The Mandarin Cypher

Chapter Four: MING

ROYAL HONG KONG POLICE

Fixed Penalty (Traffic Contraventions) Ordinance 1970

Notice of Opportunity to pay Fixed Penalty (Section 15 (2))

Motor vehicle registration Mark, Code, Disc No, was seen

in… at… hours on 79… in circumstances giving me

reasonable cause to believe that a contravention of the

Ordinance, particulars of which are given at (…) overleaf,

was being or had been committed. $30.

I took it off the windscreen and got into the Capri, starting up and moving off past the club, looking for the Jensen as soon as I was round the corner. She'd put it neatly in between some railings and a sand-bin alongside the garden of someone's consulate: the flag over the building hung like a rag in the humid air. There wasn't a parking slot anywhere so I took one end of the chain off the post in the side entrance to the consulate and ran the Capri in there, a dozen yards or so from the Jensen and facing the right way in case I couldn't make final contact with her before she left the club.

Then I walked back round the corner and through the ornate doors.

'The gentleman forgot something?'

'What? No, I was double parked, that's all.'

I went to the bar and took a stool at the end near the heavy curtains: in this area there was no backwash of light from the floor-show and I could watch the Tewson woman and the Chinese couldn't watch me because the ceiling-high papier-mache dragon was in the way.

'Indian tonic.'

'Gin and tonic? Yes, sir — '

'No. Listen. In-di-an tonic.'

'Excuse me.'

I 'You're perfectly welcome.'

From here I could see the magnum of Veuve Clicquot and the dozen gardenias on her table but couldn't at this distance tell whether she was pleased with them or not. The flying tray trick hadn't gone down too well.

'Christ,' she'd said, 'did you have to do that?'

'I'm terribly sorry — '

'That's not the point-look at this!' Indicating her model lame sheath, patches of scotch all over it, the waitress on all fours between us looking for the glass, Nora Tewson with her hands on the edge of the table as if she were going to make a speech because the banquette was behind her knees and she couldn't stand up straight without support, did I know how much this dress cost, couldn't I see where I was going, so forth, really am very sorry, such an exquisite dress, be delighted to pay damages, so on, till she went off to 'clean up', the waitress on her feet again, excited because it had broken the monotony and this called for a suitable tip, yes, fifty Hong Kong dollars and this hundred is for a magnum of champagne, look, let's go to the bar, I want it done before she comes back to her table.

The magnum hadn't been opened and she wasn't smelling the gardenias but I suppose she could have thrown the whole lot at the band.

'I s-say, d'you know those-those gairls have got holes in those — those net stockin's of theirs? Wha'?'

I looked at him.

'How can you tell?'

He gazed back at me, perched dead straight on his stool, knees gripping the sides, perfectly aware that in his present circumstances the C of G was critical. Expression of glazed outrage at my stupidity, white cavalry moustache bridling.

'Wha' — what erzackly does that mean — how can you tell?'

He turned his back on me and raised his pearl-finish opera-glasses again after wiping the steam off the lenses. Half an hour later a Chinese chauffeur in white uniform came through the curtains and got him off the stool without a struggle and carried him out so cleverly that it looked as if he was walking.

An hour after that I saw her signing the bill and five minutes later as she came past the bar I was going across to the phone in the corner, my back to her.

'I must say you know how to apologize.'

I swung round.

'Apolo — ? Oh. The least I could do.'

'It was handsome.'

Tone much less sharp after four doubles: I'd been counting them. Now the brittleness had gone she looked defenceless but would obviously bite off the first hand that moved too quickly.

'I thought it best not to present it personally.' Tone rueful, rueful smile: doormat, please wipe.

Her face went still and her eyes became fixed on me, the pupils big in the near-dark here by the curtains. She couldn't have looked like this at me, or any man, sober.

'Pity you didn't,' she said.

Fair enough.

'May I see you home?'

Eyes thinking hard, still fixed on me, and I knew now why she'd bite if anyone got too near: for the same reason that any animal bites — because it's frightened.

'Yes.'

