Spy Games (8 page)

United Kingdom

Nicole landed at Heathrow, the English summer sullen, damp and cool. She waited in the aisle for the struggles with luggage in the overhead bins to subside. She made her way into the terminal, the interminable walk across the airport to the border control officers who eyed her, asked her business in strange, angular accents she found hard to understand, all the consonants in the wrong places, the weird lack of inflection that made the speech sound so passive-aggressive. She smiled her best smile, asked them to repeat themselves as she looked them right in the eyes, saw them soften a little.

Outside the terminal it smelled of cigarette smoke and cooking fat. She sat on a tiny bus that crawled to the car rental place. She took possession of a red Mini, and then, suitcases on the back seat, she was bowling down the motorway toward Oxford.

They had arranged a flat for her in Jericho. At her last briefing, in a brown airport hotel room in Madrid, her case officer, the one she called Gristle, had thrown the keys on the table, gestured to them with his chin.

“There you are,” he’d said.

She’d named him Gristle for the way the years of secret work were etched on his face, his body sinewy, the skin cured by weather and cigarette smoke and the vile sorghum spirit he liked to drink. He was sixty if he was a day and spoke the Mandarin of a Hunanese peasant and was, in all, a duplicitous shit, but Nicole had come to know him and in an unfathomable way, love him. For beneath the keen insults, the manipulations, she saw constancy to him and a perceptiveness that she admired. That and his ruthlessness. Gristle had sat with his cigarette clutched between the second and third fingers, the hand in a claw, trying to unsettle her.

“Nice place, I hear,” he said. “There are fancy bakeries and restaurants. Boutiques. Just the sort of places you like.”

“I’m ecstatic.” She sat cross-legged on the bed, distanced from him, denying him the ability to dominate the physical interaction.

“You fucking should be on what we’re paying you.”

“Tell the Ministry of State Security they can get someone cheaper. See how it goes,” she said, idly.

“Maybe we will. A proper Chinese girl. One we can trust.”

She gave him a dry smile.

“But you can’t, can you? You pay, sweetheart, for me and for my Taiwan passport. So suck it up.”

She looked up suddenly, as if something had occurred to her.

“Where’s your little boyfriend, anyway?” she said. “Why isn’t he here, with his little laptop and his questions?” Gristle usually brought a junior case officer with him. This time he was alone.
“Chao jia le ma?”
Had a tiff?

“He’s outside in the car.”

She laughed.

“Why?”

“He’s not cleared for this.”

What? she thought, keeping her expression level.

“My, how you excite me,” she said.

He exhaled, watched her.

All right, we’re getting serious, thought Nicole.

“You know the outlines of what we require from you during the coming year,” he said. “Your Oxford year.”

She gave him a false pout.

“I am to report on Oxford’s student groups and assorted crazies. I am to report on anyone who is Chinese while concurrently Muslim. And I am to babysit the bed-wetting princeling, Fan Kaikai. Don’t worry, I was briefed into submission long ago.”

“I said, you know the outlines.”

“Why? Is there more?”

He was lighting another cigarette from the butt of the first, leaning back in his chair.

“Foreign intelligence, you know, no one really gives a shit. I mean, they like it. It makes them feel important. All that stuff you got by screwing that old man in Washington, it was pretty good. It went in the reports, and maybe some powdered prick in the Foreign Ministry got to read it, and everyone’s happy.”

She was listening to him, every nerve tight, now.

“But this, Nicole, is different.”

She said nothing, waited.

“This has become somewhat serious.”

“Why? Why is it serious? I don’t see how babysitting—”

He cut her off, his voice hard.

“I am about to fucking tell you.”

She raised her eyebrows, made a mock frightened expression which he ignored.

“The Ministry is worried. Or, more accurately, the Ministry is in a quivering fit of paranoia.”

He tapped ash from his cigarette, the
tiptip
sound of index finger against paper, the hiss of the burning tobacco.

“Where this paranoia has come from, from what poisoned well it has arisen, we are not cleared to know.”

He made a dismissive gesture. Speaking seemed to be costing him great effort, and she realized she had never seen him like this. Scared.

“These last few months… well, you wouldn’t believe it. Internal
investigations, self-criticisms, sudden retirements. Everyone jumping at shadows. It’s like a fucking purge.”

He paused, dragged on the cigarette, inhaled. She waited. He spoke very quietly.

“They’ve seen something, heard something out there, a noise, a signal. A threat. And now we’re scuttling around in the dark, chasing it down. Every lead. Every guess.”

She said nothing, just held her hands out as if to say,
What do you want me to do about it?
He was suddenly furious with her, jerking himself forward in his chair, shouting, the spittle flying.

“Don’t fucking play with me! Don’t fucking sit there and shrug your little whore shoulders at me. You will get to
work
, you little bitch.”

She shrank back.

“Doing what? What am I looking for?”

“Anything! Everything! Who does Fan Kaikai see? Why? When? Why was his room turned over? What was on that laptop? Something was, because the Ministry’s biggest hard-arses are in fainting fits about it. They are swooning in the fucking corridors over the Fan family and its stolen laptop and you,
you,
are hereby appointed Fan Kaikai’s chief protector, inquisitor, nanny and shrink, and you come to me with everything.
Everything!
Do you understand?”

