The Pekin Target q-10 Read online

  I went down the stairs with her past the great brass gong and left her at the entrance doors, which were still open to the warmth of the night. She walked down the steps into the windy street, and didn't turn her head.

  Here in the old quarter of the city the streets were narrow, sometimes no wider than alleyways, and Soong Li-fei slipped through them as if carried along on the warm rain-smelling gusts of the monsoon, the dark silk of her dress shimmering in the lamplight as she vanished at a corner and reappeared as I turned after her; she had looked over her shoulder twice since I'd begun following her, but she couldn't have seen me: I'd been working my way- from cover to cover through the shadows of the fluttering fan-palms and past bicycles knocked over by the wind; the few people I passed walked with their heads down against the gusts, hurrying, some of them dodging into the small restaurants that were scenting the night air with the smell of kimchi and sinsollo.

  "Hey, mister — you wanna girl?"

  "No."

  "You wanna boy?"

  "No."

  The wind sent another bicycle over with a clang from its bell. She had told me at least this much truth: she didn't live far from my hotel; she was already slowing her pace at the end of a narrow street of shop-houses and turning to go into a doorway; then a man came from the shadows and stopped her.

  Contact.

  He was asking her something and she was replying, explaining, shaking her head. He didn't think she was a prostitute: in this quarter she was too pretty and too elegant. I watched them from the distance of a stone's throw, keeping in the cover of shadow.

  This was a contact, the first I'd made in security since I'd left London, the end of a thread that could lead me through the night and the wind to Tung Kuo-feng. But it wasn't going to be easy: there was the length of the street between the contact and me, and he was close to a turning; there would have to be some luck.

  Soong Li-fei was already going into the doorway, leaving the man standing there alone; then he moved, and so did I, at first walking fast and keeping to cover and then breaking into a soft run as he vanished beyond the corner. I ran hard now, taking the risk that he'd hear me above the noise of the wind's rattling among the shutters and along the tiled roofs, but there was no sign of him as I swung into the alley at the intersection; it ran for fifty yards and opened into a small square filled with trees and parked horseless carts and a few benches. There was limitless cover for him here but I didn't think he'd used it; I didn't think he'd seen or heard me; I thought he'd simply moved into a doorway and gone inside, into one of a dozen buildings and with no clue as to which.

  I walked twice from the square to the intersection and back, desperate for the sign of a half-open doorway, a silhouette against a light, the sound of a voice; but he'd gone. There was no point in my staying; if I saw him now I wouldn't recognise him for certain as the man I'd seen talking to Li-fei; in the distance and the lamplight I'd seen nothing more of him than that he was young bareheaded Asian in dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt.

  I went back to the hotel the way I'd come, checking now and then to make sure I was alone. The big carved entrance doors at the top of the steps were still wide open, but there was no clerk at the desk. I looked for a copy of the Korean Herald in English behind the counter but found nothing; I'd get one tomorrow; I wanted to see the report of Soong Yongshen's death on the steps of the temple in Pekin before I signalled Ferris with information.

  The time by the American Express clock on the wall was just gone eleven as I went up the stairs, my shoes quiet on the marble. Rock music was coming faintly from somewhere, and a woman's liquid laughter; a door banged in the street outside, or it was the wind shaking something; a sound was coming from the big brass gong on the wall, so low that it was hardly more than a vibration as it trapped the other sounds and held them like an unceasing echo.

  Sleep. It was all I wanted now. She'd been going to kill me but it hadn't happened, and I was still here. Someone had made contact with her, someone who could have led me to Tung, but I'd lost him; so be it. Tomorrow was another day and with luck I'd outlive this one. But I'd get no sleep until I'd gone to ground; it was just the thought of it that slowed me a little as I climbed to the second floor, my senses lulled by the strange murmuration of the gong. The fatigue curve is not constant; it dips faster as time goes on. But I wasn't totally relaxed; one must never be totally relaxed in a red sector, if life is still held to be sweet.

