The Kobra Manifesto

Chapter Seven: KEY

The ambassador was on the telephone when the girl took me in.

That is not my concern, Colonel. One of my staff has been brutally murdered and I demand a full and immediate enquiry.'

The young man Who'd been complaining about the lack of tin hats came in with a bundle of letters and stood listening.

'Full and immediate, regardless of other considerations.'

'Have you got any money left here?' I asked the girl.

'Money?' she asked vaguely. Her face was white.

'I want five thousand riels in cash, for traveller's cheques.'

'The best of luck,' she said.

'Thank you, Colonel.'

The ambassador dropped the receiver and looked up.

'What the devil can they do? One foreigner gets killed in the middle of a minor war. Who's this man?'

'Wexford,' I said, 'correspondent for Europress. For your-'

'Keep all journalists out of here,' the ambassador told the girl, 'until I change the instructions.'

'For your information,' I said, 'the bullet was fired from the block of apartments called Les Palmiers, at the rear of the restaurant.'

He began looking at me with more attention.

'How do you know?'

'I was there.'

He went on studying me, a short grey-haired man with crooked white teeth and slight blood-pressure. By the look of his eyes I could believe he'd been working twenty-four hours without a break.

'Is that blood on your clothes?' he asked me.

'Probably. I haven't had time to look. I came here to-'

'What do you mean, you were there!'

He got up from behind his desk and came close to me and stared at me with his eyes screwed up in fatigue and suspicion and frustration. 'What else do you know about this?'

'Nothing.'

'Is that his blood?'

'Probably. It's not mine.'

I heard toe girl say oh God, very softly.

'If you have any more information, Welford, I shall ask — '

'Wexford, and listen. I've given you all I know. Now I want something from you: five thousand riels in cash, for t.c.s, and a message for BL-565 Extension 9. You can add it on to the one you're sending on the subject of Chepstow.'

I tried to think of anything else I wanted from him but there were mental blocks forming because I'd got out of that courtyard very fast and gone to ground and surveyed the block of apartments corridor by corridor in the hope of locating the sniper before I'd drawn blank and got a lift from a street-cleaning lorry crammed with refugees on their way to the airport, The mental blocks were forming because of other things too: mostly the need to reassess the situation in the light of what had happened. There were a lot of things I didn't know and would have to find out but the thing I knew for certain was that London had manoeuvred me into the Kobra mission and set me running and it hadn't been done with a directive: it had been done with a bullet.

When they'd killed Harrison in Milan he'd been alone and when they'd killed Hunter in Geneva he'd been alone but when they'd killed Chepstow I'd been there and for the first time Control had a senior executive in the field to take over. Egerton had been pushing me into one phase after another, trying to connect me with the action before I got bored and took on a mission for Parkis or Mildmay or Sargent instead, and it hadn't worked in Istres and it hadn't worked in Rome but it had worked in Phnom Penh and I had an immediate objective: Erich Stern.

Kobra was mine now, exclusive.

'Who the hell are you?' the ambassador asked.

'It doesn't matter who I am,' I told him. 'All you need to know is why you should give me assistance. Tell your wireless operator to put through a special facilities request to BL-565 Extension 9, and you'll get the point.'

There was a distilled-water dispenser in the corner of the room and I went over and filled one of the.waxed cups and drank, shutting my eyes for a moment and trying to forget. He'd looked surprised, in the instant before he was hit, but at the time I didn't understand. Conceivably he'd seen the bloody thing hi the last few yards of its travel, the sun shining on it and its configuration growing larger with the passing of each microsecond. Just a look of surprise-not fear or anything. Perhaps he'd thought it was a bee.

I supposed they'd cable her: the pretty girl in the twin-set with the sun in her eyes.

'I imagine you know,' I said as I dumped the cup, 'what that particular station is?'

'I don't happen to work in the cypher room, Mr Wexford.'

He was still standing bolt upright in the middle of the office, perhaps wondering if he could get me arrested for anything.

