Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  This wasn’t right. There were always deals to be done. Nothing was ever final and in Shanghai there was always the option of the cash offer, even to the most upstanding zealot. Even on the tarmac, at the bottom of the airline stairs. He stared at her. She was resolute, something unflinching in her determined look, as if compromise had never been in her vocabulary. Perhaps his cover as a crap agent had been too convincing. She didn’t know what he had.

  ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘We just did.’

  She turned away and disappeared out of the room. The suits frogmarched him out and they retraced their steps to the Benz. This time they put him in the front passenger seat and cuffed him to the grab rail on the dash. They hovered outside the vehicle, smoking and spitting, splinters of their exchange floating towards the car.

  ‘. . . fucking Daddy’s girl . . .’

  ‘. . . Chief was overruled, forced to take her on . . .’

  ‘. . . fuck up sooner or later and then . . .’

  ‘. . . back to Harvard . . .’

  Kovic shut down his thoughts and strained to listen. Between bursts of sadistic laughter they swapped descriptions of the indecent acts they wanted to perform on their colleague.

  ‘. . . how much more I can stick . . .’

  ‘. . . like to stick it right up her, show who’s boss.’

  They both thought this was hilarious, their blubbery chests shaking.

  Kovic’s mind went into hyperdrive. Maybe there was an arrangement he could come to with the suits to help them get rid of her, like if he escaped in such a way that it was her fault and he gave them some financial inducement; operatives at their level were always susceptible to a bribe. The lift doors opened and the woman strutted towards them.

  They were back on the street. The clock in the Benz said 02.35. The woman was driving; the heavies were in the back. All Kovic’s exhaustion from the day had been extinguished by the surge of adrenalin at the prospect of his fate. He had to think of something, make something happen. He couldn’t jump for it, but maybe he could head butt her and cause a traffic accident, create some mayhem, get free and make a run for it. The guys in back didn’t have their belts on. A decent impact would deploy the airbags, but she’d be crushed by the guy behind.

  Despite the late hour, the streets the traffic was solid. Even with the siren there was no way their path would clear. This city never slept. He looked at her behind the wheel, the men who hated her sitting in back. Was she really such a hard-ass? What had she done to deserve such hostility or was it just because she was a woman?

  Then it came to him.

  ‘Huang Shuyi.’

  There was no reaction.

  ‘Daughter of Han Zaiohong. Hannah to your friends in Cambridge.’

  Two years earlier, Langley had forwarded a request from the FBI who were examining a group of students from Shanghai suspected of espionage. He had done some background checks. Two were part of a complex hacking operation that Kovic argued should be allowed to run in order to trace whoever they were working for. Huang Shuyi was one of them. They all shared a house in Cambridge, Mass. The Feds had bugged it but were having trouble deciphering their dialect. Kovic was asked to listen in. What he discovered was one of the household, a kid named Rai, had contracted AIDS. Much of their communication was about how to get him help without tipping off his family. The shame of exposure was literally a fate worth than death.

  ‘I’m sorry for what happened to your friend at Harvard.’

  Again no response.

  ‘By the way, you should change the meatloaves on the back seat there. They were saying some pretty disgusting things about you back in the car park.’

  They passed by People’s Square. The protest was still going, with fewer people now, carrying traditional candlelit lanterns on poles.

  ‘Looks like it isn’t America’s week.’

  What did she really know about the border incident? He pressed on.

  ‘Guess we really screwed that one up.’

  She shrugged. ‘American stupidity plays into the hands of reactionary elements.’

  Interesting response, thought Kovic. ‘Reactionary? Surely those kids are the true patriots.’

  He had nothing left to lose; she had shone a tiny light into her own thoughts.

  ‘I was there, on the border; the only one who survived. Your bosses must know that – how come they didn’t tell you? Don’t they trust you? That’s probably the real reason why you’re deporting me.’

  She didn’t answer. He had gone too far. His thoughts drifted away to his home. The stuff he had accumulated.

  ‘Do I get to pack?’

  ‘Just your hygiene requirements. The rest will be confiscated.’

  He thought about Louise; they had parted on a bad note. He should at least say goodbye. Hell, she’d be better off without him, she had put up with so much. Without him she’d be able to get on with her life, get married, raise a couple of mortgages. He was just holding her back.

  A couple of fire trucks whooshed past, sirens blaring. In the distance he could see a helicopter searchlight beaming down less than a mile ahead. Hannah swerved into their slipstream.

  They were heading in the same direction, towards the French Concession. The way ahead was clearer now and she made a good job of keeping up with the emergency vehicles. If he could cause some kind of accident. This could be his last chance. When they stopped, whoever opened his door could be put out of action for a few moments but with all three of them it would be pretty hopeless. But as they got nearer the plan ceased to matter. The helicopter’s searchlight was playing on a column of brown smoke funnelling up into the equally smoky night sky. It appeared to be coming from the area where he lived.

  One of the suits spoke up.

  ‘We should leave this – go straight to the airport.’

  But Hannah didn’t answer.

