Cui bono? Who benefits?
She felt childish, gullible.
She took a taxi back to Archway and once in the flat she dropped the bags, undressed, pulled on jeans and a baggy T-shirt. She opened a bottle of cheap red, sat on the sofa, drank and watched the light dim as the afternoon clouded over. She went to the silent bedroom, got beneath the covers, pulled her knees up to her chest and held herself.
What should she have done? What should she do now?
She should have told Hopko that Mangan had a lead.
She should have told her that the Fan boy wanted to talk.
But she hadn’t.
After Patterson had made her shaky exit, Hopko had risen from her desk, crossed the room, and closed and locked the door to her sanctum. She went to one of three black safes that lined the wall behind her desk, kneeled, and on the safe farthest to the left entered a combination on a digital key pad. From inside she took a plastic envelope that held a secure handheld and an index card. Hopko placed the envelope on her desk, took out the handheld, turned it on, checked to see that the battery had some charge to it, and dialed a number written on the index card. The number had attached to it the prefix of a Caribbean country. She waited a moment. The number rang and was answered, not with a greeting, but with an accented male voice reciting a short list of numbers and letters. Hopko responded in kind.
“Ja?” came the voice.
“The situation is resolved,” she said.
“Dankjewel.” And then a digital pip, and silence.
Sumatra, Indonesia
Mangan was aware of the faint glimmer of dawn, a gentle persuasion of azure in the eastern dark. He listened to the waves on the beach. Far off in the night, he could see the lights of tankers in the Straits of Malacca, imagined the throb of engines over the black, churning water.
He had boarded a flight to Medan at the last minute, found a rattletrap taxi to drive hours through the night, stopping to eat at a roadside warung, nothing more than canvas stretched over a bamboo frame, plastic stools, a hurricane lantern reeking of kerosene. He ate gulai with his fingers, a scrawny chicken stewed in coconut milk, turmeric, garlic, caraway. The proprietor brought him an Anker beer, offered him a kretek, which he took and lit, the sugar on his tongue, clove-laced smoke hanging on the air.
It had been three in the morning when they reached the place, a speckling of splintered huts on a stony beach he knew, and he shamelessly roused the owners, pressed a wad of rupiah on them, and they gave him a mosquito net and water, waved him to a cabin in the darkness. His ribs ached, and his hands were discolored and numb.
The silver flicker of lightning in cloud, high above the sea.
They want me to come in, he thought.
The hiss of water on shingle.
But I won’t. Not yet.
He thought of Rocky, wild-eyed, sweating, hissing at him a name, a lead, a thread to pull on. He thought of an unraveling, an unblinding. He felt the draw of it, a taut wire in his veins.
I am present at the hatching of my choices.
He watched the lights of the ships across the relentless, heaving sea, watched them recede into the warm dark.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As ever, my profound thanks go to Catherine Clarke, Michele Topham, Caroline Wood and all at Felicity Bryan Associates. My thanks go in equal measure to Ed Wood and Iain Hunt and their colleagues at Little, Brown. I am very fortunate indeed to be working with all of them.
I was introduced to Ethiopia by two remarkable journalists, one who showed me Addis Ababa and its environs, and another who took me to Dire Dawa and Harer. Their insight, generosity and commitment to their craft made a very deep impression on me. They showed me their beautiful, haunting country as it teeters on the brink of change, and they introduced me to extraordinary people, thinkers who are charting Ethiopia’s future and pondering China’s role in it. They bought me coffee, too, the like of which I have never tasted. I wish I could name them, but recent events in Addis Ababa make that impossible. I am so very grateful to them. They reminded me that journalism as practiced in many countries requires of its practitioners a kind of cold courage unfamiliar to most of us.
As I imagined a world of contemporary espionage, I took advice from a number of people, some of whom know the trade and also can’t be named. They know who they are and my heartfelt thanks go to them. The book Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernization by William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon and Anna B. Puglisi has been an invaluable reference, as has the work of Peter Mattis. However, the world depicted in the novel is my creation and mine alone.
During the writing, help and support came from David Abramson and Kelly Hand, Robert Bickers, Warren Coleman, William Davison, Mike Forsythe and Leta Hong Fincher, Kim Ghattas, Paul Hayles, Ronen Palan, Jeff Wasserstrom, and the wondrous folk at Goldsboro Books in London. My warm thanks, too, to the staff of the public libraries in Takoma Park, Maryland, and Takoma, DC, especially Ellen Arnold-Robbins and Patti Mallin.
Finally, I am grateful for the generous portions of inspiration, advice, love, humor, perspective and solace provided daily by Susie, Anna and Ned.
By Adam Brookes
Night Heron
Spy Games
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
PART ONE: The Approach. Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
PART TWO: The Hook. Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
PART THREE: The Blind. Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
PART FOUR: The Fall. Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Acknowledgments
By Adam Brookes
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by Adam Brookes
Jacket design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: August 2015
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ISBN 978-0-316-39988-3
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