Night Heron (11 page)

Charteris waited at the entrance to the clubhouse, a towel round his neck. He said nothing, just beckoned Mangan into a damp, gray room filled with exercise machines. Televisions suspended from the walls were playing Korean music videos. Charteris turned his mobile phone off, removed the back cover and took out the battery and memory card, and put all the pieces in his gym bag. Mangan, making a wry face, did likewise. Charteris
put the bag down in one corner and walked over to the far side of the room. Mangan found himself leaning into the corner, his face only a few inches from that of Charteris, who murmured.

“Where did he approach you?”

“He came to the flat. Why all the bloody drama?”

“How did he get into the compound?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what did he say?”

“He gave me documents, a letter.”

Mangan could feel Charteris tensing. “Where are they now, the documents?”

“They’re where I left them in the flat, locked in a drawer. What are you not telling me, David?”

“We’re going back to the flat. Now. Don’t say anything.” Charteris walked quickly across the exercise room, picked up the gym bag, took Mangan’s arm and walked him out of the clubhouse to the car.

Minutes later Charteris’s black BMW was parked in the Jianwai compound and the two of them were in the lift, silent, Mangan embarrassed, Charteris businesslike. Mangan entered the flat first, but Charteris was quickly to the desk, waiting for him to open the drawer. Charteris pointed to the desktop computer and made the slicing gesture at his throat. Mangan sighed and shut the computer down. Then he unlocked the drawer and took the letter, photo and photocopies out and laid them on the desk with a mock-dramatic gesture.
Ta-da!

Charteris looked around him and took a piece of paper from the printer and wrote,
Is this all of them?
He pushed the paper across the desk to Mangan, who was trying to signal indignation, hands on hips, head to one side. Charteris just pointed at the note.

Mangan nodded.

How long have they been here?

Forty minutes now, about.

Charteris breathed out.

Anybody else been in the flat?

Mangan shook his head.

C
ome with me.

Charteris picked up the letter, the photograph and the document, eased them back into the envelope and put them in a pocket, along with the printer paper. Mangan stared, mute, testy now. But Charteris was already out of the apartment at a near run and Mangan followed him down the stairs.

“David, it’s polite to ask before you walk off with other people’s secret documents.”

“Philip, shut up.”

“No. What’s going on?”

They were outside now, in the bright morning, the cold almost metallic. Charteris stopped and faced Mangan. He spoke in little more than a whisper.

“That letter and that document are extremely dangerous. I’m taking them from you and I’m giving them to the Embassy Security Officer, who, I imagine, will destroy them the minute he claps eyes on them.”

“Just hang on there, David. This man is communicating with
me
.”

Now Charteris looked irritated. “Philip, grow up. If those documents were ever found, you—and Ting—would be in Qincheng Prison for twenty years. Or worse. Dangle or no dangle, it is my duty to take them from you, which is what I’m doing.”

“Your
duty
?”

“Or whatever you want to call it.”

“But, wait. Think for a moment. If you take them, I’m doing exactly what this man wants me to. I’m passing them to the UK
government. If this is a dangle, I’m incriminating myself even further.”

Charteris said nothing, just shook his head again. He was in his car now, slamming the door.

“Do not tell anybody about this, Philip, and if he approaches you again, let me know immediately.” Charteris had backed the BMW into its parking space and now pulled straight out, fast.

Mangan was left standing, shivering. What the hell just happened?

Qu Yuan, the ancient, doomed adviser to kings, had supplied the verse for Peanut’s letter. Peanut wondered if they’d pick up on the code he’d agreed with them all those years ago: lotus—
I am operating of my own free will. I am not under duress.

Qu Yuan had, indeed, supplied an entire framework for Peanut to think about his situation and his appallingly dangerous bid to contact British Intelligence.

But it was the other book, the brown volume given him by the old man in the store, which now absorbed him. For the
Tai Bai Yin Jing
, the Hidden Book of Venus, had much to say about agents and how they should comport themselves.

Peanut sat in the storeroom, the air a fug of cigarette smoke, feeling his way through the text, the ancient, complex characters. The author, Li Quan, about whom Peanut knew nothing, had written a treatise balanced somewhere between strategy and philosophy. His was the metaphysics of the baggage train, the siege engine, encirclement. And of intelligence.

