The Mandarin Cypher

Chapter Nine: SHIELD

Then I stopped dead.

I suppose there wasn't anything to get excited about but it had worried me, having to kill him like that, and he'd left a lot of muscular strain in me and there'd been those bloody things slithering about. Oh fair enough, all in the day's work, but look, we hadn't even got any target access figured out yet and already there were two dead and I wasn't beginning to fancy my chances all that much.

I stood in the street, close to a doorway, very close, looking between the buildings towards the open square in the distance, wanting to shout at them: Can't you leave me alone?

I just didn't feel ready for any more, that was all, at least for a while. Give me a day, or even a few hours if that's how it's got to be. Bloody well leave me alone.

I stood in the street with the morning sun dazzling in the shop windows, the temperature in the eighties and warming up to another lovely day in exotic Hong Kong, Pearl of the Orient: this morning we shall be taking you on yet another fascinating tour, this time beginning with a tram ride to famed Victoria Peak, then down again to explore the fabulous Tiger Balm Gardens, pride of the island. I stood in the street feeling how cold it was, how perilous.

From this distance I could see the Taunus easily enough, and the traffic passing it. There'd been a slot and I'd backed it in and it was still there where I'd left it. The square was a lawful parking zone but I'd taken the last slot and there hadn't been any vacancies since then, or they'd only just arrived. The Humber was double-parked with the bonnet up, some kind of engine trouble so the police couldn't move it on in a hurry. The red van had Typhoo Tea on it in gold letters but there wasn't a grocer's or a cafe or a tea shop anywhere near: they were all souvenir shops and cheap jewellers' on that side of the square, but the van was parked with two wheels on the pavement and the roller-door was down as if there was a delivery being made. The Chinese on the bike was just sitting there with his arms folded watching the traffic, not even bothering to fetch a paper or something to read.

The others I couldn't see or hope to recognize. There'd be others, I knew that. This was about the roughest static surveillance job I'd ever seen but that wasn't the point. The point was that the Taunus was a death trap.

The left eyelid was flickering: it always did when the nerves got close to the edge. And I was cold, standing by the doorway in the sunshine, because I knew Ferris was up there in the room below the roof, thinking I still didn't know how that tag had been on my back when I'd gone into the snake shop; well, he was bloody well wrong because I knew. I knew now. And the unnerving thing was that I'd known for quite a while, and could have told him, put him out of his misery. It was just that I'd had other things on my mind and hadn't taken too much notice.

I wasn't prepared to dodge the issue by saying that boy had sighted me by chance, even though Ferris had offered me the option. I might have been sighted by chance, but it was damned unlikely. And the only other way that boy could have got on to my back was by a communications pitch and the only way they could have found any use for communications was by having a signals source and he could be only one man: the one in the Honda at the Golden Sands Hotel. He'd been somewhere on the ground floor and seen me and recognized me and got on to the phone and told headquarters, and headquarters had put out an all-points bulletin and from that moment the Taunus was a marked target. I'd checked and double-checked on the way up to the safe-house but there were limits to what I could do in a narrow winding street already crowded with Chinese, and the boy had been the first one to sight the Taunus and he had my photograph — they all did — and he came to make the hit.

The people down there in the square didn't know that. He'd been an isolated case on his way from base to station or nosing along the Capri travel pattern of two evenings ago and he'd been lucky, if that was the word. Then someone else had sighted the Taunus but I wasn't there so there was no one to follow, so he signalled headquarters and brought the pack in: there could be twenty or thirty down there in the doorways and behind windows, besides the people on station near the van and the Humber and on the bicycle. They would be deployed along the streets leading to the square, the surveillance spreading tentacles in every direction to make sure I couldn't get within a hundred yards of the Taunus without being seen. Or two hundred: the distance from there to where I was standing now, close, very close, to the doorway.

My hand was throbbing. Must take care of it, she'd said. The feeling of deathly cold wouldn't go, and I got fed up because I ought to get more bloody control over myself: the mission was still in its access phase and I ought to be feeling right on my toes and I wasn't and there was no excuse.

'Tui mm chiu.'

