The Spy's Daughter

by Adam Brookes

  “Of course. Good Lord. Of course. Shoes off. Absolutely. No problem.”

  Emily gave an exaggerated sigh of relief and ran her hand through those curls, and Este cracked a huge grin.

  “I was thinking of getting some rugs, anyway,” Patterson said. “The place needs some colour.”

  “I’m likin’ this one,” said Esteban.

  “Oh, we’re likin’ this one a lot,” said Emily.

  Later, Patterson microwaved a pizza and sat by the open window in the hot dark, eating, watching, listening. A siren, a helicopter, snatches of speech, and the rustle of cicadas in the gingko trees, and beneath it all the city’s sub-aural thrum.

  The boy was still there, just on the edge of sight, bobbing along on his moped, the glowing coals in his eyes.

  His presence brought a sour pain, right to the centre of her, somewhere between heart and gut, the pain a perfect alchemy of self-blame and sick regret. He was still there when she tried to sleep. My habashi, he used to call her in his reedy boy’s voice. My Ethiopian. My black woman. And all she could do was to imagine laying down her weapon in the yellow-brown dust, shucking off her body armour and unlacing her boots, walking away.

  4

  Silver Spring, Maryland

  Pearl had finished her calculus problems, prepared for the next day’s class, cleaned out her backpack of crumpled paper, hairbands, leaking pens and candy-bar wrappers, tidied her room and put away her laundry, and in Pearl Tao’s world such endeavours merited a pause, a moment on her bed wrapped in a fleece blanket, alone with her phone.

  She needed the blanket because the air conditioning was on, and her father always set it at about ten below zero and her room turned into a walk-in refrigerator and she froze, so she pulled the blanket tight about her and snuggled in among her pillows and soft toys: a Tigger, a pink unicorn, an Elmo. It was evening, and low sunlight flooded the room, painting the walls a golden orange. The smell of her mother’s cooking was drifting up the stairs.

  She took a picture of herself, her face half out of shot, her tongue out, the blanket pulled up around her neck, the sunlight reflected in her glasses. She peered at the image. Her complexion was, well, as usual, the spattering of spots and welts on her pale skin, the breaking-out around the nose, pores like a lunar landscape. She had put her dreary, featureless hair up in a bun. Her mother urged her to wear make-up, but when she did her skin turned really volcanic. She sighed, and sent the picture to Cal, the phone emitting a crisp, metallic ting as it went.

  She heard the front door closing. Her father was home. She looked up from her phone. Was he coming upstairs? No. She heard the murmur of her parents’ conversation below her. They were speaking Mandarin, in their furtive way. She heard the scrape of the kitchen chair as he sat heavily, and her mother padding about, putting away his jacket and his briefcase and taking him tea that he’d blow on and sip noisily.

  Ting.

  It was Cal. A photo of him in his lab coat, holding a handwritten sign that read: MUKBANG!!!! munchigirl!!

  She texted back: new one?

  For reals she does like a ton of hot sauce.

  Pearl found herself smiling.

  ok imma watch

  She streamed the video. munchigirl was in her bedroom, as usual, somewhere near Shanghai, judging from the girl’s accent. Somewhere out in Zhejiang, maybe? She wore a strappy top that showed her shoulders, and her eye make-up gave her that manga princess look. She had a little pout, and beautiful hair. On the table in front of her was a colossal bowl of rice, a stewed chicken, a pot of what looked like hongshao rou, red-cooked pork. munchigirl, deadpan, introduced all the dishes and talked briefly about their ingredients. She picked up a pair of chopsticks and set about the chicken, dunking each mouthful in scarlet chilli sauce and holding it out to the camera so the viewer could see. She was mostly silent, but held eye contact with the viewer, and each little murmur of appreciation—Mmm, this is good. Ooh, so spicy— brought a rush of likes and dislikes and comments skating across the screen. A lot of men seemed to want to marry her. She continued eating, unperturbed, holding Pearl’s gaze. The scene felt intimate to Pearl, as if munchigirl were her friend or a sibling sitting across the table, sharing a meal, allowing her in. Pearl scrolled through it, a full hour of video. munchigirl ate all the food, and then signed off with a peace sign and a sing-song, Bye-byeeeee.

  She texted Cal.

  lol how she not fat like a dumpster

  I know right?

  u like her

  mm yeah my type. Specially the false eyelashes

  Cal loved these videos, considered himself an aficionado of the weird web. He watched hours of Ukrainian women brushing their hair, people getting put in plaster casts, community dancing.

  Wot u doing now

  In lab finishing up. Hey come tomorrow after class.

  wait why?

  something to show you!!!!!

  k

  making baozi this Saturday. yum. Pork and jiucai.

  Pearl felt a twinge of apprehension. Was that an invitation? She bit her lip and thought for a moment.

  k. see you tmrow

  She heard her mother’s tread on the stairs, and clicked quickly away from Cal’s texts. There was a tremulous tapping at her bedroom door.

  “Dinner’s ready.”

  Pearl watched the door.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  A pause.

  “You should come and eat something.”

  “Ma, I’m not hungry, really.”

  Her mother tiptoed away.

  They didn’t come for Mangan straight away.

  He made himself available, wandering about in public places, sitting at a roadside café eating grilled fish and nasi goreng, watching the street in the hot, clammy evening. He heard the call to prayer as the dusk came down, and felt for a moment taken out of himself, a momentary release from fear.

  Mangan knew fear now as his natural condition. It was an acrid cloud in the pit of his stomach, rising, falling, expanding, contracting. He measured his experiences by it. He felt for it now, its sour pulse as he gnawed on the fish, picking the bones from his mouth.

  When would they come?

  Perhaps they would just watch.

  He ordered another beer and the boy brought it, cold and dewy, and he held the bottle against his forehead for a moment, then took a long pull. He lit a clove cigarette and worked through his options.

  Option one. Skip town. Move, make a hard target. Staying still makes you vulnerable. Get somewhere safe, busy, crowded, anonymous. Kuala Lumpur, maybe. Singapore. Move.

  But the harder you run, the harder they chase. Running just excites them.

  Or.

  Option two. Do what London keeps screaming at you to do. Get on a plane. Come in, Philip. You did everything we asked, and we know how hard it’s been. Oh, and we might have a few questions. Hard questions, Mangan thought, to be administered by some very skilled, very hard men. He wondered where they’d do it. Not the swanky little mews house in Paddington where they normally kept him. Somewhere quiet, he thought, out in the dank English countryside. A place you can’t see from the road, with fences and low brick buildings and a military policeman on the gate. We are very patient, Philip, but we are going to need to talk to you. He heard Hopko’s voice and felt the uptick in anxiety that always accompanied it.

  Or.

  Option three. Do what the handlers tell you. Do what Patterson said, months, centuries ago, back in the Paddington house. When things have gone to shit, Philip, live your cover. Be who you are, or who your cover says you are. Sleep, eat, make a plan. Resoluteness and a good story, that’s what you need.

  They knew he was here, in Sorong. How? Some infestation on the laptop, firing off a digital flare each time he logged on? Impossible to tell. The phone? But he’d been living on burners, bought in damp stores down muddy side streets, places that sold supposedly untraceable SIM cards. Just the sort of place they’d look, you idiot.

 
Unless the woman had sold him, of course. Here’s someone interesting. Anxious, scruffy bulé paying top dollar for burners. Tall. Red hair. Green eyes. Can’t miss him. And someone had mentioned it to someone whose ears had pricked up and they’d mentioned it to someone else, and the knowledge of Mangan’s whereabouts had floated, like a splinter on the tide, towards the gaping maw of Chinese intelligence.

  For the last five weeks he had zig-zagged the length of the Indonesian archipelago—boats, small planes, then buses lumbering through lush forests, down red earth roads, shuddering to their appointed halts in tiny, forgotten villages where the barefoot men in sarongs held fighting cocks under their arms and stood and stared. He had slept in dingy hotels in out-of-the-way towns. He had lived his cover. Philip Mangan, progressive journalist, liberated from the controlling exigencies of the corporate media, roams Asia mapping the marginal, narrating the unspoken. He’d written obscure stories and posted them on the website. One on land use in Ambon. Migrating Home: Displaced Muslims and Christians Struggle to Reconcile Claims to Land and Genealogy. Another on the schooners that ply the routes between Indonesia’s islands. Crafting the Modern: the Pinisi Boats of the Archipelago. He’d loved writing these pieces, had tried to make them true, despite their daft titles.

