Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  I looked down through the drifting screen of snow at the string of lights in the valley. The soldiers would be three miles away by now, as a rough estimate, and the terrain was rough, loose, and inclined at something like ten or fifteen degrees. There was moonlight, but under the snow flurries it didn’t amount to much more than a glimmering sheen across the scree, with no real shadows. Across this kind of terrain a man couldn’t go too fast without risking a broken ankle, and at this altitude the lungs would be starved of oxygen to a critical degree: we’d reached here, Xingyu and I, exhausted.

  I said into the radio: ‘Two hours.’

  Waited.

  ‘Two hours. That is my deadline.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A wind gust came, cutting across my face and leaving snow whirling into the cave mouth.

  ‘Very well.’ That tone of cheerfulness again, got on my nerves, made things worse because he only ever used it when things were tricky in the extreme. ‘A great deal can be done in two hours. A great deal. Unless there’s anything you want to add, I’ll get on with things right away.’

  There was nothing important. I’d been going to report the suspicions I’d had earlier tonight when we’d been lurching across the scree to the caves: a couple of tunes I thought I’d heard faint sounds behind us, closer than the road down there, and once I’d told Xingyu we were going to take a rest, and I’d sat there listening to the rushing of the wind across the stones, but that was all I’d heard. I hadn’t thought about it since then.

  ‘Nothing to add,’ I said.

  ‘Then stay open to receive.’

  I went into the cave.

  ‘I must get to Beijing.’

  Sitting there staring at nothing, a shadow humped against the rock face.

  ‘Dr. Xingyu, I’d like you to move a bit nearer the mouth of the cave. I’ve got to be there to monitor the radio.’

  ‘Radio?’

  I spelled it out for him, saying that the signals we’d be receiving would help us to get him to Beijing, and he tried to stand up and I gave him a hand and we managed it. Snow was coming into the cave mouth and we sat crouched with our backs to it.

  ‘It’s a bit colder here, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  Small talk, I’d descended to small talk, putting off the question that had to be asked, that had to be answered, before we could do anything more, before even London could order the fully urgent process into action - because if it was the wrong answer I would have to signal Pepperidge at once.

  ‘You don’t need any insulin yet, Dr. Xingyu?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing to eat?’

  ‘No.’

  The question.

  ‘Night like this,’ I said, ‘nice tot of rum would go down rather well.”

  ‘Rum?’

  He turned to look at me, face blank.

  Ask the question.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said.

  The wind buffeted the rocks, moaning.

  Now.

  He sat huddled into his coat, staring in front of him.

  ‘Dr. Xingyu, why must you got to Beijing?’

  He turned to look at me again, the moonlight throwing a sheen on his pale face. ‘To tell the students they were wrong, in Tiananmen. Democracy is not the way.’

  Mother of God.

  ‘Hear you.’

  The snow whirled against my face. ‘He’s been brainwashed,’ I said.

  Chapter 25

  Pendulum

  ‘Zhege ymgguoren si dulde.’

  I tapped the pendulum.

  ‘In English, please, Baibing. You don’t mind if I call you Baibing?’ It would set him more at ease, invite his trust in me.

  ‘No.’ ‘

  The snow had eased over the last half hour, as it had done last night, when Chong had seen to the sergeant out there; the moon was brighter now, shining on the pendulum. I’d taken the silver paper from the packet of syringes on Xingyu’s flight bag, and wrapped it around a stone and hung it on a bit of string from one of the stalactites in the roof of the cave and set it swinging.

  It had taken a long time to persuade Xingyu to keep his eyes on the pendulum: There are things you don’t remember, important things. You’ll have to remember them, or we can’t take you to Beijing.

  Swung the pendulum.

  But I haven’t forgotten anything.

  Yes, you have. I want you to remember everything, or you can’t go home and see your wife again.

  To and fro … to and fro, a tiny silver moon a little distance from his eyes. I watched his eyes.

  There is nothing I want to tell you.

