Night Heron (12 page)

“Tell us why, please.”

Waverley cleared his throat. “Charteris is right. Even this, the table of contents, reaches the CX threshold. This is useable intelligence.” He ran a hand through his hair. “The consensus was really pretty strong that the DF-41 program was dormant, or abandoned. Not just us, the Americans, too. And the Japanese. But this, just this, seems to tell us that it’s alive. And how. Mobile, long-range ballistic missiles built for multiple thermonuclear warheads, in testing, if this is to be believed. Why don’t we know about it? And what the hell is the April sixteenth incident? We have no idea.”

“So it’s gone for assessment?” said Yeats.

“To Defence Intelligence. And they’re already breathing heavily.”

“Why, do you think?”

“Well, they see missile program, Roly. Major intelligence requirement. Crucial. And the cover sheet and number match known formats for Leading Small Group Documents, though obviously they grumble that it’s a photocopy. They’ll want the original, and the rest of it, mark my words.”

Yeats stirred. “Are we not getting ahead of ourselves a little?”

“All the usual caveats, Roly,” said Waverley quickly. “Maybe it’s fake, maybe it’s being peddled, whatever. But we need to start looking for collateral, and, reluctantly, I think we must take a closer peek at our mystery man. Poems and all.”

“Yes, what’s the poem about, anyway? Lotus? What is it?” said Drinkwater.

Hopko looked over her glasses.

“It’s an excerpt from a work called
Li Sao
. It’s very ancient. Written by a man named Qu Yuan. A reflection on loyalty and rejection and exile, told through a shamanic journey.”

Silence for a moment, while the notion of ancient Chinese shamanic journeys was digested.

“Well, what does he mean by it?” Drinkwater sounded offended.

“He says he quotes it by way of explaining his motivation,” said Patterson, in the hope of offending Drinkwater further.

“Yes, I’m aware of that, thank you. But how does it explain his motivation? I mean, really.”

“I’m not sure it helps us much,” said Hopko quietly.

“And what about the rest of it?” said Yeats. “Does anybody have a view on his offer of service?”

“Yes, I do, Roly,” said Drinkwater. “And it’s not bloody repeatable.”

“The thing is.” Yeats folded his arms. “The thing is, this all feels very unusual. And I find I’m less interested in the document—forgive me, Tom—than I am in the notion that this chap wants us to believe he has access. So who is he? What access has he got? And is he righteous? Or is he bad? I think we should take a sniff of him—if, and only if, we can do it at arm’s length. No direct contact with Beijing Station.”

The room was silent for a moment, Drinkwater biting his lip, Hopko looking over at Patterson questioningly. What now? Patterson thought.

Yeats put his palms on his knees, elbows out, as if to rise. “Minute and plan of action to me, please, Val. Assessment to me, please, Tom. And, Simon?”

“Yes?” said Drinkwater.

“Unclench a little.”

They all rose to go. As Patterson walked down the corridor, Yeats slowed and waited for her.

“Good work…“

“Patterson, sir.”

“Oh, call me Roly, please. I rather get the sense you’d like to be involved in this operation, if operation there is to be.”

She didn’t reply, sensed something in his look, danger.

“Just be sure to keep me apprised, won’t you?” he said.

Beijing

By six the cold was coming on. Qianmen was thick with people and glittered with winter lights. Peanut, tired and chilled, turned on to a pedestrian street hung with red lanterns. A medicine shop spilled its woody reek into the street. The smell at once comforted him and enlivened in him a powerful desire for something, for a life in an unnamed town somewhere filled with the familiar, a life not yet lived.

Oasis was cavernous and dim. Sour-faced waiters wore beaded waistcoats and embroidered skullcaps. On the walls were murals of maidens, curvaceous and green-eyed, in clothes of revealing gossamer.
The Exotic Silk Road! The Sensuous Desert!
Brash central Asian synth-pop blared in a language Peanut couldn’t identify. There was to be a floor show. Peanut took a booth at the back of the restaurant. He ordered lamb kebabs in chili and cumin, noodles with sweet peppers, salad, bread and beer. He waited.

