Quiller Bamboo

Chapter 20: Dawn

'The subject has been seized.'

I waited, giving him time.

In a moment: 'Is he still alive?'

'I don't know. They killed the monk on guard.'

Waited again. Pepperidge would want to put the questions in order of their priority and I left it to him. He'd have to signal London as soon as I'd rung off, and they'd want the precise facts. The mission had crashed and I didn't know what they would do, put another one together with a standby executive, fly people in from Hong Kong, call out everyone they'd got in Lhasa, sleepers, supports, agents-in-place, God only knew what they would do, if there was anything they could do at all.

'When would you say it happened?'

There was a lot of crackle on the line but I suppose that was normal for this place. 'I can't say for certain. One of the monks said he thought he heard something like a shout, not long before we got there. Call it between twenty-three-thirty and midnight.'

Chong watched me from the cab of the truck. He'd broken the lock on the gates of the depot to get me inside to the phone and then brought the truck up to block off the entrance. His face looked smaller than ever at the window of the cab, cold, pinched, his eyes watchful, pain in them, it hadn't been his fault but it had bruised him: he'd been called in by Pepperidge to support a major operation and the subject had been Dr Xingyu Baibing, the messiah, and he'd only been with the mission a matter of hours before it had crashed, and on the long nerve-wracking trip south across that appalling terrain he'd been terse, brooding, banging his fists on the rim of the big wheel and shouting above the din of the truck, cursing in Chinese, cursing or praying, I didn't know which, then falling quiet for an hour, two hours, finally finding his centre and talking normally, the rage and frustration buried again behind the easy, American-style manner.

He watched me from the cab, turning sometimes to check the street. In the sky behind him, to the east, a crack of saffron light lay across the horizon. Neither of us had eaten, slept, washed for the past twelve hours, rations in the truck but we couldn't touch them, no appetite for anything but the rancour in the soul to chew on.

'Was there any sign,' Pepperidge asked me, 'that he wasn't taken alive? That he was killed?'

I thought back. It didn't look as if there'd been a struggle. Bian, the monk was lying on his back staring into the moonlight, his prayer beads lying half across his face; I would think that another monk or someone in a monk's robes had brought food or water to the third floor and surprised him, killing him silently and going in to Xingyu's cell.

Told him these facts, Pepperidge, these assumptions.

'There would have been a second man?'

'Possibly.'

A second man who'd climbed the ladder as soon as Bian had been dealt with, in case it needed physical force to take Xingyu. But I thought I knew now what that strange sweet smell had been in the monastery: chloroform.

'Were his things missing?'

'Yes.' The diary, the technical papers, the flight bag, insulin kit. 'But they didn't find the thing that Koichi made.' The mask. 'I brought that away.'

'And you'll keep it with you.'

'Yes.'

Hell was he talking about, there was only one man in this world the mask would fit and he was gone and it looked unlikely we'd ever see him again.

'You told the abbot?'

'Yes.'

Brought them away from their prayers, the abbot and the interpreter, committing a sacrilege I've no doubt, their sandals scuffing the earth floor, their robes sickly with the smell of incense, the abbot's eyes wide as I told him, his hands going at once to his beads.

'Ni kendin Bian shile?'

The interpreter looked at me. 'You are sure that Bian is dead?'

'Yes. I'm sorry.'

'Xingyu xianshen, ta met shi?'

'I don't know. They came for him, but I doubt if it was to kill him later.'

The abbot spoke to the interpreter, who turned and called two other monks away from their prayers; they passed us with shock in their eyes, their robes flying as they hurried across the main floor to the ladder in the corner.

In a moment I said, 'Your Holiness, I imagine there are monks here who joined you not so long ago, people you don't know very well as yet. Do you think anyone like that could have betrayed Dr Xingyu?'

For an instant he looked appalled, then said through the interpreter: 'Only four of us knew about our guest. Only four.'

The abbot himself, the interpreter, Bian, and the monk who'd shared duty with him.

'The man who helped Bian.' I said, 'did you know him well?'

'But of course. It was a great responsibility I gave him.'

I left it at that, didn't ask if this man might have talked to anyone else here. It wouldn't have been easy for those who knew about this eminent guest of theirs to keep silent. This was a small sect, and the messiah was in their house.

I told Pepperidge this much, and then for a moment there was nothing on the line but crackling. Then he said, 'That could have been what happened, yes. People talked, someone chose to betray him. But they didn't go to the police.'

