Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  He was exhausted, and his whole body felt like a punchbag. The effort required to get through the gate and up the steps seemed overwhelming. He wondered about Louise. Maybe he should track her down, make amends. In theory he had the time now he had been laid off by Cutler, if he could just get to the bottom of what happened on the border.

  A black Mercedes SUV screeched to a halt beside him and two heavies emerged. They weren’t gangsters – their suits were too cheap. They stood to attention by the vehicle while a young Chinese woman stepped out from behind the wheel. She was slightly built, in a black leather jacket and fatigue type pants. Under the look of stern officiousness was a face of austere beauty. A pair of piercing black eyes were trained on him, cold and glittering. She came towards him. It was a pretty safe bet she wasn’t looking for a date.

  ‘Agent Kovic?’

  She held up an ID: Ministry of State Security.

  ‘I was just going for a shower. Care to join me?’

  Before he could gauge her response, she raised an arm and he was on the ground, his head in something damp. One of her pointed boots pressed on his lower abdomen and then everything went dark as one of the heavies slid a hood over his head. Another pair of hands clamped his wrists together with a zip-cuff. Then he was bundled into the back of the SUV and the tailgate slammed shut. Alone or otherwise, that shower was going to have to wait.

  Kovic was both furious and confused. The MSS routinely questioned him but usually he was politely invited to take a ride and the whole process was little more than a charade, a reminder that they were watching. This was definitely abduction. The choice of vehicle, a Benz SUV, suggested some kind of inflated status, or that someone inside had for some reason started throwing money around. It was decidedly unpatriotic, indeed positively decadent. Maybe the local Mercedes dealer imagined it would be good for the brand if MSS operatives rode around in their product and had been loaning them out. And as for the woman, while her heavies were standard government issue she definitely was not. In fact he had never encountered a female MSS agent.

  He heard her speak into a phone.

  ‘Target on board: ETA twenty minutes.’

  The pedantic monotone struck Kovic as somehow ludicrous. He realised it was a measure of how worn out he was that he had felt no inclination to resist. The Benz had a siren, which confirmed that he was in the hands of the authorities. Maybe that was a good thing – the devil he knew, rather than strange criminals with mysterious tattoos. He tried to find a comfortable position but with his hands cuffed behind his back it was impossible. A day that had already gone on for far too long was suddenly getting even longer, but there was no point in protesting; it wouldn’t change anything. He decided to try and grab a short nap. He had the ability to sleep anywhere, no matter how uncomfortable – well, almost.

  The journey was short; they were still in town. That meant he probably wasn’t being taken out to some wasteland to be shot, which was nice. Judging by the distance it was probably to the Golfball, the MSS’s Shanghai HQ. The SUV made a sharp descent, the engine noise bouncing back off walls that were very close, the tyres squeaking on a smooth surface: another underground car park, oh great. They stopped, the doors opened. No smell of piss though, so definitely a better class of car park than the CIA’s. Then he was out of the vehicle, through some security doors and frogmarched along an interminable corridor into a lift and down more levels. That wasn’t good. The deeper you were taken, the deeper the trouble you were in, he had generally found. He heard a door being unlocked, another bad sign, and a strong smell of disinfectant, also not good. Then he was manoeuvred into a sharp left and made to sit on a hard flat chair with only a bar for a back, so at least his wrists had somewhere to go. No one said anything. They seemed to be leaving him here so he decided to try again and have that nap, but each time his head dropped someone roughly pushed it up. He really was way too tired for this.

  ‘Hey, leave me the fuck alone, will ya?’

  And then he was on his side on the floor – the chair clattering away as it was kicked from under him. He felt a sharp pain in his neck and was instantly strangely happy.

  ‘Okay, here is good,’ he murmured gratefully as he slipped away. ‘I’ll just stay here . . .’

  His dreams were a toxic mix of the executions in the snow, the chase through Shanghai and the encounter with Cutler; all three playing in a continuous loop in his head.

  Later, maybe much later – he didn’t know when because they had taken his watch and all his belongings – he regained consciousness. The hood was off, and he found himself on a hard wooden chair with arms. The room was all done in Interrogation Grey: floors walls and ceiling. There were no windows. This was the Golfball all right; the Ministry of State Security’s recently made-over Shanghai HQ, so named because of the large concave indentations in its concrete exterior. The air still smelled the same, as if it had been breathed in and out by generations of halitosis sufferers going back to the Cultural Revolution.

  Whenever there were demonstrations, or bombs, or the political tension was heightened in any way, it was standard practice to pull in foreign station agents for a routine conversation. The intelligence game in China was just that: a game. And whenever he was pulled in, the FBI did the same with one of theirs in Washington or LA. Kovic had cultivated an image, which Chinese Intelligence seemed to have swallowed. To them he was a middle ranking CIA asset, a typical American abroad, lazy, with a reputation for drinking and occasional brawling, who gathered low to medium level intel that seemed to please his bosses enough to keep him in post. He knew this because he had hacked their file on him. And when they hauled him in for questioning he always made sure he looked suitably troubled by their findings – even though he had already read them.

