by Adam Hall
What I had to do was establish the fact that I had a purpose in leaving the hotel - that I wasn’t just making an attempt at getting clear and going to ground. They knew I was professional enough to have seen them in the street, and knew I hadn’t a chance of getting clear with so many of them manning the trap, so I had to make them believe I was flawed, and thought I could work miracles. So when I walked into the Hertz office in South Bridge Road I didn’t even glance behind me.
‘What model do you prefer, sir?’
‘Compact.’
Smaller windows.
Toyota Corolla.
Driving—license, Amex, so forth. And this pretty smile, these almond eyes, the slight lift of the breasts beneath the silk blouse, are they the last I shall see?
‘Will you please sign here, Mr. Jordan?’
And the last signature?
With a flourish, then.
Outside in the car park I walked round the Toyota once to check the bodywork and then got in and started up and clipped the belt on without taking in the environment. In the first three blocks I picked out the taxi, a yellow and black Streamline three vehicles behind. There would be others closing in; I didn’t look for them. It was tempting to try driving clear but it would mean risking lives - not theirs, I’d settle for that, but the lives of the innocent on their way home in the evening rush-hour. So I drove carefully, with due circumspection.
Countdown.
18:00.
He would be here in two hours.
There was an alley with a dead-end alongside the Red Orchid, where there would be deep shadow by eight o’clock. Al’s Chevrolet was farther down and I’d be blocking him, but he never left the bar at this time in the evening. I parked the Toyota and locked the doors and went into the hotel by the front entrance, not looking back.
The last-chance thing.
But only if Pepperidge telephoned.
‘Hi! Set it up?’
‘Yes.’
Six drops.
‘You invent this one?’
‘Flash of genius.’ Ask him. ‘No calls for me?’
‘Guess not.’
I took my drink across to the corner where I could sit with my back to the television screen: the optic nerve would have to adjust to the periodicy and tonight I wanted eyes like a cat’s.
Do something for me, will you?
I could see part of the street from here but it didn’t interest me now. They were out there, and I knew that.
For God’s sake, if and when you can, pick up a phone and call me, so that I’ll know things are still all right.
That was tempting too, to go across to the phone and hear her voice as she swung her long hair back from her eyes, Oh Martin, where are you calling from? but no, we couldn’t meet, tonight or ever again, unless he telephoned, Pepperidge, and even then it was a thousand-to-one shot.
18:31.
Rain began soon afterwards.
‘Here we go!’ Al said from the bar.
The stalls and barrows had been cleared from the narrow street an hour ago, and the stones began taking on a sheen as the rain fell harder. People out there were hurrying, some of them with newspapers over their heads.
It wouldn’t change anything.
19:00.
An hour to go. He would land in an hour.
The adrenalin began; I could feel it like a subtle vibration in the bloodstream, in the nerves. I centred at intervals of a minute, hearing the leather of the chair creak faintly as the tension came out of the muscles and the body sank lower. I would need the adrenalin later, but not now: it was too soon.
The rain steadied in the street, on the rooftops, closing us in, sequestering us in this small seedy hotel in Singapore as if we’d been washed up in an ark. They would be standing in the doorways now, taking shelter from the rain, not from the inexorable tolling of the minutes, as I was, the inescapable measurement of time moving towards the deadline an hour from now.
Not that it’s a foregone conclusion, my friends - don’t think that. I’ve slipped the executioner a dozen times and he’s brought the axe down on the bloody block with an oath I didn’t stay to listen to. I’m strong; I’m trained; I’m ready for the moment of truth.
Do you hear the sound of whistling in the dark?
I do.
Because it wasn’t going to be one against one. Even if I pulled off an overkill with Manif Kishnar they’d finish me off, the peons, if they had to. Those would be the orders from Shoda: this time it is to be certain.
The smell of the rain came through the doors as someone opened them, the smell of the rain, of the fruit lying squashed in the gutters, and on a different level of consciousness the smell of the world outside, of the death-bringer.
Telephone.
I didn’t move.
‘Red Orchid Hotel.’
The man who’d come in stood dripping by the desk on the other side of the archway, a shapeless bag by his feet.
‘Oh, hi! You bet. How are things with you?’
I checked my watch at 19:34 and thought that would be unfortunate, wouldn’t it, if Pepperidge finally called me and heard only the engaged tone while Al was asking about his girlfriend’s health or his aunt’s or whoever the hell it was on the other end, my chest’s easier but there’s still this cough, and the doctor says I do not care what the doctor says, just get off the line.
‘Look, Betsy, I have to go now, there’s a guy at the desk, okay?’
Works like magic: you just go into zen and concentrate and create your own reality, get people off the telephone, get people to call you no matter how great the distance - Pepperidge, are you listening, damn your eyes?
Watch it.
Centre, yes. Centre again.
The chair-leather creaked. Felt better, much better. If he came in now with his bloody cheese-wire I would rip the heart out of his body and throw it to the dogs.
