Read Online Spy Games by Adam Brookes - Free Book Online Page B

drink a lot.”
    “And drink a lot.”
    “They don’t want
you
in the club. They want your money,” she said. He felt as if she were testing him.
    “I think you may be right.”
    She was still looking at him askance. Neither of them said anything. Kai pondered the notion that she had creamy skin and elegant, wide eyes, and spoke a soft, educated Mandarin, like an actress. She was slight, elfin almost—not the harridan he had been warned about. She was rather beautiful, close up. Now she was speaking quickly.
    “If they see me talking to you I’m in the shit.”
    “What? Who? If who…”
    “Do you have any idea
why
we are ordered not to talk to each other? Do you?”
    “I know some of it. I think.”
    She sighed, shook her head and, with a brief, disbelieving glance at him, was gone.
    Kai returned unsteadily to his rooms, thinking about her, her self-possession. He walked up the darkened staircase. The door to his rooms was ajar.
    He stood on the step, wondering. He pushed the door open. The room was dark.
    “Hello?”
    Silence.
    “
You ren ma?
” Is anybody there?
    Nothing, just the creaking of the wooden boards beneath his feet, a burst of drunken chatter from the quadrangle below.
    He felt for the light switch, his hand fluttering against the wall.
    The room was still. He walked to his desk. His laptop was gone, but they had left the power cord, for some reason. He felt sick, shaky. He looked quickly in the bedroom, which seemed untouched. But on the sink in the corner, his flannel was draped over a tap and his toothpaste tube was empty. He looked more closely, not trusting his senses. His shoes were jumbled up. And a textbook,
Photonics: Principles and Practices
, was closed, when he knew he had left it open at the section on Fresnel equations.
    He went back down the staircase and crossed the quad to the porter’s lodge.
    The police arrived in the form of two uniformed constables and a young, stocky detective constable in jeans and a sports jacket who chewed a piece of gum and looked at him quizzically. He introduced himself as DC Busby. Kai showed him where the laptop had been.
    “Anything else missing?” said Busby, walking slowly around the room.
    “No. No, but…”
    The detective turned and looked at him.
    “No but what?”
    Kai found his English drying up, as it often did when he needed it most.
    “I think, maybe, somebody search. Something.”
    “Somebody searched the room?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “Just, things maybe have been moved.”
    “Hm,” said Busby. “And why might they do that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Because, you see, in your room search usually, the thief, he’ll turn the room upside down. Pull out your drawers, turn your mattress over, that sort of thing.” The detective smiled, spoke deliberately. “He doesn’t tidy up.”
    Kai nodded, and then one of the uniformed officers was standing in the bedroom doorway and dangling from his hand was a single latex glove.
    And when DC Busby, a conscientious man who viewed the travails of drunken students as every bit as worthy of his attention as any other, returned to the station and entered the details of the case—burglary, accompanied by a search conducted to an almost professional standard, as evidenced by the presence of a discarded latex glove—on the Police National Computer, he was intrigued to see Fan Kaikai’s name return a ping. He leaned into the screen. The ping came from the intelligence services, who, it seemed, were possessed of an interest in Mr. Fan Kaikai, as they required immediate notification should he be in contact with the police.
    Intrigued, the detective filled out the brief explainer form and hit Send. He wondered where the message would go, to whom, what strange unseen mechanism he was setting in motion.

10
    Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
    Mangan took a late evening taxi to Piazza. Hallelujah was at a jazz bar attached to a decrepit hotel, a big group squeezed around a candlelit