by Adam Hall
‘You won’t always be there,’ he said.
‘Loman will know where I am.’
‘And if Mr. Loman is not at that number?’ He meant Room 6 and was careful not to say it.
‘I think that about covers it.’ I wasn’t giving him Soi Suek 3.
‘Would I have permission to contact you through Mr. Varaphan?’
I didn’t answer. I’d taken care - nothing showed in my face. He would expect surprise but I didn’t want him to see actual shock.
A safehouse is no ordinary place: it is a cornerstone of security, and bad security can wreck a mission and kill you off. You’ve got Local Control if you’re lucky, but you can’t always rely on getting there if the operation hots up and you’re jumping. A safehouse is a home and sometimes it’s the only place you can run to. We think of it as a shrine, sacrosanct. It’s really a bolt-hole.
‘How did you get it, Pangsapa?’
Because he’d got it and it was no use asking him who Mr. Varaphan was. He knew.
I had never seen anger in him before. There wasn’t much difference: he sat as still, and didn’t raise his voice. Anger in an Asian is no more - and no less - than sudden cold.
‘Please remember that Mr. Loman gave you my name and that he gave you also Varaphan’s. How much do you trust in your own intelligence director?’ His yellow eyes remained fixed on me.
I said, ‘Let’s say, then, that you can contact me at the Pakchong, through Loman, or through Varaphan.’
My own anger didn’t show either. Loman hadn’t given it to him, I knew that. A safehouse didn’t have that name for nothing. Pangsapa must have tags out. That was unusual. He was an informant, and informants are not active. They are found among news vendors and clerks, maîtres d’hôtel, cloth importers, stockbrokers and road sweepers - they can be anyone. They are businessmen who listen and who buy and sell what they hear, and they trade outside their ordinary occupation.
They take no action. They don’t put tags out.
Kuo was a professional killer but he had moved into the snatch game. Pangsapa was a narcotics contrabandist and an informant on the side. Now he was on the move. And that was why he was different today and why his nerves were poking through the black silk and the Lotus pose and the lilt in his speech.
He said carefully: ‘I gave you the motorcade route. I gave you the man who joined Kuo. I can give you more. It is up to you whether you are prepared to take your advantage.’
‘I’m ready to take everything I can get. You still don’t mention the price.’
‘Why should I? It is not you who will have to pay.’
I had walked half a block from Pangsapa’s house when the car began slowing behind me and I caught the sound and turned sharply to face it because that is the only chance you can give yourself - to look straight at the car, at the windows on the pavement side.
The reflection of the street lamps went sliding across the metal roof. I watched it coming. The windows on my side were open but nothing protruded. The driver was alone.
She reached across and opened the passenger door as the car stopped and I got in without saying anything. She drove easily, taking her time along the empty streets. The cinemas and most of the restaurants were dark and the only patch of light along Charoen Krung Road was made by the police station, where patrol crews were assembled for rebriefing under floodlights. We were slowed and a man looked in and then nodded, waving us on.
It was all they could do: check everyone, search every house, question everything they saw. They had no direction, any more than I had. They would have asked for statements from people who had been at the scene and they would have drawn blank because no one can remember anything after an accident: knowing that they are expected to remember, they rationalize and put up a show to avoid being thought a halfwit. Their testimony is worse than useless because it is unconsciously false.
They would have extracted the bullet from the head of the dead driver and again they would have drawn blank because they’d never find the gun that had fired it: Kuo was a professional. They would have asked to see anyone who had been using a camera at the time and they would have drawn blank because there was no point in studying amateur photographs of a car hitting a crowd. The press photographers had been bunched in special enclosures and there had been no enclosure in the Link Road. Blank.
Even from my raised viewpoint in the condemned building I had seen nothing clearly, even with field glasses.
But they had to go on trying because routine work by massed forces will sometimes repay the effort. At worst the effort is seen to be made.
