pay of the Americans, surely another death sentence.

‘What was your secret?’

‘Simplicity,’ Xiang told him. ‘Simplicity is a great asset.’ He tapped the tattoo on his wrist and waved at the scrubbed walls around him. ‘Many of my rivals acquired the trappings of success – elaborate cars and mansions. Examples had to be made of them. While I’ve always lived more like a true Communist than any of the real ones.’

He laughed for some time at this insight. Kovic laughed too.

There was no rushing him. Xiang moved at his own pace. He would answer the question when he was good and ready – and maybe not at all, at least not directly.

He sucked again on his pipe.

‘When the Reds came, we were doomed. Many of my rivals were put to the sword. Almost all the gangs simply became extinct. Those who had not been executed starved to death or were broken by hard labour in the camps. A very few of us were lucky. We just withdrew like tortoises into our shells.’ He made a shrinking gesture with his neck.

Kovic shifted his weight. He longed to climb into a deep bath and soothe his battered body, but Xiang and his mysterious forgotten world fascinated him.

Xiang tapped the tattoo with the end of his pipe.

‘This is more than one.’

‘There was more than one today.’

Xiang laughed and shook his head. ‘No, no, you misunderstand. This symbol means that two gangs are in alliance. The Flaming Fist, they were most lucky. They were not purged. Instead, they were absorbed into the People’s Liberation Army. Mao needed his personal people he could call on to deal with – difficulties, like an acolyte becoming too big for his boots, a local commissar who had not shown appropriate respect—’

‘And the snakehead trident?’

Xiang put down his pipe. ‘They were purged, gone. None are left.’

He turned to his left, spat generously into a nearby spittoon.

Kovic sensed a change of atmosphere. ‘Looks like they’ve made a comeback.’

Xiang reached out a gnarled hand and laid it on Kovic’s shoulder.

‘You know I have always been careful. I choose my battles after much deliberation. So should you.’

Kovic nodded. Xiang was winding up the conversation.

‘As a friend of America, a critic too but a friend at heart, my message is this: whatever your business is with these people, drop it. Because you will not win, not with all your might.’

‘How do you know?’

He clucked again. ‘I’m ninety-seven. I know.’

He tapped the package, still on the table.

‘Bury this deep. You won’t want to be found with it. I sense you are an impetuous man, Kovic. Don’t let this be your downfall.’

‘Sir, I feel there is more you could tell me. If you could just give me something on the other gang.’

Xiang blinked slowly and drew in a breath.

‘We have arrived at a crossroads. Old and new must fight it out. Luckily for me, I have finished my battles.’

He turned away and waved to the boy. ‘Show the gentleman out. He is ready to go.’

Then he fixed his gaze on Kovic one last time. ‘It was pleasant to see you again, Kovic. But don’t come back.’

Xiang slowly closed his eyes and leaned back. The meeting was over.

16

Kovic threw the arm in a dumpster and went in search of Wu. He found him at the repair shop that belonged to his cousin, bent over the battle-scarred X6, moving his hands over the destroyed body-work like a physiotherapist feeling for bruised vertebrae. The front bumper and lights were completely gone, the hood was riddled with bullet holes. The rear and two side windows were shot out and the tailgate that had been rammed was hanging drunkenly by one hinge. And all down the nearside, bright metal grinned through deep scores, as if it had been clawed by a huge monster.

‘I’m sorry, pal, I really am.’ Kovic put his arm round him. ‘But it’s just a car.’

Clearly that wasn’t going to work. He was no good at this kind of moment. He groped for something positive to say.

‘Your cousin’s a skilled panel beater. I’ve seen his work. Incredible.’

Wu said nothing; his normally buoyant optimism levels were flatlining.

He looked at Kovic, his eyes hollow.

‘I did good today, yes?’

‘More than good. And so did the car – it saved our asses. Look, I’ll see what Uncle Sam can do.’

