The 9th Directive

17 Lee

The city was under siege.

Roadblocks had been set up at all major points of exit and were manned by units of the Royal Thai Army. Traffic attempting to leave the city had to pass through a bottleneck of tank traps, machine-gun posts and barbed wire in depth. Outward passage was permitted only after credentials had been examined by teams from the Bangkok Special Branch and all vehicles rigorously searched.

Passenger coaches serving the eighteen international airlines operating through Don Muang Airport were given mobile police escort through the roadblocks after each passenger was examined and screened at the airline offices in the heart of the city. Bus, train, and road services were interrupted and all travelers entering Bangkok were warned that there would be serious delays before they could be permitted emergency-exit passes.

Units of the U.S. Special Forces permanently stationed in the country had been drafted into the area following the immediate acceptance of an offer by the U.S. Government to place certain troops and facilities at the services of the Thai Army. Infantry search parties were linked across the rice-field areas working in radio liaison with military helicopters flying a nonstop schedule.

Sea-going traffic moving southward down the Chao Phraya River was caught in the dragnet set up by naval gunboats on the north side of Kratumban. All ships were searched by auxiliary units of the river police. Inland from Bangkok the river was blockaded on the south side of Nontaburi with a machine-gun post on each bank and a group of armed inspection vessels patrolling the midstream lanes.

A ring of armed guards was drawn round Don Muang and every other airfield in the southern provinces, and the owners of all private airplanes were ordered by special emergency decrees to immobolize their machines by draining the fuel tanks and removing their distributor rotors, and to report immediately any attempt by strangers to approach hangars or mooring-areas.

In the besieged city the flags had been taken down. Five thousand police drawn from the North and South Bangkok Metropolitan and auxiliary forces had begun a systematic search of every room in every building in every street. Mobile patrols cruised on a twenty-four-hour schedule covering a search pattern especially devised by the city traffic-control planners. All crews were armed.

Theaters, cinemas, and dance halls had closed, and few people dined out. There was music by night. The gold domes of the temples stood among silent trees. The city was numbed by the shock of the realization that its streets were not safe, by fear for its missing guest and by grief for its dead.

Fourteen people had lost their lives when the royal car had plunged into the crowd; by nightfall three of the injured had died. A memorial service was arranged to take place in the Palace grounds on the day following the tragedy.

News of world reaction reached the city hourly by radio and cable. Little news went out.

'Naturally it will prove ineffective,' Pangsapa said to me. 'An effort must be seen to be made, and anxiety for the safety of so distinguished a person must be expressed, therefore they are throwing whole armies into the search. Well and good. But ineffective.'

He had signaled me through the Embassy before I'd left Room 6 and I had come straight to his house because I was ready to snatch at any straw, any bit of information from anyone at all that might give me a direction to follow.

I said, 'You think they've still got him here in the city.'

'Of course.'

He sat in his black robe on the cushions and there was incense burning somewhere and I felt I had come to Delphi. Inaction when action is most desperately needed begets false hopes. I didn't think Pangsapa had anything I could use.

'The nearest airfield is an hour's drive,' I said.

Too far. They had no time to reach it in the ambulance before the hunt was up, and they had no time to switch vehicles. They're still here in the city and you could deploy all the troops and airplanes in Asia quite ineffectively. Armies need room to move. The police may have better luck among the cellars and the ruined temples and the riverside wharves. But there are only two people in the whole city with any real hope of finding the man you so discreetly call "the Person." I refer to our two selves.'

Today something was different about him, about his eyes or voice or the way he sat, and I couldn't even name this difference but it was there. I began watching him more carefully.

'In your case,' he said, his tone slightly sing-song, 'you know Kuo and his cell better than anyone in the whole of Bangkok, because the police observed them for a few days and they did it in shifts, whereas you made a study of them and you worked alone. You had, after all, certain intentions toward Kuo, and these necessitated your observing him with far greater care than the police.' The topaz-yellow eyes did not glance in my direction. (Question: how much did he know?) 'In my case,' he went on in the same slightly lilting tone, 'I possess information sources which the police would find it difficult to tap, since they spring from what is called the "underworld."' Plaintively he added: 'I don't know why it should always refer to cities. Every man has his own underworld and a part of him never leaves it.'

The difference showed itself in all three aspects: eyes, voice, posture. Still couldn't name it, quite.

'However that may be, we make a formidable team, Mr Quiller. We have an enormous advantage. It would be a pity to waste it.' Leaning toward me suddenly he said, 'It is essential that we keep in close contact. I have people working for me now, at this moment, working for us. They are questioning those whom the police cannot question – at least with any hope of a straight answer – and they are searching places of which the police have no knowledge at all. I cannot tell you when I shall have information for you. It may be tomorrow. It may be five minutes after you have left my house.'

Nerves. The name of the difference that was in him today. He was showing nerves: when the eyes moved they moved quickly; the English university speech-forms were remembered with less ease and the Asian lilt and pedantic phrasing showed through; the stillness of the Lotus pose was irksome to him – the limbs wanted to express the speed of thought that drove his mind. Pangsapa was nervous.

I could see no reason.

'So my question is obvious,' he said. 'How and where can I contact you with immediacy?'

Just as there is calculated risk there is calculated trust and sometimes they are the same thing. There was a calculated risk in trusting Pangsapa and it was worth taking. This kind of thing nearly always happens toward the end of a mission: you move into increasingly dangerous areas because the risks you must take become greater. The adverse party has been seen and marked down and he knows it and is provoked, and you are yourself marked down because he too is fiercely determined to survive.

But you cannot both survive.

'The Pakchong,' I told Pangsapa.

