by Adam Brookes
Patterson came around with an elbow strike that took Harker hard on the chin, saw his head snap back and his eyes close, a string of spittle in the air. And in the middle of it all Mangan saw her glance over her shoulder at him, her eyes bruised and bright and feverish, and mouth the word, Go.
That was the last time he saw her.
55
Philip Mangan ran. He ran from the room and every room like it, all the silent rooms in the safe flats and hotels and basements, the vile, silent rooms where the watchers leaned against the walls and the air was stale with mistrust. He ran down the corridor, unsteady on his long, slender legs, made for the elevators but thought better of it, went for the emergency stairs. He clattered down the concrete stairwell, eighteen flights, stopped at the bottom, gasping, pain in his chest. Then out, into the brightly lit lobby, walking purposefully, ignoring the gaze of the receptionist, sweat on his temples and his back, pushing out of the main doors, feeling the chill night air on his skin, and then he was running again, looking for the car. Use the clicker, Pearl said in his ear, and he did and he heard the horn start to go off, ran towards it. Here I am again, running for a car, he thought.
The Paulson woman was standing there, breathing heavily, between him and it.
“I don’t think so, Philip,” she said, and he saw her hips move in an elegant, fluid swing and the kick was aimed straight at his groin, but he was unbalanced and she misjudged it fractionally and the strike came at the point where his thigh met his pelvis, sending him staggering back.
She was coming at him and he shouted at her but no words came out, just an incoherent roar. He raised his arms to cover his face as she started to work on him. There must be other people here, he thought, people must be seeing this. But it was dark and deep in the most desolate hours, and no one was coming.
Paulson hit him several times in the torso, the solar plexus, and somehow the lower back, and the pain came hot and percussive, conjuring storms of white sparks in his eyes, and he knew he’d go down very quickly. He only had seconds, the shock coursing through him like a drug, dampening his thought, paralysing him—he knew he had to move on her or it was over.
Mangan shouted again and, bent double, he ran at her, trying to get his shoulder into her, but she was skipping away from him easily, backwards, down the narrow space between his car and one parked next to it.
Now there was about ten feet between them and she was still, waiting for the moment to move back in on him, and he realised he was standing right by the car door. She saw it at the same moment, and lunged for him, but he wrenched the door open and it thudded into the car in the next space, and he held it there, barring her way. She gave it an almighty kick, and the door bucked in his hands but he held it open.
Was it there? The Ruger? Was it under the seat?
He struggled into the car, holding the door open with one arm and one foot, and she kicked it again and this time he couldn’t hold it and it slammed on his leg and the sound that came out of his mouth seemed not his own but the ragged voice of another. But now he had his hand under the seat, his fingers skittering through wadded, bloody tissues and dried leaves.
The door slammed again, and he drew his leg in just in time and he took the force of it on his shoe. Paulson forced her way around the door and was reaching in for him, her hand seeking purchase on his shirt, his neck, his hair. He could hear her breathing, smell a subtle perfume. She was trying to drag him out of the vehicle, but his weight was too much for her. His hand scrabbled in the detritus of the entire terrible day that lay on the car floor and there was nothing, nothing, just grit and the fibrous feel of the matting.
Until his finger nail grazed something hard and cool, and his fingers found the cross hatching on the grip and settled around it and he pulled the little weapon out and up and jammed it hard in her ribs.
Mangan remembered that he needed to work the slide and flick the safety off and he fumbled for it and heard the chenck as the slide snapped back into place and felt the safety make its short, smooth journey under his thumb. The woman had taken her hands off him and was standing there with a slight smile on her face because she knew, as he did, that he couldn’t shoot her, that he wouldn’t get a mile down the road.
For several seconds they just looked at each other. Then he swapped the Ruger to his left hand, easing down into the seat and aiming it at her face, jammed the key in the ignition, started the car and rammed it into reverse. Paulson realised what was happening just too late, her eyes widening as the car jumped backwards out of the parking space. The woman brought her arms up to protect herself but the open door hit her hard and dragged her with it. She went down and the lower edge of the door raked her back and smashed into the back of her head. She screamed and curled up into a ball. Mangan leaned out, grabbed the door, slammed it shut and accelerated away.
