Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  ‘I didn’t know’.’

  ‘He said it was an honor. I’m sending you out tonight, is that all right?’

  ‘Whenever.’

  ‘You’ll stopover in Bombay to meet someone. The situation is this. The Foreign Office together with the PM has managed to complete a workable deal with Premier Li Peng, assuring him that we are willing to keep Dr. Xingyu Baibing in our care at the embassy out there for as long as he wishes, which could of course be years, during which time our relations with China would remain distinctly cool. We have made it clear that a guarantee from Beijing that Dr. Xingyu could move safely from the UK embassy to the airport would in turn bring our guarantee that normal trade could be resumed between the two countries.’

  ‘Xingyu’s going straight to Hong Kong?’

  ‘Straight there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Within a few days. They’ll give a specific date and time when they’re ready - they’re making the concession, not us. That part, actually, was comparatively easy. The difficult part was to persuade them that we’re not aware that the moment Dr. Xingyu lands in Hong Kong he’s to be snatched by Chinese agents and sent straight back to Beijing for brainwashing.’

  He poked his tongue into his cheek and waited.

  ‘Why can’t Xingyu be met by a platoon of Hong Kong police and taken into hiding?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Hyde said, ‘whether anyone’s made an estimate of the Hong Kong police force who are active agents for Beijing, but I would put it rather high. Xingyu would be walking right into the tiger’s mouth. We can trust, you see,’ his large flat hand hitting the desk, ‘no one. No one at all. We also have to relax their agents at the very critical time when Dr. Xingyu lands at the airport, by letting it seem that we have not the slightest idea that he’s up for snatching. We shall be sending only one man to meet him - a junior clerk in the British High Commission - as a formal courtesy. The major requirement is to play this operation hi very low key.’

  ‘What happens to the clerk?’

  ‘He’ll melt away at the right time. I’ll go into that for you; then you must tell me how you think you’re going to get Dr. Xingyu clear.’

  'Two questions first.’

  ‘Of course.’

  It was after seven in the evening, and the sounds of the traffic outside had changed, coming off the rush-hour high with not so many buses now, more taxis honking as people started out for the evening, it calmed, I think, 36 .

  a little, to hear the steady beating of the city’s pulse, something for me to remember, a touchstone, when I was out there in the cold.

  ‘What are we going to do,’ I asked Hyde, ‘about the media? They’ll be jamming the airport and they’ll get in my way.’

  ‘No, we thought about that, so the FO made the kind suggestion to Beijing that Dr. Xingyu should be smuggled in plain van from the embassy to the airport and put onto the last night flight, strictly incognito and with a briefed cabin crew. This would avoid, we suggested, unwanted publicity that would make it seem that in allowing Dr. Xingyu his freedom, Beijing had lost the game. It was meant to look like another concession and they went for it.’

  There’d been some good thinking, and it reassured me a little. ‘Where do you want me to take him?’

  ‘Out of Hong Kong.’ One of the phones rang and he pressed the off switch. ‘There’s no way you could safely keep him there, even if he wanted to stay -the place is infested with mainland agents. Beijing has grabbed at this deal because it’s pretty well their only chance of getting their hands on Dr. Xingyu again, and when he lands in Hong Kong they’ll have their own people there in force. And when you take him over they’re going to ransack the island and at the same time they’re going to put every point of exit under close and immediate observation. That,’ he said with his hand dropping onto the desk again, ‘is the objective for the mission. Not just to take this man into your safekeeping at the airport, but to get him out of Hong Kong.’

  ‘Where to?’

  That bloody shark bite had started itching.

  ‘Wherever he wants to go - subject to our good counsel.’

  It was on the left forearm, and the smell of the antiseptic was getting on my nerves.

  ‘Are you sending pictures of me to the U.K. embassy for Xingyu to look at?’

  ‘We faxed them out there as soon as you accepted the mission. Dr. Xingyu’s instructions will be that once he recognizes you at Hong Kong Airport he’ll do exactly as you tell him. His life, he realizes, will be in your hands, because if they can’t snatch him back they’ll go for a kill.’

