06 The Mandarin Cypher Page 2

  ‘He’s along at the Lab,’ Tilson said.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Egerton.’ He watched me with his pink and amiable face, tapping his fingertips lightly together.

  Not Parkis, then, or Mildmay or Kinloch. Egerton. It’s like pulling a name from a hat: you never know who you’re going to get, the next time out.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Where’s what, old horse?’

  The little bastard watched me amiably. He knew what I meant but he was playing hard to get, so I took a shoe off, the one that was leaking, and let the water out all over his nice parquet floor.

  ‘Where’s he sending me?’

  I was showing my nerves, because Egerton would tell me quick enough where he was sending me but I wanted to know now. The minute you’re called in for a mission you become desperate to know everything - whether you’re going to freeze to death in Moscow or fry in Casablanca, whether it’s a penetration job or a snatch or a radio tap, who’s to direct you in the field and who’s going to try getting you out if you come a mucker - you want to know everything and you want to know it as soon as you come in, because, I suppose, the more you know about something the less you’re afraid of it.

  ‘No earthly idea, old horse.’

  So I put my shoe back on and did up the soggy lace and told Tilson he could screw himself and he said thank you very much and I went along to the stairs and down two flights and right to the end of the corridor. The red lamp over the door went out before I reached it: that would be Tilson, told them I was on my way. I went in.

  Shaded lights and a workbench and radio gear and a screen and some chairs and a long table where Egerton was sitting, one thin leg dangling. He didn’t look up. One of the other people switched the red lamp on again and the man with the headphones adjusted the volume.

  You’d have to give me longer than that.

  How much longer?

  I don’t know. I’d have to think.

  Egerton looked up.

  ‘Is this the third cycle?’

  ‘Fourth, sir.’

  ‘Can we have isolations?’

  The man with the headphones put the tape on fast-forward and stopped and corrected, I assumed the thing was a voice spectograph.

  I … I … I … I …

  Am … Am … Am … Am …

  Afraid … Afraid … Afraid … Afraid …

  So…So … So … So …

  Idiom all right but an Englishman wouldn’t say ‘I am afraid’, he’d say ‘I’m afraid’, it didn’t sound like a speech, more like an intimate conversation.

  ‘How many have we done?’ Egerton asked.

  ‘Seventy-four, sir.’

  ‘You mean altogether?’

  ‘Well, the whole series of matching spectograms, and then the fixed contexts. We did the randoms yesterday.’

  Egerton sat like a quiet thin-legged bird on the edge of the table, looking at nothing, saying nothing, until after half a minute the man behind m5 gave a little embarrassed cough and in the silence I heard the cloth of his sleeve rustling as he moved his arm, fingering his hair back, probably not used to Egerton’s holy silences.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything, sir.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ He got off the table. ‘Yes, well, that’s fine. Do those again, will you, and double check?’

  The man with the headphones took them off slowly. ‘The whole seventy-four?’

  ‘Yes. And let me have the report from Williams.’

  Somebody whispered oh Jesus and flipped a switch rather sharply, but Egerton didn’t seem to notice anything because he wanted the whole seventy-four comparisons done again so they were going to have to do the whole seventy-four comparisons again and that was the only thing that had the slightest interest for him, ‘Did you want to see me, Quiller?’

  ‘I’m called in.’

  He’d taken to wearing glasses recently and his dull brown eyes wandered around the edge of my face as if he was trying to find the middle.

  ‘Oh yes. Why don’t we go upstairs?’

  In the corridor I asked: ‘What were the voice-prints?’

  ‘Ah. Well they’ll be working on those.’

  So I shut up and we took the main stairs because the lift in this building gets jammed between floors twice a week and we just can’t afford the time.

  Egerton had possibly been an owl in a previous life because he’d picked a room on the top floor and turned it into a sort of nest, lined comfortably with maps and books and posters of Edwardian bicycle advertisements, furnishing the rest of it with cherished objects - a skull, an abacus, a bulb-horn, that kind of thing, possibly flying through the small high dormer window with them in the dead of night.

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ he said, and draped his body behind the desk like a pile of bones. ‘When did you get back?’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Cyprus, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I haven’t been out,’ I said slowly, ‘for close on two months.’

  He reached over and dropped a folder on to his desk and said absolutely nothing for three minutes. I threw my trenchcoat across the fire-guard he used in winter and sat down on the Louis Quinze chair that years ago had been filled with stuffing. The phone rang and Egerton answered it.

  ‘Well?’

  There were streaks of rain on the window and the glow from the street sent their shadows trickling on Egerton’s face as if he were quietly crying, and it suited him, I thought. They said his wife had committed suicide at some boarding-house on the south coast, not so long ago; but nobody know if he was miserable because she’d done it or if she’d done it because he was miserable.

  ‘Has Mildmay seen him yet?’

  I could hear Tilson’s voice from the receiver, so they were talking about Styles, just in from Ankara, a sticky de-briefing session because we all knew that Styles was in it for the money and one fine day the Rusks or the Turks or the Arabs were going to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he’d blow the whole network if they didn’t watch out ‘Not in my opinion.’

