Quiller Bamboo

Chapter 13: Apothecary

The snakes were alive. I think.

It doesn't need saying, surely, that in any mission, whatever the objective, whatever the target, the one primordial requirement is to stay clear of the opposition, particularly if the opposition is not a private cell but the entire security network of the host country: police, secret police, civil and military intelligence. The one primordial requirement is to stay clear of them and get back across the frontier with a whole skin and the documents or the tapes or the defector or the blown spook who's going to die out there if you don't, die out there or finish up under the five-hundred-watt bulb without a capsule and blowing the roof off London.

They weren't moving. They were just a lot of coloured spirals curving around the inside of the big glass jar, their little black eyes open, but that didn't mean anything, we go on watching life after death, don't we, until someone closes the lids. But in any case I was disgusted. I can't stand those bloody things.

The apothecary peered at the grubby bit of paper. The light was bad.

Of course there are times when we can't for some reason stay clear of the opposition and then all we can do is to pop it and protect the mission or get clear again, bloodied but unbowed, so forth. Then there's third situation that comes up sometimes but thank God not very often: it's where the only way to keep the mission going and hope to survive and reach the objective is to set yourself up as a target and wait for them to shoot and that was what I was doing now.

One of them was moving, its small head dropping and swinging around inside the jar with the black forked tongue flickering, and I looked away, the flesh creeping, they've got no bloody feet anywhere, those things, all they can do is writhe.

'Insulin,' the old man nodded, peering at the bit of paper.

'Yes,' I said.

The decorated canopy cracked above the shopfront in the wind, and the man behind me fell prone again onto the flat of his hands, facing toward the temple farther along. A dog sniffed at his rags.

I'd tried two other apothecaries but at the first one the girl had just looked at the prescription for a long time and finally shaken her head and flashed all her gold teeth and at the second one the man said in quite good English that he was disappointed at not being able to oblige me but that I should try the one around the corner, toward the Barkhor plaza. I was there now.

There were other things, apart from the snakes: rows of bottles and bowls of herbs and a huge dried starfish and an armadillo; but there was a shelf of phials and flagons with typed labels, and a small poster with Bayer at the top. I'd been trying apothecaries in the hope of making a deal; they owned their own places and could break the rules if they wanted to, and I put the price of their wanting to at about one hundred yen.

The old man was raising his head slowly, looking up from the prescription and bringing his eyes to focus directly on mine with his face close; and in his eye there was a warning. Then their focus shifted, and it was quite clear that he was looking behind me, through me, at something else.

I said softly, 'Police?'

He nodded, pleased that I'd understood. 'If sell you this, must tell them. It is order.' Below his bald pate his brows made furrows as many as the armadillo's 'Perhaps it better you leave now.'

I heard the man outside fall flat on his hands again in obeisance to the gods of the temple; he'd moved another few yards. I could hear other sounds, mostly voices from the people at the vegetable stalls opposite and the rumbling of ironbound wheels and the dragging of harness. The dog that had sniffed at the pilgrim's rags now sniffed at my combat boots. Farther along the street there were prayer bells ringing, tuneless but with a steady rhythm. I listened carefully, analyzing the environment, because in a moment I was going to cross the line and present myself to the opposition, because I had no choice.

'I must have the insulin,' I told the apothecary 'It's urgent.' He watched me steadily, his eyes bright with intelligence, but it was obviously beyond him to understand me. 'It doesn't matter,' I told him, 'about the police.'

There was no point in pushing money at him as a bribe. In the last few minutes I'd come to know him well enough; he was an apothecary, a man of high standing in his community, a man, by his art, of great responsibility, and if he decided to report me to the police he would do it as a point of honor, the police being his enemy here; his goodwill would not be for sale.

'You understand,' he asked me, his eyes grave, 'you understand what is the truth of this thing?'

'Yes. But the police are not looking for me. I shall have no trouble.'

He lifted his hands, their skin like crumpled silk, and let them fall gracefully. 'Ah. Then it is good.'

It was a long time, minutes, before he'd filled in the form, peering again at the prescription. 'And the name? The name is not clear.'

'Xiao Dejian,' I said and spelled it for him. He wrote it down, using a pen with ink the colour of blood. Then I gave him some money and he gave me change and I took the flat packet of ampoules and returned his bow and walked through the strange leaden light of the morning, hearing the sudden shout and ignoring it because it was only in my mind, the nerves shimmering in the system with a feeling of cold light and the scalp drawn tight, because I had staked the whole of the mission on one throw, on the logical assumption that if the KCCPC were watching the clinics and the apothecaries for anyone buying insulin they wouldn't make an arrest but would simply follow.

