The Spy's Daughter

by Adam Brookes

  “We just want to talk, okay? Sort a few things out.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Like your name. Mr … Barclay, is it? Or maybe something else.”

  A pause.

  “Because, no Barclay at the hotel, so we think your name is maybe Mangan. That’s right, isn’t it? Come on, now.”

  Mangan could hear them pushing through the undergrowth, looking for a way through the fence. He crawled towards the water, then scrambled awkwardly over the rocks as the bank fell away. The space beneath the jetty was dark and reeking, the water lapping below. He took hold of a wooden pile, pulled himself under, looking for footholds on the rocks, breathing hard. He stood there in the darkness, bent double, the rotting planks of the jetty above his head, letting his eyes adjust while he tried to calm his breathing.

  “Please come out, sir. This is getting tedious.” The voice was closer. They had come through the fence. Then slow footsteps on the jetty above him, heading out towards the water, and muttering. The footsteps stopped, turned, came back. And the man was stepping off the jetty and picking his way onto the rocks, swearing to himself, then shouting.

  “Look, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is. Please, we just need to talk. No need for some big dyugu-dyugu.”

  He stepped from rock to rock, moving down the bank. Mangan made him out in the darkness. He was big, bald, broad-backed, holding his arms out from his sides while he looked around. He stood with his back to Mangan, balanced between two rocks, his feet at angles. Unsteady.

  Mangan had no plan, just a calculation of the distance between the two of them and an impulse, childish in its simplicity and rooted in panic. Clutching the wooden pile, he stepped out from under the jetty, planted one foot, raised the other.

  The man was turning, reaching for something at his waist.

  Mangan emitted some sort of weird yelp, and kicked. His heel hit the man in the base of the back. For a split second the bald man tried to retain his balance, bending frantically at the waist, wheeling his arms in a circular motion. But then he was gone, falling face first eight feet or so, thudding onto the rocks below, turning over and falling again to the water’s edge. Mangan heard a strangled cry of pain, or anger, some splashing, the man’s gasping—a hand scrabbling for purchase on the rocks. From above, another voice.

  “Sonny. You there, man?”

  Mangan ducked back under the jetty, emerging on the other side, scrambling on all fours over the rocks, away.

  “Sonny? What’s goin’ on?”

  Mangan’s breaths were tortured wheezes, as if the fear and shock had shrunk his airway. He stopped and looked back. The second man stood in the light of the headlamps, perhaps twenty yards from him now, at the end of the jetty, hands on hips, uncertain what to do, still calling out. Were there only two of them?

  Mangan stumbled into undergrowth, moving back towards the fence, clouds of insects on him, sweat running into his eyes, branches clawing at his face. He stopped and retched, tried to breathe. Where was the fence? He moved on, uncertain, guiding himself by the lights from the SUV through the trees, and before he knew it he was level with his own car. The fence, he now saw, was only about twelve yards end to end. He’d just gone round it. Christ almighty, you really are an idiot.

  The second man was still standing by the jetty, shouting, peering into the dark.

  Mangan moved out of the undergrowth, crossed the path to his own car, retrieved the duffel bag from the bushes, opened the rear door to throw it in. And then stopped.

  Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait.

  The SUV’s headlamps were on. So the keys, well, must be in it. He ran over to it. It had a starter button, the dongle sitting on the passenger seat. He threw his duffel in the back, jumped in, his thumb on the starter. At the sound of the engine, the second man turned around, his eyes wide in the light of the headlamps, his hands on the chain-link fence, his mouth opening in a furious shout. Mangan threw the thing into reverse, wrenched it through a three-point turn and tore off up the half-paved road, thumping the steering wheel, screaming to himself, Car thief! I’ve got your fucking car! You stupid, incompetent pricks! The screams part-hysteria, part-weeping.

