by Adam Hall
Missing something.
'Dr Xingyu, are you all right?'
'Yes.'
'Need insulin?'
'No.'
I was missing something and it worried me; I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was something important. Xingyu was sitting upright against the wall of the cave, looking straight in front of him, and I felt gooseflesh along my arms; this man had changed; he was different now, giving me answers like an automaton, yes and no, sitting bolt upright like that and staring in front of him, saying he'd got to go to Beijing, hadn't said it before, at the monastery, so what was in his mind, I didn't like this, there were things I wanted to know.
Oh Jesus yes, got up and staggered as far as the mouth of the cave and switched to send-'DIF, DIF DIF.'
'Hear you.'
'Have you been trying to raise me?'
'No.'
So relax, but I wasn't terribly pleased with myself; there was a bloody mountain on top of this cave and he couldn't have raised me if he'd wanted to. The last time I'd signalled him we'd been still outside in the open.
'Three hours' sleep.'
'Excellent.'
Sounded happy about that. Part of the job of your DIF is to look after your welfare, hour by hour, and Pepperidge had known when I'd last got any sleep because I'd reported on it.
'Subject is with me, no injuries.'
I confirmed the bearing I'd given Pepperidge when we'd got here three hours ago and then began giving him the general picture, not terribly reassuring.
The snow was still coming down in flurries, making a hazy screen across the terrain below the hills, and through it I saw lights moving. This cave was the third opening along from a granite bluff an estimated four miles, south by south-east of the road where it turned north in a wide curve with an estimated radius of one mile; it was the fifth opening from a low escarpment in the other direction that jutted at thirty degrees from the lie of the hills. There were no other landmarks except for the boulders, some of them huge, ten or fifteen feet high, but they were strewn across the scree at random like thrown dice.
They'd set up a roadblock, the military, halfway through the curve in the road. They'd been alerted by the shooting from the jeep behind me and the obvious decision would have been to trap all traffic in the area: there'd be another road block set up toward the west, though I couldn't see its lights from here because of the snow. But I could see the lights of the convoy; it was still stationary, most of the vehicles facing west, the way we'd come in from the temple. It was difficult to say how many vehicles there were down there: perhaps twenty, twenty-five; the ones that had passed me from the east had been personnel carriers. Estimate, then, three hundred armed troops, at least three hundred. Some of the vehicles had been swung at various angles to the road, providing a fan of light southward toward the hills and containing 180 degrees.
From this distance and with the snow flurries blowing I couldn't see the Dongfeng truck we'd abandoned near the road, or if I could see it I wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the boulders. But it would be there, standing in the fan of light, and they would have checked it out, three hours ago, and found the engine warm, and they would now be looking for the driver and any passengers. Those were the moving lights I could see as the soldiers spread out in a systematic search. They were already a mile from the road, making their way across the scree like a tide rising toward the hills, toward the cave.
I reported this to Pepperidge.
The line of soldiers was at ninety degrees to my angle of vision, and we'd have to allow a margin of error: perhaps fifteen, even twenty percent. This being given, I estimated that they would reach the caves in the hillside before morning, at the latest.
This too I reported.
Nothing but static for a moment or two, then: 'And at the earliest?'
'I can't predict that. If they increase their speed they could be here sooner than that.'
I didn't like telling him, I did not like telling him this, crouching here in the cave mouth in the freezing wind with that man inside there looking so strange, talking so strangely, giving me ideas, one of them so appalling that I couldn't express it to my director in the field until I'd tested it out, because it would change everything, it would blow Bamboo into Christendom.
'But if it occurs to them,' I told Pepperidge, 'that the people in the truck might have headed for the caves, they'll logically send troops in three or four files straight in this direction and spread out and start a search at this level.'
Static. I waited. 'They could reach you, then, in two or three hours.'
'Yes.' Waited again.
'What are your plans?'
'All I can do is play it by ear. I can get out of here and take him deeper into the hills, or stay here and explore the cave and hope to find a bolt hole and cover our tracks. If we start moving higher we'll be making a race of it with three hundred men and I don't think we could win it. On my own, yes, but I don't know how long he can hold out. I haven't questioned him yet. If we stay here, there's the chance that you might be able to do something, you or London.'
He'd said earlier tonight: I can give you a whole cadre if you need one.
We'd need a regiment.
In a moment: 'I signalled London the moment you reported you were at the caves. I said it was impossible for you to get him to Gonggar, that you had no transport, that the Koichi artifact was not in place. That was correct?'
'Yes.'
'But now the situation is fully urgent.'
Argot. In any signal, any briefing, any instructions, fully urgent has ultra priority and takes precedence over everything else: it means sound the alarms, freeze all other action, bring Bureau One into the signals room and clear all communications lines to and from London through the intelligence mast in Cheltenham and the DIP controlling the field in the host country, using scramblers or speech code or audio-grids or whatever means that will pull the whole network together and keep the shadow executive in constant touch with London Control and the signals board and the agents-in-place and the sleepers and support groups and courier lines right across the spectrum of the mission, and if I told Pepperidge yes, the situation was fully urgent, that whole process would kick in and start running.
