by Adam Hall
The place Loman had found for me in the next block didn’t sell much equipment because they were mainly in business for processing and the highest magnification they could offer was x2. There was a shop half a mile down Rama IV but I was holed up and didn’t want to show myself in the street more than I had to. They let me take my pick from what they had on the shelves and I came up with a compromise: a Pentax X-15 35-millimeter single lens reflex with a 135-millimeter lens that took a x2 Auto teleconverter and a stock adapter for my Jupiters. 135 x 2 x 8 (lens plus converter plus field glasses) gave a total focal length of 2,160 millimeters and a magnification of sixteen times.
I set it up on a tripod with a turret mounting that was
rigid enough for the weight, but the building was old and the traffic would cause vibration, so I played safe
with a Pan Plus-X, 36 frames. The depth of field wasn’t critical because seen through the Jupiters the wall inside the middle oriel appeared to be less than six feet back from the aperture. To-cut through the heat haze I used in H4 Vivo yellow filter; to mask out the glare of the fold dome a makeshift hood was essential and I had brought one of the three-foot cardboard cylinders they had at the shop for mailing blow-ups.
The gates of the temple gardens were hidden by a cloud of magnolias and only the top half of the doorway itself was visible; the doors were some fifteen feet high and priests and worshipers would pass into the temple without my seeing them. I had therefore to concentrate on the ring of oriels.
It was two hours before movement showed there and I ran off half a dozen frames at one-fiftieth, varying the aperture from f/2.8 to f/11 and using a cable release against vibration because of the slow speed and extreme focal length.
He showed twice again before noon and 1 took a further ten, speeds from one-half to one-thirtieth, same f/stops. The haze was worse now as the heat mounted in the street so I left it at that and went down to the shop and spent half an hour in the darkroom. Even the wet negs looked promising, three of the frames being sharp. It was worth staying on: I wouldn’t get better than these today because of the haze. In two hours the sharpest blow-ups were hanging up to dry. Of the sixteen essays five were successful and one perfect: a head-and-shoulders pose framed in the oriel; even the shape of the smoked glasses was recognizable - rather flat at the top with the sides tapering downward, a metal nosepiece almost level with the top of the lenses.
This one was all I needed, and from this moment there came the onset of nerves. There was no doubt left. If the protection officers failed because they were too few in number, and if the Bangkok organization failed because Colonel Ramin believed wrongly that he had covered every contingency, the shot would be fired from there, from the middle oriel of the Phra Chula Chedi, a shrine to a god who held life sacred. And it would make no difference that I could afterwards present, as evidence, a portrait of Diabolus.
The onset of nerves began now because I was committed by certainty and because a rendezvous had been established between the two of us and nothing must stop my keeping it. The date was the 29th - in three days’ time. The hour was not precise but it came to a matter of seconds: there would be a period of some ten seconds in which I would have to operate.
Loman had said: ‘It is the most sensitive operation I have ever been presented with.’
The portrait had begun curling at the bottom corners as it dried on the clips. The face looked out from the frame of the oriel, confident, authoritative. The face of a professional. I hung two more clips at the bottom and left it there; it wouldn’t matter if anyone saw it but it would matter if someone took it away, so I put the heat-dried negatives in my pocket and went into the street.
It took half an hour to reach the gun shop a mile away - three blocks on foot and checking for tags, a trishaw and another block on foot to check again - because absolute security was now essential.
I was alone and I had to stay alone and when I came to climb to the top floor of the condemned building in three days from now to keep the rendezvous, no one must know I was there.
The shop had a first-class stock and I made my choice. It was a superb instrument and Kuo himself would have approved.
Chapter 10
Husqvarna
The place was cavernous and light came dimly from somewhere high under the roof. It was very quiet. As soon as I came in I saw the thing in the gloom, a full-sized male of the species, a chula, rearing taller than a man and with livid colors streaking its head. There must have been a hundred of them in here, male and female.
I stood listening. There was no sound but the faint rush of the traffic along Rama IV, a vibration underfoot. The light had been on when I had come in and I felt it might be dangerous to look for switches and try them.
Then he came out of the shadows, his eyes brighter than the rest of him.
‘It’s the best I could do,’ he said.
‘How safe is it?’
‘Safer than the gem shop. Nobody comes in here.’
We approached each other under the vast roof, like two people meeting on a railway station, the last train gone.
‘What about exits?’ I wanted to know. I don’t like big places. The smaller the place the quicker you can get out.
He pointed. ‘One door there, another one in the far corner. I’ve got the keys to two of them. Here are yours.’
I took them. He hadn’t done badly. The place was within three minutes’ walk of the condemned building and I had reached the first door through an alley where cover was fair - several entrances and some kind of fuel-oil tank on timber props.
My eyes had now accommodated and I took a final look around. The kites were hung from horizontal poles in orderly rows so that even if they were set moving by a draft their fragile paper wouldn’t be damaged. The male chulas were barbed; the female pakpaos had long tails and were smaller. Many had painted faces; some bore the design of a dragon. Empty crates littered the floor.
