by Adam Hall
One of the policemen blew his whistle as a hotel shuttle bus slowed and tried to move into a gap too short for it; the driver throttled up again.
The rain was steady, a gray steel curtain with diamonds sprinkled in it.
I was standing next to one of Dr Xingyu's escorts, turned away from him, not looking at him, looking through the rain now, as if waiting to cross the roadway; he didn't have any interest in me: there were other people around, other passengers. I would see to him first, then the man who was swinging the bag into the trunk, then the chauffeur, who had gone back to sit at the wheel of the Mercedes.
The rain had the sound of steel brushes stroking a snare drum softly in the night.
Flashpoint as the bag dropped onto the floor of the boot and I used the right arm from the elbow to keep the strike short and visually discreet and felt the softness of the flesh covering the escort's vagus nerve against my wristbone and saw his hands coming up too late to protect himself. I didn't worry about his hands because his pulse would have begun slowing now and venous dilation would be drawing blood from his brain. His legs were buckling as the second man straightened up from dropping the bag into the boot and I used a knee against his sacral plexus hard enough to incapacitate and pulled him out of the way and slammed the boot shut and went to the side of the car and opened the driving door and worked on the chauffeur's thyroid cartilage, taking my time because he was surprised and hadn't even moved his hands and couldn't move them now because of the numbing effect of the squeeze. I used my other hand to drag him off the seat and onto the streaming roadway and started up and checked the nearside mirror and used a light foot but even then got wheelspin as I took the Mercedes away and saw the black Jaguar pull out immediately and then swing back to block off the Mercedes behind me as it started up and tried to follow. The police whistles were blowing and I'd expected that but I didn't know why the woman over there was screaming and holding her face, perhaps just because there were three people lying on the roadway in the pouring rain and they surely must be ill or something.
I turned my head and told Dr Xingyu to get down low on the backseat in case there was any shooting and he did that. I'd reached the airport road by the time a dark green Volvo flashed me from behind and came past and slowed and pulled into the curb ahead of me. The driver got out and took over the Mercedes, and I put Xingyu into the front of the Volvo with me, and when I was sure we were clean and clear I used the car phone and told Pepperidge we'd got him.
PACE!
Chapter 7: Headlights
I pushed the needle into his hip and aspirated and didn't get any blood, started squeezing the plunger.
'All right,' Pepperidge said, 'what about the next one, the man who was putting the bag into the boot?'
He was making notes, shorthand, sitting at the end of the bench that ran the length of the cabin.
'Still,' I told Xingyu. 'Keep perfectly still.' He hadn't got a lot of patience, we'd found. 'Knee to the coccyx,' I told Pepperidge. 'The sacral plexus would have been affected, where most of the major nerves go from the spine to the hips and the legs. He went down straight away.' I pulled the needle out of Xingyu's muscle and rubbed it for a bit.
Pepperidge: 'What's his future?'
It's a new thing they've started to ask in London: when we're debriefed after any kind of action we're expected to give details. It's all in the book in Norfolk but it's meant to inspire the rookies when they're told exactly what was done in a real situation.
'His life's not in danger,' I said. 'He'll need some spinal surgery, that's all. He'll walk again.'
Dr Xingyu pulled up his black woollen slacks and did the buttons.
'Thank you.'
'Don't mention it.' Saliva in my mouth, I'm queasy about needles but it had been no good asking Pepperidge to do it because I was going to be tied to Xingyu right through the mission and he needed it twice a day, 300 Insuno intramuscular, just my luck. I took the syringe over to the little copper sink and filled it with water.
'The chauffeur?'
'I used a Chin Na grip on the thyroid cartilage to give him enough pain to stop him thinking of anything else, and then pulled him out of the car and dropped him on the roadway.' I took the syringe out to the flooded afterdeck and dropped it over the side and came back. 'Just to give him enough pain, though, that's important, because you can kill like that if you do it too hard. They should understand that. I didn't need to kill anyone.'
