Assignment Peking

by Edward S. Aarons

  Assignment PEKING

  One

  The man in the mask struggled in the darkness of his nonidentity.

  Blinded, mute, held motionless more by self-imposed discipline than by his orders, he floated in the black antiseptic nowhere-nobody environment for a time beyond his reckoning. There were long hours when he thought he could not endure. There were days of passive emptiness when he was a sieve, a sponge, alternately absorbing, rejecting, testing, weighing all that was poured into him.

  Now he heard the voice, imperative and quiet, as insidious as a snake in the dark world he inhabited.

  "Durell? Sam Durell?"

  He lay silent and motionless in his black tomb of self-denial.

  "Durell, are you in there?"

  In where? Out here? Down in this place? Up in the black spinning vault of space?

  "Sam, please answer me. It is quite all right. You can answer. Vertical Five. It's important. Please, Sam."

  He let the silence spin itself out after the sly, insidious echoes. He was not here. He was not there. The name meant nothing. There was no voice. No one called to him.

  He laughed and felt cunning. He thought, "It is said by the ancient sages that a man must not shout unless he is certain of an echo."

  Do not ask for help or love unless you are certain it will be provided.

  Silence!

  Then he heard a scratching sound, a faint clink of metal on metal. There was quiet, sustained breathing.

  The man's voice called again.

  "Major Shan! Shan Tze Peng!"

  "I am here," said Durell.

  "Mr. Shan, I will get you out of here. I shall save you!"

  The words were a lie, the friendship and anxiety a deceit. He smelled danger. He smelled death breathing outside the door. The clicking was too frantic, the effort to open the locked door was an effort not to save, but to kill. He could not know this for certain, but he felt it. His sense of danger made all his nerves tighten, made a muscle jump under the bandages on his cheeks, the pads over his eyes.

  He sat up. He was not supposed to touch any of the bandages over his face, but his hands came up carefully, found the surgical tape under his ears and on his forehead, and he pulled them away with caution. He kept his eyes closed. He was afraid to open them. Then the fevered scratching at the door made him swing his legs off the edge of the bed and stand up. He had to see. It meant his life. Greentree would be furious, but it couldn't be helped. He opened his eyes.

  Swimming mist. A glow of light. Then sharp focus. He was in a room softly illuminated by a globular lamp, furnished with a huge Chinese red-lacquered bed, some elegant chairs copied from the Tangs. There was a silky yellow carpet, carved teak cabinets with a collection of fine porcelain and jade. He looked about in wonder. There was one wide window, covered with a knotted net curtain embroidered with an elaborate border. He knew there were bars and screens over the window. Dominating one wall of the room was a vast lacquered screen, a painted copy of a Chinese antique of a thousand years ago* On the other side of the room was a mirror, full-length, framed in gilt, topped by two elaborately carved wooden dragons.

  "Shan! Shan Tze Peng!" The voice outside was an urgent whisper. "Can you let me in? The lock is difficult."

  He stared at the mirror, unmoving. His breath came slowly, regularly, but controlled with an immense effort. He saw his image as a tall man, a Chinese, with a round

  face, dark-skinned, a northern nose like that of a man from Shantung, with heavy black hair and dark brown eyes under the folded Oriental lids. There were little stainless steel clips still in place at his eyelids, and pale, fading scars on his round cheeks. He had a thin black moustache. His eyes smarted, and he blinked them and drew a deep breath and looked at the white shirt and tennis slacks and shoes he wore.

  It was the first time in three weeks that he had seen himself.

  "Greentree, you son of a bitch," he whispered.

  "Shan?" the voice pleaded outside.

  "Yes," he said.

  "Help me, Major Shan."

  "Yes."

  "I will save you from these devils!"

  "Yes," he said a third time.

  He kept staring at his reflected image in the tall golden mirror. Then he shoved the face bandages that had masked him under the rumpled bedding of the big Chinese platform bed, and he went to the door.

  He knew very well that the lock on the door was difficult. It had been devised by experts. It took two keys, and they had to be manipulated simultaneously, each in a different sequence of turns, more difficult than the average lock on a bank vault. He would be safe if he ignored the man trying to get in. But he couldn't be ignored. His sense of danger was more urgent by the moment.

  He had no weapon, and for a moment he scanned the room, looking for something he could use—a scroll, a piece of wood, something to weight his hand. He could kill with any of these or, if necessary, with none of them. What was it the ancient fighting monks of China had said? Forbidden by their creed to use ax or knife, they left their monasteries and made every finger a dagger, each arm a spear, the open hand a sword. So was the art of judo born centuries ago. He flexed his fingers and swore silently again at Greentree.

  "Major Shan! Please!" came the muffled voice.

  "Coming," Durell said.

  He lit a joss stick before a little jade image of Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and went to the door.

  He manipulated the inner locks carefully, aware of a sudden silence outside, a quiet waiting like the shadow of death in the night. He knew by what the intruder had said to him that his life was already forfeited. The man had made a mistake. But maybe it had been a deliberate test. In this business you never knew the full deviousness of an opponent's mind. It was better never to underestimate the enemy. Too many good men he had known were dead now in dark corners of the world because of a moment's hesitation, a dependence on a friend, an instant's lowering of caution's armor.

  He opened the door.

  A shadow leaped, a knife flickered like a serpent's tongue. Eyes glared, a contorted face closed on him, eyes suddenly wide with amazement and recognition, then fixed on the tiny steel clips that glittered on the eyelids, the fading hairline scars on the round cheeks of a face from Shantung. There was an explosion of breath, a moment of horror. The knife came up, ripping for the gut.

  Night stars glittered outside over Sun Moon Lake. He glimpsed the cottages with their upturned eaves, tiled roofs, red-painted moon gates and low walls.

  Then the edge of his palm clipped the wrist of the hand that held the knife thrusting for his belly. The blade was diverted, hissing through cloth. The attacker did not drop the knife. He was strong and sinuous, sliding to the right, and Durell jumped, struck, avoided a second upthrust, chopped again, missed. His opponent was professional, one of the best. In the dim light of the single globular lamp on the teak chest, he saw that the man, a Chinese, had a round Cantonese face and extraordinary shoulder development.

  "Are you Shan?" the man whispered. They circled each other warily in the big room. "You look like him. Yes, exactly like him. But Shan is dead. The KMT caught him. But you are Shan, are you not?"

  "Were you sent to kill me?" Durell asked.

  "Not if you are really Shan."

  "Of course you must kill me," Durell said. "I've been kept here for a month."

  "Were you talking?"

  "Of course I talked."

  "I see."

  "You see nothing," Durell said. "Who sent you?"

  They circled once more, and again the knife flickered, snaking up and down and out, feinting. Durell moved in and the man stepped back toward the big lacquered screen against the wall opposite the bed. The man suddenly came at him and Durell jumped back, jumped
up on the big platform bed, avoided the knife, and came down again toward the open door.

  "You will die, Shan!"

  "Not yet."

  He swept up the lamp, yanking the cord loose, and threw it. It exploded with a small crash that broke the silence of their struggle. Darkness folded in. There was another crash as the Cantonese went into the lacquered screen. Sparks flew as the big tape recorders hidden there were torn loose. The sputtering was brief, sudden. The man's face looked detached, floating in the darkness. Durell came in low, felt a prick of the knife under his left arm; then his stiff fingers hit the man in the groin, came in again low in the belly, stabbed up for the face. There was a stifled scream, a wrenching away from him, a flicker of shadow at the door.

  Durell ran after him. He could not afford to let the man get away.

  The starlit night was cool. Wind soughed in the pines on the hillside overlooking Sun Moon Lake. Only a few dim lights showed in the other cottages scattered on the wooded mountainside. Stars reflected in the shimmering lake. It was long after midnight. Most of the houses were occupied by vacation people from Taipei, army men with their mistresses, a few American tourists to Taiwan, a discreetly managed brothel down the carefully tended path to the docks on the waterfront.

  He did not spot his opponent. He stepped into the

  black shadows of the upturned, tiled eaves. The breeze blew stronger for a moment, smelling of pines and charcoal smoke.

