Spy Games (17 page)

“You managed to restrain yourself from opening it?” she said.

“As ordered.”

Patterson put on a pair of surgical gloves, picked up the envelope, opened it and removed a document of some thirty pages. Together they looked at the title page.

Juemi
.

Mangan’s Chinese was marginally better than Patterson’s.

Instructions to Responsible Military Officers and Cadres Regarding Oversight of Procurement Contracts in the Case of China National Century Corporation.

Patterson worked quickly with a handheld scanner. Once the document and the car receipt were uploaded, she pushed the files through an encryption program. She wrote a short covering telegram and encrypted that, too. The laptop was connected to a handheld satellite phone and the files went in short digital bursts.

Mangan lay on the sofa, closed his eyes. Patterson left him alone, went to the fetid kitchen to make more coffee, came back into the living room to see him sitting bolt upright on the sofa, eyes wide.

“I almost forgot,” he said.

“Forgot what?” she said, alarmed.

“He said I was to tell you that he is an officer of the PLA and that he served in Sinai in 1998. He was an observer. One of the UN observers.”

Patterson stared at him, bit back an angry response.

“That’s important,” he said, blankly.

“For Christ’s sake, wake up, Philip,” she said. “He’s telling us who he is.”

Patterson waited, stunned with boredom in the safe flat. The surveillance had left London nervy and it was deemed risky for her to be out, even to build cover. She read, watched satellite television, tested the equipment, thought up elaborate operational scenarios, and in an act of boldness and rebellion, removed the plastic covering from the sofa, so that it no longer crackled when she sat on it.

Hopko came up on secure video link for housekeeping and to, as she put it, “keep the engine running.” VX, Hopko informed Patterson, had granted Rocky Shi the cryptonym by which he was to be known. He had become
HYPNOTIST
. For Mangan,
BRAMBLE
. And as such would they be known in all traffic henceforth.

“They’re breathing very heavily,” she said, through the clutter and pixellation. “Over at Assessments, at Treasury, even in the Cabinet Office.
HYPNOTIST
has got their attention. They want everything on CNaC. The lot. Links to the Party, the military. CNaC’s presence in Africa, Latin America, projects, contracts. Is every CNaC router a bug? Are there backdoors in CNaC encryption? Little CNaC black boxes in every switching room? Malware on every CNaC smartphone? After all,
we
do these things, so why
wouldn’t
they
? Is CNaC colonizing cyberspace? they ask. Is it poisoning the digital well?”

“And you think
HYPNOTIST
can answer all that?”

Hopko looked at the camera over the rim of her spectacles.

“Perhaps. If we run him well enough.”

“Are you unsure about him?”

Hopko paused.

“What concerns me, Trish,” she said, “is that
HYPNOTIST
is pointing us in a certain direction, forcing us to look a certain way. It’s as if he’s throwing meat to the dogs, keeping our noses to the ground. Why is he doing that? I wonder.”

After the call, Patterson put away the equipment, locked it in the flight cases. Stir crazy, she disobeyed orders and went for a walk in a headscarf, sunglasses. She mapped several blocks around the safe flat, fixed egress routes in her mind, watched the traffic, the people, looked for the tension, the pulse that might give away the presence of surveillance. But in a city this chaotic how the hell do you ever see it? How do you see it amid the crowds, the shanties, the ragged, stunned beggars, the young men who just seemed to float, directionless, across the city? How would you ever know?

NISS could have sixty people on her, right now.

She turned, walked quickly away from the safe flat, took a taxi back to the hotel, surprised, unnerved by her own disquiet.

Mangan lolled around Addis, waiting for instructions. He filed a desultory piece on the investigation into the bombing, to little effect. He wrote an elaborate celebration of Ethiopian quarterly growth figures.
In the Horn of Africa, a Bullish Economy!

He called the Danish and she was caustic with him, and then, to his surprise, proposed a trip out of town.

Hallelujah joined them and they drove three hours to Ambo to visit the university. Maja was wondering about nursing programs there. They wandered around the pitted, muddy campus, chatted to the students outside their crumbling concrete classrooms. They sat
in a law class and listened to an Indian lecturer explain the Ethiopian pension system in English that Mangan found hard to fathom. The students sat silent and uncomprehending. Many of them, Hallelujah explained, were Oromo and spoke little Amharic, and only rudimentary English.

“It’s our biggest problem,” he said with a hopeless shrug. “No one in Ethiopia understands anyone else.”

Maja shooed them away and sat at a rusted metal table outside the student services building, talking to a group of girls about their nursing course, what they knew of midwifery, trying to gauge what they were being taught. Hal and Mangan played table football with a knot of raucous boys, and Mangan felt taken out of himself for a moment, laughing and roaring with the rest of them as the tin ball rattled and snapped about the table.

In the late afternoon, they set out on the return journey to Addis, Mangan driving cautiously, concentrating fiercely on the road.

Twenty minutes out of Ambo, he slowed, just to see. A white Isuzu truck roared past him, horn blaring. A Nissan pickup, a bus.

But the blue car—was it a Mercedes?—a quarter of a mile behind, did not overtake. It slowed too.