She swallowed.

“All right. All right,” she said.

“There’s more,” he spat.

“More,” she repeated.

“The Chen girl. Madeline Chen.”

“Am I supposed to know who she is?”

“You know perfectly well who she is.” She did, of course—Madeline was the daughter of General Chen, the dour schemer who’d just ascended the throne of military intelligence.

“You will seek her out. Talk to her. She has minders. Or maybe something more than minders. They’re not ours. Who the fuck are they? Where do they stay? What do they do? And why?”

“How do I get her to talk?”

The question seemed to thrust him back into his rage. He was shouting, rising from his seat.

“
How?
Use your fucking
charm
! And when that fails…”

“What?”

He looked away from her and flapped a hand in the air.

“You will treat her as a hostile target.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning… do whatever you have to do. If there’s a mess, we’ll clean up.”

She said nothing, let the thought sink in, felt a cold crackle of anticipation in her stomach. He watched her, then nodded slowly.

“You will do this. And when you have something, you signal and you talk only to me. Only to me.” He was jabbing a finger at her again. “And, trust me, nothing you have done so far in your
career
remotely compares with the significance of this task.”

He sighed, rubbed his eyes.

“You,” he said, “are a small part of a large effort. Maybe Madeline Chen knows fuck all. Maybe her minders are just… minders. I don’t know. But maybe she knows…
something
. It’s called a lead. So we chase it.”

They talked finance, and then communications, arrangements with the Ministry of State Security’s London residency, the need for politesse with the Fan family. And he’d gentled her a little, and threatened her again, and then he’d taken everything that had gone between them and twisted it around her like a rope. Then he dismissed her. And she’d left, bound and plucked and willing, for the plane. As she always did.

She crawled through Oxford, braking for rivers of tourists and erratic cyclists. She parked the Mini. The Jericho flat was nicer than she’d expected. It was on the ground floor of a white terraced house in a narrow, crooked street, a hanging basket of geraniums by the dark green door. Quaint, she thought, on the edge of twee. She stood in
the airy living room, which opened onto a tiny garden, enjoying her luck.

That first afternoon, a weighty, perspiring man came from the embassy, hefted a black flight case in through the front door, complained about the traffic, the weather, the country, the food, and then swept the place for microphones. He pronounced it clean. After he left, she unpacked, walked to a mini-market, making a mental note of all the cars on the street, their numbers and colors. She bought pasta and coffee and wine and vegetables, walked home, stocked the fridge. She poured herself a glass of Viognier, stood in the garden in afternoon sunlight and birdsong, the glass cool against her fingers.

This was dangerous.

She had always worked against foreign targets, the dance, the seduction, the careful handling of an agent. But this—this smelled of internal security, the boneyards of Party infighting. This was a place where you knew no one, where you found enemies who didn’t forget.

She thought about Madeline Chen, the hostile target, and how to get to her.

Kai sat in an upstairs coffee shop, a cosy place of pine and frilled curtains that felt unthreatening to him, comforting. The memoir was on the table in front of him. It had, as yet, yielded few secrets. Grandpa was building his wartime credentials.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Mangan, in his pajamas, regarded his laptop in the darkness, his feet cold on the concrete floor, a glass of vodka in his hand. The four photographs that had turned up in his email glowed on the screen.

What
was
this?

It was someone informing him that he was being watched.

But who was being watched? Philip Mangan, the feckless if occasionally inspired journalist who lives alone in a shabby fourth-floor apartment in Gotera and files copy for a reputable newspaper on the rare occasions he can stir himself to do so? Who claims to be unveiling the machinery of insurgency and repression in East Africa? Who has a petulant curiosity concerning China, its corporations, their workings in Africa?

Or the other Philip Mangan? The one from whom, in the recent past, a hidden, parallel life had sprouted like an unexpected limb. The one who had found in himself an unimagined capacity for deception, for betrayal and for a kind of courage.

And an unimagined capacity for killing.

Was the photographer interested in this Philip Mangan, for whom
the ordinary, the quotidien, the mundane business of living, had fissured and would not knit together again, ever?

Can I tell Hoddinott about this? he thought. Yes, I can. And perhaps I can give him the INSA tidbit, the Chinese computers and technicians burrowing into Ethiopia’s intelligence agencies. He resolved to call Hoddinott. He felt as if he were leaning over some deep, dark pool, touching its surface, balancing on its edge.

Hallelujah phoned, sounding rushed and wired.

“It’s the World Cup qualifier tomorrow, so we’ll all watch at Burger House. They have a big screen. You’re coming, right?”

“Perhaps, Hal.”

“What do you mean, perhaps? This is a time of national glory, Philip! All Ethiopia wants you there.”

“Perhaps.”

“No, no, Philip, I predict Maja will be there. You must come.”

“Oh. All right.”

He paused.

“Thanks, Hal.”

“No, no. Thanks to you, my friend.”

The photographs on his screen looked like a threat—or a promise.

