The Spy's Daughter

by Adam Brookes

  “Which province is that, actually?”

  “Shanxi. Like, real glamorous.”

  “Why’s it glamorous?”

  “Seriously, you are such a Hong Kong child. Everybody knows Shanxi is the total opposite of glamorous.”

  “Why, what’s there?”

  “Mountains. Coal. They make this great black vinegar.”

  Cal made a face of recognition.

  “Ah! So that’s what you smell of.”

  She felt a jolt of alarm.

  “Wait. What?”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “No, really, my whole house smells of it. It’s entirely believable I stink.”

  Cal folded his arms. He seemed to want to make this a heart-to-heart. She wanted that, and didn’t want it at the same time.

  “So you won’t come because you anticipate that he won’t want you to come?”

  She found herself folding her arms too, mirroring him—neurologically interesting, she thought—and leaned against the railing.

  “I just want to avoid having to negotiate the issue. It’s exhausting.”

  “Tell me again why he won’t let you come and live on campus? In a dorm? Like every college student ever?”

  “They want me at home. I told you. And it’s cheaper. By far.”

  “Cheap? Cheap? Pearl, you are on full scholarship and a corporate sponsorship. Money really should not be an issue here. I mean, seriously.”

  She shrugged, uncomfortable at where his questioning was going.

  “Why do they want you at home? I mean, what purpose do you serve, do you think?”

  She wasn’t looking at him now, and had started to chew the inside of her cheek.

  “I think it’s more than serving a purpose. I’m their daughter, their only kid.” She could see he was regretting his words.

  “I’m sorry, I just meant … what need of theirs are you having to fulfil?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, Cal. But he really wants me at home. And so does Mom. They feel like they have to nurture me, nurture this …”

  “This thing you have.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your talent.”

  “I guess.”

  “Your genius.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “And do they? Nurture it?”

  “Do you think they don’t?”

  He sighed now, looked down.

  “I think you have a very rare ability, Pearl. Very rare. You see stuff that the rest of us don’t see. I’m, like, completely, insanely jealous of your ability. But you have to use it. You have to get out into the world. Get out of the comfort zone, let things happen to you, grow.”

  “The comfort zone? Seriously? Did you just say that?”

  “What?”

  “You’ll have me thinking outside the box next.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. You’re talking in meaningless metaphors.”

  He shook his head. “I mean that you will not grow by sitting in your bedroom at home every night. You will grow by hanging with other young, very smart people. By talking to them. By navigating new things and new people and new places.”

  “Really? Listening to my roomie talk about her … whatever.” She realised she had no idea what a roommate might talk about. “And doing my laundry? And going to frat parties? That’s better for me? I don’t just sit in my bedroom, Cal. I work. I think. It’s quiet there. I achieve stuff.” She paused for a moment. “And I write code for you,” she said.

  He frowned. That had hurt, as she knew it would.

  “You code for all of us.”

  “I code, therefore I am,” she said.

  He was wondering what she meant by that, she could see.

  “You got invited to a frat party?” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  He held out a hand to her. She took it.

  “I for one, would like to hang with you more, and not talk about drone swarms,” he said.

  “I feel like I don’t know how to talk about anything but work.”

  “Which is why you should come and live on campus. Interesting things might happen.”

  “Yeah, right. Like what?”

  “Jeez, Pearl. I don’t know. Like, making spaghetti and staying up. Like, watching the movies of Zhang Yimou. Going for walks. Sailing on the bay. Roller derby. I don’t know.”

  “What is roller derby, actually?”

  “Exactly! We’ll find out. Adventures in roller derby. Life awaits.”

  He was looking at her questioningly. He still held her hand.

  “Cal, I sort of know what awaits, right? I live at home. I graduate. I go straight to work at Telperion. I do my Ph.D. Maybe then I can explore roller derby with you.”

  He sighed.

  “Roller derby waits for no man,” he said. He looked disheartened. He played with her hand. “What about the spaghetti part?”

  “I can manage spaghetti. As long as my dad has, like, a month’s advance warning.”

  She walked to her car, the little red Honda—her sanctuary, and the spoils of a fierce campaign of attrition waged against her parents. Her mother had insisted on driving her to campus and picking her up every afternoon all through her freshman year. Pearl had found it humiliating and infuriating, and demanded she be allowed to drive herself. Months of trench warfare followed, the advantage gained only when Pearl had threatened to move out altogether. Her parents had sullenly relented and a nine-year-old Civic with 76,000 miles on the clock appeared in the driveway. Pearl loved the car with a passion that surprised her, and made her wonder what else in life she was missing. What else she might be able to love.

  She turned on WTMD, for its pithy indie rock. I-95 was slow, the traffic between Baltimore and Washington torpid in the hot afternoon, the sun blinding. She didn’t mind the commute. She sat in the car’s air conditioning, letting her mind wander. As she passed the National Security Agency on her left behind its screen of trees, the traffic loosened a little, and she headed for the Beltway.

  She parked in the driveway, stepped from the car, and felt the heat wash over her. Her mother was standing at the front door.

  “Ni wan le,” she said. You’re late.

