by Adam Hall
I recognised his voice when he came on the line, but we went through a double code-intro routine to make absolutely sure; then I told him I wanted a rendezvous with the director in the field, fully urgent, in the departure lobby on the third floor of Kimpo Airport half an hour from now. He didn't ask any questions and he wouldn't have got any answers if he had; nor was there any doubt that Ferris would be there on time: apart from a few hundred other things, your director in the field is required to make himself immediately available to you at whatever hour of the night or day; the executive is his sole charge and his sole responsibility.
I rang off and went back to the car.
Li-fei didn't say a word all the way to the airport; I think our meeting with the priest had brought the whole thing back to her: this was the time when the sleepless nights would begin, when she'd lie awake and wonder where things had gone wrong for her brother, and whether she could have tried harder to keep him out of trouble, away from Tung Kuo-feng's deadly influence. Nothing would have stopped him, she had told me, and I shall never know why.
She pulled up at the entrance to the terminal building and looked at me and asked: "Will you need me any more?"
"No."
"You must be very careful."
"Yes," I said, "I'll be careful."
I was looking for Ferris but couldn't see him.
"What will you do," Li-fei asked me, "when you find Tung?"
"I don't know."
"Will you arrest him?"
"Something like that."
"Or kill him?"
"I really don't know."
"Whatever you do to him," she said in a small cold voice, "let it be also for my brother."
I got out and she drove away and I watched as she made the turn, with the bright overhead lamps throwing their light across the pale china-doll face at the driving window; then I turned and went through the main doors and took the stairs to the third floor, walking with my head down and turned slightly towards the walls, because they were out there somewhere and ready to try again the moment they picked up my trail.
You'd think my instinct to survive was adequate, but now there was something extra I wanted to live for: if they were going to finish me, let it not be yet, because now I'd got something to do; grant me, 0 Lord, at least the luck of a street dog, and let me endure.
Third floor, because there were fewer people up here and all of them going one way. Two stairwells, exit report gates, two shops, airlines VIP lounge and toll waiting rooms. A group of five Japanese in light summer suits, all men and bowing to one another with punctilious regularity; two China Airlines flight attendants hobbling on high-heeled shoes; a black-uniformed chauffeur escorting a small European boy as far as Gate Three. There was no one else here: this was between flights. Through one of the windows I could see the wink of a beacon and the yellow glitter of the city to the north-east, and headlights along the highway.
Ferris late, discount, traffic problems, look at the gift shop window, what lovely plastic Buddhas.
Are you sure? Ferris would ask.
The map was in my pocket.
I'll have to signal London.
Of course. Tell Croder. Cheer the bastard up.
What pretty Japanese fans.
Get here. For Christ's sake just get here. All I ask.
A big jet came in with a thump and I saw lights flickering across the windows. Nine seventeen on the clock. But there is absolutely no point in watching the headlights. Youngquist understood the message and the message was ultra priority and he knew that: when you're operational and you use a telephone to your director or a contact it doesn't matter which telephone you use, it's a hotline.
Two heads floated against the glass of the window, bobbing up from the stairwell behind me and moving across the pantomime masks, a man and a woman; I heard their voices, half lost in the whistle of the jet as it came in towards the parking bay.
Others came, their heads appearing above the stairhead and turning, floating across the row of masks while I watched them, one of them not turning but growing larger and facing in this direction, pink and sandy and with glasses catching the light, bringing me back to a world where a future was possible again, "Bit of a jam leaving the city," he was saying.
I turned round and said: "I've got access."
He opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it for some reason and just stood watching my face as if he was trying to see if I really meant it.
"Access to Tung Kuo-feng," I told him. "I know where he is."
He glanced around and asked me, "Why the airport?"
"It would have taken me another half hour to get to the city."
"Is time critical?" I didn't answer, and it took him a full second to get it all straight. "Sorry."
"I should bloody well think so." It had taken me four days of murderous pressure to get here with what they wanted, and he'd wondered why there was suddenly such a rush.
"Are you sure enough," he asked me, "for me to let them know?"
"You can put through an interim signal, in case they've got to take up any slack in the system."
He nodded and we went down the stairs and he used one of the phones near the post office on the second floor, giving it cold to Youngquist or the Embassy or whoever was near a radio: The executive in the field has access. Then he put me in the Embassy car and took the slip road for the highway and turned north-east, slotting into the traffic stream.
"Did you catch that leak?" I asked him.
"Yes."
"We're going to the Embassy?"
"Yes."
He smelled of soap.
"Who was it?"
He always smells of soap. He's always washing. They say he's guilty about something and I can believe that: there's something in his voice like the echo of a distant shot.
"A Korean clerk, handling host-country PR."
Everything coming up roses. Tonight nothing was going to go wrong. The mood was swinging wild now: I'd stood there watching the pretty Japanese fans and thinking my God they've got Ferris and he's not just late, he's dead, and so's the mission, and now the elation was coming in, and when I finally flew out of this bloody place I'd take one of those plastic Buddhas back for some poor sod at the office, preferably Croder.
