Night Heron (19 page)

Beijing

Yin took Peanut to an Internet café in Fangzhuang. She paid and registered and they searched for a vacant screen among rows of silent boys in headphones. Peanut looked at their screens. He saw cars exploding, helicopters, rockets, gleaming silver surfaces, fountains of flame. What was this? What were they doing?

They sat, and Yin showed him the, the what, the browser. He read an article from the
People’s Daily
on the screen, and then people commenting on the article. Some of the comments suggested the newspaper article was wrong, or mistaken.

“Can they do that?” he said.

Yin just laughed.

He saw pictures of a South Korean singer—Yin’s favorite, a smooth boy with windblown hair—performing on a stage with thousands of people watching.

He lit a cigarette and asked the thing to show him pictures of the People’s Liberation Army. There were thousands. Thousands! There were the mobile launchers, on a road somewhere, troops in camouflage milling about. Short-range missiles, these ones. Was that a DF-15? DF stands for Dongfeng, East Wind, he
told her. Yin was uninterested. They scuffled over control of the keyboard and Yin brought up a picture of two women barely clothed, doing… what? He spluttered and reddened while she laughed again.

Later they had lunch at some hamburger place, one bite and it was gone. She asked him how it was he didn’t know about computers, mobile phones. He didn’t reply.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“You don’t tell anyone, Yin. That I don’t know about these things.”

“You were inside, weren’t you?” She was grinning, leaning over the table.

“You don’t tell anyone.”

“Everyone already knows.”

He forced a smile.

“What do they know?”

“Chef says you’ve ‘been away,’ and he and Dandan Mama talk about it.”

“Do they.”

She nodded, eyes wide, enjoying herself.

“Well, you don’t talk about it,” he said.

“What did you do?”

“I won’t be here much longer.”

Her smile fell away.

“So you won’t be able to tease me any more,” he said.

“Are you going away?”

“Yes.”

Her lip was trembling, he saw with astonishment.

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know yet. Come off it, Yin.”

She had dropped her head and was staring at the table. He saw a tear fall on to the red plastic tray. She murmured something.

“What?”

“I said, maybe I could come with you.”

He didn’t reply. They left the restaurant and walked towards the subway station. At an intersection Peanut looked up at a billboard. The advertisement showed a woman in sepia, her shoulder, her lips, her shining hair in a twist. The slogan read:
Because it’s my time.

Yin caught him staring at it.

“They do something to fix the picture. They tell you it’s real when it’s not,” she said.

Beneath the billboard, on a wall, was the stenciled graffiti again.
THREATEN
. This time it was a bird, a crow, wearing the goggles.

Patterson had decrypted the telegram, and now read it quickly.

GODDESS 4
reports that
GENIUS
left the salon at
02.42 ZULU/10.42
local.
GENIUS
was accompanied by a young woman who also resides at the salon and who goes by name
BEAUTIFUL PEONY
.
GODDESS 3
and
GODDESS 4
were on rotation.
GENIUS
and companion walked to subway station. No contacts were observed en route. No sign of hostile surveillance. At Puhuangyu subway stop,
GENIUS
alighted, still accompanied by young woman. They proceeded out of station and walked three hundred meters to the
WANG BA
Internet café. They entered the café at
03.36 ZULU/11.36
local. They sat at a screen. The young woman appeared to be instructing
GENIUS
in use of the computer.
GODDESS 4
made one pass.
GENIUS
and the young woman appeared to be viewing semi-pornographic images.
GENIUS
and companion left the
WANG BA
Internet café at
04.50 ZULU/12.50
local. They proceeded to a fast food restaurant where they ate hamburgers. They appeared to be deep in conversation. The young woman known as
BEAUTIFUL PEONY
became distressed. They left the restaurant and returned to the Metro, arriving back at the salon at
05.46
ZULU/13.46
local. No further contacts were observed.
GODDESS 2
and
4
withdrew.
GODDESS 2
and
4
carried out a series of passes over the next six hours. On several occasions
GENIUS
was visible through the salon window or mopping the front steps.
GODDESS 2
and
4
assume
GENIUS
remained on the premises. At
13.30 ZULU/21.30
local
GODDESS 1
took up a static position in the
BLUE MOUNTAIN
restaurant opposite the salon, and confirmed repeated sightings of
GENIUS
on the premises until
GODDESS 1
withdrew at
15.00 ZULU/23.00
local.