  Light was filtering through the grilled windows of the stairwell, throwing the restless shadows of the fan-palms in the square outside; faintly through the coloured glass I could hear them rustling; my own shadow came for a moment against the wall as I turned on the curving stairs.

  The woman had stopped laughing. There was still within me the degree of alertness necessary for the memory to remain aware that she had been laughing before, and now had stopped. I was also noting other things, as the impressions of light and sound and touch went shuttling secretly across and across the undefined borderline between the conscious and the subconscious, arousing the interplay between the primitive and the modern brain that would turn incoming data into decision when the need came.

  I reached the second-floor passage, my shadow moving again on the wall, this time with the other shadow as if we were dancing; but we were not dancing; this was more serious, and as time slowed down I was aware only of the primitive animal-brain impressions: the flare of alarm along the nerves and their response; the swift rushing of adrenalin and the contraction of muscle; the locking of the breath as the strength of the organism gathered with the force of a storm and then broke loose. Nothing was thought out; everything was done in the light of ancient wisdom, tapping the store of racial memory wherein it is recorded, for all of us, what must be done to survive when there is no time to think.

  Something snapped, possibly his arm. I remember very little about it, but that first sound was sharp. For an instant I felt his breath fanning against my face before the force in me, which was in essence the force of the living creature refusing to be killed, reached its peak and he span slowly with his back curving against the low balustrade and his arms flying upwards, the hands set in the shape of empty claws; then he was flung away from me and began going down as I watched, down the lamplit stairwell, his body turning slowly until one of his shoulders hit the huge brass gong and broke it away from the wall, so that it fell with him like a giant discus, striking the marble floor below and sounding his death knell with a clangour that shook the night.

  9: Rain

  "You mean you don't wanna lay me, honey?" The rain thundered on the roof.

  "No. I just want to stay here for a day or two."

  She gazed at me from beneath her heavy black eyelashes. "But not like a love nest?"

  I'd found her in a doorway, sheltering from the torrential rain the monsoon had brought to the city half an hour ago. She was all I had, but I'd better not tell her that, because those bloody penny-pinching secretary birds perched at their desks in the Accounts Department in London would go into instant moult when they saw my expense sheet.

  "Not like a love nest," I told her.

  There was a kind of eldritch laughter somewhere in the remnants of my soul and trying to get out, because this was an ultra-priority mission with a crack London director in control and a first-class director in the field with instructions to give me all necessary facilities from signals-through-Embassy to shields and support, and here I was in a Seoul back street soaked to the skin and trying to get a fifty-year-old whore with green eyelids to take me in from the rain.

  "Are you stoned, honey?"

  We were standing in the passage between the front door and the stairs and the door was still open and I could hear the sirens in the distance as more patrol cars zeroed in on the Chonju Hotel a few streets away, where a man was lying with his back broken under the weight of a brass gong. They wouldn't be looking for me yet: Clive Ingram, travel agent, was still ostensibly staying at the hotel and his overn
ight bag was still in his locked room; he might easily be dining out or seeing a film or holed up at the Pacific Club with friends, and wouldn't be reported absent until the morning. No one had seen me leave; the lobby had been full of people with white faces looking down at the body under the gong, and I'd gone out through a fourth-floor window and across the rooftops.

  "No," I told the woman, "I'm not stoned." I got out my wallet and peeled off some notes. "What about a hundred thousand a day, minimum three days?"

  She looked at me hard. "Don't fool around, do you?" She took the notes and led me upstairs. "You running drugs, are you?"

  "There are two conditions," I said, watching the calves of her stout veined legs as we climbed the stairs. "One is that as far as anyone else is concerned I'm not here. And while I'm here you don't see any clients."

  "That's no sweat. But what did you do out there, buster? You in some kinda trouble?"

  "Not if you don't talk."