I stood back, keeping clear of the actual doorway but remaining close enough to use it. Two other people went in, a woman and her small boy, and it wouldn't do if the wrong people saw me and recognized me and went in, say three or four men, and turned round and blocked the doorway while the rest of them came up. I wouldn't know any of them. I wouldn't have time to know anything at all, if they came.

I began working back up the shallow steps — it was a ladder street like most of them in this area — having to push my way through tourists and vendors and groups of shopkeepers gathered in the bright morning sun, want roast duck? The scent of cheap perfumes and the drains, long time no rain, people said, working back towards the snake shop but turning off as soon as I could to avoid the cardinal sin of visiting a safe-house with surveillance known to be active, want haircut? The sudden clatter of a mah-jong game in a doorway, a stall with wardrobes for the dead, is this the place where you can get to see those fruit sellers, do you know? A child's laughter as a fortune-telling bird picked a card from the basket, turning into the alley and walking faster, checking twice and going on, using every pane of glass there was, bumping into people because I had to watch the reflections, tui mm chiu, sometimes attracting attention and that could be dangerous, slowing down, taking the next street, a wider one, looking for a taxi. Finding one.

'Lane Crawford's.'

When we reached there I went through the front and out by the back way, climbing over a new delivery of merchandise, finding a bar and calling Ferris.

We listened for bugs.

'My car was covered in ticks.'

'Oh I see,' he said. He meant that was how the boy had got on to me.

'It could be rigged as well.'

'Of course. Anything in it?'

'A suitcase.'

'Everything all right apart from that?'

'It is now.'

I rang off and sat down in the corner of the bar with my left shoulder against the wall, the mirror on the other side of the room and the door facing me. I was clear of the Taunus trap but they were getting very insistent and I could be picked up anywhere, anywhere at all, because of the photograph.

'Coffee.'

To help chase some of the adrenalin out of the system: there was no chance of physical exercise. The eyelid had stopped flickering, I should bloody well hope so, I must be getting old or something. Relax, switch off, leave things to Ferris. He'd be on to the police by now, telling them where to find the Taunus and what to do with it: check it for an explosive device, check the suitcase, take the car back to Fleet-way and put the case into the harbour or wherever they liked, because i wouldn't get it back: they'd hold it for me but they wouldn't part with it or with me either without asking me an awful lot of questions Hong Kong is just like other places: the police don't like being rung up and told to look for bombs in abandoned cars without wanting to know why. Ferris could pull enough rank to tell them to shut up but it'd mean revealing the fact that we were on the island and we didn't want to advertise it.

I'd asked him to do a couple of other things for me while he was about it: pay my bill with Fleetway, and get a dozen gardenias sent to El Caliph before eight o'clock tonight with a message: Please forgive, been called to Rome due to the devaluation crisis, tried four times to ring you but not home. Will never forget you. Clive.

I put on the mask.

The nerves were back to normal and it hadn't taken so long as I thought: for three hours I'd been moving around Central as free as a tourist and nobody had tried to raid me or even get on my tail, besides which Ferris hadn't been mean: it was a white summer-weight linen suit and quite a good fit and I felt a bit less like a lavatory brush with the mange. I'd kitted up again at Lane Crawford's: new suitcase, shaver, toilet things, shoes, so forth, and the case was genuine leather because I can't stand plastic, so that scaly old hell-hag in Accounts was going to cough up her brimstone when she got the bill.

I breathed in through the nose and the faceplate tightened satisfactorily and I took it off. We spent a lot of time getting a good fit for the fins: he was a helpful little man, five feet high with a crew cut and a jolly smile and the right hand off at the wrist, said it was a shark and I believed him.

'You from England?'

'Yes.'

'What part?'

'London.'

'So! I have sister in London! Beshnill Green!'

'Well I never.'

I asked him for a double hose regulator and three standard single cylinders of compressed air with reserve mechanisms and nickel-plated interiors, capacity 71 cubic feet each.

'Can you recharge these for me if I need more air?'

'No.' He shook his head beaming. 'Used to have charging-room, but had also assistant who broke valve one day. Tank went through wall here and flew three streets away, finish through side of bus!' Peals of laughter. 'Nobody hurt, but take permission from me. You get them filled at another place, I give you address.'

