The Mandarin Cypher

by Adam Hall

  'I heard,' I told him carefully, 'that he'd got out of Lubyanka.'

  He didn't turn round.

  'Oh really, the things people say.'

  I knew he wouldn't have brought up the subject of North without a damned good reason. Bureau policy demands immediate smoke out to cover 'any event of a scandalous nature or an event considered to jeopardize security', and this policy has spread a mortuary silence throughout the corridors of that dreary hole in Whitehall. I'd talked for a minute to Dewhurst the night I'd left London because we were alone and both shocked by what had happened. Policy apart, we still don't chew the fat because a lot of it's too depressing and we'd end up neurotic, Most missions are dangerous and all of them impose a strain and every so often you'll see an operator come back too shot up physically or too shaken spiritually to be sent out again, ever: at this time Macklin was one of them and North, God knows, was another.

  When something like that happens, we do not ask for whom the bell tolls. We don't want to know.

  Watching Ferris at the set, I thought there was only one reason why he'd brought up the subject: that's why I'd made it difficult for him, to bring him down a peg. It's nearly always a part of the executive-director relationship, especially when a mission hots up: you're both having to think like hell just to survive and you keep your wits sharp with a bit of one-upmanship. The North thing had shivered the whole of the network and London was putting smoke out world-wide. As my director in the field, Ferris was giving me the official version of the affair and that was the one I would adopt if there were any questions asked by anyone, anywhere, even — or especially - under duress.

  'Ferris?'

  'What?'

  'Did North have anything to do with Mandarin?'

  'No.' Then I suppose he thought the answer had come too pat, because he spun round on his heels to face me and said slowly: 'Nothing whatsoever. And that is gospel.'

  'Fair enough.'

  He spun slowly back again. London doesn't tell you more than you have to know when you're briefed because you can work better with your head clear of extraneous data, but you're never misinformed, and Ferris was just reminding me.

  'Thing is,' he said over his shoulder, 'if they don't--'

  555-555-555-555.

  The call-sign for Mandarin, very clear. He acknowledged and stood by. 'Four blocks,' he said, 'aren't they getting fussy? You'd think old Parkis was running this one.'

  I sat a bit straighter, waiting, as Ferris was, knowing the signals were going to come on stream. I smelled the herb-and-sacking smell of this room under the roof and listened to the rising din of the narrow street below where the letter-writer would be setting up her stool and the boy lighting his charcoal under the first trussed duck, but I was thinking of London at two in the morning, the wide wet streets and Egerton's battered Rover slipping through them with a bow wave on the gutter side and his pale academic face peering through the windscreen wipers - because this was obviously what was happening over there: he'd taken the earlier signal at his bedside, the one about Tewson's being on the rig, and he had got dressed and gone down to the garage for his car. Now he was inside the building and loping at his own pace along the corridors, heading for the radio room. They knew he'd come in, and had flashed us the call sign, four blocks to indicate direct communication from Control to the director in the field, not really necessary because Egerton would announce himself. They must have someone new at the console.

  A full minute went by and Ferris began showing his nerves, leaving the set and sitting on his sack again, crossing his legs and huffing. 'Did you hear the one about the sailor who got his finger stuck in the keyhole? They tried to--'

  555-000-000.

  Mandarin: Control at console.

  Ill Ferris squatted on the floor again with his head near the integral mike and acknowledged. Within five seconds the signals came on stream and I sat upright with my eyes shut reading London, extending the digits and reversing the transfers and trying to place the tone and failing: they had in fact got a new boy in there, rather prissy but first-rate on his pauses and repeats.

  After a minute Ferris swivelled round and looked at me.

  'You reading?'

  'Yes.'

  He turned his back again and went full out for almost thirty minutes, getting the details from me as Control asked for them: estimated number of opposition observers in the field -identity of principals if any known - location of opposition base and disposition of other field-quarters, safe-houses-degree of insistence - so forth, most of it routine with key contractions, the kind of things they always wanted to know at the outset of a mission. Then the questions got specific: Egerton wanted to know Mrs. Tewson's attitude towards her 'deceased' husband, whether she appeared venal, disloyal, opportunistic. Was she promiscuous?

