He looked knotted up with nerves and didn't even ask for my report, going straight into one of his toneless monologues:
'We held an emergency conference two hours ago in Room 6. It has now been agreed to signal London and add a recommendation that the Minister himself should be informed of the Kuo situation. The risk is quite unimaginable if we leave it any longer than--'
'I've found him,' I said.
I hadn't had time to question what had happened. It's always dangerous, on a mission, not to have time to think.
But the morning was mine. Within an hour of putting the Toyota through the routine travel pattern I saw one of the Kuo cell coming out of the gunsmith's in New Road. It had been bound to happen: the only question was how long it would take. I had told Loman that much. Because you can't spend twenty hours a day, day after day, combing a town for a man without finding him in the end, unless he has holed up permanently. I knew that Kuo couldn't hole up permanently because he had work to do and it was work that must take him into the open.
For eight days I had been following the established Kuo pattern and keeping watch on every single place where he had ever shown himself. The entire pattern had been committed to my memory, beginning with his points of call that I had checked in the few hours after losing him in the Lotus Bar – Low Flora ties Nick by thongs angrily to emigrate… Lotus Bar, Residence Florale, Thai Room, Nick's No. I, Sbai-thong, Shangrilla, Emerald Gate… There were some thirty-odd places and I had mentally listed them in descending order of priority. At the top of that list was the Temple-Link Road sector. My instincts homed strongly on that area and I knew why. The Maltz psycho-cybernetic mechanism kept sending me back there. There was also a second reason.
The man in the Kuo cell had a taxi waiting for him near the gunsmith's and I put a tag on him that it was impossible for him to flush, simply because I couldn't afford to let him go. At noon I would have to report to Loman and this was the day of the deadline.
I think I had never tagged a man so mercilessly well. He never knew I was there. He led me straight to an apartment block on the river side of the city and I was still there at the curb in the Toyota half an hour later when Kuo came out with his two bodyguards and got into a car. He got in first and the two men handed him, very carefully, a roll of gold cloth.
The temptation to throw blind was strong: to hang back and let them go, remove all risk of their sensing me; to take the series of short cuts that would get me there before them and give me time to climb the stairs of the Botanical Museum. But there was a greater risk: that they were going somewhere else, somewhere I didn't know about.
In the end it was a compromise. After ten minutes the Kuo driver sensed me and began square turns, block after block, playing the lights on the amber and using his speed through Lumpini Park. It was no go. He would never lead me anywhere useful now that he knew I was there in his mirror. Kuo would order him to keep on driving until he flushed me, however long it took.
So I dropped back, putting up a fair show of being balked by the traffic at the angle of Sukumvit and Rama IV and making a couple of feints and turning back up Sukumvit into Dheb Prasit Lane and into Rama IV and speeding up dead straight and due west toward Lumpini, working on a seventy-thirty chance. It was all I had.
They didn't come into the mirror. The Botanical Museum was in the Link Road area and I left the Toyota in the driveway and took the field glasses with me.
At the Museum there is a staircase at one side with a small window on each landing. I had been there more than once in the last eight days, going up to the reading room on the top floor so that the girl at the desk in the main hall wouldn't hear my footsteps halt at the third landing and wonder why (the place echoed a lot), then coming quietly down to the small window that overlooked the Phra Chula Chedi, the temple on the Link Road.
They came within minutes. I focused the Jupiters.
One of them – not Kuo – got out of the car and went through the temple gardens, coming back with a man in a yellow robe, a priest. He leaned at the window of the car; in the 8 x 60 lens I could see his lips moving. Then he straightened up and they handed him the roll of gold cloth. He carried it with reverence through the temple gardens and the car drove away.
I am not easily moved to repugnance, but it was the ritual that was so ugly, the ritual.
8 Diabolus
The whole thing nearly came unstuck.
It was typical of our relationship: we'd known from the beginning that we weren't going to get on together; we'd known also that somehow we would have to. But this time it wasn't personal; it was on a question of policy.
'I can't sanction it.' That was his first reaction.
He spent most of the time walking about and I had to suffer his long silences while he stopped to stare at the rosewood Buddha and the moonstone and the Pan-Orient Jewel Company calendar on the wall.
'I cannot see how I could sanction it.'
After a bit I just sat down and shut my eyes except when he came up to talk to me. Even then he was talking half the time to himself, playing it aloud, trying to get a grip on it. I was hard up for sleep and would have dozed off in the chair if I hadn't been sitting on a bomb.
'It is the most sensitive operation I have ever been presented with.'
I could hear by his footsteps that he was standing in front of me again so I opened my eyes and said:
'You asked me for a set-up. It's the only one that can work. There are plenty of others but they're all chancy. You've thought of them and I've thought of them and there's something wrong with all of them except this one, so don't let's waste time going over--'
'Everything is wrong with this one.'
'And everything is right.'
I sat watching him struggle. Certainly there was a lot to this operation that would put the fear of Christ into a seasoned agent – the whole set-up was pivoted on a needle point. But it had advantages, big ones, bigger than any of the other plans could give us. He wanted to launch it; he would give a great deal to see it run; he was an intelligence director of long experience and this thing excited him, fascinated him. It was sensitive and it was elegant. What he was doing, as he shifted about and stared at things he didn't see, was trying to talk himself into saying yes.
I let him struggle with it while I sat there with thoughts of my own. I had already made my decisions: if he agreed to directing this operation I would set it up and push through with it win or lose. If he couldn't sanction it I would sign off the mission and get out of Bangkok. No half measures: if he tried to talk me into one of the other plans it was no go.
The second reason (the first was the Maltz mechanism) for the strong homing of my instincts on the temple near the Link Road was that it was one of the alternative set-ups I had given Loman some time ago. It was the feature of one of the 'assassination arrangements' he had first asked me for. The Phra Chula Chedi, with its white-frescoed walls and golden tower and beautiful gardens, was a perfect vantage point for Kuo. It was a gun sight commanding the whole length of the Link Road.
It was to the temple that Kuo himself had taken the roll of gold cloth, consigning it to the safekeeping of the man garbed as a priest. There had been people about, passing along the pavement. It didn't matter. Gold cloth-tapestries, sacred draperies – were common enough in the city temples. This one had been something over three feet long and its weight – judging by the way they had handled it – had been ten or twelve pounds. Gold fiber is heavy: the cloth itself would weigh in the region of five or six pounds.
It didn't matter that people had been passing along the pavement there in full daylight and had seen the gold cloth. In another way, it did matter. It was Kuo's hallmark: stylishness. He had taken a braggart pleasure in bringing to this sacred place, in view of the people of this city, the instrument of Cain that would send this city – and all England – into mourning.