  “I went to Cal’s lab,” she replied in English.

  “You should call.”

  Pearl said nothing, shucked off her shoes, dropped her bag on the kitchen table. The house was cool and dim and smelled of cooking fat. And vinegar. Her mother was fussing at the fridge.

  “You should call,” she said again.

  “I really don’t have to call, Mom,” Pearl said. “Sometimes …” She left the sentence hanging. Her mother put a glass of iced tea on the table in front of her.

  “Why you go to Cal’s lab?”

  “Just to say hi. But he showed me the new swarm manoeuvre.”

  “He showed you?”

  “Yup.”

  Her mother looked at her, expectant.

  “Yes, it worked,” said Pearl.

  “So you can tell the company.”

  “I can tell the company.”

  “You tell them.”

  “I will.”

  “Smart girl.”

  “My piece of it was pretty small.”

  “You tell them. Your algorithm.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  Pearl picked up the iced tea and her bag, and hurried from the kitchen, her mother watching her. She climbed the stairs, her footfalls soft on the carpet, and went to her room. It was dark and cool, and the curtains were drawn. She stripped to her underwear, put on a Doctor Who T-shirt and plaid pyjama bottoms, and tied her hair in a ponytail, before settling down cross-legged at her desk. She turned on her laptop, the big one, and cleaned her spectacles as it booted up. She went to her email and tapped compose.

  Dear Dr. Katz,

  I just wanted to let you know the new swarm manoeuvre worked out pretty good. I watched it in the la
b today with twenty-four nano-quadrotors. (This was the one used my trajectory definition and management algorithm.) The modified Bezier spline curve approach seems like it’s a go (you said so!) for feasible trajectory planning, but I still think we got issues with computational efficiency.

  So, Telperion’s summer internship program not entirely wasted on me!

  Yours,

  Pearl Tao

  She hit send, and toggled over to her music. She filled the room with a wide, cool ambient track, and sat back, biting her nails. She read the email again, realised she sounded young and eager. Too late now, she’d sent it. Then, a reply.

  Dear Pearl,

  Way to go! That’s great news, and all of us here at Telperion knew you would not be wasting the internship! Remember that we remain very concerned about minimising execution times, which of course plays into the computational efficiency question. Keep at it, and we’ll talk when you come down to see us next month.

  We need to talk about your courses this semester. Thinking about the trajectory generation, have you signed up for Differential Geometry? And have you looked at the graduate course for Partial Differential Equations? Hope so. What else?

  We also need to get going on your security clearance. I’m asking Carla at Telperion Integrity to contact you about this. She’ll walk you through it.

  Well done.

  John K

  PS Miriam tells me your stipend should have been in your account last week, but she hasn’t had confirmation from you. Can you get back to her? Tks.

  Way to go, Pearl. She brought up her online banking, and there it was. Twenty-seven thousand dollars to see her through the semester, placing her among the wealthiest undergraduates on the Johns Hopkins campus.

  What do they think they are buying? she wondered. She could be done with Partial Differential Equations in a week, given the opportunity. But the company made her sit through the course. And as for the algorithm. It was fine as far as it went. It helped to govern the drones’ movements, allowed them to decide as a group how they would plot a course based on incoming information from sensors, how they would plan their neat little flip between the posts.

  But that was all. It was such a small thing.

  There was a tapping at the door, and then her father was peering into the room, wearing his eager expression.

  “So it worked?”

  She looked straight ahead at her screen.

  “Yes, Dad, it worked.”

  “All waypoints?”

  “All waypoints.”

  He nodded, satisfied.

  “You tell Telperion already?”

  “Yup.”

  “What they say? Katz, what did he say?”

  “He said, Way to go, Pearl.”

  He grunted and the door closed. Pearl sighed. Perhaps Cal is right, she thought. I could be hanging with my roomie, out of my comfort zone, eating ramen noodles and painting my toenails.

  She thought of the smooth, silver drone in her hand, of the difference between the inanimate and the animate, where that line lay.

  She went to the window, opened it, and the hot evening air swept in, bringing twists of barbecue smoke, the cicadas an effervescent whine and chirrup in the trees, children’s voices from a yard down the street. She stood and listened, trying to envisage other lives, to imagine a life different to her own.

  And then her mother was calling her to come and eat.

  Her father was already at the table, snuffling and slurping his way through a bowl of noodles fried with mushrooms and snow peas. Some chopped soy chicken and a plate of cabbage sat in the middle of the table. Her mother was folding a dish towel.

  “Chi ba,” she said. Eat.

  Her father was giving a terse description of his work day. Problems with the servers, the cooling mechanisms running amok. He’d stepped in and saved the day from the idiots who didn’t know what they were doing.

  “What are you doing tonight?” he asked her in Mandarin.

  She shrugged. “Some problem sets. Integrals. Basic stuff.”

  “They’re not challenging you.”

  “I can challenge myself.”

  “Why do they go so slowly?”

  “Telperion wants me to do it this way, so I do it, right?”

  “Why, though?”

  Her mother was watching the two of them, listening.

  “We have been over this a thousand times, Dad.”

