The Spy's Daughter

by Adam Brookes

  “My best guess?” She stopped, tried to compose herself for a moment. “My best guess is that Monroe was having an affair with this unidentified Asian woman, alias Nicole. Nicole was a honey trap, and whoever owns her put the burn on him. They did it at the motel outside Baltimore, five months ago. Probably he was made conscious and assigned a handler, which explains why he was so panicked. It’s why his wife reports him so withdrawn and anxious from this point on. It’s why he ends up shooting himself. The cottage in Wachapreague he used as a safe house. They met him there. They handed over details of a bank account in the British Virgin Islands, probably where they were depositing his salary. The account is in the name of a holding company based in Suriname. Monroe would have drawing rights on it.”

  She paused. Hopko was expressionless.

  “Monroe was an agent. He was coerced. He was paid,” said Patterson.

  “I met him, you know,” said Hopko.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, several times.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Very accomplished. Very urbane in that Washington way.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Oh, you know. You size people up when you meet them. Gauge how much use they can be to you.”

  You do that everywhere, thought Patterson. So do I.

  “No use looking for the usual outward markers of success: clothes, money, social status,” continued Hopko, in full flow. “It’s Washington. None of that applies. That rumpled fat chap in a beard and tweed with breath like a crapulous hound might just be a Pentagon procurement specialist with fifty billion to spend. Or a staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee. He has power. He has access. Monroe could scent power and access from a mile off. As for us, well, he was politely condescending to his British counterparts, but considered us emasculated, the way neocons do.”

  She was angry, Patterson could see it: the steel in her. She was angry and dangerous. She spoke quietly, slowly, as if her words were of some special relevance to Patterson.

  “He felt we were of little relevance. That the British always over-promise and always under-deliver, like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The twist of the knife.

  “I think his judgement was flawed in a number of ways,” said Patterson. Now I’m just trying to placate her.

  “Oh, it was.”

  Hopko stopped, mulling over the question before she asked it.

  “What’s in Suriname, Trish?”

  “Well, whoever manages that account. The shell company.”

  “Why Suriname?”

  “Close to the Caribbean secrecy jurisdictions. Out of the way. Easy to hide. A sizeable Chinese population, Chinese investment.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What do you mean, is that all?”

  “Not keeping anything from me, are you?”

  Patterson felt her chest tighten.

  “No. No. What?”

  “You don’t happen to have any other lead on a Suriname connection to what appears to be a Chinese-run penetration of U.S. intelligence, in the unhappy form of Jonathan Monroe?”

  “No.”

  “Answer me very carefully now, Trish. Be sure.”

  Patterson felt the uncertainty taking hold.

  “Val, honestly, no. I don’t know what you mean.”

  Hopko waited for a beat, the beat Patterson knew to be her drawing back the blade, readying the thrust.

  “All right. I am taking you at your word. That being understood, would you be so good as to tell me what in the name of God your man Philip Mangan is doing in Suriname right now?”

  In the afternoon, Mangan lived his cover, wandering around Fort Zeelandia, the great stone edifice used by the Dutch to control the mouth of the Suriname River. He wandered along its parapets, skimmed over its exhibitions. He photographed the spot where, in 1982, President Bouterse had had fifteen dissidents shot. They were lawyers, journalists, professors, the sort who are always taken first. The December Murders, they were called, another little token of evil in this lush, sleepy country. He lingered there for a moment, caught by the poignancy of the story, and by a regret for the profession he’d once had.

  He drank a coffee at the café, watched the other tables for the wrong presence, the wrong look, then walked back to the hotel and waited.

  He presented himself, at ten, at a wrought-iron gate on the edge of Paramaribo. Beyond the gate, fountains played and terracotta sculptures rose out of pools. The gardens were ablaze with creeping, flowering plants, great profusions of them. Mangan smelled the air and caught their perfume dissipating in the night heat, next to cigar smoke and cooking meat—a grill, perhaps. The house was floodlit, glowing, a modern, asymmetric structure of glass and wood, its roofs a mass of angles and tension. There was nowhere to knock. He pushed a buzzer on an intercom and the gate clicked open.

