Quiller's Run

'So why didn't you call me to say?'

Someone gave a sigh, or a yawn, not Chen. I wanted to stop the itching but he wouldn't like it if I moved. He wouldn't have put the gun down yet.

'I was in Laos.' He raised his voice. 'Okay, turn around.'

He was sitting in a bamboo chair with his flying-boots crossed on a table, half desk, half table, the gun on his lap. 'What's he look like?'

I took in what I could, a low divan with rumpled clothes in the shadowed corner, more crates, bamboo furniture, mostly chairs, some cheap handmade rugs. It was a cavernous place, a warehouse, only two doors, no windows.

'Let's have a snort!'

It was by the river, with the river smell mingling with the chemicals. Unrefined opium, at a guess.

'Okay. But Katie, don't ever send anybody here without talking to me first. But you're beautiful.' He put the gun onto the table and sat upright. 'Sure, see you around.'

He rang off and threw me a packet of cigarettes and I caught it and threw it back. 'Trying to kick it? Sit down, Jordan.'

I took a chair near him. He was a full Chinese, scarecrow-thin, close-cropped hair beginning to grey at the temples, a weathered face, something wrong with one ear. 'Tsou-k'ai . Pieh ch'ao wo.'

The blankets on the divan moved and a naked woman rolled over and then stood up in the lamplight, ivory-skinned, tiny breasts, jet black pubic hair, walking to the inner door with her knees uncertain, like a young colt taking its first steps. She closed the door.

'She was starving,' Chen said. 'Pick 'em up for nothing.' He lit a black cigarette with a gold tip from the packet. 'So what's the story, Jordan?"

I told him I was with Laker Foundry, and about the leak.

''Let's have a snort?

Parrot.

'So what precise information do you want?'

'I need to know as much as possible about Mariko Shoda.'

He gave me a dead stare. 'Mariko Shoda…' Smoke drifted under the lamp. 'Jesus Christ.'

A cistern flushed behind the wall. 'Katie said you could tell me something about her.'

'Mariko Shoda…' He got out of the chair, tall for a Chinese, walking like a cat, crouched a little, eyes on the floor, thinking. 'What did Katie tell you about me, Jordan?'

'That you run a small freighter service and know your way around the southeast.'

He nodded, straightening up, looking around the walls. 'Sure. I fly everywhere. I flew with the Yanks in 'Nam, made good money – this is me here, come and have a look, my whole life history.' He went on talking while he showed me the photographs, four of them of light plane wrecks with Chen standing on the top with a big grin and his arm in a sling or a pair of crutches under him. 'What I'm doing now is kinda worse than those days in 'Nam, because you're strictly on your own and the name of the game is Russian roulette, you're due in at an illegal airstrip somewhere up there in Burma or maybe Laos and it's night and all they can give you is a couple of flares this end of the strip and it's thick jungle, Jesus, and maybe you're down to the last sniff of gas, even in the auxiliary tank, which is often just a waterbed inside the cabin with you, a potential fireball if you crash – and sometimes you're not sure the strip is still in friendly hands and you can go down into machine-gun crossfire, that's happened to me twice, look at this old crate, see the holes? But even if the strip is still friendly you can hit bumps or misjudge the flares or whatever, and there's a gentlemen's agreement – you're a helluva long way from any kind of medical aid out there so if you're trapped in the wreckage or it's on fire they just put a bullet in your head, like you do with horses.'

He led me back to the desk and we sat down. 'You use a drink?'

'Not just now.'

'So what happened to your face?'

'New blade.'

He laughed in his throat. 'You want to go clean up?'

'In a minute.'

'She's not still in the bathroom. So you want some information on -'

The telephone rang and he picked it up. 'At first light. Sure, if you can. What's going to be the ceiling over the coast?' He listened and then said, 'Hell, no, I'm not putting down anywhere, they just hung another bunch of guys over there, did you hear about that?' He listened again and asked for an updated met report and rang off. 'I don't ever do any trading, see, I'm just a transporter, I never take possession — that stuff over there is waiting for shipment, and anyway most of the freight I hump isn't drugs, it's arms.' He got out of the chair. 'C'mon and take a look.' A nail screamed as he levered one of the crates open and showed me neat rows of ammunition, perfectly stacked, the steel and copper glowing in the light. 'It's .223, 7.62, 9mm. Nothing to write home about in this batch; the more interesting stuff's in the other crates but I don't want to break the seals. Semi-automatics and some fully-auto calibre .50s, mostly Belgian, and some very nice riflescopes from Hungary. And some inserts' – he kicked a crate with his ripped leather flying-boot – 'put them in a shotgun and you can feed it with 9mm or .223 ammo, just the trick for your trigger-happy anti-communist citizens up north around Phnom Penh or Saravane. You want any stuff like that for trading on the side, you know where to find it.' He went back to the desk again. 'Then there's other stuff that's worth shipping around; bit of gold, gems, things like that, cut a small profit when you can. You want some coffee, Jordan?'

'No, thanks.'

'Jesus, you must have some very interesting secret vices.' He lit another cigarette. 'So you want some information on Little Kiss-of-Steel. Well I guess I don't have much but maybe it's more than most people do.' He blew out smoke. 'She's still only twenty-one, Cambodian, no bigger than this kid in here you saw just now, lives very simply and controls maybe forty, fifty million US dollars' worth of business every year, half in drugs, half in armaments. People who regard her as a friend give her presents – an apartment in London or Paris or New York or Tokyo or a palace in Rangoon, or maybe a yacht off Khiri Khan or a shipment of diamonds from South Africa. People who regard her as an enemy also give her presents, to calm her down – a permanent suite at the Manila Mandarin, gold ingots from Pakistan with her name carved on them or a fleet of limousines. She moves around in privacy, using her own 727 and going through the VIP lounge with dark glasses on and a dozen bodyguards to keep people away, because she doesn't like being photographed.'

He got up again and unlocked the drawer of a massive Japanese lacquered cabinet across the room and came back with an eight-by-ten photograph and gave it to me. 'Rather a lot of grain, but the best I could do.'

I turned it in the light. 'This is Mariko Shoda?'

'That is Mariko Shoda.' He sat down, leaning his arms on his knees, dropping ash. 'I was in transit in Saigon and I happened to know she was coming in, so I took a chance and hung around while my crate was being refuelled, and I was lucky, if that's what we're going to call it. She came out of her 727 without her dark glasses on and I had a zoom lens ready and bingo, isn't she pretty?'

The grain was so bad that I had to hold the picture at arm's length to smooth out the dots. It was an arresting face, yes, high cheekbones and large eyes, black hair cut like a boy's. Her head was half-turned as if she suspected someone was watching.

'What was the distance, Johnny?'

'Two or three hundred yards. But whenever she lands anywhere, see, she not only has a whole bunch of bodyguards close around her – they're all women, by the way – but she has a whole lot more waiting around the area, placed there before she arrives. One of them saw me take the picture. I didn't know that, but I wasn't taking any chances either so I mailed the film for processing right there at the airport.' He shrugged. 'They got me that night, on the street. I still had the camera and they pulled it open and took the film that was in it – no problem, it was a new one, blank – and smashed the camera and then worked me over.' He tugged one of his earlobes. 'This is my own, but the left one's a prosthesis they stuck on for me at the hospital. I hear Shoda very clearly with it – no photographs, please.' He took the picture and said on his way to the cabinet, 'I can let you have another print, Jordan, if you want one. Nice pinup.' He locked the drawer again and came back. 'But tell me something – are you going to try getting near that gal?'