BEIJING WAS Freezing.
The north winds swept down from the vast Manchurian plains and coated the willows, their branches already bending under snow, with a sheen of silver ice. The sun was a pale yellow, a thin disk in a pearl sky.
Nicholai stepped out of the train station and took a breath of the freezing air, which bit into his lungs with a burning sensation. He pulled the collar of his Russian coat up around his neck and wrapped the scarf around his neck.
The street was virtually devoid of traffic save for a few military vehicles – Soviet trucks and American Jeeps liberated from the Kuomintang. Most people were on foot, the luckier few struggled to hold bicycles steady on the snow as they bent low over the handlebars to escape the wind. A few rickshaw drivers picked up arriving passengers and pedaled off with them, the back wheels slipping in the snow.
Then a long black sedan, its front fenders festooned with small red flags, emerged out of the snow and pulled up on the curb. A stocky Chinese man in a padded wool overcoat and a PLA cap with a red star on the front got out and walked up to Nicholai.
“Comrade Guibert?”
“Yes.”
“I am Comrade Chen,” the man said. “Welcome to Beijing. Long live the People’s Republic.”
“Wan swei.”
“Yes, we were told you speak fluent Cantonese.” Chen smiled. He gave the slightest emphasis on “Cantonese,” just to let Nicholai know that it was inferior to Mandarin, the preferred dialect of government. “You lived in Guangzhou, was it?”
“Hong Kong.”
“Ah, yes.”
Silly games, Nicholai thought.
Endless, silly games.
“I will be your escort in Beijing,” Chen said.
“Escort,” Nicholai thought, meaning “spy,” “watchdog,” and “informer.”
“I’m appreciative.”
“Shall we get out of the cold?” Chen gave a curt nod back toward the car and the driver got out, took Nicholai’s suitcase, and loaded it into the trunk. Chen opened the back passenger door for Nicholai. “Please.”
Nicholai slid into the back of the sedan and Chen came around and got in on the other side. The car heater was working manfully, if futilely, against the intense cold, and Chen stomped his booted feet on the car floor. “Cold.”
“A bastard.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Nicholai asked, knowing that the answer would be “no,” and also knowing that Chen would appreciate a cigarette. He took a pack of Gauloises from his inside coat pocket and held it out to Chen. “Please.”
“Most kind.”
Chen took the proffered cigarette and then Nicholai leaned over the seat and offered one to the driver. He could see Chen’s annoyed look from the corner of his eye. Even in the “classless” society, there are classes, Nicholai thought.
The driver took the cigarette and, gloating, smiled at Chen in the rearview mirror, so Nicholai knew now that he was not terribly subordinate. A watcher to watch the watcher, he thought. He took out his French lighter, lit both men’s cigarettes, then his own. The car quickly filled with blue smoke.
“Good,” Chen said.
“Take the pack.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I have more.”
Chen took the pack.
Five minutes in the incorruptible People’s Republic, Nicholai thought, and the first bribe had been accepted.
Actually, Mao’s “Three Antis” Campaign to root out corruption among party officials was in full swing, and hundreds of bureaucrats had been summarily executed, shot in public displays, while thousands more had been shipped off to die slow deaths from exhaustion in work camps.
Nicholai noticed that Chen took four cigarettes from the pack and put them on the front seat for the driver. Prudent, he thought.
This was Nicholai’s first time in Beijing. He had been a boy in Shanghai, and that cosmopolitan city had seemed the world to him. The old imperial capital was so different, with its broad boulevards intended for military parades, its vast public spaces so open to the winds that it seemed almost meant as a warning of how quickly and completely things can change and how vulnerable one is to shifts in the wind.
Chen seemed a bit ahead of him. “You have never been to Beijing before?”
“No,” Nicholai said, peering out the window as the car pulled out onto Jianguomen Avenue. “And you, are you a native?”
“Oh, yes,” Chen said, as if surprised by the question. “I’m a Beijingren, born and bred. Outer City.”
In two blocks the street became Chang’an Avenue, the city’s main east-west arterial that flanked the southern edge of the Forbidden City, with its distinctive red walls. Nicholai could see the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao had stood a little over two years ago and declared the People’s Republic of China. He recalled from his briefing that Yuri Voroshenin was there with him that day.
Enormous plaques on either side of the gate read, respectively, “Long Live the People’s Republic of China!” and “Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World!”
“A small detour?” Chen asked.
“Please.”
Chen ordered the driver to take them around Tiananmen Square, which was a mess of construction work as it was being widened for even larger public demonstrations. Buildings were being torn down, the rubble removed or leveled.
“When it is done,” Chen said proudly, “it will hold over a million people.”
Many of whose homes had been torn down, Nicholai thought, to create space for them to publicly gather.
Beijing was an impressive, imposing city, created for the exercise of power. Nicholai preferred Shanghai, although he was sure it had changed as well. The China he had known was a motley of color and style – Shanghai was a center of high fashion – but the residents of Beijing in this time seemed almost cookie-cutter in their uniformity, most of them wearing the standard blue, green, or gray padded coats with baggy trousers and the same “Mao” caps.
Having negotiated Tiananmen, the driver turned north onto Wangfujing Street and pulled up in front of the Beijing Hotel, a turn-of-the-century European-style building, seven stories high, with three arched doorways and a colonnade on the top floor. The driver scurried out, retrieved Nicholai’s bag, and handed it to a hotel porter. The small middle-aged man struggled to heft the bag to the lobby, but spurned Nicholai’s proffered hand.
“He was the deputy mayor,” Chen grunted, ushering Nicholai past the porter. “Lucky to be alive.”
The lobby seemed a house of ghosts. Nicholai knew this had once been the European center of power in Beijing, where the Western barons of commerce lorded it over the Asians, and Chinese waiters scurried with trays of gin and tonics, whiskey and sodas as they endured the careless racism of the French, Germans, English, and Americans. It had been the same in Shanghai, but here – just a short walk from the Imperial Palace – it must have seemed even more insulting.
He was surprised that the Communists hadn’t simply demolished the building, leaving its painful associations in rubble, but he realized that the new regime needed a place to house its foreign guests. The lobby was clean but lifeless, scrubbed of any trace of decadence, devoid of the sense of luxury and privilege that it doubtless once possessed.
As life under capitalism was aggressively gauche, Nicholai thought, life under communism was deliberately drab.
The desk clerk, a young woman clad in the ubiquitous “Lenin suit” – a gray, double-breasted jacket with a sash belt – asked for his passport and was surprised when Nicholai produced it with a greeting in Chinese, “Have you eaten today?”
“I have, Comrade. And you?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Room 502. The porter will-”
“I’ll take my own bag, thank you,” Nicholai said. He reached into his pocket for a yuan note to give the porter, but Chen stopped him.
“Tipping is not permitted in the People’s Republic,” Chen said.
“Of course not,” Nicholai said.
“Patronizing imperialist anachronism,” Chen added.
Quite a burden to carry, Nicholai thought, for a small gratuity.
The elevator ride was frightening, and Nicholai wondered when was the last time that the creaky lift had seen maintenance. But they made it to the fifth floor alive and Chen led him down the long hallway to his room.
The room was basic but clean. A bed, a wardrobe, two chairs, a side table with a radio, and a thermos of hot water for making tea. The attached bathroom had a toilet and a bathtub, but no shower. French doors in the main room opened onto a small balcony, and Nicholai stepped out and looked down on the front of the hotel and East Chang Street. To his right he could see Tiananmen Square.
“These rooms are reserved for very special guests,” Chen said when Nicholai stepped back inside.
I’ll bet they are, Nicholai thought. He would further bet that these rooms were also wired for sound to record every conversation of said special guests. He took off his coat, gestured for Chen to do the same, and hung both coats up in the wardrobe.
“May I offer you tea?” Nicholai asked.
“Very kind.”
Nicholai took two large pinches of green tea from a canister and put them into the pot. Then he poured the hot water in, waited for a few moments, and then poured the tea into two cups. Normally he would not have served tea made in the first steep, but he knew that fuel for heating water was at a premium and that waste would be considered offensive. He handed Chen the tea and both men sat down in the chairs.
After a sufficiently awkward silence, Chen said, “This is very good. Warming. Thank you.”
“I can hardly accept gratitude for your hospitality.”
Chen was disconcerted at the thought that the visitor might be under the misapprehension that the hotel stay was complimentary. He got right to it. “But you are paying for your room.”
“Still,” Nicholai said, remembering now how blunt the Chinese could be about business matters. So unlike the Japanese, who would have engaged in ten minutes of circumlocution to subtly inform the guest that he was, after all, a paying guest.
Chen looked relieved. “There is a dinner tonight in your honor.”
“You needn’t go to the trouble and expense.”
“It is already organized.”
“I look forward to it.”
Chen nodded. “Colonel Yu, aide to General Liu himself, will be your host.”
General Liu Dehuai was a national hero, one of the key generals on the Long March and the founder of the legendary 8th Route Army. Until recently the commander of Chinese forces in Korea, he was now minister of defense. Liu would have to approve the deal for the sale of the weapons through “Guibert” to the Viet Minh. The fact that he was sending an apparently key aide to evaluate Guibert on his very first night in the country was significant.
And uncharacteristic of what Nicholai knew of the Chinese way of doing business. Typically, they would let a foreign guest cool his heels – easy to do in Beijing in January – for days if not weeks, occupying him with low-level subordinates and endless sightseeing, before getting down to business.
Liu was in a hurry to do this deal.
“I’m honored,” Nicholai said.
Chen stood up. “I am sure you are tired and would like to rest.”
Nicholai saw him to the door.
He waited five minutes, then put his coat and hat on again and went back out into the cold.
ALTHOUGH NICHOLAI HAD PORED over maps and aerial photographs, they could not substitute for on-the-ground knowledge, and he wanted to orient himself to the city. His survival might depend on an immediate decision as to what alley to turn into, what street to avoid, and there would be no time for indecision or hesitation.
Beijing in the early days of 1952 was a city of contradictions, divided between spacious governmental sections and the narrow alleys-hutongs – on which most of the people lived. The heart of Beijing was the Forbidden City – as its name indicated, closed off to the general public for most of its thousand-year existence. Now that the Communist government had moved in and turned many of its buildings into offices and residences, most of it was still “forbidden” most of the time.
The “other” Beijing that surrounded the Forbidden City was – or used to be – a vibrant, active, cosmopolitan city of some two million people, with open-air markets, streets of fashionable shops, small parks and squares where jugglers, magicians, and other buskers performed.
The Beijingren, the natives, had the same tough, jaded, superior attitude of the residents of all major cities. To them, Beijing was its own universe, and they were not entirely wrong. Everyone had come to the imperial city – not only all manners of Chinese, but, for good or ill, the rest of the world as well. So the sophisticated Beijing citizens knew all the varied cultures of China, Japan, and Europe. A well-heeled Beijingren might well have eaten in French restaurants, bought suits from Italian tailors, watches from German craftsmen. Most of the modern Beijingren had worn British suits or French dresses and danced to American music.
Still, any good Beijingren, from the impoverished night-soil collectors to the richest merchant, would proudly proclaim the superiority of Beijing culture itself- its fabled imperial buildings, its bridges and parks and gardens, centuries-old restaurants and teahouses, its theaters and opera houses, its circuses and acrobats, its poets and writers.
Beijing was a sophisticated imperial capital when London and Paris were little more than insect-infested swamps. Of all the European capitals, only Rome could rival Beijing in terms of antiquity, sophistication, and power.
The Beijingren had seen it all. Within the living memory of many of its citizens, Beijing had survived invasions from the French, the Germans, the Nationalists, the Japanese, and now the Communists. It had adjusted, evolved, and survived.
Many observers were surprised that Mao chose the city, with all its imperial associations, for his capital. Nicholai thought he chose Beijing for exactly those associations. No ruler could claim power in China without those trappings – without possession of the Temple of Heaven, no emperor could claim the Mandate of Heaven, and Nicholai knew that Mao, for all his Communist propaganda, saw himself as the new emperor. Indeed, he had quickly shut himself up in the Forbidden City, and was rarely seen outside it.
The Beijingren knew this. They had known many emperors, had seen dynasties rise and fall, watched them build monuments to themselves and then watched them crumble, and they knew that the Communist Dynasty was but one in a long line. Its time would come and its time would pass, but the city would endure.
But in what form, Nicholai wondered as he walked out the front entrance, up the street, and then turned right onto Chang’an. Mao had plans for the city and announced that he was going to transform it from “a city of consumption to a city of production.” Already blocks of old houses had been torn down to make room for new factories, narrow streets were being broadened to allow tanks to roll up and down, and Soviet architects – a perfectly oxymoronic phrase, in Nicholai’s opinion – were now busily designing sterile concrete housing units to replace the old courtyard houses that were the center of Beijing domestic life.
The courtyard walls lined the residential streets and hutongs, with only small doors opening onto the street. The doors opened onto another wall, and a visitor would have to go to the right or the left-a device that outfoxed evil spirits, which can only move in straight lines. Once around that wall, the space opened onto an interior courtyard, usually of pebbles or, in the richer homes, flagstone. The courtyard usually had a shade tree or two, and an open charcoal brazier for cooking during warmer weather. Depending on the wealth or poverty of the family, there was a single dwelling structure of one or two stories, perhaps with separate wings for the families of the sons. The Beijingren lived privately, quietly, and with great autonomy in these extended family units behind the walls.
This would never do for the control-obsessed Mao, who quickly condemned the desire for privacy as an “individualist” antisocial attitude. While waiting for the Soviets to complete their architectural atrocities, he attacked the courtyard houses on an organizational level, establishing “safety-keeping committees,” in which neighbors were encouraged to snoop on neighbors. Black-clad squads of “night people” – mostly erstwhile burglars – used their former skills to prowl around rooftops and listen for the sounds of “bourgeois activities” such as the click of mah-jongg tiles, the trilling of a pet songbird, or for antirevolutionary whisperings and conspiracies.
The assault on urban life was also conducted on public spaces. Theaters and teahouses were closed, street performers harassed for licenses, snack vendors increasingly forced into state-run collectives. Even the rickshaw drivers who once jammed the city’s avenues were being gradually phased out as “imperial relics,” symbolic of “human slavery.” It didn’t happen all at once, but it was happening, and the bustle that gave the city so much of its charm was being muted into fearful stillness, in which every activity was watched and heard.
Indeed, Nicholai discerned the man who instantly fell in behind him before he even left the hotel lobby. China was poor in most resources save population, so the intelligence service could easily afford to leave a man at the hotel with the sole responsibility of keeping an eye on “Guibert.”
It was good to know.
Nicholai wanted to ascertain the amount of surveillance that he would encounter, so in that sense he was “trolling for tails,” as Haverford would put it. Nicholai thought of it differently, of course, and in terms of Go. A basic principle of the game was that motion attracts motion. The movement of a single stone on an area of the board generally provokes a move from the opponent. So it was, he discovered, in the espionage game, at which he realized he was a neophyte.
Pretending not to notice the surveillance, he crossed Chang’an into the old Legation Quarter, past the old Russian Legation building, which the current Soviet delegation had reoccupied. Using only his peripheral vision, he scanned the front of the building, where the security, sitting in Russian sedans, was clearly visible.
He kept his pace up, as if bored with the Legation Quarter and intent on heading west to Tiananmen Square.
He walked around the vast square, chaotic with construction – his watchdog doing a good job of staying with him without getting too close – and then turned north toward the great tiled roofs of the Forbidden City.
His tail backed off then and turned him over to a second man, so Nicholai knew that the surveillance of Guibert was something of a priority. The tall roofline of the Imperial Palace, easily recognizable from a hundred photographs, loomed in front of him as he looked for a place to kill Voroshenin that would offer the requisite time and space as well as offer an avenue of escape.
Nicholai had hoped that the walls of the Forbidden City might offer such a location, but then he realized that the area was of course far too heavily guarded now that Mao had taken up residence there and many of the buildings had been turned into housing for high officials or government offices.
Nicholai went into the palace, now a museum, to get warm and firm up his tourist credentials, and lingered on the grounds (if one could be said to “linger” on this bitterly cold afternoon) before leaving the Forbidden City. Observing that he had now acquired an additional tail, he turned east and walked across a lovely bridge over the southern reaches of Beihai Lake, frozen and silver against the white willow trees along its banks.
It would not do to walk too confidently, so Nicholai assumed the gait and pace of a man who is slightly, albeit unconcernedly, lost. He paused at the corner of Xidan Street, pretended to consider his route, and then “decided” to turn north. His tails switched off, one lingering as he fussed with his scarf, the other coming ahead to pick up the trail.
It was enough for Nicholai to get a good look at their faces without being noticed. He dubbed one of them the Greyhound for his tall, slim build and foot speed, and the other Xiao Smiley, an ironic reference to his dour expression. To be fair, Nicholai thought, no one would be very happy to be pulled from a nice warm hotel lobby onto the freezing streets.
Nicholai upped his pace to see if the Greyhound would keep up with him, or whether there was another agent to turn him over to. The Greyhound quickened his steps, although he was careful to stay far behind Nicholai as he went through the South Gate into Beihai Park.
The park was lovely, Nicholai thought, and represented the very best of Asian landscaping art. Built around the oval of Beihai Lake, its walkways wended through graceful rows of willow trees, impeccable placements of stones, and perfectly located pavilions. Every curve offered a new perspective, and the whole thing came close to achieving the elusive quality that the Japanese called shibumi – understated elegance.
In fact, in winter the park resembled a distinguished elderly lady, spare and yet beautiful, who preserves her posture and dignity even in the knowledge of cold death. A man more verbally talented than I, Nicholai thought, might compose a poem about her.
Walking northward along the eastern edge of the lake, he came to a bridge that spanned the lake onto an island. Nicholai read the small sign that pointed toward the Jade Isle and stepped onto the gracefully arched bridge.
He paused at the apex to look over the lake and see if the Greyhound followed him. The Greyhound was smart and strode right past him, never even glancing as he continued onto the island. It was the smart move, Nicholai thought, anticipating that I will keep going onto the Jade Isle, but still allowing him to double back if I change my mind. Lazily scanning the scenery, he saw Xiao Smiley stop and linger in a pavilion near the base of the bridge.
Nicholai turned and crossed the bridge onto the Jade Isle, which was dominated by a tall white tower on a small rise in the center of the thickly wooded island. A narrow footpath flanked by trees and shrubs led up to the tower, identified by a plaque as, not surprisingly, the White Pagoda, built in 1651 to honor the visit of the Dalai Lama.
Ironic, Nicholai thought, considering that the Chinese had just invaded Tibet.
The tower itself was closed. Nicholai strolled around the base of the tower, which, with its curved lines and additional “steeple” with a gold Buddhist symbol on top, more resembled Tibetan than Chinese architecture.
He finished his circuit of the tower and then took a narrow curving path down through the trees to the southern edge of the Jade Isle, where the Bridge of Perfect Wisdom crossed back onto the main part of the park. From the bridge he noticed small docks on the islands, and others across the pond, and realized that on less inclement days one could hire a boat to access the island.
The Jade Isle has possibilities, Nicholai thought, particularly at night, but luring Voroshenin there would be a problem. Schooled in paranoia by the Stalinist purges, the Russian would not easily be lured anywhere, and if he is the chess player he is reputed to be, he will be quick to sniff out a ploy.
But it was a location to keep in mind, and at least Nicholai had fulfilled the immediate task of allowing himself to be spotted by Haverford’s spies in the White Pagoda.
HAVERFORD SAT and watched Solange pack.
It didn’t take long – she actually owned very few things. The rest of it – the books, the art, the fine kitchen equipment, even most of her wardrobe – had been bought and paid for by the Company and would be sold.
The bottom line was, after all, the bottom line.
She’d taken her eviction stoically, only putting up a small argument.
“But where will I go?” she asked when Haverford came to shut down the house.
He shrugged his lack of an answer. The gesture evoked what they both knew – she’d been hired for a certain job, for a certain period of time. The job was over and the time was up, and she should have thought of her future earlier.
And her concern was a bit disingenuous. Certainly she knew that a woman of her beauty, charm, and doubtless sexual talent would always find a man willing to pay for them. She had done it before and would do it again, and the money he had paid would be more than sufficient to tide her over.
“And how will Nicholai find me?”
As a piece of acting it was beautiful. I was almost convinced for a second there, Haverford thought, smiling at himself and recalling what his father had said after rescuing him from a youthful entanglement with a Broadway dolly that he thought he was in love with.
“All actresses are whores,” Haverford Senior had pronounced, “and all whores are actresses.”
This one certainly is, Haverford thought, watching Solange dab at her eyes with a handkerchief. “How will Nicholai find me?” He didn’t enlighten her that, in the unlikely case that her emotions were genuine, she needn’t trouble herself over them.
Now she folded a negligee into her suitcase, paused, and trained her remarkable eyes on Haverford. “Perhaps you and I, we could make an arrangement?”
He had to admit that he was tempted. What man wouldn’t be? She was incredibly beautiful and would no doubt be a revelation in bed, but there was no way that he could justify her continued presence in the house to the cold-blooded Company number-crunchers.
“We have an arrangement, my darling,” he answered. “You performed a service – brilliantly – and I paid you.”
“You treat me like a whore,” Solange said, snapping the suitcase shut.
Haverford saw no need for a response. In any case, he had just received word from his sources in Beijing that Hel had made his rendezvous on the Jade Isle and been duly spotted from the White Pagoda.
MEN ARE FOOLS, Solange thought as she left the house in Tokyo.
A few tears, the sparkle of an eye, the twitch of a hip, and their brains are as easily turned off as an electrical switch.
Haverford was smarter than most, but just as blind.
Like the rest, he sees what he wants to see and nothing more.
Nicholai, on the other hand…
Dommage.
What a shame.
THE PROBLEM WITH the “new” China, Yuri Voroshenin thought as he sipped a vodka and looked out his window at the Legation Quarter, is that there are no more prostitutes.
Which was damn inconvenient.
The “old” China threw no such obstacles between a man and his needs, to put it mildly. Shanghai, for instance, had some marvelous brothels. But the People’s Republic was ferociously bluestocking when it came to sexual matters, and all the pleasure girls had been swept off to factories or farms.
This was a damn poor allocation of resources and a gross violation of the economic precept of “highest and best use.”
Voroshenin remembered a different Beijing, the halcyon days of the 1920s and ‘30s when the Bada Hutongs of Tiangao, just south of Tiananmen Square, blossomed with “flowers and willows” and the old Xuanwu District’s narrow alleys teemed with teahouses, opium dens, opera theaters, and, of course, brothels.
Those were the nights when a man could go out and get a good dinner and a few drinks, take in an opera, and then attend to his less aesthetic tastes afterward, sometimes with one of the actresses he had seen onstage, or with an expensive courtesan who would serve tea, then sing an aria, and only later get down to business.
He’d even enjoyed the negotiations with the madams, who would have considered it a gross violation of decorum to offer her girls like menu items – instead, she would ask the customer for a “loan” to pay for household maintenance or some particular repair. It was all done with subtlety and style at places like the House of the Golden Flower or Little Fengxian’s.
But that was before the damn “reformers” came along-first the persnickety Chiang and then Mao, and now Beijing was a city as desexualized as the eunuchs who once ran it. Sure, there were a few “black gate women,” independent prostitutes who risked arrest on the street, but a man would have to have access to far better pharmacists than were available in present-day Beijing to resort to that.
The only person getting any illicit sex in the new China was the chief puritan himself, the Chairman. Soviet intelligence had confirmed that Mao had a personal battalion of “actresses” from the National People’s Opera at his beck and call. But it was just like that son of a bitch to feast while everyone else starved.
Even by Stalinist standards, Mao’s China was a cloud-cuckoo land of epic proportions. It would be easy to say that the lunatic was in charge of the asylum, but Mao was crazy like the proverbial fox. All of his mad proclamations were ultimately self-serving and brought him yet more power and control.
The Three Antis Campaign was rapidly stripping the country of its bourgeois middle management, and the recently launched Five Antis Campaign (I’ll see your Three Antis and raise you two, Voroshenin thought with a chuckle) – tax evasion, larceny, cheating, bribery, and stealing economic information – would soon rid China of most of its private businessmen.
And Mao had used the Korean War to conduct a witch hunt for “spies” and “foreign agents” that was reminiscent of the Red Terror in Russia thirty years ago. Neighbor was encouraged to inform on neighbor, suicides and executions were daily events, and the atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and paranoia in the city was palpable.
No wonder Uncle Joe was jealous.
Voroshenin tipped back the rest of his vodka and then heard Leotov’s distinctive knock. The man taps on a door like a mouse, Voroshenin thought – timid and tentative. As the months in this frigid open-air prison went by, Voroshenin found his chief assistant more and more annoying.
Then again, he thought, Beijing is making us all crazy.
“Come in.”
Leotov opened the door and stuck only his head through, as if making doubly sure he’d received permission to enter. “It’s time for the three o’clock briefing.”
“Yes, it’s three o’clock.”
Leotov minced his slight frame over to the desk and stood there until Voroshenin said, “Sit down.”
We do this every afternoon, Voroshenin thought. Every damn afternoon at three o’clock you stand in front of my desk and every damn afternoon at three o’clock I tell you to sit down. Could you not just once come in and plant your skinny ass down in the chair without an invitation?
I’m going stir crazy, he thought.
I need a woman.
“So, what’s new in the asylum today?” he asked.
Leotov blinked, then hesitated. Was this some sort of rhetorical trap that would get him denounced and then purged?
“The briefing?” Voroshenin prodded.
Leotov sighed with relief. He ran down the usual goings-on, the reports from moles in the endless Chinese committee meetings, the Chinese Defense Ministry’s thoughts on the stalemate in Korea, the latest round of executions of corrupt officials and counterrevolutionaries, then added, “And a new Westerner arrived in the city.”
Voroshenin was bored out of his mind. “Indeed. Who?”
“One Michel Guibert.”
“Only one?”
“Yes.”
Leotov was devoid of humor. A literal-minded drone of the sort we seem to crank out like tractor gears, Voroshenin thought. And completely useless as a chess opponent – plodding, unimaginative, and tediously predictable. Maybe I should have him arrested and interrogated just for amusement. “Go on.”
“A French national. The son of an arms dealer with ties to the French Communist Party. The father was apparently quite useful to the Resistance.”
“Weren’t they all, after the fact?” Voroshenin said. “That was a rhetorical question, Leotov, it doesn’t call for you to come up with a correct response. I couldn’t bear watching you attempt it. What’s this Guibert doing in Beijing?”
“We don’t exactly know,” Leotov answered. “But we do know he’s having dinner with General Liu’s aide, a certain Colonel Yu, tonight.”
Well, that’s interesting, Voroshenin thought. A French fellow-traveler, an arms dealer, being received by a high-ranking officer in the Defense Ministry. Surely the Chinese aren’t looking to buy weapons from the French. But it must be a matter of some urgency, otherwise the Chinese would make this Guibert sit on his hands for weeks, just to improve their bargaining position. They would make him work his way up through multiple levels of bureaucracy before getting to an important general like Liu, if he ever got there at all. So, for a high-level officer like Yu to host Guibert on the first day…
“Where is this dinner?” Voroshenin asked.
“In the banquet room of the Beijing Hotel.”
“A banquet, is it?”
“Apparently.”
Voroshenin stared at him. “Do I detect irony, Vasili?”
“Certainly not.”
Voroshenin frowned until little dots of sweat emerged on Leotov’s upper lip. Satisfied, he said, “Get on the phone to Liu’s secretary and tell him that my invitation was apparently lost and I need to know what time I should show up.”
“Do you think he will -”
“We pay him enough, don’t we?” Voroshenin snapped. “He can come up with an invitation to a lousy dinner. Just tell him to strangle another chicken or press another duck, or whatever the hell it is these people do.”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“Oh, stop it. Get out, Vasili. Go see if the phones are working.” He watched as Leotov jumped up, crossed the room, then slowly closed the door so as to make the least possible noise and not give offense. It was profoundly aggravating.
As was the sudden appearance of a new player, this Guibert. The game was at a critical juncture – the move of a knight or even a pawn would achieve checkmate – and what a pleasure it would be to take this particular king off the board.
He’d had to deal with the obnoxious Chairman for twenty years – tolerate his boundless ego, his sexual voracity, his hypochondria and hypocrisy, his endless treachery and relentless ambition, but soon he would able to view Mao’s severed head in a bamboo cage hanging from the Gate of Heaven.
They’d already chosen his successor – Gao Gang was the Chinese party boss in Manchuria, and he was ready to step in. Just waiting for the word to be delivered via Voroshenin from the puppet-masters in Moscow.
If all goes as planned over the next few months, we will replace the troublesome Mao with the pliable Gao.
So this was not the time for an additional complication, especially one involving Liu. The general was too smart, too tough, and his own man. He’d already rebuffed numerous offers to buy him. And now what’s he up to with this gunrunning Frog?
Voroshenin opened his desk drawer and took out the vodka bottle. He’d promised himself that he would only take one drink in the afternoon, but Beijing was really getting to him and the alcohol might quell his sexual frustrations. Perhaps they would have actresses at the banquet tonight, maybe even whores.
As if there’s a difference.
As if there’s a chance, he admitted.
He knocked back the drink in one throw, looked at his watch, and decided that there was time to go and visit Kang Sheng, the head of the Chinese secret police. Another broken promise, he thought sadly. The better part of him didn’t want to go see the man, despised himself for it, and yet he was drawn.
KANG SHENG DRESSED all in black.
At this moment, the head of the Chinese secret police wore a black lounging robe and black pajama pants over black slippers, but he was known to go about in public in black padded coats, black suits, and black fur-lined hats. On a lesser person, this sartorial eccentricity would have been labeled counterrevolutionary decadence and had potentially disastrous consequences, but no one in Beijing had the nerve to think, much less utter, such an opinion.
Kang Sheng had been Mao’s chief torturer since 1930. He had personally tormented thousands of Mao’s rivals back in Jiangxi, and survivors whispered that they had heard the howling of his victims during the long nights in the caves of Yenan. What he didn’t know about xun-ban, torture, had yet to be discovered; although, to give him his due, Kang Sheng was ceaseless in his efforts to discover new methods of inflicting agony.
In fact, at this very moment Comrade Kang was diligently conducting research.
His new home near the old Bell and Drum Towers in the north-central district of the city was the former mansion of a recently deceased capitalist. More of a small palace, it had guest houses where Kang’s armed guards now resided, as well as courtyards, walled gardens, and pebbled pathways. Kang had done nothing to change it, except for the construction of a concrete-lined “cave” far in the back garden.
Now, teacup in hand, he sat back in a deep chair in the cave and enjoyed the screams of his latest subject.
She was the wife of a former general in the northwest district who had been accused of being a spy for the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan. A beautiful young lady – sable hair, alabaster skin, and a body that was a sensual pleasure to behold – she bravely refused to supply incriminating confirmation of her husband’s treachery.
Kang was grateful for her uxorial loyalty. It prolonged his pleasure. “Your husband is an imperialist spy.”
“No.”
“Tell me what he said to you,” Kang demanded. “Tell me what he whispered to you in bed.”
“Nothing.”
A knock on the door interrupted his enjoyment.
“What is it?” he snapped.
“A visitor,” came the answer. “Comrade Voroshenin.”
Kang smiled. There were so many ways of achieving power and influence. “Send him in.”
THE KEY TO THE CURRENT condition of Chinese plumbing, Nicholai decided, was never to take no for an answer.
He tried three times to get hot water from the taps of the bathtub before he succeeded, and when it finally came, it did so with a scalding vengeance, an all-or-nothing-at-all response to his repeated entreaties.
Gently lowering himself into the water, Nicholai was reminded of the tub he’d enjoyed at his Tokyo home in what seemed like a lifetime ago, but was barely four years. They had been happy, albeit short days, with Watanabe-san and the Tanake sisters in the garden he had carefully constructed with the goal of shibumi.
He might have lived his whole life there quite happily, had it not been for the honor-bound necessity to kill General Kishikawa that caused his subsequent arrest, torture, and imprisonment at the hands of the Americans.
And then the offer of freedom in exchange for this little errand.
To terminate Yuri Voroshenin.
Moreover, Nicholai despised nothing more than a torturer. A sadist who inflicts pain on the helpless deserves death.
But Voroshenin was only the first torturer on Nicholai’s list.
Next would come Diamond and his two minions who had shattered Nicholai’s body and mind and come close to destroying his spirit. He knew that the Americans didn’t expect him to survive the Voroshenin mission, but he would surprise them, and then he would surprise Diamond and the two others.
It would mean leaving Asia, probably forever, and that thought saddened him and caused him some anxiety about what life would be like in the West. A European by ethnicity, he had never even been there. His entire life had been spent in China or Japan, and he felt more Asian than Western. Where would he live? Not in the United States, certainly, but where?
Perhaps in France, he decided. That would please Solange. He could envision a life with her, in some quiet place.
Nicholai pushed the thought of her out of his mind to focus on the present. Picturing a Go board in his head, he played the black stones and placed them in their current position. The point now was to push forward to gain proximity to Voroshenin. To create a position from which to get Voroshenin in a vulnerable place.
Given the close surveillance, he couldn’t simply track the target down and find an opportune moment. No, he would have to find a way to lure Voroshenin to an isolated spot, while at the same time losing his Chinese tails.
He studied the imaginary board to find that opportunity, but couldn’t find it. That didn’t worry him – like life, the go-kang was neither static nor unilateral. The opponent was also thinking and moving, and very often it was the opponent’s move that provided opportunity.
Be patient, he told himself, recalling the lessons his Go master Otake-san had taught him. If your opponent is of a choleric nature, he will be unable to restrain himself. He will seek you out, and show you the open gate to his vulnerability.
Let your enemy come to you.
Nicholai sank deeper into the tub and enjoyed the hot water.
HAVING MADE a life’s study of human weakness, Kang noticed the Russian’s fascination with the torture. It emanated from him as strongly as his body odor, which stank of stale sweat and alcohol.
Kang didn’t judge. He was a sadist himself, it was simply his nature, and if the Russian joined him in deriving pleasure from other people’s pain, it was merely a sexual preference. The odor, however, was offensive. A man could not change his nature, but he could bathe.
Voroshenin tore his eyes off the woman and said, “Actually, I came on business.”
Kang smiled. You came on the pretext of business, he thought, but very well. We shall humor your self-delusion.
“The Vixen Yips an Opera,” he said to his assistant, naming a relatively mild yet exquisite torture that he knew Voroshenin would find compelling, both from his taste for pain and his passion for Beijing opera.
“Manban,” he added, meaning that he wanted the beating conducted at a slow tempo. Kang knew that Voroshenin would appreciate it. “We can go to my study.”
Voroshenin followed him into an adjoining room, where he noticed that Kang left the door ajar.
“You mentioned something about business,” Kang said, enjoying the Russian’s discomfiture.
“This Frenchman who arrived today,” Voroshenin said. Of course Kang would already know about him. Nothing of note occurred in Beijing without its being reported to the head of the Chinese secret police.
Voroshenin heard the high-pitched yelp, which did indeed sound like a vixen yipping for her mate.
Kang smiled in acknowledgment, then said, “Guibert?”
“I believe that’s his name.”
“And what of him?”
“What’s he doing here?” Voroshenin asked.
“Something to do with arms to our revolutionary little brothers in Vietnam,” Kang answered.
“Guns to the Viet Minh?”
“Apparently.”
“He’s French,” Voroshenin said, “and he’s selling weapons to be used against his own people?”
“Since when do gunrunners know nationality?” Kang asked. “Or capitalists morality?”
The woman’s cry was perfectly in tune with the overall composition.
Voroshenin objected, “Vietnam is in the Soviet sphere.”
“A glance at the globe would indicate differently.”
“You’ve never given a damn about Vietnamese independence,” Voroshenin grumbled, listening to the woman’s moans.
Kang heard them too. The whimpers were now an underlying theme. “I am offended. We care deeply about the plight of all peoples suffering under the imperialist lash.”
“This is Liu’s operation?”
“It would seem so.”
“And you trust him?”
“I trust no one.”
It was an open secret among the higher echelons of the intelligence communities that Liu loathed Mao and was always searching for an opportunity to displace him. It was only the general’s personal power and popularity among the army that kept him alive and out of this very cave.
As much as Voroshenin shared Liu’s distaste for the Chairman, Liu’s success would be a disaster for the Kremlin. They already had their man waiting in Manchuria. A complete puppet, unlike Liu, who would be independent and might very well edge China toward an alliance with the West.
It couldn’t be allowed.
The woman hit a high note of crystalline purity.
Voroshenin stood up. “I should be going.”
Ten years, Kang thought. It was absolutely essential to preserve the Soviet alliance for ten more years. The ultra-secret military-industrial development was already under way in the southwest and would be completed in a decade. And by that time, China would have the atomic bomb, would be an economic powerhouse as well, and they would have completed the transformation of the society. Then there would be a reckoning with the condescending, patriarchal, neo-imperialist Soviets.
But they would need ten more years of Russian economic aid and military protection to realize their plans, and nothing must be allowed to interfere with that. So he stood up, took Voroshenin by the elbow, ushered him back into the torture room, and asked, “Do you want her?”
The Russian didn’t answer, and Kang took his silence as assent. He walked over to the woman and asked, “Do you want to save your husband?”
“Yes.”
“There is something you can do.”
“Anything.”
Kang drew Voroshenin aside.
“Take her,” he said. “Any way you want. My gift to you. But for added pleasure? When you are about to climax, whisper into her ear the truth that her husband is already dead. It will be exquisite, I promise you.”
He left Voroshenin alone with the woman, but lingered outside the cave to savor the subtle change in the tone of her screams, what in the opera they would call wawa diao, an aria of highest emotion.
THE FOOD WAS EXQUISITE.
A native of Shanghai, Nicholai was something of a snob when it came to the superiority of southern cuisine over its northern – somewhat barbarian – counterpart, but he had to admit that these Mandarin dishes were as superb as they were surprising.
“Yushangfang,” Colonel Yu explained when Nicholai praised the food. “ ‘The Emperor’s Kitchen.’ It makes sense when you think about it – the emperor could command the best chefs in all of China. They all came here to cook, and their legacy lingers.”
Indeed, Nicholai thought.
The banquet started with hot-and-sour soup, then proceeded with spareribs in sweetened Chinkiang vinegar and zha xiao wan zi, small fried meatballs made with prime ground pork, and, of course, jiaozi, the distinctive Beijing dumplings. Yu had sat Nicholai directly to his left at the circular table, a place of honor, and personally used his chopsticks to select the best pieces and place them on Nicholai’s plate.
Another high honor.
Now the colonel perused the platter of cold pig’s ear, chose one, and put it on Nicholai’s plate. Then he took one for himself, tasted it, and nodded in approval. “I’m a southerner,” he said to Nicholai, “a Sichuan mountain ape, and it took me some time to get used to this northern food. But it’s all right, huh?”
“It’s very good,” Nicholai answered. And Yu was anything but simian. Surprisingly young for a man who was General Liu’s right hand, he was hardly a country bumpkin but a sharp, sophisticated staff officer. He was dressed tonight in civilian garb, his Mao jacket pressed, the corners of the large pockets sharply creased. His full black hair was cut short in the current style.
“Of course I miss my rice,” Yu said to the table at large. “All these noodles you eat…”
The other diners responded with the expected polite laughter.
Voroshenin said, “Surely, Colonel, a man of your position could have pearl rice brought up from the south.”
Nicholai was impressed with Voroshenin’s fluent Mandarin, and took further note of his tone of easy familiarity with the colonel. Perhaps it was the three mao-tais the man had consumed during the round of toasts that preceded dinner. Nicholai had politely downed three rounds as well, and had to admit that he was feeling them.
“But I am not an emperor,” Yu said pleasantly, although everyone at the table heard the subtle reference to Mao, who had the best rice brought into the city and hand-peeled to leave the husks on.
Nicholai found the remark significant – it indicated that Yu felt secure enough in his position to make a jibe at the Chairman.
Voroshenin leaned across the table and speared a pig’s foot. He used the moment to ask Nicholai, “Is this your first time in Beijing?”
“It is.”
“First time in China?”
“Not really,” Nicholai answered. “I was partially raised in Hong Kong.”
“That’s part of Great Britain, isn’t it?” Voroshenin asked. It was rude, a sly dig at his Chinese hosts.
“So think the British,” Nicholai answered. “But in reality Hong Kong is no more British than, say, Mongolia is Russian.”
Yu guffawed.
“No offense,” Nicholai said, looking directly at Voroshenin.
“None taken,” Voroshenin replied, although both men knew that offense had been intended and received. He kept his eyes locked on Nicholai’s.
The other diners noticed the very Western, very un-Chinese, directness of this standoff, and Chen, seated to Nicholai’s left, was relieved when the waiters broke the tension by arriving with a platter of fried pig’s livers wrapped in iris blossoms.
But Voroshenin would not let it go. “The French have some colonies in Asia, I’m given to understand.”
Nicholai agreed. “French Indochina, to be precise.”
“Well, precision is important.”
“Precisely.”
“Although,” Voroshenin said, testing the waters, “I don’t know how much longer the French can hold on to, say, Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh is kicking the traces, isn’t he?”
“It’s a matter of time,” Yu said.
“And arms,” Voroshenin opined. “Wouldn’t you say, as a military man, that the Viet Minh insurgency can’t progress to the next phase of the struggle without a reliable supply of modern weaponry? I mean, they really can’t stand up to French firepower with what they have now, especially with the Americans arming the French.”
“To succeed,” Yu answered as he looked over the platter, “every insurgency must make the transition from guerrilla to conventional warfare. Our beloved Chairman taught us that.”
He pinched a piece of the liver and transferred it to Nicholai’s plate.
“But,” Voroshenin pressed, “it can’t be done without guns.”
“No,” Yu said simply. “It can’t.”
“And what brings you to Beijing?” Voroshenin asked Nicholai, supposedly switching subjects but fully aware of what he was doing.
“Business,” Nicholai answered.
“Agricultural equipment?” Voroshenin asked with faux innocence. “Irrigation systems, that sort of thing? In the face of the American embargo? Good for you, Comrade. But, damn, you look familiar, Michel. Something in the eyes. Have you ever been to Russia?”
Nicholai saw the man’s eyes scanning for a reaction. He knew that he was being baited, knew that Voroshenin was trying to assess him. But why? Nicholai wondered. Could he have an inkling, could there have been a leak? Could Voroshenin know the real reason for my being in Beijing?
“No,” Nicholai answered. “Have you ever been to Montpellier?”
“The one in France?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t there,” Voroshenin answered. He rudely stared at Nicholai for another moment, then said, “No offense, but I once knew a woman, in Leningrad, with eyes like yours. She… well, we’re all comrades here, right? Friends?”
He was met with silence, Nicholai noted, but despite the well-known Chinese reticence about public discussions of sexuality, Voroshenin continued. “She was a tiger in the sheets. I had her every which way, if you know what I mean.”
The slight laughter was forced, the moment horribly awkward. Voroshenin must be very confident in his power, Nicholai thought, to so brazenly offend his hosts’ sensibilities. Certainly he knew better – he just didn’t seem to care, as evidenced by the self-satisfied leer that lingered on his face.
And his vulgar reference to my mother? Nicholai wondered. A shot in the dark, or does he know? And is testing me?
A part of Nicholai wanted to do it now. It would be easy, a simple matter of thrusting a chopstick through his eye and into his brain. Done in a flash, before Voroshenin’s thugs, lurking like dogs along the wall, could do anything but confirm their boss’s death.
But that would be suicide.
So he met Voroshenin’s gaze, smiled, and asked, “Can you keep a secret, Comrade Voroshenin?”
Voroshenin smiled in return. “I was born for it.”
Nicholai leaned slightly toward him and held his eye as he said, “I’m here to do a killing.”
Chen gasped.
Nicholai laughed and said, “I’m sorry. My Mandarin, it’s rusty. What I meant to say, of course, is that I’m here to make a killing.”
The diners laughed, then Voroshenin, his face reddening, said, “That’s still a brave remark to make at a table full of Communists, mon ami.”
“I am what I believe you call a ‘useful capitalist,’ “Nicholai answered. Voroshenin’s eyes had provided no answer as to the state of the man’s knowledge. Certainly he had been insulted, and flushed with anger, but then he seemed equally relieved when Nicholai explained his grammatical “error.”
“That’s the expression,” Yu said. “Now, enough talk of business at the table. We are being terrible hosts, interrogating our guest. We should show brotherly hospitality. So, what in Beijing would you like to see, Comrade Guibert?”
Nicholai named the expected – the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, perhaps an excursion to the Great Wall. Then he decided it was time to push a line of stones forward, into Voroshenin’s part of the board. After all, the Russian had come this far toward him, it was only polite to return the gesture.
“And opera,” Nicholai added, careful to look at Yu and not Voroshenin. “I would very much like, if possible, to attend a real Beijing opera.”
“Are you a devotee of jingju?” Voroshenin asked, his interest piqued.
“I try,” Nicholai answered, in his mind’s eye seeing the opponent’s white stones moving into place. I studied the file on you, you total bastard. I know who you are. “It’s difficult in Hong Kong, as you know. Impossible in France, as you might guess. But yes, I’m a fan.”
“I’m going this week,” Voroshenin said. “I’d be honored if you would accompany me.”
“Really?” Nicholai asked. “That’s very kind. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“None at all,” Voroshenin assured him. “I’m going anyway – The Dream of the West Chamber at the Zhengyici. And Xun Huisheng himself is singing the huadan, the ‘Red Maid’ role.”
“I’ve always wanted to hear him,” Nicholai said.
Yu said, “Catch him while you can. The party doesn’t approve of men playing women on the stage. It is effete and unnatural. We shall soon be putting an end to this anachronistic practice.”
“But Xun is sublime,” Voroshenin argued.
“These old operas are a waste of time,” Yu sniffed. “Ancient fairy tales and romantic fables of the old ruling class. The jingju should be utilized for social purposes, for propaganda and education.”
“Madame Mao is an enthusiast,” Voroshenin argued.
“Of course,” Yu countered, “and we are given to understand that she is even now writing new operas that will instruct the people in socialist principles.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Voroshenin said dryly. He turned back to Nicholai. “If you’d like to attend, I have a private box.”
If your opponent is of a choleric nature, he will be unable to restrain himself. He will seek you out, and show you the open gate to his vulnerability.
Let your enemy come to you.
“I accept,” Nicholai answered. “With pleasure.”
It’s a date, a rendezvous, he thought.
The waiters brought out a new platter, set it in the middle of the table, and Nicholai saw that Chen was looking at him for a reaction. Not to disappoint, Nicholai asked, “What is this?”
“Yang shuang chang,” Chen said, then clarified, “goat’s intestine filled with blood. A delicacy.”
Yu and Chen watched for his response.
Nicholai knew that the dinner was not only a ritual, but a test – of his manners, his language skills, his temperament. It was also a time-honored ploy, to lull a business associate with massive amounts of food and drink to dull his mind, move the blood from his brain into digesting the food.
He was also aware that the selection of dishes was also a measure of his attitudes. For so long insulted by Western condescension and cultural arrogance, the Chinese wanted to see if he would meet them on their own terms. If not, it could very well end the business deal that was the cover for his mission.
Nicholai was somewhat satisfied to see that Voroshenin’s face had turned slightly green. Not waiting for Yu, Nicholai speared a piece with his chopstick, leaned across the table, and put it on Voroshenin’s plate. Then he took a piece for himself and put it directly into his mouth.
“Exquisite,” Nicholai said, to his hosts’ apparent delight. Then he looked at Voroshenin and asked, “You don’t like it?”
The Russian pinched the chunk of bloody intestine and popped it into his mouth but was unable to keep the expression of distaste off his face.
Small victories, Nicholai thought, are nevertheless to be savored.
The yang shuang was followed by a dessert course, to please the Western guests, although it consisted of Mandarin-style delicacies such as glazed yams, small honeycomb cakes, and jellied bean curd.
Nicholai was full to the point of bursting.
Yu leaned back in his chair and said, “Now we can really drink.”
In honor of their respective nationalities, they switched between mao-tai, vodka, and Pernod, a dusty bottle of which the bartender found in the back of a cabinet.
Toasts were proposed and drunk.
“Our French guest.”
“Our Chinese hosts.”
“The eternal friendship between our three countries.”
It was another test, Nicholai knew, an effort to loosen his tongue with alcohol, to see if he was who he said he was. And a dangerous test, for getting into a drinking match with Voroshenin was no mean feat – the Russian was big, a practiced drinker who could hold his liquor. So could Yu, for a small man, and the toasts went on.
“Our beloved Chairman, the Great Pilot.”
“Comrade Stalin, who shows the way.”
“Jean Jaurès.”
Between toasts, Nicholai struggled to keep his head and recall his briefings as Voroshenin pushed the conversation toward Guibert’s background.
“There is a café in Montpellier,” Voroshenin said casually, “renowned among the locals for its pain au chocolat -”
“Le Rochefort.”
“On the Square of St. Martin.”
“On the Place Ste.-Anne, actually.”
“That’s right.”
Through his thickening head, Nicholai thanked Solange for her attention to detail and incessant drills, even as his head began to swim. But that was the point of drill, after all – just as in the martial arts, repetition trained one to go beyond thought into pure reflex.
Voroshenin kept at it. The Russian invited him to share memories – some true, others false – about restaurants, regional dishes, even the local football side.
Nicholai fended off each probe.
Then Chen started in about Hong Kong. He had been there as a young man, when he had fled the Nationalist police for a while. He waxed on about Victoria Peak, the Peninsula Hotel, the street markets of Kowloon.
“Where did you live?” he asked.
“On the Hill,” Nicholai answered casually, recalling Haverford’s briefing and the fact that staged photographs had been created of him outside Guibert’s home in Hong Kong, pictures that were doubtless in Chen’s file.
Chen then proceeded to ask him about a tea merchant on the Hill that didn’t exist and Nicholai admitted to ignorance of any such place. It would have been a childishly easy trap to avoid had Nicholai been anywhere near sober, but with three brands of strong liquor swirling around his stomach and brain, nothing was easy.
He realized that they had been at the table for nigh unto four hours, and not a jot of business had been discussed.
But I have been vetted, he thought, and now I must wait to see if I’ve passed the tests.
Voroshenin rose unsteadily to his feet. “Back to the office for me, I’m afraid. You know the Kremlin – night owls.”
“It is the same with us,” Yu said, pushing back his chair. Chen steadied him as he got up.
“A pleasure,” Voroshenin said to Nicholai. “Those eyes… I wish I could remember… A countess, would you believe… I will see you at the opera, then? Thursday night?”
“It’s a date,” Nicholai answered.
I will kill you during The Dream of the West Chamber.
Sleep well, Comrade Voroshenin.
VOROSHENIN CHOSE TO WALK home from the banquet, to let the cold air attempt to clear the alcohol-induced fog from his head.
One bodyguard walked ahead, the other two kept a pace or so behind him, their hands in their coats, on the butts of their pistols. Idiots, Voroshenin thought. Beijing – especially this quarter – is perhaps the safest city in the world. The criminal class had been mostly exterminated in public executions, and an assassination attempt was highly unlikely. The only people who might try are the Chinese themselves, and if they want to kill me, these three aren’t going to stop them.
But Mao still needs to maintain his crouching posture and suck Stalin’s balls, so we are all pretty safe in China. The greatest risk is being bored to death. Or the related danger of cirrhosis of the liver.
But this Guibert, if that’s his name.
If he’s a French gunrunner, I’m a Japanese sumo wrestler.
The man is a Frenchman, all right, down to the stench of his cologne, but an arms merchant? He’s far too… aristocratic… for that bourgeois occupation. He possesses the slightly remote and superior air of a Russian -
Those damn green eyes.
Was it possible?
Back in his legation quarters, Voroshenin picked up the phone and dialed Leotov’s rooms.
“Get down here.”
“It’s two o’clock in the -”
“I own a watch. I said to bring your skinny ass down here.”
Five minutes later, a sleepy and slightly resentful-looking Leotov appeared in Voroshenin’s office.
“Get on a secure line to Moscow,” Voroshenin ordered. “I want everything on this Michel Guibert and his family.”
Leotov glanced at his watch.
“Don’t say it,” Voroshenin ordered. “Beria’s men rather famously work nights, or would you like to find that out for yourself? Also, I want everything on an old White, the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna. I believe she might have left Petrograd sometime in ‘22.”
“That’s thirty years ago.”
“Is it? Well done, Vasili. See, you’ve already got a start on it.”
A soon as Leotov left, Voroshenin opened the desk drawer and pulled out the bottle. Despite himself, he poured a stiff drink and knocked it back.
Those damn green eyes…
GENERAL LIU ZHU DE was small of stature.
His iron-gray hair was cut short, and his browned, lined face showed both his southern roots and every step he had taken on the long journey from guerrilla leader in Sichuan, through the Long March and creation of the 8th Route Army, to the hideous losses he had suffered in command of the Korean venture.
It was said that Liu felt the death of every soldier. He had opposed the Korea invasion, hadn’t wanted the command, but took it as a matter of duty. Now, almost two years later, each of the three hundred thousand casualties showed in his eyes, and rumor had it that he blamed Mao for every one of them.
Colonel Yu knocked on his door, received permission to enter, and sat down in the gray metal chair across from the general’s desk.
He admired Liu more than any man alive. A fellow native of Sichuan, the general was a true Communist and a patriot, unlike the would-be emperor Mao. General Liu worked for China and the people, Mao worked for Mao and Mao.
“How was dinner?” Liu asked. His voice sounded tired.
“Voroshenin showed up.”
“Didn’t we think that he would?”
“He knows about the weapons to the Viet Minh.”
Liu nodded. “Kang tipped him off. He has spies in our department, I’m sure.”
“Shall I send Guibert away?”
“Not necessarily,” Liu said. “Tell me about him.”
Yu related the events of the dinner – Guibert’s knowledge of Chinese, his manners, his intelligence, his little victories over Voroshenin.
“So you think he could be our man?” Liu asked.
“Possibly.”
Liu sat back in his chair to think.
Yu knew the issues.
The Russians were keen to prevent Chinese influence in Vietnam. As such, they wanted to interfere with arms shipments that might earn China just that influence.
Mao was a fool. He had already let Stalin trick him into the Korean disaster, and now he was falling even deeper into the Soviets’ arms. But a quick look at the map showed the danger – the Russians already controlled North Korea, and with it the long northeast border and the strategic Yellow Sea. They retained bases in Manchuria to the northeast and “Outer Mongolia” to the northwest. To the west, they threatened Xinjiang, its Muslim population eager to join their brethren in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Let the Russians gain control of Vietnam as well, and they would have the southern border too. The French were walking ghosts in all of Southeast Asia; it was only a matter of time. The Russians would scoop up Cambodia, then move on to the weak sister in Siam and Burma. Soviet agents were already busy in India.
The Soviets could soon have China surrounded, and then they would gobble up Manchuria and the rest of Mongolia, and Xinjiang.
But for now, Vietnam was the key. The Korean stalemate was all but over, the Soviets would control the North, the Americans the South.
Vietnam was the next front.
The problem was that the Americans were going to move in to replace the French. That would be a terrible mistake for the United States and a huge problem for China. An American move against the Viet Minh would derail any possible détente between Beijing and Washington, and drive China toward Moscow.
The Americans were busy making their own worst nightmare come true – a Communist monolith.
But the future of China – General Liu knew it and Yu believed it – was not with Russia but with the United States. Only America could provide a counterweight against the Soviets, only an alliance – or at least a working relationship – with Washington could bring China the economic prosperity it needed to develop.
Approaches, indirect and tentative, had been made, but had been rebuffed by antiprogressive elements in the American intelligence and diplomatic communities. The diplomats in Washington were as afraid of their right-wing radicals as the Chinese were of their own left-wing extremists. Yet approaches had been made, people were at least talking, and if General Liu could count on Washington’s support, he might feel strong enough to make a move against the faux-Communist dictator who now terrorized China.
But Yu knew they were in a race against the clock.
The Viet Minh were going to win in Vietnam.
The Americans were also sending aid, money, and weapons to the French and had the CIA crawling all over the country, laying the foundation for the eventual takeover. Only a quick and decisive victory against the French might dissuade Washington from a disastrous intervention that would keep America and China apart for decades.
And such a quick victory would require weapons.
Rocket launchers, for instance.
But, Liu thought, we cannot afford to be seen doing it just yet.
We need middlemen.
We need the Michel Guiberts.
NICHOLAI KNELT OVER the toilet and vomited mao-tai, vodka, Pernod, and most of the contents of what had been a superb feast.
It is as the Buddhists say, he thought, resting between retches – everything changes and at the end of the day the most pleasurable food turns a disgusting mess. He vomited again, then splashed some cold water on his face and brushed his teeth.
Not bothering to undress, he just flopped face first on the bed for a few hours’ sleep. He awoke early, just before dawn, got dressed, then jotted a quick note in code, which when Haverford transliterated it would read, Zhengyici Opera, Thursday night. He rolled the thin paper into a tight cylinder and put it in the left pocket of his jacket.
On the street just as a fragile sun was coming up over the city, he made a show of stretching just as a sleepy and very grouchy-looking Xiao Smiley emerged, his arms wrapped around his chest against the cold.
Nicholai took off jogging.
The air burned his lungs and the wind stung his face, but the exercise felt good and the acceleration of his heartbeat quickly warmed him as he ran north toward Beihai Park. Workers were already out, sweeping last night’s light dusting of snow off the sidewalks, and the night-soil collectors were coming back from delivering containers of human waste out to the countryside. On the hutongs of Xidan Market, the vendors were setting up their stands and lighting small fires in braziers, stopping from moment to moment to warm their hands over the flames. The smell of charcoal was in the air.
Nicholai kept running, aware that he was leaving the chugging Smiley far behind. It wouldn’t be long, though, before the Greyhound joined the chase and caught up with him. He sped up, barely avoided a spill on a sheen of black ice, regained his balance, and kept running until he reached Beihai Park.
He slowed to a jog again and trotted along the edge of the lake.
Even in winter, the early-morning tai chi players were out, moving slowly and gracefully against the silver sky, and Nicholai was suddenly, serenely happy to be back in China again. He ran along the lakeside and then turned left on the arched bridge to the Jade Isle.
He stopped at the apex of the bridge, put his hands on the tiled rail, and stretched his legs. Looking under his arm, he saw the Greyhound running along the lake, headed toward him. Nicholai reached into his left pocket, his hand screened by his body, took out the note, and slipped it under the loose tile.
Then he finished his stretch and resumed his run, making a circuit around the White Pagoda and then heading down toward the South Gate. Smiley stood on the south bridge, cupping a cigarette in his gloved hands. Nicholai ran past him and headed back toward the hotel.
The air in the lobby felt hot and close.
Nicholai went straight to his room, coaxed some lukewarm water from the tap, and took a quick bath. He made a single cup of tea from the water in his thermos, got dressed again, and went down to the dining room, where he got more tea, a baozi, and some pickled vegetables. He enjoyed the moist, chewy warmth of the steamed bun as he thought about the “dead drop” he had made on the bridge.
Fairly confident that he had done it cleanly, he had to acknowledge the possibility that he had been caught at it, in which case he knew that the note was now in the possession of code-breakers, and that he would soon be back in a prison cell, a torture chamber, or both.
He couldn’t read Chen’s face as his handler came through the door and approached him.
“How are you this morning?” Chen asked.
“A little the worse for wear,” Nicholai answered. “And you?”
“Very good,” Chen said. “Colonel Yu would like to see you now. Are you ready to go?”
Nicholai was ready.
THE MONK, HIS HANDS FOLDED in front of him, stepped out of the White Pagoda.
Earlier, just after dawn, the monk known as Xue Xin had meditated in the tower and stared out the window onto the Jade Isle bridge and seen the man lean against the railing.
Now he walked slowly toward the bridge. Slowly because he did not want to appear to be in a hurry, but also because his legs were oddly bowed and he had little choice but to walk slowly.
He knew that he was risking his life, knew that there was a strong possibility that any of the other strollers in the park, or one of the tai chi players, or a street hawker, even one of the other monks might be a police spy waiting to see who came to pick up the message.
Then one of two things would happen. Either they would arrest him immediately, or they would lay back and follow him, hoping that he would lead them to the entire cell. But he knew that he wouldn’t let that happen – he was experienced enough to spot surveillance, and skilled enough to dispatch himself with his own hand should it come to that.
Xue Xin would not allow himself to be captured.
He had been captured before.
Tortured, he had learned what no man should have to learn – the sounds of his own screams – and when they returned him to the cage it was only the kindness of his cellmate that kept him alive, gave him hope when he wished to die, shared the meager handfuls of rice that were their starvation diet.
Now, ten years later, he still limped.
He knew that he shouldn’t be alive at all. His captors had decided to kill them all before the Japanese took over, so they marched them to a field outside the prison, handed them sharpened sticks, and made them dig a long trench.
When the common grave was finished, they were lined up in front of it, and Xue Xin was eager for the bullet that would end this life. But the commandant explained that they were not worthy of expensive bullets, and would be slashed and stabbed to death instead.
Then it started, a blur of silver blades and spraying blood, and Xue Xin felt himself fall backward into the trench and was glad for death. It seemed days later when he felt the dirt falling on him, and he wanted to scream that he was still alive but he swallowed his fear and pain with the dirt.
The monks came that night.
Like ghosts they padded through the fog and dug with their hands, literally pulling him from the grave. Weeks later he could stand, weeks after that he could walk, if you could call it walking. He had bad dreams every night, waking in that grave.
Now Xue Xin walked past the loosened tile in the bridge, deftly snatched the message, and tucked it into his robe. In his other hand he clutched a slim sharp blade, meant for his belly if they came for him or if he detected anyone following him.
But no one did.
He walked undetected out of the north gate into a hutong in the north-central district. Five minutes later he was in the back of a small house, squatting by the dim glow of a small radio transmitter, into which he read the coded message.
He left the house reciting, “On mani padme hung.”
The jewel is in the lotus.
THE BLADE PLUNGED deep into the victim’s belly.
The man gasped and then tried to stuff his innards back into his stomach as he staggered through the alley near Luang Prabang’s crowded marketplace, but it was far too late.
The Cobra jerked the knife back, turned away, and walked quickly out the dark alley into the streets of the northern Laotian town.
It all had to do with something called “Operation X,” but the Cobra didn’t really care. All that mattered was the money, and the payments from this client were always prompt and reliable.
The Cobra fingered a small medallion and could feel the outline of the embossed face and the script -
Per tu amicu.
For your friendship.
A LARGE CROWD had formed in Tiananmen Square.
Traffic stopped, and Nicholai looked out his window to see a military caravan – Soviet trucks and American Jeeps – come past as the crowd hooted and jeered.
Nicholai spotted the objects of their derision.
Two men, one Western and one Asian, stood in the back of an open Jeep, propped up by PLA soldiers holding their legs, their arms bound to their sides by ropes. In an open truck behind them, a squad of soldiers sat, their rifles held barrel up. Members of the mob threw garbage and old vegetables, shouted insults, rushed at the Jeep and spat at the prisoners.
“Spies,” Chen explained, watching for Nicholai’s reaction. “An Italian and a Japanese. They were plotting to assassinate the Chairman.”
“Truly?”
“They confessed.”
Chen’s car fell in behind the military caravan as it slowly made its way past Tiananmen Square toward the Temple of Heaven. The parade halted at the Bridge of Heaven and the crowd swarmed around it like an amoeba. Soldiers jumped out of the truck and roughly pulled the prisoners from the Jeep and shoved them to an open space at the base of the bridge. Other soldiers used the rifles to push people back, as an officer formed other soldiers into a file.
“You execute them in public?” Nicholai asked.
“It teaches a lesson.”
In a reversal of ethnic stereotypes, the Italian stood silent and stoic while the Japanese prisoner’s legs gave out and he dropped to his knees, sobbing. A soldier yanked him back and then Nicholai saw a man dressed in a long black coat and black hat emerge from the back of a car and walk toward the prisoners.
He held sheaves of paper in his left hand.
“Kang Sheng,” said Chen, a tremor of fear in his voice.
Nicholai watched Kang strut in front of the crowd, stand beside the prisoners, and shout the proclamation that recited their crimes and condemned them to the people’s righteous rage. The Chairman in his mercy had allowed them to be shot instead of strangled, beheaded, or simply beaten to death by the mob.
Kang finished the speech, posed for a moment, and then stepped offstage.
The officer shouted an order and the rifles were lifted with a metallic clatter that echoed through the crisp air. The Italian braced himself, but Nicholai could see the stain of urine darken his trousers. The crowd saw it too, and made much fun of it.
“Look! He pisses himself!”
“He drank too much wine last night!”
The Japanese dropped to his knees again. A soldier started for him, but the annoyed officer shook his head, barked another order, and three soldiers adjusted their aim. The officer had a feel for the moment, and he lifted his arm but paused for dramatic effect until the crowd quieted.
There was a moment of silence, and then the officer dropped his hand and shouted. The rifles roared and Nicholai saw the two prisoners crumple to the ground.
The Temple of Heaven, its famous blue-tiled roof glistening in the sun, loomed over them.
“Spies,” Chen concluded.
NICHOLAI’S MESSAGE was relayed five times before it reached Haverford in Tokyo. Still, it arrived accurately, and Haverford decoded it instantly.
Zhengyici Opera, Thursday night.
The staff at the CIA station in Tokyo rushed into action. Within minutes, Haverford had a map of Beijing and several aerial photographs in front of him, and he drew a red circle around the Zhengyici Opera House.
Minutes after that, a Chinese refugee, a Beijing native, was in the room and identified the building as being in the Xuanwu District, southwest of the Old City, not far from the Temple of Heaven. One of the oldest parts of the city, it was a rabbit warren of narrow hutongs and old tenement houses. Before the Communist takeover, the area was host to the Bada Hutongs, the redlight district.
Haverford thanked and dismissed him, then got on a secure line to Bill Benton, chief of station Beijing, now working out of Macau.
“I need photos and plans of something called the Zhengyici Opera House,” Haverford said, “and an asset check in the Xuanwu District.”
Normally a request like this would take weeks, if it was answered at all, but Benton had been told in no uncertain terms that Haverford had Immediate Access Status. The requested pics and plans were on the wire within fifteen minutes, and an hour later Benton was back on the horn.
“What do we have in Xuanwu?” Haverford asked.
“You’re in luck. The Temple of the Green Truth is right down the street.”
“And what, pray tell, is the Temple of the Green Truth?” Haverford said as he scanned for it and then found the building on the map.
“The oldest mosque in Beijing,” Benton answered.
A photo of the temple appeared under Haverford’s nose. It looked like any old Chinese temple – Buddhist or Daoist – with blue-and-red columns and a sloping roof. But then Haverford noticed that the roof tiles were not the usual blue, but green. “The Commies left it standing?”
“No choice – it’s in the middle of a Hui neighborhood.”
Haverford knew that Benton was playing the “I know more than you know” game. But it was typical of the old China hands, always defensive about the fact that they “lost” the country to the Communists, and ever resentful at now being subordinate to the Asia Desk and Johnny-come-latelies like Haverford. But he was sympathetic – most of their assets had been rolled up, and now an entirely new network had to be built, slowly and painfully.
“Chinese-speaking Muslim minority,” Benton explained. “Been in Beijing for a thousand years. They call their brand of Islam qing zhen – ‘the Green Truth.’ ”
“Do we own a few of these Huis?” Haverford asked.
“More than a few,” Benton answered. “They hate the fucking Reds, see them as godless infidels trying to suppress their religion. Also, they’re hooked into the Muslim minority out in Xinjiang who are looking to secede.”
It has possibilities, Haverford thought. “I’ll need an extraction team.”
“We can do that.”
“And a dead drop location for an asset in Beijing,” Haverford added.
“Can you toss a few guns to Xinjiang?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll get back to you with details,” Benton said.
“I’ll come to Hong Kong to work out the details.” He didn’t want Benton fucking this up and he didn’t have much time to finalize a plan and get it to Hel.
THE WEAPON LOOKED as ugly as it was lethal.
There is no honor and hence no beauty in it, Nicholai thought. A sword is beautiful for the care and craft that goes into its creation, and honorable for the courage it takes to wield in personal combat.
But a “rocket launcher”?
It is ugly in proportion to its destructive power. Anonymously produced by soulless drones on an assembly line in some American factory, it brings no distinction to its owner, just the ability to kill and destroy from a distance.
Still, Nicholai had to admit as Yu recited the weapon’s particulars, its power was impressive.
The M20 rocket launcher-a.k.a. the “Super Bazooka” – weighed a mere fifteen pounds and was a little over sixty inches long, half of that being barrel. It fired an eight-pound HEAT rocket that, at a velocity of 340 feet per second, could penetrate eleven inches of armor plating at an effective range of a hundred yards. It could take out a heavy tank, an armored personnel carrier, a half-track, or a fortified pillbox.
The weapon, basically a tube with an electric firing device and a reflecting sight attached, could be broken down into two pieces for easy carrying by two men. It could be fired from a standing, sitting, or – critically for its intended purpose – prone position. That is, a man could lie in a rice paddy or stand of elephant grass and get off an accurate shot. A well-trained team of two men could fire six rounds inside of a minute, while an elite team could fire as many as sixteen shots in the same period of time.
“Could one man operate it if he had to?” Nicholai asked.
“Once it’s on its tripod.”
“And they are included?”
“Of course, Comrade Guibert.”
Nicholai made him open each of the fifty cases and inspected each rocket launcher. He was no expert on these weapons, but a failure to do so would have aroused Yu’s suspicions. No serious arms dealer – as Guibert certainly was – would have gambled on buying five cases of rocket launchers and forty-five cases of mud bricks.
The weapons were packed in a thin layer of grease to prevent fungus damage to the gunsights.
“You provide the solvent to clean them?” Nicholai asked.
“Of course.”
Fifty of these weapons, Nicholai contemplated, each of them capable of taking out a French tank, half-track, or pillbox, could make an enormous difference to the Viet Minh.
Perhaps a decisive difference.
The Viet Minh had prematurely launched a conventional offensive against the French troops on the Day River. Gunned down en masse by superior French firepower and armor, the Viet Minh lost eleven thousand men in just twenty-six days of fighting. Even so, they had almost prevailed and might have done so, had the Americans not intervened with yet another new weapon.
They called it “napalm,” liquid fire dropped from airplanes, and the Viet Minh were incinerated where they stood.
Does the American genius for mass destruction know no bounds? Nicholai wondered, recalling the firebombing of Tokyo, and of course the atomic weapons that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“I’ll take them,” he said, “depending, of course, on the price.”
Not that he really needed to drive a bargain – Haverford had supplied him with more than enough money – but, again, what kind of arms merchant wouldn’t try to drive the price down?
Not Michel Guibert.
“I am authorized to negotiate for the Defense Ministry,” Yu said. “Perhaps over lunch?”
They repaired to an enclosed pavilion overlooking Longtan Lake.
The food was quite good. A whole boiled fish in a sweet brown sauce, followed by greens in garlic and then zha jiang ma, thick wheat noodles with ground pork in yellow soybean sauce.
Nicholai asked, “So what is your price?”
“What is your offer?” Yu asked, refusing to take the bait of making the first bid.
Nicholai stated a ridiculously low figure.
“Perhaps you misunderstand,” Yu replied. “You are not purchasing just the crates, but the contents as well.” He quadrupled Nicholai’s offer.
“Perhaps I misspoke,” Nicholai responded. “I wish to buy fifty, not five hundred.” But he raised his offer a bit.
“We have expenses,” Yu said. He gave his new figure.
“Apparently heavy ones,” Nicholai answered. But now he knew Yu’s real price, for the colonel had shifted in mere arithmetic proportion toward his goal. An unimaginative Go player lacking in subtlety or flair. But Nicholai was eager to conclude this distasteful bargaining, so he raised his offer to a figure just below Yu’s desired one. He was surprised when Yu accepted. It raised Nicholai’s hackles and he wondered why.
Yu quickly provided the answer. “Now we must discuss transportation.”
Nicholai feigned interest. Of course he had no intention of actually buying these arms, much less shipping them anywhere. By the time the weapons were ready to go, he would have killed Voroshenin and hopefully made his escape. Still, the game must be played, so he said, “Of course I will pay reasonable shipping charges to some location near the Vietnamese border.”
Yu nodded. “You will deposit the funds into an account in Lausanne. When we have received the payment, we will give you a location in Yunnan Province. The appropriate army unit will help you to transport the merchandise to the Vietnamese border. Beyond that, it is up to you and your ultimate client.”
“I will deposit half the money into the Swiss account,” Nicholai replied, “and the other half when the merchandise and myself arrive safely at the border.”
“Your lack of trust is unsettling.”
“I am told,” Nicholai responded, “that despite the doubtless heroic efforts of the PLA, the mountains of Yunnan are rife with bandits.”
“There are a few, very minor counterrevolutionary elements clinging to survival,” Yu answered. “We will wipe these tu fei out soon.”
“In the meantime,” Nicholai said, “I should not wish my merchandise to be taken from me until I can deliver it to my client. Pardon my rudeness, but I cannot help but think that the local army unit of which you spoke would be even more diligent if it had, shall we say, a rooting interest.”
Yu set down his chopsticks. “Capitalists always assume that everyone is motivated by money.”
“And Communists are not,” Nicholai answered. “Hence the bank account in Lausanne. And why do you assume that I am a capitalist?”
“You are certainly not a Communist.”
“I’m a Guibertist,” Nicholai responded.
Yu chuckled. “Two-thirds and one-third.”
“Done.”
Nicholai picked up his chopsticks and went back to eating.
“THE DEAL IS MADE?” Liu asked.
“Yes,” answered Yu.
“Good,” Liu said. “And is he still pretending to be this Frenchman, Guibert?”
“And doing it very well, as a matter of fact.”
Liu laughed.
DIAMOND PICKED UP the phone. “Yeah?”
“It’s me,” the voice said. “Benton. Haverford asked me to bring you up to date.”
“I’m listening,” Diamond said.
He chuckled to himself.
Benton liked his job, was lucky to still have it, and wanted to keep it.
“YOU ARE A…” Chen searched for the word in Chinese, then decided on French. “… gourmet.”
Nicholai shrugged. “I’m French.”
When he’d returned from his meeting with Yu, a pretty desk clerk at the hotel handed him his key and asked if he needed a suggestion as to a restaurant for the evening.
“Please,” Nicholai said.
“May I recommend Hong Binlou?” she asked.
Chen was quite pleased that Guibert wanted to go to the distinguished old establishment to sample its distinctive Muslim cuisine. One of the perquisites of being an escort to a foreign visitor was the opportunity to dine in restaurants that he otherwise couldn’t afford. Or, even if he had the money, frequent custom of the finer establishments could expose him to accusations of decadence.
Of course there was no pork, but that was more than made up for by the succulent lamb on wooden skewers, the Mongolian hotpot, and especially the sliced sautéed eel.
The waiters, all of the Hui people who had migrated from the western provinces generations ago, wore short white jackets, black trousers, and, as Muslims, white pillbox caps. The few women in the place, mostly relatives of the owners, were veiled or wore shawls to cover their heads.
“Religious superstition,” Chen felt obligated to say, in order to cover himself in political orthodoxy. “You are a Catholic, I suppose?”
“By birth,” Nicholai replied.
Halfway through the meal, Nicholai excused himself to go to the toilet. The waiter gave him only the slightest glance as he passed by him near the kitchen and eased through the narrow hallway to the toilet.
Locking the door behind him, Nicholai relieved himself to satisfy any listening ears, and turned on the tap to wash his hands and cover the sound of lifting the lid of the old water tank. The message, written on cigarette paper, was stuck to the inside of the tank by a piece of gum.
Nicholai translated the code, committed it to memory, then tore the paper into small shreds, dropped them into the toilet, and flushed.
“You feel all right?” Chen asked him when he returned to the table.
“Splendid,” Nicholai answered. “Why?”
“I was worried that the eel might have upset your stomach,” Chen said.
“It’s a common dish in my part of France,” Nicholai said.
“Ah.”
The waiter was a young man, handsome, with high cheekbones and startling blue eyes. His hand trembled just a little as he handed Nicholai the bill. “Was everything as you hoped, Comrade?”
“It was everything I’d been told,” Nicholai said, glad that Chen was busy mopping up the last of the red sauce with a steamed bun and didn’t notice the waiter’s anxiety.
“I am so pleased. I will tell the chef.”
“Please do.”
The car and driver were waiting out front.
“Shall we walk instead?” Nicholai suggested.
“It is very cold.”
“We’re well fortified,” Nicholai said, patting his stomach, “inside and out.”
Chen agreed but was not pleased. A car and driver were major privileges, and now the foreign guest wanted to walk like a peasant. Still, he must be humored – the whisperings were that he had just concluded an important piece of business with the Ministry of Defense.
Shoes crunching on the snow, Nicholai listened to the rhythm of his footfalls as he reviewed Haverford’s instructions in his head.
Complete the termination. Run out of the theater, through the market, and into the Temple of the Green Truth. The extraction team, anti-Communist Hui Muslims, will be waiting for you. They will take you by truck to the port of Qinhuangdao, where a fishing boat will take you out to an American submarine in the Yellow Sea. Good luck.
Good luck indeed, Nicholai thought. It would take insanely good luck even to get out of the opera house, never mind make it through the narrow streets to the mosque. And then would the “extraction team” be able to get him through the multiple checkpoints all the way out to Qinhuangdao?
Doubtful.
But there was little point in dwelling on the unlikelihood.
NICHOLAI GOT UP for his morning run.
This time Smiley and the Greyhound were ready for him, and Nicholai wryly noted that they were now wearing running shoes, at least the PLA version of them.
Nicholai didn’t really like running – it seemed a dull, repetitive exercise, lacking the excitement of cave exploration or the demands of “naked kill” kata, but he supposed that it served a cardiovascular purpose.
Hitting a stride, he turned his mind to the challenge of killing Voroshenin. The Russian had a box at the theater, which provided the necessary privacy but would be easily secured. Doubtless his three bodyguards would be present, as would the usual Chinese security, both plainclothes and regular police.
Voroshenin’s guards will doubtless search me, Nicholai thought, before allowing me into the box next to their master, so I can have no kind of weapon on me. That’s not particularly a problem, he told himself; in fact, it’s the precise reason you were selected for this assignment and are now jogging through the brisk Beijing air instead of rotting in your Sugamo prison cell.
The killing itself would be relatively easy – at some point Voroshenin would lean toward the performance on the stage, thereby exposing his neck or throat to a lethal strike. If this were a suicide mission in the Japanese style, there would be nothing further to consider. Nicholai would simply prepare himself for death and that would be that.
But given that you do not prefer to die, he thought as he turned north toward Beihai Park, you must then consider how you are going to dispatch Voroshenin and get out of that box, never mind the building.
The theater will be dark, with the bright lights focused on the stage, so that was an advantage. Then there is the noise. Beijing Opera, with its drums, gongs, and shrill vocalizations, seemed to the uninitiated a migraine-inducing cacophony that would easily drown out the sound of Voroshenin’s dying. (Although Nicholai hoped to reduce that anyway with an efficient strike.)
He entered the park and then decided to give his followers the gift of a little variety by taking the west instead of the east path around the lake. It’s the least that I can do, he thought, for getting them up so early, and there is no scheduled dead drop on the bridge anyway.
But, he thought, what if I can kill Voroshenin without anyone noticing at all? Then I could simply get up and walk out, followed only by my Chinese handlers, whom I could then leave behind in the hutongs of Xuanwu before disappearing into the mosque.
Is it possible? he asked himself as he jogged along the lake’s edge.
Of course it is, he thought, hearing the voice of General Kishikawa. Never consider the possibility of success-consider only the impossibility of failure.
Hai, Kishikawa-sama.
He reviewed the dozens of methods that naked kill offered to dispatch an opponent from close range without undue fuss. Then he sorted them into categories based on his potential situation – sitting to the right of Voroshenin, to the left, behind him, or, a bit more difficult, if he were separated by a seat with a guard or another guest between him and his target.
Difficult, yes, but not impossible.
Only failure is impossible.
Unthinkable.
As he rounded the northern edge of the lake, Nicholai broke into a sprint to break up the boredom but mostly to see what sort of speed the Greyhound really had. It might come to that – a footrace to create space and time to lose the man in Xuanwu.
The Greyhound lived up his moniker. He accepted Nicholai’s challenge and stayed with him for the first minute or so, but then Nicholai took it up another notch, gained ground again, and noted that the Greyhound couldn’t catch up.
So it is possible, Nicholai thought as he slowed down so as not to cause his followers any undue alarm.
It is possible to do this thing and live.
Back at the hotel, he stripped off his sweaty clothes, took a quick bath in water that could only achieve tepid, dressed, and went downstairs for a spare breakfast of warm soy milk and pickled vegetables. He had been eating too much and too richly, his body felt consequently dull and slow.
Chen arrived a few minutes later. He sat down, barked an order for tea, and looked at Nicholai unhappily.
“You like to exercise,” he accused, dropping all pretense that his guest was not under constant surveillance.
“Is that a problem?”
“It is self-indulgent.”
“I had thought quite the opposite.”
Chen’s mug of tea arrived at the table. “It is self-indulgent,” he explained, “in the sense that it uses up the people’s resources that could be better spent elsewhere.”
“Such as lounging around the lobby?” Nicholai asked, wondering why it was so much fun to bait Chen.
“My men are very busy,” Chen said. “They have a lot to do.”
“Comrade Chen, I agree with you completely,” Nicholai said. “It is a total waste of precious time and resources for your men to follow me about -”
“They are not ‘following’ you,” Chen huffed, “they are ‘protecting’ you.”
“Certainly it is a waste of resources to offer protection in the new people’s society,” Nicholai observed blandly, “where crime is an anachronism that has been relegated to the imperialist past.”
“They protect you,” Chen insisted, growing more agitated, “against counterrevolutionary agents.”
“Ah,” Nicholai said. He bowed slightly. “I now realize the mistake in my thinking. Please accept my apologies for my thoughtlessness. I shall cease my morning run.”
“No,” Chen said, softening. “I just wanted to make you aware… Is that all you’re having for breakfast?”
“It was,” Nicholai answered, “but now I am thinking perhaps some steamed buns? With red bean paste?”
“Only if you want.”
“Only if you will share them with me.”
“Only to be a congenial host.”
That settled, they ordered the buns, and, friends again, ate and discussed safely mundane topics such as the weather.
Then they got up and went to the bank.
Although they deeply resented these symbols of capitalism, the Communists nevertheless needed banks to conduct business, so several survived in Beijing, their staffs vaguely shamed and tinged with guilt by association.
“Which bank?” Chen asked when they got into the car.
“Banque de l’Indochine,” Nicholai answered.
“Of course.” Chen’s response was colored with mild irony. There were banks and there were banks – some kept a close eye on the transactions of their depositors, others were more famous for blinking. Banque de l’Indochine had a well-earned reputation for the latter, its censorial eyesight as stringently selective as that of Southeast Asia itself- cheerfully and self-consciously corrupt.
If a French arms dealer was going to conduct shady monetary business in Asia, Banque de l’Indochine was the place to do it.
Nicholai took a pack of cigarettes from his coat and offered one to Chen and the other to the driver, then lit all three.
“Xie xie,” the driver said, the first words he had spoken to Nicholai.
It took only a few minutes to get to the bank. The driver waited in the car while Chen took Nicholai inside and asked to see the manager.
All bank managers are the same, Nicholai thought as the man emerged from his office, looking slightly startled at having been interrupted for business this close to opening time. This one quickly affected the standard attitude that any transaction with a depositor was an interruption.
Nicholai had intended to speak Chinese, but now he used French instead.
“Do you speak French, Comrade?”
“Yes, of course,” the manager said, jutting his chin toward the window, into which the French “Banque de l’Indochine” was etched.
Nicholai thought the manager looked a little uncomfortable in his Mao jacket. Certainly he would have preferred the standard charcoal gray suit that was uniform for bankers back in the good old days.
“I wish to make a wire transfer and I wish to make it privately,” Nicholai said, deliberately rude so that the banker would instantly understand the difference in their social status, behave obediently, and want him to conduct his business quickly and leave. He didn’t want the manager to check too many papers or perform too much due diligence.
“You have an account with us, I assume?”
“Yes, of course,” Nicholai said. He handed the manager his passbook, created by the CIA’s forgers.
The manager glanced at it. “And your passport?”
Nicholai gave him the passport, and the manager looked from the photo to Nicholai and then back again. “Very well, Mon – Comrade Guibert. Please come with me.”
When Chen started to come with them, the manager snapped, “Not you.”
Nicholai followed the manager down a hallway to a glassed cubicle that contained a desk and a single chair. He gestured for Nicholai to sit down and then said, “Please complete these forms.”
Nicholai sat and filled out the complex paperwork as the manager discreetly turned his back. He handed the papers over and the manager asked him to make himself comfortable and wait.
As he waited, Nicholai hoped that Haverford had indeed deposited the necessary funds. The Chinese were serious about business and wouldn’t tolerate a deadbeat. If the funds are not in the account, Nicholai thought, I will be swiftly shown the door and just as quickly given the bum’s rush out of the country.
That was the best scenario. The worst possibility would be that the paperwork would trigger an internal alert of some kind, that there had been a leak from CIA, and that it would be the Chinese police, not the cowed manager, who returned to the room.
The phone rang in Haverford’s room at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.
“Monsieur Cartier?” the voice asked, speaking French with a heavy Vietnamese accent.
“Yes?”
“A large transfer of funds request has just come through our Vientiane branch,” the speaker said, “and triggered an internal notice that you were to be notified.”
“Yes?”
“From a Monsieur Guibert?”
“Routed to what destination, please?”
The speaker rattled off an account number in Lausanne.
“That’s fine, yes.”
“Thank you. Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
Twenty long minutes later, the manager returned with the happy news that everything seemed to be in order, and escorted Nicholai to a different room where a wire operator sat behind a broad wooden table. The manager handed the operator the papers and told him to effect the transfer.
“The funds will be available at opening of business in Switzerland,” the manager said, nonverbally according Nicholai more respect. It had been a very large sum indeed.
“Thank you,” Nicholai said.
“Thank you for banking with us,” the manager replied. Then, needing to let Nicholai know that he was a busy man, he added, “If there is nothing else?”
“That will be all, thank you.”
Nicholai met the insulted Chen back in the lobby.
“Finished?” Chen asked brusquely.
“The man is an officious fool,” Nicholai said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I would like to see some of the sights now,” Nicholai said, “if you would be kind enough to escort me.”
“With pleasure.”
They got back in the car and headed for the Great Wall.
THE PLAN, HAVERFORD THOUGHT as he stood at the Star Ferry landing in Kowloon, is coming together.
Hel had received the message sent through the Muslim restaurant. He knew where to go and how to get there. The members of the extraction team, composed of Hui, were making their way to the Temple of the Green Truth.
“We’ll need some talent,” Haverford warned. “Things could get tough.”
Benton answered, “The whole team is trained in a Muslim Chinese martial art – bajiquan. Very good for close-range work in confined spaces. Same art used by Mao’s personal bodyguard. The team leader is a master.”
“He’ll need to be,” Haverford said.
“Don’t worry,” Benton answered. “He’s quick and clean.”
Quick, maybe, Haverford thought, but nothing about what we do is ever clean.
It would be good to get out of Hong Kong. Haverford never really liked the city, and the British were ridiculously sensitive about the “cousins” poaching on their turf. Just this morning, his British counterpart, Wooten, had accosted him at the breakfast table at the Peninsula before Haverford could even get down a cup of the less than mediocre coffee.
“Good morning, Adrian,” Haverford said. “A little early for you, isn’t it?”
“A Bloody Mary’s on the way over,” Wooten answered. A large, bluff man with, if Haverford recalled correctly, a rugby background, Wooten looked out of place in China. Looks were deceptive – Wooten was a noted Sinologist, a first at Cambridge and a lifetime in Asia attesting to the fact. “What brings you onto my patch, Ellis?”
“It isn’t the coffee, I’ll tell you that.”
“Then what is it?”
“Awfully direct, Adrian.”
“It’s early and I’m hungover.” The waiter arrived with the Bloody Mary. Wooten took a grateful sip.
“Just passing through,” Haverford said, “on my way back from Macau, checking in with some of the tea-leaf readers there.”
“Anything my king should know about?”
“Not unless he’s awfully bored,” Haverford said. “It’s the usual unusual – the Chairman is winnowing his enemies, what opposition he has are keeping their heads low, anti-this and anti-that campaigns are going on.”
“My boys reported a Benton sighting yesterday.”
“Everybody gotta be someplace,” Haverford answered, echoing the old Myron Cohen joke. He’d have to catch him the next time he was back in New York. But damn Benton and his leadfootedness.
Wooten nodded. “But a Benton sighting and a Haverford sighting. Raises the hackles, you must admit.”
Haverford shrugged.
Wooten’s red face turned unusually serious as he said, “I don’t want you mucking around on my pitch, Ellis. You, or Benton, or the both of you. Do I make myself clear?”
“I’m just back to Tokyo, Adrian.”
“Didn’t mean to be inhospitable,” Wooten said. “How are you getting to the airport?”
“Taxi.”
“No need,” Wooten said. “I’ll get one of my boys to drive you. Otherwise they just sit around all day quaffing beer.”
So I’m being escorted out of the colony, Haverford thought.
All right by me, the planning here is about done anyway.
WU ZHONG SMASHED his elbow into the wooden post.
A bolt of pain shot up from his forearm, through his wrist, and into his hand, still open in the distinctive “rake” posture that gave bajiquan its name, but Wu exhaled it away and looked back at the splintered wood. His elbow had put a hole three inches deep into the post.
That was bajiquan – it relied on quick, single, devastating strikes. Its great master Li Wu Shen once said, “I do not know what it feels like to hit a man twice.” Had this post been a man, the explosive force of the blow would have shattered his throat or his forehead, or simply stopped his heart. Wu would have continued practicing, but heard the call for prayer from the minaret just a block away.
He slipped into a white kaftan, put on his cap, and stepped out of the dojo onto Nelson Street. The mosque was the largest in Hong Kong, servicing the island’s small but devout Muslim community. The ulama had grown in recent years, as refugees fled from the mainland and found a more congenial home in cosmopolitan Hong Kong than in Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan.
As he walked toward the mosque, Wu was glad to be going to prayer. Tonight he would be infiltrated through the New Territories across the border into his homeland. The assignment itself should be nothing, the danger lay in getting in and getting out. A wushu instructor with the KMT Army for years before he retired to civilian life, he would find rough handling if he fell into Communist hands.
Now thirty-five years old, Wu had a wife and three young children who needed him. Still, he could not refuse an assignment like this. It paid well; moreover, it allowed him to strike a blow against the hated Communists, godless Kaffirs who oppressed his people. Not only would he bring home a year’s worth of income, but the American agent promised to provide a shipment of rifles to the nascent rebel movement in Xinjiang.
A tall man with impressively broad shoulders, he had to turn sideways to get through the old doorway of the mosque. He shucked off his slippers, found the prayer mat in its accustomed place, walked into the sanctuary, and knelt. Several other men, all friends from the neighborhood, were already there and had begun prostrating themselves.
Stretching his forehead to the floor, Wu could not get the assignment out of his mind. Killing was as nothing. He had used his mastery of bajiquan to kill many times before – Communists in Shanghai, Japanese in Hunan, and then the Reds again until Chiang gave up the fight and left so many of them to flee for their lives.
Now he was in a new war – a jihad to save his people. If killing helped to achieve that, then so be it. He would do it and if it was God’s will that he survive and come home to his family, then inshallah. If not, at least he knew that the ulama would not let his family starve. A brother would marry his widow and take care of his children.
Comforted by that thought, Wu gave himself over to prayer, and the ritual, as always, felt good to him. Old, solid, and reliable. There was joy in pure worship, peace in the repetition of the ancient words as he chanted, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.”
A BLEARY-EYED LEOTOV stood in front of Voroshenin’s desk.
He had worked all night and now Voroshenin didn’t as much as offer him a glass of tea, although he sipped his own, the white sugar sitting at the bottom of the glass like sand under a lake at one of the vacation dachas that Voroshenin could use but Leotov couldn’t.
“So?” Voroshenin asked.
Leotov started with Guibert.
It all seemed to check out. The Guiberts were indeed a Languedoc family of arms merchants with loose ties to the French Communist Party. Papa Guibert opened a Hong Kong office to take advantage of the business opportunities presented by the incessant warfare between Chinese warlords following the 1911 Revolution. He appeared to have ceased operations during the Japanese occupation, owing his survival to that discretion and to the Vichy French status as noncombatants. There were rumors, however, that he continued to work, with American collusion, with Vietnamese rebels fighting against the Japanese, especially but not exclusively Ho Chi Minh and that lot.
His leftist ideology appeared to be somewhat flexible, as, after the war, he dealt with both Nationalists and Communists in China, as well as with independence movements in French Indochina.
“Connections with L’ Union Corse?” Voroshenin asked, citing the Corsican mafia that controlled the drugs and arms between France and its Southeast Asian colonies.
“Naturally,” Leotov answered, “although Guibert isn’t Corsican, so the relationship is strictly business. Certainly he dealt with La Corse during the war.”
“What about the son?” Voroshenin asked.
“Michel?”
Voroshenin sighed. “Yes.”
Again, all appeared to be as it seemed. Leotov laid some grainy photographs on the desk. The son was born in Montpellier but raised in Hong Kong, hence his fluent Cantonese. He had the reputation of a gambler, womanizer, and ne’er-do-well, out of his father’s favor until after the war and the auto accident.
“The what?”
“There was a car crash in” – Leotov checked his notes – “the summer of ‘50, in Monaco. Michel had apparently dropped a bundle at the casino, drowned his sorrows, and crashed the car halfway through a wicked S-curve.”
Apparently it was touch and go for a while, and Guibert fils needed extensive surgery to repair his face. The surgeries seemed to have accomplished a character transplant of a sort – the son emerged a changed, more serious man, eager to take his place in the family business.
“That’s interesting,” Voroshenin said.
Leotov shrugged. He really didn’t see what was so interesting about it.
Voroshenin did. He hadn’t survived the Stalinist purges by being tone deaf, and this auto accident struck a discordant note. Reconstructive facial surgery followed by a moral metamorphosis?
“Where is the father now?” he asked. “Do we know?”
“I suppose in Hong Kong.”
“You suppose? Find out.”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“All right, what about Ivanovna?”
