The Mandarin Cypher q-6

by Adam Hall

  I'd hired a dark grey station wagon from Fleetway so that I could lay the air tanks flat. I stowed the gear and found the place where they sold chains and noted the place where they could give me a recharge if I needed one and bought some black adhesive tape and reached the Harbour Hotel on the north shore of the island by noon. That was where Ferris had booked me in.

  There was already a message for Mr Wing: please call TWA about my reservation. I used the phone in my room and we listened for bugs and then he went straight into speech code, switching to cypher where he had to and rattling off the numerals. The code was standard operational for this date, Far East theatre, listed arbitrary with no mnemonics: October for briefing, Monday for rendezvous, Gin-rummy north east, yellow left hand, so forth. I went into the same pitch and thought Christ, he's got something moving.

  'I want you for briefing,' he said.

  'When?'

  '20.00 hours.'

  'Where?'

  He gave the directions: there was a junk tied up in the Causeway Bay typhoon anchorage, the August Moon, the seventh along from the base of the north-east breakwater, left-hand side of the utilities stanchion.

  'What's the flap?' I asked him.

  'There's no flap. I'm sending you out to the rig, that's all.'

  'When?'

  'Midnight tonight.'

  I slept six hours in Room 31 at the Harbour Hotel with traps at the door and the window and then got up and showered and took the stuff out of the canvas case and tried on the wet suit again and tested the mask, putting talc on the fins and taping the safety marker to black it out: they might just as well have painted a bull's-eye on the back of the suit, bang on the tenth vertebra.

  19.00

  It was only a ten-minute run to the typhoon anchorage, allow another five to park the station wagon with decent security and find the August Moon. That gave me forty-five minutes to spare and I didn't like it: Ferris must have got a panic signal from London with orders to arrange immediate access and put his executive into the target zone, Bureau signals phrasing right out of the book. It meant they wanted the ferret thrown into the sea. That was all right: the thing I didn't like was having to hang around for three-quarters of an hour before I could even get to the briefing and find out what kind of access Ferris had fixed up and what kind of communications we were going to use and what kind of chance there was of my coming out of that particular target zone alive.

  The oil rig stood in international waters but it was Chinese territory and at a rough guess I'd put its defence armament at about the same strength as a pocket battleship.

  I knew from earlier missions that Ferris was terribly fast and it was possible they'd picked him to field-direct this operation because they knew we might have to hurry at any given phase or at some precise phase they'd been able to anticipate in the initial planning. They might have shot him out to Pekin as a cultural attache or some kind of Embassy stooge the minute they'd seen Mandarin coming up on the agenda. I began wishing I knew a bit more about this job and that was a perfectly normal reactio

  n at forty-four minutes to final briefing: the blood starts moving a few degrees quicker and the nerves start exchanging energy a few microseconds closer to optimum speed and you start wondering why the hell those zipper-lipped bastards in London couldn't have told you a bit more or preferably a bloody sight more about the operation they'd decided to pitch you into — in this case by Egerton's thrice-accursed subterfuge.

  Relax.

  I picked up the phone and gave it ten rings and put it down again and that was a perfectly normal reaction too at forty-three minutes to final briefing: the closer you move to potential death the more you think about women. Poor little bitch, we'd got her hormones moving again after all that time and all she was going to get at the El Caliph at eight o'clock tonight was a bunch of gardenias and all I was going to get was the shakes.

  Phone.

  19.11.

  Ferris.

  'London wants to send a shield.'

  'Oh for Christ sake, Ferris, be your age.' We were using cypher and all I could give him was the circumscribed phrase: Instructions refused. But I got what I meant into the tone. Trust those bloody people in London to get you to the brink and then pull you back while they sent someone out to hold your hand.

  'They're postponing the operation twenty-four hours,' Ferris told me, 'while they fly someone in from Taiwan. He's due to-'

  'Ferris.'

  He waited.

  'You let those pox-ridden bastards try sticking a shield on to me and as far as I'm concerned they can screw this mission and find another ferret. You know me and you know I mean that. I'm going in solo repeat solo or not at all.'

  Difficult finding the right cypher phrases, request no support, am withdrawing from mission, like trying to blow someone's head off in a foreign language without knowing all the pronouns, but some of it I put across in straight English, pox-ridden, so forth, because it wouldn't give anything away.

  'I think they're right,' Ferris said reasonably.

  I gave it five seconds because you don't get as far as the final briefing phase and chuck the whole thing in your director's face without another thought. This wasn't Egerton, or not totally: his chief talent was in knowing precisely what a given operator could do and how he was best able to do it. We all have our little ways and Heppinstall won't work properly without a shield because he's really a slide-rule and requires peace of mind to do what he has to do, and while he's trying to feel his way in to the complex centre of some sophisticated shadow-summit configuration or whatever he's doing he likes to be free to concentrate while his shield keeps the competition away till he runs out of ammunition. Styles won't operate without a shield because he's shit-scared and London keeps a whole regiment standing by to support him through a mission because they know he's sensitive and brilliant and highly successful so long as he can keep his sphincter muscles under control.

