by Anthony Grey
‘How is he, Doc?’
The doctor fell into step beside Ketterman as he set off along the broad corridor towards a white door at the end. ‘Surprisingly well for what he’s been through. He’s out of shock now—asks frequently where he is—in English. I haven’t told him, of course - but he should be told something soon to help him re-orientate.
The left ear-drum’s definitely perforated—but he’s hearing okay with the other one. Other lacerations stitched in London are healing okay.
They stopped outside the door and Ketterman motioned the doctor to wait. Then he knocked quietly, and went in. Yang was lying stiffly in a hospital bed, his head and shoulders raised on a bank of pillows. The high-ceilinged room was furnished over-elaborately with gilded red-velvet French antiques. A pale Indian carpet covered the centre of the polished wood floor and vases of summer flowers and bowls of fruit had been carefully arranged on side tables. A Handel concerto was playing softly from concealed speakers.
Yang’s round, moon-like face was drawn and pale and he watched Ketterman approaching ‘with a suspicious stare. The American pulled a straight-backed chair to the bedside and sat down. He smiled and waved a hand vaguely round the room. ‘I hope you feel we are looking after you well here, Comrade Yang.’ He paused, ‘In Washington.’ Ketterman had spoken Mandarin and he watched Yang’s eyes widen in surprise.
‘How did I get to Washington?’
‘Let’s just say I had it arranged.’
Yang was silent for a moment, his narrow, lashless eyes studying Ketterman’s face. ‘You were at the Institute,’ he said slowly, ‘the American who came late.’
‘Right! Harvey Ketterman, US State Department’ He held out his hand towards Yang. When the Chinese ignored the gesture he dropped it and, still grinning, gripped his right forearm through the sheet instead.
Yang turned his head angrily in the direction of the black guard pacing ostentatiously back and forth outside the window on the fire-escape. ‘So after four years as a prisoner of the socialist imperialists in Moscow, I am to be held captive now by the American imperialists.’
‘Wrong, Comrade Yang. That guy out there is one of several affording you protection from your “friends” from Moscow. They tried to blow your brains to pieces in London. They very nearly succeeded—and they did kill Dr. Stillman and Dick Scholefield’s friend, Nina Murphy.’
Yang’s angry glare filtered for only an instant. ‘It was not the Russians. The culprits were the radical faction in Peking whom I have exposed!’
‘You’re still trying to sell your bum folios, hub, Comrade.’ Ketterman stood up and walked slowly to a fake antique chiffonier standing against the wall at an angle to the bed. He removed the vase of flowers, lifted the false top and turned down the volume of the Handel concerto in the control panel of the concealed tape deck inside.
‘Your fraternity brothers Razduhev and Bogdarin took the bomb in the briefcase to the World Affairs Institute. Dressed up a minor diplomat from the Mongolian embassy in a Peking-style cadre’s uniform to deliver it, of course, to make it look like a Mao-job.’ Ketterman opened the doors of the chiffonier to reveal a built-in 29-inch television screen. He switched it on and stepped back to study the picture that immediately appeared of the intersection outside the house. A car drove slowly across, followed by two girls on bicycles. After that the screen remained devoid of activity.
Ketterman turned back to find Yang looking at the screen with a baffled expression. ‘Sorry the programme isn’t more fun, Comrade. It’s just so we can see which people try to pay a call on you. You’re a popular guy right now. You could have a whole stream of visitors coming up here all day long if we’d let ‘em.’ He closed the doors of the chiffonier, leaving the set switched on, and turned round grinning.
‘Why was I brought here from London?’ Yang winced as he shifted his position slightly in the bed.
‘There are an awful lot of shepherds running around the field looking for one lost sheep right now, Comrade. Three-quarters of the intelligence services of all Russia and China, I’d guess, are working 24 hours a day to locate you.’
A faint tap on the door interrupted him and Ketterman opened it. The fair-haired man who had driven for him in London handed him a slim leather document case and quickly closed the door again. Ketterman unzipped it and took out a large folded sheet of pink paper. He opened it and held it out in front of him at arm’s length, running his eye rapidly over the handwritten Chinese script.