They were not clods in the Kuo Chi Ching Pao Chu. A cloddish intelligence service would have given orders to have me arrested and thrown into a cell and interrogated, but these people knew how long the odds are against getting information out of a trained agent; it's not an exact science, and you can beat a man into a kind of stupor where he himself wouldn't know the truth from a lie, or you can push him beyond the point when he can tell you anything at all.

They thought or they knew that Dr Xingyu Baibing was in Lhasa, and the odds were better that I could lead them to him now.

Why did they think, or how did they know? I must find out.

Perhaps he would tell me, the short, squat-bodied Chinese who was walking behind me on the bright curved surface of the copper samovar, fifty paces, I would have said, behind me, allowing for the reduction in size of everything reflected there, a cup of tea, how nice, but I haven't the time just now, warming their hands, the little group around the stall, warming their hands on the cups as the tea came gushing from the spout, hanging back a little now, he was hanging back, because here the street was clearer and if I looked around he'd stand out and I might notice him, he was good at the rudiments of urban tracking and that made things safer by a degree because a trained tag is predictable and his movements would be unsurprising, I could do with that.

I could do with anything in point of fact that I could get in the way of advantages, because he would carry what those Americans so delightfully call a 'piece' and it would be heavy-calibre, big enough to drop me from a distance if I looked like getting away. It was probable too that he'd been here on the roof of the world a bit longer than I had and had got used to the atmospheric pressure and would be able to run more effectively, to outrun me if I had to, through the leaden light of the forenoon.

There's a case to be made for calling us cocky, you must understand, we the brave soldiery of the thrice-accursed Sacred Bull that runs us across the board like pawns until at last the paint wears thin and the glue cracks and the head comes off and they throw us away, for calling us cocky, yes, as we work our way through the labyrinth, meeting so often face to face with our grinning fate that we lose much of our fear and become irrational in the heat of crisis, and this, my good friend, was a crisis, because the executive had moved deliberately into the surveillance field of the opposition and attracted its attention and the opposition was not some maverick terrorist cell with no claim to expertise or efficiency but the multifaceted and highly competent intelligence service of the People's Republic of China, and as I walked across the packed dirt of the next street to my right my feet felt sticky on the web.

He was keeping pace, moving across the window of a bathhouse, neat in his parka, his head turned to the side a little in case I looked back, cocky, yes, in a crisis, and this had often been our undoing, the head comes off, you understand, and they throw us away; but this was a two-edged thing, because if we couldn't allow ourselves the choice of deadly options and face the matter head-on we'd never get anywhere, would we, all we'd do is sit there in the park with a drip on our nose and a plaid rug on our knees feeding the bloody pigeons, turned again, I turned again, working my way to the edge of town through the leaden light of the forenoon.

There'd been no other choice, let's face it. That improvident diabetic up there in the monastery, that crass idiot, the messiah, my precious protege, needed the stuff in my pocket before he slipped into a coma, and I couldn't have asked Pepperidge for help because the director in the field can have no part of the action; his job is to hole up in his ivory tower and liaise with London, report to the signals board on the progress of the mission and request instructions, to protect, nurture, and advise his executive certainly, but not on the streets, in harm's way, because if a wheel comes off he provides a kind of black box for the Bureau, slipping away from the field and leaving the blood and the smoke behind him and taking a plane for Londinium and a debriefing room, there to explain what happened, why we crashed, so that our little mistakes can go down in the records and those poor little buggers in training at Norfolk can be duly warned: Here is a case, you see, where the executive began believing himself to be invulnerable, and overestimated his talents. Got cocky, yes.

Yet it was logic that drove me through these streets and I won't have it otherwise: that man had to have his medication and there was no one else who could get it for him — I'd already put that monk in hazard without meaning to — and there'd been no way I could have bought it in time without walking straight into the trap, won't have it otherwise, I tell you, I don't care what you think.

Things were not, though, going to be pretty.

