Spy Games (36 page)

London

Charlotte Fan had been found, the detective inspector reported to Hopko. Chen’s people had been holding her at one of their safe flats in Watford, but they’d done a runner. Madame Fan had climbed, half-naked, through a window, run down the street to a newsagent’s babbling about a plot to destroy China. Someone had called the police.

Her captors were god-knows-where by now. The police had taken her to a doctor, who pronounced her tired but unharmed, and then to the Kensington apartment, where family retainers had fussed over her, and she made tearful calls to China. And when the detective inspector had been able to get a word in, her nephew, the boy Fan Kaikai, had woodenly repeated, as if from a script, that everything was fine and there was nothing for UK law enforcement to concern itself with and no charges would be brought, even if her kidnappers were found. And Madame Charlotte Fan would be leaving the country as soon as possible for rest and recuperation in Hong Kong and possibly Macau and, no, it was highly unlikely she would be able to appear in court should such an opportunity arise. And at this point a fresh gout of tears engulfed Madame as she
ascertained that her beloved brother, a great titan of Chinese industry, had been found in the city of Kunming—locked in an upstairs room at a military guest house—and returned to the bosom of the family, and the well-being of his person was no longer in doubt, and Madame sat and sobbed and shrieked as the cook and the maid wrapped her in blankets and brought cups of ginseng tea.

And the boy just stood there, with this stunned look on his face. Like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. As if he were utterly disgusted with something.

The detective inspector paused, let his memory work.

There was, he said, another woman present. She stayed close to the boy, hovered behind him, watched him, made sure he stayed on script. Rather striking, youngish, beautifully turned out. The expensive sheen of a woman who knows her way around Knightsbridge, Manhattan, the first-class lounge.

Just a family friend, she’d said, no name.

But the detective inspector saw on her the knowingness of one who has the full measure of events. And when he’d tried to talk to her, she had flitted away. Disappeared.

When the police had gone, and Aunt Charlotte had been escorted wailing to bed, Kai put on a baseball cap and shades and slipped from the apartment and walked to Park Lane. It took him a little while to find a public telephone. He dialled.

“This is DC Busby.”

“It’s me. You talked to me, in my college.”

There was a short silence.

“I remember, yes.”

“I couldn’t talk freely.”

“I rather assumed that was the case.”

“The woman, with you.”

The detective hesitated.

“What about her?”

“Tell her I… I will talk to her. I’m ready.”

“What makes you think she would want to talk to you?”

“Tell her. Please,” said Kai. And he put the phone down.

Who benefits?

A question that Hopko, coiffed and steely, all in black today, tight black shirt open at the collar, a leaf of silver at her throat, black pencil skirt, black boots, was only too willing to address with her customary obliqueness.

“Mangan wants to know who benefits? Well, I suppose we all do, don’t we? China is saved from itself, quietly, and is grateful. We are saved from the prospect of China’s unraveling. The status quo benefits, wouldn’t you say?” She forced a smile, but it did not spread to her eyes. “I’m told there was considerable relief in the City of London and the major financial centers of Europe and the United States. Instability in China gives them the collywobbles.” She made a flourishing movement with her hand.

Patterson was muzzy-headed from the flight, lack of sleep.

“I’m not sure that answer would satisfy him.”

“Well, he shall have to remain unsatisfied. At least until we can talk to him directly. Where the hell is he, anyway? And when is he coming in?”

“He needed time.”

“Don’t we all,” said Hopko. She reached for a file on her desk, pulled from it a printout, a newspaper article.

“He’ll see this, I imagine,” she said.

It was from the
Bangkok Post
.

They’d found him in his room, sprawled on the bed, white foam at his mouth, skin bruising. Local police sources hinted at an overdose. The casino was a few miles upstream from where they’d left him head down, kneeling in the dust.

Patterson sat heavily, smoothed her hair.

“We could have brought him out,” she said.

Hopko didn’t speak.

“You knew, didn’t you?” Patterson said.

“Knew what?”

“That he wasn’t coming out. You thought that he and Mangan… that neither was coming out.”

Hopko was silent, then pursed her lips and spoke.

“Trish, I’m sorry to say you are being taken off the China beat.”

Patterson felt a flush of heat in her face, the prickling of shock.

“You will leave the P section and you are to be posted.”

“Posted?”

“To Washington. It’s a Requirements position. Not operational, I’m afraid. You’ll assist in the conduct of liaison, intelligence sharing.”

Patterson looked down.

“It’s not such a bad outcome,” said Hopko, slowly.

“Do I get to ask why?”

“Human Resources, in two words.” She smiled. “She will be happy to explain, no doubt.”

“Could you not have stopped it?”

“Possibly. But I didn’t.”

Hopko paused, then spoke, her tone understanding.

“Trish, an intelligence officer is not a soldier. Your agents are not the objects of your empathy, the way soldiers under your command might be.”

Patterson stood on shaking legs.

“Have I failed? How?”

Hopko sighed.

“Human Resources thinks that you are… unreliable. That you are a little too
singular
, was the word she used.”

“
Singular?
And do you share this opinion?”

“I think that you have yet to… to fully encompass this work. I think you have yet to understand fully what it is we
do
. And besides, we all have to live out a period or two of exile.”

Patterson held up a hand to stop her speaking, walked from the room.

She went back to her cubicle, through the silent corridors.

On her handheld, a voice mail, from the policeman in Oxford. DC Busby.

