Spy Games (16 page)

Sunday afternoon. Mangan took the jeep, headed southeast out of Addis on a smooth, Chinese-built highway in light traffic, slowing for the herds of goats, donkeys standing in the road, rigid, unmoving even as the boys whipped them. The rainy season was coming on, the dun hills laced with green.

Another meeting
, the Clown had said, leaning into him, whispering in his ear as he crossed Mauritius Street.
We want you to see something
.

Twelve miles out of Addis, Mangan pulled over, watched his mirrors. He released his hold on the wheel, realized his palms were damp. The traffic flashed past, a brown sedan, two motorcycles, a red Mitsubishi four-wheel drive, an overladen bus listing to one side, the white Isuzu trucks ploughing down the center of the highway at speed. He pulled out and executed a fast U-turn, headed back toward Addis for two miles, then stopped again at the roadside, watched. Nothing he could see. He turned around and drove on towards Debre Zeit.

Look for the church, the market set on the hillside.
Mangan pulled in behind a gleaming white Toyota SUV, left the engine running.
After a moment, a figure climbed out of the Toyota, walked toward the jeep: Rocky Shi, in sunglasses and wearing a vest festooned with pockets of the sort a photographer might wear. Mangan lowered his window. Rocky pushed his sunglasses up onto his head, beamed, spoke in Mandarin.

“
Lai ba.
” Come.

Mangan craned his head out of the jeep’s window, looked around.

“Are you alone?” he said.

“No,” said Rocky, pleasantly. “One more in the car.
Lai, lai.
”

Mangan checked his mirrors one more time. A blue Mercedes had stopped about two hundred meters behind him.

Could be anything.

He opened the door and stepped from the car.

They walked up the hillside, Rocky first, Mangan following, touching his top pocket, making sure the pen Patterson had given him was in place. Women were unloading donkeys, taking the burlap bags, turning them down and laying them on the ground. Lentils,
teff
, grains Mangan did not recognize.
Gesho
leaves for making beer. Some stringy vegetables, tomatoes. The women squatted in the mud by the burlap bags, watched the two men. Rocky stopped.

“They’ve come down from the villages,” said Rocky. “Some of them have walked very far, eight, ten miles.”

He walked over to a woman in a brown T-shirt and a ruffled skirt whose goods were meager. He stood over her, spoke in halting Amharic. She looked up at him, replied, and made a gesture that seemed to indicate far away.

“She says before she never came here, but now the cost of living is so high, she must farm and sell. Her husband is in Addis, looking for work on the building sites.”

He spoke to her again, and she reached into a bag and brought out a phone, handed it to him.

“But she has a mobile phone,” said Rocky. He turned it over in his hand, showed it to Mangan. On the back cover was the corporate
logo of CNaC. Rocky tapped the phone with his index finger, gave Mangan a knowing look.

What is this? thought Mangan. Why are we here? The blue Mercedes was still parked at the roadside, a short distance down the highway.

They walked on, to the top of the hill. Rocky stopped. They looked at the market spread out beneath them, the mud, wood smoke, the silent donkeys with matted fur.

“It’s so backward,” said Rocky. “But that’s a Chinese road and a Chinese phone. Do you see America here anywhere? Do you see Europe, Britain?”

Mangan decided that these were rhetorical questions.

Rocky was grinning.

“But now I really want to show you something amazing,” he said. “Show you what China can do.”

Mangan turned toward him, so that the lens could capture Rocky Shi’s visage with sufficient clarity. But Rocky was already making his way down the hill, back toward the vehicles.

They drove another eight miles or so, Mangan following the white Toyota, the road winding through flat, muddied country speckled with villages half-seen in the distance, fields of
chat
. The Toyota drove fast, accelerated past the crawling buses. Mangan struggled to keep up, the jeep rattling as he overtook, swore to himself.
British agent fails to make crucial rendezvous due to weak driving skills.
Then the Toyota slowed and he saw, on the right, set back from the road, a wire security fence, high, sturdy, well built, of the sort that might surround a military facility. Beyond the fence, a quarter of a mile from the road, enormous warehouses, or hangars, ten or twelve of them, rose out of the fields. The Toyota signaled and pulled over at a gate facility with stadium lights and a watchtower looming over it. Mangan watched Rocky lower his window and talk to two uniformed Ethiopian security guards. One of the guards spoke briefly on a mobile phone.

