by Adam Hall
A last thought before sleep, trying to betray me: Kityakara knew what had happened, and he wouldn’t now expect me to take on the mission, so why not accept that, and go home, and live?
Because this was home, lying curled like a fox in the dark, unnerved and bloodied but with cunning still left for the morrow.
CHAPTER 6
KATIE
He was an absolute shit. Fantastic in bed, but that was all, and that was the trouble, I suppose’ she leaned across the little bamboo table, her thin shoulders moving forward, her eyes intense - ‘I mean, sex isn’t enough for a relationship, is it?’ She forked some more satay off the skewer, dropping a piece of pork. ‘Do you think so?’
The girl in the green silk dress, today in khaki with a beaten gold necklace, her light hair swinging as she moved, moved constantly, restlessly, watching me hard, wanting to know what I thought. ‘Am I talking too much?’
I’d been coming out of the Thai Embassy an hour ago and she’d seen me and swung round. ‘Oh, hello, look, I’m sorry I was so - well, I don’t know, brusque the other night.’ The night when she’d asked me to escort her to a taxi and then slammed the door on me without any thanks.
‘I didn’t notice.’ Then I’d suggested lunch because it looked as if she worked at the embassy or had some kind of connection with it, and that could be useful. I was parched for information and as soon as I could get what I needed I could go to ground, where it was safe.
‘Love to.’ Her blue-grey eyes narrowed, focusing, taking me in. ‘What about Empress Place, on the river?’
Sitting next to me on the torn plastic seat of the cyclo she’d filled me in. ‘The divorce was only a couple of months ago and he still thinks I’m ready to hop into bed with him again - taking it in turns with his bloody mistress, thank you very much - and that night he was half-seas over and if you hadn’t got me into that taxi he’d have pushed me into a corner and torn my clothes off - God, doesn’t that sound sordid! But that’s why’ - twisting round on the seat and putting a thin ringless hand on my knee - ‘that’s why I didn’t even have the grace to thank you, because I was furious. Or scared, I’m not sure which.’ She took her hand away. ‘I’m Katie McCorkadale.’
‘Martin Jordan.’
‘Of course. Everyone’s talking about you.’
The nerves tightened. ‘Where?’
‘At the British High Commission - that’s where I work. You were almost killed, weren’t you?’
‘So they told me.’
She stared into my eyes, beginning to say something and changing her mind and saying instead, ‘How did you manage not to be?’
‘Bit of luck.’
The cyclo lurched between a taxi and a standing bus and she grabbed the rail. ‘I was terribly upset when I heard the news.’
I said carefully, ‘There wasn’t any news.’
‘What? Oh. I know. I mean, when I heard from my boss. There was nothing in the papers the next day, and that puzzled me. Who are you, actually?’ Another level stare.
‘I wondered, too,’ I said, ‘about the blackout.’
‘It came from the Thai embassy, I know that. We traced it through. Their ambassador phoned the Singaporean minister for home affairs and asked him if he could hush the whole thing up.’
‘Well, this place has got a good reputation for safety in the streets, and tourists read newspapers.’
‘It could be that.’ Her eyes didn’t leave mine. ‘But it wasn’t. Was it?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘The Chief of Police was also requested to pursue his enquiries with the utmost discretion, in the interests of the state. I quote.’
Which explained why there weren’t a whole drove of people from the homicide squad waiting round my bed at the hospital.
‘1 don’t know how these things work,’ I said.
‘No?’ She blew out a gentle laugh. ‘There’s something else that intrigues me. I’m pretty certain you’re the first man I’ve ever met who can deal with five assailants armed with knives. And smartly.’
‘They weren’t very good.’
She laughed again and said, ‘Do you mind the Empress? It’s only a food centre, but you can pick and choose among all the hawkers, absolutely anything - Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, whatever - and they bring it to you cooked. Or do you know all this - have you been here before?’
‘Just passing through. The Empress sounds fine.’
