The Kobra Manifesto

Chapter Six: TARGET

She was practising arpeggios.

The heavy lace curtains were half drawn and the light in die room was muted, softening the reflections in the lid of the piano.

I watched her hands. She was only a child, and having trouble with her right thumb, passing it under with a little jerk and using her arm to support the movement. Several times she gave up and sat perfectly still, gazing in front of her with her pale ivory face composed and her eyes quiet. A painter would have run for his brushes, though I could believe chat if I hadn't been in the room she would have sworn aloud each tune she stopped playing.

I was putting her off, I said.

No, not at all.

We spoke Italian.

I was only here for a moment, I told her.

She didn't blame me, she said with a wistful smile.

Then she began again, trying to get her thumb ready so that it didn't jerk. I sat listening until Rumori came in.

He was dark and thin with eyes that moved restlessly in the shadows of 'his brows, as if he were all the time half-listening to some distant drummer, 'Mr Wexford,' he said.

We spoke English.

'Europress.'

He nodded absently, taking me into the hall, where an immense lantern hung from the ceiling, its coloured-glass pendants smouldering under a film of dust. The silk walls were torn here and there, and the plaster showed through: the Piazza Piccola was an area of crumbling villas where people tended to move in and out a lot as the rents went up; and the moving men were indifferent 'She's making progress,' I said.

'You think so?'

He stooped towards the door of the music room, listening.

'Perhaps not,' he said, and turned away. There was an appointment book on the gilt console and he ran a long delicate finger down the page.

'You were to come for a lesson,' he said, 'on the Ninth.'

The Seventh, surely.' I went to look at the book.

'In a series of twelve lessons,' he said reluctantly, 'I shall need you here at least twice a week.' He turned again and led me to the stairs and I followed him up.

Code introduction for the period Eighth to Fourteenth was any number at random, with an answering sequence of two below and three above, in this case 9-7-12. I'd only seen him once before, nearly four years ago, and remembered him as a larger man. I suppose you can't feel as mournful as that without losing weight.

The bandage was too bloody tight round my arm, and my hand felt numb. I decided to ask him to help me re-tie the thing before I left here. They'd done a reasonable job at the clinic but the nurse had been a real bitch and I'd finally got out of the place at dawn this morning, down the fire escape: they'd kept me for more than five hours and wanted to make a lot of tests because there'd been a head injury and they weren't satisfied with the reflex response. Good at their job, I'm not saying they weren't: it was just that I was so bloody annoyed about the Fogel thing that I wanted some action to drain off some of the adrenalin.

At the first landing Rumori looked at me attentively for a moment.

'You are feeling well?'

'Fantastic,' I said.

He'd been ahead of me on the stairs but he'd noticed me stop, halfway up: his thoughts weren't so far away as he liked people to think. It was the result of long habit: he'd been our agent-in-place for seven years and Macklin said this was the safest house in southern Europe.

'If you need anything…' he murmured, and we began on the next staircase.

He'd almost certainly seen the report in the press: they'd held over some space for this one because it wasn't often they lost a 747 on the ground because some maniac blew it up with a fuel tanker. The Italian police were playing it close to the chest: a person whose identity had not yet been revealed had caused an accident on the tarmac, killing four members of the maintenance crew and a freight loader. The 747 was totally gutted. A British journalist, as yet unnamed, had driven his automobile through the flames and hit a maintenance trolley a hundred yards away on the far side without having caught fire. He had been dragged to safety by the emergency crews. Unfortunately it was impossible to reach the occupant of the other car, since it was hi the heart of the conflagration.

No mention of the carabinieri, or the chase, or the exchange of shots.

Rome, like Marseille and other focal points, is a centre for every major intelligence network including Africa, South America and Japan. The Italian police knew who the occupant of the burned-out Alfa-Romeo had been, and so did the monitoring sections of every major intelligence network. The Italian police were very interested in the British journalist but I'd given them the Interpol routine and they'd called Paris and then asked me a lot of questions and got a lot of answers that didn't tell them very much and finally called off the two men they'd stationed outside the door of my ward. The third one had tagged me from the hospital as far as the nearest intersection, where I'd got rid of him for the sake of practice.

