The Chinese Assassin

by Anthony Grey

  ‘But what’s going in the casket?’

  ‘Relax, Mr. Cooper. You’ll see—at mid-day tomorrow before you seal it for me.’ Ketterman glanced through the open door as a taxi with its illuminated sign switched off and pulled up at the kerb. ‘Why not take this taxi home and get a good night’s rest?’

  He took the little undertaker firmly beneath the elbow and steered him through the crowd out onto the pavement. He opened the door of the taxi and helped him in. The driver, a black West Indian wearing a tartan cap and dark glasses, stared stolidly ahead and didn’t even turn his head to receive directions. As Cooper sank uncertainly onto the back seat, Ketterman leaned inside, smiling faintly. ‘You mustn’t worry, Mr. Cooper, if the doors and windows of the taxi won’t open from the inside on the way home. You may find your telephone at home isn’t working either. But we’ve only cut the wire as a precaution. My colleague here will spend the night with you to see you don’t leave home suddenly, or contact anybody else. He’ll escort you to pick up the body tomorrow and show you where to bring it. Sleep well.’

  Ketterman stepped back and slammed the door as another unlit taxi pulled up behind. He got in quickly and as the first cab began to pull away, he saw Cooper frantically trying the locked doors. Then his white face appeared staring out through the smoked glass of the taxi’s rear window. His mouth was open wide and his tongue protruded visibly between his teeth. The expression reminded Ketterman of the futile snarl of some small furry animal—he couldn’t remember which one—suddenly finding itself helplessly at bay.

  YENAN, PEOPLES’ REPUBLIC OP CHINA, Friday—Communist Party members here and in Kwangchow, Soochow, Nanking, Shanghai and Peking have been told that Lin Piao’s Trident jet was shot down over Mongolia last September, killing all aboard—his demise in fact appears to have been nothing short of an aerial execution.

  Far Eastern Economic Review, 22 July 1972

  10

  Ketterman closed his eyes to shut out the sight of Cooper’s face and slumped back in the corner of the taxi’s rear seat. His driver, a young man with shoulder-length fair hair wearing a denim shirt and jeans, piloted the vehicle with ostentatious care through the light traffic on Wigmore Street and Baker Street then swung west onto Oxford Street. He drove as far as Marble Arch, taking pains to observe strict lane discipline before turning south into Park Lane. Only when he was safely established at thirty miles an hour in the solid tide of cars rippling down the wide, grass- flanked mile towards Hyde Park Corner did he slide back his glass partition and address Ketterman over his shoulder.

  ‘I bought the Pan Am cargo supervisor for two thousand.’

  His English accent had the faintest trace of Boston vowels. ‘Got to him in a pub near Hatton Cross outside the airport. Told him we were an obscure Mormon sect who didn’t believe the soul departed from the body finally until forty-eight hours after the moment of death. He seemed to swallow it. Grabbed the cash fast enough anyway.’

  Ketterman nodded his head wearily without replying. He lay back drinking in the cool air provided by the cab’s air conditioning.

  ‘I spent another two hundred persuading one of his loaders to let me work his shift tomorrow afternoon so I can see it into the pressurised hold. Documents are copying his security pass for me now. Means I gotta get me a haircut.’ He laughed pleasantly.

  ‘Great work.’ Ketterman’s tired voice made the remark almost sound like a sneer. He didn’t pull himself into a sitting position again until the driver changed down to allow the cab to be sucked smoothly into the swift millrace of vehicles that sweeps dizzily around Hyde Park Corner almost twenty four hours a day. Then he twisted in his seat to stare out through the rear window at the faded Georgian elegance of the pillared hospital standing dark against the fading pink of the sky along the western edge of the Corner. ‘Which room’s Yang in?’

  The driver watched the skeins of traffic around him intently as they broke up to skirt the walls of Buckingham Palace along Constitution Hill and southward to Victoria. ‘Fourth floor—the tall lighted window between the middle pillars of the portico.’

  Through the gathering gloom Ketterman spotted the silhouette of a man standing at the edge of a tall green screen, looking out into the night. ‘They’ve got a guard at his bedside.’

