Quiller Bamboo

Chapter 3: Pepperidge

She was very thin, and faded-looking, still pretty, though, perhaps, had been stunning, once, with her large eyes and her cheekbones. She sat decoratively on the worn settee, her thin legs trying, I believed, to cover the patch of cretonne where the cat had sharpened its claws, where perhaps it always did: she looked a cat-lover, a quiet woman, half in hiding.

'Would you like some tea?'

'No,' I said, 'thank you. I haven't much time.'

Half in hiding from life, or from death, hoping it wouldn't find her. They'd told me it was cancer.

'He won't be long now,' she said.

'Supposing I go and meet him?'

'You could try. But I don't know whether he's gone to the grocer's or the post office, and they're in different directions.' She smiled ruefully at the contrariness of life.

'I see.'

The cat was on a windowsill by a pot of geraniums, its fur mangy, their leaves yellowed. It spreads everywhere, if you let it, through the body and into the house, through the house.

'It's so cold,' she said in her pretty voice, 'so early, this year, isn't it?'

'Yes. We could get a white Christmas, though.'

There must be a kind of terrible relief, I thought, in actually knowing you didn't have long, in knowing that it wasn't worth the effort of trying to fight it off, in having time to get ready, and tidy all the drawers, instead of taking your fear with you to a rendezvous with potential death as I did, time after time, carrying it for years like putrefying baggage.

'… last year, didn't we?'

'I said we had a little snow last year, didn't we, for Christmas?'

'Yes, that's right,' I said, 'I remember.'

What would her brother give her for Christmas? A posy for her grave? We tend, as I'm sure you've noticed, to be a trifle morbid when we're waiting to go out.

'What's she called, your cat?'

'Smoky. It's actually a he.' Another little smile.

'He's very handsome,' I said. I like cats myself; I always think of them as female, I suppose because of their grace and their mysteriousness.

'If you haven't got long,' she said, 'you could go and stand outside, to watch for him. Then you could go and meet him.'

'All right.'

But he was coming down the narrow little path between the patches of brownish grass when I went out there.

'Hello,' he said. 'You were quicker than I'd bargained for.' I'd phoned him from the Bureau. 'I had to get some things for Gladys.'

'That's all right." I took one of the brown paper bags and we went back into the house.

Pepperidge had only directed me once in the field, in Singapore; he'd conned me into it at the Brass Lamp, making me think he was a burned-out-spook, too far gone to take it on himself. He'd been very good, before that, as a shadow, first-class at covert infiltration, knew how to kill with discretion when it was necessary; then he'd come in and managed the Asian desk for a while. He'd been a good DIF, getting me through the Singapore thing without any fuss and doing most of it from London, through the signals mast at Cheltenham, before he'd come out to the field and brought that bastard Loman with him. But Loman had done well too, handled me well, give him his due.

'How are things going?' I asked Pepperidge.

'Oh,' he said cheerfully, 'we soldier on, you know. Did they tell you about her, then?'

'Yes.'

He nodded, picking up a spanner, looking at it. We were out in the little toolshed at the back, where she couldn't hear us, not that she'd pass anything on, I was sore; it was just bur natural habit to drift somewhere but of earshot, wherever we were. 'She hasn't got anyone due, you see. Poor old George went — oh, it must be five or six years ago now. I'm all she's got left.' He gave a dry laugh, watching me with his yellow eyes in the half-light of the shed, the shadow of his rather ragged moustache, hiding most of his mouth. Been mending the lawn mower,' he said, putting the spanner down, 'though the grass is pretty well dead.'

The word dropped into the silence like a stone into a pool, irretrievably, and I saw the slight tightening of the skin across his sharp cheekbones; then it was over. 'Know anything about lawn mowers?'

'You have to push them along, don't you?'

'Only if you can't wheedle out of it. They got the fidgets again, have they?'

'Yes.'

'Anything to do with the Chinese ambassador?'

It had been on the nine-o'clock news.

