by Adam Hall
He got out his handkerchief again, this time to wipe his face. He was talking about inciting a coup that could bring his country out of stagnation and despair and into the light of freedom and its fruits; world acceptance, world trade, and an honorable place in the community of nations; and on a personal level, perhaps, he was talking of the hope that there would be time to save his brother.
‘After all,’ he said in mock innocence, ‘we shall only be following the wisdom of the late Chairman Mao himself, who said that power lies in the mouth of a gun. If you, gentlemen, can vouchsafe the freedom of Dr. Xingyu Baibing, we shall have that gun in our hands.’
Qiao left ahead of us, his counselor with him, clutching his big briefcase. Hyde and I stopped for a few minutes to talk to the MI6 man; then we took the elevator to street level and walked into the open air and the wail of police sirens and stood there with the flash of the colored lights in our eyes and our breath clouding in the chill of the morning as we looked down at the little Chinese ambassador spreadeagled on the pavement with his glasses smashed and his blood trickling across the edge of the curb.
Chapter 3
Pepperidge
She was very thin, and faded-looking, still pretty, though, perhaps, had been stunning, once, with her large eyes and her cheekbones. She sat decoratively on the worn settee, her thin legs trying, I believed, to cover the patch of cretonne where the cat had sharpened its claws, where perhaps it always did: she looked a cat-lover, a quiet woman, half in hiding.
‘Would you like some tea?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘thank you. I haven’t much time.’
Half in hiding from life, or from death, hoping it wouldn’t find her. They’d told me it was cancer.
‘He won’t be long now,’ she said.
‘Supposing I go and meet him?’
‘You could try. But I don’t know whether he’s gone to the grocer’s or the post office, and they’re in different directions.’ She smiled ruefully at the contrariness of life.
‘I see.’
The cat was on a windowsill by a pot of geraniums, its fur mangy, their leaves yellowed. It spreads everywhere, if you let it, through the body and into the house, through the house.
‘It’s so cold,’ she said in her pretty voice, ‘so early, this year, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. We could get a white Christmas, though.’
There must be a kind of terrible relief, I thought, in actually knowing you didn’t have long, in knowing that it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to fight it off, in having time to get ready, and tidy all the drawers, instead of taking your fear with you to a rendezvous with potential death as I did, time after time, carrying it for years like putrefying baggage.
‘… last year, didn’t we?’
‘I said we had a little snow last year, didn’t we, for Christmas?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said, ‘I remember.’
What would her brother give her for Christmas? A posy for her grave? We tend, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, to be a trifle morbid when we’re waiting to go out.
‘What’s she called, your cat?’
‘Smoky. It’s actually a he.’ Another little smile.
‘He’s very handsome,’ I said. I like cats myself; I always think of them as female, I suppose because of their grace and their mysteriousness.
‘If you haven’t got long,’ she said, ‘you could go and stand outside, to watch for him. Then you could go and meet him.’
‘All right.’
But he was coming down the narrow little path between the patches of brownish grass when I went out there.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You were quicker than I’d bargained for.’ I’d phoned him from the Bureau. ‘I had to get some things for Gladys.’
‘That’s all right.” I took one of the brown paper bags and we went back into the house.
Pepperidge had only directed me once in the field, in Singapore; he’d conned me into it at the Brass Lamp, making me think he was a burned-out-spook, too far gone to take it on himself. He’d been very good, before that, as a shadow, first-class at covert infiltration, knew how to kill with discretion when it was necessary; then he’d come in and managed the Asian desk for a while. He’d been a good DIP, retting me through the Singapore thing without any fuss and doing most of it from London, through the signals mast at Cheltenham, before he’d come out to the field and brought that bastard Loman with him. But Loman had done well too, handled me well, give him his dine.
‘How are things going?’ I asked Pepperidge.
‘Oh,’ he said cheerfully, ‘we soldier on, you know. Did they tell you about her, then?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded, picking up a spanner, looking at it. We were out in the little toolshed at the back, where she couldn’t hear us, not that she’d pass anything on, I was sore; it was just bur natural habit to drift somewhere but of earshot, wherever we were. ‘She hasn’t got anyone due, you see. Poor old George went - oh, it must be five or six years ago now. I’m all she’s got left.’ He gave a dry laugh, watching me with his yellow eyes in the half-light of the shed, the shadow of his rather ragged mustache, hiding most of his mouth. Been mending the lawn mower,’ he said, putting the spanner down, ‘though the grass is pretty well dead.’
The word dropped into the silence like a stone into a pond, irretrievably, and I saw the slight tightening of the skin across his sharp cheekbones; then it was over. ‘Know anything about lawn mowers?’
‘You have to push them along, don’t you?’
‘Only if you can’t wheedle out of it. They got the fidgets again, have they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything to do with the Chinese ambassador?’
It had been on the nine-o’clock news.
‘I can’t really tell you anything,’ I said, ‘because they’ve thrown a blackout across it. All I really came for was to find out if you’d be interested in taking it on.’
‘Directing you?’
‘Yes.’
In a moment he said, ‘It was nice of you to bring her flowers.’
