06 The Mandarin Cypher Read online

  THE MANDARIN CYPHER

  ADAM HALL [1975]

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  Contents

  Chapter One:

  Chapter Two : CYPHER

  Chapter Three : CONTACT

  Chapter Four : MING

  Chapter Five : FLOWER

  Chapter Six : BREAKTHROUGH

  Chapter Seven : OVERKILL

  Chapter Eight : 555

  Chapter Nine : SHIELD

  Chapter Ten : MIME

  Chapter Eleven : TARGET

  Chapter Twelve : SOLO

  Chapter Thirteen : DIRECTIVE

  Chapter Fourteen : FLOTSAM

  Chapter Fifteen : TRAP

  Chapter Sixteen : FUSE

  Chapter Seventeen : COVER

  Chapter Eighteen : OBJECTIVE

  Chapter One:

  It’s not only dogs that have a sense of smell, the ability to sense alien presence… Then I stopped thinking about the room because when I squeezed the toothpaste on to the brush an air bubble popped and I saw the stuff was too runny and I went suddenly cold and thought I don’t mind them issuing cyanide capsules when they brief me in London but I don’t like people putting the bloody stuff in my toothpaste… 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 well: 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.

  It was like scratching a sore because there wasn’t any need for me to know any more about North. On the shadow-executive level we work in totally separate fields and there’s just no connection.

  ‘How long had he been there?’ I asked Dewhurst.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Lubyanka.’

  ‘Oh, I dunno really.’

  Lubyanka is the place you’re sent to if you’re picked up on the wrong side of the Curtain and they specialize in implemented interrogation and if you can ever get out of there alive then you’ll finish up like North. There wasn’t anything more I wanted to know about him - the whole thing had suddenly turned my stomach sour. We were standing by the stairhead now, with the open space between the flights running from the top of the building to the bottom like a vertical tunnel, the low-wattage bulbs throwing a depressing yellow light through the rows of banisters, Dewhurst quietly watching me.

  ‘You’re on call, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t let a little thing like this put you off your stroke. He simply didn’t have what it takes, that’s all.’

  He wandered off to see if there were any more signals for him, and I stayed where I was for a minute, looking into the shadows of the stairwell and thinking it wasn’t the sort of epitaph we’d ever want to be landed with … he simply didn’t have what it takes … We’ll fight like hell to go out respectably when the crunch comes and the last gate slams, then tell us who your contacts are, the bright lamp burning into your eyes and the bruises throbbing, I’ve told you already I haven’t got any contacts on this operation, the night-stick again on flesh already aching for peace, but you were seen using a letter-drop, the big white light coming through your eyelids and into your head and burning there, you mistook me for someone else, the stick or the flame or the jerk of the current or whatever it was they were using, tell us, using so expertly, there’s nothing, their foul breath heavy and excited, tell! the light in your head, screw yourself! and reason beginning to go, tell us! the jerk of their hands, no! Always the answer, the same answer, for as long as you can - No! No! No! Till it’s over.

  Not because of any loyalty to the Bureau, nothing like that, because by this time you’re quite beyond any thought of alma mater and the team spirit and what-not, all you’re trying to do is get yourself a half-decent epitaph out of sheer stinking pride, deceased during mission, nothing spectacular, found with security intact, just something we can live with in the last few minutes before we die. Unlike that poor bastard, we hope to prove to the clerks and the accountants and the operations staff and the whole bloody bunch in this building that when the crunch came and the last gate slammed we’d got … after all… what it took.

  I went down the stairs, this place gave you the creeps at night, shrugging my wet mack on, passing one of the briefing staff in a lower corridor.

  ‘Hello, Quiller, what are you doing here?’

  ‘None of your bloody business.’

  It occurred to me, driving back to Knightsbridge through the rain, that I could be entirely wrong about this: maybe North hadn’t told them anything in Lubyanka, maybe he’d stood up to it and got out clean and then just couldn’t stand the reaction, gone a bit too far. There must have been something still left in him even in the last few minutes of his life, because he’d made an attempt to explain his misery to Connie in terms of his cover: ‘nearly crashed’, and something about fog across the airport. That hadn’t been easy to do and he’d done it so maybe they’d chalk up something decent for him as an official epitaph, better than the one Dewhurst had given him.