Washington DC

The few runners out that morning along the Parkway were hooded and muffled. Winters in Washington DC could be surprisingly sharp, the air, on occasion, streaming down from the Great Lakes, shrouding the capital in dry, bleak cold.

Monroe had strapped his legs before heading out, bandaged his creaking, middle-aged knees. He jogged slowly through trees that stood stark against the sky.

He was back on his front porch now, through the screen door, and enveloped in the aroma of coffee from within. Molly was at the kitchen table with the
Post
. He stood for a moment in the ticking silence, smelling the coffee, the chemical cleanness beneath it, bleach, laundry detergent.

She looked up from the paper.

“It’s seven-thirty, Jonathan.”

He took the stairs slowly, walked through the bedroom to the bathroom. He stood under the shower, which was hot but fitful. Limescale in the head? He toweled his lean torso, rubbed a clear spot in the steamed-up mirror, leaned in to clip his beard. The
snick
of the shears. His beard was short and tidy, a dignified
frosting that strengthened his jaw, made up for the baldness and the grayness. Naked, he padded to the cupboard for underwear, starched shirt, sober crimson tie.

On the Metro the young man seated next to him read a Bible in Korean. He looked out of the corner of his eye, tried to piece together the script.

At C Street the security was tight. Some visiting Foreign Minister was snarling traffic, the diplomatic police watchful. Once inside he moved, frictionless, through security to his office.

“Morning, Mr. Monroe.”

“Morning, Mr. Monroe. You have the interagency at 10.30; you have the Assistant Secretary at 11.30. Afternoon is clear. Mr. Harman of Liaison has already called and awaits your call back.” The secretary handed him a note with Harman’s number. He nodded and entered his true home, the SCIF, the muffled, airless Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

On his desk, two packets. The first: collated intelligence, analysis, the Daily Brief. The second: selected pieces of raw intelligence, intercepts, agent reports more or less scrubbed, imagery.

The first packet, then. To be disposed of as quickly as possible. The Daily Brief’s charts, headlines and newspapery language annoyed him. And some of the analysis, well. Sophomoric drivel written by some twenty-five-year-old at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
China’s principal rival for regional influence continues to be Japan.
Why did they bother? He put it to one side.

The second packet was different. The second packet had
TOP SECRET/SCI
stamped on it. He went straight to the China folder, which was thick this morning. Decrypted Chinese cable traffic, some of it days old. It would keep. The debriefing of some bankers who’d been in Beijing talking to the Ministry of Finance about currency exchange rates. Transcripts of phone calls made by Chinese diplomats at the UN, some emails. Something that purported to be an internal Party memo detailing unrest in the
rust belt, origins unclear. And what was this? Liaison material. In from the jolly old Brits, how charming.

TOPSECRETSNTK//DTELASTIC//TS-UK//NOFORN//ORCON//
25
X
1

He signed the cover sheet and opened the folder.
Certain Questions. DF-41.

The phone was ringing. Harman, of Liaison.

“Have you seen the stuff from the Brits?”

“Good morning, Grover.”

“Good morning, Jonathan. Have you seen it?”

“I have just this second opened the folder.” Monroe put a throat sweet in his mouth.

“Look at the translation for us, Jonathan. Then look at the original. Give us a view. We need you on this.”

“Grover?”

“Yes?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Well, good. Do you think you might have something for us, say, at the interagency?”

“I shall try, Grover.”

“Thank you, Jonathan.”

“And, Grover?”

“Yes?”

“We might want to give our British friends a look at the
DTWHIPLASH
material, might we not?”

A pause.

“The what?”

“
DTWHIPLASH
.”

“We’ll discuss.”

The first collateral was coming in. A sharp-eyed American military attaché, based in Beijing but driving through Hebei, had
come across a People’s Liberation Army convoy. At the center of the convoy was a six-axle truck carrying a large canister. The vehicle appeared to be a TEL, Transporter/Erector/Launcher. So, in the canister was a missile. A big one. DF-31, thought the attaché. What’s that doing here? But then he looked more closely. The configuration of the vehicle was unfamiliar. The canister overhung the front of the tractor. And it looked bigger than usual. And that’s not six axles, it’s eight. And the hydraulic rams that should raise up the canister to its launch position weren’t there. Was this some sort of mock-up? A prototype?

