ADAM HALL - The Mandarin Cypher

Hong Kong is certainly a little expensive.

So's everywhere, I find! Excuse me, but are you sort of — I mean fully Chinese?

I was born here. That makes me a British subject.

Oh isn't that nice I Pushover.

He was staying at this hotel too, and knew London quite well. She ought to look up his brother when she got back, he must give her the address. The Chinese Embassy-just a temporary post.

She'd found his brother charming, and discreet, and extraordinarily generous. Because of his love for the British.

Then Hong Kong again for their next vacation and this time a prearranged contact and a blazing row in their hotel, what did she think she was doing, she wasn't doing anything except wasting the best years of her life tied to a man who couldn't even do it more than once a month and couldn't give her any money so she could at least buy a few new dresses and try to look like a woman somebody loved, but this would be treason , oh don't be so bloody dramatic, the Chinks haven't got anything against us, it's India they're scared of now it's got the bomb, he told me, they're a poor country and this thing you're working on would cut their costs of defence down to a tenth, oh all right, we've talked quite a lot together, so what, and listen, will you, do you know how much they'd pay us for a. few months' work, just as a technical adviser? Better get ready for it, George. A hundred thousand pounds.

He sat with his head down, toying with some kind of fruit mush in a waxed hygienic cup.

'I haven't had time to think,' he said quietly.

He meant he hadn't had time to think about what I'd told him out there on deck with the riveter hammering away.

I haven't had time to think.

You'd have to give me longer than that.

How much longer?

I don't know. I'd have to think.

Egerton sitting there on the edge of the table by the voice spectograph, telling them to do the whole series again and double check.

Tewson's voice.

I wondered where they'd bugged him. Somewhere in Hong Kong.

They'd been getting serious about George Henry Tewson, maybe a long time before they'd sent for me and put me down the hole. They wouldn't be too worried about the Chinese Republic setting up a cheap missile system: the UK was a small island at the wrong end of the telescope and the first targets in any kind of pre-emptive nuclear showdown would be the Soviet Union and India. But Tewson didn't have to stop at China. He'd got goods for sale and there were other potential buyers and some of them were in Europe and he could go from door to door a hundred thousand a knock and she'd think he was the most wonderful man in the world and that was what he wanted, all he wanted.

He didn't want money. None of us do. We want what it can buy.

He wanted his wife.

They didn't know about that in London or maybe they did and maybe that was why they wanted him back there to put away and lose the key. He was a bacillus at large: a one-man do-it-yourself bubonic plague.

He hadn't spoken for five minutes.

'That was very nice,' I said, and pushed my plate away and got up and took my knife and prised the second wall-plug cover off and dragged out the wires and pulled down the portrait of Mao and neutralized that one too and got the fire-extinguisher off the wall and shot foam into the ceiling ventilator grille that didn't have any dust accumulated around the vanes and threw the extinguisher on the bunk and said:

'Listen, they don't want anyone to know they've got this thing because people are going to feel pressed into developing their own systems in retaliation, particularly India, and if you're let loose across the frontiers everybody will know. They'll even know if you're caught and sent back to London and shoved in clink, because of the trial proceedings.'

He was watching me from his chair and the light wasn't across his thick-lensed glasses and I could see his eyes and I could see they were looking at something he'd known would happen to him one day. So he didn't look surprised and he didn't look afraid. He looked destroyed.

'There's only one way they can make sure you keep your mouth shut about the work you've done for them. They're going to do it for real this time, Tewson: they're going to take you to Tai Tam Bay and leave you long enough for the fish to pick you clean so they can show you've been there since your fishing accident and they're going to take a leg off to show it was a shark but they'll leave your head on so the dentist can prove it's you. And don't tell me I've given you a load of cobblers — work it out for yourself.'

No one had come to the cabin yet Maybe no one would.

It depended on their thinking: they knew the three mikes were dead and they knew I'd done it and they knew why. But they also knew they could break this poor bastard open and play the whole thing back. They wanted to know what we were talking about and they couldn't do that if they came along here because we'd shut up. The only thing they could do by coming in here would be to show themselves up as a bunch of lemons, and there's this face thing they're all so fussy about.

'How much longer is this job going to take, Tewson?'

He stared at me through the lenses.

'What did you say?'

I'd dragged his thoughts back, God knew from what particular hell.

'This job you're doing for them. How long's it going to take?'

He tried to concentrate.

'About two weeks.'

'All right. You've got two weeks to live. Thought I should tell you.'

His silhouette came into the window again.

This was a different one: they'd changed the guard at midnight. His ears stuck out from a rather thin neck. I couldn't see his eyes. The window was narrow and I'd taken a lot of time measuring it to see if my body could pass through it. In the end I gave it up.

That was before he'd started again. Not this one, the one with the red-rimmed eyes.

Why did you destroy the listening devices?

I've told you.

Why did you destroy the listening devices?

Gave me three hours.

Three hours can be a long time. I could still see the lamp.

What did you say to him?

Leave me alone you bastard!

What did you say to him?

Screw yourself.

One hundred and eighty minutes and five repetitions every minute and the light making pools at the back of my empty skull, blazing its way right through the sockets. One hundred and eighty temptations to tell him.

The light was still in my eyes.

They were shut but it was still there.

I would like to sleep. I would like to sleep. I would like to see the light go out and hear the dark and feel the silhouette turning slowly, the tape running through the bright metal dishes, anything else but millet? Of course if I'd known you were married, she laughed and opened her legs and the blood was there in a long smear down the road, a man flower, what is a man.

Watch it.

Mouth dry and the breath pumping, happened, what happened?

Bloody well wake up.

Window was blank he wasn't at the window.

Check.

00.55.

Don't do again. It again. Tired that's all, haven't had any sleep since eight o'clock last night, last no, night before, yes, a long time.

I raised my head off the pillow and waited.

He came again.

Very regular. Every five minutes. Assumption was that he paced the width of the deck and took station at the rail and surveyed and paced back. The door was locked from the outside and he'd remain within earshot and I couldn't do anything with the door and if I tried the window it'd make a noise.

What did you say to him?