Twenty minutes later the silver-haired professor eased himself into the booth. He was expressionless.

“So this is what you ate, is it? All those years. Is this why I’m here? A reminder?” said Wen Jinghan.

“No, Jinghan. I ate corn bread for all those years. This is what I didn’t eat.”

“For all those years.”

“Don’t get petulant with me, Jinghan. You’re here because I told you to be here.” Peanut forked a chunk of dripping lamb on to a plate, added salad, and shoved it across the table at Wen, who stared at it.

“Tell me how it works,” said Peanut.

Wen Jinghan took his time.

“Where’s your sister?”

Peanut stopped chewing.

“Mei’s in New Zealand,” he said.

“She got away.”

“Yes, she got away.”

“Are you in touch with her?”

Peanut sat back.

“What are you trying to say to me, Jinghan? You’re not making a threat, are you?”

Wen looked up. “No. No threat. I just wanted to ask.”

“Because if it is a threat.”

“And your mother passed away, what, ten years ago? While you were away. My mother went to the funeral. Did you know that? Wore a black armband. Did all the bowing, everything. We sent a big wreath.”

“Did you now.”

Wen Jinghan withdrew a cigarette from a pack—Zhonghua brand, Peanut noticed, expensive, the cadre’s cigarette—and lit it slowly, collecting himself. Peanut took more lamb, tore off more bread, too quickly, he knew. Wen watched him.

“Clever of you to remember the anniversary of my father’s death. Do you think about your own father much?” Wen Jinghan said.

Peanut didn’t answer.

“When I saw you looming out of the trees, up there at the temple, I thought you’d come to be my friend again,” said Wen.

“No, you didn’t, Jinghan. You started to shit at the sight of me.”

Wen exhaled slowly. “This little scheme of yours. Is it working?”

“This little scheme of ours. And yes, thank you.” Peanut pushed his plate away from him. He reached over and took a cigarette from Wen’s pack, lit it. “Now. Tell me how it works.”

“How what works?”

“Your access. You mentioned networks.”

The professor just half-smiled, shook his head. Peanut stood up and walked around to Wen’s side of the booth. He looked around quickly. The restaurant was full and loud, plates clattering, music thumping. Peanut slid into the booth next to Wen and laid a hand on the back of his neck, applied gentle pressure. Wen had both hands braced against the side of the table now, pushing back.

“Jinghan, do not try to talk your way out of this. You are
in
. And you have a lot to lose.”

Wen Jinghan said nothing, his head forced down towards his plate. Peanut suddenly slackened his grip and Wen’s head jerked backwards.

“Tell me how it works.”

Wen stared furiously at the table, breathing hard, his nostrils flaring. A waitress looked, then looked away.

“Networks.”

“They are stand-alone networks. Do you know what that means?”

“Indulge me, Jinghan. I missed the… the what do you call it… the digital revolution.”

“It means that you can’t get access to them. They are secure. They are not connected to any other network. Passwords and
fingerprint scans. And when you log on to them, every move you make is tracked by fifteen-year-old shits from some utterly unnamed security department. So, no, you can’t get anything from them for your sordid little scheme.”

The floor show had started. A couple in cartoonish Arabian dress danced on a stage to a pulsing Uighur love song. The man, heavy-browed, a scar on his bare shoulder, took the woman by the waist from behind and ran his hands down to her hips while she writhed. With an extended second finger he made a rotating motion against her skin, as if stimulating some exquisitely sensitive point. She feigned gasps. He stuck his tongue between his teeth and leered into the audience, some of whom were now up and dancing.

“You have printers, Jinghan.”

“You are a fucking baby.”

“Print things out.”

“Every time I print, the system monitors what I’ve printed. The fifteen-year-olds come and knock softly on my door. So polite. Professor, so sorry to bother you. But have we perchance been printing out these blueprints, those reports. Now, why would we need to do that? I print, I die.”

Peanut exhaled. “I like the sound of blueprints.”

“Fuck you, Huasheng.”

“So tell me how we do it.”