The Link Road thing had happened only a few hours ago and I was homeless and my time in the condemned building was at an end. Mil. 6 knew a dozen places now where they could pick me up until I went to ground and the Pakchong might just as well be one of them. It would be amusing for a night or two to sleep like a gentleman in a bed.

'You won't always be there,' he said.

'Loman will know where I am.'

'And if Mr Loman is not at that number?' He meant Room 6 and was careful not to say it.

'I think that about covers it.' I wasn't giving him Soi Suek 3.

'Would I have permission to contact you through Mr Varaphan?'

I didn't answer. I'd taken care – nothing showed in my face. He would expect surprise but I didn't want him to see actual shock.

A safehouse is no ordinary place: it is a cornerstone of security, and bad security can wreck a mission and kill you off. You've got Local Control if you're lucky, but you can't always rely on getting there if the operation hots up and you're jumping. A safehouse is a home and sometimes it's the only place you can run to. We think of it as a shrine, sacrosanct. It's really a bolt-hole.

'How did you get it, Pangsapa?'

Because he'd got it and it was bo use asking him who Mr Varaphan was. He knew.

I had never seen anger in him before. There wasn't much difference: he sat as still, and didn't raise his voice. Anger in an Asian is no more – and no less – than sudden cold.

'Please remember that Mr Loman gave you my name and that he gave you also Varaphan's. How much do you trust in your own intelligence director?' His yellow eyes remained fixed on me.

I said, 'Let's say, then, that you can contact me at the Pakchong, through Loman, or through Varaphan.'

My own anger didn't show either. Loman hadn't given it to him, I knew that. A safehouse didn't have that name for nothing. Pangsapa must have tags out. That was unusual. He was an informant, and informants are not active. They are found among news vendors and clerks, maitres d'hotel, cloth importers, stockbrokers and road sweepers – they can be anyone. They are businessmen who listen and who buy and sell what they hear, and they trade outside their ordinary occupation.

They take no action. They don't put tags out.

Kuo was a professional killer but he had moved into the snatch game. Pangsapa was a narcotics contrabandist and an informant on the side. Now he was on the move. And that was why he was different today and why his nerves were poking through the black silk and the Lotus pose and the lilt in his speech.

He said carefully: 'I gave you the motorcade route. I gave you the man who joined Kuo. I can give you more. It is up to you whether you are prepared to take your advantage.'

'I'm ready to take everything I can get. You still don't mention the price.'

'Why should I? It is not you who will have to pay.'

I had walked half a block from Pangsapa's house when the car began slowing behind me and I caught the sound and turned sharply to face it because that is the only chance you can give yourself – to look straight at the car, at the windows on the pavement side.

The reflection of the street lamps went sliding across the metal roof. I watched it coming. The windows on my side were open but nothing portruded. The driver was alone.

She reached across and opened the passenger door as the car stopped and I got in without saying anything. She drove easily, taking her time along the empty streets. The cinemas and most of the restaurants were dark and the only patch of light along Charoen Krung Road was made by the police station, where patrol crews were assembled for rebriefing under floodlights. We were slowed and a man looked in and then nodded, waving us on.

It was all they could do: check everyone, search every house, question everything they saw. They had no direction, any more than I had. They would have asked for statements from people who had been at the scene and they would have drawn blank because no one can remember anything after an accident: knowing that they are expected to remember, they rationalize and put up a show to avoid being thought a halfwit. Their testimony is worse than useless because it is unconsciously false.

They would have extracted the bullet from the head of the dead driver and again they would have drawn blank because they'd never find the gun that had fired it: Kuo was a professional. They would have asked to see anyone who had been using a camera at the time and they would have drawn blank because there was no point in studying amateur photographs of a car hitting a crowd. The press photographers had been bunched in special enclosures and there had been no enclosure in the Link Road. Blank.

Even from my raised viewpoint in the condemned building I had seen nothing clearly, even with field glasses.

But they had to go on trying because routine work by massed forces will sometimes repay the effort. At worst the effort is seen to be made.

South Sathorn Road with the Klong running parallel on our left. There were no rings on her hands; they were cool-looking and long-fingered, tenderly moving on the hard rim of the wheel. Sometimes her reflection came against the windshield, a ghost face flying along the street's facade.

It was too late now to do anything about it. The tricks wouldn't work any more – calling her a bitch, calling her Scarf ace, resenting her, telling Loman to get her out of my way. Loman had seen the signs. He had said, 'That's the second time you've mentioned her.' I should have shut up after he'd said that.

North Sathorn, passing the Immigration Office. We were heading for the Pakchong Hotel, my last known address before I'd gone to ground and she'd lost me for three days. Didn't she bloody well have anywhere else to go? It didn't work any more. I didn't want her to have anywhere else to go.

Toward Lumpini Park a police patrol was throwing a man into the van; he ducked once and nearly got clear enough to start running, then they chopped him short and picked him up and threw him in; one of his shoes had been wrenched off and they threw it in after him. He was one of hundreds; the cells were crammed with suspects held for questioning since the search was mounted.

Vithayu Road, turning north. Far over to the left a beam of light stood against the dark sky, tapering upward – a helicopter probing along the river.

The night was warm and her arms were bare. She must have tagged me from the Embassy when I'd left there to answer Pangsapa's call; then she had waited for me to come out of his house. I had been there for nearly an hour and she had used the time thinking, sitting alone in the car, undistracted, thinking it all out.

Then she had decided, and picked me up. Until now we had driven in silence through the city, leaving each other in peace.

Her head lifted a fraction but she didn't turn to look at me.

'Do you remember,' she said, 'a man named Lee? Norwich, England, July last year?'

And I knew why Kuo had made the snatch.