Quiller's Run

7 Johnny Chen

Who are you?' I didn't move. 'My name's Jordan.'

Lamplight fell slanting across the rough timber wall.

'What do you want here?'

I couldn't see him. He was behind me.

'Some information.'

'But why come here?' He dug into the psoas muscle.

'Katie sent me.'

'Sent you?'

'She told me where to find you.'

The balcony was thirty feet up and there was nothing I could do anyway. By his tone he wasn't playing.

'What name did she tell you?'

'Johnny Chen.'

He began whistling softly, no actual tune.

My face was still bleeding from the flying glass.

'Open the door.'

I turned the loose brass handle.

There was a low light in the room, and a smell I couldn't identity, a chemical smell.

He patted me down. 'Get over there, face to the wall.'

Crates everywhere, crates and rope and a cluster of jade vases, a Buddha. The light brightened as he switched another lamp on. Pictures of aeroplanes on the wall, photos of crashes.

He was dialling.

Perhaps I'd got it wrong, or she'd got it wrong, and I wouldn't be able to trust him, or trust her. This wasn't Bureau. Feeling my way through the dark.

The blood itched on my face. It had taken me another two hours, nearly till sundown, to shake the tags, and even then it had needed luck: I'd gone into an office block and gained enough time to get round a corner and wait. It had worried him, this particular tag, and he was running flat out, his rubber-soled track shoes squeaking on the marble floor like a bird chirping, and when I tripped him he span in a twisting arc and smashed through the glass door like a bomb, fragments flying. It was luck because they hadn't had time to cover the rear entrance.

'Johnny. Look, there's a guy here says his name is Jordan.'

American accent, Oriental intonation.

'So why didn't you call me to say?'

Someone gave a sigh, or a yawn, not Chen. I wanted to stop the itching but he wouldn't like it if I moved. He wouldn't have put the gun down yet.

'I was in Laos.' He raised his voice. 'Okay, turn around.'

He was sitting in a bamboo chair with his flying-boots crossed on a table, half desk, half table, the gun on his lap. 'What's he look like?'

I took in what I could, a low divan with rumpled clothes in the shadowed corner, more crates, bamboo furniture, mostly chairs, some cheap handmade rugs. It was a cavernous place, a warehouse, only two doors, no windows.

'Let's have a snort!'

It was by the river, with the river smell mingling with the chemicals. Unrefined opium, at a guess.

'Okay. But Katie, don't ever send anybody here without talking to me first. But you're beautiful.' He put the gun onto the table and sat upright. 'Sure, see you around.'

He rang off and threw me a packet of cigarettes and I caught it and threw it back. 'Trying to kick it? Sit down, Jordan.'

I took a chair near him. He was a full Chinese, scarecrow-thin, close-cropped hair beginning to grey at the temples, a weathered face, something wrong with one ear. 'Tsou-k'ai . Pieh ch'ao wo.'

The blankets on the divan moved and a naked woman rolled over and then stood up in the lamplight, ivory-skinned, tiny breasts, jet black pubic hair, walking to the inner door with her knees uncertain, like a young colt taking its first steps. She closed the door.

'She was starving,' Chen said. 'Pick 'em up for nothing.' He lit a black cigarette with a gold tip from the packet. 'So what's the story, Jordan?"

I told him I was with Laker Foundry, and about the leak.

''Let's have a snort?

Parrot.

'So what precise information do you want?'

'I need to know as much as possible about Mariko Shoda.'

He gave me a dead stare. 'Mariko Shoda…' Smoke drifted under the lamp. 'Jesus Christ.'

A cistern flushed behind the wall. 'Katie said you could tell me something about her.'

'Mariko Shoda…' He got out of the chair, tall for a Chinese, walking like a cat, crouched a little, eyes on the floor, thinking. 'What did Katie tell you about me, Jordan?'

'That you run a small freighter service and know your way around the southeast.'

He nodded, straightening up, looking around the walls. 'Sure. I fly everywhere. I flew with the Yanks in 'Nam, made good money – this is me here, come and have a look, my whole life history.' He went on talking while he showed me the photographs, four of them of light plane wrecks with Chen standing on the top with a big grin and his arm in a sling or a pair of crutches under him. 'What I'm doing now is kinda worse than those days in 'Nam, because you're strictly on your own and the name of the game is Russian roulette, you're due in at an illegal airstrip somewhere up there in Burma or maybe Laos and it's night and all they can give you is a couple of flares this end of the strip and it's thick jungle, Jesus, and maybe you're down to the last sniff of gas, even in the auxiliary tank, which is often just a waterbed inside the cabin with you, a potential fireball if you crash – and sometimes you're not sure the strip is still in friendly hands and you can go down into machine-gun crossfire, that's happened to me twice, look at this old crate, see the holes? But even if the strip is still friendly you can hit bumps or misjudge the flares or whatever, and there's a gentlemen's agreement – you're a helluva long way from any kind of medical aid out there so if you're trapped in the wreckage or it's on fire they just put a bullet in your head, like you do with horses.'

