Taxi-driver.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
'Late?' I asked him.
'Yes. They will fire him soon, you mark my words.'
He turned back to the console and listened to a signal in French, Chinese accent, aircraft to base, while I tried to think how to get out of him what I had to get, because he was just listening at random, picking up whatever signals he could find as he turned the dials – and he was just as interested in what some bloody taxi-driver was talking about in Singapore as he was in what Shoda was giving him.
Check that.
'Where is the bug, Colonel, on Mariko Shoda?'
He flinched at the name and I expected him to react as he had before, but it was all right this time: we could talk about her now. 'I am not sure. I think in one of her limousines, or perhaps an aircraft. The wavelength tells me nothing.' There was some speech in what sounded like Laotian in the background and in a moment he said without changing his tone, 'This man is drug-running, but he is an amateur. It is a bug placed by the narcotics branch. It will be amusing, won't it, when they catch him? The spider and the fly?'
No. Not in the least amusing. This poor bastard's mind was like the console here, filled with random signals dial had no pattern. When that sabre had swung down and cleft his face it had turned his brain into a mental kaleidoscope.
All I could do was put questions.
'Have you any idea, Colonel, who placed the bug in Shoda's communications system?'
'No.' But I didn't think he'd heard that, or understood.
'Do you think it could have been a woman named Sayako?'
His hand stopped moving the dial and his body became totally still.
He didn't turn his head, didn't look at me, just sat there. I didn't know what I'd started in him; I was ready for anything. No movement in him for what seemed minutes, then his head lowered and something fell onto the chipped, grimed shelf of the console, glinting in the light. It was something so extraordinary to issue from such a man that I felt the strangeness of compassion, the stirring of a mood in me that I believed was long ago buried within the shell of indifference demanded by the life I'd chosen. And so we sat there in the cramped, cluttered room in the Laotian jungle, a foreign agent and a former chief of intelligence, while on the console the human tear made a dark patch that had already begun drying.
Colonel Cho turned his head at last and looked across at me, his riven cheek glistening.
'No,' he whispered, 'it was not Sayako.'
At first light I woke with a jerk of the nerves but there was no threat that I could see. It was simply that I'd slept with me subconscious awareness that my host might at any time go pitching over the edge of his fragile sanity and come for me.
In the hours of the morning he spent his time hacking at the creeper and writing in his journal, and towards noon he went into the radio room and talked into one of the microphones at the transmitter console, speaking sometimes in his own tongue, Laotian, and sometimes in one of the Chinese dialects. I stayed near the open door, and once went in, to ask him if I could take a message with me when I left here.
It was the first time I'd mentioned it, and I watched him carefully. He'd been lucid for the past hour, except for that fact that the mike he was using was dead: none of the transmission dials were registering.
'When you leave here?'
'Yes. I need to go on with my work.'
He sat looking in front of him, not up at me. 'Your work?'
'My plans to destroy Shoda.'
He turned now and faced me, his eye rational. 'So.'
I couldn't tell if he'd remembered what I'd said when I'd first come here, or whether it was something new to consider. I thought I'd follow up, with the big question.
'If you agree to let me have the wavelength of the Shoda bug, I can use it very effectively, Colonel.'
He gazed at me for a time and then looked away. 'We shall see. We shall talk of that.'
So I had to wait, and in the afternoon he took off his kimono and put on his gi, moving to face the portrait of Funakoshi and giving the ret, the punctilious bow with the head lowered and the eyes down, expressing trust in an opponent.
He then worked out for an hour and went through Kanku and Jion, allowing me the privilege of watching. For a time there was no sound but the movement of his feet through the stances, and his deep, guttural kiai. The powdered earth, churned by the kicks and turns, floated above the surface of the floor. Again I noted his great speed and strength. It didn't reassure me.
Later he motioned me to sit with him on the rugs in the corner. His eye was calm, but his head turned a little sometimes, and I sat facing him with a kind of prayer running through my head. It was the first time in any mission I'd had to deal with a deranged mind, and in a man capable of overwhelming me with his bare hands.
'You wish to leave,' he said.
'Yes.'
'Why should I trust you?'
'With what?'
He moved a hand. 'With my presence here. I have enemies who would like to find me.'
'I understand that. But you can trust me because I am your cohei, Sempai.'
His subordinate in Shotokan.
'Is that sufficient?'
'Funakoshi would think so.'
His eye flicked to the portrait on the wall.
'Even so, you would be carrying my life in your hands, if I let you leave here.'
'I understand that too. It would be an honour, Sempai, that I would respect even at the cost of my own.'
It would have sounded less formal in English but the meaning was there. What had happened, after all? I'd come here by stealth, a stranger, killed one of his dogs and entered the privacy of his dwelling uninvited; yet he'd offered me food, which is basically an offer of life itself. He had also forgiven me for looking upon his maimed, grotesque countenance that he'd hoped to keep hidden from the world for the rest of his life. That was the least I owed him: his life.
'You are persuasive,' he said.
'It's not my intention. I hope simply to reassure.'
His head began moving and I held my breath and centred. He'd been slipping into the psychotic phase less often than yesterday, perhaps because he'd learned to trust me a little; but he was now having to make up his mind to trust me totally, and his brain was in overload. I sat perfectly still and faced him, as I'd learned to do, faced his one eye as it sighted from the edge of his riven cheekbone. I still found the effect chilling, transfixing; he was so certain that he was now in hiding and watching me from behind cover that there was a degree of transference: I half-believed that this wasn't his body, but some object that concealed him.
A rat squeaked in the silence, even this slight sound bringing shock. Cho hadn't heard it, deep in his meditation; his eye didn't change expression, which was one of fierce enquiry; I could have imagined a ray of light playing on my face, searching it.
I wanted to move but couldn't, daren't.
Wait.
All I could do.
Wait.
And then I heard his breath come, releasing. The turning of his head was so. gradual that for a moment I didn't catch it After a while he was facing me again, his eye calm.
•Very well, Cohei.'
I left the next morning.
Cho gave me the wavelength of the Shoda bug, but none of the tapes. They were 'his voices', as he put it, though I wasn't quite sure what he meant, unless they peopled his self-made prison. If he'd been normal it would have been easier for me: he would have given me the Shoda tapes for editing and analysis in Singapore; they offered the kind of information that an intelligence agent would give his soul for. But there was nothing I could do about it. They were his, and I couldn't steal them or force them out of him; they were his 'voices' and his obsession, and he couldn't see the logic of letting me have them to use as a weapon for Shoda's destruction.