ADAM HALL: The Pekin Target

Limping, but not any more. Grief, yes, as I drove beside the Thames with his pale blue stare still on me, an unfamiliar sourness in the pit of my gut, some kind of emotion that was strictly disallowed by the faceless, nameless, dehumanised institution we worked for, and hated, and stayed with because it gave us what we craved: a clandestine but lawful place outside society where we could search endlessly in the shadows for our identity, sometimes unto the death. This Sinclair had been doing; but what had he found? The bastards had come for him too soon, cutting him down.

Grief, then, and anger, and persisting fright as I drove alongside the river in the warm summer night. They'd invaded our home ground for the first time, and made a killing.

The people walked slowly along the embankment, watching the lights across the Thames, not wanting to go home yet because it was too warm to sleep and the stars were out and the town stood shimmering in the night.

The blue light of a police launch was leaving a reflected path across the water as it came under Chelsea Bridge, followed by the white line of its wake. It was the last thing I remembered.

She was watching my eyes.

"I'm sorry," I told her.

"What?" She leaned closer.

"I'm sorry about the evening," I said. My voice sounded faint and not very distinct.

"Don't worry." She had calm brown eyes, with the reflection of lamps in them.

"What's going on?" I asked her, and tried to sit up, but my feet were too high: they'd raised them on something. She pushed me gently back.

"Don't worry. You're all right. But you've got to rest." To hell with that. This wasn't the same girl at all. "Listen," I said, "I want to know what's happening." But it didn't seem worth the effort. Drifting again. Drifting. Flash of a needle in the light, as she drew it away from my arm. "I want to know…"

"Don't worry."

Chandler came.

"For God's sake," I asked him, "what's the time?"

He glanced up at the clock on the wall. "Nearly five."

"Five what?" I swung my head to look at the windows, but the blinds were down. "Five in the morning?"

"Yes." He pulled the metal-framed chair closer, narrowing his eyes as he stared at me. "How are you feeling?" He had the face of a watchful bird of prey.

"Bloody awful." My feet were still raised on pillows or something under the coverlet and there was a saline drip plugged into my left arm and my mouth tasted of gunpowder.

"He mustn't talk too much," the nurse said; she was on the other side of the bed; she was the one with the brown eyes I'd seen before.

"Is this intensive care?" I asked her and tried to sit up, but my ribs hurt too much.

"Yes. But you're okay now. Just keep quiet."

I looked at Chandler. "What happened?"

"Someone crashed into your car in Grosvenor Road near Dolphin Square, and wrote it off."

I tried to get him in focus. They'd been plugging me with drugs, by the feel of things. "Was I driving?" It sounded an odd question. The thing was, I couldn't remember anything.

"Yes. But someone got an ambulance in time." He watched me with his bright black-eyed stare.

The room seemed to have gone very still; the nurse wasn't moving, nor was Chandler; he sat with his feet together and his pale hands on his knees, his face held slightly upwards with its thin hooked nose sniffing the air. I looked away from him, wanting to think. So there was a memory gap of some sort. The crash had been wiped out. The second crash. Sinclair's, then mine. They were very much in earnest.

"Who are they?" I asked him, and then remembered the nurse, and wasn't surprised when he didn't answer. He looked up at her instead.

"It's really quite urgent that I put a few questions," he said. "Quite urgent."

She went out and came back with a doctor, who looked at me for a long time and then looked at the chart. "Yes," he said, "it was mainly shock, plus two cracked ribs and one or two bruises and a bit of retrogressive amnesia."' The nurse must have told him I'd been asking Chandler what had happened.

The doctor was watching me critically. "What can you last remember?"

I shied from making the effort; it was like having to go back into a distant country where everyone was a stranger. "I remember some people," I said. "Some people walking on the embankment, by the river. And a man — " but I broke off.

A man floating on his back, staring up at me with his dead blue eyes. But that had been before, beyond some kind of time shift. That had been Sinclair. "Some people," I said, "and a blue light."

"A blue light?" He was looking amused, as if I needed humouring.

"Listen," I told him, "I want Koyama here, can you get him?"

"Who is he?"

I was getting bloody annoyed because tonight — last night — they'd killed Sinclair and tried to kill me and this idiot in the white coat was treating me as if I was a bit of flotsam washed up from the street. "Chandler, tell them to —»

"All right." He spoke to the doctor with a sudden and surprising note of authority. "This man is used to shiatsu massage and I think he'd respond well to it."

"Well, I don't know about that. What sort of massage —»

"For Christ's sake," I cut in on them, "get me Koyama, and I don't care what time it is: he'll come. And I don't want any more drugs, is that understood?"

Chandler took a few minutes sorting things out while I lay there with my rib cage throbbing and waves of dizziness coming and going as their voices faded and loudened again. Then there was only Chandler in here, pacing the room with short accurate steps while his hook-nosed shadow kept pace with him along the wall.

"I can remember Sinclair," I told him, and managed to sit up without tugging at the saline drip tube. "All I don't remember is the crash."

"I don't think it's important. Amnesia's pretty common after an accident. At least you know the facts. You're in a state of siege, of course, for the moment. There are two plain-clothes men outside the door and we've got someone monitoring calls at the main switchboard in case anyone rings up to ask about your progress; the only people who know you're here are the people who tried to kill you, assuming they followed the ambulance. We sent —»

"They followed me from Riverside Walk, did they? I mean that's how they got onto me?"

He stopped pacing and swung his narrow head to look at me, and I saw how relieved he was. Now that he was closer I could see the strain in him, and realised how much he had to handle. Maybe it was his neck on the block for having let Sinclair fly in with no escort to meet him.

"Yes," he said briefly, "we can assume that is how they got onto you. I'm glad you can still think straight. How do you feel generally?"

"I'll be all right when Koyama gets here."

"I've sent for him."

"I'm operational, if you've got anything for me."

He looked away in frustration. "You're not recovered yet. We'll send some flowers to the young lady, the one you were dining with. Your car's a total write-off and we'll see to the insurance claim. Our chief concern for the moment is keeping you out of harm's way, and I suppose this is as good a place as any."

"You're expecting them to try again?"

"Of course."

"Who are they, Chandler?"

"We don't know."

"They're not the Soviets."

"No. This is quite out of character."

"Someone from the Far East, who followed Sinclair to London?"

"We've considered that. We've been in signals all night with Taiwan, Hong Kong and Seoul. He was doing something for us in Seoul, you see, before he flew back via Taiwan and Calcutta."

"Was he on a specific mission?"

"It's not in my province to know. Mr Croder was running him."

"Then it was something big." I said: