ADAM HALL - The Mandarin Cypher

I wasn't sure it was Tewson but I'd bet on it because the whole thing fitted in with her attitudes towards me and her behaviour at Jade Imperial: as a young widow released from a sexless marriage her eagerness, archness and inexperience had been predictable, but it hadn't explained her sense of guilt and intrigue. She wasn't just having an affaire: it was an extra-marital affaire.

Hindsight makes you look a fool: I should have known two nights ago that Tewson was alive.

The engine of the launch was still running and I lifted the 7X50's again, not wanting to, making myself, because if Tewson put to sea and I couldn't follow and find out where he went, the only lead would be Nora again and she'd have to be worked on and that would mean asking London for one of the psychos and he'd have to come all the way out — unless they could rake one up from the embassies or consulates in Pekin or Taipei or Tokyo — and start from scratch and it could take weeks to break her down and get what he wanted without her knowing. And all I'd get out of it was a free ride home and a stomachful of adrenalin, what the hell was London doing , I didn't want the bloody Guards called out, I just wanted a boat, for Christ's sake, and I wanted it now .

It wouldn't have made much difference if I'd used speech code instead of cypher: it would have saved maybe a few minutes but no more than that because C and C were open twenty-four hours and there'd only been two signals to unzip and besides, it would have been highly dangerous. They picked the flower was perfectly safe because even if it was intercepted and its meaning understood, it didn't say anything they didn't already know. It was a whole lot different asking for a director to come out to the field: it not only meant the operator had got hold of something big enough to need direction, but that he was going to try for immediate penetration, a tacit declaration of war that would bring in their troops — and their supply line was a few miles long, from here to the South China coast, with ours having to stretch half across the globe.

The second signal, ordering a boat and specifying the rdv, couldn't have gone in any other way but cypher: it was fully urgent and strictly hush and if the opposition had intercepted and decyphered it they'd have just sent someone down here to the twelve-pile breakwater half a mile north of the Golden Sands Hotel in Telegraph Bay with orders to tread all over my face.

The man had finished his calisthenics under the looking-glass tree and was walking slowly up the beach to his fishing boat. I wasn't worried about him: he could have tagged me here from the hotel and semaphored the entire Book of Mao if he'd wanted to, but he hadn't. His movements had been genuine tai chi chuan and I'd made certain that no one was tagging me when I'd come down here. The immediate field was totally secure.

There was movement now and I refocused: two figures detaching themselves from the edge of the building, one white, one darker, indistinct because the line of magnolias was in the way. More movement, this time on the far side of the pagoda: two figures again, both white, the same stature, their motion co-ordinated. A slight burst of noise from the launch as the seaman cleared the cylinders.

The darker figure stopped, looking up at one of the first-floor windows, and even at this distance and with no depth of field I could see his awkwardness as he waved his hand. Then they were filing down to the jetty, forming the same kind of procession I'd seen last night.

I estimated that Mandarin had another two minutes to run.

London was six thousand miles away but they'd got a radio hadn't they, got a telephone for Christ sake, this wasn't an alien state, it was a Crown Colony and they could pull some rank, couldn't they, and what the hell was the Minister doing about this, the one they were so bloody proud of because he could cut through the red tape in ten seconds flat, hadn't anyone picked up the blower and got him off the pot?

Sweating like a pig.

The seaman was in the stern, handing his party aboard, and the launch heeled slightly to their weight. Two of the figures were going into the cabin, one of them the man in the bush jacket, George Henry Tewson, the man from London, dead on paper, killed off by bought witnesses at the dictates of clandestine necessity, the man at the centre of Mandarin, alive and well and vanishing from sight as the stern went down and the exhaust note bubbled to a roar. Within thirty seconds the launch was a small indistinct blob half lost in the morning haze, and I lowered the binoculars.

Mission aborted. Am returning to London.

Because there wasn't anything else I could do. Tewson was I being released periodically on some kind of parole and he might come here again but it wouldn't be for another week, unless they changed the pattern. I'd already got as close to Nora as I could without getting killed and if I stayed in Hong Kong for another week I wouldn't have time to do anything but keep out of their way and hope to stay alive: but that wasn't what I was here for. All London could do was send one of their tame mind-benders to work on Nora Tewson and by the time he'd produced results I'd be somewhere else and stuck into a different jumble sale — Helsinki, if I could twist their arm, there was a ministry scandal blowing up and we all knew it was Nikolai again and we'd have to stop him. Aware, at the edge of my thoughts, that the sound of the launch remained steady, even though it was on the horizon now. They were going to go straight through the roof in London because they hated a mission to abort, it meant someone had blundered. I supposed it was something to do with the acoustic properties of the East Lamma Channel, there was an echo coming back from the hills over there, making it seem that the launch was stationary at full speed. So what did we do, we lost yet another of those poor little wretches they always put in the field too early and we had all the paper off the wall at the Hong Kong Cathay and we ran out of toothpaste. London was going to fire Egerton from a cannon every Tuesday at the Horse Guards Parade for as long as they could find anything to put back in the barrel. But the direction of the sound had altered too, and I turned my head.

The damn thing was nosing inshore, losing way, some kind of police boat, I hadn't seen it because the binoculars had been stuck in my eyes, the engines dying to a slow boil, three smart-looking officers in the stern and watching me but not making any sign in case I was the wrong man. I went along the breakwater like a monkey, jumping from pile to pile and trying to keep my balance along the horizontal timbers. The launch was standing off, quite a big vessel, twin screws, couldn't come in any closer, take time to lower the boat, it was up to me, really.

One of them grabbed me as I fell aboard.

'Can you move off?'

'Are you Mr Wing? We received — '

'Can you move off immediately ? Look, you see that boat on the horizon?'

His head swung like a perched hawk's when it sights prey. He was a neat young Chinese, thin as a string, all cap-peak and cheekbones, his eyes locked on the distant sea.

'You wish me to follow?'

'If it's not too late.'

He moved a hand in a signal to the bo'sun and nearly had me in the water as the stern dipped and the deck lurched, sending me against the rails. He was calling something to me above the roar of the engines.

'What?' I shouted.

'Are you Mr Wing?'

'Yes.'

'Captain Liu Tse-tung, Narcotics Division.'

The wind was whipping at our faces now and he led me into the cabin. I caught the scent right away and he saw my expression, giving a quick laugh.

'Fifty kilos,' he said. A couple of the bags had burst and the stuff had spilled across the top of the locker. 'We were taking it in when we had the signal about you.'