He would just have to delve into his slush fund.

‘Will there be more like today?’

Kovic took a deep breath. ‘You want out? I’ll understand.’

‘Is it going to get badder?’

‘
Worse
. Yes, it is going to get worse.’

‘
Ai ya!
’ said a voice from behind them.

Wu turned and faced his cousin who was staring at the X6 in disbelief.

A short exchange followed in Zhujinese, the local dialect that Kovic was glad he couldn’t follow. Wu’s crest fell even further.

The cousin turned to Kovic and addressed him in English.

‘Explain – this is totalled. Goodbye car.’

‘Easy, pal,’ said Kovic. ‘This is a difficult time for him.’ He moved closer to the cousin, like a desperate relative beseeching a doctor. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

The cousin walked round the car slowly, assessing the damage and shaking his head.

‘It’s gonna cost you big dollars.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

The cousin mentioned a sum in yuan that sounded uncomfortably far away from $10,000 – on the wrong side.

‘What about the family discount?’

‘That’s
with
family discount.’

‘Okay. You got a courtesy car?’

‘Maybe. Come back in the morning.’

Kovic led Wu away.

‘It’s going to be okay, buddy. And look at it this way; when you get to the States you’ll get yourself a whole new car.’

He knew the hint about a future in America would cheer him up – even though Kovic had yet to figure out how he was going to swing that for him.

They went to a favourite food stall of Wu’s in Fanbang Lu and ordered Snow beers. Up on the wall, the TV was on. Wu squinted at it a moment then suddenly cheered up.

‘Jin Jié is back!’

‘Well, deck the halls,’ said Kovic.

He was aware of the young politician, but had dismissed him as just another celebrity star burning brightly and briefly in the New China firmament. They watched the screen. At Pudong airport, on a small podium set up in front of the aircraft from which he had just disembarked, the young man with the improbably innocent face was waving at the crowd and throwing his arms in the air in a very un-Chinese manner. Each time he punched the air a fresh roar of delight rose from the crowd, followed by more chanting of his name.

‘So?’ Something about the spectacle irritated Kovic.

‘Very good man, very good for future.’ Wu’s English always took a nosedive when he was excited.

‘He’s a kid with a degree from MIT and good dental work.’

Kovic knew that wasn’t quite fair. Jin Jié had just been named
Time
magazine’s Person of the Year. His book on the new global economy was a bestseller. America seemed to have taken him into their hearts. What did interest Kovic was how this American adulation would play back here, especially after what he had seen this morning.

Kovic noticed some of the diners paying attention. ‘
Jin Jié! Jin Jié!
’ several tens of thousands of ecstatic fans chanted. Between the semi-continuous chanting of the crowd and the hyper-excited commentator a few phrases from Jin Jié’s speech floated through . . .

‘
know that we can achieve whatever we put our mind to
.’

‘
. . . pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one nation . . .
’

‘
. . . keep, in the twenty-first century, promise alive . . .
’

And then he paused, and spread his hands to quiet the crowd.

‘
. . . Our government should work for us, not against us, listen to all voices . . .
’

And at a reference to the thousands of dissidents banged up in China’s jails, the crowd broke into a rapturous roar. Kovic looked across at Wu, gazing wide-eyed at the screen. ‘Well that’s gonna go down like a cup of cold sick in Beijing.’

Wu was oblivious to Kovic’s warning tone.

‘The man’s a visionary. We never had nothing like this before.’

Kovic pondered the contrast between the protest earlier in the day, the angry mob on the point of lynching an American, and this upstart wowing the crowd having just come from the US where he was feted. Xiang was right: China was at a crossroads.

17

French Concession, Shanghai

A cab dropped Kovic at his gate. He told the driver to keep the change and eased himself gingerly out of the back seat. He stood for a moment as the car moved away. It was night, the sky a smoky purple. The sounds of evening were in full flow: a mash up of TV, radio, Western pop, Chinese folk, advertising jingles and a heavy reggae beat under a shrill trilling falsetto.