“One car only,” he said. Mangan parked, and as he did so, he thought he saw a streak of blue across his rearview mirror. He
walked to the Toyota and climbed into the back seat. Rocky looked back at him and gave him a high-wattage, anticipatory smile. The driver was of Chinese appearance and said nothing.

The guards raised the barrier and waved them through.

To enter the compound was to enter a different realm. Here, the asphalt was smooth and flat. The verges were of well-kept grass. No rubble, no mud, no weeds. Hundreds of potted plants, ferns and geraniums, lined the roadway. The hangars were vast and identical, the walls a pale yellow, the roofs blue.

Beside Mangan on the back seat lay a piece of paper. A receipt?
AA Car Services, Djibouti Street, Addis Ababa.
The customer’s name, phone number.

They drove to the hangar furthermost to the left, pulled in before steel double doors where a youngish Chinese man in a white shirt awaited them, hands on hips. As they climbed from the car, Mangan lingered for a fraction of a second in the back seat, folded the car rental receipt and pocketed it before getting out.

Effusive introductions followed. Rocky spoke Mandarin, gave the line about his fund, his exploratory visit to Ethiopia. Mangan was introduced as a reporter, eager to witness the fulsome fruit of Chinese investment.

The young man nodded and gestured and led them briskly onto an enormous factory floor. Spread out before them, extending into the recesses of the hangar, a production line, manned by hundreds of Ethiopian workers. The air was warm and smelled of cooking rubber, glue, oil. The clatter and hiss of machinery. To his right, Mangan saw lines of presses of some sort, then row upon row of women at oversized sewing machines. Their guide was leaning in to them, speaking loudly.

“This line produces footwear for the European and US markets. You can see.” He held up a woman’s flat shoe, pointed at the label stitched in the tongue—the brand name of a high street chain. Rocky nodded appreciatively. Mangan looked about him. The workers were all repetitive, directed motion. Some of them gazed up at the visitors,
their eyes lingering on the tall red-headed Englishman as they worked. The factory was spotlessly clean and overhead hung red banners with slogans.
Together Lay The Foundation For Sino-Ethiopian Cooperation and Prosperity!
The guide gestured and they walked slowly along the production line. Next, a classroom. A hundred or so Ethiopians faced a Chinese lecturer and a screen. On seeing the visitors, the students immediately stood and began to clap.

“They are welcoming you,” said the guide. Rocky nodded and held up a hand in acknowledgement. At a sharp command from the lecturer, the students sat. On the screen, in English, were the words “Discipline” and “Responsibility.”

“Here,” said the guide, “the workers study our corporate values.”

It was, to Mangan, as if a factory complex had been surgically transplanted from southern China, its ethos and expectations entirely intact.

Rocky whispered into Mangan’s ear.

“They’ll employ fifty thousand Ethiopian workers here. Automotive production, agricultural processing, all kinds of things.” He beamed.

They walked back across the factory floor and out to the cars. Rocky professed himself astounded, delighted. He assured the guide he would report to his superiors at the earliest opportunity.

Mangan followed the white Toyota in the mauve evening light. They drove farther from Addis Ababa, into the quiet town of Debre Zeit. Rocky, it transpired, had booked them rooms at a hotel. Mangan’s, yellowed peeling walls, a lightshade filled with desiccated insects, looked out on a courtyard of orchids. The driver disappeared, and Mangan and Rocky ate, the only diners in a dark and cavernous dining room, kebabs,
wot
, beer
.
The food was lukewarm and sickly. Mangan watched Rocky across the table.

“So,” said Mangan, “what was all that about?” He was speaking English.

“All what?” said Rocky.

“What was I supposed to learn today? At the market. The factory.”

“Didn’t you find it interesting? I find it all very interesting.”

Mangan waited.

“I hoped you would see possibility,” said Rocky. He gestured with his hand, as if grabbing for something in the air. “I want you to see what China can do, what we could be.”

“I don’t need to be taken on publicity tours.”