  I have to work solo because for me there has to be a risk. This isn't because I like a a cheap thrill but because I need the stimulation of constant hazard to whip up the nerves and galvanize the organism to the pitch where I can do things I couldn't do otherwise. If I had to rely on other people to keep me alive I'd get sloppy and make mistakes and that can be just as fatal as if you haven't got a shield at all, look at that poor bastard Crowther — I thought he was there, his face puckered like a child's and his eyes watching me as we swayed along in the ambulance, I thought he was there, the last thing he ever said and I've never told anyone because he meant he thought Jones was there, shielding his back while he went in and found he couldn't get out again till they dropped him over the railway bridge for someone to find, blown and cleaned out and dying while Jones was waiting for him in Lyons Corner House and stuffing himself on buns, a question of a missed rendezvous, that was all, a little misunderstanding at a critical time, the tears running down Crowther's face as he closed his eyes and gave it up — frustration, not self-pity or anything, he didn't leave anyone who loved him — frustration because he'd completed the access and was ready to strike and get out again, another beautiful job, beautifully timed, how does he do it, we all used to say.

  Don't you give me Jones. Or anyone.

  'Ferris,' I said, 'if you're not prepared to direct me without a shield you'd better say so now.'

  After a bit he said plaintively: 'It's London, old boy.'

  'London knows bloody well I always work solo.'

  'It's because it's underwater,' he said.

  'Tell them they can pull me out, then. Send someone else in.'

  There was a short silence, then he said: 'Don't go away.'

  I put the phone back and left an imprint of sweat on it and walked up and down, feeling soured and deceived and afraid because they could have settled this question earlier: Ferris had his access worked out, or he wouldn't have called me in for final briefing, and he couldn't have worked out his access before he'd signalled his plans. That was when they should have said all right b
ut if it's underwater we're going to insist on a shield. But they'd had second thoughts and I didn't like that: it meant they were worried.

  19.13.

  Ferris couldn't have left the safe-house yet because he was still in signals with Control. There hadn't been time for him to rig up a set of his own on the junk or somewhere because he'd need to make directional tests and check out the interference patterns and he wasn't a radio man. And he wasn't signalling through Chiang; the present traffic was too sensitive. So even if we could get London to agree, it was going to take a lot of time and we were going to miss the 20.00 hours rdv and arrive late for the midnight jump and it was giving me the sweats because if ever there's — a time during a mission when you want everything to run like clockwork it's when you're down for final briefing and taking up the slack on your nerves so you'll be ready to do what you have to do, wherever it is and wherever it's going to take you.

  Ferrets have feelings.

  The phone didn't ring for twenty-five minutes and I spent the interval in a limbo, not wanting to do anything intelligent like checking over the briefing material because the whole thing could have gone dead and cold by now, very much wanting to phone Ferris and tell him to send a final signal: Executive withdraws from mission. But there wouldn't be any point because they'd know I'd started to go gently round the bend. I'd never withdrawn from a mission even when Loman was running me, even when the bastards booted me into Tunis to pick up an operation already half wrecked and with two top-echelon ferrets out of the running, one dead and one blown before we'd even found access. That's why they shanghaied me into these stinking rotten jobs, because they knew no one else would take them and they knew I wouldn't back out once I'd Phone.

  19.38.

  No bugs.

  'London,' he said, 'is going to compromise. You don't get a shield but they're sending in a reserve.'

  I thought about this for so long that he had to ask if I was still on the line. I said:

  'All right. But keep him out of my way.'

  'I told them that's what you'd want.'

  'You didn't tell them anything they didn't know.'

  He said there was time to. keep our rendezvous and I said that was a bit of luck and rang off before

  I could say anything else: because you don't feel relieved when the pressure comes off, you feel like murder. It's something to do with the organism using the quickest way to get rid of the shock and I was quite happy about that, spending the next three minutes murdering half the directors in the Bureau very slowly and with an awful lot of screaming as the volts came on. While this was happening I put the gear back into the canvas bag and shoved it into the wardrobe with the track suit and the other stuff and rigged entry traps and went down to the station wagon sixty seconds ahead of schedule.

  I didn't object to a reserve. They were taking a risk, I knew that. Since my signal reporting that Tewson was alive they'd been logically assuming he was either in Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland, where I could have got to him through the normal penetration channels. Ferris had then shaken them by reporting that he was in fact under guard in what amounted to a maximum security block entirely surrounded by water and he'd shaken them a second time when he'd told them he planned to send me in solo.

  He knew it was the only thing he could do. In the specific circumstances of this mission at this phase he knew it was the only possible access to the target zone: not by a fleet of ships or an airborne regiment, but by one man, alone. And he knew we couldn't use a shield because this one man would himself become a target, and we didn't want to double its size. Ferris had told me he thought London was right because he wanted to see if I had any doubts. He'd seen I hadn't, and- he'd got into signals again and persuaded Control to lay off.

  A reserve was all right. A shield would have followed me about and tried to keep me alive, and got in my bloody way, but a reserve would be told to stand off and do nothing; unless I was blown or killed. Then he'd move in. That was all right.