'I can't really tell you anything,' I said, 'because they've thrown a blackout across it. All I really came for was to find out if you'd be interested in taking it on.'

'Directing you?'

'Yes.'

In a moment he said, 'It was nice of you to bring her flowers.'

She'd put them straight into a vase, and shown them to him when he'd come back. 'She's a pretty woman,' I said.

'I suppose she is.' He was thinking about what I'd been saying, about the mission.

'She ought to get married again,' I told him.

'Why not? Why not…' He brushed some dry grass cuttings off the edge of the worn bench. 'No one phoned me, I suppose you know that?'

'Hyde was going to, but I said I wanted to come here on my own, see how things were, sound you out.'

'That was kind.' He stared through the little cracked window, where there was a piece of paper sticking: Get blades ground. 'Hyde's going to run it?'

'Yes.'

'He pick me?'

'No. He asked me who I wanted.'

'You couldn't get Ferris?' The gray October light touched his face at an angle from the window; he wasn't all that old, perhaps forty, but the skin had shrivelled into fine lines across his cheeks, like a balloon almost deflated. He'd been out East a lot.

'Ferris hasn't got Chinese,' I said. But he knew that I must have tried for Ferris and couldn't get him. 'It's very big, this one. Very big indeed.'

'Or they wouldn't have asked for you.'

'I was available. It wouldn't keep us out there too long, so Hyde said. A matter of days, all going well.'

'Days?' He turned his head to look at me. 'Sounds pretty concentrated.'

'That's why MI6 wouldn't touch it.'

'They were approached first?'

'Yes. The thing is, we're talking about looking after someone out there, and he's going to be right in the spotlight. We might have to do things they can't.' The Bureau doesn't officially exist, but the other services are expected to keep their house clean, not get into anything wet. They're specifically public servants, whereas you could call us, I suppose, a maverick force, answerable only to the PM.

'Looking after someone,' Pepperidge said, puckering his thin mouth. 'There's already one down, isn't there?'

'Yes.'

He meant the Chinese Ambassador. They'd come in very early, the opposition, though not early enough: the meeting we'd had would provide the blueprint for the whole mission. My guess was that Qiao hadn't been discreet since the uprising of '89, when he'd become 'disgusted.' It couldn't have been easy for him to hide a, in the confines of his embassy in London. Or perhaps he'd talked to his brother, and his brother had been put under the screws out there, and Beijing intelligence had signalled their agents here in London: Get Qiao.

'The other chap came through, though,' Pepperidge said, 'didn't he?'

Hou Jing, the little counsellor. 'They said his briefcase saved him. There was a lot of stuff in it.'

'Close shot?' He was still watching me.

'Passing car.'

'There were some policemen killed, it said on the-'

'Three. It was an assault rifle.'

'Those bloody things. I suppose there wasn't anything like a bit of kevlar in that briefcase, was there?'

'I thought of that too.'

In this trade we are steeped, as I told you, in subterfuge. Hou Jing could have worked as a spotter.

Pepperidge looked through the window again, and got a piece of rag and wiped some of the grime off, but most of it was outside in the air, fog pressing down form a steel-gray sky. 'Let's go in,' he said, 'and talk to Gladys."

She was in the kitchen, scraping at the bottom of a burned saucepan, her thin body leaning against the sink; I would imagine she got tired easily.

'You go,' she said, when Pepperidge put it to her — we were in the sitting room now, where the cat was arched like a drawn bow with its claws on the settee and its haunches flat on the carpet. 'I'll be perfectly all right here,' she said. 'Don't, Smoky! I've got friends who come in, Doris and Marjorie.' She didn't ask how long he was talking about, I think in case it was a long time and she'd feel scared and we'd see it.

'It's only for a few days,' her brother said quickly.

'Oh,' relieved, 'then what's all the fuss?' A pretty smile, radiating life.

'If you go out, Glad, I don't want you walking any farther than Tesco.'

'All right.'

