by Adam Hall
It’s standard Bureau practice when a flight’s booked solid: you send in a contact who picks the shabbiest-looking passenger in the waiting area and makes him an offer he’s not liable to refuse for cancelling his flight and leaving a seat available.
‘That’s all,’ Pepperidge said. ‘Questions?’
‘Any support?’
He looked at me briefly. ‘None on the first flight, one at the airport in Chengdu. That’s all’ - a shrug - ‘we’ll need.’
Because if the Chinese secret police got on to us for any reason we’d just have to argue things out in the interrogation cell. Pepperidge could send in a dozen people in support and there wouldn’t be anything they could do because the KCCPC wasn’t just a private opposition unit in the field: it controlled the field, sharp-eyed and gun at the hip. We were going through the Bamboo Curtain, and the only reason for putting a man into Chengdu airport was to have him report to London if he saw us being hustled into a van.
‘Signals?’
‘Through Cheltenham,’ his yellow eyes on me again, ‘but all you’ll have is a telephone booth. Have you made many calls in China?’
No signals line, then, no contacts, no couriers, nothing, just that one man in Chengdu with a watching brief. Xingyu Baibing was the most wanted man in China and that was where I was taking him and we couldn’t risk anyone else getting near him because they’d know where he was, and if they were picked up and put under the light they could break and speak and we’d crash.
It was the way I’d always wanted to work: no support in the field, no contacts, no cutouts, no one who could get in my way, I’d argued the toss about it time and again with Loman, Croder, Shepley, trying to make them see that I could work best when I worked solo. This time I’d got what I wanted.
And felt lonely.
‘I lock up?’
‘Yes,’ Pepperidge said. ‘Drop the key into the letterbox on the jetty.’
‘No more questions.’
He looked at Xingyu, who was sitting at the table with his head in his hands.
‘Dr. Xingyu?’
He looked up. ‘What? No. I have no questions.’
Perhaps it was partly the diabetes that was making him so depressed. Did diabetes make people depressed? I didn’t know, didn’t think so. All I knew was that it was going to be a long day, and a long night.
Pepperidge looked at his watch and got up and let his eyes rest on me for a moment and then got the attaché case with his name tag on it and opened the door of the cabin, going out and looking around him.
‘Smells nice,’ he said, ‘after the rain. It’s going to be a fine day.’
‘She is very attractive.’
This was at noon. We’d got through four hours together, mostly in silence, with the tension in Xingyu filling the cabin.
‘You have seen photographs of her?’
..
I said I had.
‘She is very attractive, yes?’
‘Very.’
‘And she is quite a little younger than I am, as you know, if you have seen her photograph. I am a lucky man.’
I didn’t say anything. He wanted to think aloud, not talk to anyone. But it was true: the press photographs I’d seen of his wife showed that she was very attractive, with a brilliant smile in some of the shots, and younger than Xingyu, but, from her description, as brave, marching with him in the streets, sharing the contempt hurled at him in the government controlled media nationwide, an intellectual, Xingyu Chen, a professor in economics.
‘I wish to telephone Beijing.’
This was soon after three in the afternoon. He’d lapsed silent for hours, doing something with papers, foolscap sheets he’d found in a drawer of the small writing desk near the galley, filling them with Chinese script and mathematical hieroglyphs and formulae. But now he wished to telephone to Beijing.
I told him no.
‘I must know how she is,’ he said, and his eyes behind his heavy horn-rimmed glasses were hard, obstinate. ‘I must know that she is not being victimized. Victimized because of me. Because of me.’
Told him he couldn’t telephone. He knew that already; Pepperidge had told him enough times. Perhaps he thought I’d be softer to work on, couldn’t read faces very well.
‘I wish to telephone a friend, a very close friend, the dean of my department at the university. He will know what is happening to my wife. They will not trace the call, you must realize that.’