'Thank you.'

Tank harness with instant release buckle, lead belt, depth gauge, compass, underwater watch.

'Dry suit?'

'No, wet. Foam neoprene, have you got one?'

'Oh yes.'

Diving knife, saw-tooth edge one side, straight edge the other.

'You want shark repellent?'

'Yes.'

'Speargun?'

'No.'

'Abalone iron?'

'No.'

I had to try three wet suits on before I found the right one. It had a yellow insignia on the back as a safety marker and I'd have to cover it with black adhesive tape later.

'Do you stock chains?'

'What sort of chains?'

'To secure the tanks to the boat.'

'No. Tell you where to buy.' He gave me another address.

'I need a lamp.'

He kicked the stool over to the shelves again and jumped up and hooked down the box, catching it in the crook of his elbow. We tested the batteries and I signed a traveller's cheque, sweating a lot after trying on all those suits but feeling much better, almost back on form, even the muscles feeling smoother. Tonight I'd be getting some sleep because Ferris wouldn't be able to rustle up everything we needed before the morning. God only knew how he was planning to send me in to the objective but if it was going to be an air drop we'd obviously have to make it by night: that would be tomorrow at the earliest.

I'd hired a dark grey station wagon from Fleetway so that I could lay the air tanks flat. I stowed the gear and found the place where they sold chains and noted the place where they could give me a recharge if I needed one and bought some black adhesive tape and reached the Harbour Hotel on the north shore of the island by noon. That was where Ferris had booked me in.

There was already a message for Mr Wing: please call TWA about my reservation. I used the phone in my room and we listened for bugs and then he went straight into speech code, switching to cypher where he had to and rattling off the numerals. The code was standard operational for this date, Far East theatre, listed arbitrary with no mnemonics: October for briefing, Monday for rendezvous, Gin-rummy north east, yellow left hand, so forth. I went into the same pitch and thought Christ, he's got something moving.

'I want you for briefing,' he said.

'When?'

'20.00 hours.'

'Where?'

He gave the directions: there was a junk tied up in the Causeway Bay typhoon anchorage, the August Moon, the seventh along from the base of the north-east breakwater, left-hand side of the utilities stanchion.

'What's the flap?' I asked him.

'There's no flap. I'm sending you out to the rig, that's all.'

'When?'

'Midnight tonight.'

I slept six hours in Room 31 at the Harbour Hotel with traps at the door and the window and then got up and showered and took the stuff out of the canvas case and tried on the wet suit again and tested the mask, putting talc on the fins and taping the safety marker to black it out: they might just as well have painted a bull's-eye on the back of the suit, bang on the tenth vertebra.

19.00

It was only a ten-minute run to the typhoon anchorage, allow another five to park the station wagon with decent security and find the August Moon. That gave me forty-five minutes to spare and I didn't like it: Ferris must have got a panic signal from London with orders to arrange immediate access and put his executive into the target zone, Bureau signals phrasing right out of the book. It meant they wanted the ferret thrown into the sea. That was all right: the thing I didn't like was having to hang around for three-quarters of an hour before I could even get to the briefing and find out what kind of access Ferris had fixed up and what kind of communications we were going to use and what kind of chance there was of my coming out of that particular target zone alive.

The oil rig stood in international waters but it was Chinese territory and at a rough guess I'd put its defence armament at about the same strength as a pocket battleship.

I knew from earlier missions that Ferris was terribly fast and it was possible they'd picked him to field-direct this operation because they knew we might have to hurry at any given phase or at some precise phase they'd been able to anticipate in the initial planning. They might have shot him out to Pekin as a cultural attache or some kind of Embassy stooge the minute they'd seen Mandarin coming up on the agenda. I began wishing I knew a bit more about this job and that was a perfectly normal reactio

n at forty-four minutes to final briefing: the blood starts moving a few degrees quicker and the nerves start exchanging energy a few microseconds closer to optimum speed and you start wondering why the hell those zipper-lipped bastards in London couldn't have told you a bit more or preferably a bloody sight more about the operation they'd decided to pitch you into — in this case by Egerton's thrice-accursed subterfuge.

Relax.