'And don't carry anything too heavy. Doris has got her car.'

'I've never heard such a fuss! Now off you go, for goodness sake.' She picked up the cat and held it while she came to the front door with us. 'It was so nice of you to bring the flowers.' The smile of a young girl, shy and vulnerable. I couldn't take her hand because of the cat, so I kissed her cheek and we went out, Pepperidge and I, and got into the Lamborghini.

'Nice hot cuppa, love?'

'Please.'

She looked at me from under the heavy false lashes. 'Do you good.'

She mopped the plastic table top and limped off to the tea urn with her arthritic hip. You think your nerves aren't showing, but Daisy will catch the vibrations.

Pepperidge had been put on a plane for Hong Kong an hour ago and I'd been cleared and briefed and there was nothing to do now, nowhere to go while I waited, as the light lowered in the basement window, the winter seeping into the room like a cold shadow, dimming the light bulbs, bringing a chill to the air. They'd overdone the thermostat thing when Hyde had sent his instructions, and now this bloody place was as cold as the grave.

'There you are, love.'

'Thank you, Daisy.'

'What about a nice buttered bun?'

'All right.'

For something to do, I sat with my hands around the cup of tea to warm them. Anyone forming the actual intention of putting this stuff into his body would be clean off his rocker: it's jet-black and there's enough caffeine in it to blast the back end off a bulldog. What we really come down here for is to escape the madhouse going quietly on upstairs along those bleak and dimly lighted corridors and behind the doors of those unnamed and unnumbered rooms, with signals coming in from the mast at Cheltenham and traffic going out from Codes and Cyphers, the whole giddy circus engaged in the sinister task of dealing with lies and secrets, subversion and betrayal, in the name of the need to know.

'There you are, duck.'

Margarine, not butter, but what can you do? What they budget for in this place is to buy loyalty, to put a price on trust, to replace a car full of bullet holes at some far frontier post, to arrange, when things go wrong, for funerals, to fork out a widow's pension.

'I put it in the microwave for you.'

Standing over me with her bright ginger wig like a fire in the gloom and her rouged cheeks burning with the warmth of motherly love.

'Good old Daise.'

We come here for escape and the comfort of this woman's saintly presence as she limps from table to table and back to her huge steaming urn, our very own blowsy and overblown Mother Teresa, garbed in her stained and sluttish apron and dispensing not only her black undrinkable tea and her stale uneatable buns but also the sweet anodyne of compassion that we need so badly when we crawl back from a mission with the rattle of shot or the scream of a dying man still echoing in the far reaches of the mind, or when we sit here with our hands around a cup while our fate hangs in the balance like a rope in the wind as those bastards upstairs turn the signals around and peck at the computers and shuffle softly from room to room in their worn suede shoes and finally decide which one of us should be picked for the mission that's come onto the board, which one of us shall be sent out to worm our way through the serpentine shafts of the labyrinth to seek the enemy and overcome him, pre-mission nerves, I trust you will understand and perhaps even excuse, this is just a touch of the willies.

'You'll need to get that dressing changed every three days, until they say you can leave it off.'

Clearance, Medical Section. I'd said yes, I understood.

'And you need to take a gram of C and two hundred and fifty milligrams of calcium in this form, the citrate, every day.'

'Why?'

'You're just back, aren't you, and going out again?'

'Yes.'

'That's putting a strain on the adrenals.' She gave me the small plastic box. 'Don't forget.'

I'd got a map of Hong Kong and a plan of the airport from Travel but I hadn't studied them yet and didn't want to: nothing was certain; they might not be able to con the Chinese into giving Dr Xingyu free passage out of the embassy, or any one of a dozen scenarios could come up and we'd have to abort this one while the shadow executive was still trying to get his teeth into this bloody bun.

I kicked the chair back and went out of the Caff and op the stairs along the corridor to the room at the end and found a slack-bodied woman in a drooping twinset peering into a filing cabinet through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that were surely thick enough to be bulletproof.