Rocky shook his head, adopted a sad frown.

“But imagine, Philip. Imagine projects like that all over Africa!”

“I’m trying,” said Mangan.

Rocky was silent. Then he wiped his mouth with a napkin, gestured at Mangan, spoke in Mandarin, and for the first time, Mangan thought he felt an undertow in the man, some current of anger running beneath.

“You, you Western people. Your naivete. For you everything must fit in the easiest story, the neatest narrative. And for you China is a monolith, just a big, nasty, authoritarian factory, full of people you don’t know, can’t know. But you know nothing about our struggles. Nothing of our disappointments. Our successes. China can be a force for good, Philip. No more sitting in the corner, silent, pliable. We can change things. We can create new conditions. It might be a little… shocking. But that is the China we want. Really.”

Mangan saw the opportunity, took it.

“Who is we?”

“But…”

“Who is we?”

Rocky looked to be considering.

“We, Philip, are a small group of patriotic Chinese.”

“Forgive me, but patriots do not usually engage in the activities you have recently engaged in.”

“We have our reasons.”

“I need to know what they are.”

Rocky grinned, said nothing. Mangan spoke very quietly now.

“Why do you want to discredit CNaC?” he said.

Rocky sipped his beer, ignored the question.

“You saw the surveillance?” he said, quietly.

“A blue Mercedes, with us all day,” said Mangan.

“Is it yours?”

“No.”

Rocky made a wry face.

“I think we may not have very much more time.”

“If that is true, it is all the more urgent that you start speaking openly and clearly with me.”

Rocky gave his best puckish, twinkling grin.

“Did you ever study Confucius, Philip?”

Mangan thought back to college days, a course in classical texts, the hopeless slog through
The Analects.

“A little.”

“So you know. You know that we Chinese have always valued the humane.
Ren,
we call it. Humaneness. Very important. Not because some god tells us so, but because Confucius understood that society works when we are humane. And the true ruler is humane, like a parent to a child.”

Mangan waited.

Rocky picked at his food, spoke carefully.

“There is a man. A very decent, patriotic man. A soldier. When he speaks you know you are hearing truths. He believes in these virtues, real Chinese virtues. Many of us admire this man very much. He shows us the way. We answer to him.”

“Does he have a name, this virtuous soldier?”

Rocky shook his head, put down his fork, sat back.

“So that is what we are, Philip.
Ren.
Humane. That is our motive. You can tell them this.”

Rocky raised a finger and wagged it.

“And you may tell them one more thing. Tell them that I am a soldier, too. An officer of the People’s Liberation Army. Tell them that I served as a military observer in the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt, in 1998.”

When Mangan awoke in the morning, Rocky had already left. But an envelope had been pushed under the door.

At the Jupiter Hotel, Patterson had lain awake much of the night, tried to read, watched some television—a vile movie on a satellite channel featuring mawkish man-children who made their cars skid and spin to no apparent purpose, sumo wrestling, an ancient, saccharine rom-com. For a while she paced the room. From her window, she watched the damp, dim city, the streets mostly silent now, the sprawled and ragged figures by the roadside. She went early to the safe flat, brewed coffee, tested and retested the equipment.

Mangan arrived at eleven, unshaven, unhurried, sat on the crackling sofa, rubbed his eyes.

“The surveillance is there. It’s real,” he said. “And it’s not his.”

“Was it with you this morning?” she said.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see it. I left the car at home, took three different taxis to get here.”

“Mobile phone?”

“At home.”

“My, what a pro,” she said.

He gave her a quizzical look, then reached in his pocket, took out the pen and handed it to her. She unscrewed the barrel to reveal a socket which she cabled to the laptop. A short upload, and they were looking at images of Rocky Shi. Patterson studied the screen, watched the compact figure in its ludicrous photographer’s vest walking through the market, listened to the reedy voice, the forced laughter, saw immediately the elusiveness of the man, the outward layers of obfuscation.

“That is very good,” she said.

“There’s more,” he said.

He gave her the Toyota’s license plates, the car rental receipt. Patterson felt a flicker of excitement, a half-smile forming. He watched her.

And then—finale!—he laid the envelope on the table with a flourish.