The military attaché snapped some images on his mobile phone as he passed, and, one hand on the wheel as he accelerated away, put a marker in his satellite navigation system. The attaché sent his findings back to Bolling Air Force Base with coordinates and a recommendation that the satellites get busy. Which they did.

The results were now on Patterson’s desk in a series of images and reports under the codename
WHIPLASH
, sent post-haste by some bigwig in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, INR. Something afoot. A new, bigger transporter, for a new, bigger missile. The dimensions of the canister, calculated from the satellite images, came hair-raisingly close to what was described in the
GENIUS
product. The defense analysts were in a frenzy. Requirements was beaming. It’s real, Trish, said Hopko. He’s real.

SIS, Vauxhall Cross, London

This was the moment to keep one’s mouth shut. Patterson shuffled the files in front of her on the conference table. Next to her was Hopko, circles under those dark eyes, in a skirt that was, well, hippy, and a necklace that looked like Stonehenge.

At the far end of the table sat the Director, Requirements and Production, engrossed in the briefing papers in front of him, dark suit, one hand on chin, in the other a bulbous fountain pen, with which he made scratchy annotations. Next to him was Yeats, who kept leaning in to the D/RP and murmuring. Opposite Patterson was Drinkwater of Security Branch, taut and steely as a wire brush, and another, more senior Security officer whose name she’d forgotten already.

Waverley entered, locks awry, and winked at her. Everyone waited for the gap at the head of the table to be filled. By C, the Director of the Secret Intelligence Service, himself.

He arrived five minutes late, gave a sterile apology, and the meeting got underway.

Hopko briefed. Hopko proposed. The Director of Requirements and Production was inquisitor in chief. C listened.

“But the sub-source. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew for sure who he was.” The Director laid his fountain pen on the table. “Come to that, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if we could confirm where
GENIUS
has been all these years.”

C spoke, drily.

“So would I.”

Drinkwater leaned forward, as if delivering news of a death.

“Security
is
concerned, Chief, that checking
GENIUS
against the Taiwanese lists
will
constitute unacceptable risk to the integrity of the operation.”

The Director of Requirements and Production allowed his gaze to fall on Drinkwater.

“I appreciate that, thank you, Simon. However, I rather feel that the use of an agent whose entire adult life is a mystery poses a threat to the integrity of the operation.”

Waverley spoke.

“Run up a big list, why don’t you? Fifty, sixty names. Drop
GENIUS’
s name in the middle, Li Huasheng in among all the other Li’s. Let the Taiwanese check ‘em all against their lists. They’ll not know which one we’re interested in.”

He held out his hands. Simple.

In the end, at Hopko’s suggestion, they agreed on a request to the Taiwanese for a list of all subjects, surnamed Li, sentenced to labor reform between May 1989 and June 1994. And the request would go via the Singaporeans. Drinkwater was squirming. C was showing signs of impatience.

“And the gadget?”

“A memory stick, or thumb drive,” said Hopko. “Stealthed. Won’t set off any alarms in the host system. We hope and believe.”

“And what sort of a take would that offer us?”

“These things are up to a terabyte now. We can clone a decent
part of a network,” said Hopko. “It’s a little larger than normal, but still small. It’ll attach to a key chain.”

A pause.

“It’s worked before, Chief,” said Hopko.

“What’s the flap potential?” asked C.

“Well, if the gadget is discovered, the sub-source is arrested, obviously,” said Hopko. “He tells all, and we must assume fingers us as his paymasters. He points them towards
GENIUS
. But
GENIUS
is hard to find and resourceful, so we have a cut-out there, which would buy Mangan time to get out.”

“You’re telling me it’s manageable?”

“It is. I am.”

The D/RP sat back and exhaled. He looked at C, who neither moved nor spoke.

“Christ, Val,” he said. “I’ll take it to the Special Adviser. But only because it’s you.”

Wen Jinghan was a study in disbelief.

“Thirty thousand yuan?
Thirty thousand?
”

They were in Tuanjiehu Park, perhaps the only people, the day blustery and frigid. The water in the lake had begun to freeze. They sat on a bench next to the exercise area, the equipment stirring and squeaking in the wind.

“It’s a lot of money,” said Peanut, wrong-footed.

“My summer holiday costs more than that.”