The place was crowded when we got there but some people were just leaving. It was a corner table not far from the river and I spent the first ten minutes sweeping the environment, simply as a matter of routine because there were upwards of a hundred people in this area and if any one of them wanted to do anything with a gun I couldn’t stop him. But it was going to be safer for me in the open until I could go to ground. Shoda didn’t want to make any fuss: the limousine thing had been set up carefully to provide discretion. My little Yasma was meant to kill with the first thrust, and afterwards my body would have been buried deep in a rubbish dump and the car would have gone back to the hire company.
Shoda would have been very upset by the agitation at political level, in spite of the news blackout, and the next time she’d order the subtlest kill she could think of. But that was an assumption, and assumptions are dangerous. As I sat talking with this reasonably attractive but rather chatty girl at the rickety bamboo table my nerves were crawling, just below the skin.
‘You take everything in, Martin, don’t you?’ She pulled another kebab out of the basket and skinned the skewer. ‘I mean, you actually listen.’
‘You’re so interesting.’
She gave me another stare, then looked down suddenly. ‘Not really. I talk like a bloody -‘ she shrugged, her thin shoulders coming forward. ‘I’ve made it a rule, you see, not to bore my friends - I mean about him, Stephen. And you turned up as an absolute stranger, and I suddenly felt like letting my hair down.’
‘It looks nice like that.’
Two Asians watching me from the table twenty yards away, twenty-five yards, tough, track-suits, intent.
‘Actually,’ Katie said, ‘the wounds are still raw. It hasn’t been long. Do you remember that film? A Married -no-An Unmarried Woman?
‘I don’t think I saw it.’
They looked down, not away, when they saw I’d made contact. I didn’t like that. But there were quite a few track-suits among the crowd; I’d seen the joggers in the park on the way here.
‘They were just walking in the street, in New York. She was Meryl Streep - no, Jill Clayburg. She’s asking him about where they ought to go for their holiday, and he suddenly tells her he’s met someone else. And, I mean, it was a long marriage. And she doesn’t say anything, or I don’t think she does. All I remember is that she just goes across the pavement and throws up into a rubbish bin. God, what a script.’
Perhaps I shouldn’t be wary of men in any case, but of women - women in black track-suits. She might use women exclusively in her death squads. But I glanced across the two men over there at short intervals. And others: the short Burmese standing with his back to the rail with the river behind him and his head turning in this direction every so often, and the two thick-necked Mongols on the far side of the’ flower stall: they weren’t anything to do with it because they never spoke to the merchant; it was just good available cover.
The skin crept at the nape of the neck. Aftermath of the near-death experience. Discount. But don’t discount entirely.
‘Well, that was how I felt, you see, when he told me the same thing - Stephen. Only I didn’t throw up. I just turned and walked across the street and nearly got killed by a taxi, and do you know’ - she was watching me hard with her eyes narrowed to make sure I was listening - ‘do you know the thought that flashed into my mind as the thing came hurtling so close to me that it tore my dress? I was hoping I was going to the because then he’d be tortured with guilt for the rest of his life.’ She shrugged, and her thin shoulders came forward. ‘So I s
uppose I must have loved him, to hate him that much.’
‘How long ago was it?’
‘Three months. Three months and two days.’
‘And how d’you feel now?’
‘Better for having got it off my chest for the thousandth time to a virtual stranger.’ She puffed out a laugh. ‘You’re a patient man.’
‘I’m glad I could help.’
‘Can I have some more sake?’
I got her some from the stall. The two men in track-suits were leaving, not looking back. They could have been looking at Katie, fair-haired and slender.
When I sat down again she said, ‘The reason why I was so terribly upset that night, you know, the night when you helped me at the Thai Embassy, was because I realised later that when I slammed the door on you like that I was leaving you to go to your death, or damned nearly. I would’ve been almost the last person in this world you’d have spoken to. It gave me the willies - I didn’t sleep much afterwards.’ She put her hand on mine for a moment. ‘I’m so glad you’re all right. Who are they, anyhow?’