  Mangan was over the bridge, leaving the city now, the road dark and empty. Three hours back to the Marowijne River, and the border. He was weak and terribly thirsty. Somewhere around Tamanredjo, he pulled off the road, suddenly, and searched the car. In the glove compartment he found a phone. It was locked. He couldn’t turn it off and had no means of getting the battery out. He weighed its value—the names, numbers, planted in the servers to grow and bud and reveal the shape of a network—against its ability to track him. He dropped it in a sewer.

  In the back of the SUV lay a brown holdall. In it were tape, zip cuffs and a taser. And a hood, made of black sacking.

  We just want to talk.

  He threw all of it into the bushes.

  They’d know who he was, soon. They had his name. He’d be on camera somewhere. They’d have DNA from his hotel room.

  So, move.

  Just before dawn he was back at Albina. He dumped the car in a banana plantation, trudged the last mile into town, down to the beach. The men stood next to their long, slender boats, ready to take him back over the river, to French Guyana.

  Weak, filthy, he squatted in the prow, pushing all the fear down into the fissure in him. He had wielded the weapon given him by the Chinese colonel, cracked open the little bead of possibility.

  And his reward was a glimpse of a network. A Chinese network, its silent workings reaching deep into America. He found himself shaking his head, laughing a little to himself at the enormity of it, the danger of the knowledge he now held. The power of it.

  The sun was coming up and he could hear the birdsong even over the outboard motor, whistles and whoops across the water.

  PART THREE

  The Tell

  29

  At Sibley Memorial Hospital, Trish Patterson waited in a corridor. She had to be accompanied into the Intensive Care Unit, where Molly Monroe now resided. This time, there was a cop on the door. A male nurse in green scrubs took her in. Molly was connected to a welter of tubes and monitors. She was barely conscious, her eyes open but glassy. She was entirely bald, all her hair had gone, and she had wasted away. Patterson felt a jolt of shock.

  “What happened to her hair?” she asked the nurse.

  “It fell out,” he said.

  Patterson gave him a direct look.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I can see that. Can you tell me why?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss her case with you. You are not family.”

  Patterson sat by the bed, laid her hand on Molly’s.

  “She’s paralysed, isn’t she?”

  There was a pause while the nurse wrestled with the question.

  “Yes. She has lost the use of her arms and legs over the last few days.”

  “And soon it’ll be her breathing, won’t it?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Her diaphragm will become paralysed too, won’t it? And she won’t be able to breathe.”

  “I—”

  “What have they tested for?”

  “Everything.”

  “And?”

  “I think you know.”

  “It’s a heavy metal, isn’t it? Thallium?”

  The nurse sighed.

  “Is she still able to speak?”

  The nurse just shook his head.

  “The cops have been?” said Patterson.

  “They were called in three days ago.”

  “What did they say?”

  The nurse shrugged. “They tried to ask her questions, but she couldn’t really reply. So they took photographs and left.”

  Patterson bent over Molly, searching for any sign of recognition in the woman’s eyes. But as she did so, Molly stiffened and let out a long, keening wail. Patterson took a step back. For a moment she thought she saw fear on the woman’s face, but the look guttered and vanished
and Molly convulsed violently, her torso arching off the bed and quivering, the cry turning to a choking, attenuated rattle.

  The nurse said “Oh, God,” and hit a button on the wall, and in a moment two more nurses appeared, but there seemed to be little for them to do, other than to ensure that Molly didn’t propel herself off the bed. She was struggling for air now, her breath coming in snorting, animal gasps. Patterson slipped out of the room, took the stairs down and ran out into the night.

  It had rained and the trees were wet and filled with the soughing of the cicadas. She walked quickly away from the hospital and wondered at her own disgust, the deep roiling of her anger.

  Polk was angry, too, though Patterson was coming to understand that anger was a part of his state of being, a sort of incredulous fury at the state of things. They were at a kebab place on N and Polk was inhaling charred cubes of lamb and rice and peppers.

