The Spy's Daughter

by Adam Brookes

  She raised the weapon and placed the barrel in her mouth, her teeth against the gunmetal. She tasted the oil, closed her eyes. A car passed on the highway; night insects chirruped; her breathing was ragged.

  She took the barrel from her mouth, laid the gun in her lap. She started to cry again, great heaving sobs, started the car and headed out onto the freeway, going west.

  Dear Philip,

  I’ll be in San Francisco.

  Pearl

  48

  Mangan was on the balcony, alone. Patterson opened the screen door and joined him, shutting it behind her. Mangan leaned against the balustrade, looking out over the parking lot, the highway, a sea of orange neon in the pre-dawn dark.

  “You’re up early,” she said.

  He was lighting a cigarette, shaking the lighter, then cupping it.

  “Heard anything?” she said.

  He just looked at her, saying nothing.

  “Share,” she said.

  “We should go,” he said. “We should go and meet her.”

  “They’re on their way, Philip. They’ll find her, Harker and the others. They know what they’re doing.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He spoke very quietly. “What do they intend to do with her, when they find her?”

  “She’s given us assurances.”

  He drew on the cigarette.

  “And how much weight do we attach to Val Hopko’s assurances?” he said.

  She swallowed, thinking of the Chinese colonel, Mangan’s agent, her agent, kneeling in the dust by a river in Thailand, the two MSS men hauling him to their car as she watched—following orders, Hopko’s orders.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, Trish, that Pearl is—”

  “Pearl is an extremely valuable asset, is what she is. Her father’s laptop is probably even more valuable than she is. They’ll find her. We’ll get to her.”

  “The lady doth protest too much.” He was very calm.

  “Fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just think it through for a minute,” he said. “Hopko’s been all over me since this thing started. I thought I was being all clever, bold, seizing the initiative, following the lead. To Suriname, here. But she knew, didn’t she? All of it. For Christ’s sake, Posthumus was reporting directly to her. She’s working me, Trish. She’s … she’s …” He shrugged. “Why?”

  “You feeling used?”

  “I think I don’t understand my position.” He looked straight at her. “I think perhaps I never did.”

  “What’s this? A galloping epiphany?”

  “I think you know what I mean.”

  “I think you have delusions of grandeur.”

  “What?”

  “So you’re the centre of the story now, are you?”

  “That’s fucking nonsense.” They were talking over each other now. “She is using me, and you, too.”

  “All about you.”

  “You’re being puerile.”

  “You may believe that your contribution is central, but believe me, Philip, it isn’t.”

  “She is being fundamentally dishonest with us.”

  “Oh, grow up.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” he said slowly.

  “I’ll talk to you any bloody way I like.”

  “Trish. Stop!”

  She caught herself. He was looking at her, astonished.

  “What the actual fuck?” he said.

  She shook her head, jabbed a finger at him, but could think of nothing to say.

  He leaned away from her, regarding her with that straight, unmoving look, and took another drag on his cigarette.

  “What?” she said finally.

  “I’m leaving.”

  She felt her stomach turn over.

  “Where to?”

  “To where Pearl is.” He stepped past her, opened the screen door, went inside and walked quietly to his room. She followed him, seeing that he’d already packed the ridiculous duffel bag. He picked it up.

  “Has she told you? Where she is?”

  He didn’t reply, just made for the front door of the flat. But the hallway light came on, and Brendan was standing there in a T-shirt and shorts. He stood between Mangan and the door.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said. He spoke very quietly.

  “Get out the way,” said Mangan.

  “You just stay right the fuck where you are,” Brendan said, pointing at the floor. “What has she said?”

  “Out the way. Now.”

  “You tell me immediately what Pearl has said to you.”

  Mangan stepped towards him, making to shoulder past him, but Brendan stepped in his way again. Mangan was a head taller.

  “Fuck off,” he said.

  And then Brendan moved quickly, a ducking movement, and did something that Patterson couldn’t quite see, but Mangan doubled over, his arm out, his face contorted in shock and pain. Brendan took a step back, clinical.

  Patterson stepped between them and Mangan lurched for the door, flung it open, and was off down the corridor towards the elevators, one hand on the wall to steady himself, the other dragging the duffel bag.

  Brendan stared after him, then looked at Patterson, gauging how he would get round her.

  “Don’t try it with me, sweetheart. The result won’t be the same,” she said.

  Brendan backed away, his expression stone.

  And Patterson knew she’d just taken a step off the path, out into treacherous ground, like the ground in Iraq, where you didn’t know what lay buried just below the surface, where a scratching in the earth presaged catastrophe, the rending of limb and artery. And she had a sudden vision of the little boy barefoot on the moped, her agent, those warm, dark eyes laughing at her the last time she’d seen him alive. My habashi, he’d said. She thought of the morning they found him, just after dawn, eyeless, splayed across a garbage pile on the outskirts of town, smoke rising in the air, buzzards wheeling overhead.

  Not this time, she thought. Not this time.

  At around five in the morning, Pearl passed a turning onto a dirt track that appeared to lead away into low hills. She took it, bouncing along for a half-mile or so, and pulled the car into a narrow ravine, out of sight. She got out, pissed, then got back in and closed the door.

