"Message understood."
I didn't relax until the silence continued for another few seconds after Ferris acknowledged. Sinitsin would have jumped straight in with a question if he'd had one. Ferris himself was less of a worry: he knew he daren't ask any one of a dozen questions he was wanting to — my reasons for speech-code and «ignore» keys, and so forth; their presence alone warned him of danger.
"He doesn't sound very surprised," Sinitsin said.
I looked blank and turned to Tung Kuo-feng and waited for the translation to come through, at the same time thinking out the answer. When I was ready I said through Tung and the Korean: "In our trade, Colonel, there aren't many things left that can surprise us, don't you agree? And your transmission's being relayed to London, so he's not going to hold things up by any questions. Do you have more?"
"Yes."
He began on the next phase.
It was now midnight by the twenty-four hour chronometer on the lighted console, three o'clock in the afternoon in London. If the Embassy in Seoul had immediate relay facilities, Croder would be channeling this transmission direct to half a dozen departments, alerting sleepers and agents-in-place throughout South-east Asia, asking for an immediate two-week playback analysis from Asian Signals Coordinate to catch anything intercepted during the last fourteen days that sounded like a terrorist or political abduction, and directing emergency staffs into Soviet Department V Operations Monitor Section, Dossier File (Asia), Intelligence Support Stations (South Korea) and Active Signals Search.
Feedback would be reaching Seoul within minutes and all of it would go to Ferris, but only for his information until someone picked up traces of the Tung Chuan abduction or made a lucky hit with one of the dozen radio direction-finding mobile units that would initiate roving missions even while the stuff was still coming in from London. This service offered the greatest hope: they could pinpoint an individual house if they were in the area at the right time; but high-speed transmitting would make it difficult, and if the Russian agents had an automatic player device it would make it impossible. But the signal I was now sending on this set was going to launch a massive intelligence search for Tung Chuan throughout South Korea: I wasn't just speaking to Ferris on an internal directive level.
Midnight plus ten. We walked through the minefield together, a Russian, a Korean, a Chinese and an Englishman, with the glow of the radio console on our faces and hum of the transmitter bridging the silence between the babel of words and phrases.
Sinitsin threw in traps for me a dozen times, and when I looked up at Tung for the translation I warned him with my eyes and he stepped around the traps and I covered the transmission with insertions and «ignore» keys. Three times Tung missed an international name, one of them «Washington», and I put it into transmission as early as I could before Sinitsin noticed the omission. Several times Sinitsin threw in an inconsistency, and Tung questioned it, and I covered.
We walked through the minefield not as friends trying to guide each other to safety but as enemies trying to reach our different goals and reach them first; the terrain itself was innocent, and the danger lay in our own conflicting objectives. If Sinitsin caught me in a deliberate mistake or suspected for an instant that I was sending a different signal he would turn to the guards and have me shot. If Tung Kuo-feng caught any hint that my transmissions were trying to compromise him or the rescue of his son, he would tell the KGB party that they were right: I was too dangerous to remain alive. And if I could see a way to do it, as I picked my way through the patterns of explosive phrases, I would destroy them both.
By 00:19 the transmission was completed. Sinitsin had ended his message with the implication that Ferris should ignore the events in Pekin and turn his full attention to preventing the imminent coup in North Korea. I would send further signals when I had more information. This message did not go through. Tung ended his transmission with a warning that in two days' time the first of three further assassinations was due to take place, unless his son were located and brought to safety.
Ferris came back with a formal acknowledgement and I shut the set down and sat for a moment with my eyes closed and the sweat drying on me and the strange feeling that inside the next two days we could achieve the objective and phase out the mission and let everyone go home. The Bureau had massive and effective facilities in the Asian theatre, and Croder would press them into service to the limit, because apart from anything else his reputation was at stake: in the last eight days jade One had been driven into the ground by the opposition, and now there was a chance.
A chance for the mission, but not for me. I wouldn't be going home. Even if Tung Chuan were found and released, the KGB contingent here wouldn't be threatened; they would simply go home like everyone else, after they'd shot Tung Kuo-feng to stop his exposing them, and after they'd shot me for destroying their operation.
I heard Sinitsin pacing now, his shoes clicking over the flagstones. Tung Kuo-feng had left the console, and I could feel the release of tension in the air as the aura of his ki was withdrawn. Yang would still be behind me with the gun.
In a moment I heard Sinitsin say: "Take him to his cell."
The muzzle bit into my spine.
25: Moscow
The fat crumpled face of a god.
A shadow passing.
Playing with bricks again.
The shadow belonged to Yang. It was his tour of duty.
These bricks had belonged to the monk, I suppose, who had lived in this cell; blocks, rather than bricks, smelling of ancient wood and with yellow dust in the carving, perhaps fibres from his saffron robe. I lined up the three fat gods in a row, putting the five thinner ones below them and adding the ram, the deer and the eagle, giving the left hemisphere something to do while I ransacked the other one for ideas.
But there weren't any. It was the evening of the next day and for seventeen hours I'd been stuck in here while Tung's Triad were carefully lining up the next shot in Seoul or Pekin or Tokyo, the next step in the destruction of Chinese-American relations and Chinese-American-Japanese triangle diplomacy.
Tung was powerless to do anything, I knew that. The KGB never let him go near the radio console unless two interpreters were also there; he couldn't send a signal to his Triad, ordering them to postpone the three final assassinations in the hope that the Bureau could find his son. I couldn't get near the radios myself, and even if I could, Tung would be listening, and in any case I'd got nothing definite to tell Ferris; two of the three people on the death list were likely to be the US Charge d'Affaires in Pekin and the Japanese Ambassador; the third was certain to be the Premier of the People's Republic of China, though his death would have to suggest natural causes: the Soviets wouldn't want China's ostensible responsibility for these assassinations to extend to the killing off of her own; but Tung's scenario of a pro-Russian general's assuming power in China would obviously require the Premier out of the way.
It wasn't easy to play with my bricks while somewhere a telescopic rifle was swinging into the aim with an innocent man's head in the cross-hairs.
Tung Kuo-feng, I'd written on a ten won note, and on the other side in English: Urgent we talk again. I'd waited until Yang's relief had taken over the guard outside my cell and given the note to him, tapping my finger on Tung's name; he'd gone off with it but I doubted if Tung ever received it; Yang had a particular hatred for me but the others had the look of the executioner on their faces whenever they came into the cell; I'd killed one of their own and they were all hoping I'd try running for it.