The Chinese Assassin

by Anthony Grey

  Ketterman ignored him and turned to pick up the zinc inner lid that stood propped against the wall. It had a little window of plate glass eighteen inches square let into it at about head height.

  ‘That’s for identification purposes, Mr. Ketterman.’ Cooper, panting, with exertion, was trying to watch Ketterman over his shoulder as he worked. ‘Your embassy doesn’t do it any more. But most of ‘em still send diplomats down here to identify the body from the passport once its been sealed in—’ Cooper broke off suddenly in alarm and turned to stare up at the window in the wall behind him. He could see nothing through the frosted glass but something had deflected the light momentarily. He looked quickly towards Ketterman for reassurance. But the American was still staring thoughtfully at the identification panel in the inner lid.

  ‘They make us solder that on. If a dead body isn’t aspirated properly, you know—the gases build up inside it. A corpse can explode and blow the lid off an ordinary coffin, if there isn’t an inner metal lining with a soldered lid.’ A hint of hysteria had crept into Cooper’s voice and by now he was turning constantly to glance over his shoulder at the window. ‘If that happens in an aircraft hold all the other cargo can get contaminated. It’s happened more than once. The French for instance are terrible embalmers. Bodies from France often reek to high heaven.’

  Ketterman laid the panel carefully aside and walked over to the bench where Cooper had left the file of sealed documents. He picked them up and began to inspect them minutely.

  ‘They’re all there, you’ll find, Mr. Ketterman. The top one’s the affidavit I swore at your embassy. Just a simple affidavit, that’s all you need now if you don’t send someone to identify. The Russians and the East Europeans still come through. They don’t trust anybody. We have to put extra screws in the top of the coffin and drip sealing wax on them so they can stamp them with their seals—’ Cooper stopped and swung round towards the window again. This time he caught a glimpse of a blurred shadow through the frosted glass, before it ducked away out of sight.

  ‘The Israelis are the most careful though, Mr. K.’ Cooper was almost sobbing now. ‘They always come, never miss. Feel all round the body and underneath it. Search the whole coffin with a fine tooth comb before it’s sealed. Nobody else does that.’

  Ketterman finished scrutinising the documents and tossed them onto the bench. He watched as the point of the drill broke through the zinc lining then put a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘Okay Cooper? that’s enough. Now open up the garage door.’

  Cooper licked his lips nervously and hurried over to the garage door. When he’d opened it Ketterman slipped through and waved a signal to the driver behind the wheel of the truck. A minute later it had been reversed into the garage. Cooper replaced the padlock with hands that were now trembling violently. His face twitched as be watched the black taxi driver and the fair-haired man climb up into the mobile surgery to lift the stretcher out. It was covered with a white sheet but the outline of a man’s figure was discernible beneath it. The two men manoeuvred it carefully down into the garage, then looked enquiringly at Ketterman.

  At that instant Cooper glanced up over his shoulder at the window behind him for the hundredth time—and found himself staring into the distorted face of Vladimir Razduhev. Ketterman swung round as Cooper let out a shriek of fright. The Russian was peering through the narrow strip of clear glass at the top of the frosted windows, his face unrecognisable under the pressure of a nylon stocking. As Ketterman looked up at him he dropped quickly out of sight.

  The American shouted and waved frantically to the two men holding the stretcher. Immediately they lowered Yang to the floor and slid him beneath the heavy carpenter’s bench. Ketterman snatched a pistol from his briefcase and backed against the bank of refrigerators that lined one wall, covering the ‘window where Razduhev’s head had appeared. The black taxi driver and the fair-haired man drew hand guns from inside their jackets and dragged Cooper down behind the carpenter’s bench.

  In the silence that followed Ketterman pointed mutely to an empty stretcher and motioned towards the embalming table where the dead Libyan was lying. The two men nodded quickly and dashed bent double across the workshop. They lifted the dead Arab between them, dropped him onto the empty stretcher and pulled the sheet up to cover his face. Then they ran back across the workshop to where Ketterman had set up two more empty trestles beside the open casket and lowered the stretcher hurriedly onto them before dropping behind the bench again.

