by Adam Hall
‘An armed confrontation?’
‘In these days,’ he said bleakly, ‘nothing is impossible, after the disastrous failure of the summit conference. This isn’t just the cold war any more: it’s the freeze.’
‘Potent stuff. Where did this thing come from?’
‘My department was approached by a foreign power in that region via the diplomatic bag. You would be working for that power, but the success of the mission would benefit the UK, and, of course, our ally the United States. Not to say world peace.’ He leaned back.
‘It doesn’t sound like my kind of operation. It’s too geopolitical.’
‘The background is a geopolitical, yes, but that wouldn’t concern you operationally. In fact it’s very much your kind of thing - the very careful, clandestine infiltration of a major opposition network.’ He tugged a sleeve back. ‘But why don’t you go and talk to Pepperidge again before you decide? I’m due at the Travellers’ in ten minutes, and you’ll want to be on your way.’ He turned to the window to find out where we were, and slid the glass panel open. ‘Driver, you can put me down anywhere here.’ He turned back to me and said softly, ‘We haven’t made contact, as I’m sure you understand.’
‘I’ve booked you out,’ Pepperidge said, ‘on Singapore Airlines Flight 297, change at Bombay, first class.’ He threw another crust for the ducks. ‘All expenses paid, though not by me. The hotel in Singapore isn’t very posh, but there’s a good reason. It’s tucked away in one of the market streets, and you might want to make it your base.’
Crouching beside him, I held the paper bag while he dug for another crust. A light wind came across the lake, ruffling the surface; in the distance the flags above St James’s Palace made patches of crimson and gold against the gunmetal clouds.
‘Not that one, you silly little bugger, you’ll choke yourself. Wait till it soaks a bit.’
‘What about cover?’ I asked him. ‘Access, liaison, communications?’ I was instantly sorry, but couldn’t take it back. This wasn’t the Bureau sending me out. This was just the remnant of a once-talented shadow executive, shrugging off a mission he couldn’t handle himself. ‘Never mind -‘
‘I’m rather afraid,’ he said quietly, ‘you’ll be pretty much on your own, old boy, this time.’
‘Of course.’
Take a little getting used to.’ A thin smile.
‘Yes.’ I’d got a dozen passports and visas and border-franked papers in the safe and I could work out my own access once I was in the field, if I decided to take this thing on at all.
‘The cover I’d suggest,’ Pepperidge was saying, ‘would be either import-export or some kind of weapons specialist. You’d get a briefing on that, locally.’ He tossed the last crust at a pretty emerald-winged mallard and crushed the empty bag into a ball, stuffing it into his pocket. ‘As to access, they’ll come to you, don’t worry. It’s all in there.’ He’d given me a sealed oblong envelope when we’d met. ‘As far as liaison goes, you’ll have to pick a few people yourself, if you can find anyone you can trust.’
He stood upright, and I noted the stiffness in his legs. He was out of training, an old man, for God’s sake, and not yet forty… ‘I can’t promise anything,’ I told him.
‘Of course you can’t. Just go and see them, and listen to what they have to say. If you don’t like it, you’re not committed - I gave them no guarantee.’ I caught a note of wistfulness. ‘You’ve nothing to lose: this trip’s on them. Enjoy yourself.’
I met Pepperidge again two days later, over a coffee in a Wimpey along the Edgware Road. As we came out on to the street I told him I’d drop him off on my way to the airport. ‘Not to worry, old boy; I feel like a walk, do me good.’ He stood with his hands buried in the pockets of his mac as it flapped against his legs; a spring wind was buffeting through the streets, reeking of diesel fumes. ‘And listen, I’ -his thin mouth tightened suddenly, then he made himself go on - ‘I haven’t had a drink since the day before yesterday, and that’s how I’m going to go on, if you take this thing over. I just’ - a slack hand emerged, making a throwaway gesture - ‘just wanted you to know. And you’d better have this.’ He offered a card. ‘I’m renting a cottage in Cheltenham not far from the GCHQ mast. The pubs around there are full of interesting info, of course, and if I pick anything up that might help you I’ll pass it on. That’ll be my number. Not my name, you see, it’s the owner’s, but just make a note of the number. I’ll put in an answering machine, all right? You can always leave a signal on it if I’m out sweeping for data in the pubs.’ One of his wintry smiles. ‘Tonic water and Angostura, that correct? God, not a festive prospect, I must say.’