Xingyu was putting the bottle of insulin away in the pocket of his sheepskin coat. Pepperidge finished writing and didn't look up as he said: 'They ran over his head. Not your fault.'
In a minute I said, 'Oh, Christ.'
'Don't have it on your mind, but I had to tell you. They were in too much of a hurry trying to follow you.'
Explained, then, why that woman had screamed when I drove away: I'd wondered. Three down already, and we were learning fast: Bamboo was hungry.
'I took trouble,' I said.
'Of course you did. You're always fastidious.'
I sat down on the opposite bench, feeling cold, and Dr Xingyu looked at me and then at Pepperidge and said, 'So what will you do with me now?'
Tone of total cynicism, almost hostility. He was sitting very upright, his big hands on his lap, his feet together and his head lifted, sitting very still, like something to be shot at. Pepperidge came around the end of the teakwood table and sat facing the Chinese, resting his hands in front of him with the fingers spread open, a symbolic posture, I suppose, to mean he wasn't hiding anything.
'Dr Xingyu, you were told at our embassy in Beijing, as politely as possible, that you were becoming an embarrassment to the United Kingdom in our efforts to reestablish normal relationships with your government, and we therefore offered to ensure your freedom if you choose to leave the embassy. You were — '
'I can take care of my own freedom now. This is Hong Kong.' His eyes narrowed, his tone sharp.
'You're at liberty, Dr Xingyu, to leave this boat on your own and go wherever you wish, but before morning you'd find yourself back in Beijing, and no longer free. If you'll — '
'I do not think that. And I do not like all this — this subterfuge. It 'is not necessary. And a man has been killed, you say. That is terrible. Terrible.'
He is known for his extreme openness — Hyde, in Final Briefing — and his compassion. You may find him difficult, therefore, to control. There'd certainly been no subterfuge, I knew from the papers, in his opposition to the Communist Party in Beijing: he'd told them exactly what he thought of their failure to protect the welfare of the people.
'Dr Xingyu' — Pepperidge, his yellow eyes holding the other man's steadily across the table — 'you have a brilliant mind. You must use it now as you've never used it before, because the future of the Chinese people depends on it.'
Xingyu stood up so quickly that he knocked his head against a beam, but didn't flinch. 'I can only help my people if I am with them in Beijing. I should not have come here. I — '
'Since you're here, Doctor, I would ask you to do me the courtesy of hearing what I have to tell you.'
Xingyu stared him back for a moment and then dropped his head and sat down. 'Excuse me.'
It was his wife, I think, who was most on his mind: he'd talked about her in the car on our way from the airport. She'd been meant to join him at the U.K. embassy as soon as she could get there. I would not have gone there myself, you see, if I had thought she could not come. It was a terrible mistake. His wife and his friends, most of them fellow professors at the university, most of them now under arrest and inside Bambu Qiao Prison. Many of the cells have no doors or windows, he'd told me, there is only a trapdoor in the ceiling, and you cannot stand upright, the ceiling is too low.
'You are more than excused, Dr Xingyu.' Pepperidge was looking down, not wanting the Chinese to find his eyes on him when he raised his head again. 'You've got a lot to worry about, I know that. Now, I can't tell you as much as I'd like to, because if the KCCPC find
you and take you back to Beijing by force, we don't want you to have any information about us that they might try to extract from you. But if all goes well, we might be able to send you back to Beijing to greet the leaders of a new and democratic government. This — '
'It would take years. Years.'
'If you were ready to cooperate with us, Dr Xingyu, it might take only a few days."
'That is out of the question! You do not realize — '
'Dr Xingyu. You must be prepared to listen to me.'
It took another ten minutes for him to get the message across and he didn't tell Xingyu any more about the setup for Bamboo than he had to know, which was simply that when he went back to Beijing it could be to help his people work out the structuring of a new China. What he did tell him in great detail was more to the point.
