by Adam Brookes
In her mirror, close, a red SUV.
She thrust the coffee in the cup holder, put both hands on the wheel, and tried to hold down the panic. She looked in the rear-view mirror again. She could make out two figures in the car: one, a woman, in shades; the driver was male. She was half a mile away from the interstate now, no other traffic on the road. She sped up. The SUV kept pace. The road was taking her through farmland, then orchards on both sides, mountains coming closer, grey, speckled with scrub. She thought of throwing the car into a turn, speeding back to the interstate, but had no idea how. And then she heard the urgent, rising moan of an engine accelerating very rapidly, and out of nowhere a second car was overtaking her, fast, roaring off ahead—a blue van this time, no windows in the back. It braked, skidded into a turn, came to a halt side-on, blocking the road, rocking on its suspension. She braked hard, thought of pulling off and bumping along the verge, but the way was blocked by scaly black trees.
She stopped some twenty yards from the blue van, leaving the engine running. The red SUV stopped behind her. In her mirrors, she saw the two of them get out, the man, the woman in shades. Ahead of her, the blue van’s door was opening, and another man was getting out. So, three of them that she could see. They just stood by their vehicles, waiting.
Pearl felt her chest heaving, her breath coming in great juddering gasps, and a flash of heat through her body that brought a prickle of sweat. She wondered if she might faint.
They were just standing, waiting.
Did it end here? How could she tell Philip?
She leaned forward and grasped under the seat for the Ruger. There it was, the cool gunmetal amid the candy wrappers and plastic bottles. She picked it up, still breathing hard, worked the slide, clicked the safety off, its bright little snick.
The man from the blue van was now walking very slowly towards her, his hands out, palms turned upwards. He was Chinese, she guessed, slender, all in black. As he drew closer she focused on his face, his eyes, his hopeful little smile, and registered his features, their extraordinary symmetry. A face to reach out and touch, to wonder at.
She got out of the car and stood in the open door, the Ruger out of sight at her side. She looked over her shoulder. The other two—the woman in shades and the large, white man with thinning hair—were standing still, watching her. Handsome Man was calling out, in English.
“Hey, Pearl.” He was smiling. She didn’t respond.
“Pearl, can we just talk? I’m sorry for all … this.”
She went to speak, but her throat was closed, and she had to swallow and try again. The words fell out of her and the effort of just speaking was torture.
“What do you want?”
He took a few more paces towards her.
“Really, just to talk. Can we do that?”
“Go on, then. Talk.”
“Look, everyone is really worried about you, okay? Your mom, your dad. Cal. They just want you home. Are you ready to go home?”
Somewhere, behind the fear, a little flame of anger began to flicker.
“Do I look like I’m ready to go home?”
He looked away for a moment, towards the mountains, as if considering.
“Well, I guess you don’t. You got me.”
“I want you to leave me alone.” Her voice sounded thin, whiny almost. She took a breath, trying to bring herself under control. She felt very small, as if her fear reduced her physically.
“I suppose we all want to be left alone sometimes. I sure do. But, Pearl, this is some important stuff right here, and we just need you to come home and not freak everybody out.”
“What stuff? What are you talking about?”
“Well, your mom and dad, your family in China, your friends, your work. I guess I don’t know why you’d throw all that away. I mean, why, right?”
He raised his arms and let them fall as if confounded. God, he was beautiful.
“See, the thing is, Pearl, we’ve found you now.” He was holding his hands out again, appealing to her. “So we’re going to be with you, okay? I don’t want to sound like this is a threat or anything, really I don’t, but, you know, we can’t just let you go, because that will make a lot of trouble for a lot of people.”
“I won’t be trouble,” she said. “You can’t make me do this … this thing. I just want to be left alone.”
He held up a hand, a resigned expression on his face.
