Night Heron (25 page)

Beijing

Mangan went south on Dongdaqiao, in the direction of the embassy. He walked quickly, keeping his gaze straight ahead, the carrier bag, in his right hand, swinging at his side. The traffic was stalled, the buses packed in the darkness, their occupants swaying, dead-eyed. There would be snow tonight, supposedly, but the air was dry, thick with dust and fumes. Mangan wondered if there were any moisture in it at all. He passed a vast new apartment and mall complex, its surfaces glinting, tessellated in the night. Where its silvered walls met the pavement, the graffiti artist had been at work; the crow again, with its bulbous, grotesque goggles, the stencil a little imprecise this time, smeary, as if the artist had rushed his work beneath the surveillance cameras. Mangan stayed in shadow where he could. To every lamppost, a camera. Half a million of them in Beijing, he’d read.

And then, walking towards him as he rounded the corner on to Guanghua Lu, Charteris.

Mangan made to extend his left hand, the gadget wrapped inside it, but Charteris’s hands remained in his pockets, and in his eyes, a warning.

Mangan peeled away immediately, made to cross the street. Glancing back, he saw Charteris turning the corner. Behind him, nobody. A taxi was grinding slowly along the curb, looking for fares. Mangan hailed it and got in. He gave the driver the name of a hotel. He looked down at his hands to find them trembling, damp.

“I have
GODDESS
1.”

“
Wei? Xin meiyou dao.
” The letter hasn’t arrived. The pass has not taken place.

Patterson stood, felt the spike of adrenalin in her gut. Hopko leaned and spoke into the microphone.

“
Weishenme?
” Why?

“
Haoxiang mei you ji.
” It seems he didn’t post it. Officer aborted.

Hopko, speaking urgently now, “
You wenti ma?
” Is there a problem? Have you identified hostile surveillance?

“
Yinggai mei wenti ba.
” I don’t think there’s a problem. But the voice sounded defensive.

“Z
ai shi yi shi
.” Let’s try again. Move to fallback.

“
Hao.
” Moving to fallback.

“What the hell is that about?” said Patterson.

Charteris’s line came up on the screen. The technician brought it in.

“It’s me. Sorry I didn’t turn up. I wasn’t feeling well,” he said. I believe I may have detected hostile surveillance.

“I see. Well, everybody else was fine,” said Hopko. No hostile surveillance reported.

A pause, just the sound of Charteris’s breathing hissing on the line. Patterson reached over, closed the microphone.

“Fallback, Val,” said Patterson.

Hopko considered.

“Yes, fallback,” said Yeats. “Now.”

Hopko closed her eyes for a moment. Patterson saw her jaw clench. She opened the microphone.

“We’d like to move on,” said Hopko. Proceed to fallback.

Another pause on the line, the rustle of Charteris’s movement.

“Well, okay.” Officer proceeding to fallback.

Mangan sat in the lobby lounge of the Crowne Plaza, watching the doors, wondering about cameras. A smiling waiter approached, gestured at the menu. Mangan ordered sparkling water, left money on the table so he was ready to move.

Then Charteris was striding across the lobby, nonchalant, hands in pockets. He made for the men’s lavatory, went in. Mangan watched the door close behind him. He waited ten seconds.

Up and moving now, past the check-in desk. Two hotel security goons with earpieces stood self-importantly by the main doors, running their gaze across the lobby. Mangan tried to ignore them. Do something with your hand, she’d told him. Look occupied. As he walked he checked the time on his wristwatch, patted his pockets for his mobile phone, pulled it out, looked at it, even though it was switched off. He pushed open the door to the men’s lavatory. Charteris was standing at the basins, rinsing his hands. No one else. Charteris took a towel, dried. As Mangan approached him, he let one hand fall to his side, palm out. Mangan pressed the key into it and spoke quietly.

“What happened?”

“Outside the embassy. I thought there was a watcher, in a car. I was wrong. It’s nothing.”

And he was gone.

Mangan leaned against the countertop, breathing.

“
Dao le.
” The letter’s arrived. Officer has re-entered the embassy.

“
Hao. Hai you shi ma?
” Anything more?

“
Meiyou biede shi.
” Nothing more. No sign of hostile surveillance.

“
Na, ni hui jia ba.
” Go home.

“
Xianzai jiu zou
.” We’re leaving now.