  “You did integrals when you were thirteen.”

  She spooned some noodles into her bowl, some cabbage.

  “Okay, so why don’t I just go do my Ph.D.? Right? Right now,” she said. “Why not? I could. You want a prodigy, I can do that.”

  “No, no, no.” Her father was pointing his chopsticks at her. “You stay with Telperion. Much better that way. The money’s good, and it’s one of the best tech companies out there.” He swallowed. “Defence technology never goes out of fashion.”

  She shrugged. Her father brooded. She knew what was coming. He just couldn’t restrain himself.

  “But back in China,” her father said, “they would make you go much faster. Qinghua University. Or Jiaotong. They’d make you work.”

  “Back in China, back in China,” she parroted.

  “Mitchell,” said her mother, “stop it.”

  “They would challenge you.”

  “I’m American, Dad.”

  And as she said it, her father laid his hands on the table, and Pearl caught his glance across at her mother, their eyes meeting for a second.

  “Yes,” he said, “you are American.”

  And Pearl, for the thousandth time, sensed an understanding between her mother and her father that she was not privy to.

  Mangan stood in the bathroom, heaving, spattering the sink with blood. He felt his nose, probing the bridge carefully. It was swelling, and a deep stain was spreading beneath his eyes. The pain was lessening a little. He washed his face, went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands.

  What the hell was that?

  That, he supposed, was a cease and desist letter from Chinese intelligence. A polite one.

  He reached for a cigarette, lit it, his hands shaking.

  Since Mangan had begun leading his hidden life, two years earlier, in a cool Beijing autumn, he had come to understand the role of fear in it. Fear seemed to be both the natural condition of the trade and a tool used in advancing its purposes. Fear of discovery, fear of failure, fear of intimacy, fear of betrayal, fear of the future. To cope, he understood his life in espionage as having opened a fissure in him, and it was into that fissure that he crammed his fear, and all the things that had happened. That was where the hidden life was, in the fissure. He sat there and took the memory of the man by the mosquito net, and the pain, and thrust it deep into the fissure, tamped it down.

  Mangan looked at his duffel bag, leaned towards it, then stopped himself. He stood and went to the door, pressed his ear against it and listened, before walking slowly round the room, running his hands over the surfaces, under tables, atop the wardrobe. Had they left anything? A camera? Anything? He turned the light off and went to the window, pulled the blind back and looked out to a weed-strewn courtyard, some roofs, a garage, and the first signs of dawn. He took his phone, popped the back off and took out the battery, put the disassembled pieces under the pillow, and sat again, shaky, nauseated.

  Now, the duffel bag.

  In an inside pocket was a red, plastic ballpoint pen. He unscrewed the barrel, and extracted a tiny coil of paper. On it in minute letters, an address:

  Suriname. Paramaribo. 76 Prins Hendrickstraat.

  Teng. Lawyer.

  What was said.

  He took the scrap of paper and put it in his mouth, chewed it and went back to the bathroom and spat the pasty remains into the toilet.

  He lay on the bed, touched his face, his nose, trying to ride the pain.

  A name, an address, coordinates in space and time. Given to him by a renegad
e colonel in Chinese military intelligence, some months earlier, by a river in Thailand, moments before officers of China’s Ministry of State Security descended. The colonel passed the words to Mangan in the manner of one man handing another a weapon.

  Use it, the colonel had said.

  Part of Mangan wanted to stop, to walk away. For two years and two operations he had been contracted to British intelligence, probing the China target, acting as handler, courier and cutout, and discovering facets of himself he had never known—some he’d never wanted to. A natural, Hopko had called him, for his powers of observation, his clarity of mind, and his uncertain, cockeyed bravery. Man’s a bloody natural. The words had sustained him even as the fear curdled inside him, and the fissure grew deeper.

  But Mangan, to his own discomfort and surprise, knew that another part of his divided, doubting nature needed to keep marching. Just over the next hilltop. To face whatever’s there. In the knowledge that he held a weapon, and if he used it well he would eviscerate a network of Chinese intelligence. And he would demonstrate his own worth, the value of the path he had taken. And he would matter to those who mattered to him.

  Now, as he lay there in the stifling heat and the rustling of night insects, he sensed in himself, beneath the fear and the pain, a quickening of thought and intention. He thought of the angel-faced man, the hard man in the T-shirt, their controlled violence, the system that bred them, lent them agency and licence. He thought of everything that had been taken from him. He felt the hatching of a choice.

  I am not finished yet.

  Patterson spent the weekend wandering Washington, looking at the monuments in the sodden, buggy heat. And buying rugs. On the Saturday, she ate at a little barbecue place in Shaw where every single person was black, a new experience for her. She sat at the bar and ate ribs in a hot, smoky sauce with a crisp, cold slaw, her fingers sticky and her throat burning. TVs on the walls were showing some baseball game that everyone was riveted to, Nats and Cardinals, and when it ended some young guys, lawyers, chatted her up and tried to place her, her accent, laughing uproariously. Where the frik is Notting-ham? One of them was a veteran and they silently acknowledged each other. He bought her a beer and, when she left, saw her decorously to a taxi.