Quiller's Run

14 Countdown

I phoned Pepperidge but he wasn't there. Just the answering-machine. I left a message. I'm in a red sector. Phone me.

This was at 10:03.

The first thing you do when you find a trap closing on you is to note the time because later it can save your life.

At 10:03 there were five of them outside the hotel and I checked them again, using shutters, the mirror in the bathroom of the vacant room at the end of the third-floor corridor, and the angle of vision across the courtyard at the rear between the edge of the roof and the vent-pipe from the kitchen, leaving myself only enough of a gap to sight without exposing more than the width of one eye. It took more than an hour.

11:14.

I wished Pepperidge would telephone.

That'll be my number. I'll put in an answering-machine, all right? You can always leave a signal on it if I'm out sweeping for data in the pubs.

He wouldn't be in a pub at three in the morning.

Then where was he?

Not quite the service you're used to. Sorry.

There was a chance of getting clear of the trap if I could talk to Pepperidge and set up a last-ditch thing before nightfall, but in any case I'd have to assume that Kishnar would get here before I could use it.

They'd send for him, of course.

Sayako had said he'd be leaving Bangkok the day after tomorrow, taking his time, making his plans while Shoda's people here in the city did a square search for me in the streets until they found me and cornered me and had me waiting for him. They'd had some luck and they'd done that and I was set up for the kill and they'd send for him now -had sent for him – and he wouldn't waste any time. Shoda would put him in one of her private jets and it was only a three-hour flight.

At noon I telephoned Thongswasdi, the Thai inspector of police Katie had talked to. Pepperidge had checked out their Intelligence ranks for me and hadn't found anyone doubtful, but that didn't mean there wasn't a Shoda agent in their embassy here. If I asked them for information on Manif Kishnar it could warn him that I knew he was coming and I didn't want that.

'How can I help you?"

Thongswasdi.

'You were talking to Miss McCorkadale recently about Manif Kishnar.'

'That is so.'

The smells came in from the street as a man went through the swing-doors into the morning sunshine where I couldn't go, where I might, by nightfall, be carried.

'Can you describe him for me?'

It wasn't useful: a characteristic Hindu, 5 foot 9, 10 stone, black hair, brown eyes, no scars, no other distinguishing features.

'What are his methods?'

'Excuse me?'

The line wasn't very clear.

'How does he kill?'

'With the garrotte, exclusively.'

Thuggee.

'Does he use assistants?'

'No. He has always worked alone. He is a man of great pride in his efficiency.'

'Does he prefer daylight or darkness?'

'He kills only by night. That is understandable, since he must approach from behind the victim. It was Kishnar who dealt with one of the agents mobilised by Thai Intelligence against Mariko Shoda.'

Two men came in from the street and I watched them through the archway.

'Is there anything else you can think of, Inspector, that might help me?'

There was a short silence. 'Miss McCorkadale mentioned that you might at some time find yourself in danger from this man. Is that correct?'

'Yes.'

'I could send you a copy of his dossier, if you like.'

'That's not necessary. I think you've given me all I need.'

They were at the desk now, talking to Lily Ling; I caught snatches of Italian. Neither of them had been part of the surveillance team I'd seen outside.

'If you would like my advice,' Thongswasdi said, 'you should take the utmost care to avoid Manif Kishnar.'

'I'll do that.'

I thanked him and rang off and went out to the lobby and listened for a minute or two while the Italians were booked in, representatives of a minor shoe company in Naples. Then I went upstairs and made routine sightings again.

One of them was a woman who'd worked with the team that had got onto me when I'd been on my way to see Johnny Chen; I recognised her because it had taken me two hours to get clear of them. Another was the young Chinese standing near the salted fish stall fifty yards from the hotel entrance, lifting on his toes all the time, flexing his ankles; he'd been in the previous team and had the walk of a karateka. At the back of the hotel there were two more men and a woman, one of them on the balcony of a shop-house backing on to the river, two of them in the street and keeping on the move the whole time, blending into the crowd on the narrow pavement as far as the intersections and then coming past again, not looking upwards because my room was on the other side, looking only at the gate of the little courtyard and along the low whitewashed wall.

13:15.

No call from Pepperidge. At intervals I centred on the area at the top of the stairs where Al or Lily Ling would pass if they wanted me to go down to the telephone. Then as the long afternoon began I went through the whole building as I'd done as soon as I'd got here, but now more critically.

He would come for me barefoot. The nerves and muscles in the sole of the foot are infinitely sensitive, controlling and balancing and refining all the movements made by the upper body as well as the legs and hips. To put shoes on is to deaden the information received by the naked foot from the terrain, so that all the body has to work on is the crude fact that it's more or less upright, the inner ear alone controlling the balance. Shoes also create noise, and he would need to come for me in total silence.

If he came into the hotel he would look for me in my room first, and I ignored it, because I wouldn't be there. I concentrated on the only areas where he could come at me from behind: the corridors, the landings and the stairs. I started from the roof and worked downwards, noting whatever looked useful. The roof was dangerous for three reasons: access was difficult, with small skylights and only one trap door. I used the trap door because the skylights were jammed with paint and I might break the glass. On the roof itself there was almost no cover and even at night I'd show a partial silhouette against the city-lit haze. Thirdly the drops were mostly sheer, except where the rusted fire-escape ran down on the north side; but I noted that a jump could be made from the roof to the first landing of the fire-escape seven or eight feet below, providing the tiles at the edge of the roof didn't break or shift and send me wide of the landing and into the courtyard five storeys down – a killing drop.

At intervals I had to stop work and wait until one of the guests or a whole party of them had left the corridors and gone into a room or down the stairs. I saw Lily Ling twice and she didn't say there'd been a call for me.

14:10.

I would have liked, I would have liked very much, to hear the voice of Pepperidge this afternoon. He was a burnt out spook with no network behind him but in the last couple of conversations with him over the phone I'd begun sensing a calmness in the man that had come from experience in the field. He knew more than most what I was up against, how lonely I was out here, how afraid. He understood my paranoia, almost as well as Ferris had when he was running me. And Pepperidge had pride: I don't sleep when there's work to do, you know. I've been in signals with the Thais most of the night.

But I didn't just want to hear his voice on the telephone. I wanted to set up the last-chance thing in case nothing else would work.

The hours were going by, and the stress of a trapped animals mounts progressively. The work I was doing now was essential, vital, and could save my life, but it was an intellectual exercise, and in the brain stem there was a primitive creature shaking the bars of its cage.

If I went out of the hotel I'd still be in a trap: they'd move with me through the streets and wherever I went they would go, and this time they wouldn't let me get clear, because Kishnar was coming and their orders were to hold me ready for him.

I was beginning to know Shoda. You know how to do this thing, by knowledge of woman. Sayako. I knew there were enough of them out there to make a concerted kill by sheer weight of numbers, but they'd tried it before, five of them in the limousine, and this time Shoda had known that the only way to make certain was to send Kishnar. To let these minions attempt a kill would be like asking the peons in the plaza de tons to go for the bull instead of leaving it for the matador.

She had style, Shoda. This time she wanted the act accomplished with certainty, discretion and grace. She would be praying for me, I knew, at some time in the hours of this night.

14:25.

Most of the vacant rooms were on the fifth floor because there wasn't a lift and the stairs were steep; they were also ancient, and creaked. That would be the terrain of my main defence: the staircase. It would send me immediate and accurate signals if anyone set foot in it, even bare. Kishnar would know that. He was a professional. He would look at this building and know by its age and construction that the stairs would creak. He would therefore try to bring me out to the street, and lead me to dark places. I didn't know how he would do this, but with the passing of these uneasy hours I might come to know, or catch a gleam of intuition. My mind was already engaged with his, as the distance closed between us.

At three o'clock I went downstairs and asked the kitchen boy to bring me some food in the bar, a two-egg omelette and wholewheat toast; fat, protein and carbohydrate. I sat with the long window at my right side, the window overlooking the street, where they could see me and be reassured that I knew nothing, felt myself to be in no danger.

'We're here for the gee-gees.' A sly laugh.

Al was booking them in, wouldn't know what gee-gees were, unless he was versed in the vernacular of the suburban Londoner.

'It's always too bloody wet at Epsom.' Rueful chuckle.

Have a nice stay, Al told them, not knowing what Epsom was, or where, it's good to have you folks at the Red Orchid, so forth, while this compatriot of theirs, this undistinguished spook, sat eating his eggs and toast and tried to keep his mind off the fact that there was a narrow-angled vector running from this window to the roof on the other side of the street, from this head to the muzzle of a .22 single-shot rim-fire Remington 40XB with Redfield Olympic sights, one quick squeeze and the glass of the window flying inwards and the little grey cylinder meeting the skin and then the bone and then the brain and nuzzling into the consciousness at two thousand revolutions a second and blowing the world away, morbid, yes, just a touch melodramatic but the fact remained, the fact remained, damn you, dial a calculated risk is still a risk and this was going to be a long day and it wasn't over yet.

'Hell's Epsom?'

'What?'

Al looking down at me, a toothpick in his mouth, his lazy, cynical smile covering his habitual apprehension.

'Oh. A race-track near London.'

Just a thought, that was all. They wouldn't use a gun.

'And the gee-jaws?'

'Al, you slay me.' Now what a turn of phrase. 'Gee-gees, horses, don't ask me why.'

'I get it. Penang. People think we speak the same language, you know that? They okay?' Looking at the eggs.

'Excellent.' Penang was the race-track just across the border.

'You want anything, you name it.'

