by Adam Hall
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I told him he couldn’t.’
You cannot stop me.
Facing me under the bleak tube lights, the blast of cold air from the ventilators sending a corner of the newspaper fluttering between his hands.
‘That is a trap,’ I’d told him, ‘don’t you know that?’ He went on staring at me, hadn’t heard of traps in newspapers, thought I must mean something else. ‘Your wife’s not in danger - they just want you to think she is, to get you back there. Try and understand.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘It’s an old trick, that’s all. They’re just working on your emotions. If you—’
‘You cannot say that!’ You cannot give me any guarantee that my wife is safe!’ He shook the paper, pushing it against me. ‘It could be true, don’t you understand? No one is safe in Beijing!’
I heard the girl at the gate talking to the tour guide, raising her sharp thin voice, we were going to be late, so forth.
I got the paper out of Xingyu’s hands and folded it, bunching the bloody thing up and throwing it into the big oil drum against the pillar and standing close to him, talking quietly, holding his arm, looking into his masked face and moving into his mind with my own, just as they’d done, the people in Beijing. ‘Dr. Xingyu, you’re playing into their hands, and if you go back now your wife won’t see you again, not the man you are now, not when they’ve finished with you. All we’re asking of you is three days, and in three days you can go back to Beijing, do you understand? You’ve got—’
‘Look, if you’re coming with us’ - tour guide - ‘it’s now or never, come on!’
‘I am not going with you,’ Xingyu said and turned away and began walking and I caught him up. ‘When we land in Gonggar you can phone your wife, then you’ll—’
‘You say three days - why three days?’
‘It’s all the time we need. You—’
‘To do what? I know nothing of what you are trying to do, nothing. I am going back to Beijing.’
Tour guide shouting now— ‘You’d better phone my office, okay, tell them what happened!’
The need to make a decision came right up against my face and I stopped walking and thought about it, thought about everything, all the options, all their permutations, and finally faced the stark fact that if Dr. Xingyu Baibing got as far as the checkin counter across there and booked to Beijing we were finished and there was only one way I could try stopping him.
Caught up with him again and said, ‘If you knew our plans for you, you wouldn’t want to go back to Beijing.’
‘That is possible. If I knew. But I do not know.’
Standing together in the unearthly light of this place, attracting God knew what attention from the police and the plainclothes PSB agents among the crowd, with Bamboo ticking to doomsday on the big round clock.
‘So I told him.’
Pepperidge didn’t react.
‘How much?’
‘Most of it.’
‘When did you tell him?’
‘There wasn’t time at the airport. I just gave him my word that if he caught our plane I’d answer any questions he wanted to ask.’
He sat very still, Pepperidge, the pad on his knee and the ballpoint sticking out from his thin wrinkled fingers, his eyes looking down, and in a moment he said gently, ‘Well, there’s always something that can be done.’
He should have blown my head off.
I felt very tired suddenly, as if I’d been climbing a real bitch of a mountain and got to the top, felt I could let go at last, flop out, because I’d told him now, I’d got it over, very tired indeed, suddenly, or perhaps it was the AMS the tour guide had warned us about, acute mountain sickness, exactly, the one I’d just been climbing, I’m sure you see my little joke.
‘What else could I have done?’
Sounded angry, didn’t have the gentleness of this bloody saint, didn’t have the kind of philosophy that was going to get us through this one if anything could.
‘Not much,” he said.
Well yes, I could have gone on arguing the toss with Xingyu until the plane had left, taken him to a hotel and called London, not having Pepperidge’s number in Lhasa yet, called London and told them the situation and asked for instructions, let them take this one on their back, or I could have told Xingyu to phone his wife or a trusted friend, anyone in Beijing who could have told him there was nothing in fact to worry about, his wife was only under house arrest with no interrogation going on, but it might not have worked all that well because the pretty Xingyu Chen could indeed be in Bambu Qiao under a five-hundred-watt lamp bulb and it would have been someone else who’d answered the telephone, a colonel of the KCCPC who’d been stationed in their apartment to wait for this very call.
Or I could have simply tried to muscle him onto the plane for Gonggar, a center knuckle on the nerves here and there to get his attention, to show him I was serious, but of course he could well have reacted, started an uproar, and they would have closed in rather smartly, the chaps in their peaked caps, and finis, my good friend, finite.
‘The alternative,’ I said, ‘would have been to try keeping the man hanging around Chengdu scratching his mask off while I tried phoning London or tried getting some news from Beijing, and—’
‘You don’t have to explain.’
So I shut up. He’d thought out all the alternatives for himself in five seconds flat. But I hadn’t been trying to tell my director in the field how to suck eggs; I’d wanted him to know that I’d seen what the alternatives were and seen that they weren’t worth using. But he would know that too.
I closed my eyes and let the whole thing ride, because I was going to need my strength. Someone, my gentle DIP or my Control in London or Bureau One himself, would have to work out what to do next, and their instructions could be frightening.
It had seemed so easy, almost a model exercise. The shadow executive was to take charge of a distinguished dissenter from Beijing at Hong Kong airport and keep him discreetly sequestered for a day or two and then send him back to the capital when all was ready. The distinguished dissenter would not of course be informed of the main operation, would know nothing of the People’s Liberation Army general who would contain Tiananmen Square with his tanks while Dr. Xingyu Baibing, the hero of the hour, went before the television cameras in the Great Hall of the People and offered to lead his country out of the shadow of Communism and into the light of democracy.
Things were different now. He’d picked up the paper.
Plopping sound, like a silenced shot. I let my lids open a degree and saw Pepperidge had pulled the cork out of his big thermos flask.
‘A drop now,’ I said.
‘Do you good. Rest a lot, drink a lot.’
‘Yes.’ Rest, drink, but do not be merry, my masters, ‘tis not the hour.
If he hadn’t done that, Xingyu, if he hadn’t picked up the paper, there would have been no mission-breaker, no ultimate risk of something happening that could blow the whole enterprise. Even if Xingyu was killed in some kind of unexpected action he could be replaced by someone in front of the television cameras, a disciple of the messiah who could still do the job at a pinch. Even if they blew us, the KCCPC, blew Pepperidge or me or both, we would pop our capsules to protect security and London could replace us and the operation could still proceed. If Xingyu was captured and sent back to Beijing and brainwashed it could still proceed, because the army general would still make his move and Xingyu’s replacement would still do his job, at a pinch.
But now we had a mission-breaker. We would have to go on from here in the face of the ultimate risk.
‘Cheers.’ Pepperidge gave me a mug of tea.
‘Cheers,’ I said.
And the ultimate risk was buried like a bomb inside the head of Dr. Xingyu Baibing himself. He knew everything now, because I’d had to tell him, and if they got at him tomorrow or the next day and put him under implemented interrogation he’d blow every phase of B
amboo like a firecracker, and within the hour the PLA general in Beijing would be arrested and shot and his division ordered out of the capital and when Xingyu was finally propped in front of the cameras like a ventriloquist’s doll they’d wind him up at the back and he’d say he’d been wrong after all, he’d say that the people had mistaken their way along the road to socialist salvation, tempted by foreign blandishments, he’d say they must hold high the torch and keep the faith, while all over the city and across the nation a hush would fall, and hope for the future would limp away like the beggar at my table in the cafe, his tin bowl empty.
Pepperidge sipped his tea. ‘I shan’t inform London.’
I sat up straighter. ‘You’ve got to.’
‘I see no reason.’
‘This is major. You can’t just go it alone.’
‘I don’t see,’ he said slowly, ‘that London could have instructed you to do anything else at Chengdu, other than what you did. I think you took the only way out, and it must have shaken you to do it. I can only commend your decision.’