"How did you get him?" I asked Ferris.
"Routine trap. We asked HE to say there was a suspected security problem, and checked everyone on the staff below second attache on their way home. This character had some papers on him, nothing classified but not his business."
A lot of the elation going, downswing now, but that was normal. "This man Tung," I said, "is just about everywhere."
"It might not have been Tung's man. In Asia there's a lot of intelligence mercs: they'll pass on whatever they can pick up, to whoever will pay most."
"There could be someone else," I said, "at the Embassy."
"No. I've been working all day on that: five trial rendezvous with Youngquist and three contacts, half of them by open phone and half over various radios in open speech, three languages, and no one ever turned up to survey. Youngquist took the skin off his feet."
"That's a shame."
"I thought you'd like that."
When the lights of downtown started swinging overhead I told him about the priest and he listened for ten minutes without interrupting before he asked:
"Is he sure?"
"Yes. I told him that lives depended on it, and he said he could believe that, because he knew what kind of man Tung was, and he knew I was an agent opposing him."
"You told him that, did you?"
"I had to, for Christ's sake"
"Just wanted to know," he said quietly.
"Look, he wouldn't have opened up if I hadn't told him that much, Christ, I could've been anyone, can't you see that?"
"Everything's perfectly all right," he said, and I sat back and started cooling in my own sweat. Nerves, that was all; paranoia; it'd been a rough four days.
"Bloody
Ferris," I said. "You know what they say about you in the Caff? They say you strangle mice."
He gave that thin, rustling laugh of his, like a snake shedding its skin, and we pulled into the Embassy yard in Chung-dong Street and got out of the car and went into the building and up the stairs to a room on the second floor, empty except for some garden furniture and a cardboard box of paper cups and a projection screen hanging at an angle against the wall.
Ferris shut the door and I got out the map.
"You mean there's no approach by road?"
"The nearest road is this one, twenty miles away. All you've got are mule tracks."
Ferris looked at the larger map he'd got from the night clerk. "He pinpointed the monastery here?"
"Yes."
"He was absolutely certain?"
"He said it was his home for fifteen years."
"We're depending," Ferris said, "on the word of one man. A blind man."
"He had his sight up till three years ago."
"How did he lose it?"
"I don't know. But I asked him. He said it was 'karma'. And I realised we'd have to depend on his word alone; that's why it took an hour and a half to get it all clear; and I'm satisfied. He knows the mountains, the terrain and the layout of the monastery."
"You say it's in ruins now?"
"Partly. There was a rock fall, three years ago, and the monks had to leave."
"That was when he was blinded?"
"He told me it happened three years ago, only that."
"You think Tung did it? Or had it done?"
"That was my impression. I'd say their paths had crossed."
There was a knock on the door and Ferris went over and unlocked it. The night clerk looked in.
"I've got the cook out of bed." He was a young chap with a long face and inquisitive eyes; or perhaps they hadn't looked so inquisitive before we'd come in here and asked for food and maps and a camp bed and absolute privacy; he didn't know who we were but he knew Ferris must be persona grata with HE. His eyes were darting from our faces to the maps all over the floor. "Bacon and eggs and toast, was that right?"
"And coffee," Ferris said.
"Okie-doke. Coming up."
That was at 11:25.
I'd slept for an hour by the time Ferris came back from the cypher room, his face perfectly expressionless. He told me they'd exchanged fifteen signals so far, and that London was «open-minded». Two people from the Bureau had gone across to the Foreign Office to sit at the radio, and ten minutes ago Croder had come on the air.
"Why doesn't he make up his mind?" I asked Ferris.
"He's in the process of doing that." Cool tone: rebuke. He was getting fed up with his executive needling Control all the time; I could see his point so I shut up. "They want to know," he said in a moment, "what the chances are of putting a chopper down in that area."
"I asked the priest. He said the only place you can put down a chopper in that region is at the monastery itself; the surrounding terrain is nothing but peaks and crags."
He got onto the floor with the maps again. "We're going to assume that if Tung is using this place as a refuge it's liable to be more like a fort than a monastery."
"Thank you. That'll give me a chance."
"You wouldn't want to try going in with a chopper?"
That was obviously an official question and for the record.
"No. There's only one way I'm prepared to go in, as I told you."
He sat there cross-legged like a thin sandy Buddha. "Why did he go there? Why did he need refuge?"
Some of these questions were passed on from London; some were coming into his mind as the sessions progressed.
"The priest didn't say."
"But you asked him?"
"Yes."
"You think he didn't know?"
"I think he knew, but wasn't saying."
"What are your thoughts on that?"
"I'd say that Tung is under some kind of pressure; that he's running his operation by remote control, using a radio."
"A defensive operation?"
"I don't think there's anything defensive about assassinating a secretary of state and an ambassador."
"So what do you think?"
