Vithayu Road, turning north. Far over to the left a beam of light stood against the dark sky, tapering upward – a helicopter probing along the river.
The night was warm and her arms were bare. She must have tagged me from the Embassy when I'd left there to answer Pangsapa's call; then she had waited for me to come out of his house. I had been there for nearly an hour and she had used the time thinking, sitting alone in the car, undistracted, thinking it all out.
Then she had decided, and picked me up. Until now we had driven in silence through the city, leaving each other in peace.
Her head lifted a fraction but she didn't turn to look at me.
'Do you remember,' she said, 'a man named Lee? Norwich, England, July last year?'
And I knew why Kuo had made the snatch.
18 The Swap
The maximum sentence that can be imposed on a foreign national convicted of espionage in the United Kingdom is fourteen years, and the man calling himself Peter Lee had received this term at the hands of the Lord Chief Justice in No. 1 Court, Old Bailey, in July 1965.
The real name of the prisoner was Huang Hsiung Lee, and the affair became known as the Norwich Case. A group of distinguished physicists, headed by Sir Arthur Hare and Professor James K.W. Fadieman, had been working on a project for the past two years at Norwich Physical Research Establishment under a special Treasury grant and with certain technical facilities provided by the U.S.A., three of whose scientists were among the team. The project concerned a refinement of the Laser device (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). This is an electromagnetic oscillator producing light waves massed into an ultra-narrow wave length band, and directed along a fixed path in a ray one million times brighter than is possible in any normal way.
The Laser beam has been used successfully in surgery of the eye, operating at a distance of a few inches. A beam directed by the same method at the surface of the planet Venus, at a distance of 23,000,000 miles, has been reflected back to earth and picked up by optic receptors. Between these two extreme instances of its remarkable range, the Laser has capabilities that make it essential that strict security covers all research into its further development.
Data produced by the Hare-Fadieman Project during the past two years had automatically passed onto the secret list. Mil. 5 and the CIA set up a special unit to protect every aspect of the Norwich research, but in January 1965 an agent seconded to the technical branch of a U.K. mission in Teheran intercepted a signal concerning an entirely different subject and triggered a snap-inquiry that sent a Special Branch car to No. 67 Beacon Street, Norwich, within twenty-four hours. 'Peter' Lee, a student in applied physics with friends at the Research Establishment, was arrested and charged with being in possession of information coming under the Secrets Act.
A second and immediate inquiry among the Hare-Fadieman research team established that the leak was of the most serious proportions. On the same day an exhaustive search of Lee's apartment in Beacon Street revealed microdot photographs of two comprehensive files and third-phase technical drawings on the subject of a stage in the development of the Laser instrument so far in advance of its current potential that any government on a war footing would take the most extreme measures to possess its raw data.
Further inquiries revealed that 'Peter' Lee, whose family was in Singapore, had recently asked permission to curtail his studies at Norwich owing to his father's illness. He had planned to leave England three days after the Teheran signal had set in motion the inquiries. At the time of his arrest he had been in the process of settling small local bills, and one of his travel cases was already packed.
At the trial in July the Lord Chief Justice had made a point of congratulating those agents responsible for the action, and public opinion swung from alarm at the first news of the leak to reassurance that it had been stopped in time, by however fine a limit. The microdot material had been destroyed and Lee was sent down for the maximum term. He could do no further damage. The Norwich Case was closed.
The street lamps swung overhead, their light throwing the reflection of her face against the windshield. I watched it as it brightened and faded, block after block.
I said, 'Where are you dropping me?'
She said, 'Nowhere.' I knew what she meant.
'I've got some things to pick up at the warehouse.' She knew where it was. The place where she had tagged Loman and opened a door to listen, the night when -knowing she was listening -1 had called her Scarf ace.
Lee. I thought about him. The public had been reassured, and only a few people had gone on worrying. I was one of those. We knew that Huang Hsiung Lee had an intellectual quality that came very high on the list among technical operators: he had a brilliant and photographic memory.
It didn't matter, so long as he was in prison.
It mattered now.
'A straight swap,' I said.
She said: 'Yes.'
'But they can't do it. It can't be on government level.' I suddenly felt annoyed. 'No government can admit they've ordered a snatch on this scale, with someone as big as the Person.'
She was silent.
I said, 'They can't play outside the rules. A spy for a spy. They can't just--'
The sensation was almost physicaclass="underline" bright light flooding into my head.
You light your lamps as you go, picking your way through the dark… There are patches of dark and you skirt them, because your lamps are too small to show you everything… Now she had thrown a floodlight across the whole area and for a minute I was blinded.
In the reflection of her face the eyes had moved; she was watching the reflection of my own. She said:
'That's right, Quill. It's a straight swap. But if they can't get him to the frontier, they'll get you.'
I remembered Loman: 'Our mission is still running, and it won't finish until we know why the Person has been abducted, and why you appear to be linked with him as a subject for preservation.'
I said to her: 'That's why they held off, why they didn't try putting me in the sights.'
'Yes. You're the reserve – a substitute if they can't get him to the frontier.'
We turned back through Lumpini Park on the way to the kite warehouse and I asked her to pull up under the trees. Over to our right was the haze-gray jet of the fountain. They had turned the lights off; normally it was illuminated but tonight its gaiety would not become this city.
She moved in her seat and her face had all the warmth the reflection had lacked. I knew she would talk now because she'd already given me the whole picture. I said:
'When did your group come in?'
'Some weeks ago.' She no longer spoke in nervous snatches. Her eyes were cool and steady, as they'd been when I had first seen her in the Cultural Attache's office. The flickering had gone. 'We got a lead from one of our people in Hong Kong that an attempt was going to be made to spring Lee from Durham. No one in London could confirm – they said we must have duff info. But we kept checking and found it was right: Lee was down for exchange. The only snag was that the Chinese Republic didn't have a candidate. There was no one to exchange for Lee. We knew they'd have to find someone and that he'd have to be someone fairly big. Then we got wind that your Bureau was sending a protection man to deal with the assassination threat. We knew it was likely to be you because of your work in Bangkok two years ago – you know this place blindfolded. So we set up a protection mission of our own. You were looking after the Person – we were going to look after you.'