He was going right out of his way this time. But it wasn’t just charity. We were going to have to keep the mission on track if we could, and the director in the field didn’t want to run a shadow executive who was living on the edge of his nerves because he’d made an ultrasensitive move without asking London’s permission.
‘Few things you should know,’ he said, ‘before we make up our minds what we’re going to do. I’ve been in signals with London quite a bit since I got here, picked up some of the gossip. The Bombay police found a body in a canal last night, been garotted, head half off but with the face still there and papers intact in his wallet, five snake bites on him. It was Sojourner.’
I thought about it and then asked him, ‘Are they certain?’
‘Oh yes. Two of our people were flown out from London to dig up the facts. Apparently Sojourner was released from the intensive-care unit twenty-four hours after he went in there, and a friend of his fetched him from the hospital. He was reported as being “still weak, but ambulatory,” and his friend - Hindu - declared he would look after Sojourner with great care.’
‘How old was the friend?’
‘I asked that, too, because of what you’d told me. He was an adult, not the boy. Of course, it wasn’t necessarily that man who killed him, though it looks like it. They’re trying to put everything together.’ He brought the thermos over and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Top you up. The only thing that worries us, of course, is that he might have been interrogated, during the time when he was escorted from the hospital and the time he was killed. For the moment London is assuming that Sojourner’s assassin didn’t get it right the first time and simply had to finish him off. Snake venom’s uncertain in its effect, depends on body weight and general constitution. Whatever they find, I’ll let you know.’
‘If he was interrogated,’ I said, ‘and they got everything out of him …’
‘Let’s not think about it. On the more positive side,’ getting up and fetching a news clipping from his briefcase, ‘when Dr. Xingyu was at our embassy in Beijing they asked him if he’d got any photographs of himself taken abroad, and he came up with this one, among others.’
Head-and-shoulders shot, saying cheese, against the background of Big Ben, unmistakable. Caption: Dr. Xingyu Bribing, released yesterday from the British embassy in Beijing, in London for talks with the Foreign Office.
‘Any chance they’ll swallow it?’
‘Not much. The first place Beijing would expect him to go is of course London, and of course they would have posted a very large contingent of their people at Heathrow to watch for him. But who knows, they might fall for the snapshot.’
He took another sip of tea and sat looking down into the mug, perhaps waiting for me to say something, though I didn’t think so. He’d been going over the Chengdu thing while he was talking, and had now reached, I believed, a decision. I had an idea of what it was going to be, and I hoped I was wrong, hoped to God I was wrong.
Sand hit the windows as the gusts came whipping into the streets from the plateau. I found I was watching the telephone with its chipped plastic and its tangled cord, and either Pepperidge noticed this or there was one of those little flashes of telepathy that we become used to, when the mission begins to take shape and our nerves follow the same rhythm and our minds touch and drift away again but not far.
‘I would phone London, of course, if you wanted me to.’
In a moment I said, ‘Have you got the answer?’
Swinging his head to look at me. ‘I think so.’
‘And you’re ready to go ahead with it?’
‘Not really the question.’ He looked down again. ‘It’s whether you will be ready to go ahead with it.’
Sand on the window, coming in waves across the rock desert out there in the night, eroding the town by infinitesimal degrees, reminding me how impermanent life was, how fragile.
I said, ‘Try me.’
He got off the bed, taking his mug and putting it down carefully on top of the chest of drawers with its patchy varnish, one brass handle missing.
‘The only added risk,’ he said, ‘that we now face is Dr. Xingyu himself. For as long as he stays uncompromised, we shall have no trouble.’ It’s one of the precious euphemisms those sniveling scribes at the Bureau think up to soften reality: in this case, for the opposition to ‘compromise’ Dr. Xingyu Baibing they would throw him into an interrogation room and squeeze out every bit of information he’d got in his head while the radio was turned up to full volume to cover the noise. ‘If he were found and seized and interrogated,’ Pepperidge went on, ‘all would of course be lost, and there wouldn’t be anything we could do about it. After all, Sojourner possessed the same information that you—’ tiniest hesitation ‘—that Dr. Xingyu has now become privy to. The only difference is that we believed Sojourner was safe from any attention, whereas Dr. Xingyu is being actively sought throughout the world. We should have protected Sojourner, and didn’t but at least we know we must protect Dr. Xingyu, if necessary to the point of death.’