'The buns,' I said. This was what they grandly called Administration Services. 'Those bloody buns down there.'

She looked around and stared. 'Buns?'

A girl came through the doorway and took a look at my face and scuttled for cover behind a pile of papers. 'Those buns down there in the Caff,' I said, 'are nothing more than resuscitated crud left over from Oliver Twist's workhouse. Have you ever-'

'If you wish to make a complaint, you'll have to fill in the appropriate form in triplicate. We can't-'

'You expect us to go out there and shove our heads right into the cannon's mouth and when we're lucky enough to come back the best you can give us is crud.' I looked at the mousy-faced girl. 'What's your name?'

'Gertrude, sir.'

'Little Gertrude, do something for me. Fill out the appropriate form in triplicate with my complaint, which you can put down as attempted food poisoning, and drop it into my message box for me to sign.'

I went along to see Holmes and blow his head off for nothing at all, which is what friends are for, but he wasn't in, so I looked in at Signals and saw a very sticky endgame going with Croder himself manning the board for Flamingo and Holmes watching the score as the stuff came in from Nigeria. Two other boards were open, the fourth was dark, and the last one was lit up but blank except for the word Bamboo chalked at the top, code name for the mission. That would be mine, and I stood for a moment looking at it with a feeling of time warp going through me, as if I could already see the future, the board filling with status reports as Pepperidge sent them in from the field, with routine information or requests for help; and I wondered how far down the board we'd manage to go before something flew at me from the dark or a wheel came off or I ran into a dead end with nowhere else to run, and Pepperidge would have to send the last signal: Shadow down.

The adrenals, yes, a strain on the adrenals, so let us quietly close the door of the signals room and go back to the caff and drink some tea and pop some calcium and inform Daisy that one fine day she might well Achieve a certain tawdry stardom in this bloody place for being able to offer its hard-pressed denizens some eatable buns.

Ten minutes later my beeper went and I used a phone and they told me Hyde wanted to see me for one final briefing, and I knew they weren't going to abort this one: the mission had started running.

'Pepperidge,' Hyde told me, 'will be in Hong Kong by the morning. That was a good choice you made,' swinging his large head to watch me obliquely, 'with Pepperidge. He's very fine indeed with his signals and of course he's got a great deal of regard for the way you work.'

'I didn't know'.'

'He said it was an honour. I'm sending you out tonight, is that all right?'

'Whenever.'

'You'll stop over in Bombay to meet someone. The situation is this. The Foreign Office together with the PM has managed to complete a workable deal with Premier Li Peng, assuring him that we are willing to keep Dr. Xingyu Baibing in our care at the embassy out there for as long as he wishes, which could of course be years, during which time our relations with China would remain distinctly cool. We have made it clear that a guarantee from Beijing that Dr Xingyu could move safely from the UK embassy to the airport would in turn bring our guarantee that normal trade could be resumed between the two countries.'

'Xingyu's going straight to Hong Kong?'

'Straight there.'

'When?'

'Within a few days. They'll give a specific date and time when they're ready — they're making the concession, not us. That part, actually, was comparatively easy. The difficult part was to persuade them that we're not aware that the moment Dr Xingyu lands in Hong Kong he's to be snatched by Chinese agents and sent straight back to Beijing for brainwashing.'

He poked his tongue into his cheek and waited.

'Why can't Xingyu be met by a platoon of Hong Kong police and taken into hiding?'

'I'm not sure,' Hyde said, 'whether anyone's made an estimate of the Hong Kong police force who are active agents for Beijing, but I would put it rather high. Xingyu would be walking right into the tiger's mouth. We can trust, you see,' his large flat hand hitting the desk, 'no one. No one at all. We also have to relax their agents at the very critical time when Dr Xingyu lands at the airport, by letting it seem that we have not the slightest idea that he's up for snatching. We shall be sending only one man to meet him — a junior clerk in the British High Commission — as a formal courtesy. The major requirement is to play this operation hi very low key.'

'What happens to the clerk?'

'He'll melt away at the right time. I'll go into that for you; then you must tell me how you think you're going to get Dr Xingyu clear.'

'Few questions first.'

'Of course.'

It was after seven in the evening, and the sounds of the traffic outside had changed, coming off the rush-hour high with not so many buses now, more taxis honking as people started out for the evening, it calmed, I think, him a little, to hear the steady beating of the city's pulse, something for me to remember, a touchstone, when I was out there in the cold.

'What are we going to do,' I asked Hyde, 'about the media? They'll be jamming the airport and they'll get in my way.'

'No, we thought about that, so the FO made the kind suggestion to Beijing that Dr Xingyu should be smuggled in plain van from the embassy to the airport and put onto the last night flight, strictly incognito and with a briefed cabin crew. This would avoid, we suggested, unwanted publicity that would make it seem that in allowing Dr Xingyu his freedom, Beijing had lost the game. It was meant to look like another concession and they went for it.'

There'd been some good thinking, and it reassured me a little. 'Where do you want me to take him?'

'Out of Hong Kong.' One of the phones rang and he pressed the off switch. 'There's no way you could safely keep him there, even if he wanted to stay — the place is infested with mainland agents. Beijing has grabbed at this deal because it's pretty well their only chance of getting their hands on Dr Xingyu again, and when he lands in Hong Kong they'll have their own people there in force. And when you take him over they're going to ransack the island and at the same time they're going to put every point of exit under close and immediate observation. That,' he said with his hand dropping onto the desk again, 'is the objective for the mission. Not just to take this man into your safekeeping at the airport, but to get him out of Hong Kong.'

'Where to?'

That bloody shark bite had started itching.

'Wherever he wants to go — subject to our good counsel.'

It was on the left forearm, and the smell of the antiseptic was getting on my nerves.

'Are you sending pictures of me to the U.K. embassy for Xingyu to look at?'

'We faxed them out there as soon as you accepted the mission. Dr Xingyu's instructions will be that once he recognizes you at Hong Kong Airport he'll do exactly as you tell him. His life, he realizes, will be in your hands, because if they can't snatch him back they'll go for a kill.'

He poked his cheek again; that was getting on my nerves too, like the shark bite. Everything was getting on my nerves, and it was going to be like this until I reached the field. Part of it was because of the kill they'd already made, early this morning.

'Ambassador Qiao,' I said. 'What's the analysis?'

Hyde got up and went to a window, shoving his huge hands into his pockets. His voice bounced off the glass. 'It's too early for a complete analysis, of course. It's been impossible to ask any questions of his embassy here, even by phone. The diplomatic card is that Her Majesty's Government deeply regrets the affair, but the language was couched to make it perfectly clear that the assassination was none of our doing and they'd better not try to accuse us. It's fairly obvious that Qiao hadn't been able to hide what he called his disgust with his government, and when his brother surfaced as a resurgent last week they added things together and ordered a wet affair, before Qiao could try defecting. They were of course too late.'

'He could have been followed,' I said, 'to the tube station last night.'

'Despite the precautions, yes.' He half-turned his head. 'The Foreign Office set up that rendezvous, together with the Yard. We'd have done it differently.'

'All those police.' I got out of my chair, too, feeling restless.

'All those police, yes. But what could we do? The FO had called us in. It was their field.'

'Hou Jing,' I said. The little embassy counsellor with the briefcase. 'Where's he now?'

'In the country. He seems terribly cut up, but he's bang rather carefully questioned, of course.'

There was a black rectangular clock on the desk, with a disk you could turn through the international time zones. Here in London it was 7:14. 'Was Hou Jing's briefcase actually hit?' I asked Hyde.

'At an angle. It was in fact shot out of his hands.'

In a moment I said, 'I don't want to be blown before I'm even clear of London.'

