The 9th Directive

7 The Ritual

There's nothing,' she said, 'that I can tell you.'

I had been leaning forward. Now I slid back and rested my head on the rear seat squab, my half-closed eyes on the mirror where hers watched me. It was a big car, comfortable. It would be nice to be driven some where, along a road that ran straight and had no danger spots, no traps.

The airport was suddenly aglow with light as the dusk fell. The flowers became vivid. What is your name?' I asked.

'Maine.'

'All of it.'

'Vinia Maine.'

She turned her lean body and laid one arm along the back of her seat and looked at me directly instead of in the mirror. There wasn't any expression in the wide clear eyes; they were just alert.

I said, 'It doesn't sound very likely. Your cover name, is it?'

She said nothing.

'Who were the tags? The thin one, and the one with the splayfooted walk, who were they?'

The vivid flowers were reflected in her eyes.

'Who were they?'

I watched the pulse beating in her slim throat. She didn't look away from me.

'Where are they now? Why are you having to do their job? Why did you tag me here?'

Her lips parted. A second's hesitation. Then: 'I thought you might be getting on a plane.'

Her voice was low and its clear timbre made my drowsiness worse. It was a voice to send a child to sleep.

'What would you have done,' I asked her, 'if I'd got on a plane?'

'It would have depended where you were going.'

'Oh, come on – come on!' I was suddenly sitting up straight. Loman was a hell of an intelligence director if he couldn't keep this bitch out of my way – I'd told him to, I'd made a point of it. 'Just give me basic answers, will you? Where d'you think I might have been going in a plane?'

'Into China.'

'What would you have done?'

'Stopped you.'

'How?'

'By warning you.'

'Warning me?'

'By telling you why you can't cross into China.'

'I'm taking the midnight so tell me now.'

The smile was tentative, starting in the eyes and then touching the mouth. 'No. You're not.'

I looked away from her through the window. A car had come into the parking area, a taxi. I watched the people get out.

She said, 'I came alone. There was no time to tell anyone where I was going.'

I looked back at her. For an instant, because I was tired and because the big car was comfortable, I wondered what had happened to the left side of her face.

What outfit are you in?' I asked. 'You and the two tags Security? Why can't you do your job on your own instead of following me about like pilot-fish hanging on for the pickings? I've lost the bastard – you know that.

But I'm going to find him and when I find him you won't be there. By God, I'll make sure of that.' I opened the door. 'Tell them to lay off. Keep out of my way. I don't like hangers-on.' I got out and slammed the door. The driving window was open and I leaned in and jerked the ignition key out and threw it across the flower beds.

'If you have to cross into China,' she said looking up at me intently, 'please see me first. I can always be contacted at the Embassy.'

'You won't see me again.'

I got into the Toyota.

At noon the next day I reported to Loman at the safehouse in Soi Suek 3. He didn't ask if I'd made any progress because he knew I'd be only too damned glad to tell him if I had.

That bitch at the Embassy,' I said. 'Who is she?' He said curiously, That's the second time you've mentioned her.'

'I told you to keep her out of my way. She tagged me last night and she's had me tagged for the past fifteen days – who the hell are they?'

After a bit he said: 'I'll try to find out. It's the secretary to the Cultural Attache you mean, is it?'

'Scarface.'

'I've had no information on her, of course.'

It was never possible to tell when he was lying. In his game it was one of his assets. I let it go. He talked for a bit to see if he could gleam anything from my mood. He would have given a lot just for one crumb, one small crumb of hope. Before I left him I said, 'All right – I've got two more days.'

I went straight back to the Pakchong and had my two cases sent down to the car. It looked as though Loman didn't know who she was or why she was hanging on so I would just have to fade. Occasionally you get a fool girl with a built-in do-it-yourself Mata-Hari kit in her wig and they play hell all over the departments, picking bus-tickets out of the w.p.b. and sending them to Codes and Ciphers. This was one of them. They lived in their own cold-war dream world and talked out of the side of their mouths – 'Don't cross into China' – that sort of thing. This one had roped in a couple of clerks from Cultural Aid for Distressed Pomeranian Pavement Artists and put them onto my track, in between cozy bedtimes.

I spent ten minutes in the thick of the city with both eyes on the mirror and jabbing the Toyota heel-and-toe through the corners to shake off any possible tag, then made a straight line for a safe hotel near the Pan-Am office. I had used it before and the management was still the same.

Then I worked till midnight and drew blank.