  ‘And two on the front door below—on the steps. There’s another two at the Casualty entrance around the corner in Grosvenor Crescent. What they’ve got on the ward door and in the corridors we don’t know.’ The driver leaned on his horn and mouthed an explosive American obscenity as a red TR 6 sports car cut impudently across his bows. Then he swung to the inside lane to begin his turn north past the dilapidated pillared frontage of St. George’s Hospital. ‘The Russians are using their two television repair vans. Blue ones, parked on meters in Grosvenor Crescent, opposite the Casualty entrance. We think we’ve sported most of their pedestrians watching the window, too. They cross every few minutes around the Royal Artillery Memorial opposite the front steps.

  Ketterman glanced out of the taxi at the pale stone barrel of the stubby 9.2 howitzer guarded by massive-legged, black metal artillerymen in First World War rain capes and tin helmets. “Where are the Chinese staked out?’

  ‘Not sure yet, Sir. We’ve been watching a small furniture van in a residents’ parking bay in Belgrave Square. No movement in or out so far, though. Two Japanese “tourists” in plastic macs have been taking pictures of the Quadriga on the Wellington Arch all evening with very long telephoto lenses. They’ve shot it nine times so far from different angles-always with Yang’s window in their view finders.’

  ‘Are Scholefield and the others in the same ward?’

  ‘No sir! Major Accident Procedures in St. George’s don’t run to clearing wards right down like, for example, the Middlesex It’s 250 years old, remember. They just absorb the casualties into other wards. Mr. Scholefield’s on the third floor, front.’

  The taxi crested the rise at the Knightsbridge corner and swung towards Piccadilly Circus. The driver nodded out of the window. ‘The British are using the Wellington Arch police office as a reserve area. They’ve got half a dozen Special Branch men in there, at least, in walkie-talkie contact with the man at the bedside.’

  Ketterman could see the tiny lighted windows of London’s most discreetly disguised police station inside the base of Wellington’s triumphal arch. High above, on its summit, floodlights had already come on illuminating the prancing horses of war and the angel of peace who, in an ideal world, reined them in. Below, in the inner curve of the arch itself; the great, black, wrought-iron gates bearing the Queen’s arms were dosed. Ketterman made out two or three shadowy figures watching the windows of St. George’s through the gaps in the decorative ironwork. He turned back to the driver. ‘Take a turn around Belgrave Square, so I can give the rest of the opposition the once over before I visit Comrade Yang.’

  The ornamental Victorian wrought—iron gas lamps on both sides of Constitution Hill blossomed yellow suddenly in the gathering darkness, turning the summer foliage of the trees a pale, translucent green, as the driver completed a second circuit of the crowded Hyde Park Corner race track and swung round the side of the hospital into Grosvenor Crescent The two dark blue television repair vans were still standing back to back on parking meters opposite the Casualty entrance. Nobody was visible behind the blacked out windows and Ketterman scarcely gave them a second glance. He stared across the road instead into the cobbled mews that ran along the back of the hospital. ‘Is anybody holed up there?’

  ‘No, sir. It’s been checked out twice.’

  Ketterman studied the cream-painted wrought-iron fire escapes that ran down the side of the eighteenth-century hospital. ‘Drive up there.’

  ‘Grosvenor Crescent Mews is a blind alley, Sir,’ warned the driver as he swung the cab deftly across the road in its own length in a U-turn. ‘It’s also a private road of the Grosvenor Estate. They close that little white metal barrier at the entrance at midnight. I guess that�
�s why our Russian and Chinese friends aren’t using it.’

  He pulled cautiously into the narrow cobbled lane and drove slowly between rows of vehicles parked outside motor repair workshops. In a side spur two empty ambulances were parked in a bay reserved for the hospital. A hay fork stood propped against yellow-painted double doors further along the mews beside a sign advertising ‘Hacking in the Park—horses at livery.’ At the far end a white stone wall, with climbing creepers hanging thickly, closed off the mews. The creepers almost obscured a narrow door that gave access to pedestrians.

