by Adam Hall
'Oh yes.' His voice gentle, reasonable. He knew I was looking for a way out and he wasn't going to let me have one. He couldn't. 'There are several known dissidents in Beijing available, top intellectuals much admired by the people. London would certainly have gone to one of them, through the embassy, and put things to him.'
'You think someone's been briefed to take Xingyu's place, if he gets killed?'
'We can be certain. Most of the planning was made by Bureau One, with Sojourner as his adviser. But we don't want to see Dr Xingyu as in any way… expendable. We would hope, if anything happened to him, that his replacement could rally the people under the protection of the tanks; but we are certain that Dr Xingyu could do it. He is our highest priority. But if there were any risk of his exposing the mission…'
Walking about, I walked about, cold all over now, deathly cold, logical thought not coming easily but it didn't take a lot of working out, Xingyu Baibing was the messiah, with the future of all those people in his hands, but also with a bomb in his head they were asking me to detonate if he became a danger to them.
Pepperidge, watching me, the naked bulb in the ceiling reflected in his yellow eyes, waiting for me to understand that I hadn't got a chance. The objective for Bamboo was to protect Xingyu Baibing, but that objective would automatically be overidden — if something went wrong — by the highest priority of all: to protect the mission itself.
This hadn't been part of the planning, specifically; it had been built into the very bones of the Bureau in its conception, a commandment carved in stone: Protect the mission.
In the end I said, 'No gun.'
'Very well.' He had to accept that much and he knew it. I've got my commandments too. 'But you accept the need to avoid any risk to the mission?'
Said yes.
I had said yes.
Lying here in the padded sleeping bag with the dust settling onto my face, making it itch, lying not far from him, from the messiah, watchful guardian and defender of his fate, but if things went wrong, the means implement of his crucifixion.
Blood on the floor.
I was sitting against the wall on a slatted bench, head down, chin on my hands, looking across at the counter some times and then looking down, ill, depressed, abandoned to my fate, appropriate cover for a place like this.
Streaks of blood across the floor, he'd been brought in a minute ago, a young Khampa horseman, I would have said, in his brigand's garb, they ride as if into the teeth of hell and sometimes come a cropper. A woman in a stained white smock came with a mop and bucket, shaking her motherly head. There were a dozen people in here, most of them at the counter, some with an arm in a sling, one carrying an infant with his face red with rage, its cries piercing. The monk was at the other end, at his dispensary.
His name was Bian. The abbot had assigned him to me, telling him that he would do what I wanted better than anyone, more discreetly. I'd been surprised at first how ready the abbot had been to help me, but Xingyu had explained things: the monastery, like a hundred others, had been half destroyed by the Chinese forces in 1959, and the monks were still painstakingly restoring it; their hate for the Chinese had burned on when the fire was put out, and they would help anyone who could free Tibet and leave them in peace.
Yelling the place down, the infant, as the mother shuffled forward in the queue. Bian, the monk, was talking to someone now across the counter, a man in a white coat, the dispenser, giving him the prescription. It had become grubby in Xingyu's wallet and had been much handled, and I'd improved on that, making a smudge across his name that had left it unreadable.
This was simply an exercise in caution. Quite apart from the world-media photograph of Dr Xingyu Baibing in London, the Chinese weren't likely to suspect that he was already back on the mainland. It's the last place they'd expect me to go, he'd told me on the boat in Hong Kong, and that was why Pepperidge and London had agreed to let him come to Lhasa. But I'd asked Bian to buy the insulin for me to cover the thousandth chance that we were wrong, or that one of the KCCPC agents who'd seen me making the snatch at Hong Kong airport was now here in Lhasa, and that they suspected I was still looking after him. So this was just routine, straight out of the book.
'I shall require another injection,' Xingyu had told me, 'by noon.'
