Night Heron (28 page)

The knock was hard and clattered around the flat.

Then silence. Then again.

She stood still, her hand in mid-air, still outstretched towards the light switch. What sort of a knock was this? Not a friend’s knock. Not Philip back with his diffident shrug and slow smile, or Harvey to pop a cork, spirit her off somewhere, flirt with her. Not one of the others, the Americans or French or Germans,
each from their little paper, magazine, radio station, each with its own earnest identity, come in to lounge and chat and quietly pick her brains because Ting knew people, knew where to go, who to ask, how to ask, how to get the paperwork done.

The knock came again. And this time a voice, speaking official.

“
You ren ma? Kai men.
” Anyone there? Open up.

She let her hand drop from the light switch. She knew what kind of a knock it was now.

Breath, posture. Big, big smile. She opened the door.

They drove south in silence, the traffic sluggish, twilight coming on. It was a full half-hour until Harvey turned on to the approach to the bus station, and almost dark. The pavements were full with clusters of travelers. Huge two-decker buses halted and hissed through the traffic. Taxi drivers lounged by their cars in lines, hunched against the cold, bought
baozi
from stalls lit by hurricane lamps. The air reeked of exhaust and fat. Water in the gutters had frozen, and people walked tentatively, clutching luggage, holding each other’s elbows in the shadows.

Harvey pulled over, pushed the jeep up on to the curb. “I think it’s about time you really tell me, Philip, what’s going on,” he said.

“Stay here, please, Harv.” Mangan opened the door, stepped out. He walked towards the main entrance to the bus station, veering through the crowd. He looked around. Nothing.

He took his mobile phone from his pocket and turned it on. One message. He called his voicemail, listened. It was Milam, his languid tone replaced with something else.

“Phil, hey. Look, is everything okay? I’m here in the compound and I just saw Ting walking out with two guys, like, heavy guys. And, man, did she not look happy. Just call me, okay? It did not look good, Philip, really. Call, like, soon, okay?”

He pushed a knuckle to his forehead, closed his eyes.

He stumbled through the crowd towards the station, searching faces, looking for the powerful, insistent gait amid the shadows, the headlights. A bus pulled out spattering slush, its gears shrieking.

He turned to go back to the jeep, but someone gripped his arm.

“This way, quickly.”

They walked past the jeep. He saw Harvey watching from the front seat. They walked away from the bus station. The crowd thinned a little and the street got darker. Peanut cut abruptly to the right, towards a shop selling videos, a soundtrack blaring from speakers above the door, gaudy posters in the window. Next to the shop a very narrow, very dark alley. Mangan turned and looked for the jeep, which was closer. Harvey had pulled down the street in their direction, following them. Peanut was pulling him into the alley. It was barely wide enough to walk through, and it was a dead end. Why… but now Peanut had taken hold of his coat at the shoulder and was shoving him through a doorway.

“Up,” he said.

Mangan climbed. The stairwell was dark and reeked of piss. He trod on something soft, pulled away. Peanut pushed him again from behind. He emerged on to a rooftop, littered with empty bottles, styrofoam boxes. They were on a flat roof now, above the video shop. At one end a metal walkway carried over to the next building, and on. Peanut squatted, gestured to Mangan to do the same. Mangan could see him breathing heavily, felt the tension coming off him.

“What have they told you?” Peanut said.

“Nothing. They told me to stop. I’m no longer part of it.”

Peanut spat.

“You broke our agreement.”

“I—”

“You fucking tell them, Mang An. I want my money and papers. That was promised to me. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was,” said Mangan.

“This entire thing is now gone to shit.”

He was breathing hard, the skin on his face damp, reflecting the glow from the streetlamps.

“Look, what happened this morning?” said Mangan.

“What do you mean what happened? State Security turned up, and they were looking for me. By name. That’s what fucking happened.”

“But how…“

“I don’t know how.” His voice was a furious whisper. “But if they’re looking for me they’re looking for you too, Mang An. So why don’t we make a call to our handler and politely inform him that on top of his fucking around with my deal, State Security is now all over us as well.”

“I think they’re at my office,” said Mangan.

Peanut looked at him, his mouth open. He pointed to the mobile phone Mangan held in his hand.

“Call them, now.”

“I’m not calling them, and not on a mobile phone.”