  Ketterman leaned forward, staring up the mews through the front windscreen while the driver reversed carefully back to the street again. Then he fell back into his seat, deep in thought. He scarcely glanced at the suspect furniture van that the driver pointed out in Belgrave Square and when he got out of the cab in Knightsbridge three minutes later he strode away towards St. George’s Hospital without another word.

  The two plainclothes men on the front steps of the hospital inspected his State Department pass then allowed him in after checking on an internal telephone. He encountered no other guards on the stairs or in the corridors, but at the entrance to the ward on the fourth floor a uniformed policeman barred his way. Through a glass panel in the ward door he could see the civilian security guard he’d glimpsed from the taxi standing by the window. High green screens stood all round the bed in which Yang was lying. A doctor and a nurse emerged from behind them as be watched and began walking towards the door. ‘Nobody at all is allowed in, Sir, unless carrying express written permission signed by Mr. Percy Crowdleigh of the Cabinet Office.’

  Ketterman shrugged as the policeman returned his pass. While he waited for the doctor to emerge, he studied the duty roster for the ward nurses on the wall behind the policeman. When the doctor came out through the door, he held out his pass. ‘I was present in the room where the explosion occurred tonight, doctor.’ He indicated the bruise on his face. ‘I was one of the lucky ones. Can you tell me how Mr. Yang is?’

  The doctor looked from the pass to Ketterman’s bruised face, then at the policeman. ‘I suppose there’s no harm in your knowing that Mr. Yang has had a very fortunate escape. He suffered considerable lacerations which have now been stitched. He may have a perforated ear drum and he’s had a small blood transfusion. He’s under sedation and observation, of course, because he’s still in shock. But otherwise it was a rather remarkable escape. It’s a miracle more people weren’t killed.’

  The doctor returned Ketterman’s pass and hurried away down the corridor. The policeman stolidly motioned for Ketterman to follow.

  The American gave the policeman a friendly smile and complied. But once out of sight he deliberately took a wrong turning and hurried downstairs to the third floor at the back of the building. He peered out into the dusk through an emergency exit leading onto the iron landing of a fire escape. Through the dusty windows he could see the dim street lamps illuminating the cobbled mews below. He checked that the corridor behind him was empty before quietly easing open the latch on the door. Then without hurrying he retraced his steps and took the lift down to the ground floor. He strolled slowly past the X-ray section making a mental note of its location and walked out of the front door into the stifling night air. He nodded and smiled at the Special Branch guards then went slowly down the steps and sauntered back along Knightsbridge to the Berkeley Hotel, whistling softly to himself as he went.

  LONDON, Saturday—In a symphony of official confirmation almost a year after Lin Piao ceased to be officially mentioned, Chinese spokesmen in Peking, Algiers, Paris, and London yesterday acknowledged that the former Defence Minister died in an air crash in Mongolia on September 12, 1971 while fleeing the country as a traitor and frustrated assassin.

  The Guardian, 29 July 1972

  11

  The pale blue five-ton pick-up truck with ‘New Savoy Hotel Laundry’ stencilled on its sides rolled slowly down the Strand past Chasing Cross Station and halted at the westward-facing traffic lights in an almost deserted Trafalgar Square. It didn’t attract a second glance from the routine police patrol car parked by the base of Nelson’s Column. Its driver, the young American with shoulder-length hair, leaned casually out of his open window to look back at the illuminated blue and gold dock face on the tower of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. It showed three-twenty.

  ‘When the lights changed, the driver eased the truck smoothly away into Pall Mall so as not to unseat the six Chinese crouching uncomfortably inside on narrow benches that had been fitted on either side of a stretcher trolley. They wore white gauze masks, dose-fitting head covers and surgical gowns down to their ankles. The interior of the truck was equipped with a comprehensive array of casualty treatment aids, including oxygen cylinders and blood plasma bottles rigged on racks ready for use. Johnny Fei and the five other men sat staring expressionlessly at each other across the empty stretcher, listening only for sounds from outside.

  The truck drove slowly into Pall Mall and past the anonymous windows of the British World Affairs Institute. There was no outward sign of the explosion that had wrecked its basement lecture room nine hours earlier. Because the royal boulevards of the Mall and Constitution Hill are permanently forbidden to commercial vehicles the driver had to take the long slow climb up St. James’ to Piccadilly. By three twenty-five the truck was dipping down right on schedule into the mouth of the Hyde Park Corner underpass. A minute later it resurfaced from the Knightsbridge end of the tunnel and immediately swung left across the road into the narrow cul-de-sac of Old Barrack Yard.

