Quiller Bamboo

Chapter 8: Mask

Koichi opened one end of the big plastic bag and lowered it over Xingyu Baibing's shoulders with his head sticking out of the hole.

'Please excuse! Not polite to put gentleman in garbage bag! You have had cast taken before?'

'No.'

Xingyu was sitting upright in a deck chair under one of the binnacle lamps. Koichi had tried talking to him in Chinese when he'd come aboard, but either he wasn't fluent or the good doctor wished us all in hell and wasn't ready to exchange any courtesies. I shall wear no mask, he'd told Pepperidge.

'You have sometimes claustrophobia?'

'No.'

'Good! Sit still, please.' He pulled a bald cap over Xingyu's head and drew the hairline across it with a felt pen and used the glue and began mixing the alginate in a bowl. I'd seen this done before at Norfolk as a demonstration, not by this man but by the master himself, Robert Schiffer.

I was now watching the operation again, and very carefully, because I might have to put this thing on Xingyu myself, when he flew into Beijing.

Pepperidge was on the telephone again, talking in Chinese, presumably booking our seats on the charter flights; he would leave before us on an earlier flight to set up the safe house and a base for himself in Lhasa. When Xingyu had been using the head before the Japanese had come aboard, Pepperidge had told me, 'I spoke to Bureau One personally, and we agreed that the subject would be psychologically more manageable in Tibet — closer to his wife and friends — than if we took him to London. The point was made that we should let him feel endangered, just as they are, with the KCCPC hunting him down. What do you think?"

'I think you're right. He won't feel quite so much that he's left his people in the lurch.' But it took some saying. I didn't, quite frankly, fancy Tibet.

'Exactly. I don't believe, actually, that we would have stood much chance of getting him on a plane for London. I think he would've slipped us and tried to get back to Beijing.'

'I didn't expect him to be so bloody tricky. Now we know how he feels about his wife I'm surprised he ever agreed to coming out here to Hong Kong in the first place.'

Pepperidge had touched my arm. 'It was the only way he could get out of the embassy, and he wanted to get out of there to be with his wife. Hong Kong was the only place the Chinese would agree to, for obvious reasons.' The only place outside China that was saturated with their security agents. 'We've got to consider the man he is, and make allowances. He's always been ready, to defy his government openly and in public, and here we are trying to smuggle him through a security tunnel and he doesn't like that, doesn't like subterfuge, anonymity.'

It had been an apology, in a way. Pepperidge and Bureau One had agreed to push me through the mission right under the nose of the KCCPC, and I hadn't got a choice: these were instructions.

'Still, please. Keep still!'

Xingyu Baibing had started jerking his head around, trying to say something. The alginate was covering the whole of his face now, and I suppose he was feeling stifled.

'You say you do not have claustrophobia! Now I do this for you, and you breathe better!' The timer went off and Koichi reached around to the table and reset it.

From what I've seen at Norfolk it's not much of a joke: the stuff has got to be pushed right into the corners of the eyes and under the lashes, it wouldn't have made Xingyu feel any better to know what the Japanese was actually doing: he was making a death mask.

'As soon as you possibly can.' Pepperidge was on the phone to someone else now, in English. 'I want to leave here in the morning, not later than oh eight hundred. My flight's at nine-oh-five.'

Visas. Passports and visas. There must have been a hitch somewhere, because the Bureau forgers in Hong Kong who serviced our Far East sector would have got their instructions direct from London days ago.

'I'll pick mine up on my way to the airport. You'll bring theirs when you bring the car.'

Don't worry, he'd told me, but he wasn't trusting the Volvo out there. There was almost no chance that anyone had seen us switch cars on our way here from the airport, but if there was a chance in a thousand he wasn't taking it.

'Are all the bags ready?'

One for Xingyu, one for me, the clothes secondhand and worn a little, Hong Kong labels on them, the luggage tags already fixed, the initials on the bags matching our cover names. The only thing Xingyu would take from here would be the insulin and the needles.

'At whatever time,' Pepperidge said and rang off.

'Must wait now,' Koichi told us, and his smile was a fraction weary. To do that job really well is exacting. 'Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.' When he left here he'd be working most of the night to produce a positive from the negative and have it ready by morning.

'What about a drink?' Pepperidge asked him.

'Not yet. When finished, then some sake!' He touched the alginate here and there, his fingers as sensitive as a blind man's. 'Will make you look older, you understand, maybe ten years older. Depressing! But then-' He picked at the mask, dropping a fleck of the stuff into the bowl. 'But then when you take off, young again! Very cheerful then!'

It was nearly midnight when he peeled off the negative and studied the inside, holding it to the light, turning it, nodding and frowning; then the big grin came again. 'It is good. Will be good mask, finally!'

Pepperidge switched off the cabin lamps for a moment and Koichi slipped through the door and vanished into the rain. Xingyu went into the galley and washed his face, snorting and making a lot of fuss. 'You are taking a great deal of trouble,' he said as he used a towel, 'to protect me from the security forces, and you say you are in favour of a democracy in my country. But what possible interest could the British have in the fate of China?'

'We're traders,' Pepperidge told him, 'and China's a huge country, with a lot of potential profit for the West.'

'I see. You have no actual sympathy for the Chinese people and their predicament.'

'But of course. I would happily go to Beijing and lead your people to freedom, but my government believes that you can do it rather more effectively.'

Koichi was back before seven in the morning and fitted the mask and brought out his mirror for Xingyu and I had a feeling of slipped focus, putting myself in the place of the Chinese and getting a sense of what was going through his mind, because that wasn't his face in the mirror, nothing like it, an older man's, unrecognizable. All I could see of Dr Xingyu Baibing were his eyes, and they were frightened. I suppose he'd already begun to feel a certain loss of identity since he'd run through the doors of the British embassy a week ago and asked for asylum, to be sequestered among aliens and cut off from his wife and his friends, and now he was on foreign soil and staring into a mirror at a face he'd never seen before. He wasn't, after all, an intelligence agent; he was an astrophysicist.

'It's good,' Pepperidge said. 'It's good, Koichi.'

'Yes. Am satisfied. Sake now.' Huge grin. 'No, is joke, I go home now.' To Xingyu: 'When you leave here?'

'Eight tomorrow,' Pepperidge said. 'Eight in the morning.'

'I will come here half past seven, to fit mask again.' He peeled it off, and I noticed Xingyu grab at the mirror again and stare into it, and the fright go out of his eyes. Koichi laid the mask gently into a white cardboard box and went to the door of the cabin. 'Go home now.' A formal bow to Xingyu — 'Thank you' — and one for us — 'Thank you' — and he was gone.

The rain had stopped, and through the doorway I could see white mist clouding across the water of the bay and the bristling masts of the marina, half lost in the haze, their pennants hanging limp. In the stillness of the morning a voice sounded, a long way off, and the slam of a hatch cover.

Pepperidge briefed us a little before eight o'clock. 'This is the way it goes. I shall take the nine-oh-five charter flight this morning to Chengdu and change planes there for Lhasa.' He was sitting at the table, with two manila envelopes in front of him. A courier had come to the boat in the night, leaving some papers with Pepperidge and three worn leather suitcases near the door. 'In Lhasa I shall go to the monastery you've indicated and tell them you're coming. I'll then go to my hotel. You will take the same flight the next day, keeping your distance from each other as strangers. If the flights are on schedule there's a twenty-five-minute stop in Chengdu and you'll change planes, but remember that flights are often overbooked, unavailable, or cancelled because of bad weather. The airport for Lhasa — Gonggar, ninety-five kilometres from the city — is notorious for strong winds, and the CAAC will only allow flights when conditions are perfect.'

He briefed us on customs, immigration, boarding requirements, and slid one envelope across the table to Xingyu and the other to me. 'Everything you need is there.' He was making less eye contact than usual this morning and was, I thought, a little reserved, distant, and it occurred to me that while I felt that he and Bureau One had agreed to push me through the mission under the nose of the KCCPC and had left me with no choice, it couldn't have been easy for them. If a wheel came off and we crashed, Pepperidge would have to answer to Shepley, and Shepley to the head of state, and just incidentally a nation of one billion people would have to go on living under the boot of a decadent clique until they were ready to risk more bloodshed in the streets.

'You should also know,' Pepperidge said, 'that the charter flights out of Hong Kong were of course fully booked, and we had to buy three cancellations, and if any of the airline computers get things mixed up, the passengers you're replacing are a Mr Brian Outhwaite and a Mr Yan Hanwu. Everything was done correctly, so you have to insist that those are indeed your seats.'

It's standard Bureau practice when a flight's booked solid: you send in a contact who picks the shabbiest-looking passenger in the waiting area and makes him an offer he's not liable to refuse for cancelling his flight and leaving a seat available.

'That's all,' Pepperidge said. 'Questions?'

'Any support?'

He looked at me briefly. 'None on the first flight, one at the airport in Chengdu. That's all' — a shrug — 'we'll need.'

Because if the Chinese secret police got on to us for any reason we'd just have to argue things out in the interrogation cell. Pepperidge could send in a dozen people in support and there wouldn't be anything they could do because the KCCPC wasn't just a private opposition unit in the field: it controlled the field, sharp-eyed and gun at the hip. We were going through the Bamboo Curtain, and the only reason for putting a man into Chengdu airport was to have him report to London if he saw us being hustled into a van.

'Signals?'

'Through Cheltenham,' his yellow eyes on me again, 'but all you'll have is a telephone booth. Have you made many calls in China?'

No signals line, then, no contacts, no couriers, nothing, just that one man in Chengdu with a watching brief. Xingyu Baibing was the most wanted man in China and that was where I was taking him and we couldn't risk anyone else getting near him because they'd know where he was, and if they were picked up and put under the light they could break and speak and we'd crash.

It was the way I'd always wanted to work: no support in the field, no contacts, no cutouts, no one who could get in my way, I'd argued the toss about it time and again with Loman, Croder, Shepley, trying to make them see that I could work best when I worked solo. This time I'd got what I wanted.

And felt lonely.

'I lock up?'

'Yes,' Pepperidge said. 'Drop the key into the letterbox on the jetty.'

'No more questions.'

He looked at Xingyu, who was sitting at the table with his head in his hands.

'Dr Xingyu?'

He looked up. 'What? No. I have no questions.'

Perhaps it was partly the diabetes that was making him so depressed. Did diabetes make people depressed? I didn't know, didn't think so. All I knew was that it was going to be a long day, and a long night.

Pepperidge looked at his watch and got up and let his eyes rest on me for a moment and then got the attache case with his name tag on it and opened the door of the cabin, going out and looking around him.

'Smells nice,' he said, 'after the rain. It's going to be a fine day.'

'She is very attractive.'

This was at noon. We'd got through four hours together, mostly in silence, with the tension in Xingyu filling the cabin.

'You have seen photographs of her?'

I said I had.

'She is very attractive, yes?'

'Very.'

'And she is quite a little younger than I am, as you know, if you have seen her photograph. I am a lucky man.'

I didn't say anything. He wanted to think aloud, not talk to anyone. But it was true: the press photographs I'd seen of his wife showed that she was very attractive, with a brilliant smile in some of the shots, and younger than Xingyu, but, from her description, as brave, marching with him in the streets, sharing the contempt hurled at him in the government controlled media nationwide, an intellectual, Xingyu Chen, a professor in economics.

'I wish to telephone Beijing.'

This was soon after three in the afternoon. He'd lapsed silent for hours, doing something with papers, foolscap sheets he'd found in a drawer of the small writing desk near the galley, filling them with Chinese script and mathematical hieroglyphs and formulae. But now he wished to telephone to Beijing.

I told him no.

'I must know how she is,' he said, and his eyes behind his heavy horn-rimmed glasses were hard, obstinate. 'I must know that she is not being victimized. Victimized because of me. Because of me.'

Told him he couldn't telephone. He knew that already; Pepperidge had told him enough times. Perhaps he thought I'd be softer to work on, couldn't read faces very well.

'I wish to telephone a friend, a very close friend, the dean of my department at the university. He will know what is happening to my wife. They will not trace the call, you must realize that.'