I picked up the phone and gave it ten rings and put it down again and that was a perfectly normal reaction too at forty-three minutes to final briefing: the closer you move to potential death the more you think about women. Poor little bitch, we'd got her hormones moving again after all that time and all she was going to get at the El Caliph at eight o'clock tonight was a bunch of gardenias and all I was going to get was the shakes.

Phone.

19.11.

Ferris.

'London wants to send a shield.'

'Oh for Christ sake, Ferris, be your age.' We were using cypher and all I could give him was the circumscribed phrase: Instructions refused. But I got what I meant into the tone. Trust those bloody people in London to get you to the brink and then pull you back while they sent someone out to hold your hand.

'They're postponing the operation twenty-four hours,' Ferris told me, 'while they fly someone in from Taiwan. He's due to-'

'Ferris.'

He waited.

'You let those pox-ridden bastards try sticking a shield on to me and as far as I'm concerned they can screw this mission and find another ferret. You know me and you know I mean that. I'm going in solo repeat solo or not at all.'

Difficult finding the right cypher phrases, request no support, am withdrawing from mission, like trying to blow someone's head off in a foreign language without knowing all the pronouns, but some of it I put across in straight English, pox-ridden, so forth, because it wouldn't give anything away.

'I think they're right,' Ferris said reasonably.

I gave it five seconds because you don't get as far as the final briefing phase and chuck the whole thing in your director's face without another thought. This wasn't Egerton, or not totally: his chief talent was in knowing precisely what a given operator could do and how he was best able to do it. We all have our little ways and Heppinstall won't work properly without a shield because he's really a slide-rule and requires peace of mind to do what he has to do, and while he's trying to feel his way in to the complex centre of some sophisticated shadow-summit configuration or whatever he's doing he likes to be free to concentrate while his shield keeps the competition away till he runs out of ammunition. Styles won't operate without a shield because he's shit-scared and London keeps a whole regiment standing by to support him through a mission because they know he's sensitive and brilliant and highly successful so long as he can keep his sphincter muscles under control.

I have to work solo because for me there has to be a risk. This isn't because I like a a cheap thrill but because I need the stimulation of constant hazard to whip up the nerves and galvanize the organism to the pitch where I can do things I couldn't do otherwise. If I had to rely on other people to keep me alive I'd get sloppy and make mistakes and that can be just as fatal as if you haven't got a shield at all, look at that poor bastard Crowther — I thought he was there, his face puckered like a child's and his eyes watching me as we swayed along in the ambulance, I thought he was there, the last thing he ever said and I've never told anyone because he meant he thought Jones was there, shielding his back while he went in and found he couldn't get out again till they dropped him over the railway bridge for someone to find, blown and cleaned out and dying while Jones was waiting for him in Lyons Corner House and stuffing himself on buns, a question of a missed rendezvous, that was all, a little misunderstanding at a critical time, the tears running down Crowther's face as he closed his eyes and gave it up — frustration, not self-pity or anything, he didn't leave anyone who loved him — frustration because he'd completed the access and was ready to strike and get out again, another beautiful job, beautifully timed, how does he do it, we all used to say.

Don't you give me Jones. Or anyone.

'Ferris,' I said, 'if you're not prepared to direct me without a shield you'd better say so now.'

After a bit he said plaintively: 'It's London, old boy.'

'London knows bloody well I always work solo.'

'It's because it's underwater,' he said.

'Tell them they can pull me out, then. Send someone else in.'

There was a short silence, then he said: 'Don't go away.'

I put the phone back and left an imprint of sweat on it and walked up and down, feeling soured and deceived and afraid because they could have settled this question earlier: Ferris had his access worked out, or he wouldn't have called me in for final briefing, and he couldn't have worked out his access before he'd signalled his plans. That was when they should have said all right but if it's underwater we're going to insist on a shield. But they'd had second thoughts and I didn't like that: it meant they were worried.

19.13.

