by Adam Hall
'Couple of Australians. There weren't any Chinese,' I said, 'on board.'
'Good-o.' He finished his soup and pushed the plate away and said, 'I've been in signals with London, as you can imagine.' Because of the temple thing. 'They asked me what I thought our chances are now." His yellow eyes on me.
'Chances of what, specifically?'
'Of protecting the subject.'
'What did you tell them?'
Head on one side, 'What would you have told them?'
I gave it a minute, not the time for making a wild guess. 'I'd have said our chances are fifty-fifty.'
He looked away. 'You're that sanguine?'
'I'm not a bloody amateur at this kind of thing.'
'No offence, of course. But you see, you're operating on foreign soil with the police, the public security forces, the intelligence services, and the military already searching for the man you're assigned to protect. On top of that, this town is under martial law and there's a curfew.' His fingers drummed softly on the bare-wood table. 'I don't think your chances are fifty-fifty.'
'Tough shit.'
'I understand how you feel.'
'So what did you tell them?'
'I told them that in my considered opinion our position is close to untenable.'
If he'd been Loman or Fane I'd have walked out and gone underground and taken Xingyu with me. But this man I could respect, and he wasn't getting cold feet; he was seeing things as they were, or as he thought they were.
'Most of the situations in most of the missions we're given are untenable, for Christ's sake. It's part of the job, you know that.'
He leaned closer, tracing the edges of the stains on the tabletop with a finger. 'There's so much stacked, you see, on this one. We have to play for safety, can't go taking risks. We-'
'So what did they say?'
His finger tracing the stains, 'Your instructions are to get the subject to Beijing as soon as possible, without waiting for the deadline.'
Bloody dog sniffing around my feet and I kicked out and got a yelp. 'Shepley said that?'
'Hyde. But of course it would have come from Bureau One.'
'They're out of their bloody minds.'
'At first glance, perhaps. But they have a point.'
Door slammed again, they wanted a bit of rubber or something on that door, stop it banging all the time, got on your nerves. 'They're not out here in the field,' I said. 'They're five thousand miles away in London looking at a chessboard, what the hell are you talking about?'
'I don't think,' he said, 'that they're asking the impossible.'
The thing was to keep my voice down, keep control, but it wasn't easy. 'The whole of this operation's built on timing and coordination. He can't go into Beijing until they're ready for him there, until the tanks have taken control and they can meet him at the airport and escort him to Tiananmen Square. You know that. And now London's pushing the panic button and telling me to go pitching into a precipitate last-ditch sauve qui peut that's going to cut right across Bamboo and blow it to hell.'
He waited for a while, looking past me at the people in here, fingers drumming softly on the bare stained wood, giving me time to listen again to what I'd just said, test it out perhaps, perhaps re-assess.
It didn't work. Let the defence rest. Bloody London.
His eyes came back to rest on mine, and his voice was gentle.
'The overall timing is important, yes, but not to us. We are local. Our bailiwick is here. All we're being asked to do is to get the subject out of Lhasa and into Beijing, and the only difference is that they want us to do it now, instead of later.'
Head throbbing, wouldn't leave me alone. That worried me, because it wasn't the injury so much, it was the stress, and if the executive was starting to lose his cool at this stage of the mission then God help us all.
The door opened again and I tensed, waiting for the bang.
'I don't see anything precipitate here,' Pepperidge said. 'Right or wrong — and I think I'm right — I've reported that our position here is nearly untenable, and London is simply changing procedure to protect the mission. When we started out, we believed that Beijing was too hot for our subject, so we brought him here — the last place, as he told us, where they'd expect him to be. Now things have changed. Lhasa has got too hot for him, and the last place they're going to look for him is in Beijing. We've got plenty of people there, and they'll keep him underground till everything else is ready.' He leaned forward, touching my arm. 'There's no real problem, you see.'
It's difficult.
Someone over there was getting drunk, a round-eye, hitting the table, shouting something in English, something about bloody travel agents.