  A woman in a maid’s black-and-white uniform waited for him at the front door. She showed him into an atrium with a stone floor. He could hear voices, glimpsed a dining room, candlelit, glittering. The maid took him up a wide staircase, and said, “Mr. Posthumus is waiting upstairs.”

  He was standing in what seemed to be a library. He wore the tan suit, a light blue shirt, and glasses perched on his forehead. The blinds had been drawn, and a bottle of rum and two glasses stood on a little table. He raised both hands in greeting.

  “Philip! Hello! Please.” He gestured to an armchair, sat and poured the rum, and Mangan watched its golden syrupy flow onto the ice and felt his throat clutch in anticipation.

  “So, what can I do for you?” said Posthumus.

  “Well, we spoke before about, you know, navigating around this city, and I’m looking for a local guide. A lawyer, perhaps, someone who can point me towards the right places, procedures. You know what I mean. And I wondered if I could run a few names past you. Just see what you think.”

  Posthumus looked at him, amused.

  “Of course.”

  Mangan took a piece of paper from the inside of his limp, grubby linen jacket, handed it to him. On it, five names. Posthumus flicked his glasses down onto his nose and perused the list, sipping his rum.

  “Well, it’s a strange list, Philip, I’d say. These were recommendations?”

  “Yes. Yes, they were.” He’d taken them from the phone book.

  “I see. Hmm. Well, the first one, Hendricksen, is not here any more, I think. He is back in Rotterdam. The second one, Suwanto, does mainly wills and estates. I mean …” He looked at Mangan over his glasses, a mock-surprised look. “Not really what you’re looking for, I would say. The third here, Kumar, he’s a more commercial guy. I mean, he could be useful, I suppose.”

  He looked up again, a puzzled look.

  “And then T. Y. Teng,” he said. “Now, that’s an interesting one. Who recommended these names, if I may ask?”

  “Oh, just someone with an interest.”

  Posthumus, nodded, amused again.

  “I am tempted to ask—an interest in what? Because this guy, Teng, is a curious fellow.”

  “Curious in what way?”

  “Well, he’s not very active here in Paramaribo, since most of his business seems to be conducted elsewhere in the Caribbean. He’s a fixer, let us say.”

  “And who does he fix for?”

  “Not for the likes of you and me.”

  “Who then?”

  Posthumus exhaled, world-weary. “Philip, you have some background in China, I believe. At least, your internet profile tells me you do. You know how many wealthy Chinese people are moving their money, yes? Looking for safe places. Discreet places. Places where the Communist Party bloodhounds won’t find it. Maybe it’s legitimate money. Profits from your factory or your construction company. Maybe not so much. Maybe you’re a Party guy in some shitty little town in the interior and you’ve been skimming on big state-backed infrastructure projects—airports, highways, what have you. A little profitable sub-contracting here, a little corner-cutting there. Before you k
now it you’ve a hundred million RMB in the bathroom closet and no way of explaining it. So. You call T. Y. Teng.”

  He sipped his rum.

  “And he, and his friends, help you get it out of the bathroom closet, out of the country, into Hong Kong dollars, into a shell company, then into U.S. dollars, and on its happy globalised way. Maybe this money spends some time in one of the beautiful casinos you see here in our cosmopolitan city. Or maybe it buys and sells a few little businesses. Or what about some real estate in London or New York or Monaco? And after a while, your money, only slightly depleted by fees and commissions, is wrapped up all snug in a company with a meaningless name in the Caymans, or the Cook Islands, or the Virgin Islands. Delaware, maybe. Jersey. Which is owned by a different company. Which is owned by … you get the idea. And T. Y. Teng is the only person—the only person—who knows how it got there. And, by the way, he’s forgotten.”

  “Does he only do Chinese money?”

