Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why did you suggest it?’

  ‘Because at this moment, Dr. Xingyu, I’m looking for miracles.’

  Stiffly, ‘I am afraid I cannot help you.’

  In Beijing, if we could ever get him there, he would climb onto the rostrums and face the people and throw them miracles until they were dizzy with them, but here in the burned-out hulk of the monastery he could offer them none, not even the pressure of his finger on a trigger to defend his life, the life of their messiah.

  I understood that. I understood. But I could have used a miracle myself; it would have lightened the load.

  ‘Forget I mentioned it, Dr. Xingyu. But you’ve got to do something for me. It would have been far less difficult, as you know, to have taken you out of Hong Kong to safe territory, where your government has no jurisdiction. But you asked us to bring you to Lhasa and we took your point and we agreed. You had friends here, you said. Now this is what you’ve got to do for me. You’ve got to trust no one. No one. You must talk to no one, even if you’re alone with him, even if it’s the abbot himself, or the monk who guards you while I’m away, Bian, especially him, because it’s natural that you should want to talk to him - you’re not used to being alone, with no companionship.’

  They were chanting still, below, and a bell had started tolling, the huge bell that I’d seen in the garden behind here, its mouth two or three feet across with a beam as big as a tree trunk slung on ropes to strike it with, and as its rhythmic booming sounded through the great hollows of this place it made me afraid, I’m not sure why, perhaps it was just the vibration stirring in my body, in my bones, or perhaps it had the semblance of a clock, its beat inexorable as it measured the seconds, bringing us closer to what was to come.

  Fatigue, surely. Fatigue and the altitude and the head wound, everything adding up as I knelt there swaying in front of him, in front of Dr. Xingyu Baibing.

  Yes, I knew him once. We were trying to get him back into Beijing, but they ran us too close …

  The great bell boomed in my bones.

  Finally he said, ‘I will talk to no one.’

  ‘No one. Trust no one.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Do that for me.’

  ‘I will do it for you.’ Like a litany, kneeling together.

  ‘Because at any time now,’ I told him, ‘they’re liable to start hunting for you, now they know you’re in Lhasa. They’ve got hundreds of men they can use. They can search-every building, beat every bush.’ I was swaying again, and made an effort to straighten up. ‘But I can keep you hidden, Dr. Xingyu. I’ve had extensive training and a lot of experience. I can make it extremely difficult for them ever to find you. With luck, impossible.’

  The great bell booming.

  ‘But I can’t do anything for you,’ I said, ‘if you take risks, if you put us both in danger by talking. Some of the monks in this place don’t even know that you’re here: the abbot assured me of that. Only a few know. So don’t talk to anyone. Don’t trust anyone, whoever he is.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The great bell booming in my bones.

  I wonder if he does, if he does.

  In my bones.

  Chapter 15

  Drunk

  ‘We couldn’t do anything,’ Pepperidge said. ‘The police were already there.’

  My skin crawled.

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘My chap got there just before noon.’ He took another spoonful of soup.

  ‘He was fast,’ I said.

  ‘Adequate.’

  ‘New to the field?’

  ‘Oh, no. Been here a year.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘Chinese. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Bit skewed, still. Listen, when you debriefed him, did he say how long he thought the police had been there when he turned up?’

  ‘He said not long. They hadn’t brought the body out.’

  ‘How long did he stay?’

  ‘A good hour. He was in a Jeifang, made out—’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sorry - truck, big as a dinosaur, always breaking down, so it was good enough cover, he had the bonnet up, got some spanners out.’

  ‘He’s Bureau?’

  ‘Yes. Reports to Hong Kong.’ His yellow eyes were on me suddenly. ‘You’re active, are you?’