He hadn't apologized for the trouble involved, hadn't realized there was a risk, however slight. He'd been squatting on the floor when I'd left him, writing busily, some kind of diary perhaps, that he'd have to leave behind him when we made our final move; if so, the abbot would look after it for him.
The monk, Bian, was nodding, putting money on the counter, hitching the red robe higher on his shoulder, taking a packet from the dispenser, coming away.
I left the clinic five minutes after him and cut him off in a cobbled street behind one of the temples, deserted except for a huddle of mendicants sheltering from the wind.
'I did not bring it,' Bian told me.
'The insulin?'
'This is aspirin. I bought it in case I was watched. The dispenser said he would give me insulin but warned me, saying he had orders to report it.'
Mother of God.
'To report any sale of insulin?'
'Yes.' He looked along the street, then back to me, the stubble on his face catching the light from the flat gray sky where the sun made a hazy disk, his eyes watering in the freezing wind. 'He was a Tibetan, and was sorry, but said he would lose his license, perhaps be arrested for disobedience.'
Perhaps I was just paranoid, losing my grip. There could be other explanations. 'Bian,' I said, 'how many places are there in Lhasa where you can get insulin?'
'Very few. Very few places.'
So they wouldn't have to put a standing watch all over the town, the KCCPC, though of course if they had to, they would do that. They'd got limitless manpower.
Put a final question, to see if it was just paranoia: let him tell me. 'Bian, can you think why they would watch for anyone asking for insulin?'
He seemed a little surprised. 'I would think because they know our guest has need.'
Had need. And was somewhere in Lhasa.
He stood there, Bian, holding the small brown-paper packet of aspirin and some money, the change; he watched me with pain in his eyes: it was perhaps his 'guest's' karma to be found and taken away. The wind whipped at his worn soiled robes.
'Where else,' I asked him, 'could I find insulin? Not the hospital or the clinics — would an apothecary stock it?'
'Perhaps I'll try-'
'No.'
It was too dangerous now; it needed professional handling. I asked him for the prescription and told him to offer the money at one of the altars at the monastery and add the aspirin to their medical supplies; then I walked with my back to the wind and sat on a broken bench in a little park and worked on things and came up with the essentials: that unless there was another diabetic on the run the KCCPC either knew or suspected that Xingyu Baibing was here in Lhasa and were closing in; that it would take time to signal Pepperidge because the telephones here weren't very good and you had to go through an operator and I didn't know Mandarin or Tibetan; and that Xingyu had got to have insulin before noon and there was only one way I could get it for him and the risk was appalling.
Chapter 13: Apothecary
The snakes were alive. I think.
It doesn't need saying, surely, that in any mission, whatever the objective, whatever the target, the one primordial requirement is to stay clear of the opposition, particularly if the opposition is not a private cell but the entire security network of the host country: police, secret police, civil and military intelligence. The one primordial requirement is to stay clear of them and get back across the frontier with a whole skin and the documents or the tapes or the defector or the blown spook who's going to die out there if you don't, die out there or finish up under the five-hundred-watt bulb without a capsule and blowing the roof off London.
They weren't moving. They were just a lot of coloure
d spirals curving around the inside of the big glass jar, their little black eyes open, but that didn't mean anything, we go on watching life after death, don't we, until someone closes the lids. But in any case I was disgusted. I can't stand those bloody things.
The apothecary peered at the grubby bit of paper. The light was bad.
Of course there are times when we can't for some reason stay clear of the opposition and then all we can do is to pop it and protect the mission or get clear again, bloodied but unbowed, so forth. Then there's third situation that comes up sometimes but thank God not very often: it's where the only way to keep the mission going and hope to survive and reach the objective is to set yourself up as a target and wait for them to shoot and that was what I was doing now.
One of them was moving, its small head dropping and swinging around inside the jar with the black forked tongue flickering, and I looked away, the flesh creeping, they've got no bloody feet anywhere, those things, all they can do is writhe.
'Insulin,' the old man nodded, peering at the bit of paper.
'Yes,' I said.