‘When is the fight?’ I asked Loman.
‘On the first of the month. Nobody will be here to fetch them until after the motorcade.’
I’d had no time to watch the papers but there would obviously be a kite fight organized during the Visit. Loman was being very efficient.
‘Did you have any success?’ he asked me, and I showed him the print.
‘It’s not fully dry.’
He got his pocket lamp and the face, with the smoked glasses stared back. He said:
‘And you are one hundred per cent certain.’
‘And I am one hundred per cent certain.’
He took a slow breath and I knew that he felt as I had when this picture had slowly appeared from the sodium sulphite. We were committed.
I asked him: ‘What about the itinerary?’
Nobody knows yet.’
‘We’ve got to know.’
He looked up sharply because of my tone. It was going to be trickier than ever now to keep patience with
each other because of the nerves.
‘I am watching the situation,’ he said as evenly as he ‘could. ‘It is difficult, very. I have to take care not to provoke them into shutting every door on me - my efforts to interest Colonel Ramin in Kuo have already annoyed him—‘
‘Can’t they find out at the Embassy?’
‘As soon as the Ambassador knows, I shall know.’
I was nervous about two things: that there was a rendezvous and that there might not be one. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘either Kuo has got his information and he knows the route—‘
‘There may have been a leak—‘
‘A leak or his agents have done their job well - it doesn’t matter a damn, does it? Either he knows the route or he’s setting up more than one gunpost so that he can use any one of them at the last minute. He could even be training his cell to man several posts at the same time so they’ll be certain of a kill. So we’ve got to know.’
When I’d had a minute to cool down he said:
‘What do you think? What do you reall
y think?’
‘All right, but there’s a risk - you know that. I think he’s got the information.’ Because of the roll of gold cloth. Because of the ritual. If Kuo hadn’t found out the exact and final itinerary of the motorcade he wouldn’t have made such a show of personally handing the weapon to the priest at the temple: that had been the act of a man who is certain of what he is doing.
It was all I had to go on: my intimate knowledge of the man and his character. But I knew him like a brother.
‘From the inquiries I have made,’ Loman said, ‘there seems very little doubt that whatever the final route, it will include the Link Road. There are several good reasons - the new hospital is the subject of some pride in the city and the Person will want to see it; it is easier to control large crowds lining the route along the Link Road than along that section of Rama IV which is the only alternative. It is virtually certain that the itinerary will run from the Royal Palace northward, turn east to take in the British Embassy, then south to the Lumpini Polo grounds, then westward, back toward the palace. The single major thoroughfare from Lumpini to the railway station - en route for the palace itself - is Rama IV; and the only possible deviation from Rama IV is through the Link Road. It may be, of course, that Kuo is working on the same theory—‘
‘He’d be a fool not to. I agree with all your reasons, but for God’s sake get some definite information for me - tell the Ambassador to get off the bloody pot. What the hell is he for?’
‘He is not,’ Loman said with viciously quiet pauses, ‘under any obligation to us. We do not exist. He knows me simply as a member of the Special Services. If I were to ask him point blank for information he would merely tell me to liaise with the other groups - Mil. 5, Mil. 6, the Special Branch overseas unit and Security.’
‘Tell him he’s indirectly responsible for the safety of the Person while he’s here.’
‘He is well aware of that.’ He began walking about to get rid of his frustration and his footsteps padded without echoes despite the size of the place; the big paper kites hung as thick as clothes in a crowded wardrobe and muffled the acoustics. ‘The Ambassador is a worried man.’ He stopped in front of me from time to time in case I wasn’t listening. ‘The situation at the Embassy is extremely sensitive. Quite apart from the normal rivalry between the Special Services there is an added reluctance to acknowledge each other. I have never seen security so tight - and of course it’s natural, you must see that. Every group feels that it alone is chiefly responsible for the safety of the Person and that if it gives any information at all to another group, that other group may jump the gun and wreck the most carefully made plans. And it is the Person whose life is in danger.’
‘Do what you can,’ I said. It wasn’t really meant to rile him. He was doing all he could and I knew it. But I had the set-up on ice now and it was all I could think about. I was scared that something would bust it up -something like a last-minute decision by the Bangkok security people to take the Link Road off the itinerary.
It wouldn’t worry Kuo. He had a cell of four picked marksmen and he would just shift the pattern so that whatever route the motorcade used it would come under fire from one of them, with Kuo himself manning the most likely area. There is only a given number of main streets in any city where a public procession can be run: you cannot, in London, send it up and down Curzon Street and Half Moon Street to avoid Piccadilly.
Loman hadn’t answered. He had gone off on one of his therapeutic walks around the empty crates to get his anger down. I was sorry for him. I had once seen him briefing five crack operators at the Bureau, giving them a mission as complicated as an electronic computer -access, courier lines, letter drops, radio hook-up, cover stories, timing factors, liaison patterns and the whole picture, all within one hour because there was a plane waiting and the complete operation depended on moonlight. It was a masterpiece and nothing went wrong.