He turned off the main road and drove for half a mile down a bumpy, cobbled track that wound through fields and into a village of thatch and chickens. Mangan watched his mirrors as the other two looked out of the windows.

They stopped, and stepped out of the car into sudden, deep quiet. They watched boys driving cattle home through the haze. Girls with babies on their backs came shyly from the huts and approached them. Hallelujah knelt and joked with them, asked them slow questions in Oromiffa and they answered in whispers. Maja went and kneeled next to Hallelujah, held out her hand, and one of the girls took it in her tiny, dusty fingers.

She’s so gentle, Mangan thought.

The girls touched her hair, wondered at the color of it, tried to braid it. Maja sat cross-legged in the dust, letting them run their
fingers through it, her eyes closed, smiling, listening to the children’s breathy giggles, their sing-song chatter.

Mangan walked a little way away, on his own, smelled the wood smoke and vegetation on the air. The fields stretched away for a mile to a jagged escarpment. Children in a village, cooking smells, the tinkle of a cowbell. Such places always felt to him intimate yet unattainable. He watched the thunderheads piling up above the dark rock, silver sunlight angling through the pillars of cloud.

Maja spoke from behind him.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I think so. Coming to places like this helps.”

She threaded her arm through his.

“Helps what?” she said.

“Oh, you know. Everything.”

“You mean the bombing?”

“That, and… yes, that.”

“I’m only just starting to feel as if I could ever be normal again, but you seem as if you have already left it far behind,” she said. “Where are you going? It feels like you are looking over your shoulder at me.”

When they got back on the road, there was no sign of the blue Mercedes.

Mangan called her the next day and they went for an Addis walk together, into the Merkato in a dank sunlight, up the hill at What-Do-You-Have? where the metal beaters knelt in the filthy street amid the potholes, the mud laced with oil and chemicals, reconditioning ancient, battered aluminium pots, kettles, bowls, their hammers tap-tapping out the dents, the women scouring, rendering them new, stacking them in dull, silvered piles. Where the boys sat amid stinking piles of old shoes, stitching, patching, renewing, bringing them back to life. The air was full of clanging and shouting, the toil of machinery, showers of sparks. Mangan saw ashtrays and grinding cups made from old shell cases, mortar rounds, sandals cut from
reeking mounds of old tires, rakes, fences, doors fashioned from scrap iron.

“Why do they call it that?” said Maja.

“The trucks come in from out of town, with all this”—Mangan gestured to the mounds of scrap, refuse. “And the buyers shout, ‘What do you have?’ And the name stuck.” The air was clotted with smoke, decaying rubber, burning. The men watched them pass, bloodshot-eyed, hard-handed, blistered, lean men, their clothes spattered with oil, rotted with acid.

They walked on, into the spice market, her hand suddenly in his. He took her down a covered alleyway, a narrow maze of stalls, the light tinted yellow from a corrugated plastic roof, porters elbowing past them, shouting, laughter, the women carving great slabs of
kocho
, the white banana root, pounded and fermented, falling off the knife. Maja stopped in front of an elderly woman in a plaid scarf, little white burlap sacks arrayed before her.
Feto
seeds for grinding and mixing with lemon, for purification. Kohl for the eyes.
Ades
leaf for infusing in butter, combing into the hair. Sulfur for wounds and exorcism. The woman put crumbs of incense into a twist of paper and pressed them into Maja’s hand, waved her away with a smile.

They stopped somewhere deep in the alleyways, sat on plastic stools, while two women grinned at them and chattered in Amharic, its playful, questioning ring. The women took coffee beans from a sack, shook them onto a skillet atop a clay brazier, moved them around with the tiny rake as they roasted. Mangan watched, smoked. Maja leaned forward, smelled the roasting coffee. The women dropped shards of frankincense into the brazier, wafted the smoke over Mangan and Maja, gestured for them to breathe deeply, breathe it in, this richness. The women ground the beans, brewed the coffee, poured cups and passed it to them. It was sweet and dark, the frankincense lingering on it.

Maja was quiet, regarded Mangan, then spoke.

“I was thinking I might move back up here, to Addis.”

“Really? Leave the clinic?”

“I’m not sure how much more I can take down there. I’m feeling burned out, frightened.”

“Perhaps you should think about a break. Going home.”

“Oh, should I?”

“Well, I mean…”

“Yes, perhaps I should.” She looked down, paused. She put her cup down.

“Philip, do you think there is any possibility that you and I might… might connect? I mean, really? If I came back to Addis we could, perhaps, try, no? I think of it, sometimes. No, a lot, actually. But you seem so… preoccupied. You seem so… absent. A bomb goes off, and you are all business.”

Mangan wondered how to respond. She was looking at him intently and he was aware that this was some kind of inflection point.

Could he tell her? Hint at it, maybe? The danger she was in?
Don’t worry, Maja, my reticence is explained by the fact that I am the operative of a secret intelligence agency. My true interests lie in providing targets for lethal drone strikes. Oh, and by associating with me, you are exposing yourself to the scrutiny of several intelligence agencies whose good manners are not to be relied upon.