He drove wildly in a direction he thought was south, until he saw signs to I-5 and Los Angeles. About eight hours to the Mexican border. Mangan found himself rigid at the wheel, his stomach and sternum churning with pain, shock. When he leaned down and touched his left shin, his fingers came up sticky with blood.
After two hours he pulled over, some speck of a place with chain-link fences and wizened palm trees bathed in sodium orange. He didn’t even see its name.
He filled up the car, parked it and walked off the garage forecourt into the darkness. He was walking on hard, scrubby desert. He could make out hills against the night sky. There were houses up in the hills—he could see their lights twinkling.
He lit a cigarette, and then felt his knees all but go out from under him, and he knelt hard in the dust and great lurching sobs were rising up and he just let them come, giving himself over to them because there was nothing else he could do.
He had abandoned her. Patterson had cracked open a moment for him to get out, and he had just gone. He thought of the Venezuelan woman in the foul brothel, beaten and penetrated and abandoned, of how he paid her off. And then billowing up in him all over again, Pearl, the flicker of pink against the sun’s glitter, her tiny body rocking on the sea.
He stayed that way for some time, kneeling there in the dark, letting it all play out. And for a while he thought he might not be able to get back to the car, to carry on. But in a while he forced himself to his feet, his breath still coming in great shuddering gasps, and retraced his steps.
He stopped, felt in his pocket.
The little ball of paper, Pearl’s tiny, dangerous legacy, was still there.
He unfurled it, looking at her handwriting for a moment, the web address. He thought of her looking into the camera, giving her own eulogy, and how that consciousness in all its complexity and its subtlety and its pain and confusion was now extinguished, its moment as brief as a firefly’s.
He held the scrap of paper between his thumb and forefinger, tore it into pieces, and let them flutter from his hand in the dark.
56
Chiang Saen, Thailand
Eight days later
Granny Poon’s boys had set up a perimeter of sorts. They flanked their mother, facing away from the river, keeping their eyes on the Thai security men. Eileen, resplendent behind enormous shades, a fan in hand, sat on a little folding stool and sipped from a bottle of water. She wasn’t sure what agency the Thais were from: something civilian, but nobody was talking. Hopko was stern and silent at her side, gazing at the river. She was angry, Eileen could tell, an anger born of something more than the usual failures and frustrations of intelligence work. Hopko, she sensed, felt betrayed, undermined. And to Eileen, Hopko’s simmering silence reinforced her own sense that a chapter was closing, that their long partnership was at an end. Not such a surprise, given her own age, and Hopko’s recent troubles. But still. A sad way for it to end, unresolved, silent.
Hopko grunted a dissatisfied hmm and took a drink of water from a bottle. The figure standing next to her—a hard, bulky man of Chinese appearance, his hair brush-cut, his eyes like sharpened flints, a Mandarin spe
aker—was familiar to Eileen, his face etched on her mind from the recent past. But he didn’t know her, of course, and she said nothing. The man stooped and spoke quietly to Hopko, and she nodded, but the senior Thai officer waved him away, and he stepped back, deferential.
Eileen turned her face to the river, scanning its sluggish brown surface, all the way to where it disappeared in a welter of green. Eileen was a veteran of a dozen moments like this, defections, the wait in the heat for a blown and panicked agent to surface. Will he? Won’t she? Are they even there? Are they alive? She’d watched them all—the traitors, drunks, narcissists, manipulators, crooks, and the occasional thoughtful volunteer—come blinking across borders, down ramps, out of car boots, to confront their fragile futures. And, sometimes, she’d watched the best-laid exfiltration plans crumble in an electrified instant of shouts and sirens and shattering disappointment.