'Thank you. I'm Clive Wing.'

Her dark eyes stayed on me for another few seconds and then she turned her head away with a little jerk and I supposed that whatever the problem had been she'd made up her mind about it. It could have been the simple, the obvious: Tewson had died over two months ago and there'd had to come a time when she was ready to speak to men again and maybe it had come tonight.

Outside in the warmth of the night air she tried to light a cigarette and I said let me have that and took the magnum.

'I'm Nora Tewson,' she said and flicked the lighter shut as if making a point of it. We'd only moved a few paces from the doors and the Chinese came out too fast and saw us and tried to go back and realized he couldn't and went on past us, turning his head away to look up at the light across the acacia leaves, walking briskly towards the corner.

'The name rings a bell,' I said.

'Does it? My car's down that way.' We began walking. 'How did you come here?'

'In a cab.'

Because she wouldn't want to leave a brand-new Jensen lying around and I didn't want her to see the Capri. The only thing was that if I'd been driving I could have got rid of the tag, not overtly, just playing the lights and the traffic. But it might not be worth risking: of the half-dozen theories in my mind the one I liked best was that Tewson had been an agent in one of the London departments and had been knocked off by the opposition and his wife had been talked into a decoy operation, in which case the thin man might not be a tag but a bodyguard. That would explain her nerves.

'Beautiful job,' I said.

'It was expensive,' she said and swung out past the sand-bin, clearing it by a couple of inches. Her anxiety state was prompting a steady release of adrenalin, combating the alcohol: the psyche was relaxed enough to let her forget her widowhood for the first time but her physical reactions were still good enough to drive this thing through the eye of a needle.

'Tewson,' I said. 'That's Tee-ee-double-yew, ess-oh-en?'

'How long have you been in Hong Kong?'

'I flew in this evening.'

'Then you won't have heard the name.'

'I was here a couple of months ago.'

She gave a slight resigned shrug. 'Then you've heard it.'

The Honda swung into the chrome frame of the nearside wing mirror and stayed there until she turned off Gloucester Road and headed south. I counted five and the configuration moved into position again.

She drove as she'd driven before, her movements rhythmic and calculating, her eyes always straight ahead as if she had to stare something down, something in the future that would rush her into the present if she looked away and dropped her guard.

When there'd been enough time for me to think back and call it to mind I said: 'There was some kind of fishing accident, wasn't there?'

Pause.

'Yes.'

'And you don't want to talk about it.'

Pause.

'No.'

The magnum was half empty.

'Why aren't you drinking any, Clive?'

'Too acid.'

We were sitting on the thick Hangchow carpet and she looked at me over her clasped knees.

'Are you trying to get me pissed?'

'You've been helping yourself.'

She looked steadily at the magnum. 'That's perfectly true. God, this stuff goes right through you, doesn't it,' she said, and went out for the third time. 'Fix yourself some scotch or whatever you want.'

I looked around again. The overall picture was inconsistent: Ming to the tune of ten or fifteen thousand pounds and then a lacquer table you could pick up in Cat Street for a song, and in between them a brand new cocktail cabinet with chrome bamboo style legs imported from Birmingham. A nouveau riche with condescending friends who'd told her where to buy the Ming and hadn't been looking when she'd done some shopping on her own. But the total contents of this apartment would still pull in close on fifty thousand even at an auction and the Tewson dossier said they'd come here for the last two years on a package tour.

No books, no pictures. No picture of George Henry Tewson, even in the bedroom when she'd shown me proudly round. The whole apartment was just an expensive waiting-room.

'To tell you the truth,' she said, coming back and smoothing her lame skirt, 'I do want to talk about it.'

'About what?'

'Remember you said I didn't want to talk about it?'

'Oh yes.'

'Well — ' She tried to lift the magnum and I went to help her but she put it down again, shaking her head. 'I'd better not, had I?'

'If you feel like it.'

'Why shouldn't I?'

'I'll put you to bed.'

'I bet you would!'

She giggled and looked away and that was when the shivering began, but I didn't think it was anything to do with sex, at least not directly. Freedom or something.

