The Mandarin Cypher

ADAM HALL The Mandarin Cypher

Chapter One: MANDARIN

It was three in the morning when she phoned me and I went straight round there through the pelting rain and found North slumped in a chair looking like death.

'What happened?'

He didn't answer. I don't think he heard.

Connie said: 'Thank God you're here,' and got some brandy and put it into tumblers, shivering, only a thin dressing-gown round her shoulders, hair all over the place and her big eyes frightened. The rain hit the window-sills in sharp taps, like someone typing.

'It's okay now,' I told North, but he sat staring up at me with his face appalled, as if I'd told him Big Ben had just fallen over; but his pupils looked normal, he didn't look doped and he certainly wasn't drunk. Connie brought one of the tumblers for me, chipped round the rim, and I held it for him — 'Come on, slosh this lot down, you're ten drinks short.' But he wouldn't take it, didn't seem to catch on to anything I was saying.

I didn't know him very welclass="underline" he was one of the new ones, said to be brilliant, specialized in the documentation snatch, knew his Kremlin, had a lot of Slav languages. The one obvious thing about him at the moment was that he was recently back from a mission.

'When did he get here?'

'About an hour ago.'

He was still fully dressed, his wet mack thrown over a chair Bear the door. People came to this place to have a drink and go to bed with Connie and he hadn't done either. He just sat there looking totally blank, his tie pulled loose and blood on his knuckles.

'What happened?' I asked her again.

'Nothing, really.'

'Well how did he get like this? Was anyone else here?'

'No. He was hitting things,' she said irrelevantly, 'punching the wall and — '

'What's he been talking about?' I put it as just another quick question so that she wouldn't think it was significant. The thing was that when a man came back from a mission a bit broken up he was liable to talk too much and blow the whole works.

'He said something about "nearly crashing", and "ten-tenths shit across the airport", things like that, nothing that made any sense.'

I remembered she thought he was an airline pilot; we always have to make something up. It doesn't matter which girl we're with, they never know who we are. Nobody does.

'Did anything in particular start him off?'

'Not that I can remember. He came in looking sort of done-up, and wouldn't have a drink, and wouldn't say what was the matter. Then he slowly went wild.' She drank some more brandy and choked on it a little. 'I've got to be up at six, you know — can you take him away so I can get some sleep?'

I watched North for a bit. He was looking more settled now, with a strange half-smile on his face as if he'd quietly come round to thinking that the only thing to do was laugh the whole thing off. The smile didn't look very good because he was still white to the gills.

'You'll be okay now,' I told him and looked round for the phone.

'Can I use this?'

She nodded and I picked up the receiver while North pulled himself out of the chair and said 'Excuse me,' and went quietly off to the bathroom and shut the door and blew his brains out, by the sound of it.

Connie screamed just once and I got across the room very fast and tried the bathroom door and found it locked and took three paces back and then went at it, going in with a lot of momentum left, with the door stopping halfway because he was on the floor. Then I came back and told her not to go in there, and picked up the receiver from where it had dropped, and dialled the number.

'North has just killed himself and there's been a lot of noise, so we'll need smoke out.'

I gave them the address.

Connie was hunched on the floor, shivering badly, couldn't take any more. 'Christ, what a night,' I said, 'd'you think you could get us some nice hot coffee?' Give her something to do.

Five minutes later I saw a black saloon pulling in to the kerb three floors below and I thought that was pretty fast, even for the Bureau, but they were people in uniform getting out, so I supposed one of the neighbours had called emergency when they'd heard the gun go off: if he'd been punching the wall there wouldn't have been much sleep for anyone, and the bang in the bathroom had been the last straw.

'In there,' I told the sergeant. He must have come up the stairs two at a time, quicker than the lift, because he just nodded and blew out a lot of breath and went over and pushed the door open. Then he came back and asked if he could make a phone call and I said yes.

There was a nice smell of coffee now and I could hear Connie getting through a lot of Kleenex in the kitchen. She'd called out once — 'Why did he have to come and do it here?' — which I suppose was a healthy sign.

Johnson got here next, looking very compact and noncommittal, taking a look in the bathroom. The sergeant had his notebook out, and started with me.

'Will you give me your name and address?'

'No,' Johnson said as he came back from the bathroom, and pulled out his wallet and showed the sergeant his identity and then told me to clear out Connie was in the kitchen doorway holding a green plastic tray with two cups on it, looking at Johnson and wondering who he was. I called out goodnight to her and opened the door as Johnson said: 'Look, Sergeant, I'm going to call my chief, then we'll work out the best way to handle this. There's no immediate need for an amb — ' then I shut the door and went down the three flights slowly, pressing the time-button to put the lights on, nearly walking into someone.

'What's the trouble?' A man in pyjamas, red-eyed from sleep.

'Just a family row.'

The September rain was soft and fresh-smelling as I crossed the pavement and got into the car. Connie wasn't one of my girls, though I'd met her once or twice and I was on the list of names she had to call if any kind of trouble came up. Of course we can make what friends we like, unless there's an actual detective warning us off, and that only happens if by sheer chance we've taken a fancy to someone with a job in a foreign embassy or with their name on the books as a security risk. All the same, the Bureau tries to steer a few girls our way, clerks and secretaries working somewhere along Whitehall or across at the Foreign Office, civil servants with a known background. One of our people — I think it was Carslake — said it was the best-run call-girl system in the whole of London, and a director heard him and got him hauled up on high, because the Bureau is terribly sensitive about things like that.

I went along there now, turning through Hyde Park with the rain hitting the windscreen and slowing the wipers. Except for the fact that we worked for the same outfit, I had nothing to do with North and he had nothing to do with me, but some of his misery had rubbed off and I knew I wouldn't sleep if I went back to the flat, and anyway we all seem to gravitate to that dreary bloody building whenever there's trouble. Comfort in numbers, I suppose, when the nerves start playing up.

There wasn't anyone in Field Briefing or the canteen at this time of night. Signals was in full operation because of the Irish thing but I couldn't talk to anyone in there, they'd throw me out. I found Dewhurst wandering about morosely on the first floor.

'When did North get back?' I asked him.

'Who?'

'North.'

I took off my trenchcoat and shook some of the rain off it.

'Two days ago.' He looked at me in the bleak electric light, trying to see if I'd heard the news.

'I was there,' I said.

'Where?'

'In Connie's place.'

'Oh my God, were you?' He dug his hands into his pockets and stood with his shoulders hunched. 'All I know is he got out of Lubyanka about a week ago and came in by plane through Antwerp. Next thing I heard he was picked up in St George's psychiatric department. How the hell did he manage to fetch up round at Connie's?'

We were standing outside Monitoring, and there was some stuff coming through on the short-wave, something about street-fighting breaking out again in Cyprus, and Dewhurst wandered off and I went with him, wanting to hear more about North, if he knew anything, like scratching a sore. Since last week I'd been on a ten-day call, which meant two things: they had a mission lined up for me and at any next minute they were going to shove it in my hands and tell me to get on with it. And when you're on a ten-day call your nerves are quite tender enough without some poor bastard like North blowing his head off right in front of you.