The Mandarin Cypher

by Adam Hall

  'D'you have a room facing the beach?'

  At the Golden Sands the focus of social life would be on the beach, at the poolside and along the two lower terraces.

  'I will see,' he said, looking a little worried that he might have to disappoint me, but with only half a dozen cars down there and the terraces deserted I had an idea things might turn out all right. 'We can offer you this one, sir, if it's just for one night.'

  Room 27, second floor, view taking in the jetty. The Hong Kong life-style was maritime and there could be as much traffic to and from the hotel by sea as by road. I stayed in the room for less than half a minute to check security points and then went across to the terrace bar at the front, because you could watch the road from here and anyone arriving by boat would take the lantern-lit magnolia walk past the end of the building, coming around to the entrance.

  Small girls in glowing cheongsams, their feet making no sound.

  'No,' I said. 'Indian tonic.'

  There was a phone and I started work: ten rings for Jade Imperial Mansion and then the rounds, beginning with the ones in her known pattern - the Bayside Club, the Danshaku, Gaddi's, the Eagle's Nest.

  Even from the front of the building you could hear the noise of the power boats, and I kept one ear open in case any of them came across to the jetty. Two cars arrived: two couples, their voices floating up through the dusk, way to come, I know, but Felicity said it was a simply fabulous place for fish, headlights moving along the main road through Pok Fu Lam.

  'Yes, I think table reserved in name Tewson.'

  The Harbour Room. A hit and a miss, because I was here, not there.

  'For tonight?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'What time?'

  'I think - excuse me. Lady cancel table.'

  'She what?'

  'Lady cancel table. Not come tonight.'

  Hugo's, the Man Wha, the Tai Pan Grill, trying Kowloon now as well as the Island, no go, every time a negative, trying the Miramar as the low grey Jensen came round the curve of the drive and parked under the row of lanterns.

  She was alone.

  19.07.

  Small neat steps that would have left footprints in a dead straight line, not turning her head as she came towards the doors, not looking upwards. I had a cover line if she saw me here but it might be dangerous, better she didn't see me, turquoise tonight, a discreet shower of sequins, her midriff bare, where the mole was, though I couldn't see it from here. The Honda arrived within ninety seconds and although the driver didn't get out I could see it was the short Chinese, the one I'd taken to the Mauritius Hotel. A whiff of exhaust gas came on the air.

  I went to the top of the double staircase and looked down. Not every word was distinct but there wasn't any delay at the desk: the room had been reserved. The boy was taking her to the lift, her short hair bright as she passed below the lamps. It stopped at this floor and I was in my room when they came past, a breath of something by Faberge, she'd told me she always seemed to go for the expensive ones, she didn't know why.

  She wandered, for the next half an hour, among the few people who had moved on to the lower terrace, not speaking to any of them, not looking anywhere in particular but sometimes at the sea, drinking three vodkas in a row-twice going along the lantern path under the magnolias, so that I had to use the binoculars to keep her in sight among the shadows there. Then she got fed up and came back, her steps quicker and her bag swinging, and sat at one of the tables not far below my windows, clasping her bare arms and swinging one foot all the time, now and then swatting at insects.

  Taking calculated intervals I got out the map from the briefing material and spread it on the bed, looking at it for half a minute in every five, Directorate of Overseas Surveys Series L882, Sheet 20, Hong Kong 1:25,000, Cape D'Aguilar (Hok Tsui) Area, Grid Zone Designation 50Q. Very close to Grid Ref. 2:14-24:60, roughly in the centre of Tai Tam Bay, Macklin or Egerton or someone had put a red cross: Tewson drowned from boat here. Peripheral features: Tai Tam Village, prison at Tung Tau Wan, Lo Chau Island, Turtle Cove Beach. A second reference, blue cross: Slipway where Tewson hired boat. Also Witness 3 and 4. This was 1,650 yards from the centre of the bay where the red cross had been marked. Witnesses 3 and 4 were two of the Chinese fishermen who had seen Tewson in trouble. A green cross marked the point on Turtle Cove Beach where Tewson's papers had been washed up later. Submarine contours gave only 5 fathoms within a 100 yards of the shore near the slipway, 10 fathoms for the general bay area.