And with that, Hopko authorized the
GODDESS
team to disperse and return to their Hong Kong base as quickly and quietly as they could. And Patterson went down to the cafeteria for coffee, and they made their way slowly back to the P section, where she and Hopko sat in silence for a few minutes, before Hopko stood suddenly and went off to find Yeats, to tell him that the principal operational phase of
STONE CIRCLE
had been completed.

Granny Poon peeled off from the target and walked south. As she rounded the corner on to Jianguomenwai Dajie she took the phone from her pocket. She removed the SIM card, bent it double between her thumb and index fingers till she felt the plastic split, then she dropped the two halves in two separate rubbish bins, the battery and phone in a third. She hailed a taxi. She opened the door and climbed in slowly, one hand atop the open door to steady herself, an elderly lady, a little rheumatic perhaps, taking her time. And as she lowered herself into the seat, she glanced back at the passers-by. And a man smiled at her. A man in his thirties, with a baseball cap, a short black jacket, perhaps a golfer’s jacket, jeans of a light color, and white training shoes bearing the mark of a famous brand in red. She sensed, more than saw, his lingering look and she fastened the image of him in her mind. She sat in the back seat, closed the door and asked the driver to take her to Beijing South Railway Station, where she would take the express to Tianjin, and from there a flight to Hong Kong. Winston would take the bags.

She sat in the back of the taxi in a stale cigarette reek. The taxi ground slowly through the Beijing night.

Someone was watching, probing.

Who?

GCHQ, Cheltenham

The gadget, wrapped in polythene and placed in a plastic container impervious to dust or water, went by secure bag. The bag—a large black briefcase of the sort lawyers might carry—remained handcuffed to the wrist of the courier for the ten-hour British Airways flight to London.

At Heathrow a van waited to transport courier and bag to the town of Cheltenham, where, in a basement of the enormous doughnut-shaped structure that housed Government Communications Headquarters, the exploitation team waited. Patterson sat against one wall, chilly in the air-conditioning, and eyed them. Six linguists, three computer technicians, eight analysts. They sat at terminals arranged on a horseshoe table in a secure computer lab. A cryptographic team was on standby. Late afternoon now, the flight was on time, the courier due any minute.

Hopko, of course, charmed them, flitting from terminal to terminal, asking questions, being interested, perching herself on the table, leaning in to hear explanations of software, databases, digital dictionaries. She spoke at length to one woman—a BBC, she called herself, British-Born Chinese—who would be the
lead translator and who seemed to have absorbed an astonishing vocabulary of Chinese military terms. Hopko tested her playfully on missiles. Throw weight, drawdown curve, midcourse phase. But the woman wanted to know context, please, Val. What sort of material are we expecting? Hopko just shrugged and smiled and said she had no idea what would be on the drive other than, well, “a largish chunk of a very secret Chinese network.” This prompted grins around the table. The analysts looked at one another and raised their eyebrows, shifted in their seats. One boy—a technician—overweight, his hair gelled, adopted a mock frown and spoke up to Hopko.

“So we might be here a while, then?”

Hopko played along.

“Oh, definitely. All leave canceled, I’m afraid.”

Patterson watched Hopko stand and walk purposefully to a man who had remained silent throughout, brow furrowed, concentrating on the screen before him. Middle-aged, this man, thinning fair hair on a pale pate; the moist patina of one who spends many hours in windowless secure rooms. And the dress sense, too. Ill-fitting, pleated trousers, a light-blue shirt, square spectacles.

Patterson looked at the man’s identity badge. It read, “McGovern, Mike.” The green strip with the word
CONTRACTOR
in white. Beneath it
CALTRON APPLICATIONS INC
. So McGovern, Mike was private sector, brought in by GCHQ from a corporation. A very big, very quiet corporation. To do what, exactly?

Hopko reached out a hand.

“Mike. Hello. Val Hopko.”

He looked up and regarded her, a weary look, one that braced for criticism. He shook her hand, said nothing.

“And to what do we owe the pleasure?” said Hopko.

McGovern held up his hands in surrender.

“They tell me to be here, I’m here,” he said. A faint Irish accent.

Hopko waited.

“I’m on the exploitation team because you will be using applications that were designed by Caltron,” he said slowly. “Security applications. Applications that will ensure your networks are not all blown to bits by whatever is about to be brought into this room. Figuratively speaking.”

A pause.

“Consider me tech support. I’m here to help.”