  ‘Call it eighty percent.’ He hadn’t been satisfied when I’d told him I was a bit skewed. I shouldn’t have done that, got to play by the book, and the book says the shadow executive has to give his director in the field his exact condition when asked for. All right, say eighty percent. Fully active would mean I was fit enough to do anything at all, nothing barred, run a mile flat out or swim submerged or deal with any sort of attack and defeat it and get clear. I couldn’t do that, not as I felt now: the head was still a degree dizzy and I could feel the effect of the altitude in the lungs.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘they couldn’t have got onto it that fast, I mean from their end.’ They couldn’t in other words have put down that agent as missing and started a search for him and found him at the temple: there hadn’t been time. ‘Someone must have heard the shots and reported it.’

  Pepperidge was quiet for a moment. The inference was there all right and it gave me the creeps: if anyone had heard those shots they could have seen me leaving the temple soon afterward, and given the police my description.

  ‘Possible,’ Pepperidge said at last.

  Two people came in, peasants, slamming the door, and it reached my nerves. ‘It’s not very good,’ I said, ‘is it?’

  ‘Not very.’ Spooned some soup. ‘Nil desperandum.’

  Easy to say. The KCCPC had suspected that Xingyu Baibing was here in Lhasa because he’d blown it at the embassy in Beijing, and now they’d found that body it wouldn’t be long before they identified it even though I’d made a gesture and changed coats and taken his papers, and they’d check their assignment roster and find that the agent posted on watch at the apothecary’s wasn’t there anymore and that’d be all they’d need.

  ‘How did you do it?’ Pepperidge asked me. The agent?’

  This was for Norfolk, for the new recruits. ‘I broke the thyroid cartilage with a half-fist, immediate internal hemorrhage.’

  ‘He had a gun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he fired it.’

  ‘Yes.’ He could smell the cordite on me.

  ‘How much light was there?’

  ‘Not much. Practically dark.’

  Tell those poor bloody children at Norfolk to try that one against a loaded gun and they’d get their brains blown out. Don’t do as I do, and so forth.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Pepperidge asked me.

  ‘There was a tourist bus at the monastery down the road, just starting back.’

  He thought about that. ‘Who was running it?’

  ‘Couple of Australians. There weren’t any Chinese,’ I said, ‘on board.’

  ‘Good-o.’ He finished his soup and pushed the plate away and said, ‘I’ve been in signals with London, as you can imagine.’ Because of the temple thing. ‘They asked me what I thought our chances are now.” His yellow eyes on me.

  ‘Chances of what, specifically?’

  ‘Of protecting the subject.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  Head on one side, ‘What would you have told them?’

  I gave it a minute, not the time for making a wild guess. ‘I’d have said our chances are fifty-fifty.’

  He looked away. ‘You’re that sanguine?’

  ‘I’m not a bloody amateur at this kind of thing.’

  ‘No offense, of course. But you see, you’re operating on foreign soil with the police, the public security forces, the intelligence services, and the military already searching for the man you’re assigned to protect. On top of that, this town is under martial law and there’s a curfew.’ His fingers drummed softly on the bare-wood table
. ‘I don’t think your chances are fifty-fifty.’

  ‘Tough shit.’

  ‘I understand how you feel.’

  ‘So what did you tell them?’

  ‘I told them that in my considered opinion our position is close to untenable.’

  If he’d been Loman or Fane I’d have walked out and gone underground and taken Xingyu with me. But this man I could respect, and he wasn’t getting cold feet; he was seeing things as they were, or as he thought they were.

  ‘Most of the situations in most of the missions we’re given are untenable, for Christ’s sake. It’s part of the job, you know that.’

  He leaned closer, tracing the edges of the stains on the tabletop with a finger. ‘There’s so much stacked, you see, on this one. We have to play for safety, can’t go taking risks. We—’

  ‘So what did they say?’

  His finger tracing the stains, ‘Your instructions are to get the subject to Beijing as soon as possible, without waiting for the deadline.’

  Bloody dog sniffing around my feet and I kicked out and got a yelp. ‘Shepley said that?’