  The Sun Moon Lake area, the most scenic of old Formosa, was only a seven-hour drive south from Taipei below the East-West Cross Island highway. The scents of autumn were in the air. Down the mountainside at the dock area were the simple hostels for tourists and the one modern hotel, the Evergreen, about a mile away. He could see the rowboats and launches that took sightseers by day to the Wen Wu temple, the aboriginal village of Tsung Shao, and the small islet in the center of the lake, called the "Gem of Formosa." Everything slept under the midnight stars. He had objected to this site during the three weeks that Greentree, McFee, and Colonel Chu Yi-fen had kept him in seclusion here, since it seemed to him like a place whose very isolation invited an easy breach of security. Now, when the training and work were almost over, the tapes ended, and Greentree's labors complete, it had happened.

  Durell bit back his anger, and concentrated on searching the dark night, listening and watching.

  The house where he had lived stood on a rocky outcropping among the mountain pines. A jeep trail led in a twisting route down toward the lake, far below. The wind felt cold. He shivered briefly. There were two smaller cottages here, like tiny jewels of Chinese temples. The jeep was parked before the one that Dr. Greentree shared with Colonel Chu. It was dark and silent over there. Durell considered the garden. An old stone lantern bulked between himself and the moon gate in the compound wall. There was an unaccustomed shadow under the stone lamp, and he moved with three long strides toward it and knelt beside the man who sprawled facedown on the carefully raked pebbles of the path.

  It was one of Colonel Chu's men who ordinarily stood watch—a tough, slender old veteran of the Kuomintang's flight from mainland China to Taiwan. His grizzled head was bloody, and his mouth was open in death's inevitable surprise. What had killed him was a knife blow just under

  the heart. He had been knocked out first, so murder had been gratuitous, unnecessary. It told Durell something about the man who was hiding from him nearby.

  He straightened silently. The soughing of the wind stopped and in the brief quiet he heard the faintest crunch of a shoe on the pebbled path beyond the moon gate. He waited for the pine-scented breeze again, then moved rapidly to the left of the gate. The wall was only five feet high. Low shrubs grew along it. With a fluid movement he put his hands on top of the wall and vaulted over it. He almost came down on the assassin crouching there.

  "Shan, no!"

  The man's words came with an explosive burst of breath. Durell glimpsed white, liquid eyes, and then his quarry was up and running, careless of noise, smashing through the pine trees. He had taken the path toward the lake.

  Durell was only a few steps behind him.

  For some moments he could see nothing but the slashing pine branches, and his opponent knew the way better than he. The distance between them lengthened. In a minute, the man was lost to sight in the dark woods.

  Durell swung left, came out on the jeep track, and ran at top speed down its rutted path. The road was twisted, longer than the way through the pines but easier to cover. Now and then he glimpsed the lake. Across from the eastern shore were the bamboo rafts of the aborigines. During the day these semi-wild people performed a "Pestle Dance" for visiting tourists. He wondered if the assassin were headed that way.

  He paused at the second switchback in the trail. The wind died again. The surface of the lake mirrored the stars. Two lights twinkled on the opposite shore, a lamp glowed in the island temple, a night light shone in one of the Evergreen Hotel windows. A bird called sleepily. Durell shivered again. With eyes adjusted to the starlight, he could see more details now. Stooping, he picked up a stone that fitted smoothly into his hand and clenched his fist over it.

  Now he heard his quarry coming, jumping and sliding downhill toward him. A little to the right perhaps. Durell took a dozen steps and paused under a towering pine. The assassin was panicky, noisy in his haste to escape.

  The man burst out of the wooded hillside only two steps away.

  Instantly, Durell was under him, his body low, blocking the hurtling figure, tumbling the man head over heels into the road. The impact knocked Durell sidewise, off his feet, and he rolled over twice and came up to leap on his opponent's dark, sprawled figure. The man was good; he made a quick recovery. His fingers stabbed at the throat, missed, and his knee came up savagely; he grunted and wriggled aside. Durell caught one flailing arm and pinned him down and smashed at the face with the stone in his fist. The man's head thudded backward on the ground. Durell hit the contorted face once more and heard teeth and jawbone splinter.