'You mustn't think, then, Doctor, that you're in any way our captive, or under any kind of duress. You can part company with us at any time you like — but I want you to understand that my government has put a very great deal of work into this operation, at the highest level, and we don't feel that a person of your intelligence would allow an impulse to destroy our efforts on your behalf, and incidentally on the behalf of the People's Republic of China.'
Pepperidge has a quiet voice, and when he's talking about something important he measures his tone to catch your thoughts up in its rhythm; this is why Xingyu Baibing was listening carefully now, and not interrupting as he'd done before. I watched him as he listened, because it was necessary to get an idea of his character, the cut of his jib; later it would help me, and help him, and perhaps save his life, or mine.
'We cannot expect from you,' Pepperidge went on, 'any assurance, at this stage, that you won't decide to leave the protection we offer you and go it alone.' A beat, while he considered whether Xingyu's grasp of idiom was adequate. 'To leave our protection and rely on your own resources.'
Headlights.
'But I'd like your assurance, at least, that you'll give us warning if at any time you feel you must go back to Beijing, which will always be a temptation for you.' He waited, watching Xingyu, his eyes a degree more open, alerted: he'd seen the headlights too, through the cabin windows.
'I tried twice to leave the embassy,' Xingyu said, hunched forward a little now, his hands clasped and the fingers working, the whispering of their dry skin audible below the beat of the rain on the cabin roof. 'I tried twice.'
'That's what I'm talking about.' Pepperidge said. 'You're worried about your wife. But I want you to understand, you see, that if you put your trust in us, you may hope to be back with your wife much sooner, perhaps in a matter of days.'
Silence for a moment, then the big dry hands flew apart. 'You talk of a few days. But they have a stranglehold now, the party. A stranglehold on the people, through the army.'
The headlights weren't moving now; they'd swept their beam through the rain, silvering the images out there on the quay, and now the beam rested and only the rain moved, slanting through it.
I looked at Pepperidge. 'Did you order anyone in?' I meant support.
'No.'
I watched the headlights again.
'You must put your trust, you see, in whatever we tell you.' Pepperidge waited for it to sink in. 'That isn't easy, but it's got to be done. We know much, much more than you do, Dr Xingyu, about this operation.' He leaned forward across the table, and his voice was quieter still. 'You remember what they did to the Berlin Wall. We're going to do something like that in China.'
I looked at Xingyu. It had got his attention. Behind him on the varnished timbers the gloss darkened as the headlights went out.
'Don't worry,' Pepperidge told me.
It practically amounted to instructions. The executive in the field had brought the objective under protection but the mission was only two days old and there'd been three people killed and we still had to get this man out of Hong Kong and into deep shelter and the risk was extremely high and the above-mentioned executive was ready to get his nerve endings into an uproar at the sight of a pair of headlights, point taken, don't worry, just as you say, there are fifty boats tied up here and their owners come down to the quay by car and at night of course they have to switch their headlights on.
'I'm not worrying.'
'That's good.'
But he'd noticed them, the headlights. I'd seen the reaction in his eyes.
'I do not think you realize,' Xingyu was saying, 'the power of the people you have to deal with.'
'We realize it very well.' Pepperidge leaned back again, away from the good doctor, and told him that we have our powers too, told him that the planning of this operation had been made by some of the most brilliant men in British intelligence, laid it on a bit thick, I thought, but we'd got to convince the little bugger somehow to listen to Pepperidge. I listened to Pepperidge while the blood from the ambassador crept its way to the curb and the snake spread its hood and the wheel went across the skull with the sound, I suppose, of a cracking coconut, a coconut splitting open, listened to Pepperidge and watched another car come down to the quay and the ghost-white shape of a jet go sloping down to Kaitak with the strobes making white hazy explosions through the rain while he went on talking, Pepperidge, and at last got an undertaking from Xingyu, for what it was worth.
'Then I will give you warning, if I decide to go back to Beijing. I will give you warning.'
