Spy Games (2 page)

He had his head in his hands.

“Dr. Keung, we
will
resolve this situation and ensure you are safe. Is that clear? Now, as long as you understand the emergency procedures, let us move forward.”

Let us
move forward
? For Christ’s sake. She licked her lips.

“They know,” he said. He made a chopping motion in the air with his hand. “They know, they know, they know. Move forward with
that
.”

She waited a beat, heard the wind pounding against the windows.

“Who knows and what do they know?”

“They know. They came.”

“Please start at the beginning. Tell me.”

“They came to my apartment two days ago. In the morning.”

“Did they identify themselves? How many of them? What did they look like?”

“No, no identification. They just expect me to know. Three of them.”

“Mainlanders?”

“Mainlanders. From the north. Beijing, maybe. The one who spoke, anyway.”

“How could you tell?”

“What do you mean, how could I tell?” He looked at her, wild-eyed. “Because he spoke Mandarin! With that accent they have. And that tone. So polite. So… threatening.” He put a shaking hand to his forehead.

“And what did they look like? What were they wearing?”

“What were they wearing?” He looked at her with incredulity. He was clenching and unclenching his fists.

Patterson cleared her throat, put her hand in front of her mouth for a moment.

“Well, would you say they looked like military men, for example? Or something else?”

He stood up, raised his hands in a gesture of despair. He leaned toward her, shouted at her.

“I tell you! They know. Why do you just sit there? Fuck!” The obscenity sounded incongruous, unfamiliar, as if he hadn’t used it before.

“Tell me exactly what they said.”

He started to pace.

“You get me out of here first. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Patterson.

“Get me out.”

“Dr. Keung, we may not have much time. Tell me what they said. Now.”

He stopped, pinched his forehead with one hand.

“He said, the northern one, that they wanted me to do a job. That I should use my ‘contacts.’ My
guanxi
. He had this smirk.”

Patterson was silent, waited for more.

“He said they had a message.”

“A message? For who?”

“For you, who the fuck do you think!”

“Did he actually say it was for us? Explicitly?”

“No, of course not. He just said it was for my
guanxi
.”

“Well…”

“No. No ‘well.’” He jabbed his finger at her. “You get me the fuck out of here. I am blown, and I am not going back and you owe me, whatever the fuck your name is.” He was warming to his obscenities now, thrusting his despair and anger at her.

“What message?” she said.

“They said I had to go to meet someone, okay? Some big wheel guy. He’d give the message.”

But Patterson wasn’t listening.

Because in her earpiece was a voice as close as a lover’s, saying, “Magazine. Magazine. Magazine. Acknowledge.”

She sent nothing, waiting for confirmation.

“Magazine. Magazine. Magazine. Acknowledge.”

Abort. The meeting is compromised. Abort.

First, say the trainers, choose your attitude. Choose calm, clear-headedness, optimism. Do not rush your movements. Rushing will make you immediately conspicuous. Move at the pace of those around you, or more slowly. Do not become visibly vigilant. When you are compromised in a denied area, resoluteness and a good cover story are your friends.

All the pabulum of training revolved slowly in her mind like detritus around a drain.

Just give it a minute, she thought. In a minute, the instinct will kick in. The rush of cold clarity will come. It will come. It will come to the soldier in me.

Patterson stood up.

“I’m afraid we have to end this meeting,” she said, with a regretful smile.

Dr. Keung turned and faced her, panic flaring in his eyes.

“What? Why?”

“Our people tell me it’s for the best. Now, you remember the procedures?”

She gestured toward the door. His eyes followed. He looked at the door and then back at her.

“We will be in touch. Try not to worry. We will meet again very soon and we will resolve this situation.”

He didn’t move.

“Dr. Keung, we need to go now.”

“They’re here, aren’t they?”

“Follow the procedures. Someone is waiting for you. They will ensure you get away cleanly.”

“Oh, Christ.”

She opened the door and looked quickly both ways down the corridor.

“Dr. Keung. Go.” She held his damp coat for him.