Today, she had been told, it would be a boat. A long, fast, wooden boat with a shallow draft and a powerful long-tail outboard engine, laden with reeking baskets of fish. The boat would come down the Mekong River, skirting the Chinese patrol boats, lingering in the shallows.
And BOTANY? They didn’t even know his name. Eileen thought of him only as the purveyor of White Rabbit milk candy in little twists of waxy paper. He had been, Eileen knew, Hopko’s great hope. He was to be the penetration of Beijing’s deep and secret canyons that would show them China’s brave new world, would lay bare the intelligence operation that was scraping the insides of the world’s corporations for every secret they ever owned. But—the rumours were a welter of metaphor—Hopko had called it all wrong, overplayed her hand, speared him and tried to reel him in, rather than playing him with a long line. She had threatened to cut off his legs, pressured him, ruined him.
Eileen waved away a mosquito, fanning herself. It had been an hour already, more. Would he come? Could he?
And just as the thought registered, she sensed a quickening of the moment, an increase in tension around her. A flat-bottomed boat had come into view, hugging the Thai bank, rounding an outgrowth of trees that overhung the water, two figures aboard, one at the outboard motor, the other at the prow. The boat seemed to accelerate a little towards them, the pilot glancing over his shoulder.
Hopko stood, and the senior Thai officer and the rotund, brush-cut hard man stood next to her, and all took small steps towards the jetty. One of the Thai security men held a nasty-looking sub-machine gun. The boat slowed as it came in, and the pilot threw a rope, and the Thai security man fumbled it and it fell in the water. The pilot had to pull it in and throw it again, wet, this time.
The man in the prow was in his sixties. He wore a blue polo shirt, a light tan golfing jacket and beige slacks, all of which were improbably immaculate. He sat very still, his hands in his lap. His hair was silver and was combed back from the forehead and Eileen noticed his soft, smooth skin, and thought that this was, indeed, a man who paid attention to his appearance, to his grooming: a spotless man.
No emotion registered on the man’s face as he stood and clambered out of the boat onto the jetty. His eyes were black and hard as obsidian. Hopko moved towards him and held out her hand and he gave it a brief shake, but was looking beyond her. He started to walk down the jetty, as if this welcoming committee were a waste of his time, and he had places to be. Hopko was forced to turn and walk after him, which she did with ill grace.
Eileen watched her go, stocky, hard Hopko, trailing a twist of perfume, the jangle of silver bracelets and an air of endurance. She made Eileen think of a runner deep into the hard miles, or a boxer in the corner, waiting for the seventh round. As Hopko passed her, their eyes met for a moment, and Hopko gave her a tight smile, as if to say, Well, that’s that.
But then her boys were next to her, murmuring, Come on, Ma, let’s go. There was a safe house on loan from the Thais, about thirty miles away, with a team waiting to carry out an initial debrief. It was a big place surrounded by forest and fences, with airy, wood-panelled rooms. Fastidious Man would have his own room fitted with wireless microphones, and he’d be permitted to take short walks in the garden in the company of Service personnel. They’d flown in a cleared Chinese chef from Singapore to do the cooking. Hopko wanted Eileen there listening, checking the translation, picking up on the names, the connections, in the way only she could. So she’d go, be there for two or three days of it. But perhaps this would be the last time.
Eileen got to her feet, brushed away Winston’s helping hand, reached in her purse and extracted a packet of beedi; she lit one, took a deep pull and felt it hot and astringent in her chest. Winston made a reproachful face but she ignored it. She walked towards the riverbank, looked out over the reeds to the brown water and felt the pull of home.
57
Near Baucau, Timor L’Este
Ten weeks later
Mangan got out of the car and lingered for a while by the side of the road. Some soldiers had erected a makeshift checkpoint—three oil drums and a couple of branches—and he wasn’t getting through. The soldiers stood around in the dry heat and hard, flat midday light, their fatigues faded, their boots covered in dust, their M16s slung. He noticed that the rifles were dull, unoiled.
