Free Night Heron by Adam Brookes Page A

recesses, pale, but with a spark of pleasure that Peanut hadn’t seen before. Blank little Yin, suddenly filled with purpose. He was watchful and ducked quickly into the store.
    She steered him to the men’s clothing and made him strip in a white changing stall. He wanted a blue jacket with gold buttons. Yin had to search to find one that coped with his girth. And a striped shirt and tan slacks. He settled on a pair of cheap shoes made of some indeterminate material, which shone the color of chestnuts, and a plain black overcoat. He stood, labels dangling, under the neon, while Yin regarded him, hips cocked, arms folded.
    “What’s this for, anyway?”
    For cover.
    “I may have to meet someone and I want to look right,” said Peanut.
    “Who may you have to meet?”
    “Never mind.”
    She smirked. “But I do mind. When are you meeting her? Perhaps I’ll follow you.”
    Now he looked at her and spoke slowly. “No. You won’t.”
    He tried hard, but the afternoon was broken after that. They rode the bus back to the Blue Diamond in silence.
    That evening, as Yin and the other girls were getting down to work, he sat in the little storeroom under the dim light bulb, half an ear on the proceedings. He took from its plastic bag the faded, fragile newspaper clipping and looked intently at it for a long time.
    A photograph in poor black and white print on yellowing paper.
    A Party leader, wearing a suit with a scientist’s white coat over the top. The leader is walking purposefully through what seems to be an aircraft hangar, his expression one of pride and resolution.Behind him a coterie of scientists, also in white coats, captured in mid-stride, keeping up, excited, gratified by this visit from the leadership. The caption:
Communist Party General Secretary and State President Jiang Zemin visits the Nanyuan Launch Vehicle Facility.
That’s all. Among the scientists scurrying in the General Secretary’s wake, one has his eyes down and carries a clipboard. Even through the smeary print, Peanut could make out the head of silver hair, long, touching the collar, and the fine bones in the face, a lean, sculpted look, ascetic if not for its handsomeness. The face of an intellectual whose great gifts are at the service of Party and Motherland.
Such important work!
    Peanut put the clipping back in its bag. He took out notepaper, and after some consideration wrote two letters. To whom it may concern. We were spies.
    Mangan read the email from the agency. Meeting concurred, excellent work. Pix ran in major markets, strong network pick-up. Well done and thanks to you and crew.
    The paper was pleased, too, at Mangan’s story. He’d thrashed the wire services. The piece ran high on the big news sites in Europe, the USA and Japan, but not in China. The Great Firewall blocked it.
    Mangan looked out of the window, measuring the approval of his editors against his own sense of incompleteness. He could hear Ting as she wrestled with the story’s fallout. She fielded a nasty call from the Jiangxi Provincial Foreign Affairs Bureau. And another one, more polite, but pointed, from the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, very close by, the purveyors of accreditation, all powerful.
    “Would Mr. Mangan come to discuss his recent trip to Jiangxi? There are some questions. When might be convenient?”
    Nothing, mercifully, from State Security.
    Ting did her best to calm the waters, and in good heart,but Mangan fretted. She was vulnerable. The more rules he and Harvey broke, the more vulnerable she became. They had talked about it, agreed that when the day came that she faced questioning because of his infractions, she’d play dumb as to Mangan’s movements and contacts beyond the most inoffensive. Sometimes he kept things from her to protect her, and she pretended not to notice.
    Two months earlier they’d had a horribly close call. Mangan had met a leathery old army colonel who had in his possession a copy of a very interesting letter. The letter,