Writing thirteen hundred years ago, Li Quan referred to those who gathered intelligence as
xing ren
.

Xing
: to walk, to move.
Ren
: person, man. Moving man.

Spy as moving man. Stillness is the enemy.

Later Peanut stood ladling out the vegetables in their cumin broth, steam rising in the cold bright air, black paint still under his nails. Yin, covername Beautiful Peony, deep dark circles under her eyes, was holding out her rice bowl. And the spiky, hatchet-faced, orange-haired girl, covername Pavilion of Softness, was pressing the peppers into the rice with her chopsticks, swirling the broth. Moving man, spy.

Peanut wondered how much longer, here.

SIS, Vauxhall Cross, London

The date. A reference number.

FM CX BEIJING

TO LONDON

TO TCI/29611

TO P/64815

FILE REF C/FE

FILE REF R/84459

FILE REF SB/38972

TO: CABINET OFFICE 771

TO: RESEARCH DEPT 864

LEDGER UK S E C R E T

LEDGER DISTRIBUTION:
CABINET OFFICE JIC ASSESSMENTS STA

PRIORITY

/REPORT

1/ BEI 2
received a telephone call from Philip
MANGAN P77395. MANGAN
said he had been approached for a second time by unidentified Chinese male
P77396.
The contact came uninvited to the flat in which
MANGAN
works and resides. The contact deposited documents with
MANGAN
.
The documents included
what appeared to be photocopies of official materials at the highest level of classification.

2/ BEI 2
met
MANGAN
immediately and took possession of the documents.
BEI 2
advised
MANGAN
his continued possession of the documents endangered his own security and that of his staff.
MANGAN
allowed
BEI 2
to remove the documents.

3
/
The documents are as follows:

A
—
Photocopy, two sheets, title page and table of contents taken from report on experimental launches of
DF-41
missile. Numbered.
Juemi
/Top Secret classification.

B
—
Handwritten letter, one sheet. The writer, presumed to be contact
P77396
,
appears to make an offer of service.

C
—
Photograph, one.
MANGAN
confirms the subject in the photograph is contact
P77396.

Documents are scanned and attached. They follow by bag.

4/ BEI 2
advises that Document A may have CX value, advises immediate assessment.

5
/
Grateful for traces on
PAN GLINT
,
WINDSOCK
,
confirmation that
P77396
is identical
WINDSOCK
.

/
ENDS

Patterson’s phone rang. It was Hopko.

“You will get to those files. At once, please.”

Patterson left her arid little cubicle and walked the silent corridor. She took the lift to Central Registry.

A matronly Registry bee stood next to a pile of files. She was wiping what looked to be dust from her hands with a tissue.

“There you are. Eighty-four to eighty-nine. The lot.”

Patterson ran her fingers over a tan cover.

She signed the files out and carried them back to her cubicle. That afternoon she made a start, and stayed at it into the night. She moved chronologically, making notes, building the narrative, fighting her way through the Service’s long-abandoned paper system, the memoranda known as minute pages, white for substantive, pink for ephemeral, the tally sheets, an obsessive record of who saw what, when, festooned with the self-important signatures of officers long gone. Audit trails. Telegrams. Malcolm Clarke’s pungent contact reports. Requirements. Assessments of product. The short life of a forgotten network, frozen in dusty, bureaucratic amber.

Patterson found the Clarkes’ reports working on her, drawing her in. There was a persuasiveness, a vividness to them.
PAN GLINT
was made up of five agents, she read.
WINDSOCK
was Li Huasheng, born 1960 in Beijing, to a family of intellectuals. The father was a geologist, Professor at the Institute of Mines. The mother taught Chinese literature in a high school.

She turned a page.

The family, wrote Clarke, was stable, intellectuals building New China, watching their step in the volatile Mao years, getting by, caring for their children. Little Li Huasheng went to primary school in 1966.

