The Pekin Target

by Adam Hall

  We also suspected something else, but hadn’t wanted to talk about it. This was the information that Sinclair had brought to London: that the Secretary of State was marked for death. If Sinclair could have talked, we could have prevented it.

  Jason too might have known, and might have warned Ferris when he’d flown in last night, before the opposition had got at him. But why hadn’t either of them sent a signal?

  “Thank you,” the Ambassador told the Chief of Police. “I wanted to make sure of the facts, and of the implications.”

  “The implications we must divine later, when we have all the facts. I shall allow myself the honour of making further reports as the enquiry proceeds.” He waited until the interpreter had finished speaking in her soft musical tones, then drew himself straight. “I wish to repeat, Your Excellency, that together with other city and government departments, the Metropolitan Police Department of Pekin is shocked and distressed by the tragedy that has befallen your distinguished countryman, and will devote all its energies to bring those responsible to justice.”

  A couple of straw mattresses had been brought in and a clerk sent to the Hotel Beijing for our toilet things: the last signal from London had ordered that Ferris and I should remain at the Embassy until further notice. McFadden raked up an alarm clock and a small transistor radio to make us feel at home, which was civil of him.

  The Embassy cook knocked together a scratch meal and McFadden came along to share it with us in one of the offices, talking a bit but not about the bombing; he missed England and wanted to know if The Mousetrap was still running and whether you could buy camel feed in Harrods these days. It was nearly midnight before Conyers came, and we moved into the main reception room because it was bigger.

  Conyers was an American anti-terrorist agent, but we didn’t know his official background and he didn’t explain. He was a quiet and slow-moving man with a weathered face and a bright-blue stare and an artificial hand encased in a black leather glove.

  “How are the other guys?” he asked no one in particular and lit a cigarette, flicking the match into the pot with the half-dead fern in it near where Ferris was sitting.

  “Nothing serious,” Ferris said.

  Detective-Inspector Stanfield had gone in the ambulance with the Secretary of State but was let out of hospital an hour ago with minor injuries; he’d caught more of the blast than I had, because Bygreave had provided a shield. The three other security men hadn’t been touched.

  “I’m in Pekin,” Conyers said with a glance across the two doors, “because we had wind of something, but it wasn’t anything to do with the British team. Your Ambassador here has asked me if I have any ideas as to the motive involved in this thing. Frankly I haven’t. Frankly I’m mystified. The Chinese have no motive for antagonising the West, at a time when they’re looking for expanding trade and closer military ties. It doesn’t escape your attention that I’m talking as if the British Secretary of State has been assassinated. I believe he was. I believe that bomb was intended for him, and for nobody else. Some people are saying that this was an act of terrorism, designed simply to blow a dead body out of its box in front of a captive audience with instant media replay world-wide by courtesy of the international journalists present, a protest against the prevailing political constitution of the People’s Republic of China. That’s bullshit. There isn’t any prevailing political constitution in this place, simply because they haven’t had time to clear up the mess that Mao left all over the doorstep.”

  He took a drag on his cigarette. “This, gentlemen, isn’t Lodd Airport and it isn’t the Munich Olympics. Nobody has come forward to claim responsibility, even though the PLA and half a hundred other terrorist organisations would be sorely tempted to do just that, simply because this was a Hollywood spectacular and if there’d been any message for anyone it would’ve gotten an Oscar for Western Union. The only message I can see is that somebody wanted the British Secretary of State to be dead. You boys will know a lot more than I do about that, but you have my deepest sympathies; it’s a lousy way to go.”

  “You think it was a political assassination?” Ferris asked him.

  “I think it was a political assassination.” He flicked ash off his cigarette and I noticed his good hand was never quite still. He watched Ferris with his bright blue stare.

  “Don’t you think it’s a bizarre way of doing things?”

  “Sure. But hellish effective. Look, they didn’t do it this way for fun. These are experts. Technically it took a lot of working out, and I know of what I speak.” He glanced down briefly. “My left hand was last seen travelling at five hundred feet in a south-westerly direction, and although it was a mistake on my part, I’d been trixying around with these toys for ten years without so much as a broken finger-nail. They decided this was the most effective way of working, that’s all. Remember how the Basque activists terminated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the President of Spain? They dug a tunnel thirty feet long underneath the street in Madrid where he used to pass every day on his way to morning mass, then they packed the place with a hundred and seventy-five pounds of dynamite and blew it up from a hundred yards away by remote control. The President’s car was lifted five storeys high and it wasn’t found for several hours because no one thought of looking for it on the far side of the Church of San Francisco de Borja, where it had landed. Bizarre? Sure. But effective? Sure.”

  Ferris got up and began walking about and Conyers watched him and waited to see if he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. He was just restless, and it didn’t do my nerves any good because Ferris walking up and down was like anyone else yelling the roof off.

  “We also have to consider this,” Conyers went on. “It might seem that it would have been easier to pick up a telescopic rifle and do it that way, but with an estimated crowd of half a million people and the security services of fifty-three nations plus the Pekin contingent can you imagine any way it could have worked? They had to put the assassination instrument right into the centre of the target area, where it could be guaranteed to do the job, and then they simply had to wait for the target himself to approach the instrument - which again, he was guaranteed to do. How could they miss? They didn’t. And the man who pressed the button just went on standing there. So let’s forget the ‘bizarre’ angle, gentlemen. It makes our teeth ache to say so, but this was a success story.”

  After what seemed a long time Ferris stopped walking up and down and said, “Does anyone feel a draught?”

  “What?” McFadden took his chin out of his hands. He saw Ferris was looking up at the two big fans overhead. “Oh,” he said, and went across to the scalloped brass switch on the wall, and the fans began slowing down.

  “You’d rule out the Chinese?” Ferris was looking at Conyers now.

  Conyers lit another cigarette and picked a strand of tobacco off his lower lip and said: “The Chinese aren’t a nation of uniformed robots. I’d say that none of the Chinese in present authority would want such a thing to happen, especially at a time when, as I’ve said, they’re looking forward to increased trade with the West, subscribing to the American presence in the Pacific and entertaining - like they did just a month back - a US Defense Department logistics delegation on their own ground here, for meetings with the Chinese armed forces chief of staff. I’d say that these people wouldn’t want this kind of thing to happen to any Western government representative, and certainly not to a representative of Britain or the United States, with their close historic and military affiliations.”

  The big ceiling fans had come to a stop and a dying fly came down in spirals from one of the dusty motor housings, landing on the worn leather blotter of the escritoire and buzzing in mad circles until Ferris went over there and stabbed one finger down and wiped its tip on the blotter and came back and said:

  “Then who?”

  Conyers blew out smoke. “Who? Holy cow. You’re pointing at a broken window and looking around at a playground full of kids and asking who? Terr
orist organisations aren’t isolated units. They’re Communist inspired or directed or motivated, and all roads lead away from Moscow. They’re all in touch with one another; they help one another; they lend one another hard cash and weapons and forged papers. The order for this coup might have originated anywhere on earth. But in the final analysis, like I said, I frankly don’t see this thing as an act of terrorism anyway.”

  “Is terrorism criminal or political?” Ferris asked him. “It’s the criminal implementation of political ideals.” “Was Bygreave’s assassination political?”

  “Okay, I know what you’re saying, but the fact that polar bears are animals, and white, doesn’t mean that all animals are white. I’m going to put it on the line. I’m going to say that whoever assassinated the British Secretary of State was a political but not a terrorist.”

  “Or somebody,” Ferris said, “who was paid to do it?”

  “Or somebody who was paid, sure, by a political group that is not a terrorist group, since terrorist groups do their own dirt without paying other people to do it for them.”

  I said: “A hit man?”

  Conyers put his bright-blue stare on me. “Or a hit group. This had to be the work of more than one operator.”

  “So that we’re not concerned with questions of nationality.”

  “Right. Not if this job was paid for. The Mafia will hit for the Church Army Zionists so long as the money’s good.”

  Ferris was watching me, perhaps thinking I’d got someone in mind. I hadn’t. Twenty-four hours into the mission we were still at ground zero, with a major objective already achieved by the opposition - the major objective, if it was Bygreave’s death alone. Sinclair could have told us; Jason could have told us; but without the information they’d taken with them we couldn’t make a move. If the Bygreave assassination had been the thing we’d been pushed into Pekin to prevent, we might as well go home.

  Except for London. London would have called us in by now.

  “There’s nothing on my mind,” I told Ferris obliquely. “Nothing at all.”

  All I could think about was the way that man’s arms had been flung out like a cross by the shockwave as his body was hurled against me in Tiananmen Square this morning, knocking me down, while the flowers had clouded the sky. What would Sinclair have put in his signal? What would Jason have told us?

  Don’t let the Secretary of State lay the wreath. Tell him to feign a sudden turn and ask the Chinese attendant to do it for him. Then get him back inside the RAF transport, fast.

  No. They couldn’t have known, or they would have sent a signal, in code. Then what had they known?

  “The thing is,” Conyers said, “the Chinese are working on it. They are the host country and it’s their responsibility. And they’re smart. They’re also as conscience-stricken as hell over this thing, even though they didn’t have any part of it - in my opinion. They want to get that son of a bitch that pressed the button, so they can prove to the world they didn’t do it themselves. Look what they stand to lose if they can’t: zillions of yuan in international trade; nuclear power equipment from the West; Japanese and American support against the Soviets. Who wants to support a country that can’t even put on a funeral without a major international incident?” He dropped more ash into the fern pot. “So maybe we should wait a few more days and see what these guys can come up with. Maybe we - “

  Then one of the Embassy clerks came in and said that the man named Jason who’d been reported as missing last night by Mr. Ferris had been found by the police with severe head injuries in a freight truck at Beijing Station and taken to the hospital, where they were trying to save his life.

  Chapter 5

  Death-trap

  I didn’t know much about Jason.