Said yes.
A beat, then: 'How much time have we got, would you say, before you could be discovered, if they began sending probes into the foothills and the caves directly? What is my deadline?'
I looked down through the drifting screen of snow at the string of lights in the valley. The soldiers would be three miles away by now, as a rough estimate, and the terrain was rough, loose, and inclined at something like ten or fifteen degrees. There was moonlight, but under the snow flurries it didn't amount to much more than a glimmering sheen across the scree, with no real shadows. Across this kind of terrain a man couldn't go too fast without risking a broken ankle, and at this altitude the lungs would be starved of oxygen to a critical degree: we'd reached here, Xingyu and I, exhausted.
I said into the radio: 'Two hours.'
Waited.
'Two hours. That is my deadline?'
'Yes.'
A wind gust came, cutting across my face and leaving snow whirling into the cave mouth.
'Very well.' That tone of cheerfulness again, got on my nerves, made things worse because he only ever used it when things were tricky in the extreme. 'A great deal can be done in two hours. A great deal. Unless there's anything you want to add, I'll get on with things right away.'
There was nothing important. I'd been going to report the suspicions I'd had earlier tonight when we'd been lurching across the scree to the caves: a couple of tunes I thought I'd heard faint sounds behind us, closer than the road down there, and once I'd told Xingyu we were going to take a rest, and I'd sat there listening to the rushing of the wind across the stones, but that was all I'd heard. I hadn't thought about it since then.
'Nothing to add,' I said.
'Then stay open to receive.'
> I went into the cave.
'I must get to Beijing.'
Sitting there staring at nothing, a shadow humped against the rock face.
'Dr Xingyu, I'd like you to move a bit nearer the mouth of the cave. I've got to be there to monitor the radio.'
'Radio?'
I spelled it out for him, saying that the signals we'd be receiving would help us to get him to Beijing, and he tried to stand up and I gave him a hand and we managed it. Snow was coming into the cave mouth and we sat crouched with our backs to it.
'It's a bit colder here, I'm afraid.'
'I don't mind.'
Small talk, I'd descended to small talk, putting off the question that had to be asked, that had to be answered, before we could do anything more, before even London could order the fully urgent process into action — because if it was the wrong answer I would have to signal Pepperidge at once.
'You don't need any insulin yet, Dr Xingyu?'
'No.'
'Nothing to eat?'
'No.'
The question.
'Night like this,' I said, 'nice tot of rum would go down rather well."
'Rum?'
He turned to look at me, face blank.
Ask the question.
'Never mind,' I said.
The wind buffeted the rocks, moaning.
Now.
He sat huddled into his coat, staring in front of him.
'Dr Xingyu, why must you go to Beijing?'
He turned to look at me again, the moonlight throwing a sheen on his pale face. 'To tell the students they were wrong, in Tiananmen. Democracy is not the way.'
Mother of God.
'Hear you.'
The snow whirled against my face. 'He's been brainwashed,' I said.
Chapter 25: Pendulum
'Zhege yingguoren si duide.'
I tapped the pendulum.
'In English, please, Baibing. You don't mind if I call you Baibing?' It would set him more at ease, invite his trust in me.
'No.'
The snow had eased over the last half hour, as it had done last night, when Chong had seen to the sergeant out there; the moon was brighter now, shining on the pendulum. I'd taken the silver paper from the packet of syringes on Xingyu's flight bag, and wrapped it around a stone and hung it on a bit of string from one of the stalactites in the roof of the cave and set it swinging.
It had taken a long time to persuade Xingyu to keep his eyes on the pendulum: There are things you don't remember, important things. You'll have to remember them, or we can't take you to Beijing.
Swung the pendulum.
But I haven't forgotten anything.
Yes, you have. I want you to remember everything, or you can't go home and see your wife again.
To and fro… to and fro, a tiny silver moon a little distance from his eyes. I watched his eyes.
There is nothing I want to tell you.
Taken a long time, fifteen or twenty minutes, wearing him down, he'd never get to Beijing, never see his wife, over and over again, tapping the pendulum. But now he was deep in theta waves and under my control.
'Zhege yingguoren si duide.'
'In English, Baibing.'
They'd talked to him in Mandarin, or course, in the temple, Trotter or the man who'd been with Xingyu when I'd found him, or both; but it wouldn't make any difference: I was asking him for images, ideas, not speech patterns.
'The Englishman is right,' he said.
'Is he? Right about what?'
He didn't answer, went on staring at the tiny silver moon. I was up against a block, something he felt was very important, important not to divulge.
'Right about democracy?' I asked him, and that broke his resistance.
'Yes. There is no future in democracy for the People's Republic, no room for it. You can see what democracy has done to Europe and America. We cannot contemplate that happening in China.'
I touched the stone to keep it swinging. 'What has it done, Baibing, to Europe and America?'
In a moment — 'It's all there, in the manifesto.'
'What manifesto?'
'The blueprint.'
'Of course it is. But I forgot where you put it. The manifesto.'