Wen Jinghan drew deeply on his cigarette and looked down, and Peanut knew instantly that there was a way.

“You will tell me, Jinghan. Really, you will.”

“We must find him first. And then we can take a look at him,” said Patterson.

They were in Hopko’s office, talking through an operational framework. Hopko wore kitten heels and a suit of some plum color. She was standing, holding her glasses by the earpiece.

“Go on,” she said, a note of caution in her voice.

“Well, we can’t use Charteris. All station officers are ruled out, Roly says. Drinkwater was close to foaming at the mouth at the thought of it.”

“So?” said Hopko.

“It will have to be a Visiting Case Officer.” Patterson tried to sound nonchalant, looked at her notes. “We use the telephone number and make a direct approach. Three days max, in and out. Probably best to use the Hong Kong land border and a train to Beijing.”

“And the Visiting Case Officer would be you, I imagine.”

“I know the case as well as anyone,” she said.

Hopko grinned. Patterson went on.

“Val, I have been with the Service now for well over a year. I am experienced. In the army I handled agents. In Iraq.”

“I know you want a run, Trish.”

“But what?”

“But China is a denied area. There will be no VCO.”

Patterson was nonplussed.

“Too dicey to contact him directly, too uncertain a payoff,” said Hopko. “If P77396 turns out not to be
WINDSOCK
at all but some MSS thug dangling us, ghastly consequences for all concerned. You’ll be picked up and under the lights in no time: thoroughly blown and even more thoroughly embarrassed.”

So how? wondered Patterson.

I will deal only with you, Mr. Mang An.

“Val, you’re not suggesting…“

“Why not?” said Hopko.

Mangan.

Patterson caught herself. The notion of using a civilian grated on every fiber of her military being. She tried not to sound too incredulous.

“Forgive me, but why on earth would Mangan consent to get
involved? He’ll run a mile, won’t he? Sanctity of the press and all that.”

“He may, Trish, he may,” Hopko said, with what Patterson considered an indecent measure of equanimity.

Hopko had walked across the room and closed the door, using it to punctuate, change the subject.

“So,” she said. “How are you finding it?”

How am I finding what? thought Patterson.

“Do you miss the army?” said Hopko.

“Do I look as if I do?”

Hopko smiled. “Just wondered.”

Patterson shrugged. “It’s taken me a while to adjust to the, um, culture.”

“It’s just that—and this isn’t a criticism, merely an observation—you seem rather distanced from your work. I wonder if you’re happy in it.”

Patterson was startled.

“Well, I don’t think that’s the case at all, Val.”

She thought for a moment.

“I’ll admit to feeling on the back foot at times. Some of the older officers… “She didn’t complete the sentence.

“Like who? Between us, of course.”

“Do you know what Simon Drinkwater said to me? My second or third day in the P section? He was surprised to see me on the China beat. Thought I might be a bit… ‘conspicuous’ was the term he used. Thought I should look to the southern hemisphere.”

Hopko shook her head.

“Drinkwater is a frightful shit. But you’re not the first black officer in the Service, even if people like Drinkwater make you feel like you are.”

“It didn’t really matter in the army.”

“And we must ensure it doesn’t matter here. Are you ready for an operational role, Trish?”

Patterson, thoroughly wrong-footed now, sought to regain her balance, leaned forward on her chair.

“You know I am.”

“Well, then. Fancy a day out?”

SIS, Vauxhall Cross, London

She took a Service car. By late morning she was in the Chilterns, the motorway snaking past fields touched with frost.

As she drove, Patterson considered Valentina Hopko, her superior officer. Her mentor? Perhaps. She had sought intelligence on Hopko where she could, sought to understand the unlikely alchemy that had produced her. Hopko’s father was British, but of an émigré family—Ukrainian, was it?—working in the Gulf as an engineer. Her mother was Lebanese, and little Val spoke Arabic to her, Russian to her father and English to the Filipina maids. Her early years were spent all over the Middle East, Muscat, Sharjah, Basra, soaking up accents, stories, geography, scatological vocabulary.