'Good point,' I said. 'For your information it's the secret log designation for No. 10 Downing Street and the special facilities request I'm making will go direct to the Prime Minister's secretary. For Christ's sake,' I said reasonably, 'I'm not asking for troops or a destroyer or anything, so let's get it over with, shall we?'

He stood there for another five seconds and then went back to his desk.

'You intelligence people are a damned nuisance,' he said and picked up the intercom phone. 'Give me mat number again — the signals number.'

So I gave it to him and he got on to the cypher room and I waited till he'd told the operator what was wanted, then. I said: Tell them they can get a message through to Q-15, Asian theatre, till you shut this place up and go. With your permission, of course.'

He began talking into the phone again.

'Who was it?' the girl asked me.

'What?'

'Who shot Brian?'

'I don't know.'

She was staring at me, through me, with her eyes like ice.

'Jesus Christ,' she said, and her voice faltered, 'I'd give a lot to find out.' She turned away suddenly and went back into the hall and I heard her sobbing out all the four-letter words she could think of, as quietly as she could. Then I remembered that people can look a lot different in photographs, especially if the sun's in their eyes.

'As soon as you can,' the ambassador said, and put down the phone, pinching the bridge of his nose. 'I shouldn't think we've got five thousand,' he said, 'or anything like it. We'll need some for ourselves, to bribe our way through difficulties, if I know anything about it.' He got up and took the portrait of the Queen and Philip off the wall and began fiddling with the knobs on the safe. 'Poor little devil. If you know anything else about this terrible affair, I think it's your duty to tell me.'

'Nothing else. Nothing at all.'

He swung the door of the safe open and turned to look at me for a moment, his eyes weary.

'I suppose he was mixed up in some sort of intelligence work too, was he? That's why they — ' he shrugged with one hand, and didn't finish.

'It'll be easier all round,' I said, 'if he's remembered as the second cultural attache. Full stop.'

The driver shook his head and said no good, no good, so I got in and gave him five hundred dels in denominations of fifty and told him he was my driver for the rest of the day and I wanted to go to the Royal Cambodian Hotel just as fast as he could do it. It was between the US Embassy and the Presidential Palace and we had to make a detour round the evacuation zone near the Bassac River, where three or four hundred Marines were protecting the operation.

The ambassador had only been able to let me have a couple of thousand so I'd have to go easy with it. Most of the services were breaking down in the city and there didn't seem to be much of a future, so that hard cash was the only remaining key to a lot of things.

The hotel looked abandoned when we got there but I found a last-ditch skeleton staff in the foyer with a French-speaking Eurasian supervising at the desk.

'J'ai un ami chez vous — Monsieur Erich Stern. II n'est pas parti, j'espere?'

He slid a perfectly-manicured finger down the page of the register, glancing up as the sound of light bombardment began vibrating in the air, then glancing down again.

'Monsieur Stern est toujours la, m'sieur. Suite 9. Vous voulez lui telephoner, ou — '

'Plus lord. D'abord, je voudrais une chambre pour moi-meme.'

He gave me Number 91, asked about luggage, and glanced a second time at my clothes without comment. My passport said 'press correspondent' and that explained a lot of things in a place like this, including the bloodspots and the bandage on my wrist they'd given me in Rome and the fact that I wanted a room at the best hotel in Phnom Penh when most people were getting out of the place in a hurry. I'd had to leave my suitcase behind when I'd got the lift in the helicopter because the pilot had been bringing troops in and the weight was critical.

He called for a boy to take me to my room.

A different vibration was in the air and I identified it as the throb of chopper blades as a new wave came across to the airport from one of the carriers.

'Please?'

I followed the boy. The lift wasn't working because some of the power lines had been hit last evening, which explained the candles everywhere in bowls and saucers. We took the stairs and the boy gave little bows on each landing and pointed upwards again. There was a suite on each floor and that was why I'd asked for a room on the ninth: Erich Stern was the immediate objective and I was going to stay as close to him as I could; but I didn't think there was any point in trying to see him about getting a girl out of the country until I'd got a few answers worked out in my head because this place had become a red sector for me when that bullet had made a hit: the 'scope-sight must have passed across my image as the sniper had lined up his shot.