A double-decker swung past, blotting out the sky, its exhaust drumming against a dress-shop window. ‘I’ve got friends,’ Pepperidge said, ‘in Cheltenham, of course.’ A tone of pride redeemed. ‘If necessary I could possibly get a signal 2) you over the mast itself, through the British High Commission in Singapore.’ He looked away for a moment, Then his yellow eyes came back to rest on mine, squinting against the wind. ‘Not quite the service you’re used to. Sorry.’
An hour and fourteen minutes later, at 17:51,1 got out of my cab at the Singapore Airlines departure point at Heathrow. Another one pulled in behind and I checked the single pass-eager as a matter of routine.
Flight 291 taxied to Runway 9 half an hour later and then got held up while an executive jet came in. We were cleared by the tower at 18:24 and got airborne seven minutes after the scheduled departure time. The evening sky was almost clear, with a scattering of cumulus along the southern horizon and the windsocks hanging limp.
Nine hours later in Bombay, waiting to change flights, I picked up a copy of the Times of Singapore and found a seat in the departure lounge. In Kuala Lumpur a top National Front leader had called for an end to unbalanced pro-Malay government policies and urged Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad to crack down on corruption. In Bangkok, Thailand’s new military commander, General Chovalit, had ordered the army and its nationwide radio and television networks not to play politics in the coming general ejection. In Singapore, a government minister had accused police officers of being too strict, and suggested they should mix more freely with the public they served. Fights among teenagers in coffee-shops and at wayangs were becoming more violent, following the increasing practice of ‘staring down’ in order to provoke attack, which had yesterday led to a twelve-year-old boy’s ear being severed by a knife.
There was nothing in the paper to do with drug-running or the armaments trade. After twenty minutes I left my seat and picked up a copy of Glitz at the gift shop and went aboard Flight 232 for Singapore at 08:36. I was almost the last on.
During the flight I re-read the instructions Pepperidge had given me, memorised their main points and went forward to the toilet, tearing the three sheets of feint-ruled paper into small pieces and flushing them in the pan. As I went back to my seat a stewardess was pulling the curtain closed between the first-class and coach sections after pushing a drinks cart through. I notched my seat back a little and relaxed, slipping from beta to alpha waves.
There were a couple of moles, of course, digging away in SIS. It could be that.
‘Would you like some champagne?’
Almond eyes, heavily shadowed; an exquisite silk hanbok, ochre shot with emerald, pattern of white cranes, a few stitches gone at the shoulder seam.
I shook my head. ‘Are we running on schedule?’
She glanced at her thin jade-faced watch. ‘Ten minutes early. We should land in Singapore in about three hours from now, at 1 p.m. local time. Is there anything I can bring you, sir?’
‘Nothing.’ Patchouli on the air as she passed behind me.
It hadn’t been Floderus who’d told me about the moles: everyone along the grapevine knew it and a lot of them couldn’t sleep at night. They were having a swine of a time trying to find them, and until they found them they couldn’t tell how much damage was being done. So it could be that.
One of the moles had caught wind of the mission Floderus had been offered. Or Pepperidge had talked too loudly, in a pub or somewhere.
I wasn’t totally surprised. Even at the clearance and briefing stage of any given mission there could be vibrations picked up and passed on for what it was worth, however tight the security. Last year they’d got on to me very fast indeed, moving in and having a go at me before I even left London, smashing my car against the Thames embankment and putting me into hospital. This time they’d picked me up almost as fast, but this was just low-key passive surveillance, one man with a black dress-bag for camouflage. I hadn’t been looking for anyone; I’d just been checking the environment as a matter of routine, and the Asian with the bag - the one who’d got out of the cab behind mine at Heathrow - had turned away a couple of times in the departure lounge in Bombay, avoiding eye contact, and I’d followed up at once, heading for the men’s toilet and fading before he got there. He’d panicked right away, checking the toilet and coming straight out again, not terribly professional.