  Fires weren’t unusual in the French Concession. Cramped accommodation, the fashion for paper lanterns, the common proximity of laundry to gas rings and – even more popular – bad electrical connections with several appliances run off a single light socket all made the whole place a bonfire waiting to be lit. But this one was bigger than he had ever seen. Shanghai’s firemen were notoriously inept when it came to dealing with domestic blazes and none too willing to risk their lives for some careless citizen who’d left the gas on.

  Hannah pulled up a block short of the narrow street that led to his building. It was clogged with fire trucks, a large crowd pressed up against them, paying no attention to a cop shouting at them to disperse. The car door on his side now opened and one of the suits unlocked his cuffs from the dash. He should take advantage of the mayhem. But his desire to flee was fading, overtaken by curiosity and a rising sense of dread. It was now clear that the smoke was coming from his courtyard. As a clutch of firemen in hi-vis green jumpsuits were attempting to manoeuvre a ladder into the cramped space, a flash of flame shot into the air from an exploding gas canister. The firemen retreated.

  Two policemen were restraining someone who was trying to enter the building. Kovic recognised him as Ren, the son in law of one of the old ladies. He was screaming and gesticulating wildly. The cops who were restraining him pushed him back and he fell, slipping on the paving that was awash with fire hose water.

  This was his chance. He whirled round. One of the suits lost his grip and he slammed his free fist into the face of the other. Hannah gripped him by the collar with both hands but he knocked her sideways using all his weight. The crowd engulfed her. But he didn’t run. Instead he threw himself at the gateway into the courtyard, kicking out at a cop who tried to tackle him, and dashed into the smoke. He could hear one of the old ladies screaming from one of the inner rooms. The door was jammed from the heat. Where the fuck were the firemen? Probably consulting the manual. He shouldered the door four, maybe five times before it gave, his lungs bursting, his eyes streaming. He plunged into the smoky darkness and tripped over a soft mound: his elderly neig
hbours, huddled together below the smoke.

  ‘Get up. Come!’

  He scooped up one of them but she could barely stand. He hitched an arm over his shoulder and dragged her forward as he reached for the other. Both of them collapsed back on to the ground. He bent low to take a lungful of the least smoky air just inches from the ground, then grabbed one of the women by the shoulders and dragged her out of the door and into the courtyard, coughing and yelling to the firemen to help. A group of them rushed forward as he dashed back through the door, retraced his steps and brought out the other woman who was now unconscious.

  Through the smoke he glimpsed his own door. This morning he had locked it. Now it was open.

  19

  There was no question where the fire had started. Fires, like explosions, left tell-tale burn patterns that could be deciphered, ugly shapes he remembered all too well from his time in Afghanistan. It had started in his bedroom, right on his bed in fact, the remains of which still reeked of gasoline. Despite the cramped conditions, he was a hoarder of books and magazines, thanks to an old fashioned weakness for print on paper. This was deliberate. Someone had made a pyre of papers on the bed. Although the fire was out now, everything sodden from being hosed down, the base of the bed was still warm, the jet-black charred wood frame incongruously reminiscent of the glistening coat of his parents’ black Labrador. Nothing much of the mattress remained. With mounting apprehension he parted the damp clumps of ash.

  Most people would not recognise what he now saw. But Kovic wasn’t most people. He had seen things that he was glad most people hadn’t. He had entered freshly bombed and burned dwellings in search of crucial intelligence, methodically working through the pockets of the dead when their bodies, sometimes in pieces, were still warm, coolly focused on the job in hand, not thinking about the horror of what surrounded him. Today his head was in another place, not primed to receive the horrible truth of what he was now looking at.

  He turned towards the scorched bedside table, and a pair of sunglasses, melted and fused with the surface as if they had been cooked on a hotplate. And something else caught his eye beside the table, on the floor, too low to have been caught by the flame and almost intact but for a scorch mark; side by side, bright as day, the earrings.

  Louise had come back.

  20

  Hotel Majesty Plaza, Shanghai

  Hannah refilled the glass. The Scotch seared his throat, then dulled the throbbing a little. Rage and remorse jockeyed for control of him.

  He had let her escort him away. At first he had resisted, giving her the brunt of his rage at the horrific sight of Louise’s remains. But all his strength and the will to resist had ebbed away.

  ‘She always slept curled up right under the duvet. They must have shot first and not even bothered to check who was under.’

  ‘Did she know about your work?’

  He shook his head. ‘But it was getting to be a problem, the sudden disappearances, changes of plan. It couldn’t have lasted; things were coming to a head. She deserved better.’

  Each of them had known the other had stuff they didn’t want to unload. Louise was a fugitive from an unhappy life in London. Once in an idle moment, Kovic had started to run a character check on her. Langley demanded that ‘significant others’ were all vetted and declared. He was equipped to retrieve every email, all her phone history, every search she had made. But then he stopped; instead he submitted a whole load of data harvested from a stranger who roughly fitted her profile. She would choose when to tell him stuff, when she was good and ready. But now that would never happen. His life with her had existed in a compartment all of its own, completely separate from his work. Now one had spilled over into the other in the most lethal way.

  Hannah, respectful of his grief, avoided eye contact.