There was a certain degree of trauma still lingering, on that subject. The ideal mission is when London knows enough to brief you on the whole thing: objective, access, timing, so forth. The minute you leave Whitehall you know where you're going and you know what you've got to do and all you 'have to work out is how to do it. It doesn't often happen like that. Most of the time it breaks suddenly, and nearly always with a burst of signals from an agent-in-place or a Curtain embassy or just someone who's bust a code and exposed an operation the Bureau might want to penetrate: there isn't always time to London-brief an executive and work out his access before he's sent in. This was the kind of thing that was happening now: I was being pitched into the mission with London only one jump ahead of me at any given phase, and no director in the field. We don't mind that: it keeps us flexible; but it's dangerous because there hasn't been enough ground-work done and you can suddenly find yourself sitting in the cross-hairs of a telescopic rifle sight without even knowing it and that was why I'd hit the ground and bounced into a zig-zag run from cover to cover among the tables and the palm-trunks till I was inside the restaurant with nothing to show for it but grazed hands and the trauma that lingered in me now.

The bee could have come for me.

'One more please, yes?'

The boy pointed upwards, 'Yes.'

We climbed again.

One of the answers I had to work out concerned Chepstow. I didn't know who he was: I only knew what he'd been doing. He could have been in Liaison 9 like Steadman in Nice or he could have been nosing around for DI6 or any one of the overseas intelligence branches with or without the Bureau's knowledge. But somewhere along the one the Bureau had got a fix on him. It hadn't been done here in Phnom Penh while the forces of the Khmer Rouge were threatening the city: it had been done in London while the dustmen's strike was on. Egerton or one of the other directors had picked it up in a pub or a club or a Turkish bath: a word here, a word there, a raised eyebrow and a glance away, the talk becoming quieter and suddenly more disciplined. Erich Stern was in Phnom Penh and the second cultural attache was surveying him: was this of any use? It was. Egerton had gone to a telephone and within two minutes the signal was filed on readiness for Q-15, Rome, to be received against the distant background of arpeggios.

I knew what Chepstow had been doing but I didn't know exactly how he'd been doing it. Not very well. He'd got in their way and they didn't like it and I needed a change of clothes.

'Please.'

'How good is your English?' I asked the boy.

'Pretty good.' He put the key in the door and opened it for me. 'Pretty good English, all time speak slow, yes?'

I tried him on French and got a blank look and went back to pretty good English. 'Listen. Here is money. I pay more if you work well, understand?'

He hesitated, I think because he'd never seen five hundred riels before, all in one wad. 'Yes. Work for you.'

'Right. A man named Mr Erich Stern is staying here in Suite 9.' I made him repeat. Then I gave him the rest: not to watch Mr Stern's room too closely but to warn me at once if the gentleman looked like leaving. If I weren't in the hotel, find out where Mr Stern was going and telephone the British Embassy and ask for me, so forth. And tell no one, repeat no one, repeat no one.

Then I sent him away and took a look round Room 91 and noted doors, windows, catches, locks, extreme angles of view from each window, hazardous aspects and areas, auditory factors (pile carpet in the corridor), ballistic vulnerability (the door panels were half-inch teak, judging by weight), escape patterns. No bugs under the telephone or behind the sandal-wood plaque or in the television set or anywhere obvious. The chances of a permanent set-up in a random room of this hotel were acceptable and I ignored.

Within half an hour I'd checked the various closets, lift-shafts, and — alcoves on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors and noted five people go into Suite 9 and four come out: two Europeans, the rest Asians. None of them saw me.