‘I don’t know. No one I recognised.’
‘So you don’t know why they attacked you?’
‘No.’
The Burmese was a plain-clothes man. I’d got his attitude down now, his movements. He was watching a group of Chinese at another table, not me.
‘You must have some idea,’ Katie said quietly. ‘Was it to do with your Thai connection?’
She’d only seen me twice, but each time it had been at their embassy. ‘Possibly.’ It was time to see what she could give me, apart from the pain of a smashed marriage. ‘You asked me just now who I was. I’m a weapons specialist.’
‘I know. Representing Laker Foundry.’
‘You checked with Immigration?’
‘We certainly did, after what happened to you.’
She’d become quiet, attentive. Maybe this was her real self, intelligent, serious, now that she’d got the Stephen thing off her mind.
‘So it could have been Shoda,’ I said. Either she’d pick it up or she wouldn’t.
Her eyes were suddenly intense and she straightened on her chair. ‘Mariko Shoda?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why should she want to kill you?’
‘Have I got your confidence?’
‘You can take my word, for what it’s worth.’
‘How much is it worth?’
‘It’s priceless.’ She wasn’t smiling.
‘All right. We’ve found a leak at the factory. One of our ultra-special weapons has been reported missing. In fact, twenty or thirty prototype models. We put out immediate feelers, and our friends in the Thai government said they’d seen this particular weapon being used on a target range in Laos.’
I waited. I’d given her enough to get a lot more back, if she wanted to talk.
‘Whose target range? Which rebel group?’
‘The Thais don’t know, but they think it could be one of Shoda’s.’ I was using some of the briefing Pepperidge had given me, and some of what I’d heard from Kityakara, but from now on I’d have to feel my way.
She sipped her sake. ‘Are you selling this weapon to the Thais?’
‘We’re negotiating terms, one of which is that we don’t sell it to anyone else in Southeast Asia.’ Whatever I said, Krtyakara would back it up if necessary: that had been agreed.
‘If it’s so special, Mariko Shoda would certainly want to get at it.’ She toyed with her heavy gold chain. ‘The people who attacked you were women, weren’t they?’
‘Except for the driver.’
‘She uses women for her bodyguards, I know that.’
‘What else do you know?’
‘About Mariko Shoda?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a great deal. But I might be able to find someone who does. I mean’ - she levelled her blue-grey eyes at me with that characteristic stillness - ‘you’re going to need all the help you can get, aren’t you? She won’t just leave it at that.’
I was watching a short, compact woman now, not in a track-suit but a chongsam. She looked too athletic to be wearing silk, too butch. She’d glanced across me two or three times from fifty feet away, near the sushi bar. But it was just my nerves: if there were any kind of surveillance on me it’d be from behind.
‘The kind of help I need,’ I told Katie, ‘is information.’
She turned her head to watch a Greek freighter moving past the docks on the river, her eyes narrowed in thought. ‘What I know most about is the drug trade. It’s part of my job to keep tabs on it for London - we’re trying to help cut off the supplies. But look, if you think your special weapon - what’s it called, or is it classified?’
‘The Slingshot.’
Pepperidge had said it was already in the press.
‘All right, if you think it’s reached Laos illegally, what are you doing in Singapore?’
‘They wanted to meet me here.’
‘The Thais?’
‘Yes.’
The woman in the chongsam was making distance-contact with someone else, someone I couldn’t see, lifting her head slightly, her gaze oblique, oblique in this direction. In the language of the trade it could mean several things, but one of them was He’s over there.
The Greek ship gave a blast and the sound brought sweat out on me.
·Are you all right, Martin?’
‘Relatively.’ Katie didn’t miss much.
‘You must still be a bit sore. You smell like an operating theatre.’
‘Doesn’t turn you on?’