Further down the road, someone had been hacked to death with a machete. Maybe two people. No one seemed sure who had been killed, or who had done the hacking. Was it the notorious martial arts gangs, fetid pools of toxic masculinity? Or the Revolutionary Council, a local dissident group prone to getting shouty and violent? Or an angry husband? Mangan tried to ask the soldiers, but they took his cigarettes and waved him away.
He walked back to the car and stopped for a moment. Clouds were massing out over the sea. The afternoon would bring rain, perhaps a storm. He wanted to be off the road before then. He turned the car around and headed back to Baucau along the coast road, slowing for goats, children, piglets. He stopped at a gloomy Chinese store and bought water and nuts and rambutans and a fresh packet of cigarettes from an unsmiling Hakka woman, before heading back into town to the guesthouse.
The kids were in the courtyard, Inacia, in a little blue flowery dress, holding her baby brother. She was walking him around, winding between the flower pots and the enamel basins and the wicker chairs. The air was sultry, the sky grey, low.
“Elo, Philip,” she said. It came out Pleep. She ran over to him, her flip-flops slap slap on the concrete. “Elo.”
She put the boy down on the ground. He wobbled for a moment but caught himself, a flicker of a smile on his face. Inacia looked up at Mangan and said something in Tetum, way too fast for him to catch, pointing, her brown eyes on him.
“Favor repete,” he said. Please repeat. And she burst out laughing and gave him a playful whack on the thigh. She took his hand and pulled him across the courtyard, past the hanging cage where a lorikeet gabbled and whistled. Fernando, the bird was called. He’d bob and weave and follow your finger. Inacia motioned for Mangan to sit on one of the chairs. She had her pencil and her exercise book, its paper a gritty beige colour, the print smudged and uneven. He tried to read her loopy handwriting while she looked up at him eagerly.
I go to school.
My bird name Fernando.
I have brother. He is good. I love him.
A gentle, reproving voice came from the kitchen. Her mother peered out. Inacia looked up at him and he smiled and nodded to say it was okay. He sat there and helped her correct the phrases and she bent over the book, frowning, working an eraser back and forth.
“Obrigada, Pleep.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she repeated in a whisper, mouthing the sounds.
He got up, crossed the courtyard and went up the stairs to his room, opening the shutters to the quiet street sounds, a bicycle bell, the rattle of a taxi, the children wandering home from school chattering beneath the banyan trees. The air smelled of dust, woodsmoke and leaves.
He’d found the place, the job, quite by accident. A half-
drunk conversation in a bar in Ubud led somehow to an interview in Perth, then a flight, and here he was, producing reports for a group of Australian non-profits. There was some writing, some editing, some human rights monitoring, a bit of interviewing. It paid enough to keep body and soul together, no more. But it gave him a room in this quiet guesthouse on the furthest edge of Asia with its courtyard and peeling paint and squawking lorikeet and the little girl who brought him cups of instant coffee in the mornings and sought his help with her homework and laughed at his height and wild red hair and his long, pale limbs. It gave him some structure, some purpose.
From here, he’d thought, he could, perhaps, begin to rebuild, to reconstitute a sense of himself, examine where he’d gone awry, reconcile himself to the things he had been part of.
Espionage.
The word had lost its mystique, its soft, sibilant glitter, its promise entwined with threat. Now, to Mangan, it evoked a world that was hard, vicious even, yet in the end, banal. It meant murderousness, and loss. He wondered, as he sat there in his room with the first fat drops of rain spattering on the roof and the geckos patrolling the ceiling, if he would ever be able to expunge that image, the smear of pink and blue against the sea. It floated at the back of his eyes. Sometimes he fancied he saw Pearl’s hair, too, flying in the wind. But memory reconstructs itself, remaking itself every time you summon it, so his every recall of that moment was each time a fresh horror, retold in a new way. Her hair, her hands, her voice would enter the narrative unbidden, pushing him to the very edge of coping.