The thing was that the intelligence networks would also be very interested in the British journalist. They hadn't asked any questions yet but if they could get hold of me they certainly would. London would have got the story through Fitzalan right away, and the Bureau's sleeper agents in Rome would have been alerted. Emilio Rumori had got it direct on the air from London or from Fitzalan, long before he saw the newspapers. Fitzalan had rung me at the hospital twice in the name of Jones, asking for news of my progress. He'd been hanging around the out-patients department when I'd gone down there to see if I could get away, so he knew I was back on my feet and presumably he'd cleared the area because I was hot and if anything happened to me he wouldn't be involved.

That nurse had been such 'a bitch that I finally had to bribe one of the cleaners to get my clothes back for me so that I could do the fire-escape thing. They were in a pretty bad condition because I'd been dragged out of the Fiat and there'd been a lot of fire-foam about, and I had to re-kit in a man's shop and pick up another suitcase, real pigskin because I liked the look of it and because I was so bloody upset about blowing the Fogel assignment that I thought I'd pass on some of the angst to those withered old crones in Accounts.'

All I hadn't replaced was the razor with the fancy modifications and I didn't imagine Rumori kept things like that around. If I came across any locks that needed blowing I'd have to do it the hard way and go in shoulder-first.

I stopped again, near the top of the second flight of stairs. The whole thing was reeling and I held on to the banister and waited, you should take it easy for a couple of weeks, the specialist had told me, the banister rail tilting up and down under my hand, Rumori's pale ivory face looking at me from above, his deep eyes lost in shadow, take it easy, the roar of the flames again and the wail of the sirens.

'- right?' His voice coming and going.

'Perfectly,' I said, and began climbing again, one ankle weak and the shoe supping a bit on the edge of the stair, come on for Christ's sake, put some bloody effort into it, watching me carefully with his pale ivory face.

'You can rest here, of course. Nobody would disturb you.'

'Some other time.'

He watched me for a bit longer and then took me across the high-ceilinged landing to the small room at the end, where there were two ceramic cherubs above the door, one of them with an arm broken off. A fly buzzed against the coloured-glass skylight. He stood perfectly still for a moment with his head inclined and his eyes half-closed, listening to the uncertain run of notes from the music-room below. Then he straightened up with a slight sigh and unlocked the door of the room with a large iron key and led me inside.

This was the lumber room, full of Florentine stools and chipped porcelain lamps with their shades at all angles and the parchment torn away. A huge bronze lion on a marble base was wedged between a console and a hand-painted urn, and they were obviously on some kind of base because he twisted the lion's head and swung the whole thing round, sitting on the stool that was part of the base and nicking a switch.

'Q-15,' I told him.

'Yes,' he said, 'I know.' He began fiddling with the set until he got the station identification bleep sorted out from the squelch. After a minute he got a successful series of nines in three blocks and told mem I was waiting. It was now close on 10:00 hours in London and it was just conceivable that Egerton was sitting in at Signals: his standard practice when there was something big breaking was to stay with it until, three or four in the morning and then come in again about noon, but the Rome objective was dead and standard practice might no longer apply.

999 — 999–999.

Rumori leaned over the set, shifting the band-spread and watching the carrier needle to get the signal as pure as he could. All they were doing at the moment was keeping us open with the mission identity sequence: 9 was for Kobra.

Egerton had possibly told them to call him in if they got anything from Rome, but they wouldn't wait until he'd driven all the way to Whitehall from his place in Richmond: they'd only keep us hanging around if he were already in his office.

The arpeggios come faintly from below, both hands now.

999 — 000–000.

Control at console.

Perched on the packing case with his long legs dangling and his eyes wandering vaguely around the room. He is one of the few directors who sit in at Signals and respond at only one remove: through the scramble encoder. The others use their yellow telephones and demand memoranda in duplicate, according to the rules. Egerton doesn't do it for the benefit of his executives in the field: it's just that underneath his remote and donnish appearance he runs at very high voltage and likes to be close to the action. As a spin-off advantage his executives feel more comfortable because the exchange is a lot faster and we know there won't be any confusion, send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance, so forth.