Yang’s features twisted into a sneer. ‘And why should you care whether I am safe or not? Have the rabid capitalists of America suddenly become concerned with the sanctity of life of every single communist, worldwide?’
‘Fair question,’ said Ketterman calmly, ‘to which the answer’s “No”. We just want to keep you in one piece long enough to counteract the lies your buddies from the Kremlin have cooked up with you in those folios of yours.’
‘They are not lies.!’ Yang raised his head from the pillow, his eyes blazing. ‘They tell the truth.’
‘The whole truth and nothing but the truth, Comrade?’ Ketterman raised an eyebrow and walked back to the chiffonier again. He took an unmarked tape cassette from the document case lying on the chair beside it, stopped the Handel and removed it. He slotted the new cassette into the deck and turned up the volume. Yang sank back on the pillow listening as a crackle of static came from the concealed speakers.
Above the interference a Chinese voice shouted a call sign first in Mandarin, then in English. ‘Trident 256 to Irkutsk control.
Trident 256 to Irkutsk control...’ Yang’s face clenched tight suddenly as he listened. ‘Cleared take-off Peitaiho, heading Irkutsk. . . Marshall Lin safely on board. . Repeat Marshall Lin safely on board... Anticipate no interception at border with People’s Republic of Mongolia...’
The static and background roar took over again and Ketterman softened the volume. He turned and looked questioningly at Yang.
‘It’s a fabrication!’ The Chinese glared at Ketterman from the pillows.
The American smiled patiently. ‘Comrade Yang, our satellites don’t lie. We know every time Chairman Mao leaves his zip-fly undone—and how many workers you’ve got on the nuclear night shift at Lop Nor.’ He spread his hands wide and hunched his shoulders. ‘The National Reconnaissance Office has four or five hundred pieces of junk bumping around up there in the sky over the Soviet-Chinese land mass—and we’ve got B29’s flying around with basketball nets on their noses catching the tape decks jettisoned from those birds—that’s how we get such clear reception on your signals. The National Security Administration employs eighty thousand guys around the world intercepting radio signals and playing them through the largest computer complex in existence anywhere in the world. Its budget is twice the CIA’s. With outfits like that we don’t even have the time to fake up signals.’ He walked over to the bed and dropped his arms to his sides, grinning hugely again. ‘Besides—your Szechuanese accent is a dead give-away—you’re mixing up your third and fourth tones, as usual.’
‘If the interception of the radio signal by your satellite is genuine, why is there no response from Irkutsk control?’
‘Peking’s a difficult bull’s-eye to hit, Comrade, with those spy-birds. For a start if we get the angle of launch wrong from Vandenburg Air Force base in California, the satellite just burns up. We’ve lost a lot trying to throw them up onto the precise “hook” in the sky so that they orbit constantly right over your Chung Nan Hai.’
A movement outside the window caught his eye and Ketterman acknowledged a hand signal from the black man with a faint nod of his head. ‘Even when we get it right the slant range gives us a fairly good pick-up over a radius of only about, a hundred miles around Peking—that’s why the first signal was clear. But out at 150 or 160 miles from the centre, the pick-up is down to thirty-five percent. That’s the reason we never registered anything at all from the Irkutsk end. Okay?’
Yang looked away. He winced and sh
ifted his position painfully in the bed again.
‘So the boys in the Kremlin definitely knew you were coming - they were in on the plot. We’ve known that all along, Comrade Yang.’ Ketterman grinned. ‘So the crap about dodging in under their radar screen without their knowledge we read straight away as a pure Kremlin snow-job to clear them of any complicity in Lin Piao’s activities. We know too you didn’t come out of China. We know the KGB put you and Stillman ashore in an inflatable raft on the North Norfolk coast two weeks ago because the Israelis in Moscow tipped us off—just like they tipped us about the Lin plot in Seventy-one.’
Yang lay silent staring at the ceiling. Ketterman walked over to the bedside and stood looking down at him, holding the large square of folded pink paper in his hand.
