Quiller's Run

'Possibly.'

He pursed his mouth. 'That could be difficult. She'd have to want a meeting, and even then you should maybe think twice. She has all these bodyguards, but she does her own thing a lot of the time. People always tell me the same tiling about Little Kiss-of-Steel – don't stand too close, and above all don't touch. And she's very spiritual – she always prays for you before she kills. Of course, she may take a shine to you, but even then I'd be careful. She has a keen sense of the priorities, like the praying mantis.'

The phone was ringing and he picked it up and spoke in Hokkein, which I didn't understand. I got up and went to look at the stuff on the walclass="underline" photographs, pinups, philosophical maxims – There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots — some faded lading bills with customs franking, a woman's black lace glove and a dried monkey's head and a Player's cigarette packet with what looked like a bullet-hole through it and a lock of black hair in a blue ribbon. I wanted to know as much about him as possible, and particularly why he'd met me with a gun in my back and ten minutes later had shown me around the place without even telling me to keep my mouth shut. Did he trust Katie that much?

'The way Shoda works,' he was saying, putting the phone down and coming over, 'is something quite remarkable. She never goes out to public places like restaurants, and when she has to visit somebody downtown, the most anyone sees of her is between the limo and the building, dark glasses and bodyguards and the whole bit – and those bodyguards are kind of cute too; have you heard of the Kunoichi?'

I said I hadn't.

'It's the deadly sisterhood of the Ninja, originally Japanese. Like the geishas, they were trained in singing and entertaining, see, so they could get access into the household of an enemy warlord, and just when he'd gotten her nice and cosy in his arms he'd end up with an icepick through the ear into the brain – one of their favourite tricks, in my language the ssu chieh wen – the kiss of death. You know something? I was in Phnom Penh maybe around six months -'

A beeper sounded and he broke off at once and went to the desk and picked up his gun. 'You just stay there, Jordan, I'll be right back.'

He went out through the door where the girl had gone, not the one where he'd brought me in at gunpoint. So this was the alarm I'd tripped on my way up the outside staircase, and there must be another one covering the entrance he was going to check on now. I was tempted to get out of my chair and take a look at the crates and the other two desks and the Japanese cabinet but I stayed where I was because I didn't know this man yet, and I didn't know if he'd simply asked the girl beforehand to trigger the beeper and give him an excuse to leave the room so that he could see what I did while he was gone. I hadn't got access yet, the most vital phase of the mission, access to Shoda, and maybe he could give it to me.

He came back through the same door and went to the desk and dropped a small chamois bag onto it, using a key on the padlock. 'Chu-Chu!' The key stuck and he had to worry it. 'Chu-Chu, c'mon in here!'

She was wearing a cheap cotton shift now, and looked younger than ever, glancing at me and standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, watching Chen.

'Hold out your hand, sweetheart.' He opened his own, palm upwards. ''Hand — this thing, right?'

She obeyed him hesitantly, and he fished in the leather bag and dropped a ruby onto her palm. 'A present, okay? Worth a thousand dollars, maybe more.' He stood over her, pleased with himself, with her, with his gift. 'You're my thousand dollar baby.' She gazed steadily at the gem; it was cut, polished and glimmering on her palm, and I sensed the uncertainty in Johnny Chen now: he'd 'picked her up for peanuts', probably from a refugee camp on the Cambodian border or from parents who needed food for themselves more than a daughter's mouth to feed, and now she was his, Johnny Chen's, but he didn't know how to get through to her. Perhaps on an impulse he'd taken over a life, and wasn't sure what to do with it.

'Present, Chu-Chu. Present.' He circled his hands, awkwardly. 'Means I love you.' He kissed her on the brow and touched her cheek and came away. 'You can stay here now,' gesturing to the divan. 'Chu-Chu stay, okay?'

She walked away with the gem held out in front of her, gazing down at its colour; I was aware of the softness of the nape of her neck, the back of her knees.

'Okay, she's just a kid,' Chen said defensively. 'But kids like her get raped every day over there, up at the borders, in the villages. She doesn't get raped, she gets loved, okay?'

'I can see that.'

'Okay. So what's the deal, Jordan? You want to know if Little Kiss-of-Steel has this weapon you're talking about?'

'Very much.'

'If she doesn't have it, she'd sure as hell maim it.'

'Have you ever seen one?'

'No.' He toyed with the chamois bag. 'But I've seen some of the specs. I'd say if that thing got into the wrong hands in Southeast Asia we could see the whole damn place go up. It can knock choppers out of the sky, right?'

'Any aircraft up to 30,000 feet.'

The bag hit the desk with a soft thump. 'Thirty thousand, Jesus Christ. And hand-held? That's more than the Stinger can do.'

'By a factor of three.'

He thought for a while, his eyes down; then he pulled another black cigarette out of the packet and lit up and looked at me through the smoke. 'How long have you known Katie McCorkadale?'

We had lunch.'

'You must have impressed her.'

'Perhaps she's just a good judge of character.'

'I guess. I mean, when Katie tells me I can trust somebody, it's for real. She's never been wrong.'

'That's why you had a gun in my back.'

'I didn't know you were from Katie.' He picked some tobacco from his lip. 'So I've told you what kind of woman this Mariko Shoda is. You still want to meet her?'

'It's why I came.'

'Thing is,' he said, watching me obliquely, 'she doesn't want to meet you, right? Weren't you the guy in the limo, few nights ago? There wasn't anything in the news, but there's a whole bunch of grapevines in Singapore.'

'She got the wrong impression,' I said. 'I don't mean her any harm.' That too was for the grapevine.

'Then you're pretty unusual.' He straightened on the bamboo chair and picked up the phone, dialling. 'Couple of months back,' he told me, 'someone dive-bombed a monastery where she stays sometimes, blew it apart. She wasn't home.' On the phone he asked for Sam. 'That gal has so many people who want her dead, she's kind of jumpy. I guess that's why she gave you the grief in the limo. Sam? How's things? Listen, do something for me. I believe there's a guy named Lafarge in town from Bangkok. He's due out of the airport some time in the next few days but I don't know which flight. I know he's made a reservation because I picked it up when I was coming through Anna Siang's office. Can you hit the computer for me?' He dropped ash into the jade bowl on his desk. 'Okay, get back to me, Sam.'

He put the phone down and crossed his spider-thin legs.

'Like I was starting to say, I was up in Phnom Penh a while back and took a chance and checked out an illegal airstrip out of the city. We have to do that, the flyers. We need to know where the strips are and how to get in there if ever we have to – and you never know when. There's hundreds, see – make it thousands. Anyway, I happened to see some troops drawn up in some kind of a training camp, place was thick with barbed wire but you could catch a glimpse of what was going on. The guys were being reviewed by their colonel, as best I could see, a tiny little guy but absolutely impeccable, like they all were. Even from that distance I could see they were all officer rank, by the uniform. Then I kind of put a few things together – the location of the camp and the obviously elite performance going on, see, and then I got it. That tiny little guy was Mariko Shoda, because, believe me, there isn't another female colonel around in this neck of the woods. I mean, just to see the salute she snapped up – even at that distance I knew I was in the presence of real style. So that's Shoda too, she's -'