Pepperidge slid his rump along the bench to the far end and stood up. 'Calls for a spot of tea, I'd say, what about you chaps?' Filling the kettle, plugging it in, it had been a lot of work getting even that much out of the Chinese. 'So we'll be leaving Hong Kong some time tomorrow, can't say exactly when, but the thing is, we'd rather like to put you on a plane for London, naturally, and look after you there while events develop in Beijing. Would that suit?'
'London?'
He seemed surprised, Xingyu, though I couldn't think why: it was the obvious place to keep him holed up, a nice long way from the People's Republic of China and the merry boys of the Kuo Chi Ching Pao Chu with their little trapdoors in the ceiling, a safe haven, I would have thought, London, placed under honourable house arrest in one of the discreet Mayfair flats where even one young bobby would be enough to keep people away.
'That's right,' Pepperidge said, and dropped two Earl Grey teabags into the pot. 'Just for a few days.'
'No,' the feet planted together, the hands resting squarely on the black-trousered knees. 'I want to go to Tibet.'
The rain drummed on the cabin roof like a light rattle of shots.
Tibet.
This bodes ill, my friend, this bodes ill indeed.
A car door slammed, somewhere along the quay.
'A few sardines?'
'No,' Xingyu said.
Pepperidge held the tin aslant under the small reproduction binnacle lamp, peering at the trademark. 'Crown Prince. Rich in Natural Fish Oil, No Salt Added. They're very good.'
'I wish to eat nothing.'
I don't think Xingyu was sulking, although he was just sitting there hunched up with his forearms on the table now, the big hands open, empty, empty of hope for the wife and the friends he believed he'd deserted, and that was it, not sulking but despairing, because Pepperidge hadn't sounded too charmed by the idea of putting this man back into China, which getting him to Tibet would mean.
'We couldn't take you through Kathmandu,' Pepperidge had told him, 'because there wouldn't be time to make the trip by road from there to Lhasa. That is where you meant, isn't it, when you said Tibet? You meant Lhasa?'
'Yes. I have friends there.'
'The thing is, we'd have to fly you in, because that's all we'd have time for, and that means we'd have to go Hong Kong to Beijing to Chengdu to Gonggar. As far as I know there's no Air China flight direct from Hong Kong to Chengdu without going through Beijing, which is out of the question. Sorry. You've asked for the impossible.'
'I wish to go to Lhasa. I will be safe there.'
That was an hour ago and
Pepperidge had compromised and signalled London through the scrambler and told them the situation. They said they'd confer with Bureau One and send his instructions. We were still waiting.
I hadn't heard any footsteps after the car door had slammed out there on the quay. I would have liked to hear footsteps going from the car to one of the boats. I didn't want to think that a car had arrived and doused its lights and was just standing there with people inside, people watching. I'd come away clean from the airport thing and switched to the Volvo and the chances that anyone had seen the switch and followed me were strictly slight but you can't, you know, you can't entirely ignore the nerves because it's not always paranoia, it's sometimes a warning of danger culled from the observations of the subconscious, and if you don't give it at least a bit of attention you can shorten your life without even trying.
Pepperidge had told me the procedure: if anyone came near this boat, Xingyu would be bundled quietly into the head and I would go to the sleeping quarters behind the curtains and Pepperidge would stay where he was with his.37 magnum on his knees under the table.
But it shouldn't come to that. This thing about Tibet had caught me unawares, that was all. Xingyu had turned out so unpredictable and we couldn't trust him: he must know we couldn't fly him to Lhasa without going through Beijing and that might be what he'd got on his mind — trying to jolly us into getting him back to Beijing so that he could give us the slip there and leave the plane and rush off to join his friends in Bambu Qiao.
'What you must realize' — Pepperidge stirred his tea and watched Xingyu, watched him with no great affection — 'is that we have to consider the timing of this operation. Our deadline, as I have told you, is in three days from now. In three days we expect to be able to fly you into Beijing with impunity, a very different Beijing from the one you have just left. We — '
