ADAM HALL - The Mandarin Cypher

So there wasn't a chance but you have to think of everything or you'll miss a trick and they'll go in there and switch the lights on and lock the door and pull your dossier out of the safe and drop it into the document destruction thing, just because you didn't think of everything .

'You're making a mistake,' I told them again.

They didn't understand and it worried them in case I was saying something they could use for their profit. They told me to shut up: I didn't know the word but I knew the tone. Then the thin one folded my papers and put them into the passport and I waited for him to hand them back to me and give a shrug and let me go, because the imperilled psyche becomes undisciplined and clutters the mind with false hopes, however you try to reason.

He said a word and the gun was pushed harder against my spine and we moved at last, the four of us, towards the station wagon. I was forced back into the driving seat and they took my wrists and put my hands on the wheel-rim. Then they all climbed in and slammed the doors and one of them tugged out the street map from the glove compartment and got it open and stared at it for a moment and finally stabbed his finger near one of the folds. 'Here.' He looked at me with his blank animal eyes to see that I understood. 'Go here.' The facia wasn't lit but there was a chemical glow from the quayside lamps and his finger was stabbing again at the point on the map: the corner of Statue Square, where the Bank of China stood with its great brass doors and its garrison of armed guards and interrogators, the place where they were going to take me and after a while make me wish to Christ I'd drawn a capsule.

'Have you seen this chart?'

'Yes,' I told him.

'Where?'

'On the launch.'

'What launch?'

'The narcotics boat.'

'Oh yes.'

He had it spread across the table: Chart 341 — China — South-East Coast — Approaches to Hong Kong-Islands South of Lantau .

'Have you studied it?' he asked me.

'Not in detail.'

His head turned slightly and he became very still for a second or two. Then he went across to the bulkhead and put his foot down and there was a light crunch and he came back.

'I wish to Christ you wouldn't do that,' I said.

He gave a titter but watched me with unamused eyes. 'Cockroach, old boy, the mariner's bane. How are you feeling?'

'Bloody awful.'

Physically I was all right but it had put an edge on my nerves, those three little ticks trying to get at me like that within minutes of final briefing.

'You've got three and a half hours yet,' said Ferris. 'Take it easy.' He leaned over the chart again, moving the lantern so that its light featured the bottom right-hand corner. This was the target zone, centred on Longitude 114 by east, Latitude 22 by north. The oil rig was two miles south of the San-men Islands and I saw he'd marked it in: I suppose he'd asked the Navy or someone where the thing was.

'Have you seen any other charts?'

'One or two.'

'On the narcotics launch?'

'Yes.'

I hadn't studied them. He got another one and unrolled it and spread it out and began topographical briefing while I sat in my track suit and tried to get my left eyelid to keep still: they could have wrecked the whole mission for me, those little bastards.

'Hong Kong is pretty well surrounded,' said Ferris, 'with these little islands, a couple of hundred of them belonging to the Colony and the rest of them garrisoned by the Communist Chinese.'

I didn't ask any questions yet but I was already wondering how the hell he was going to drop me into the target zone with any kind of security, even by night.

'You'll be going in by sub,' he said without looking up from the chart.

It wasn't telepathy: he was just a very bright director and keeping one step ahead of me. I let him go on talking, trying to get the other thing out of my mind.

They were probably dead.

'This group is perfectly barren, with the nearest garrison on this island here, five nautical miles to the north-east.'

I was beginning to steam now so I unzipped the track suit to the waist and let it hang open. Ferris had gone to fetch it for me from the Harbour Hotel, mustn't catch a cold he'd said with a whinnying laugh, and left me here on the junk with a towel round me. I hadn't dried off enough before I put the track suit on and that was why I had begun steaming.

It hadn't taken a minute, but it had seemed longer. There wasn't time to plan anything elegant because once they got me inside that bloody place I wouldn't come out again alive and they'd have a go art getting the whole lot before I was too far gone to say anything. There wasn't anything useful I could tell them about Mandarin: we wanted to reach Tewson and we weren't even in the access phase and they knew a hell of a lot more about him than we did. But they'd try for general background: what was my cell, what network, what bases, so forth, and if they worked on me for long enough — I mean for months, not hours — they might get a picture of the Bureau and even some of the organizational features. Names wouldn't mean anything: they were all code. The thing about having the 9 suffix after your name in the dossier is that although it means you've proved yourself reliable under torture it doesn't mean they won't start doing things to you one day that'll finally break you down.

I don't like pain any more than anyone else does.

My hands were on the wheel where they'd put them and the thin one turned the ignition key to start the engine and then told me to drive off.

'Go now,' he said, and I thought how Chinese it sounded, even though he spoke in English.

So the first thing to do was blow my cover.

'I can be quite useful to you,' I said.

The thing that surprised them was that I said it in Cantonese.

They'd been half-sure I was the man they wanted: it was only when they couldn't find a gun that they began having serious doubts, and even then they'd thought it was worth while taking me along to the interrogators. Now they had all they needed: I could speak Cantonese and I'd been concealing the fact, on top of which I'd told them I could be useful to them.

They all three started to talk at once and the thin one told the other two to shut up. He leaned forward with his arm across the top of the facia, turned sideways to watch me.

'You are from Londan?'

'Yes.'

'Your name is Clive Wing?'

'Yes.'

His Cantonese wasn't much better than mine but we got along.

The man behind me was pressing the gun into my neck so hard that I couldn't sit up straight. They were excited again now, ready for the execution but the thin one had a certain basic intelligence and thought I could conceivably be more use alive than dead.

The thing I needed was speed.

'Drive to the Bank of China,' he said.

'If that's what you want. But I've told you, I can be useful to you.'

The engine was ticking over.

'You will tell them at our headquarters,' he nodded, his tone cocky and his whole attitude like that of a master-spy running an entire operation. 'I shall arrange full interrogation.'

I kept quiet for a couple of seconds and then got the right degree of reluctance into the tone. 'All right, but I can put one of my agents into your hands, if you'll be lenient with me later.'

I looked at my watch.

'What agent?'

'We're working together. But we'll have to hurry because we had a rendezvous at 20.00 hours and he'll leave if I don't show up.'

It was terribly basic stuff and I felt a bit embarrassed. The hit men of any network are never much more than muscle, but these were from a state where most of the population had been trained to regard the life of the ant as Utopia. If I tried any kind of subtlety with them we'd get bogged down in misunderstanding and all I needed was speed: speed in terms of actual miles per hour. Also I needed a valid reason for hurrying.