by Peter Tonkin
“He bought a newspaper,” said the Secretary.
“Straits Times” Parmilee read it off the list.
“Can we get a copy?”
“I don’t know. We could try Records. They might have a copy on file.” His voice was doubtful.
“Try.”
Parmilee rang through to Langley. They were lucky. Sections of the paper had been micro-copied. “Why?” asked the Secretary, as the microcopy and a microcopy reader were being rushed to them by the night staff. “Articles about American VIPs,” said Parmilee. The Secretary nodded. Within half an hour the microcopy reader was before them, its television face flooding like the dawn sky into silvery brightness. The paper had been copied by authority of Chief of Station, Singapore. Copies appended to the file on Feng’s Defection (Action unnamed). Copies to Records, and Ex-Serviceman File: Eldridge Gant (Special Forces - MATA Dept. Ref. 1965-9).
The whole of three pages had been copied. Page one, which contained a news story about Eldridge Gant. Page eight which contained an interview with the actor, and page fifteen with a review of his one-night charity performance of Macbeth. On page one, the headline (a small sub-head part way down column four) read ‘ACTOR REVEALS I WAS SPECIAL FORCES HERO.’ It was a front page filler story, blown up a little to lift it from being gossip into being news. On page eight Gant’s actual involvement was more fully examined. It was not as sensational as the front page seemed to promise, but it might be enough to offer hope to a terrified defector, fleeing for his life. On page 15 a rave review of Gant’s performance ended by revealing that he was in the process of returning to America in order to act in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play which he had never tackled before, although he considered it ‘the finest play since Shakespeare. A work of the greatest genius’. Immediately below Gant’s fulsome praise of the play, there was a quarter-page advertisement for a large westernised bookshop in the Queenstown district offering a range of volumes from cheap paperbacks to priceless First Editions.
Both men understood at once. It must have seemed like a gift from God to the terrified defector. His one wish was to get rid of his bargaining counter - for if Hummingbird and Bee found it on him, then they would take that back and leave Feng himself behind, probably floating in the Singapore Roads. Simply to throw it away would leave him defenceless if he escaped and re-established contact with CIA.
What he did smacked of genius. He bought the rarest edition of O’Neill’s play that he could find, secreted his secret bargaining counter somewhere within it and sent it to a man who first would treasure the gift and secondly, as an ex-serviceman, would be capable of protecting the secret he didn’t even know he held, if anything went wrong.
The Secretary of State slammed his telephone to his ear and said to the switchboard, “Get me Eldridge Gant. His suite at the Waldorf. I know what the time is, dammit! Just get me Eldridge Gant.” He covered the mouthpiece with a broad hand and said, “Twenty minutes! That’s incredible. I don’t know which of them should get an award: Gant or Alec Stone, but to hang on to the bottom rung of a ladder like that for twenty minutes - even with someone holding your wrist - that’s incredible.” Then his eyes abruptly lost focus, his hand moved and he said, “Eldridge? Hello, Eldridge? Look, I know it’s a hell of a time, but listen…”
Beijing, December
The Chairman was dying, but even so he had come to 15 Bowstring Alley himself. He had one last matter of overwhelming importance to discuss with the quiet but infinitely powerful men who occupied the top floor here.
“If we need a name for the action,” observed the Chairman, his voice a broken whisper, “we will call it ‘Action: Chairman’s Legacy’.”
The Director of the Social Affairs Department sat quietly, nodding. His face, surprisingly fine-boned for a Chinese, was expressionless. “There are only a few more gestures to be performed,” continued the Chairman. “We must look for some suitably humiliating act which we can perform with regard to Russia.”
“There is that pilot who may or may not have been photographing our defences before he crashed well within our territory,” said the Director. “Might we not return him to his family and loved ones?”
“Yes indeed. That would be perfect. An unexpected, unsolicited diplomatic courtesy. Perfect. The Kremlin and the FSS will know for certain that Washington has something capable of throwing us into utter confusion.” The two men laughed.
The barbarian President and the Gweilo ‘Foreign Devil’ - Secretary of State had returned to America the day before. Their visit to Beijing had been a notable success for the American policy of detente. Without upsetting Moscow too much, the President had quite obviously extended a hand of gracious friendship towards the Peoples’ Republic. And the hand had been warmly accepted.