The decorated canopy cracked above the shopfront in the wind, and the man behind me fell prone again onto the flat of his hands, facing toward the temple farther along. A dog sniffed at his rags.
I'd tried two other apothecaries but at the first one the girl had just looked at the prescription for a long time and finally shaken her head and flashed all her gold teeth and at the second one the man said in quite good English that he was disappointed at not being able to oblige me but that I should try the one around the corner, toward the Barkhor plaza. I was there now.
There were other things, apart from the snakes: rows of bottles and bowls of herbs and a huge dried starfish and an armadillo; but there was a shelf of phials and flagons with typed labels, and a small poster with Bayer at the top. I'd been trying apothecaries in the hope of making a deal; they owned their own places and could break the rules if they wanted to, and I put the price of their wanting to at about one hundred yen.
The old man was raising his head slowly, looking up from the prescription and bringing his eyes to focus directly on mine with his face close; and in his eye there was a warning. Then their focus shifted, and it was quite clear that he was looking behind me, through me, at something else.
I said softly, 'Police?'
He nodded, pleased that I'd understood. 'If sell you this, must tell them. It is order.' Below his bald pate his brows made furrows as many as the armadillo's 'Perhaps it better you leave now.'
I heard the man outside fall flat on his hands again in obeisance to the gods of the temple; he'd moved another few yards. I could hear other sounds, mostly voices from the people at the vegetable stalls opposite and the rumbling of ironbound wheels and the dragging of harness. The dog that had sniffed at the pilgrim's rags now sniffed at my combat boots. Farther along the street there were prayer bells ringing, tuneless but with a steady rhythm. I listened carefully, analyzing the environment, because in a moment I was going to cross the line and present myself to the opposition, because I had no choice.
'I must have the insulin,' I told the apothecary 'It's urgent.' He watched me steadily, his eyes bright with intelligence, but it was obviously beyond him to understand me. 'It doesn't matter,' I told him, 'about the police.'
There was no point in pushing money at him as a bribe. In the last few minutes I'd come to know him well enough; he was an apothecary, a man of high standing in his community, a man, by his art, of great responsibility, and if he decided to report me to the police he would do it as a point of honor, the police being his enemy here; his goodwill would not be for sale.
'You understand,' he asked me, his eyes grave, 'you understand what is the truth of this thing?'
'Yes. But the police are not looking for me. I shall have no trouble.'
He lifted his hands, their skin like crumpled silk, and let them fall gracefully. 'Ah. Then it is good.'
It was a long time, minutes, before he'd filled in the form, peering again at the prescription. 'And the name? The name is not clear.'
'Xiao Dejian,' I said and spelled it for him. He wrote it down, using a pen with ink the colour of blood. Then I gave him some money and he gave me change and I took the flat packet of ampoules and returned his bow and walked through the strange leaden light of the morning, hearing the sudden shout and ignoring it because it was only in my mind, the nerves shimmering in the system with a feeling of cold light and the scalp drawn tight, because I had staked the whole of the mission on one throw, on the logical assumption that if the KCCPC were watching the clinics and the apothecaries for anyone buying insulin they wouldn't make an arrest but would simply follow.
They were not clods in the Kuo Chi Ching Pao Chu. A cloddish intelligence service would have given orders to have me arrested and thrown into a cell and interrogated, but these people knew how long the odds are against getting information out of a trained agent; it's not an exact science, and you can beat a man into a kind of stupor where he himself wouldn't know the truth from a lie, or you can push him beyond the point when he can tell you anything at all.
They thought or they knew that Dr Xingyu Baibing was in Lhasa, and the odds were better that I could lead them to him now.
Why did they think, or how did they know? I must find out.
