See Charlie Run

Chapter Twenty-One

The planning meeting was convened, naturally, in Fredericks’ suite, everyone there except Jim Dale, who drew the first shift monitoring the commercial flights out of Kai Tak airport. In addition to the CIA men, Fredericks brought in the Special Forces colonel commanding the army group which had been brought in on the C-130, a hard-bodied, stiffly upright man named Jamieson who appeared vaguely uncomfortable in tropical civilian clothes and looked out of place in them anyway.

‘Well?’

The CIA supervisor directed the question to Winslow Elliott, the liaison with the local informants and stringers and the man coordinating the ongoing check of hotels.

Elliott shook his head. ‘Nothing, so far. We’re still checking out Kowloon …’ He looked needlessly at his watch. ‘Should be starting on the island any time.’

‘The bastard can’t just have disappeared: it’s not possible in a place as small as this!’ protested Fredericks. ‘What about cars? He must have used a vehicle!’

‘Nothing there either,’ said Elliott. ‘Still checking obviously.’ He was as anxious as the supervisor to nail Charlie Muffin but he didn’t like the way Fredericks appeared to be panicking.

‘There should have been something by now!’ said Fredericks.

‘We’ve only just started,’ reminded the reasonable Takeo Yamada, who was also concerned at their controller’s knee-jerk attitude.

‘Time we don’t have!’ insisted Fredericks, mouthing the much repeated injunction. He guessed he had three days before Langley began burning his ass: four at the outside. To the Green Beret colonel, he said: ‘What about leaving a minimum out at the airport and bringing in your guys, so we can section up the goddamned place grid-fashion?’

Jamieson made a doubtful rocking gesture with his hands. ‘I know Hong Kong: R and R’d here a lot, from ‘Nam. It’s not built that way. Cover all the obvious hotels more quickly than you are at the moment, maybe, but what if he’s holed up with her in some apartment? Don’t forget to the Chinese we’re “gweilos” — white ghosts or devils — not people they should help. House-to house stuff is never going to work.’

‘We’ve got to do more than just sit around and wait!’

‘The airport is the place and we’ve got that blocked,’ said Jamieson, positively.

Fredericks looked around at the assembled men and smiled, an expression that surprised them. ‘What’s the one edge we’ve got? Small, but still an edge?’ The smile stayed, at the shoulder-shrugs and head shaking. ‘Numbers,’ announced the huge man. ‘We’ve got numbers and Charlie Muffin is by himself. So what’s he got to do?’

‘Call in local help,’ accepted Levine.

‘Right!’ said Fredericks. To Elliott, the liaison man, he said: ‘Get back to everyone: some of them will double anyway, probably for the British. Get the names of anyone who deals exclusively for them … of anyone, who’s ever done anything for London.’

‘It could be a shortcut,’ agreed Harry Fish, speaking for the first time.

‘You got a better idea!’ demanded Fredericks, truculently.

The CIA man flushed at the unnecessary attack. He said: ‘And when we get the names?’

‘Whatever it takes,’ said Fredericks. ‘Money, pressure, whatever …’

‘Do you mean actually move against a guy, if we think he knows something?’ demanded Yamada. He didn’t intend getting his balls in a bind in some later enquiry because of an instruction as vague as that.

‘If we come up with a guy who just maybe knows something then I’ll personally stoke the fire and turn the spit until we find out what it is,’ said Fredericks positively.

It only took an hour to get Harry Lu’s name and it linked with a coincidence. At the same time Elliott’s hotel checks extended across the harbour to begin on Hong Kong island and the Mandarin doorman identified Charlie Muffin positively and at once from the CIA file pictures. There very briefly, the doorman said: he didn’t know the woman with whom the man left but Harry Lu was a local businessman, into a lot of things, including a car hire firm. Actually parked his Mercedes against the prohibited sign. Harry Lu did things like that; tipped well, too. The doorman smiled, pleased the American took the hint.

‘Here we go!’ said Fredericks, triumphantly, when he heard the news. ‘What do we know?’

‘He’s a ‘breed,’ said Elliott, who was given to American western expressions. ‘Chinese father, English mother. Got a Chinese wife and a kid. Never worked for anyone else but the British.’

‘The family gives us a pressure point,’ judged Fredericks. ‘We get to Harry Lu and we get to Charlie Muffin and the woman …’ To the Special Service’s colonel, he said: ‘We can just leave the plane crew out at the airport. Bring all your guys in.’

‘You planning to snatch?’

‘You bet your ass,’ said the supervisor.

‘Thank you,’ said Lu. He sounded sincere.

‘I’m glad it was possible,’ said Charlie. Believing he was finally able to relax, if only briefly, Charlie had slept in the taxi on the return over the Peak and on the hydrofoil crossing back to Macao, but he still felt thick-headed. The whisky was probably a mistake, but there’d been so many what did one more matter? Through the bay window of the ground-floor Hyatt bar he could see the leisurely arc of the bridge linking the tiny peninsula with the town on the other side of the river, which was fouled thickly with the sediment brought down from the Chinese mainland. Deep yellow: definitely not pearl. He guessed the other Chinese tributary had got in first with the name, so pearl was the best alternative they could manage. They should have put more thought into it.

‘I didn’t think it was going to be,’ said Lu, in a hesitantly shy admission.

‘Wait until you get everything from the High Commission,’ warned Charlie. Never believe the cheque is in the post, he thought.

