Spy Games (31 page)

Thirty or forty such addresses. And names. Lawyers, accountants, nominee directors.

“You let me see before you push Send,” said Rocky absently. “Oh, and tell them one more thing. To show we are serious, they should watch Charlotte Fan. In London. Today. And the boy. In Oxford. Fan Kaikai.”

“Yes. All correct. Good,” said Rocky.

“Yes! Philip, that is very good. That is exactly what I mean.”

“Good, good,” said Rocky.

Laboriously, he copied out the list of names and addresses, put them in the appendix. Rocky nodded. Mangan dropped the document, encrypted, on the darknet site.

They cuffed him again, and left.

The Clown came back with a plate of food which looked as if it had been arbitrarily assembled from a hotel buffet. Slices of prime rib, sickly salad, grilled shrimp, some cold dumplings, slices of cheese. He dropped the plate on the floor, spilling the food into the dust and grit.

Patterson saw Mangan’s message almost as soon as it dropped, the computer alert waking her from a subterranean sleep just after 4 a.m.

She had seen many versions of the crazed midnight telegram, an agent in a bad place, imagining footsteps outside, terror dictating their demands. She’d watched operations sink, and the Service’s deft pulling away, scattering plausible denials in its wake while the
joe
drifted into the dark.

But never had she seen anything quite like this.

A
purge
?

She read it again, trying to break it down into its component parts, to prioritize. An agent held hostage. A demand for intelligence. A rupture in the delicate skein of power that held China together.

Military units, moving against the Fan family and its interests, and against the Communist Party, too.

Patterson imagined soldiers rattling along the gray brick
hutongs
of Beijing, smashing down the big red steel doors to beautiful courtyard mansions, dragging out the Fans, their retainers, allies, bankers, nieces, nephews, fixers, goons. Squirreling them off to God knows where. Some military base? Safe houses? Barreling through the
offices of China National Century up there on the Third Ring Road in the ghastly silvered tumescence that was its corporate headquarters, breaking into the safes, the networks.

How on earth did they think they were going to do this?

Who did they have in Beijing, General Chen, Colonel Shi and their feverish little band of plotters? Did they have military? Elements of 2PLA? How the hell did they think they would get around the Ministry of State Security? The People’s Armed Police? The Capital Garrison, its two divisions right outside town?

And watch Charlotte Fan in London and Fan Kaikai in Oxford? Why? What were they going to do on UK soil?

Why on earth did they think Britain would help?

Because if we don’t, they will kill our agent.

She sat still for a moment, tried to rein in her thoughts, but nothing occurred to her that matched the enormity of what she saw.

What is my part in this? What are my lines now?

She began to pack, then abruptly stopped and sat back down to look at the telegram again. The only other addressee was Hopko. Mangan was keeping it close. It was 10 p.m. in London.

It was light by the time her secure handheld buzzed, birdsong coming in through the window. It was Hopko.

“You’ve seen it?” she said.

“Yes,” Patterson said.

“Secure video conference, twenty minutes.”

She spun up the sat phone, logged in to London on a scratchy secure feed, the signal squelching and pixelating. Arrayed across the screen were the sleep-slapped faces of Chapman-Biggs and Mobbs, the Director, Requirements and Production. Hopko looked calm and serious, dressed as if she had arrived straight from the opera, her hair teased up, a dress of midnight blue silk, her tanned, stocky shoulders, a necklace of silver in beautiful, beaten ingots.

“So sorry to have dragged you all here,” she said. “But we do seem to be at a rather significant moment.” She looked straight at the
camera, went on. “If
HYPNOTIST
is to be believed, and his reassurances notwithstanding, we find ourselves in a place one could best describe as perilous, and I submit we
should
send this intelligence up to Cabinet and we
should
alert our partners.”

“Do we believe him?” This from Mobbs, a sour tone to it.

“We find him credible,” said Hopko.

A pause. The Director spoke, deadpan.

“What are you telling me?”

“I am telling you,” said Hopko, “that the deal between the soldiers and the Party which has kept the world’s largest country afloat for sixty years and more appears to be coming apart.”

She left a beat for effect.

“Chairman Mao decreed that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never command the Party. Well, these clever chaps at 2PLA appear to envisage a new arrangement.”

Chapman-Biggs cleared his throat, spoke.