'No.' Xingyu hadn't been taken by the police, the PSB, the KCCPC, or the military, or there would have been jeeps raising the dust outside this place and shouting and the tramp of boots and Xingyu would have been hustled away with his wrists bound and his feet dragging, the abbot too, summary trial and execution. 'It wasn't the police,' I said, 'who took him, or anyone official. It was a private cell.'

And this was the worst of it. I hadn't told Chong on the way south in the night; he was support, not executive; his job was to provide manpower, pass information, liaise with the director in the field, protect the shadow, blow up sergeants. Support people must be told even less than the executives because they're more vulnerable, more in danger of capture and interrogation.

I wouldn't have told him in any case; he was frustrated enough as it was. But this was what we faced now: we hadn't just got the police and the Public Service Bureau and Chinese Intelligence and the People's Liberation Army to deal with. Somewhere in Lhasa, in the streets, behind the walls, behind the doors, in the shadows, there was a private cell operating, professional, effective, and with powerful political backing, or they wouldn't have targeted a man like Xingyu Baibing, and this was the worst of it because the forces of vast organizations like the police and the military have got the advantage in numbers and equipment and information resources and it's often difficult to keep out of their way, but at least you know where they are and what they look like, you can see them coming.

A private cell is different. You can be standing next to a man in a bar or a hotel or an airport and not know that you're in hazard, not know that your mission has been infiltrated and that you'll crash if you're lucky or be found dead by morning if you're not.

A private cell can work in the dark, in silence and in stealth. Its power to destroy the opposition is not paraded, like that of a rattlesnake, but shrouded, like that of the black widow.

We were the opposition.

'Do you think' — Pepperidge on the line — 'that someone is just trying to make some money?'

Xingyu would have a price on his head, a big one.

'No. The people who took him were professionals, not mercenaries, not terrorists.' It had been done with great expertise: they'd not only succeeded in finding Xingyu Baibing but they'd gone into a monastery full of monks and got out again with the man they wanted, killing silently and disturbing no one.

Chong was getting out of his cab, looking along the road, looking at me, his gloved hands palm down, pressing the air, don't worry, just keep a low profile, stay where you are, don't come into the street.

I told him I'd gone to ground, but going to ground doesn't necessarily mean that you've got to bury yourself in a cellar, though it might come to that if it's the only way to survive the field and finally get out and go home; it normally means you've got to keep off the streets if you can, stay away from hotels and taxis and airports, watch for the police every minute you're exposed and be ready to duck and run and wait things out if they see you. It's a status we loathe and fear because it can only get more dangerous as time goes by.

They knew my name at the Public Service Bureau: they'd checked my papers there and asked Su-May Wang if she knew where I was. The police would have been alerted as a routine procedure and I'd given my passport and visa to Pepperidge in the cafe because if I were stopped on the street I couldn't show them, would have to say I'd lost them and then try to get clear before they took me along to the station for an inquiry: you cannot, in a town where martial law obtains, go without papers.

Pressing his hands down, Chong, everything's under control, his breath clouding on the raw morning air as the light in the east took on more colour, pouring gold along the horizon.

'Do they want the subject,' Pepperidge asked, 'or what he's got in his head?'

Not after facts now, simply tapping me for what he could get, for what I could give him, because London would ask these questions and he'd need answers. 'If all they wanted was information,' I said, 'they'd have gone for me, not him.' Information on Bamboo, the information I'd been forced to give Xingyu to keep him from running home to Beijing.

'So what do they want him for?'

I had to think, but it wasn't easy, the cold was like a clamp, numbing the body, numbing the brain, not cold so much as fatigue, been a hard day last night. 'They want him,' I said, 'for bargaining, perhaps. As a hostage.' There were a lot of possible scenarios with Xingyu Baibing as the catalyst, brought forward to bring political pressure, a guarantee, a bargaining chip, a martyr to bring the weight of the people against the Chinese government.

'They can't do anything with him here.'

'No. They'll have to take him to Beijing.'

'But they can't do that.' His voice kept fading, coming back. 'Any more than we could have, now that he's being actively sought. In a moment, 'What is your situation?'

'Ground. Chong's still in support.' I told him about the roadblocks, the sergeant.

'Can you still use the truck?'

'Yes.' The sergeant wouldn't have seen it distinctly enough from the roadblock to identify it as a green Jeifang, and the most he would've said to anyone would have been that there was a vehicle on the move down there, he'd go and check it out.

'If they were searching vehicles,' Pepperidge said, 'it couldn't have been a coincidence. Someone must have told them you were going to him.' A beat. 'They're very close, aren't they?'

I didn't say anything. I'd thought about that before but it hadn't got me anywhere, simply confirmed that we had a private cell dogging my shadow, infiltrating Bamboo, driving me to ground.