Burger House was packed and raucous. Girls had daubed red, yellow and green on their cheeks. They draped each other in flags and scarves and some had started dancing while the young men leaned against the bar drinking St. George’s and watched and whooped. In the center of the restaurant a huge television screen was showing the pregame, with commentary in Amharic at blistering volume. Around it, chairs were placed in a semicircle, but all of them were taken and people sprawled on the floor. Where to sit? Hallelujah pursed his lips, looked around and caught the eye of the bartender, who gestured them over and mouthed something in his ear. Hallelujah took Mangan by the arm.

“He’s my friend,” he said. “We go to the garden.” They threaded their way through the restaurant and out of a back door into soft evening light, the smoky, sweet smell. More plastic chairs on a scrubby lawn and another screen beneath a spindly tree. Maja stood in a small group, saw Mangan immediately and made a
cheers
gesture with her beer bottle. He went over to her. Her hair was loose, hung carelessly. She wore a dark blue dress and a wrap. He had an idea she’d been waiting for him, then told himself not to be stupid.

“The elusive journalist,” she said.

“Elusive? Me?” said Mangan.

“I’d been wondering when I might see you.”

He looked at her questioningly.

“I was thinking about how I might, what does one say, give you a story.”

“Are we going to Ogaden?”

“Ogaden is hard going, you know.”

“I can do hard going.”

“Oh, yes? You look like the diplomatic cocktail party type to me,” she said.

Mangan blinked.

“I’m not that. I…”

“Ogaden is for tough people. You look like you’ll blow over in a strong breeze.”

Wrong-footed now, Mangan found a beer bottle being pushed into his hand. Hallelujah was watching the exchange, smiling.

“I’ve been tough. In the past. I was tough in China.”

“Yes, and I’ve been meaning to ask you that. Why did you leave China?” she said, abruptly. “Who leaves Beijing for Addis Ababa? Can it be considered a promotion?”

Mangan took a breath. She was smiling, laughing at him. It dawned slowly on him that she was flirting.

“Who leaves Copenhagen for Ogaden?” he managed.

“I’m not from Copenhagen, I’m from Løkken. A little seaside
town, where the North Sea meets the Skagerrak. Huge skies, freezing beaches.”

“So, Ogaden makes for a contrast.”

“It does. The climate. And the cuisine. Herring consumption is limited in Ogaden.”

“Herring?” said Hallelujah, frowning. “What is it?”

Maja and Mangan both laughed.

“A fish,” she said.

“A fine, forceful fish,” said Mangan. “Pickled or charred.”

And as he looked at the two of them and felt the warmth of her look, her laughter, there started up quite suddenly a metallic ringing in Mangan’s bones.

He registered in a tiny, rushing fragment of time a flicker of shock on her face and a reflexive jerking movement of her hands. He felt himself drop his beer bottle, or, more accurately, felt it carried out of his hands. A powerful, piercing shriek in his ears and a
whump
of acrid heat hit him hard in the back and enveloped him.

And then he was looking at packed earth and felt strands of grass against his face and something was happening inside his head at the back of his nose, a sort of ticking, as if the pressure were changing deep inside him.

And then pain, deep in his eyes, his jaw.

And as he reached out for support, for anything, he seemed to roll and he looked up to a storm of silent flying insects, black against the evening sky, the air dark, predatory, full of motion.

After that, stillness, and some sense of a period of time passing, though he couldn’t say how long. Movement in his peripheral vision, but otherwise he just looked at an empty sky. And the pain receding somewhat, and deep inside his head the thin metallic ring, though falling away a little now, and an awareness of shards and bits on his skin and lips. He tried to spit, but his mouth was dry.

And then the sky was blotted out and he felt fingers on his throat, and Maja’s voice calling him from some distance. He felt able to nod, and she was kneeling over him, telling him to get up. He saw that all
of the lights were out. He heard, beyond the ringing, what seemed to be glass shattering and other voices.

“Did the… the power…” he said.

“Philip, you can hear me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s a bomb. You understand?”

He nodded.

“You are all right. We need to move.
Now
. Stand up,” she said.

Slowly he got to his feet. He was shaking. She held his hands. His eyes and head cleared a little.

“Where’s Hal?” he said.

“He’s here. He’s hurt, but it’s not bad, some shrapnel to the arms. He’s walking out to the street. Don’t worry.”

Some shrapnel.

“And you…?” he asked.

“I’m okay. I’m fine. But inside, they’re not fine. I am going in.”

“No,” he said. “There might be another device. We should go.”

“Philip, I am a nurse. I have to go in.”

“No.” He shook his head. She shrugged. He noticed that she was speckled with dirt, her dress torn at the side.

“I have no choice,” she said.

He saw a bottle of water on the ground. He took an unsteady step and picked it up, undid the cap and poured water over his face, washing out his eyes, rinsing his mouth. He coughed and spat. He felt for his phone.

“All right. I’ll come.”

“You’ll come?”

“Yes. Together, okay?”

She nodded, and he could see now that she was very frightened, and very determined. They walked hand in hand toward the restaurant’s back door. Smoke drifted from it and inside was only darkness.