‘Sure, I’ll see you get some extra towels, guess it caught you when you weren’t ready.’ Noting the time in the register, 7.35 p.m. ‘Happens all the time like that - one minute there’s a clear sky and the next minute you’re trying to find a canoe.’
Or, in the terminology of international chronometers, 19:35, now 36 because time, like life, has its rendezvous to meet.
As do I.
The adrenalin was still seeping into the bloodstream even though I was spending most of the time in alpha now and coasting along in the philosophical dimension below full consciousness, and I tried to go lower still because the conclusion wouldn’t be made in thirty-five minutes from now, that was when he would arrive, and he’d have to take me into the dark to do what he wanted and that could happen at any time, at midnight or beyond.
‘You bet.’
His footsteps came through the archway and across to the bar behind me; I knew Al’s footsteps.
Well, if Mary was so upset about it why didn’t she call me?
Maybe she just didn’t want to bother you.
Look, she knows I’m always ready to help, Cindy.
‘You don’t ever watch this stuff?’
Turned my head. ‘I like watching the rain.’
‘Makes a whole lot more sense, I guess. You okay there, you need another of those specials?’
Said not just now.
For fifteen minutes I brought the waves back into beta and went through the building again, reinforcing the memory and testing out some of the options; there was one that worried me: the drop from the roof to the top platform of the fire-escape at the rear. It was chancy enough in dry conditions, seven or eight feet and at an angle, but tonight the tiles would be wet and so would the fire-escape and it was five floors and a stone courtyard below and in any case they’d cover that area and even if I did the drop and nit it right they’d be waiting for me below, on any of the four landings below. Cancel that one, then; yes, cancel it. If I was forced onto the roof I’d stay there till they came for me.
Not they. Him. Kishnar. On the dark rooftop.
Ear
ly this morning the body of a man was found lying at the rear of the Red Orchid, a hotel in the Chinese quarter. His identity is being withheld until relatives have been informed.
19:59.
Sweat starting on the flanks, and the adrenalin pumping -the very lack of control was frightening and I asked questions. I’d been in a red sector before and I’d always been able to hold back the defence mode until it was needed, minutes or even seconds before the attack, but tonight I was ready too soon, much too soon - I felt primed, galvanised, invincible. I think it was because of the timing, the gradual nearing of the deadline, the need to wait, and do nothing, to wait in the trap for the hunter to come in his own good time with his bright skinning-knife. And there was something else.
Shoda.
Shoda, my deadly succubae.
I could smell the fear on my skin.
Because she had a long reach, sending her finely-tuned vibrations across time and space, to stroke insidiously the tender membrane of the psyche, soft as the searching touch of the black widow as she seeks the area where her bite will most easily penetrate and her poison most quickly kill.
He’d be at my throat but Shoda was already in my soul.
In Kuala Lumpur today, a top National Front leader, addressing his party’s annual convention, demanded that the ugly encroachment of corruption at high levels be halted as soon as possible.
Eight o’clock news.
Datuk Dr. Lim Keng Yaik also referred to the matter of Malaysia’s threatened economy, stressing the-Sex symbol of the fifties. She was fifty-seven.
Al didn’t go for politics.
Touching down now, with plumes of smoke curling back from the landing-wheels, and I got up quickly because the only way to get rid of the excess adrenalin was to exercise the body and there was a staircase out there with four flights I could use. If I Telephone and Al took it and said yes he’s here and then called out to me and I went over to the bar and took the phone from him.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr. Jordan?’
‘Yes.’
‘He has landed in Singapore.’
Sayako.
‘What is he wearing?’
‘He is wearing dark business suit, head is bare.’
‘He’ll need a raincoat. Is he carrying one?’
‘He carry only briefcase.’
What had they asked him, at the security check in Bangkok, about the coil of piano-wire on the X-ray screen?
‘Is there anything else you can tell me, Sayako-san?’
It might not have shown up, it would be very thin.
‘There is nothing else, Mr. Jordan. But I will help if I can. You must be very careful, and leave hotel if is possible. I pray for you now.’
Line went dead.
Pray for me, yes, Sayako-san, as Shoda is praying for me now.
She prays before she kills.
I put the receiver back.
Steady rain in the street and Al sitting hunched on his stool behind the bar and three men coming in from the stairs, Asians, I’d seen them before in here and heard them talking, they were waiting for a shipment of silk to come in from Laos, important to them but not important to me because Kishnar was here in the city and the deadline for Pepperidge to call was past and the last-chance thing was blown away and what I must do now was try to contain the body’s preparedness, try to damp down the effusions of life-preserving hormones as the glands obeyed the panic mode of the mind.
Start with the stairs, then, bring the muscles into play.
‘Mr. Jordan!’ Al caught me on the first landing and I looked down. ‘You got another call.’
Impossible.
Kishnar would never phone me.