  I drove steadily. The lights had come on in the dusk an hour ago and now they were bright, the whole of the Kowloon shoreline glittering across the night-black harbour where the shipping floated like patches of fire that had broken away from the land. The traffic was easing off towards Causeway Bay, but I was taking the narrower streets, doubling sometimes to check, finding it clear.

  Waiting at a set of lights, it occurred to me that London must be terribly nervous, wanting to send in a reserve. People like Egerton realize the whole thing isn't a chess game: they know the shadow executive comes under strain the minute the mission starts running, and he's not expected to feel reassured if they send a man out to sit like a vulture on a tree while he's doing his best to stay alive and bring home a winner if he can. Normally London never tells you: they might tell the director in the field but he doesn't necessarily pass it on. Well, they could screw themselves.

  There were people milling around the car, trying to swarm across the road before the lights changed, and a Boeing went sloping weightlessly down the night sky towards Kai Tak on the other side of the harbour. Maybe they'd told me about the reserve because London was narked about my refusing a shield, and Ferris wanted me to know what Control's thinking was: he was very good about that, and tried not to keep you in the dark even if it meant telling you something you didn't want to know. There was no time to think about it anyway, because they were holding the gun hard against my left temple and I couldn't even turn my head to see who it was.

  Chapter Ten: MIME

  The Boeing drifted lower, its port light flicking on and off as it vanished behind the buildings and reappeared again, its attitude slightly nose-up as it settled along its flight path. Most of the people milling across the road were Chinese, coming up from one of the ferry piers, but there were also a couple of American sailors and a group of Japanese tourists and an airline steward, Royal Dutch. The lights were still red.

  Not many things in this scene were registering on a conscious level because they weren't significant, except for the lights. When the lights changed to green I'd have to drive off. The forebrain was very active, triggered by the sensation of pressure against the temple. Before we do anything physically we go through the performance mentally, as an automatic projection of intention to find out if it's really a good idea. If we think it is, the motor nerves are fired and the muscles ordered. There's still time to cancel the whole thing halfway or at any other stage: the freedom of choice is infinitely variable. But it's normally better to go right through with the intention once we're committed, because we've seen it happen mentally and we're fairly confident it's going to work: otherwise we wouldn't have put it into action.

  There didn't seem a lot I could do. A mass of data was streaming in from the sensory systems and it had to be computed before anything useful could be done. Movement was restricted: with the people thronging in front of the station wagon I couldn't drive off. This was one of the countless combinations presenting themselves for review: a strike upwards with the right arm and a stab downwards with the right foot, leaving it for the sudden vacuum in the induction manifold to kick the automatic shift into low and send thrust into the final drive. Most of the combinations involved both movable components: man and machine. This one got an instant negative because I couldn't drive through the people and because the computing element of the cortex didn't estimate sufficient time for the right-arm action to hit the gun away before it was fired.

  I assumed it was a gun but that was all it was: an assumption. Electrical impulse was pouring data into the brain and there was so much to handle that normal thought was ceding the field to imagination and instinct, and it wasn't logical to imagine they were pressing a fountain pen to my head, or a lipstick case. The image of a face flickered for one microsecond among all the others, the memory plundering its archives as a contribution to the welfare of the organism. It was a smooth round face, always rather sulky until you knew the man, Heppinstall's face, in my mind for this instant because we'd laid bets
one day, the three of us (Stoner was the other), on whether it was possible to tell the calibre of a gun pressed to the back of the neck. We used several guns, alarming the fellow in Firearms because we weren't on duty at the time, and Stoner lost his money because he said one of them was a.38 and it was really the end of a scent bottle.

  The lights went green.

  A rickshaw got on the move, the other side of the station wagon, the man between the shafts butting his way through the stragglers. Two girls ran giggling to the crowded pavement, hobbled by their cheongsams, and on the far side of the intersection a bus driver began tapping his horn as he moved slowly forward. No one was taking any notice of what was happening around them: at this hour they were hurrying into the town from the ferries or along to the restaurants and.brothels and bars of the Wanchai district or eastwards to the hotels and supper clubs and theatres of Causeway Bay. A few were strolling, going where their fancy took them: this was their first sight of Hong Kong by night and they circled like moths.

  He was a professional.

  Quite a lot of the data concerned this man. Memory suggested he was Chinese because the competition on this operation was Chinese, and sensory perception tended to confirm this: he smelt of incense and the faint distorted image in the chrome strip of the window was Oriental. The pressure against my head was steady and constant and I knew he was a professional because he was speaking to me and laughing a little, presenting the image of someone talking to a friend through the window of his car, even though he realized it was hardly necessary when the passers-by were so preoccupied.

  The station wagon swayed an inch as the rear door was pulled open on the far side. As far as I could tell there was only one man getting in. Then the front passenger door came open and someone else got in and slammed the door and pushed the muzzle hard against my left side, below the rib-cage. The taxi in the mirror began honking because the lights had changed a few seconds ago, but we wouldn't be long now because the man who had been talking and laughing to me took his gun away and got into the back, leaning forward on the edge of the seat to talk again, bringing the gun to the nape of my neck and covering it with his left hand: I could feel the warmth of his little finger just above the muzzle.