Peanut said nothing.

“You’re telling me that I’m betraying everything, everything I know, risking nine grams in the head, and you’re going to pay me thirty thousand yuan.”

“Well, aren’t you the businessman, suddenly?”

Wen Jinghan looked at him open-mouthed.

“This is a farce.”

“I don’t have to pay you anything at all. Your reward is my not sending those letters.”

The silver-haired man just shook his head, looked away, raised his hands, then dropped them on his knees, a gesture of despair.

“Jinghan, don’t give me your I’ve-found-my-courage line again. It bores me.”

“Well, don’t worry, Huasheng, about boredom. We’ll have plenty of excitement soon, when State Security bangs on the door. Oh, God.” He looked down.

A woman, muffled to the eyes, walking a small dog and talking on a mobile phone, passed them.

“I need to know all your security procedures, Jinghan. At both places. At the Academy and at the General Armaments Department. Everything. From the minute you approach the building to when you’re looking at your computer.”

Wen Jinghan had his eyes closed. A bird was picking its way across the ice with tiny, inky feet.

The Sings came back. Three thousand six hundred and forty-eight people surnamed Li had, according to the Taiwanese records, been sent to labor reform facilities between those dates. Would you like us to narrow it down a bit? they’d asked. Why not just give us the name? Hopko and a keen boy from Research spent a nervous two hours going down the lists, Patterson looking on.

And there he was. The sentence was handed down in mid-ninety. Li Huasheng. Beijing Fengtai District court. Attempted murder, assault, wounding. Reform through labor. Loss of political rights.

The sense of excitement around the operation was palpable.

Wen Jinghan began to speak with a tone of tired indulgence of the security arrangements at the General Armaments Department.
Cameras outside the building. A static post on the gate. A concrete guardhouse, the
chuandashi
, whose occupants stare and note. Then, inside, metal detectors, like an airport. Peanut pointed out he had never been to an airport. The professor looked at him with something Peanut felt came very close to contempt, so Peanut was obliged to sound threatening, again, to keep the upper hand, and the professor carried on. Bags through a machine, contents of pockets go into a little tray. A once-over with a wand. To get into the offices where he worked, a second sweep. A bag search, in and out. A swipe card opened the doors. The building was a Faraday cage, but the computer itself was not. Logging on required a thumb scan, a network key in the form of a card inserted into a reader, and a password. The system was alarmed against any unauthorized hardware.

The Launch Vehicle Academy was similar, but here security was conducted by a private company, which made it sharper. Security officers would appear unbidden in your office, conduct spot checks. Workers were known to be patted down on their way out, on top of the bag search.

Peanut thought about it.

“How comprehensive is it, Jinghan?”

“Very.”

“You got a sixty-page document out.”

The professor shuddered.

“Hold it together, Jinghan. Not much longer and it will all be done. Now go home.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“I’ll call you.”

“No, I mean, how on earth do you think this can be done?”

“We did it before.”

“It’s different, now.”

“Why? Because you’ve got a smart car and your nose in the trough. What the fuck happened to you, Jinghan?”

“A lot happened while you were shoveling shit in Qinghai. Did you notice? We grew up. The Party grew up. The cadres stopped killing the intellectuals and started listening to us. We rebuilt China. We turned our country into a global power.
We
did that. You’re fighting an old war, Huasheng. The little shits who killed your father are all gone.”

“I’m going to turn you in just for the fun of it,” said Peanut.

The professor slumped.

“Don’t you do that.”

“Go home, Jinghan.”

Peanut watched the professor’s retreating back. Dusk was coming down, lights flickering on in the apartment blocks, their pale glitter in the lake’s ice. The park was still. He was hungry, should be back at the salon. He lit a cigarette and watched. The woman walked her dog. He could just see her across the lake.

To his right a man in a tracksuit, half-walking, half-jogging, was coming towards him. Peanut watched him. Overweight, breathing heavily, his breath steaming, the man came close to Peanut and slowed. The man looked intently at him. Peanut looked away. The man stopped next to the bench on which Peanut sat, and stood there, breath rasping in the cold. Peanut stood up deliberately, flicked his cigarette into the lake, where it skittered sparking red over the ice, and, hands in pockets, walked away. The man began to follow, staying a few paces behind. Peanut began to move more quickly; the man kept pace. Now the path led away from the lake into a stand of bamboo. Peanut heard the man’s footsteps quicken. He turned to find the man almost on him, one arm extended. Peanut took a step back.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

The man moved towards Peanut, placed a hand on his upper arm.