‘We’re pretty sure, too,’ said Ketterman quietly, ‘that Marshall Lin Piao was still alive and living in Peking in January 1972—four months after he’s supposed to have died in that Trident’
Yang’s head turned slowly on the pillow until he was looking up into Ketterman’s face.
‘We picked up radio messages by satellite that Lin’s supporters were sending to you out in Mongolia. I can play them to you if you’d like.’ He delved into the document case, drew out a sheaf of papers and dropped them on the bed. ‘Here arc the transcripts of the Trident signals and the messages to you on the steppes. We knew somebody survived that crash—and with a back-pack radio transmitter and receiver intact We believe he was meant to survive it.’ Ketterman pulled up the chair, sat down and waved the pink paper in front of Yang’s face. ‘Your options have run out, Comrade. Officially you’re dead. We know Yang Tsai-chien died in that crash, his body was fingerprinted. The Russians who’ve sprung you to here obviously want you dead now—whoever you are, if that bomb in London is anything to go by. To stay alive, you have to remain here.’
Yang’s head jerked towards the window in alarm as the silhouette of the black man suddenly reappeared on the fire escape outside and tapped urgently on the glass. Ketterman waved him away with an impatient gesture.
‘If you want to stay, we want two things from you—first, some more lies.’ He opened the sheet of pink paper out so that Yang could see the Chinese handwriting.
‘What is that?’
‘The Ninth Folio.’
Yang gazed at it blankly.
‘It begins,’ said Ketterman, reading from the opening paragraph, “Now that I am free after four years’ imprisonment in the Soviet Union and about to start a new life at a secret address in the West, I wish to state that I ‘was forced to invent a terrible tissue of lies that have been presented as the truth in Folios One to Eight written by me.” The American paused and smiled. ‘There’s a lot of detail telling how the Russians encouraged Lin Piao in a plot to murder Mao, how they offered him a safe sanctuary—and how they sent up MIGs to shoot his Trident down over Mongolia to cover up their treachery when he failed.’
‘But that isn’t true!’ Yang’s voice was barely a whisper.
‘Sure it isn’t true,’ Ketterman agreed blithely. ‘We know they scrambled no MIGs. Our satellites would have picked them up if they had. This faked Ninth Folio is an antidote to the other eight. If the Soviets try to get their bum information broadcast around the world, we produce this one in your calligraphy signed by you and with your thumbprint on the bottom right hand corner, right, just exactly like the others.’ Ketterman was grinning affably at Yang again. ‘The other thing we want is the truth about the Trident. We believe maybe even the Russians themselves don’t fully know what happened. We think even now they believe a lot of that bullshit you’ve written in the Folios—that you’ve held out on them right under their noses in Moscow for four years. But most important of all, we want to know why they’ve mounted this elaborate operation.’
Yang swallowed hard. His skin had taken on a grey pallor, but his eyes still gleamed’ bright with defiance. ‘I won’t cooperate!’
Ketterman stood up suddenly, his smile gone.
‘Even though you torture me!’
‘You’re in the wrong country if you’re looking for something as unsubtle as torture.’ Ketterman rubbed the side of his nose with his forefinger, gazing down coldly at the Chinese. Then he turned on his heel, walked briskly to the fake chiffonier again and opened the doors. He looked at the closed-circuit picture for a moment, standing deliberately in front of the screen. ‘I think an old friend of yours is arriving to see you, Comrade Yang.’ He stepped aside so that the Chinese could see the picture of the intersection from his bed.
Yang raised his head to look. On the screen a car had halted at the kerb on the far side of the street and a man had climbed out. He stood uncertainly on the pavement looking about him, taking care to hold the passenger door of the car open. Elsewhere in the house an unseen hand operated a control switch that set the telephoto lens of the concealed camera revolving in a steady zoom to close-up on the man beside the car. Within a few seconds Razduhev’s chalk-white face filled the screen.
‘He seems to have forgotten your flowers and grapes,’ said Ketterman.
