Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  That, was the important thing, I suppose, that I’d felt she’d wanted to say.

  ‘By the police?’

  ‘No. By anyone.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I said, and took her hand from my arm and kissed it and went out and down the stairs and waited in the hallway until the siren’s howling had died to a moan. Through one of the windows I could see the vehicle was an ambulance; it had stopped some fifty yards along the street, and people were gathering to watch. There was one minute to go, but when I walked into the street the huge green Jeifang was already waiting there higher up with its engine running, facing away from the scene of the accident and out of sight from the hotel windows, and I crossed over and the door of the cab came open and I climbed inside and we started off. There wouldn’t be anyone following us: he’d be in the ambulance by now.

  It looked all right until we got as far north from the town as the No. 4 truck depot along Jeifang Beilu, I mean the vehicle we were in was good cover and Pepperidge had protected the rendezvous and I was looking forward to telling Xingyu Baibing we were going to get him to the airport and fly him into Beijing tomorrow - he’d be seeing his wife sooner than he’d expected - but as we approached the crossroad where Daqing Lu runs east-west we saw red lights flashing in the dark and Chong said it was a police roadblock and put his foot on the brakes.

  Chapter 17

  Chong

  ‘Not police,’ I said. ‘They’re military.’ I could see the vehicles had camouflage paint on them, as the lights of the traffic swept across their sides.

  ‘Yes,’ Chong said. ‘Soldiers.’

  There was snow blowing on the wind; there’d been a few flakes in the town when we’d left there ten minutes ago.

  Most of the traffic was coming the other way, from the north; the soldiers weren’t stopping it; against the dark background of the hills we could see lighted batons waving the stuff through: jeeps, a tourist bus, horse-drawn wagons. Another big green Jeifang overtook us from the south, from the town, and came to a stop behind the traffic piling up against the barrier, a couple of hundred yards from where we were standing.

  ‘What are they looking for?’

  Chong sat with his thin shoulders hunched over the wheel, a big moth-eaten fur hat dwarfing his small face, his jaws working on some chewing gum. ‘They’re always looking for something.’

  ‘Can we go north any other way?’

  ‘We could turn back and get onto Linkuo Lu.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘North again as far as the Sky Burial Grounds, then west, then north again on the road we are on now.’

  ‘How long would that take?’

  ‘Maybe forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Turn your lights off before—’ But he’d hit the switch already and looked at me and away again and made a U-turn and switched the lights on and throttled up, some heavy metal clanking in the rear of the truck.

  ‘What are we carrying?’

  ‘Mining gear.’ He’d learned his English in the States, or from an American. ‘I’m on contract.”

  ‘What’s your cover story for this run?’

  ‘Oh, I sometimes work late.’

  ‘Do you know what we’re going to do?’

  He looked at me briefly again. ‘Pick him up, take him to the airport at Gonggar.’

  We rumbled through the night.

  It is difficult. Everything is very difficult for me to understand. There are things I would like to tell you, but I cannot. Her long eyes shadowed.

  What things?

  You must be careful. When you go down the street, make sure you are not followed.

  Why had she said I could go to her hotel when she’d known there’d be surveillance on it from the street?

  By the police?

  No. By anyone.

  Who?

  The .snow slanted across the windshield, whitening from the dark across the headlight beams. When we turned again I asked Chong if we were now on Linkuo Lu, the road to the north he’d talked about.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe another thirty minutes now.’

  I wound the window down an inch and the freezing air blew in, but it was better than the exhaust gas seeping up through the floorboards.

  ‘You know you’ve got a leak in the exhaust on this thing?’

  “Sure. Leaks everywhere.’

  Head was aching again because of the bumps when we went across potholes; everything rattled and bounced, the windshield, the seat, the floorboards, the brains inside my skull.

  I would ask Pepperidge to get a coverage on her from London; her father was a university professor and she was an employee of the Civil Aviation Administration of China with a license to practice shiatsu, and all those things would be in the official records. London could get one of our sleepers in Beijing to raise everything there was on her background; if we ran into trouble it might be useful: I could get some idea of where her loyalties lay, what value she might have for the mission, what dangers she might pose. But of course if we could get Xingyu to Beijing tomorrow it wouldn’t matter a damn, nothing would, mission completed, so forth.

  ‘Shit,’ Chong said.

  Red lights flashing, a mile ahead of us to the north.

  ‘Are they at the crossroad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We should turn west there, then north again?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He braked and ran the big truck onto the rough ground at the side of the road and doused his lights.

  ‘Have you seen military blocks like this before?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘I mean at two adjacent crossroads?’

  ‘Not so much. Thing is, when they block every goddam highway, means they’re probably in a ring right around the town.’

  Traffic was coming past us from the north, running into the screen of snow and breaking it up, sending it into eddies as the wind took it again.

  ‘This snow. Is it going to settle?’

  ‘Guess not. The ground’s too dry. It’ll maybe pile up into drifts against the scree, that’s all. It’s too cold for it to keep on coming down.’ He moved his gum to the other side of his mouth. ‘We go back?’