Water slapped the beam of the boat as another vessel left the quay, spreading a wake. Light dappled the bulkhead from the ports on the other side, from the sunlit sea.

'No,' I said, 'they wouldn't trace the call, but your friend would be excited to hear from you, and would be very quick to tell your other friends, and when one of the plainclothes Armed People's Police on the campus picked it up, your friends would be arrested. Is that what you want?'

It took another hour to get him to see what his situation was really like, to think more like an intelligence agent than a philosopher, more like the most wanted man in China, to understand that just by picking up the telephone over there he could send his best friends into the interrogation rooms in Bambu Qiao prison.

Perhaps he managed to get a different perspective on himself, I don't know; I hoped so, because he could let us take him through this mission as an exercise in clandestine intelligence work or he could drag us through the labyrinth with death and destruction grinning from the dark at every turn.

'Have you a wife?'

Back to that, to his pretty Chen.

'No.'

'If you had a wife — ' He reached for his worn black wallet and began opening it, then shut it again and put it away, remembering there was no photograph of her there anymore, because Pepperidge had cleared out the whole contents and sent them to London through our courier line for safekeeping. 'If you had a wife like mine, you would know what I mean.'

Said I was sure I would.

The next thing he wanted was a newspaper, and I was surprised he hadn't asked for one before; perhaps in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boat he was forgetting the facilities of the outside world. I didn't refuse him this time: Pepperidge had briefed me privately that within the stifling confines of the mission I was to allow Xingyu as much freedom and as much information as I could, to build his trust in me and keep him from going crazy.

I used the phone and told the contact what I wanted and fifteen minutes later a car stopped and there were footsteps and a knock on the cabin door, three long, two short, three long, and I opened it and took the copy of the South China Morning Post and gave it to Xingyu. He went through the first two pages and passed them to me, not saying anything, just prodding a finger at a half-column report on the second page.

XINGYU BAIBING SENT INTO EXILE. As the result of an agreement reached between the People's Republic of China and Great Britain, Dr Xingyu Baibing, formerly Professor of Astrophysics at Beijing University and a notorious agitator, has been released from the British embassy here, where he fled to evade arrest after fomenting dissension among his colleagues in the faculty. This concession on the part of the People's Republic was granted in order to preserve the positive relationship between the two nations.

Should Dr Xingyu choose to return to Beijing of his own free will, his present status as an exile in disgrace would be reviewed, a source close to Premier Li Peng has revealed, but he would face a rigorous inquiry as to his actions before fleeing to the British embassy. Certain other intellectuals, several of them friends of the exiled scientist, have-been placed under arrest and will be invited to explain their part in the unrest of the past two weeks and to volunteer information on the role played particularly by Dr Xingyu Baibing, so that the truth may be brought to light in the interests of the people.

The rest of the report was a summary of Xingyu's repeated attempts to interrupt the steady progress of socialism in the People's Republic, and ended with praise for Premier Li Peng's magnanimous gesture to Great Britain in relieving her of the embarrassment that inevitably followed her misguided decision to offer sanctuary to a notorious troublemaker whose continuing presence in her embassy could only have exacerbated her predicament.

Photograph of Xingyu, carefully chosen from hundreds of others, that had caught him with an expression on his face that could be seen as fearful, hunted.

I'd asked for the English-language Morning Post because it would give Xingyu an indication of Beijing's attitude toward him and his present position. The Hong Kong Times would have slanted the report in sympathy with Xingyu and would have used a different picture. What worried me was that the Post hadn't mentioned Xingyu's wife, hadn't reported her feelings about losing her husband to the West, a traitor to his people, so forth. I would have expected it to do that, to turn the screw.

Lying in my bunk, hours later, my eyes open and watching the play of light on the overhead from boats moving in the bay, I went on worrying about it, about the obviously deliberate omission of any reference to Xingyu's wife, certain that it was designed to set him up in some way, designed as a trap, went on worrying instead of sleeping, as the boat moved gently to the waves coming in from the bay and the lights played on the varnished timbers and the sound came of Xingyu's quiet sobbing in the dark.