Hyde moved his head, tilting it upward, his eyes remaining on my face. 'We shall make it our business,' he said, 'to ensure that nobody gets at Hou Jing. Until you complete your mission, he will remain under protective house arrest.'

I left it at that because most of it was paranoia and I didn't want it to show. I felt drawn to the clock again because time was running down, my time in London.

At 7:20 we sat down again and I told him how I was going to take over Dr Xingyu at the airport and put him in a safe house until we could get him out of Hong Kong. The safe house was for Pepperidge to set up when the time came. It took me twenty minutes and Hyde said he liked it and told me I'd get the people I wanted at the scene.

'You'll be flying to Bombay,' he said, 'via Cairo, where you won't leave the aircraft. We've made a rendezvous for you with a man named Sojourner.'

'He's Bureau?'

'No. He's been around the U.K. embassies for quite a few years and he's been a first secretary in Beijing for the past eighteen months. He's made contacts there, some of them underground — it's the way he likes to work. One of his contacts is the People's Liberation Army general who's pledged to support Dr Xingyu.' He didn't tell me the general's name. He wasn't telling me a lot of things; all he wanted me to have in my head when I went out there were the absolute essentials. The less I knew, the less anyone could get out of me if I ran into a trap and couldn't reach the capsule in tune.

'What is Sojourner's job?'

'He's the coordinator. He'll put everything together at ground zero, as you'll hear when you meet him. Let me say that he's extremely capable and we have every confidence in him.'

'What's his intelligence background?' I would have been happier if Sojourner had been Bureau, not an itinerant diplomat.

'He has no actual intelligence background, but in point of fact it was he who suggested this whole scenario to the late Ambassador Qiao, in essence, following clandestine approaches to the army general. You may trust Sojourner. You may trust him completely.'

There wasn't anything I could say. I had to trust all of them completely: the Head of Bureau, Chief of Signals, London Control, my director in the field, and whoever was manning the signals board if Bamboo began running hot.

7:46 on the black clock and I looked away. 'How many people have you got lined up to replace me if I go down?'

In a moment Hyde said heavily, 'I don't understand.'

"Oh, for God's sake.' Showing my nerves; too late to sake it back.

'I would certainly have told you,' Hyde said, 'earlier in your briefing, if I intended to put anyone else into the field. We-'

'Look, I'm just one man, and you're talking about winging down a government. It's-'

'You don't feel confident?'

'Of course I feel confident, but why not put ten people into the field, a protective cadre with Xingyu in the saddle?'

'As they did with Guzhenko?'

It stopped me dead in my tracks, as it was meant to do. Five years ago the Bureau had tried to bring Guzhenko 'cross to the West, an invaluable double agent with his head stuffed 'with ultrasensitive information, and it had to be done extremely fast because he'd been blown and our people had picked him up from the half-submerged wreck of a dredger on the Volga where he'd run for cover. Portland had been London Control for the mission and he'd sent out six men and a support group backing them up, and one of the six had been aught and took a capsule in time, and the next one had run out on the operation when the KGB had closed in, and two others were shot in a rearguard action, and the support group had scattered because Guzhenko was exposed and targeted and there was nothing they could do, nothing, and the trap was shut and Guzhenko was taken back to Moscow and thrown into a psychiatric ward and came out five weeks later with his head as empty as a coconut husk and half the files in our Moscow desk blown through the ceiling.

I said: 'Point taken.'

'Good. I run things differently.'

7:51.

'Yes. No more questions.'

Hyde came to the door with me. 'There's an enormous weight of responsibility,' he said, 'on all of us. The destiny of a billion people, if one were to put it vulgarly, is at stake. But don't let that discountenance you. This is a case of softlee, softlee, catchee monkee — in other words we play this very low-key.'

I saw Holmes for a minute and picked up my briefing and the prepacked suitcase on my way out of the building and the time on the round oak-framed clock in the hall showed 8:02, and that was the time they would note on the signals boards for Bamboo, after the date and the chalked entry: Executive dispatched.