'Xing.'
'Oh, I'm much obliged. Go on, Doris, get her back here so I can talk to her, for God's sake. We're going to miss that plane.'
The air cold in in here, with the harsh reek of the factory smoke creeping in under the doors, the lights clouded, some of the tubes flickering, some of them dark, they don't run a good ship here, my friend, they do not run a good ship, their methods are crude and their thinking is proscribed, conditioned, and they will throw him into the van like a common criminal while I go on shuffling forward like a puppet, not daring to leave the queue and follow him, follow them, hoping to do something miraculous and get him away, get him to ground, not daring to do anything except shuffle forward and go through the charade and get out of here, because this was no place for miracles.
Get out of here and signal London, let the hand pick up the piece of chalk and change the board. Executive reports subject lost to KCCPC, Chengdu airport, 12:16 l.t.
The man from the Bureau was watching the desk, his dead stare fixed now. I couldn't see much of Xingyu because he was shorter than the three girls in front of me and they were moving around, anxious for Marjorie.
I watched the man over there instead: we had, in this instant, established signals. He would swing his head and look at me when anything important happened there under the immigration board, under the flickering lights, would let a smile touch his mouth if all were well, or leave his stare on me and move his head to and fro by the smallest degree if all were not well, if the trap slammed shut, finito.
'She's got no need to be frightened of them, for God's sake, they're only people. It's just the air trip getting to her stomach, that's all.'
'This is all we needed.'
'It's what we've got. We'll muddle through somehow, we're British.'
The stink of the smoke in here was enough to make anyone sick, it wasn't the air trip, but you're wrong, my little love, you're wrong, you know, there is every need to be frightened of these people, there is every need. They are the people with the tanks.
Movement suddenly at the desk as the officer got to his feet and another one came up and the plainclothes supervisor nodded and turned away and the man from the Bureau swung his head and looked at me with his mouth relaxed and I saw Dr Xingyu Baibing leave the desk and pick up his bag and walk slowly away, folding his papers and putting them into the pocket of his sheepskin coat. I went forward and passed through the checkpoint and then customs and joined our charter group.
'How is your toothache?'
'Much better.'
But he was reading a newspaper.
CAAC Charter Flight No. 4401 to Gonggar will depart from Gate 6 at 12:15. All passengers must report to Gate 6 for embarkation.
They were already lined up, windbreakers and sheepskin jackets and woollen hats and skiing gloves or red hands rubbing together, heavy boots, combat boots, a whole line of boots with the people tethered by them to the littered concrete, swaying in the stream of cold filthy air from the ventilators, all of them except Xingyu Baibing.
He was reading a newspaper, standing near the poster on the wall, Mitsubishi, holding the paper quite still and concentrating on a certain page, a certain column, and as I walked over to him I knew I'd blown Bamboo.
I shouldn't have let him buy a paper.
They hadn't set a trap for him here in Chengdu, specifically. They'd set a trap for him everywhere, wherever he might go, once he'd got out of Hong Kong. They'd been prepared even for the impossible, that somehow, despite their agents there, he'd get clear of Hong Kong, and they'd set a supertrap that couldn't fail.
He was in it now and it had sprung.
'We're boarding,' I said, as if nothing had changed, as if by one chance in a thousand I was wrong.
He looked at me, his eyes smouldering, the newspaper trembling between his hands.
Passengers for Flight No. 4401 for Gonggar are now boarding. All passengers for Gonggar must report immediately to Gate 6 for departure.
Xingyu pushed the newspaper towards me.
'Dead.'
Top of page two.
WIFE OF DISSIDENT IN PRISON. Dr Xingyu Chen, wife of the exiled scientist Xingyu Baibing, who left the People's Republic yesterday in disgrace, was arrested late last night in their apartment in Beijing and taken to Bambu Qiao Prison, where she is now undergoing intensive interrogation, in the hope that she can be persuaded to inform the authorities on the whereabouts of certain friends and colleagues also wanted for questioning, and to offer information particularly on her husband's subversive activities at the university.
Though nothing official has been announced, a source requesting anonymity has declared that if the exiled dissident Xingyu Baibing were to return voluntarily to Beijing for interrogation, his wife would in all likelihood be released immediately.
I folded the paper.
'Hey, come on! You're with our lot, aren't you?'
Xingyu stood facing me.
'I must go to Beijing.'
'No,' I said, 'you can't do that.'
'You cannot stop me.'
Chapter 10: Su-May
She came floating toward me, big eyes in a small pinched face, her body swathed in the folds of a hooded fur jacket too big for her, the hide torn and patched and stained, floating toward me looking rather like an Eskimo child, though she wasn't a child, more like a grown-up china doll.
'They have asked me to assist them,' she said.
I tried to relax, and she stopped floating. On our way from Gonggar to the city the tour guide had told us that at eleven thousand feet we might hallucinate sometimes; there was oxygen, he said, at most of the hotels.
'Assist them?'
I didn't know why it was anything to do with me that they'd asked her to assist them; the people in uniform behind the long cluttered counter, Chinese Public Security officers, one of them watching me steadily, would have worried me if it weren't for the fact that he'd never seen me before, hadn't been outside the airport in Hong Kong when we'd done the Xingyu thing. On the other hand I wasn't totally at ease: they'd picked me up in a military jeep and brought me here for questioning and my passport and visa and Alien Travel Permit were spread all over the counter and the PSB officer would certainly recognize me again if we crossed paths.
'With your case,' she said.
I hadn't got a case. I'd left it in my cell at the monastery with Xingyu looking after it.
'I see,' I said.
She meant my case, of course, criminal charges, so forth. I suppose if the Bureau knew I'd got arrested within an hour of entering Lhasa on a strictly zero-zero clandestine operation they'd call me in straight away, wouldn't blame them. But that wasn't all I'd done since we'd flown out of Chengdu, it was not all, my good friend, that I had done. But I don't want to think about that now, I want to listen to this little china doll and find out if I can rescue anything from the wreckage.
Xingyu is safe.
Yes, concentrate on that. He is safe and among friends at the monastery and you can say, if you want to be charitable, that I've completed the mission, the objective of which was to get Dr Xingyu Baibing out of Hong Kong. But we remember, don't we, that Bamboo has a new objective now: I have to get him back into Beijing when the time is right, and I'm not sure how I can do that if these people throw me into jail.
I think she was waiting for me to say something.
'What exactly is my case?"
'You were out of bounds.'
'Ah. I didn't know.'
In fact when the military jeep had pulled up and the soldier had shouted something to me above the noise of the engine I'd thought he was offering me a lift.