It's difficult for me, always has been, to give London credit. It's not because they don't deserve any: they're not stupid, in fact they're brilliant, or I wouldn't work for them. The trouble I have with London is a lot of my own making, you know that if you've known me long, although they've certainly got habits that can drive you straight up the wall, and people, of course, people like that bastard Loman with his cufflinks and his polished shoes and his pedantic bloody speech, enough to send you — but you note how easily I can get carried away, about London.
'Come and see the marvels of the Holy City on the Roof of the World,' the man over there was shouting, 'and all I've seen so far is a lot of burned-out fucking monasteries and yak shit wherever you go, stinking the fucking place out!'
Hitting the table, red-faced, woollen hat with a bright green bobble on it, while two other men tried to shut him up.
No, the thing with London is that they control me. I signed for it, fair enough, but it's not easy to live with. I don't like it when a signal hits the board from the field and Croder or Shepley picks up the executive like a bloody pawn and puts him down on another square, when in point of fact the said executive can be working his way through a minefield in the dark with a pack of war-trained dogs on his tracks or cooped up in a plain van with a gun trained on him while he tries to get at his capsule before they put him under the light — I've been in both situations and a dozen like them, not a dozen, dear God, a hundred, and you get to resent those people back there in Whitehall, the red-tabs ensconced comfortably behind the firing line, doing their daily stint and going home to a nice hot shower while you're lying out there in a cellar in Zagreb with four days' filth on you and blood in your shoe. You get to resent-
'Invigorating mountain air, they told us, Christ, you can't even fucking breathe!'
You should try those people in London, my good friend, then you'd have some real yak shit to chew on.
'They're right,' I told Pepperidge.
He leaned back, letting his breath out.
'I was hoping you'd see.'
'It's the only thing we can do. If we can do it.'
'But of course. Carpe diem.' Seize the day, quite so. 'The mask is still in safekeeping?'
'Yes.'
'And you can fit it on for him?'
'Yes.'
'Then we shouldn't have any trouble. How is he?'
'Bearing up. I'm treating him as gently as I can.'
Head on one side- 'In what way?"
'He's so bloody innocent. I had to know what had brought the KCCPC on our track, and I found out. He'd told someone at the embassy that he wanted to go to Lhasa if he could get out of there. I think he was overheard.'
His fingers began drumming again. In a moment, 'Possibly. But I got a signal early this morning. Our people in Bombay have taken a good look at Sojourner's body. He'd been tortured.'
In a moment I asked him, 'Between the time he was taken out of hospital and the time he was killed?'
'Right. Not before the snake bit him. So it could have been that. Sojourner had talked to the subject at the embassy, of course.'
'Oh, my God.'
'Not happy, is it? But let's not see demons-'
'Sojourner could have blown the whole thing. Bamboo.'
A brief shrug. 'Possibly.
London doesn't think so.'
'Why not?'
'Because our sleepers in Beijing have reported no movement at all among the army generals and their garrisons. If the Chinese government had got wind of things, they'd have taken our general away from his command and shot him. He is alive and well.'
'Is that all we're relying on?'
A wintry smile. 'We rely on anything we can get. But it stands up, you know. They wouldn't have let the subject leave the embassy if Sojourner had been broken.'
It wasn't easy. I'd never known a mission to be so dogged, step after step, by the threat of destruction. Ambassador Qiao, in London, blown and killed; Sojourner, in Bombay, blown and killed; and the very man we were protecting, the subject, the messiah, treating the whole thing as if those thugs in power in Beijing were a league of gentlemen. He knew bloody well they weren't.
'He's such a saint,' I said, 'and he thinks everyone else is the same. He-'
'The subject?'
'What? Yes. He-'
Crash as the man over there knocked a metal bowl off the table, shouting his head off, and another gust of freezing air came through the door as one of the staff went trotting outside. The talk had died down in here; these people were unused to drunkenness, and all you could get in here anyway was chang.