Those who had looked upon the President’s mission with some misgiving after the humiliation of the Secretary of State at the hands of the same men scant weeks earlier, breathed covert sighs of relief and looked wisely at each other. The Secretary had got something on the yellow devils, they said: the cunning old bastard had found his big stick.
Tucked neatly, immovably and invisibly into the spine of Eldridge Gant’s priceless signed First Edition of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night was a piece of tissue paper covered with Chinese characters.
It had been inevitable in the new political climate that the Social Affairs Department should consider breaking with centuries of tradition and begin a series of Intelligence Actions designed to prepare the new battlefields for the re-emerging Dragon Empire. Making full use of the five types of spy enumerated by Sun Tzu, the Director at the behest of the ailing Chairman, had arranged an action whose prime objective had been to distract the other major forces threatening the Peoples’ Republic.
Although Sun Tzu himself had been primarily concerned with wars between the same racial types, his strictures proved wise guidance for men running actions across racial boundaries. The SAD had, therefore, sought native spies from among the ranks of their enemies, and internal spies from among their officials to supply the native spies with information, to run and guide them. Double spies purchased with the liberality suggested by The Art of War. Doomed spies, such as Feng was designed to be, and returning spies such as Hummingbird and Bee had been supposed to be - had various forces beyond even the SAD’s control not doomed them after all.
But, with the patience and the deviousness upon which the whole Chinese People justly pride themselves, the Action had only started here - and as it proceeded, so it gained a truly oriental elegance. For the SAD had begun to target men and women who could move from one end of the crumbling Soviet Empire to the farthest reaches of San Francisco without arousing suspicion. Men who could be called upon - if the call were carefully framed - to perform a range of acts guaranteed to preoccupy their unsuspecting hosts. There was almost an inevitability about the conjoining of a militantly non-religious state and the power of uncontrolled fanaticism.
Secretly but surely, the SAD began to purchase with a range of things far more subtle than money the allegiance of a series of Moslem leaders. The majority of these good men, each with their own burning agenda, remained ultimately unaware precisely who was fulfilling their wishes. It was impossible, after all, to tell a Kalashnikov made in Moscow from a perfect replica manufactured in Manchuria; to discriminate, between Semtex made in Czechoslovakia and China. From Afghanistan to Chechnya, from Trabzon to the World Trade Centre, the Ayatollahs followed their individual agendas and the SAD supplied their needs.
There was only one list of the names and contacts by which this process had been facilitated. One flimsy sheet of almost rice-thin paper, covered in black Chinese script; and this had been Feng’s bargaining counter. The list of all the Muslim militants supplied by the Social Affairs Department, and their materiel, command structures, main bases, had gone south with Feng all those weeks ago. It had passed through Hong Kong in the days before that colony became Xiang Gang once more and
had vanished in Singapore. Folded into the spine of Long Day’s Journey into Night, it had gone with Eldridge Gant into the lifeboat and onto the island; to New York and finally to Washington, onto the desk of the Secretary of State.
In the face of this, the Chairman was, of course, powerless. Everything the Secretary suggested, everything the President mentioned became matters of the utmost moment. The President’s visit was a triumph for the United States. Feng’s list, said the Secretary of State, would be buried in files far beyond the reach of the most assiduous, or powerful, searcher.
Now the Chairman sat with the Director of the SAD in a modest room, high in No. 15 Bowstring Alley. “It has all passed off excellently,” said the Chairman. “The seed is sown. There has been enough blood to nurture it. Now all it needs is time. Life will not trouble me much longer. I will allow myself, therefore, the old man’s prerogative of prognostication if not of outright prophesy.
“What we have given the Americans, the list of the Muslim activists, is a poisoned chalice, a time bomb. They try to pursue a policy of peace and understanding between both our nations, yet we are almost at war, the Peoples’ Republic and Russia. They can only remain in friendship with us, therefore, if they do not reveal what is written on Feng’s paper to our enemies. And if the Russians ever find out that at a time of understanding and detente between Washington and the Kremlin, the USA held the list and did not tell them about it, they will never forgive the Americans.
