by Adam Hall
The Pekin Target
( Quiller - 10 )
ADAM HALL
In Peking ("Pekin" in British usage) the crowds gather for the funeral of the Chinese Premier. Quiller reports it: "The British delegates formed a short line along the side of the catafalque as their leader placed the Queen's wreath carefully against it; then suddenly the sky was filled with flowers and the bloodied body of the Secretary of State was hurled against me by the blast as the coffin exploded."
"Quiller takes over where Bond left off." (Bookseller)
ADAM HALL
The Pekin Target
1: Limbo
For a moment I thought I saw a face; then it was gone.
Chandler, standing beside me, hadn't spoken a word for ten minutes. No one had.
The smell of the river came on the night air, bland and rotten. We went on watching, and I glimpsed a black wet fin disturbing the surface not far from the bank. Bubbles popped in the soft light of the lamps, tracing a regular pattern.
The face came again and I kept my eyes on it, but it must have been a patch of rubbish or something, surfacing on the slow current; it vanished again. From across the river Big Ben started chiming the prelude to the hour. The air was sultry after the heat of the long summer day.
On our left the small boat was moving downstream, the two men in it paying out the lines to the net. Someone on the bank swivelled the end floodlight, and we saw an oily black ripple as one of the divers neared the surface and rolled over, going down again. The eleventh chime of the clock faded to silence.
More people were walking down from the bridge, where they'd left their cars. The police had a barrier halfway along Riverside Walk, to keep them back. The inspector in charge of the operation was standing somewhere on the other side of Chandler, not speaking, leaving it to his team to get on with the job: they obviously knew what they were doing. -
I'd never met Chandler before; he was one of the new people, a pale thin man who kept his distance, afraid of questions until he felt sure of his ground. I'd only asked him a couple of things and he'd stared at me for a long time, as if I were a bloody fool; it was just that he didn't know the answers. None of them knew for certain who it was in the river here.
Tilson had said it was Sinclair, when I'd talked to him on the bridge earlier tonight.
The submersible lamps were swinging again, below water; the divers moved like shadows across the diffused light, nearer the surface now. The men in the boat had started calling to the land crew along the bank.
I hoped to God it wasn't Sinclair. He was one of the best we had.
Higher along the embankment, at the end of the bridge, the police were still taking flash photos of the wrecked car. From the little Tilson had told me, Sinclair — or whoever it was — had been thrown from the car into the river when it had crashed, or had been dragged out of the wreck and dropped off the bridge.
The light was getting brighter now, and soon one of the divers rose like a shark, his black finned body breaking the surface not far downstream; then another came into view and a lamp swung clear of the water and flashed across our eyes before a man on the bank grabbed it and steadied it. We were all leaning forward now, and I heard someone say: "Right. They've got him."
Chandler moved at last, poking his thin face towards the river, where two more divers were surfacing, pulling at the drag lines as the land crew took up the slack; then we saw the body as it floated clear of the long net, rolling in the turbulence with its white face showing and then darkening, showing again in the glare of the floods. They hauled him out and lowered him to the walkway, turning him onto his back and gently pulling his legs together. Chandler stooped over him.
An hour ago I'd been with a girl in the Gaslight Club, halfway through a late dinner and getting to know her, one of the Foreign Office staff, the only ones we were allowed to meet when we were on standby, for security reasons. A plain-clothes man from the Yard had come in and told me I was wanted, and I didn't argue because he'd mentioned the name Tilson.
I'd driven straight to the Thames with a police escort and found Tilson standing near the wrecked TR-4.
"Sinclair was coming in from Taiwan," he said plaintively, "with something to tell us, according to his signal from Calcutta. There was some trouble with the plane, and he had to switch flights." He gazed unhappily through his horn-rimmed glasses at the diving crew along the river.
"When did he get in?"
"About an hour ago. We'd cleared Customs for him."
Some people from the Yard were taking measurements of the TR-4's position, and bringing flash equipment. We moved away a bit to give them room.
"What was he doing here, for God's sake?" I asked Tilson. I was getting worried. They don't often go for us on our home ground, any more than we go for them at the embassies. Sinclair would have driven straight from the airport to our place in Whitehall if he'd had something so important to say that he couldn't put it in a signal.
"We think he was got at," said Tilson.
"Pretty obvious. He knew how to drive, for Christ's sake." A flashlight popped, freezing the scene, and I noticed some blood on the seat of the crashed car. "Who met him at the airport?" I asked Tilson.
"He landed thirty minutes early. They missed him."
I went cold suddenly. Tilson was keeping an awful lot back, I knew that now, but this was quite bad enough. Someone had let this man fly into London with some vital information in his head and they'd left him without an escort and now he was down there somewhere among the dead cats and the weeds with his mouth shut forever.
Tilson shuffled his feet, and I noticed he'd come here in such a hurry that he was still wearing the plaid slippers he used at the office. "I suppose what happened," he said miserably, "is that he picked them up in his mirror on his way to our place and led them clear just in time. Led them as far as here." Glass crackled under the men's feet as they moved around the car with their cameras.
"Did anyone see him crash?"
"Oh yes, several people. They said another car ran smack into him and drove off without stopping. But someone said he thought he saw the car stop, and two men go over to the wreck and pull the driver out. You know what witnesses are. We're doing what we can to spread the story of a drunk hit-and-run driver."
That was routine: this looked like a wet affair and the Bureau would try for an immediate blackout. The Bureau doesn't officially exist, and if anything awkward happens in public we go to ground. The police here wouldn't ask us any questions, because of our cards.
Tilson moved his feet again. "Sorry we had to break up your evening, old fruit. The thing is, we need to know for certain whether it's Sinclair, and you knew him better than most."
I'd left him keeping guard on the wreck, and come down here on foot along the embankment to report to Chandler, and now I looked into the dull blue stare of the man on the ground and said, "Yes, this is Sinclair."
People were still strolling along the Embankment fifteen minutes later as I drove beside the river, heading for Cheyne Gardens.
I'd thought of ringing the girl at her place and trying to patch up the evening, but it wouldn't have been much use, even if she agreed. Tonight I was grieving, and scared. I'd known Sinclair for a long time, and done some work with him in various parts of the world, tricky work that had taken him right to the edge of things, as it takes all of us when we're out there in the field; but they'd come for him and got him right on his home ground, and that hadn't happened before to any of us. In London they know where we are and we know where they are — mostly at the embassies — and there's no point in starting trouble because it could escalate and end in a massacre and shake the whole of the diplomatic structure.
But they'd gone for Sinclair
with a purpose and nailed him down, and the thing that scared me was the knowledge that there must be something awfully big going on in the background, and going wrong.
And grief, yes, mixed in with the fright. We're meant not to care what happens to anyone else and we try to play it like that, because there's a high mortality rate among the field executives and any kind of friendship would bring the whole thing too close to us and we'd start breaking up. But we can't avoid contact when there's a big mission going and the heat comes on and the thing starts running wild: Sinclair had been in the helicopter when they'd pulled me out of that awful mess in Mecklenburg after I'd gone in too close and no one could find me — no one except Sinclair, who'd been turning the signals base inside out till he'd traced my last call and told them where I was: halfway across a minefield in the dark and with no support; my own bloody fault because I'd refused it, didn't want anyone getting in my way. The border guards had started firing and we put the chopper down three miles away on one skid and a rotor tip, wrecking the whole thing but getting out alive and with nothing to show for it except that Sinclair had started limping with his left -
Limping, but not any more. Grief, yes, as I drove beside the Thames with his pale blue stare still on me, an unfamiliar sourness in the pit of my gut, some kind of emotion that was strictly disallowed by the faceless, nameless, dehumanised institution we worked for, and hated, and stayed with because it gave us what we craved: a clandestine but lawful place outside society where we could search endlessly in the shadows for our identity, sometimes unto the death. This Sinclair had been doing; but what had he found? The bastards had come for him too soon, cutting him down.
Grief, then, and anger, and persisting fright as I drove alongside the river in the warm summer night. They'd invaded our home ground for the first time, and made a killing.
The people walked slowly along the embankment, watching the lights across the Thames, not wanting to go home yet because it was too warm to sleep and the stars were out and the town stood shimmering in the night.
The blue light of a police launch was leaving a reflected path across the water as it came under Chelsea Bridge, followed by the white line of its wake. It was the last thing I remembered.
She was watching my eyes.
"I'm sorry," I told her.
"What?" She leaned closer.
"I'm sorry about the evening," I said. My voice sounded faint and not very distinct.
"Don't worry." She had calm brown eyes, with the reflection of lamps in them.
"What's going on?" I asked her, and tried to sit up, but my feet were too high: they'd raised them on something. She pushed me gently back.
"Don't worry. You're all right. But you've got to rest." To hell with that. This wasn't the same girl at all. "Listen," I said, "I want to know what's happening." But it didn't seem worth the effort. Drifting again. Drifting. Flash of a needle in the light, as she drew it away from my arm. "I want to know…"
"Don't worry."
Chandler came.
"For God's sake," I asked him, "what's the time?"
He glanced up at the clock on the wall. "Nearly five."
"Five what?" I swung my head to look at the windows, but the blinds were down. "Five in the morning?"
"Yes." He pulled the metal-framed chair closer, narrowing his eyes as he stared at me. "How are you feeling?" He had the face of a watchful bird of prey.
"Bloody awful." My feet were still raised on pillows or something under the coverlet and there was a saline drip plugged into my left arm and my mouth tasted of gunpowder.
"He mustn't talk too much," the nurse said; she was on the other side of the bed; she was the one with the brown eyes I'd seen before.
"Is this intensive care?" I asked her and tried to sit up, but my ribs hurt too much.
"Yes. But you're okay now. Just keep quiet."
I looked at Chandler. "What happened?"
"Someone crashed into your car in Grosvenor Road near Dolphin Square, and wrote it off."
I tried to get him in focus. They'd been plugging me with drugs, by the feel of things. "Was I driving?" It sounded an odd question. The thing was, I couldn't remember anything.