  But for all the truth in the writing, the pieces themselves and the website on which he posted them were fictions. Fictions dreamed up, built and paid for by clever tech wallahs in the basement of VX. The fictions of cover.

  At what point, he thought, do I also become a fiction? Or am I one already?

  He stood unsteadily and dropped rupiah notes on the table, looked out cautiously into the twilight. The air smelled of kerosene, cigarette smoke and, running beneath, the sea. He walked through silent, darkening streets back to his hotel. He realised that at this particular moment he didn’t care that much if they were watching or not. It came over him more frequently of late, this feeling. Often, alcohol helped bring it on. He’d be ducking, diving, watching his back, worrying about cover and comms, and it would just bubble up in him. What’s the point?

  In his room, he stripped and lay naked under the mosquito net in the darkness, smoking. Why not just do what London wanted? Why not come in? They’d question him, and he would cope. He would give them everything he had. China, Ethiopia, Thailand, everything that had happened over the last two years. How, blown, he had watched a truck driver bleed out in the cold night beside a highway, a stubby knife in his chest. How the man, as he died, had asked for his child.

  How he’d once had a lover, but she’d been taken.

  How his agent had died, sprawled in a casino bedroom on the banks of the Mekong River, foam at the mouth, skin mottling.

  He’d tell them how it felt to lie. How it felt to be played. He’d tell them of his revulsion, and his compulsion, the rhyming contradictions of the self. Spy. Don’t spy.

  But they knew it all. And the fevered self-examination of a minor, blown agent in a hot and distant country wouldn’t interest Hopko, or Patterson, or any of them.

  What would interest them, back there in dank England, other than dissection of his operational carcass?

  Well, one thing.

  He had one thing to make Patterson sit straighter and lean into him, to bring Hopko’s glittering gaze on him, to make him matter. And the thing? A tiny, smooth bead of possibility residing unspoken and silent just beneath the meniscus of memory. He reached for it as he lay there in the vile, fetid room, and there it was, hard and urgent.

  Very desirable, this little bead of possibility.

  And then, as if scenting his thoughts, they came.

  5

  It was around three. Mangan struggled up from the depths of alcohol-soaked sleep at the creak of a chair, the smell of something, someone. He sat bolt upright, blinking at the darkness, heart pounding. Beyond the mosquito net he could make out the orange glow of a cigarette. The someone was sitting at the little writing desk. The orange ember moved upward, glowed brightly for an instant, and Mangan heard the crackle of the burning tobacco. Then a long exhale, like a sigh.

  Mangan tried to think of something to say or do.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he managed.

  The figure shifted on the chair a little.

  “You’re awake,” it said. A man’s voice.

  “Get the fuck out of my room,” said Mangan.

  The seated figure said nothing for a moment and Mangan got the impression it might be deferring to another person. Was there more than one of them? He looked around, but could make out nothing through the mosquito net and the darkness.

  “We’re so sorry to disturb you,” came the voice. English spoken by a non-English speaker, the pronunciation Asian, Chinese perhaps, but American inflected.

  “The fuck you are. Get out.” His mouth was dry, his words thick.

  “What was said?” The voice was quiet, very assured.

  “What?” said Mangan.

  “What was said?”

  Mangan made to get off the bed. He was still naked.

  “Don’t,” came the voice. “Stay there.”

  Mangan swallowed. Were they armed?

  “What was said, Mr. Mangan?”

  “Fuck you. Get out.” The words were starting to feel as if they belonged to another, as if someone else were speaking them. That’s fear, he thought. Fear does that.

  Another crackle and exhale.

  “You have been a busy, busy man the last, what, year and a half, two years. Lots going on.”

