by Adam Hall
'The alternative,' I said, 'would have been to try keeping the man hanging around Chengdu scratching his mask off while I tried phoning London or tried getting some news from Beijing, and-'
'You don't have to explain.'
So I shut up. He'd thought out all the alternatives for himself in five seconds flat. But I hadn't been trying to tell my director in the field how to suck eggs; I'd wanted him to know that I'd seen what the alternatives were and seen that they weren't worth using. But he would know that too.
I closed my eyes and let the whole thing ride, because I was going to need my strength. Someone, my gentle DIP or my Control in London or Bureau One himself, would have to work out what to do next, and their instructions could be frightening.
It had seemed so easy, almost a model exercise. The shadow executive was to take charge of a distinguished dissenter from Beijing at Hong Kong airport and keep him discreetly sequestered for a day or two and then send him back to the capital when all was ready. The distinguished dissenter would not of course be informed of the main operation, would know nothing of the People's Liberation Army general who would contain Tiananmen Square with his tanks while Dr Xingyu Baibing, the hero of the hour, went before the television cameras in the Great Hall of the People and offered to lead his country out of the shadow of Communism and into the light of democracy.
Things were different now. He'd picked up the paper.
Plopping sound, like a silenced shot. I let my lids open a degree and saw Pepperidge had pulled the cork out of his big thermos flask.
'A drop now,' I said.
'Do you good. Rest a lot, drink a lot.'
'Yes.' Rest, drink, but do not be merry, my masters, 'tis not the hour.
If he hadn't done that, Xingyu, if he hadn't picked up the paper, there would have been no mission-breaker, no ultimate risk of something happening that could blow the whole enterprise. Even if Xingyu was killed in some kind of unexpected action he could be replaced by someone in front of the television cameras, a disciple of the messiah who could still do the job at a pinch. Even if they blew us, the KCCPC, blew Pepperidge or me or both, we would pop our capsules to protect security and London could replace us and the operation could still proceed. If Xingyu was captured and sent back to Beijing and brainwashed it could still proceed, because the army general would still make his move and Xingyu's replacement would still do his job, at a pinch.
But now we had a mission-breaker. We would have to go on from here in the face of the ultimate risk.
'Cheers.' Pepperidge gave me a mug of tea.
'Cheers,' I said.
And the ultimate risk was buried like a bomb inside the head of Dr Xingyu Baibing himself. He knew everything now, because I'd had to tell him, and if they got at him tomorrow or the next day and put him under implemented interrogation he'd blow every phase of Bamboo like a firecracker, and within the hour the PLA general in Beijing would be arrested and shot and his division ordered out of the capital and when Xingyu was finally propped in front of the cameras like a ventriloquist's doll they'd wind him up at the back and he'd say he'd been wrong after all, he'd say that the people had mistaken their way along the road to socialist salvation, tempted by foreign blandishments, he'd say they must hold high the torch and keep the faith, while all over the city and across the nation a hush would fall, and hope for the future would limp away like the beggar at my table in the cafe, his tin bowl empty.
Pepperidge sipped his tea. 'I shan't inform London.'
I sat up straighter. 'You've got to.'
'I see no reason.'
'This is major. You can't just go it alone.'
'I don't see,' he said slowly, 'that London could have instructed you to do anything else at Chengdu, other than what you did. I think you took the only way out, and it must have shaken you to do it. I can only commend your decision.'
He was going right out of his way this time. But it wasn't just charity. We were going to have to keep the mission on track if we could, and the director in the field didn't want to run a shadow executive who was living on the edge of his nerves because he'd made an ultrasensitive move without asking London's permission.
'Few things you should know,' he said, 'before we make up our minds what we're going to do. I've been in signals with London quite a bit since I got here, picked up some of the gossip. The Bombay police found a body in a canal last night, been garotted, head half off but with the face still there and papers intact in his wallet, five snake bites on him. It was Sojourner.'
I thought about it and then asked him, 'Are they certain?'
