Spy Games (14 page)

He held the memory stick in his hand. What the hell to do with it?

He booted up his laptop. He laid the memory stick on the table. He lit a cigarette, stared at its knowing orange ember in the darkness, pondered elementary cyber security.
Do not, in general, when in receipt of a memory stick donated by a largely anonymous representative of the Chinese intelligence services, plug said memory stick into your laptop.
A good rule. Prudent.

He plugged it in.

The
sneck
as it lodged in the port, the electronic two-toned
bongbong
as the laptop found it and began to read.

Mangan sat in the dark, the smoke from his cigarette winding and curling in the glow from the screen.

Not much, this time. Fifteen documents. He opened the first one.

It was a scan of an original hard copy, the text slightly misaligned on the page, a grainy look, the characters shrunken, hard to read. Clear enough, though, at the top of the page:
juemi
, top secret.

The familiar dryness in the mouth, now, the quickening. Mangan felt his way through the first couple of paragraphs. It was a
neican
, an internal report for the eyes of senior Party leadership, written somewhere in the depths of the Xinhua News Agency, but very definitely not for public consumption.

A trial, somewhere in southwest China. A corruption trial, by the look of it. An unfortunate official of the state-owned petroleum corporation. Something about wells, drilling. He’d declared certain oil wells were empty when they weren’t, was that it? Mangan skipped to the end. The official had received a sentence of execution by lethal injection.

And?

He closed the document, moved to the next one.

Central Discipline Inspection Commission.
The Party’s corruption hunters, half of them bent as a gimlet themselves.

Juemi.

The same case, but a much more detailed report. Dates, times, numbers. Technical vocabulary Mangan couldn’t penetrate. The unfortunate official had been responsible for the evaluation of the oil wells’ production capacity and he had greatly understated it. Bad decision, for sure, but wherein lay its significance?

The other documents told versions of the same story, as far as Mangan could see, mostly shorter, less granular. One seemed to contain bank account numbers.

There’s something in here, he thought. Something to be forged into a weapon. To touch someone, undermine them, blind them, ruin them.

Mangan closed the documents, removed the memory stick. His computer did not seem to have melted down. He ran a virus scan which came up clean but that, he knew, meant little. He felt a tremble in his hands, a ringing in his neck and head, reminiscent somehow of the sensation that followed the explosion. He wondered if he had some new weakness in him, as if his store of strength were finite, each weird episode contributing to its depletion, never to be restored.

Fear is born of loneliness and exhaustion. Someone had said that to him.

Loneliness first, then fear.

And something else, some inexplicable kindling of purpose.

He put the memory stick in the money belt he kept strapped to the base of his back. He closed up his pack and put it by his bed. Fully clothed, shoes on, he pulled the covers over himself and tried to sleep.

The next day, all flights to Addis were overbooked, leaving Mangan with twenty-four hours to kill—to live his cover and check his back.

The girl brought him breakfast, tea and pancakes in honey, which he ate sitting cross-legged on rugs and cushions in a reception room, the doors and windows open, morning light flooding in. He walked through the old city, down the Street of the Tailors, the old men
working on Singer sewing machines, pins in their mouths, their bolts of saturated red and gold fabric against the white stone walls. He grinned, took photographs, asked questions, ostentatiously made notes. A small herd of children followed him, and behind them, an older man, in a red shirt and sandals. The man stood, arms folded, a short distance away.

He walked out of the old city at its main gate, stopped at a café up a green iron staircase, ordered macchiato so rich it was like drinking dark velvet.

The man in the red shirt and sandals dawdled on the street below.

He walked to Arthur Rimbaud’s house, where the boy poet lived the latter part of his short, wracked life. An expansive courtyard wrapped around with wooden balconies, an odd library, a dusty exhibition of photographs. Rimbaud the precocious schoolboy, the winner of prizes, stared flintily past the camera, tie askew, the boy who wrote “shit on God” on the walls of starchy Charleville, who wrote the founding verses of modernism before he was twenty.

Rimbaud had fled, renounced his explosive poetry in disgust and come here to Harer, to trade in gems and guns.

I am present at the hatching of my thought
, he had written.

Mangan stood on a balcony, looking out over the old city, smelling the breeze coming from the hills, the smell of sun on rock and dust. He thought about escape, about watching himself hatch his own decisions.
I am deciding to spy. Here I am, spying.