South Sathorn Road with the Klong running parallel on our left. There were no rings on her hands; they were cool-looking and long-fingered, tenderly moving on the hard rim of the wheel. Sometimes her reflection came against the windshield, a ghost face flying along the street’s facade.
It was too late now to do anything about it. The tricks wouldn’t work anymore - calling her a bitch, calling her Scarf ace, resenting her, telling Loman to get her out of my way. Loman had seen the signs. He had said, ‘That’s the second time you’ve mentioned her.’ I should have shut up after he’d said that.
North Sathorn, passing the Immigration Office. We were heading for the Pakchong Hotel, my last known address before I’d gone to ground and she’d lost me for three days. Didn’t she bloody well have anywhere else to go? It didn’t work anymore. I didn’t want her to have anywhere else to go.
Toward Lumpini Park a police patrol was throwing a man into the van; he ducked once and nearly got clear enough to start running, then they chopped him short and picked him up and threw him in; one of his shoes had been wrenched off and they threw it in after him. He was one of hundreds; the cells were crammed with suspects held for questioning since the search was mounted.
Vithayu Road, turning north. Far over to the left a beam of light stood against the dark sky, tapering upward - a helicopter probing along the river.
The night was warm and her arms were bare. She must have tagged me from the Embassy when I’d left there to answer Pangsapa’s call; then she had waited for me to come out of his house. I had been there for nearly an hour and she had used the time thinking, sitting alone in the car, undistracted, thinking it all out.
Then she had decided, and picked me up. Until now we had driven in silence through the city, leaving each other in peace.
Her head lifted a fraction but she didn’t turn to look at me.
‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘a man named Lee? Norwich, England, July last year?’
And I knew why Kuo had made the snatch.
Chapter 18
The Swap
The maximum sentence that can be imposed on a foreign national convicted of espionage in the United Kingdom is fourteen years, and the man calling himself Peter Lee had received this term at the hands of the Lord Chief Justice in No. 1 Court, Old Bailey, in July 1965.
The real name of the prisoner was Huang Hsiung Lee, and the affair became known as the Norwich Case. A group of distinguished physicists, headed by Sir Arthur Hare and Professor James K.W. Fadieman, had been working on a project for the past two years at Norwich Physical Research Establishment under a special Treasury grant and with certain technical facilities provided by the U.S.A., three of whose scientists were among the team. The project concerned a refinement of the Laser device (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). This is an electromagnetic oscillator producing light waves massed into an ultra-narrow wave length band, and directed along a fixed path in a ray one million times brighter than is possible in any normal way.
The Laser beam has been used successfully in surgery of the eye, operating at a distance of a few inches. A beam directed by the same method at the surface of the planet Venus, at a distance of 23,000,000 miles, has been reflected back to earth and picked up by optic receptors. Between these two extreme instances of its remarkable range, the Laser has capabilities that make it essential that strict security covers all r
esearch into its further development.
Data produced by the Hare-Fadieman Project during the past two years had automatically passed onto the secret list. Mil. 5 and the CIA set up a special unit to protect every aspect of the Norwich research, but in January 1965 an agent seconded to the technical branch of a U.K. mission in Teheran intercepted a signal concerning an entirely different subject and triggered a snap-inquiry that sent a Special Branch car to No. 67 Beacon Street, Norwich, within twenty-four hours. ‘Peter’ Lee, a student in applied physics with friends at the Research Establishment, was arrested and charged with being in possession of information coming under the Secrets Act.
A second and immediate inquiry among the Hare-Fadieman research team established that the leak was of the most serious proportions. On the same day an exhaustive search of Lee’s apartment in Beacon Street revealed microdot photographs of two comprehensive files and third-phase technical drawings on the subject of a stage in the development of the Laser instrument so far in advance of its current potential that any government on a war footing would take the most extreme measures to possess its raw data.