  At that bloody mausoleum in London where the Bureau runs its field staff into the ground we’re not encouraged to know anything more about one another than that whenever our paths cross it could be for the last time. We don’t mind that. We don’t want to make friends, because on any given mission we might have to leave someone behind and without a chance, or blow his cover because they sent us out first and we’ve got more information in our heads than he has and only one of us can get out, or simply throw him to the dogs because that’s what he’s there for - to provide a decoy, a scapegoat, a standin for us at the show trial with a life sentence in the labour camps while we’re safely back in London sipping a beer and thinking Christ, it could have been me.

  We work in a place where friends are dangerous; but we pick up gossip down there in the basement between missions, hunched over the tea-stained plastic tables in the Caff and always looking up when someone comes in, someone we didn’t necessarily expect to see in here again; and I know that Jason stuck a limpet mine under the stern of a fishing boat out of Leningrad with so much electronic surveillance gear on board that there wasn’t room for the fish; then there was some trouble about a girl in Rio de Janeiro when he was there trying to bug a bordello and catch some pox-ridden generalissimo full of military secrets with his trousers down; and it was Jason who fell through the glass roof of the winter garden of the East German consulate in Budapest and the next day cleared three security checks on his way to the Austrian frontier with the target documents because his face was covered in bandages and his passport photograph was no better than anyone else’s.

  Now I was looking down at the closed eyes in the deathly face of the man in the bed, waiting for him to regain consciousness and trying to ignore the electrocardiograph on the wall, where the green dots of light had been bouncing lower during the last two hours, losing their rhythm.

  “The signs are not good,” the Frenchman said, “but you know what they say - while there’s life, there’s hope.”

  Ferris tried again. “Is there any chance of his talking to us, even though he’s worsening?”

  Dr. Restieux shrugged. “Nothing is impossible.” He was the only one on the medical staff at this hour who spoke a European language, and Ferris had asked him to help us. “The trauma is quite massive, you must understand, and the suboccipital area of the skull is complex. There isn’t an electroencephalograph available to us at the moment, so it’s difficult to tell what’s going on. This patient’s brain could be dying, and we wouldn’t know. The human brain dies gradually, from the stem to the deeper regions, and that could be happening now. The blood gas reports are showing signs of stability, but that doesn’t tell us too much as to his chances. We have to wait.” He hooked the chart back and turned away, but Ferris stopped him.

  “Can anything be done to stimulate him?”

  “Stimulate?”

  “Can you bring him back to consciousness, even temporarily?”

  Restieux looked puzzled. “You mean with drugs?”

  “Drugs, electric shock, whatever would work.”

  “Not without harming the patient.”

  “But it could be done?”

  In the bleak light of the intensive care unit the doctor’s eyes widened slightly. “The question is academic. We’re not prepared to harm the patient, whatever else is involved.”

  “I’ve discussed this with the Chief of Police,” Ferris told him levelly. “This man might help us to find out quite a lot about the assassination of the British Secretary of State, if he could talk to us even for a few minutes. He might help us to save lives in the future. It’s extremely important for us to learn any information this man has in his possession, and if you’re able to do anything at all, I’m asking you to consider it. The host country is responsible for the welfare of visiting delegates, and we’re anxious to cooperate; my orders are direct from London.”

  Restieux went on watching him for a moment before he spoke. “And I am responsible for the welfare of my patients, and my orders are direct from Hippocrates.”

  When he’d gone I looked at Ferris. “Have you been in signals?”

  “Yes.”

  “London’s pretty desperate.”

  He stared down at Jason’
s white face for a moment. “We were handed this one rather late, so we’re having to make up time. No cause for concern.”

  He left me five minutes afterwards, his crepe soles making a faint kissing sound along the linoleum. I sat on the paint-chipped metal chair, watching the slow dripping of the intravenous catheter and the light patterns bouncing across the screen. It was now three-thirty in the morning, and the building was quiet. There were two nurses on duty at the ward station and one of them had been coming in here every few minutes, checking the IV bottle and taking Jason’s temperature and noting it on the chart.

  During the two hours I’d been here, Ferris had gone down to the telephone in the main hall at intervals, coming back and telling me nothing. There might have been nothing to tell: he’d obviously been signalling London via the Embassy, reporting on Jason’s condition and asking for orders; but unless Jason could tell us something there wouldn’t be any orders: we couldn’t make a move. And I knew this: if Croder was so desperate for information that he was ready to risk Jason’s life, the assassination in Tiananmen Square hadn’t been the end of things. Whatever operation the opposition had mounted, Bygreave’s death hadn’t been the objective; it could have been no more than the first step. Their operation was still running and there was nothing we could do, no direction we could take; it was like waiting in the dark for a blow that could come from anywhere, even from behind.

  Just after four-fifteen Jason opened his eyes.

  I looked up at the screen and saw the green dot was bouncing slightly higher and with a steadier rhythm.

  “Jason,” I said softly.

  He didn’t move, but I thought he’d heard me; his eyes were turned to watch the ceiling above my head. “Jason.”