Quiller's Run

32 Kiss

It was very quiet now. The tower had instructed the captain of the 727 to shut down his engines, and he had done that. Since then, the aircraft standing in line along the taxiing path had received the same order, and they too were silent now.

I heard the cry of sea birds beyond the airport, in the waters of the Straits. It was humid; the air clung to the skin, heavy with the reek of kerosene. I stood looking up at the windows of the flight deck. One of them slid open and a face appeared there. A voice came, something in Chinese, I didn't know what. Beyond the smooth shape of the plane the lights of the city stood against the sky, and I could see traffic moving along Changi road, some of the vehicles flashing red and blue; I heard sirens.

The generators of the 727 kept a low singing; its lights, too, went on flashing at the spine of the fuselage and at the tail section. I could smell the rubber of the tyres, heated by the brakes when the emergency stop had been ordered.

I felt rather lonely.

Waited.

Flash, flash, flash. I looked away, didn't want to become mesmerised. The generators sang quietly. Sweat on my face, partly the humidity, partly the organism producing heat as it stabilised its systems at the level of optimum alertness.

Waited.

The cries of the gulls were mournful, a plaint from the souls of dead sailors.

Then a door opened – a sudden heavy metallic sound and it swung open, the cabin door. Someone standing there, army officer, revolver trained on me.

He called something in Thai. I didn't understand, but it could only have been, what do you want.

'I want to talk to Mariko Shoda.'

Fly on my face; I brushed it away; I can't stand these hot wet climates, you might just as well be in a sauna bath.

The gun hadn't moved. In good English, 'Who are you?'

'Martin Jordan.'

He spoke across his shoulder; I could see the blur of a face behind him. He never took his eyes off the target. Bloody things, all they do is make a loud bang, I hate bangs.

She would bring a knife, if she came.

They'd all bring knives, her clutch of athletic young hags. This was one of the assumptions, you understand. The whole operation was designed like a pin-table, a carefully-plotted pattern of assumptions, and if each one rang a bell I'd score the maximum, which would be the destruction of Mariko Shoda. I didn't know what the chances were of my losing -the percentages, as I'd told Croder, of life and death – but I knew that of the series of assumptions I'd worked out, each one would have to be right, would have to ring a bell. And this was the first of them: that she would decide to come and talk to me.

I wasn't guessing, you needn't think that. I was relying on the detailed information I'd been given on her character and what I believed to be her present frame of mind. She had set her feline assassins on me in the limousine and I'd confronted her in the temple and she'd tried to have me killed when she'd heard I was in the village in the jungle and she'd thrown Kishnar onto me twice and been sent his body in a coffin and if she could find one single chance in a thousand of finally killing me she'd want to do it herself, fierce in her pride, hot in her craving for vengeance, triumphant in the savage, decisive termination of our fateful relationship.

I'd come here to give her that chance.

There was movement in the cabin doorway. Another officer in khaki uniform stood looking down at me for a moment; then they both moved back. They'd be the two military officers Loman had seen earlier from the car. She'd got her own little army, Chen had said.

Another bumping noise and the steps appeared in the doorway, sliding and angling down, the rail rising on the stays until the bottom of the steps reached the tarmac and the movement stopped. Then one of the officers came down, came down steadily, uniform immaculate, short tropical sleeves, polished belt, the shirt open at the neck, a knife sheathed at the hip on the side opposite from the revolver, a short figure, even slight.

Shoda.

She stood for a moment on the bottom step, watching me, her eyes shadowed by her peaked cap. Then she came onto the tarmac.

I stood with my hands by my sides, empty. At the edge of my vision, above her, I noted figures, faces in the cabin doorway. She'd ordered them to stay on board.

Sounds faded, or seemed to fade, and silence fell across us both, containing us, enclosing us, bringing intimacy.

I could see they were all officer rank, by the uniform. Johnny Chen. Then I put a few things together, the location of the camp and the obviously elite performance going on, and then I got it. That tiny little guy was Mariko Shoda, because, believe me, there isn't another female colonel in this neck of the woods.

I'd expected her to be sheathed in silk, sinuous, feline, seducing me into the shades of Lethe with the kiss of her bright blade. But despite the uniform she looked as she had when I'd seen her in the temple, her small face fragile, ivory-skinned, the cheekbones sculpted, noble, her dark eyes luminous, her short hair night-black under the cap.

'You are not armed?'

A light voice, but with the note of harshness I'd heard before, on the tapes, and now something else, a tone of disbelief. Understandable.

'No.'

She moved her right hand, a delicate, fine-boned hand, a hand you would want to touch your lips to, and rested it on her gun.

I hadn't expected a gun.

She was looking over my head now, scanning the background for snipers, still disbelieving.

'You have no support?'

'No.' I was aware of feedback, and heard that my voice was totally calm. 'I don't need arms, and I don't need support."