But he was out here on the far side of the world from his natural base with only an Embassy to work on instead of fifty official departments and reference sources and with one single bloody-minded agent who’d sold him a set-up that had shocked him to the guts.
Next time he’d choose someone else and amen to that.
‘One thing I want to know,’ I said when he came up to have another look at me. ‘You’re trying hard to get information out of the security people at the Embassy. How hard are they trying to get information out of you?’
He was suddenly interested. It was just a flicker of the eyes but even in the poor light I caught it.
‘Everyone is trying to keep information from the other groups, as I have just said. It’s just as natural that everyone is also trying to get it.’
‘I’m still waiting, Loman.’
He said obliquely: ‘It’s part of my task as your director to attend to every fringe aspect of the mission and leave you to concentrate on the actual—‘
‘The one that’s trying the hardest is the Maine girl, correct?’
‘I really can’t expose you to problems that—‘
‘She’s outside now, did you know? She tagged you here.’
His face went stiff. ‘But I took every possible—‘
‘Look, it was bound to happen. The minute you sanctioned my operation I cleared out of the hotel and went to ground and she lost me for the first time in fifteen days and it must have sent her hysterical. You’re my only contact and she knows it because I asked for you by name at the Embassy the first time I met her there, so she’s had you tagged since she lost me - must have. She needs me badly and all I want to know is why. And all you have to do is tell me.’
He didn’t provoke me by asking if I were certain she was there outside. It was my job to know where people were. He hadn’t sensed the tag because he wasn’t an agent in the field - he was an executive who did most of his work at a desk. But I had checked him for tags every time we had met since I’d left the Pakchong Hotel and tonight he wasn’t clean: she’d been using one of the cover availabilities I’d examined in the alley - the fuel-oil tank on the timber props.
‘I am very disturbed to—‘
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘You’re not expected to know the drill. That’s why I always make sure you’re the first to arrive. Just tell me what she wants.’
‘I don’t know.’ He said it quite spontaneously and I knew he wasn’t lying. It always had to be watched: a good intelligence director will tell his agent precisely what he chooses, precisely what is good for him, and will lie his way out of any risk that his agent will be worried or confused by anything that he does not specifically need to know. An agent is sent like a ferret into a hole and he is not told if there is a dog at the other end. It’s Control that takes care of the dog.
I said: ‘You don’t know? But you must have some ideas. I’m in a red sector now, Loman. I can’t trust in Local Control Bangkok to deal with fringe aspects for me while I’m in the field because Local Control Bangkok is one man: you. And it isn’t your field.’
He said nothing, but he compromised: he didn’t walk away. I knew he was worried about loss of face because he hadn’t sensed the tag but he could worry about it some other time when I didn’t need him. I said:
‘She’s trying to milk us, isn’t she? Her group’s been following me ever since I took the mission over. I do the work, they get the results. If they want to protect the Person they’ll have to do it on their own and in their own way. You know the danger - if they balk me now it can spoil my aim and we’ll miss. You know the risk. Call it a national tragedy.’
He studied my face for a bit and then broke a rule because he had to, because he was Local Control Bangkok and one man wasn’t enough to keep an agent alive in a red sector.
‘They’re not concerned,’ he said, ‘with protecting the Person.’
‘Is that an idea or do you know for certain?’
‘I’ve told you, I don’t know anything. You asked for my ideas. The Maine group isn’t trying to get information about the
Person, from me or anyone else. They’re not interested in the official arrangements or the itinerary or the Kuo set-up.’ To prove his worth as a director and save some of his face he said parsonically: ‘That is why I made no comment when you twice asked me about the woman. My conviction was that her group was not running a mission similar to yours and was therefore unlikely to get in your way. That is still my conviction and I still believe it’s my duty to tell you simply to forget it and concentrate on your operation.’
But I knew he was ready to talk so I didn’t waste time on persuasion. I told him:
‘Stick to principles and you’ll have a death on your hands. His. And maybe mine. If they’re not on a protection mission what’s their field?’
‘They are on a protection mission.’
‘But you said—‘
‘Their mission is not to protect the Person. It’s to protect you.’
I shut up because I had to think.
It checked. They had been tagging me - the woman herself and the two men, the thin one and the one with the splayfooted walk - and no one else. They had seen that I was logging the Kuo travel pattern but they had never switched their attention from me to him, and when I lost him they went on tagging me: they weren’t interested in Kuo. And the woman had been there at the airport ‘in case I took a plane.’
The kites had begun moving.
We are too old, too animal, to let ourselves become lost in thought, lost in our environments. Our environments are the jungle. A draft from the street had begun moving the kites and they danced grotesquely, the big male chulas and the female pakpaos. Someone had opened a door, so I spoke more loudly:
‘Then tell them to get out of my field.’ Loman composed his face in suffering, thinking I had raised my voice merely in anger. ‘Go out and pick up Scarface and tell her to mother someone else’s chick - I’m a big boy now. The only protection I need is from her. I’m relying on you to do that for me, Loman, strictly urgent.’ I took the photograph from him and turned away. ‘Ten minutes be enough? Then I’m leaving. Clean.’
