by Adam Brookes
“Pearl …”
“This is all my stupid fault. All of it.” She had balled her hand into a fist and was grinding it into her own thigh.
“Pearl, stop. Please. It’s not helping.”
It was getting light. They were driving through rolling hills of alder and pine, the ocean off to their left. Mangan watched the mirrors.
Some distance further on, he saw a sign. It said SCENIC VIEW, and pointed down an unpaved track towards the coast. Mangan took it, needing to stop, to piss, to think. The track came out in a dusty parking lot atop cliffs, the ocean crashing onto rocks a hundred feet below, where the heaving slate sea ripped itself open, bled white spume.
Alone with his thoughts, feeling the wind on his face, Mangan contemplated the last two years of his life: his immersion in espionage, this weird ecology of manipulation and untruth. What exactly he’d imagined it would be like, back in that frigid Beijing winter, during those first moments. Then, the passing of a document, a hard drive, was a step into the thrilling dark, an affirmation. He’d stepped off the sidelines. He’d mattered.
And then, when he’d started to lie to the people he trusted, even loved, and his distance from them grew, he could justify it by resorting to his urgent, secret reason. I can’t love you, I’m afraid, because I lead a secret life and that precludes truth and honesty in my relationships. He thought of the bewilderment on the faces of the people he had betrayed: his thoughtful, gracious lover in China, whose arrest was the direct result of what he’d done. And in Ethiopia, a brave and forthright Danish woman, who’d seen right through him before he’d crept away.
He turned and looked at Patterson, who was sitting next to Pearl on the back seat of the car, gentling her. Her eye was half closed and her lip was badly swollen, and when she moved, Mangan could see she was in pain, from what he didn’t know and she wouldn’t say.
He thought again that she was the only person who knew him, and to whom he told the truth. My handler. He looked out at the cold glitter of the Pacific. He could see a pelican out there, skimming smooth and low over the water.
“Philip,” said Patterson, warning in her voice.
“What?” he said. He was still looking out at the sea.
And then Pearl’s voice in a long, frightened wail. “Oh, God, no, no, no, no.”
51
There were three cars.
One blocked the track, so there was no getting away. The other two pulled up about thirty feet from them and six people got out. Five men, one woman. A couple of the men were white, the rest of Asian appearance. The woman wore elaborate shades and an expensive quilted jacket and Mangan knew immediately it was her, the woman Patterson had told him about—Nicole.
The men spread out a little way and faced them. Were they armed? He couldn’t tell. But they were professionals, not thugs. They had the lean, spare movement, the watchfulness.
Patterson pulled Pearl out of the car, grunting with the pain, her arm around her, but the girl was visibly shaking. Mangan went over, stood by them.
Nicole was going to do the talking, apparently. She walked out towards them, raising her shades onto the top of her head, so Mangan could see her eyes. She was striking, almost beautiful, her face ivory pale, slender, a pronounced chin. In it, Mangan saw intention, a ripple of cruelty. Her posture and her clothing made him think of some wealthy businesswoman, a fund manager or an investor, a citizen of the boardroom and the private jet. What was she doing here, rooting around in this shitty operation, hunting a terrified teenager? She spoke directly to Pearl, her accent an elegant American, touched by the coast of China.
“Pearl, you are to come with us. And I know you are confused and afraid. I want you to tell me what kind of assurances you need right now. Tell me what you need. Please.”
Pearl didn’t reply. Nicole tried again.
“Pearl, this is over, and you need to come with us. Really. The people you are with, these people,” she gestured contemptuously at Mangan, “they do not have your interests at heart. They are not—”
“And you do, do you? You lying bitch,” Patterson roared at her.
Nicole half smiled.
“Let’s just calm down a little, all right?”
“Let’s not, actually.” Patterson was shouting. “Do not come any closer.”