“Pearl, you are way, way too important for that.” He smiled and beckoned. A bird was singing somewhere high above them, and for a minute she felt her attention shift to seek it out against the grey sky. Anything to take her away from this beautiful, terrifying man in front of her. She thought of the fragile beauty of the prairie birdsong, the pulsing and sighing of the cicadas in the hot Maryland night, the tiny, gorgeous signalling of the fireflies in the dark. The thought of everything she was to lose welled up in her and she had to hold herself, her hands on the car door.
Footsteps behind her. She turned. The large white guy had taken several steps towards her, but the woman had her hand on his arm restraining him. He looked angry. He looked like he was going to take her physically. When she turned back, Handsome Man had come closer, too. She felt the panic rising again, a great billow of it, tears coming behind her eyes.
“Stay away!” she screamed.
Handsome Man was still saying something about just coming with them, and it would all be okay, but she turned around again and the big guy was moving, perhaps only twenty feet from her now.
Pearl raised the Ruger. It was slippery with sweat in her palm, and she brought her other hand up to cup the first one, steadying herself.
The man stopped mid-stride, shaking his head, and the Asian woman had her mouth open … and Pearl squeezed the trigger.
The little weapon bucked in her hand and she heard the chenk of the moving parts and the report clattering off the cars, the metallic tinkle of the empty case on the asphalt.
And then everyone was moving. The big man and Asian woman scurried—no other word for it—behind the red SUV, ducking. Pearl whipped around and Handsome Man was backing quickly away from her, but with a calm to the way he moved, a half-smile on his face, his head cocked to one side in a Really? expression.
She raised the weapon again and his hands came up and the look on his beautiful face changed, and she fired, the report clanging down the road, and suddenly the man was running, bent double, back to his car, hiding behind the engine block, peering out at her. She fired again, and he disappeared, and Pearl just stood there, hearing the echoes of the gunshot rolling away through the trees.
Behind her, no movement, but a voice. The woman.
“Pearl, sweetheart, really you have to stop this. It’s me, Nicole. I know you don’t want to hurt us—”
Pearl fired again, low towards the red SUV and she saw the round go through the door, a perfect little black void in the paintwork, a silvery splash around it. She heard furious swearing from the other side. She took four or five steps towards the vehicle, and fired again, this time at the front tyre.
Nothing happened for a moment, and she wondered if she’d missed, but then she heard the hiss and whine of air escaping, and the vehicle began to sink to one side. She did the same with the rear tyre. How many rounds left in the clip? she wondered. I should have counted. They tell you to count.
Pearl walked towards the blue van, fired once more at its front tyre, and that was it, she was out. She ran back to her black car and got in, slammed and locked the door, and in her mirror she saw the big white guy coming at her. He was holding something, a metal bar of some sort. She turned the key in the ignition and the car juddered to life and she threw it into reverse, spinning the wheel, and then the big white guy was in front of her, blocking her way, one hand on the hood as if he could hold the car back with his own strength. He shouted something at her and waved the tyre iron or whatever it was, ready to strike. She caught his eye and he raised his eyebrows, as if to say, Do you get my
full meaning?
She put the car in drive and tapped the accelerator and the car lurched forward four or five feet and he half-jumped, half-skidded backwards, working to keep his balance, shouted something furious at her. Then he brought the iron bar down hard on the hood with a terrible crash and stared at her through the windscreen. His hair was awry and he looked ready to murder her. She wanted to tell him to get out of the way, and she shouted it but her voice sounded tiny; he just shook his head and leaned on the hood, and then she saw Handsome Man was right there, just the other side of the driver’s side window, and he was trying the door and banging on the glass. She hit the accelerator again and this time kept her foot down and the car took a huge leap forward and kept going.
The big white guy sort of rolled off to one side, his arms flailing, and then he was gone—she couldn’t see what had happened to him. She swerved to avoid the red SUV. The Asian woman ran down the road in front of her, away from her.
