Noble House

by James Clavell

  He stared at her, keeping his agony for her bottled. His heart was grinding in his chest and he had eight plans for her and he thought, Oh Christ poor Kathy! “Yes. Well, thank God you can rest all you want,” he said, keeping his voice calm like hers. “Do you mind if I talk to Tooley?”

  “I think that would be all right. There’s no need to be alarmed, Ian. He said I’d be all right if I took care of myself, and I told him I’d be ever so good so he needn’t have any worries on that score.” Kathy was surprised that her voice was calm and her hands and fingers rested in her lap so easily, betraying none of the horror she felt within. She could almost feel the disease bugs or microbes or viruses seeping through her system, feeding on her nerves, eating them away oh so slowly, second by second hour by hour until there would be more tingling and more numbness in her fingers and her toes, then her wrists and ankles and legs and and and and and oh Jesus Christ God almighty …

  She took a little tissue out of her purse and gently dabbed beside her nose and forehead. “It’s awfully humid today, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Kathy, why is it so sudden?”

  “Well it isn’t dear, not really. They just couldn’t diagnose it. That’s what all the tests were for.” It had begun as a slight dizziness and headaches about six months ago. She’d noticed it most when she was playing golf. She would be standing over her ball, steadying herself, but her eyes would go dizzy and she could not focus and the ball would split and become two and three and two again and they would never stay still. Andrew had laughed and told her to see an optician. But it wasn’t glasses, and aspirins did not help, nor stronger pills. Then dear old Tooley, their family doctor forever, had sent her to Matilda Hospital on the Peak for tests and more tests and brain scans in case there was a tumor but they had shown nothing, nor had all the other tests. Only the awful spinal tap gave a clue. Other tests confirmed it. Yesterday. Oh sweet Jesus was it only yesterday they condemned me to the wheelchair, at length to become a helpless slobbering thing?

  “You’ve told Andrew?”

  “No dear,” she said, pulled once more back from the brink. “I haven’t told him yet. I couldn’t, not yet. Poor dear Andrew does get into a tizzy so easily. I’ll tell him tonight. I couldn’t tell him before I told you. I had to tell you first. We always used to tell you everything first, didn’t we? Lechie, Scotty and I? You always used to know first….” She was remembering when they were all young, all the lovely happy times here in Hong Kong and in Ayr at Castle Avisyard, at their lovely old rambling house on the crest of the hill amid the heather, overlooking the sea—Christmas and Easter and the long summer holidays, she and Ian—and Lechie, the oldest, and Scott, her twin brother—such happy days when Father wasn’t there, all of them terrified of their father except Ian who was always their spokesman, always their protector, who always took the punishments—no supper tonight, and write five hundred times I will not argue anymore, a child’s place is to be seen and not heard—who took all the beatings and never complained. Oh poor Lechie and Scotty …

  “Oh Ian,” she said, her tears welling suddenly, “I’m so sorry.” Then she felt his arms wrap around her and she felt safe at last and the nightmare softened. But she knew it would never go away. Not now. Never. Nor would her brothers come back, except in her dreams, nor would her darling Johnny. “It’s all right, Ian,” she said through her tears. “It’s not for me, not me really. I was just thinking about Lechie and Scotty and home at Ayr when we were small, and my Johnny, and I was oh ever so sad for all of them….”

  Lechie was the first to die. Second Lieutenant, Highland Light Infantry. He was lost in 1940 in France. Nothing was ever found of him. One moment he had been there beside the road, and then he was gone, the air filled with acrid smoke from the barrage that the Nazi panzers had laid down on the little stone bridge over the stream on the way to Dunkirk. For all the war years they had all lived in the hope that Lechie was now a POW in some good prison camp—not one of those terrible ones. And after the war, the months of searching but never a sign, never a witness, not even the littlest sign and then they, the family, and at length Father had laid Lechie’s ghost to rest.

  Scott had been sixteen in ’39 and he’d gone to Canada for safety, there to finish schooling, and then, already a pilot, the day he was eighteen, in spite of Father’s howling protests, he had joined the Canadian Air Force, wanting blood vengeance for Lechie. And he had got his wings at once and joined a bomber squadron and had come over well in time for D Day. Gleefully he had blown many a town to pieces and many a city to pieces until February 14, 1945, now Squadron Leader, DFC and Bar, coming home from the supreme holocaust of Dresden, his Lancaster had been jumped by a Messerschmitt and though his copilot had brought the crippled plane to rest in England, Scotty was dead in the left seat.