The man in the red shirt and sandals had gone. But his relief was there: a boy in a green T-shirt with a phone, looking up at him from the alleyway.

Ignore it, he thought. Live your cover.

But something was scratching at the back of his skull and he descended to ground level, found a door to a neighboring courtyard and forced it, slipping through a gate back onto the street, walking slowly away, peering at his guidebook. And as he turned uphill towards the main square and the church, an approach…

“Yes, please, mister. How are you? I can be your guide. Where do you like to go?”

All delivered in an aggressive monotone by a beefy, gray-bearded individual who stood too close and let his hands dangle at his sides.

“I don’t need a guide, thank you,” Mangan said.

“Yes, yes, we can go,” said the man.

“Thank you. I’m going back to my guest house,” said Mangan.

“Yes, we go there. We can talk.” He reached out and took hold of Mangan’s arm, tried to steer him off the main drag. People on the street were turning away, Mangan saw. The man was pushing him toward a storefront, no, an alleyway.

“Fuck off,” Mangan shouted. He wrenched his arm away, then gave the man a two-handed shove in the chest. The man barely moved, stepped back a foot, maybe. He was looking at Mangan directly in the eyes, his hands open by his side, fingers curled.

“Who you are meeting today?” said the man. “Where you go?”

Mangan ignored him, walked away fast, heart thumping. The man was shouting at his back.

“Why you are here? What you have?”

Mangan turned a corner, made for the guest house.

I have been warned. By someone.

That night he took a taxi to a restaurant called Fresh Touch and sat alone at an outside table, ate pizza, tried to keep it normal. He walked in the murmuring dark to the edge of the old city, where an elderly man threw offal down in the dust, and the hyenas emerged from the brush and pawed and scuffed for the meat, their feral reek hanging on the air.

The flight back to Addis the next day was horrible, the plane bucking and yawing on the turbulence, passengers gripping their seats and muttering. They landed in rain, the city concrete gray, flecked with green, dripping vegetation, the streets jammed, heaving, sodden, pooling with water, the dogs crouching still, shivering.

On Ethio-China Street, his taxi crawled, the wipers straining and
squeaking. Mangan leaned forward and gave the driver the full fare, but slipped out into the traffic. He ran down a side street of shanties and stalls that narrowed, its surface turning to mud. Women watched him from doorways as he hurried past. Children pointed. One man, sparked and jittery on
chat
, stepped in front of him, made to grab him, but Mangan shoved him out of the way and ran on. The man yelled at his back, something indistinguishable. He came out onto a thoroughfare he didn’t recognize, hailed another taxi, sat low in the back. He felt for the pouch at his waist, the smooth bulge of the memory stick. He told the driver to head for Comorros Street and the British embassy.

Oxford

Nicole had gone to his musty rooms in college. She wore a strappy dress of duck egg blue that lifted her breasts, a whisper of perfume, her hair down. The clothes made her feel girlish, light. But beneath, she was hard, operational.

Kai sat in a scrofulous armchair in T-shirt and shorts, barefoot, gazing at her.

“So,” she said, “you’ll be here all summer.”

“I have to cram. There’ll be a tutor.”

He spoke in a monotone, awkward, mawkish, even. She looked sympathetic.

“Not much of a summer.”

He nodded.

“Well, perhaps we can keep each other company.”

He nodded again.

“And will anyone else be around?” she said.

“No. Everyone is leaving for the summer. They’ll all be gone soon.”

She considered.

“And the Chen girl. Is she leaving for the summer, do you know?”

He shifted in his seat. Anxious, weak, she thought.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s she like?” she said.

“Madeline Chen?”

No, the Empress Wu.

“Yes, Madeline Chen. What sort of person is she?”

He shrugged, raised a hand and let it drop feebly to the arm of the chair.

“I don’t know. She’s smart.”

“Who does she hang out with?”

“Girls from her college. Some other Asians. I don’t know.”

This was a
lead
?

“So, when you’ve spoken to her… what did you talk about?”

“Well, like I said, I made the suggestion, which my parents apparently don’t appreciate, that she and I could communicate, put aside some of the anger.”

“Perhaps you should trust your parents when they tell you that—”

He cut her off, which surprised her.

“I have heard this, already. Really, I know what you are going to say.”

She just nodded.

“So…” he said, suddenly. “You’re from Taiwan.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Taiwanese girl.” She held up her bare arms, gestured to herself.
That’s me!
His eyes flickered over her. “But I’ve been in the States the last few years. For my doctorate.”