  For a moment there was silence, broken only by Cooper’s intermittent whimpering from behind the bench where he was hiding. Then the distant rumble of another train approaching along the overhead track began to make the coffin racks tremble once more. Ketterman glanced up suddenly and caught sight of Bogdarin’s face watching these preparations intently from a small square window in the opposite wall above the refrigerators. But he dropped from sight too as the sound of the train thundering onto the viaduct became a deafening roar. A moment later the sound of the glass shattering was drowned in the roar of the train’s passage and the barrels of the sub machine guns that Razduhev and Bogdarin had carried dismantled in their tool boxes burst through a window and began stitching uneven threads of bullets along the racked cons a few feet above the ground.

  The Americans pressed themselves to the floor beneath this lethal barrage and watched helplessly as one of the Russians directed a long burst of fire at the stretcher beside the open casket. The body under the sheet leapt and jerked spasmodically as the bullets slammed into it and eventually the trestles broke and collapsed under it. The attack lasted about fifteen seconds in all, and the shooting ceased as abruptly as it had begins when both Russians dropped out of sight.

  Gradually the noise of the train faded slowly into the distance. The coffin racks stopped shaking and silence settled slowly over the chilly embalming room once more. Even Cooper’s whimpering which the others had heard intermittently throughout the attack, had stopped at last.

  MOSCOW, Thursday—Pravda suggested today that the recently published accounts of Lin Piao s death in an air crash in Mongolia might have been invented by the Chinese leadership and that in fact the former Defence Minister might have been ‘annihilated’ in Peking.

  The Guardian, 6 September 1972

  15

  For a full minute after the Russians disappeared Ketterman allowed nobody to move. Then he stood up slowly himself and1 still watching the windows carefully, walked over to where the stretcher had been concealed. He took hold of Yang under the armpits and dragged him out from under the carpenter’s bench. The black taxi driver took his feet and together they lifted him gently into the open “Connaught” casket. The expression on the face of the Chinese was peaceful and relaxed. His eyes were closed and his breathing was even. A puzzled frown creased Ketterman’s brow for an instant and he glanced up uneasily at the window where he’d caught sight of Bogdarin’s face. Then he shrugged and returned his attention to the job in hand. When they had settled Yang satisfactorily with a pillow under his head, Ketterman looked round for the little undertaker.

  Silent and apparently even now petrified with fright, he was still crouched motionless behind the carpenter’s bench. ‘Okay Mr. Cooper, the bully boys have gone,’ said Ketterman soothingly, ‘you can come out now.’

  When Cooper didn’t move Ketterman walked over and patted him consolingly on the shoulder. The instant the American’s fingertips touched him, Cooper pitched forward. His head thudded dully against the stone floor and he rolled slowly onto his back. When Ketterman saw the ragged hole above his left eyebrow he lifted both hands to his temples and stood motionless with his eyes closed for fully half a minute. When he opened them again the fair-haired man and the black taxi driver were standing looking at him expressionlessly, waiting for instructions.

  ‘One of the individual refrigerators I guess.’ He waved a hand wearily over his shoulder. ‘And make sure you lock it. It’s far from ideal but it might just give us the time we
need.’

  Ketterman walked over and lifted the sheet covering the dead Libyan. The fusillade of bullets had done surprisingly little damage to the bloodless corpse. Dry puncture marks spread thickly across the trunk of the body but the face and neck were unmarked. ‘There’s a casket addressed to Beirut in that rack by the door. Drag it out and open it up with this.’ He picked up a plumber’s chisel from the workbench. ‘Put our bullet-riddled friend inside and dump the Lebanese on the slab. We just gotta hope the imam won’t notice the difference when he comes to wash him.’

  Ketterman took off his jacket and picked up the zinc inner lid for Yang’s casket. He lowered it carefully over the face of the Chinese and fitted it into the side grooves. He watched with satisfaction as the unconscious man’s breath fogged the glass of the identification window a few inches above his face. Then he connected up the acetylene gas cylinder to a burner, picked up a foot-long strip of solder and directed the flame onto it until it began dripping into the runnel around the edges of the zinc panel.