‘No. But everything else does.’ Her thin shoulders came forward again as she folded her arms on the table, looking down for a moment, thinking, then raising her head to look at me. ‘Aren’t you absolutely scared out of your mind?’
‘Fraction edgy.’
‘God, I’ve never been so close to so much drama.’
I said quickly, ‘I don’t think you’re in any danger, Katie. I’m the one they want.’
‘I don’t really think I care.’ She was looking over my shoulder now. ‘In my job, life is so bloody -‘
I waited, but she left it, looking down again. ‘You really ought not to have any more sake’ I said.
She blew out a soft laugh. ‘It’s always my undoing at lunch time. But it never makes me say things I don’t mean. Now look, if you want to know about the weapons trade out here you’ll have to know about the drug scene too. They’re sort of interlocked. The game’s the same in South America and Turkey and everywhere else - drugs for money for guns. Only here, of course, it’s on a massive scale. Do you want this now, or some other time?’
‘When d’you have to be back?’
‘This is my day off - I was just delivering a note to the embassy. So, to put the whole thing into a nutshell, the power of the drug traders is just too big for anyone to break them. We’re talking about half a trillion US dollars in annual sales - I said trillion. And the alliances between the dealers and the drug-producing countries are equally unbreakable. The dealers - the big ones - have got more money than most of the governments in the world, and they’ve got their own shipping fleets, air transports and even their own armies. And the governments of the drug-producing countries can’t be got at either. I can give you a whole file on this from my office, if you like - I mean Xeroxed, but I’m just trying to -‘
‘This is exactly what I need. The nutshell.’ I had to take short cuts wherever I could find them, on my way to ground.
‘All right.’ She wiped the tip of her finger round the sake cup and licked it. ‘I mean, Reagan and Thatcher and other world leaders have to give the people circuses - you know, the war on drugs bullshit - but what else can they do? They can’t arrest foreign governments for producing drugs when they’ve got political treaties and trade agreements with them.’
She was looking behind me again, her eyes ranging. ‘Thailand and Burma are the big centres here, as I’m sure you know. I mean, there are some very ritzy cl
ubs around in the major capitals where most of the members are growers, refiners, couriers, dealers, middle-men, pilots, you name it. But what interests you is the arms connection. I’ll -‘
I was standing over him and he looked frightened to death, his eyes very wide and his mouth open, and it took a second before I could cancel out the whole operation and get things back to normal, though I knew it’d take much longer than that for the adrenalin to shut off and the nerves to come down from their high. It had just been the noise, that was all - he’d dropped a metal tray and it had touched my left shoulder, just lightly but enough to digger me, and then the organism itself took over and I had a sensation of flowing light and a series of stop-action photographs: the background swinging down as I was suddenly on my feet and then his face and body superimposed in close-up - the ear, temple, neck, the vital targets - while my right hand was moving so fast that I felt the air-rush even on its way up. The reflex was still building up its force but the left brain had started doing some very urgent work and the motor nerves of my right arm got the signal just in time and the braced half-fist stopped an inch short of his neck, even though the necessary imagery was still flickering in my mind: the knuckles moving through the sinews and crushing the carotid artery against the spinal column.
Everything had slowed down and for a while we just stood there in a clumsy tableau, the Chinese in a half-crouch with his eyes staring up into my face, my arm fixed at an angle and my body leaning over as the force died away and the first breath came and sounds filtered into the consciousness and movement started up again.
Faces in the background, watching. Other still figures, people poised in whatever act they’d been performing, a hawker with a basket, three women caught in mid-stride with their mouths open, a small child staring upwards with a doll in its hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
He was relaxing and straightening but not trusting me yet. I picked up his tray and got my wallet out. There was a whole spill of mangoes and papayas and oranges on the ground and my small bamboo chair was quite a long way off. ‘Sorry - I made a mistake.’ I gave him a US$50 note and he stared at it for a moment before he took it, gingerly. ‘A mistake,’ I told him, ‘all right?’