Further inquiries revealed that ‘Peter’ Lee, whose family was in Singapore, had recently asked permission to curtail his studies at Norwich owing to his father’s illness. He had planned to leave England three days after the Teheran signal had set in motion the inquiries. At the time of his arrest he had been in the process of settling small local bills, and one of his travel cases was already packed.
At the trial in July the Lord Chief Justice had made a point of congratulating those agents responsible for the action, and public opinion swung from alarm at the first news of the leak to reassurance that it had been stopped in time, by however fine a limit. The microdot material had been destroyed and Lee was sent down for the maximum term. He could do no further damage. The Norwich Case was closed.
The street lamps swung overhead, their light throwing the reflection of her face against the windshield. I watched it as it brightened and faded, block after block.
I said, ‘Where are you dropping me?’
She said, ‘Nowhere.’ I knew what she meant.
‘I’ve got some things to pick up at the warehouse.’ She knew where it was. The place where she had tagged Loman and opened a door to listen, the night when -knowing she was listening -1 had called her Scarf ace.
Lee. I thought about him. The public had been reassured, and only a few people had gone on worrying. I was one of those. We knew that Huang Hsiung Lee had an intellectual quality that came very high on the list among technical operators: he had a brilliant and photographic memory.
It didn’t matter, so long as he was in prison.
It mattered now.
‘A straight swap,’ I said.
She said: ‘Yes.’
‘But they can’t do it. It can’t be on government level.’ I suddenly felt annoyed. ‘No government can admit they’ve ordered a snatch on this scale, with someone as big as the Person.’
She was silent.
I said, ‘They can’t play outside the rules. A spy for a spy. They can’t just—‘
The sensation was almost physical: bright light flooding into my head.
You light your lamps as you go, picking your way through the dark … There are patches of dark and you skirt them, because your lamps are too small to show you everything … Now she had thrown a floodlight across the whole area and for a minute I was blinded.
In the reflection of her face the eyes had moved; she was watching the reflection of my own. She said:
‘That’s right, Quill. It’s a straight swap. But if they can’t get him to the frontier, they’ll get you.’
I remembered Loman: ‘Our mission is still running, and it won’t finish until we know why the Person has been abducted, and why you appear to be linked with him as a subject for preservation.’
I said to her: ‘That’s why they held off, why they didn’t try putting me in the sights.’
‘Yes. You’re the reserve - a substitute if they can’t get him to the frontier.’
We turned back through Lumpini Park on the way to the kite warehouse and I asked her to pull up under the trees. Over to our right was the haze-gray jet of the fountain. They had turned the lights off; normally it was illuminated but tonight its gaiety would not become this city.
She moved in her seat and her face had all the warmth the reflection had lacked. I knew she would talk now because she’d already given me the whole picture. I said:
‘When did your group come in?’
‘Some weeks ago.’ She no longer spoke in nervous snatches. Her eyes were cool and steady, as they’d been when I had first seen her in the Cultural Attaché’s office. The flickering had gone. ‘We got a lead from one of our people in Hong Kong that an attempt was going to be made to spring Lee from Durham. No one in London could confirm - they said we must have duff info. But we kept checking and found it was right: Lee was down for exchange. The only snag was that the Chinese Republic didn’t have a candidate. There was no one to exchange for Lee. We knew they’d have to find someone and that he’d have to be someone fairly big. Then we got wind that your Bureau was sending a protection man to deal with the assassination threat. We knew it was likely to be you because of your work in Bangkok two years ago - you know this place blindfolded. So we set up a protection mission of our own. You were looking after the Person - we were going to look after you.’
I glanced away through the windshield because I wanted to think with a cold forebrain. I said:
‘You didn’t think it was the Person himself up for a swap.’
She said impatiently, ‘Did you?’
‘I just wondered. Mil. 6 can be a bloody nuisance but it works. Who sent the threat?’
I was hoping to ask her something she didn’t know, Rivalry is insidious. Mil. 5, Mil. 6, the FBI and the CIA - they’re at each other’s throats trying to do the same job in the same way. You find yourself caught up in it.. No excuse.