  Taken a long time, fifteen or twenty minutes, wearing him down, he’d never get to Beijing, never see his wife, over and over again, tapping the pendulum. But now he was deep in theta waves and under my control.

  ‘Zhege yingguoren si duide.’

  ‘In English, Baibing.’

  They’d talked to him in Mandarin, or course, in the temple, Trotter or the man who’d been with Xingyu when I’d found him, or both; but it wouldn’t make any difference: I was asking him for images, ideas, not speech patterns.

  ‘The Englishman is right,’ he said.

  ‘Is he? Right about what?’

  He didn’t answer, went on staring at the tiny silver moon. I was up against a block, something he felt was very important, important not to divulge.

  ‘Right about democracy?’ I asked him, and that broke his resistance.

  ‘Yes. There is no future in democracy for the People’s Republic, no room for it. You can see what democracy has done to Europe and America. We cannot contemplate that happening in China.’

  I touched the stone to keep it swinging. ‘What has it done, Baibing, to Europe and America?’

  In a moment - ‘It’s all there, in the manifesto.’

  ‘What manifesto?’

  ‘Of course it is. But I forgot where you put it. The manifesto.’

  Silence. He was having to find his way mentally through a bewildering field of concepts: his own fierce convictions before Trotter had gone to work on him, then the doubts Trotter had put into his mind, then the new convictions he’d been given under hypnosis. And now I was starting to ask worrying questions.

  ‘We can’t go to Beijing,’ I told him, ‘without the manifesto.’

  Swinging the pendulum.

  ‘He said he would give me a copy of it, on the flight to Beijing.’

  ‘What’s it about? The manifesto?’

  ‘It is the blueprint for the New China.’

  ‘Under democracy?’

  Hesitation, noted. ‘No.’

  ‘Under Communism?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Under your present leaders?’

  ‘No.’

  Oh really.

  ‘Under what leaders?’

  ‘Under Xu Yun.’

  Making some progress now. Xu Yun was on the second level of the hierarchy, a young minister, said to be brilliant and on his way; but he’d been given a rap on the knuckles for going personally into Tiananmen Square in June 1989 to talk to the students and peddle a soft line to bring the tension down.

  ‘What will Xu Yun do for China?’

  ‘He will at first seem to favour democracy, then gradually swing the ideas of the people toward the new Communism. He is very clever, and the students approved of his actions in Tiananmen, when he went to listen to them.’

  ‘Good. And what is the new Communism?’

  ‘A society in which all people are truly equal, with no rich and poor as we see in Europe and America, with no millionaires and homeless sharing the same streets, with no pollution as the end product of industrial greed, no crime waves induced by social inequality, no drug culture spawned by the egocentric devotion to the self instead of the state. It is in the manifesto.’

  Gooseflesh again, as I listened to Trotter speaking with Xingyu Baibing’s voice. And a sense of revelation, because I was beginning to learn more about
the Englishman and the dream that had driven him.

  ‘That’s very interesting, Baibing. Would you like to tell me more?’

  He hesitated again: the question seemed to worry him. ‘I have not read the manifesto.’

  ‘But our friend Mr. Trotter talked to you, didn’t he, for quite a long time. Tell me a little more.’

  In a moment - ‘The human race has so far proved itself the least intelligent of all living species; man is the only animal incapable of living within its natural environment and accepting nature as its earth mother instead of a system to be conquered and controlled. By the use of fossil fuels, the construction of nuclear power stations, the destruction of the rain forests and of life in the oceans, we are destroying the planet itself, its surface and its protective envelope.’

  His tone was easier now, less hesitant: he was on his own ground here, speaking of ideas he’d held long before he’d come under Trotter’s influence.

  ‘And the new Communism will be able to do something about that?’