“So… I wondered, why my family… how they know you.”

She frowned, adopting a thoughtful pose.

“Hmm. Let’s see. Well, it’s through friends. Friends who trust each other. We have to look out for each other, don’t we? Chinese people? Out here in the world.”

The dumb nod again.
No future captain of industry, this one.

Late afternoon at Vauxhall Cross, and Patterson sat at her cubicle, palms flat on the desk before her. She took four deep breaths, exhaling slowly, trying to loosen the tension that had built around her shoulders and deep in her neck. Then she stood, gathered the files from the desk in front of her and made her way to the conference room.

Vezza of Africa Controllerate was there before her and flapped a hand idly as she walked in. A moment later, Requirements appeared, in the form of the straight-backed, gray-haired figure of Chapman-Biggs, his charcoal suit and regimental tie. He flashed a smile at Patterson, the two of them complicit in their army backgrounds. He sat heavily, stretched.

Weekes arrived, resentment inscribed on his pale features, his skin shiny, suit creased. He dropped his files on the table, the
slap
of paper on tabletop designed to signal disapproval, to discomfit. A propensity to act out, thought Patterson, is not a useful trait in a spy.

Weekes gave her a deadpan look. “So where’s the mother ship?” he said.

Patterson returned his look.

“What, or who, might that be?” she said.

He rolled his eyes.

“Your fearsome leader, Valentina Hopko, God bless her and all who sail in her.”

“I’m sure she’ll be along.”

Enter Hopko, brusque, all in black, a chunky necklace of coral and lapis, something Afghan or Tibetan, heels.

“Sorry to keep you all,” she said. “Let’s get started, shall we? Trish, please bring us up to date.”

Forward
.

“Well, as you know, Mangan delivered the memory stick to Addis station. It went by secure bag straight to Cheltenham. They’ve disinfected it and downloaded the contents, which you should have in front of you in hard copy, with translation.”

Weekes piled in.

“And please, please, tell me why this obscure Chinese corruption case should be of any interest whatsoever to the rest of us?”

Patterson didn’t respond, just waited. Chapman-Biggs of Requirements raised his eyebrows. Vezza spoke.

“Just run us through it, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said. Patterson swallowed, pushed on.

“Oil wells, in west China, the concessions all owned and run by the state-owned oil corporation. One official decides he’s going to get smart. He rules that certain oil wells are exhausted, used up, pumped dry. Then he sells those wells off at bargain basement prices to his friends. Surprise! The wells are not exhausted after all, but seem to have come back to life. So the friends pump away and generate a small fortune.”

Weekes was sighing, writhing in his seat with impatience, but Vezza was more thoughtful.

“So who gets to buy the supposedly dried-up wells? Is that it?” he said.

“Thank you,” interjected Hopko, appreciatively. “Trish?”

“Document number seven gives us names. One of the buyers, and
she made millions, no doubt, was a woman named Charlotte Fan. And that is
the
Fan family.”

A blank look from Vezza. Patterson cleared her throat.

“The Fans are as close to royalty as you can be in China. They are an old revolutionary family. The patriarch was with Mao in the war years. Charlotte Fan is his daughter. One son is on the Politburo. The other is the boss of China National Century, the telecoms and tech corporation. You know who they are?”

“Yes, thank you. Even those of us marooned in Africa Controllerate are dimly aware of CNaC,” said Vezza.

“Yes. Right. There’s a kid over here, at Oxford. Heir to the CNaC fortune. He’s a bit weedy, apparently, and not terribly bright.”

“So the Fans are well-connected, and bent,” said Vezza. “So what?”

Hopko stepped in and for a moment Patterson saw what Hopko saw, felt herself balanced on a fulcrum of understanding.

“Our Rocky Shi, whoever he may be, has made us a gift,” said Hopko. “He has showed us the system at work. You see, everyone in China suspects that the princeling families have their noses in the trough. But it’s hard to figure out quite how. Or how much. The Party
ensures
that nobody knows, doesn’t it? And the Party decides who gets busted and who doesn’t. And if you’re the Fans you’re off-limits, aren’t you?”

She looked around the room, head tipped forward, peering over the top of her glasses.

“But what we have
here
…”
s
he went on, tapping the document in front of her, “is a weapon. CNaC is a tool of Chinese power in the world. Our Rocky Shi has given us the means, should we choose to use them, to disrupt it.”

She sat back, grinning her hangman’s grin.