"He could be running his operation this way to avoid the danger of getting hit."
"You think if he got hit, personally, it would destroy the operation?"
"Yes. I think he's running a cell of out-and-out fanatics, totally loyal, totally obedient, riders of the divine wind. They're the type who break if the leader breaks."
He went on questioning, with intervals of meditative silence. I did the best I could, but it wasn't easy because there weren't too many facts: I was bringing out feelings, recalling things that Li-fei had told me in the Chonju Hotel, and at her house, and in the car, and at the temple, when I'd listened half to the things she wasn't saying, and taking more notice of them than of the things she was. I had also listened to the silences of the priest, unconsciously measuring their length, knowing that the longer he was silent the more he was troubled by the questions I'd asked him through Li-fei.
"You think the priest would like to see Tung dead?"
"What?" I had to think about that. "Yes. But not in the way we'd mean it, in the West. He'd feel personally relieved to see Tung cleansed of his earthly sins; that was a phrase he used, if Li-fei got the translation right. And the kind of sins he was talking about can only be atoned for by death."
"But not death as punishment?"
"Death as atonement."
Then there was a knock on the door again and the night clerk put his long face in the gap. "Kirby wants you, sir." Kirby was the cypher clerk and this was another signal.
00:46 hours, and already morning.
"They're in contact," Ferris said, "with the CIA."
"Because of the American Ambassador?"
He didn't answer that. "I just want you to know there's now an American connection. Are you still prepared to go in there?"
"To the monastery?"
"Yes."
"If it's my way, by a night drop."
Ferris was sitting on the floor again with the maps in front of him. He slotted his long fingers together and didn't look up as he told me: "Control says you can go in, on his terms."
Dead end. Sixteen signals, leading us to a dead end. Because I knew Croder. He wouldn't have made this proviso if they were the kind of terms I could accept. Croder is God: he giveth and he taketh away.
"What terms?"
"That you take someone with you as a guide."
I said no.
01:32.
"I always work solo," I said. "You know that."
"This time it's too critical."
"Only the landing. After I'm down I don't want anyone with me. They'd get in my way."
"You won't even find your way, without a guide."
"Look, I did a night drop into the Sahara and there was no problem. I was alone."
"This isn't the Sahara."
"Croder doesn't trust me, that's all. He never has."
Ferris began whistling quietly, which was like anyone else kicking the door down. "They're putting everything on this one venture. If you take a guide with you it's going to decrease the risk of your getting lost. All the guide has to do is get you to the monastery — to within sight of it. Then you go in alone."
"It's the drop I'm worried about. Two chutes are more visible than one: you're doubling the risk, not decreasing it."
"You're dropping by night."
"By moonlight."
"Over completely unknown territory."
"With a compass."
"And magnetic rocks in the area. You won't know whether you're north or south of the target."
"If they can drop me reasonably close, I'll be able to see the monastery; there can't be too many rectangular mountain peaks."
He began whistling softly again and I waited.
Hear me: if ever I get out of this one alive, I'll never work for Crod
er again. This is the second time and he hasn't changed.
"Your arguments," Ferris said, stopping his pacing and looking down at me, "have been presented to London. I foresaw most of them; the others won't be transmitted because it won't be worth it. They'll say no."
"They're not doing the drop. I am."
"What you're doing," Ferris said, "is provoking Croder. You hate his guts and you want him to know it. But he knows it already, so you're wasting your time."
"Croder's not doing the drop." I got up and moved about, keeping out of Ferris's way.
"Do you think this is the first one he's ever set up?"
"What are my chances, Ferris? You thought about that? I'd put them at fifty fifty and that's optimistic. That's why you've got Youngquist out here, standing by. Who the hell is Croder to make it tougher for me than it is already?"
"Croder is our Control."
"That doesn't mean he's God."
"Yes, it does. And he's the only one we've got."
It stopped me, but I don't know why. He saw it, and came closer, and lowered his voice. "It's the only way we can ever work, isn't it? With someone in London who knows more than we do, and who can get us out of traps we can't even see because we're too close."
I didn't say anything. I'd used all the arguments I could think of and they hadn't worked.
"You'd do it for any other Control," Ferris said, "wouldn't you?"
In a moment I said: "Yes."
"So you'll do it for this one. Won't you?"
I turned away from him. "Yes."
He moved towards the door. "I'll go and tell them."
"Do that."
Because it was over now, the little show of nerves because the mission was shifting phase and we were all having to make decisions instead of simply trying to stay alive. A minute ago I'd believed Croder was wrong, that he was trying to kill me off in the only way he could, and that he was the enemy, not Tung Kuo-feng. I'd believed it: I hadn't just been shouting the odds. But Ferris knew that if he talked to me long enough the adrenalin would recede and I'd peak out and come down from the high and listen to reason again. That's what your director in the field is for, to understand your own particular kind of neurosis and then pander to it, to bitch you about like a nagging mother till you find your own feet again.