ADAM HALL - The Pekin Target

Came again. So quiet that it could have just been in my mind; but I know my mind; it doesn't play tricks on me; it lets me know things; it lets me know the kind of things I should know.

The shadows on the arched ceiling outside the door of my cell looked much as I'd seen them before; they were moving in the same rhythm, as the mountain air breathed through the labyrinthine passages and apertures of the monastery, pulling at the lantern flames. These people could have lit this place like a supermarket if they'd wanted to; they had a generator going for the transceivers; but it was probably visible at night to some of the villages on the far slopes of the foothills, or to the wagoners and goatherds along the mountain tracks. They'd put camouflage nets over the two helicopters out there, so they wanted things to look normal.

A very definite click. Immediate associations: gun, wooden box, lock. It was too quiet for the moving mechanism of a gun and there wasn't a wooden box in this cell for anyone to open and nobody could get in here without -

Lock, yes.

Turning.

Rotten taste in my mouth from that dream: the taste of fear.

It was a heavy door, solid oak and with huge wrought hinges. I'd seen the key when they'd first put me in here, an enormous thing, the kind of thing you'd only ever see in a flea market, genuine antique, and so forth. They'd oiled the tumblers through the ages; monks run a tight ship, orderliness next to godliness. But there's no way you can turn a lock this size without making at least a slight noise.

Tung.

For the last five hours he'd been shut in with his sense of impotence in the face of karma, hearing his son's name again and again in that heavy Russian accent. I will do anything you wish, if you can save him. That was only in a dream, yes, but dreams are cyphers for a reality we haven't the time to understand.

No, it couldn't be Tung outside my door. He didn't need to come along here in the dead of night to talk to me, because he didn't think I knew any more about the Moscow signal than he did; he didn't know I understood Russian. Besides, he'd have to knock out Yang or the other guard: one of them was always outside and at this hour it would be Yang; I knew the shifts they worked. Yang wouldn't let him in here without permission from Sinitsin: the KGB was running this show, not Tung Kuo-feng.

Yang wouldn't let anyone in here.

I would have to think about that.

Other tiny sounds, from a different direction. Immediate associations: water rushing, fire crackling, both very far away; distant rain. I turned my head a little to listen and the sounds were suddenly much louder; it was the straw in the palliasse, close to my ear.

Mechanical sound again, of tumblers falling against the force of the spring, held back by the tines of the key. And I'd thought about it now. Yang wouldn't let anyone in here, so either he'd been called away from guard duty or someone had got at him. Unsatisfactory: these Koreans were military and they wouldn't take a guard away without relieving him, and no one could have got at him because no one would want to, except Tung, and Tung was under house arrest and had guards watching him wherever he went.

Pride?

There was nothing over me; the night was too mild. My arms were free, and lying along the mattress. The mattress was on the stone floor. The only light in here was coming from the small oblong in the door, and its source was a good way off, near the second archway along the passage to the operations room; if I lifted my hand I would just about see it, but that was all.

Wounded pride.

Because I'd gone for him in front of the others, even though he'd had a submachine gun pointing at me. For whatever his reasons, this was Yang coming in here.

He took his time. I watched the thin strip of luminosity forming on the wall as the big door began swinging inwards, and smelled the oil from the lamps out there, and the lingering sweetness of the incense that had filled the arched chamber where Tung Kuo-feng had talked to me last evening. The far voice of a night bird came from the mountain heights; it had been too faint to register through the narrow oblong in the door, and there was no window here.

Yang was moving with infinite patience. I could see his hand now, and his shoulder, a shadow against the shadows beyond, as the door swung inwards. Its edge was three feet from the end of my mattress; when he had the door wide open he would be within reach of me if he leapt. But perhaps he wouldn't do that. Perhaps he'd just come to talk. Not seriously, no.

The far cry of the nightbird. Incense.

The door was wide open now, and he stopped moving. He was a shadow the shape of a man, and I watched him. He had left the big gun outside; it would make too much noise in the still of the mountain night.

He stood watching me. I lay watching him.

I suppose the instincts of his ancient race had been working in him over the hours while he'd been pacing outside my door, pacing tiger-like, soft-footed in his trackshoes, ten steps to the left and then ten to the right, the gun in his arm and hate in his heart for me, the bruise pulsing in his throat and in his pride, his instincts begging revenge and so strongly that his military training was gradually overwhelmed, with the stealth of an infiltrating foe.

He wanted my blood.

Not moving. He was not moving now.

But what would he tell them afterwards? That someone else had come here and done this bloody deed? There'd be a lot of awkward questions: who were they and why did he let them pass? Perhaps he was going to do it in some way that would leave no mark, no evidence, pricking my skin with a poisoned thorn or holding me still while I inhaled exotic and lethal fumes, so that it would look as if I'd died in my sleep, or of a poison that someone else had put in my food. It wasn't my concern, and I stopped thinking about it because time must be short now.

I had only worked once before against Asiatics and that was in Bangkok, nine or ten missions ago; but I remembered that they killed readily. In the Curtain theatre it seldom happens; there are hundreds of KGB agents in London and as many CIA and British Secret Service people in Moscow, but we leave each other alone unless we're really pressed: there's a tacit understanding that if once we decided to wipe each other out on our home ground there'd be no possibility of carrying on our trade any more, and that would be dangerous in the extreme because Cold War espionage lowers the risk of a hot war breaking out. The Asiatics are different, and these people at the monastery were terrorists rather than spooks. It wasn't that life was cheap, but that death was expedient.

They'd tried to kill me four times, and the odds were growing short; in our trade a man has only so many lives.

The organism was sensitised now; the appropriate chemicals had been poured from the glands into the cardiovascular and muscular systems; blood had receded from the surface and I was breathing deeply; my pupils were expanded to make full use of the available light. I was cocked like a gun.

He believed I was asleep, and couldn't see the glint of my eyes between the narrowed lids because I lay in shadow; he would also assume that if I were awake and had heard him come in here I'd be on my feet by now. But all I had to rely on was the advantage of surprise; in all other respects I was appallingly vulnerable here on the ground. From my viewpoint he looked tall, dominant and invincible, and I knew that when he came for me he'd come very fast, exploding against me, fired by the hate that burned in him; he wouldn't be human, but monstrous, and with a monster's demoniacal strength. My quickest way out would be to underestimate him, I knew that.

He seemed to be moving now.

Or I thought he was moving, my imagination anticipating the event. I wasn't sure; I had to watch the soft edge of his shadow and the gap between it and the shadow of the door, but even then I couldn't tell if his movement were real. The saliva was thick in my mouth and I wanted to swallow but that would trigger him: the sound would be loud in the infinite stillness of the little cell. Anything would trigger him, however slight, even the rustle of the straw under my body. He wanted to do it while I slept, forcing my brain from its slow delta waves into the terminal stillness of annihilation.