  When the other two men had opened up the coffin bound for Beirut they undressed its corpse and removed it to the embalming slab. Then they put the bullet-riddled Libyan inside and using another acetylene set, soldered a new lid into place. Ketterman told them to turn round all the coffins that had been raked by the gunfire so that the holes wouldn’t be discovered immediately. They also cleaned up the glass from the broken windows and fitted sheets of opaque polythene over the missing panes with sticky tape.

  When he’d finished soldering, Ketterman stood looking down at the face of the Chinese beneath the inspection panel. Yang’s breath was still misting the glass regularly as he exhaled.

  ‘What in God’s name happens to him if he wakes up while he’s still sealed in?’ asked the black driver in an awed voice. ‘It would take me all of thirty seconds to go permanently insane in there.’

  ‘Sedation will last him twenty-four hours,’ said Ketterman crisply.

  They lifted the wooden coffin top into place and screwed it down, then tugged the tailor-made hessian cover around it. They checked to make sure that it wasn’t torn and that none of the breathing holes were visible. Then the fair-haired man sewed up the end with a long string bodkin. With the hessian stretched tight around it, the casket looked, as was intended by those who made the rules, like any other innocent freight package. They loaded it into the back of one of the collecting ambulances and Ketterman drove it out. The fair-haired man took the five-ton truck and the black driver followed in his cab along the quiet, lunchtime street.

  Two miles away near a junction with the M4 motorway Ketterman handed over the ambulance to the black driver, who took it to Hatton Cross and delivered the coffin on behalf of Mr. Arthur Cooper of Jarvis’ to the Pan American cargo supervisor, at five minutes to two. The fair-haired man parked the truck in a car park of a nearby public house and checked in for his shift using the fake identity card he’d carried with him in his stolen Pan Am overalls. Ketterman took a taxi to the Post House hotel, dose to the Heathrow passenger terminals, and booked into a single room.

  At five o’clock he left again, took a taxi to Terminal Three and checked onto the six o’clock Pan Am flight to Washington. Because of the long queues for routine security checks on hand baggage and body searches, the Boeing 747 didn’t trundle out onto the taxiing runway until six thirty-five. When it finally made its long lumbering run along the southbound runway ten minutes later, Ketterman was sitting in a seat in the first class section, sipping a glass of chilled champagne.

  Somewhere beneath him in the underbelly of the aircraft a partly-tranquilised dog in a straw-lined crate raised its head and howled in fear when it detected faint but unmistakable signs of human life coming from the box lying beside it.

  Half an hour later as the airliner headed out over the Irish Sea the dog cocked its head again to listen. Against the dull background roar of the engines it heard the noise of a man crawling clumsily across the floor of the darkened hold and it began to whine once more. It heard the scrape of metal on metal as the fair-haired American struggled among the closely packed freight cases, carrying a torch in one hand and a knife in the other. When he found Yang’s casket he cut away the hessian until he had uncovered the screw heads countersunk into the lid. He removed these with the knife and eased the lid aside. By the light of the torch he saw the viewing window in the zinc panel had now misted over completely. He quickly fitted suction pads from his pockets onto all four corners and cut round the edge of the glass with a diamond tipped cutting tool Then lie lifted the glass and touched Yang’s forehead with his fingertips. His skin was burning hot and his breathing was fast and shallow.

  The American took a pad of cloth soaked in surgical spirit from a small medical satchel strapped around his waist inside his overalls and wiped the perspiration from Yang’s face. Then he extracted a flat vacuum pack of ice cubes from the satchel, wrapped several inside the cloth, and held them gently against the Chinese man’s burning forehead. With his free hand he loosened the cloth around his throat to ventilate his body as far as possible.

  As he worked he turned his wrist slightly so that he could read his watch in the light of the torch He drew a long, careful breath, then exhaled very slowly. It would be more than six hours before the 747 touched down at Dulles International Airport outside Washington.

  PEKING, Thursday—Lin Piao was killed when his plane ran out of fuel in Mongolia, Chou En-lai has informed visiting American newspaper editors. ‘I have told you everything, it’s much clearer than your Warren Report on the assassination of J. F. Kennedy,’ the Chinese Prime Minister said.

