The Pekin Target

3: Funeral

I had worked with Ferris before.

He'd been sitting on the stairs with the gun on his lap in the Hong Kong snake shop while I'd fought for a kill with the hit man they'd sent from Kowloon to wipe me out. He'd pulled me out of Morocco with the coastguard cutter's searchlight sweeping the sea as we lay prone on the afterdeck of the fishing boat and Sandra's jewelled revolver sank below the waves to the bottom, where no one would ever find it. He'd been with me when Alitalia Flight 403 had hit the runway too short in Beirut and we'd lost two back-up executives but saved the mission because the documents weren't on board.

And now he was walking with me from the Beijin Hotel along Wangfujing Street in Pekin, a tall thin man with his body sloping forward and his wisps of sandy hair all over the place in the light breeze coming off the rice-fields to the north.

Dark suits, black ties. Someone from the Bureau had done my packing for me yesterday evening while Tilson had been getting me out of the hospital in the dry-cleaner's van; the other clothes they'd put in were much lighter: the July temperature here was already eighty degrees and it was only ten in the morning.

My ribs were still painful but I'd slept off the lingering effects of the drugs on the long flight out, and my head was clear enough to warn me that London must have been desperate, to have moved me into the field without warning and without a home briefing.

"They must have been desperate," I said.

Ferris turned his honey-coloured eyes on me, watching me for a moment from behind his glasses. "I wouldn't disagree."

"Desperate to get me into Pekin, or out of London?"

"You were a target there."

"I'll be a target here, once they pick up my trail."

We turned left towards the huge crowded square, edging past a group of uniformed school children carrying white posies for mourning. The street was roped off and all traffic had stopped.

"You didn't leave a trail," Ferris told me. "You came out here under RAF security." He noticed a cockroach at the edge of the pavement and moved to his left slightly, and I heard the faint cracking sound under his black polished shoe.

"Oh for Christ's sake," I said.

"Another little soul saved for Jesus." He gave the soft dry laugh I remembered so well, the sound of a snake shedding its skin. "The thing is, London believes Sinclair had something rather important to tell us, and they don't want things to get cold. Logical, for London."

A squadron of military jets was passing overhead, in salute to the dead premier. When it was quieter I asked Ferris: "Who was Sinclair's main source, do we know?"

"A man called Jason."

"One of ours?"

"A sleeper, yes, based in Seoul."

"He's there now?"

"No. He flew into Pekin last night."

"To rendezvous with us?"

"That's right. He was told to meet you when you landed."

"Why didn't he?"

"I rather think," he said, "they got to him first."

I slowed, and he waited for me to come abreast again. "Fill me in, will you?" He'd been letting me ask the questions, according to routine procedure. The director in the field tells the executive only what he specifically needs to know, but will answer most questions; the idea is to leave the executive's head clear of data that isn't essential, and data that could be dangerous.

"Jason checked into our hotel soon after ten o'clock last night," Ferris told me. "We had a secure rendezvous set up for thirty minutes later, so that he could tell me what kind of information Sinclair had been carrying, and hopefully where he'd found it." He combed back his pale wispy hair with his fingers. "So it's not really our day, is it?"

I didn't answer. The Sinclair information was my objective for the mission and after two hours in the field I was being told that the only contact was lost. In a moment I asked:

"You think Jason is dead?"

"I would think so, yes."

"They're working so fast."

He nodded. "These people are different."

"Who are they, Ferris?"

"I don't think they're political, and I don't think they're intelligence. But I think they might be a paid political instrument — a hit group — with access to intelligence sources. They seem too efficient for a government agency; they don't have to wait for orders before they move. As you say, they move very fast."

"Here and in London."

"Just so."

We passed a thin ragged boy kneeling on a newspaper, his head down in prayer. A lot of the people standing at the base of the buildings were in the same attitude, all of them wearing black armbands. A huge military band was pushing its way through the crowd at the end of the square, with the police trying to help them.

"Is this a wildcat group we're up against?" I asked Ferris.

"You mean terrorists?"

"I suppose so." What worried me most was that the opposition was already hitting us without leaving a trace.

"I don't think they're terrorists, exactly. They're not trying to terrorise anyone. So far their action's been focussed on the Sinclair information: they killed him to silence him; they tried to kill you because they realised you were connected with him; and they got at Jason because he too was a connection. There could be something they've got to protect, without counting the cost. Some sort of — " he waved a vague hand, "some sort of project."

"A big one."

"Certainly on an international scale. Otherwise Croder wouldn't have come in as Control."

It was getting more difficult to make our way through the crowd; at the hotel I'd been told that an estimated half-million people would gather in Tian'anmen Square.

"How long," I asked Ferris, "were you and this man Jason together at the hotel?"

In a moment he said: "The name's Ferris. Remember me?" He'd decided to make a joke of it but I heard an edge to his tone.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't mention it."