  “Now we’ve got a case,” he said. He framed a headline with his fingers. “We’ve got a doozy of a case. And it’s a homicide. A homicide, Patterson. A suspected fucking poisoning, using methods from fucking Torquemada, or Saddam. Just fucking baroque. Who knew?” He tore off a piece of bread, rammed it in his mouth, chewed. “So who the fuck is a suspect? What do you say, Patterson? Who did it?” He wasn’t looking at her, instead concentrating on his food.

  Patterson nursed a plastic bowl of spinach and lentil soup.

  “They’ve done tests on the house, by now, surely? Did they find the source?”

  “Nope. There are traces where she threw up, but all the foodstuffs are clean.”

  “So someone fed it to her in a restaurant. Or a delivery? Takeout, maybe?”

  Polk just chewed, saying nothing.

  “The Chinese don’t do this, Frankie.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Poison the wives of their own agents. It’s not like them.”

  “Thing is, Patterson, why’d they do it? Whoever did it. Why?”

  “Well, she knew something.”

  “What’d she know?”

  “I don’t know, Frankie. She knew his friends. She knew his history. She knew his movements, his bank balance. She knew stuff that would correlate when you walked back the cat. When he was here. When he was away. When he got funny phone calls late at night. Sudden unexpected trips out of town, purpose not entirely clear. She knew Nicole.”

  Polk looked up.

  “She knew who, now?”

  “Oh. Nothing.”

  “What did you just say?”

  Idiot.

  “Frankie, have you put a tail on me?” she said quickly.

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Have you?”

  He looked right at her.

  “No. We have not. And you can take that to the bank. You being tailed?”

  She nodded. Polk thought about it, chewing.

  “Huh,” he said. “Who the fuck is Nicole?”

  “It’s nothing, Frankie, it’s not relevant.”

  “Well, it sure sounded like you thought it was relevant.”

  “It’s not.”

  He dropped his fork on his plate and wiped his mouth.

  “Something about me, Patterson,” he said, “I bear grudges. Just so’s you know.” And with that he rose and walked out of the restaurant.

  30

  Pearl’s father had not spoken to her in four days. Not a word as they left the hotel in Paramaribo, not a word on the plane, not a word as they landed at Dulles, not a word on the interminable taxi ride home, the Beltway jammed, a sea of red brake lights blurred by rain, and not a word since.

  Now he ignored her across the dinner table as he shovelled jiaozi into his mouth, leaning over his bowl, the tablecloth spattered with vinegar. Her mother sat in silence, too. She was pale, emotionally drained. Pearl felt the atmosphere as explosive, fraught with potential energy, requiring only the tiniest catalyst to turn kinetic.

  She pushed a jiaozi around her bowl, watching the dark vinegar pool, the flabby dough break apart and the pork and chives and fat spill out.

  She put her chopsticks down and pushed her chair away from the table. Her mother looked up at her, the worry soaking her gaze.

  “I think I’ll go do some work,” Pearl said. She walked across the room to the stairs, looked back towards her father.

  “I don’t know what I did,” she said. “All I did was talk to some random guy in a hotel coffee shop. I don’t know why this has caused you to freak out. I genuinely don’t—leaving aside the whole question of the bizarre nature of our so-called vacation, and your weird behaviour, which is hard, trust me. But if we are going to fix this, you are going to have to communicate.” It sounded like a little speech.

  Her father didn’t look at her, just continued eating.

  “Should I say it in Mandarin?” she said. Her mother was shaking her head, fear in her eyes. Don’t. Her father didn’t respond.

  She went to her room, undressed, got into bed with her laptop and put Bach on her headphones—the E major Partita. She had no email and no messages, apart from one from Cal, which was just a question mark and a smiley emoji, and an abrupt acknowledgement from Telperion that they had received her security clearance forms and submitted them.

  With someone named Beetle absent from the relatives’ column.

  She leaned over to turn off her bedside light. But then the door crashed open, and her father stood there, in hiking boots and a waterproof.

  “You get up,” he said.