  The worst aspect of these Q&As, Kovic found, was the boredom. A hundred pro forma questions would be asked to which a hundred stock responses would be given. It wasn’t about the content of the answers, it was the fact of the event itself; the MSS needed to show Washington it knew who its agents were. It was just a formality, a bit of low level sabre-rattling, since their own hackers would be doing their best to keep them up to date with all his activities: emails, phone calls to and from Langley, and, of course, all his traffic with Cutler in Beijing. With this in mind, he made sure to keep these channels appropriately active with carefully selected intel, some of it mildly sensitive, or sensitive enough to convince the MSS that they were efficiently keeping tabs on him, but all of relatively low grade, to suggest he wasn’t that good at his job. He had even created a series of fictitious moles inside the Party whose fake communiqués to him were littered with government gossip he had gained access to from other sources, to be pored over by their analysts. This material caused them to waste hundreds of hours trying to uncover his fictitious sources.

  Kovic noticed he was now zipped into a GITMO style boiler suit that had definitely not been washed since the last wearer had had it on, perhaps even the first. The red-brown stains and another, less vividly coloured, crunchy patch were testimony to that. He had nothing on his feet and the floor seemed artificially chilled. Beside him there were two identical metal bowls. One had a liquid in that he hoped was water; at least it didn’t seem to smell of anything either human or deadly. The other was presumably his toilet.

  There was no point in speculating about what was coming, it was a waste of time and brainpower. ‘Know this,’ a grizzled instructor at the Farm told his group as they were about to go out into the world as fully fledged agents, ‘however many billions of dollars they spend on you and however many thousands of hours you put in to figuring what your friend or enemy’s next move is, only one thing is for sure – it ain’t gonna be what you predicted. From the Iran hostages to jets slamming into the Twin Towers, the shit that happens will be the last thing you expected. Never underestimate how little you know.’

  He heard steps outside – not heavy, lumbering, goon steps but the light, well balanced tread of someone who hadn’t
been hired for their muscle. The woman was back.

  She strode in, sat and opened a fat file. In English, he recited the standard pro forma he was required to when detained by in-country officials.

  ‘I am a US Government public servant and I demand to know on what authority you are acting. I must protest in the strongest terms that under the—’

  The woman was standing over him. She seemed to be somewhat agitated.

  ‘Just shut the fuck up, okay?’ she said in English, her voice barely an inch from his ear. Something hard landed on the side of his head: a fist.

  ‘I insist on speaking to my—’

  ‘We have already informed your office of your detention.’

  She sat down and reached for a table lamp that was by her chair, set it on the table, switched it on and trained the light in his face. He started to laugh. Suddenly his face was stinging again. He hadn’t even seen the slap coming.

  ‘What is this, step two from the MSS interrogation manual? Train light on prisoner to maximise discomfort. Or are you gonna give me a facial? Or a new nose – I sure could do with one. Are you a plastic surgeon? Or just a make-up artist? I know – it’s Shanghai’s municipal clean up foreigner day.’

  She ignored him and continued to study the file in front of her.

  ‘No, honestly, why am I here? And I didn’t catch your name.’

  She started to read from the file.

  ‘Kovic, Laszlo—’

  ‘No one calls me that.’

  She continued to read: ‘United States Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Operations, Shanghai Station. ’

  ‘I am not and have never been an employee of any organisation of that name.’ Technically this was true. On his paperwork he was simply ‘Government Servant’.

  ‘Your lies are futile.’ ‘Your L’s are excellent. Where’d you go to college?’

  She continued to examine the file as he watched her. This was new to him. Just by her movements he could tell she’d spent time in the West. Her English was fluent and natural. The MSS he was used to was an all-male machine and Chinese ministerial paranoia dictated that all MSS agents had to be purebred products of the system, uncontaminated by pernicious outside influences. Family devotion to the Party was a prerequisite for admission, which meant they didn’t necessarily get the best or the brightest. The only MSS women he knew of were either the clerical staff or the honey traps, run by a totally separate division to ensure no contagion spread to the core.

  She continued to read from the big file.

  ‘You have resided in Shanghai for six years following transfer from Afghanistan.’

  ‘As I said, your English is excellent.’

  ‘It’s better than your Mandarin.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  He cleared his throat, and recited in Mandarin:

  ‘Who is lovelier than she?

  Yet she lives alone in an empty valley.

  She tells me she came from a good family

  Which is humbled now into the dust . . .’

  A small frown, otherwise her face was blank.

  ‘Du Fu – “Alone In Her Beauty”. I know the whole poem.’

  He drew some satisfaction from the fact that his refusal to take this too seriously was irritating her.

  ‘Do you realise how much trouble you are in?’

  ‘I’m always in trouble.’

  ‘Try not to brag.’

  ‘I’ll work on it. Is this going to take long?’

  She ignored this and smoothed out the page in front of her.

  ‘Recruited 1999, after flunking out of high school in Detroit.’

  ‘It was no place for a young man of ambition.’

  ‘Your principal concluded that your only memorable character traits were deceitfulness and a disregard for authority.’

  ‘They always stood me in good stead.’

  ‘You failed Basic Training at the Farm.’