Then an ear-splitting bang, and the nearside window was gone, and the air full of glass. She heard herself screaming and shut her eyes and the car was pulling to the right and she hit the brakes but then thought no no and forced her eyes open and hit the accelerator again, shooting past the Asian woman, who was running off into the trees.
Pearl felt the car come back under her control. Straight ahead of her was the interstate. And she could just see the two men in her rear-view mirror, watching her go.
50
San Francisco International Airport
Mangan stood outside, on the pavement, his duffel bag at his feet, smoking.
Patterson had taken a different flight, and it had been delayed, so he’d spent an hour in an airport restaurant, eaten while he could, kept it to two glasses of wine, then went to hire a car. Like the idiot he was, he’d neglected to withdraw cash before he left Washington, so he had to use his card at the car hire place, and therefore it wouldn’t be long, he assumed, before all and sundry knew he was there.
And there she was now, striding out from the double doors, in jeans and trainers and a navy blue waterproof, a backpack on one shoulder. Patterson stopped, back straight as a ramrod, looking around for him. He watched her for a moment, this lithe, powerful woman. He had seen her at work, operational, in Thailand, in Ethiopia, and had marvelled at her discipline, her formidable ability to focus, attending to details that would bore and frustrate him—the agent. Now her face betrayed her anxiety.
What had she done?
Mangan stubbed the cigarette out on a reeking steel ashtray and walked towards her. She saw him and he nodded in greeting, but the expression on her face didn’t change. He wanted to embrace her, but her stance said, Stay away.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said.
“Bit late for that now,” Patterson said.
“What did you tell Hopko? Before you left. What did you say to her?”
“What did I say? I said, in effect, I’m blowing off my chain of command, disobeying orders, and running off with my agent to save a blameless girl from evisceration by China’s secret services, or Britain’s, or America’s, or all of them. Cheers. Bye.”
Mangan didn’t smile.
“Quite the exit. How did she take it?”
“How the hell do you think she took it?”
“The way you put it, it sounds quite romantic.”
“Oh, fuck off, Philip.”
“Sorry. Sorry. But look, why?”
“I—”
“You sounded as if you believed her. Hopko, I mean. All that other operational contingencies bullshit. Oh, there’s something going on that I just can’t tell you because it’s super secret and, by the way, Pearl’s just the price we all pay. All that crap. I thought you bought it.”
Patterson shook her head.
“I mean, you’ve just—”
“I’ve just blown it. My career. Such as it was. Yes, I’m aware. Thanks.”
It wasn’t just your career, he thought. The decision has uprooted your certainties. Some portion of yourself, the soldier-spy, has abdicated and made way for doubt, for something new.
“Doubters, you and me,” he said. “Someone said that to us once.”
She looked down, hating it.
“We do have to get to her. Right? To Pearl,” he said.
“And when we do? You think we can protect her?”
“Do you think we can’t?”
“What’ll you do? Hit them with your notebook? Maybe you could write about it and bore them into submission.”
He smiled.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “In fact, you’ve got no bloody idea how glad I am.”
“Why?” she said. “Don’t you have a plan?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so.” She said it with a half-smile but he could see real pain, coursing just below her skin.
This is where I am. Please get here. Please.
Pearl’s final message had given them an address. It was a women’s shelter in the Tenderloin. Patterson got them there fast, expertly, in the hire car, into the city in the chill, fading light. It had been, by Mangan’s reckoning, about eighteen hours since Pearl had arrived in San Francisco. The women’s shelter was a clever idea—no men allowed. She’d be safe there, for a little while.
They parked two blocks away. The Tenderloin was dirty, tense, febrile, the panhandlers persistent, talking trash. A woman lay on a piece of black plastic on the sidewalk; she caught Mangan’s eye and shouted at him fuck you lookin’ at and made a masturbating gesture with a bottle, rubbing it against her crotch. They passed a corner store, bars on the windows, Liquor Cigarettes Money Orders, skittish men loitering outside, hands deep in their pockets, eyes glassy.