And then things started to go wrong. The Cultural Revolution was underway. Red Guards were all over the campuses and one day they were at the door and the father got it in the neck. The Red Guards threw things out of the apartment windows, hurled pot plants to the floor, smashed pictures. They branded the father a capitalist roader. They locked him in a maintenance room in the Academy of Mines for four months in the summer and autumn of 1966. When they remembered, the Red Guards pushed rice or bread through the door. He nearly starved. They took him out for struggle sessions. Sometimes he was made to kneel on a stage, a sign around his neck, as a crowd shouted
abuse and denounced him. Sometimes mother and son were forced to attend the sessions. The father was beaten twice, but the real damage was psychological.

Patterson stopped and rubbed her eyes.

When the father was allowed out of the maintenance room, he came home, but he never worked again. He died a few years later. The mother supported the family. They lived in a single room. Things died down. The Red Guards were reined in, but they were still around, posturing and glowering, keeping track, waiting for next time. Li Huasheng forged on through high school. He took the university entrance exams and won a place at Tsinghua University. He was bright. He read physics and went on to the Aerospace Institute, where he specialized in ballistics. And it was there that the Clarkes recruited him.

Patterson picked her way through the recruitment process, watched the Clarkes deftly place their agent at the center of a network. She scoured the protocols, the tradecraft, for clues. She looked for duress codes.

Patterson was exhausted. She left the building for twenty minutes to walk quickly in a freshening wind off the river, clear her head. She bought a kebab and sat on a bench on the river bank in the chill dark and ate it, and returned to her cubicle reeking of onion.

At two in the morning she turned the page to find an encounter report the Clarkes filed early in the operation. They’d picked up
WINDSOCK
in their car, at night, driving slowly through Beijing’s darkened streets, had spoken with him for eighteen minutes.

“
WINDSOCK
remains preoccupied by the fate of his father. He speaks of his father as a gentle man reduced by the depredations of the Cultural Revolution to a shadow who spent his days in a darkened room, starting at noises, venturing out seldom, weeping
often. He died in 1972. The posthumous rehabilitation of the elder Professor Li came in 1979, as it did for many of the victims of the Cultural Revolution, but for
WINDSOCK
the sense of monstrous injustice was only the greater for it. The proximate cause of death was a heart attack, but
WINDSOCK
insists his father died of fear.”

Patterson imagined the Clarkes probing their new agent, feeling out his motivations, calculating how far he’d go for them.

“
WINDSOCK
may hold limited access for now, but a combination of anger, ambition and acquisitiveness may render him a highly exploitable asset in the long term.”

By three she had moved on to the sub-agents. The first to come on board was
TANGO
, one Gu Hua, a metallurgist at Tsinghua University, a friend of
WINDSOCK’
s. Then
COPPER
. He was at the Aerospace Institute. His field was Materials and Precision Tools. Clarke described him as “larcenous.” Then came
CURTAIN
. He’s the truly clever one, wrote Clarke, destined for great things. Wen Jinghan. He’d already gained his Ph.D. in rocketry and telemetry. The last was
NEPTUNE
, an electrical engineer. Deceased, said the file, a suicide.
WINDSOCK
was cut-out. The Clarkes only encountered the others a handful of times.

The next morning, on three hours of sleep, Patterson briefed Hopko, who ate an eclair at her desk.

“And what year was it they first met him, Trish?”

“Nineteen eighty-four.”

“Ah. Interesting moment.”

Patterson sighed inwardly. “Why interesting?”

“Oh, China really started to change that year. The Cultural Revolution trauma was fading. Those big beautiful reforms were starting to take hold. In the villages the peasants had been allowed to grow what they wanted. No more horrid communes,
or fewer anyway. In the cities they started to think things were possible. And that October was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Big parades, lots of looking forward. Something new in the air, some sense that you could start to push boundaries, transgress.”

Hopko dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

“So,
WINDSOCK
. Mr. Li Huasheng. Clever, furious, missing his daddy, has resurfaced after all these years. He’s turned up on the doorstep of what he thinks is the Service, because that’s what he knows. To encounter a bemused journalist. Is that what we think?”

“I think it’s a real possibility. One worth pursuing,” said Patterson.

Hopko was silent for a moment, weighing it.