  She hadn't moved.

  The report was attached to the map. Approximately twelve noon Tewson hires boat from Mr. T'sai, game weight tackle. Alone on board as before.

  There were some bits about Tewson's being noticed by several people: coastguards, narcotics officers, the crews of fishing junks.

  Approximately 16.00 hours several others, including the four key witnesses, see Tewson in 'some kind of difficulty'. Mr. Fu Jen-chang sees boat rocking, flurries in water (normal surface conditions smooth throughout bay), 'silvery flashes on surface'. Mr. Yung Lung-kwei, fisherman on junk within 100 yards of Tewson's boat, sees him 'struggling' with what appeared to be a fish, just prior to his overbalancing and falling in. Another witness — A woman laughed suddenly below and I went to the window, thinking it might have been Nora, but she hadn't moved, and no one was talking to her. From here she looked small and somehow significantly alone, untouchable, sitting there with her secrets, trying to drink some of them away. I wondered where she'd been, that day: whether she'd been on the slipway watching the distant blob of the boat when her husband had struggled with his fish, and lost. I wondered whether she had known it was going to happen, this event that had brought so much change in her fortunes.

  There were still beats out on the channel, their lights making patterns across the still water; and one of them was swinging in a curve towards the jetty, the throb of its motors fading to a murmur. It was the fifth I'd counted since Nora had gone out to the terrace, and three of them had left their mooring again. She'd watched each of them as they'd arrived, and she was watching this one, not leaving the table but keeping her small head angled attentively.

  I picked up the 7 X 50's again and focused them on the jetty.

  The glow of the lanterns left shadows, and I could have seen better by the more diffuse light of the moon that was just rising. A small group of men, one of them remaining with the launch as the others began moving towards the building. The ; woman's laugh came again from below but I didn't look away. There were four of them, three wearing white shirts or jackets. i As I went on adjusting the focus I saw that two of them hung back a little. As they came under the terrace lights the details were immediately clearer: three Chinese and a European, two of the Chinese hanging back quite a few yards (big men, possibly bodyguards), the other Chinese walking side by side with the European, who wore some kind of bush jacket and a pair of sunglasses.

  I got this man into sharp focus and studied his face for a moment and then put the binoculars down as he saw someone and gave an awkward little wave of his hand. Nora had left her table, smoothing down her dress and going to greet the two men, the Chinese holding back a pace, the two others remaining by the pagoda some dozen yards away. The European embraced Nora, kissing her on the cheek, a shade embarrassed, Nora a shade cool and breaking away rather soon, perhaps because they'd all kept her waiting for nearly an hour.

  I shut the window quietly and went to the phone.

  A girl answered and sweat broke out on me at once because we were going to have to work very fast: Mandarin had shifted gear again, kicking hard into phase three, and we had to go with it.

  'He come,' the girl said.

  Briefing said the arrangement was that Chiang would remain on close call continuous throughout this operation but that didn't mean he could go and — 'Yes?'

  Goose, gold, so forth.

  'For London, urgent, immediate, coded numerals.'

  He didn't answer. Getting his pad.

  '
Ready?'

  'Yes.'

  I gave it to him in Cantonese: there didn't have to be any mistakes. There were two signals but the first was the most urgent.

  'Saam - yat - baat - saam,' extended phase digits, 'Leong say - leong - sup - saam,' reverse transfers for the sake of speed, 'Yat - look - baat,' throw in a suffix group of three fives repeated to cancel any inadvertent alert in case he left an omission in the blanks. 'Read back.'

  He was quicker in his own tongue, only just giving me time to phrase it mentally in English, but he'd got it all right, first go:

  Need director fully urgent. Tewson alive.

  Chapter Seven

  OVERKILL

  The sea was dead calm, a flat blue shimmer of light reaching to the hills of Lamma Island, half seen through the haze. The water near my feet lapped softly across the big smooth stones, swirling around the piles of the breakwater. It was nearly dawn.