And there was a girl, whose image imprinted itself on Mangan’s mind, something to be thought about, written about later. She was crossing a street. Her jeans were stained and torn. She wore a black hoodie, her hair a filthy blonde, her face grimy. She couldn’t have been older than seventeen, and she walked with a terrible limp, her right leg next to useless, and every step an agony for her. Elbows out, grimacing, she inched across the street, her leg dragging. Had she been shot? Hit by a car? Or was it an infection, a sketchy needle? The men outside the store watched her through filmy, yellowed eyes.
“Concentrate,” said Patterson, her tone sharp. She fell back, and he looped around, up O’Farrell Street and down to Turk as she hovered behind, watching. After twenty minutes she was suddenly at his side again.
“Nothing,” she said. “Best we can do.”
He just nodded and took out a cigarette, noticing the tremor in his right hand. He was very tired, but fear was beginning to work on him the way it did, shutting down his words, crimping his vision.
“Come on,” she said. She looked watchful, tense.
At the shelter, he stayed outside, standing in a doorway from where he could see the entrance and the street. It was dark now, and the traffic was thinning, but the street seemed to get busier, figures flitting in and out of the headlamps, rows of kids with dreads and hoodies and dogs sitting on the sidewalk. The air smelled of piss and cannabis and was filled with shouts and sirens. A man approached him and offered him something in a little baggie. He just shook his head and the man walked away, muttering. A police prowler moved slowly down the street, the kids watching it go.
After thirteen minutes, Patterson emerged from the shelter’s front door, looked over at him. He nodded, and she walked carefully across.
“She’s there,” she said.
“You spoke to her?”
“Yes.”
“How is she?”
“She’s … all right, considering.”
“Will she come with us?”
“She wants to see you.” Patterson wasn’t looking at him. She was scanning the street incessantly. “I don’t think we have long.”
“Okay, so how—”
“At the back of the building, there’s an alleyway. She can see out of a bathroom wind
ow. She’s waiting.”
They walked quickly around the block. The alley was filthy with garbage and pooling water. It was dark, too, and he hesitated, but Patterson shoved him on the shoulder. Halfway down, they stopped next to a forest of garbage cans, which made Mangan think of the memorial to the dead by the side of the road in Suriname. Behind a five-foot brick wall was the shelter, a window, a figure looking out at them. He raised a hand, and the figure, hesitantly, did the same. There was a moment’s pause. Mangan wondered what would happen next, but then the window was thrown open and a leg emerged, then another, and Pearl dropped three feet to the ground and ran flat-footed towards them. They had to help her over the wall, and then there she was, a little, pale, rumpled figure with short, mottled hair, breathing heavily and peering up at them through her glasses. She wore a T-shirt and leggings and a backpack. She looks as if she’s going on a school trip, he thought.
“Hello, Pearl,” he said.
“Um, hi,” she said.
“It’s good to see you. Are you okay?”
She blinked.
“No. Not really.”
“No. You’re probably not. Well—”
Patterson interrupted.
“Time to go,” she said quietly.
They moved quickly, Patterson in the lead, back down the alley, towards the car. Mangan stayed behind Pearl as she ran, splay-footed, through the puddles.
When they reached the street, Patterson held up a hand and they stopped. Mangan watched her step out into the light of the street lamps, look both ways and linger for a moment, searching for the anomaly, the tiny disconnect, that ripple on the street’s surface. Pearl looked as if she were about to cry, and Mangan made to put a hand on her shoulder, but she pulled away. Patterson turned back to them and nodded, and they moved towards the car. Pearl started to run, but Patterson held her back.
The hire car was small, a white VW Golf. Patterson waited, scanning the street, while the others got in the back seats.
“Where are we going?” said Pearl.
“We’re going to get out of town,” said Mangan. “There’s a motel, over the bridge and up into Marin a way. We’ll stop there for the night, and talk. Make a plan. Is that okay?”