“I’m constantly amazed,” she said, “at how many agents have fathers who are missing, either physically or emotionally.”

“Shouldn’t we talk to the Clarkes before we make diagnoses?” said Patterson.

Hopko looked surprised.

“Oh, Malcolm Clarke died years ago. But Sonia’s still alive.”

“And will that help us?”

“Do you know, I think it might.” Hopko beamed. “Because the word was that Sonia did all the work.”

He could have used his new mobile phone, but something in Peanut understood the function of the cut-out. And that something—call it tradecraft—told him one phone for Mangan, another for the professor.

So he took a bus, and then he walked, to Beijing South Railway Station, the morning frigid, the color of ashes. He stayed with a crowd, where he could. Three times he cut abruptly on to quiet side streets. He found no one on his back. But the sense of precariousness was growing in him.

He made his way through the murmuring crowd, migrants most of them, with their cheap luggage, string bags of fruit, cigarettes, to find the station a shining silver dome, sparkling lights affixed to nests of white steel. He saw a train that looked like something from the science comics he hoarded as a child, sleek, white, sculpted. It looked like a missile. He stared at it, wondered at its shimmering modernity, and had to tear himself away.

No one was using the public phones. He dialed slowly, using the card Yin had given him.

“Yes?”

“It’s me. We’re going out for dinner. You’re paying.”

Silence.

“The Oasis. In Qianmen. Six o’clock.”

Nothing.

“Do you hear me, Jinghan?”

“Yes.”

A long day, spent weaving through south Beijing. He’d been tempted for a moment by the Revolutionary History Museum on Tiananmen Square, but caught himself. The thought of the plainclothes men made his stomach lurch.

So he followed the railway tracks south for a time, and then west, into a district of light industry. He walked into a sharp wind that howled between silent, still factory buildings. Weeds sprouted through the asphalt. A strange whitish dust had settled on roofs and car windows. Then through broad tree-lined streets, north to Taoranting Park, where he sat for an hour listening to a knot of old men singing Beijing opera to each other. They had set up their operational base in a concrete pavilion by a lake. They had laid newspapers on the stone table, a bag of fruit, a thermos full of tea. One played an
erhu
, its two strings mournful in the gray cold over the lake, the green water. The men ignored Peanut. There was no one else. A few flakes of snow fell.

Another round of Hopko’s Fancies, this time for the benefit of higher orders. Roly Yeats, Head of Western Hemisphere and Far East Controllerate, now sat in Hopko’s sanctum beneath the fine, fragile leaves of bamboo and waited for the conundrum to be placed before him. He was once a lecturer at Manchester, Patterson knew. He was impish, ginger-bearded and elusive, Patterson thought. He rubbed his hands together.

“Yup, okay. So what have we got, Val?”

Hopko had assumed the advantage by placing herself behind her own desk.

“Well, it’s a poser.” Hopko looked over her glasses and smiled.

“Fire away, then.” Yeats had a northern twang, for authenticity, thought Patterson.

Hopko turned to Patterson and looked expectant. Patterson swallowed, and began.

“Well, we’ve all seen the latest from Charteris. The contact has turned up unbidden at Mangan’s flat, handed him a fragment of a white-hot document and left. We have a photo of the contact. And a letter with a phone number.”

Hopko said, “Charteris was clumsy, but at least he got hold of the material.”

Drinkwater of Security was tensed, ready to leap.

“Could we please have a
bit
more bloody detail? Where did Charteris and Mangan meet? Under what circumstances? Was anyone watching their backs? This feels slipshod, frankly.”

Yeats looked benign. “Perhaps Charteris was improvising, frankly.”

“He bloody well
was
improvising, I’d say.”

“Is that a sin, in the circumstances?” said Patterson.

Drinkwater leaned forward and for once talked straight at her.

“In Beijing improvising
is
a sin,” he said. “In Beijing we plan. We consult. We do
not
improvise, unless we want to be eaten alive.”

All present regarded Drinkwater for a moment, then Yeats turned to Waverley.

“Tom.”

“Well, the document changes things somewhat, doesn’t it?” he said, evenly.