Totally calm, even though I hadn't expected a gun. There was a trace of panic in the organism that I could detect; it was tuned by its awareness of mortal danger to a pitch where it would have the speed and the strength to save itself if there were a chance.

I didn't think there was one, now. Because of the gun. I'd need to take her through rage before she'd break, and in her rage she'd shoot me.

Sounds coming back, fading in, the high thin whistling of the jets overhead as the tower ordered them into a holding pattern, waiting to land.

Shoda spoke.

'But surely you must realise that I shall kill you now.'

Looking at me with her dark eyes shimmering, the eyes of a woman in love, in love with what she was going to do.

But there was something here on the positive side – oh, a bare degree, of course, Christ yes, what can we expect with her hand on that bloody gun, sweat running now, cooling the skin, but at least a degree, a sign of something positive. She wasn't thinking straight. If she'd been thinking straight she'd have realised that a professional agent wouldn't just come here and bare his neck for nothing. He'd come with some kind of bargain to offer, a gesture of tit for tat, you get off my back and I'll get off yours, so forth. But she hadn't even asked why I'd come to her, alone and unarmed. She was too full of her obsession, too eager to rid herself of the one obstacle in her path to Armageddon to think of anything else.

Or I was whistling again, maybe, in the dark.

'There'd be no point,' I said, 'in killing me.'

'Why is that?'

Throw in the first one and watch the reaction.

'Because you've lost the Slingshot.'

Without that missile – Pepperidge – she's finished. Without the Slingshot she'd struggled from her agonising childhood through the jungles of the Golden Triangle to seize the almost infinite power she'd needed as an antidote for her innermost pain; but now she'd gone beyond that, creating a dream of all Asia in flames, and to make it real she needed a real weapon: the Slingshot. And now she couldn't go back from there, from the heights of her megalomania, to the life of a tawdry narcotics tycoon. She'd have to go on, or break.

I watched the reaction, a faint gold spark in the depth of her eyes: a hit, a direct hit. But what I'd said had shocked her, that was all; she couldn't let herself believe it.

'The shipment has landed,' she said, 'in Prey Veng. I was informed.'

'Yes. It landed at 21:14 hours, on schedule. But your agents are checking the containers now, and there are no missiles. We removed them.'

Her hand hit the holster and pulled the clip and drew the gun and I tensed but she half-turned, calling something to the people in the cabin doorway in Thai and I didn't understand but it was obviously something like, Signal our unit in Prey Veng and ask what's in the containers.

Then she swung back to face me and now I could see the fear in her eyes, the fear that it was true.

I took the tension off a degree because I needed the calm to work through the project, the end-phase. We'd got the timing right: we'd worked inside the five-minute bracket and that was over now. There wouldn't have been a single chance of breaking Shoda if she'd already heard she'd lost the Slingshot.

II had been essential that I tell her myself, It would give me the power I needed to break her. The news she feared most had to come from this man standing in front of her, unarmed, unassailable, omnipotent. We were to use – it had been agreed by Loman, by Pepperidge, by Croder himself- the psychic chemistry of voodoo.

She waited. She'd do nothing, say nothing. I knew, until she received the signal from Prey Veng, telling her whether I was right or wrong, whether she'd won or lost. That would be the moment when she'd start to break.

Or shoot me dead.

I didn't know the weaponry in Asia all that well but it looked like a regulation Japanese army 9mm Hitaki, either five or six shots, I couldn't tell, because the chamber was polished and highlighted with not much shadow in the grooves. But I saw she'd been trained in gun-handling: her index finger was flattened against the barrel, pointing at the target, and her middle finger was inside the trigger-guard. I couldn't tell if she'd already got pressure on the primary spring but I didn't think it was likely. When the time came she'd do it execution-style, formally, order me to turn my back and kneel, a single shot in the head.

I could hear voices in the near-distance, from inside the jet, one of them distorted, sounding from a speaker on the flight-deck.

She was listening too.

The whistling of the aircraft drifted from the night sky as they circled in their holding-pattern, other flights joining them over the minutes.

Sea-birds still called from the waters beyond the perimeter road, wakeful in the artificial light. Perhaps they were still fishing, closing their wings and plunging through the surface to pierce the sweet flesh of the prey with their stiletto beaks, one must live, my friends, one must survive.

She went on watching me, Shoda, with her hand on the gun, until a voice reached us from the cabin of the plane, alarm in it, though I didn't understand the words, only their meaning, and I saw the spark come again into Shoda's eyes and flare into rage so I said to her, 'The civilised nations can't afford to let you take possession of a weapon like that. It'd be like putting a live bomb into the paws of a monkey.'

She fired and the bullet hit and I blanked out ordinary needs, the temptation to crouch over my diaphragm, the point of impact, to let out my breath, to do anything but stand and watch her, stand without moving and watch her face and see the rage in her eyes change to fear as they widened and her mouth parted and her head tilted back as she stared at me.

The smell of cordite drifted on the air.

