The Pekin Target

by Adam Hall

  “La vie est pleine de surprises,” I told her.

  She squinted at me over a cigarette. “How’s that again?”

  “An old Chinese proverb.” I asked if I could use her phone and she said okay and I rang the British Embassy and spoke only in French, asking them to get the cypher clerk out of bed. He came on the line after ten minutes and I gave him Jade One, the code-word for the mission, and put the whole thing across in routine speechcode because it was all I could do without a one-time pad and he wouldn’t have one, taken ill for “blown” and confined to his room for “gone to ground”, and so forth, Ferris would have a bloody fit when he got this one: there’d now been a total of four attempts on my life and I’d had to kill twice and now I was blown for the second time since I’d reached the field and we still hadn’t got any access to the opposition. It was like a two-way mirror that only they could see through; I’d worked only once before in the Orient but I was beginning to remember how it felt: nothing is what it seems; your feet are on shifting sands and the images you see are only reflections and the sounds you hear are only echoes and the logical process of Western linear thinking takes you through shadows and leads you into the ethereal haunts of illusion until you start losing your grip, and then you’re done.

  Fatigue, of course. Have to brace up, you know. Spot of Horlicks and a sound night’s sleep, that’s all you need.

  Not quite. I need some magic.

  “Attendez, ce n’est pas tout.” I asked for information on Soong Li-fei, spelling her name out in French, saying she was allegedly an interpreter for Korean Airlines. I asked for information on Soong Yongshen, allegedly her brother and dead by ritual murder in Pekin. I asked who Youngquist was.

  I also reported that although Ferris couldn’t have told anyone that my new cover was Clive Ingram and that I was booked into the Chonju Hotel in Seoul tonight, the opposition had sent a woman there to meet me, with a gun.

  Some kind of magic, yes, was needed here, to arm me against theirs.

  The rain beat on the tiles overhead and I gazed into the watchful eyes of Sadie, the whore from Memphis, her thick black lashes narrowed against the cigarette smoke that drifted between us on the sultry air of the room.

  Who is Sadie?

  She’s just a whore from -

  Are you sure?

  Fatigue, yes, ignore.

  “Bien, c’est tout maintenant. Je repete: Ji - a - de - eu, un.”

  I rang off.

  “She no speaka da English?” Sadie asked me.

  “That’s right.”

  I asked her where I was to sleep and she took me to a small room at the back of the building with a single bed in it already made up and an electronic alarm clock on the bedside table showing the correct time and a plastic baseball trophy on the dressing-table underneath an array of faded silk flags and pennants - ASU Sun Devils, Cincinnati Reds, Dodgers - and a tin-framed photograph of a young man with a crew cut and a winning smile, with fly spots clouding the glass.

  “This is Danny’s room,” she said, a warmth touching her voice and lingering. “That’s him up there. He’s my son. I keep everything ready for him, when he comes to see me.”

  “A handsome boy. When do you expect him here next?”

  She turned away. “Oh, not yet awhile, I guess. Hasn’t been here for a year or two - he keeps pretty busy, see, works for the Hertz people in Hong Kong, but he always calls me up at Christmas time, never misses. You be okay in here?”

  “Yes.” I asked her if she had an English-language newspaper and she found one for me from the kitchen, the Korean Herald of today’s date. Front page headline: WORLD SHOCK AT SECOND ASSASSINATION IN PEKIN.

  I said good night to Sadie and shut the door and opened the small window at the foot of the bed and did a quick survey as the rain cascaded from the clogged gutters into the street below. This was the second floor and there was a narrow balcony directly underneath; it looked as if it might collapse if I hit it too hard but that would be all right: it would break the fall. Telephone wires, drainpipe (out of reach and dilapidated), a rope of dead creeper, four windows overlooking this one, two of them curtained.

  I shut the window against the din of the rain and got into bed and looked again at the paper. Picture of Omer J. Rice, US Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, shot to death yesterday by an unknown assailant as he was leaving the Embassy. Vice-President Liu Faxian orders ceaseless and untiring efforts to find and bring to justice those responsible for these monstrous crimes; photograph of Faxian. US Embassy placed under massive day and night police guard as CIA investigators are flown in from Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan and the United States to assist ANFU, the Chinese security service, in their enquiries. Report from the Tass agency in Moscow declares China a country where the diplomats of other nations are no longer safe. The body of Ambassador Rice to be flown by special plane to his home town of Springfield, Massachusetts. Chinese government placed in difficult and precarious position by these mystifying acts of violence against the West.

  And on page three a grainy picture of a young Chinese national, Soong Yongshen, who was the apparent victim of ritual murder on the steps of Huang Chiung Yu, the Temple of the God of Paradise. Police were said to be following certain leads indicating a possible connection between Soong Yongshen and the funeral bombing of yesterday morning that had killed the British Secretary of State. Picture: British Secretary of State.