'I'll have to signal,' Pepperidge said, 'of course.' The line cracked, and I waited. Chong came through the gates, standing inside, his back to me, stamping his feet, gloved hands rammed into the pockets of his coat. An engine was rumbling and I watched the gates; they were heavy timber, with gaps at the hinged ends, a gap in the middle. 'I will relay,' Pepperidge's voice came again, 'what you've told me. They'll want to know what your plans are.'

That had been the reason for the silence on the line: he'd been thinking out how to put it, because this was going to be rough.

In a moment I said, 'To find the subject?'

It was an army vehicle, a camouflaged personnel carrier; I watched it through the gaps in the gates, past Cheng's motionless figure. It was loaded, the carrier, Chinese troops in battle dress. It was going slowly, toward the centre of the city.

'Yes,' Pepperidge said, 'your plans are to find the subject, of course. But London will ask for details.'

Either they were coming down from the intersections in the north, the roadblocks, or they were moving into the town from an outlying base, to begin a house-to-house search for Xingyu Baibing.

'Tell London they can't have any details,' I said into the phone.

The carrier had stopped, not far from the big green Jeifang, and Chong turned and stood facing me now, his mouth working on the chewing gum, his eyes blanked off. We'd agreed, on our way south through the night, that we would go on using the truck as our base, at least for the first hour or two of theday, that it wasn't a risk, wouldn't call attention. There were hundreds of these things in the city and around it and along the roads to Chengdu, Golmud, Kathmandu, most of them painted green like this one. The only man who could have recognized it as ours was dead.

But perhaps we were wrong, because boots were hitting the ground as men dropped from the carrier. Or their citywide search was going to start here, at the truck depot.

'It's like this, you see' — Pepperidge — 'I've got every confidence in you, and I think you've got as good a chance as anyone of bringing this thing home.'

The mission. As good a chance of bringing it home as any other executive they might fly out here to take over and do what he could to go in cold and try pulling something else out of the wreckage.

'The only point,' I said, 'in getting someone else out here would be that he could work at street level.' Unknown to the police and the PSB, unknown to the private cell.

Boots on the outside. I watched the gates. The engine on the personnel carrier was still running; it hadn't moved on.

'What they'll say' — Pepperidge — 'is that while I have total confidence in you, they cannot share it. Unless you can give me any idea of where you plan to go from here, they may well instruct me to send you out of the field.'

He hadn't liked saying that. He would have done anything not to say it.

'I quite understand.'

Best I could do, put him out of his misery, take it like a man, so forth, as I watched the gates and saw coming over to them, three soldiers.

Chong didn't move. He was standing twenty feet away between me and the gates, facing them now, perfectly still. There were trucks standing in the depot, a dozen or more, most of them big Jeifangs, adequate cover.

On the far side was a low wall, and that was the way I would have to go. And this is the problem of going to ground: you can be forced at any minute to run, and keep on running. There's no base anymore that you can work from, no stability; the sands are shifting all the time under your feet.

You can see their point, can't you, in London, quite understand.

Shivering in the first pale light of the new day, shivering under the warm padded coat, the one I'd taken from the man in the temple, first his life and then his coat, uncivil of me, I will admit, shivering despite its warmth as the soldiers came to the gates and started banging on them.

'Da kai!'

Chong didn't move, shouted back at them — 'Zher hai mei ren.'

Pepperidge: 'I can only obey their instructions, of course.' London's. 'If they-' he broke off, 'was that someone shouting?'

'Yes.'

'Are you pressed?'

'Not really.'

'Tamen shenme shihou dao?'

Crackling on the line. 'Who is shouting?'

'Chong. He's all right, but I might have to ring off. If I do, I'll get through to you again from somewhere else.'

In a moment, 'Don't leave anything too late.'

Chong hadn't moved. 'Jiu dian!' Shouting at them.

He would give me time, I knew that. If they started forcing the gates he'd turn and give me the signal and we'd separate, make our own way out, if they didn't start shooting first.

'Look,' I said, 'they can't get him out of Lhasa. He's still here somewhere. I'm going to find him.'

Soldiers banging at the gates.

Chong standing perfectly still, shouting at them.

'Lihai zher ba. Jiu dian huilai!'

Pepperidge on the line, worried by the noise. 'I'd be happier if you'd ring off and look after things there.'

'He's still in this town,' I said, 'and I'm going to find him. Tell them to give me a bit more time. A few hours.'

Banging at the gates.

'That's all I'm asking. A few hours.'