  ‘Not immediately. It will take ten or twenty years. But it must be done, for the planet and human life to survive. Instead of nuclear power, with its unconscionable problem or Chernobyl-like disasters and lethal waste disposal, we need to harness the infinitely greater power of the sun’s heat and the force of the winds and the oceans. Instead of fossil fuel, with its equally unconscionable problems of the increasingly lethal accumulation of poison gas in the atmosphere, we need electric transportation, much of it solar-powered. Instead of impoverishing the soil and saturating food products with toxic chemicals and irradiation, we need to allow the land to enrich itself again by disciplined crop rotation and the development of organic fertilizers. All this can be achieved. It is in the manifesto.’

  I stood up to check on things outside. The snow had stopped, and moonlight flooded the scree. As the wind shifted I could hear sounds from below, the banging of tailboards and the murmur of engines. The line of light had crept higher, away from the road and toward the hills; the soldiers were still too far away for me to pick out individuals, but their line was nearer now.

  Tempted to pick up the radio: Your deadline was two hours and there’s ninety minutes left. Have you done anything? Are these bastards awake in London? The tide was rising, and all I could do was to go back in there and listen to Trotter’s vision of a brave new world.

  Xingyu was still sitting bolt upright, absorbed by the rush of concepts and images going through his mind. ‘I must get to Beijing,’ he said.

  Not really. Not now.

  ‘So China can achieve all that,’ I said, ‘in a matter of a decade, two decades?’

  ‘If fossil fuel suddenly dried up overnight, the United States of America would have an efficient electric automobile industry within two years, otherwise trillions of dollars would be lost. Industry is very inventive, the lure of gold being its mainspring. In the People’s Republic we can be equally inventive, otherwise life itself will be lost.’

  I leaned against the rockface, feeling its chill through my coat, feeling its reality. I needed life, too, and even more than that I needed to vouchsafe the life of this man here, because the mission is the Holy Grail and held to be above the survival of the executive, and the mission tonight was to protect Dr. Xingyu Baibing, the messiah, the little robot sitting here regurgitating a romantic’s manifesto. I found myself sitting very still, my back to the freezing rockface and my eyes -on the moonlit sky and my mind suddenly close to the Englishman’s, to Trotter’s, as if a mental zoom had closed the distance between us.

  He had lied very little, that man, and then only by omission. His objective had been precisely the same as mine: to get Xingyu Baibing to Beijing and in front of the cameras. He had wanted the geriatric tyrants there to be thrown out of power, as we did. He had protected my operation all along the line, just as he’d said, because he didn’t have the dissident commander’s tanks readied to defend the people, as we did, in Tiananmen Square, didn’t have the contacts, the coordination, the military escort that would lead Xingyu to the cameras after Premier Li Peng had been seized and put under military arrest.

  So Trotter had used the Bureau.

  Had used me.

  Our aims are the same, my dear fellow, I do hope you understand.

  The same, up to a point. Not just as far as getting Xingyu out of Tibet, not just as far as getting him into Beijing and through the streets and into the Great Hall of the People, but to the very point when the lights would come on and the cameras start rolling and he would appear on the television screens right across the nation.

  And speak not for democracy but for the new Communism under Xu Yun as its leader.

  Sat very still, shutting my eyes, absorbing the light of revelation.

  I do hope you understand, my dear fellow.

  Yes, I think so.

  He’d wanted, as we had, to put this man on the television screens - but with a robot’s brain.

  ‘When they came for you at the monastery, Baibing, was Mr. Trotter there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did he say to you?’

  ‘That I would not be hurt.’

  ‘I see.’

  The object had not of course been to hurt Xingyu Baibing but to keep him sequestered in the temple and subjected to intensive brainwashing, probably under the influence of a hypnogenic drug from Dr. Chen’s little black bag.

  ‘Did they give you an injection? I don’t mean insulin.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  It wasn’t important; it would simply have been useful to know what kind of change I was dealing with: psychochemical or hypnotic.

  ‘Did Mr. Trotter tell you that he’d be letting you go free?’