Then I went down the emergency stairs at the rear of the hotel and pushed open the door on the ground floor and waited, checking the environs and checking particularly the skyline where the tops of the buildings were broken here and there by the heads of the palm trees. A sniper works from ground level only when he is certain that no obstacle will cross his line of fire, and this courtyard had vehicles parked against the walls, one of them backing out and turning for the gates.

Two further checks: one halfway across, one at the gates to the street. Blank.

The three cars parked behind the cab I was using were all empty. So were the two in front. My driver was squatting on the pavement beside his battered Citroen, making a pair of porter-thong sandals.

'Remember me?'

He got up quickly and I watched his eyes. He hadn't been got at while I was away: I would have known. Only a poker player could have kept it hidden, or a trained spook. This boy was a cab driver.

I told 'him I wanted kitting out and he took me north towards Central Market and found one of the army surplus stores that had been springing up in the past few weeks and taking anything the refugees and troops couldn't carry out of the city. To change the image I chose a para-military bush jacket and slacks with outside pockets and a sheath on the belt.

'Have you got any sunglasses?'

'Comment?'

'Lunettes fumees.'

'Par ici, m'sieur.'

Through the narrow doorway I kept my driver in view. I had to watch everyone, everything. The 'scope-sight had passed across my image and settled on Chepstow before the finger had squeezed because Chepstow had been the target and not me. The marksman had been the paid employee of a private operator or the hit-man for an intelligence cell and there'd been nothing personal involved; but he would have reported that his target had been sitting with a companion who wasn't from the embassy and who hadn't been seen before, and it was conceivable that his report would be followed up, even though it didn't sound significant: Chepstow could have had a hundred friends and acquaintances. And if the report-were followed up it could become, in the end, significant: my objective was Erich Stern and the closer I went to him the higher the risk of drawing his attention and the parallel became obvious — Chepstow had got in his way and they didn't like it, and the next time the 'scope-sight moved across my image it might well move back, and centralize.

Nothing personal but this was why I had to watch everything and everyone including the man squatting over there by his battered Citroen, making his sandals.

'Combien je vous dois?'

'Allons voir, m'sieur.'

He made the total and I paid him in cash and told him to wait for five minutes and then go across to the man with the Citroen and tell him I wanted him parked outside the Royal Cambodian Hotel, the side entrance opposite the jade emporium. Then I made my way between the rows of clothing and glass beads and sandalwood carvings and soup-kitchens and left the place by the rear entrance and walked three blocks to the cabstand I'd noted on the way up.

The sunglasses had a slight distortion in the frame and halfway to the hotel I took them off and bent one of the side-pieces, tilting them up a little and then down before I put them on again. The metalescent-grey Peugeot 404 turned off at the next intersection, taking its reflection with it. Discount.

The Citroen was already parked opposite the jade emporium when I went into the hotel by the side entrance. I passed close enough to driver to make him look up from his leather-work but he didn't recognize me and I felt a bit more comfortable.

Another tremor came from the distant 81-mm mortars and the people in the foyer froze for a moment in an impromptu tableau, and voices trailed off. I think they were listening for the actual volume of the sound, trying to tell whether the Khmer Rouge were closer now to the city. Apparently they weren't, because everyone began talking again and moving about as they'd done before: there was no particular mood of apprehension. Most of the voices were French, as they'd been at the restaurant: the man in the surplus store had told me that several hundred had decided to remain in Phnom Penh as the insurgents closed in.

The boy I'd engaged to survey Suite 9 was scraping the candle-grease from a brass tray near the stairs, looking up quickly at anyone who passed him. I kept clear of him and crossed the area in front of the desk at a fair distance, just close enough to make sure mere was no message-slip in the niche for 91: with the lift out of service I didn't want to rely on a written message being sent to the ninth floor. It could come from only one person: the boy I'd engaged.