“And they will find out, of course, perhaps not tomorrow, but eventually...”
“In American politics, tomorrow is a long way away,” observed the Director, with the voice of a man advised by a strategist who had lived 2,500 years ago.
“In life, Mr Director, five years are nothing. The blink of an eye. Yes, I would guess that five years would see it done. In five years they will be at each others’ throats. No matter who is in each White House, no matter who rules in Langley and in the Lubianka, they will be tearing each other to pieces and we will be free to do as we wish, economically, politically, militarily...”
The old man fell silent and leaned back in the simple chair, his eyes narrow and his thin lips wide as he smiled the smile of the tiger.
London, July
The prince was dying but he did not know it yet. Nash leaned forward until his still healing side began to protest, his whole being enraptured by the sight as never before. Perhaps it was the production; perhaps it was the occasion. Perhaps it was the medication.
“How does the Queen?” asked the prince, gasping, his face alive with concern and awash with perspiration. Nash unconsciously narrowed his eyes and drew shuddering breaths. He would never have begun to dream that Alec Stone could pull off a performance as intense as this.
“She swoons to see them bleed,” laughed the stricken King in half answer, glancing round the gleaming, jewel-bright court with a wildness only the camera saw - only the wide screen revealed. The Dolby quadraphonic system brought every rich resonance of Gant’s rolling dramatic voice and showed how completely he had sunk himself into the part. Not a trace of the Irish-American of his towering James Tyrone.
And the Queen - only Gant could have persuaded her to play the part - pulled her sinking body up to look upon her panting nephew-son. “No, no, the drink, the drink! Oh my dear Hamlet, the drink, the drink…”
Nash tore his eyes away from the agony on the screen and looked across the Royal box past Rebecca Dark and Alec Stone to where Eldridge Gant was sitting beside the real Prince. The American’s distinguished profile was alive with revelation and the old spy realized with a lurch that Gant had not seen himself on celluloid since before he went to Viet Nam.
Words whirled out of the speaker system, washing over the entranced Royal Premier audience whose clothes were scarcely less glittering than the courtly gorgeousness upon the screen.
“Thy mother’s poisoned. I can no more. The King! The King’s to blame …”
Soldier Nash shook his head in wonder and looked back up just in time to see Alec Stone - no, not Alec at all; Prince Hamlet - jump over the body of the fainting Laertes and hurl himself upon the shrinking figure of the King. The poisoned sword point drove home and the dying monarch howled. Nash recognized that sound. He had been told about it at length. It was the cry the Bee had made on seeing what was left of the burned Hummingbird.
Jaw squared, wild face working, Hamlet snatched the poisoned chalice from the rigid fingers of his dead mother and hurled himself back on the King. Blood welled out of the royal mouth. Poisoned wine choked in, the one as gloriously ruby as the other. “Follow my mother,” screamed the crazed young man, and his uncle’s bloodshot eyes rolled up.
Horatio gently pulled the fainting Prince to his feet and they gasped a broken conversation as Laertes died and Hamlet followed into silence.
Young Fortinbras strode onto the scene and surveyed the carnage with lordly disdain. He spoke to Horatio and the courtiers, then spat his orders to his men. Such was his assumption of command that old Soldier felt his wounded body jumping to obey.
The wide, wide camera pulled back. The exquisite setting became framed and still, like a Rubens or a Raphael. “Take up the body,” ordered Fortinbras, his voice growing as distant as the gorgeous scene. “Such a sight as this becomes the field but here shows much amiss. Go, bid the soldiers shoot...”
Music swirled. Credits rolled. The audience rose.
Nash found himself on his feet with all the rest, looking with something akin to awe at the faces of Alec Stone and Eldridge Gant. It seemed incredible to him that they should have taken Broadway by storm and still have found time - the resources - to make a film as powerful as this. It was, thought Soldier Nash, as much of a miracle as all the rest.
And, as he clapped until he thought his hands would bleed and watched the tears spill out of Rebecca’s laughing eyes, the screen, reflected in the lenses of Eldridge Gant’s spectacles filled with two words:
‘The End’.