  A ring around the town, Jesus, it wouldn’t matter where we went, we’d run into a block. In a minute I asked him, ‘If I weren’t with you, would you have any trouble getting through?’

  He thought about it. ‘I can’t answer that. I mean sure, in the ordinary way, maybe I’d get through okay, my cover’s watertight, I’ve got my contract I can show them, this is one of my regular routes and everything, but see, it depends what they’re looking for, what they want, they can just say, look, I don’t give a damn if you’re the king of Siam, you just turn around and get your ass back down that highway. With these people you can’t make any predictions.’

  ‘Switch this bloody engine off, will you?’ I got the window down as far as it would go, blast of cold air but at least it was fresh. Snow blew against the side of my face, and I put a gloved hand up. The wind hit the truck, rocking it on its springs. I didn’t know, suddenly, what we were doing here: with a ring of military checkpoints set up around the town there wasn’t a chance of reaching the monastery and bringing Xingyu Baibing back through an armed blockade.

  Your instructions are to get the subject to Beijing as soon as possible.

  Pepperidge.

  No go.

  ‘Chong, was there a phone anywhere along the road we’ve just come up, any building we could phone from?’

  ‘Guess not.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He was probably right. The only buildings I’d seen were sheds, barns, ruined temples.

  ‘Then where is the nearest phone?’

  ‘Way back down there on Dongfeng Lu, the Telecommunications Office.’

  Thirty minutes away. We don’t often feel like asking for instructions at the highest level from London when we’re stuck in the field
with the odds stacked and the chances thin because we know the situation and the environment better than they do; but tonight I thought there was a case for putting a signal through, phoning Pepperidge: We’re cut off by roadblocks set up by the military and there’s very little chance of bringing this thing off until at least the morning, if then, so please signal London and see what they say.

  I knew of course what Croder would say.

  Follow your instructions.

  His small pointed teeth nibbling at the words like a rat with a corncob, one hand stroking the metal claw that he used for the other, his black eyes watching for your reaction, ready to catch any sign of hesitation, of weakness, ready to pull you off the mission and throw you out of London and into Norfolk for refresher training, executive replaced, stroking the metal claw, ready to bury it into your guts if you were found wanting, following your instructions, oh, the bastard, follow your instructions.

  ‘Chong, can we make any kind of detour?’

  ‘Mean get past the block?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He began chewing faster. ‘Jeez, I dunno.’ I waited for him to run it through his head. ‘Thing is, sure, we could try, yah, but we couldn’t use our lights. They’d see us, I mean they’d see we weren’t on any kind of a regular highway. Be on a pretty rough surface west of here, but of course this baby can handle what you might call inclement terrain, so high off the ground. Sure, we could try it. That what you want to do?’

  ‘Yes.’ He started the engine. ‘But take an angle,’ I told him. ‘Go south about half a mile if the ground’s all right, then stay parallel with the east-west road.’

  ‘You got it.’

  I think he was pleased, in his quiet way, hadn’t wanted to give up and go back. ‘Chong, have you ever been in trouble?’

  Argot for intensive action: getting out of a trap, battling unequal odds, running a frontier under fire, things like that.

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  He didn’t work in London, wasn’t used to the idiom.

  ‘Say, breaking out of an interrogation cell and leaving dead.’

  ‘Oh, right, yeah, couple of times.’ He turned his small head to look at me. ‘I tote a capsule.’

  ‘I just wanted to know what your status is.’

  ‘We .get into trouble tonight,’ he said, ‘I aim to kick any asses around I can find.” Working his gum. ‘Call me reliable.’

  He looked ahead and put the big truck at a slope of shale and gunned up. With the lights off we couldn’t always make out what was ahead of us; the moon was a hazy crescent high and beyond the flying snow.

  Pepperidge would not of course have given me an amateur. It was nerves, that was all: I’d never worked with this man Chong and if those people up there at the roadblock caught the outline of this truck they’d come and ask questions. The snow made a light screen but this thing was as big as an elephant.

  ‘Can we work our way south a bit more?”

  ‘Guess not. There’s ravines down there, not big ones but we get a wheel jammed and we could break the axle.’

  Crash of metal from behind us as we took a bump, skewing across loose stones and swinging back.

  ‘Take it slower,’ I told Chong.

  ‘You got it. But sometimes, see, you got to take a run at a slope or you don’t have enough momentum.’

  ‘Keep the sound down as best you can.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He fished in a pocket. ‘Care for some gum?’

  ‘Not just now.’

  He spat out of the window and peeled the packet. ‘Saves my nails. You worked in Beijing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was born there. Mom and Dad fighting like cats when I left school, so I shipped out on a freighter to San Francisco, five or six years there, got involved with a private detective agency and took in most of the cities across the States, did a few things for the CIA kind of under the table, then I shipped out again to London, got into a very interesting situation getting a Nicaraguan vice-consul out of a hostage deal at the embassy in Gloucester Road - that time I was still on the unofficial payroll of the CIA, but it brought me in touch with your outfit. They wanted someone like me in Beijing, bilingual native with a little experience in what they called the “clandestine arts” - those guys kill me - so I said okay.’

