Quiller Bamboo q-15

by Adam Hall

  Meant find Xingyu.

  'All right,' I said.

  In a moment, 'Have you any plans?'

  'I'm going to follow up whatever I can find.' Couldn't tell him what I'd asked Chong to do for me; we weren't scrambled. But I think he knew what I was going to do. I think he knew.

  'Very well.' A note of cheerfulness, I wished he wouldn't do that, it was like whistling at a funeral.

  Meant to be kind, he meant to be kind, God knew how this man had got through all the missions he had — major operations, three of them Classification One to my knowledge, global scale — with this much humanity, this much compassion. Simply because, perhaps, he could preserve enough heart in his executive to keep him running on, give him the feeling he wasn't alone, take enough tension out of his nerves to let him see a chance he might otherwise miss, and muster the strength to take it.

  Miracles do not always come easily, do not burst upon us with the holy light of revelation; they must sometimes be conjured from the sickly flame of despair, the hands held close to keep the draft away and the gaze steadfast, bringing to bear upon the matter the grace of faith, until through the dark of disaffection the small flame thrives, leaping at last to burn with a light that holds the very soul in thrall, by which I mean, my good friend, that one must not go limping home, must one, when all is wretchedness, no, one must sit here in this stinking truck and watch the doorway over there, not for an instant taking the eyes away, in case there is a last chance, however thin, of conjuring that little flame within the hands, and there she is.

  Su-May.

  She was alone, coming through the doorway of the little broken-down hotel, first looking to her right and then to her left in the way they do, the amateurs, when they want to take care they are not watched, making her way past the vegetable stall, a small figure bundled against the freezing wind, soon to be lost among the blade-edged shadows of noon.

  Hit the button — 'Breaking, stay open, out.'

  She was at a table in the far corner.

  I could only just about see her: large luminous eyes set in a small pale face above the fur collar of her parka; something had gone wrong, I suppose, with one of the stoves in here, the cafe was thick with smoke. This was a bigger place than the one I'd gone to before with little Su-May and later Pepperidge; it was crowded, people hungry in the middle of the day. My stomach was empty but I hungered not, had ordered tea. Fear doth not prick the appetite, and Lord, I was afraid.

  The oil lamps flickered against the walls like warning beacons across a foggy sea, and dark figures moved through the smoke, servers, customers, beggars, and monks; dogs darted between their feet and under the rickety bamboo tables and out again, seeking scraps for their hallowed stomachs.

  They are sacred, she had told me, little Su-May, believed by some to be the reincarnation of departed monks, I think she'd said, believed by some but not by me, kicked at one of the little buggers and felt it connect, they'll start gnawing on your bloody ankle if you don't watch out, sitting with my hands around the cup of tea, nursing my nerves.

  Because it had come to this. When a mission has crashed and the opposition has gained the field and there is nothing you can do, almost nothing, we will correct that, almost nothing you can do, there is always a last desperate play that you can consider using, and it has never failed. It will give you access again, a way in through the wreckage, and if you get it right you will once more confront the enemy, and with luck and the blessing of every saint in Christendom you may even, finally, prevail.

  Men moved like shadows in this ghostly place, women too, I suppose, though it was difficult to tell because most of them were swathed in robes or skins or coats and big fur hats, the drab plumage of their winter hibernation here on the bleak roof of the world. Someone was coughing his heart up in the drifting smoke, and a door was banged open behind me to let some of it out.

  There were no mirrors in here.

  It's not in the book, the ploy I was talking about, even though it has never failed. You'd think a thing like that would be a dead ringer for the Manual of Procedures, which is the Bible rewritten for the shadow executives of the Bureau, and I've tried to get it put in, but their lordships of the hierarchy won't have it, and the best I can do is spell it out for the — neophyte spooks whenever I give an instruction class between missions at Norfolk.

  She had been sitting alone, but now a man was joining her at the table, his black leather outfit gleaming in the shadows as the light from the oil lamps caught it. He looked young, athletic; he was an Oriental. I didn't think I'd seen him before, though I might have — no one in this smoke was easy to recognize. I hadn't known she'd come here to keep a rendezvous, but I'd thought it possible, by the way she'd checked the street outside the hotel, right and left, in the way they do, the amateurs, the unfortunates in this life who pass too close to the machinery, sometimes with the thought in mind of monetary gain or the perverse excitement of betrayal, sometimes just by accident — as in her case, I believed, little Su-May's — passing too close to the subtle and delicate machinery of international intelligence, fine as the web of that black widow we talked of, you and I, the machinery of subterfuge and treachery, deceit and untimely death.

  They were talking, she and the young athletic-looking Oriental, their heads close. She hadn't seen me: I knew this. She would have reacted, would react if she saw me.

  They won't allow it in the book, their lordships of the hierarchy, because although this last desperate play has never failed, it is deadly. It is lethal. It has killed.

  At first I thought she was all she'd seemed to be, little Su-May, a refugee from the continuing oppression in Beijing, afraid for her father. Then I'd thought — had known — she was something more than that, perhaps working for the private cell that had moved into the field — not, certainly working for the police or Chinese Intelligence: she was totally untrained. Then I'd assumed that she had, yes, simply passed too close to the machinery, to become caught up, her loyalties compromised, fragmented, so that she was grateful to me for the message I'd sent to her father, impressed that I'd killed an agent of the KCCPC, the arch enemy, had protected me from the police in the cafe — perhaps on instructions — but had been working against me for the private cell and even then had become torn both ways and finally had warned me.

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

  By the police?

  No. By anyone.

  All I knew of her now was that she might provide me with the only link there was to the opposition, to whatever agent or cell she was working for, and could conceivably lead me to Xingyu Baibing.

  The man in black leather could have been one of the people who had gone into the monastery last night and seized Xingyu and killed the guard. I could be within touching distance of the subject, the messiah.

  It was all that sustained me, this thought, all right, this straw I was clutching at. Without it, nothing could have made me leave the truck and follow this woman here through the bright streets of noon, totally unable to know if I myself had picked up a tag among the people of this place in their robes and skins and coats and big fur hats, their disguise if you will, because that's what it amounted to, totally unable to know if I had been followed here and being watched at this moment through the drifting smoke.

  No mirrors, and a door wide open behind me, does that tell you anything? Normal security measures had gone to the dogs: I'd used no cover on my way here, hadn't even looked back, had walked into this place alone instead of waiting for other people to camouflage the image through the doorway, had sat down at a table in the middle of the room, my back to the door, breaking every single bloody rule in the book, chapter and verse, because that is what the ploy demands before it can work for you.

  I took another swallow of tea; it was thin, bitter, sharp with tannin, but hot, scalding still from the big black insulated jug they carried from one table to the next; it warmed my hands, burned them, as I sat her
e with the skin crawling and the nerves flickering along their pathways like liquid fire, a lone spook cut off now from all support, contact, and communication, sitting here like a rabbit on a firing range, divorced from the mission, sequestered in a location unknown to my director in the field, offering myself body and soul to the opposition in the hope that all could be reversed as the hours mounted slowly through the day, to allow me at last a chance, however small, of finding him, Xingyu, Dr Xingyu Baibing, and of bringing him to safety.

  You know what it is, the ploy.

  She was standing up suddenly, Su-May, at the far table in the corner, still talking to the man in black leather, looking down at him, one hand resting on the tabletop, a bag of some kind slung from her shoulder.

  You know what it is, my good friend, if you've soldiered with me before: it is a matter of getting in their way. If you cannot find them, let them find you. Let them see you, let them come for you, let them trap you, and if it becomes necessary let them do the most dangerous thing of all — let them take you.

  Voila.

  Jason did it in Sri Lanka and got away with it, brought home the product. Tomlin did it in Costa Rica, got in and got out and left a chief of police hanging from his feet in a brothel. Cartwright did it in Tokyo, took on their mafiosi and got a British national home and followed on with a smashed hip and his nerves like a bombed piano — but they were the success stories, the ones we pass around in the Caff between missions to remind ourselves how good we are at this game, how successful, how intrepid, as an antidote to the fear of going out again. There are also the others, the other stories, which are not passed around in the Caff — Brockley tried the get-in-their-way thing in Athens and the colonels had him shot at dawn; Fairchild tried it in Calcutta and went out wearing a garotte; Myers tried it in Damascus and lasted three days and died mad, I was there in the signals room when the DIF reported through a drug runner's radio: executive seized, believed under torture, am pulling out.

  So that is the way it is, it sometimes works and then you're in spooks' heaven and hallowed by the name around the tea-slopped tables in the Caff, but it very often doesn't work and you can end up in the scuppers of some stinking hulk with your throat cut or spread-eagled on a trash heap with their heavy bone-white beaks picking at the still-warm flesh, I don't mean, I do not mean to sound discouraging, my good friend, but that, as I say, is the way it is, we must keep our fingers crossed and from the depths of the timorous soul pluck up a prayer that this time it will work for us. She had taken a step, had turned again and was coming between the tables, coughing in the smoke, and I angled my head to make sure she'd recognize me and she slowed at once, almost tripping, then went on past my table without looking at me again, her voice just loud enough for me to catch.

  'You are in great danger.'

  Swallowed some more tea, didn't actually need telling of course but she'd meant well, could have saved me as she'd done before in the other place, went out, she went out through the wide-open doorway into the street.

  He stayed ten minutes, the young Oriental in black leather, then put some money down and left the table, moving along the bar on the far side without coming anywhere near me, though the path Su-May had taken was the more direct. So I had made contact, and must follow up.

  Put five yen on the table, the generosity of a man with nothing to lose, got up and went to the door and found the smoke drifting into the sunlit street and some policemen pulling up in a jeep, it looked in fact as if the whole place was on fire, turned my face away and followed the man in black.

  He wouldn't carry a gun; the police were fussy here, pick you up on the spot and search you and he'd known that. But he was a senior belt, by his walk, and that was far more dangerous. And he wouldn't be alone: he was walking alone toward the marketplace, but there would be others not far away; this was already a mobile trap they'd got me in — it hadn't, you see, failed; it never does.