  There it stopped and turned, and backed up to the shuttered outlet of the Berkeley Hotel laundry chute. The driver switched off the engine and headlights, jumped down from his cab and walked slowly out onto Knightsbridge. He lit a cigarette and stood for two minutes on the pavement smoking and looking carefully in both directions. The only vehicles on the road were isolated taxis and occasional long-distance transports making a long dash through the heart of the sleeping city. When he was satisfied the street was deserted, he signalled towards the darkened truck with an urgent upraised thumb.

  Immediately the slatted back of the truck flew up. The white- gowned figures slipped out and ran silently on plimsolled feet to the white, creeper-covered wall protecting the end of Grosvenor Crescent Mews. Finding the tiny door already locked, they swarmed quickly over the top. By the time the driver returned to the truck they had all disappeared. He took a crowbar from the cab, crossed to the wall and quietly broke open the door. As he eased it ajar he caught a glimpse of the last man scaling the wall round St. George’s Hospital at the other end of the mews. One had separated from the others and was crouched by an ambulance parked in the bay on the other side of the lane, working on its locks. He watched until he saw the last of the five climbers swing from the top of the wall onto the iron fire-escape. Then he ran back to the truck, restarted the engine and reversed across the yard, positioning the open back end of the mobile surgery flush against the open doorway in the wall. When he’d switched off the engine he opened a panel behind the driving seat and climbed though into the back. He picked a sawn-off shotgun from a rack on one wall and settled down on the cud of the stretcher trolley, holding the gun across his knees.

  At the other end of the mews the cream-painted iron fire- escapes on the western wall of the hospital were in deep shadow.

  But Fei made all his men wriggle up the steps on their stomachs so they couldn’t be seen above the balustrades. Outside the third floor emergency exit unlocked earlier by Ketterman he produced a knife and slipped it in the crack between the door and its lintel. It came open without resistance and the five men slipped quickly through, still bent double on hands and knees. Because of this, the men from the Russian embassy watching from the closed television repair vans on the other side of Grosvenor Crescent saw nothing at all of their entry.

  Inside, the five men immediately split tip. Fei and one other went openly up the stairs to the fourth floor, two began
searching for a stretcher trolley, and the last man remained crouching in the shadows by the emergency exit.

  As he neared the last blind junction on the fourth floor leading to Yang’s ward, Johnny Fei produced a clipboard and pen from under his white gown. He made a quick gesture to his accomplice to hang back out of sight, and strode confidently on around the corner. Without breaking his stride he nodded formally to the policeman, now seated somnolently on a chair at the side of the corridor, and pushed open the ward door. Most of the lights were out and only the faint muffled sounds made by sleeping patients disturbed the silence. Swinging his clipboard in his hand the Chinese walked briskly down the darkened ward towards the tall green screens.

  The policeman had risen uncertainly to his feet and was still staring indecisively after him through the glass panel of the ward door when the second Chinese ran silently round the corner of the corridor and clamped a hand over his mouth from behind. In the same moment he hit him in the side of the neck with the heel of his other hand. The Chinese used the momentum of his fall to drag the policeman bodily into the ward sister’s empty ante-room. Footsteps sounded immediately outside in the corridor and he looked up to see the other two Chinese arriving at the door with the stretcher and trolley.

  Inside the shadowy ward, the Special Branch guard at Yang’s bedside rose to his feet with a friendly nod as he saw the man in a doctor’s gown approaching with a clipboard. ‘We’ve decided to do a final set of investigatory X-rays right away, just to be on the safe side,’ said Fei quietly in perfect, unaccented English. ‘So we’ll need to have him in the X-ray department on the ground floor for half an hour.’

  The guard’s face clouded. ‘In the middle of the night, doctor?’ He spoke in a whisper and glanced down incredulously at his watch. ‘It’s half past three. And besides, he’s under sedation, for God’s sake.’