2829–7476–0198…

Rumori cleared his throat and glanced round at me to see if I looked all right. I nodded and we began reading the signals as they came off the integral unscrambler. The voice we were listening to wasn't Egerton's because he didn't have the skill or experience to choose fast abbreviations and pick out routine phrase patterns to suit the messages, but some of Egerton's personal signature was coming through and I could tell he was worried.

There was another thing I noticed.

8387–9817 — 9166

An encapsulated summary of the info they'd received from Fitzalan. Then they asked me to talk and it didn't take me long: I hadn't been able to identify Heinrich Fogel with absolute certainty in visual terms but yes it was his face as I remembered it and yes the cranial scar was there. From the way he got clear of the airport I had recognized his thought patterns and I would go further towards identification on that score. Message ends.

Wanted to know if I required further medical treatment, whether I would ask to withdraw on physical grounds, whether I felt the Rome phase was terminally abortive, so forth.

No, no and no.

Then Egerton began talking again through his signaller and I began listening a little harder because the other tiling I'd noticed was the tone of his phrases: he was diffident ('would the executive feel prepared'), persuasive ('assuming a developing potential for the mission') and specious ('the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy').

These windy phrases had been designed by their lordships in Admin, but most of them had been chosen so that their initial letters could be transferred straight into numerals and shot through the scrambler at high speed. At the receiving end we habitually decode into the original phrases but what Egerton was telling me now was that he was desperate for me to remain in action because he was lining up something very big for me.

The specious bit was typical of Egerton. At this stage I could honourably tell London that there was nothing else to do out here and they hadn't got a mission assembled for me yet so I wanted to come in and do something more interesting. But the brief signal 7372 — the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy — is normally used when there's a wheel coming off in a shut-ended situation and the poor bastard can either get out or get killed. Egerton had thrown me the 7372 as a sly attempt to persuade me by an obvious association of ideas: if I'd got cold feet at this stage he was willing to replace me.

For a brilliant man he can be sometimes naive: he knew damned well I could see through that signal. But naivete is emotional, gut-think and not brain-think, and the thing that came through so clearly was that he was desperate to keep me running. Desperation, too, is emotional.

'Oh Christ,' I said softly, 'that bloody Egg.'

Emilio Rumori half-turned his head, 'Excuse me?'

'Don't send that,' I said.

But you can come full circle, you know.

Listen: if I did come in because there was nothing to do in Rome and there wasn't a mission lined up for me, I could never be certain that London believed those were my reasons. They'd be justified in believing that when you've been shot at and gone through a tanker explosion and come out with head injuries you're liable to get cold feet.

My feet can get as cold as the next man's. I'm in this trade to prove myself. I'm frightened of pushing things to the point where they might blow up, so I push things to the point where they might blow up, to prove I'm not frightened.

Egerton knows this and this was what he was working on and the whole thing was coming full circle: maybe he wasn't so naive. Maybe this was pure brain-think: he knew the one thing that could persuade me to stay in the field — an implication of cold feet. And to a certain degree it could even have some truth in it because that craven little organism was still making its voice heard in the dark roaring of the aftershock that was keeping one hand on the banisters: it didn't want any more tankers on fire; it wanted to go home now.

I said to Rumori:

'Tell them I'll stay in the field.'

'Yes.'

'Ask for directives.'

'Yes.'

He selected 938 and 635: Executive prepared to continue mission. Please brief as fully as possible. It wasn't accurate because we hadn't got a mission yet and a — full briefing is only possible with a director in the field, but Rumori had picked the two phrases with almost no hesitation and got them through and the saving of time was vital. The whole idea of this method of sending is that you can put through quite a lot of information before the opposition starts getting on to you with a mobile D/Fing unit. There might not be a unit within miles but we always assume it's next door and for this reason the communication between two first-class signallers resembles championship table tennis: the ball seems to vanish because it's going so fast.