'Oh yes. Two of our people were flown out from London to dig up the facts. Apparently Sojourner was released from the intensive-care unit twenty-four hours after he went in there, and a friend of his fetched him from the hospital. He was reported as being "still weak, but ambulatory," and his friend — Hindu — declared he would look after Sojourner with great care.'
'How old was the friend?'
'I asked that, too, because of what you'd told me. He was an adult, not the boy. Of course, it wasn't necessarily that man who killed him, though it looks like it. They're trying to put everything together.' He brought the thermos over and sat on the edge of the bed. 'Top you up. The only thing that worries us, of course, is that he might have been interrogated, during the time when he was escorted from the hospital and the time he was killed. For the moment London is assuming that Sojourner's assassin didn't get it right the first time and simply had to finish him off. Snake venom's uncertain in its effect, depends on body weight and general constitution. Whatever they find, I'll let you know.'
'If he was interrogated,' I said, 'and they got everything out of him…'
'Let's not think about it. On the more positive side,' getting up and fetching a news clipping from his briefcase, 'when Dr Xingyu was at our embassy in Beijing they asked him if he'd got any photographs of himself taken abroad, and he came up with this one, among others.'
Head-and-shoulders shot, saying cheese, against the background of Big Ben, unmistakable. Caption: Dr Xingyu Bribing, released yesterday from the British embassy in Beijing, in London for talks with the Foreign Office.
'Any chance they'll swallow it?'
'Not much. The first place Beijing would expect him to go is of course London, and of course they would have posted a very large contingent of their people at Heathrow to watch for him. But who knows, they might fall for the snapshot.'
He took another sip of tea and sat looking down into the mug, perhaps waiting for me to say something, though I didn't think so. He'd been going over the Chengdu thing while he was talking, and had now reached, I believed, a decision. I had an idea of what it was going to be, and I hoped I was wrong, hoped to God I was wrong.
Sand hit the windows as the gusts came whipping into the streets from the plateau. I found I was watching the telephone with its chipped plastic and its tangled cord, and either Pepperidge noticed this or there was one of those little flashes of telepathy that we become used to, when the mission begins to take shape and our nerves follow the same rhythm and our minds touch and drift away again but not far.
'I would phone London, of course, if you wanted me to.'
In a moment I said, 'Have you got the answer?'
Swinging his head to look at me. 'I think so.'
'And you're ready to go ahead with it?'
'Not really the question.' He looked down again. 'It's whether you will be ready to go ahead with it.'
Sand on the window, coming in waves across the rock desert out there in the night, eroding the town by infinitesimal degrees, reminding me how impermanent life was, how fragile.
I said, 'Try me.'
He got off the bed, taking his mug and putting it down carefully on top of the chest of drawers with its patchy varnish, one brass handle missing.
'The only added risk,' he said, 'that we now face is Dr Xingyu himself. For as long as he stays uncompromised, we shall have no trouble.' It's one of the precious euphemis
ms those snivelling scribes at the Bureau think up to soften reality: in this case, for the opposition to 'compromise' Dr Xingyu Baibing they would throw him into an interrogation room and squeeze out every bit of information he'd got in his head while the radio was turned up to full volume to cover the noise. 'If he were found and seized and interrogated,' Pepperidge went on, 'all would of course be lost, and there wouldn't be anything we could do about it. After all, Sojourner possessed the same information that you-' tiniest hesitation '-that Dr Xingyu has now become privy to. The only difference is that we believed Sojourner was safe from any attention, whereas Dr Xingyu is being actively sought throughout the world. We should have protected Sojourner, and didn't but at least we know we must protect Dr Xingyu, if necessary to the point of death.'
I sat with my hands around my mug of tea to warm them. The ancient electric heater set into the wall was keeping the room just this side of freezing.
He didn't mean mine, my death. The shadow executive doesn't necessarily expect to return from a mission; that much is a given — it's in our contract. And it is understood by all parties concerned that in inclement circumstances the life of the undersigned may become forfeit despite any or all efforts that will if possible be made to protect him.
