Night Heron (17 page)

And here was
GODDESS
3, coming in for a second pass of the target’s destination.

Some beauty salon. Pervert.

Mangan, walking hard towards Dongzhimen, felt the stirring of panic. His mobile phone rang.

“Philip, good lord, where on earth are you?”

Mangan reached for a biting response to Charteris’s languid tone, couldn’t find one, and told him.

“Keep walking, I’ll pick you up.”

It was eight minutes before a taxi drew up. Charteris was slumped low in the back, wearing a baseball cap and a scarf. Mangan got in, made to speak, but Charteris shook his head and gestured to the front of the vehicle. A microphone protruded from the dashboard. The driver looked straight ahead and pulled out into the traffic. Mangan gave a questioning look. Charteris returned a sardonic smile and settled back in the seat, eyes half-closed. He had a blue backpack on his lap.

“Let’s go and have a drink,” he said.

They got out at the mouth of a
hutong
near the Drum Tower. Charteris paid the driver, while Mangan turned and avoided the driver’s look. The street was crowded with students, some tourists. The bars were warming up.

“Slowly does it, Philip. Just walk.”

They walked in silence past the junk art shops and noodle restaurants. Charteris stopped outside a bar, put a hand on Mangan’s arm.

“This one’s loud.” Red lanterns hung against the gray
hutong
brick. Pink neon spelled out the name, Funky Time. They went in. Charteris took a booth at the back. The music was Shanghai synth-funk, screechingly loud. Charteris took out his phone and gestured with it. Mangan took out his own and, under the table, removed the battery. Charteris leaned across the booth.

“Are you carrying something, Philip?”

Mangan nodded, looked down at his stomach.

“Leave it for now. What happened? Keep it oblique.”

Mangan told him. “Well. We met. He told me to call him Peanut. Just Peanut. No other name. He has an offer, he says. One time. Like in the letter. Access to networks. David, I…“

“Slow down. One thing at a time. Did you ask him where the proof came from?”

“He has a collaborator. Like before, he says. He got it from this collaborator.”

“Say who?”

“I asked. He wouldn’t say.”

“But you asked him.”

“Yes. He called it a… a what… a sub-source.”

Mangan saw Charteris’s blink. A waitress came to the table, ponytailed and sullen. She wore a dress plastered with the brand name of a famous beer that hugged her figure. Charteris ordered a Coke, Mangan a vodka.

“And what about him, Philip? Did you ask about him?”

“He’s on the run. Been in a labor reform facility since eighty-nine, the demonstrations. He said he assaulted someone. I think maybe he killed them.”

“How do you know he’s on the run? Give me everything he said, Philip.”

“He said he used unorthodox methods to get out of prison. I asked him, are you on the run? and he looked surprised, like I’d rumbled him.”

“But he didn’t say so.”

“He might as well have done. For Christ’s sake, David.”

“Don’t get agitated, please. What else?”

“He wouldn’t tell me where he lived, or his circumstances. He just wanted to talk about this offer. He said you already knew him, knew he’d deliver.”

“And the offer, tell me quickly.”

Mangan placed his hands palm up on the table, shook his head.

“David.”

“Tell me.”

Mangan looked down. And Charteris waited for him to take another step.

“Come on, Philip, you’re nearly done. Tell me what the offer was.”

Mangan shook his head, rolled his eyes. It was, thought Charteris, a gesture intended to convey resigned acquiescence. Take the step, he thought.

“Stand-alone networks at the General Armaments Department and the Launch Vehicle Academy,” he said.

An offer of access to China’s secret heart.

Charteris nodded, gave nothing away.

“All right, that’s enough. For now. You’ve a ticket booked for Seoul tomorrow afternoon. Do not take your phone. Go to the Plaza, wait for a contact.”

Mangan gaped. Charteris ignored him.

“Now take the backpack. Go to the lavatory and put whatever you’re carrying into the pack. Go.”

Mangan stood up slowly, his gaze not leaving Charteris. The lavatory was next to the bar’s entrance. The music was pounding. Two girls in tight halter tops and glitter eyeshadow sat at the bar drinking cocktails through little straws. They watched him and whispered. He stopped by the entrance to the men’s lavatory and looked over to the front door. Out in the street a western family was strolling past the shops. The shopkeepers gestured and smiled at them, cooing over the blonde kids. Diplomats? English teachers? Mangan had a sense of the world receding. He turned back. Charteris was resting his elbow on the table, chin in hand. He nodded, and gestured with his eyes towards the lavatory.