Razduhev was squinting through his wire-rimmed spectacles in the late evening sunlight as he peered about him in all four directions in turn. Once his eyes seemed to look directly into the room as the lens caught him scanning the windows of the house. Ketterman folded his arms, settled himself comfortably with his back against the wall beside the cabinet, and waited. Yang stared at the screen transfixed.
‘Sign and thumbprint the Ninth Folio, Comrade, and I’ll run down straight away and show it to your fraternal Marxist ally.’ Ketterman smiled jocularly again. ‘It’s a life-saver, don’t you see? Once the Ninth Folio is authenticated by you, the other eight are invalidated—even if they kill you! Think of it as your life warrant. You can copy it out in your own handwriting later to do the job properly—after that socialist imperialist jackal down there has been sent away with his tail between his legs.’
‘These pictures are a trick! I still refuse.’
Ketterman shrugged. ‘Okay. You have a free right to choose in a democratic country, Comrade—and you’ve chosen wisely. You’re free to go right away.’ He eased himself away from the wall and strode across to the window. He opened it and spoke loudly to the black guard. ‘Okay fellah, stand down now—and tell all the other security guards to disperse immediately. Only the medical staff need stay on. And go tell Razduhev I’ll be right down to talk to him about Comrade Yang.’
He closed the window and stood gazing out abstractedly across the sunlit lawns for a moment. ‘This is a private clinic, and of course visitors are allowed any time day or night—no embargoes.’ He was speaking out towards the gardens, his back to Yang. ‘Really concerned friends can use the fire escape as a direct means of entry, even after dark.’ He turned and pointed to the screen on which the black guard could now be seen crossing the Street to talk to Razduhev. A group of half a dozen broad-shouldered young men followed him out from the house and sauntered away along 34th Street. Ketterman watched the screen intently as Razduhev and the black man exchanged a few wary words. ‘You see, Comrade, it’s no trick.’ He gathered up the document case and walked over to the bed. Slowly he took out a pen and inserted it in Yang’s right hand. After a final glance round at the screen he smoothed the pink folio out on the face of the document case and held it at a convenient height in front of Yang’s chest.
The Chinese hesitated for a whole minute. Then he signed both copies, without looking up. Ketterman removed the pen smoothly from Yang’s hand, then dipped into the document case again and drew out an ink pad. He opened its lid and pressed it against the unprotesting thumb of the Chinese. Then he held the case under the folios once more while Yang impressed his print on the bottom right hand corner of each copy of the Ninth folio. Ketterman inspected both documents minutely in turn then replaced them in the case and hurried out. A minute later he appeared on the grey screen walking towards Razduhev. The camera moved into another telephoto close—up and
Yang saw what appeared to be anger contorting Razduhev’s features as he scanned the paper Ketterman had thrust into his hand. He saw the American laugh and punch the Russian lightly on the arm. Then be walked back towards the house, looking up into the camera and grinning hugely.
Razduhev climbed angrily back into the car which immediately shot away out of the picture, leaving the intersection quiet and still once more. A minute later the black guard re-appeared on the fire-escape outside the window and dropped into a squatting position, surveying the gardens below, as before. Almost at the same moment Harvey Ketterman re-entered the room. He went directly to the chiffonier and switched off the dosed-circuit picture of the street outside. He put the Handel cassette back into its slot in the tape deck and immediately the soothing strains of the sixth Concerto Grosso swelled gently from the concealed speakers. The same switch activated another concealed tape machine hidden behind a panel beneath the headboard of the bed and Ketterman picked up the chair again, swung it round and sat down resting his chin and elbows along its back, smiling genially at Yang.
‘Okay Comrade, so much for the lies—now let’s hear what really happened on the Trident. And perhaps as a bonus you’d like to tell me the truth about this new “plot” to kill Chairman Mao. If it’s really good we’ll see what we can do about finding you a new identity and a new life in the land of the free.’
WASHINGTON, Friday—American intelligence experts today expressed strong doubts that Marshall Lin Piao died in an air crash in Mongolia. The belief here was that he either died of natural causes while imprisoned or was shot trying to escape.