  “Good heavens, no. Could be Kazakh, Russian, Malaysian, anybody’s. And of course it’s not only the good T. Y. who is at work. Your countrymen and mine are among the most able and assiduous at these tasks.” He smiled. “What amazes me about the British is the way they make the whole business seem respectable, you know? Even tasteful. They dress up all their tax havens in flags and … and hats and ostrich feathers and tradition and lend them all these wonderful backstories. And suddenly it’s as if you’re buying into a luxury brand, or sending your money off to an expensive boarding school to be turned into a better, more refined version of itself.”

  There was no humour in Posthumus’s tone. His expression had turned harder than Mangan had seen it before. Mangan shifted in his chair, fingered his glass.

  “Is it only hot money he’s interested in? Are there other sides to his work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mangan shrugged. “Does he do other favours?”

  Posthumus exhaled again and smiled thinly.

  “Oh, I’m sure he does.”

  “Do you—” But Posthumus had cut him off.

  “Philip, you are starting to alarm me a little now. I think you may be straying into waters that are best left untested. And I also think it’s time you told me what the true nature of your interest in Suriname is. What are you really doing here?”

  Mangan paused.

  “I’m a journalist. I really am. You looked online. That’s me.”

  “Oh, I did. And I feel like what I see there isn’t quite—how would you say?—congruent.” He tilted his palm. “One thing doesn’t quite match the other.”

  Mangan felt a twinge of alarm.

  “Well, I’m not sure what I can do about that,” he said.

  “If I were you, I’d think of something.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “Why the interest in Teng, Philip?” said Posthumus, very serious now.

  Mangan held out his hands, tried to rally.

  “All the reasons you just gave. He sounds utterly fascinating.”

  Posthumus just looked at him, and Mangan began to understand that he was on the threshold now.

  “Perhaps I should just go and knock on his door. Ask him some questions,” Mangan said. “You know, feel him out. Take a view.”

  Posthumus dropped his voice.

  “I really think, Philip, in fact I urge you not to insert yourself into Teng’s field of vision. I really think that would be a mistake.”

  Too fucking late for that, thought Mangan, thinking of the coffee shop, Pearl, her furious mother.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you are what you say you are—a journalist, a reporter, a good guy, maybe a bit of investing on the side or whatever your story is—you are not … equipped.”

  He took a sip of his rum.

  “And if you are something else, Philip, which, increasingly I am inclined to believe you are, you are not prepared.”

  Posthumus arched his eyebrows in a do you understand look. “You are tweaking the tail of the tiger. And I believe things may,” he said, “start moving rather quickly.”

  Mangan swallowed, felt the rush of adrenalin as physical shock.

  “Are you suggesting …?”

  Posthumus nodded.

  He put down his glass, stood and fled.

  Mangan, back on the street, the heat unrelenting, jogged towards the Buena Vista, every alarm clanging and ringing in his skull, the acrid cloud in his gut screaming, Move. Now.

  At midnight, he clattered into the foyer. The desk clerk stared, said nothing. No, Have you had a wonderful night, Mr. Mangan? No, Have you been frequenting the fine culinary establishments of Paramaribo? Or perhaps the glamorous and well-appointed casinos? Were you lucky, Mr. Mangan?

  Nothing but a frightened Creole girl, the night clerk, in a shabby waistcoat who didn’t know what to do, dropping her eyes, turning away.

  He crashed through the double doors, taking the stairs two at a time. At the door to his room, he stopped, listened, ear pressed against the wood. Silence. He turned his key in the lock, pushed the door open hard but stepped back.

  Nothing.

  He crammed what he could into the duffel bag—the laptop, dirty clothes. Money and passport went in the money belt at his back. He was out of the room in under three minutes, creeping down the hallway to the emergency stairs. The entire hotel was silent but for a phone ringing, unanswered, down in reception.

  Why doesn’t she answer the phone? he wondered.