'He thought it was all right,' I said, 'to talk about coming to Lhasa, he fell straight into their trap at Chengdu, and he didn't believe I'd been followed this morning — I had to spell it out. I've warned him not to talk to any of the monks, but he hasn't got any idea of even normal discretion. And he's got the whole thing in his head, you know that, the whole mission.'
Pepperidge sat with the collar of his sheepskin coat turned up against the draft from the door, fingers restless on the rough tabletop, the dregs congealing in his soup bowl.
'Then we must simply be careful,' he said, 'and you know how to do that.'
He was quiet again for a while; I assumed he'd started working out the future, the immediate future for the mission. Anytime now I was going to get his instructions, and I didn't feel ready for them: I wasn't fully active, wouldn't be able to take on anything really critical and be certain of coming through.
'You got a lift here,' Pepperidge said, 'on a tour bus. You still don't want a car?'
'No.'
We'd been over it before, in my first briefing here. In a big modern city the executive has got to have a car because it gives him transport, cover, protection, a mobile base, and a weapon, but in a place like Lhasa a car was too noticeable, and if I'd used one it would have established a dangerous travel pattern to the monastery and back.
'Very well.' Pepperidge leaned forward again and folded his hands on the table. 'We're safe for the moment in thinking that while the subject is instantly recognizable without the mask on, the KCCPC are not looking for you. This gives us the edge we need: you're still operational at street level.'
Argot. The opposite of street level is going to ground, losing yourself, burying yourself. 'Unless someone saw me at the temple,' I said. I didn't think anyone had, just wanted to make the point.
'What are the chances?' He watched me with his yellow eyes, trusting me not to lie.
'How do I know, for Christ's sake? Anyone could have seen me go in there, or come out.'
Not precisely a lie. Call it an exaggeration, playing it safe, playing it too safe, because I didn't want any action, I was still healing, uncertain of my strength if there were demands made on it, out there at street level.
'I think,' Pepperidge said, 'the chances are slight. But I won't push you.'
I looked away. We were getting awfully close to the unthinkable. Signal for Bureau One, his eyes only. Executive's injury has left him less fully active. Suggest bringing replacement to stand by.
The unthinkable.
'Push me,' I said. 'Push me as hard as you need to.'
'Perhaps, then, a compromise. Take every chance you can find of normal cover. Don't reinforce the image.'
Show my face, in other words, as little as possible. That was all right.
'What I'll do," Pepperidge said, 'is bring in the Jeifang. The truck, I'll use the same man, Chong.'
'The man you sent to the temple?'
'Yes.' He got out a scrap of paper and a ballpoint. 'The Jeifang is green. Most of them are, in Lhasa. This is the number plate. He'll be at the rendezvous after dark, at twenty hundred hours, and he'll take you and the subject to Gonggar, where you'll sleep for the night in the truck. The CAAC plane normally leaves between ten hundred and ten-thirty in the morning. I want you to fit the mask on the subject and see him as far as the departure gate, but don't keep close; you'll be there simply in case of any trouble. Then you'll go back to the truck. He'll be met in Beijing and taken off the street immediately.'
'Chong stays with the truck?'
'Yes.'
'What's his cover, if we're stopped?'
'I'm going to ask for my fucking money back! They can't do this!'
Bottle smashing, then very quiet. I suppose the man on the staff had gone darting out just now to fetch the police.
'Chong's cover,' Pepperidge said, 'is just what it looks like: he's the driver for a transport company.'
'Will he be armed?'
'No.' Pepperidge watched me thoughtfully. 'Do you want him armed?'
'No.'
Then the door opened again and Su-May came in and caught sight of me by chance and edged her way between the tables and passed close to us, whispering, 'You shouldn't be in here — the police are looking for you,' and I saw them in the doorway, fur hats, red stars, bolstered guns.
Chapter 16: Shiatsu
Skull of a dog.
'How do you know?"