Peanut looked like he was about to shout, leaning forward; Mangan saw the whites of his eyes, the straining jaw.

“Just call them!”

Mangan shook his head. There was a shout in the street, two stories below them.

“Mang An!” said Peanut, his face twisted with anger. “We might have minutes here.
Minutes!
Do you fucking understand? I was in prison and I am not going back. Do something.”

But Mangan was on all fours, crawling through the rubbish to the edge of the roof. He looked down, blinking into the darkness. Three black sedans had pulled up in the street. Two were
some distance away from the video shop, blocking traffic. The third was immediately opposite, stopped on the pavement, its engine running. Next to it a man stood. He held in his hand some sort of electronic device, which he was studying. His face was illuminated by the glow from its screen. Four more men were walking towards him from the other two cars. One of the four had his hand inside his jacket, resting it there. They all wore plain clothes, jeans, running shoes. A few onlookers had gathered, standing on the icy pavement beneath the streetlamps, craning their necks, their breath steaming.

The man with the device put one hand up, as if to signal
standby
.

Peanut was now at Mangan’s shoulder, looking down, too, and Mangan could feel the jolt of fear in him. Then he was gone, a herky-jerky crawl through the rubbish and shards of filthy ice towards the metal walkway at the far end of the roof. Mangan looked again, quickly. The man with the device was pointing, tentatively, towards the video shop. One of the men was jogging over towards it. He held a walkie-talkie.

Mangan looked back up the street towards the jeep. Harvey had got out and was standing next to the vehicle, hands on hips, looking down the street towards them. Two more of the men were now jogging towards the video shop, and the man with the device was speaking into a radio. Mangan turned and, running at a crouch, followed Peanut to the walkway.

It was a flimsy affair of aluminum struts, galvanized sheeting. Peanut was already on it, crawling. The walkway bounced with his movement. Mangan went on to all fours, crawled the fifteen feet or so to the adjacent roof, the ribbed metal cold against his hands.

A siren, now.

Mangan ran to the front of the building. They were sealing off the street, police in short gray uniform overcoats, balaclavas
under their stiff caps; they moved jerkily under the flashing lights. A knot of people was in front of the video shop. Eight or nine kids—they looked like the shop’s occupants, T-shirts, spiky hair—were kneeling in the road with their hands on their heads. The man with the device stood, hands on hips, waiting for something.

And then Mangan saw Harvey. He was walking away from the jeep towards the video shop and the police. A uniform was walking towards him. Harvey had something in his hand. It was his blue journalist’s card. He was holding it out. And now one of the plainclothes men saw him, ran towards him. Two more followed. The plainclothes man pushed the uniform aside, snatched at the card. The two others went behind Harvey. The plainclothes man waved the card in Harvey’s face, shouted something. Harvey held his hands up, conciliatory. The plainclothes man shouted it again. Harvey shouted something back and Mangan saw him turn away, try to shove past the two behind him. The plainclothes man had pulled something from his waistband. An umbrella? No, a baton, telescoping out to three or four times its original length with a
snap
. Mangan could see the heft of it in the man’s hand, the nasty little weighted sphere at one end. The man brought it down hard on Harvey’s shoulder. Harvey bent sideways and twisted away, one hand up, pointing to the plainclothes man, who brought the baton down again and hit Harvey on the wrist. Harvey doubled over, put his wrist under the other arm. The plainclothes man just stood and watched. The others were moving in on him now, but Harvey was big, and with his good arm gave one a hard shove in the chest. Mangan kneeled up, a shout rising in his throat. But Peanut had wrapped a huge hand around his upper arm and wrenched him back down to his knees.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he hissed.

So Mangan watched, silent, from a distance.

Harvey was clearly in pain, his head still angled over, and now he made a break, running for the jeep. The plainclothes men jogged easily behind him, then slowed, as if to stand back and watch how it all turned out. A siren whooped, then the gunning of an engine. A black sedan came down the street at speed. The driver, practiced, dipped the wheel towards Harvey as he passed. The offside wing caught Harvey at the hip and he went up, clean into the air. The momentum was all with his legs and lower torso and he flipped, almost a cartwheel. He seemed to land on his head and shoulder, rolled to one side and lay still. A leg was broken, maybe the pelvis, the feet at wrong angles.

