by Adam Hall
Tibet.
This bodes ill, my friend, this bodes ill indeed.
A car door slammed, somewhere along the quay.
‘A few sardines?’
‘No,’ Xingyu said.
Pepperidge held the tin aslant under the small reproduction binnacle lamp, peering at the trademark. ‘Crown Prince. Rich in Natural Fish Oil, No Salt Added. They’re very good.’
‘I wish to eat nothing.’
I don’t think Xingyu was sulking, although he was just sitting there hunched up with his forearms on the table now, the big hands open, empty, empty of hope for the wife and the friends he believed he’d deserted, and that was it, not sulking but despairing, because Pepperidge hadn’t sounded too charmed by the idea of putting this man back into China, which getting him to Tibet would mean.
‘We couldn’t take you through Kathmandu,’ Pepperidge had told him, ‘because there wouldn’t be time to make the trip by road from there to Lhasa. That is where you meant, isn’t it, when you said Tibet? You meant Lhasa?’
‘Yes. I have friends there.’
‘The thing is, we’d have to fly you in, because that’s all we’d have time for, and that means we’d have to go Hong Kong to Beijing to Chengdu to Gonggar. As far as I know there’s no Air China flight direct from Hong Kong to Chengdu without going through Beijing, which is out of the question. Sorry. You’ve asked for the impossible.’
‘I wish to go to Lhasa. I will be safe there.’
That was an hour ago and Pepperidge had compromised and signaled London through the scrambler and told them the situation. They said they’d confer with Bureau One and send his instructions. We were still waiting.
I hadn’t heard any footsteps after the car door had slammed out there on the quay. I would have liked to hear footsteps going from the car to one of the boats. I didn’t want to think that a car had arrived and doused its lights and was just standing there with people inside, people watching. I’d come away clean from the airport thing and switched to the Volvo and the chances that anyone had seen the switch and followed me were strictly slight but you can’t, you know, you can’t entirely ignore the nerves because it’s not always paranoia, it’s sometimes a warning of danger culled from the observations of the subconscious, and if you don’t give it at least a bit of attention you can shorten your life without even trying.
Pepperidge had told me the procedure: if anyone came near this boat, Xingyu would be bundled quietly into the head and I would go to the sleeping quarters behind the curtains and Pepperidge would stay where he was with his .37 magnum on his knees under the table.
But it shouldn’t come to that. This thing about Tibet had caught me unawares, that was all. Xingyu had turned out so unpredictable and we couldn’t trust him: he must know we couldn’t fly him to Lhasa without going through Beijing and that might be what he’d got on his mind -trying to jolly us into getting him back to Beijing so that he could give us the slip there and leave the plane and rush off to join his friends in Bambu Qiao.
‘What you must realize’ - Pepperidge stirred his tea and watched Xingyu, watched him with no great affection - ‘is that we have to consider the timing of this operation. Our deadline, as I have told you, is in three days from now. In three days we expect to be able to fly you into Beijing with impunity, a very different Beijing from the one you have just left. We—’
‘You have not told me why it is to be in three days, why it is not ten, or twenty. You tell me little.’
‘That is essential, for your own safety. I have told you that, also.’
Patience on a monument.
Hyde had briefed me about the deadline: three days would bring us to the 17th, and that was when Premier Li Peng was going to make a party address and launch a ferocious attack against the intellectuals. It was on that day that we had to get Dr. Xingyu Baibing readied for the TV cameras instead. It was information that I’d had to be given as the executive for the mission but it couldn’t be given to Xingyu because those three days were going to expose us to the entire force of Chinese Intelligence and Security and I had a capsule to pop if I had to and Xingyu didn’t.
‘I have also told you,’ Pepperidge said, ‘that if we—’
The phone was ringing and he answered it.
London. You will on no account take the subject into Tibet, so forth, good old Bureau One.
But Pepperidge was speaking in Japanese, and in less than half a minute he rang off.