I went out through the front entrance and round to the courtyard, using the emergency stairs. The boy was watching everyone on the main staircase very efficiently and if he saw me I doubted if he'd recognize me, any more than my driver had done; but there was a risk and I didn't want to take it. This was normal procedure and right out of basic training: five hundred dels can buy you a friend but a thousand from someone else can buy you an enemy. I'd engaged the services of two mercenaries and then changed the image and from this point I would stay clear of them unless I needed the Citroen. The bell boy could contact me indirectly, by the room telephone or through the embassy, so at this precise point in the Phnom Penh phase of the Kobra mission the state of security was one hundred per cent On the ninth floor I made another routine audio check at the door of Suite 9, noting the acrid scent of a Gauloise and the clink of a glass. There were voices but they were too low to penetrate a door this thick. A telephone rang once and was immediately answered; then the voices took up again. They were unintelligible but one was speaking in educated German: I'd heard it before, when I'd listened here on my way down the emergency stairs ninety minutes ago. I assumed it belonged to Erich Stern.

I turned away and went along to Room 91 near the end of the passage and put the key in the latch and stopped moving.

In most trades people develop a sixth sense appropriate to the work they do. In my trade we call it mission-feel. The instincts of man have become blunted and distorted by technology and habit: he will breathe carbon monoxide fumes for extensive periods in a traffic jam and accept them as normal, even though he knows they are lethally toxic in concentration; whereas a wild creature, scenting the first whiff of smoke, will run for safety. In the nervy business of active intelligence the instincts remain sharp in the almost constant presence of danger; and even in the early phases of a mission these instincts can approach the refinement found in the wild creature. The intention of the organism is to survive.

Incoming data was fairly banal as I stood at the door with the key in the lock and my fingers on the key. Visual and aural perception didn't give me anything of interest: the door was unmarked by any sign of a forced entry and the latch bore no scratches: there was no sound coming from the other side of the door. The subtler senses gave me nothing either: no vibration in the key or movement of air against my skin; no smell but the lingering scent of the Gauloise; nothing to taste.

There was only mission-feel.

Think.

Fact: if there were nothing of interest in the incoming data, it must be in the past, in the recent memory: because that was where the information existed now. In the memory. The eye had seen something; the ear had heard something; or my fingers, pushing the key into the lock, had felt something; and alarm arousal had taken place.

Remember.

Try to remember.

But it was difficult because the information had been presented so subtly that it had been barely on the conscious level.

There is an area of the eye that has no vision. But it detects movement, right at the periphery of the retina, and signals the motor nerves to turn the head and look in that direction. The ear is as sensitive, and even a microscopic shift of the eardrum will be recorded consciously: when the basilar membrane shifts through a distance of less than one hydrogen molecule a tonal sensation results. But other sights and other sounds, being grosser, overlay these refined experiences: the light in the window at the end of this corridor; the vibration of the mortars in the distance.

I turned my head slowly to the right, then to the left, remembering the flight of the bee. There was nothing, no one.

I left my fingers where they were: on the key.

Changes were taking place in the organism: the pituitary gland was being stimulated hypothalamically, promoting the release of adreno-corticotrophin; these and other sympathetic physiological changes were preparing to protect the organism against the effects of stressors.

The intention was to survive.

Consider possibility of psychological imbalance: I'd been with him when the thing had smashed his head open and it had been a shock and the shock still lingered and I might be standing here in front of this door in a dead funk because the nerves were still on edge and if that were the case then I'd better get a grip on myself and turn this bloody key and go in there.

Don't.

Wait.

Think.

Fact: shock doesn't induce hallucinations. I hadn't imagined anything. I hadn't seen anything or heard anything that wasn't there.

Touched anything?

The key.

My fingers were still on the key and I left them there because I didn't want to move. The organism was queasy, ready to start whining about ail this, I don't like it, there's something here I don't understand, I — .

Shuddup.

Bloody well concentrate.

The tactile area was a strong possibility because the visual and aural environs had no particular interest. It could be something to do with the key, the way it had felt when I'd pushed it into the lock. Or it could be something to do with the door. Some kind of movement or lack of movement:, something unusual.

Think of everything.