  Kathy had been at his funeral and Ian had been there—in uniform, come home on leave from Chungking where he had been attached to Chiang Kai-shek’s air force after he was shot down and grounded. She had wept on Ian’s shoulder, wept for Lechie and wept for Scotty and wept for her Johnny. She was a widow then. Flight Lieutenant John Selkirk, DFC, another happy god of war, inviolate, invincible, had been blown out of the sky, torched out of the sky, the debris burning on the way to earth.

  Johnny had had no funeral. There was nothing to bury. Like Lechie. Just a telegram came. One for each of them.

  Oh Johnny my darling my darling my darling …

  “What an awful waste, Ian dear, all of them. And for what?”

  “I don’t know, little Kathy,” he said, still holding her. “I don’t know. And I don’t know why I made it and why they didn’t.”

  “Oh I’m ever so glad you did!” She gave him a little hug and gathered herself. Somehow she put away her sadness for all of them. Then she dried her tears, took out a small mirror and looked at herself. “God, I look a mess! Sorry.” His private bathroom was concealed behind a bookcase and she went there and repaired her makeup.

  When she came back he was still staring out of the window. “Andrew’s out of the office at the moment but the moment he comes back I’ll tell him,” he said.

  “Oh no dear, that’s my job. I must do that. I must. That’s only fair.” She smiled up at him and touched him. “I love you, Ian.”

  “I love you, Kathy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  4:55 P.M.:

  The cardboard box that the Werewolves had sent to Phillip Chen was on Roger Crosse’s desk. Beside the box was the ransom note, key ring, driver’s license, pen, even the crumpled pieces of torn newspaper that had been used for packing. The little plastic bag was there, and the mottled rag. Only its contents were missing.

  Everything had been tagged.

  Roger Crosse was alone in the room and he stared at the objects, fascinated. He picked up a piece of the newspaper. Each had been carefully smoothed out, most were tagged with a date and the name of the Chinese newspaper it had come from. He turned it over, seeking hidden information, a hidden clue, something that might have been missed. Finding nothing, he put it back neatly and leaned on his hands, lost in thought.

  Alan Medford Grant’s report was also on his desk, near the intercom. It was very quiet in the room. Small windows overlooked Wanchai and part of the harbor toward Glessing’s Point.

  His phone jangled. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Rosemont, CIA, and Mr. Langan, FBI, sir.”

  “Good.” Roger Crosse replaced his phone. He unlocked his top desk drawer and carefully put the AMG file on top of the decoded telex and relocked it. The middle drawer contained a high-quality tape recorder. He checked it and touched a hidden switch. Silently the reels began to turn. The intercom on his desk contained a powerful microphone. Satisfied, he relocked this drawer. Another hidden desk switch slid a bolt open on the door soundlessly. He got up and opened the door.

  “Hello, you two, please come in,” he said affably. He closed the door behind the two Americans and shook hands with them. Unnoticed, he slid the bolt home
again. “Take a seat. Tea?”

  “No thanks,” the CIA man said.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Both men were carrying manila envelopes. Rosemont opened his and took out a sheaf of good-quality eight-by-ten photos, clipped into two sections. “Here,” he said, passing over the top section.

  They were various shots of Voranski running across the wharf, on the streets of Kowloon, getting into and out of taxis, phoning, and many more of his Chinese assassins. One photograph showed the two Chinese leaving the phone booth with a clear glimpse of the crumpled body in the background.

  Only Crosse’s superb discipline kept him from showing astonishment, then blinding rage. “Good, very good,” he said gently, putting them on the desk, very conscious of the ones Rosemont had retained in his hand. “So?”

  Rosemont and Ed Langan frowned. “You were tailing him too?”

  “Of course,” Crosse said, lying with his marvelous sincerity. “My dear fellow, this is Hong Kong. But I do wish you’d let us do our job and not interfere.”

  “Rog, we, er, we don’t want to interfere, just want to backstop you.”

  “Perhaps we don’t need backstopping.” There was a sharpness to his voice now.

  “Sure.” Rosemont took out a cigarette and lit it. He was tall and thin with gray crew-cut hair and good features. His hands were strong, like all of him. “We know where the two killers’re holed up. We think we know,” he said. “One of our guys thinks he’s pegged them.”

