Quiller's Run

20 The Rat

This time it was a woman's voice on the tape. Colonel Cho was watching me intently. 'Do you know who is speaking?'

'No.'

'It is the voice of Shoda.'

The sibilants were silky and drawn out, emphasising certain words, but the tone of her voice was harsher than I'd imagined, carrying a deep energy, filling the small studio, commanding, authoritative.

There was a break in transmission, and Cho stopped the recorder.

'Do you understand Cambodian, Mr Jordan?'

'No. What was she saying?'

'She was ordering one of her army chiefs to hold back the mobilisation of his forces until the shipment arrives. She also told him that it was essential for him to remain in close liaison with her other forces, to avoid a precipitate action.'

They were right – Pepperidge, Katie. This was a major breathrough. My target for the mission was Mariko Shoda and in the temple in Thailand I'd been close to her physically for the first time and now I was listening to her voice – as it issued orders to one of her army commanders.

There was massive data coming in for questioning and analysis and I'd have to take it in stages.

One: Johnny Chen's place was bugged.

But I'd have to get the answers from Cho with infinite care because he'd come close to killing me five minutes ago when he'd opened the door and found me outside. God knew how , he'd sensed me there, but he lived in the wild and was junglesensitive. He hadn't been startled, and his head had turned slowly to sight me, and in his one eye there was the light of rage. His body was also moving, subtly, his breath drawing deeply from his abdomen as he gathered force, his right shoulder lifting by degrees as he brought the arm back, preparing the vector that would bring the edge of his sword-hand slicing against the carotid artery in my neck. I'd initiated this blow often enough to recognise its preparation.

He was ready now and when I spoke I think it was within a half-second of my death.

'Sempai, Funakoshi watches you.'

I waited.

I'd run through the whole gamut of options open to me and none of them would have worked: I knew that. But I'd remembered something that had got through to him when he'd seen me here for the first time and was ready to attack me for my flagrant intrusion: I'd addressed him punctiliously as my sempai, my respected superior in the sacred tradition of Shotokan, and it had given him pause.

I went on waiting. Movement in him had ceased and his mind alone was active, its dark side, ravaged and traumatised and vengeful, willing his body to destroy this creature, this threat to his sacrosanct privacy, while the light of reason flickered also within him, a candle's flame beset by the wind. Then it was over, and his head turned to face me.

'Come in. I want you to see my communications centre.'

The tension went out of me and as the left brain began functioning again I noted that whenever this man's mind returned to reason, he had no memory of his lapse into psychosis.

The room was small but walled on three sides with dials, signal-strength meters, switches, charts and time-schedules. It must have been the original receiving-transmitting studio, and it had escaped the worst of the bombing. Cho went to the ripped vinyl chair on the dais in front of the main panel and began running the tapes, ignoring me as the signals came through again. There were cassettes everywhere, stacked on the shelves and along the console, with boxes of blanks bearing the Sanyo shipping label.

Then the voice of Shoda came again, its sibilants lingering, the consonants frank and articulated.

Cho turned his head. 'That was monitored some days ago. She was giving instructions for the British agent named Jordan to be brought to his death.'

'Really.'

'You are a fortunate man.'

He went back to his editing, and when signals came in English, French or Russian I listened to them: when they were in a language unknown to me I worked on the data that was still coming in.

Two: Chen's place was bugged. By whom?

Not by Cho. I'd noticed that whenever an English signal came through he stopped it short, even though one of the dialogues had been on a high level politically, mentioning the British prime minister.

Chen's place could have been bugged by one of his competitors in the drug trade but I doubted it: he wasn't big-rime, running a whole network. Leave it for now.

Three: Who had bugged Shoda's communications?

Sayako?

'Sayako-san,' I'd asked her over the telephone at the Red Orchid, 'are you in Shoda's organisation?'

'I have access to information.'

Sayako, then; yes, it was logical. This could have been the signal she'd picked up just before she'd warned me – the one I'd just heard, 'giving instructions for the British agent named Jordan to be brought to his death'.

Another signal was coming through in English, and I listened to it before Cho cut it short. It was from the flight deck of a North-West Orient jet, the accent Japanese.

Not a bug.

I began listening the whole time now as Cho made notes and fast-forwarded some of the signals, running others back to monitor again. I'd have said at this stage that he was searching for specified transmissions and I could have been right, but I was beginning to realise that there was no order in this material, no sequence. He was picking up bugs in four languages but among a whole range of random signals, a lot of them aircraft, some of them hams, two of them radio-taxis in Singapore. What worried me was that he didn't edit out the garbage.

He should be doing that.

And wasn't.

He looked up suddenly, fixing me with his eye. 'He is always late, that one.'