At the moment he was somewhere back there in the coach section.
There was no actual problem. He wasn’t strictly a tag: he wasn’t trying to find out where I was going - you can’t shadow someone and hope to get a seat on the same flight at the last minute if that’s where he takes you. This man had just been told to make sure I got to Singapore without changing flights and finishing up somewhere else, where they’d never find me again. I couldn’t shrug him off until we landed, and in any case I knew now that there’d be others, waiting at the baggage claim: they wouldn’t leave it to one man to keep track of me through terrain as tricky as Singapore.
Action later.
Sticky heat struck the face as we went through the walkway, then there was the cool of the air-conditioning again. I behaved precisely on cue at the baggage claim, checking no one, taking my time, chatting up a nice little American girl and helping her pull her two streamlined cases off the carousel.
In the cab outside I told the driver to take me to the Marina Bay area, and when we were moving along Fullerton Road I leaned forward on the seat.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Ahmad.’ A big grin. ‘How are you?’
I passed him a US $50 bill. ‘Let me have your card. And head for Chinatown.’
‘This money not enough. Hundred dollar fare.’
‘Listen carefully, Ahmad. I’m going to leave my bags in your care. Drop them at your office and make sure they’re kept safe. I’ll pick them up there in an hour, and then you get another fifty.’
‘A hundred. I can’t -‘
‘Ahmad. Look at my eyes in the mirror. Do I look like someone you can bullshit?’
His eyes met mine, then he looked away. ‘What place you want to go?’
‘Keong Siak Street.’
‘Okay.’
When we got there the other cab was still close behind us but I hit the door open and dropped, pitching between two fish stalls and ducking under a bead curtain, scattering birds near a grain merchant’s cart, the wet noon heat against my skin and the smell of sandalwood on the air, sandalwood and lamp oil and fish and curry and incense, a voice yelling out in Malaysian as I dodged past a medicine man and under a flower stall, finding an alley and lurching among bicycles and cane-work and dustbins, coming out into New Bridge Road and stopping the first cab.
‘Chong Street, off Boat Quay.’ I slammed the door shut. ‘Not this way - through Cross Street. When’s it going to rain, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Maybe tonight, cool things off.’
‘Jolly good show.’
CHAPTER 4
PARTY
The screams were coming from the room next door and I went into the passage. The door was locked so I shouldered it open and it swung back with a crash and I saw the woman standing on the windowsill, clutching the thin canvas curtain.
The window was open and she let go of the curtain and began tilting forward just as I got to her, and pulled her back into the room. She started screaming again in Chinese, beating at me with small cold fists, her half-starved body naked under the cheap cotton wrapper, a huge mole standing out on her stomach.
‘What’s up?’ Al said from the doorway.
‘She was trying to jump out of the window.’
‘Ta-men sha-ssu le wo ti erh-pzu!’
‘Take it easy now,’ Al said. ‘Six in the morning, for Christ’s sake, you’ll wake everybody up.’ He ran this place, the Red Orchid. ‘They hung her son,’ he told me, ‘over there, dawn this morning. Let’s get her onto the bed.’
She went on struggling for a minute and then suddenly went slack, and we laid her down, pulling a blanket over her thin ivory body as she went into a paroxysm of shivering. I went and shut the window, drawing the curtain to keep the brightness out.
‘We were all praying for him,’ Al told her, ‘all of us. Take it easy now.’
He sat on the edge of the bed and stroked the woman’s thin untidy hair as the sobbing began, worse than the screaming had been, the quiet desolate sound of a breaking heart.
‘What, then?’
One of the kitchen boys stood in the doorway, white slivers of wood from the smashed frame scattered around his feet.
‘Get Lily up here,’ Al told him. ‘Lily Ling. Now-la!’
The boy flapped away in his rubber sandals.
‘A fucking rope,’ I heard Al saying softly though his clenched teeth, ‘they gave him a fucking rope.” He went on stroking the woman’s hair, his face bunched and his eyes flickering. Voices began in the narrow street three floors below, the rattle of carts, a man’s sudden laughter.