  She was panting as we reached the big low room at the top of the stairs. Stained cotton rugs, two sagging divans, a cheap bead curtain over a door in the corner, a big Japanese lantern and a dead palm in a chipped reproduction Ming container. The wall was papered with old posters: Sadie Nackenberg's In Town… Sadie Be Good… If You Knew Sadie Like I Know Sadie… New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans. And hundreds of photographs.

  "Showbiz," she said with an echo of desperate pride, "that was me. Those were the good days, like Streisand says. Where are you from?"

  "London. My name's Clive Ingram."

  "Hi. I'm Sadie. Born in Memphis, US of A. Been in a fight?"

  "There was an accident." There were still scratches on my face from Li-fei's nails, and I'd fallen nine or ten feet onto a pile of stacked crates at the back of the Chonju Hotel when the creeper had given way.

  "You on the run, mister?"

  "My wife doesn't understand me."

  "Uh-huh. She throw you out the window?"

  "Something like that."

  "Goddamn women's lib, it takes the joy out of everything." But she was watching me critically, wondering how far a hundred thousand won would go if one day she had to bribe the police. "Listen, I don't want no trouble here. This is a respectable place. I mean I don't want your wife here. Or whoever. I have a businesslike understanding with the cops, you know what I mean?"

  Water was dripping from my clothes as I stood checking the usual things: exits, windows, telephone, visual security from the street and other buildings; tonight it wasn't easy: all I could see from the windows was the rain through the flimsy curtain.

  "If you don't talk to anyone," I told her, "you won't have any trouble." But I'd have to be careful when I went into the street; by the morning the Homicide Bureau would be pushing the street patrols for results. "Is there a shower?"

  "You bet. You don't have any dry clothes?"

  "I want to go straight to bed. They'll dry overnight."

  "I got some hangers. Bathroom's through that curtain and turn left. Careful with the faucet, it needs fixing, you can get yourself drenched." She looked at my clothes and gave a husky laugh. "What am I saying?"

  The telephone rang twice while I was in the bathroom and I listened to the soft rasp of her voice through the thin white plaster wall, that's okay, honey, I didn't expect you a night like this, I'll miss you too, and so forth. I dried myself on a towel marked Seoul-Hyatt and wrapped myself in the blanket she'd given me. The phone rang again and I listened again, in case. I wasn't safe here, but I wouldn't be any safer anywhere else. Spur might have put me up, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep with that bloody thing crawling all over the floor; as soon as they found my room still empty at the Chonju in the morning the police would be checking every hotel in the city; the Embassy would give me a bed, but you don't go to ground in your Embassy when you're blown: London is terribly fussy about abuse of diplomatic hospitality overseas and in any case the opposition would expect me to go there for refuge and I'd never get out again without walking into a trap.

  "You can see the kinda clients I got," Sadie told me the third time the telephone rang. "They call me up when they can't make it. Most of them are in the US forces out here, some of them lieutenants and upwards, fresh outa West Point but underneath the war-paint just boys from back home, and you know something? They miss their mothers; half the guys that come here don't even ask me for sex, they just wanna talk to someone who can speak the Queen's goddamn English. Gee, honey, you look real cute in that poncho."

  The rain was still drumming on the roof and sending cascades into the street below. Five minutes away from here the girl with the cinnamon eyes would be listening to it, the girl with the Astra Cub.22. What had the Asian said to her when he'd stopped her outside her apartment?

  He hadn't followed me back to the hotel: I'd checked to make sure I was alone. He'd taken a different route through the maze of alleys and reached there before me, not knowing at that time that I wasn't still in my room.

  Did you kill him? he'd asked her outside her apartment.

  No. He's not the man, she'd said.