  ‘I am sorry for your loss and after your courage saving the two women—’

  He cut her off with a wave of his hand.

  She had taken him to a hotel and got a room for him where he could shower. She sent one of the suits to get him some new clothes; his own were smeared with soot and stank of smoke. When he was cleaned up, instead of continuing the journey to the airport, she took him to the hotel bar. The goons were gone.

  ‘I can’t keep up. Few hours ago you were smacking me about, now I feel like I’m on some kind of . . . date. Is this a new MSS tactic?’

  She was very still. The shrill patriot-dominatrix had been replaced by a more sombre persona.

  ‘I am very sorry about your friend. Do you know who might have started the fire?’

  He pulled a paper napkin towards him and made a sketch of the snakehead trident tattoo.

  ‘Mean anything to you?’

  She stared at it blankly.

  ‘Why should it?

  ‘You don’t know Shanghai, do you?’

  ‘It’s where I live and work.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t know Shanghai. It has many layers. This is a tattoo.’

  She shrugged. ‘We don’t deal with gangsters; that’s for the police.’

  ‘But you’re dealing with me.’

  ‘You are a spy and therefore under my jurisdiction, even though you appear to be involved with criminal gangs.’

  ‘In my world there’s a fine distinction between involvement and running for your life.’

  She was silent for some time, looking down into her Coke.

  ‘You sure you don’t want any Scotch?’

  She shook her head, lost in thought. He stared at her until she met his eyes.

  ‘Here’s what I think you’re thinking: behind all that righteous indignation about what I was saying being such a terrible slur on your proud Ministry et cetera, you’re thinking – what’s this guy on about? He’s got no reason to be making this stuff up. Maybe he’s on to something. Maybe he knows stuff I could do with knowing too, which could further my career.’

  She showed no reaction to this, so he pressed on.

  ‘You and I, we both want the same thing: stability and harmony between our countries. Without that the whole world suffers. China’s come a long way since the Cultural Revolution. All those intellectuals, denounced by their own students, then sent out to break rocks to make them better Communists, that’s all in the past. China’s relationship with America is crucial to the future – and someone’s trying to throw a wrench into it.’

  Again, no reaction, but she was listening. He pressed on. ‘We barely know each other – we’ve only just met. I guess in the MSS manual of how to deal with degenerate foreign spies, rule one is to deport them, ship them home, but that doesn’t alter the fact that things are happening here which you appear not to even know about – which frankly doesn’t say much for the state of your Ministry of State Security.’

  ‘Why should I believe you?’

  He gave her his version of the incident on the border. She was dismissive.

  ‘An example of foolish imperialist aggression, typical of the arrogance of your leaders. China would never involve itself in such a mission.’

  Kovic sighed. ‘Ah, don’t go all Little Red Book on me, just when we’re starting to get along.’

  ‘Why would they shoot the others and not you?’

  ‘They didn’t see me.’

  ‘You’re invisible?’

  ‘I was under the snow. Look, this was billed as a joint mission, mounted from Chinese territory. I witnessed, with my own eyes, wounded suffering Americans pleading for their lives. Shot in the snow like dogs. By people from your side.’

  ‘How do you expect me to believe any of this?’

  ‘Take out your phone. Check out the border photos.’

  She found the image that had been on the flier.

  ‘This is supposed to have been taken on the North Korean side. See the flag; it’s hanging westward so the wind is in the east. If you check the weather records for the last three days the wind had been coming from the west. That photo is taken on the Chinese side of the border. Someone in China set thi
s up.’

  She was silent, absorbing what he had told her.

  He moved his glass to one side, put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.

  ‘Whoever murdered Louise almost certainly thinks they killed me. They don’t know they screwed up. You could put me on a plane home and wash your hands of me. But how are you ever going to find out the truth? And I’m never going to get to the bottom of who killed Louise. You saw her remains. I know you’re a compassionate person because I know what you went through to help your friend in Cambridge. I go home tomorrow and you’re going to be left sitting here, wondering what the hell just happened. And I’ll bet your masters are going to want to bury this, just as mine do.’

  Her eyes narrowed.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  He downed the contents of the glass.

  ‘Don’t send me home. Declare me dead. Let the CIA think I’m gone too. You’ve said yourself they’ll probably be glad to be rid of me. Let me find out who did this and I’ll share it all with you, whatever I discover.’

  She looked at him, incredulous. Her mouth tightened so that her lips almost disappeared, her head slightly lowered.

  ‘You’re asking me to recruit – you?’

  His pulse raced. Into the pause he poured all his hope.

  ‘What makes you think I would trust you?’

  ‘My bosses just cut me loose. They don’t want me hanging around. Sending me home – you’re doing them a favour. Why does Cutler want rid of me? Because I’m an embarrassment, because I don’t toe the line, because he’s probably sharp enough to know that if I stay, I won’t sit by and pretend what I saw never happened.

  ‘I thought most Americans hated China.’

  ‘I’m not most Americans.’

  At that moment there was a commotion at the entrance to the bar. A crowd of excited people thronged around a young man. Kovic saw Hannah’s eyes widen a fraction then look away.