There was a message from Loman the next day: Pangsapa was trying to contact me. It took an hour to find him but I didn't lose patience; if he had information on Kuo it was worth the whole day. He was supervising a shipment at one of his wharves along the Chao Phraya and I had to wait until he had given orders for his overseer to take charge.

'We will go into my office,' he lisped. 'You will have some tea, I hope?'

There's no time, Pangsapa.' Tea in this latitude meant a protracted ceremony.

He wore Western clothes today and his office was functional in design so that our meeting had the appearance of the mundane, as if a householder were taking out a mortgage with the help of life insurance. Except that looking into these quiet yellow eyes I remembered the beautiful fish.

'I understand,' he said considerately. 'People tell me that your time is very short, and very limited. I wish I could be of some further use. That's why I hoped you might come to see me.'

He had the manner of a bargainer and I tried mentally to put a price on his information – if he had any, and if it would lead me to Kuo. But there were the imponderables: even if I found Kuo it wasn't certain that I could stop him from making his kill. How much would the Bureau go to, with the life of the Person in hazard?

There was no time for bargaining. They'd have to pay what it said on the ticket.

'Let's use short words, Pangsapa. You wanted to see me and I'm here.'

He nodded. 'Very well. I'll be brief. First, I've no information for you. I don't know where he is. But I would like to help you find him before it's too late. That might expose me – or friends whom I cherish – to some danger.' He got up from his desk and looked from the big low window. The shadow of a crane swung across him. I believed him to be genuinely interested in the loading of his shipment and I cursed him for not being as interested in Kuo. 'You see,' he said without turning from the window, 'I don't know much about you, Mr Quiller. I don't know how dangerous your work is, or to what degree I and my friends would share your dangers if we took' – he swung his head and looked straight at me – 'exceptional measures to help you.'

I said: 'It's no go. I'm on a mission – you know that. And you know what it is. There's nothing I can add.'

His wistful smile appeared. 'If you want me to help you find this man it would be natural for me to ask you more about your mission. After all, they are practically the same thing. But I won't press you. Just tell me about yourself, as distinct from your present work.'

I leaned forward and cupped my face in my hands. The light from the big window burned my eyes.

'Particularize,' I said.

I heard him sitting down again.

'Are all your missions dangerous, Mr Quiller?'

'I'd be safer in bed.' It was all my subconscious could think about. Sleep.

'Do you always work in an official capacity?'

'There's an office behind my work, just as there's an office behind the work of shipping snow.' A bit impolite. To hell. He had no bloody information.

'Does the Government reward you sufficiently for the dangers you're asked to face?'

God knows I'd asked him to use short words but this was getting basic. I said:

'Make me an offer, and tell me for what.' I emerged from my hands because I needed to watch him now.

'You mustn't misunderstand me,' he said quickly. 'It's so difficult, you see, having to put my questions without any concession to subtlety. It makes them seem so crude. The Occidental can do it, and it has its advantages – it must save so much time at the conference tables. But "short words" are difficult currency east of :he Mediterranean, so you must forgive me.' With what seemed an effort to be accommodating he leaned toward me and said: 'I'll put all my questions into one. What is your status?'

'In London?' I didn't like his drift but the only alternative to following it was to shut up and I had to find Kuo and Pangsapa might work the trick. Tomorrow was the last day. 'You mean how important am I to the Government?'

That would be a way of putting it, yes.'

Maybe he was just bargaining, wanting to know how much I could call on. The last time I had been good for fifty thousand baht.

I said: 'You've heard of Abel?'

'I have.'

'Lonsdale?'

'I have.'

'I'd say I'm about their weight.'

He nodded slowly. Thank you. You see, I like working with big people. I can do more for them and they can do more for me.'

I got up, annoyed with him. It was quite simple. He had impressive information sources and his network had told him that I was up against it and having a bad time trying to find Kuo, so he'd got me along to question me and assess the price. There was nothing wrong with bargaining: a value has to be set on goods. I was annoyed with him only because the deadline was so appallingly close and money wasn't important. Maybe that was because the Bureau was going to fork out, not me.

'All right, Pangsapa. If you can give me a lead on Kuo before noon tomorrow what's it going to cost?'

He came round the desk and stood as close to me as any Oriental will ever stand to his companion.

'Nothing.'

He was known to be a man who would do anything for money, unless Loman's dossier on him was duff. I asked:

'With how many noughts?'

He really took my little indiscretions remarkably well. 'You may put it down to what you called my "undying love for the monarchy" if you wish. I will tell you simply that although I have no information at present on the whereabouts of this man I will make every effort to help you find him. I may not be lucky, but I will try. And if I succeed it will cost you nothing.'