  The man under the looking-glass tree hadn't moved.

  I put the binoculars up again. The jetty of the Golden Sands Hotel was half a mile away, and the launch was still there. A figure was moving about on it, opening the engine hatch and half disappearing, and I thought if he was going to start it up it would mean they'd be leaving soon and there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing.

  Relax. You've asked for the impossible so don't start bellyaching because it's not going to happen.

  Five minutes later the island across the channel became suffused with a rose light, and the man under the looking-glass tree lifted his arms, beginning the movements of tai chi chuan. He was about sixty or seventy yards from where I stood, and hadn't yet seen me.

  Part of my frustration was due to the fact that nothing apparent had happened since I'd sent the two signals last night. Chiang had got them off before 20.15 hours and I'd sweated it out till midnight to give Egerton time. Then I rang Chiang again.

  Will make attempt, London had said. Chiang told me the signal had come in at 21.13 hours. That was pretty fast considering the action they'd had to take. My first request wouldn't have been any problem: Macklin had told me during field briefing that they'd probably fly someone in from Pekin to direct me in the field, and he was probably here already, holed up with all those bloody snakes and asking Chiang where the hell I'd gone. It was my second request that would have shaken them up a bit: I'd asked for a high speed power boat to make rendezvous with me at this precise point, the twelve-pile breakwater half a mile north of the Golden Sands Hotel in Telegraph Bay, soonest possible, essential before dawn.

  London was six thousand miles away and I didn't know how they were going to do it. I just knew they had to.

  If Egerton hadn't played it so close to the chest they could have put a director into Hong Kong with me and there wouldn't have been any trouble: he would have tickled up the Navy or a private small-boat fleet operator and I would have been on board by now, that's what a director in the field is for. Sometimes Egerton is too clever by half.

  The man under the looking-glass tree was bending and swaying, bringing his spirit into harmony with the rhythm of the universe as the rose light turned gradually to gold on the hills of Lamma.

  Binocs: nobody moving anywhere outside the building itself, two Chinese boys trying to get a sail up near the end of the jetty, could only be to air it, there wasn't any wind. The man on the launch was shutting the engine hatch and in a few seconds I heard the slight thump of the timber. A minute later the throb of the engine began.

  Fatalism now necessary. Either London would do something in time and we'd still have a mission or London would be too late and we wouldn't. Nothing I could do.

  Of course I wasn't certain it had been Tewson, the European in the bush jacket and sunglasses. But he'd looked like the photographs - the one in my briefing file and the one in the Hong Kong Standard, and his greeting of Nora and her response had been precisely in character with what I knew of their relationship. They'd been meeting, probably, for the first time since Flower had tagged her to the Golden Sands, and they'd met in the presence of strangers, or at least alien acquaintances. They'd kissed, but not like lovers: it had been a gesture of almost anything but love-habit, convention, the need to demonstrate a token affection, leaving nothing for the neighbours to say.

  I wasn't sure it was Tewson but I'd bet on it because the whole thing fitted in with her attitudes towards me and her behaviour at Jade Imperial: as a young widow released from a sexless marriage her eagerness, archness and inexperience had been predictable, but it hadn't explained her sense of guilt and intrigue. She wasn't just having an affair: it was an extra-marital affaire.

  Hindsight makes you look a fool: I should have known two nights ago that Tewson was alive.

  The engine of the launch was still running and I lifted the 7X50's again, not wanting to, making myself, because if Tewson put to sea and I couldn't follow and find out where he went, the only lead would be Nora again and she'd have to be worked on and that would mean asking London for one of the psychos and he'd have to come all the way out - unless they could rake one up from the embassies or consulates in Pekin or Taipei or Tokyo - and start from scratch and it could take weeks to break her down and get what he wanted without her knowing. And all I'd get out of it was a free ride home and a stomachful of adrenalin, what the hell was London doing, I didn't want the bloody Guards called out, I just wanted a boat, for Christ's sake, and I wanted it now.