Then came exile to an English boarding school outside Stoke, where, displaying a mix of Slav doggedness and Levantine flair, dark, stocky Val mastered the sodden hockey pitch, the calamitous diet, the dreary timetable. Her admiring housemistress would have been taken aback when Val had insisted on Leeds University.
Leeds? My dear girl, we were thinking of Girton for you.
No, Leeds. For Val wanted to study Chinese under Skinner,
in the Leeds Chinese department, lodged in its little Victorian house adrift in a sea of campus concrete, where languid, incisive Bob Skinner would have taught her to read and immersed her in history and forced her to think about dictatorship, and power.

On weekends she would drive a senile Austin Princess up into the Lakes, it was said, and march for hours across the fells.

And when the Service clapped eyes on her, it fell, no doubt, into a swoon.

Then, of course, the picture went dark. Glimpses of Hopko as an operational officer—rumors of a stint in the Gulf running an agent deep inside OPEC. Negotiating positions. Production quotas. Oil futures. Product that could save the British exchequer billions. And where she was rumored to have recruited a skittish Arab general, who, while screaming in public for Israel’s annihilation, played geopolitical footsie under the table with Val and her quiet, predatory Service.

Later a China posting under diplomatic cover. Hong Kong. Then the Middle East again. Visiting Case Officer, London-based. And then, well, something. Something that, if it were known what transpired, might explain why Roly Yeats sat in the seat marked Head of Controllerate and Valentina Hopko did not. Or was Val merely guilty of that very particular offence: serving while female? Patterson did not know.

She left the motorway, drove down a silent, dark back road, hemmed in by beech woods.

Patterson, the little girl from the council estate in Nottingham, had never had a mentor. There had been teachers at her shabby secondary school, good, tired, harassed people, who had pushed her. But hers was not an upbringing in which watchful elders offered grooming and patronage. She remembered showing her parents the university admissions forms, asking them their advice. They’d been in the sitting room, looking at the television. She remembered them fingering the forms, their
blank, almost fearful expression, their eyes skittering back to the screen, her own embarrassment. She’d taken the forms to her bedroom and filled them out alone in ballpoint pen, and was dumbfounded when Coventry offered her a place.

In her second year, she’d started taking courses in Chinese, and surprised herself. The rote learning, the endless study of characters, piles of flashcards teetering on her desk, spilling from her backpack, suited her temperament.

And in her third year an army recruiting team visited the campus, bluff, solid men in polo shirts and fleeces. They showed her brochures and asked her what her plans were. One, a warrant officer, came to watch her at the judo club. She laid it on thick in the
randori
, brought a girl down hard with her hip throw, put her in a choke till she submitted, showed the warrant officer her speed and litheness, her capacity for aggression. When she bowed and left the mat, adjusting her belt, he gave her a round of silent applause. His look said, I’m impressed. They went to the student union bar, sat at a plastic table, and he bought her a shandy. He asked her about 9/11, what she thought, and he listened without patronizing her. He asked her if she’d ever thought about Sandhurst. She felt seen.

She emerged from the beech woods on to sudden, open uplands, the frost heavier here, lacing the hedgerows in white. Ahead of her, its tower rising through a stand of trees, gold in low sunlight, an abbey.

She pulled in before a half-timbered cottage in the center of the village, its thatch low over mullioned windows, stone boxes spilling some flower of searing blue. The village of Brightwell, silent, soaked now in afternoon winter light. Patterson stretched in the crisp air, took it in. A pub—
The Black Boy
, for heaven’s sake. A post office, a green. Notices tacked to a telephone pole declared a coming winter festival and choirs at the abbey, and
urged Brightwell to compost. She knocked at the cottage door to no response. A piece of notepaper lay on the step.

I’m over at the abbey! The Cloister Tea Room!

She walked to the abbey, negotiating the cobblestones in her heels. The abbey’s interior was vast, ancient and plain, filled with hushed activity. A scaffold stood next to an expanse of whitewashed east wall. On its platforms of wooden plank, three women in overalls kneeled or lay on their stomachs. Under light from a powerful halogen lamp, they picked at the plaster with tiny steel implements. Where the plaster had been removed, Patterson could see a faint reddish outline on exposed wall, some ancient fresco revealed inch by agonizing inch.

