Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  ‘Keyi da nide bian che ma?’

  ‘Chong, what’s he saying?’

  Stink of diesel gas seeping through the floorboards. I wound the window down.

  ‘Wants a lift.’

  ‘We’ll give him one.’

  Chong looked at me. ‘He a friend?’

  As distinct from foe, trade argot.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shang che.’

  As the man came around the front of the truck I said, ‘Chong. You don’t speak English.’

  ‘Gotcha.’

  I pushed the door open and shifted over to make room and the man came aboard, hauling himself up by the big iron handgrip, expensive duffel jacket, heavy black beard, an energetic, barrel-shaped body, dropping onto the seat beside me, pulling the door shut with a noise like a bomb.

  ‘Xiexie.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘Ah.’ Peering at me, then - ‘Well, well! You’re getting a lift too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had sunglasses on; otherwise he would have recognized me sooner, even with the two-day stubble. A lot of people wore sunglasses here without attracting attention; the ultraviolet was intense at this altitude: this was cataract country.

  ‘Trotter. How is the head?’

  ‘Much better, thanks of course to you.’

  ‘My dear fellow, I’m glad it turned out all right.’ In a moment. ‘That bloody jeep always gives trouble about here - I do this road every day. Grit in the carburetor, I daresay, an occupational hazard for every vehicle in Lhasa, but the thing is they never replace the air filters at the rental place.’

  He sounded, I thought, a degree too talkative.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

  Chong shifted the huge gear lever again. For a truck as big as a dinosaur there wasn’t much room in the cab. I felt Trotter moving closer to me.

  Very quietly, under his breath, ‘This chap speak English?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah.’ Gloved hands a little restless on his knees, fingers tapping. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of it, my dear fellow, but the police are looking for you. Locke, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. How do you know?’

  ‘I’m sort of local here, on and off, come here to dig as often as I can. Police know me well, and they sometimes haul me in whenever there’s a problem with a round-eye, ask me if I know anything and so on.’ In a moment, ‘From what I gather there was an agent of the KCCPC found dead in a temple yesterday.’ A beat. ‘The one where I picked you up. It appears someone described you.’ He turned his face toward me. ‘I can assure you it was not I.’

  Chong hit the brakes again as a tour bus cut things close past a horse and cart, and we put our hands on the dashboard.

  ‘Bie dang dao!’

  I hadn’t given Trotter any kind of an answer.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘in the first place I told them I didn’t know anything about you, obviously. It wouldn’t be wise for me to refuse to help those buggers when I can, because they turn a blind eye if I’m still on the road after a curfew, back late from a dig, that sort of thing. But they get damned little out of me, I can assure you.’

  Buildings were coming up as we passed the nomad camp ground, the big Telecommunications Office in the distance: we’d been making better time. I hadn’t said anything.

  ‘In the second place,’ his deep voice muted, ‘I’m not the slightest bit interested in your affairs, but if by chance you happen to have dispatched an agent of the KCCPC then I’m delighted, between you and me. You’re certain, are you, that this chap doesn’t understand English?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘Well and good, because this is tricky territory, as I imagine you realize. Never know who you’re talking to’ - his gloved hand on my knee for an instant - ‘I mean the Chinese. So the thing is, since the police are after you, it might be a good idea to make yourself scarce, don’t you agree?’

  ‘It sounds logical.’

  ‘Ni yao kouxiangtang ma?’ Chong, holding out his packet of Wrigley’s.

  Trotter shook his head. ‘Bu, xiexie ni. It’s not easy,’ he said, ‘in a place like this, to make oneself scarce, with martial law and everything. Of course, the entire populace hates and detests the authorities, but one or two are so scared of reprisals that they’ll give anyone away, even their friends, even their relatives.’ We reached for the dashboard again as Chong used the brakes for the first traffic lights, the drums moaning. ‘What I would like to tell you, my dear fellow, is that if you need a good place - a safe place - to sort of lie low till things blow over, I’d be delighted to assist.’ He leaned forward, looking past me at Chong. ‘Mafan ning, keyi rang wo zai xiayitiao jie xia che ma?’

