Last night they'd seen me operating a tag and they'd seen my face and they'd made signals and looked me up. They might not know my name and they might not have a dossier on me but they knew I was London.
West into Hennessy Road and in four minutes I came up on the Fleetway Rent-a-Car office with its windows, one of them smashed, that's right, and patched up with cardboard and sticky tape till they could get it replaced. I didn't even slow down, no need, just kept on going, south along Tin Lok Lane and then east again, heading north after a while towards the Excelsior. No police link, then: they'd raided the Capri outside the Orient Club and found the Fleetway documents but they didn't have anyone in the police who could ask Fleetway the name of the man who'd rented the car. They could have gone there first thing this morning and said a Ford Capri with this number had clouted their wing and not stopped, who was the renter and what was his address, so forth, but they were moving too fast and they didn't want to wait for the morning and the office had closed at eight so they'd just broken in and looked at the books, Clive Wing, nationality British, Hong Kong Cathay Hotel.
Final phase: they'd returned to their base, the impressive building with the big brass doors at the corner of Statue Square, overtly the Bank of China, covertly the party and diplomatic headquarters of the Communist Chinese Republic in Hong Kong, Pekin's listening-post and window on the West. They wouldn't have bothered to look up Clive Wing because cover names are only used once, and they wouldn't find Quiller on their books because it's a code name and never used for cover or signals, never used at all outside the doors of the Bureau in Whitehall. They'd looked up the mug shots in the Western Intelligence section and found this particular scarred and bitten-eared alley-cat face with the cynical mouth and the watchful eyes, the picture that some bright spark had managed to take when I was crossing the road or going through Customs or feeding the ducks in Bangkok or Tokyo or Seoul — because they're everywhere, the Chinese, everywhere in Asia, a cell in every city and a plant in every consulate; and they'll follow anything that moves, they'll survey and observe and monitor every intelligence operation they can smell out, whether it involves Pekin or not. They'd looked at the pictures and the man who'd observed me outside the Orient Club and outside Jade Imperial Mansions had identified me. Very well, they'd said, this man is London. Eliminate him.
I left the Capri outside the Excelsior and went in and used a phone and the ringing tone began.
Flower had said she never left her pad before ten or eleven in the morning and it was now 11.21 and I could have missed her and that would mean driving through her travel pattern in the hope of seeing either the Hillman or the Jensen and taking it from there. But it had been near dawn when I'd left her this morning and she might want to catch up on her sleep, so I let it ring eight times, nine.
It didn't matter too-much if her schedule was different today because part of my object was to meet Flower, get a complete report on every aspect of his surveillance, take his notebook and then tell him to get on the first plane to London and don't come back. I could make contact with him anywhere and at any time. But the other part of my object was to ease myself into the tag: watch her travel pattern and note the busy areas and short cuts and cover availability, taking loops and coming back while Flower manned the tag.
Eleven rings, twelve.
If I found more than two of the opposition in the field at Jade Imperial I'd warn Flower off and order him to London straight away because there wouldn't be room for two of us if they were going to move into an actual guard action around Nora Tewson. The mission had already gone into active phase and it could keep on changing as fast as an automatic gearbox, all the way up through the range.
Fourteen, fifteen.
I'd left it too late. I'd have to take the risk and 'Hello?'
'This is Clive,' I said.
Slight pause and then a soft easy laugh. 'Oh. And how do you feel this morning?'
'I'm only just coming down.'
There was another soft little laugh, and she said sleepily, 'Let's do it again.'
'That's why I rang.'
I was having to think what to say, because the bug was already there when she'd opened the line: they had a permanent three-way station operating. There'd been the slight ker-lunk as the circuit had tripped in, and now the line was hollow.
'Hoping you would,' she said.
'Would you like to go somewhere tonight? The El Caliph — '
'Not tonight,' she said quickly, and didn't say why. I tried to catch the tone, to imagine what she would have added in explanation, I've got to do my homework, or my mother's coming round, it was on that wavelength.
'Tomorrow?'
'Yes.'
'What time shall I come?'
'Don't come here. I'll meet you there at eight.'
'The El Caliph Room?'
'Yes.'
I tried every time to listen between the words and get the message. Her voice wasn't sleepy any more: it was a little breathless, secretive, excited, guilty, not quite any of those things but all of them. In her inexperienced way she was conducting an intrigue.
'All right,' I said.
'Clive.'
'Yes?'
It came in an arch little rush. 'I've never known anything like it. You know?'
'Nor have I.'
'My God, I bet you have.'
I said I'd never met anyone like her, been searching all my life, so forth, repeated the time and place and let her ring off first. An instant of regret as I put the phone down, because if I ever met her again it'd have to be without the ticks in tow and that was unlikely. Painfully inexperienced, arch, gauche, coy, but hungry and demanding, like a half-starved waif, wanting to learn and then going for it hard the moment she got the message, God, I've seen them do this in a film, wanting to do everything and do it now, as if it was going to be for the last time, Clive, I didn't know it could be like this, some of the dialogue, presumably, from the same film, though she meant it, and finally you bastard, for some reason, oh you bastard, meaning this too and leaving blood on me with her nails. It seemed fairly clear that she'd made the mistake of marrying a slide-rule and couldn't think of anything to do about it except play about with a flickering projector in a girl-friend's cellar.
Slight progress made: I'd confirmed they had a bug on her phone and there would obviously be others here and there among the Ming. She didn't know about it, or with her Victorian attitudes she wouldn't have said what she did on the phone just now, and she certainly wouldn't have done what she did last night. Another point of interest was that she couldn't meet me tonight because she had to do something she didn't particularly want to do, and conceivably she had to do it in Room 192 at the Golden Sands Hotel, because Flower had told me that the only time she'd made a definite movement was when she'd gone expressly to that hotel and stayed the night.
If they picked me up today and I shook them off they'd know where to find me again if I checked out of the Cathay, or at least they'd think they knew. I supposed I'd have to send another magnum and a dozen gardenias or something to the El Caliph Room tomorrow night; that snivelling old crone in Accounts was going to fracture a whalebone at this rate.
The sunshine bright as I went down the steps, the smell of the sea much stronger here, the ragged banners of the sails in the typhoon shelter and the throbbing of power boats.