She asked in a stage whisper, “The Tea Room?”

One of the women, portly, wearing a red headscarf, smiled and gestured to a sign.
The Cloister.

The Tea Room was quiet, with a scattering of elderly couples dressed in hiking gear, murmuring. It was cool, the air smelled of stone. Patterson, in her business suit, sat before a table spread with fruit cakes, torte, macaroons. A tall, pale matron in half-moon spectacles poured her a cup of tea the consistency, it seemed to Patterson, of a light crude.

“Just take what you like, and tell us what you had at the end, and we’ll tot it up. I’ll tell her you’re here,” said Half-moon. Carrying the teapot, she went to a doorway and lent in.

“Your visitor is here, Sons darling.” And then more quietly, “She seems very… metropolitan.”

Patterson waited. From the doorway came a woman untying an apron. She wore her gray hair clipped short, and a blue cardigan over a white shirt. A hint of stiffness in her walk, Patterson noticed, but elegant. A thin mouth, deep creases to her face, and the watchfulness that never quite leaves those in the trade. Her eyes found Patterson, then flickered to the door and back, before settling on her, taking her in. Then a terse nod.

“We should go back to my place, I think.” She turned and barked through the doorway. “Vivvy, I’m off.” It came out “orf.” “I should be back later on.” Patterson left too much money tucked under a plate. Half-moon watched them walk out into the cold cloister.

Sonia Clarke kneeled and pushed a burning spill into the fireplace. The fire caught quickly. A clock chimed softly in another room. There was more tea on a tray, and Patterson positioned a digital recorder among the china and sat primly on a sofa patterned with roses. She reached into her briefcase and took out a brown envelope.

Sonia stood and turned.

“Hadn’t you better show me some identification?”

“Of course, Sonia. Here we are.” Patterson handed over her Service identity card, the real one, with the diagonal red stripe, to be used only with officialdom and nosey policemen. She gave a bright, reassuring smile. “And you can call your routine contact number if you need to be sure.”

“No, that’ll do.” Her eyes were on Patterson now. “So what’s this all about?”

“Well, I want to take you back a little way.” She drew from the envelope a sheaf of photographs, all of them middle-aged Chinese men, some of them images snapped in the street, others passport photos, blown up for clarity.

“Would you mind just taking a look at these? And tell us whatever comes to mind.”

Sonia reached behind her to the mantelpiece for a pair of glasses on a gold chain. She put them on and took the photographs. She went through them, slowly, one by one. And then stopped, held one—a passport photo of a bristle-haired, sharp-eyed character—up to catch the fading light.

“Well, well,” she said. “Hello, Peanut.”

Peanut stood, mute, fascinated, furious, in the cold neon-lit night. Beyond his own reflection in the glass, a car.
Lambo…
a foreign word. Several of them. They were yellow, boxy and spiderish, made him think of whip-quick insects on the desert floor. A salesman held a door open, nodding appreciatively as a woman in suit and shades lowered herself, skirt riding up long legs, into the driver’s seat. She gripped the wheel and shook her hair out. An older man looked on, the smile of ownership. Over his arm a coat of silver-gray fur, which he held for her.

Peanut watched it play out, the theater of the unattainable in the Beijing night. He had taken to coming here from time to time, when trade was quiet and Dandan Mama gave him an evening off, to Jinbao Jie, Golden Treasure Street, to watch China sell itself a new fantasy.

Earlier that cold afternoon, at a filthy underpass in Hepingmen, he had purchased a knife from a ruddy-faced, green-eyed Uighur man. It was a lethal thing, the blade narrow and double-edged, with a fuller for strength. The knife had a rubber handle and a black nylon sheath, military issue.

The Uighur, unsmiling, had taken his money and counted it twice.

“Be careful who sees it.” The man’s breath had steamed in the cold air.

“Oh, I will.”

“They don’t like it, the cops.”

“I know.”

“Don’t use it on anyone.”

“What are you, the Discipline Inspection Commission?”