Hopko seemed about to say more, but the door opened with a hiss and two uniformed security men escorted in a courier in a rumpled suit. The courier looked around, questioning, and Patterson, as holder of the relevant codes, stood to meet him. She uncuffed him and then entered the combination that opened the case. The room was quiet now. Hopko, on tiptoe almost, watched Patterson pull out the watertight box, open it, unwrap the gadget. The technicians crowded around making approving noises. There was business with signatures, and the courier, clearly relieved, left the room. The lead technician, wearing rubber gloves, took the car key, opened it up and inserted the drive into a terminal.

Patterson watched Hopko, saw in her dark eyes sheer, joyful venality.

Once McGovern and the techs had pronounced it clean, the team worked their way through the drive trying to discern what they had, explorers in a pixellated tomb.

They had a lot. They broke the product out into serials.
WOODWORK
to cover hundreds of documents related to China’s missile program; the DF-41 was there, so was the carrier killer, so were anti-satellite weapons still on the General Armaments
Department’s drawing board, and policy papers that projected the capacity of China’s strategic missile forces twenty-five years into the future. Analysts pretended to fall off their chairs and rub their eyes in shock. They ate sandwiches at their desks until the techs objected because of the crumbs, and nobody minded the overtime.
QUILTER
to cover naval procurement files, which would need the creation of a special analytic cell with draftees from DI Strategic Assessments, Naval Intelligence and more specialists from the corporations who joked about being “pressganged.”
DRAWBRIDGE
to cover product related to budgets and accounting practices,
STEAMER
to cover a tranche of personnel files; God only knew when they’d get to them. Patterson was alternately madly busy channeling samples of product to Waverley of Requirements and stunned with boredom as the translators haggled over some minute distinction in the vocabulary of phased array radar. She ate miserably, slept fitfully in visiting officers’ quarters and washed out her underwear in the sink, her overnight bag having proven woefully inadequate.

But the serial that created most excitement in the room, especially among the technicians, was
GAMMA
, which was to cover product describing the Chinese military’s information operations. A slender file,
GAMMA
, but tantalizing. Here were maps of the network infrastructure. Here was China’s military telecommunications backbone. Here was the chain of command leading from China’s new cyber warfare units to the General Staff. And that, there, said the lead technician, a balding man in his fifties wearing a blue cardigan and rubber-soled shoes, gesturing to the screen, that is a list of exploits we’ve already found in the operating system.

“A tiny bit more explanation, please,” said Hopko.

“They don’t have their own operating systems, you see, Val,” said the technician. “All their software was written, originally,
in the west. But because they’re a secure network, they’re not connected to the Internet. So they don’t receive the updates that the writers of the software send out. So their operating systems are full of holes, which they should have patched. But they never did, did they?”

There was much joking among the technicians about the state of the operating system. “It’s like a Swiss cheese,” one said. “Some of it looks like pirated software. Honestly, ripe for the picking.”

And wherever material appeared that seemed destined for the
GAMMA
serial, there was McGovern of Caltron Applications Inc., purveyors of cyber expertise and intelligence support systems and services to a number of very quiet agencies. McGovern listened to the translators, offered occasional advice to the techs, pointed out a new approach, a new route. He spoke modestly, and was self-effacing in his manner, and allowed others to take credit for his successes. Then he withdrew to his own screen, or sometimes left the room for half an hour.

And, Patterson noticed, McGovern of Caltron Applications Inc. became as close to animated as was possible for him to be when it was discovered that the gadget had unearthed, from deep in the Chinese network, a series of files detailing contracts awarded to a Chinese corporation, China National Century Inc. CNaC, as it was known, China’s brave new telecoms warrior. CNaC fiber stretched from Tibet to Manchuria, its wireless from Korea to Angola, its processors everywhere, from alarm clocks to spy satellites to weapons systems in one hundred and thirty countries.

Patterson watched as McGovern leaned in, the glimmering screen reflected in his smudged spectacles.

Later, on her way to the canteen, Patterson saw Hopko standing in an office and speaking on a secure phone, gesticulating.

The conference room, deep in the Ministry of Defence, was paneled with rich dark wood. At one end, an assortment of comfy leather armchairs, of the sort one might find in a gentlemen’s club, arranged around a fireplace. Along the length of the room ran a mahogany table, a file with a tan cover at each seat, each classified to a level of secrecy appropriate to its contents. The contents of the files would not leave the room, nor would they be discussed beyond the room with any degree of specificity. Mobile phones, laptops and any other consumer electronics—the bane of security—were to be relinquished upon entry. Coffee and croissants on a side table lent a wonderful morning smell. And at vantage points throughout the room were positioned, delicately and invisibly, a number of cameras and microphones, so that the proceedings might be closely monitored in adjoining rooms.