  I did What I could, catching the questions in the air before Ferris had to ask me, and in fifteen minutes I was sweating hard and wishing to Christ I didn't feel so ragged: the little bastard had forced a throat block for ten seconds or so before I could break it and I was still getting flashes in front of the eyes. Then Control went on to the mundanities and the only question I had to answer was about the damage to the Hong Kong Cathay: I said they'd want some new wallpaper and a plumber and an electrician but no windows smashed, telephone okay, so forth, while some poor bloody clerk put it all in the book — you could tell this was Egerton's mission. The Hong Kong Cathay Hotel would in due course receive a cheque 'in compensation for any damage sustained during the sojourn of one of their guests'. If the manager took it into his head to try tracing the cheque to its source he'd grow old before 'his time. Egerton was particular about what he called 'the public domain'. Dewhurst would have just said they must be insured against drunks, bookies and acts of God and left it at that, his point being that as a British taxpayer he wasn't going to fork out for things the insurance companies ought to pay for.

  298 - 363 -586 . . .

  Flower. No further action required on our part.

  What would actually happen was that his parents would be met at the airport by a senior secretary of Welfare Section, and all their expenses would be paid.

  398 - 277 - 972 . . .

  I began reading alertly again because I could tell they were getting round to instructions. Egerton had probably gone into another room to work things out either alone or in consultation while his second-stringer key-contracted the routine advisories: further movements and establishing of access, liaison and security left to discretion of director in field; transmission schedules to be as per current pattern, Far East theatre; emergency signals to follow established rulings as to times, form and code; allocation of stand-by periods to conform with current schedules, bi-hourly (diurnal), hourly (nocturnal); heavy traffic by-pass key: 555-000. State of mission reports were specified, right down to the last microdot.

  Then they went off the air for fifteen minutes.

  Two stand-by signals and then four blocks of 555. Then they began on the instructions, the first of which we'd already been expecting: I was to go out to the oil rig and try to get aboard.

  Chapter Nine

  SHIELD

  Then I stopped dead.

  I suppose there wasn't anything to get excited about but it had worried me, having to kill him like that, and he'd left a lot of muscular strain in me and there'd been those bloody things slithering about. Oh fair enough, all in the day's work, but look, we hadn't even got any target access figured out yet and already there were two dead and I wasn't beginning to fancy my chances all that much.

  I stood in the street, close to a doorway, very close, looking between the buildings towards the open square in the distance, wanting to shout at them: Can't you leave me alone?

  I just didn't feel ready for any more, that was all, at least for a while. Give me a day, or even a few hours if that's how it's got to be. Bloody well leave me alone.

  I stood in the street with the morning sun dazzling in the shop windows, the temperature in the eight
ies and warming up to another lovely day in exotic Hong Kong, Pearl of the Orient: this morning we shall be taking you on yet another fascinating tour, this time beginning with a tram ride to famed Victoria Peak, then down again to explore the fabulous Tiger Balm Gardens, pride of the island. I stood in the street feeling how cold it was, how perilous.

  From this distance I could see the Taunus easily enough, and the traffic passing it. There'd been a slot and I'd backed it in and it was still there where I'd left it. The square was a lawful parking zone but I'd taken the last slot and there hadn't been any vacancies since then, or they'd only just arrived. The Humber was double-parked with the bonnet up, some kind of engine trouble so the police couldn't move it on in a hurry. The red van had Typhoo Tea on it in gold letters but there wasn't a grocer's or a cafe or a tea shop anywhere near: they were all souvenir shops and cheap jewellers' on that side of the square, but the van was parked with two wheels on the pavement and the roller-door was down as if there was a delivery being made. The Chinese on the bike was just sitting there with his arms folded watching the traffic, not even bothering to fetch a paper or something to read.