The sedan stopped and the plainclothes man was talking into the radio. Someone was examining the blue journalist’s card and signaling
no
with a wave of the hand.

Peanut was tearing him away, dragging him back towards the walkway. Mangan felt as if the nerves in his body were ringing, a metallic toll through his spine, hands, head.

They crawled further along the walkway, to a third rooftop, a little distance now between them and the video shop. The walkway ended at a stubby tower laden with mobile phone repeaters. A ladder was bolted to the wall. They took it, Peanut first, his knuckles white on the rungs as he climbed down to the street. Then they ran into the cold night, Peanut relentless, lumbering, Mangan behind him.

The date. A reference number.

FM CX BEIJING

TO LONDON

TO P/64815

FILE REF C/FE

FILE REF TCI/29611

FILE REF R/84459

FILE REF SB/38972

LEDGER UK TOP SECRET

URGENT URGENT

/REPORT

1
/
Operation
STONE CIRCLE
has been compromised.
BEI 72
is reported at
RATCHET’
s residence. Situation continues to develop.

2
/
Embassy press officer received a telephone call from correspondent for the
Los Angeles Times
, Spencer
MILAM
,
U.S. national, asking for comment on the arrest of
ZHAO
Ting.
ZHAO
is paid assistant to
RATCHET
.
Press officer replied he had no information.

3
/
Whereabouts of
RATCHET
,
GENIUS
as of
11.00
ZULU are unknown.

4
/
Status of
CRATER
unknown.

/
ENDS

SIS, Vauxhall Cross, London

They were in Yeats’s office; the first time, Patterson realized, she’d ever been invited in. An ornate lamp stood on the desk and, on the wall, photographs. Yeats with a Prime Minister, shaking hands, looking down the lens; Yeats in some far-off place, in a bush jacket; a river, tropical foliage. Now he was standing, leaning on the back of the chair behind his desk. Hopko sat, legs crossed, arms folded. Yeats spoke.

“Well, technically, this is no longer your responsibility, Val. So perhaps we can dial down the indignation a little.”

Hopko tilted her head to one side and smiled.

“Roly, Philip Mangan works for us. Or he did.”

“As you point out, the locus of operational management is now elsewhere.”

The what? thought Patterson. She stood up.

“Which locus would that be?” she said. “The one that’s driving around Beijing in a silver bloody limo, holding agent meetings? That one? Or the one that’s handing out hard drives?”

Yeats narrowed his eyes at her, his tongue working in his mouth.

“What is on that drive?” she asked.

Yeats waited a moment.

“The situation will be brought under control. I think we should end this meeting now,” he said.

“Will it? Be brought under control?” said Hopko, quietly. “This, Roly, is what they call a flap.”

Hopko stood and walked out of the room. Patterson could feel Yeats’s eyes on her as she followed. In the corridor Patterson, feeling the fury rising in her, turned to Hopko. But Hopko just shook her head.

The bus, a big two-decker thing, the heaters on full blast, took them to Tianjin, eighty miles distant, some two hours in freezing rain. Peanut had flagged it down and to Mangan’s astonishment the thing had stopped and the door opened with a hiss. Mangan had paid the driver and they’d sat upstairs at the back, Mangan hiding his face as they passed more police cars heading towards Zhaogongkou.

On the expressway Peanut had handed him a cigarette, and they sat silently and smoked. Peanut seemed to be collecting himself, calculating.

“So, Mang An,” Peanut said, very quietly. “I am inclined not to stay with you.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Mangan.

“Well, you’d better think of something to tell me soon.”

“I have to get out of China,” said Mangan.

“We all have to get out of China.”

Mangan exhaled.

“I have a number to call.”

“But back in Beijing.”

“No. In London.”

Peanut raised his eyebrows, looked very hard at Mangan. He had taken off his coat and wore only a T-shirt. Mangan saw his
bulk, the hardness of it, smelled the reek of cigarettes, sweat, stress.

“What will you say to them?” said Peanut.

“I don’t know. They must meet us, get us out.”

Peanut shifted in his seat.

“Some plan,” he said. And then, after a pause, “Is there a chance?”

Mangan sighed, shook his head, said nothing.