276 — 412 — 398

Routine stuff: Proceed solo — prepare to rdv — report arrival.

Then they said where.

Cambodia.

'Get it again,' I said.

He asked for a repeat. You can't make a phrase out of a place name, so they'd sent Kmbdia. Now they put it in full: 26358193.

'Are you reading?' Rumori asked me. His narrow dark head had been turned to look at me because I was sitting on the floor now with my eyes half closed.

'Yes.'

They stayed on the air for another six or seven seconds and he only asked for two repeats. Contact was to be made at the British Embassy with the second cultural attache and I was to retain my cover: I would be in Phnom Penh to liaise with a Berlin correspondent of Europress in an attempt to get the final stories from wealthy merchants fleeing the capital. By the phrasing I suspected that the Berlin correspondent of Europress was probably a replacement for Heinrich Fogel, because Europress doesn't actually exist and this presented the man as a shadow figure and the only shadow figure around would be in the opposition: I was proceeding solo and wouldn't have a local director. But reading between the lines of a signal exchange that's taking place in one-second flashes can be difficult and I shut my eyes and let it go.

Of course there was a lot of data that didn't appear in the stream of coded digits: it looked as if Heinrich Fogel was being replaced within hours of his death and it looked as if he'd been feinting his travel pattern by landing in Rome because the two places were a hell of a distance apart, considering the Kobra people were assumed to be zeroing in for a rendezvous. Further indications: Kobra now realised their operation was being surveyed (by the unnamed journalist in the Italian press) and might even be penetrated, but they weren't intending to call the whole thing off and go to ground and come up somewhere else. London wouldn't send me to Cambodia unless they had a strong lead, because Egerton was running this one and he didn't like shifting his executives around lime pawns. He was sitting there in Signals with the pattern spread out on the board as far as it was known: he was pouncing and missing and he'd pounced on Rome and missed Fogel and now he was pouncing on Phnom Penh and with luck I'd make a hit.

'Shut down?' Rumori asked me.

'Yes.'

Q — 15 — 000

He cut the switch and swung the tableau of bric-a-brac into place and got off the stool and stood looking down at me with his head on one side.

'You need medical attention,' he said reflectively. 'We have the services of a highly-'

'It's delayed shock, that's all. But you can get me some air tickers.' Phnom Pehn would be like a beehive someone had kicked over and the last scheduled airliners had stopped operating five days ago. 'Get me as close as you can, all right? Then I'll try cadging a lift on a U.S. Air Force chopper or whatever's available.'

'It will be very difficult,' Rumori shrugged.

'It'll be close to bloody impossible, but I've got to get in there. You heard what London said.'

A storm of dust whirled up, blotting out most of the airport building at Pochentong, and the pilot left the rotor spinning as the doors were thrown open.

'Whaddya want to come back here for, buddy?'

He sat loosely at the controls, a cigar jutting out of his stubbled face and his eyes red from fatigue as the armed escorts began dropping through the doorways.

'I'm here to get a story,' I called back above the noise.

'That right? Listen' — he poked a thick gloved finger at me — 'there's only one story about this goddamn place. we're gettin' out, and we shoulda stayed, okay? Tell 'em that from me!'

I nodded and someone gave a yell and we all crouched, waiting. Dirt flew up fifty yards away and the debris pattered across the windscreen of the helicopter. They said the airport had been under mortar fire for the past five days, and as I dropped through one of the doorways I saw a big 3-130 standing keeled over near the end of the runway with its tail blown off. The Communists had pushed a unit within a mile and a half of Pochentong and I could feel a series of thumps under my feet as the mortars kept up their fire.

'Okay, let's get goin'!' a man yelled and we spread out as we ran through the dust, half-blinded. Dirt fountained again on our left as the transport vehicles started from the main building towards the helicopter, packed with refugees. A line of US Marines were strung out towards the road, holding back a crowd of Vietnamese civilians; and blobs began darkening in the sky as the next wave of choppers came in from the carriers lying off the coast. Somewhere a siren was screaming an alert, as if no one could hear the mortars or see the earth flying up.