  The others I couldn't see or hope to recognize. There'd be others, I knew that. This was about the roughest static surveillance job I'd ever seen but that wasn't the point. The point was that the Taunus was a death trap.

  The left eyelid was flickering: it always did when the nerves got close to the edge. And I was cold, standing by the doorway in the sunshine, because I knew Ferris was up there in the room below the roof, thinking I still didn't know how that tag had been on my back when I'd gone into the snake shop; well, he was bloody well wrong because I knew. I knew now. And the unnerving thing was that I'd known for quite a while, and could have told him, put him out of his misery. It was just that I'd had other things on my mind and hadn't taken too much notice.

  I wasn't prepared to dodge the issue by saying that boy had sighted me by chance, even though Ferris had offered me the option. I might have been sighted by chance, but it was damned unlikely. And the only other way that boy could have got on to my back was by a communications pitch and the only way they could have found any use for communications was by having a signals source and he could be only one man: the one in the Honda at the Golden Sands Hotel. He'd been somewhere on the ground floor and seen me and recognized me and got on to the phone and told headquarters, and headquarters had put out an all-points bulletin and from that moment the Taunus was a marked target. I'd checked and double-checked on the way up to the safe-house but there were limits to what I could do in a narrow winding street already crowded with Chinese, and the boy had been the first one to sight the Taunus and he had my photograph - they all did - and he came to make the hit.

  The people down there in the square didn't know that. He'd been an isolated case on his way from base to station or nosing along the Capri travel pattern of two evenings ago and he'd been lucky, if that was the word. Then someone else had sighted the Taunus but I wasn't there so there was no one to follow, so he signalled headquarters and brought the pack in: there could be twenty or thirty down there in the doorways and behind windows, besides the people on station near the van and the Humber and on the bicycle. They would be deployed along the streets leading to the square, the surveillance spreading tentacles in every direction to make sure I couldn't get within a hundred yards of the Taunus without being seen. Or two hundred: the distance from there to where I was standing now, close, very close, to the doorway.

  My hand was throbbing. Must take care of it, she'd said. The feeling of deathly cold wouldn't go, and I got fed up because I ought to get more bloody control over myself: the mission was still in its access phase and I ought to be feeling right on my toes and I wasn't and there was no excuse.

  'Tui mm chiu.'

  I stood back, keeping clear of the actual doorway but remaining close enough to use it. Two other people went in, a woman and her small boy, and it wouldn't do if the wrong people saw me and recognized me and went in, say three or four men, and turned round and blocked the doorway while the rest of them came up. I wouldn't know any of them. I wouldn't have time to know anything at all, if they came.

  I began working back up the shallow steps - it was a ladder street like most of them in this area - having to push my way through tourists and vendors and groups of shopkeepers gathered in the bright morning sun, want roast duck? The scent of cheap perfumes and the drains, long time no rain, people said, working back towards the snake shop but turning off as soon as I could to avoid the cardinal sin of visiting a safe-house with surveillance known to be active, want haircut? The sudden clatter of a mah-jongg game in a doorway, a stall with wardrobes for the dead, is this the place where you can get to see those fruit sellers, do you know? A child's laughter as a fortune-telling bird picked a card from the basket, turning into the alley and walking faster, checking twice and going on, using every pane of glass there was, bumping into people because I had to watch the reflections, tui mm chiu, sometimes attracting attention and that could be dangerous, slowing down, taking the next street, a wider one, looking for a taxi. Finding one.

  'Lane Crawford's.'

  When we reached there I went through the front and out by the back way, climbing over a new delivery of merchandise, finding a bar and calling Ferris.

  We listened for bugs.

  'My car was covered in ticks.'

  'Oh I see,' he said. He meant that was how the boy had got on to me.

  'It could be rigged as well.'

  'Of course. Anything in it?'

  'A suitcase.'

  'Everything all right apart from that?'

  'It is now.'