She’d put them straight into a vase, and shown them to him when he’d come back. ‘She’s a pretty woman,’ I said.
‘I suppose she is.’ He was thinking about what I’d been saying, about the mission.
‘She ought to get married again,’ I told him.
‘Why not? Why not…’ He brushed some dry grass cuttings off the edge of the worn bench. ‘No one phoned me, I suppose you know that?’
‘Hyde was going to, but I said I wanted to come here on my own, see how things were, sound you out.’
‘That was kind.’ He stared through the little cracked window, where there was a piece of paper sticking: Get blades ground. ‘Hyde’s going to run it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He pick me?’
‘No. He asked me who I wanted.’
‘You couldn’t get Ferris?’ The gray October light touched his face at an angle from the window; he wasn’t all that old, perhaps forty, but the skin had shriveled into fine lines across his cheeks, like a balloon almost deflated. He’d been out East a lot.
‘Ferris hasn’t got Chinese,’ I said. But he knew that I must have tried for Ferris and couldn’t get him. ‘It’s very big, this one. Very big indeed.’
‘Or they wouldn’t have asked for you.’
‘I was available. It wouldn’t keep us out there too long, so Hyde said. A matter of days, all going well.’
‘Days?’ He turned his head to look at me. ‘Sounds pretty concentrated.’
‘That’s why MI6 wouldn’t touch it.’
‘They were approached first?’
‘Yes. The thing is, we’re talking about looking after someone out there, and he’s going to be right in the spotlight. We might have to do things they can’t.’ The Bureau doesn’t officially exist, but the other services are expected to keep their house clean, not get into anything wet. They’re specifically public servants, whereas you co
uld call us, I suppose, a maverick force, answerable only to the PM.
‘Looking after someone,’ Pepperidge said, puckering his thin mouth. ‘There’s already one down, isn’t there?’
‘Yes.’
He meant the Chinese Ambassador. They’d come in very early, the opposition, though not early enough: the meeting we’d had would provide the blueprint for the whole mission. My guess was that Qiao hadn’t been discreet since the uprising of ‘89, when he’d become ‘disgusted.’ It couldn’t have been easy for him to hide a, in the confines of his embassy in London. Or perhaps he’d talked to his brother, and his brother had been put under the screws out there, and Beijing intelligence had signalled their agents here in London: Get Qiao.
‘The other chap came through, though,’ Pepperidge said, ‘didn’t he?’
Hou Jing, the little counselor. ‘They said his briefcase saved him. There was a lot of stuff in it.’
‘Close shot?’ He was still watching me.
‘Passing car.’
‘There was some policemen killed, it said on the—’
‘There. It was an assault rifle.’
‘Those bloody things. I suppose there wasn’t anything like a bit of Kevlar in that briefcase, was there?’
‘I thought of that too.’
In this trade we are steeped, as I told you, in subterfuge. Hou Jing could have worked as a spotter.
Pepperidge looked through the window again, and got a piece of rag and wiped some of the grime off, but most of it was outside in the air, fog pressing down form a steel-gray sky. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, ‘and talk to Gladys.”
She was in the kitchen, scraping at the bottom of a burned saucepan, her thin body leaning against the sink; I would imagine she got tired easily.
‘You go,’ she said, when Pepperidge put it to her - we were in the sitting room now, where the cat was arched like a drawn bow with its claws on the settee and its haunches flat on the carpet. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right here,’ she said. ‘Don’t, Smoky! I’ve got friends who come in, Doris and Marjorie.’ She didn’t ask how long he was talking about, I think in case it was a long tune and she’d feel scared and we’d see it.
‘It’s only for a few days,’ her brother said quickly.
‘Oh,’ relieved, ‘then what’s all the fuss?’ A pretty smile, radiating life.
‘If you go out, Glad, I don’t want you walking any farther than Tesco.’
‘All right.’
‘And don’t carry anything too heavy. Doris has got her car.’
‘I’ve never heard such a fuss! Now off you go, for goodness sake.’ She picked up the cat and held it while she came to the front door with us. ‘It was so nice of you to bring the flowers.’ The smile of a young girl, shy and vulnerable. I couldn’t take her hand because of the cat, so I kissed her cheek and we went out, Pepperidge and I, and got into the Lamborghini.
‘Nice hot cuppa, love?’
‘Please.’
She looked at me from under the heavy false lashes. ‘Do you good.’
She mopped the plastic tabletop and limped off to the tea urn with her arthritic hip. You think your nerves aren’t showing, but Daisy will catch the vibrations.
Pepperidge had been put on a plane for Hong Kong an hour ago and I’d been cleared and briefed and there was nothing to do now, nowhere to go while I waited, as the light lowered in the basement window, the winter seeping into the room like a cold shadow, dimming the light bulbs, bringing a chill to the air. They’d overdone the thermostat thing when Hyde had sent his instructions, and now this bloody place was as cold as the grave.
‘There you are, love.’
‘Thank you, Daisy.’
‘What about a nice buttered bun?’
‘All right.’