Taxi-driver.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

'Late?' I asked him.

'Yes. They will fire him soon, you mark my words.'

He turned back to the console and listened to a signal in French, Chinese accent, aircraft to base, while I tried to think how to get out of him what I had to get, because he was just listening at random, picking up whatever signals he could find as he turned the dials – and he was just as interested in what some bloody taxi-driver was talking about in Singapore as he was in what Shoda was giving him.

Check that.

'Where is the bug, Colonel, on Mariko Shoda?'

He flinched at the name and I expected him to react as he had before, but it was all right this time: we could talk about her now. 'I am not sure. I think in one of her limousines, or perhaps an aircraft. The wavelength tells me nothing.' There was some speech in what sounded like Laotian in the background and in a moment he said without changing his tone, 'This man is drug-running, but he is an amateur. It is a bug placed by the narcotics branch. It will be amusing, won't it, when they catch him? The spider and the fly?'

No. Not in the least amusing. This poor bastard's mind was like the console here, filled with random signals dial had no pattern. When that sabre had swung down and cleft his face it had turned his brain into a mental kaleidoscope.

All I could do was put questions.

'Have you any idea, Colonel, who placed the bug in Shoda's communications system?'

'No.' But I didn't think he'd heard that, or understood.

'Do you think it could have been a woman named Sayako?'

His hand stopped moving the dial and his body became totally still.

He didn't turn his head, didn't look at me, just sat there. I didn't know what I'd started in him; I was ready for anything. No movement in him for what seemed minutes, then his head lowered and something fell onto the chipped, grimed shelf of the console, glinting in the light. It was something so extraordinary to issue from such a man that I felt the strangeness of compassion, the stirring of a mood in me that I believed was long ago buried within the shell of indifference demanded by the life I'd chosen. And so we sat there in the cramped, cluttered room in the Laotian jungle, a foreign agent and a former chief of intelligence, while on the console the human tear made a dark patch that had already begun drying.

Colonel Cho turned his head at last and looked across at me, his riven cheek glistening.

'No,' he whispered, 'it was not Sayako.'

At first light I woke with a jerk of the nerves but there was no threat that I could see. It was simply that I'd slept with me subconscious awareness that my host might at any time go pitching over the edge of his fragile sanity and come for me.

In the hours of the morning he spent his time hacking at the creeper and writing in his journal, and towards noon he went into the radio room and talked into one of the microphones at the transmitter console, speaking sometimes in his own tongue, Laotian, and sometimes in one of the Chinese dialects. I stayed near the open door, and once went in, to ask him if I could take a message with me when I left here.

It was the first time I'd mentioned it, and I watched him carefully. He'd been lucid for the past hour, except for that fact that the mike he was using was dead: none of the transmission dials were registering.

'When you leave here?'

'Yes. I need to go on with my work.'

He sat looking in front of him, not up at me. 'Your work?'

'My plans to destroy Shoda.'

He turned now and faced me, his eye rational. 'So.'

I couldn't tell if he'd remembered what I'd said when I'd first come here, or whether it was something new to consider. I thought I'd follow up, with the big question.

'If you agree to let me have the wavelength of the Shoda bug, I can use it very effectively, Colonel.'

He gazed at me for a time and then looked away. 'We shall see. We shall talk of that.'

So I had to wait, and in the afternoon he took off his kimono and put on his gi, moving to face the portrait of Funakoshi and giving the ret, the punctilious bow with the head lowered and the eyes down, expressing trust in an opponent.

He then worked out for an hour and went through Kanku and Jion, allowing me the privilege of watching. For a time there was no sound but the movement of his feet through the stances, and his deep, guttural kiai. The powdered earth, churned by the kicks and turns, floated above the surface of the floor. Again I noted his great speed and strength. It didn't reassure me.

Later he motioned me to sit with him on the rugs in the corner. His eye was calm, but his head turned a little sometimes, and I sat facing him with a kind of prayer running through my head. It was the first time in any mission I'd had to deal with a deranged mind, and in a man capable of overwhelming me with his bare hands.

'You wish to leave,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Why should I trust you?'

'With what?'

He moved a hand. 'With my presence here. I have enemies who would like to find me.'

'I understand that. But you can trust me because I am your cohei, Sempai.'

His subordinate in Shotokan.

'Is that sufficient?'

'Funakoshi would think so.'

His eye flicked to the portrait on the wall.

'Even so, you would be carrying my life in your hands, if I let you leave here.'

'I understand that too. It would be an honour, Sempai, that I would respect even at the cost of my own.'