Mangan pushed open the lavatory door, the reek of piss. He entered the stall and lowered the lid of the toilet, sat. He pulled the pages from under his clothing. They were damp. He pushed them into the backpack. Philip Mangan, observer of events from a careful distance, becomes participant, meddles in history.
Jesus Christ, I am out of my mind.
He rubbed the back of his neck.

He stood, flushed and walked out of the lavatory, back to the table.

“You really are a shit, David.”

“I’m a shit in a good cause. And now you are, too.”

Charteris reached under the table for the backpack, stood and leaned in one last time to be heard over the music.

“That was very, very good, Philip.”

“Piss off, David.”

GODDESS
3—Winston Poon, the wiry cousin—entered the Blue Diamond at about nine p.m. He was greeted by a rotund woman who simpered a little and offered him tea and the weeknight special. She gestured to the girls who sat amid the salon clutter with fixed smiles.
GODDESS
3 selected a short pale girl, with protuberant teeth, whose name was given as Beautiful Peony, though in
GODDESS
3’s judgment this was a work name. The two of them stood and Beautiful Peony took
GODDESS
3 by the hand and led him towards a beaded curtain, next to which, on a stool, sat the target. The target had changed into a pair of blue shorts and a white vest. He smoked as he sat. He was, in
GODDESS
3’s view, providing security for the salon. The others in the room seemed to treat him with respect, the reason for which became clear a little later.

GODDESS
3 proceeded through the beaded curtain and was shown into a small room with a bed. There he was asked to disrobe, which he did.
GODDESS
3 then pleaded an inability to perform and sat with the girl for a decent interval, before dressing
and returning to the salon. In conversation with the girl,
GODDESS
3 asked discreetly about the target. The girl replied that “Uncle” was there to help with the running of the business.

When
GODDESS
3 re-entered the salon, the target was standing, in conversation with three men, all of whom
GODDESS
3 judged to be migrant workers. They appeared intoxicated and were behaving in a boisterous fashion. One of them reached for the girl known as Beautiful Peony as she passed and placed his hand inappropriately on her bosom. The target, moving surprisingly quickly, administered a blow to the man’s lower back. He then took the man by the throat and propelled his head into the wall several times, leaving the man stunned but not seriously injured. The target ordered all three men to leave the salon, which they did.
GODDESS
3 noted that at no time during this incident did the target appear to lose his composure.
GODDESS
3, himself no amateur in these matters, concluded that the target was possessed of a considerable capacity for violence and had the physical and mental resources to match.

Ting had left a message.
Philip, we’ll be at Neo Lounge.
He needed company, and more to drink. She was at the bar, which glowed pink, with Milam from the
LA Times
, Harvey, and a cluster of press corps interns and hangers-on. As Mangan approached, Harvey eyed him, then reached down the bar for a cold, misty bottle of vodka. Harvey poured and held out the glass to Mangan.

“What you been up to?” he said.

Mangan shook his head.

“Are you all right, Philip?” said Ting.

Milam was watching.

“We wondered where you got to, Philip. Busted again?”

Mangan looked at him.

“What?”

Milam blinked.

“Last week. In Yunnan. You and Harv. No?”

“Oh. That.” Mangan took a mouthful of vodka.

“You should be careful,” said Milam.

“Thanks. Cheers.”

“You got to watch out.”

“Yup, thanks.”

“
And
Ting tells me you’ve been in Singapore. Nice hotels, business class. Mm-hmm. How can I get me one of those gigs?”

“Yes, right. Ting, I’ve got to go and do another one. Tomorrow. Same people, Pan Asia thing. In Seoul.”

Ting looked up at him, the surprise on her face.

“Tomorrow. They don’t give a lot of notice, do they?”

“They’re using me as a sort of fill-in, I think.”

He took another sip of vodka. Something was fluttering in his stomach. Nervousness, a measure of shock. Hard-bitten journalist finds himself caught up in matters that offend his professional sensibilities. Professes indignation.

Feels something else entirely.

Anticipation?

“Anyway, tomorrow afternoon I’m flying. So we might need to do some rescheduling.”

Harvey feigned choking on his vodka.

“Scheduling? Philip, since when do you have a schedule?” he said, and Ting put her hand over her mouth and laughed.

“Well, I’m flying tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow. Rescheduling. Okay, Philip, I’ll do some rescheduling,” Ting said.

Mangan was surprised at how easily the lies came.

Even later, with Ting lying in the crook of his arm, her skin against his, her breath on his neck, he wondered at how easily they came.