Ferris couldn't have left the safe-house yet because he was still in signals with Control. There hadn't been time for him to rig up a set of his own on the junk or somewhere because he'd need to make directional tests and check out the interference patterns and he wasn't a radio man. And he wasn't signalling through Chiang; the present traffic was too sensitive. So even if we could get London to agree, it was going to take a lot of time and we were going to miss the 20.00 hours rdv and arrive late for the midnight jump and it was giving me the sweats because if ever there's — a time during a mission when you want everything to run like clockwork it's when you're down for final briefing and taking up the slack on your nerves so you'll be ready to do what you have to do, wherever it is and wherever it's going to take you.

Ferrets have feelings.

The phone didn't ring for twenty-five minutes and I spent the interval in a limbo, not wanting to do anything intelligent like checking over the briefing material because the whole thing could have gone dead and cold by now, very much wanting to phone Ferris and tell him to send a final signal: Executive withdraws from mission. But there wouldn't be any point because they'd know I'd started to go gently round the bend. I'd never withdrawn from a mission even when Loman was running me, even when the bastards booted me into Tunis to pick up an operation already half wrecked and with two top-echelon ferrets out of the running, one dead and one blown before we'd even found access. That's why they shanghaied me into these stinking rotten jobs, because they knew no one else would take them and they knew I wouldn't back out once I'd Phone.

19.38.

No bugs.

'London,' he said, 'is going to compromise. You don't get a shield but they're sending in a reserve.'

I thought about this for so long that he had to ask if I was still on the line. I said:

'All right. But keep him out of my way.'

'I told them that's what you'd want.'

'You didn't tell them anything they didn't know.'

He said there was time to. keep our rendezvous and I said that was a bit of luck and rang off before

I could say anything else: because you don't feel relieved when the pressure comes off, you feel like murder. It's something to do with the organism using the quickest way to get rid of the shock and I was quite happy about that, spending the next three minutes murdering half the directors in the Bureau very slowly and with an awful lot of screaming as the volts came on. While this was happening I put the gear back into the canvas bag and shoved it into the wardrobe with the track suit and the other stuff and rigged entry traps and went down to the station wagon sixty seconds ahead of schedule.

I didn't object to a reserve. They were taking a risk, I knew that. Since my signal reporting that Tewson was alive they'd been logically assuming he was either in Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland, where I could have got to him through the normal penetration channels. Ferris had then shaken them by reporting that he was in fact under guard in what amounted to a maximum security block entirely surrounded by water and he'd shaken them a second time when he'd told them he planned to send me in solo.

He knew it was the only thing he could do. In the specific circumstances of this mission at this phase he knew it was the only possible access to the target zone: not by a fleet of ships or an airborne regiment, but by one man, alone. And he knew we couldn't use a shield because this one man would himself become a target, and we didn't want to double its size. Ferris had told me he thought London was right because he wanted to see if I had any doubts. He'd seen I hadn't, and- he'd got into signals again and persuaded Control to lay off.

A reserve was all right. A shield would have followed me about and tried to keep me alive, and got in my bloody way, but a reserve would be told to stand off and do nothing; unless I was blown or killed. Then he'd move in. That was all right.

I drove steadily. The lights had come on in the dusk an hour ago and now they were bright, the whole of the Kowloon shoreline glittering across the night-black harbour where the shipping floated like patches of fire that had broken away from the land. The traffic was easing off towards Causeway Bay, but I was taking the narrower streets, doubling sometimes to check, finding it clear.

Waiting at a set of lights, it occurred to me that London must be terribly nervous, wanting to send in a reserve. People like Egerton realize the whole thing isn't a chess game: they know the shadow executive comes under strain the minute the mission starts running, and he's not expected to feel reassured if they send a man out to sit like a vulture on a tree while he's doing his best to stay alive and bring home a winner if he can. Normally London never tells you: they might tell the director in the field but he doesn't necessarily pass it on. Well, they could screw themselves.

There were people milling around the car, trying to swarm across the road before the lights changed, and a Boeing went sloping weightlessly down the night sky towards Kai Tak on the other side of the harbour. Maybe they'd told me about the reserve because London was narked about my refusing a shield, and Ferris wanted me to know what Control's thinking was: he was very good about that, and tried not to keep you in the dark even if it meant telling you something you didn't want to know. There was no time to think about it anyway, because they were holding the gun hard against my left temple and I couldn't even turn my head to see who it was.