by Adam Hall
I think he wasn’t quite finished, but I got up at that point and did a bit of walking about to ease the leg muscles. “Look, you ought not to be telling me things like that at this stage, before the trial. You’ve just made some pretty hefty confessions.”
His small grey head was turning to watch me. “As you know, the Americans are as fanatical about sport as the English. The object of the sabotage action was to further incense the Americans and strain their new relations with China.”
“All I can say is, I’ve given you fair warning.”
It was like having two conversations going on, but we both knew what we were doing, and we both knew that we knew.
I kept on walking, five yards one way and five back, while he sat there like a carved Buddha. I didn’t pass either of the two grilled apertures.
“You realise,” he said evenly, “that you have no chance of leaving here alive.”
“Possibly not, but it’s my duty to warn you that if I don’t get a message to my unit by radio then you’ll have to suffer the consequences. They’ll certainly start a search for me after forty-eight hours, because they know exactly where I came down and I told them I’d telephone them from the village to report progress.”
“I am going to correct what I just told you. Your only chance of leaving here alive is to give me your confidence.”
And blow my own cover.
“That’s what I’m doing.”
His head turned again to follow me. “There will be a point in our conversation when you will realise that your cover is less important than the proposition I shall make. You might find yourself in a position to prevent the assassination of the next three people on the list. The dates of these events are already fixed, and the first is to take place in two days’ time - unless you are prepared to cooperate.”
I got impatient with him. “But surely you realise that the moment I rejoin my unit you’ll be hunted down and arrested?”
He ignored that, as I knew he would; my remark was simply there for the record as part of my cover. It might not be true that he knew who I was or that we were the only people here who understood English or that he was a prisoner at the monastery; the chances were that there was someone on the other side of these apertures in the wall with a microphone, or that Tung had one concealed in his hand for that matter.
But now I understood something about the Russian connection. Not all, but something. It concerned Chinese-American relations.
“I must tell you,” he went on, “that the assassination of the British Secretary of State was a mistake, and that I deeply regret it. The one responsible has already forfeited his life.”
Soong Yongshen.
“That hardly helps the late British Secretary of State, does it? You bloody terrorists don’t care whom you wipe out. You know that man had a family?”
“I mention the incident so that you shall be conversant with the overall situation. And the situation is this. A short time ago I received a proposal from the Soviet KGB that I should assist them in a certain endeavour, the object of which would be the severance of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and with it, the end of the so-called triangle diplomacy involving those two powers and Japan. The threat to the Soviet Union presented by the growing recognition of China is seen by the Kremlin as intolerable. The four thousand miles of frontier common to Russia and China and the constant military skirmishes across it are of deep concern to the Soviets; in addition, China is close to developing a nuclear missile with a range of eight thousand miles, capable of reaching Moscow. It is my personal opinion that the severance of relations between China and the United States may be a preliminary to a Soviet attack on China, with a view to pre-empting a nuclear-armed, American-supported attack by China against the Soviets. To you and to me, such fears on the part of the Russians may seem extreme; but you must remember these people are xenophobic to a dangerous degree.”
I stopped walking about and sat down to listen, leaning my shoulders against the cool stone wall to ease the bruises. I had fifty questions for him, but I didn’t speak; I wanted to see how far he would go in what he was telling me; but even at this stage I was ready to take notice because he was answering a lot of the questions that had been on my mind before I’d left Seoul.
He wasn’t putting out an elaborate smokescreen, I knew that. He wasn’t even interested in my intelligence background; if he’d wanted to get any information out of me he would have thrown me to the Koreans and told them to go to work, and they would have enjoyed it after what I’d done to their friend.
“I declined the Russian’s proposal that I should assist them.” Tung hadn’t moved since I’d come in here, but there was nothing lifeless about him except his voice; I had the feeling that if I made a wrong move he’d react with the speed of a snake. “They offered me several million US dollars to help them; I forget how many; I was not interested. But they persisted, saying that I was the only man who could successfully carry out the necessary tasks involved. I told them I was no longer active internationally. They offered me political power in the new government of China, but again I refused; the power I have now is sufficient to me.”
His ash-grey head was turning slightly, so that he faced me directly in the low light of the lamp, and in the shadowed and stone-dark eyes I saw an expression shimmering, like a reflection on black water.
“So they took away my son.”
I felt a kind of pressure in the air, as if the edge of a storm had passed across the mountains, leaving the chamber grave-quiet and the flame of the lamp pointed and motionless in this deathly calm.
“Tung Chuan, my son. He was studying the Buddhist faith, and was to be a priest; but they seized him in North Korea and accused him of spying; and now he has vanished.”
The air seemed charged again with pressure, as if dark lightning had struck, and I knew now what it was: it was an expression of his psyche. His rage was so intense that it was producing an aura, and I was recording it, somewhere in the complex psycho-chemical organism that I identified as myself.
“I do not know where he is,” he said. “my son, Tung Chuan.”
It was a little while before I could get my senses back to normal.