“They’ll shoot me, you know,” said Peanut. “They won’t shoot you, because you’re a foreigner, and they’ll work something out.”

Peanut turned and faced the window, which was streaked with rain.

“But they’ll shoot me.”

They got off outside a railway station in the west of Tianjin. Peanut stayed outside, shivering in the shadows. As Mangan walked away, Peanut said, “You will come back, won’t you?”

And here, of course, the cameras. Nothing to be done. The ticket hall was quiet, echoing. A scattering of travelers, standing, looking up at the screens. Mangan walked the length of the hall to a bank of telephones. At the far end one had a sign: international calls. He went to it, took one of the credit cards, swiped, dialed the number.

Patterson was running down the corridor. The call had come through on a live line for “Rachel Davies,” and the operators had put it into a suite and notified the P section.

She barreled past Drinkwater who was emerging from a lift. He said something about the Grand National, and whoever he was with laughed.

She crashed through the door to the operations suite. The technician was already there.

“Ready?” he said.

She nodded, trying to calm her breathing.

“Bringing them in now.” He tapped the screen.

She leaned forward to the microphone.

“Hello?” Noise of, what? Chimes, echoing announcements. An airport? A station?

“Is that Rachel Davies?”

“This is Rachel Davies.” He remembered that clipped, hostile tone, the dark eyes. He was wrestling a notebook from his pocket.

“Where are you?” she said.

“We’ve left Beijing. We need to know what to do.” He was cupping his hand round the mouthpiece.

“You say we. How many of you?”

“Two. Me and… our friend.”

There was a brief silence, as if she were making up her mind about something.

“All right. Listen very carefully. And tell me if you understand. You will go to Fuzhou City, in Fujian Province. Do you understand?”

“Fuzhou, yes.”

“Then to Xiao’ao Township. On the coast.”

“Xiao’ao. Yes.”

“Look for the Golden Crab restaurant, south of the town by the water.”

“Yes.”

“Behind it there’s a breakwater. Be there at oh-two-forty tomorrow night, or the night after.”

“Oh-two-forty.”

“There’ll be a recognition—”

A hand, hard on his shoulder. He turned. Peanut, eyes hard, teeth bared, looking down. “We go. Now.”

“Wait.” He pulled away from Peanut’s grip.

“Do you understand?” came the voice on the line.

“No, wait, say that again.” Pushing Peanut away. Peanut hissing at him.

“For recognition, use the Chinese word
shichang
, ‘market.’ They’ll reply using the word ‘riptide.’ ” He wrote furiously.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes. But they are—” Then the pip as the line went dead.

Patterson held her head in her hands. A hundred and thirty-three seconds on an open line. The technician looked sympathetic.

“Happens to the best of us,” he said.

She looked at him, aghast.

“
What
happens to the bloody best of us?”

“Oh. I didn’t mean to give offence… I…“

But she had stood up and was out of the suite, striding back to the P section, wondering if hers would be quite one of the shortest careers the Service had ever seen.
CALIPER
had been Hopko’s idea, she’d seen from the file. Set up a few years back, topped up regularly. A useful contingency, whose use, the file told her in stentorian tones, required authorization at very, very high level, due to the “exceptional sensitivity of the operational modalities.” Service speak, Patterson knew, for high probability of mayhem and international incident. And as for the authorization, well, Patterson had somehow neglected to obtain it.

Would it work?

Mangan hung up. Peanut was rigid, had his fingers twisted into Mangan’s jacket. Mangan looked the length of the ticket hall, saw nothing and turned to Peanut.

“They’re outside,” said Peanut. As he spoke, at the far end of the ticket hall the large silver doors opened and four police officers walked in, with a couple of plainclothes. They were moving quickly, scanning the hall. To the right of the bank of telephones, perhaps fifteen feet away, a swing door with “No
Entry” stamped on it in red, a window in the center of it, with wire mesh in the glass. Peanut still held Mangan’s jacket.

“Walk slowly,” he said.

They made for the door. Then Peanut was through it and running, Mangan close behind. A corridor, a freight elevator. Peanut’s thumb stuttered on the call button. Mangan looked behind him. Through the glass in the door he could see the policemen moving past the telephones. The lift juddered to a stop. A soft
ping
. They waited for the doors to open. The doors stayed closed. More uniforms now, closer to the glass. Peanut raised his hands and let them fall, exasperated. The doors didn’t move. Mangan pushed Peanut aside, grabbed what appeared to be, recessed into the metal of the door, a handle. He wrenched it and the door groaned open. Manual doors.