  ‘Keyi’

  ‘I gave you my card, I believe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Phone me at any time, my dear fellow. At any time. I know a safe place, if you’re really stuck - not the hotel, of course, it’s just a tiny apartment in the native quarter. Dear God, the whole town used to be the native quarter, but now the Chinese are taking over, it’s appalling. The sooner they get that gang of cutthroats out of power in Beijing the happier I shall be, not to mention my good friends the intellectuals.’ He looked at Chong again. ‘Wo qian ni shenme ma?’

  ‘Bu. Heng huanying ni da wo de che.’

  ‘Ni zhenshi ge re xin ren.’ He braced himself as the truck slowed. The big black beard close to my ear -‘Please remember, Mr. Locke, that you can count on me, for the aforesaid reasons. I have a feeling you are hardly a friend of those bastards in Beijing, which makes you one of mine.’

  He used a fist on the door handle and dropped onto the street, looking up at me with his dark eyes serious. ‘You know where to find me.’ Swung the door shut with a bang.

  Across the road was a red-and-white sign in Chinese and English: Truck Rental.

  Chong gunned up and got into second gear. ‘You know that guy?’

  ‘Slightly.’

  ‘British?’

  ‘Yes. How many people,’ I asked him, ‘have we got in the field?’

  ‘Maybe a dozen in support, some of them sleepers, got a short courier line to the airport, longer one to Kathmandu, then we can use—’

  ‘All right, I want a two-way radio with a ten-kilometer range and fresh batteries. I want another one delivered to our DIP with the frequencies synchronized.’ He slowed for traffic lights, and I gave him a rendezvous. ‘I also want a different truck - what are those brown things with the rounded front?’

  ‘Called a Dongfeng, sure, I can rent one of those.’

  ‘How long will it take to get what I need?’

  ‘How soon do you want it?’

  ‘Fast as you can.’

  He worked at his gum. ‘Gimme an hour, okay?’

  I switched to receive. ‘Hear you.’

  ‘I’ve had no response yet.’

  There wouldn’t have been time. With the signals board in the state it was, they’d have to call in Bureau One, the all-highest, and he’d have to confer with Croder and possibly that bastard Loman and decide which way to go, leave me out here in the hope that I could make another move or call me in and replace me.

  ‘Did you tell them I’m asking for a few hours more?’

  ‘Of course. But I assume nothing has changed.’

  He waited.

  You cannot lie. You can lie to every single human being you meet in the field, you can lie like a trooper, like Satan himself, because your life will often depend on it, and that is understood. But the shadow executive cannot lie to his director, because he is his link to London, to Control, and to the signals board and the mission screens in the computer room and finally to the decision-making process that is the crux and fulcrum of the entire operation. That too is understood.

  ‘No,’ I said into the radio. ‘Nothing has changed.’

  Someone else came through the doorway across the street, a man wrapped in rags with some kind of basket on his back. I
watched him until he was out of sight past the vegetable stall. I was sitting in the truck, the new one, the Dongfeng, bloody thing reeking of yak dung.

  ‘But at least we are now in constant touch,’ Pepperidge said.

  That was like him: he’ll always find the remnant of a silver lining in the darkest reaches of despair and bring it into the light.

  Said yes.

  ‘Location?’

  It would be very dangerous to give it to him: there was no scrambler on these things. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Very well. I had a signal,’ he said, ‘through Beijing, an hour ago. The deadline has been moved up a little.’

  Mother of God.

  The briefing was that Premier Li Peng was due to address the Chinese nation on television from the Great Hall of the People at ten o’clock on the morning of the 15th, and that was the governing factor that fixed the timing of Bamboo: the premier was to be removed by force from his desk and Dr. Xingyu Baibing installed in his place. The briefing had noted that if the deadline couldn’t be met, we wouldn’t get another chance for months: Premier Li wasn’t scheduled to speak again until the spring.