SIS, Vauxhall Cross, London

Patterson had been home to Archway, showered and eaten a fried egg sandwich, before heading straight back to headquarters. She took the stairs from the Tube to the street two at a time and dodged traffic.

Just opposite the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, to Patterson’s perennial amusement, stood the Pyramids Sauna. Catering exclusively to men, and open for business twenty-four hours a day, Pyramids enjoyed an ancient Egyptian theme. Its façade featured images of oiled boys in white shifts and golden headdresses, King Tut-style.
London’s raunchiest venue! Weekend parties!
In the cafeteria she had once joked that the Service was surely the mirror image of its steamy neighbor, “full of overheated men trying to stab each other from the rear.” It hadn’t gone down well, and she had made few jokes since.

She was in the lobby now. She inserted her pass and stepped on to the pressure pads. She was due in Hopko’s office in forty minutes. The telegram traffic had come through: contact report; a version of the product—Charteris had been up half the night scanning and encrypting; surveillance report from the
GODDESS
team, encrypted by Winston and dropped, for seconds only, on the Yip Lo website. She was to collate them and have them ready for the meeting and Hopko’s Fancies and sod the weekend. Though weekends, Patterson was finding, were largely deserts of silence relieved only by television.

Hopko was still in her tracksuit. Roly Yeats had managed a discreetly checked shirt and a jacket and was stroking his beard. Tom Waverley, of Requirements, had been hauled in from the golf course.

“So,” said Hopko. “Poons seem happy that no one’s watching. We can, perhaps, rest a little easier that we are not being played. Trish flies to Seoul tonight. She will have meetings with Eileen Poon, and Mangan.”

Hopko turned a piece of paper and looked at it over her glasses.

“I must say I think they did awfully well, the
GODDESS
team. Don’t you, Roly? I do hope there’s nothing wrong with Winston, not being able to perform like that. What do you think, should we encourage him to see a specialist? His insurance will cover it, won’t it?”

She turned to Yeats, as if expecting an answer. Patterson found Hopko’s ability to deadpan terrifying. Yeats said nothing.

“Perhaps it just needs a pill, Roly, what do you think?”

Yeats was deep in the telegrams. Hopko turned to Patterson.

“Men’s problems.”
Don’t drag me into this, Val.

“So, Mangan steps up,” said Hopko. “Thought he would, didn’t I, Trish? And in the course of about, what, twelve minutes in a cupboard upstairs in a temple, speaking in Chinese, he elicits an astonishing amount of information. Man’s a bloody natural.”

“Information that is not readily confirmed, though,” said Waverley.

“That’s true,” said Patterson. “But the pieces fit together. Our man was
WINDSOCK
. He assaulted someone during the Tiananmen uprising in eighty-nine, he was arrested, went to labor reform like a common criminal.”

Waverley smiled regretfully.

“But it’s circumstantial,” he said.

“Well, I think we can check the prison part,” ventured Patterson.

“Oh?” said Yeats. The whole room was looking at her now.

“The Taiwanese have acquired a lot of inmate lists, over the years. Not complete, but extensive. Court records, too. But it would mean handing them a name, of course.”

“You’ll be handing out no names for the time being, thank you,” said Yeats. “Now, Tom, the product.”

“Well, it seems to match what he gave us before. I’ve struggled through a few pages, Roly, and it seems to be very significant CX. We’ve given it an initial rating of C2”—2 designating a report of likely reliability; C designating a source of suspect or unproven reliability.

“C2? That’s not going to set anyone on fire, is it?” said Yeats.

“Just to start with, Roly. It’s already gone to Defence Intelligence. They’re going to handle translation. They’re all in a tizzy, bringing in staff. We’ll write a preliminary assessment and, if it all stands up, we could break it out to consumers as early as next week.”

Yeats looked disconsolate.

“But C2? Can’t we gin it up a bit?”

Hopko had her stony look on. “Roly, we need to find collateral. Though as usual, there may be none, because we may have stumbled on a genuine secret. Always tricky that, isn’t it?”

She peered around the room, looking, thought Patterson, in her scarf and bangles and tracksuit, like some sort of unemployed new age priestess.

“But if our man’s to be believed,” said Patterson, “the main event is still to come.”

“All right, I’ll bite. Go on,” said Yeats.

“In the initial account we have of the meeting the contact used the words ‘sub-source’ and ‘collaborator,’ and said it was ‘like before.’ ”

“So we have a reporting chain,” said Yeats.