  He poked his cheek again; that was getting on my nerves too, like the shark bite. Everything was getting on my nerves, and it was going to be like this until I reached the field. Part of it was because of the kill they’d already made, early this morning.

  ‘Ambassador Qiao,’ I said. ‘What’s the analysis?’

  Hyde got up and went to a window, shoving his huge hands into his pockets. His voice bounced off the glass. ‘It’s too early for a complete analysis, of course. It’s been impossible to ask any questions hi his embassy here, even by phone. The diplomatic card is that Her Majesty’s Government deeply regrets the affair, but the language was couched to make it perfectly clear that the assassination was none of our doing and they’d better not try to accuse us. It’s fairly obvious that Qiao hadn’t been able to hide what he called his disgust with his government, and when his brother surfaced as a resurgent last week they added things together and ordered a wet affair, before Qiao could try defecting. They were of course too late.’

  ‘He could have been followed,’ I said, ‘to the tube station last night.’

  ‘Despite the precautions, yes.’ He half-turned his head. “The Foreign Office set up that rendezvous, together with the Yard. We’d have done it differently.’

  “All those police.’ I got out of my chair, too, feeling restless.

  “All those police, yes. But what could we do? The FO had called us in. It was their field.’

  “Hou Jing,’ I said. The little embassy counselor with the briefcase. ‘Where’s he now?’

  “In the country. He seems terribly cut up, but he’s bang rather carefully questioned, of course.’

  There was a black rectangular clock on the desk, with a disk you could turn through the international time zones. Here in London it was 7:14. ‘Was Hou Jing’s briefcase actually hit?’ I asked Hyde.

  ‘At an angle. It was in fact shot out of his hands.’

  in a moment I said, ‘I don’t want to be blown before I’m even clear of London.’

  Hyde moved his head, tilting it upward, his eyes remaining on my face. ‘We shall make it our business,’ he said, ‘to ensure that nobody gets at Hou Jing. Until you complete your mission, he will remain under protective house arrest.’

  I left it at that because most of it was paranoia and I didn’t want it to show. I felt drawn to the clock again because time was running down, my time in London.

  At 7:20 we sat down again and I told him how I was going to take over Dr. Xingyu at the airport and put him in a safe house until we could get him out of Hong Kong. The safe house was for Pepperidge to set up when the time came. It took me twenty minutes and Hyde said he liked it and told me I’d get the people I wanted at the scene.

  ‘You’ll be flying to Bombay,’ he said, ‘via Cairo, where you won’t leave the aircraft. We’ve made a rendezvous for you with a man named Sojourner.’

  ‘He’s Bureau?’

  ‘No. He’s been around the U.K. embassies for quite a few years and he’s been a first secretary in Beijing for the past eighteen months. He’s made contacts there, some of them underground - it’s the way he likes to work. One of his contacts is the People’s Liberation Army general who’s pledged to support Dr. Xingyu.’ He didn’t tell me the general’s name. He wasn’t telling me a lot of things; all he wanted me to have in my head when I went out there were the absolute essentials. The less I knew, the less anyone
could get out of me if I ran into a trap and couldn’t reach the capsule in tune.

  ‘What is Sojourner’s job?’

  ‘He’s the coordinator. He’ll put everything together at ground zero, as you’ll hear when you meet him. Let me say that he’s extremely capable and we have every confidence in him.’

  ‘What’s his intelligence background?’ I would have been happier if Sojourner had been Bureau, not an itinerant diplomat.

  ‘He has no actual intelligence background, but in point of fact it was he who suggested this whole scenario to the late Ambassador Qiao, in essence, following clandestine approaches to the army general. You may trust Sojourner. You may trust him completely.’

  There wasn’t anything I could say. I had to trust all of them completely: the Head of Bureau, Chief of Signals, London Control, my director in the field, and whoever was manning the signals board if Bamboo began running hot.

  7:46 on the black clock and I looked away. ‘How many people have you got lined up to replace me if I go down?’