We've lived with that one from the beginning, and never pay it much attention. People get killed in bullfights, in marital strife, on the road. What frightened me was that Pepperidge meant Xingyu's death, not mine.
'I don't want,' I told him, 'to make guesses.'
'No, quite.'
If you think I was giving him a hard time, my good friend, you are in error. I wanted to be absolutely sure of what my director in the field would give me for instructions, because in the heat of action I might forget what was said, or what was meant.
Pepperidge took a step or two, his thin body stocky-looking in his padded windbreaker, his raw, knuckly hands tucked under his arms, his eyes resting nowhere.
'Quite. Well, let me ask you this. Do you think there's any chance of persuading Dr Xingyu to carry a capsule? If you explained the need?'
I didn't even have to think about it. 'No.'
'Understandable, quite, devoted to his wife and all that. Just thought I'd ask, because you've been with him longer than I have.' He turned away, taking another step, so that his voice reached me indirectly, echoing softly off the walls above the moaning of the wind outside. 'So what it comes down to is this. I need to know whether, in order to protect the mission, you yourself would be prepared to take his life.'
Chapter 12: Cockroach
He looked like a Buddha sitting there.
I didn't know if he'd seen me; he didn't give any sign.
There was a three-quarter moon outside; it had lit my way, no more than a patch of light through the haze of the flying sand but enough to show me the road, rutted by carts, up the long hill to the monastery. It shone through the oblong gaps in the walls here that once may have been windows, and through the broken timbers bracing the roof, its light leaning between the pillars, some of them rearing at an angle: the whole top floor had shifted, by the look of it, during the fire. There were ladders everywhere, most of them broken, hanging from their top rungs from the floor beams; the one I'd just climbed was the only one still usable — I'd checked for that, earlier, when we'd come here.
He sat very still, the moonlight touching on his scalp, turning his red robes to black, conjuring a spark of luminosity in the shadow of his face, a tiny jewel from this distance, his eye. So he was watching me.
This place was a catacomb, its spaces tunnelling through massive timbers, its perspectives broken by frozen cascades of plaster blackened in the fire, by doors hanging from a single hinge, with cells making hollows darker than the walls, and galleries running as far as the light allowed the eye to follow. The smell of the fire was still here, acrid in the mouth.
The wind shrieked, rising to a gust and dying again, keening, and sand drifted through the beams of moonlight as if through the timbers of a wrecked galleon. I'd made no sound coming here, climbing from the main hall of the monastery: I wanted to know how good this monk would be as Xingyu's guard; but there was enough noise going on already, from falling debris and the shifting of joists and roof beams as the wind shook the building. Perhaps he'd seen me in any case from the distance, as I'd climbed the ladder.
He hadn't moved, but since his eyes were open I knew he wasn't meditating or in prayer, but I gave a bow to make sure I wasn't disturbing him, and he returned it, getting to his feet when I neared him, a gold tooth gleaming as he greeted me with his palms touching lightly together. He was agelong, fully ordained.
'He sleeps,' he whispered to me.
'I won't disturb him. Did he ask for anything?'
'For paper, to write. And must buy drug.'
'What drug?' He couldn't mean insulin.
'For the sickness that he has.'
'For his diabetes? He needs more insulin?'
'Yes.'
'You mean there's none left?'
'Must buy tomorrow, he say.'
He could have warned me, Xingyu, for God's sake, that he was getting low.
'All right,' I said.
'Peace be with you,' the monk whispered. We exchanged bows, and he moved along the gallery, a rufous shadow in his robes, picking his way across the gapped timbers to the ladder.
He'd been upset, Xingyu, by the fuss in Hong Kong, the airport snatch and the mask and having to go back through the terminal for the flight to Chengdu; it could have made him forget he was running low on insulin. But that might be his way, to forget things, and I'd have to watch it: he could be living half his life on the edge of the galaxies, the absentminded-professor syndrome, it could be dangerous, could be dangerous now — how easy would it be to get hold of insulin in a place like Lhasa?