It would have sounded less formal in English but the meaning was there. What had happened, after all? I'd come here by stealth, a stranger, killed one of his dogs and entered the privacy of his dwelling uninvited; yet he'd offered me food, which is basically an offer of life itself. He had also forgiven me for looking upon his maimed, grotesque countenance that he'd hoped to keep hidden from the world for the rest of his life. That was the least I owed him: his life.

'You are persuasive,' he said.

'It's not my intention. I hope simply to reassure.'

His head began moving and I held my breath and centred. He'd been slipping into the psychotic phase less often than yesterday, perhaps because he'd learned to trust me a little; but he was now having to make up his mind to trust me totally, and his brain was in overload. I sat perfectly still and faced him, as I'd learned to do, faced his one eye as it sighted from the edge of his riven cheekbone. I still found the effect chilling, transfixing; he was so certain that he was now in hiding and watching me from behind cover that there was a degree of transference: I half-believed that this wasn't his body, but some object that concealed him.

A rat squeaked in the silence, even this slight sound bringing shock. Cho hadn't heard it, deep in his meditation; his eye didn't change expression, which was one of fierce enquiry; I could have imagined a ray of light playing on my face, searching it.

I wanted to move but couldn't, daren't.

Wait.

All I could do.

Wait.

And then I heard his breath come, releasing. The turning of his head was so. gradual that for a moment I didn't catch it After a while he was facing me again, his eye calm.

•Very well, Cohei.'

I left the next morning.

Cho gave me the wavelength of the Shoda bug, but none of the tapes. They were 'his voices', as he put it, though I wasn't quite sure what he meant, unless they peopled his self-made prison. If he'd been normal it would have been easier for me: he would have given me the Shoda tapes for editing and analysis in Singapore; they offered the kind of information that an intelligence agent would give his soul for. But there was nothing I could do about it. They were his, and I couldn't steal them or force them out of him; they were his 'voices' and his obsession, and he couldn't see the logic of letting me have them to use as a weapon for Shoda's destruction.

But the wavelength alone was a breakthrough and I'd have to settle for that.

I asked him about the reference to the arrival of a 'consignment' on the Shoda tapes, but he said he didn't know what she meant. I asked him if she'd mentioned a missile, but drew blank again. I didn't want to press it, because he'd agreed to let me leave and I wasn't keen to have him change his mind.

He took me to the door that I'd never yet seen open. Outside were the dogs.

'Don't move,' he told me.

Six of the bastards. The seventh was lying at the edge of the jungle, a skeleton; they'd found it and dragged it here and picked it clean. This was their stamping-ground, the jungle floor beaten down and littered; they'd brought other carcasses here, half of them rotting.

When they saw me they went into the attack posture at once, ears flattening and the neck-muscle rising, the dry, mangy fur bristling. They had teeth like bright knives.

Colonel Cho was talking to them in a Chinese dialect: he'd had them brought here from the village, probably. But I didn't know whether he could control them or only believed he could; he lived half his life in fantasy, and this could be part of it. He was less predictable in a way than a raving lunatic; you couldn't tell reality from the dream, the nightmare.

'Ta shih shou jen! Pieh yao t'a!

Telling them I was a friend, presumably. Yes – he was putting his arm round my shoulders to show them, and I had an instant's mad idea that in this pose we should be asked to smile.

The bastards didn't look too impressed. They backed off a little but moved in restless circles, their heads hung low and their eyes up to watch me, a concerted snarling deep in their throats, didn't care for it; I tell you, I did not fucking well care for it, in a pack this size they were sudden death and the only man in control was stark raving mad, sweat running on me, only two options left, go back and stay with him until he had a brainstorm and did me in or walk out there through the dogs and let them do it.

'They will not attack you,' Cho said, and took his arm away.

Didn't ask him if he were sure, too much bloody pride.

'Thank you, Sempai.' Took six paces, turned, gave him the ret and turned again, not looking at the dogs because that's the first rule – if you look into their eyes they'll take it as a challenge and that's all the excuse they want, kept on walking, looking straight ahead and listening to the snarls they were making, getting louder because they'd stopped circling and started to follow, closing on my heels, look straight ahead, it's a pretty view, everything green and moist with a blue haze above the trees, something to remember but not for long if they get their bloody way, it'd be like sharks in a feeding frenzy, the first taste of blood sends them crazy, and what was he doing, Cho, turning his head like that, perhaps, turning it very slowly, sighting me from behind himself, deciding once and for all that I was going to give him away the minute I reached civilisation Ta shih shou jen! Pieh yao t'a!'

Jesus Christ what's he telling them now but it's too late anyway because I'm past the point of no return and in the end it's going to depend on karma, kismet, whatever the hell you want to call it, running with sweat, the bastards are coming after me, I can hear them, keep on walking and don't look back, look straight ahead, it's such a pretty view.