‘Wilson wouldn’t have lied,’ said Lu, confidently. ‘It would have been stupid.’

‘Yes, it would have been,’ agreed Charlie.

Lu took the picture of his wife from his pocket, for his benefit rather than for Charlie’s this time. Looking down at it, Lu said: ‘She’ll be very relieved.’

‘To get out of Hong Kong?’ said Charlie.

Lu looked up at him. ‘More than that,’ he said. ‘She has always been frightened, by what I do.’

‘She knew?’ asked Charlie, surprised.

‘Not everything: a lot, though.’

‘It’s best they don’t.’

‘Doesn’t Edith?’

Charlie had forgotten Lu’s training secondment to London and the pub crawls around the City bars and the late-at-night Indian or Chinese meals — all that had been available — where she’d tolerated their drunkenness and stayed sober herself, to drive them home. Harry Lu had been one of the few people in the business to whom he’d ever introduced her. He said: ‘Edith’s dead.’

‘Oh,’ said the other man. He stopped short of the empty, automatic regret. Nor did he ask the question, leaving Charlie to explain if he wanted to.

‘You never heard what happened?’

‘To Edith, no,’ said Lu. ‘For a long time, whenever I asked about you, I was stonewalled, like you didn’t exist.’

Charlie examined his empty glass, uncertain, and then thought why not? He gestured to the waiter for refills and said: ‘They tried to dump me. I beat them, instead. Caused a lot of grief. Edith got caught in the crossfire. Literally.’

Lu’s reaction was alertly professional. ‘So what are you doing here, operating like nothing has happened?’

Charlie started the replenished drink, appreciating the man’s ability and regretting the distance that had grown between them, despite the efforts each was making now. He said: ‘I suppose the word is rehabilitation. I was in a special position to do something and prove myself. The job didn’t work out, but they don’t seem to doubt my loyalty any more.’ At least the Director didn’t, Charlie thought. It was too involved — and didn’t matter anyway — to explain his being a decoy for a jailbreak with another man he — but more importantly Moscow — believed to be a genuine spy. Or how, in Moscow, he’d screwed the man into Gulag imprisonment, only to discover when it was too late and he was back to London that the poor sod was someone Wilson had trained for years to infiltrate the Russian service. He decided, too, against telling the man about Natalia, for whom he’d come close to chucking everything and staying in Moscow.

Refusing to lose his point, Lu said: ‘But Edith knew?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie. Edith was different, from anyone else.

‘Didn’t she worry?’

‘All the time,’ admitted Charlie.

‘That’s how it is with me. Why I’ll be glad to quit.’

Charlie looked intently at the other man, held by another fear, that Harry Lu had lost his nerve. There was no outward indication, no obvious apprehension, but the admission was worrying: he didn’t want the man collapsing on him, not now. He said encouragingly: ‘You’re going to get your papers: everything’s going to be all right.’

‘I should tell her,’ said Lu.

‘Time enough later,’ urged Charlie. ‘Let’s get this thing over, first.

Charlie’s concern registered, for the first time. Lu said: ‘She’s safe.’ He offered the photograph and said: ‘Did I show you this one?’

Politely Charlie took the print. It was different from the earlier picture. This one showed the woman in a strictly formal pose, porcelain-faced, jet-black hair dressed high on her head, her wide-belted cheong-sam reaching the ground. The child called Open Flower was at her side, a miniature replica. Charlie said: ‘Don’t endanger her — either of them — with knowledge.’

Now it was Lu’s turn to show concern. ‘They wouldn’t move against them!’

‘Why not?’ demanded Charlie, in brutal honesty. He was surprised at the man thinking otherwise; perhaps it was time that Harry Lu did get out.

‘I should see they’re all right.’

‘Not personally,’ insisted Charlie, at once. He’d be glad when Cartright got here: better still when the army team arrived.

‘Call at least,’ insisted the man.

‘Don’t say where we are.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ said the man.

He’d deserved that, accepted Charlie. ‘Maybe you should call,’ he agreed.

Charlie ordered another drink, able from where he sat to watch the man go to the telephone bank. Had he exaggerated, about a risk to Lu’s family? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Had he been asked two weeks ago, he would have dismissed the likelihood of six men being killed to block an escape route. Mind focussed, he went again over the conversation with Wilson, trying — and failing — to reconcile the American denial of involvement. How much longer, before things started to make sense? He concentrated upon the whisky he held before him in both hands, and decided it would be a long time if he went on drinking like this. In a moment he had to confront Irena Kozlov, who had the benefit of a night’s sleep. He smiled up, at Lu’s return.

‘Everything’s fine,’ said the man, whose apartment was in Wanchai, off the road leading to the Happy Valley racecourse. As Lu spoke, Fredericks, Levine and Fish were arriving outside, spreading out at once to establish a triangular surveillance pattern.

And in her seaview room at the Macao Hyatt, five floors above where the two men sat, Irena Kozlov replaced the receiver after the conversation with her husband in the Tokyo apartment, warmed by the contact. It was wonderful, after the difficulties they’d had, to know that he loved her so much now: so determined to protect her against any trickery that he’d refused to go across to the Americans until she was beyond the risk of any interception. She smiled, remembering the assurance; relax, you’re safe, he’d said.

‘Darling Yuri,’ she said, aloud. ‘Darling Yuri.’