  United Press International, 12 October 1972

  16

  When the groaning lift shuddered to a halt outside his flat, an unseen hand pulled open the outer gate before Scholefield could move. Taken aback, he peered cautiously into the pitch blackness through the iron lattice of the inner gate. Then he smelled the whisky, and in the faint fluorescence from the dim bulb in the roof of the lift he made out the grinning features of Moynahan.

  As he stepped out onto the landing, the porter took his arm and drew him quickly along the passageway. The reek of spirit on his breath made Scholefield wince as he leaned close to whisper conspiratorially in his ear. ‘Glad to see you back, Mr. Scholefield. You’re as popular as ever with the ladies, I see.’

  The potter’s features creased into their familiar lascivious leer. Scholefield passed a hand wearily across his brow. ‘What the devil are you talking about this time, Moynahan?’

  The porter raised his index finger urgently to his pursed lips, motioning him to a silence. He tried to pull free of the porter’s grasp, but failed. Moynahan, suddenly feeling the bandages around the wrist he was holding, peered close into his face iii alarm. ‘You’re hurt, Mr. Scholefield.’

  ‘I was involved in a slight accident Moynahan, yes, but I’m fine now, I’ve just come from the hospital.’

  The porter drew him along the darkened landing a pace or two until they were out of earshot of the flat door. ‘Is it your drinkin’ arm or your lovin’ arm, Mr. Scholefield, eh?’ Moynahan nudged him with his elbow and giggled lewdly. ‘I hope it’s not your lovin’ arm because there’s a real dilly of a Chinese lady awaitin’ you. Paid me to let her wait inside, she did. Gave me a tenner, no less. Thought you’d want me to let you know that.’

  Scholefield stared at him uncomprehendingly in the darkness. ‘What sort of Chinese “lady” Moynahan? And what the hell are you doing letting strangers into my flat when I’m out.’

  ‘She’s no stranger, Mr. Scholefield. Said she’s an old friend of yours. Wearing one of those lovely green silk dresses with big slits up her thighs. A cheongsam, d’you call it? Hair all piled up on top of her head with combs like one of those geisha girls, eh? Real dish, Mr. Scholefield. Said you was expectin’ her.’

  Scholefield could see in the faint light coming from the lift that he was holding out his hand. His voice had taken on a wheedling tone. ‘Di
d I do right, Mr. Scholefield?’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Ten minutes, quarter of an hour.’

  He pushed him aside and strode to his door. The porter was still cursing him softly in the darkness as he shut the door behind him. Inside, the entrance hall was in darkness but there was a line of light showing under his study door. He opened it and found the green-shaded desk lamp was lit, casting a pool of bright light on his empty blotter.

  As he closed the door behind him the high-backed leather swivel chair at his desk rotated slowly to reveal the impassive seated figure of Tan Sui-ling. Her hair was dressed on top of her head in an elaborate high coiffure and she sat relaxed and at ease, her bare arms spread along the arms of the chair. Her feet were primly together on the carpet so that the divided skirt of the cheongsam fell straight, revealing nothing but her ankles.

  He stared at her, a puzzled frown wrinkling his forehead. Then his face suddenly cleared. ‘You were behind the kiosk counter when Yang bought the Lu Hsun book.’

  She nodded slowly.

  He crossed the room to where he’d left the bottle of vodka on a side table two nights before. The unwashed glass he’d used then was still there and he poured himself a large measure and gulped it straight down. The arm that had been damaged in the explosion had begun to throb and he rubbed it with his uninjured right hand. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To talk to you about the so-called folios “Comrade Yang” brought to you.’ She laid heavy ironic emphasis on the name and tossed her head contemptuously as she spoke.

  ‘Who showed you them?’

  She hesitated and smiled faintly. ‘Your “friend” Ketterman.’ Again the heavy irony, again the little toss of the head. ‘He knew about it all in advance.’

  He looked up at her for a long time without speaking, then poured himself another drink. He took it back to the chesterfield and sat down. ‘So you’ve come to give me Peking’s official answer to Yang’s fake folios?’