Quiller Bamboo

'Yes.' Waited again.

'What are your plans?'

'All I can do is play it by ear. I can get out of here and take him deeper into the hills, or stay here and explore the cave and hope to find a bolt hole and cover our tracks. If we start moving higher we'll be making a race of it with three hundred men and I don't think we could win it. On my own, yes, but I don't know how long he can hold out. I haven't questioned him yet. If we stay here, there's the chance that you might be able to do something, you or London.'

He'd said earlier tonight: I can give you a whole cadre if you need one.

We'd need a regiment.

In a moment: 'I signalled London the moment you reported you were at the caves. I said it was impossible for you to get him to Gonggar, that you had no transport, that the Koichi artifact was not in place. That was correct?'

'Yes.'

'But now the situation is fully urgent.'

Argot. In any signal, any briefing, any instructions, fully urgent has ultra priority and takes precedence over everything else: it means sound the alarms, freeze all other action, bring Bureau One into the signals room and clear all communications lines to and from London through the intelligence mast in Cheltenham and the DIP controlling the field in the host country, using scramblers or speech code or audio-grids or whatever means that will pull the whole network together and keep the shadow executive in constant touch with London Control and the signals board and the agents-in-place and the sleepers and support groups and courier lines right across the spectrum of the mission, and if I told Pepperidge yes, the situation was fully urgent, that whole process would kick in and start running.

Said yes.

A beat, then: 'How much time have we got, would you say, before you could be discovered, if they began sending probes into the foothills and the caves directly? What is my deadline?'

I looked down through the drifting screen of snow at the string of lights in the valley. The soldiers would be three miles away by now, as a rough estimate, and the terrain was rough, loose, and inclined at something like ten or fifteen degrees. There was moonlight, but under the snow flurries it didn't amount to much more than a glimmering sheen across the scree, with no real shadows. Across this kind of terrain a man couldn't go too fast without risking a broken ankle, and at this altitude the lungs would be starved of oxygen to a critical degree: we'd reached here, Xingyu and I, exhausted.

I said into the radio: 'Two hours.'

Waited.

'Two hours. That is my deadline?'

'Yes.'

A wind gust came, cutting across my face and leaving snow whirling into the cave mouth.

'Very well.' That tone of cheerfulness again, got on my nerves, made things worse because he only ever used it when things were tricky in the extreme. 'A great deal can be done in two hours. A great deal. Unless there's anything you want to add, I'll get on with things right away.'

There was nothing important. I'd been going to report the suspicions I'd had earlier tonight when we'd been lurching across the scree to the caves: a couple of tunes I thought I'd heard faint sounds behind us, closer than the road down there, and once I'd told Xingyu we were going to take a rest, and I'd sat there listening to the rushing of the wind across the stones, but that was all I'd heard. I hadn't thought about it since then.

'Nothing to add,' I said.

'Then stay open to receive.'

I went into the cave.

'I must get to Beijing.'

Sitting there staring at nothing, a shadow humped against the rock face.

'Dr Xingyu, I'd like you to move a bit nearer the mouth of the cave. I've got to be there to monitor the radio.'

'Radio?'

I spelled it out for him, saying that the signals we'd be receiving would help us to get him to Beijing, and he tried to stand up and I gave him a hand and we managed it. Snow was coming into the cave mouth and we sat crouched with our backs to it.

'It's a bit colder here, I'm afraid.'

'I don't mind.'

Small talk, I'd descended to small talk, putting off the question that had to be asked, that had to be answered, before we could do anything more, before even London could order the fully urgent process into action — because if it was the wrong answer I would have to signal Pepperidge at once.

'You don't need any insulin yet, Dr Xingyu?'

'No.'

'Nothing to eat?'

'No.'

The question.

'Night like this,' I said, 'nice tot of rum would go down rather well."

'Rum?'

He turned to look at me, face blank.

Ask the question.

'Never mind,' I said.

The wind buffeted the rocks, moaning.

Now.

He sat huddled into his coat, staring in front of him.

'Dr Xingyu, why must you go to Beijing?'

He turned to look at me again, the moonlight throwing a sheen on his pale face. 'To tell the students they were wrong, in Tiananmen. Democracy is not the way.'

Mother of God.

'Hear you.'

The snow whirled against my face. 'He's been brainwashed,' I said.

Chapter 25: Pendulum

'Zhege yingguoren si duide.'

I tapped the pendulum.

'In English, please, Baibing. You don't mind if I call you Baibing?' It would set him more at ease, invite his trust in me.

'No.'

The snow had eased over the last half hour, as it had done last night, when Chong had seen to the sergeant out there; the moon was brighter now, shining on the pendulum. I'd taken the silver paper from the packet of syringes on Xingyu's flight bag, and wrapped it around a stone and hung it on a bit of string from one of the stalactites in the roof of the cave and set it swinging.

It had taken a long time to persuade Xingyu to keep his eyes on the pendulum: There are things you don't remember, important things. You'll have to remember them, or we can't take you to Beijing.

Swung the pendulum.

But I haven't forgotten anything.

Yes, you have. I want you to remember everything, or you can't go home and see your wife again.

To and fro… to and fro, a tiny silver moon a little distance from his eyes. I watched his eyes.

There is nothing I want to tell you.

Taken a long time, fifteen or twenty minutes, wearing him down, he'd never get to Beijing, never see his wife, over and over again, tapping the pendulum. But now he was deep in theta waves and under my control.

'Zhege yingguoren si duide.'

'In English, Baibing.'

They'd talked to him in Mandarin, or course, in the temple, Trotter or the man who'd been with Xingyu when I'd found him, or both; but it wouldn't make any difference: I was asking him for images, ideas, not speech patterns.

'The Englishman is right,' he said.

'Is he? Right about what?'

He didn't answer, went on staring at the tiny silver moon. I was up against a block, something he felt was very important, important not to divulge.

'Right about democracy?' I asked him, and that broke his resistance.

'Yes. There is no future in democracy for the People's Republic, no room for it. You can see what democracy has done to Europe and America. We cannot contemplate that happening in China.'

I touched the stone to keep it swinging. 'What has it done, Baibing, to Europe and America?'

In a moment — 'It's all there, in the manifesto.'

'What manifesto?'

'The blueprint.'

'Of course it is. But I forgot where you put it. The manifesto.'