  In a moment Hyde said heavily, ‘I don’t understand.’

  “Oh, for God’s sake.’ Showing my nerves; too late to take it back.

  ‘I would certainly have told you,’ Hyde said, ‘earlier in your briefing, if I intended to put anyone else into the field. We—’

  ‘Look, I’m just one man, and you’re talking about winging down a government. It’s—’

  ‘You don’t feel confident?’

  ‘Of course I feel confident, but why not put ten people in the field, a protective cadre with Xingyu in the saddle?’

  ‘As they did with Guzhenko?’

  It stopped me dead in my tracks, as it was meant to do. Five years ago the Bureau had tried to bring Guzhenko ‘cross to the West, an invaluable double agent with his head stuffed ‘with ultrasensitive information, and it had to be done extremely fast because he’d been blown and our people had picked him up from the half-submerged wreck of a dredger on the Volga where he’d run for cover. Portland had been London Control for the mission and he’d sent out six men and a support group backing them up, and one of the six had been caught and took a capsule in time, and the next one had run out on the operation when the KGB had closed in, and two others were shot in a rearguard action, and the support group had scattered because Guzhenko was exposed and targeted and there was nothing they could do, nothing, and the trap was shut and Guzhenko was taken back to Moscow and thrown into a psychiatric ward and came out five weeks later with his head as empty as a coconut husk and half the files in our Moscow desk blown through the ceiling.

  I said: ‘Point taken.’

  ‘Good. I run things differently.’

  7:51.

  ‘Yes. No more questions.’

  Hyde came to the door with me. ‘There’s an enormous weight of responsibility,’ he said, ‘on all of us. The destiny of a billion people, if one were to put it vulgarly, is at stake. But don’t let that discountenance you. This is a case of softly, softly, catchee monkee - in other words we play this very low-key.’

  I saw Holmes for a minute and picked up my briefing and the prepacked suitcase on my way out of the building and the time on the round oak-framed clock in the hall showed 8:02, and that was the time they would note on the signals boards for Bamboo, after the date and the chalked entry: Executive dispatched.

  Chapter 4

  Incense

  They circled continuously over the dead.

  ‘And how is London?’

  ‘Cold.’

  Here in Bombay the evening was mild, a little humid.

  ‘I miss London.’

  We were on a veranda overlooking a courtyard full of frescoes and eroded statuettes and frangipanis, with only a boy in sight, white-robed, watching.

  ‘Not everything, of course,’ Sojourner said, ‘happens in London. One has to peregrinate.’

  They were black against the sky, images cut from black crepe and thrown to the azure heights above the Parsee Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill, where they dived and rose and circled in the lowering light. They worried me.

  ‘One can hardly stay all one’s life in one place,’ Sojourner said, ‘even London.’

  I was becoming interested in seeing how long he could keep talking without actually saying anything. But he wasn’t just trying to make small talk at our first meeting. He was, I thought, assessing me very carefully, watching for gestures, alert to the tone of voice.

  I didn’t answer, and he listened to that too.

  ‘You flew straight out?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And shall you be flying straight to Hong Kong?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was the first time he’d looked at me directly. Up to now he’d been like a headmaster questioning a schoolboy, studying his nails, eyes averted, stripping the boy of his identity, listening as if to a liar. But now Sojourner looked up, but couldn’t make contact: I was watching the boy down there, slender in the white robe, his eyes jeweled in the shadows as he stared up at the veranda. He hadn’t been in the courtyard when I’d arrived, but had come through the crumbling stone archway soon afterward.

  Sojourner looked away from me, and down at the boy. ‘Door wo ja-“o’, Patil. Chalah ja-“o’.’

  The boy slipped through the shadows, not glancing back.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Sojourner asked me. About flying straight to Hong Kong.

  ‘No.’

  I looked upward again. They worried me, those bloody birds. In the five towers the dead would be lying on stone slabs in three concentric circles, the men on the outside, then the women, with the children in the middle. They would be picked clean before dark.