“It’s possible I might not be staying here too much longer myself,” he said.

And as he said it, he felt an imagined life recede, dissipate into the air.

The traces on Rocky Shi were through. Patterson sat, head in hands, plowing through them, watching the man take shape, trying to sense the meaning of his experiences.

From 1998, out of the United Nations mission in the Sinai, an appreciation of the then Major Shi Hang, written in starchy prose by an Australian colleague who was clearly intrigued to encounter the fabled Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

Major Shi Hang—“though he insists on the use of a nickname, Rocky”—was a valued member of the UN mission, apparently, enduring the long, hot patrols into the Sinai with professionalism, reporting punctiliously upon ceasefire violations by Egyptian or Israeli forces, as was his mission. The Australian officer found Major Shi somewhat wanting in military deportment—“he smokes heavily and does not join in calisthenics,” yet he was “approachable, cheerful and good for morale. An accomplished cook, he has been known to return to base in possession of live poultry, which he will transform into a tasty Chinese soup for the benefit of himself and his brother officers.”

Major Shi, it is ascertained, is an officer of the Second Department of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Headquarters (2PLA).
That is to say, he is an officer of Chinese military intelligence, information that is relayed with a certain frisson.

And from this one fixed point of reference, Rocky Shi’s life and career can be found out.

Major Shi Hang, alias Rocky, now to be known as
HYPNOTIST
, pops up all over the place, as you would expect of a resourceful military intelligence officer.

Special Branch in Hong Kong made him, back in the early nineties, as part of a covert Chinese presence in Hong Kong in advance of the colony’s return to Chinese rule. And what was he doing there? “Specific intelligence on Shi Hang’s operational role continues to elude us,” Special Branch conceded wearily.

There he was in Honolulu, a military diplomat on a rare trip to United States Pacific Command in 2006, escorting an anvil-faced major-general named Chen. “Urbane and attentive,” reads the PACOM report, “Major Shi was a keen observer, an active questioner and an enthusiastic golfer.” Crucially, the report included a group photograph. Rocky, in uniform, stood at the edge of the group, a generous grin plastered across his face, in contrast to the flinty gaze of General Chen.

And here, a liaison report from a furious CIA station chief in Tashkent, where Rocky, as China’s deputy military attaché, has infuriated the Americans with his charming and good-natured subversion of the Pentagon’s plans for permanent air bases in Uzbekistan.

A true professional, as Hopko had foreseen.

The car rental had been paid in cash, no useful address. The mobile phone number led nowhere. It had called a grand total of three other numbers in its short life. One was Mangan’s, the second was the Chinese embassy in Addis, the third appeared to belong to an expensive Ethiopian lady who frequented a “closed house” near Bole airport, whose favors a wealthy, visiting Chinese businessman might be expected to enjoy. Hopko strongly suspected that Rocky Shi was, again, teasing them.

Not a whiff of his motive, not a whiff of his objective. Just the lingering sense that Rocky Shi had a pitch, that he had not yet made it, that he was waiting.

In the safe flat, Patterson stood while Mangan lounged on the sofa as she briefed him on what they now knew of Colonel Shi. Mangan responded by turning, she thought, a little pale.

“London feels the need for a stronger ‘operational footing,’” she said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that at the moment we are all just hanging on dear Colonel Shi’s largesse. And they don’t like that. It makes them uneasy. They want a clear commitment, an arrangement they understand.”

“And what sort of arrangement would that be?”

“Come on, Philip. One that relies on the tried and the tested motive for the agent: money or ideology or coercion or ego.”

Mangan paused, considered.

“That’s pretty unimaginative, isn’t it?” he said. “Aren’t people more complex than that?”

“Agents may be. London-based operational planners, not so much.”

“And how am I supposed to ease him into an understanding of his own motives?”

“Well, he talked about money before, didn’t he? So you can pursue that with him. But more than that, you’re to get him talking,” she said. “Talk about the future. Get him to envisage his future, with us. Let a plan form.”

“If he is the professional you say he is, he’ll know instantly what I am trying to do.”

“There is that.”

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m passing on instructions.”

He waited. She felt his eyes on her.

“What does she say, your boss? The clever one with all the jangly jewelry,” he said.

“She sees things differently.”

“How?”

Patterson pondered the wisdom of revealing to him Hopko’s unconventional wisdom.

“She thinks that Rocky Shi wants something other than a conventional arrangement. Something more. That there’s something larger at work here.”

He was listening carefully.

“And what does that mean for me?”

“She believes that you have the gift. That you can open people up, bring them to a point where they reveal themselves. So go and talk to him. Just see what you find.”

He stood up and pulled on his coat.

“And you? Will you be anywhere in the vicinity?”

“No.”

“Can I ask why?”

“I’m grounded.”

“But it’s all right for me to go and get snooped on.” He was trying to be jocular, but she could sense tension coursing through him.

“You’re starting to see how this works, then,” she said, realizing as she did how cruel it sounded. She opened the front door of the flat for him. He stopped and gave her a searching look, a half-smile, then he was gone. She closed the door quietly, wondering once again why he had chosen as he had.