Our friend says he wants to talk. And you never heard it from me.

She picked up her bags, took the lift, swiped herself out of VX. She walked to the bridge, leaned on the railing. The Thames was full of chop, glittering in a stiff breeze, hard sunlight. She looked across to the other bank, up toward Westminster.

And for a moment Patterson saw not a country but something else. Something adorned with the trappings of country, for sure, the Union Flags billowing from the rooftops, the curve of the river, the grandiose architecture of the state. But, in that instant, these things seemed merely a surface, a patina, and she felt the movement of some deeper musculature running beneath, the pulse of power and intention, its horizons far beyond the Thames, beyond London, elusive, virtual.

Cui bono
?
Who benefits?

She felt childish, gullible.

She took a taxi back to Archway and once in the flat she dropped the bags, undressed, pulled on jeans and a baggy T-shirt. She opened a bottle of cheap red, sat on the sofa, drank and watched the light dim as the afternoon clouded over. She went to the silent bedroom, got beneath the covers, pulled her knees up to her chest and held herself.

What should she have done? What should she do now?

She should have told Hopko that Mangan had a lead.

She should have told her that the Fan boy wanted to talk.

But she hadn’t.

After Patterson had made her shaky exit, Hopko had risen from her desk, crossed the room, and closed and locked the door to her
sanctum. She went to one of three black safes that lined the wall behind her desk, kneeled, and on the safe farthest to the left entered a combination on a digital key pad. From inside she took a plastic envelope that held a secure handheld and an index card. Hopko placed the envelope on her desk, took out the handheld, turned it on, checked to see that the battery had some charge to it, and dialed a number written on the index card. The number had attached to it the prefix of a Caribbean country. She waited a moment. The number rang and was answered, not with a greeting, but with an accented male voice reciting a short list of numbers and letters. Hopko responded in kind.

“
Ja?
” came the voice.

“The situation is resolved,” she said.

“
Dankjewel.
” And then a digital
pip
, and silence.

Sumatra, Indonesia

Mangan was aware of the faint glimmer of dawn, a gentle persuasion of azure in the eastern dark. He listened to the waves on the beach. Far off in the night, he could see the lights of tankers in the Straits of Malacca, imagined the throb of engines over the black, churning water.

He had boarded a flight to Medan at the last minute, found a rattletrap taxi to drive hours through the night, stopping to eat at a roadside
warung
, nothing more than canvas stretched over a bamboo frame, plastic stools, a hurricane lantern reeking of kerosene. He ate
gulai
with his fingers, a scrawny chicken stewed in coconut milk, turmeric, garlic, caraway. The proprietor brought him an Anker beer, offered him a
kretek
, which he took and lit, the sugar on his tongue, clove-laced smoke hanging on the air.

It had been three in the morning when they reached the place, a speckling of splintered huts on a stony beach he knew, and he shamelessly roused the owners, pressed a wad of rupiah on them, and they gave him a mosquito net and water, waved him to a cabin in the darkness. His ribs ached, and his hands were discolored and numb.

The silver flicker of lightning in cloud, high above the sea.

They want me to come in, he thought.

The hiss of water on shingle.

But I won’t. Not yet.

He thought of Rocky, wild-eyed, sweating, hissing at him a name, a lead, a thread to pull on. He thought of an unraveling, an unblinding. He felt the draw of it, a taut wire in his veins.

I am present at the hatching of my choices.

He watched the lights of the ships across the relentless, heaving sea, watched them recede into the warm dark.

As ever, my profound thanks go to Catherine Clarke, Michele Topham, Caroline Wood and all at Felicity Bryan Associates. My thanks go in equal measure to Ed Wood and Iain Hunt and their colleagues at Little, Brown. I am very fortunate indeed to be working with all of them.

I was introduced to Ethiopia by two remarkable journalists, one who showed me Addis Ababa and its environs, and another who took me to Dire Dawa and Harer. Their insight, generosity and commitment to their craft made a very deep impression on me. They showed me their beautiful, haunting country as it teeters on the brink of change, and they introduced me to extraordinary people, thinkers who are charting Ethiopia’s future and pondering China’s role in it. They bought me coffee, too, the like of which I have never tasted. I wish I could name them, but recent events in Addis Ababa make that impossible. I am so very grateful to them. They reminded me that journalism as practiced in many countries requires of its practitioners a kind of cold courage unfamiliar to most of us.

As I imagined a world of contemporary espionage, I took advice from a number of people, some of whom know the trade and also
can’t be named. They know who they are and my heartfelt thanks go to them. The book
Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernization
by William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon and Anna B. Puglisi has been an invaluable reference, as has the work of Peter Mattis. However, the world depicted in the novel is my creation and mine alone.

During the writing, help and support came from David Abramson and Kelly Hand, Robert Bickers, Warren Coleman, William Davison, Mike Forsythe and Leta Hong Fincher, Kim Ghattas, Paul Hayles, Ronen Palan, Jeff Wasserstrom, and the wondrous folk at Goldsboro Books in London. My warm thanks, too, to the staff of the public libraries in Takoma Park, Maryland, and Takoma, DC, especially Ellen Arnold-Robbins and Patti Mallin.

Finally, I am grateful for the generous portions of inspiration, advice, love, humor, perspective and solace provided daily by Susie, Anna and Ned.

To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our
latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.

Sign Up

Or visit us at
hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters