The Chinese Assassin (44 page)

During
the two
minutes
which elapsed
between their disappearance and
the re-emergence of the hollow-chested cadre at the top of the steps, her eyes never
left the
open doorway.
She watched him glance once round the airport then start quickly down the steps, followed by the bigger man, who now carried a blue canvas holdall. both kept their heads bent forward so that only the tops of their khaki caps were visible. They got into the car quickly from different sides and the driver had the Warszawa moving before the doors had closed.

I
n
the sickly green gloom of the rear seat Scholefield stared out at her from under the khaki peak of the Public Security Bureau cap. His face was gaunt with tension. He opened his mouth to speak but she motioned him to silence with a quick gesture as the car sped across the airport towards a side exit.

23

Scholefield knew
that the
twenty-foot, single-character signboards spaced at fifty yard
intervals along
the
airport
approach road spelled out one of Mao Tse-tung’s thoughts on the inevitability of international revolution. But they flashed by him now in an unreadable
red and white
blur as the driver accelerated the
rattling
Warszawa rapidly towards
its
maximum speed of eighty miles an hour.

Once out on the wide, arrow-straight forty-kilometre highway leading into Peking the driver kept his foot on the accelerator
and
his hand on the horn
and rushed
headlong down the centre of the
dusty,
tree-lined road. Oncoming
cyclists
swerved from
their
path
screaming abuse and
sweating mule drivers hauling commune produce into the city on tottering, net-covered carts took off
their
straw hats
and
waved
them
in fury in the thick dust clouds
thrown
up in the wake of the speeding car.

The driver
didn’t
slow until they reached the outer suburbs of
the
city. By then the lights
was beginning
to fade
and Tan Sui-ling, after
checking the road behind them, leaned forward and
tapped
him once on the shoulder. He throttled back immediately and drove more
carefully
among the cyclists pedalling unlit
machines
several abreast on both
sides
of the broad street.

Because
of the clammy heat,
occupants
of the apartment
blocks
that
stretched like
red brick cliffs along
both
sides of the
street
were squatting in the
dust
on the unpaved
sidewalks.
Many of
the
men were stripped to the waist
and the
women
and girls had
rolled
their
baggy
trousers
up
above their knees in an effort
to keep cool.

Scholefield
took
off
the khaki cap and mopped
his sweating face. He could feel the cotton jacket
sticking
to his back but when he wound down the
window
on his side
the
fetid air that entered through the nylon curtain
carried
the
sickly reek
of drains. Sudden
l
y
the
oppressive heat, the press of sweating bodies
around
him in the cramped car,
and
the
fatigue
of eighteen hours flying
sent
a surge of anger through him. ‘Do all
Chairman Mao’s guests
in Peking get this cloak
and dagger
welcome?’ He spoke
the
words fiercely in
Chinese and swung
round to face Tan Sui-ling.

She ignored the question completely
and
they drove for
several minutes
more in. a brittle silence.

‘You were selected
quite arbitrarily,
by the socialist imperialists in Moscow, to propagate
lies
about China.’ She spoke quietly at last without
turning
her
gaze
from the road ahead.
‘Because
of this Chairman Mao took the unprecedented step of inviting you to Peking—on my recommendation—to hear the truth.’ She turned her head slowly to look at him. ‘But
these are unsettled tunes.
The leadership of
China
is not united. You will perhaps be surprised to
find
Chairman Mao, ‘when you meet him at
midnight
in a mood of apprehension.’

Scholefield stared at her. ‘Were you following his
instructions in of
fe
ring
me
disguise
before I
left
the aircraft?’

She looked away into the gathering dusk
and
nodded. ‘It
was
commanded by Chairman Mao himself that for your
own
safety your movements in China should be conducted under conditions of maximum security. Such
meetings
are not unprecedented. There
has
been trouble before.’

The Warszawa was’ passing
through Wai
Chiao Ta Lou, Peking’s foreign diplomatic quarter,
and
Scholefield
watched a
British
Ford Escort with
diplomatic plates driven
by a young haughty-looking man swing across in front of them. The Warszawa
had
to brake
sharply
to avoid
the car and
the driver shook his
fist after the Escort as
it sped away towards the
British
embassy, now fully restored
after its
destruction by Red Guards at the height of
the Cultural Revolution.