Chapman-Biggs ran a hand through his hair, and when he spoke for the first time, it was quietly, deferentially.

“But why, Val? And who the hell
is
Rocky Shi?”

“Time to find out, don’t you think?” said Hopko.

Patterson, like any self-respecting intelligence officer, held an innate suspicion of coincidence, and believed that a strong memory was a potent operational tool.

So when she finally, belatedly made the association, she wanted to kick herself, or strike something. It was late that same evening and she was at home. Damian from downstairs was sprawled on the couch. He had come thundering up the stairs, thumped on the door.

“I need to watch your TV,” he said. “I was watching on my computer but the connection’s gone down.” He made an imploring gesture, fingers locked together, a mock agonized face.

She sighed, let him in and he bounded to the sofa, picked up the remote. It was some European qualifier game. She went to the kitchen and took two lasagnas in plastic containers from the freezer and put them in the microwave.

“Why is your flat always so flipping tidy?” he shouted from the living room. She went back through, carrying two glasses, a bottle of red.

“I said you could watch, not critique,” she said. “And take your feet off the coffee table, please.”

He gave her a cheesy grin, patted the sofa next to him. She sat down, tried to concentrate on the game.

“You should get a new TV,” he said.

“You should get a new computer.”

“Got too much stuff on it to get rid of it.”

And the memory burst through to the surface. She sat forward. The Fan family is under attack from persons unknown somewhere deep in Chinese intelligence. The Fan boy’s laptop is stolen.

There are no coincidences in intelligence.

She stood up.

“What is it?” said Damian.

What the hell did that mean? she thought. How could I have forgotten that?

“Have I done something wrong?” said Damian.

Her mind was racing. The microwave was pinging.

“What? No… I…”

He was looking at her strangely.

“Trish, you look like you’re about to kill someone.”

She ignored him, went to pick up her secure handheld. She just heard him walk out quietly and close the front door behind him.

With a speed and bureaucratic deftness that only Valentina Hopko could muster, an operation was brought into being. Vezza, in Africa Controllerate, and the hard men of Global Issues/Counterterrorism could only marvel at how she drew together the disparate strands—the approaches in Hong Kong and Addis Ababa, the extraordinary Mat Naim take, the offer of service from Rocky Shi, the corruption of the Fan family—and wove them into a narrative pregnant with possibility.

There’s a new source, nestled somewhere deep inside China’s blackest of black boxes.

And he’s asking for us.

The contents of the memory stick were scrubbed and sent to the Assessments Staff, and a brief report began threading its way through Whitehall to a very few, very carefully chosen desks.
We have found out the Fan family secrets
, the report said.
We have been handed a stiletto. What else might we find?

A small team of analysts was set to work searching, more in hope than in anticipation, for any trace of Rocky Shi. Cheltenham began mining stored flight data, searching metadata for calls placed between Harer and Beijing, Harer and the Chinese embassies in Addis, Djibouti, Nairobi, on certain dates. They fired up a useful little program that tracked email traffic into and out of hotel reservation sites in search of bookings made in Ethiopia by Chinese government agencies. They came up empty.

Patterson, astonished, found herself rapidly assembling a cover that would hold in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia!
Maria Todd takes a holiday, perhaps, a break from her onerous accounting duties in London and Hong Kong. A vacation to the churches at Lalibela, or among the
colorful tribespeople of the south. Why not? A backpack, a guidebook.

No.

“Tourist” is a surprisingly hard cover to live, with its dawdling and gawping and counting the pennies. Patterson, it was decided, would be a small businesswoman, an aspiring importer of handicrafts and fabrics, venturing to Ethiopia for the first time, harboring a particular interest in the icons of Ethiopian Christianity, whose full-lipped madonnas, wide-eyed Christ children and dragon-slaying saints, rendered on goatskin in shimmering gold and green and magenta, would find approval among the fickle tastemakers of London.

“Because,” said Hopko, “the only way we’ll get to him is on the ground.”

The sticking point was Mangan.

The notion of putting him back in play was met with splutters of disbelief from Security Branch.
Philip Mangan? Formerly of Beijing? Veteran of an initially thrilling, later terrifying, and ultimately bloody venture in China that scared the living shit out of us? That Mangan?