Perhaps he would tell me, the short, squat-bodied Chinese who was walking behind me on the bright curved surface of the copper samovar, fifty paces, I would have said, behind me, allowing for the reduction in size of everything reflected there, a cup of tea, how nice, but I haven't the time just now, warming their hands, the little group around the stall, warming their hands on the cups as the tea came gushing from the spout, hanging back a little now, he was hanging back, because here the street was clearer and if I looked around he'd stand out and I might notice him, he was good at the rudiments of urban tracking and that made things safer by a degree because a trained tag is predictable and his movements would be unsurprising, I could do with that.
I could do with anything in point of fact that I could get in the way of advantages, because he would carry what those Americans so delightfully call a 'piece' and it would be heavy-calibre, big enough to drop me from a distance if I looked like getting away. It was probable too that he'd been here on the roof of the world a bit longer than I had and had got used to the atmospheric pressure and would be able to run more effectively, to outrun me if I had to, through the leaden light of the forenoon.
There's a case to be made for calling us cocky, you must understand, we the brave soldiery of the thrice-accursed Sacred Bull that runs us across the board like pawns until at last the paint wears thin and the glue cracks and the head comes off and they throw us away, for calling us cocky, yes, as we work our way through the labyrinth, meeting so often face to face with our grinning fate that we lose much of our fear and become irrational in the heat of crisis, and this, my good friend, was a crisis, because the executive had moved deliberately into the surveillance field of the opposition and attracted its attention and the opposition was not some maverick terrorist cell with no claim to expertise or efficiency but the multifaceted and highly competent intelligence service of the People's Republic of China, and as I walked across the packed dirt of the next street to my right my feet felt sticky on the web.
He was keeping pace, moving across the window of a bathhouse, neat in his parka, his head turned to the side a little in case I looked back, cocky, yes, in a crisis, and this had often been our undoing, the head comes off, you understand, and they throw us away; but this was a two-edged thing, because if we couldn't allow ourselves the choice of deadly options and face the matter head-on we'd never get anywhere, would we, all we'd do is sit there in the park with a drip on our nose and a plaid rug on our knees feeding the bloody pigeons, turned again, I turned again, working my way to the edge of town through the leaden light of the forenoon.
There'd been no other choice, let's face it. That improvident diabetic up there i
n the monastery, that crass idiot, the messiah, my precious protege, needed the stuff in my pocket before he slipped into a coma, and I couldn't have asked Pepperidge for help because the director in the field can have no part of the action; his job is to hole up in his ivory tower and liaise with London, report to the signals board on the progress of the mission and request instructions, to protect, nurture, and advise his executive certainly, but not on the streets, in harm's way, because if a wheel comes off he provides a kind of black box for the Bureau, slipping away from the field and leaving the blood and the smoke behind him and taking a plane for Londinium and a debriefing room, there to explain what happened, why we crashed, so that our little mistakes can go down in the records and those poor little buggers in training at Norfolk can be duly warned: Here is a case, you see, where the executive began believing himself to be invulnerable, and overestimated his talents. Got cocky, yes.
Yet it was logic that drove me through these streets and I won't have it otherwise: that man had to have his medication and there was no one else who could get it for him — I'd already put that monk in hazard without meaning to — and there'd been no way I could have bought it in time without walking straight into the trap, won't have it otherwise, I tell you, I don't care what you think.
Things were not, though, going to be pretty.
I was walking a bit faster now, giving him the picture, glancing around sometimes to see if anyone was watching, my steps more purposeful, man with a mission, yea, verily, huge black yak coming the other way, pulling a cartload of dried dung, whites of his eyes, breath clouding on the air, one hoof split and bound with a metal ring, the driver chanting, head lifted to the sky, lost in his own world. I could have run now, using the yak and the cart for cover and taking whatever doorway or alley I could find, running flat out and gaining enough ground to get me clear before he could catch up; but there'd be no future in that: he could have dropped me with a shot or cut across the terrain and intercepted me, his lungs better than mine, more used to the altitude, and in any case it would only have confirmed to his agency that they were right: Xingyu Baibing was indeed in Lhasa and must now be hunted down.