For something to do, I sat with my hands around the cup of tea to warm them. Anyone forming the actual intention of putting this stuff into his body would be clean off his rocker: it’s jet-black and there’s enough caffeine in it to blast the back end of a bulldog. What we really come down here for is to escape the madhouse going quietly on upstairs along those bleak and dimly lighted corridors and behind the doors of those unnamed and unnumbered rooms, with signals coming in from the mast at Cheltenham and traffic going out from Codes and Cyphers, the whole giddy circus engaged in the sinister task of dealing with lies and secrets, subversion and betrayal, in the name of the need to know.
‘There you are, duck.’
Margarine, not butter, but what can you do? What they budget for in this place is to buy loyalty, to put a price on trust, to replace a car full of bullet holes at some far frontier post, to arrange, when things go wrong, for funerals, to fork out a widow’s pension.
‘I put it in the microwave for you.’
Standing over me with her bright ginger wig like a fire in the gloom and her rouged cheeks burning with the warmth of motherly love.
‘Good old Daise.’
We come here for escape and the comfort of this woman’s saintly presence as she limps from table to table and back to her huge steaming urn, our very own blowsy and overblown Mother Teresa, garbed in her stained and sluttish apron and dispensing not only her black undrinkable tea and her stale uneatable buns but also the sweet anodyne of compassion that we need so badly when we crawl back from a mission with the rattle of shot or the scream of a dying man still echoing in the far reaches of the mind, or when we sit here with our hands around a cup while our fate hangs in the balance like a rope in the wind as those bastards upstairs turn the signals around and peck at the computers and shuffle softly from room to room in their worn suede shoes and finally decide which one of us should be picked for the mission that’s come onto the board, which one of us shall be sent out to worm our way through the serpentine shafts of the labyrinth to seek the enemy and overcome 32 .
torn, pre-mission nerves, I trust you will understand and perhaps even excuse, this is just a touch of the willies.
‘You’ll need to get that dressing changed every three days, until they say you can leave it off.’
Clearance, Medical Section. I’d said yes, I understood.
‘And you need to take a gram of C and two hundred and fifty milligrams of calcium in this form, the citrate, every day.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re just back, aren’t you, and going out again?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s putting a strain on the adrenals.’ She gave me the small plastic box. ‘Don’t forget.’
I’d got a map of Hong Kong and a plan of the airport from Travel but I hadn’t studied them yet and didn’t want to: nothing was certain; they might not be able to con the Chinese into giving Dr. Xingyu free passage out of the embassy, or any one of a dozen scenarios could come up and we’d have to abort this one while the shadow executive was still trying to get his teeth into this bloody bun.
I kicked the chair back and went out of the caff and op the stairs along the corridor to the room at the end and found a slack-bodied woman in a drooping twinset peering into a filing cabinet through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that were surely thick enough to be bulletproof.
The buns,’ I said. This was what they grandly called Adminstration Services. ‘Those bloody buns down there.’
She looked around and stared. ‘Buns?’
A girl came through the doorway and took a look at my face and scuttled for cover behind a pile of papers. ‘Those buns down there in the Caff,’ I said, ‘are nothing more than resuscitated crud left over from Oliver Twist’s workhouse. Have you ever—’
‘If you wish to make a complaint, you’ll have to fill in the appropriate form in triplicate. We can’t—’
‘You expect us to go out there and shove our heads right into the cannon’s mouth and when we’re lucky enough to come back the best you can give us is crud.’ I looked at the mousy-faced girl. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Gertrude, sir.’
‘Little Gertrude, do something for me. Fill out the appro
priate form in triplicate with my complaint, which you can put down as attempted food poisoning, and drop it into my message box for me to sign.’
I went along to see Holmes and blow his head off for nothing at all, which is what friends are for, but he wasn’t in, so I looked in at Signals and saw a very sticky endgame going with Croder himself manning the board for Flamingo and Holmes watching the score as the stuff came in from Nigeria. Two other boards were open, the fourth was dark, and the last one was lit up but blank except for the word Bamboo chalked at the top, code name for the mission. That would be mine, and I stood for a moment looking at it with a feeling of time warp going through me, as if I could already see the future, the board filling with status reports as Pepperidge sent them in from the field, with routine information or requests for help; and I wondered how far down the board we’d manage to go before something flew at me from the dark or a wheel came off or I ran into a dead end with nowhere else to run, and Pepperidge would have to send the last signal: Shadow down.
The adrenals, yes, a strain on the adrenals, so let us quietly close the door of the signals room and go back to the caff and drink some tea and pop some calcium and inform Daisy that one fine day she might well Achieve a certain tawdry stardom in this bloody place for being able to offer its hard-pressed denizens some eatable buns.
Ten minutes later my beeper went and I used a phone and they told me Hyde wanted to see me for one final briefing, and I knew they weren’t going to abort this one: the mission had started running.
‘Pepperidge,’ Hyde told me, ‘will be in Hong Kong by the morning. That was a good choice you made,’ swinging his large head to watch me obliquely, ‘with Pepperidge. He’s very fine indeed with his signals and of course he’s got a great deal of regard for the way you work.’