The Pekin Target

by Adam Hall

  A very definite click. Immediate associations: gun, wooden box, lock. It was too quiet for the moving mechanism of a gun and there wasn’t a wooden box in this cell for anyone to open and nobody could get in here without –

  Lock, yes.

  Turning.

  Rotten taste in my mouth from that dream: the taste of fear.

  It was a heavy door, solid oak and with huge wrought hinges. I’d seen the key when they’d first put me in here, an enormous thing, the kind of thing you’d only ever see in a flea market, genuine antique, and so forth. They’d oiled the tumblers through the ages; monks run a tight ship, orderliness next to godliness. But there’s no way you can turn a lock this size without making at least a slight noise.

  Tung.

  For the last five hours he’d been shut in with his sense of impotence in the face of karma, hearing his son’s name again and again in that heavy Russian accent. I will do anything you wish, if you can save him. That was only in a dream, yes, but dreams are cyphers for a reality we haven’t the time to understand.

  No, it couldn’t be Tung outside my door. He didn’t need to come along here in the dead of night to talk to me, because he didn’t think I knew any more about the Moscow signal than he did; he didn’t know I understood Russian. Besides, he’d have to knock out Yang or the other guard: one of them was always outside and at this hour it would be Yang; I knew the shifts they worked. Yang wouldn’t let him in here without permission from Sinitsin: the KGB was running this show, not Tung Kuofeng.

  Yang wouldn’t let anyone in here.

  I would have to think about that.

  Other tiny sounds, from a different direction. Immediate associations: water rushing, fire crackling, both very far away; distant rain. I turned my head a little to listen and the sounds were suddenly much louder; it was the straw in the paillasse, close to my ear.

  Mechanical sound again, of tumblers falling against the force of the spring, held back by the tines of the key. And I’d thought about it now. Yang wouldn’t let anyone in here, so either he’d been called away from guard duty or someone had got at him. Unsatisfactory: these Koreans were military and they wouldn’t take a guard away without relieving him, and no one could have got at him because no one would want to, except Tung, and Tung was under house arrest and had guards watching him wherever he went.

  Pride?

  There was nothing over me; the night was too mild. My arms were free, and lying along the mattress. The mattress was on the stone floor. The only light in here was coming from the small oblong in the door, and its source was a good way off, near the second archway along the passage to the operations room; if I lifted my hand I would just about see it, but that was all.

  Wounded pride.

  Because I’d gone for him in front of the others, even though he’d had a submachine gun pointing at me. For whatever his reasons, this was Yang coming in here.

  He took his time. I watched the thin strip of luminosity forming on the wall as the big door began swinging inwards, and smelled the oil from the lamps out there, and the lingering sweetness of the incense that had filled the arched chamber where Tung Kuofeng had talked to me last evening. The far voice of a night bird came from the mountain heights; it had been too faint to register through the narrow oblong in the door, and there was no window here.

  Yang was moving with infinite patience. I could see his hand now, and his shoulder, a shadow against the shadows beyond, as the door swung inwards. Its edge was three feet from the end of my mattress; when he had the door wide open he would be within reach of me if he leapt. But perhaps he wouldn’t do that. Perhaps he’d just come to talk. Not seriously, no.

  The far cry of the nightbird. Incense.

  The door was wide open now, and he stopped moving. He was a shadow the shape of a man, and I watched him. He had left the big gun outside; it would make too much noise in the still of the mountain night.

  He stood watching me. I lay watching him.

  I suppose the instincts of his ancient race had been working in him over the hours while he’d been pacing outside my door, pacing tiger-like, soft-footed in his trackshoes, ten steps to the left and then ten to the right, the gun in his arm and hate in his heart for me, the bruise pulsing in his throat and in his pride, his instincts begging revenge and so strongly that his military training was gradually overwhelmed, with the stealth of an infiltrating foe.

  He wanted my blood.

  Not moving. He was not moving now.

  But what would he tell them afterwards? That someone else had come here and done this bloody deed? There’d be a lot of awkward questions: who were they and why did he let them pass? Perhaps he was going to do it in some way that would leave no mark, no evidence, pricking my skin with a poisoned thorn or holding me still while I inhaled exotic and lethal fumes, so that it would look as if I’d died in my sleep, or of a poison that someone else had put in my food. It wasn’t my concern, and I stopped thinking about it because time must be short now.

  I had only worked once before against Asiatics and that was in Bangkok, nine or ten missions ago; but I remembered that they killed readily. In the Curtain theatre it seldom happens; there are hundreds of KGB agents in London and as many CIA and British Secret Service people in Moscow, but we leave each other alone unless we’re really pressed: there’s a tacit understanding that if once we decided to wipe each other out on our home ground there’d be no possibility of carrying on our trade anymore, and that would be dangerous in the extreme because Cold War espionage lowers the risk of a hot war breaking out. The Asiatics are different, and these people at the monastery were terrorists rather than spooks. It wasn’t that life was cheap, but that death was expedient.

  They’d tried to kill me four times, and the odds were growing short; in our trade a man has only so many lives.