‘The American
journalist, Snow, came several times to Peking to talk with Chairman
Mao. But always there
was
opposition— although he had
penetrated
the Nationalist blockade in the Thirties to reach Yenan.’ She
shrugged.
‘Chairman Mao’s
wife
spent sixty hours
with an American
woman sinologist in 1972 revealing her life story. This
too was
opposed by her
enemies and
therefore had to be conducted in
secret.’
She paused
and smiled a brittle humourless smile. ‘Because
of
our historical
experience at the
hands
of foreign exploiters there is a deeply- ingrained suspicion in
China
of intimate
contact with outsiders.
Such things can be
magnified as serious
political mi
s
judgements,
indiscretions which
may be used as a
basis
for
all-out attacks
by political opponents.’ She
smiled
bitterly again. ‘My
own experience with
your friend
Harvey Ketterman leads me to share that suspicion.’

‘Harvey Ketterman
is
dead.’

For
a fraction of a second
she
was unable to disguise her
surprise. Then
she looked
quickly
away. ‘He
deserved
to die,’ she
said in
a barely audible voice.

‘The
Russians
killed him.’

She nodded once more. ‘It
is
right.’ She made no further attempt to
explain herself:

The Warszawa swung
onto Chang An,
the
ten-lane
Boulevard of
Eternal
Peace which
bisects
Peking
east
to
west, and immediately
the
driver
began leaning
heavily
on
his
horn
again.
But
its
voice
was immediately
lost in
the already deafening
symphony of noise coming from the
red and
cream
trolley-buses
as they nosed through the rapidly-failing light, honking furiously at the
undisciplined droves
of cyclists all
around
them. The thick
crowds thronging
the wide paveme
n
ts under the
trees
on either side of the boulevard were barely moving, as if the stilling
humidity
of the approaching night
had
already sapped
their last dregs
of
energy.

With a muttered curse
the
driver of
the
Warszawa swung out towards the centre of the highway to
find
a clear passage. As he accelerated
Scholefield
saw
through
the
windscreen a great
ragged
mass of purple-black cloud
spreading like
spilled ink
across the
evening
sky
behind the Great Hall of the People. It
snuffed
out
the last f
l
icker
of light
with
a
surprising
sudden
ness, and in
the brief moment before the trolley-buses switched on their
headlights a deep,
breathless darkness gripped
the city. Then
the
street lamps
began coming
on, and Scholefield caught a glimpse of the giant floodlit portrait of Mao high on the vermilion
walls
of
the
Gate of Heavenly Peace
just
before the Warszawa
swung
into
Nan Chitze and began running north
beside
the
moated east wall of the old Forbidden City.

‘Where are we going?’

Instead
of replying she
unbuttoned
o
ne of
the breast pockets
of her
tunic and handed
him a plastic-covered
document
.
She switched on an
interior
light
and
he
saw that the
green security
pass was inscribed with his name
written in both Latin
and Chinese
characters above one of the photographs taken at the Soho
market.
in the
bottom
right-hand corner it bore
the
signature
and
photograph of Wang
T
u
ng-hsing, Deputy Minister
of Public
Security and
head of
Unit
8341, the elite
army group responsible
for
guarding
Chung
Nanhai and
th
e person
of Mao
Tse-tung.

‘That
and
your letter from the Chairman
should ensure
your
safety
here in
Peking—if your
presence is not
too widely
advertise
d
’ She reached out
and switched
off the light. ‘You will remain only a few hours. Your
departure has
been arranged at dawn on the first flight to Tokyo—for your
own sake.’
He tucked
the
pass into his pocket
and glanced anxiously
out of the window again.
The
car was threading
through one
of the narrow, cluttered
streets
of
drab grey-roofed houses huddled beneath
the high walls of the Forbidden
City.
‘It
was an imperial
edict that
ensured that
the common people of Peking paid
architectural
as well as
physical
obeisance to
the
golden roof
s
of the emperor’s palaces from
these
bumble homes of no more than a
single
storey.’