“Stop this.” Nicole was standing about twelve feet from the three of them, and the others had started to move forward as well, as if to rush them. Pearl was backing away. Mangan felt the tick of violence in the air, saw them readying themselves. “Pearl, you are going to have to come with us. I’m sorry, but that is the way it is. Nothing is going to happen to you. We’ll take you back to your mom and dad. That’s all, okay?”
“No,” said Pearl.
“I guarantee you will be safe.” Nicole’s voice was hard, demanding now. “I guarantee that you will be reunited with your family.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Of course I know what I’m saying. What do you mean?”
“I can’t be reunited with them. They’re … I just can’t.”
“Why not, Pearl?” She was trying to moderate her tone, make it sympathetic.
“Because they are … everything is a lie.” She was sobbing, her voice wobbling up and down like a child’s. “They only want me so I can spy for them. That’s all they wanted.”
“Oh, Pearl, please, that’s not true. They are your family. Your future. They miss you so much. And so does Cal.”
Pearl looked up at her.
“You saw Cal?”
“Yes! Yes, we went to see him, and he told us how much he missed you. He helped us.” She was trying to sound reasonable, but Mangan could see it was only a matter of moments now.
“What? Cal? He didn’t help you.”
“Oh, Pearl, he’s just as concerned as everyone. He wants you back. You should be …”
“No!”
“ … together.”
Nicole was reaching out now, extending one hand to Pearl.
“Come here. Now. Please.”
“Get away!” But then Pearl let her head fall and stared at the ground.
“Cal,” she said, tears on her cheeks, her nose running, as if the loss of him were the loss of everything.
Nicole abruptly stepped forward. In a single smooth motion, Patterson whisked the Ruger out, pointed it upwards into the air. Mangan didn’t know what to do.
“Trish,” he said quietly. She gave a tight shake of the head.
“Back off,” she shouted.
Nicole stopped. The five men behind her didn’t move. Nicole exhaled sharply, as if impatient.
“There is no need … Just put it down,” she said. And as she spoke, Mangan felt Pearl take his hand, her fingers fluttering around his. Nicole went on, and Mangan heard her shading once again into threat.
“Look. We have been with you for a while now. And we’re not going anywhere. So we will find you. Wherever you go now, we are going with you. So it’s going to happen either now or later. Let’s just do this now.”
Pearl’s fingers were pressing on his palm.
She was pressing something into his hand.
The five men were moving forward, slowly. One of them was sidling sideways, moving to get behind them.
“Get back!” shouted Mangan, whirling around.
But the man didn’t stop.
“No!” Pearl screamed.
Patterson brought the Ruger down to aim it at Nicole, who turned her head away as if in disgust.
And now Pearl was pulling herself out of Patterson’s protective grip, and moving.
Mangan thought for a mad second that she was going to give herself over to them, said “What the hell …?” and grabbed at her, but she batted his hand away. She ran away from them all, towards the cliff.
“Pearl!” he shouted.
One of the five men, a white guy in a navy windbreaker, the one who’d been trying to get behind them, lunged for her, but Pearl lurched sideways
and he missed, and Mangan was on him, trying to tackle him, and the two of them went down in the dirt. The man kicked at him and then seemed somehow to lift him and throw him off and Mangan hit the ground hard, the wind going out of him and a thick pain running up his back and through his lungs.
The man in the windbreaker was back on his feet, and Mangan struggled onto his elbows, gasping. Patterson was shouting, “Pearl! Pearl!” in her huge military bark.
And then the whole scene was frozen. All of them, stock still, in various poses of shock.
The man in the windbreaker with both hands raised as if in refusal.
Nicole with a hand over her mouth.
Patterson half-doubled over, one arm out, reaching.
But none of them moved or spoke. Mangan noticed how the wind moved their hair.
And as he lay there, he realised that he had glimpsed her go, just out of the corner of his eye, a smear of blue and pink against the sparkling sea.
52
The first thing he heard was a harsh whisper, something in Mandarin, a foul swear word, stained with disbelief. It came from Nicole, who seemed to Mangan to have shrunk, her whole being diminished.