But as Hopko pointed out, entirely reasonably in Patterson’s mind, Mangan was already in play, wasn’t he? Because the Service had no earthly means of getting to Rocky Shi, or whatever this man’s true name might be, other than via Mangan. Her logic was accepted grudgingly and on condition that, as soon as feasible, a case officer—either visiting or from Addis station—should assume the handling of the asset, if asset there proved to be. Hopko blithely accepted the condition, with absolutely no intention, Patterson could see, of adhering to it.

But what puzzled Patterson was the speed and voraciousness of Hopko’s operational approach, the degree she seemed to be invested in Rocky Shi as a source when so little was known about him.

“We don’t even know his full name,” she said quietly, as they sat in Hopko’s sanctum looking at maps of Addis Ababa. “What’s the hurry?”

Hopko smiled her venal half-smile, didn’t respond, waited, as if she knew Patterson had more to say.

“Val, there’s something else. The Fan boy, the one at Oxford. There was a ping on the Police National Computer. He had his laptop stolen.”

“Lorks. When?” said Hopko.

“Recently. I’ll get you the exact date. There was a search of his room. The police thought it was done professionally.”

Hopko sat forward, took off her glasses.

“Do we know what was on it?”

“No. There was nothing in the police report. I just thought…” Patterson’s voice trailed off.

Hopko was considering.

“I don’t like coincidences, Trish.” She took a sharp intake of breath, put her glasses back on. “But I do like Ethiopian food. Do you? My old dad loved it, bless him. He had an Ethiopian housekeeper when he worked on the wells in the Emirates, and she cooked for him. He couldn’t get enough of it.” She reached across her desk and opened a drawer, brought out a photograph which she held up for Patterson to look at. A beach, boats, or dhows, and in the foreground, a broad-shouldered man in a blue shirt, thick, tanned forearms, an expensive watch, eyes squinting against the sun. In him, Patterson saw the source of Hopko’s square figure, her stocky, strong shoulders, her air of implacability.

“There he is,” said Hopko. “The Ukrainian engineer, sitting in Sharjah, in a hundred and ten degrees, mopping up all those fiery Ethiopian stews.” She looked at the photograph for a minute. “My Lebanese mother was less enthusiastic. Didn’t like being cooked for…”

She paused, looked up.

“By a black woman
,
” said Patterson.

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Hopko, offhandedly. “Anyway, there’s a little place off Horseferry Road. Let’s go. Consider it training.”

Hopko did not mention the laptop again, and Patterson took away the odd impression that she did not want to talk about it.

The little place off Horseferry Road was called the Queen of Sheba. It sat sandwiched between a betting shop and an estate agent. Patterson was early and sat at a round wicker table facing the door. The lights were dim, and the dining room was silent and smelled of damp carpet. She contemplated ordering a beer, but thought better of it on this, her last evening before traveling.

An evening to be endured. Hopko arrived at precisely the appointed time and bustled over to her, sat, smoothed her hair, bracelets jangling. She wore perfume, Patterson noticed, and more than a touch of makeup. For dinner at the Queen of Sheba? Without a greeting, Hopko picked up the menu.

“Now then,” she said, “shall I order for both of us?”

Obviously, thought Patterson.

“Do you like lamb? It’ll come in a delicious sort of aromatic sauce.”

“Lamb is fine.”

Hopko looked up at Patterson, who felt herself tensing.

“Lamb it is, then,” said Hopko, holding her gaze. “And how about a
doro wat
, lovely chicken hot pot with eggs in it.”

“Sounds delicious,” said Patterson.

Hopko flipped the menu, looked at the wine list.

“Feeling a little nervy, Trish?” she said.

“No.”

“It’s allowed. New case, new place.”

“I’m fine, thanks, Val.”
I have been briefed ad nauseam. What are we doing here?

Hopko gestured for a waitress, and ordered briskly, the dishes, a bottle of wine.

“I wanted to talk a bit of history.”

Patterson sighed inwardly.

“What sort of history?”

“The history of the Fan family. Well, more of a dynasty, really, isn’t it?”

Patterson gave up and reached for the wine bottle.

“There’s a memoir,” said Hopko. “Written by the old man, the patriarch.”

Hopko had a gift for narrative, Patterson thought. She had the memory, the facility for drawing out only the telling fact. Patterson listened as the little boy scratched his characters on a slate in the yellow dust of Shaanxi, as he watched the refugees scavenge for scraps of food while the fighters wheeled and banked, as he lay waiting for the Japanese bayonets to come glinting up the hillside. As he knelt, the leather belt on his wrists, the screams in his ears, naming names.