‘I have also told you, Dr. Xingyu, that if we are prepared to expose ourselves to very great danger on your behalf, we expect you to give us as little trouble as possible.’ He gave it time to get through. ‘That was the man who is coming to design the mask you’ll be wearing when you leave this boat. His name is Koichi, and he’ll be here later tonight to take the matrix.”
‘I shall wear a mask?’
‘You see’ - a wistful smile - ‘I tell you as much as I can.’
‘I shall wear no mask.’
‘Without one,’ Pepperidge said gently, ‘you will never leave Hong Kong a free man, I can assure you.’ The telephone began ringing again and he picked it up.
‘Yes?’ He reached for his signals pad, and I slid it along the table to him. This, yes, was London.
Headlights swung through the rain again, their beams glancing across the long narrow ports and sparking on the polished binnacle lamp.
‘Very much so.’ Pepperidge. ‘He argues that the last place the Chinese will expect him to go is back into China - a point which I concede - and that he would only be fifteen hundred miles from Beijing when we’re ready to fly him there. He has very reliable friends in a monastery in Lhasa, with - as Tibetan monks - a deep hatred of the Chinese.’ He listened again.
A point which I concede. I think he threw that in to let London know that if they finally instructed us to take the subject into Tibet then we would do that, however dangerous. We have our pride, my good friend, we have our principles.
A car door slamming outside on the quay. Two. Most of the boats tied up here were cruisers, and I suppose the owners were coming back from the town after dinner there. That would be natural.
While Pepperidge was on the phone I watched Xingyu again, ready to glance away if he looked up. He’d put his hands into his coat pockets now, and his face looked cold, pinched. I’d have put him at no more than forty, forty-two, and the lines in his face were of strain, I believed, the long strain of living in a country that he called his own, but a country where his worst enemies were the people who governed it, ruled would be a better word, ruled with the unanswerable power of the gun. And the strain, more recently, of becoming separated from his wife. I would have felt compassion for him, as I had before, except that he was now trying to drive us straight into a trap if he insisted on going to Tibet and London approved.
‘ … check out the possibilities,’ Pepperidge was saying; he’d been on the phone ten minutes now, listening more than talking, and I hadn’t been able to tell which way things were going. I wished, quite honestly, that he’d get it over, so that I could know the worst, or preferably not the worst.
‘Understood,’ he said and rang off and went straight to the telephone directory and began riffling through the pages, not looking at me, carefully not looking around as he sat perched on the end of the bench with his thin legs drawn up and his shoulders hunched a little, as if against the rain outside, or against the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that had been gathering in here while he’d talked to London.
He picked up the phone and started talking again, this time in Mandarin, to a woman I think, his tone gentle, even more gentle than usual, giving her names Hong Kong and Chengdu and Gonggar, which was the airport for Lhasa. I didn’t understand the rest.
Xingyu was listening attentively, his head turned.
I watched Pepperidge too, his hunched shoulders, head bent over the telephone, and had the eerie feeling that I was watching him from the future, looking back on him from some other time and som
e other place and remembering how it was when everything had become fixed in our affairs, locking us in with our karma, and this feeling persisted when he put the phone down and turned around and said to Xingyu, ‘It would be out of the question, as I told you, to take you on any flight that would go via Beijing, but I’ve found that Air China has a new charter service through Chengdu direct, and according to my instructions we shall be taking you into Tibet.’
Chapter 8
Mask
Koichi opened one end of the big plastic bag and lowered it over Xingyu Baibing’s shoulders with his head sticking out of the hole.
‘Please excuse! Not polite to put gentleman in garbage bag! You have had cast taken before?’
‘No.’
Xingyu was sitting upright in a deck chair under one of the binnacle lamps. Koichi had tried talking to him in Chinese when he’d come aboard, but either he wasn’t fluent or the good doctor wished us all in hell and wasn’t ready to exchange any courtesies. I shall wear no mask, he’d told Pepperidge.
‘You have sometimes claustrophobia?’
‘No.’
‘Good! Sit still, please.’ He pulled a bald cap over Xingyu’s head and drew the hairline across it with a felt pen and used the glue and began mixing the alginate in a bowl. I’d seen this done before at Norfolk as a demonstration, not by this man but by the master himself, Robert Schiffer.