  ‘I see,’ Sojourner said, and left it at that. The implication was that he would certainly find out, and I wished him luck. You may trust Sojourner. You may trust him completely. Hyde. But I make my own rules in the field.

  There wasn’t anything to dislike, particularly, about Sojourner, except perhaps for the rather cloying cologne he used, or the slender grace of the boy in the robe. To look at he was unremarkable, a smooth well-shaven face, heavy thick-lensed glasses, decent enough suit, a lawyer, to look at, or a scientist, one of the brilliant younger men searching cleverly through the subatomic particles for the Nobel Prize. And I disliked, of course, his arrogance, because arrogance is a dangerous trait in the netherworld of subterfuge where an inflated ego can prove fatal. But I suppose it was understandable in this man, because Hyde had said the whole operation was his idea in the beginning, and he’d naturally feel he was running the show.

  ‘Ba-ai-ra,’ he called, and our server came, moving quietly through the gap in the shutters, smelling faintly of body oils. ‘Hum kuche order kerna cha-ha-thi hy.’

  ‘Sahib.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Sojourner asked me. ‘They do curries well here, of course, or do you prefer something European?’

  I said I’d have whatever he was having, and we watched the last of the sated vultures drift away from the hill to the trees below as the light lowered.

  Later the server touched the wicks in the brass openwork lamps with the flame of a Bic lighter, and as the darkness was pressed back, Sojourner began talking, wanting to show me, I think, how well versed he was in the world’s affairs, perhaps even trying to make me see that I could trust him, because of his openness.

  ‘The idea is not actually to save China,’ he said, ‘but to save Hong Kong, as you have probably realized. China is very resilient, and if all those people are content to live with a bowl of rice and a bicycle all their lives then it’s their right to choose, and they’ve chosen the form of government they want, in the broader sense. We are committed, nevertheless, you and I and certain others, to bringing about a form of government that only a few thousand of them want, and with the grace of God we shall see that they get it. But that’s not the real focus. The real focus is Hong Kong.’

  Below the veranda, people moved through the courtyard, mostly in white
tunics and saris, their sandals scuffing across the cobblestones. I wasn’t worried about the people in the courtyard; I’d checked the environment with the strictest attention on my way here from the airport, and the only danger was if Sojourner hadn’t also covered his tracks. I assumed he would have.

  ‘There are of course great opportunities for trade between China and the West. Ten years ago the trade figures were in the region of two billion U.S. dollars, and it’s now five times bigger. But what these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed captains of industry don’t realize is that a trade boom fifty times that big would come into being given a democratic government in China. But no one had time to squeeze the present government out of Beijing with a quick and effective stranglehold of sanctions and embargoes in ‘89. It would have been easy enough - the top people had already begun transferring massive amounts of cash into Swiss and Hong Kong bank accounts as soon as the uprising started, and they had a Chinese Air Force transport plane standing by in Beijing with an escort of MiG fighters to get them out of the country. Success for the democracy movement was that close, but big business had its nose stuck fast in the bookkeeping. Is the patatchi all right?’

  I said it was very nice.

  Some kind of argument had started down there on the far side of the archway; a man in a rumpled white suit was apparently trying to get into the hotel. Sojourner watched for a moment and then lost interest.

  ‘But in Hong Kong it was different,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t apply sanctions, as the West could have done. Moreover, it was told by Beijing that any real signs of support for the democratic movement would deny it the continuance of a capitalist economy after the takeover in 1997. But there were things it could do, by virtue of its unique political and economic position. Politically, it can do pretty well what it likes, since it’s responsible to no one - it is not, for instance, a world leader required to set a shining example in everything it does. Economically it has great power and many friends among the giant corporations.’ As the twilight bled from the sky the lamps along the veranda held back the dark, but shadows came close, and I could no longer see Sojourner’s eyes: his thick horn-rimmed glasses had become a mask, showing only reflections. ‘Hong Kong also has enough cold cash,’ he said quietly, ‘to buy up the People’s Republic of China, and that is why we are here now.’