He was exhausted, and his whole body felt like a punchbag. The effort required to get through the gate and up the steps seemed overwhelming. He wondered about Louise. Maybe he should track her down, make amends. In theory he had the time now he had been laid off by Cutler, if he could just get to the bottom of what happened on the border.

A black Mercedes SUV screeched to a halt beside him and two heavies emerged. They weren’t gangsters – their suits were too cheap. They stood to attention by the vehicle while a young Chinese woman stepped out from behind the wheel. She was slightly built, in a black leather jacket and fatigue type pants. Under the look of stern officiousness was a face of austere beauty. A pair of piercing black eyes were trained on him, cold and glittering. She came towards him. It was a pretty safe bet she wasn’t looking for a date.

‘Agent Kovic?’

She held up an ID: Ministry of State Security.

‘I was just going for a shower. Care to join me?’

Before he could gauge her response, she raised an arm and he was on the ground, his head in something damp. One of her pointed boots pressed on his lower abdomen and then everything went dark as one of the heavies slid a hood over his head. Another pair of hands clamped his wrists together with a zip-cuff. Then he was
bundled into the back of the SUV and the tailgate slammed shut. Alone or otherwise, that shower was going to have to wait.

Kovic was both furious and confused. The MSS routinely questioned him but usually he was politely invited to take a ride and the whole process was little more than a charade, a reminder that they were watching. This was definitely abduction. The choice of vehicle, a Benz SUV, suggested some kind of inflated status, or that someone inside had for some reason started throwing money around. It was decidedly unpatriotic, indeed positively decadent. Maybe the local Mercedes dealer imagined it would be good for the brand if MSS operatives rode around in their product and had been loaning them out. And as for the woman, while her heavies were standard government issue she definitely was not. In fact he had never encountered a female MSS agent.

He heard her speak into a phone.

‘
Target on board: ETA twenty minutes
.’

The pedantic monotone struck Kovic as somehow ludicrous. He realised it was a measure of how worn out he was that he had felt no inclination to resist. The Benz had a siren, which confirmed that he was in the hands of the authorities. Maybe that was a good thing – the devil he knew, rather than strange criminals with mysterious tattoos. He tried to find a comfortable position but with his hands cuffed behind his back it was impossible. A day that had already gone on for far too long was suddenly getting even longer, but there was no point in protesting; it wouldn’t change anything. He decided to try and grab a short nap. He had the ability to sleep anywhere, no matter how uncomfortable – well, almost.

The journey was short; they were still in town. That meant he probably wasn’t being taken out to some wasteland to be shot, which was nice. Judging by the distance it was probably to the Golfball, the MSS’s Shanghai HQ. The SUV made a sharp descent, the engine noise bouncing back off walls that were very close, the tyres squeaking on a smooth surface: another underground car park, oh great. They stopped, the doors opened. No smell of piss though, so definitely a better class of car park than the CIA’s. Then he was out of the vehicle, through some security doors and frogmarched
along an interminable corridor into a lift and down more levels. That wasn’t good. The deeper you were taken, the deeper the trouble you were in, he had generally found. He heard a door being unlocked, another bad sign, and a strong smell of disinfectant, also not good. Then he was manoeuvred into a sharp left and made to sit on a hard flat chair with only a bar for a back, so at least his wrists had somewhere to go. No one said anything. They seemed to be leaving him here so he decided to try again and have that nap, but each time his head dropped someone roughly pushed it up. He really was way too tired for this.

‘Hey, leave me the fuck alone, will ya?’

And then he was on his side on the floor – the chair clattering away as it was kicked from under him. He felt a sharp pain in his neck and was instantly strangely happy.

‘Okay, here is good,’ he murmured gratefully as he slipped away. ‘I’ll just stay here . . .’