  “I’m a journalist. What’s it got to do with you?”

  “What’s it got to do with me? Well. Okay. Let’s see. Couple of months ago you were hanging out with a slutty little Chinese colonel, right? That’s got to do with us.”

  “No.”

  “This colonel was a little free with his confidences, am I right?”

  “None of your fucking business who I hang out with.”

  “You know what happened to him? He got a little frisky with the birdie powder in some shitty casino up the Mekong someplace. What an asshole. They found him with a needle sticking out of his groin. You hear that?”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure. Well, the people I work for, they feel that this colonel talked a lot of shit to a lot of people. And, I’m sorry to say, they hold the opinion that he said some shit to you, Mr. Mangan.”

  The voice paused for a second, drew on the cigarette again, the orange glow.

  “You are talking to the wrong person.” It sounded weak, he knew.

  “Really. The thing is, Mr. Mangan, the people I work for—”

  Mangan found himself speaking over the voice.

  “Who do you work for?”

  There was a pause, as if the voice were displeased at the interruption.

  “The thing is, the people I work for want to know what got said, Mr. Mangan. The colonel was very forthcoming to us before his needle episode. He talked a lot. Lots of detail. He told us about you, all your creeping around Asia, bits of Africa, pretending to be a journalist. We know about your communications, the darknet sites you use, all that stuff. And believe me, back home they know your name. We asked around, and they’re like, what the fuck? Philip Mangan? The one who did nine kinds of crazy shit in Beijing two years ago? You’re famous. Or blown. Yeah, you could call it blown. And they’re like, so what did Colonel Slutski say to Mangan? When they were alone, dreaming up their little conspiracies, what got said?”

  Mangan felt the polished bead, deep in his mind. Hard as a gemstone.

  “This is bullshit. Now get out.”

  The voice was moving, approaching the bed. And there was another person in the room, to Mangan’s right, also moving now. Mangan felt his own fingers digging into the mattress.

  “Mr. Mangan, please don’t tell me to get out. In fact, you tell me to get out one more time and we may have a frank disagreement, okay?”

  The voice was standing at the end of the bed. Mangan could just mak
e out his form through the mosquito net, his eyes.

  The voice was quiet, matter-of-fact.

  “Mr. Mangan, we don’t do kidnapping or rendition or any of these things like your Service and the Americans and the Russians do. We don’t grab people off the street and drug them and put them in a nappy and fly them off for a torture cruise. We don’t blow them to pieces with drones. We don’t put polonium in their tea. It’s not in our playbook. Not yet, anyway. We like to think that we’re smarter than that. So we prefer to ask you nicely, okay, to please tell us whatever the fuck it is you are doing.”

  The other figure, to his right, was standing very still. He tried to rally.

  “What do you mean what I’m doing? I’m not doing anything. Now fuck off and leave me alone.”

  There was silence in the room. The voice stood still at the end of the bed. So did the other one, to Mangan’s right. Then the voice spoke again, as if he’d decided to restrain himself. The tone was calm, but Mangan could feel anger running underneath it.

  “Okay. Okay. So the colonel, before he shoots up, he has a little moment of defiance, right? Just a moment. He gets all brave. And he tells us he’s done something. ‘I’ve done something,’ he says. ‘What have you done?’ we ask.”

  The snick of a lighter, and Mangan suddenly saw through the net, in the shocking light of the flame, a face. A young face, Asian featured, and, Mangan registered, absurdly handsome. A fine-boned, full-lipped, dimpled, doe-eyed treasure of a face. Then darkness again, the glowing tip of the cigarette, the visage fading at the back of Mangan’s eye. The man spoke again.

  “He says, the colonel, ‘I’ve let something go.’ He says, ‘I’ve let it go on the wind. For them to use. And they’ll find it and they’ll fuck you with it.’ That’s what he says. He means us, right? My bosses. Me. We are the ones getting fucked in this scenario. But who is going to do the fucking? This, we do not know, because Colonel Slutski wouldn’t tell us, and he had an appointment with a needle. Now what are we supposed to think?” He was feigning exasperation. “I mean, what?”