“Get off me, now.”

“Don’t be awkward,” the man said.

Peanut allowed himself to be pushed off the path into the bamboo, which clacked and rustled. It was darker in here. The man was behind him, still holding his arm, forcing him on.

And then Peanut turned, very fast. His left hand, with a
thwack
, was on the back of the man’s neck. His right brought up the little knife and laid the blade flat on the man’s cheek, its point just below the eye.

“You move, it goes in.”

The man stood stock-still, leaning in slightly to Peanut, his mouth wide, eyes flickering.

“What do you want with me?” said Peanut.

The man could only whisper.

“You know…“

“Who are you working for?”

“What?”

“Who are you working for?” A little pressure under the eye.

“I… I work for an insurance company. What’s that got to do with anything?”

Peanut blinked.

“Why were you following me?”

“I thought… you… you know. Please don’t do this.”

“You thought what?”

“Please.”

“Why?”

“We come here to meet, people.” The pitch of his voice was rising. The man was shaking now, his knees starting to give way.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “Please let me go now.”

Peanut allowed the point of the knife to break the skin, a tiny blossom of blood visible against the knife’s sheen. He could feel the bulge of the eye against the point. The man gasped, then wrenched himself away. His head went down and Peanut felt the knife cut in. The man thrashed and swung open-handed at
Peanut’s head, barely making contact. Peanut pulled the knife back. The man bent double and placed his hands over his eye. He was breathing very fast, making an urgent mewling sound with each exhalation. Then his knees went and he was on the ground amid the bamboo stems.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” said Peanut.

Blood was running out through the man’s fingers. He didn’t speak.

“I’m asking one last time: why did you follow me?”

The man muttered something Peanut couldn’t make out.

“What?”

Now the man shrieked, his voice cracking. “I just wanted to
play
.”

Peanut swallowed. He could smell blood and piss. He turned and pushed his way through the clattering bamboo, and ran.

Ting ordered the bean curd drenched in explosive chili sauce, and delicate shredded pork. They had spent the day driving around the villages to the north-west of Beijing, looking for sand. The paper wanted a feature on desertification.
Sandy Tentacles of the Gobi! Reaching for Beijing!
It wasn’t hard to find. They found villages where houses were almost buried by dunes moving south-east year by year. The villagers pointed to rows of scrawny poplars they’d planted, which did no good. The fields were gray and icy, but the sand was, well, sand.

China’s vibrant capital could soon vanish beneath the vast Gobi Desert, according to environmental experts.

Mangan shot some stills of a mournful family atop their roof, as the dune slowly filled up their home, spilling in through the windows. The stills were good, with nice textures, sand, brick, the rough clothes of the toothless grandmother. But Ting pointed out that the family looked as if they were marooned on the roof, as if by a flood, so Mangan made them come down and
shot them all over again, the grandmother laughing
mei guanxi!
No matter.

In the car on the way back Ting had spoken of the simplicity, the honesty of traditional peasant life.

“It’s very beautiful, Philip. Generations of family in one village. We’ve lost that, now.”

Mangan had spent enough time in villages—villages with corrupt and brutal local officials, the young men all gone to work on the building sites, villages racked with HIV—to wonder where the sentiment came from.

Now Mangan studied her, as they waited for the food. And she studied him back.

“You seem a bit… preoccupied, Philip. Is everything okay? How are our finances? Can you still afford me?”

Mangan looked at his beer glass.

“Yes, well, looking up, actually. These people at the Pan Asia Institute. They’ve made a proposal.”

He stopped. Proceed with care, he thought. Ting looked expectant.

“What sort of proposal, Philip? Marriage? Something more casual?”

“They’ve asked me to put in a proposal for a book.”

Ting looked astonished.

“A book? You?” She put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. Her nails were painted bronze.

“I know. But they’re so floored by my lectures, they want more. So there we are.”

“What’s it going to be about?”

“Well, I have to put in an idea, a summary. I was thinking, we could look at some aspect of the Followers. Who they are, how the state has responded to them. God knows we’ve spent enough time watching them. It would say something about power, challenges to state authority. It’s compelling.”