  “How many men have you got watching the ship?”

  “Ten. Our guys didn’t notice any of yours tailing this one. The diversion almost spooked us too.”

  “Very dicey,” Crosse said agreeably, wondering what diversion.

  “Our guys never got to go through his pockets—we know he made two calls from the booth….” Rosemont noted Crosse’s eyes narrow slightly. That’s curious, he thought. Crosse didn’t know that. If he doesn’t know that, maybe his operators weren’t tailing the target either. Maybe he’s lying and the Commie was loose in Hong Kong until he was knifed. “We radioed a mug shot back home—we’ll get a call back fast. Who was he?”

  “His papers said, Igor Voranski, seaman first class, Soviet merchant marine.”

  “You have a file on him, Rog?”

  “It’s rather unusual for you two to call together, isn’t it? I mean, in the movies, we’re always led to believe the FBI and CIA are always at odds.”

  Ed Langan smiled. “Sure we are—like you and MI-5—like the KGB, GRU and fifty other Soviet operations. But sometimes our cases cross—we’re internal U.S., Stan’s external, but we’re both out for the same thing: security. We thought … we’re asking if we could all cooperate. This could be a big one, and we’re … Stan and I’re out of our depth.”

  “That’s right,” Rosemont said, not believing it.

  “All right,” Crosse said, needing their information. “But you first.”

  Rosemont sighed. “Okay, Rog. We’ve had a buzz for some time there’s something hotting up in Hong Kong—we don’t know what—but it sure as hell’s got tie-ins to the States. I figure the AMG file’s the link. Lookit: take Banastasio—he’s Mafia. Big-time. Narcotics, the lot. Now take Bartlett and the guns. Guns—”

  “Is Bartlett tied into Banastasio?”

  “We’re not sure. We’re checking. We are sure the guns were put aboard in L.A.—Los Angeles—where the airplane’s based. Guns! Guns, narcotics and our growing interest in Vietnam. Where do narcotics come from? The Golden Triangle. Vietnam, Laos and the Yunnan Province of China. Now we’re into Vietnam and—”

  “Yes, and you’re ill-advised to be there, old chum—I’ve pointed that out fifty times.”

  “We don’t make policy, Rog, any more than you do. Next: Our nuclear carrier’s here and the goddamn Sovetsky Ivanov arrives last night. That’s too convenient, maybe the leak came from here. Then Ed tips you off and we get AMG’s wild-assed letters from London and now there’s Sevrin! Turns out the KGB’ve plants all over Asia and you’ve a high-placed hostile somewheres.”

  “That’s not yet proved.”

  “Right. But I know about AMG. He’s nobody’s fool. If he says Sevrin’s in place and you’ve a mole, you’ve a mole. Sure we’ve got hostiles in the CIA too, so’ve the KGB. I’m sure Ed has in the FBI—”

  “That’s doubtful,” Ed Langan interrupted sharply. “Our guys are handpicked and trained. You get your firemen from all over.”

  “Sure,” Rosemont said, then added to Crosse, “Back to narcotics. Red China’s our big enemy and—”

  “Again, you’re wrong, Stanley. The PRC’s not the big enemy anywhere. Russia is.”

  “China’s Commie. Commies’re the enemy. Now, it’d be real smart to flood the States with cheap narcotics and Red China … okay the People’s Republic of China can open the dam gates.”

  “But they haven’t. Our Narcotics Branch’s the best in Asia—they’ve never come up with anything to support your misguided official theory that they’re behind the trade. Nothing. The PRC are as anti-drug traffic as the rest of us.”

  “Have it your way,” Rosemont said. “Rog, you got a file on this agent? He’s KGB, isn’t he?”

  Crosse lit a cigarette. “Voranski was here last year. That time he went under the cover name of Sergei Kudryov, again seaman first class, again off the same ship—they’re not very inventive, are they?” Neither of the two men smiled. “His real name’s Major Yuri Bakyan, First Directorate, KGB, Department 6.”

  Rosemont sighed heavily.

  The FBI man glanced at him. “Then you’re right. It all ties in.”

  “Maybe.” The tall man thought a moment. “Rog, what about his contacts from last year?”

  “He acted like a tourist, staying at the Nine Dragons in Kowloon….”

  “That’s in AMG’s report, that hotel’s mentioned,” Langan said.