  To her surprise, she woke in early, cool sunlight. She scrambled up to the high ground and lay down, looking over at the highway. The traffic was sparse. No red SUVs.

  She turned over and lay on her back, looking up at the sky, adhering to the rock beneath her as the void spread out before her. She thought of the physics of one human being’s violence upon another, the transmission of kinetic energy used to snuff out conciousness.

  She lay there most of the morning, in the sun, watching buzzards soaring on the thermals above the road. Once, her father had taken her birdwatching. She’d have been ten, eleven, maybe. They had driven to a state park near Baltimore and sat in the bushes; he had a big pair of binoculars, and they used them to watch a blue heron flap lazily along a creek. It was the one and only time they went birdwatching, and the pursuit of ornithology left the family as abruptly as it had arrived. Other enthusiasms—barbecue, Civil War history, guitar—had come and gone too. She had sat in her room, waiting for math camp and wondering where this frenzied search for distraction came from. What he was displacing.

  Now she knew.

  Her parents had been coerced. That much was clear to her. And the elusive cousin Beetle was the man behind it, she guessed. And now she was coerced as well. The threats disgusted her, and when she thought of her mother, sitting there on the bed, giving her pathetic explanation of their entrapment—At the beginning, you do it because it’s so exciting—she felt her heart break a little. A whole life lost, she thought, stolen by these manipulative, lying men, with their threats and their petty, pointless ambitions.

  And now a whole life was be
ing taken from Pearl.

  In the early afternoon, she got back in the car, feeling for the Ruger under the seat, then pushed on.

  At least she knew where she was going now. She felt hungry, a little stronger, the feeling of inevitability having receded an inch or two.

  Would he be there?

  Could he give her a life back?

  At Eugene, she turned onto I-5 heading south, watching her mirrors.

  Five hundred and thirty miles to San Francisco, down through the Cascades, the country rolling out towards the mountains, the cold air thick with pine resin. If she didn’t stop, she could do it by midnight.

  She was almost at the California line when they found her.

  49

  Hopko’s rage was silent, deep.

  “And why didn’t you stop him?” she said.

  Brendan ignored Patterson, speaking across her.

  “I had him stopped, until Typhoid Mary here stepped in.” He jerked his head towards Patterson.

  Hopko took off her glasses, put a finger to her temple.

  “Tell me, Trish.”

  She shrugged, opened her mouth to speak, but Hopko had changed course, starting to shout.

  “Don’t shrug at me. Don’t you dare shrug your shoulders at me. You will take a good look at yourself and attempt to regain some professionalism. You will tell me, immediately, what you know of why Mangan has left, despite his explicit orders. Tell me, now, and then get out. Get out and return to the Station, and prepare to re-examine your career and your reasons for being here.”

  Patterson felt herself falling. Going to a place where she hadn’t been for a long time. She felt like a child facing some incomprehensible wrath for some unfathomable wrong, the futility of resisting the parent, the teacher. She felt the tension go out of her, felt her shoulders fall, her knees start to shake. She wondered if she might be sick.

  “I think he’d had enough,” she said quietly.

  “Had enough? Had enough what?”

  She shook her head. “Of what? Of this. Of you. Of being used. Of being told he’s a natural, when in fact he’s realised he’s entirely fucking disposable. As we all are.”

  Hopko looked—there was no other word for it—disgusted.

  “What in God’s name do you mean?”

  Patterson could feel a sort of fatalism setting in.

  “Do any of us have any value to you?”

  Brendan snorted with contemptuous laughter.

  “Trish, I think you are becoming a little overheated,” said Hopko.

  “You won’t even tell us what this operation is about, what it’s for.”

  “You are not cleared—”

  “How are you going to use Pearl, when you get her?”

  And for a moment Hopko paused, and Patterson saw it, saw that she’d hit home, though she didn’t know why. She could feel that the answer was just on the edge of her consciousness, almost in reach. She saw Brendan’s eyes flicker over to Hopko, too. Hopko spoke slowly.

  “That is none of your concern.”

  Patterson thought, I’m throwing it all away, right here, right now.

  “She’s linked in some way to BOTANY, isn’t she?”

  “Stop it. Now,” said Hopko.

  “Monroe threatened to blow BOTANY. And now you need Pearl.”

  Brendan had a hand to his forehead.

  “You need Pearl,” said Patterson, “to save BOTANY, or to use as leverage, or something. You need her, and you’re going to get her, and then you are going to use her.”

  Hopko was silent. She’s calculating, thought Patterson.

  And it was then, as the three of them faced each other in the stale air of the safe flat, in the pre-dawn, that she sensed the enormity of it. Perhaps it showed on her face, because Hopko had a pacifying hand up. Brendan was reaching for a phone.

  “Trish,” said Hopko quietly, “Please sit down. I need to talk this through with you.”

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” said Patterson. She turned to where her overnight bag lay next to the camp bed. She kept it packed, like she did her daysack in the army, ready to move. Now she picked it up, reached for her jacket and checked her handheld was in her pocket. Brendan stood between her and the door. The movement made her feel stronger and the adrenalin was kicking in.