His dreams were a toxic mix of the executions in the snow, the chase through Shanghai and the encounter with Cutler; all three playing in a continuous loop in his head.

Later, maybe much later – he didn’t know when because they had taken his watch and all his belongings – he regained consciousness. The hood was off, and he found himself on a hard wooden chair with arms. The room was all done in Interrogation Grey: floors walls and ceiling. There were no windows. This was the Golfball all right; the Ministry of State Security’s recently made-over Shanghai HQ, so named because of the large concave indentations in its concrete exterior. The air still smelled the same, as if it had been breathed in and out by generations of halitosis sufferers going back to the Cultural Revolution.

Whenever there were demonstrations, or bombs, or the political tension was heightened in any way, it was standard practice to pull in foreign station agents for a routine conversation. The intelligence game in China was just that: a game. And whenever he was pulled in, the FBI did the same with one of theirs in Washington or LA. Kovic had cultivated an image, which Chinese Intelligence seemed to have swallowed. To them he was a middle ranking CIA asset, a
typical American abroad, lazy, with a reputation for drinking and occasional brawling, who gathered low to medium level intel that seemed to please his bosses enough to keep him in post. He knew this because he had hacked their file on him. And when they hauled him in for questioning he always made sure he looked suitably troubled by their findings – even though he had already read them.

The worst aspect of these Q&As, Kovic found, was the boredom. A hundred pro forma questions would be asked to which a hundred stock responses would be given. It wasn’t about the content of the answers, it was the fact of the event itself; the MSS needed to show Washington it knew who its agents were. It was just a formality, a bit of low level sabre-rattling, since their own hackers would be doing their best to keep them up to date with all his activities: emails, phone calls to and from Langley, and, of course, all his traffic with Cutler in Beijing. With this in mind, he made sure to keep these channels appropriately active with carefully selected intel, some of it mildly sensitive, or sensitive enough to convince the MSS that they were efficiently keeping tabs on him, but all of relatively low grade, to suggest he wasn’t that good at his job. He had even created a series of fictitious moles inside the Party whose fake communiqués to him were littered with government gossip he had gained access to from other sources, to be pored over by their analysts. This material caused them to waste hundreds of hours trying to uncover his fictitious sources.

Kovic noticed he was now zipped into a GITMO style boiler suit that had definitely not been washed since the last wearer had had it on, perhaps even the first. The red-brown stains and another, less vividly coloured, crunchy patch were testimony to that. He had nothing on his feet and the floor seemed artificially chilled. Beside him there were two identical metal bowls. One had a liquid in that he hoped was water; at least it didn’t seem to smell of anything either human or deadly. The other was presumably his toilet.

There was no point in speculating about what was coming, it was a waste of time and brainpower. ‘Know this,’ a grizzled instructor at the Farm told his group as they were about to go out into the world as fully fledged agents, ‘however many billions of dollars they spend
on you and however many thousands of hours you put in to figuring what your friend or enemy’s next move is, only one thing is for sure – it ain’t gonna be what you predicted. From the Iran hostages to jets slamming into the Twin Towers, the shit that happens will be the last thing you expected. Never underestimate how little you know.’

He heard steps outside – not heavy, lumbering, goon steps but the light, well balanced tread of someone who hadn’t been hired for their muscle. The woman was back.

She strode in, sat and opened a fat file. In English, he recited the standard pro forma he was required to when detained by in-country officials.

‘I am a US Government public servant and I demand to know on what authority you are acting. I must protest in the strongest terms that under the—’

The woman was standing over him. She seemed to be somewhat agitated.

‘Just shut the fuck up, okay?’ she said in English, her voice barely an inch from his ear. Something hard landed on the side of his head: a fist.

‘I insist on speaking to my—’

‘We have already informed your office of your detention.’

She sat down and reached for a table lamp that was by her chair, set it on the table, switched it on and trained the light in his face. He started to laugh. Suddenly his face was stinging again. He hadn’t even seen the slap coming.