  “Yes. We’ve been covering it for a year or so. We’ve found nothing. Bakyan—Voranski—did ordinary tourist activities. We had him on twenty-four-hour surveillance. He stayed a couple of weeks, then, just before the ship sailed, sneaked back aboard.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “No. Not a regular one. He used to hang out at the Good Luck Dance Hall in Wanchai. Quite a cocksman, apparently, but he asked no questions and met no one out of the ordinary.”

  “He ever visit Sinclair Towers?”

  “No.”

  “Pity,” Langan said, “that’d’ve been dandy. Tsu-yan’s got a place there. Tsu-yan knows Banastasio, John Chen knows Banastasio, and we’re back to guns, narcotics, AMG and Sevrin.”

  “Yeah,” Rosemont said, then added, “Have you caught up with Tsu-yan yet?”

  “No. He got to Taipei safely, then vanished.”

  “You think he’s holed up there?”

  “I would imagine so,” Crosse said. But inside he believed him dead, already eliminated by Nationalist, Communist, Mafia or triad. I wonder if he could have been a double agent—or the supreme devil of all intelligence services, a triple agent?

  “You’ll find him—or we will—or the Taiwan boys will.”

  “Roger, did Voranski lead you anywhere?” Langan asked.

  “No. Nowhere, even though we’ve had tabs on him for years. He’s been attached to the Soviet Trade Commission in Bangkok, he spent time in Hanoi, and Seoul, but no covert activities we know of. Once the cheeky bugger even applied for a British passport and almost got one. Luckily our fellows vet all applications and spotted flaws in his cover. I’m sorry he’s dead—you know how hard it is to identify nasties. Waste of a lot of time and effort.” Crosse paused and lit a cigarette. “His major’s rank is quite senior which suggests something very smelly. Perhaps he was just another of their specials who was ordered to cruise Asia and get into deep cover for twenty or thirty years.”

  “Those bastards have had their game plan set for so long it stinks!” Rosemont sighed. “What’re you going to do with the corpse?”

/>   Crosse smiled. “I got one of my Russian-speaking fellows to call the captain of the ship—Gregor Suslev. He’s a Party member, of course, but fairly harmless. Has a sporadic girlfriend with a flat in Mong Kok—a bar girl who gets a modest allowance from him and entertains him when he’s here. He goes to the races, theater, Macao gambling a couple of times, speaks good English. Suslev’s under surveillance. I don’t want any of your hotshots ponging on one of our known hostiles.”

  “So Suslev’s regular here then?”

  “Yes, he’s been plying these waters for years, based out of Vladivostok—he’s an ex-submarine commander by the way. He wanders around the fringe here, mostly under the weather.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Drunk, but not badly so. Cavorts with a few of our British pinkos like Sam and Molly Finn.”

  “The ones who’re always writing letters to the papers?”

  “Yes. They’re more of a nuisance than a security risk. Anyway, under instructions, my Russian-speaking fellow told Captain Suslev we were frightfully sorry but it seemed that one of his seamen had had a heart attack in a phone booth at Golden Ferry Terminal. Suslev was suitably shocked and quite reasonable. In Voranski’s pocket there ‘happened’ to be an accurate, verbatim report of the assassin’s phone conversation. We put it in Russian as a further sign of our displeasure. They’re all professionals aboard that ship, and sophisticated enough to know we don’t remove their agents without very great cause and provocation. They know we just watch the ones we know about and, if we’re really very irritated, we deport them.” Crosse looked across at Rosemont, his eyes hard though his voice stayed matter-of-fact. “We find our methods more effective than the knife, garrotte, poison or bullet.”

  The CIA man nodded. “But who would want to kill him?”

  Crosse glanced at the photos again. He did not recognize the two Chinese, but their faces were clear and the body in the background unbelievable evidence. “We’ll find them. Whoever they are. The one who phoned our police station claimed they were 14K. But he only spoke Shanghainese with a Ningpo dialect, so that’s unlikely. Probably he was a triad of some sort. He could be Green Pang. He was certainly a trained professional—the knife was used perfectly, with great precision—one moment alive, the next dead and no sound. Could be one of your CIA’s trainees in Chiang Kai-shek’s intelligence agency. Or perhaps the Korean CIA, more of your trainees—they’re anti-Soviet too, aren’t they? Possibly PRC agents, but that’s improbable. Their agents don’t usually go in for quai loh murder, and certainly not in Hong Kong.”