He went away on his small, careful feet, his shoulders a little hunched against the rains of Providence. There's nothing, my good friend, that I want, though it's kind of you to ask, unless perhaps you can by some ethereal magic erase the beginning of this day and run reality through once more and render the street out there innocent of the death-bringers, so that I might stroll through the doors and wander among the stalls and the handcarts and the colourful canvas awnings and pick perhaps at a ripe guava, paying too much for it and loving the merchant for his greed, which would equal mine, though mine would be the greed for life itself.

Someone shouted and the skin crawled suddenly, tightening across the skull, a man protesting that a cyclo had nearly knocked him down. I'll have to do better than this, my masters, better than this if I'm going to outdo Manif Kishnar when he comes for me.

'You want coffee?'

Said no, because I couldn't judge the timing yet, didn't know precisely when I would need the stimulus of the caffeine before its effects died away and left a treacherous dip in the energy-wave.

'No time in the day when breakfast doesn't go down just right, what? You from the Old Country?"

Red face, clipped white moustache, club tie, a jolly laugh.

'Excusez-moi, m'sieur, mais je ne park pas l'anglais.'

'Ah. Sorry, my mistake. Er – par-dong.' Hurried away, waving.

Think nothing of it, old boy, and good luck with the gee-gees, I'd try a little flutter on Kinross Lad in the fifth race, I think Ismail's riding and it'll be soft going after the rain.

15:34 and Pepperidge hadn't phoned so I went upstairs and got on with the good work and put him out of my mind because I didn't know what time it would be when it would become, across the span of a single second, too late for him to phone, too late for me to set up the last-chance thing.

I took sightings again and saw that two of them had gone, to be replaced by a slight woman in a track-suit with International Fitness Clubs printed across the front and a male European, Teutonic, very cool, adept at the sweeping glance that took in everything.

Still only five. They thought that was enough, and of course it was, because there'd be a dozen more in the background waiting to move in and man the mobile trap if I tried to leave the hotel.

This time you mill please ensure that he does not survive.

Shoda.

I mean, it's feasible, plausible, that a woman like that, vicious and powerful and so on, could easily have been that kind of child – resourceful and adaptable and savage. Wouldn't you think?

There was nothing in my room or any of the vacant rooms that would make any kind of weapon better than my hands, but what made me nervous was the idea of looking for weapons at all: I couldn't remember doing it before, even when things were touching the brink of extinction. My hands were lethal and I knew that.

It was the first hint that my nerve had started to go.

It wasn't the waiting. I'd waited before, in Moscow and Bangkok and Tangier, waited for hours, for days, and kept the nerves intact, operational. It was Shoda. She kept coming into my thoughts, the memory of her face with its high cheekbones and its wide, luminous eyes, the clear brown under the night-black hair, the face of the angel of death.

Someone asked her how she could have possibly managed to survive seven months in the jungle at that age, and she said it was easy, once you became an animal.

Voodoo is real. It exerts its influence all over the world, not just in places like Tahiti. It is the stage, insidiously reached, where fear becomes belief.

What the hell is that bastard Pepperidge doing?

Where fear begins to ask questions like that, questions that shoot into the mind through the defences you thought were impregnable.

Why hadn't he phoned?

Like bullets coming into the brain, already there before you even hear the shot.

Because if he didn't phone before nightfall I knew there wasn't a chance left for me – I knew now.

She watched the monkeys, and ate only the berries and things they ate, so as not to get poisoned. She killed a tiger.

Shoda.

Her name was voodoo.

So, all right, the nerve was going and something would have to be done about it and I set up a whole tactical scenario from one end of the building to the other and from top to bottom, creating a dozen situations where he could come for me, Kishnar, and I could get clear and survive or engage with him and kill him and survive, but it was an intellectual exercise to keep panic away because I knew what the deadline was now, the deadline for Pepperidge to call before it was too late for me to set up the last-chance thing: it was the time, the hour, the minute, when Manif Kishnar landed in Singapore.

Unless, of course, for some reason unknown to me he hadn't been sent for yet. That had been an assumption on my part and assumptions are always dangerous and sometimes lethal. He could still be taking his time, leaving Bangkok the day after tomorrow, not hurrying, confident, perfectly confident, knowing I was in a trap and held ready for him.

That would mean I'd have two more nights and a day to work something out and surely to God I wouldn't need more than thirty-six hours to set something up that could get me away from this bloody place with its doors and passages and windows and stairs and skylights and blind spots and escape routes spinning around in my mind with the nerves rubbing raw while I soaked in my sweat and listened, listened the whole time for the sound of the phone down there.

'Mr Jordan?'

Lily Ling.

I went to the staircase.

'I'm here.'

'Telephone, please.'

'Thank you.'

16:21.

Pepperidge. I went down the stairs, the nerves going slack like the cut string of a cello, the legs without any strength in them, where the hell had he been all this time?

I picked up the phone and said hello.

'Mr Jordan?'

'Yes.'

'This is Sayako. Kishnar has just left Bangkok.'

Three hours' flight.

Countdown.