He led me back to the desk and we sat down. 'You use a drink?'

'Not just now.'

'So what happened to your face?'

'New blade.'

He laughed in his throat. 'You want to go clean up?'

'In a minute.'

'She's not still in the bathroom. So you want some information on -'

The telephone rang and he picked it up. 'At first light. Sure, if you can. What's going to be the ceiling over the coast?' He listened and then said, 'Hell, no, I'm not putting down anywhere, they just hung another bunch of guys over there, did you hear about that?' He listened again and asked for an updated met report and rang off. 'I don't ever do any trading, see, I'm just a transporter, I never take possession — that stuff over there is waiting for shipment, and anyway most of the freight I hump isn't drugs, it's arms.' He got out of the chair. 'C'mon and take a look.' A nail screamed as he levered one of the crates open and showed me neat rows of ammunition, perfectly stacked, the steel and copper glowing in the light. 'It's .223, 7.62, 9mm. Nothing to write home about in this batch; the more interesting stuff's in the other crates but I don't want to break the seals. Semi-automatics and some fully-auto calibre .50s, mostly Belgian, and some very nice riflescopes from Hungary. And some inserts' – he kicked a crate with his ripped leather flying-boot – 'put them in a shotgun and you can feed it with 9mm or .223 ammo, just the trick for your trigger-happy anti-communist citizens up north around Phnom Penh or Saravane. You want any stuff like that for trading on the side, you know where to find it.' He went back to the desk again. 'Then there's other stuff that's worth shipping around; bit of gold, gems, things like that, cut a small profit when you can. You want some coffee, Jordan?'

'No, thanks.'

'Jesus, you must have some very interesting secret vices.' He lit another cigarette. 'So you want some information on Little Kiss-of-Steel. Well I guess I don't have much but maybe it's more than most people do.' He blew out smoke. 'She's still only twenty-one, Cambodian, no bigger than this kid in here you saw just now, lives very simply and controls maybe forty, fifty million US dollars' worth of business every year, half in drugs, half in armaments. People who regard her as a friend give her presents – an apartment in London or Paris or New York or Tokyo or a palace in Rangoon, or maybe a yacht off Khiri Khan or a shipment of diamonds from South Africa. People who regard her as an enemy also give her presents, to calm her down – a permanent suite at the Manila Mandarin, gold ingots from Pakistan with her name carved on them or a fleet of limousines. She moves around in privacy, using her own 727 and going through the VIP lounge with dark glasses on and a dozen bodyguards to keep people away, because she doesn't like being photographed.'

He got up again and unlocked the drawer of a massive Japanese lacquered cabinet across the room and came back with an eight-by-ten photograph and gave it to me. 'Rather a lot of grain, but the best I could do.'

I turned it in the light. 'This is Mariko Shoda?'

'That is Mariko Shoda.' He sat down, leaning his arms on his knees, dropping ash. 'I was in transit in Saigon and I happened to know she was coming in, so I took a chance and hung around while my crate was being refuelled, and I was lucky, if that's what we're going to call it. She came out of her 727 without her dark glasses on and I had a zoom lens ready and bingo, isn't she pretty?'

The grain was so bad that I had to hold the picture at arm's length to smooth out the dots. It was an arresting face, yes, high cheekbones and large eyes, black hair cut like a boy's. Her head was half-turned as if she suspected someone was watching.

'What was the distance, Johnny?'

'Two or three hundred yards. But whenever she lands anywhere, see, she not only has a whole bunch of bodyguards close around her – they're all women, by the way – but she has a whole lot more waiting around the area, placed there before she arrives. One of them saw me take the picture. I didn't know that, but I wasn't taking any chances either so I mailed the film for processing right there at the airport.' He shrugged. 'They got me that night, on the street. I still had the camera and they pulled it open and took the film that was in it – no problem, it was a new one, blank – and smashed the camera and then worked me over.' He tugged one of his earlobes. 'This is my own, but the left one's a prosthesis they stuck on for me at the hospital. I hear Shoda very clearly with it – no photographs, please.' He took the picture and said on his way to the cabinet, 'I can let you have another print, Jordan, if you want one. Nice pinup.' He locked the drawer again and came back. 'But tell me something – are you going to try getting near that gal?'

'Possibly.'

He pursed his mouth. 'That could be difficult. She'd have to want a meeting, and even then you should maybe think twice. She has all these bodyguards, but she does her own thing a lot of the time. People always tell me the same tiling about Little Kiss-of-Steel – don't stand too close, and above all don't touch. And she's very spiritual – she always prays for you before she kills. Of course, she may take a shine to you, but even then I'd be careful. She has a keen sense of the priorities, like the praying mantis.'