“That’s rough luck,” I said. “The British Secretary of State’s family know where he is. In a coffin, what few bits you left of him.”
I think he could have killed me then, and I was ready for it. I think that at the back of my mind I was wanting to do something for Sinclair, and Jason, and the American and the girl with the cinnamon eyes; I think I’d wanted to provoke this murderous bastard so that I could destroy him before he could destroy someone else.
Unprofessional conduct. I’d got business to do here. But it fitted the cover of a forthright Army colonel shocked by the death of the British delegate.
In a moment Tung Kuofeng said carefully: “My agents have been trying to find my son, and have failed; they report at he is known to be in South Korea, but that is all. It may be that the resources of the British Secret Service could discover more than that; Tung Chuan was seized by Russian agents, not Koreans; your Service might have learned of it through its agents in Moscow, and are unaware of its significance. You should inform them. A great deal of trouble could be avoided if my son was set free. “
“I’m afraid the British Army hasn’t any agents in Moscow, or anywhere else.”
He said: “The moment my son was safe, I would halt my operations and you would have achieved your objective.”
Cool stones against my back, and the stillness of the lamp’s flame against my eyes; voices in the distance, coming rough the grilled apertures, and farther way the sound of miniature bells as the goats were gathered in the mountain dusk. No real sense that we were ourselves held captive by guards armed with submachine guns while two military helicopters stood by; _instead, a sense of karma, a feeling that what this man was saying was true, and that I should trust him; and a premonition of enormous danger, not only for me but f
or many.
Fatigue, that was all.
“You could avert enormous danger,” the quiet monotone came to me through the waves of silence, “for many people.” A spasm of nerves passed along my spine as I realised how easily this man was reading my thoughts; I sat straighter against the hardness of the wall at my back, trying to borrow from its strength. “Before the advent of Mao, the Chinese military was trained by the Soviet Red Army, and is still oriented towards the Russians’ tactics, strategies and weapon systems. On the political and ideological level the two countries are opposed, but there are several Army generals still capable of wielding great power, and they feel a natural brotherhood for their Soviet mentors and would like to be training with them once more. Lin Pao’s attempted coup against Mao did not succeed; but Mao is now dead, and a new power struggle has begun in China. We are very close to seeing a general take command, supported by high-ranking military advisers, all of them friendly to the Soviets. I do not need to tell you what such a volte face would mean: the immediate destruction of the American-Chinese-Japanese bloc and a massive Soviet-Chinese threat to the West. The next two actions I shall undertake on behalf of the Soviets will bring this about, within a matter of days, unless you can prevent it.”
The fatigue was leaving me, and I felt a singing in the blood as the thought in my mind released adrenalin.
“You must find my son,” he said.
His voice seemed to echo among the stone walls, as if he had shouted the words from a long way off, as if they were echoing among the mountains out there as well as in here, where the lamplight sparked on the gold of his robe and darkened his eyes in shadow.
One thing, yes, to be done, and to be done at once. Without awareness that I was preparing myself I could sense nerve and muscle and sinew awakening and becoming a force, and so rapidly that the explosion was only instants away as my eyes measured, my hands tensed, my thought raced toward detonation.
I think I had begun moving before his voice came.
“No. Not that way.”
He sat perfectly still as the air became silent thunder, hurling me back against the wall.
Chapter 22
Sinitsin
Igor Sinitsin.
I had heard of him more than once along the bleak corridors of the Bureau in London.
I had heard of him because he was one of our opposite numbers in the field; he worked for V, the Executive Action Department, a special service of one of the three Sub-directorates of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.
Department V is the most secret arm of Soviet operations and responsible for mokrie dela, the ‘wet affairs’ outside the USSR involving sabotage, kidnapping, political assassination and similar blood-letting operations designed to create chaos in foreign governments at times of internal crisis, to paralyse communications, provoke hostility among non-Communist nations and generally to render foreign soil fertile for the seeds of Marxist-Leninism. V was once called the Thirteenth Department, or Line F, just as the Bureau was once designated Liaison 9 before it broke away from D16.
It is said, along the bleak corridors in London, that Colonel Igor Sinitsin was in Paris when the charge d’affaires of the Persian Embassy was found on the top floor of an apartment in the Place Pigalle with a steel knitting needle buried into his brain through the left eye and no trace of the belle de nuit who had lived and worked there for the last three years before striking up an acquaintance with a member of the visiting Ballet Russe.
It is said that Sinitsin was in Buenos Aires when one of our people got on to his track and was found the next day in the wreck of an elevator in the Hotel Conquistador with his spine driven upwards into his skull.
Tilson says that Sinitsin was involved in the assassinations of General Batista, President Sri Phouma and Minister of State Hasan Kazan, and that he personally dispatched two gentleman acquaintances of Eva Peron in the hope of receiving her favours in their place.
“Not permitted,” he said.
The small Korean interpreter, a cripple with thick glasses, put it straight into Chinese for Tung Kuofeng.