“And there is the matter of the UK’s role as a repository of certain funds which may prove problematic in the way it is perceived, were this information to become public.”

Now, thought Patterson.

“And there is the matter of our agent,” she said, “who is being held hostage in an impossible situation.” It sounded weak, childish, she knew as soon as she said it.

The Director turned his wolfish features straight to the camera.

“That,” he said, “I’m rather afraid, is the least of our concerns at this juncture.”

It was a sparkling July midmorning by the time they got the authorizations, flash messages to the Home Secretary, the Met, Thames Valley Police, Hopko and the Director working the secure phones. Two squad cars to the Fans’ flat in Kensington and two more to the house in Regent’s Park they were known to own. Two more to the Fan boy’s college in Oxford. The detective inspector in charge spoke
to Hopko by secure video link, and, accustomed to her foibles, reported as much detail as he could.

At Kensington the hard-eyed men in the lobby didn’t want to let them in and there was some squaring off until the inspector stalked in and pulled rank. With ill-will, the hard-eyed men opened the lift, tailed them up to the apartment.

Nobody there but the housekeeper, reported the inspector. She was cowering in the kitchen and didn’t appear to speak English. Nobody else. They had taken a look around and decided it was quite a place, marveled at the huge windows of bulletproof glass, the surveillance systems everywhere, motion sensors. Panic room with its own egress system, apparently. That was locked, though, so they couldn’t get in. And all this bloody awful furniture, all cream and gold and twirly, like something out of Versailles but cheap-looking.

But Regent’s Park, that was different, said the inspector. One of those bloody great white Georgian places, a palace, surveillance everywhere. A Bentley in the driveway. On buzzing, a croaky voice didn’t want to let them in, told them to go away at first, so a translator told it about warrants issued under Section 42 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and after a short interval, the gate slid open and the big black front door was opened by this little old lady in chef’s whites, face like a collapsed paper bag, all red-eyed, weepy. She’d been cleaning up, smashed crockery all over the floor. The house had been turned over. The old lady said she was the cook and had worked for Madame Charlotte Fan for thirteen years, and loved her for the way she looked out for the cook’s family in Lewisham, and the cook made her pork and coriander dumplings and
dandan
noodles and onion pancakes and proper
rou jia bing
with tender minced pork and sesame and pickles all wrapped up in the pancake and Madame Fan always told her how much she loved it because you couldn’t find proper food in London anywhere. And when gently pressed she said men had come in the early morning, and she didn’t know how they’d got in, and Madame Fan had got out of bed and there’d been a big row and the men had started searching the house
and smashing things up, and then they’d said they were taking Madame Fan with them and the cook was told if she said anything to anyone or talked to the police that would be the end of her and her family down in Lewisham, so she wasn’t to say anything. So, really, she was afraid she couldn’t tell them anything at all.

The inspector looked up, smiled. But Hopko had her eyes closed. He pushed on.

The translator was sitting with her arm around the cook, and one of the constables had brought her a glass of water, and the Service liaison officer had knelt down beside her and said she shouldn’t worry, the police would make sure her family were kept safe and what, please, had happened to Madame Charlotte Fan. And the cook, face creasing and puckering, said that Madame Fan had grown very pale and then given her, the cook, a nod as if to say it’s all right do what they say. And they all went out of the front door, and a big gray car drew up and they all got in and drove away. And, no, she had not seen the license plate, even though as the car turned out of sight she realized that she should have and now was cursing herself for being so thoughtless and disloyal and stupid. And the translator said not to worry, we’ll find it, and what time was it roughly and the cook said they left at about four-thirty in the morning. And a police guard was put on the house and the cook was left, weeping over the shards of early Qing vases which had been hurled to the floor as General Chen’s men moved against those who had corrupted and degraded China.

“Though I must say, I wonder,” said Hopko, in her sanctum, to Chapman-Biggs, paper cups of coffee on the desk, “if we are right to frame this as a move by the military against a Communist Party elite. Or whether we ought to see it as a sort of family feud. Is that what it is? Two bloodied old revolutionary families and their retainers duking it out?” She brought up her fists in a Queensberry rules gesture. “They loathe each other, you know. The Fans are all metropolitan and modern and entrenched in the Party, rich as Croesus and
principled as cooked spaghetti. And the Chens, all austere and nationalist and martial and convinced they’re the true repository of Confucian virtue.”