‘What is this, step two from the MSS interrogation manual? Train light on prisoner to maximise discomfort. Or are you gonna give me a facial? Or a new nose – I sure could do with one. Are you a plastic surgeon? Or just a make-up artist? I know – it’s Shanghai’s municipal clean up foreigner day.’

She ignored him and continued to study the file in front of her.

‘No, honestly, why am I here? And I didn’t catch your name.’

She started to read from the file.

‘Kovic, Laszlo—’

‘No one calls me that.’

She continued to read: ‘United States Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Operations, Shanghai Station. ’

‘I am not and have never been an employee of any organisation of that name.’ Technically this was true. On his paperwork he was simply ‘Government Servant’.

‘Your lies are futile.’ ‘Your L’s are excellent. Where’d you go to college?’

She continued to examine the file as he watched her. This was new to him. Just by her movements he could tell she’d spent time in the West. Her English was fluent and natural. The MSS he was used to was an all-male machine and Chinese ministerial paranoia dictated that all MSS agents had to be purebred products of the system, uncontaminated by pernicious outside influences. Family devotion to the Party was a prerequisite for admission, which meant they didn’t necessarily get the best or the brightest. The only MSS women he knew of were either the clerical staff or the honey traps, run by a totally separate division to ensure no contagion spread to the core.

She continued to read from the big file.

‘You have resided in Shanghai for six years following transfer from Afghanistan.’

‘As I said, your English is excellent.’

‘It’s better than your Mandarin.’

‘How would you know?’

He cleared his throat, and recited in Mandarin:

‘
Who is lovelier than she?

Yet she lives alone in an empty valley.

She tells me she came from a good family

Which is humbled now into the dust
. . .’

A small frown, otherwise her face was blank.

‘Du Fu – “Alone In Her Beauty”. I know the whole poem.’

He drew some satisfaction from the fact that his refusal to take this too seriously was irritating her.

‘Do you realise how much trouble you are in?’

‘I’m always in trouble.’

‘Try not to brag.’

‘I’ll work on it. Is this going to take long?’

She ignored this and smoothed out the page in front of her.

‘Recruited 1999, after flunking out of high school in Detroit.’

‘It was no place for a young man of ambition.’

‘Your principal concluded that your only memorable character traits were deceitfulness and a disregard for authority.’

‘They always stood me in good stead.’

‘You failed Basic Training at the Farm.’

‘Actually I think they were threatened by my brilliance.’

‘Your previous tour in Afghanistan was marked by controversy.’

‘I think you skipped some of the good stuff there.’

She sighed heavily. Good, he was getting to her.

‘Your purpose here is to lure citizens into the corrupt practice of betraying their country by stealing secrets in return for monetary gain. Do you deny it?’

Her exasperation was starting to show in her voice. She was new to this, he could tell. It was time to try another tack.

‘Of course I don’t deny it. It’s what we both do, you know that.’

‘In addition to being involved in espionage,’ she said, her voice becoming shriller, ‘you are a corrupt degenerate. You have been consorting with criminal elements. You are not only an embarrassment to your country but a menace and a danger to ours.’

It sounded like a textbook denunciation from the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

‘Oh stop, you’re making me blush.’

‘Are you intoxicated?’

‘Sadly not, but I could use a shot of something. What say we go on over to Danny Tang’s and get—’

She slapped his face again, hard.

Her indignation seemed genuine. Either that or she was putting on a pretty good act for her superiors who might be watching, which in practice amounted to the same thing.

She opened a laptop, fired it up and turned it round to show him a video: a compilation of CCTV footage, the chase, first in Wu’s car, then on foot and on the rooftops, all lovingly edited together like a trailer for an action movie.

‘Nicely paced. Your leading man is quite a hunk, isn’t he?’

‘You caused thousands of yuan of criminal damage, committed violence against numerous other persons, showing a flagrant disregard for public safety—’