  I looked for a long time at the photograph, aware of a memory stirring. This man’s face was like another I’d seen yesterday in Pekin, somewhere in the crowd at the funeral. But sleep was coming down on me like a dead weight and I folded the paper and dropped it onto the bedside table and switched off the lamp, listening to Sadie’s husky and muted voice in the outer room saying sure, honey, it was a hell of a night to be out, and in any case she’d be out of town for the next few days visiting a sick friend on the coast, so they’d have to take a rain check, and Jesus, they could say that again and no kidding.

  I lay in the dark with one or two last thoughts circling, trying to form an equation in my mind. I remembered now whose the other face was, the one that was rather like the British Secretary of State’s: it was the American Vice-President’s; I’d seen him among the mourners in Tiananmen Square. To an Asian they would look identical. The lilting voice of Soong Li-fei was in these last thoughts, telling me something again, that her brother had “done something wrong, something to do with the dreadful thing in Pekin”, where the police were said to be following leads indicating a possible connection … between Soong Yongshen … and the funeral bombing of yesterday morning …

  Thoughts circling in the dark, nothing very coherent, long time no sleep. Perhaps Soong Yongshen had made … a mistake … of some kind … yesterday in the square where the flowers had gone whirling into the dark sky and come drifting down in waves of sleep … sleep …

  I woke at first light and heard Sadie doing something in the kitchen and went out there to see her, giving her a shopping list: some clothes, shoes, toilet stuff, a street map of Seoul and a map of South Korea. The rain had stopped and we could hear shutters banging along the street as people opened up their shops.

  When Sadie had gone out I rang Spur. “Do you know speechcode?”

  He tried some but it was out of date and I didn’t want any confusion. I asked him if he spoke Russian.

  “Nyet.” His speech was slow: I’d woken him up. “Chinese, bit of Japanese, bit of French.”

  I tried out his French but it wasn’t good enough.

  “There isn’t a chance in hell,” he told me in English, “that this line is bugged. Or have you got someone with you?”

  It was mission paranoia and he’d spotted it. I said:

  “So far they’ve tried to get me four times, do you want me to spell that?”

  There was a silence; I suppose he was giving that soundless laugh of his. Then he said: “Time you retired, old boy, like I did. Make some money.”

  “Have you got a
ny information?” I asked him.

  “Yes. Are you ready?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I’ll come over.”

  “Just as you like. But not before tonight. I’m still working for you. Say about nine, all right?”

  It crossed my mind to take the risk and ask him for it now, but I remembered how strong their magic was, the way they knew where I was moving, the way they’d been making one move ahead. Paranoia isn’t all negative: it can keep you from getting too careless or too bold. By this time the police working over the Chonju Hotel would be asking the desk clerk for my description; last night they would have gone the rounds, knocking on every door and questioning the guests, getting their alibis and asking what they’d seen, what they’d heard. I’d left my things in Room 29 as a matter of routine procedure for a skip, to let them assume I was simply out for the evening, giving me time to use if I needed it. That time was now up, because I hadn’t returned, and by now there’d be an all-points bulletin posted for me throughout the city: Clive Thomas Ingram, British nationality, full description, wanted for questioning.

  “All right,” I told Spur, “nine tonight.”

  Then I rang off. It had been tempting to ask him to come and talk to me here, but that too would have been a risk: I didn’t know how clean he was; he could be under constant or intermittent surveillance without knowing it, in spite of the care he’d taken to arrange the bottles like that in the window; he was tapping the spy rings in this city for the CIA and he was in place and without support; he’d once been in the field for the Bureau but that was over now and it doesn’t take long before you lose your cunning. If he came here to see me he could bring my death.

  Nor could I go to see him before I was ready to break cover: going to ground means exactly that and I couldn’t leave here until Ferris had produced new papers for me and a change of identity; and even then I’d have to move by night and cross the street every time I saw a policeman. The longer I was missing from the Chonju Hotel the more they’d suspect me, and before this day’s end I would become the subject of a manhunt.

  While Sadie was still shopping for me I rang the Embassy and asked for the cypher clerk and we spoke in speechcode.

  He told me that Ferris had signalled three times during the night to ask for my present location and an urgent rendezvous when he arrived in Seoul at noon today; and such is the loneliness of the ferret in the labyrinth, and such is his need for the support and comfort of his director in the field that the tension in me broke as I put the phone down and thought Christ, I’ve still got a chance.

  Chapter 10

  Arabesque

  “You American?”

  This table was against the wall between the entrance and the door to the toilet on the opposite side. From here I could watch the entrance and if necessary get up and turn my back on it and reach the toilet before anyone coming in could get to me across the crowded room; I’d checked the windows in there: they were narrow but low down and opened onto an alley; also, anyone coming in here from the street would be half-blinded by the near-darkness after the sunshine outside. But I would have to recognise them.

  “No,” I said.

  I’d walked here from Sadie’s through the steaming streets, where the sun was heating the puddles and the choked gutters after the rain; this place was more than a mile from where I was staying; it was a long low building half lost among the derelict houses between the railway and the Han River, and to look for me here would be to look for one fly on a flypaper. The room was nearly full, two-thirds of them customers and one-third working them over. Hard rock came from the cobwebbed gratings along the wall.