  The body under him went limp.

  He did not release his grip. He rolled the man over, off the jeep road. The slanted eyes were open and blank, the face deceptively relaxed, except for the blood that oozed from his broken mouth. Breath whispered faintly from the parted, everted lips.

  "Who are you?" Durell gasped.

  There was no answer.

  "Come on, you can speak. How did you find me?"

  The breathing stopped.

  "Tell me, or "

  There was a smell of cyanide on the last exhaled breath that escaped the assassin's lungs. A broken capsule gleamed between the shattered teeth.

  The man was dead.

  Two

  Two hours later, Durell's anger was unabated.

  "He knew me," he said. "He called me by name, by my real name, before he called me Major Shan."

  "Take it easy," Greentree said.

  "I can't take it easy. Everything is blown. The cover is gone."

  "Not necessarily. Sit still."

  "Ike, you've wasted all your time."

  "Be still, will you?" Dr. Greentree was pedantic and patient. Durell could just see the surgeon's narrow, intellectual face beyond the glare of the surgical lights. The metal table on which he sat felt cold under his thighs. He looked beyond Ike Greentree's gold-rimmed World War II aviator's glasses. Somewhere in the background, outlined against the dawn that made the barred windows gray, was Colonel Chu's silent, elegant figure. Durell felt a twinge of pain in his eyelid as the last tiny steel clip was removed from his flesh. Greentree clicked his tongue with satisfaction and said, "Good. It's beautiful. Really beautiful, Sam. There won't be a mark left in three days."

  "To hell with it," Durell said.

  Colonel Chu spoke in his precise Oxonian accent. "I have sent the man's body to our intelligence people in Taipei. It should be there in an hour, old boy. Photographs, skin analysis, clothing—nothing much to tell us, there—and fingerprints and autopsy are scheduled. The fi
les are open for it. We should have him identified before the day is over."

  "And if you don't?" Durell asked angrily.

  Colonel Chu shrugged.

  Durell said: "So it's blown. I repeat it, they know. The whole damned gimmick is off. And I'm a dead man."

  "Then so will I be," said Chu.

  "You're damned easy about it," Durell sighed.

  Chu laughed. "My inscrutable Oriental fatalism, you think? Let's switch to the Mandarin now, Cajun. You're Major Shan Tze Peng from this moment on. For three weeks, you are Major Shan in the flesh."

  "A wonderful job," Ike Greentree said. He was engrossed in his professionalism. "It's a bit unusual, you see, reversing Occidental features to Chinese. In Hawaii, of course, some of my plastic surgeon colleagues have quite a practice making Oriental girls into Westerners. A simple operation, really. But with you, Sam, the problem was to make the job reversible, so we can turn you back into Sam Durell when your job is done."

  "We'll never get off the ground," Durell said.

  "Mandarin, please, Shan," Chu insisted gently.

  "You can get up now," Greentree said. He stood back to let Durell off the surgical table. "Lovely job. Really lovely. You understand what I've done? The Oriental eyelid is a feature of the epicanthic fold, you see. I worked on the lateral canthus, where the eyelids join, to narrow and elevate its appearance. Western eyes have a redundancy of this fold, but the Eastern 'slanted eye' does not have this extra layer of flesh to be eliminated. Rather than excise the fold completely—which could not then be returned to its original appearance—I've inverted the eye-fold so we can reproduce the upper lid the way it once was. Nothing to worry about. Really, nothing. To all intent and purposes, the upper lid fold has been eliminated and your eyes are now—ah—Chinese. How do the contact lenses feel?"

  "They itch," Durell said.

  "Major Shan—Mandarin, yes?" Chu asked softly.

  "Not to Ike," Durell said. "Ike Greentree speaks German, Italian, Polish, Yiddish, and Cantonese. Mandarin is for gentlemen and Peking government bureaucrats."

  Dr. Greentree smiled tightly. He was not amused. "Be careful of those lenses, Samuel. You would look odd, if you lost them, as a blue-eyed Chinese."