‘The threat was sent by a Thai who had picked up a clue by accident. He’d heard that Kuo the Mongolian was coming to Bangkok. He chose the safest way to tip off London - anonymously. Kuo is very much feared, and you don’t sign your name to information against him.’
Headlights swept the lawns and flower beds and a police van pulled up quietly near the fountain. Another followed and they doused their lights. I asked her:
‘Why did you have me checked when I showed up at the Embassy?’
‘I wasn’t sure of you. I’d never seen you before.’ She watched the vans too. ‘As soon as you were identified without any doubt my group knew the mission was on. From that minute we never lost sight of you except when you - took evasive action.’
Ten uniformed police, five from each van, made a ring and closed in on the fountain. Under the great jet there was a flower-covered blockhouse with a small iron door. It was where the pump was installed. I said without wanting to:
‘But you lost sight of me this morning. When the motorcade began. You didn’t know where I was.’
Her voice became tremulous again, just by a degree. ‘We knew you were holed-up in the Link Road area.’ It seemed that she was going to leave it at that. The ring of police had reached the small iron door. It all looked very efficient. She said: ‘They have found the man in the Phra Chula Chedi - in the temple - did you know?’
It must have been the three priests who had been at the gates. They had wanted to know what I’d been doing in there. I looked at her again and saw the faint flickering of the eyes. I asked her:
‘How much did you know about my set-up?’
‘We knew you - had to - shield the Person in the only way possible.’
I looked back to the fountain. She wanted me to talk but there was nothing interesting to say about the man in the Phra Chula Chedi. They had opened the small iron door and searched the pumphouse and were coming back to the vans. It was going on throughout the city but they wouldn’t find him. Kuo was a professiona
l and he wouldn’t go to earth in any obvious place like a ruin or a wharf or a fountain pumphouse.
‘How long,’ I asked her, ‘have you been in the trade?’
Perhaps it wasn’t just that death had a fascination for her; perhaps she was unused to it.
‘Three years, on active ops.’
‘Mil. 6 all the time?’
‘Except for the Karachi show.’
I looked at her; she was watching the police. I said, ‘”63?”’
‘Yes.’ She still didn’t turn her head.
The Bureau hadn’t been in on that show because it amounted to an almost military operation including an air drop and briefing liaison with the Pakistani opposite numbers and we hadn’t enough operators free. It was successful but very messy and it might have been after that mission that she’d had to undergo plastic surgery. Three people - two of them Mil. 6 - had got killed.. Davis, Chandler, Browne. No, it wasn’t that she was unused to death. Then why the morbid interest in one dead duck?
A couple of policemen were coming across to vet us. They had their right hands loose against the hip, just over the holster.
‘Who was your chief in that field?’ I asked her.
‘Karachi?’ She still wouldn’t look at me. There was answer enough in the slight jerk of her head. ‘I forget.’
They ordered me out of the car and checked our papers with flashlamps, double-checking with a few questions about the Embassy staff before they stood back politely and gave us a salute. They went across to their vans and I got into the car again.
She started up and we drove out of Lumpini, because I didn’t want to talk about the man in the temple and she didn’t want to talk about the Karachi thing. It is a commonplace that once a sensitive subject comes up in a conversation, reference to anything in the world will somehow lead back to it.
We turned right into Rama IV and headed for the Link Road and I reviewed a final thought about Lee. At the time of his trial he had been called a ‘brilliant and perceptive student’ by his mentors, and it was fairly certain that his studies were a cover. Therefore the data and drawings contained in the microphotographed material were probably within his range of understanding. This fact, taken together with his excellent memory, meant that he still carried valuable information on Laser development in his head. Overlapping this factor was a second probability; that he would have taken duplicate copies in microdot for his own keeping in case it were unsafe to transmit the others, or in case there were a risk of their being lost in transit.