  The emergency stairwell was dark and smelled of garbage and concrete. He moved down it clumsily, breathing heavily, pausing at each landing. It brought him to an exit by the kitchen that led into an alley, pooling water reflecting the street lamps, the smell of urine and cannabis now. The rental car was half a block away. Take it? Leave it? He edged along the alley in the darkness, the strap of the duffel bag biting into his hand. He emerged on the street full of purpose. A visitor to Paramaribo, at midnight, leaves his hotel and goes for a drive. A late flight, perhaps. An unforeseen contingency. Nothing to see.

  He strode along the sidewalk towards the car, unlocked it, the chunk of the locks loud in the night, threw the duffel bag on the back seat, got in, closed the door, and waited a beat. Someone stood on the steps of the Buena Vista, looking out into the street. Was it the receptionist?

  No, a man, with tension in his stance.

  Look for the vigilance, Philip, Patterson had told him once, in an arid flat in Addis. Gives them away every time. Look for the way they scan the environment for their target, for threat.

  See their separateness, exiles even in their own space.

  And when he turned the key in the ignition, the man looked sharply towards him, shifted his stance, craned his neck. Mangan pulled slowly out of the parking space, moving off sedately. In his rear-view mirror, he saw headlamps come on. He drove, unrushed, to the end of the block, turned right, then floored it. The car lurched, wheels spinning against the asphalt. He hurled it at another right turn, roared down the block, then another right and another and he was on a broad thoroughfare heading south with the river on his left, the sweeping arch of the Suriname Bridge to his front. He had no idea where he was going. The road back towards the border with French Guyana lay over the bridge. His way out, surely. He leaned on the accelerator, pushed towards the bridge.

  Something in his mirrors now, coming up very fast.

  How the living fuck?

  And then it was level with him, a silver SUV, a face at its window, peering at him. He stamped on the brake, let the SUV roar past him, hauled the car into a side street. Going where? No idea. As he turned, he saw the brake lights on the SUV come on, the thing going into a turn, and then he was bumping down something only half paved, with shanty and trees on either side, winding towards the river. He saw a chain-link fence in his lights. And the road dead-ended. Obviously.

  Mangan stamped on the brake, reversed the car off the road into undergrowth, turned the engine off and got out. His hands were shaking, h
is jaw rigid, a blinding headache taking shape just behind his eyes. He listened. The SUV was a little distance up the track, moving towards him slowly, its high beams on. He dragged the duffel bag from the back seat, threw it in the bushes a few yards from the car and looked about.

  The track ended in mud and garbage—plastic bottles, styrofoam. The chain-link fence, and then … a jetty, was it? And the river.

  He ran to the fence, shook it. It was loose, rattled. He searched for a gate, a gap. A few feet to his right, a length of link had come unmoored from the post. Mangan went onto his knees in the filth, wrapping his fingers around the wire links, wrenched the fencing upward, opening a narrow slit between it and the ground.

  The SUV was rounding a bend in the track, its headlights coming to bear on where he knelt.

  Mangan forced his head and shoulders under the fencing, his hands and knees squelching and scrabbling for purchase in the mud, forced himself forward. His waist was through, and then he was unable to move, stuck, the jagged wire caught on something. His belt? He lay on his stomach, feeling behind himself, fumbling blindly. Jesus Christ. And then his fingers found it, the wire gouging a hole in his trousers, just above the hip pocket, and he wrestled with it, exhausted now, and the lights of the SUV were on him and he could see his own shadow, so they must have seen him. He shook and yanked at the wire and then, with a spang sound it came free and he scrabbled his way under and out, his heart pounding, mouth dry.

  He stumbled forward in the darkness. The jetty protruded some thirty feet out into the river, its wood slimy, rotten. On either side lay a tumble of jagged rocks strewn with garbage, falling away fifteen, twenty feet to the black water. He heard car doors slamming, voices. The headlights were on, but the jetty was in shadow. The men rattled the chain-link fence behind him. Then a voice.

  “Okay. Enough of this.” English, with the lilt of the Caribbean. “Just stay where you are, please. We come round to fetch you.”

  He dropped to his knees, squatting, where the jetty met the riverbank.