He was my director in the field and responsible for my safety and in the next few days or the next few weeks he was going to steer me through the mission and try to get me out alive, and he was telling me now that he hadn't been so careless as to make contact in public with Jason, who was the known source of the information that had led to Sinclair's death and nearly to mine.

The military band was now assembled opposite the Palace Museum and playing "The East is Red", the Chinese Communist anthem.

Ferris pitched his voice above the noise. "I made the rendezvous with Jason over the phone when he landed at the airport. I've never met either Sinclair or Jason, so that at the moment I'm clean, and so are you; but we're only one step ahead of the action and I want to make high-security rendezvous and use contacts; there are quite a lot of Occidentals here for the funeral but in a few days' time we'll be standing out in a crowd." He looked at his watch. "You've got five minutes to join your group before the cortege comes into the square from the other end. Make for the dais under the portrait of Jiang Wenyuan and do whatever the security man tells you — and don't forget you'll be under scrutiny."

The military band was now playing the «Internationale», and there was movement beginning in the crowd packing the far end of the square.

"I shall be standing behind the official mourners," Ferris told me, "and I'll meet you again after the ceremony. If for any reason we get separated and you need me, phone the Embassy and ask for McFadden, second cultural attache; he's the station officer for the Bureau and he's versed in speech-code, so I want you to use it. Questions?"

"Yes. When is the English contingent flying back?"

"Some time this afternoon, as soon as the Secretary of State has offered his condolences to the Vice-Premier and his party. We then change your cover and papers."

"Understood."

I left him and pushed my way to the roped area below the immense portrait of the late Premier and showed my credentials to an officer of the special police guard; he was almost casual in the way he let me through, and I remembered this was Pekin, not Moscow.

"'Morning, Gage."

Detective-Inspector Stanfield took a couple of steps towards me and half-turned again to watch the Secretary of State. "You want instructions, I understand."

"Just general procedure." All this man had been told was that I was Secret Service and working here as one of his team.

"We're expecting no trouble," he said quietly. "The main thing is to keep your eye on the body. There's no crush here and everyone in this enclosure has had to show their papers, so he'll be all right. If anyone's got any ideas about lining up a pot-shot, the ANFU will spot him in the crowd — there's three hundred of them just at this end of the square. The thing is to relax — and, as I say, keep your eye on the body."

"Fair enough."

The sun had climbed above the roof of the huge Palace Museum and the direct heat was stifling; the breeze from the rice-fields was blocked here by the buildings. The Secretary of State was talking quietly to Claudier and Veidt, the French and German delegates: I recognised a dozen people here from their press photographs.

"Three kings," Stanfield was speaking from the side of his mouth, "twenty-nine presidents and heads of state, twenty-one prime ministers and sundry odds and sods. Quite a turn-out for someone who was only in office ten months."

I noticed Walter Mills, the US Vice-President, surrounded by the ten members of his delegation, with the same number of security men positioned along the edge of the dais.

The crowds along the east side of the square were murmuring now, the sound of their voices trapped by the buildings; I looked twice in that direction and saw the cortege coming, with the draped funeral carriage drawn by a white-painted jeep.

"Eye on the bod," Stanfield murmured, and I turned my head back to watch Bygreave. There were quite a few Europeans on the far side of him but I couldn't see anything of Ferris.

At ten-fifteen the cortege reached this end of the square and Stanfield-drew me along the dais as the first of the official mourners took their wreaths from the attendants and began laying them against the coffin, the Premier's widow and two sons being the first to step down from the dais. The military band had stopped playing now and the square was quiet. Beyond the English delegates I could see hundreds of school children going onto their knees along the roped pavement, one of them dropping her white bouquet of flowers and crawling between two police guards to fetch it; from somewhere nearer I could hear women sobbing, and wondered why. This wasn't Mao, the Father of the Revolution, but a man without charisma and less than a year in office; perhaps they always cried at funerals because the flowers were so beautiful, or because unlike the men their hearts could be moved beyond politics to the thought that whoever this was, here was a man dead.

It took twenty minutes for the Communist Party and military delegates to lay their wreaths and bow three times in front of the coffin. The first of the foreign delegates were the Albanians, whose anti-revisionist creed had been allied to Mao's; they were followed by the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Cambodians, with the Japanese next in line.

The crying of the women was beginning to depress me; I hoped someone would be there in London, to cry for Sinclair.

Pigeons flew from the parapets along the facade of the Museum, their wings black against the sun's glare until they wheeled and caught the light; along the rooftops the flags were at half-mast, some of them catching the breeze; down here the air was still and stifling as the American Vice-President moved forward and laid a wreath of white tiger-lilies against the catafalque, leading the rest of the delegates past at a steady pace.

The British contingent followed, and as Detective-Inspector Stansfield moved to the edge of the dais I went with him and was close enough to read the name on the wreath of white roses as Bygreave took it from an attendant — Elizabeth R.

The delegates formed a short line along the side of the catafalque, watching as their leader placed the wreath carefully against it; then suddenly the sky was filled with flowers and the bloodied body of the Secretary of State was hurled against me by the blast as the coffin exploded.