Voices, I believed. They were faint, but I could hear their rhythm changing, and their tone. There was more than one person speaking; it had the sound of dialogue.
Or it was a dream and I waited for some kind of data to come in, lying so still that my own breathing was inaudible. Moonlight was striking softly across the earth floor; it came in rays, filtering through the creepers on the far wall; in it I saw something on the move, small, longer than a rat, some sort of stoat, a predator, its thin tail held stiffly behind as it darted suddenly and made its kill, with nothing more this time than a scuffling, the teeth going into the throat before the cry could come.
The voices didn't stop, and for a time I lay listening to them and at last surfaced through the twilight zone and knew for certain I was now awake and that the voices were still going on.
Cho had lain down in the corner where he slept, beneath the picture of Funakoshi; he wasn't there now. I got up and moved to the centre of the room and turned slowly until I got the direction of the sound; then I went over there, to the door in the south wall that I'd never seen open. The voices were louder here, and the words audible.
Radio.
No. There was no consistency: it wasn't a programme.
…But I told him there was absolutely no certainty of that. So what was his reaction? He simply said we would be going ahead in any case, since the ambassador wanted to.
Yes, radio, then, but taped. These were tapes I was listening to, being played over to check the contents.But I'm damned if I'm going to give in to him. The prime minister's quite adamant on that score – we dig our heels in, she told me, and tell them -we're not going to budge. All right, sir, what it I tell Blakeney? Tell him to go to hell. The real issue Et je vous assure, M'sieur le Consul, que nous aliens faire tout le necessaire pour produire le resultat que nous cherchons. C'est tout a fait impossible de faire autrement, en consideration des nouvelles de Paris, surtout – As I guess you know. But if there's anything that sounds urgent, call me. Will do. When did you eat? God knows. Let's have a snort!
20 The Rat
This time it was a woman's voice on the tape. Colonel Cho was watching me intently. 'Do you know who is speaking?'
'No.'
'It is the voice of Shoda.'
The sibilants were silky and drawn out, emphasising certain words, but the tone of her voice was harsher than I'd imagined, carrying a deep energy, filling the small studio, commanding, authoritative.
There was a break in transmission, and Cho stopped the recorder.
'Do you understand Cambodian, Mr Jordan?'
'No. What was she saying?'
'She was ordering one of her army chiefs to hold back the mobilisation of his forces until the shipment arrives. She also told him that it was essential for him to remain in close liaison with her other forces, to avoid a precipitate action.'
They were right – Pepperidge, Katie. This was a major breathrough. My target for the mission was Mariko Shoda and in the temple in Thailand I'd been close to her physically for the first time and now I was listening to her voice – as it issued orders to one of her army commanders.
There was massive data coming in for questioning and analysis and I'd have to take it in stages.
One: Johnny Chen's place was bugged.
But I'd have to get the answers from Cho with infinite care because he'd come close to killing me five minutes ago when he'd opened the door and found me outside. God knew how , he'd sensed me there, but he lived in the wild and was junglesensitive. He hadn't been startled, and his head had turned slowly to sight me, and in his one eye there was the light of rage. His body was also moving, subtly, his breath drawing deeply from his abdomen as he gathered force, his right shoulder lifting by degrees as he brought the arm back, preparing the vector that would bring the edge of his sword-hand slicing against the carotid artery in my neck. I'd initiated this blow often enough to recognise its preparation.
He was ready now and when I spoke I think it was within a half-second of my death.
'Sempai, Funakoshi watches you.'
I waited.
I'd run through the whole gamut of options open to me and none of them would have worked: I knew that. But I'd remembered something that had got through to him when he'd seen me here for the first time and was ready to attack me for my flagrant intrusion: I'd addressed him punctiliously as my sempai, my respected superior in the sacred tradition of Shotokan, and it had given him pause.
I went on waiting. Movement in him had ceased and his mind alone was active, its dark side, ravaged and traumatised and vengeful, willing his body to destroy this creature, this threat to his sacrosanct privacy, while the light of reason flickered also within him, a candle's flame beset by the wind. Then it was over, and his head turned to face me.
'Come in. I want you to see my communications centre.'
The tension went out of me and as the left brain began functioning again I noted that whenever this man's mind returned to reason, he had no memory of his lapse into psychosis.
The room was small but walled on three sides with dials, signal-strength meters, switches, charts and time-schedules. It must have been the original receiving-transmitting studio, and it had escaped the worst of the bombing. Cho went to the ripped vinyl chair on the dais in front of the main panel and began running the tapes, ignoring me as the signals came through again. There were cassettes everywhere, stacked on the shelves and along the console, with boxes of blanks bearing the Sanyo shipping label.
Then the voice of Shoda came again, its sibilants lingering, the consonants frank and articulated.
Cho turned his head. 'That was monitored some days ago. She was giving instructions for the British agent named Jordan to be brought to his death.'
'Really.'
'You are a fortunate man.'
He went back to his editing, and when signals came in English, French or Russian I listened to them: when they were in a language unknown to me I worked on the data that was still coming in.
Two: Chen's place was bugged. By whom?
Not by Cho. I'd noticed that whenever an English signal came through he stopped it short, even though one of the dialogues had been on a high level politically, mentioning the British prime minister.
Chen's place could have been bugged by one of his competitors in the drug trade but I doubted it: he wasn't big-rime, running a whole network. Leave it for now.
Three: Who had bugged Shoda's communications?
Sayako?
'Sayako-san,' I'd asked her over the telephone at the Red Orchid, 'are you in Shoda's organisation?'
'I have access to information.'
Sayako, then; yes, it was logical. This could have been the signal she'd picked up just before she'd warned me – the one I'd just heard, 'giving instructions for the British agent named Jordan to be brought to his death'.
Another signal was coming through in English, and I listened to it before Cho cut it short. It was from the flight deck of a North-West Orient jet, the accent Japanese.
Not a bug.
I began listening the whole time now as Cho made notes and fast-forwarded some of the signals, running others back to monitor again. I'd have said at this stage that he was searching for specified transmissions and I could have been right, but I was beginning to realise that there was no order in this material, no sequence. He was picking up bugs in four languages but among a whole range of random signals, a lot of them aircraft, some of them hams, two of them radio-taxis in Singapore. What worried me was that he didn't edit out the garbage.
He should be doing that.
And wasn't.
He looked up suddenly, fixing me with his eye. 'He is always late, that one.'