And then a drawn-out yell from Patterson. She was on her knees, the Ruger at her side, her face contorted, blood trickling again from her lip. The five men were standing awkwardly, not sure what to do.
Mangan got to his feet and walked unsteadily to the edge of the cliff to look over, down towards the sea and the rocks. At first, he couldn’t see her. She’d vanished, and he wondered if she’d been drawn under by a current. But then he saw a little streak of light blue, her backpack, he realised, and a pale arm breaking the surface. She was rocking back and forth, the sea drawing her out, then thrusting her back, beating her against the rocks, again and again.
And as he turned away, the wash of deep, black shame rose up in him, through his gut, his chest, his neck and eyes, as if every failure of his life were renewed and magnified in this moment. He thought he might faint. He bent over and put his hands on his knees.
Patterson was looking at him as she knelt there, interrogating him with her eyes, as if she still awaited confirmation of what had happened. He looked down at the ground, swaying, tried not to black out. And then he heard Patterson speak, her voice soaked in revulsion.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“Trish,” he said.
“No, just … we need to report … this.”
He stood upright, took a breath, tried to steady himself. He looked around and caught the eye of the man in the windbreaker, who just shook his head. But now Nicole was pointing at Patterson.
“You will take full responsibility,” she said blankly.
Patterson looked at her, disbelieving. Then she stood up quickly and raised the Ruger, said nothing.
And suddenly everything was movement. The men were running for their cars, and Nicole was backing away, and Patterson squeezed the trigger, once, twice, and Nicole was running for a car, and one of the windshields had a white spider’s web thrown across it. Mangan saw the little brass casings tumbling through the air and he wondered how hot they would be if he picked them up, and birds were rising from the trees. The cars were starting up and their wheels were spinning against the dust and he caught a last glimpse of the woman, Nicole, glaring out of the car window at him, and then the cars were tearing off down the track. Patterson, almost idly, squeezed again but Mangan didn’t see where the round went, just that one of the cars wavered slightly, veered one way, then the other, steadied itself and picked up speed, and then all the cars were gone and everything was silent.
It was over, and the two of them were left there, the cool sun on their faces, the wind on their skin, as the great sea birds beat steadily away over the water.
53
They drove wordlessly away from the coast in the direction of San Francisco, stopping at a Motel 6 in the early afternoon. They took a room and lay on the bed and he put his arm around her and Patterson tried to talk, but cried, her broad shoulders heaving against him. Tears didn’t come for him; he placed it all where he always did, deep in the fissure. And there it would sit, along with all the rest, lining his soul like a layer of hard, dried mud.
Patterson’s secure handheld had died, and Mangan gently told her to charge it, because they were going to need to talk to someone, and soon. And Patterson nodded and got up and went to her bag and took out the charger and plugged it in. Mangan watched her and thought that she seemed very fragile.
“What will you do?” he said after a while.
“I don’t know. Any suggestions?” she said.
“We have to talk to Hopko.”
He saw her shudder, the dread on her face.
“We have to get away, Trish,” he said quietly. “We have to get away fast.”
She nodded dully.
“Who are we running from now, do you think?” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. The police, probably.”
The phone had started to charge and was pinging as notifications came in, the tiny ting precise against the mutedness of the room.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” she said.
And it was only then that he remembered. He reached in his pocket. It was a little ball of paper, scrunched up and wrapped around with a light blue hairband. He thought of Pearl’s fingers, fluttering around his, pushing her legacy into his hand, and for a moment thought he might faint again. He breathed deeply, steadied himself.
“What is it?” Patterson said.
“She gave it to me, pushed it into my hand. Just before.” He sat on the edge of the bed, picking at it.
Patterson came and sat next to him. She held a tissue to her bloodied mouth.