Water slapped the beam of the boat as another vessel left the quay, spreading a wake. Light dappled the bulkhead from the ports on the other side, from the sunlit sea.
‘No,’ I said, ‘they wouldn’t trace the call, but your friend would be excited to hear from you, and would be very quick to tell your other friends, and when one of the plainclothes Armed People’s Police on the campus picked it up, your friends would be arrested. Is that what you want?’
It took another hour to get him to see what his situation was really like, to think more like an intelligence agent than a philosopher, more like the most wanted man in China, to understand that just by picking up the telephone over there he could send his best friends into the interrogation rooms in Bambu Qiao prison.
Perhaps he managed to get a different perspective on himself, I don’t know; I hoped so, because he could let us take him through this mission as an exercise in clandestine intelligence work or he could drag us through the labyrinth with death and destruction grinning from the dark at every turn.
‘Have you a wife?’
Back to that, to his pretty Chen.
‘No.’
‘If you had a wife—’ He reached for his worn black wallet and began opening it, then shut it again and put it away, remembering there was no photograph of her there anymore, because Pepperidge had cleared out the whole contents and sent them to London through our courier line for safekeeping. ‘If you had a wife like mine, you would know what I mean.’
Said I was sure I would.
The next thing he wanted was a newspaper, and I was surprised he hadn’t asked for one before; perhaps in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boat he was forgetting the facilities of the outside world. I didn’t refuse him this time: Pepperidge had briefed me privately that within the stifling confines of the mission I was to allow Xingyu as much freedom and as much information as I could, to build his trust in me and keep him from going crazy.
I used the phone and told the contact what I wanted and fifteen minutes later a car stopped and there were footsteps and a knock on the cabin door, three long, two short, three long, and I opened it and took the copy of the South China Morning Post and gave it to Xingyu. He went through the first two pages and passed them to me, not saying anything, just prodding a finger at a half-column report on the second page.
XINGYU BAIBING SENT INTO EXILE. As the result of an agreement reached between the People’s Republic of China and Great Britain, Dr. Xingyu Baibing, formerly Professor of Astrophysics at Beijing University and a notorious agitator, has been released from the British embassy here, where he fled to evade arrest after fomenting dissension among his colleagues in the faculty. This concession on the part of the People’s Republic was granted in order to preserve the positive relationship between the two nations.
Should Dr. Xingyu choose to return to Beijing of his own free will, his present status as an exile in disgrace would be reviewed, a source close to Premier Li Peng has revealed, but he would face a rigorous inquiry as to his actions before fleeing to the British embassy. Certain other intellectuals, several of them friends of the exiled scientist, have-been placed under arrest and will be invited to explain their part in the unrest of the past two weeks and to volunteer information on the role played particularly by Dr. Xingyu Baibing, so that the truth may be brought to light in the interests of the people.
The rest of the report was a summary of Xingyu’s repeated attempts to interrupt the steady progress of socialism in the People’s Republic, and ended with praise for Premier Li
Peng’s magnanimous gesture to Great Britain in relieving her of the embarrassment that inevitably followed her misguided decision to offer sanctuary to a notorious troublemaker whose continuing presence in her embassy could only have exacerbated her predicament.
Photograph of Xingyu, carefully chosen from hundreds of others, that had caught him with an expression on his face that could be seen as fearful, hunted.
I’d asked for the English-language Morning Post because it would give Xingyu an indication of Beijing’s attitude toward him and his present position. The Hong Kong Times would have slanted the report in sympathy with Xingyu and would have used a different picture. What worried me was that the Post hadn’t mentioned Xingyu’s wife, hadn’t reported her feelings about losing her husband to the West, a traitor to his people, so forth. I would have expected it to do that, to turn the screw.
Lying in my bunk, hours later, my eyes open and watching the play of light on the overhead from boats moving in the bay, I went on worrying about it, about the obviously deliberate omission of any reference to Xingyu’s wife, certain that it was designed to set him up in some way, designed as a trap, went on worrying instead of sleeping, as the boat moved gently to the waves coming in from the bay and the lights played on the varnished timbers and the sound came of Xingyu’s quiet sobbing in the dark.