Freezing in here. The window was open.
'I have to report back there,' she said, 'twice every day.'
The Public Service Bureau, where she'd helped me this morning.
Skull of a dog on the wall. Narrow bed in a corner and a few bits of rough wood furniture and one or two oil lamps, the window blind with a bracket loose at one end, hanging at an angle, no telephone need I tell you, cut off, I was cut off from my director in the field, cut off from London and going to ground, I would have to go to ground, lose myself, bury myself, don't think about it, Dr Xingyu Baibing stuck up there on the third floor of a monastery and the man who was meant to get him to the airport stuck in a tenth-rate hotel and freezing to death while the police scoured the town for him, think about anything but that.
'Why?'
Why did she have to report back to the PSB station twice a day? She didn't volunteer very much; I had to keep asking questions.
'I broke the curfew last night.' Her teeth were chattering. She was freezing too, or frightened, or both.
'So you have to report back? Can't we shut the window?'
She went across to it, but it was stuck and I helped her. She'd had trouble with the stove by the look of it, the front was raised and there was ash on the floor, the cheap linoleum had burned patches, why, I suppose, she'd had to leave the window open, smoke, stank in here, it wasn't wood smoke, it was yak dung, having to make an effort, I was having to make an effort to think straight, get things in order, because the mission was like a sinking ship now, rolling in mid-ocean in the dark, the decks awash and wallowing and the stern down, sliding to the cold vast bosom of the deep, must get perspective, yes.
'You are not well,' Su-May said.
'So what happened when you reported back?'
'The officer who dealt with you this morning was still there. He asked me about you.'
She went across to the stove and got some dung out of a torn brown-paper bag.
'What did he ask?'
'If I knew where you were staying. I said no.' She lit some paper and put the stuff on top and began blowing at it.
'Why did they want to know where I was staying?' I suppose it was just her way, didn't talk much.
'They are looking for a man who was seen near a temple. They say someone was
found dead there, an agent of the KCCPC.'
I moved nearer the stove. It wasn't giving out any heat yet but there was a flame to watch. 'What did you tell them, about me?'
'I told them we parted,' she said, 'as soon as we left the PSB station. I said I had not seen you since then.' She was squatting by the stove, the box of matches still in her hand, here eyes lifted to watch me with the question in them quite clear: Did you kill him?
'What else did they ask? What else did they say? Give it to me all at once, will you, everything you can think of.'
She looked down, ashamed: I'd criticized her. 'They said that I should look out for you wherever I went, and tell them immediately if I saw you again.' The small flame growing in the stove, its yellow light reflected in the sheen of her thick black hair, the matches still in her long ivory fingers, forgotten, 'I told them I would look out for you, and tell them if I saw you. What else could I say?'
I got down beside her, sat on the gritty linoleum, standing made me tired, you are not well, she'd said, did I look that bad? 'There was nothing else,' I said, 'you could tell them. When you came into the cafe, you didn't expect to see me there?'
'Of course not.' She brought her head up and looked at me. 'If I had known you were in the cafe, I would have gone there sooner, to warn you.'
'Thank you.'
There is hot water here, for the shower.' She put the matches down on the plank of wood fixed to the wall with bent wire supports, a shelf. Other things on the shelf: incense, a torn glove, a half-burned votive candle on a spike in a rusty bowl. 'Not really hot,' a shy smile, put on, acted, because that too was shameful: she was my host and could offer me hospitality but it wasn't as it should be, not really hot. 'But it is not cold, either. Please use the shower, if you wish.'
Do not think it strange, my good friend: in Lhasa in wintertime a shower that is not freezing cold is a luxury beyond all the perfumes of Araby, and I probably smelled, most people here did, lived in their clothes, and I'd soaked these with sweat in the temple when he'd come for me. Her invitation must be counted as grand hospitality.
'I'd like that,' I told her. She got up quickly and I said, 'Su-May, do you think the PSB officers followed you away from the station?'
