I glanced away through the windshield because I wanted to think with a cold forebrain. I said:
'You didn't think it was the Person himself up for a swap.'
She said impatiently, 'Did you?'
'I just wondered. Mil. 6 can be a bloody nuisance but it works. Who sent the threat?'
I was hoping to ask her something she didn't know, Rivalry is insidious. Mil. 5, Mil. 6, the FBI and the CIA – they're at each other's throats trying to do the same job in the same way. You find yourself caught up in it.. No excuse.
'The threat was sent by a Thai who had picked up a clue by accident. He'd heard that Kuo the Mongolian was coming to Bangkok. He chose the safest way to tip off London – anonymously. Kuo is very much feared, and you don't sign your name to information against him.'
Headlights swept the lawns and flower beds and a police van pulled up quietly near the fountain. Another followed and they doused their lights. I asked her:
'Why did you have me checked when I showed up at the Embassy?'
'I wasn't sure of you. I'd never seen you before.' She watched the vans too. 'As soon as you were identified without any doubt my group knew the mission was on. From that minute we never lost sight of you except when you – took evasive action.'
Ten uniformed police, five from each van, made a ring and closed in on the fountain. Under the great jet there was a flower-covered blockhouse with a small iron door. It was where the pump was installed. I said without wanting to:
'But you lost sight of me this morning. When the motorcade began. You didn't know where I was.'
Her voice became tremulous again, just by a degree. 'We knew you were holed-up in the Link Road area.' It seemed that she was going to leave it at that. The ring of police had reached the small iron door. It all looked very efficient. She said: 'They have found the man in the Phra Chula Chedi – in the temple – did you know?'
It must have been the three priests who had been at the gates. They had wanted to know what I'd been doing in there. I looked at her again and saw the faint flickering of the eyes. I asked her:
'How much did you know about my set-up?'
'We knew you – had to – shield the Person in the only way possible.'
I looked back to the fountain. She wanted me to talk but there was nothing interesting to say about the man in the Phra Chula Chedi. They had opened the small iron door and searched the pumphouse and were coming back to the vans. It was going on throughout the city but they wouldn't find him. Kuo was a professional and he wouldn't go to earth in any obvious place like a ruin or a wharf or a fountain pumphouse.
'How long,' I asked her, 'have you been in the trade?'
Perhaps it wasn't just that death had a fascination for her; perhaps she was unused to it.
'Three years, on active ops.'
'Mil. 6 all the time?'
'Except for the Karachi show.'
I looked at her; she was watching the police. I said, '"63?"'
'Yes.' She still didn't turn her head.
The Bureau hadn't been in on that show because it amounted to an almost military operation including an air drop and briefing liaison with the Pakistani opposite numbers and we hadn't enough operators free. It was successful but very messy and it might have been after that mission that she'd had to undergo plastic surgery. Three people – two of them Mil. 6 – had got killed.. Davis, Chandler, Browne. No, it wasn't that she was unused to death. Then why the morbid interest in one dead duck?
A couple of policemen were coming across to vet us. They had their right hands loose against the hip, just over the holster.
'Who was your chief in that field?' I asked her.
'Karachi?' She still wouldn't look at me. There was answer enough in the slight jerk of her head. 'I forget.'
They ordered me out of the car and checked our papers with flashlamps, double-checking with a few questions about the Embassy staff before they stood back politely and gave us a salute. They went across to their vans and I got into the car again.
She started up and we drove out of Lumpini, because I didn't want to talk about the man in the temple and she didn't want to talk about the Karachi thing. It is a commonplace that once a sensitive subject comes up in a conversation, reference to anything in the world will somehow lead back to it.
We turned right into Rama IV and headed for the Link Road and I reviewed a final thought about Lee. At the time of his trial he had been called a 'brilliant and perceptive student' by his mentors, and it was fairly certain that his studies were a cover. Therefore the data and drawings contained in the microphotographed material were probably within his range of understanding. This fact, taken together with his excellent memory, meant that he still carried valuable information on Laser development in his head. Overlapping this factor was a second probability; that he would have taken duplicate copies in microdot for his own keeping in case it were unsafe to transmit the others, or in case there were a risk of their being lost in transit.
The Republic of China, determined to take its place among the power elite of nations, possessed no decisive weapon of war. A refinement of the Laser ray, turned to hostile use, could provide that country with the power to threaten, a power far greater than the fission bomb that nobody dared throw.
Their most brilliant agent, Huang Hsiung Lee, must have got one signal through to Peking before he was arrested. He must have told his Control that he was in possession of valuable material. They knew what he had been looking for; they had then known that he had got it. From that moment they must have set up a priority ways and means committee entrusted with one task: to get Lee home. At whatever cost.
The warehouse stood dark against the stars.
'Which door?' she asked.
'The one in the alley.'
All I took was the overnight case. The rest of the stuff was too well-concealed to worry about.
We were stopped twice on the way to the Pakchong Hotel by police patrols and I knew it must be even more difficult on the routes out of the city that led to the roadblocks. Bangkok was a trap.
The same room at the hotel was still reserved for me; I had made a point of that because rooms weren't easy to find anywhere: the Person's visit had filled the town. I had the travel case sent up and we took the stairs while the night porter was still in the elevator.
We had nothing to say to each other; it was now too urgent for that. In the glow from the bedside lamp she moved without awkwardness, revealing her lean body with feline arrogance until she was naked except for the wafer-flat .22 that was bolstered on the inside of her thigh. She undipped it deftly and dropped it onto her clothes.
19 Halfmask
She had cried out, the first time, and afterwards the heat of her tears touched my hand. She had said his name -Richard – without meaning to, without knowing it.
Davis, Chandler, Browne. One of them.
God grant that the dead can be consoled.
We had both wanted the light, and then I had turned it off at last in the early hours of the morning. We had both slept but I was awake again.
The phosphorous dial said 3:21. The animal is easily satisfied; the encephalon is more demanding. My head felt clear and thought had begun streaming through it because questions had to be answered.
Question: Had the decoy known he was going to die? Doubtful. Suicide missions were a wartime phenomenon, even among Orientals. No, he had been put up like a clay pipe, expendable. Probable mechanics: he was recruited by cash and told that he was to be a reserve. His orders were to take over the sniping post set up by Kuo, to man it in readiness and to shoot into the royal car once it had passed the curve. If it passed the curve it would mean that Kuo had shot and missed or had jammed his gun or was for some reason holding his fire and leaving the kill for his reserve.