  They wouldn't like it in London.

  Executive in immediate contact with opposition and fully compromised.

  It's the way they say things on the signal boards, and I suppose it works, as a kind of shorthand. They wouldn't know, of course, for a while; they'd have to wait until I'd surfaced and reported my new position to Pepperidge, or had not of course reported at all, because of the bone-white-beaks thing they so charmingly call sky-burial.

  How does it feel to have the left eye plucked from the socket and carried aloft, and then the right, carried aloft by those great black wings and digested in the airy pathways of their going, the eyes and the tongue and the genitals and then the whole thing buried in the sky with only the skeleton left down there, grinning at its fate, how does it feel? But we must not be morbid, we must keep on walking, keep up a steady pace and not bump into any monks, they're everywhere, there must surely be redemption for this doomed spook in a place so holy, turning to the right, into an alleyway, the man in black leather, and I followed him.

  The sun beat down from a brazen sky and the smells from an apothecary's stall were rich and strange as I passed through them; they grind the bones of tigers here, and bottle the ashes of snakes and sea horses, a different smell, you will acknowledge, than your good old milk of magnesia.

  I walked into the alleyway and in a moment they followed, the others, but simply kept station, not crowding me, and I felt pleased, as well as frightened, horribly frightened, pleased that even though I might never get out of this alive at least I had decided to make a final effort and get in their way, not for his sake, Xingyu's, not for the future of the Chinese people or the stock market in Hong Kong but of course from pride, the stinking pride of the professional, that and vanity, the constant itch to take on dangerous things to prove not that I can do them but won't die in the doing, that personal and very special game of hide-and-seek you play in the shadows, so that when the grim reaper comes you can take him by surprise and with his own dread scythe cut him asunder.

  There were stray dogs here in the alley, mangy and hollow-flanked, their eyes milky, and one of them, dirty white with brown patches, backed off from me as I went down on my knees and stayed like that for a moment and then fell prostrate like the monks I'd seen, the dog coming close now and sniffing at me as I wondered if I was facing the east as I should be, prone on the ground like this.

  Chapter 22: Mad

  Naked, she was more slender than I'd imagined.

  It had been the clothes she'd worn, thick and padded against the cold, that had made her look almost dumpy, in spite of her small face. Sitting like this in the soft light of the lamp she had the stillness of an ivory figurine, one arm resting across her raised knee, her dark eyes watching me and her mouth pensive, her throat shadowed, flawless, a tuft of silken black hair curling from her armpit, her small breasts high on her chest, their nipples erect in the centre of their large ochre-coloured aureoles. She hadn't spoken since we'd come in here.

  For a time I just let my eyes take in the beauty of her face, her body, and then I began feeling restless because it wasn't enough, and I put my hand on her sharp, delicate shoulder blade and she came against me at once, but I couldn't see her so clearly now because they'd taken one of my eyes, the shadows of their great wings falling across her body, and then I was sightless, and my tongue flared and they began tearing at my genitals and I think I called out, though there wasn't any pain, just a feeling of surprise that I knew what it was like now, to be buried in the sky.

  'Ta kuai xingle.'

  Indefinable scents in the air, and coloured lights drifting against the walls, casting rainbows across the huge gold man.

  'Yao wo qu jao ta ma?'

  No, coloured lights not drifting anywhere, it was when I'd turned my head; the lights weren't moving.

  'Shi.'

  The huge gold man sat very still. I'd seen one as big as this before, in the monastery. They were all over the place, all sizes.

  'Water.'

  I heard sandals scuffing across the floor, opened my eyes again — the li
ds had closed without my knowing it — saw the head and shoulders of a man going through a doorway, I must be lying on my back.

  'Here.'

  A face near me, creased into fine lines, a dark mole on the temple just above the eye, reflections throwing light across it, reflections from the glass of water.

  A stray thought, quick as a spark — he'd known I would be thirsty: the water had been here. He wasn't the man who'd gone through the arched doorway.

  'Thank you.'

  'Drink.'

  Yes, thirsty.

  'Where's the dog?'

  He frowned, shaking his head, tugging his robes tighter around his thin body. Perhaps he didn't know about the dog, the dirty white one with the brown patch.

  'Feel pain?'

  'What? No.' I finished the water and he took the glass away, putting it down on something hard, perhaps marble: this was a temple, and the coloured light came from a window high in the arched roof.

  No pain, but felt heavy, weighed down, when I moved, when I tried to sit up, couldn't manage it.

  Someone was coming.

  Tried again to sit up and the big man came across the room and got me gently by the arms and gave a heave- 'Let me help you, my dear fellow.'

  White teeth in a thick black beard, dark intelligent eyes, couldn't think of his name for the moment, things a bit hazy still, sitting on the ledge now, a kind of plinth where they'd kept altar bowls and prayer wheels, they'd been moved onto the floor to make room for the blankets, for me, this was a temple, got it now, Trotter, yes.

  'Oh,' I said, 'hello.'

  'This is Dr Chen.' Trotter turned to him. 'What do you think, Doctor?'

  'He is all right soon. Is the altitude sickness, that is all.'