"Yes. But someone got an ambulance in time." He watched me with his bright black-eyed stare.
The room seemed to have gone very still; the nurse wasn't moving, nor was Chandler; he sat with his feet together and his pale hands on his knees, his face held slightly upwards with its thin hooked nose sniffing the air. I looked away from him, wanting to think. So there was a memory gap of some sort. The crash had been wiped out. The second crash. Sinclair's, then mine. They were very much in earnest.
"Who are they?" I asked him, and then remembered the nurse, and wasn't surprised when he didn't answer. He looked up at her instead.
"It's really quite urgent that I put a few questions," he said. "Quite urgent."
She went out and came back with a doctor, who looked at me for a long time and then looked at the chart. "Yes," he said, "it was mainly shock, plus two cracked ribs and one or two bruises and a bit of retrogressive amnesia."' The nurse must have told him I'd been asking Chandler what had happened.
The doctor was watching me critically. "What can you last remember?"
I shied from making the effort; it was like having to go back into a distant country where everyone was a stranger. "I remember some people," I said. "Some people walking on the embankment, by the river. And a man — " but I broke off.
A man floating on his back, staring up at me with his dead blue eyes. But that had been before, beyond some kind of time shift. That had been Sinclair. "Some people," I said, "and a blue light."
"A blue light?" He was looking amused, as if I needed humouring.
"Listen," I told him, "I want Koyama here, can you get him?"
"Who is he?"
I was getting bloody annoyed because tonight — last night — they'd killed Sinclair and tried to kill me and this idiot in the white coat was treating me as if I was a bit of flotsam washed up from the street. "Chandler, tell them to —»
"All right." He spoke to the doctor with a sudden and surprising note of authority. "This man is used to shiatsu massage and I think he'd respond well to it."
"Well, I don't know about that. What sort of massage —»
"For Christ's sake," I cut in on them, "get me Koyama, and I don't care what time it is: he'll come. And I don't want any more drugs, is that understood?"
Chandler took a few minutes sorting things out while I lay there with my rib cage throbbing and waves of dizziness coming and going as their voices faded and loudened again. Then there was only Chandler in here, pacing the room with short accurate steps while his hook-nosed shadow kept pace with him along the wall.
"I can remember Sinclair," I told him, and managed to sit up without tugging at the saline drip tube. "All I don't remember is the crash."
"I don't think it's important. Amnesia's pretty common after an accident. At least you know the facts. You're in a state of siege, of course, for the moment. There are two plain-clothes men outside the door and we've got someone monitoring calls at the main switchboard in case anyone rings up to ask about your progress; the only people who know you're here are the people who tried to kill you, assuming they followed the ambulance. We sent —»
"They followed me from Riverside Walk, did they? I mean that's how they got onto me?"
He stopped pacing and swung his narrow head to look at me, and I saw how relieved he was. Now that he was closer I could see the strain in him, and realised how much he had to handle. Maybe it was his neck on the block for having let Sinclair fly in with no escort to meet him.
"Yes," he said briefly, "we can assume that is how they got onto you. I'm glad you can still think straight. How do you feel generally?"
"I'll be all right when Koyama gets here."
"I've sent for him."
"I'm operational, if you've got anything for me."
He looked away in frustration. "Y
ou're not recovered yet. We'll send some flowers to the young lady, the one you were dining with. Your car's a total write-off and we'll see to the insurance claim. Our chief concern for the moment is keeping you out of harm's way, and I suppose this is as good a place as any."
"You're expecting them to try again?"
"Of course."
"Who are they, Chandler?"
"We don't know."
"They're not the Soviets."
"No. This is quite out of character."
"Someone from the Far East, who followed Sinclair to London?"
"We've considered that. We've been in signals all night with Taiwan, Hong Kong and Seoul. He was doing something for us in Seoul, you see, before he flew back via Taiwan and Calcutta."
"Was he on a specific mission?"
"It's not in my province to know. Mr Croder was running him."
"Then it was something big." I said:
"They killed Sinclair to shut him up. But why did they try to kill me? They couldn't have — " then his thin dark-suited body span against the wall and the lights blacked out and all I could hear was a kind of buzzing, and after a very long time his voice fading in.
"… the doctor here?"
"What?"
"Do you want me to get the doctor here?"
He was standing over me with his dark hollow eyes watching me closely. "How long was I out for?" I asked him.
"Only a few seconds."
I looked at the wall clock, but couldn't focus. "No. No doctor. Only Koyama."
"He's on his way here now. I'll stay with you till he arrives."
I hitched myself up again, feeling weak and furious and afraid. "Listen, they didn't go for you, or Tilson, or anyone else out there. Only me."
"They recognised you. They know you as one of our field executives. They might have thought you'd be replacing Sinclair."
My skin crawled.
"Am I?"
Impatiently he said, "Someone's got to."
We don't like doing it. We're made superstitious by the life we lead, outside society and often isolated, often in danger and often afraid. We don't like the feel of a dead man's shoes.