  The organism was sensitised now; the appropriate chemicals had been poured from the glands into the cardiovascular and muscular systems; blood had receded from the surface and I was breathing deeply; my pupils were expanded to make full use of the available light. I was cocked like a gun.

  He believed I was asleep, and couldn’t see the glint of my eyes between the narrowed lids because I lay in shadow; he would also assume that if I were awake and had heard him come in here I’d be on my feet by now. But all I had to rely on was the advantage of surprise; in all other respects I was appallingly vulnerable here on the ground. From my viewpoint he looked tall, dominant and invincible, and I knew that when he came for me he’d come very fast, exploding against me, fired by the hate that burned in him; he wouldn’t be human, but monstrous, and with a monster’s demoniacal strength. My quickest way out would be to underestimate him, I knew that.

  He seemed to be moving now.

  Or I thought he was moving, my imagination anticipating the event. I wasn’t sure; I had to watch the soft edge of his shadow and the gap between it and the shadow of the door, but even then I couldn’t tell if his movement were real. The saliva was thick in my mouth and I wanted to swallow but that would trigger him: the sound would be loud in the infinite stillness of the little cell. Anything would trigger him, however slight, even the rustle of the straw under my body. He wanted to do it while I slept, forcing my brain from its slow delta waves into the terminal stillness of annihilation.

  Yes.

  He was moving.

  He was crouching over me, so slowly that even now there was no real indication of movement; his shadow-form was simply becoming larger, and changing shape. I could hear his breathing now, and in it the trembling rhythm of the animal engaged in a matter of life and death. And now I caught a glint of light on something he was holding in one hand; it was very small.

  My breathing became deeper, and my veins sang with their blood; my ears were loud with its coursing.

  What have you brought for me, Yang, in the dead of night?

  Nothing kindly.

  By Christ he was fast and the thing was in my mouth before I could stop it because my
jaws had opened in readiness for stress the instant he’d moved and he’d known that would happen and as I bit into his fingers a warning rang in my head not to bite the capsule because that’s what it was and we’ve all held them in our mouths before to get an idea of the feel and the taste, biting his fingers, biting hard, my jaws locked and my teeth sharp and the blood coming as I broke through the flesh, and all the time the feel of the capsule lying at the side of my tongue with only the thickness of the glass between the cyanide and my nervous system, I’ve seen the stuff work, I saw that poor bastard Lazlo put one in his mouth in Parkis’s office in London because we were going to throw him back across the frontier, gone down in five seconds with his skin turning blue and his fingers hooked and his teeth bared, so this was what Yang wanted them to think: rather than wait for them to finish me off I’d do it my own way.

  Monstrous strength, his other hand rising and thudding against the mattress with the force of an axe as I rolled my head clear and used a splay-hand into his eyes, their resilience against my fingertips as I drove them hard again and again as he jerked his head back but not fast enough, my teeth clamped and his blood running into my mouth until I swallowed and felt the capsule go with it into the safety of the alimentary canal, unbroken, the cyanide unreleased.

  I won’t have this. A sob came from him because of the pain of his eyes; he was blinded by now because he’d brought me to the edge of death and I’d had to work hard to get clear again, I will not have this do you understand, coming in here and trying to kill me, this is the fifth time you bastards have - his hand tugging to get free of my teeth, his other hand slamming a sword-edge for my throat and reaching it and producing great pain for an instant before I rolled half over and brought my knee into his groin and felt him rock back with his breath hissing, I won’t have it, it’s too personal, too intimate, you’re too fucking impudent to think you can come in here and splodge me out like a fly, it can’t be done, I won’t have it, but great fear somewhere, too, fear for my life, its stimulus giving me the strength I would not have had without it, and now an end to this, my hand rising for his larynx and connecting easily because he was blind now and couldn’t see its shadow in the shadows of the night, rising and driving against the cartilage and breaking it and going deeper as his head and body jack-knifed and their dead weight came down on me and we lay like lovers, where no love ever was.

  Sinitsin lit a cigarette.

  “That won’t be necessary. They won’t send a new ambassador now; even the Americans have that much sense.”

  “But the Chinese Premier,” Major Alyev said with a certain deference, “will have to go?”

  “Of course. But not by violence.”

  He was sitting in the only chair, a bamboo tripod with goatskin stretched across it; his two aides were on the long stone bench nearer the radio transceivers; the interpreter was cross-legged on the floor, one foot sticking out at an odd angle and his head in a listening attitude. One of the Korean guards was crouched on his haunches in the big arched entrance, facing away from the room with a submachine gun tucked under his right arm. There might have been other people there but I couldn’t be certain: this was as far as I could go along the stone-flagged passage without their seeing me.

  The time was 11:54.

  There had been a rough blanket in the cell, folded tightly and thrust into a niche in the wall, and I had spread it over the body on the mattress, leaving the head half-exposed; in the faint light it hadn’t been possible to see where blood had stained the floor and the mattress; all I could do was increase the chances that if anyone shone a lamp through the oblong in the door they’d believe it was the Englishman lying there asleep.

