The Pekin Target q-10

by Adam Hall

  "I rather think," he said, "they got to him first."

  I slowed, and he waited for me to come abreast again. "Fill me in, will you?" He'd been letting me ask the questions, according to routine procedure. The director in the field tells the executive only what he specifically needs to know, but will answer most questions; the idea is to leave the executive's head clear of data that isn't essential, and data that could be dangerous.

  "Jason checked into our hotel soon after ten o'clock last night," Ferris told me. "We had a secure rendezvous set up for thirty minutes later, so that he could tell me what kind of information Sinclair had been carrying, and hopefully where he'd found it." He combed back his pale wispy hair with his fingers. "So it's not really our day, is it?"

  I didn't answer. The Sinclair information was my objective for the mission and after two hours in the field I was being told that the only contact was lost. In a moment I asked:

  "You think Jason is dead?"

  "I would think so, yes."

  "They're working so fast."

  He nodded. "These people are different."

  "Who are they, Ferris?"

  "I don't think they're political, and I don't think they're intelligence. But I think they might be a paid political instrument — a hit group — with access to intelligence sources. They seem too efficient for a government agency; they don't have to wait for orders before they move. As you say, they move very fast."

  "Here and in London."

  "Just so."

  We passed a thin ragged boy kneeling on a newspaper, his head down in prayer. A lot of the people standing at the base of the buildings were in the same attitude, all of them wearing black armbands. A huge military band was pushing its way through the crowd at the end of the square, with the police trying to help them.

  "Is this a wildcat group we're up against?" I asked Ferris.

  "You mean terrorists?"

  "I suppose so." What worried me most was that the opposition was already hitting us without leaving a trace.

  "I don't think they're terrorists, exactly. They're not trying to terrorise anyone. So far their action's been focussed on the Sinclair information: they killed him to silence him; they tried to kill you because they realised you were connected with him; and they got at Jason because he too was a connection. There could be something they've got to protect, without counting the cost. Some sort of — " he waved a vague hand, "some sort of project."

  "A big one."

  "Certainly on an international scale. Otherwise Croder wouldn't have come in as Control."

  It was getting more difficult to make our way through the crowd; at the hotel I'd been told that an estimated half-million people would gather in Tian'anmen Square.

  "How long," I asked Ferris, "were you and this man Jason together at the hotel?"

  In a moment he said: "The name's Ferris. Remember me?" He'd decided to make a joke of it but I heard an edge to his tone.

  "Sorry," I said.

  "Don't mention it."

  He was my director in the field and responsible for my safety and in the next few days or the next few weeks he was going to steer me through the mission and try to get me out alive, and he was telling me now that he hadn't been so careless as to make contact in public with Jason, who was the known source of the information that had led to Sinclair's death and nearly to mine.

  The military band was now assembled opposite the Palace Museum and playing "The East is Red", the Chinese Communist anthem.

  Ferris pitched his voice above the noise. "I made the rendezvous with Jason over the phone when he landed at the airport. I've never met either Sinclair or Jason, so that at the moment I'm clean, and so are you; but we're only one step ahead of the action and I want to make high-security rendezvous and use contacts; there are quite a lot of Occidentals here for the funeral but in a few days' time we'll be standing out in a crowd." He looked at his watch. "You've got five minutes to join your group before the cortege comes into the square from the other end. Make for the dais under the portrait of Jiang Wenyuan and do whatever the security man tells you — and don't forget you'll be under scrutiny."

  The military band was now playing the «Internationale», and there was movement beginning in the crowd packing the far end of the square.

  "I shall be standing behind the official mourners," Ferris told me, "and I'll meet you again after the ceremony. If for any reason we get separated and you need me, phone the Embassy and ask for McFadden, second cultural attache; he's the station officer for the Bureau and he's versed in speech-code, so I want you to use it. Questions?"

  "Yes. When is the English contingent flying back?"

  "Some time this afternoon, as soon as the Secretary of State has offered his condolences to the Vice-Premier and his party. We then change your cover and papers."

  "Understood."

  I left him and pushed my way to the roped area below the immense portrait of the late Premier and showed my credentials to an officer of the special police guard; he was almost casual in the way he let me through, and I remembered this was Pekin, not Moscow.

  "'Morning, Gage."

  Detective-Inspector Stanfield took a couple of steps towards me and half-turned again to watch the Secretary of State. "You want instructions, I understand."

  "Just general procedure." All this man had been told was that I was Secret Service and working here as one of his team.

  "We're expecting no trouble," he said quietly. "The main thing is to keep your eye on the body. There's no crush here and everyone in this enclosure has had to show their papers, so he'll be all right. If anyone's got any ideas about lining up a pot-shot, the ANFU will spot him in the crowd — there's three hundred of them just at this end of the square. The thing is to relax — and, as I say, keep your eye on the body."

  "Fair enough."

  The sun had climbed above the roof of the huge Palace Museum and the direct heat was stifling; the breeze from the rice-fields was blocked here by the buildings. The Secretary of State was talking quietly to Claudier and Veidt, the French and German delegates: I recognised a dozen people here from their press photographs.

  "Three kings," Stanfield was speaking from the side of his mouth, "twenty-nine presidents and heads of state, twenty-one prime ministers and sundry odds and sods. Quite a turn-out for someone who was only in office ten months."

  I noticed Walter Mills, the US Vice-President, surrounded by the ten members of his delegation, with the same number of security men positioned along the edge of the dais.

  The crowds along the east side of the square were murmuring now, the sound of their voices trapped by the buildings; I looked twice in that direction and saw the cortege coming, with the draped funeral carriage drawn by a white-painted jeep.

  "Eye on the bod," Stanfield murmured, and I turned my head back to watch Bygreave. There were quite a few Europeans on the far side of him but I couldn't see anything of Ferris.

  At ten-fifteen the cortege reached this end of the square and Stanfield-drew me along the dais as the first of the official mourners took their wreaths from the attendants and began laying them against the coffin, the Premier's widow and two sons being the first to step down from the dais. The military band had stopped playing now and the square was quiet. Beyond the English delegates I could see hundreds of school children going onto their knees along the roped pavement, one of them dropping her white bouquet of flowers and crawling between two police guards to fetch it; from somewhere nearer I could hear women sobbing, and wondered why. This wasn't Mao, the Father of the Revolution, but a man without charisma and less than a year in office; perhaps they always cried at funerals because the flowers were so beautiful, or because unlike the men their hearts could be moved beyond politics to the thought that whoever this was, here was a man dead.

  It took twenty minutes for the Communist Party and military delegates to lay their wreaths and bow three times in front of the coffin. The first of the foreign delegates were the Albanians, whose a
nti-revisionist creed had been allied to Mao's; they were followed by the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Cambodians, with the Japanese next in line.

  The crying of the women was beginning to depress me; I hoped someone would be there in London, to cry for Sinclair.

  Pigeons flew from the parapets along the facade of the Museum, their wings black against the sun's glare until they wheeled and caught the light; along the rooftops the flags were at half-mast, some of them catching the breeze; down here the air was still and stifling as the American Vice-President moved forward and laid a wreath of white tiger-lilies against the catafalque, leading the rest of the delegates past at a steady pace.

  The British contingent followed, and as Detective-Inspector Stansfield moved to the edge of the dais I went with him and was close enough to read the name on the wreath of white roses as Bygreave took it from an attendant — Elizabeth R.

  The delegates formed a short line along the side of the catafalque, watching as their leader placed the 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.

  4: Assassination

  "Then for God's sake," said the Ambassador, "get him for me on another line."

  The girl in green came through again with a file of papers, catching the toe of her lizard-skin shoe in the frayed silk rug but saving herself, dropping a loose paper and picking it up and going on into the Ambassador's room. They'd left the door open: there was no point in shutting it with all these people wanting to see him.

  "Then tell him to ring me back."

  He dropped the phone and another one rang and he picked it up. "Metcalf here."

  The Chief of Police came through again from the main entrance, a small man, hurrying, with an officer trying to catch him up.

  "Then tell him to hold the plane." The Ambassador dropped the phone and looked up. "Who are you? Oh, yes, come in."

  Another reporter tried to get through the main entrance and I saw the Chinese guard pushing him back with surprising strength for such a small man. The two people from the Xinhua News Agency were still talking to a girl in the room on our left and getting nowhere: she spoke rapid Cantonese with a lot of emphasis.

  Night was falling outside the tall windows overlooking Kuang Hua Lu Street, and there was no sound of traffic. We'd been told that the Ministry of the Interior had ordered a curfew throughout the city beginning at ten o'clock; that was a few minutes ago. Checkpoints had been set up along the roads out of Pekin and there were long lines at the railway stations and the airport as passengers were put through an emergency screening. Half a dozen political agitators of high rank had been arrested but their names hadn't been publicised.

  I got up and started walking about again, feeling the draught of the slow ceiling fans. Ferris was aggravatingly calm, sitting at his ease on the wicker chair with one arm hooked over the back and his legs crossed, a foot dangling. But that was what he was for: to be calm, to keep his head while I went on fuming. "This isn't a mission," I'd told him when we'd come into the Embassy, "it's just a mess they've got themselves into over here and Croder's thrown me in to see what happens."

  I was also worried because my face had appeared in two of the evening papers already and I knew that by this time tomorrow I'd get world coverage as the man standing behind the British Secretary of State in the instant before he died. If that was Croder's idea of effective cover for an executive arriving in the field I didn't think it was all that funny because it could cost me my life. The Bureau doesn't officially exist and we operate in strict hush, but after a certain number of missions we become known among the opposition networks and intelligence services — known, recognisable and vulnerable.

  I'd come out here under RAF security and the opposition didn't even know I'd left London, but all they had to do now was pick up a paper and when I went through those doors and down the steps and into the street I could walk straight into the cross-hairs.

  "You'd better get those chaps in here," I heard the Ambassador telling someone. "And McFadden too."