  It wouldn't have made much difference if I'd used speech code instead of cypher: it would have saved maybe a few minutes but no more than that because C and C were open twenty-four hours and there'd only been two signals to unzip and besides, it would have been highly dangerous. They picked the flower was perfectly safe because even if it was intercepted and its meaning understood, it didn't say anything they didn't already know. It was a whole lot different asking for a director to come out to the field: it not only meant the operator had got hold of something big enough to need direction, but that he was going to try for immediate penetration, a tacit declaration of war that would bring in their troops - and their supply line was a few miles long, from here to the South China coast, with ours having to stretch half across the globe.

  The second signal, ordering a boat and specifying the rdv, couldn't have gone in any other way but cypher: it was fully urgent and strictly hush and if the opposition had intercepted and decyphered it they'd have just sent someone down here to the twelve-pile breakwater half a mile north of the Golden Sands Hotel in Telegraph Bay with orders to tread all over my face.

  The man had finished his calisthenics under the looking-glass tree and was walking slowly up the beach to his fishing boat. I wasn't worried about him: he could have tagged me here from the hotel and semaphored the entire Book of Mao if he'd wanted to, but he hadn't. His movements had been genuine tai chi chuan and I'd made certain that no one was tagging me when I'd come down here. The immediate field was totally secure.

  There was movement now and I refocused: two figures detaching themselves from the edge of the building, one white, one darker, indistinct because the line of magnolias was in the way. More movement, this time on the far side of the pagoda: two figures again, both white, the same stature, their motion coordinated. A slight burst of noise from the launch as the seaman cleared the cylinders.

  The darker figure stopped, looking up at one of the first-floor windows, and even at this distance and with no depth of field I could see his awkwardness as he waved his hand. Then they were filing down to the jetty, forming the same kind of procession I'd seen last night.

  I estimated that Mandarin had another two minutes to run.

  London was six thousand miles away but they'd got a radio hadn't they, got a telephone for Christ sake, this wasn't an alien state, it was a Crown Colony and they could pull some rank, couldn't they, and what the hell was the Minister doing about this, the one they were so bloody proud of because he could cut through the red tape in ten seconds flat, hadn't anyone picked up the blower and got him off the pot?
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  Sweating like a pig.

  The seaman was in the stern, handing his party aboard, and the launch heeled slightly to their weight. Two of the figures were going into the cabin, one of them the man in the bush jacket, George Henry Tewson, the man from London, dead on paper, killed off by bought witnesses at the dictates of clandestine necessity, the man at the centre of Mandarin, alive and well and vanishing from sight as the stern went down and the exhaust note bubbled to a roar. Within thirty seconds the launch was a small indistinct blob half lost in the morning haze, and I lowered the binoculars.

  Mission aborted. Am returning to London.

  Because there wasn't anything else I could do. Tewson was I being released periodically on some kind of parole and he might come here again but it wouldn't be for another week, unless they changed the pattern. I'd already got as close to Nora as I could without getting killed and if I stayed in Hong Kong for another week I wouldn't have time to do anything but keep out of their way and hope to stay alive: but that wasn't what I was here for. All London could do was send one of their tame mind-benders to work on Nora Tewson and by the time he'd produced results I'd be somewhere else and stuck into a different jumble sale - Helsinki, if I could twist their arm, there was a ministry scandal blowing up and we all knew it was Nikolai again and we'd have to stop him. Aware, at the edge of my thoughts, that the sound of the launch remained steady, even though it was on the horizon now. They were going to go straight through the roof in London because they hated a mission to abort, it meant someone had blundered. I supposed it was something to do with the acoustic properties of the East Lamma Channel, there was an echo coming back from the hills over there, making it seem that the launch was stationary at full speed. So what did we do, we lost yet another of those poor little wretches they always put in the field too early and we had all the paper off the wall at the Hong Kong Cathay and we ran out of toothpaste. London was going to fire Egerton from a cannon every Tuesday at the Horse Guards Parade for as long as they could find anything to put back in the barrel. But the direction of the sound had altered too, and I turned my head.