The spirit seemed to go out of him. His shoulders slumped, his hands hanging at his sides.

“Dr. Keung.”

He walked listlessly to her, took the coat. He walked out of the door. He didn’t speak to her or look at her again as he headed down the corridor.

Patterson wrapped the scarf tight around her hair, put the sunglasses back on, clicked Send.

“Sitrep,” she said.

A single click came back. Maintain silence.

Her own egress procedure called for a complicated weave through the apartment block, cutting across the width of the building from stairwell to stairwell, taking a street-level exit through a fire door, where a watcher would pick her up. She walked through a labyrinth of corridors, slowing herself, keeping it natural. She clattered down the concrete stairwells. It took her nearly eight minutes to get to street level—where the fire door she was supposed to use was locked, a padlocked chain linking the crash bars.

A good officer expects such things.

She put her ear to the door, heard the thump of the wind, the rain spattering the concrete.

A good officer anticipates that the door will be chained shut, or
the road will be blocked by construction or the electricity will go out at precisely the moment the operation reaches its climax.

She swore.

She checked the time. The watchers should have picked up the doctor by now. They would be on the MTR train with him, seeing him to safety.

Why the panic? she wondered. What had the watchers seen? Who?

She turned and made her way onward through the dim corridors, looking for another exit to the street, finding none.

A figure was coming toward her. She heard the footsteps on the linoleum. She turned her face down and walked on. A man, carrying something. A phone? He was short, of Chinese appearance, with a wrestler’s sloping shoulders, thick fingers. He wore a T-shirt and running shoes. He had stopped, was watching her. She kept walking. He stood to one side, let her pass, said nothing.

Lifts.

The man was standing stock still some twenty feet behind her in the corridor. She could sense more than see him.

Patterson pushed the lift call button.

She waited, every sense strung taut. The lift pinged and the doors slid open. It was empty. She stepped in, pressing the button marked “Basement 2”—the underground shopping precinct, she hoped. The doors began to close, but a thick hand wedged itself between them and they opened again to reveal the wrestler, looking straight at her.

Was this the opposition? Or an opportunist mugger?

He stepped into the lift, his eyes still on her. The doors closed. She moved carefully onto the balls of her feet.

He was reaching for her.

Choose your attitude. Make your move. Understand that it may hurt, but know that you can win, she thought.

He was reaching for her clothing. What did he want to do? Grapple?

She jogged slightly to the side, waited for him to compensate. His hand was extended, open, searching for a grip on her. She breathed
out, then clamped his wrist in her left hand, steadied it, and with her right grasped his index and middle fingers and twisted hard, sinking her elbow and shoulder into the movement, feeling the bone crackle, the tendons go.

He ripped himself away, the flutter of astonishment on his face giving way to pain. He staggered back and leaned against the wall of the lift, looking at his hand, the ruined fingers.

“Give me the phone,” she said.

He looked at her, blinking. She tried in Mandarin.

“Shouji gei wo
.
”

She held out her hand. He didn’t move. The lift was approaching Basement 2. She took a step into him and executed a sharp kick to the knee, angled so that the knee buckled and he went straight down, cracking his head on the control panel as he did so. She reached down and took the phone from him. He didn’t resist, just lay still, breathing hard.

The doors slid open.

She signalled fallback, and after a decent interval on the street, drenched and chilled by the wind, she was picked up outside a 7-Eleven a mile or so away. The driver—her rail-thin, goateed watcher—had the air conditioning on, and she lay on the back seat and shivered as they ploughed through the typhoon, the windscreen wipers working hard.

“So tell me,” she said.

“They just turned up. Two cars. Two in each. Some guys on foot. I counted three. They covered the main entrance and the MTR station. And, well, there they were.”

He had turned into an underground car park and the car was circling down into its echoing, concrete belly. He parked and checked his mirrors.

“We wait here for a while,” he said. Patterson sat up. His eyes were on her in the rearview mirror. “You okay?”

She nodded, giving him a wry look.

“Sorry about the fire door,” he said.

