A false alarm – there always is: the roof of a police car mistaken for the vanguard of the motorcade. The voice of the crowd rising in a sudden wave, subsiding.
About a minute.
The mission had seemed very long, all those weeks, living in the Toyota, living with the Jupiters, learning him like a brother. Soon we would be strangers.
Sound came from the distance, clapping, cheering, at first faint, loudening, so I moved round to the back of the room and wiped the sweat from my hands for the last time, wrists, palms, between the fingers, carefully between the fingers of the right hand.
There was a flat square top to the tripod with a set-screw proud in the center to take the camera and I had put a cloth pad over it with elastic bands. The blue steel barrel of the Husqvarna had left its impression on the pad from previous sightings. I raised the Husqvarna and laid the barrel across the pad and flicked the safety catch off. The smell of the machine oil was strong, a good smell, clean and efficient.
The sound of the crowd was rising in a slow wave from the distance and the people directly below the condemned building began calling his name and I had the crosshairs centered dead on the face in the oriel.
His gun came up and I saw the long glint of the barrel and my finger took up the tension of the preliminary spring and went on squeezing, and when the big Husqvarna kicked I kept the sights on the target and saw redness color the face and head, but something was wrong because the crowd had begun screaming and I knew that I'd killed for nothing because something was wrong down there.
14 Shock
Burnt cordite reeked in the room and my head still rang from the explosion.
When I looked down from the window they were still screaming and the change in their sound was terrible; seconds ago they had been calling his name and now they cried out in agony.
It was impossible to focus on details, but the overall scene had the dreadful clarity of a slow-motion picture: the vanguard escort of ten motorcycle police had rounded the 150-degree curve in the road but the royal car had run straight on to plunge into the crowd, and the wall of living bodies had been breached before its momentum was arrested.
The long white Cadillac was halted now in the midst of the swaying people. The vanguard escort was wheeling and coming back. The motorcycle police on the left flank of the procession were sliding to a stop; the first of these, surprised by the course of the royal car, had swung their machines flat onto their sides in an attempt to avoid ramming the crowd. Gasoline had spilled, and a spark from the friction of metal against flint had fired a tank and the rider was rolling on the ground to put out the flames that had caught his uniform.
The right flank of the escort was halting and turning back, two of the patrols colliding. The second and third convertibles had slowed to a stop and the rear guard of fifteen police was pulling up.
Stretcher-bearers had already driven a lane through the stricken crowd from the ambulance near the curve and the ambulance itself was backing in their wake with both doors held wide open.
An intermittent buzz began on the floor beside me and I ignored it. Loman was trying to call me up on the two-way radio but there was nothing to tell him, nothing that would make sense.
The police were first attacking the gasoline fire, dragging the overturned machines clear before another tank went up. Other riders were pressing their way along the front of the crowd and trying to force them back from the flame area – but the crowd was helpless, cut off from escape by its own mass. The ministers and equerries were getting out of the two convertibles to help the police.
Sirens began sounding from the distance beyond the temple as the nearest fire-fighting unit was called into action.
The sun made everything bright and the colors of the crowd were gay – flags, flowers, women in silk, the flutter of parasols. The screams still came.
Even from the top floor of the condemned building I could not see what was happening around the royal car because it lay buried in frenzied movement.
It seemed a long way to the elevator, a long time tearing the carpet down from the door and wrenching at the handle, the empty passage, the metal gates. I came back running, knocking the glasses by accident against the door and lunging for the window, kneeling there to focus them and swing the white Cadillac into the center of the lens.
Loman kept on signalling.
They had put out the flames. Fire foam smothered people and frothed across the roadway. The chapter of Brahman priests had made their way across and were helping the police. Only two men were still inside the royal car, the driver in the front sitting motionless, the other man slumped on the floor at the back. Even through the x8 Jupiters I could not distinguish the white-dress tunic of Prince Rajadhon because the uniforms of the police were also white and the first of them had now reached the royal car.
The crowd was spilling through the broken guardropes and the roadway was inundated but for the lanes kept open for the bringing out of the injured. Two ambulances of the Thai Red Cross were thrusting their way to the central area.
The screams had died away. There was no more fire.
I picked the thing up and flicked the switch:
'Loman?'
He asked: 'What were those sirens?'
He had been listening to them from the distance, trying to get through to me.
I told him: 'The car left the road and hit the crowd.'
He said something I couldn't catch – just 'God,' or something like that. I went on talking. 'A gasoline fire started but they've got it dealt with. A lot of injured and some dead – it went straight into them. There was an ambulance near the spot and it's just leaving. I can't see much detail.'
When I cut him in he asked: 'What happened to Kuo?'
'He's dead.'
The smell of the cordite was still in the air.
Loman was silent. There was a question he had to ask and it wanted courage.
It is always agreeable to make your report at the end of a successful mission. The risks have been taken and the dangers are past and nothing can go wrong any more and you are still by luck alive. In the sight of your director and the whole Bureau you have scored a point; in the sight of whatever paltry gods you call your own you have smashed a hand into the amorphous face of the enemy (whose name is the fear of failure) and earned a perch in whatever far heaven you can fleetingly believe in till it all begins again and your hand – still bruised and bleeding – must smash again into the same face and the same fear and show that the day… for another day… is yours. Yea, even in your own sight, the one that counts the most.
No go.
'From where you are,' Loman put his question, 'can you see the Person?'
'No.'
Another short silence. 'I'll get down to the Link Road. Contact later.'
When I cut the switch I knew that the mission was over and that it had failed.
So the dog had eaten dog and to no purpose. It crouched here licking its wounds.
In the small high room I could have stayed for a long time, trying to think, to piece together the smashed bits of a mission manque and set the record straight. No one would have found me until they came to knock the building down. But there were some bits missing and I had to go and pick for them among the rubble.
I put everything into the elevator with the rest – the field glasses, cheap carpet, tripod, gun, the tools of my trade. And went down by the stairs.
It is difficult to walk without thinking; the body's movement stirs the mind. A few thoughts came: there had been no accident. But why had they taken so much trouble, made it so elaborate? Perhaps to be certain. Only in the midst of a dense crowd made powerless by shock could they be absolutely certain of getting to him at close hand and killing him before his protectors could reach him. Eight bodyguards and thirty-seven armed police, cut off from him by the living and the injured and the dying and the dead, by one massive psychological barrier: shock. Hadn't they been, then, certain of Kuo, of one straight shot from a master killer?