  I asked Pepperidge: ‘By how much?’

  ‘ The speech was going to be made at ten hundred hours on the fifteenth, as you know. It’s now down for eighteen hundred hours the previous evening, which means that the bomber will have to pick him up at Gonggar at three tomorrow afternoon, instead of midnight.’ Short silence. ‘Bit rough, I know.’

  I watched the doorway.

  Nine hours.

  ‘What’s London telling the coordinator?’

  ‘In what way?’

  I think he knew, but didn’t want to get it wrong. This was sensitive ground. ‘Is the coordinator being told that the subject is now missing? That we can’t have him ready for the rendezvous at Gonggar in any case?’

  In a moment, Wo.’

  A gust of wind rocked the truck, blew dust along the street. ‘When will they tell him?’

  ‘I think they’ll leave it to the last possible moment. There’s not much to lose, after all. The bomber’s scheduled to leave Beijing at fifteen hundred hours Beijing time, thirteen hundred hours Lhasa. If we can’t make the rdv, all we have to do is put through a signal for them to cancel the flight, five minutes before takeoff.

  It gives us a slight edge, if there’s anything we can do in the meantime.’

  Meant find Xingyu.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  In a moment, ‘Have you any plans?’

  ‘I’m going to follow up whatever I can find.’ Couldn’t tell him what I’d asked Chong to do for me; we weren’t scrambled. But I think he knew what I was going to do. I think he knew.

  ‘Very well.’ A note of cheerfulness, I wished he wouldn’t do that, it was like whistling at a funeral.

  Meant to be kind, he meant to be kind, God knew how this man had got through all the missions he had - major operations, three of them Classification One to my knowledge, global scale - with this much humanity, this much compassion. Simply because, perhaps, he could preserve enough heart in his executive to keep him running on, give him the feeling he wasn’t alone, take enough tension out of his nerves to let him see a chance he might otherwise miss, and muster the strength to take it.

  Miracles do not always come easily, do not burst upon us with the holy light of revelation; they must sometimes be conjured from the sickly flame of despair, the hands held close to keep the draft away and the gaze steadfast, bringing to bear upon the matter the grace of faith, until through the dark of disaffection the small flame thrives, leaping at last to burn with a light that holds the very soul in thrall, by which I mean, my good friend, that one must not go limping home, must one, when all is wretchedness, no, one must sit here in this stinking truck and watch the doorway over there, not for an instant taking the eyes away, in case there is a last chance, however thin, of conjuring that little flame within the hands, and there she is.

  Su-May.

  She was alone, coming through the doorway of the little broken-down hotel, first looking to her right and then to her left in the way they do, the amateurs, when they want to take care they are not watched, making her way past the vegetable stall, a small figure bundled against the freezing wind, soon to be lost among the blade-edged shadows of noon.

  Hit the button - ‘Breaking, stay open, out.’

  She was at a table in the far corner.

  I could only just about see her: large luminous eyes set in a small pale face above the fur collar of her parka; something had gone wrong, I suppose, with one of the stoves in here, the cafe was thick with smoke. This was a bigger place than the one I’d gone to before with little Su-May and later Pepperidge; it was crowded, people hungry in the middle of the day. My stomach was empty but I hungered not, had ordered tea. Fear doth not prick the appetite, and Lord, I was afraid.

  The oil lamps flickered against the walls like warning beacons across a foggy sea, and dark figures moved through the smoke, servers, customers, beggars, and monks; dogs darted between their feet and under the rickety bamboo tables and out again, seeking scraps for their hallowed stomachs.

  They are sacred, she had told me, little Su-May, believed by some to be the reincarnation of departed monks, I think she’d said, believed by some but not by me, kicked at one of the little buggers and felt it connect, they’ll start gnawing on your bloody ankle if you don’t watch out, sitting with my hands around the cup of tea, nursing my nerves.