The phone was ringing and he picked it up and spoke in Hokkein, which I didn't understand. I got up and went to look at the stuff on the wall: photographs, pinups, philosophical maxims – There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots — some faded lading bills with customs franking, a woman's black lace glove and a dried monkey's head and a Player's cigarette packet with what looked like a bullet-hole through it and a lock of black hair in a blue ribbon. I wanted to know as much about him as possible, and particularly why he'd met me with a gun in my back and ten minutes later had shown me around the place without even telling me to keep my mouth shut. Did he trust Katie that much?

'The way Shoda works,' he was saying, putting the phone down and coming over, 'is something quite remarkable. She never goes out to public places like restaurants, and when she has to visit somebody downtown, the most anyone sees of her is between the limo and the building, dark glasses and bodyguards and the whole bit – and those bodyguards are kind of cute too; have you heard of the Kunoichi?'

I said I hadn't.

'It's the deadly sisterhood of the Ninja, originally Japanese. Like the geishas, they were trained in singing and entertaining, see, so they could get access into the household of an enemy warlord, and just when he'd gotten her nice and cosy in his arms he'd end up with an icepick through the ear into the brain – one of their favourite tricks, in my language the ssu chieh wen – the kiss of death. You know something? I was in Phnom Penh maybe around six months -'

A beeper sounded and he broke off at once and went to the desk and picked up his gun. 'You just stay there, Jordan, I'll be right back.'

He went out through the door where the girl had gone, not the one where he'd brought me in at gunpoint. So this was the alarm I'd tripped on my way up the outside staircase, and there must be another one covering the entrance he was going to check on now. I was tempted to get out of my chair and take a look at the crates and the other two desks and the Japanese cabinet but I stayed where I was because I didn't know this man yet, and I didn't know if he'd simply asked the girl beforehand to trigger the beeper and give him an excuse to leave the room so that he could see what I did while he was gone. I hadn't got access yet, the most vital phase of the mission, access to Shoda, and maybe he could give it to me.

He came back through the same door and went to the desk and dropped a small chamois bag onto it, using a key on the padlock. 'Chu-Chu!' The key stuck and he had to worry it. 'Chu-Chu, c'mon in here!'

She was wearing a cheap cotton shift now, and looked younger than ever, glancing at me and standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, watching Chen.

'Hold out your hand, sweetheart.' He opened his own, palm upwards. ''Hand — this thing, right?'

She obeyed him hesitantly, and he fished in the leather bag and dropped a ruby onto her palm. 'A present, okay? Worth a thousand dollars, maybe more.' He stood over her, pleased with himself, with her, with his gift. 'You're my thousand dollar baby.' She gazed steadily at the gem; it was cut, polished and glimmering on her palm, and I sensed the uncertainty in Johnny Chen now: he'd 'picked her up for peanuts', probably from a refugee camp on the Cambodian border or from parents who needed food for themselves more than a daughter's mouth to feed, and now she was his, Johnny Chen's, but he didn't know how to get through to her. Perhaps on an impulse he'd taken over a life, and wasn't sure what to do with it.

'Present, Chu-Chu. Present.' He circled his hands, awkwardly. 'Means I love you.' He kissed her on the brow and touched her cheek and came away. 'You can stay here now,' gesturing to the divan. 'Chu-Chu stay, okay?'

She walked away with the gem held out in front of her, gazing down at its colour; I was aware of the softness of the nape of her neck, the back of her knees.

'Okay, she's just a kid,' Chen said defensively. 'But kids like her get raped every day over there, up at the borders, in the villages. She doesn't get raped, she gets loved, okay?'

'I can see that.'

'Okay. So what's the deal, Jordan? You want to know if Little Kiss-of-Steel has this weapon you're talking about?'

'Very much.'

'If she doesn't have it, she'd sure as hell maim it.'

'Have you ever seen one?'

'No.' He toyed with the chamois bag. 'But I've seen some of the specs. I'd say if that thing got into the wrong hands in Southeast Asia we could see the whole damn place go up. It can knock choppers out of the sky, right?'

'Any aircraft up to 30,000 feet.'

The bag hit the desk with a soft thump. 'Thirty thousand, Jesus Christ. And hand-held? That's more than the Stinger can do.'

'By a factor of three.'

He thought for a while, his eyes down; then he pulled another black cigarette out of the packet and lit up and looked at me through the smoke. 'How long have you known Katie McCorkadale?'

We had lunch.'

'You must have impressed her.'

'Perhaps she's just a good judge of character.'

'I guess. I mean, when Katie tells me I can trust somebody, it's for real. She's never been wrong.'

'That's why you had a gun in my back.'