'I've just realized,' she said with a gutsy little laugh, 'it wouldn't've been funny if this bloody great bottle had been on that tray, would it!'

She lit another cigarette, gold lighter, Dunhill. That would have been a present. This was where I could say well go on, tell me what happened to him, and just conceivably blow the whole thing.

'How old are you, Nora?'

'Little me? Thirty-two. Why?'

'I'm a bad judge of people's ages.'

'I wouldn't have thought,' she said with the frank stare starting again, 'you'd be a bad judge of anything.'

No extra-marital affaires, the dossier said, so far as is ascertainable. This explained her little Victorian innuendoes and frank stares and so forth. It could explain the shivering too.

'It's time you threw me out,' I said, and got up reluctantly, and quickly she said 'I was going to talk about it, wasn't I?'

'Oh yes.'

'He was in the Ministry of Defence.'

Oh was he?

There must have been a good reason why London had kept this one out of the briefing and out of the dossier and maybe it was on the principle of never telling the ferrets what they don't have to know or maybe it had been part of the softlee softlee catchee monkee approach by that devious bastard Egerton because he knows if he tried to sell me a conventional intelligence operation I'd only tell him to tuck it up his truss.

'Pretty important job,' I told her and knew instantly I was right on the nail. It had been the only thing she'd ever been able to say about George Henry Tewson: the Ministry of Defence, you know.

'Pretty important,' she said, liking the phrase. 'Well, I mean it was important that he worked there — ' she uncurled off the carpet and stood with her hands clasping her bare arms, not quite sure where to go — 'actually his work wasn't important, to tell you the truth.'

'As long as it was to him.'

'Oh Christ,' she said with a sour laugh, 'it was all he ever thought about.'

Then she knew where she wanted to go and it took ten minutes for the whole trip, back to England and then to Hong Kong for the first time, 'all he could think about, worked half the night sometimes, I don't believe he knew I was there except when he wanted his meals,' still with her small ivory-pale hands clasping her arms and she trod circles in the silk pile, not looking at me once, 'hewouldn't have gone across his own doorstep if I hadn't dragged him, it was like getting a baby away from its bottle, him and his slide-rule,' dropping the cigarette-end into the neck of the magnum, she was going to regret that, 'it was Spain at first, the Costa Brava, then I saw this ad about the Exotic East and it — ' she stopped moving and stood dead still and looked at me — 'it really turned me on, you know? Perfumes and jade and jewellery and all that sort of thing, I suppose you think I'm childish.'

Said no.

'He liked it, in a way. It was the fishing.' From this point she lost touch and most of the time forgot I was here, 'It quite brought him out, the first time we came,' a curl of her light hair falling loose as she talked, her small stockinged feet silent as she moved across the carpet, the nervous giggles more frequent and the memories more random, 'though to tell you the truth it might have been the Isle of Wight as far as he was concerned, everywhere was the same once he'd got over the shock of leaving England for a couple of weeks,' gesturing now and saying suddenly and bitterly, 'he never thought much about sex,' stopping just this once to listen to what she'd said and then going on, 'giving me the impression that she didn't really want to tell me about George Henry Tewson but about something much more urgent that she daren't even mention, so this would have to do, giving her some kind of release.

I could have looked around at the Ming and the Cat Street Contemporary while I was listening because that was all I'd come here for, to listen, but she was using her body a lot, couldn't keep still, and I looked at that, and the movements it made, the way she shivered sometimes as she went on, she'd only meant to go in as far as her knees and it was up to her stomach now, the tense trembling fear of going too tar, the thrill of not going back, talking to me all the time, and none of the time, about Tewson, 'then of course I found he'd been putting it away in Savings Certificates and buying insurance and that kind of thing, poor lamb,' her cigarette tracing smoke in the air as her feet did a pirouette, 'that's how I can live like this, and quite honestly it makes a change. My God, I can go on once I get started — you must be bored stiff!'

Said of course not.