I opened the door of the cell as carefully as I could, but the wooden hinge still creaked. It wasn't a cell exactly, though Jiang the abbot had called it that; it had once been three or four cells, but the shifting of the building during the fire had brought down some of the flimsy plaster walls, and we had the luxury of space here, you could call it a guest room, almost, a royal suite, with glass in every window and straw on the floorboards, a pipe from a cistern on the roof bringing water to the metal trough in the corner where the midday sun thawed the ice and you turned the tap on with a wrench. It had been used, Jiang had told me, to accommodate a visiting dignitary on a secret mission for His Holiness during the 1959 rebellion; hence the glass in the windows and the water basin, and of course the unlikelihood of our ever being found here on the fifth floor of a ruined hulk.
I couldn't tell if Xingyu was awake, as I opened my sleeping bag. He didn't speak, or even stir, as far as I could tell with the noise the wind was making, and I found myself worrying, as I believe young mothers do, whether my precious charge was sleeping quietly or lying there in the silence of untimely death: the insulin thing was on my mind, and I didn't know how fast a coma could set in, with a change of diet.
I lay on my side, with dust sometimes settling on my face and making the skin itch as the wind fretted at the cracks in the ceiling, worrying also that I had crept in here to lie in the dark beside this man, his watchful guardian and defender of his faith, but if things went terribly wrong, his executioner.
So what it comes down to is this — Pepperidge — I need to know whether, in order to protect the mission, you yourself would be prepared to take this life.
I hadn't said anything.
Sand blowing across the window. Took another step, Pepperidge, head down, looking at the floor. 'Let me spell out the situation for you. Memory is fallible. The situation I'm talking about is one in which for some reason Dr Xingyu were found and seized and you were unable to save him, but were able to take his life before it was too late, before there was any time for the KCCPC to put him under interrogation. I hope that's clear.'
'Yes.'
It wasn't likely that a situation like that would come up: it
was more liable to be one thing or another — either I'd succeed in protecting Xingyu and bringing him home safely to the plane for Beijing, or something would go wrong and the KCCPC would infiltrate our operation and catch Xingyu and break him and send him to Beijing for the puppet show. But I could think of a hundred situations, a thousand, where I could be right in the middle of a last-ditch action to save the protege and indeed have the option of seeing him taken away or protecting the mission by taking his life. The most obvious scenario would be that we were both found and seized and taken for interrogation, giving me the chance of seeing to Xingyu somewhere along the way and then popping my capsule. We were both replaceable, and Bamboo could survive.
Seeing to Xingyu, oh for Christ's sake who's been bitching about the use of precious euphemisms, killing him, yes, killing Xingyu, I take your point.
'You didn't draw a gun,' Pepperidge asked me, 'this time out?'
'I never do.'
We're given one or two options on our way through Clearance, draw a weapon if we feel like it, draw a capsule; but I don't like guns; the hands are quieter and I prefer going in close.
'I know,' Pepperidge said, 'but I just wondered, you know, this time. In the kind of situation we're talking about you might not get a chance of staying near him, near enough. Question of distance, timing, chance of pulling off a shot.'
My hands had gone cold around the mug, the tea was cold, my spirit was cold, and I got off the bed and put the thing down on the chest of drawers and told him, 'You can't insist. You cannot insist.'
Touching my arm, 'Of course not. I've just got to sound you out, you see, find some sort of compromise. Got to remember, though, haven't we, that there's rather more at stake than the disinclination of one single executive to take a life. There's the future, isn't there, of China and Hong Kong.'
Beginning to feel light-headed, you've got to avoid stress, the guide had told us, or you'll make things worse, the altitude sickness, take it easy, walking. I was walking about now, Pepperidge moving over the wall to give me room, that bloody cockroach crawling across the wainscoting, looking for a way out, felt like, I felt like putting my foot on the thing, Ferris would have done that, he's always looking for beetles to tread on, makes me sick because where do you stop, putting my foot on a cockroach, on Xingyu, said, I said- 'They must have provided for an accident, in their original planning in London, an accident to Xingyu, I mean they-'