  ‘Actually I think they were threatened by my brilliance.’

  ‘Your previous tour in Afghanistan was marked by controversy.’

  ‘I think you skipped some of the good stuff there.’

  She sighed heavily. Good, he was getting to her.

  ‘Your purpose here is to lure citizens into the corrupt practice of betraying their country by stealing secrets in return for monetary gain. Do you deny it?’

  Her exasperation was starting to show in her voice. She was new to this, he could tell. It was time to try another tack.

  ‘Of course I don’t deny it. It’s what we both do, you know that.’

  ‘In addition to being involved in espionage,’ she said, her voice becoming shriller, ‘you are a corrupt degenerate. You have been consorting with criminal elements. You are not only an embarrassment to your country but a menace and a danger to ours.’

  It sounded like a textbook denunciation from the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

  ‘Oh stop, you’re making me blush.’

  ‘Are you intoxicated?’

  ‘Sadly not, but I could use a shot of something. What say we go on over to Danny Tang’s and get—’

  She slapped his face again, hard.

  Her indignation seemed genuine. Either that or she was putting on a pretty good act for her superiors who might be watching, which in practice amounted to the same thing.

  She opened a laptop, fired it up and turned it round to show him a video: a compilation of CCTV footage, the chase, first in Wu’s car, then on foot and on the rooftops, all lovingly edited together like a trailer for an action movie.

  ‘Nicely paced. Your leading man is quite a hunk, isn’t he?’

  ‘You caused thousands of yuan of criminal damage, committed violence against numerous other persons, showing a flagrant disregard for public safety—’

  ‘I was fleeing for my life. If you examine the footage more closely – the unedited version – you might notice some of your comrade citizens were trying to kill me.’

  ‘They are criminal degenerates with whom you had been consorting, presumably with the intention of procuring narcotics.’

  ‘I don’t do drugs: it’s in my contract.’

  ‘Or prostitutes.’

  ‘I am happily, serially monogamous.’ Or I was.

  She raised a hand, as if stopping traffic.

  ‘Agent Kovic, America may think it can trample all over other countries with impunity, leaving a trail of destruction and – chaos.’ She took a deep breath and almost hissed into his face. ‘Not China!’

  She paused, lowered her tone and rebooted herself.

  ‘For the last six years your purpose here has been to lure citizens into the corrupt practice of betraying their country by stealing secrets in return for monetary gain. Your presence has been closely monitored and many of the traitors who have collaborated have been punished appropriately.’

  It was true. Some of his more expendable sources had been found out, usually because they were careless with the money he paid them. Instead of being parsimonious, as it certainly was with its own salaried employees, the Agency allowed agents to be generous towards their assets, so he could splash out hundreds and even thousands of dollars on intel that was frequently low level or unprovable and sometimes obviously false.

  He stared at her, puzzled. ‘You know what? I don’t think you really know why I’m here. I think you’ve been told to bring me in, but you don’t know why. I think this whole interrogation is a sham. You’ve got your file and your video, but this is just a denunciation.’

  She didn’t move, didn’t even blink, but her sudden stillness said it all. He was right. What did she know about the border incident? Did she even know he’d been there? Or about Vaughan’s involvement with the demonstration, why he had had to run for his life?

  ‘What do they want? I’ll give it to you. I want to go home.’

  She stared at him as if she was at a loss to know how to answer.

  Kovic felt his patience running out. ‘Look, where is all this
going? Despite the chemically induced nap, I’m seriously tired. It’s been an extremely long day and I’d like to go home and have that shower.’

  She stood up and glared at him, a flicker of satisfaction lifting her expression. ‘You are going to get your wish.’ She closed the file.

  ‘You are going home.’

  It took a moment to sink in.

  ‘You are booked on the Delta flight to Washington DC at 8.30 a.m. tomorrow.’

  18

  French Concession, Shanghai

  This had to be some kind of mistake. Cutler would have to intervene, smooth it out. Chinese agents in the US were frequently in trouble for crossing lines. But expulsion . . . Surely this whole charade was just a slapped wrist. The metal door swung open and the two suited heavies from the Benz appeared and began to un-cuff him. One had his clothes in a plastic bag. The woman got up and started towards the door. Suit One hauled Kovic to his feet and started pulling off the jump suit.

  He yelled after the departing interrogator.

  ‘Hey! You can’t do this without notifying the US Consulate.’

  She turned and smiled thinly.

  ‘We already did. Before we picked you up.’

  Shit. Few things got to Kovic like the thought of going home. He wasn’t ready. He had stuff to do.

  ‘You have to allow them the opportunity to make a formal objection.’

  ‘They confirmed no objection was being raised. Perhaps your behaviour today was an embarrassment. You seem to make trouble and draw attention to yourself wherever you go. Hardly the correct behaviour of even a mediocre agent. They must be very disappointed to have wasted all those tax dollars on your training.’

  That cunt Cutler had hung him out to dry.

  ‘You will be escorted to your place of residence where you will be permitted to collect essentials for the journey. Then you will be taken straight to Pudong airport and on to the flight for Washington DC. You will never return to China.’