'Then I thought no, I'll stay here, and never go back at all. I don't want to leave him, you see? The psychiatrist said I was right, the one I went to. He said I'd get over it quicker if I stayed here, where George was.'

Then she just stood perfectly still in the middle of the room looking at nothing, a girl with ivory skin and stockinged feet and a lock of hair and a sheath dress with stains where the scotch had soaked it, her head turning slowly as she remembered me, her dark eyes deepening.

'You don't have to go, do you?'

'No.'

The shivering began again.

'I'm so bloody frightened,' she said.

I walked north, away from the Cathay Hotel, going along Kingston Street and up as far as Gloucester Road without seeing any traffic, not really expecting to at this hour, three in the morning. A patrol car slowed a little to check me, going west, and turned down Cannon Street. The smell of the harbour came on the wind, and a ship was hooting, some way off, three slows, farewell.

It had been as if she hadn't slept with anyone for years, or as if she knew it was for the last time, an act of desperation, and afterwards depression of course, tugging the cigarette out with small sharp nails, tearing the packet, I don't even know who you are, Clive, who are you, so forth. Essential to ask her why she was frightened, two reasons: I wanted to know and she'd expect me to ask. No go. Did I say that, I must've been stoned, furious with herself for having said it and with me for reminding her.

There was a taxi outside the Excelsior and I got in.

'Mauritius Hotel.'

The streets swung past and I shut my eyes, lingering flight-disorientation and nothing to have to watch, everything under control. One certainty: she wasn't an agent, either ours or theirs. One probability: Tewson had been. But there were inconsistencies because everything fitted so well and then came apart: he'd presented a classic cover in his dossier, lowly work for a government department, three-year-old Austin and a few small debts and never travelling until Spain (to establish the new image) and then suddenly Hong Kong, three trips in a row and then careless, leaving a widow, no children. All right, started off in DI6, ferreting around Portsmouth and places, then seconded or transferred to MI5 for missions abroad, a feint in Spain and then the Far East theatre, something strictly specific and confined to Hong Kong as a base for the South China seaboard area. Then the classic sequence: approach from Pekin, temptation, defection, exposure, elimination, but not before he'd been paid enough for his widow to blow it on Ming. Chief inconsistency: MI5 are a grotty lot but they wouldn't have given him the terminal handshake, they'd have sent him back to London for the full fourteen-year stretch, justice seen to be done, so forth.

I'm so bloody frightened.

Because she'd known about it and couldn't stop it running. But Tewson had stopped running and she was still frightened so what was running now?

South and then west again into Hennessy Road, a dark bundle of clothes on the pavement and some police around it, the end of the opium trail. We began slowing.

'Mauritius Hotel,' the driver said.

I got out and paid and under-tipped to provoke an argument because the lights weren't too bright here and I wanted to make it easy, oh all right then, here you are, but you people are bloody robbers, and he went away happy as anything with a Hong Kong dollar.

I went into the hotel and nodded to the night-clerk when he woke up, taking the stairs. The first-floor passage was conveniently long and I walked nearly to the end, thinking it could of course have been Nora Tewson herself who'd pushed the poor bastard into it, like Mrs Tuckman: she was hooked on money and there might have been quite a lot of it from Mao if Tewson had something they particularly wanted.

I got my keys and pushed one of them against the door of the cleaner's closet and then opened it, going in and shutting it, nothing but bloody brooms everywhere, pitch dark, don't tread on anything, there may be a bucket. Standing against the wall I thought the only thing she'd said that was really interesting was about his work, and even that had been clumsy: Pretty important, well, I mean it was important that he worked there, actually his work wasn't important, to tell you the truth.

Most of what she'd told me was in his dossier and the rest I could check on. His cover had been something in technical or engineering, design or research or development, him and his slide-rule, she wasn't bright enough to make that up or deliver it without over-acting. Some kind of cleaning-fluid stinking to high heaven, ammonia in it, eyes accommodating now, faint light from a ventilator above me. I couldn't hear him but I didn't expect to: There was carpet in the passage and he'd walk quietly, coming just far enough to note the number of the room next to the closet, then going away.