I was now watching the operation again, and very carefully, because I might have to put this thing on Xingyu myself, when he flew into Beijing.
Pepperidge was on the telephone again, talking in Chinese, presumably booking our seats on the charter flights; he would leave before us on an earlier flight to set up the safe house and a base for himself in Lhasa. When Xingyu had been using the head before the Japanese had come aboard, Pepperidge had told me, ‘I spoke to Bureau One personally, and we agreed that the subject would be psychologically more manageable in Tibet - closer to his wife and friends - than if we took him to London. The point was made that we should let him feel endangered, just as they are, with the KCCPC hunting him down. What do you think?”
‘I think you’re right. He won’t feel quite so much that he’s left his people in the lurch.’ But it took some saying. I didn’t, quite frankly, fancy Tibet.
‘Exactly. I don’t believe, actually, that we would have stood much chance of getting him on a plane for London. I think he would’ve slipped us and tried to get back to Beijing.’
‘I didn’t expect him to be so bloody tricky. Now we know how he feels about his wife I’m surprised he ever agreed to coming out here to Hong Kong in the first place.’
Pepperidge had touched my arm. ‘It was the only way he could get out of the embassy, and he wanted to get out of there to be with his wife. Hong Kong was the only place the Chinese would agree to, for obvious reasons.’ The only place outside China that was saturated with their security agents. ‘We’ve got to consider the man he is, and make allowances. He’s always been ready, to defy his government openly and in public, and here we are trying to smuggle him through a security tunnel and he doesn’t like that, doesn’t like subterfuge, anonymity.’
It had been an apology, in a way. Pepperidge and Bureau One had agreed to push me through the mission right under the nose of the KCCPC, and I hadn’t got a choice: these were instructions.
‘Still, please. Keep still!’
Xingyu Baibing had started jerking his head around, trying to say something. The alginate was covering the whole of his face now, and I suppose he was feeling stifled.
‘You say you do not have claustrophobia! Now I do this for you, and you breathe better!’ The timer went off and Koichi reached around to the table and reset it.
From what I’ve seen at Norfolk it’s not much of a joke: the stuff has got to be pushed right into the corners of the eyes and under the lashes, it wouldn’t have made Xingyu feel any better to know what the Japanese was actually doing: he was making a death mask.
‘As soon as you possibly can.’ Pepperidge was on the phone to someone else now, in English. ‘I want to leave here in the morning, not later than oh eight hundred. My flight’s at nine-oh-five.’
Visas. Passports and visas. There must have been a hitch somewhere, because the Bureau forgers in Hong Kong who serviced our Far East sector would have got their instructions direct from London days ago.
‘I’ll pick mine up on my way to the airport. You’ll bring theirs when you bring the car.’
Don’t worry, he’d told me, but he wasn’t trusting the Volvo out there. There was almost no chance that anyone had seen us switch cars on our way here from the airport, but if there was a chance in a thousand he wasn’t taking it.
‘Are all the bags ready?’
One for Xingyu, one for me, the clothes secondhand and worn a little, Hong Kong labels on them, the luggage tags already fixed, the initials on the bags matching our cover names. The only thing Xingyu would take from here would be the insulin and the needles.
‘At whatever time,’ Pepperidge said and rang off.
‘Must wait now,’ Koichi told us, and his smile was a fraction weary. To do that job really well is exacting. ‘Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.’ When he left here he’d be working most of the night to produce a positive from the negative and have it ready by morning.
‘What about a drink?’ Pepperidge asked him.
‘Not yet. When finished, then some sake!’ He touched the alginate here and there, his fingers as sensitive as a blind man’s. ‘Will make you look older, you understand, maybe ten years older. Depressing! But then—’ He picked at the mask, dropping a fleck of the stuff into the bowl. ‘But then when you take off, young again! Very cheerful then!’
It was nearly midnight when he peeled off the negative and studied the inside, holding it to the light, turning it, nodding and frowning; then the big grin came again. ‘It is good. Will be good mask, finally!’