Silence. He was having to find his way mentally through a bewildering field of concepts: his own fierce convictions before Trotter had gone to work on him, then the doubts Trotter had put into his mind, then the new convictions he'd been given under hypnosis. And now I was starting to ask worrying questions.
'We can't go to Beijing,' I told him, 'without the manifesto.'
Swinging the pendulum.
'He said he would give me a copy of it, on the flight to Beijing.'
'What's it about? The manifesto?'
'It is the blueprint for the New China.'
'Under democracy?'
Hesitation, noted. 'No.'
'Under Communism?'
'Yes.'
'Under your present leaders?'
'No.'
Oh really.
'Under what leaders?'
'Under Xu Yun.'
Making some progress now. Xu Yun was on the second level of the hierarchy, a young minister, said to be brilliant and on his way; but he'd been given a rap on the knuckles for going personally into Tiananmen Square in June 1989 to talk to the students and peddle a soft line to bring the tension down.
'What will Xu Yun do for China?'
'He will at first seem to favour democracy, then gradually swing the ideas of the people toward the new Communism. He is very clever, and the students approved of his actions in Tiananmen, when he went to listen to them.'
'Good. And what is the new Communism?'
'A society in which all people are truly equal, with no rich and poor as we see in Europe and America, with no millionaires and homeless sharing the same streets, with no pollution as the end product of industrial greed, no crime waves induced by social inequality, no drug culture spawned by the egocentric devotion to the self instead of the state. It is in the manifesto.'
Gooseflesh again, as I listened to Trotter speaking with Xingyu Baibing's voice. And a sense of revelation, because I was beginning to learn more about the Englishman and the dream that had driven him.
'That's very interesting, Baibing. Would you like to tell me more?'
He hesitated again: the question seemed to worry him. 'I have not read the manifesto.'
'But our friend Mr Trotter talked to you, didn't he, for quite a long time. Tell me a little more.'
In a moment — 'The human race has so far proved itself the least intelligent of all living species; man is the only animal incapable of living within its natural environment and accepting nature as its earth mother instead of a system to be conquered and controlled. By the use of fossil fuels, the construction of nuclear power stations, the destruction of the rain forests and of life in the oceans, we are destroying the planet itself, its surface and its protective envelope.'
His tone was easier now, less hesitant: he was on his own ground here, speaking of ideas he'd held long before he'd come under Trotter's influence.
'And the new Communism will be able to do something about that?'
'Not immediately. It will take ten or twenty years. But it must be done, for the planet and human life to survive. Instead of nuclear power, with its unconscionable problem or Chernobyl-like disasters and lethal waste disposal, we need to harness the infinitely greater power of the sun's heat and the force of the winds and the oceans. Instead of fossil fuel, with its equally unconscionable problems of the increasingly lethal accumulation of poison gas in the atmosphere, we need electric transportation, much of it solar-powered. Instead of impoverishing the soil and saturating food products with toxic chemicals and irradiation, we need to allow the land to enrich itself again by disciplined crop rotation and the development of organic fertilizers. All this can be achieved. It is in the manifesto.'
I stood up to check on things outside. The snow had stopped, and moonlight fl
ooded the scree. As the wind shifted I could hear sounds from below, the banging of tailboards and the murmur of engines. The line of light had crept higher, away from the road and toward the hills; the soldiers were still too far away for me to pick out individuals, but their line was nearer now.
Tempted to pick up the radio: Your deadline was two hours and there's ninety minutes left. Have you done anything? Are these bastards awake in London? The tide was rising, and all I could do was to go back in there and listen to Trotter's vision of a brave new world.
Xingyu was still sitting bolt upright, absorbed by the rush of concepts and images going through his mind. 'I must get to Beijing,' he said.
Not really. Not now.
'So China can achieve all that,' I said, 'in a matter of a decade, two decades?'
'If fossil fuel suddenly dried up overnight, the United States of America would have an efficient electric automobile industry within two years, otherwise trillions of dollars would be lost. Industry is very inventive, the lure of gold being its mainspring. In the People's Republic we can be equally inventive, otherwise life itself will be lost.'
I leaned against the rockface, feeling its chill through my coat, feeling its reality. I needed life, too, and even more than that I needed to vouchsafe the life of this man here, because the mission is the Holy Grail and held to be above the survival of the executive, and the mission tonight was to protect Dr Xingyu Baibing, the messiah, the little robot sitting here regurgitating a romantic's manifesto. I found myself sitting very still, my back to the freezing rockface and my eyes — on the moonlit sky and my mind suddenly close to the Englishman's, to Trotter's, as if a mental zoom had closed the distance between us.
He had lied very little, that man, and then only by omission. His objective had been precisely the same as mine: to get Xingyu Baibing to Beijing and in front of the cameras. He had wanted the geriatric tyrants there to be thrown out of power, as we did. He had protected my operation all along the line, just as he'd said, because he didn't have the dissident commander's tanks readied to defend the people, as we did, in Tiananmen Square, didn't have the contacts, the coordination, the military escort that would lead Xingyu to the cameras after Premier Li Peng had been seized and put under military arrest.