‘You want me, boss?’ Lily Ling asked him.
‘Yes,’ Al said. ‘Stay with her, okay?’ He stopped stroking the woman’s hair, looking relieved, a man awkward in the presence of suffering. ‘Stay with her the whole time, Lily. Don’t leave her unless you get someone else in here to take over.’
The Chinese girl came and sat on the bed, taking the woman’s head in her hands, laying her face against the other’s. ‘What happen?’
Quietly Al said, ‘She tried jumping out of the window. So watch her, okay?’
‘She Mrs. Seng. She say a man come to see her, maybe. Last night.’
Al’s mouth tightened. ‘And did a man come?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ He relaxed again, touching my arm. ‘Let’s go, I feel like a drink.’
In the bar he said, ‘They swung a few guys over there this morning. Like I said, he was one of them. Her son.’
‘And the man who said he’d come to see her?’
His eyes went hard. ‘Those bastards move in whenever there’s trouble. He’d have told her he could pull strings, see, get him off, get him just a prison term. He’d have taken her life savings.’ He broke off to call to a boy going through the lobby. ‘Mahmood - there’s a door needs fixing up there, Number 37, okay? Go and check it out, need some tools.” He poured himself another Scotch. ‘Three ounces of heroin and they get a life term over there. Four ounces and they swing. Malaysia’s trying to beat the drug problem and I guess that’s the way they do it. Month back they swung a couple Australians, you read about that? Everybody sent in an appeal - the Australian Prime Minister, Amnesty International, Margaret Thatcher. Those boys were caught with just six ounces of the stuff, they weren’t trading a truck-load, but they swung.’ He hit a mosquito that had settled on his arm, leaving a smear of blood. ‘They give it a lot of publicity, so people are going to get the message - they’ll give these kids headlines in the evening papers over here.’ He took a swig at his drink. ‘Her son couldn’t read.’
The sound of boots came from the lobby.
‘Police!’
‘Shit,’ Al said under his breath, and went to stand in the archway. ‘So what’s up?’
‘Somebody reported a woman screaming.’
‘They’re always screaming.’
The young cop stood there hard-faced and angular, sharp
creases in his uniform, the holster shining. ‘They said the sound came from this hotel.’
‘Sure. People laughing, it sounds the same. Always a party going on at the Red Orchid, right?’ He shook his head. ‘Anything wrong, I’d know it, okay?’
The Chinese stood looking around the ceiling, waiting to hear if the screaming came again, and when nothing happened for a minute he gave Al a bright stare and then turned on his heel and went out through the swing door, his polished boots clumping and his leather belt creaking, his cap set dead flat on his head. Other sounds came in from the narrow street: cyclo bells, chickens, someone beating a gong. Then the door swung shut.
‘Tell me about the drug scene,’ I said to Al, ‘in this region.’
He swung his head. ‘All of it? Jesus, take some time.’
Two days later the rain came pelting down out of a black sky on to the roof of the car with a noise like massed drums. The windscreen wipers were only just clearing the glass enough for the driver to see through, and from the rear seat I watched the thick steel-grey haze on the bonnet as we crossed the river and headed for Orchard Road.
The Thai security man sitting next to the driver said something to him, a quick word or two, and the driver nodded without turning. They were professionals, these two: they’d come to the Red Orchid on foot to meet me because the market street was too cluttered for the embassy limousine to pass, and as soon as I’d come into the lobby they’d hijacked a cyclo and put me into it to keep me more or less dry, hurrying alongside like well-trained bodyguards to where the car was parked, checking the environment the whole time whole the cyclo bell cleared the way.
It had been like that yesterday when the two embassy officials had come to find me — two, not just one - both stone-faced, asking me for my identity papers first and then presenting their own with a curt formality before they gave me the embossed card. His Highness the Crown Prince Sonthee Sirindhorn requests the pleasure of your company at 8 p.m. on the evening of 15 April 1987, at the Embassy of Thailand, on the occasion of his birthday.