Pepperidge switched off the cabin lamps for a moment and Koichi slipped through the door and vanished into the rain. Xingyu went into the galley and washed his face, snorting and making a lot of fuss. ‘You are taking a great deal of trouble,’ he said as he used a towel, ‘to protect me from the security forces, and you say you are in favour of a democracy in my country. But what possible interest could the British have in the fate of China?’
‘We’re traders,’ Pepperidge told him, ‘and China’s a huge country, with a lot of potential profit for the West.’
‘I see. You have no actual sympathy for the Chinese people and their predicament.’
‘But of course. I would happily go to Beijing and lead your people to freedom, but my government believes that you can do it rather more effectively.’
Koichi was back before seven in the morning and fitted the mask and brought out his mirror for Xingyu and I had a feeling of slipped focus, putting myself in the place of the Chinese and getting a sense of what was going through his mind, because that wasn’t his face in the mirror, nothing like it, an older man’s, unrecognizable. All I could see of Dr. Xingyu Baibing were his eyes, and they were frightened. I suppose he’d already begun to feel a certain loss of identity since he’d run through the doors of the British embassy a week ago and asked for asylum, to be sequestered among aliens and cut off from his wife and his friends, and now he was on foreign soil and staring into a mirror at a face he’d never seen before. He wasn’t, after all, an intelligence agent; he was an astrophysicist.
‘It’s good,’ Pepperidge said. ‘It’s good, Koichi.’
‘Yes. Am satisfied. Sake now.’ Huge grin. ‘No, is joke, I go home now.’ To Xingyu: ‘When you leave here?’
‘Eight tomorrow,’ Pepperidge said. ‘Eight in the morning.’
‘I will come here half past seven, to fit mask again.’ He peeled it off, and I noticed Xingyu grab at the mirror again and stare into it, and the fright go out of his eyes. Koichi laid the mask gently into a white cardboard box and went to the door of the cabin. ‘Go home now.’ A formal bow to Xi
ngyu - ‘Thank you’ - and one for us - Thank you’ - and he was gone.
The rain had stopped, and through the doorway I could see white mist clouding across the water of the bay and the bristling masts of the marina, half lost in the haze, their pennants hanging limp. In the stillness of the morning a voice sounded, a long way off, and the slam of a hatch cover.
Pepperidge briefed us a little before eight o’clock. ‘This is the way it goes. I shall take the nine-oh-five charter flight this morning to Chengdu and change planes there for Lhasa.’ He was sitting at the table, with two manila envelopes in front of him. A courier had come to the boat in the night, leaving some papers with Pepperidge and three worn leather suitcases near the door. ‘In Lhasa I shall go to the monastery you’ve indicated and tell them you’re coming. I’ll then go to my hotel. You will take the same flight the next day, keeping your distance from each other as strangers. If the flights are on schedule there’s a twenty-five-minute stop in Chengdu and you’ll change planes, but remember that flights are often overbooked, unavailable, or canceled because of bad weather. The airport for Lhasa - Gonggar, ninety-five kilometers from the city - is notorious for strong winds, and the CAAC will only allow flights when conditions are perfect.’
He briefed us on customs, immigration, boarding requirements, and slid one envelope across the table to Xingyu and the other to me. ‘Everything you need is there.’ He was making less eye contact than usual this morning and was, I thought, a little reserved, distant, and it occurred to me that while I felt that he and Bureau One had agreed to push me through the mission under the nose of the KCCPC and had left me with no choice, it couldn’t have been easy for them. If a wheel came off and we crashed, Pepperidge would have to answer to Shepley, and Shepley to the head of state, and just incidentally a nation of one billion people would have to go on living under the boot of a decadent clique until they were ready to risk more bloodshed in the streets.
‘You should also know,’ Pepperidge said, ‘that the charter flights out of Hong Kong were of course fully booked, and we had to buy three cancellations, and if any of the airline computers get things mixed up, the passengers you’re replacing are a Mr. Brian Outhwaite and a Mr. Yan Hanwu. Everything was done correctly, so you have to insist that those are indeed your seats.’