Chapter 9
Chengdu
‘Have you been there before?’
‘Where?’
‘To Lhasa?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why did you go?’
‘To meditate.’
‘Ah. I saw the Dalai Lama, once.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘He is beatific. Beatific.’
The wheels went down with a thump and the cabin shuddered.
‘He radiates good. You can see it, like an aura.’
I think the Hong Kong Chinese chew more gum than the Americans. Everyone, I’m sure you’ve noticed, does more American things than the Americans do.
‘He personifies the second coming of Christ, I truly believe.’
Or he would, I suppose, if he weren’t a Buddhist. I saw Xingyu scratching at his face again. He was sitting five rows back from the flight deck. I was in a rear seat, from which I could watch everyone.
‘You don’t talk much.’
‘I’ve got toothache,’ I said.
‘Ah. You should suck cloves.’
The aircraft settled into the approach. Buildings below us now, a waste ground of buildings, block after block of apartment houses, factories, their smoke clouding like stirred mud across the bare winter trees of the apple orchards to the west.
Chengdu.
I had expected trouble going through Hong Kong airport, because that had been where the objective for Bamboo was to have been completed: to get Dr. Xingyu Baibing out of Hong Kong. There was a new objective now: to get him into Tibet and under cover and protect him until he was needed in Beijing. But I’d still expected trouble going through the airport, because the mask might not have been good enough, or my own blue woollen cap and glasses might not have been enough to change my image. That image hadn’t been in view for more than a minute outside the terminal where I’d made the snatch on Xingyu, but someone might have remembered it.
But there had been no trouble in Hong Kong.
The Chinese stewardess came down the aisle checking seat belts, her face lit with a china-doll smile.
The trouble came in Chengdu.
‘You may find itching,’ Koichi had said, Koichi the Japanese. ‘Sometimes find itching, under mask. But do not scratch. Must think of something else.’ Huge grin. ‘Think of very fine Chinese dinner, very good sizzling rice and everything.’
There was no grass down there below us, no trees, nothing but stones, asphalt, bricks, rooftops, with a tangled web of electric cables spread across the streets to power the trams.
I would have liked to go forward and tell Xingyu not to scratch, to think of very good sizzling rice. In a few minutes we’d be going through immigration and customs checks, and the mask had to go on looking perfect. But I couldn’t leave my seat now.
It was going to be more difficult, of course, to get through Chengdu than out of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong there’d been a strong cadre of KCCPC agents on the watch; in Chengdu there would be more, simply because this was a major Chinese airport and passengers from Hong Kong would be coming, in effect, from the West.
‘Do you speak Chinese?’
‘Not very much.’
‘Then I will try to buy some cloves for you.’
Scratching again, Xingyu. He must be mad.
The cabin leveled off and we bumped three times and then the brakes came on and there was some Chinese coming from the speakers and then some English.
All passengers must remain in their seats with their seat belts fastened until the aircraft comes to a stop. For your information, CAAC Flight 304 will depart from Chengdu at 12:25 p.m. in thirty-five minutes from now. Your guide will escort you to the gate.
I got into the aisle without wasting any time and reached the queue at the immigration desk with Xingyu ahead of me in plain sight. The terminal was huge, bleak, echoing, built on Soviet lines, and there were upward of a hundred people here in uniform with peaked caps, most of them standing at the line of desks and farther out near the walls and the exit doors; they formed what amounted to a living barricade, a potential trap, and it was now that I looked at Xingyu standing there under the immigration sign and thought for the first time that there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting him through this massive array of police and onto the flight for Tibet, not a hope in hell.