I sat with my hands around my mug of tea to warm them. The ancient electric heater set into the wall was keeping the room just this side of freezing.
He didn’t mean mine, my death. The shadow executive doesn’t necessarily expect to return from a mission; that much is a given - it’s in our contract. And it is understood by all parties concerned that in inclement circumstances the life of the undersigned may become forfeit despite any or all efforts that will if possible be made to protect him.
We’ve lived with that one from the beginning, and never pay it much attention. People get killed in bullfights, in marital strife, on the road. What frightened me was that Pepperidge meant Xingyu’s death, not mine.
‘I don’t want,’ I told him, ‘to make guesses.’
‘No, quite.’
If you think I was giving him a hard time, my good friend, you are in error. I wanted to be absolutely sure of what my director in the field would give me for instructions, because in the heat of action I might forget what was said, or what was meant.
Pepperidge took a step or two, his thin body stocky-looking in his padded windbreaker, his raw, knuckly hands tucked under his arms, his eyes resting nowhere.
‘Quite. Well, let me ask you this. Do you think there’s any chance of persuading Dr. Xingyu to carry a capsule? If you explained the need?’
I didn’t even have to think about it. ‘No.’
‘Understandable, quite, devoted to his wife and all that. Just thought I’d ask, because you’ve been with him longer than I have.’ He turned away, taking another step, so that his voice reached me indirectly, echoing softly off the walls above the moaning of the wind outside. ‘So what it comes down to is this. I need to know whether, in order to protect the mission, you yourself would be prepared to take his life.’
Chapter 12
Cockroach
He looked like a Buddha sitting ther
e.
I didn’t know if he’d seen me; he didn’t give any sign.
There was a three-quarter moon outside; it had lit my way, no more than a patch of light through the haze of the flying sand but enough to show me the road, rutted by carts, up the long hill to the monastery. It shone through the oblong gaps in the walls here that once may have been windows, and through the broken timbers bracing the roof, its light leaning between the pillars, some of them rearing at an angle: the whole top floor had shifted, by the look of it, during the fire. There were ladders everywhere, most of them broken, hanging from their top rungs from the floor beams; the one I’d just climbed was the only one still usable - I’d checked for that, earlier, when we’d come here.
He sat very still, the moonlight touching on his scalp, turning his red robes to black, conjuring a spark of luminosity in the shadow of his face, a tiny jewel from this distance, his eye. So he was watching me.
This place was a catacomb, its spaces tunneling through massive timbers, its perspectives broken by frozen cascades of plaster blackened in the fire, by doors hanging from a single hinge, with cells making hollows darker than the walls, and galleries running as far as the light allowed the eye to follow. The smell of the fire was still here, acrid in the mouth.
The wind shrieked, rising to a gust and dying again, keening, and sand drifted through the beams of moonlight as if through the timbers of a wrecked galleon. I’d made no sound coming here, climbing from the main hall of the monastery: I wanted to know how good this monk would be as Xingyu’s guard; but there was enough noise going on already, from falling debris and the shifting of joists and roof beams as the wind shook the building. Perhaps he’d seen me in any case from the distance, as I’d climbed the ladder.
He hadn’t moved, but since his eyes were open I knew he wasn’t meditating or in prayer, but I gave a bow to make sure I wasn’t disturbing him, and he returned it, getting to his feet when I neared him, a gold tooth gleaming as he greeted me with his palms touching lightly together. He was agelong, fully ordained.