She stopped and Chapman-Biggs knew better than to say anything. This was pure Hopko, the careering analytical zigzag at the last minute.

“Or is it a combination of the two?” she said. “Are they reverting to something? To an older way of doing things, of being. Perhaps Communism
was
just a blip, after all, and clans, warlords, dynasties are reawakening, remembering how to function.

“But whatever it is,” she said, “it’s here. In the UK. And it’s begun.”

The car, a silver Pajero, showed up on the cameras at 4:22 a.m. leaving Regent’s Park and heading west on the Marylebone Road. Later, it turned north and entered the underground parking facility of a large residential block. Multiple vehicles left the block, rendering further tracking of the abducted Charlotte Fan difficult.

The squad cars that roared through Oxford’s early morning streets and came to an overly dramatic halt outside the gates of Fan Kaikai’s college were disappointed. The boy was not there.

Kai had walked as the evening turned and the dark came on. He needed movement. Movement served to calm the gnawing, impotent fury in him. He walked around the city center, avoiding the knots of late night drinkers. He walked over the bridge and down St. Clement’s. At her street, he stopped, looked around. He walked quickly to the small wrought iron gate in front of her house. The windows were dark.

He opened the gate, went to the front door and listened.

He bent over and pushed open the mail slot to peer through it. He could just make make out the tiled floor in the hallway. He smelled something rich and pungent, a chemical overlay to it.

And then, from inside, a muffled movement. Someone standing, perhaps, a footfall on a carpeted floor.

He stood upright, let the mail slot snap shut, its metallic
snack
startling in the darkness. He backed away, toward the front gate.

And there, in the downstairs window, a flicker of movement, a face to the glass. Then, gone.

Kai turned and ran.

He ran back to the main road, panic driving him. The road was empty now, open and silent, the traffic lights at green. He ran up a long hill with parkland to one side, his breath roaring in his ears. He stopped, chest aching, rested against iron railings, his hand on the cold black metal. He looked back toward her street, listened to the city’s low-frequency night hum, and over it, the sound of a motorbike starting up, revving.

He straightened up, another bilious jolt of fear.

From her street, a bike pulled out, fast, came in his direction, accelerating hard into the turn, the back wheel giving slightly, then righting and racing through the gears.

He ran blindly on, up the hill. The bike’s roar was growing in his ears. I have seconds, he thought.

He turned to the railings. They were six feet or so high, the spikes atop them blunted by layers of black paint. He hurled himself at them, grabbing hold of the spikes, dragging himself upward, feet scrabbling furiously against the railing for traction. He got one knee up, wedged between the spikes. He hauled his torso up, balanced precariously, felt the fence wobbling beneath his weight.

The bike was hurtling up the hill toward him.

Nothing for it. He toppled to the side, the spikes jabbing him in the stomach and groin, one catching his shirt. For a second he hung there, half over, stuck, and wondered if this would be how they caught him, absurd, dangling. And then the shirt ripped and he fell, hitting the grass hard with his shoulder and the side of his head. And then he was up and running into the park, into darkness, shrubs, trees. He glanced over his shoulder.

The bike had stopped by the side of the road, its engine idling. Its
rider seemed to be holding a phone. And just as the thought registered, he felt his own phone vibrate in his pocket.

What?

He rounded a corner, ducked behind an oak and pressed himself against its trunk. He answered the phone.

“Where the hell are you?” It was Nicole. He struggled to comprehend what was happening.

“Is that you?” he said.

“Yes, it’s me. Where are you?”

“I mean… you’re on the bike? Calling me?”

“What? What bike?”

He shook his head, tried to focus.

“I’m… that’s not you?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Why are you not in your rooms?”

“I… someone’s chasing me, on a motorbike.”

“What? Where?”

“I… I don’t know… I’m in a park. It’s dark.”

“Oh god, what park, Kai? Tell me. I will come to you.
What park?
”

Kai took the phone away from his ear for a second, heard the motorbike revving its engine.

“It’s… it’s near her house… on the hill.”

“Listen to me. I am coming. By car. I will call you again when I am near, and I will find you.”

“What should I do?”

“Run, or hide. Do not let them take you, Kai.”