  I rang off and sat down in the corner of the bar with my left shoulder against the wall, the mirror on the other side of the room and the door facing me. I was clear of the Taunus trap but they were getting very insistent and I could be picked up anywhere, anywhere at all, because of the photograph.

  'Coffee.'

  To help chase some of the adrenalin out of the system: there was no chance of physical exercise. The eyelid had stopped flickering, I should bloody well hope so, I must be getting old or something. Relax, switch off, leave things to Ferris. He'd be on to the police by now, telling them where to find the Taunus and what to do with it: check it for an explosive device, check the suitcase, take the car back to Fleetway and put the case into the harbour or wherever they liked, because i wouldn't get it back: they'd hold it for me but they wouldn't part with it or with me either without asking me an awful lot of questions Hong Kong is just like other places: the police don't like being rung up and told to look for bombs in abandoned cars without wanting to know why. Ferris could pull enough rank to tell them to shut up but it'd mean revealing the fact that we were on the island and we didn't want to advertise it.

  I'd asked him to do a couple of other things for me while he was about it: pay my bill with Fleetway, and get a dozen gardenias sent to El Caliph before eight o'clock tonight with a message: Please forgive, been called to Rome due to the devaluation crisis, tried four times to ring you but not home. Will never forget you. Clive.

  I put on the mask.

  The nerves were back to normal and it hadn't taken so long as I thought: for three hours I'd been moving around Central as free as a tourist and nobody had tried to raid me or even get on my tail, besides which Ferris hadn't been mean: it was a white summer-weight linen suit and quite a good fit and I felt a bit less like a lavatory brush with the mange. I'd kitted up again at Lane Crawford's: new suitcase, shaver, toilet things, shoes, so forth, and the case was genuine leather because I can't stand plastic, so that scaly old hell-hag in Accounts was going to cough up her brimstone when she got the bill.

  I breathed in through the nose and the faceplate tightened satisfactorily and I took it off. We spent a lot of time getting a good fit for the fins: he was a helpful little man, five feet high with a crew cut and a jolly smile and the right hand off at the wrist, said it was a shark and I believed him.


  'You from England?'

  'Yes.'

  'What part?'

  'London.'

  'So! I have sister in London! Beshnill Green!'

  'Well I never.'

  I asked him for a double hose regulator and three standard single cylinders of compressed air with reserve mechanisms and nickel-plated interiors, capacity 71 cubic feet each.

  'Can you recharge these for me if I need more air?'

  'No.' He shook his head beaming. 'Used to have charging-room, but had also assistant who broke valve one day. Tank went through wall here and flew three streets away, finish through side of bus!' Peals of laughter. 'Nobody hurt, but take permission from me. You get them filled at another place, I give you address.'

  'Thank you.'

  Tank harness with instant release buckle, lead belt, depth gauge, compass, underwater watch.

  'Dry suit?'

  'No, wet. Foam neoprene, have you got one?'

  'Oh yes.'

  Diving knife, saw-tooth edge one side, straight edge the other.

  'You want shark repellent?'

  'Yes.'

  'Speargun?'

  'No.'

  'Abalone iron?'

  'No.'

  I had to try three wet suits on before I found the right one. It had a yellow insignia on the back as a safety marker and I'd have to cover it with black adhesive tape later.

  'Do you stock chains?'

  'What sort of chains?'

  'To secure the tanks to the boat.'

  'No. Tell you where to buy.' He gave me another address.

  'I need a lamp.'

  He kicked the stool over to the shelves again and jumped up and hooked down the box, catching it in the crook of his elbow. We tested the batteries and I signed a traveller's cheque, sweating a lot after trying on all those suits but feeling much better, almost back on form, even the muscles feeling smoother. Tonight I'd be getting some sleep because Ferris wouldn't be able to rustle up everything we needed before the morning. God only knew how he was planning to send me in to the objective but if it was going to be an air drop we'd obviously have to make it by night: that would be tomorrow at the earliest.