  Not that we’d ever hear of him again. Outside the hermetically sealed circle of his immediate contacts - his briefing officer, mission controller and director in the field - there wouldn’t be any enquiry. After tonight, along those warren-like corridors of that anonymous building in Whitehall where no one officially exists even when they’re alive, there’d be no questions asked, and the name of North would never be mentioned again. In the Bureau, death is a disease with no complications.

  The call came through over the week-end and I ducked down the steps below the leaky guttering and got into the car, every bloody window misted up, had to find the cloth and even then it wasn’t much better, the rain drumming on the metal roof and the street lamps just coming on as I drove through the park. Well over the limit and one eye on the mirror, no real hurry but this was the sixth day of the ten-day call and that meant they’d set it up in record time: someone had been on the blower or there’d been a bunch of signals in and Parkis or Mildmay or Kinloch had looked at the picture again and said all right tell him to come in.

  No real hurry but it’d been nearly two months since I’d done a mission and I’d forgotten how it affected the nerves when the call came through, nothing to show, just an eyelid flickering, a tendency to keep the foot down through the park, that sort of thing, because we’d made it the last time and the time before that and it had brought us closer to the time when for one reason or another a wheel was going to come off and our name, along those quiet and echoless corridors, would never be spoken again.

  Nothing to show, just an eyelid flickering and the sudden awareness of a composite personality -‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, because the shadow executive, creeping alone through the maze where his work has led him, cat-nerved and ferret-quick, sniffing the damp and the dark and ready to run, ready to kill, comes inevitably to know the plurality of the creature that lives alone and close to death, the mind busy with logic, talking to itself and reasoning the way ahead while the flesh chills and the body pleads for life, go back, go back while there’s time, and the psyche calls for courage, go on, go on while we can, calling sometimes for more than that, for everything, banners raised and bugles sounding, forward my friend to a fool’s death and cheap at the price, out of pride.

  Lights flashing, hemming me in. Black plastic waterproof over his uniform.

  ‘Can I see your licence, please?’

  ‘All right.’

  A temptation to flash the worn leather holder with the card framed in it, the one that would get me through almost any door, Ten Downing Street or New Scotland Yard or Chequers, but you had to justify it later in de-briefing and the Bureau was fussy about it, take your head off at the neck while you weren’t even looking.

  ‘D’you know what speed you were doing over the last mile?’

  ‘Flying too low, was I?’

  Worse for him than for me, he was getting soaked out there, served him bloody well right, he should’ve joined the Navy.

  There was a parking-slot open for me in the yard behind the Bureau: they always see to little things like that when you’re on call and in a way it’s infuriating because you’re always trying to catch them out and never can. I slopped up the worn steps, one shoe leaking, and pushed the door open, nothing on it, no name or number or brass plate or even Keep Out -nothing at all and therefore perfectly appropriate to the business this building housed. At this hour there were quite a few people about but the corridors were almost as quiet as they’d been the other night when I’d talked to Dewhurst by the stairs. The Bureau is a government department but officially it doesn’t exist, and this nihilistic status has long ago cast a sort of creeping blight over the people who work here. Most of us don’t know each other even by our code names because we’re a shifting population of rootless souls and our business is our own business and we’re not interested in anyone else’s.

  Sometimes one of the directors will put a team together, an active unit with field discretion on explosives, and drop them into whatever banana republic or emergent nation is playing with the matches; but most of the active staff are shadow executives, single-objective people with very specific orders: Pekin has appointed a new military attaché in Sumatra, go and vet him; Cuba has just put a unit of combat troops under secret training, go and get pictures; there’s a member of the Secretariat on his way to the border in Berlin, go and help him across.

  Exchange of vital information takes place between missions behind closed doors. Friendships aren’t discouraged: there isn’t any need, because we’re dedicated professionals and all we’d want to talk about is our work and that’d bore the bejesus out of us because a lot of the work is a strain and all we want to do between missions is try to forget it.