He opened the door for me and we stood on the timber balcony overlooking the dockside where the crane was still swinging. There was no point in asking him to explain and I was too jaded to worry the thing so I just said, 'You can always contact me through Loman.'

I went down the steps.

The heat was worse now. The sun was turning the city to brass and it burned under the haze. The Toyota had become an oven because I couldn't always park in the shade.

That day I worked nineteen hours and I drew blank. There was no word from Pangsapa.

The next morning I tried to contact Loman by telephone at three places – his hotel, the British Embassy, and the safehouse – and had no luck. So it was at twelve noon when we met in Soi Suek 3 according to routine.

He looked knotted up with nerves and didn't even ask for my report, going straight into one of his toneless monologues:

'We held an emergency conference two hours ago in Room 6. It has now been agreed to signal London and add a recommendation that the Minister himself should be informed of the Kuo situation. The risk is quite unimaginable if we leave it any longer than--'

'I've found him,' I said.

I hadn't had time to question what had happened. It's always dangerous, on a mission, not to have time to think.

But the morning was mine. Within an hour of putting the Toyota through the routine travel pattern I saw one of the Kuo cell coming out of the gunsmith's in New Road. It had been bound to happen: the only question was how long it would take. I had told Loman that much. Because you can't spend twenty hours a day, day after day, combing a town for a man without finding him in the end, unless he has holed up permanently. I knew that Kuo couldn't hole up permanently because he had work to do and it was work that must take him into the open.

For eight days I had been following the established Kuo pattern and keeping watch on every single place where he had ever shown himself. The entire pattern had been committed to my memory, beginning with his points of call that I had checked in the few hours after losing him in the Lotus Bar – Low Flora ties Nick by thongs angrily to emigrate… Lotus Bar, Residence Florale, Thai Room, Nick's No. I, Sbai-thong, Shangrilla, Emerald Gate… There were some thirty-odd places and I had mentally listed them in descending order of priority. At the top of that list was the Temple-Link Road sector. My instincts homed strongly on that area and I knew why. The Maltz psycho-cybernetic mechanism kept sending me back there. There was also a second reason.

The man in the Kuo cell had a taxi waiting for him near the gunsmith's and I put a tag on him that it was impossible for him to flush, simply because I couldn't afford to let him go. At noon I would have to report to Loman and this was the day of the deadline.

I think I had never tagged a man so mercilessly well. He never knew I was there. He led me straight to an apartment block on the river side of the city and I was still there at the curb in the Toyota half an hour later when Kuo came out with his two bodyguards and got into a car. He got in first and the two men handed him, very carefully, a roll of gold cloth.

The temptation to throw blind was strong: to hang back and let them go, remove all risk of their sensing me; to take the series of short cuts that would get me there before them and give me time to climb the stairs of the Botanical Museum. But there was a greater risk: that they were going somewhere else, somewhere I didn't know about.

In the end it was a compromise. After ten minutes the Kuo driver sensed me and began square turns, block after block, playing the lights on the amber and using his speed through Lumpini Park. It was no go. He would never lead me anywhere useful now that he knew I was there in his mirror. Kuo would order him to keep on driving until he flushed me, however long it took.

So I dropped back, putting up a fair show of being balked by the traffic at the angle of Sukumvit and Rama IV and making a couple of feints and turning back up Sukumvit into Dheb Prasit Lane and into Rama IV and speeding up dead straight and due west toward Lumpini, working on a seventy-thirty chance. It was all I had.

They didn't come into the mirror. The Botanical Museum was in the Link Road area and I left the Toyota in the driveway and took the field glasses with me.

At the Museum there is a staircase at one side with a small window on each landing. I had been there more than once in the last eight days, going up to the reading room on the top floor so that the girl at the desk in the main hall wouldn't hear my footsteps halt at the third landing and wonder why (the place echoed a lot), then coming quietly down to the small window that overlooked the Phra Chula Chedi, the temple on the Link Road.

They came within minutes. I focused the Jupiters.

One of them – not Kuo – got out of the car and went through the temple gardens, coming back with a man in a yellow robe, a priest. He leaned at the window of the car; in the 8 x 60 lens I could see his lips moving. Then he straightened up and they handed him the roll of gold cloth. He carried it with reverence through the temple gardens and the car drove away.

I am not easily moved to repugnance, but it was the ritual that was so ugly, the ritual.