'Now that your grandiose ambitions are destroyed, Mariko Shoda, you've nothing left, you are nothing, except a sordid little drug-dealer feeding the dreams of the dead-beats on the streets of Hong Kong and Berlin and New York, an ineffective little revolutionary beating with your small fists at the gates of civilised nations. Surely your father, the prince, wouldn't have wanted such a fate for you -'

The gun flashed and I took the shock again and absorbed it, watching her face and seeing the fear change to terror as I went on standing there, not moving.

There's this bullshit, of course, that you see in the movies when a man gets shot and goes flying backwards as if he's been hit by a train and I suppose it looks cute but work it out for yourself in terms of basic physics, force exerts equal force in the opposite direction, so the gunman would go flying backwards too.

Not that I was actually enjoying myself. I'd told Flood I wanted it proof against knives because that was what I'd expected to be getting into if it came to a showdown – a super-spectacular barn dance with half a dozen of those jungle cats trying to do a Julius Caesar thing on me if I couldn't make Shoda fall for the voodoo bit, but obviously it was also proof against close-range 9mm ammunition, a sixteenth-of-an-inch-thick weave of tungsten steel mesh with a covering of toughened nylon, according to Flood's description.

Not, though, enjoying it, no, because she was breaking fast now and if she raised that gun and aimed at my head it'd be strictly no go, finite, and a rose for Moira.

I spoke again, telling her what she must be told at this stage in the affair. I hadn't expected a gun when I'd come out here to meet her but there'd been one, so I'd had to change the script. I'd expected her as an Oriental to accord me the execution-style formality so that I could enter Nirvana kneeling in prayer but she hadn't done that because she was now totally dominated by her emotions and all she could think about was pumping the shots into me and focusing on the standard target, the heart, because if she missed it even at this range she'd hit a lung or the spleen or the liver and start death spreading through the system.

So I continued my assault on her psyche because she was now conditioned for it.

'It is not your karma to kill me, Mariko, as you see. This much is now made manifest. On the contrary, you know that by the law of karma the abusers of power must surrender it. This much is ordained.'

Flash and in the next millisecond the bang of the gun and then the smoke clouding between us, the third shot, that was the third shot, I'd been counting, but the thing was I didn't know if the chamber held five or six bullets and I was waiting for her to raise the gun and aim at my head and squeeze the thing and Jesus Christ, I didn't want her to do that, sweating like a pig, wouldn't you, waiting for her to do that in the next second, the next two seconds, blowing my head away, what happened to Q, oh he never got back, the opposition blew his head away in the middle of a runway on Singapore airport, he'd bitten off more than he could chew, got into some kind of exotic end-phase he couldn't get out of, he was always a bit like that, if you remember, the fear of Christ in me as 1 watched her, fascinated, keeping the gun at the edge of my vision and seeing it come up, seeing her lift it and take aim at the centre of my forehead, not, in fact, no, just the nerves, watching her face and waiting for her to do that but she'd gone beyond the point of rational thinking because all she could see in front of her was this man, this creature, an animalistic phantasm that was proving itself omnipotent, unkillable, immortal, and, most hideous of all, the incarnation of her own appointed Nemesis.

Watching her face.

Watching her face as she fired again and I felt the impact just above the heart. Fourth shot.

If you had said to an artist, a sculptor, fashion me a mask that will show fear, more than fear, terror, more than terror, the recognition of a force so powerful that the wearer pales before its dread countenance, in thrall to the knowledge of impending death, the death of the mask-wearer, a death that is decreed, predestined, that is fixed by the stars so as to be inescapable, if you had asked an artist, a sculptor, to make you a mask like that, then you would be looking into the face of Shoda as I saw her now.

Like glass, one day break easily. You make her break. I think, one day.

Smoke drifting between us on the quiet air.

Bring her down.

Bring her down now.

'Acknowledge your karma, Mariko, and obey it. There is nothing more for you here.'

Flash and the gun banged and I took the shock and waited. Fifth shot, that had been the fifth shot and there could be a sixth, I didn't know.

Stink of cordite and the echoes coming back from the hangars, the nerves running with fire because of the effort needed to absorb the impact every time it came, the effort to go on standing still, to show her the tranquil mien of an immortal so that the voodoo would work.

Not voodoo, really. I'd told her the eternal truth and she'd recognised it and knew its power.

One last throw, because I had to find out.

'There is nothing you can do now, Mariko, but obey your karma.'

She raised the gun and took aim at my head and fired but there was no flash this time, just a click from the hammer, a five-shot chamber, yes, and I watched the final understanding come into her eyes and dwell there, the understanding that this creature was beyond her reach in this world; and then her arms went down and her hand opened and the gun dropped from her fingers and I said, 'Go to your father now and be at peace,' and turned my back to allow her privacy for this most intimate of acts and heard the knife hiss from its sheath and the soft cry as the blade was buried and I began walking across the tarmac towards the lights.

THE END.