Noble House

In a moment he was calm again. Now the next file. Again ciphers appeared and the lettering vanished.
Dunross worked steadily and efficiently. When the flame began to fade he was prepared. He refilled the lighter and continued. Now the last file. He cut out the quarter carefully and pocketed the eleven pieces of paper, then slid the files back into their hiding place.
Before he relocked the box he took out a deed for camouflage and laid it beside AMG's letter. Another hesitation, then, shielding AMG's letter with his body, he put the flame to it. The paper twisted as it flared and burned.
"What're you doing?"
Dunross jerked around and stared at the silhouette. "Oh, it's you." He began breathing again. "Nothing, Bruce. Actually it's just an ancient love letter that shouldn't have been kept." The flame died and Dunross pounded the ash to dust and scattered the remains.
"Ian, are you in trouble? Bad trouble?" Johnjohn asked gently.
"No, old chum. It's just the Tiptop mess."
"You're sure?"
"Oh yes." Wearily Dunross smiled back and took out a handkerchief to wipe his forehead and hands. "Sorry to put you to all this trouble."
He walked off firmly, Johnjohn following. The gate clanged after them. In a moment the elevator sighed open and sighed closed and now there was silence but for the scurry of the rats and the slight hiss of the air conditioner. A shadow moved. Silently Roger Crosse came from behind a tall bank of boxes and stood in front of the tai-pan's section. Unhurried, he took out a tiny Minox camera, a flashlight and a bunch of skeleton keys. In a moment, Dunross's box was open. His long fingers reached into it, found the false compartment and brought out the files. Very satisfied he put them in a tidy pile, clipped the flashlight into its socket and, with practiced skill, began to photograph the files, page by page. When he came to one of the special pages he peered at it and the missing section. A grim smile flickered over him. Then he continued, making no sound.
SUNDAY
71
6:30 A.M. :
Koronski came out of the foyer of the Nine Dragons Hotel and hailed a taxi, giving the driver directions in passable Cantonese. He lit a cigarette and slouched back in the seat, keeping a professional watch behind him in the unlikely chance that he was being followed. There was no real risk. His papers as Hans Meikker were flawless, his cover as a sporadic foreign journalist for a West German magazine syndicate real, and he visited Hong Kong frequently as a routine. His eyes reassured him, then he turned to watch the multitudes, wondering who was to be chemically debriefed, and where. He was a short, well-fed, nondescript man, his glasses rimless.
Behind him, fifty yards or so, ducking in and out of the traffic was a small, battered Mini. Tom Connochie, the senior CIA agent, was in the back, one of his assistants, Roy Wong, driving.
"He's going left."
"Sure. I see him. Relax, Tom, you're making me nervous for chrissake." Roy Wong was third-generation American, a B.A. Lit., and CIA for four years, assigned to Hong Kong. He drove expertly, Connochie watching carefully—crumpled and very tired. He had been up most of the night with Rosemont trying to sort out the flood of top-secret instructions, requests and orders that the intercepted Thomas K. K. Lim's letters had generated. Just after midnight they'd been tipped by one of their hotel informants that Hans Meikker had just checked in for two days from Bangkok. He had been on their list for years as a possible security risk.
"Son of a bitch!" Roy Wong said as a traffic jam blossomed in the narrow, screeching street near the bustling intersections of Mong Kok.
Connochie craned out of the side window. "He's screwed too, Roy. About twenty cars ahead."
In a moment the jam began to ease, then closed in again as an overladen truck stalled. By the time it had cranked up again, their prey had vanished.
"Shit!"
"Cruise. Maybe we'll get lucky and pick him up."
Two blocks ahead, Koronski got out of the taxi and went down a swarming alley, heading for another swarming road and another alley and Ginny Fu's tenement. He went up the soiled stairs to the top floor. He knocked three times on a drab door. Suslev beckoned him in and locked the door behind him. "Welcome," he said quietly in Russian. "Good trip?"
"Yes, Comrade Captain, very good," Koronski replied, also keeping his voice down by habit.
"Come and sit down." Suslev waved at the table that had coffee and two cups. The room was drab with little furniture. Dirty blinds covered the windows.
"Coffee's good," Koronski said politely, thinking it was hideous, nothing to compare with the French-style coffee of exquisite Bangkok, Saigon and Phnom Penh.
"It's the whiskey," Suslev said, his face hard.
"Center said I was to put myself at your disposal, Comrade Captain. What is it you want me to do?"
"A man here has a photographic memory. We need to know what's in it."
"Where is the client to be interrogated? Here?"
Suslev shook his head. "Aboard my ship."
"How much time do we have?"
"All the time you need. We will take him with us to Vladivostok."
"How important is it to get quality information?"
"Very."
"In that case I would prefer to do the investigation in Vladivostok —I can give you special sedatives and instructions that will keep the client docile during the voyage there and begin the softening-up process."
Suslev rethought the problem. He needed Dunross's information before he arrived in Vladivostok. "Can't you come with me on my ship? We leave at midnight, on the tide."
Koronski hesitated. "My orders from Center are to assist you, so long as I do not jeopardize my cover. Going on your ship would certainly do that—the ship's sure to be under surveillance. If I vanish from the hotel, eh?"
Suslev nodded. "I agree." Never mind, he thought. I'm as well trained an interrogator as Koronski though I've never done an in-depth chemical. "How do you conduct a chemical debriefing?"
"It's quite simple. Intravenous injections of a chemical agent we call Pentothal-V6, twice a day for ten days at twelve-hour intervals —once the client has been put into a suitably frightened, disoriented frame of mind, by the usual sleep-wake method, followed by four days of sleeplessness."
"We've a doctor on the ship. Could he make the injections?"
"Oh yes, yes of course. May I suggest I write down the procedure and supply you with all the necessary chemicals. You will do the investigation?"
"Yes."
"If you follow the procedure you should have no trouble. The only serious thing to remember is that once the Pentothal-V6 is administered the client's mind is like a wet sponge. It requires great tenderness and even greater care to extract just the right amount of water, the information, at just the right tempo or the mind will be permanently damaged and all other information lost forever." Koronski puffed at a cigarette. "It's easy to lose a client."
"It's always easy to lose a client," Suslev said. "How effective is this Pentothal-V6?"
"We've had great success, and some failures, Comrade Captain," Koronski replied with care. "If the client is well prepared and initially healthy I'm sure you will be successful."
Suslev did not answer, just let his mind reexamine the plan presented so enthusiastically by Plumm late last night, and agreed to reluctantly by Crosse. "It's a cinch, Gregor, everything's falling into place. Now that Dunross's not going to Taipei he's coming to my party. I'll give him a doctored drink that'll make him as sick as a dog—it'll be easy to get him to lie down in one of the bedrooms— the same drug'll put him to sleep. Once the others have left—and I'm keeping the party short and sweet, six to eight—I'll put him in a trunk and have the trunk brought to the car through the side entrance. When he's reported missing I'll say I just left him there sleeping and have no idea what time he left. Now, how are we going to get the trunk aboard?"