A military jeep was making a close turn on the tarmac with a bunch of Europeans clinging on, so I grabbed one of the hand-grips and got some kind of a purchase as it gunned up and headed for the roadway past the line of Marines.

'Where's this thing going?'

The US Embassy!' someone shouted back.

I got a better grip and hooked one leg inside and relaxed and felt the throbbing in my head take on a slower rhythm. Maybe there'd be time to get a rest, somewhere along the line: at the moment I wasn't physically mission-ready and if London threw me anything serious to do I didn't know how I was going to do it.

The British Embassy wasn't far from where the jeep dropped me off, and I walked there in the hot sun with my jacket sticking to my back and the glare of the sky in my eyes, trying to think of even one good reason for an international terrorist being holed up in this place on his way to the Kobra rendezvous. One possible answer could be that he wasn't in fact an international terrorist: he could be any kind of contact with connections London wanted me to use. His cover was Europress but he wasn't on the Bureau staff because they would have told me, and if he were in fact a Berlin correspondent for anyone there were possible links with Heinrich Fogel and Baader-Meinhof.

I went through the doors of the embassy, 'Are you looking for HE?'

'No,' I said.

The thin youth turned away and said to the girl at the reception desk: 'Then who was looking for HE?'

'Pretty well everyone,' she said, tucking a curl in. 'He's at lunch anyway, so you won't get near him.' She turned to me with a direct stare and said: 'Can I help you?'

'I'd like to see the second cultural attache.' I dropped my Europress card on her desk but she didn't look at it 'Have you been hit?'

'No. I always look like this.' I was getting fed up.

She gave a sudden bright laugh and ducked and waited, looking away from me. Something like a wall went down, not The US Embassy still is,' he said, 'obviously.' One of the files hit the floor and he picked it up, turning it the right way round. 'We got all our people out five days ago,'

The phone rang and he jumped slightly.

'No,' he said into it. 'I can't. Not now.' He put it down.

'Is your cypher room still manned?' I asked him.

He looked at me quickly, 'The telex is open, if that's what you mean.'

'No,' I said, 'I don't.'

He considered this, half-listening to the mortars and perhaps wondering if there was going to be a plane left to take him out. I was getting a bit annoyed because this contact had been lined up for me by Control and he didn't seem to know what the situation was. The telex was no use to me: I had to get into signals because one of the routine directives received in Rome was to report my arrival in Phnom Penh.

'You're the second cultural attache, is that correct?'

'Yes.' He tried to concentrate. 'Have you got a passport I can see?'

I showed it to him and he gave it a quick glance and said: 'Fair enough. Sorry, but things have been a bit confusing here for the last few weeks. Mind telling me the name of your editor?'

'Frank Wainwright.'

He nodded, swinging the case off the desk and dumping it into a corner. 'I'll take you along.'

The cypher room was at the end of the passage on the floor at the top of the building, where all embassy cypher rooms are if they're located with an eye on security.

Chepstow introduced me to the man at the console and said he'd vouch for me, though he didn't sound too certain. The man gave me a stuffy look and said he couldn't send anything for the press, and I told him the station and asked him to do it through Crowborough. He went rather shut-faced because the station I'd given him was number three in the secret log and I doubt if he'd ever made contact before.

'When you're ready,' he said.

The thing was an ordinary diplomatic wireless and hadn't got a scrambler so we used speech-code while the second cultural attache stood listening near the window, sometimes turning round and then turning back.

As soon as London came in I reported arrival and asked for directives. There was an awful lot of static, partly because of aircraft movement; and someone was trying to jam us but not very successfully: Crowborough was seven-tenths audible and we didn't talk for long because London didn't have anything new for me. I was to survey and report on the objective until the situation was critical and I had to leave the city. The key contact was still the second cultural attache. I thought of questioning this because Chepstow didn't seem as if he could help me much, but that was possibly because he wasn't sure of me yet, and the fact that I was in signals with the number three station on the secret log should give him a lot more confidence than a passport.

'Any repeats?' the man at the console asked me.

'No.'

'Addenda?'

'No.'

'Shut down?'

'Yes.'

Chepstow came away from the window, still stooping a little and with his hands dug into his pockets. Possibly he'd banged his head on some of the doorways here in the native quarter. I couldn't make out his attitude and it worried me: he seemed too abstracted to take more than a half interest hi anything that was going on around him. He seemed to be waiting for something.

'Was that satisfactory?'

'Mustn't grumble,' I said.

'I'm going off duty now. Want to have a coffee with me?'

'All right.'

The mortars had stopped by the time we were out in die street, and he looked around him with a certain pleasure, as you do when you realize the rain has stopped.

'About time,' he said, and took me across to a battered little Hillman with some sticking plaster across the rear window and one front tyre almost flat. 'Can't get anyone to repair it,' he said in lost tones, 'so I have to keep putting more air in. Look at these blisters — ' he showed me his palm. 'One of those hand pumps, you know the kind? Spare's flat too, but I didn't know till I looked at it.'

We turned into a courtyard where a few other cars were parked at all angles, as if it didn't matter any more. This poor old thing's only got to last me a few more hours anyway, with a bit of luck. That goes for the whole city, as you can see for yourself — whole place is on its way out'

There were some small bamboo tables under the fan-palms, with half a dozen people sitting there over coffee. Most of the conversation I could hear was in French. Chepstow nodded to a huge man with a tiny glass of cognac in front of him.

'Still here, Francois?'

'Not for long, mon ami!'

He raised the little glass to us.

They've got Turkish,' Chepstow told me. 'You like it?'

I said I did.

'Black as sin,' he nodded with a wan smile, 'about the only good thing left in this bloody dump.'

He didn't talk again until the coffee was brought 'All right — this chap Stern,' he said.

'Who?'

'Erich Stern.' His tall body drooped over the coffee cup. There's a «von» in it somewhere, big deal. Anyway, he's your man. That's what you came to me for, isn't it? I mean, to get all the information you can on him?'

I said it was.

'Right' He looked around him again, at the balconies that vanished and reappeared among the palm trees. I was beginning to get a fix on his attitude: Phnom Penh was a place that meant something to him, and he was losing it Worse still, he was having to watch it die before he left. This could explain my impression that he was waiting for something: he was waiting for this place to become nothing.

Three American ambulances went past the courtyard and left dust drifting across our table in the sunshine. Chepstow raised his head to watch them and then looked down again.

'I'm on a plane out,' he said conversationally, first thing in the morning. If there is one.' He sipped his coffee, but it was too hot 'How are you getting out, Wexford?'

'I haven't made any arrangements.'

He gave a weak laugh and stared at me.' Then you'd better make some, hadn't you? ''

'Tell me about Stern,' I said.

He shrugged his thin shoulders. 'All right. You can find him at the Royal Cambodian Hotel. Just ask for him. He doesn't see people by appointment — you have to get in the queue.'

'What does he do?'

He looked up, surprised again. 'Don't you know? He's selling visas. Five thousand US dollars a go, minimum. He got seven members of the government on to a plane when the panic first started, then he took on industrialists and the odd prince or two, anyone with enough cash.'

'Is he alone?'

He frowned. 'How d'you, mean, alone?'

'Never mind.'

Another shrug. The best way in for you,' he said, 'is to tell him you want to get a girl out. A local girl, of course. You want me to go with you?'

'I don't know, yet.'

The leaves of the palms stirred to a breath of wind, and their shadows moved across the bamboo table.

'The best thing,' he said reflectively, 'is for me to point him out to you, from a distance. Don't you think?'

'I don't know.' I was getting fed up because he hadn't been trained to give information and he'd only got half his mind on it anyway. 'Listen, give me a few facts, will you? When did Stern arrive in Phnom Penh? Was he alone when he arrived? Did he have any contacts here? Let me have everything you've got.'

'Do my best,' he said.

He lifted his cup to take another sip, and that was what I remember particularly: the way the way the cup stayed in the air for an instant as his skull shattered and he pitched back with his legs flying up and one foot kicking the table over.