'I suppose,' he said carefully, 'you have been giving some thought to the threat – the actual threat received in London.'
'It wasn't from Kuo. It wasn't from anyone who means to have a go. I'm not interested.'
'Of course it was valuable to us. We wouldn't have been alerted. We wouldn't be here now, you and I.'
With no rancor I said: 'What a bloody shame.'
He smiled quickly. He'd swallowed the hate. It was still there all right and one fine day he would catch me wide open and slam me down or try to.
'You'll need to know the security picture,' he said. 'It's not easy for me to get information in that area. We don't exist and we've no official access or liaison. Also they're cagey by nature. But I know this much: they're keeping three suspects in view. One is of course Kuo himself, but they don't rate him very highly. Kuo is respected and the moment he crosses a frontier they double the security guard round every head of state as a matter of routine. On the other hand he travels a great deal even when he's – shall we say – off duty. Providing he remains in view and doesn't at any time go to ground they'll be content to keep a routine watch on him. If he goes to ground they'll try to find him but they'll use routine methods and it might be too late. But you will have been concentrating solely on him and with any luck you'll know where he's gone.' He gave me one of his bright stares. 'Don't ever lose him, will you?'
'And I won't eat too many sweets.' They were all like that, the London mob. Talked to you like a governess.
'Remember,' he said in precisely the same tone, 'that the Thai Home Office and Security departments have been told of the threat received in London and are giving our people unlimited facilities. King Aduldej has been kept informed and has made it very clear that he expects every conceivable effort to be made for the protection of his guest. Quite apart from anything else he is jealous of his capital city's reputation as a place where one can walk in the streets unharmed.'
When Loman wasn't talking like a governess he was talking like an official spokesman for the Junior Conservative Society. I went on listening.
'The city police are already mounting a dragnet operation to round up all known or suspected agitators and subversives. The first wave of arrests will take place in two days' time. Routine checks are already going on at Don Muang Airport, the Royal Palace and the major stopping-off points along the route the motorcade will take. All mail and messages addressed to the Person to await his arrival are being given the infra-red, and there is a permanent police guard in the Palace kitchens and garage. The guest suite now being prepared is--'
'Look,' I said wearily, 'it's up to them what they do. There's a dozen ways – prussic acid in the caviar, the parcel bomb, the snake-in-the-mattress trick. But you've told me yourself that we've got to assume that Kuo has been sent in to do this job, so let me concentrate on him. As far as I'm concerned it's going to be the classic method, the one that's most difficult to stop – the long-range shot. A public execution.'
5 To Ground
A simple rule of mnemonics is that if a face is to be remembered it must be forgotten in its absence. Attempted recall in the absence of the image is dangerously prone to distort it.
A man of sour disposition and small stature may have a short gray beard and high skin coloration; these two features are easily accepted on sight by the memory. But later, in the absence of the image, the memory will concentrate on the only data in its possession and exaggerate it: the beard will become longer and whiter, the face rosier. Small additions to the image then build up, since the need to remember flogs the mechanism that must do it; the eyes are now remembered as being light blue, the figure as large and lumbering – and the man is now certain to be remembered the next time he is seen.
In fact he is not even recognized. In place of the almost wholly fictional image of Santa Claus's twin brother is the real thing: a small, irascible man with brown eyes and a tobacco-stained gray beard.
Most instances of poor memory are examples of retroactive interference producing qualitative changes: the memory, goaded into conscious service, begins making things up. If left alone, the initial neural traces will remain absolutely clear, and will recognize the image immediately the next time it is seen – because no change has taken place.
Kuo the Mongolian was a difficult image, partly because he was Mongolian and partly because his features were not typically Mongoloid. He could have passed for a Manchurian, a Sikhote Alinese, a Kunlunese or even a Cantonese. So I made no attempt to remember him after establishing the initial image in the gymnasium. There was thus no remolding of the recall process.
Recognition was immediate the next day just before noon when he came out of the gymnasium. I knew there were training fights each morning and evening of this week and I was waiting for him.
The machine I had chosen from Compact Hire was tailor-made for the work in hand: a small 1500 Toyota Corona with a 90 miles-per-hour peak and 19.7 quarter-mile standing-start acceleration performance. Being small it could cope with even a New Road rush-hour tangle; being fast it could keep most other cars in sight along the exurban fringe highways, even if they were trying to slip the tag.
The windshield was only a few degrees raked and the fascia-board reflection across the lens of my field glasses was not serious. I had Kuo in them at x8 magnification as he came down the steps.
We started from there.
For six days he made no attempt, absolutely no attempt, to hide his movements. This worried me. He as too accommodating. I didn't like his display of confidence. I knew – and he knew, he must have known – that he was never let out of sight by the Thai Special Branch. I had trouble in keeping out of heir way; it meant a lot of long-distance surveillance with the field glasses (this was why I had asked Loman for a pair) and meant giving the little Toyota the gun on a cold engine then Kuo came out of somewhere after a long stay. It meant risking, time after time, losing him altogether.
There was no particular travel pattern emerging; his excursions were haphazard and his timing flexible. He made vague sightseeing tours of the city: a motor-boat trip along the Chao Phraya and the market canals, a look at the Monastery of the Dawn and the Emerald Buddha in the Wat Phra Keo, doing the rounds, taking his time, enjoying himself while I had to sit with the AO Jupiters focused at a hundred yards and one foot over the clutch, one hand on the starter switch, the gear already in, one eye on the mirror so that I didn't smash someone up if I had to take two seconds to get out of a parking gap it had taken twenty minutes to find. One morning I had to spend over an hour watching them grab the king cobras and squeeze the venom out of their fangs at the Pasteur Snake Farm because Kuo was so interested.
The only reward 1 had was the certain knowledge that Kuo was behaving out of character. He was in character as a tourist; but he wasn't a tourist. He'd been in this city before. (He is still reported as having been in Bangkok on June 9,1946 when King Ananda was found shot dead with a revolver near his body. Suicide has never been established and that verdict is still unacceptable by certain members of the Royal Household.)
During the six days of Kuo's sightseeing tour the only incident was when he stopped his Hino Contessa 1300 for too long outside the Royal Palace at the main Sanam Chai Road gates. Four men in neat suits got out of the car that had pulled up behind his and spoke to him through the window. Then they got him out of his car and put him in theirs, driving off. I had to wait two hours outside Phra Ratchawang police station near the river before I could pick up the tag. The information filtered to me through Loman the next day; they'd grilled him, searched him and taken the film from his camera.