  Pearl pulled the blanket up to her chin.

  “What? Really, Dad? What are you doing?”

  Without a word he walked across the room, ripping the blanket from her grip and off the bed, grabbing hold of her arm, pulling her upright, hard.

  “Get up. Get dressed.”

  “Dad, what are you doing?” She was shaking, on the edge of tears.

  “Now!”

  She put on her glasses, pulled on jeans, her Hopkins T-shirt, pink sneakers, her hands trembling as she fumbled with the laces. He was standing by the door, waiting. They went down the stairs and to the garage. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.

  “We take your car,” he said. “You drive.” She got into the red Honda, and her father was putting a shovel on the back seat.

  “Dad?” she said quietly.

  “Shut up,” he said. They took 29 north, past the Beltway, the suburbs thinning. They had almost reached the Patuxent River when he told her to turn off. They wound through some darkened subdivisions, neat places with lawns and playsets and mailboxes and minivans in the driveways, places that spoke to Pearl of normality, of comfort. He made her pull into a parking lot adjoining a neighbourhood sports field.

  Her father shoved her out of the car and they walked past the silent baseball diamond and a little skate park towards a stand of trees. He carried the shovel and a flashlight and a handheld, the screen silvering his face in the darkness. At the treeline he stopped and looked around.

  “What are we doing here, Dad?”

  “You look for a little blue tag. On a tree, or bush, something,” he said.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Just look.”

  There it was, on a scrubby sapling, eight inches or so above the ground, a piece of blue duct tape. She saw it first, in the beam of the flashlight. Her father went to it, scratched aside leaf litter and twigs, started to dig. A few inches down, he knelt, feeling around with his fingers, starting to work something free. He couldn’t get it out at first, so he took the shovel again and loosened the earth around it.

  Pearl just stood and watched. She was cold. The thing in the hole was in a black plastic bin liner, heavy, perhaps half a cubic foot in size. Her father wrenched it free from the soil and filled the hole in, then spent some time covering the surface with leaf litter, trying to mask the depression in the soil. He took the blue duct tape off the sapling, picking at it with his fingers. The park was quiet, but he was watchful, scanning the approach to the treeline. He picked up
the thing, whatever it was, and they made their way quickly back to the car.

  He said nothing at all as she drove, just worked at his fingernails, trying to get the dirt out.

  Back in the garage, he took the thing to his workbench. He handed her a box cutter.

  “Cut the wrapping off. Take it out,” he said.

  She swallowed.

  “Dad, I don’t want to do this, whatever it is.”

  “You do it. Now.”

  She sliced open the bin liner.

  The money was all in old twenties, in wads of maybe a thousand held together with elastic bands. There must have been a hundred thousand or more. She didn’t know what to do. Her father stood behind her. She could hear his breathing. And she felt a sensation almost like falling, this new knowledge propelling her into new understandings of who she was—what she was.

  “What’s this for?” was all she said.

  He didn’t answer, but stepped around her, his shoulder brushing against hers. He picked up a wad of bills and turned to her. He leaned down, held the bills in front of her face.

  “We do this for us,” he said, “For me, for you, for our family.”

  He stared at her, and she sensed his fury, his fissile nature.

  “It is for all of us. Family. You will understand this.”

  Ask, and risk his anger? Or stay silent and comply?

  Choose silence. Choose safety, no matter how temporary.

  “Go to bed,” he said.

  She looked down, walked to the door.

  “Pearl,” he said.

  She stopped, waited.

  “You tell anyone, you put your family in danger. Mama, me, Auntie, Nai-nai, everyone. You put them in danger.”

  And as she stood there, under the neon lights of the garage, shock and tears in her eyes, her throat, she understood that until now she had thought her world was one way, when in fact it was another. And now her father was revealing the real world to her, little piece by little piece, so her view of it was always incomplete, rendering her unable to give an account of it, even if she tried. And only at some point in the future would its true, awful shape be apparent.