He’d blow it, the whole thing. He wasn’t an experienced agent, not even an agent at all; he might know the chemical composition of Jupiter but he wouldn’t know what to say when they asked him what his reason was for going to Tibet. He’d remember what we’d told him to say, of course, that he wanted to study the language, but it wouldn’t be the truth, and he’d been used to shouting the truth from the rooftops all his life, it was in his character, in his bones, and he was going to tell these peak-capped robots his precise reasons for going to Tibet, he was going there to implement the overthrow of the Communist Party in Beijing and let freedom ring throughout the land, so forth, while I stood here listening to the orders for the police to close in and take him away, milling around him like a pack of starving dogs that had found a bone.
Nothing you can do now, it’s too late. Just stand here and wait for it, stand here and wait.
Sound of Bedlam, like bloody Bedlam in this place because there was no carpeting, no acoustic ceiling, only the peeling paint of the walls and the scarred concrete floor and the vast dirt-filmed windows throwing the echoes across and across the hall, with somewhere the tinny sound of music from the loudspeaker system or someone’s radio, a Chinese singing a Bing Crosby song, ‘I’m in the Mood for Love,’ a hilarious thought, a hilarious thought, my good friend, in a place where any kind of love had long since fled, or died, like a butterfly caught in a machine.
‘George, are you going on with the rest of us?’
‘Look, for God’s sake don’t give them any lip, you’ll drop us all in the shit.’
‘Where’s Jimmy, then? He said he’d be here.’ The United Kingdom contingent, not from Hong Kong, doing the Tibet trip, a change of pace from Majorca.
‘Show them everything, mate, don’t try any tricks.’
‘Everything all right?’ A face close to mine suddenly, the voice very quiet, the eyes looking nowhere.
‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘to stop scratching his face.’
He turned away and wandered about again, passing close to Xingyu ahead of me in the queue and then moving away, standing at a distance, looking around him for some lost sheep according to his cover, Aurora Travel on the red plastic disk pinned to his lapel, the man from the Bureau, sent here to signal London that he’d seen the shadow executive and the subject land safely at Chengdu and present themselve
s to immigration, or of course to report that the subject had in point of fact been smothered suddenly in a scrum of policemen and hustled into a van outside, it would depend, wouldn’t it, on what the most wanted man in the People’s Republic of China said to the smartly uniformed officer behind the desk, on how he said it, and on whether he was going to stop scratching his face until he tore a hole in the mask and finis, all fall down, he must be out of his mind.
‘Marjorie’s not coming.’ Scared blue eyes.
‘But she was on the plane.’
‘She’s not coming with us. She wants to go back to Hong Kong.’
The queue shuffled forward again. Dr. Xingyu Baibing was the next in line at the desk. Not, perhaps, out of his mind, no, in the sense that he didn’t realize the danger, just being driven out of his mind by the itching under the mask, itching can do that, yes.
‘What on earth for?’
‘She says she can’t get her mind off what they did that time in Tianen - Tia - you know, that square.’
‘God, that was ages ago. Tell her—’
‘She says she’s frightened of them. She’s never been in China before.’
‘Tell her she’s all right with us. I can’t leave—’
‘She’s being sick in the lavatory.’
‘Then for God’s sake go and help her. Tell her the plane goes in ten minutes.’
Shuffled forward again, and Xingyu got his papers out, clumsily, dropping one of them, picking it up -would they notice the blood hadn’t gone to his face after he’d bent down like that! - showing them the papers now while the man over there with the Aurora Travel badge swept his eyes across the crowd and didn’t let them stop at Xingyu. One of the policemen took a step forward, a step toward the desk, stretching his legs, perhaps, but his eyes were watching the desk, watching the little man there from the shadow under the peak of his cap, the shadow thrown by the bleak neon lights that hung from the iron rods under the ceiling while the noise went on, the din of so many voices, of so many people trapped in here like cattle in a slaughterhouse but we must not, must we, let our imagination get out of hand, we must not be sick in the lavatory.