I was walking a bit faster now, giving him the picture, glancing around sometimes to see if anyone was watching, my steps more purposeful, man with a mission, yea, verily, huge black yak coming the other way, pulling a cartload of dried dung, whites of his eyes, breath clouding on the air, one hoof split and bound with a metal ring, the driver chanting, head lifted to the sky, lost in his own world. I could have run now, using the yak and the cart for cover and taking whatever doorway or alley I could find, running flat out and gaining enough ground to get me clear before he could catch up; but there'd be no future in that: he could have dropped me with a shot or cut across the terrain and intercepted me, his lungs better than mine, more used to the altitude, and in any case it would only have confirmed to his agency that they were right: Xingyu Baibing was indeed in Lhasa and must now be hunted down.

Also I had a rendezvous.

Walls of a temple garden, huge cracks in it, weeds growing, a pair of timbered gates, one hanging from a rusty hinge, the other decorated with dried leaves in an intricate design, embodying prayer, presumably, or homage to the Lord Buddha, so I went in there, it seemed appropriate, went in there to keep the rendezvous.

It was mostly a ruin.

The main doors had been chained at some time but one of the hasps had been jimmied away from the woodwork and now the doors hung open. Human excrement on the worn stone steps, pages torn from a pulp magazine, a cracked boot lying on its side in a corner and the white bones of a skeleton glowing in the half-light inside the doorway, a dog's, with one leg missing.

Smell of stale incense, or perhaps a fire, a torching of aromatic timber: this could be one of a hundred temples ransacked and ravaged by the angels of Chairman Mao. It was cold in here, silent, smelling of a grave, with feeble light from the aureoles along the gallery pooling on the floor, playing on dead leaves and the carcass of a rat.

Suddenly a face in front of mine as I moved into the shadows, the shock hitting the nerves and the adrenaline hot in the blood, a face with the gold leaf peeling away from the dry cracked wood underneath, the eye sockets brooding in meditation, the hands folded across the gross belly two inches below the navel, I didn't stop, didn't hesitate, because the scenario required confidence here: I was meant to know my way, I was bringing the insulin to Dr Xingyu Baibing, for it was here that he was hidden.

Scream of a bird and the echoes played it back from the domed ceiling, a flurry of wings and a spattering and then silence again until I moved forward, my boots grating across the chipped tiles, there was a door here.

I pushed it open and it swung back, hitting the wall before I could stop it, darkness now, blindness across the eyes, and a silence so deep that even my breath echoed until I controlled it and went forward again, swinging the door shut but not with a bang, because any noise in this place could attract attention and we wouldn't want that, Dr Xingyu Baibing and I.

'I've got it,' I said, we must not ham it, must not actually say insulin.

'You were late,' at the back of the throat. 'I need it now.'

Then I waited against the wall behind the door.

I was relying on his pride.

This was a kind of inner chamber, I suppose, but it might have another door, to the outside, either locked or chained or able to be opened. There could be fixtures in here, lamps, candle sconces, Buddhas, perhaps, unless they'd been saved from the torching; by the acoustics it was a small place with a flat ceiling, not domed; there was not a photon of light here. It smelled of damp rot, with a mortuary sharpness that caught at the throat: there might be a cadaver here, neither rat's nor dog's this time, and not bared to the bone, the flesh still stirring to the feast of maggots, but we are being morbid, perhaps, the nerves producing a little video show for the imagination to work on, worried now, I was worried because I was relying on his pride and that could be a mistake.

From far away the tolling of a bell, perhaps in requiem, we are not, are we, feeling too cheerful just now, less than sanguine, because he might not, lacking pride, decide to push the door open and come in with his gun to catch us unawares, Dr Xingyu Baibing and I, and make the arrest and herd us to the nearest Public Service Bureau, promotion assured, the man who caught the infamous dissident, subject of a worldwide search. He might decide instead to play it safe and leave us here, sure of our staying at least long enough for him to fetch help in case we were armed.

I didn't want that to happen. I'd pushed the mission into a new phase by making contact with the opposition, with the intelligence service of the host country, and I wanted it to stay like that, and control the outcome if I could. There were- No, he hadn't gone.

The door had a metal lever, and he was pushing it down, and with great care, by infinite degrees, and sweat came on my skin immediately and the pulse went up and I steadied the breathing, we are engaged, my good friend, we shall have our reckoning, he and I.

They would have been interested in this, the people sitting there at the signals board in far Londinium; it would have broken the ennui for them. There'd been a flurry of excitement I suppose when Pepperidge had put it through the mast at Cheltenham, Executive undertakes to ensure silence of subject if protection of mission necessitates, but since then they'd been sitting on their hands.