  Or he’d be found floating.

  ‘I can’t see him at the moment, I’m sorry.’

  He put the phone down and looked at the stuff in the folder again and sat back and said: ‘There’s nothing concrete yet.’ He expected me to say something so I didn’t. ‘Things are a little confused over there.’

  ‘Over -‘

  ‘In Pekin.’ He folded his thin raw hands, studying the scars of the winter’s chilblains for a moment. ‘Have you been briefed on China?’

  I got off the Louis Quinze chair and he looked up in surprise and I said: ‘I haven’t had a mission for two months and they put me on a ten-day call and brought me in after six days and nobody’s told me a bloody thing except that Tilson says you’re my Control.’

  He gave me a bleak smile.

  ‘I know how you feel? He didn’t.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘have you got a mission for me?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  I hadn’t expected that. I sat down again, and a thought came at a tangent: the second voice on that tape, the one with the right idiom and the wrong tone, I am afraid so, could possibly be an educated Chinese.

  ‘The problem,’ Egerton said apologetically, ‘is that they got the timing wrong. It wasn’t their fault.’ He checked a sheet in the folder, looking down through the lower lenses of his glasses and trying to get used to the focus. ‘We were all ready to send you in, and now we’re not.’ He shut the folder and slid it to one side.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

  I got up again and squelched around in my leaky shoe.

  ‘Not, anyway,’ he said, ‘for a few days.’

  ‘A few days?’

  He looked surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  The thing is that after two months you get the feeling you’ll never be able to do it again unless you do it soon, and it bring the nerves to the boil. I thought he’d meant weeks, not days.

/>   ‘Look, if it’s Pekin - is it Pekin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If it’s Pekin, why don’t you put me into Hong Kong, so I can wait for the signal?’

  He looked up sharply. ‘Why Hong Kong?’

  ‘Well, I’d be right on the doorstep.’ Even to get out of London would be something, I’d at least be on my way. He was thinking it over so I sat down again and caught a spring of that bloody Louis Quinze right on the buttock.

  ‘Bring me the blue file,’ he told someone on the phone, and put it down and looked at me and said: ‘Frankly I’d rather you waited here. We’re expecting signals.’

  He could switch them to Hong Kong, it was a Crown colony, but it wasn’t my job to remind him of that. A woman came in, brogues and a bun and a whiff of carbolic, typical Bureau staff, and left a blue file on Egerton’s desk, and then of course I realized why he’d popped a tuck when I’d suggested Hong Kong: it looked as though they had something running there and he was wondering how I knew.

  NIAVONVW

  He brooded over the folder, slipping one sheet out at a time and craning his neck instead of moving it nearer, he ought to have those things changed, the tears running down his long thin face while the rain pattered at the window. I wouldn’t mind, once I could get him off the pot. Once I’d elbowed him into putting me out there I wouldn’t mind having him as my London Control. He was a miserable sod and over-cautious (he’d brought Walsh back from Beirut a month ago just because they’d bust a cypher), but he wouldn’t ever make the kind of mistake that would leave you without a chance.

  NIBVCNVW?

  You don’t see with your eyes, you see with your brain, and while I was thinking about Egerton there was peripheral cerebration going on, trying to read the name on the folder, typed in capitals and upside down from where I was sitting. I gave it my full attention.

  MANDARIN

  His thin raw hands moved softly, shifting the papers, the hands of a priest performing the last rites.

  ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘We could use you there for a day or two, but I don’t want to take the risk.’ He put the last sheet back into the folder and closed it and pushed it to the end of his desk. ‘As soon as the signals come in, you can take the first plane, after all.’

  I drew a steady breath. ‘What risk?’

  ‘Well, communications, really. I don’t care to switch signals. The risk of delay, really.’

  I took another slow breath and let a couple of seconds go by, because if you try jumping Egerton he shuts like a clam.

  ‘Be a delay anyway, wouldn’t there? What’s Hong Kong -twenty-four hours?’

  ‘A little more than that, I rather think.’

  He phoned again and put the receiver back and took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  ‘We’d save that much,’ I said.

  She came in again and he gave her the file.

  ‘Did you want to see Colonel Fraser, Mr Egerton?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘He’s waiting.’ .

  ‘Oh, is he?’ He put his glasses on again. ‘All right, I’ll be along in a moment.’

  She went out and I didn’t say anything because he might still be thinking over what I’d said, about saving at least twenty-four hours if I went right away.

  ‘It would mean helping us out a little,’ he said, looking into the middle distance.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that,’ I said.

  Like trying to get a bird to eat out of your hand.

  ‘It’s just a routine investigation.’ A bleak smile. ‘Not quite your field.’

  ‘That’d be okay. Just for a few days.’

  He got his long thin legs together and stood up and wandered about for a bit, finally stopping and gazing quietly at a young lady in knickerbockers holding her very own new bicycle.

  ‘Well, perhaps we could, yes, fit you in.’

  Gotcha.

  Chapter Two : CYPHER

  I was still hanging around at midnight waiting for someone to take me in Field Briefing, bangers and mash in the canteen when I finally got fed up, then back to square one, thinking I might have been a bloody lemon after all if this was the way they were going to play it.

  There was a lot on, of course, and not all of it overseas. Those bastards had put one in St Paul’s, nobody hurt, a small one or not very efficient but that wasn’t their fault, then one of the staff at the Palace had found something rigged up in the kitchens, God knows how they’d got in there through doubled security. Lawson was in charge of the main counter-terrorist unit and somebody had heard him say if he actually caught one of them at it he’d spear the bastard bodily on the railings outside the Tower and the thing we all knew about Lawson was that he’d probably do it.

  Signals was hard at it and all you could see were trays of tea going in, but then Signals was always manned, even when most of the other sections were shut down. There must be a whole unit going out, for Field Briefing to keep me hanging around like this. I didn’t check with the upstairs people to see if Egerton had changed his mind because he would have got a message to me, he had good manners, whatever else.

  ‘Quiller?’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Macklin’s ready for you.’

  I was in Monitoring, military communique from Cyprus Radio, air attacks increasing around Nicosia while the Security Council issued further appeals for a ceasefire, the old 1974 lark all over again, couldn’t care less, Field Briefing was the next floor up and I began hurrying and then remembered this wasn’t really the outset of a mission, I was going to have to piddle about in Hong Kong for a while, looking at all the postcards. Well, I’d asked for it.

  Macklin was buried in a filing-cabinet and poked his head out and told me to sit down. Tilson had gone off hours ago and we were alone, with the bright neon light-tubes buzzing in the ceiling and Macklin’s ashtray thick with dog-ends. He came over, giving the metal drawer exactly the correct amount of push so that as he sat down opposite me it rolled shut behind him with a click.

  ‘Not your kind of operation.’

  ‘It’s just something to do out there while I’m waiting.’

  ‘Yes, Egerton mentioned.’

  He was sorting out the material, one glass eye gazing slightly off-centre, the hard neon light discolouring the scar so that it looked even deeper than it was. He’d been running an escape chain and got his minefields mixed up on the chart near Hellingenstadt, three months of plastic surgery so he wouldn’t frighten the children any more, then he’d opted for an office job, lucky to get it.

  There’s not much,’ he said, and slid the file across the desk to me, never handed things to people if he could avoid it, still had the shakes. ‘You’d better curl up with it and give me a prod when you’re ready.’

  One of his phones was ringing and he answered it and I opened the folder and went through the stuff: George Henry Tewson, 43, five foot so forth, several pictures, last seen alive 22 July, Tai Tam Bay, Hong Kong. Three local fishermen (named: see Coroner’s Report) saw him lose his balance in the boat and go overboard, ‘a big fish tugging at his line’. According to several other witnesses, disturbance in water indicative of shark attack. Remains never found, but wallet and some papers washed up on Turtle Cove Bay, unmistakably identified, confirmed by wife.

  ‘I can’t help that,’ Macklin was saying on the phone, ‘the whole unit has to get airborne at the same time. Do without the navigator if you have to, and find a pilot who knows his maps.’

  It never occurred to me that it was a bit odd giving me a briefing officer like Macklin to spell out this little job I was going to do for Egerton, strictly a gumshoe number. Maybe he was just filling in for someone, as I was.

  Nora Millicent Tewson, nee Harmer, now legally designated widow, still in Hong Kong, now resident. Present address ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I can read the rest of this stuff on the plane.’

  ‘What plane?’

  ‘That’s what I mean, there could be an e
arly flight.’

  His glass eye looked at me dully, slightly off-centre. I remembered it was the left one you had to look at.

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘I can’t stand this interminable bloody rain.’

  He gave a sudden lopsided laugh and the scar went pink, ‘Can’t ever wait, can you —’

  ‘Listen, I’ve been out for two months -‘

  ‘Shagging yourself to a standstill -‘

  ‘Oh balls, listen, fill me in, will you, give me the main outline.’

  He flipped a switch and said: ‘How soon can you put a man in Hong Kong?’

  They said they’d call him back.

  He looked at me again. ‘We just want to know a bit more about what happened to Tewson. On the face of it everything seems to be quite okay: he and his wife were on a package tour holiday, the third time they’d been to Hong Kong in three years, and he went in for sport fishing. It’s shark water and that kind of accident sometimes happens if they don’t lash themselves to the boat. All the same, we’ve had a request to check on it and make quite sure it was an accident.’

  I didn’t ask who’d requested it. After a few years at the Bureau you learned the language, and in Field Briefing their job is to tell you everything you ought to know and if they seem to be missing a few things out you don’t ask questions because it’d be a waste Of time. The mission controllers work on the principle that if you know too much it’ll get in your way. Some of the crudest operations, like busting an opposition cell or getting a man across a frontier, can carry the most complex political significance: you can be quietly picking the lock of a dispatch case in an embassy in Zagreb without the slightest knowledge that the imminent East-West summit depends on whether you get it open or not; and the people who structure policy feel that if you realized your responsibility you’d probably break the hairpin.

  We don’t argue. At times this sort of built-in reticence can be a bloody nuisance but in the long run they’re probably right.