Igor Sinitsin didn’t look like the archetypal KGB officer; when I had come into the room with Tung five minutes ago I’d thought at first glance that he was a Scandinavian; of middling height, he was quick-moving and rather graceful, striking poses to suit what he was saying: feet equally balanced when he was being firm, as he was now; one leg bent and arms folded pensively when he considered. His eyes were light blue and he had the attractively crumpled features of an experienced ladies’ man, not unlike Philby’s; he dressed casually and at some cost: a silk scarf tucked inside the open neck of a Cardin shirt, the grey alpaca suit from Savile Row and the thin gold watch from Cartier’s; this, anyway, was the impression they gave and the impression he wanted to create; for a ruthless KGB colonel it amounted almost to a disguise.
“You will have to permit it,” the interpreter said in Russian, turning from Tung to Sinitsin.
The tension in the room was increasing rapidly; it had begun when Tung had brought me in here to find Sinitsin and his two aides sitting near one of the big radio transceivers. They had all stood up, less out of courtesy, I think, than out of an unwillingness to be caught off their guard; whether Tung carried some kind of ninja weapon in the folds of his robe or not, they were uneasy in his presence, perhaps because they sensed the same powerful emanations of ki that had seemed to throw me against the wall not long ago.
He had made the introductions through the interpreter: Mr. West of British Intelligence, Colonel Igor Sinitsin of the KGB and his aides, Major Petr Alyev and Captain Viktor Samoteykin. The aides looked more traditional, with flat Slav faces and badly fitting suits; their expression hadn’t changed during the introductions. Sinitsin had studied me with interest for a moment and then given me a brief energetic nod as from one professional to another; he hadn’t bothered to hide the impression that as soon as possible he would have me shot dead. This wasn’t only because I’d killed that marksman out there; in our trade the opposite numbers in the field don’t bear each other any grudge, and there’s even a degree of respect on an impersonal level; but the KGB have had their knife into me ever since I wiped out their Colonel Vader, right on his home ground in Dzerzhinsky Square: his own bloody fault, he shouldn’t have tried to throw me into a political asylum, but it had really got them on the raw, and when I’d looked into Sinitsin’s light blue eyes for the first time I’d known his thoughts.
“You will have to permit it,” I heard the interpreter saying in Russian, “because otherwise our operation will be increasingly endangered.” This was from Tung Kuofeng.
After Tung had used the force of his ki against me as a warning that I must not try to kill him, we’d talked for only a few minutes longer. “I am taking you to the operations room,” he had said, “to meet the Soviet contingent. I have decided not to attempt persuading them into accepting your cover as a NATO officer. Instead I am going to use you against them, and for this your true identity is essential.”
Then he had briefed me.
We were still standing, all of us; the light was brighter in here than it had been in Tung’s chamber; they’d set up two butane lamps, one on each side of the radio console, which was mounted on a wooden trestle; the light was bright and harsh, and shadows were sharp against the walls. This place wasn’t an enclosed room but a kind of hall, with open arches at one end and massive double doors at the other, and iron sconces along the walls where the flames of oil lamps had left patches of soot on the ancient stones. In one corner a huge bench bore what looked like wooden printing blocks, carved with the letters of the Buddhist scriptures; along the main wall stood a hearth built of carved stone with a Buddha at each end, flanked by two faded tapestries.
The heat of the day was still in the building, and the night air was still; through the archways I could see two figures moving as the moonlight sent an occasional reflection from the weapons they were carrying: from this distance they looked like subm
achine guns. One of those men would be Yang.
He too was waiting to kill me.
Tung was talking again through the interpreter, whose accent I recognised as North Korean. “Since this agent arrived from London, my action group has come under increasing difficulties. I have been told that other members of his cell are now dangerously close to infiltrating our operation.”
Sinitsin was listening carefully; the interpreter had run into trouble two or three times, hesitating while he looked for the right word, his dark head going down each time as if he were listening. He was good at his job: he knew what the situation was and he didn’t try to alter the mood between Tung and Sinitsin by adding courtesies: when the Russian had said “Not permitted,” a moment ago, the interpreter had spoken what sounded like only one word to the Chinese; in the same way, he’d told Sinitsin: “You will have to permit it,” without any embroidery. The trouble he was running into was unavoidable even for an expert: the proximity of Korea and mainland China has led, over the centuries, to a degree of lingual transmigration; but the Russian influence in Communist North Korea has added specialist terms, particularly in the intelligence field, and the young crippled interpreter had probably had to change “Triad” to “action group” and come up with the strictly specialist phrase “infiltrating our operation” for Sinitsin’s benefit.
The interpreter was also scared; not perhaps by the personalities of either man as such, but by the atmosphere of tension that was affecting all of us. In the confrontation that Tung Kuofeng had started when he’d brought me in here, either he or Sinitsin would finally have to back down, and I couldn’t imagine either of them doing that.
“If your operation is close to being infiltrated,” the KGB Colonel said, “then you must take the necessary action.” His ice blue eyes were levelled at Tung over his folded arms.
“Our operation” had become “your operation.” Noted. The Russian connection was telling the Chinese end that they expected the goods delivered, regardless of obstacles.