  Because it had come to this. When a mission has crashed and the opposition has gained the field and there is nothing you can do, almost nothing, we will correct that, almost nothing you can do, there is always a last desperate play that you can consider using, and it has never failed. It will give you access again, a way in through the wreckage, and if you get it right you will once more confront the enemy, and with luck and the blessing of every saint in Christendom you may even, finally, prevail.

  Men moved like shadows in this ghostly place, women too, I suppose, though it was difficult to tell because most of them were swathed in robes or skins or coats and big fur hats, the drab plumage of their winter hibernation here on the bleak roof of the world. Someone was coughing his heart up in the drifting smoke, and a door was banged open behind me to let some of it out.

  There were no mirrors in here.

  It’s not in the book, the ploy I was talking about, even though it has never failed. You’d think a thing like that would be a dead ringer for the Manual of Procedures, which is the Bible rewritten for the shadow executives of the Bureau, and I’ve tried to get it put in, but their lordships of the hierarchy won’t have it, and the best I can do is spell it out for the -neophyte spooks whenever I give an instruction class between missions at Norfolk.

  She had been sitting alone, but now a man was joining her at the table, his black leather outfit gleaming in the shadows as the light from the oil lamps caught it. He looked young, athletic; he was an Oriental. I didn’t think I’d seen him before, though I might have - no one in this smoke was easy to recognize. I hadn’t known she’d come here to keep a rendezvous, but I’d thought it possible, by the way she’d checked the street outside the hotel, right and left, in the way they do, the amateurs, the unfortunates in this life who pass too close to the machinery, sometimes with the thought in mind of monetary gain or the perverse excitement of betrayal, sometimes just by accident - as in her case, I believed, little Su-May’s - passing too close to the subtle and delicate machinery of international intelligence, fine as the web of that black widow we talked of, you and I, the machinery of subterfuge and treachery, deceit and untimely death.

  They were talking, she and the young athletic-looking Oriental, their heads close. She hadn’t seen me: I knew this. She would have reacted, would react if she saw me.

  They won’t allow it in the book, their lordships of the hierarchy, because although this last desperate play has never failed, it is deadly. It is lethal. It has killed.

 
At first I thought she was all she’d seemed to be, little Su-May, a refugee from the continuing oppression in Beijing, afraid for her father. Then I’d thought -had known - she was something more than that, perhaps working for the private cell that had moved into the field - not, certainly working for the police or Chinese Intelligence: she was totally untrained. Then I’d assumed that she had, yes, simply passed too close to the machinery, to become caught up, her loyalties compromised, fragmented, so that she was grateful to me for the message I’d sent to her father, impressed that I’d killed an agent of the KCCPC, the arch enemy, had protected me from the police in the cafe - perhaps on instructions - but had been working against me for the private cell and even then had become torn both ways and finally had warned me.

  You must be careful. When you go down to the street, make sure you are not followed.

  By the police?

  No. By anyone.

  All I knew of her now was that she might provide me with the only link there was to the opposition, to whatever agent or cell she was working for, and could conceivably lead me to Xingyu Baibing.

  The man in black leather could have been one of the people who had gone into the monastery last night and seized Xingyu and killed the guard. I could be within touching distance of the subject, the messiah.

  It was all that sustained me, this thought, all right, this straw I was clutching at. Without it, nothing could have made me leave the truck and follow this woman here through the bright streets of noon, totally unable to know if I myself had picked up a tag among the people of this place in their robes and skins and coats and big fur hats, their disguise if you will, because that’s what it amounted to, totally unable to know if I had been followed here and being watched at this moment through the drifting smoke.

  No mirrors, and a door wide open behind me, does that tell you anything? Normal security measures had gone to the dogs: I’d used no cover on my way here, hadn’t even looked back, had walked into this place alone instead of waiting for other people to camouflage the image through the doorway, had sat down at a table in the middle of the room, my back to the door, breaking every single bloody rule in the book, chapter and verse, because that is what the ploy demands before it can work for you.