  The wheels began spinning again across loose shale and he played with the steering and got us straight. ‘Then you know what happened? I found I was Chinese again, and see, I had a kind of advantage in Beijing - I could sink right down into the daily life and look out from there with what you could call Western eyes and see what was really going on, and at first it didn’t bother me too much - this was in Mao’s time but I learned to live with it because I was in your outfit now, sending stuff in to London, and they were very pleased.’ He slowed the truck and we rolled carefully down a slope with the brake shoes moaning in the drums. ‘Then something happened that kind of changed things. I had a sister, see, and she had a kid, couple of years old, good husband, I liked him, still do, works in a coal mine, and then they made a law you couldn’t have more than one kid, keep the population down, and she made a mistake and had another one and they towed her and a lot of other women naked behind a truck through the streets as punishment, and that was what really changed things for me, see.’ He turned to look at me. ‘That really changed things. I told my director I wanted different work, where I could get at these people with my bare hands, you know, the police and the PSB and the KCCPC and the military, any son of a fucking gun I could get near, so I could practice my clandestine arts, you understand me?’

  The slope leveled out and he gunned the engine again. ‘You wanted to know my status, and now you do.’

  His big fur hat bobbed as we took the bumps, his thin body coming right off the seat over the bad ones, his small gloved hands playing on the thick rim of the wheel. I didn’t say anything, but it reassured me, what he’d said; if we got into anything sticky on this trip I wouldn’t have to carry him.

  Sometimes the moon came out as the wind took the snow and cut swatches through it, letting the light reach the ground.

  ‘What happened at the rendezvous, Chong?’

  He caught the truck as it skewed again over the stones. “I guess it was more or less routine. Your DIP sent a guy along to see if the hotel had any surveillance on it, and it did. So we took it from there.’

  It’s in the book, under the heading of Protecting the Rendezvous. There are fifty ways of doing that but tonight Pepperidge had chosen this one because it had suited the situation: there were people in the street and the Jeifang had a big profile and I had to climb into it without anyone paying attention and in any case the peep had got to be removed so that he couldn’t tag me, so our man had worked out the timing and ten or fifteen minutes before the rendezvous he’d dropped the peep with a discreet nerve strike and then made a show of helping him as he lay on the ground, told someone to call an ambulance, this man was having a heart attack, and by the time the ambulance was on the scene everyone in the street was watching the action while I got into the truck farther along.

  ‘Is he going to follow up?’

  ‘Your DIP?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure, told me he would. We need all the info we can get, right?’

  Right. Who the peep was, who was running him: the man who’d dropped him would stay close.

  There was an inch of snow on the window on my side and I let it down an inch again and saw the red lights still flashing up there to the north, behind us a little now. We’d been going for fifteen minutes but this was virgin rock without even a wagon track and our average speed wasn’t much more than walking pace.

  ‘Snow’s easing,’ Chong said.

  ‘Yes.’

  We didn’t want that. The light from the three-quarter moon was brighter now across the ground, throwing shadows. It made the going easier but the truck would stand out more against the lights of the town to the south.

  ‘Chong.’
<
br />   He turned his head.

  ‘What’s your cover story for driving overland like this?’

  ‘I’m looking for the new mining site. The research crews have just set up camp, there’s no road made yet.’

  ‘What are they going to mine?’

  ‘They’re not sure yet - it’s just an assay. They’re going to drill a hundred meters down and take samples. The geologists say there should be copper in this region.’

  ‘That’s your full story?’

  He looked at me. ‘You think anyone in the People’s Liberation Army’s going to question it?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Tell you something. What the average soldier in the PLA has got in his head is rice.’

  I let it go. It shouldn’t come to that; if they were going to see us they’d have seen us by now.

  The snow had almost stopped; isolated flakes drifted, black against the sky and turning white as they settled on the dark green of the truck. The shadows were sharp now, and rocks stood out, their flint surfaces glinting in the light.

  ‘Chong. Where are you going to put him?’

  ‘I got crates back there, one of them empty. He can breath okay, gaps where the lid goes. We can pile a whole lot of drilling gear on top, see. He’ll be snug as a bug in there, got a blanket and some cushions, nothing too good for that guy.’

  A front wheel caught a loose rock and threw it upward and it banged on the underside of the truck like a gunshot. Reaction from the nerves and it worried me. The effects of the the shiatsu had worn off a little, or it was simply that I was standing back in my mind and seeing the whole thing in perspective from overhead: the truck, small from that distance, crawling across the dark terrain a mile and a half from the group of army vehicles and the flashing red lights, a mouse creeping across the floor under the nose of a cat, not a pleasant simile, no, uncomfortable, unnerving.

  ‘You weren’t there,’ Chong asked me, ‘in Beijing, that time?’

  The time of Tiananmen. It was how they all spoke of it these days, as ‘that time.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was there.’

  The rocks glinting ahead of us, bright now, too bright, the shadows too black, too sharp. I turned my head.