  ‘Hyde. But of course it would have come from Bureau One.’

  ‘They’re out of their bloody minds.’

  ‘At first glance, perhaps. But they have a point.’

  Door slammed again, they wanted a bit of rubber or something on that door, stop it banging all the time, got on your nerves. ‘They’re not out here in the field,’ I said. ‘They’re five thousand miles away in London looking at a chessboard, what the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that they’re asking the impossible.’

  The thing was to keep my voice down, keep control, but it wasn’t easy. ‘The whole of this operation’s built on timing and coordination. He can’t go into Beijing until they’re ready for him there, until the tanks have taken control and they can meet him at the airport and escort him to Tiananmen Square. You know that. And now London’s pushing the panic button and telling me to go pitching into a precipitate last-ditch suave qui peut that’s going to cut right across Bamboo and blow it to hell.’

  He waited for a while, looking past me at the people in here, fingers drumming softly on the bare stained wood, giving me time to listen again to what I’d just said, test it out perhaps, perhaps reassess.

  It didn’t work. Let the defense rest. Bloody London.

  His eyes came back to rest on mine, and his voice was gentle.

  ‘The overall timing is important, yes, but not to us. We are local. Our bailiwick is here. All we’re being asked to do is to get the subject out of Lhasa and into Beijing, and the only difference is that they want us to do it now, instead of later.’

  Head throbbing, wouldn’t leave me alone. That worried me, because it wasn’t the injury so much, it was the stress, and if the executive was starting to lose his cool at this stage of the mission then God help us all.

  The door opened again and I tensed, waiting for the bang.

  ‘I don’t see anything precipitate here,’ Pepperidge said. ‘Right or wrong - and I think I’m right - I’ve reported that our position here is nearly untenable, and London is simply changing procedure to protect the mission. When we started out, we believed that Beijing was too hot for our subject, so we brought him here - the last place, as he told us, where they’d expect him to be. Now things have changed. Lhasa has got too hot for him, and the last place they’re going to look for him is in Beijing. We’ve got plenty of people there, and they’ll keep him underground till everything else is ready.’ He leaned forward, touching my arm. ‘There’s no real problem, you see.’

  It’s difficult.

  Someone over there was getting drunk, a round-eye, hitting the table, shouting something in English, something about bloody travel agents.

  It’s difficult for me, always has been, to give London credit. It’s not because they don’t deserve any: they’re not stupid, in fact they’re brilliant, or I wouldn’t work for them. The trouble I have with London is a lot of my own making, you know that if you’ve known me long, although they’ve certainly got habits that can drive you straight up the wall, and people, of course, people like that bastard Loman with his cufflinks and his polished shoes and his pedantic bloody speech, enough to send you - but you note how easily I can get carried away, about London.

  ‘Come and see the marvels of the Holy City on the Roof of the World,’ the man over there was shouting, ‘and all I’ve seen so far is a lot of burned-out fucking monasteries and yak shit wherever you go, stinking the fucking place out!’

  Hitting the table, red-faced, woolen hat with a bright green bobble on it, while two other men tried to shut him up.

  No, the thing with London is that they control me. I signed for it, fair enough, but it’s not easy to live with. I don’t like it when a signal hits the board from the field and Croder or Shepley picks up the executive like a bloody pawn and puts him down on another square, when in point of fact the said executive can be working his way through a minefield in the dark with a pack of war-trained dogs on his tracks or cooped up in a plain van with a gun trained on him while he tries to get at his capsule before they put him under the light - I’ve been in both situations and a dozen like them, not a dozen, dear God, a hundred, and you get to resent those people back there in Whitehall, the red-tabs ensconced comfortably behind the firing line, doing their daily stint and going home to a nice hot shower while you’re lying out there in a cellar in Zagreb with four days’ filth on you and blood in your shoe. You get to resent— ‘Invigorating mountain air, they told us, Christ, you can’t even fucking breather You should try those people in London, my good friend, then you’d have some real yak shit to chew on.