Hopko sat in an adjoining room of meaner appointment. Before her were six screens and a keyboard equipped with a little joystick.

Patterson clattered into the room, accidentally slamming the door behind her. Hopko looked her up and down sympathetically.

“Trish. You look hot and bothered,” she said. “Sit you down.”

Patterson exhaled and sat.

“What exactly are we doing here?” said Patterson.

“Security. Simon Drinkwater is supposed to do it, but I volunteered to do it for him and he accepted with an indecent degree of alacrity.”

Patterson looked mystified.

“We listen and ensure the briefers don’t say anything they’re not supposed to,” said Hopko.

As she spoke a smart MoD functionary holding a clipboard opened the door to the conference room and a procession of men entered. Patterson and Hopko watched them on the screens. The
men were tailored in the manner of senior executives, some affecting a classic masculine authority in navy blue and gray pinstripe, others alluding to current fashion in black, cut snug and narrow.

The men wore visitor passes on dangling cords with a contractor stripe and national flag. Most were British, but here and there Patterson saw an American or a Canadian. Beneath the flag was printed their corporate affiliation: Such-and-such Systems Inc. Such-and-such Mission Solutions. Such-and-such Kinetic Applications. Shiny, hard-edged names, evocative of movement and power, yet elusive in their lack of specificity. What, thought Patterson, do they actually do at TRSI Risk Dynamics?

“See this one?” said Hopko. She touched the joystick and the camera moved in on a silver-haired American, suited in black with a simple red tie. He had poured himself a cup of coffee and sat unspeaking at the end of the table.

“Who’s he?” said Patterson.

“He’s ex-CIA, Trish. He used to be Deputy Director of their Clandestine Service. But he retired. Now he has a very comfy billet at Shady Creek Group.”

Patterson wondered if the name was supposed to mean something to her. Shady Creek. A name suggestive of small beginnings, roads less traveled, dappled sunlight, authenticity.

On the screen Hopko and Patterson watched the executives open the files, all of which, Patterson could now see, were stamped with
GAMMA/TOP SECRET
.

“So these are all corporations and we’re briefing them on the product?” said Patterson.

“Or those bits of the product that we think they need to know about,” said Hopko.

“Why do they need to know any of it?”

“So they can design things, services, capabilities, that we will buy from them,” said Hopko. “Here’s China’s network, we say. Now go away and build something that will penetrate it.”

The briefer was talking now, taking the executives through the early read on the
GAMMA
material and what it revealed of China’s telecommunications infrastructure, its cyber future.

“Though I can’t imagine our friend from Shady Creek is going to learn much he doesn’t already know,” Hopko said.

“Why?”

“Why? Because Shady Creek is private equity. It owns Caltron, among other things. And you can’t move for Caltron people at GCHQ. Remember that pasty fellow during the exploitation? McGovern? He was Caltron.”

Hopko paused for a moment and leaned forward to look more closely at the screen.

“So I imagine that our Shady Creek friend here has already been briefed on everything that was on our drive,” she said.

The door opened again and another figure entered the conference room, hurriedly. Not so well-suited this one, Patterson noted. The figure pulled up an extra chair next to the silver-haired American and murmured in the American’s ear.

“Well,” said Hopko.

“What’s he doing here?” said Patterson.

“Making sure,” said Hopko, “that Shady Creek Group has everything it needs.”

And, as she spoke, Roly Yeats, Head of Western Hemisphere and Far East Controllerate, looked straight into a camera, as if locking eyes with Patterson and daring her to question him.

Later, Patterson took the Tube home to Archway and walked home in darkness suffused with a rain so fine it was almost mist. She unlocked the front door and stood in the still hallway, listening for a sign that Damian was at home. She heard nothing but the city’s low frequency whisper-roar, climbed the stairs to her flat and let herself in. She changed into jeans, heated lasagne in a foil tray and poured herself a glass of red wine.

She sat at her laptop, eating. She searched Shady Creek Group. The firm’s headquarters, she read, sat not on a creek of any sort, but a river, the Potomac, a short distance from the White House and the Pentagon and Langley.

And there Shady Creek had designed the private equity strategy that had brought them to their illustrious position at the most secret conference tables. First the big ramping-up a decade earlier: the acquisition of translation and security and logistics companies. The recruiting of the hard men, ex-Delta and SAS, and the field operatives. At one point the director of the CIA had to ask Shady Creek to stop recruiting in the cafeteria at Langley.