Mangan untwisted the hairband and opened up the little ball of paper. On it, handwritten in pencil, were a web address and a password. He felt his thoughts quicken. Beads of possibility. And even as he thought it, self-loathing billowed up in him—beads, crystallised out of her self-erasure.
But the two of them still checked the room and drew the curtains. They sat in the gloom in front of his laptop. Entered the web address. They waited, watching the absurd little swirling circle on the screen.
It was a personal blog, password protected, and looked to have been set up in a hurry. Patterson read out the password, a long jumble of numbers and symbols. The blog had only a single entry.
It was a video, apparently recorded on Pearl’s tablet. Mangan clicked play, and at first the screen was all moving shadow and the rattle and click of the microphone. And then there she was, Pearl, in the pink Hopkins T-shirt. She was in a bathroom, perched on the edge of the tub, the shower curtain behind her, the light hard and yellow. She looked at the camera. She seemed to be preparing herself to speak.
Mangan knew that he wanted it all to end now, that he was unequipped to manage whatever it was that Pearl was handing to him, whatever judgement she had arrived at. He reached for the mouse to turn it off, but Patterson took hold of his wrist and stopped him. Her eyes were locked on the screen.
Pearl began to speak, but her throat seemed to catch and she had to start again.
“Philip and Trish. This is for you.”
Her voice was drained of feeling. She held her hands in front of her, palms together.
“To start with, I wanted to, like, say thanks. I, like, know you guys have really tried to help me. And I really appreciate that.”
A pause.
“But, the thing is, I don’t think you can. Help me. Because, I am a scientist. That’s who I am. Or who I was. And I am a daughter. Or I was.
“And both these things have been exposed as … lies, I guess.” A shrug.
“I wasn’t really a scientist. Scientists deal in hypothesis and evidence and truth. I was a spy. I was dealing in … well, I don’t even know. But nothing was true. And I wasn’t really a daughter. I was a tool. So I was just one big, fat lie.”
Patterson had her hand at her mouth, and Mangan heard her whisper, “No.”
She shifted her position on the edge of the bathtub.
“And so I don’t know what I can do now. Science won’t have me. I mean, who’ll ever trust a Chinese ex-spy, right? And my family’s gone. I mean, it was never really there, right? And I can’t ask Cal to be with me, not after all this. But I thought for a while that maybe you guys could help.
“But I don’t think you can.
“So I just wanted to say goodbye, and thanks, and leave you a token of my appreciation.”
She leaned forward a little, towards the lens. The yellow light caught her eyes behind the spectacles, and Mangan saw the glisten on them.
“So, the hard drive? From my dad’s computer? I posted it to General Delivery, U.S. Post Office on Ellis Street in San Francisco. It’s addressed to you, Philip. It should be there. I think if someone can get into it there’ll be a lot of stuff on it. I mean, a lot. Like everything he was doing. Names, bank accounts, passwords, communications, everything. The whole network. And that’s what you want, right? That’s what you want. So there it is.”
She sat back and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Remember that poem, Philip? The Bai Juyi poem? About the slave girl? That’s me. I’m, like, sneaking away, over the wall. Off into the trees, into the mountains. Looking for a new home. Because I have been a slave my whole life and I can’t do it any more. I just can’t.”
She leaned forward and reached up for the tablet.
“Bye.”
And the screen went black.
Mangan, numb with shock, looking for something to do, lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl upwards in the half-dark. Patterson sat on the bed, her shoulders slumped.
“Was she right? Was that what we wanted? All we wanted? Some fucking hard drive?” she said.
“No,” said Mangan. “She was wrong.”
“Why? What were we going to do? Save her?”
“I wanted to … I don’t know. I wanted to prevent that bloody woman from getting her hands on her, at least.”
“Which bloody woman?”
“Either. Both,” he said.
Patterson didn’t speak for a moment, then got up and walked over to him. She stood in front of him, then leaned into him and put her arms around his neck, her forehead on his shoulder. He embraced her, still holding the cigarette. He was gentle, careful so as not to hurt her ribs.