  ‘They’re right,’ I told Pepperidge.

  He leaned back, letting his breath out.

  ‘I was hoping you’d see.’

  ‘It’s the only thing we can do. If we can do it.’

  ‘But of course. Carpe diem.’ Seize the day, quite so. ‘The mask is still in safekeeping?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you can fit it on for him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we shouldn’t have any trouble. How is he?’

  ‘Bearing up. I’m treating him as gently as I can.’

  Head on one side— ‘In what way?”

  ‘He’s so bloody innocent. I had to know what had brought the KCCPC on our track, and I found out. He’d told someone at the embassy that he wanted to go to Lhasa if he could get out of there. I think he was overheard.’

  His fingers began drumming again. In a moment, ‘Possibly. But I got a signal early this morning. Our people in Bombay have taken a good look at Sojourner’s body. He’d been tortured.’

  In a moment I asked him, ‘Between the time he was taken out of hospital and the time he was killed?’

  ‘Right. Not before the snake bit him. So it could have been that. Sojourner had talked to the subject at the embassy, of course.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  ‘Not happy, is it? But let’s not see demons—’

  ‘Sojourner could have blown the whole thing. Bamboo.’

  A brief shrug. ‘Possibly. London doesn’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because our sleepers in Beijing have reported no movement at all among the army generals and their garrisons. If the Chinese government had got wind of things, they’d have taken our general away from his command and shot him. He is alive and well.’

  ‘Is that all we’re relying on?’

  A wintry smile. ‘We rely on anything we can get. But it stands up, you know. They wouldn’t have let the subject leave the embassy if Sojourner had been broken.’

  It wasn’t easy. I’d never known a mission to be so dogged, step after step, by the threat of destruction. Ambassador Qiao, in London, blown and killed; Sojourner, in Bombay, blown and killed; and the very man we were protecting, the subject, the messiah, treating the whole thing as if those thugs in po
wer in Beijing were a league of gentlemen. He knew bloody well they weren’t.

  ‘He’s such a saint,’ I said, ‘and he thinks everyone else is the same. He—’

  ‘The subject?’

  ‘What? Yes. He—’

  Crash as the man over there knocked a metal bowl off the table, shouting his head off, and another gust of freezing air came through the door as one of the staff went trotting outside. The talk had died down in here; these people were unused to drunkenness, and all you could get in here anyway was chang.

  ‘He thought it was all right,’ I said, ‘to talk about coming to Lhasa, he fell straight into their trap at Chengdu, and he didn’t believe I’d been followed this morning - I had to spell it out. I’ve warned him not to talk to any of the monks, but he hasn’t got any idea of even normal discretion. And he’s got the whole thing in his head, you know that, the whole mission.’

  Pepperidge sat with the collar of his sheepskin coat turned up against the draft from the door, fingers restless on the rough tabletop, the dregs congealing in his soup bowl.

  ‘Then we must simply be careful,’ he said, ‘and you know how to do that.’

  He was quiet again for a while; I assumed he’d started working out the future, the immediate future for the mission. Anytime now I was going to get his instructions, and I didn’t feel ready for them: I wasn’t fully active, wouldn’t be able to take on anything really critical and be certain of coming through.

  ‘You got a lift here,’ Pepperidge said, ‘on a tour bus. You still don’t want a car?’

  ‘No.’

  We’d been over it before, in my first briefing here. In a big modern city the executive has got to have a car because it gives him transport, cover, protection, a mobile base, and a weapon, but in a place like Lhasa a car was too noticeable, and if I’d used one it would have established a dangerous travel pattern to the monastery and back.

  ‘Very well.’ Pepperidge leaned forward again and folded his hands on the table. ‘We’re safe for the moment in thinking that while the subject is instantly recognizable without the mask on, the KCCPC are not looking for you. This gives us the edge we need: you’re still operational at street level.’