But he’d just landed and was coming through the terminal building in a dark business suit, not some hessian rag with a headband and a knife in his teeth - he would have style: Shoda would expect style in a man close to her in her organisation, a man who had dispatched nine of her top competitors in the drug trade, her top competitors, warlords like Khun Sa whose income was in the billions of dollars, so that each time he’d hit one of them it would have increased Shoda’s own fortune by the same figure. He’d be a millionaire, then, himself, Manif Kishnar, the executioner, one of the elite, stepping off one of his employer’s private executive jets and walking through the airport past all the telephones - yes he might call me.
Mr. Jordan, my name is Manif Kishnar, and I believe you have heard of me, knowing as I do the extensive sources of information at your disposal as a preeminent intelligence agent.
Letting my mind run wild but that was understandable because of the woman I was up against, the mystic and I psychotic Mariko Shoda, and because of Sayako, with her uncanny knowledge of the environment I was moving through, shadowed, tortuous and cryptic - these weren’t the KGB with their orderly and predictable methodology; these weren’t the paramilitary executives of the state machine; they were shadows, voices in the night.
The skillful practitioners of voodoo.
You will therefore surmise my reason for coming to Singapore tonight, and since there is no question of my failing to accomplish my mission for my employer, may I suggest with all respect that we meet somewhere removed from public gaze, and deal with the matter circumspectly. I feel that might be your wish.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Manif Kishnar wasn’t a man like that, with a mind like that. I’ve met them before, intellectual, supremely competent, even though their work is deadly. They are the elite, and they can operate on a level of sophistication you won’t find in the lesser breeds.
Removed from public gaze.
The dark.
And this would be his reason: to draw me into the dark.
The circumstances, Mr. Jordan, are well defined. If you choose to remain in your hotel, then I must come for you there. But will that not be a little… unseemly? The owner is trying to run an honest business, after all, and we would embarrass him, and jeopardise the reputation of his establishment, do you not agree?
Sirens in the night.
The flash of blue and red and white across the walls in the street outside, diffused by the downpour; the faint squawk of the zip-fastener as they closed the black plastic bag before they lifted me; Al’s white face on the stairs, Lily, for Christ’s sake get a mop and hot water.
He had a point, Kishnar, had a point.
If you agreed to meet me on what we might call neutral ground, Mr. Jordan, I would offer you all due ceremony. Men of your calling seldom the with dignity, but for you I would vouchsafe it.
With the rain falling steadily on our heads, its drops silvering the dark; The exchange of courtesies and then the quick movement and then nothing, finis.
Not while there’s life, my friend.
But Mr. Jordan, it is a foregone conclusion. You know that. I shall not fail - indeed I dare not. I am simply attempting to bring this matter to an end in a rational and civilised manner.
Do you see his point? A desperate stalking operation through the building here, waking the guests however quietly we moved, however secretly, each seeking the other’s death until the end-game and the last hot deed enacted in the close confinement of the flesh or a missed foothold and the hideous drop to the stones below or a lost chance and the wire’s bite and the blood spilling and the cry cut off, and then the mess, the messiness of a violent death - or alternatively his offer of due ceremony, out there somewhere in the privacy of the rain and the dark with no one near and no sound but the intoning of my executioner’s prayer.
If this was in his mind you couldn’t say he wasn’t civilised. Better, surely, than baring one’s neck to a brute.
I went down to the bar and picked up the phone.
CHAPTER 16
TOYOTA
What kind of red sector?’ Pepperidge. His tone was sharp, brief.
‘I think it’s too late,’ I told him.
‘Sorry, I had to go up to London, then your phone’s been engaged. What can I do?’
/> ‘I’m in a massive surveillance trap and Shoda’s sent a hit man here.’
‘Who?’
‘Kishnar.’
‘Manif Kishnar, yes, he works for her exclusively. What are your chances?’
‘About nil.’ The clock on the wall said three minutes past eight.
‘Why not signal the Thai Embassy?’
‘There’s no point. I -‘
‘Police, then, get them to send a gun team -‘
‘No, it’s-‘
‘I can phone the High Commission. They’d —’
‘It wouldn’t work.’
‘Fuck.’
It was a shut-ended situation and he didn’t like it. We never do.
The reason why it wouldn’t work was because Shoda was running things and this time she wouldn’t let me get clear; this time she’d ordered a sure hit and even if I could persuade Rattakul to risk a diplomatic showdown against every known principle of intelligence policy or persuade the Singapore police to send in a gun team it’d be the same thing in the end - these people would bring me down, if necessary with a rush attack, if necessary with a suicide run, if necessary with an exchange of gunfire with the police team despite Shoda’s wish for a discreet kill that would cause no fuss and leave no trace.
Three minutes past eight but that wasn’t significant. What could conceivably make any difference was that it would take Kishnar twenty minutes to reach here from the airport. There’d be a car to meet him and the driver would know the way, would know this city intimately, but in this rain and with the cabs in demand and cluttering the streets it would take twenty minutes at least. The earliest he could arrive here would be at eight-twenty-three.
Then give it a go.
‘I can send you some shields,” Pepperidge was saying. ‘I could raise three or four, if-‘