She bit back a response. Frederick Poon was his name, she knew from the file. A watcher, a street artist.

“Who were they?” she said.

He sighed, shifted in his seat.

“I don’t know. Clumsy. Not State Security. They could be military maybe. Had the build. The haircuts. But… I don’t know.”

She waited a moment.

“Private?” she said.

“Could be. I guess.”

“Did they make you?”

He turned in his seat and cocked an eyebrow.

“Not a chance, lady.”

“You’re sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“Did any of them enter the building? A short one, looked like a fighter. T-shirt.”

He frowned, shook his head. “Not that I saw. But could have come from another entrance.”

“And the agent?”

Frederick Poon was silent. Then:

“Didn’t turn up. We were in position. But he didn’t come to the platform.”

She waited for more.

“He’s tricky, you know, that one. Probably took his own route. Don’t worry too much.”

She was hungry. He gave her a bar of chocolate.

The phone was a burner. Nothing on it. No numbers, no calls dialled, no calls received, nothing in the contacts. They’d send it to Cheltenham for a proper going over, but it was, the two of them agreed, of no operational intelligence value. Frederick even had a gizmo for reading the SIM card, and he fiddled with it while they sat there and the car windows fogged up. But, again, nothing.

Which meant, of course, that the wrestler, whoever he was, was practicing communications security. In the way a professional might.

“Okay, time now,” said Frederick Poon. “They’ll be here in five.”

And after exactly five minutes, a white SUV swung in next to them. Patterson opened the rear door of the car.

“Bye, Frederick. Next time.” She moved to get out. The SUV was waiting. Frederick turned in his seat.

“Hey,” he said.

She turned.

“Sorry about the fire door.”

“Whatever,” she said.

They drove fast to Chek Lap Kok in the gathering night. Patterson watched Hong Kong recede under the storm, its lights strewn into the darkness, the city tensed on the edge of the sea. Such power in this place, she thought.

She turned to the driver, another Poon. Winston, this one, wiry like his cousin, forty-ish.

“How’s your aunt?” said Patterson.

“Eternal,” said Winston. Granny Poon, Eileen, presided over this little jewel of a family network. Eileen Poon, possessed of a will of iron, a taste for the foul Indian cigarillos known as bidi and a gift for operational security, had given the Service more than three decades. In the late seventies, as a guileless factory girl, she had penetrated and laid waste to the Communist Party cells that infested the Crown colony. Her Majesty’s Government had given her a codename,
HAVOC
, and, very quietly, a medal she wasn’t allowed to keep. Then, with a sniff, it gave Hong Kong to China. Granny Poon carried on regardless.

“I’m sorry not to see her,” said Patterson.

“She’s with us in spirit,” said Winston, his eyes flickering to the mirrors. Chase cars, Patterson assumed, watching their rear. Was Eileen behind a wheel back there, weaving through the traffic, reeking bidi clamped in her teeth?

“London wants you,” he said, and passed her a secure handheld.

It was Hopko, from London.

“Tell me you’re all right.”

“I’m all right.”

“Position?”

“Clear. Heading to the bird.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No.”

“How badly did you hurt him, out of interest?”

Patterson said nothing.

“And our friend?” said Hopko.

“Gone. No visibility.”

Hopko didn’t reply straight away. Patterson pictured her in an operations suite at VX, tight skirt and tawny cleavage, the initial after-action report in her hand, the stillness in her eye as she calculated operational fall-out, cauterization.

“His concerns?” said Hopko.

“Real, I think.”

“Why?”

“They’d been to his flat. Put the frighteners on and dropped this message thing on him. Whoever they were, they were real.”

“Something gives,” said Hopko.

“Something does.”

Another pause.

“Come home,” said Hopko.

Patterson smiled.

“On my way.”

Winston dropped her at Departures, the wind falling now, the pavements steaming, the glowing terminal rearing into the night. She slipped from the car and into the crowd.

She moves well, thought the watcher.

You don’t see how dangerous she is. Or how brittle.