That was last night. Mr Shepley, Bureau One. Nothing since!

No, sir.

Then where the hell is he? Hyde, my Control, less patient than the King of Kings, less able to control his nerves.

The lever on the door was still moving.

It would have got them going, wouldn't it, if they'd known the score. Holmes would pick up the chalk and look at the big digital clock and punch the international time-zone button and note Tibetan local and fill in the rest of the line, Red One, DIF on open circuit.

And they'd start walking about, not looking at one another, because Red One is perhaps rather theatrical shorthand for a situation in which either the executive's life or the security of the entire mission is in extreme hazard, which can simply mean that the poor bastard out there is stuck on a frozen roof two hundred feet above the street with the lights of the chopper fingering the buildings one by one or spread-eagled facedown with a boot on his neck and a gun in his spine and the stink of exhaust gas from the unmarked van in his lungs or reeling in the chair under the light and praying for the ill-judged blow that will bring him what he can't bring himself because they found the capsule on him and he's got promises to keep before he sleeps and he can't take much more before he breaks them, not much more of this.

There was light on the wall now, a thin pale sliver of light that ran like a vertical crack on the plaster, and across it was his shadow.

There was nothing to be done yet. Things would take their course. I don't like guns and I never use one, as you know, but that's not to say that I don't respect them, for they can summon the death-bringer.

DIF on open circuit is more technical, and simply means that the director in the field can put his signal straight through to the speaker system at the board, taking automatic priority over all other traffic. It can make things tricky if there are two Red Ones in operation from two different missions but it's the best they can do.

The crack of light was widening.

Shall we raise him, sir?

The DIF?

Yes.

Not yet. It's Pepperidge.

Don't call us, we'll call you: despite his gentle manners, Pepperidge has more nervous stamina than most, and doesn't shoot till he sees the whites of their eyes.

What I didn't like was that the hinges of the door were on the left, looking from the other side, from the side where he was standing now, and I was right-handed, and the choice was unaccommodating: either I'd have to use my left hand or move my whole body into his vision field before I could use my right. Either decision could be lethal.

As I'd thought, this place wasn't very big. The light coming through the doorway was faint, but I could see the opposite wall now, and it was close. There wasn't anything to see on the floor so far except chips of plaster and broken tiles, no cadaver despite this smell of decay, no remains of some starving pilgrim who'd crawled in here to sleep and dream no more, nothing, either, like a fallen joist or a broken pane of glass that would do for a weapon.

I could hear him breathing.

He wasn't going to rush it. I didn't expect him to: he'd be well trained, a professional. We could have a whole armoury in here, Dr Xingyu Baibing and I.

The hinges of the door hadn't made any sound when I'd opened it and later closed it, but that could have been because I'd swung it fairly fast. He was moving it much more slowly now, and that could make it creak, and if it did that I would expect him to use his shoulder and smash the door back before we could find our guns, my insubstantial companion and I, because we might be somewhere off this chamber where we couldn't see the light but could hear the door.

This would be in his mind, as it was in my own. Our heads at this stage were probably eighteen inches apart with the door between them, each the vessel of a quiet blaze of consciousness as the synapses fired in their billions and the nerves at the extremities of our bodies recorded the pressure of the floor underfoot and the tactile impression of the air at my fingertip and the trigger under his and our cortices processed the data and reacted accordingly. I had been as close as this before to a fellow creature whose presence could bring my death, but it's not something you get used to, because every time can be the last and you know that.

The strip of faint light widened on the wall, and his shadow took on bulk. His head was defined now and I could see his right elbow but not the gun: that would be held in front of him.

I could smell him now.

Danger came close — he could smell me.

Nothing, there was nothing to do but wait, and it wasn't easy but it had got to be done because I couldn't leave him alive and I'd have to see more of his body before I could take him down — I was badly positioned because of the left-hand-right-hand thing.

It wouldn't be long now. You can't stand as close as this to someone and not become aware of him, and this man's senses would have started picking up the signals by this time, the almost soundless exchange of air by the lungs, the barely discernible rise in temperature as the heat radiated from the skin, and above all else the vibration of the aura itself beyond the reach of the senses but within the field of the subconscious where the alarm would be raised, the nerves galvanized and — he fired the gun and the shock smashed at the walls.