  He'd been standing a few feet away from me when it had happened, though I couldn't remember much about it in any kind of order: it had seemed like a moving surrealist picture with sound effects — the heavy brutish grunt of the explosion and then the sudden blizzard of white flowers filling the sky as the shockwave came and the black-suited figure of the Secretary of State was hurled against me, while slowly the flowers settled and the sky was filled again as hundreds of pigeons flocked from the buildings in fright and women began screaming. A moment of strange stillness, then the police began closing in, with press photographers racing in front of them and shooting wild. Then suddenly Ferris's voice right behind me: "Come on — we're getting out."

  The Secretary of State had died in the ambulance, they'd told me at the hotel; I'd gone straight there, smothered in blood from his injuries, to change my clothes and wash.

  "HE would like to see you," the girl in green was saying, and Ferris got out of the wicker chair as McFadden joined us from the corridor, a compact man, freckled and ginger-haired and shut-faced: Ferris had introduced us in the signals room when we'd got here this evening.

  "Sit down, gentlemen," Metcalf told us, "and someone please shut the door."

  The room was crowded and the Chief of Police was insistent on standing because there weren't enough chairs. The Embassy interpreter, a young Eurasian girl, began translating for him without any preliminaries.

  "The police guard on this building has been substantially reinforced, on instructions from the Minister of the Interior, and I hope this will not be found inconvenient for you; it is for your personal safety." When the girl had stopped speaking he gave a slight bow. "Enquiries are still proceeding at the place of embalmment, and all those who were involved in the construction of the coffin, in the security of the building, and in the preparation of the late Premier Jiang Wenyuan's earthly remains have come under our closest scrutiny." Another bow. He was facing the Ambassador, standing directly in front of his desk, and didn't look at anyone else. "The findings of the five doctors who attended the late British Secretary of State are that the pressure of air and debris from the explosion disrupted the heart and lungs, while at the same time the pressure invaded the cavities of the face and distended the sinuses, damaging the frontal lobes of the brain. As to the —»

  He broke off as one of the telephones began ringing, and the girl in green reached over and picked up the receiver.

  "No calls, Janet."

  The Chief of Police waited punctiliously until she was sitting down again. "As to the explosive device itself, our skilled experts, who are members of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, have collected material from the site and used electro-magnets to probe the debris from the whole area. Analysis has been made and a considerable portion of the device reconstructed; we already know that it was of Japanese make, but do not regard this as necessarily significant, since terrorism is international and so are its weapons. We know also that the device was detonated by remote control, via a radio beam."

  The Ambassador lifted his head an inch.

  "They're absolutely certain of that?"

  Ferris hadn't moved.

  "Yes, Your Excellency."

  Metcalf leaned forward. He was tanned and athletic-looking but must be close on sixty; this could be his last tour, and it hadn't been very pleasant, apart from the physical shock he'd received down there in Tian'anmen Square; he'd caught some of the blast and his left eye was still red from the effects of the flying debris.

  "You mean," he asked carefully, "that the timing of the explosion was also controlled?"

  "We cannot say that. We can say that the timing of the explosion was technically feasible." When the girl finished translating he made to add something but the Ambassador cut in.

  "You mean," he asked with even more care, "that if these — if the perpetrators h
ad wanted to explode the device at a precise and premeditated time, they could have done so. Is that right?"

  "That is right, yes."

  Ferris was gazing quietly at the wall, where there were yellowing photographs of Princess Anne taking a jump on a thoroughbred and Charles clouting a ball. We were pretty certain of one thing, and had talked about it this afternoon: this hadn't been an act of terrorism, a public and dramatic show to catch world attention; it had been an act of assassination, and at the moment when the Secretary of State had bent forward close to the coffin to place the wreath there'd been someone in the crowd or on a rooftop with binoculars and a transmitter.

  We also suspected something else, but hadn't wanted to talk about it. This was the information that Sinclair had brought to London: that the Secretary of State was marked for death. If Sinclair could have talked, we could have prevented it.

  Jason too might have known, and might have warned Ferris when he'd flown in last night, before the opposition had got at him. But why hadn't either of them sent a signal?

  "Thank you," the Ambassador told the Chief of Police. "I wanted to make sure of the facts, and of the implications."

  "The implications we must divine later, when we have all the facts. I shall allow myself the honour of making further reports as the enquiry proceeds." He waited until the interpreter had finished speaking in her soft musical tones, then drew himself straight. "I wish to repeat, Your Excellency, that together with other city and government departments, the Metropolitan Police Department of Pekin is shocked and distressed by the tragedy that has befallen your distinguished countryman, and will devote all its energies to bring those responsible to justice."

  A couple of straw mattresses had been brought in and a clerk sent to the Hotel Beijing for our toilet things: the last signal from London had ordered that Ferris and I should remain at the Embassy until further notice. McFadden raked up an alarm clock and a small transistor radio to make us feel at home, which was civil of him.

  The Embassy cook knocked together a scratch meal and McFadden came along to share it with us in one of the offices, talking a bit but not about the bombing; he missed England and wanted to know if The Mousetrap was still running and whether you could buy camel feed in Harrods these days. It was nearly midnight before Conyers came, and we moved into the main reception room because it was bigger.