Perhaps just the nerves. The aftermath of the Chepstow kill.

Listen for Christ's sake I know what I'm doing, I've taken on most things in this trade that'd kill a man if he didn't know how to operate and get away with it time after time, get away with his skin. There's nothing dramatic about it: you've just got to be cautious, that's all. Push your luck a bit now and then, but not right out of the window.

Faint voices.

Not from inside this room: they were coming from Suite 9. The city was in flight and this hotel would be deserted if it weren't for the few people staying on to the end: the brave, the stupid, the loyal, the ostrich-brained and the handful of international opportunists who were backing their chances of cleaning up by doing a deal with the Communists when they took over the place. But they weren't many, and most of the rooms in the Royal Cambodian Hotel were gathering dust; on the ninth floor only Suite 9 and Room 91 were taken, and none of the skeleton staff felt like climbing this high to turn down the beds.

For this reason the voices coming from Stern's quarters were audible to me, and a new hazard was presented. These voices had only just become loud enough for me to hear and the immediate explanation was the simple and obvious: in human congress the volume of sound during greeting and farewell is higher than during normal speech, since the parties concerned are at a greater distance from each other: they begin their speech when moving closer and continue their speech when drawing apart, raising their voices slightly.

Assume present visitor is taking his leave of Erich Stern.

Make a decision.

Not easy because vital factors unknown. I didn't want to go into this room: my whole instinct was against it. But I didn't want to be seen here in the corridor because Stern himself might emerge with the other man. When you are surveying an objective you will succeed only to the point when you are yourself seen: then you're blown because there's too big a hole in security and the next time the objective sees you he'll recognize you. Finis.

Once seen, you have to take so many precautions that the thing breaks down: you find yourself driving ten vehicles behind the objective instead of two, with ten chances of losing him instead of two; you get to the point when you have to go down a wall ledge by ledge over a sheer drop because if you take the stairs or the lift he'll see you for the second time and recognize you for what you are: an amateur. Some, people do it — or try it. In a minor operation it doesn't add up to anything because the situation isn't loaded but if you're on a major kick and the phase is sensitive and you chance your luck on a thing like that you'll muck it up. Conway tried it, near the end-phase of the Bombay assignment when he was cut off from signals and directives and escape lines and had to keep on going or get out: and he kept on going and they saw him twice at the wrong time in the wrong place and some kid found his head on a rubbish heap when he was looking for cast-off shoes, Dusseldorf, 1973.

So I didn't want Stern to see me and I didn't want to go into this room so I made the decision because the time was short: I had no practical data concerning this key or this door and if Stern or another man came out of Suite 9 I would turn my key and go inside before they saw me. It was a one way situation because there wouldn't be time to reach the nearest alcove or the emergency stairs when their voices reached the pitch when it was certain one of them or both of them was coming out.

Control new hazard.

And concentrate on the immediate threat: the assumed danger of opening this door. Cover every aspect, analyse, and calculate the risk. Most of the necessary thinking had already been done and it had presented close to zero.

Make a guess but don't make it wild.

During my absence someone had conceivably raided Room 91 and searched it or bugged it. Unlikely because security stood at one hundred per cent.

Or: the lock had been tampered with and therefore the key had felt different when I'd inserted it. More likely because it would explain the sensory alarm-reaction when I'd done that.

Or: nerves. Not totally discountable because my arguments against this theory could be based on pride.

There were several other theories and I covered them and discounted them. The voices seemed progressively louder from the other end of the corridor but I waited because I could still use every available second for exploring the situation: once the door of Suite 9 opened I could get in here faster than they would be coming out.

The key was still under my fingers and I hadn't moved. Thought process is electronically quick and no more than nine or ten seconds had passed since I'd pushed the key into the lock.

Recapitulate.

But there wasn't time because the voices became suddenly clear and I heard the click of the latch along the passage and acted on the decision I'd made and turned the key and opened the 'door and the whole of the wall blew out and hurled me into the dark.