  Hesitation again, quite pronounced this time. ‘He said I would be returned to your protection.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  He was, then, to have been released in such a way that I would ‘discover’ him and take him somewhere to safety and finally to Beijing, the same man but not with the same mission.

  And then I’d mucked everything up for Mr. Trotter by deciding to get in his way and find Xingyu for myself.

  I do hope you understand, my dear fellow.

  Actually yes.

  ‘Were you given posthypnotic instructions, Baibing?’

  I don’t know what he would have said because the radio crackled and Pepperidge came on and I acknowledged and began listening.

  Chapter 26

  Shadow

  ‘What is your situation?’

  ‘They’re closer,’ I told him.

  I watched the ragged line of light in the valley below.

  ‘By how much?’

  ‘Half a mile, a mile, it’s difficult to tell.’

  ‘Are they looking for you, or Xingyu Baibing? Or both?’

  I thought about that. ‘The military were alerted by two things, the fire in the temple and someone shooting at us from a Beijing jeep behind us. I think Trotter could have been hi the jeep, alone or with one of his hit men. Or it could have been just a hit man, or two of them. I think Trotter was probably injured by the bombs, could be dead by now.’

  The line of light seemed to be breaking up in one or two places. Either one or two of the soldiers were moving up faster than the rest because of easier ground, or the officer in command had ordered probes to move directly into the hills to search the caves.

  I didn’t report this. I wasn’t certain yet.

  ‘What might have happened,’ I said into the radio, ‘is that the military caught whoever was firing at me from the jeep, and put him straight under interrogation.’

  ‘And he told them you were somewhere in the area?’

  ‘Yes, with Xingyu. They wouldn’t have mounted a search on this scale for me alone. The police and the PSB agents are looking for me, but not the army.’

  I waited.

  My position was not good; it was probably lethal; but I preferred it to what Pepperidge was going through. He’d been pleased
to take this one on, had been courteous enough to say he’d be honored to direct me in the field, and we’d done well together, got the Chinese Communist government’s most dangerous political opponent through the trap in Hong Kong and the trap in Chengdu and got him into hiding. Then Trotter and his private cell had moved in and the objective for Bamboo had changed totally. It wasn’t that we could no longer hope to fly Xingyu into the Chinese capital: we no longer wanted to. It was the last thing we must do. All that was left of the mission was a static rearguard action outnumbered by something like ISO to one, and my final instructions from London would simply be to save this man’s life if I could.

  I did not envy my director in the field. He was talking to, me from this lonely room in that shabby hotel, the link between London Control and his beleaguered executive trapped in a mountain cave in Tibet, with no further objective except to survive.

  His voice, of course, was perfectly steady, and that helped.

  ‘They haven’t brought helicopters in?’

  ‘God forbid.’

  ‘Quite so. But if they do, please report at once.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Have you explored the cave?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no hiding place.’

  ‘Will you decide to leave there, do you think, since the search is closing on you?’

  ‘Yes, unless there’s something you can do.’

  Better to be overtaken in the open and on the run than raked out of a hole like a couple of bloody badgers.

  In a moment: ‘I signaled you to tell you that London has been very active indeed since I reported our predicament. Through the embassy in Beijing and our courier line they have contacted General Yang.’

  ‘Yang?’

  ‘He is the commander who would have supported Xingyu Baibing’s television appearance with a tank corps in Tiananmen Square. He was told of Dr. Xingyu’s critical situation and agreed to send one of his colonels immediately to Gonggar airport to see if anything can be done.’ There was a crackle of static suddenly and then his voice came in again. ‘Was… course… originally hoped that he might be able to help us get the subject to Beijing, until you reported that he has been compromised.’ Read brainwashed. ‘If the colonel can do anything now - his name his Zhou - it will be to attempt to rescue both of you from the cave. London reports that he has already left Beijing in a MiG 23 fighter-bomber and should arrive Gonggar in a little less than two hours. I have no information on what he will do then, but I assume he’ll use his rank and try to halt the search that is now in progress. But that is conjecture.’