  It was possible. Anything was possible, but I had to look for a likelihood, a logical scenario. It could have been someone else who stalked me in the corridors of the Chonju but I didn't think so: it would have been too much of a coincidence. The man who had turned slowly in the air as he went down the marble stairwell had been Asian and he'd worn dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt; Soong Li-fei wasn't just an official interpreter for the airline: she'd had a brother who was in Pekin at the time of the funeral bomb — "It was something to do with that dreadful thing in Pekin" — and they'd killed him because he'd "done something wrong". She had a friend who had lent her a gun, and someone had told her that the man who'd killed her brother would be checking into the Chonju Hotel tonight, Room 29. She'd got Tung connections, strong ones, close ones, whether she knew it or not; and they'd tried to use her as a killing instrument and when she'd failed to kill me the young Asian had gone there to do it himself.

  "I had one young guy," Sadie said, "who spent the whole time just showing me the photographs of his mom and dad and his kid sister, telling me about them. Then you know what he did? He tried to lay me, but there was no spring in his step and he said, 'Shit, man, when am I goin' to grow up?' We both of us ended up crying in each other's arms, at least that's what I tried to make it sound like, but you know what I mean, people think this job don't carry any responsibilities, can you believe it?"

  "La vie est pleine de surprises," I told her.

  She squinted at me over a cigarette. "How's that again?"

  "An old Chinese proverb." I asked if I could use her phone and she said okay and I rang the British Embassy and spoke only in French, asking them to get the cypher clerk out of bed. He came on the line after ten minutes and I gave him Jade One, the code-word for the mission, and put the whole thing across in routine speech-code because it was all I could do without a one-time pad and he wouldn't have one, taken ill for «blown» and confined to his room for "gone to ground", and so forth, Ferris would have a bloody fit when he got this one: there'd now been a total of four attempts on my life and I'd had to kill twice and now I was blown for the second time since I'd reached the field and we still hadn't got any access to the opposition. It was like a two-way mirror that only they could see through; I'd worked only once before in the Orient but I was beginning to remember how it felt: nothing is what it seems; your feet are on shifting sands and the images you see are only reflections and the sounds you hear are only echoes and the logical process of Western linear thinking takes you through shadows and leads you into the ethereal haunts of illusion until you start losing your grip, and then you're done.

  Fatigue, of course. Have to brace up, you know. Spot of Horlicks and a sound night's sleep, that's all you need.

  Not quite. I need some magic.

  "Attendez, ce n'est pas tout." I asked for information on Soong Li-fei, spelling her name out in French, saying she was allegedly an
interpreter for Korean Airlines. I asked for information on Soong Yongshen, allegedly her brother and dead by ritual murder in Pekin. I asked who Youngquist was.

  I also reported that although Ferris couldn't have told anyone that my new cover was Clive Ingram and that I was booked into the Chonju Hotel in Seoul tonight, the opposition had sent a woman there to meet me, with a gun.

  Some kind of magic, yes, was needed here, to arm me against theirs.

  The rain beat on the tiles overhead and I gazed into the watchful eyes of Sadie, the whore from Memphis, her thick black lashes narrowed against the cigarette smoke that drifted between us on the sultry air of the room.

  Who is Sadie?

  She's just a whore from -

  Are you sure?

  Fatigue, yes, ignore.

  "Bien, c'est tout maintenant. Je repete: Ji — a — de — eu, un."

  I rang off.

  "She no speaka da English?" Sadie asked me.

  "That's right."

  I asked her where I was to sleep and she took me to a small room at the back of the building with a single bed in it already made up and an electronic alarm clock on the bedside table showing the correct time and a plastic baseball trophy on the dressing-table underneath an array of faded silk flags and pennants — ASU Sun Devils, Cincinnati Reds, Dodgers — and a tin-framed photograph of a young man with a crew cut and a winning smile, with fly spots clouding the glass.

  "This is Danny's room," she said, a warmth touching her voice and lingering. "That's him up there. He's my son. I keep everything ready for him, when he comes to see me."

  "A handsome boy. When do you expect him here next?"

  She turned away. "Oh, not yet awhile, I guess. Hasn't been here for a year or two — he keeps pretty busy, see, works for the Hertz people in Hong Kong, but he always calls me up at Christmas time, never misses. You be okay in here?"