  Let it come, she thought. It’ll come. The speed, the clarity. It’ll be there, for the soldier in me.

  Brendan had his phone to his ear, and was signalling she should stay where she was. Hopko was shouting something, but she didn’t listen. She moved towards Brendan. He looked absurd, this wiry little white man in his T-shirt. She felt the surge of aggression taking hold. Brendan took the phone from his ear, tossed it onto the camp bed. He had raised both his hands now so they were either side of his face—I don’t want any trouble—but Patterson could read it, the way his elbows were tight to his torso, the way he was on the balls of his feet, ready to move hard, fast.

  And he was fast.

  She was equal to it, but only just, the heel of his right hand coming at her face, at her upper lip or her nose, his whole torso behind it, hips turning into the thrust. She fell away from the waist, felt the strike miss her by a whisker, his left coming straight after but wide, this time. And she had a split-second wordless memory of a sergeant who’d taught unarmed combat on a close observation course, some godforsaken training area somewhere, the grey rain dripping from the trees. The sergeant, SRR, sandy-haired, moustached, had yelled at them, Go for the fucking legs. Smash the knees, the fucking ankles. And the sergeant had watched Patterson, watched her drive the stamp kick into the inside of her opponent’s knee, watched her aggression, and he’d yelled at the others, Watch her, watch ma’am here, and do it like that, you fucking mincers.

  She pivoted on the ball of her left foot, drove the heel of her right straight into Brendan’s knee, felt it give and heard his intake of breath, and then she was turning back into the strike, the heel of her right fist making contact with his right ear, and he was going down, inert even before he hit the floor.

  She turned. Hopko was watching her, standing very still, hands at her sides, her eyes alight.

  “He came at me,” Patterson said.

  “Oh, he did,” said Hopko. Her tone was terribly calm. “And what are you going to do now?”

  Patterson licked her lips. She went to reply, but caught herself and turned away to leave.

  Hopko spoke to her back.

  “If you stay, I can probably rescue you, repair the damage,” she said. “If you go, it’s over.”

  Patterson stopped, looked at the floor.

  “If you go, you lose everything. Your career. Your rank. Your reputation.”

  Patterson felt her own heart beating.

  “Your honour, even.”

  Hopko took a step forwards, her footfall soft on the carpet.

  “Matters to you, doesn’t it? That word. So archaic, yet it’s all bound up in who you are.”

  Hopko was right behind her now, speaking so quietly, her words incisions.

  “Do we disappoint you, Trish? Do I disappoint you? You poor thing, you. Desperate to serve. Desperate to find the master you can believe in, the objective you can march towards. But we always disappoint, don’t we? The moment we accept you, you, we disappoint you.”

  Brendan was stirring on the floor. Patterson was very aware of her own breathing, her fingernails digging into her palms. “You will give Pearl to the opposition, won’t you?” she said.

  Hopko said nothing. Patterson still had her back to her.

  “Why?”

  Nothing.

  “Did you kill Monroe? His wife?” said Patterson. She heard Hopko’s sigh, and turned to look at her.

  “You are being utterly ridiculous,” said Hopko.

  Patterson shook her head and made for the door.

  TOP SECRET STRAP 2 BOTANY—UK EYES ONLY

  COPY 3/5

  //REPORT

  1/ (TS) Source FULCRUM sent a brief message to C/
FE. It was marked Most Urgent. It is printed below in full.

  Beijing

  To: Controller, Far East and Western Hemisphere,

  United Kingdom Secret Intelligence Service,

  Vauxhall Cross, London

  MOST URGENT/RESPOND IMMEDIATELY

  My friends,

  WHY do you threaten me? I have been most cooperative and our business together has much potential. Still you are make UNNACCEPTABLE THREATS. You may not pressure me in this way.

  I am now beginning to understand that YOU are making direct troubles for me, for my operations, to threaten and pressure on me. I understand that YOU are threaten to destroy my work and my position unless I reveal my identity and following your tasking. This is UNACCEPTABLE.

  Respond immediately with assurance that such threats will cease, and we can return to business as normal, or YOU will shoulder full responsibility for all consequences.

  ENDS///

  Pearl pulled off the interstate for gas at a place called Talent, a little tangle of tree-lined streets and clapboard houses and a brick strip mall. It was evening, overcast, and the place was silent. She stood on the forecourt listening to the tick tick of the pump. She bought coffee and a pupusa from a convenience store and got back in the car. The car smelled bad now, the engine was running hot and San Francisco was still three hundred miles away.

  Would he be there? The Englishman. Philip. She had only a hazy recollection of what he looked like now, but remembered his rumpled calm, his easy way of moving. He was like Cal that way. He cared and didn’t care at the same time.

  What would he do? What did he want from her, apart from her father’s hard drive, apart from everything? What could he give? A life?

  She started the ignition and put the car in drive. It shuddered into motion and she headed back towards the interstate. She was sipping coffee with one hand on the wheel when she missed a turn that would have taken her to the on-ramp, and found herself first in an underpass, the interstate thundering above her, and then on a two-lane road, wandering off towards the mountains. She looked for a place to turn around.