  The element of time was totally unpredictable. If anyone went along the passage to my cell they would see Yang was no longer there on guard, and would try to find him, sounding the alarm when they failed. That could happen within minutes from now, although the cell was at the end of a passage forming a cul-de-sac where only my guards would normally go. The latest deadline was an hour and six minutes from now, when Yang’s relief took over the guard and saw he was absent. That would be at 01:00 hours tomorrow.

  I stayed where I was for a few minutes longer, hoping to pick up evidence of anyone else’s being in the room with the KGB party. Both transceivers were switched on, with their panels glowing; one would be waiting to receive Moscow; the other would be tuned to the Triad or the KGB group holding Tung Chuan. It was tempting to stay here in case a message came through, but time was already running out. Half an hour ago the chances of my taking any kind of action, even to save my own life, had been nil; but now that I was free to move through the monastery the situation was radically changed.

  There were eleven men here, all of them armed. This was excluding Tung Kuofeng. He was the key.

  His quarters were at the far end of this passageway and across the courtyard where they’d taken me out and stood me against the wall. I went in that direction now, moving on my bare feet in total silence. Not far from the pagoda there was a small fountain in a basin carved from the solid rock, and I stopped to lean over the water’s surface and plunge my face where the moon’s reflection lay afloat, opening my mouth and cleansing his blood from it, drinking deeply and slaking my bruised skin with its cooling touch, my body hunched at the basin’s rim like a beast at a waterhole, easing the ravages of the hunt before moving on.

  There was a guard mounted outside Tung’s quarters, the white stripes of his tracksuit showing up against the stones of the building; I could see the blunt shape of the submachine gun slung from his shoulder as he moved into full moonlight towards the parapet that overlooked the mountain slopes, tossing a cigarette-end across the wall and standing there for a moment and then moving on, stalking his own squat shadow, his track shoes making no sound. A patch of light shone from a grilled aperture in the building, catching the hammered brass of a gong against the wall inside. I couldn’t see Tung Kuofeng but he would be there, because the guard was there.

  I listened. From the reaches of the slopes an owl gave voice, and I could hear the faint ringing of bells as goats moved; but they were far away. Behind me the small fountain splashed, and I listened to that sound particularly: it was between where I was standing and the distant arches of the monastery where Sinitsin and his aides kept their vigil at the radios. If they were talking, their voices didn’t carry this far; I stayed for minutes, because this was important, and as I listened I watched the Korean pacing between the parapet and the lighted aperture; sometimes he looked up at the moon and halted, staring as if he’d only just seen it there; his face was white and shadowless in the flat light, a clown’s face.

  There was no way of reaching him from where I watched, in the shadow of the stone Buddha. I waited until he turned his back to retrace his steps towards the parapet; then I moved nearer, crossing the open space and risking his turning and seeing me; at this stage risks had to be taken, and they were not small; they had to be taken because Tung was the key.

  I waited again, in shadow; when the guard turned and paced back, towards me, I drew fully into cover and watched the edge of his own shadow flowing in rhythmic patterns cross the uneven flagstones as he came nearer. During the time I’d been watching him he hadn’t come as far as the corner of the building here, but he might do it now, and if he did there wouldn’t be time to reach deeper cover; I’d have to confront him, and there wouldn’t be much chance: his hand was near the trigger of that bloody thing and he’d only have to swing it towards me and there’d be nothing I could do.

  I watched his shadow as it neared; his movement was no longer soundless; I could hear the soft wincing of his rubber soles and the faint brushing of his legs as the inner seams of the track suit rubbed against each other. He was so close now that I could smell gun-oil. If he came right to the corner here I wouldn’t have time to jump him before he put out some shots, and even if he missed me the sound would bring the others.

  Wincing of the rubber soles, smell of
oil, and the thought that I shouldn’t have taken a risk so big so soon, that being suddenly free had made me overconfident: it was a classic syndrome. His shadow came on, and when an owl called from the belltower my scalp shrank and I drew a breath sharply, and then the barrel of the gun swung in a half circle as he turned and his shadow moved away, flowing across the ones obliquely in front of him and becoming smaller. Then I broke cover and stood there watching his back and judging the distance and the terrain and the state of its surface and its acoustic properties and the number of steps it would need for me to take him down at this precise point and in silence without the heavy gun hitting the stones and alerting the other guards; then I moved back into cover because it was no go; the distance and the terrain and the acoustics were all in my favour but I would have to go for him alone and I couldn’t do that, because of the moon; I’d have to take my shadow with me and he’d see it before I was close enough and when I jumped him I’d be jumping straight into the gun, no go.

  From here he looked smaller.

  A minute ago the owl that had called earlier from the belltower had lifted, beating its wings three times and then dropping in a long slow glide to the rocks below the parapet, uneasy about my presence.

  The Korean looked smaller because from this height his body was foreshortened, twelve feet or so below where I crouched on the roof of the pagoda. It had taken me some time to reach here, climbing the thick flowering vine and testing each glazed tile of the roof before I put my weight on it. The time was now 12:06 and I was sweating uncomfortably because the gap was narrowing and there was so much to do, yet I mustn’t hurry: to hurry would be dangerous.