The watch was probably changed at midnight: this one was shorter and quite a bit older, no glasses, quite good, turning away when I'd come down from her apartment and through the lobby, nearly missed him. And a Morris, not the Honda, keeping such a big gap that I thought I'd better stand there arguing with my cab-driver to give him a bit of time. I don't even know who you are, Clive, who are you, got quite excited when I'd mentioned bullion, I'd better pick up a tag tomorrow and take him to one of the dealers they'd given me in Credentials and then lose him afterwards, somewhere near the Singapore.

Check: I'd given him enough time to reach the top of the stairs before I was halfway along the passage and there hadn't been any cover because the doors weren't recessed so he'd have had to wait there in case I turned round, and from that distance and from that fine angle of view, almost zero degrees, he couldn't see if I were going into the closet or the room next door. Satisfactory: given him five minutes to clear.

Proposition: she was still frightened so something was still running and she knew it and she knew what it was and London had given me the key to Mandarin at the outset: Nora Tewson. But I didn't know if Mandarin was their name for an opposition project they wanted me to penetrate or survey or destroy, or the name of my own mission on the files, and it was beginning to look a bit like a counter-intelligence thing. I didn't mind that: it could be a legitimate penetration job either way and that was in my field, somewhere to go into and go into alone, a prescribed target and access availability and a safe-house for signals and refuge. So far there hadn't been any problem: since touch-down at Kai Tak I'd checked the safe-house, made the contact with Nora Tewson, noted the opposition surveillance, gone in under it to develop the contact and established a false base, Room 12, Mauritius Hotel. The sole hazard potential was Flower and as soon as possible I'd have him recalled to London.

I turned the handle of the door and it took ten seconds to push it open one millimetre, the diameter of the human pupil in artificial light. Field clear. Stairs, lobby, street, check, re-check, clear. I had to walk as far as the Luk Kwok before I found a taxi.

'Orient Club.'

'You want nice Chinese girl?'

'No, just the Orient Club.'

Got out and paid him and watched him away. Re-check: clear. The street very quiet in the pre-dawn hour, no lights anywhere on this side of the consulate, a haze of gnats floating below the lamp near the sand-bin. Notice of Opportunity to pay Fixed Penalty, so forth, put it with the other one, some people collect absolutely anything these days, check ignition wires and start up. Final check: clear.

There were no messages for me at the Hong Kong Cathay and I went straight up to my room and opened the door and froze.

It's not only dogs.

The room was at the rear of the hotel and on the top floor. It faced north-east and at this moment the first light was coming into the sky above the theatre and the trees in the park. The shutters were half open, the way I'd left them, making a silhouette against the ashy light. My cases were on the stand, the way I'd left them.

It's not only dogs that have a sense of smell, the ability to sense alien presence in the environment, or its recent presence. All animals have it, but in varying degrees of refinement. In humans it has been atrophying over the decades since they began living with machines and relying on lights, locks and mechanical systems, but in creatures of the wild it remains highly developed. In creatures of the wild and in those few of us who express and incur mortal enmity in pursuit of our complex purposes.

There was no actual smell that worried me. In the short time I'd spent in this room I had become familiar with the subtle blend of sandalwood, jute, linen, polish, Jeyes Fluid and the ingrained odours of the human body. Nothing was different about the smell. There was no particular sound. From somewhere in the hotel I could hear the clack of mah-jong pieces and the far faint jangle of an alarm-clock, but they weren't loud enough to prevent my detecting human breathing in the room here, if there were any human near me. There was nothing to be seen but faint light, shadows, areas of near-darkness, and various objects occupying positions familiar to me. The shutters, the cases, shoes, hotel literature, doors, lamps, bathrobe, everything I could see in the dim light was as I had seen it last.

The only cover in the room itself was under the bed and if a man were there he would be facing this way, towards the door, so I moved very fast, using the bed itself as a springboard and spinning as I hit the floor on the other side and checked the space underneath against the light from the open doorway. No. I opened the bathroom door and threw the bathrobe in and waited two seconds and dropped and went in and looked behind the door. No. Check wardrobe, check window, no point in checking the main doorlock for signs of tampering because in a small hotel you don't have to force a lock, you get the concierge to turn his back on the keyboard for the required five seconds.