'I didn't know you were from Katie.' He picked some tobacco from his lip. 'So I've told you what kind of woman this Mariko Shoda is. You still want to meet her?'

'It's why I came.'

'Thing is,' he said, watching me obliquely, 'she doesn't want to meet you, right? Weren't you the guy in the limo, few nights ago? There wasn't anything in the news, but there's a whole bunch of grapevines in Singapore.'

'She got the wrong impression,' I said. 'I don't mean her any harm.' That too was for the grapevine.

'Then you're pretty unusual.' He straightened on the bamboo chair and picked up the phone, dialling. 'Couple of months back,' he told me, 'someone dive-bombed a monastery where she stays sometimes, blew it apart. She wasn't home.' On the phone he asked for Sam. 'That gal has so many people who want her dead, she's kind of jumpy. I guess that's why she gave you the grief in the limo. Sam? How's things? Listen, do something for me. I believe there's a guy named Lafarge in town from Bangkok. He's due out of the airport some time in the next few days but I don't know which flight. I know he's made a reservation because I picked it up when I was coming through Anna Siang's office. Can you hit the computer for me?' He dropped ash into the jade bowl on his desk. 'Okay, get back to me, Sam.'

He put the phone down and crossed his spider-thin legs.

'Like I was starting to say, I was up in Phnom Penh a while back and took a chance and checked out an illegal airstrip out of the city. We have to do that, the flyers. We need to know where the strips are and how to get in there if ever we have to – and you never know when. There's hundreds, see – make it thousands. Anyway, I happened to see some troops drawn up in some kind of a training camp, place was thick with barbed wire but you could catch a glimpse of what was going on. The guys were being reviewed by their colonel, as best I could see, a tiny little guy but absolutely impeccable, like they all were. Even from that distance I could see they were all officer rank, by the uniform. Then I kind of put a few things together – the location of the camp and the obviously elite performance going on, see, and then I got it. That tiny little guy was Mariko Shoda, because, believe me, there isn't another female colonel around in this neck of the woods. I mean, just to see the salute she snapped up – even at that distance I knew I was in the presence of real style. So that's Shoda too, she's -'

The phone rang and he picked it up. 'Yes? Sure.' He pulled a scratch pad towards him and got a pen from a drawer. 'OK. I have that, Sam. And listen, I never asked you about this guy, okay? I didn't even call you up. With the you-know-what connection, if there's any trouble it's going to be my ass. Or head.'

He asked about someone called Lee and said give him my best and rang off, tearing the top sheet from the pad and giving it to me. 'Okay, Dominic Lafarge is a French-born naturalised Thai subject and he's booked out on that flight in the morning. He got himself naturalised because he works for Shoda and she calls the shots. From the grapevine I use, Lafarge has lived in Thailand for the past ten or eleven years and at present he's the major source of the weaponry flowing into Shoda's hands and out again to the rebel forces in Indo-China.' He pressed his cigarette butt into the bowl. 'I don't know what he's doing in Singapore and I don't know why-he's flying to Bangkok in the morning, but if you asked me to make a bet I'd say he's very likely visiting his boss, because that's where she is right now.' He got a fresh cigarette. 'Make any sense?'

'This grapevine. How reliable is it?'

I hadn't expected this amount of luck, so early. I was desperate for access, because once I found a way in to Shoda and her organisation I could leave the deadly environment of the open ground and go clandestine and that would give me a tenfold chance of survival. And it would give me the mission.

'The grapevine I use,' Chen said, 'is better than most. What I've just told you about Lafarge is true, vouched for. I'm in the arms trade, okay? I therefore make it my business to know the others. So if you aim to tag on to this guy tomorrow you'll at least know he's the right guy. But what's going to happen to you at the other end of that flight, God knows – and don't hold me responsible. You'll be moving in to Shoda's territory.'

I got up and walked around and looked at the photographs and the black lace glove and the dried monkey's head and the cigarette packet with the bullet hole in it and then came back to talk to Johnny Chen and took a risk so big that my skin crawled.

'If I took that flight, I wouldn't want you to tell anyone.'

He got up and crushed out a butt and stuck his thin hands into his hip pocket and shrugged. 'It's your ass, Jordan, if anything goes wrong. But if anyone finds out you've got plans to take that flight, it won't be from me. I don't want your death on my hands.'

I cleaned my face up in the small sandalwood-scented bathroom before he showed me out through the back way, down some stairs and across a freight-storage hangar and through a door leading into an alleyway stacked with emptied crates and rubbish bins and oil drums, with only one high yellow lamp at the corner of the warehouse.

'Happy landings,' he said, and went back inside.

I spent thirty minutes checking the riverside environment before I walked into the open street and kept to whatever cover I could find, trying to talk myself out of the half-knowledge that I was driving myself into a trap and talk myself into believing that I'd got access – access to Shoda, and that tonight the mission had started running.