  “You want hashish? Coke?”

  Technically I was safe here, a good distance from the main entrance and the corners of the room; but there would be nothing I could do if they came for me: I was watching the entrance but if anyone came in here to kill me I wouldn’t recognise them; I didn’t know them, as they knew me.

  “No,” I said.

  This was what it was like, and going to be like, fighting Tung Kuofeng. It was like, and going to be like, fighting the unknown.

  I hadn’t told Sadie where I was going: I hadn’t even known myself; I’d walked for an hour, double-tracking and making absolutely certain that I wasn’t followed, until I’d found this place, the type of bar the police left alone because it would be a waste of time to do anything about it. The moment I’d got here I’d telephoned the Embassy.

  A dozen small emeralds hit the table in a shower from a black velvet bag, and the man watched my eyes.

  “Direct from the mine,” he said, but I went on watching the entrance, and in a moment he swept the stones back into the little bag and moved on to the huge sailor sitting with a girl at the next table.

  The entrance was a bright gold oblong, a cave-mouth with the black silhouettes of people passing through. I went on watching it.

  Sadie had done well for me: a good shirt, manila suit, tan shoes, Thai silk handkerchiefs to match. “You look real sharp, honey. I sure hope I don’t go an’ lose you to another woman.”

  A man came in and stopped, his thin stooping figure outlined against the hot bright street, his glasses throwing a spark of reflected light. I didn’t move. But now I was ready to buy emeralds, or hashish, or anything they wanted to sell me. You wouldn’t believe what it feels like, when your operation has been immobilised and you’ve been blown and gone to ground, to see your director in the field show up at the rendezvous.

  By the time he’d seen me and made his way through the crowd my mood had swung in the opposite direction to something like anger; it happens like that when things are chancy: you suddenly wonder where your nerves have gone, and there they are all the time on the roller coaster.

  “Did he know about this?” I asked Ferris the moment he sat down. I meant Croder and he knew that.

  “About what?”

  “Those assassinations. Did he know the targets?”

  “Not till it happened.”

  “For Christ’s sake, he knew it was something big. Why -“

  “How’s everything?” he asked me cheerfully and I shut up and just sat there while he ordered a beer and watched me for a minute with his narrow head tilted, his pale eyes hidden by the reflection on his glasses. “Been rough, has it?”

  I didn’t like the way he was having to play it so very cool, to cover his own gooseflesh.

  “Does London want me called in?” I asked him.

  He made me wait, simply because it was good for discipline. He had to get me back to where I’d started out, with lots of reserve control.

  “Not so far,” he said. I felt myself slacken off a little; it had been one of the fears that had run with me through the dark of the last four days: that when they saw that the opposition was closing in on me and certain to kill, London would call me in.

  “Then who’s Youngquist?” I asked him. It was a name Spur had dropped, and failed to cover convincingly.

  The boy brought the beer for Ferris, and he sat for a moment with his thin sensitive hand round the glass, moving it in small precise circles on the teakwood table.

  “He’s your replacement,” he told me.

  Ice along the spine.

  I didn’t forgive him for a long time, for using both barrels at point blank range.

  “When’s he replacing me?”

  He looked surprised. “As soon as you’re ready.”

  I tried to think back to the signal I’d sent to the Embassy. Something was wrong. I said: “I’m not ready.”

  “Part of your signal read: Where is Youngquist? I assumed you wanted him to take over.”

  This time I made him wait, and when I was ready I leaned over the table and spoke very quietly. “In the six missions we’ve done together, have I ever asked for a replacement?”

  He didn’t have to think. “No.”

  “What makes you think I’m asking for one now?”

  He moved his head and the reflection left his glasses and I
could see his eyes, and they were surprised. “You’re staying in?”

  “Yes. I always have.”

  “I must say I’m rather glad.” He drank some beer.

  I sat back again. “I think this is a good time to get one thing straight. If you ever get a signal from me asking for a replacement, discount it. Okay?”

  “That’s what I did this time,” he said. “Then I began thinking.”

  “You want girl?”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  Ferris gave his soft sinister laugh. “Of course I didn’t tell London. I wanted to see you first.”

  “I should bloody well hope so. What did you begin thinking?”

  “Well, they tried to smash you up in London, and you flew out here full of dope; then there was that thing in Pekin, which left you a bit washed out; and according to your signal they tried again twice. I don’t know the details, but it struck me that you might not be physically operational any more. Sorry.”

  “I would have said so.”

  “Point taken.”

  “I asked who Youngquist was, not where.”

  He thought that over. “We’ll have to do better, won’t we?”

  “I don’t want any cutouts or contacts, Ferris. The police are looking for me, as well as the opposition. They can pick up my trail at any time. Any kind of contact could be fatal.”

  “Agreed. I’ll try setting up a radio.”

  “Do that. And one other thing: when was Youngquist sent out here?”

  He’d been hoping I wouldn’t ask him.

  “After they tried to finish you off, in Pekin. I told Croder you were still operational, but he makes his own rules.”

  I was going to have to work on him. “What else has he done?”