So everything was perfectly all right and I put the light on and shut the door and began checking small details: I'd left the bottom corner of the hotel literature precisely lined up with the pattern on the table and the three drawers had been left pulled open a quarter-inch at the right-hand, left-hand, right-hand ends from top downwards, and the cases had been set with their top corners exactly touching, the left rivet an inch lower than the right, so forth, it wasn't anything special, we always do it and we do it with the speed of habit and we can check just as fast. It's absolutely foolproof providing the opposition isn't too professional but if it's professional enough then you don't have a chance unless you go into the more refined mechanisms: a hair across the wardrobe doors, tautened between notches; a dead match on the floor with the ash still intact; £ pin balanced across the gap in the bathroom doorway.

I hadn't used these traps because no one had tagged me since I'd landed except for the two men surveying Nora Tewson and I'd made sure neither of them had tagged me to this hotel. When I'd picked up the Capri just now I'd been absolutely clear and I'd come into the hotel with security intact. Except for one factor: If they'd wanted to they could have got my address, the Hong Kong Cathay. I didn't think they'd want to, because I'd gone in overtly to make the contact in the Orient Club and I'd let them tag me to Jade Imperial and later from there to the Mauritius Hotel. There was no reason why they should suspect my cover: no reason at all.

Disregard.

Discount the animal instinct, ignore the slight raising of the hairs along the arms under their sleeves, the prickling of the scalp, the micro-watt surge of galvanic force along the nerves of the spine. Dismiss and rationalize: fatigue, flight-disorientation unfamiliarity with the environment, imaginative fears, so forth.

Very well. Because it was so very unlikely they would have taken any real interest in me so early, so fast. The young thin tubercular Chinese had been police-trained and predictable: he hadn't even noted Flower in the surveillance area. The older man had been much better and I'd nearly missed him in the lobby of Jade Imperial, but he'd been so cautious on the run to the Mauritius Hotel that I'd had to give him a full minute outside the place so he could keep me in sight.

The access to the Mandarin target was prescribed and orderly: it wasn't a night-drop or a crash-drive or anything panicky like the Tunis thing. Egerton and Macklin and the administration in London had roped me in but they hadn't thrown me in: they'd given me time to contact the key figure — Nora Tewson — and develop a relationship and the thing I had to do now was give her total attention until she showed me the way in and I sent for a director and set the action up and got moving.

So there was no reason for me to stand here in Room 39 of the Hong Kong Cathay Hotel with the instinctive feeling that someone had been here in my absence. No reason. Because Mandarin wasn't as big as that yet: this was still the preliminary phase and I'd have to make a mistake or provoke them or get in their way before they'd extend their own routine surveillance of the Tewson woman and move into my field on covert combat level. If they'd been here this early and this fast it would mean that the initiative had already passed from the local cell or unit to the major directive: not Hong Kong but Pekin. And I just didn't believe that had happened. I wasn't prepared to credit the idea that within twelve hours of landing at Kai Tak Airport I was faced with a mission that had started blowing right open in the primary phase.

Sleep.

Normal precautions, pull the shutters and swing the catch, throw the security bolt, put a coin on the door handle and the two glass ashtrays on the carpet below, a gesture to the needs of survival now that I'd rejected instinct. Last thoughts as I took off my things: call her later today and listen to see if they've got her phone bugged, go and ask Fleetway Rent-a-Car if anyone's been trying to find out who hired the Capri, tell them about the carburation, difficult to start and that could be critical on a tagging run.

There was a mosquito Whining in the bathroom and I wondered what the humidity was in this place in September, felt somewhere near eighty. Then I forgot about it because when I squeezed some toothpaste on the brush an air-bubble popped and the stuff was too runny and I felt suddenly cold and thought I don't mind London offering me capsules but I don't like people putting the bloody stuff in my toothpaste.