Peanut lurched into the elevator. Mangan slammed the doors behind them. The elevator smelled of garbage. Its control panel offered six floors.

“Where? Up? Down?”

“Down,” said Peanut. The elevator shuddered downward. Peanut leaned back, shook his head.

Two floors down the elevator stopped. A bleak passage with pipework running along its ceiling, cream walls. And, in dribbling red spray paint the length of the passage, anarchy signs, the circled letter A, again and again.

They clattered down the passage to double doors. Peanut thrust them open and propelled himself through and Mangan saw a mop and a bucket and a small elderly man sat on an upturned crate with a metal lunch box in his hand, chopsticks halfway to his mouth, eyes wide, frozen. Peanut couldn’t stop and went straight over him, crashing to the floor with man and crate, the lunch box clattering, rice, onions, some fatty pork spattered on the floor. Peanut was up, fast, and had his hands on the old man’s lapels, lifting him, shouting.

“How do we get out of here?”

“Wha—?” The man was terrified, on his knees, pawing at Peanut’s arm. Peanut screamed at him again.

“How do we get out?”

The man pointed back the way they’d come, to the freight elevator. Peanut shook him.

“Not that way. Another way.”

The old man was gasping now. He pointed, again, the other direction.

“There’s stairs.”

“Show us.” He lifted the man and set him on his feet. “Now.”

The man started to walk stiffly. Peanut put a meaty hand on his back and propelled him forward. The man grunted and grimaced.

“God in heaven. Move, you imbecile.”

The man went forward at a pained trot. They rounded a corner and another. The light was dim. The red anarchy signs bled down the walls. Ahead of them were double doors with a crash bar.

“There,” said the man.

“What’s on the other side?” said Peanut.

“Stairs,” said the man.

Peanut had him by the throat and up against the wall.

“Where do the stairs go?”

“Up,” said the man, his breath rasping under Peanut’s grip. “Up to the rubbish bins and there’s a loading dock.”

Peanut let him go and he slid to the floor. Peanut pointed a warning finger at him.

“You do not tell anybody you’ve seen us. If you do, I’ll be back and I’ll deal with you.”

The man just looked up at him, on the verge of tears, said nothing. Peanut dealt him a savage kick that took him in the chest, and he whimpered and cowered. Mangan hit the crash
bar on the doors and suddenly could smell the night. They ran up the stairs; Mangan peered around a corner. It was raining hard. The loading dock was empty. A truck stood there, no one in the cab.

“They said we have to get to Fuzhou,” said Mangan.

“Why?”

“I think we might be met.”

“Fuzhou,” said Peanut.

Mangan took a breath, hurried out past the loading dock, through the gate, on to the street. The whoop of a siren came from the other side of the station. There were taxis, waiting their turn to go to the rank.

“How much money have we got?” Peanut said.

They had three and a half thousand yuan between them.

“Trucks,” said Peanut.

Mangan hailed a taxi.

“I’m a foreign journalist,” he told the driver, speaking too quickly. “I want to interview truck drivers. About the cost of fuel. Could you take us to where there are many truck drivers? A truck stop, perhaps.”

The driver frowned, thought about it, then turned the cab around and pulled away. Mangan sat low, rested his head against the seat. The tiredness in him was gathering in his limbs, in the sourness in his stomach and chest, a desire to do nothing now, to go no further.

And, at some point, he would have to think about Ting and about Harvey. Because he hadn’t thought about them yet, but what he knew was welling up at the outer edges of his mind like water against a fragile dam, torrents of guilt and despair awaiting release. But he could not think about them quite yet, because to do so would result in his incapacitation. So he would think about them later.

He thought of becoming angry with Peanut.
Why did you drag
me into this?
But his complicity, his own titillation—
an agent! A joe!
—rendered the impulse stupid and dishonest. He looked over at Peanut, who was looking keenly from the window, his breath steaming the glass.

“
Ni kan shenme?
” he said. What do you see?

“
Wode shenghuo.
” My life.

The Tianjin streets went past in a sodden blur of neon and rain.