The Uighur had looked at him.

“Don’t be clever. You don’t look like you can run very fast.”

Peanut had shaken his head, turned away. As he had walked off, he saw the graffiti again, sprayed on the underpass, the
woman in the hideous goggles.
THREATEN
. The stencil was perfect, the image urgent.

“We encountered him first at English corner.” Sonia Clarke sat back in her chair and looked at the fire as she spoke. Patterson sat still, allowing the memories to come, only occasionally prodding. Outside the winter dusk was setting in, and the room was darkening.

“Beijing used to have these places, in parks sometimes, or just on streets, where people would gather to practice their English. English corners, they were called. Learning English was everything. They’d watch a television program called
Follow Me
and then go to English corner and practice. It was allowed by then. Encouraged, even. Well, for us, it was a goldmine. A couple of journalists, helping out the locals with their English, chatting them up a bit at the same time. All very above board. There were snitches there, of course, but it didn’t matter. It was a way of building acquaintance, you see, which was very hard to do in China back then. I told Malcolm, I said, we’ll find people there, targets. He didn’t think so, but I told him. And I was right.”

“Which year was this, Sonia?”

“Eighty-four. There was an English corner in Ritan Park. It was just a short walk from Jianwai, where we had that bloody flat. I’d go down there and chat with whoever turned up. We met Peanut in October, gorgeous Beijing autumn. I know that because it was just after National Day, the huge parade that year, through Tiananmen. Thousands of troops, tanks, these ghastly floats celebrating hydro-electricity or sorghum production or what have you. Deng Xiaoping was up there on the gate taking the salute. Anyway, a few days after that was the first time I saw Peanut at English corner. Li Huasheng. He was sparky, intense. A bit fat, which was unusual. He was trying his damnedest to enthuse about the parade in English. I said to him, ‘What did
you like best? The tanks? The floats?’ And he shook his head and wagged his finger at me, and he said, ‘The students. The Beida students.’ ”

“And what did he mean?”

“The Beijing University students. They were marching in the parade, two, three hundred of them. But no float or anything. They were just ambling along. They were wearing those big green army overcoats everyone wore, and they looked exactly how Chinese intellectuals ought to look—weedy, big glasses, a straggly beard. Tubercular. Suffering for wisdom. They had a few hand-painted banners, black characters on a bed sheet. And one of them read ‘
Xiaoping, ninhao!
’ ” She paused, a hand held in mid-air in the gloom as if framing the banner, its blotchy characters.

“Can you imagine? Calling the most powerful man in the Communist Party by his given name? Not Comrade Deng. No. Xiaoping. And
ninhao!
, ‘hello!’ But with the honorific,
nin
, as you’d speak to a teacher, you see? It achieved both intimacy and respect. It said, we understand you. We’re with you. And then they did the most amazing thing. As they passed Tiananmen Gate, with the entire Politburo up there watching, they just broke ranks, and ran. They just ran, laughing, their pathetic banners flying around and their army overcoats flapping, all those engineers, and biologists and theorists and economists, just running, all flat feet. No marching, no saluting, nothing. They looked… unbound. I remember thinking that. You’re unbound. Mao’s gone. All that intellectual cringing and dissembling has gone. Thinking is back. You’re the future. And you know it.” She stopped and sighed. “Anyway, Peanut loved it. He counted himself in that class, you see, the
zhishifenzi
. The intelligentsia. Oh yes, always telling us how brilliant he was, the technical subtleties of his field. And he was right, he was in the intellectual class, but somehow not of it.”

“Why not?”

“He was… resentful. Loved the idea of reform, and China resurgent and all that, but he had this gimlet eye for it. Hated the slippery bastards who’d come through the Cultural Revolution intact. The shits who’d killed his father.
I see them every day, Sonia, strutting around campus. Mouthing all the new slogans. Reform and opening up is all tops! Mind out for spiritual pollution!
The same ones as locked his father in a… what was it, a broom cupboard or something—now saying hello to him in the dining hall. God, Peanut was angry. But he held all that anger in. And I thought, I’ll have some of you.”