“He’s doing what he knows. And he’s been in prison. So he has nothing to sell, but he’s getting it from somewhere. So who’s the collaborator?”

“I am hoping you have an answer, young Trish,” said Yeats.

All right, she thought, here we go.

“Well, I’ve tried to find him through the T2 Operating Platform,” said Patterson. “Our contact wasn’t on screen much, as you might expect. Our man simply doesn’t figure—no addresses, no bills, no passport, no phones, no web presence, no nothing. A few mentions in scientific journals from the eighties, that’s all. Nothing after June eighty-nine. Very consistent with being in clink for two decades.”

Yeats was listening closely. He loved technology, preferred it to his own officers, thought Patterson. She forged on.

“But his old friends, the other sub-agents from the original
PAN GLINT
network, are a different story.
COPPER’
s at the University of Alberta, very visible. Great strings of information. I can tell you how much he earns, where his kids go to school, the brand of shirt he wears. No, really, I can, I’ve got credit card receipts.”

Laughter.

“But nothing there points us back to Beijing, let alone into the General Armaments Department. He has a few ageing relatives in a small town in Hebei Province, that’s all. He seems to have pretty much made a clean break. There’s no way the collaborator is
COPPER
.” She paused, took a sip of coffee. “And
NEPTUNE’
s dead, we know that.”

“All right. And the rest?” said Hopko.

“
TANGO
, again pretty visible, gave up academia altogether in the early nineties. He went into business, ‘jumped into the sea’ as they used to call it. Anyway, he did very well. He owns a shopping mall in Shanghai and does villa developments up and down the coast. Drives an Aston Martin. The T2 had good visibility on him, lots of reporting in the business media, photos, charity stuff, but again no string that led towards the military.”

The room was quiet now. Patterson had spent many hours with the early versions of the T2 in the army. She was, she knew, one of the few officers who could really use it.

“But then there’s
CURTAIN
. Real name Wen Jinghan. Professor. Age fifty. Not much there, but what there is… well. He’s tagged in scholarly journals, and everything points to involvement with launch technology. He’s had, and presumably still has, a position in the General Armaments Department. His main job is at the Launch Vehicle Academy down at Nanyuan. We don’t know what he does, but he’s senior. And I found multiple strings flying off into the military and the defense industry. A private firm in Washington was doing targeting for CIA a couple of years ago and they actually identified him as ‘of interest.’ There’s one photograph: a press clipping, he’s in the background.”

She forced herself to stop.

“So he’s missiles,” said Yeats.

“He certainly is.”

“And, perhaps, he’s networks.”

“Yes.”

Yeats had steepled his fingers and sat back in his chair. Patterson saw the smile spreading on his face.

It was late afternoon. Patterson was parched and had a headache forming behind her right eye. The light from the greenish windows in Hopko’s office—polymers on the glass to prevent
electromagnetic leakage, thermal imaging—was dimming. She suddenly remembered she had agreed to go to the pub with Damian, and perhaps on for a curry, a rare evening out. They’d talk about the football and his job at the advertising agency.

But now it was time for Hopko’s Fancies.

“Let’s go round,” said Hopko. “Tom. Where’s Requirements?”

“Well, if there’s one thing guaranteed to stir the pot more than missiles, it’s networks,” said Waverley. “Architecture, capacity, content, the lot. Chinese cyber. Priority requirement, right there in the Red Book. If this character can deliver access to the networks he says he can… “Waverley left the sentence hanging.

“But?” said Hopko.

“But how? Even with a friendly body inside the General Armaments Department. What do we plug in, and where? And, of course, there’s the one-off problem. We just don’t like one-offs.” He looked directly at Patterson. “We like a track record, as you know. A one-off, you never quite know what you’re getting, do you?”

“Quite. Trish?”

“I assess we have the beginnings of a reporting chain. But Mangan needs to be made fully conscious for it to work,” said Patterson.

Hopko, making notes, smiled.

“And Mr. Yeats, sir?”

Yeats paused for effect. Then nodded sagely.

“I’m prepared to take this another step. We’ll need advice, especially on the technology. It’ll have to go right up the chain, Director, Permanent Under-Secretary. We all need to be ready for that. We need to consider the role of Mangan carefully. Let’s have a plan quickly.”

“Right you are, Roly. Oh and Trish, you have one last thing, yes?”

“The contact, who we now presume to be Li Huasheng, has been issued with a codename. He is
GENIUS
.”

“Is he, indeed?” said Yeats. “Well, let’s bloody hope so. You will keep me personally informed, young Trish Patterson, of his every move.”