“I have a full report.” Leotov started to recite his findings.
“Leave it.”
“But there are -”
“I said to leave it.”
Leotov set the file on the desk and left.
Voroshenin opened the desk drawer. He had a feeling he would need a stiff drink to read this file.
THE GREAT WALL certainly is, Nicholai thought.
A monumental, as it were, achievement of architecture and organization. But, like a static Go defense, it never fulfilled its function of keeping out an invader. There is no point building a wall when the gatekeepers can be purchased.
Still, the wall was a marvel to see, as it stretched along the rises and falls of the ridges and hills, flexible as a giant snake, its stones resembling the scales of a reptile. Or a dragon, perhaps, Nicholai thought, in the Chinese zoological cosmology.
No, he decided, the Go analogy is more apt. The wall was like a thin long line of stones, vulnerable by its very length, unsupported by defensive depth.
A lesson to be had there, certainly.
Chen fell asleep on the drive back to Beijing, sparing Nicholai the necessity to make small talk. Instead he began to prepare his mind for the task at hand, and as he thought about it, he realized that he was soon to become a professional assassin.
He had killed three men in his young life – nothing by the standards of his generation, which had endured the slaughters of the war.
His first had been Kishikawa, his father figure, and he had done it to spare his mentor shame. So it was a matter of filial duty, almost as if he had assisted the general in committing seppuku.
The next two had tried to kill him first, so they were acts of self-defense.
But this would be an intentional act of murder for profit. He could rationalize it by thinking that he was reclaiming his own life, and Solange’s, but the fact remained that he was about to take another’s life to benefit his own, and moral evasions were as useful as the towers of the Great Wall.
Yet the monetary compensation from the Americans was almost irrelevant.
This was a matter of honor.
Voroshenin was not just another man, another human life.
Shortly before she died, Nicholai’s mother had told him the story of what happened between her and Yuri Voroshenin.
Petrograd was frozen and fast running out of fuel.
The winter of 1922 was unusually harsh, the small supply of coal had already dwindled, and the Communists were tearing down private homes for firewood. The famed lindens of Taurichesky Gardens had been stripped of the branches for firewood, and the trees looked like execution stakes.
It was a miracle – no, not a miracle but a testament to her iron will – that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna’s family house, occupying half a block on Kirochnaya Street, still stood, although the Soviet Petrograd had forced her to turn most of it into a kpmmunalka, housing several dozen workers’ families.
Well, workers in theory, anyway – the lack of fuel and materials and the hyperinflation brought on by Western financial assaults on the ruble had closed many of Petrograd’s factories. The workers were freezing and starving.
It was on a February afternoon that Yuri Voroshenin, then the head of the Petrograd Cheka, climbed the steps to the huge wooden doors and kicked the snow off his shoes. He entered without knocking.
The enormous foyer was full of people, shuddering in coats and blankets, and yet she had prevented them from chopping up the expensive wooden furniture that filled the house. Voroshenin walked past them onto the sweeping curved staircase and went up to the rooms where she retained her “apartment.”
She was thin, her cheeks a little sunken, her skin pale with hunger. Even the upper classes were hard-pressed to find or pay for food. Nevertheless she regarded him with the haughty look of the ruling class, as if to ask what he was doing disturbing her at such an early hour of the afternoon.
Clearly he was not used to insolence. He wanted her to be afraid, as well she might have been, for this creature was responsible for countless executions and hideous tortures and she was at his mercy. But she showed no fear.
“Good day, Comrade Ivanovna.”
“I am not, nor never will be, your ‘comrade.’ ”
“You know that such an attitude could get you shot.”
She closed the book. “Now? Shall we go? Should I bring a wrap or are you going to shoot me here?”
“I am not amused.”
“Nor amusing.”
She reached to her bed table for a square of colored paper and unwrapped it to reveal a piece of chocolate and then noticed the Bolshevik’s hungry stare. Despite the fact that she had saved this little bit for weeks, she said, “How rude of me. Would you care for a bite?” Snapping the chocolate in half, she held it out to him.
He accepted it. “I haven’t seen chocolate since…”
“I believe ‘since before the Revolution’ is the phrase you’re searching for,” Alexandra said pleasantly. “Yes, St. Petersburg was a city of large and small pleasures then.”
“It’s Petrograd now.”
“As you wish,” she said.
She watched him savor the chocolate, and then he said, “You will be required to move out.”
What was she to do? she asked Nicholai as she told him the story. Her family had all been killed in the war or executed by the Reds. More than death, she was terrified by the thought of being out in the street, without her attachments, her belongings, her things. There were few places to live in Petrograd, fewer still where a notorious “White” would find a welcome. She had seen her peers on the streets carting human waste, selling apples, renting their bodies.
“And where will I go?” she asked.
“That is not my concern.”
Alone and helpless, the only power she retained was the only power a woman had in those days. She looked at him for several moments and then said, “It could be. Your concern, that is.”
“Whatever would make you think that?”
“The way you look at me,” she answered. “But am I wrong? Perhaps I am mistaken.”
“No, you are not wrong.”
Releasing her hand from his grip, she walked over to the huge bed.
She kept her apartments.
He joined her there many afternoons and most nights, his position in the Cheka protecting him, at least for the time being, against the “social contamination” of an affair with a member of the “possessing classes.”
One night he told her that he loved her. She laughed. “Certainly a good Bolshevik such as yourself doesn’t believe in romantic love.”
“Perhaps I do.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” she said. “Romance is dead in this world, my dear. You should know, you helped to kill it. We have an arrangement, Voroshenin, nothing more.”
An arrangement indeed, he thought. She gave him herself, he protected her from himself. The symmetry was mind-boggling.
The next afternoon he walked into her apartment, his face white with concern. “Alexandra, you have to go. Now.”
She looked startled. “I thought that -”
“The Cheka knows about Rizhsky Prospect.”
Since the Revolution she had carefully, secretly, bit by bit hidden the Ivanov family fortune – millions of rubles – away in the safekeeping of an old accounting firm on Rizhsky Prospect. For a fee, the men there were slowly smuggling it out of the country, little by little, into banks in France and Switzerland. It was an act of incredible daring – Whites had been tortured to death for hoarding a watch, a ring, some loaves of bread, and she conspired to hide millions. And the discipline – feigning poverty, going hungry, starving herself, allowing herself only the odd little square of chocolate.
“It’s only a matter of time before they come for you,” he said. “Me too. You have to go. Get out. Leave the country.”
“But my things, my furniture -”
“A train east out of Finland Station tomorrow morning at seven,” Voroshenin said. “I’ve arranged space for you and all your things. A heavy bribe, but apparently you have money, no? I’ve drawn up travel papers that will take you safely to Vladivostok. After that…”
Thousands of Whites had taken this route – to Vladivostok, then across the porous border into China, where most had sought the relatively cosmopolitan refuge of Shanghai. It was not a pleasant choice, but the only choice she had.
“Where is your money?” he asked. “I’ll need some of it for bribes. The rest, carry with you in cash.”
“I’ll go get it.”
He shook his head. “Too dangerous. You would be arrested and then… I could no longer protect you. And you would tell them everything, Alexandra. Trust me on this, you would tell them everything they want to know and more.”
She told him where the money was. “But most of it is still there?” he asked.
She nodded.
They made plans.
Cheka agents would storm her house that night, “confiscate” and cart off all her furniture and belongings, and take them to a waiting rail agent at the station, where they would be loaded onto a special Cheka car.
“No one will have the nerve to inspect it,” Voroshenin assured her.
She would be “arrested” before dawn and taken to the station for removal to some hellhole in Siberia. Instead, she would ride in relative comfort to Vladivostok with the papers asserting her new identity.
“And my money?” she asked.
“I will deliver it to the train myself,” he said.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Aren’t you in danger?”
“I will be on the next train,” he said, “with my new papers. In Vladivostok, we can decide what to do next about our arrangement. But we have to act quickly,” he urged. “There is much to do and little time to do it, and the Cheka is on the hunt.”
Ivanovna gave him the address of the accountants in Rizhsky and then started to gather her personal belongings – jewelry, china, crystal, treasured family heirlooms, all the things she had protected against the mob for the past five long years.
Voroshenin went to Rizhsky Prospect.
His Chekan subordinates, suitably bribed and cowed, arrested her in the morning and took her to the train.
Voroshenin, of course, never turned up.
She knew that she had been outsmarted and was lucky he had let her take her belongings into exile.
This was the story that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna told her son.
How Yuri Voroshenin had taken her honor and his inheritance.
VOROSHENIN SET DOWN the file.
Staring out the window, he forced himself to focus on the current applications and not drift into the realm of memory.
The reports, many of them copies of old and handwritten documents, were unanimous in the opinion that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna had fled Russia in 1922, but that much Voroshenin already knew. Apparently she took the quite common eastern route, through Manchuria and into then wide-open China, where she was reputed to have settled in Shanghai. Although she had all her household possessions, she was otherwise penniless – but, again, Voroshenin knew that – and survived by using her wit, beauty, and seductive skills to charm a series of wealthy expatriates and adventurers.
Voroshenin had no doubt about her seductive powers, having experienced them himself. The memory of her lush body, satin skin, and…
According to the reports, Ivanovna had seduced a German nobleman, become pregnant by him, and then refused the pro forma offer of marriage from the young Keitel zum Hel. Sometime around 1925 or ‘26, she gave birth to a son, whom, unreconstructed aristocrat that she was, she christened Nicholai.
Nicholai Hel, Voroshenin noted, was almost precisely the same age as Michel Guibert. It was a coincidence, but the men Voroshenin knew who believed in coincidence were all dead men.
Such as zum Hel, who had died at Stalingrad.
Ivanovna disappeared from intelligence reports until 1937, when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and her house was commandeered, literally, by the Japanese general, Kishikawa. The cited informants salaciously repeated gossip that the relationship became something a bit more than hostess and hosted, and Voroshenin felt an unexpected twinge of jealousy, remembering afternoons in…
The countess might very well have made herself vulnerable to charges of collaboration had she survived the war, but she died of natural causes.
But what of the son? Voroshenin wondered.
On the subject of Nicholai Hel, the files had nothing more to offer. The boy simply disappeared from the record, which was not unusual, Voroshenin reassured himself. In the chaos that was wartime Asia, hundreds of thousands of people simply disappeared.
Now, as Voroshenin sat in his office at the Russian Legation, he wished that he had ordered Ivanovna to be executed – or done it himself – before the bitch could spawn.
But is it possible?
Is it possible that this Guibert is Hel, come for his vengeance?
Just when I am on the verge of making my escape?
THEY TOURED ALL the major sights.
Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the Bell and Drum Towers, and Beihai Park.
“Which you’ve already seen,” Chen remarked.
He was relieved when Nicholai suggested that they go to Xidan Market to sample the street vendors’ wares. It was bitterly cold now, in the gloaming dark of late afternoon, and they paused by the open braziers and trash-can fires to warm their feet and hands as they wandered through the hutongs of Xidan. During one such hiatus Nicholai finally learned that the driver’s name was Liang Qishao and that he was a Beijing native, as he treated both men to fried dough cakes, mugs of hot green tea, scorched sausages, roasted chestnuts, and bowls of sweet porridge.
Nicholai enjoyed the outing, a colder and somewhat tamer version of his youthful forays into the seedier parts of Shanghai, and the common food was as delicious as anything served in the finer restaurants.
Sated, he said to Chen, “Now I would like to go to church.”
“To church?”
“A Catholic church,” Nicholai clarified. “I am French, after all. Do any survive in Beijing?”
Liang nodded. “Dongjiaomin. ‘St. Michael’s.’ In the Legation Quarter.”
“Could you take me there?” Nicholai asked.
Liang looked to his boss.
Chen hesitated, then nodded.
“All right.”
The church was lovely.
Nicholai was not a devotee of religious architecture, but St. Michael’s had an undeniable charm, its twin Gothic spires rising above the otherwise low skyline. A statue of the Archangel Michael stood above the two arched doorways.
Chen had him dropped off on the east side of the building, off the main street, and neither he nor Liang accompanied him through the iron gate into the courtyard. Nicholai enjoyed the rare moment of privacy before going inside.
The interior was relatively dark, lit only by candlelight and the dim glow of a few low-wattage wall lamps behind sconces. But the fading afternoon sun lit the stained-glass windows with a subtle grace, and the atmosphere was quiet and peaceful.
As Solange had tutored him, Nicholai dipped his fingers in the small well of holy water and touched his forehead and shoulders, making the sign of the cross. He walked down to the altar, knelt in front of the votive candles, and said a prayer. Then he retreated to the pews and waited for someone to come out of the confessional booth.
She was a Chinese woman, her head covered in a black scarf, and she looked at Nicholai and hurried out, frightened. He waited for a moment, remembering the words Solange taught him, and then went in and knelt in the confessional and said in French, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
He could barely make out the priest’s face through the screen in the darkened booth, but it looked Asian.
“What is your name, son?”
“Michel.”
“How long has it been since your last confession?”
Nicholai recalled the number called for. “Forty-eight days.”
“Go on.”
Nicholai confessed a precise list of “sins,” in precise order – lust, gluttony, dishonesty, and lust again – Haverford’s small joke. When he had finished, there was a short silence and the priest’s face was replaced with a piece of paper.
“Can you see?” the priest asked. He turned up the lamp a bit.
“Yes,” Nicholai said, studying the floor plan of the Zhengyici Opera House. A certain box was circled in red.
He memorized the plan – the doorways, stairs, the halls – then said, “I have it.”
The priest’s face came back into view. “Your sins are forgiven you. Ten Hail Marys, five Apostles’ Creeds, and an Act of Contrition. Try to curb your lust. God be with you, son.”
Nicholai left the confessional, returned to the altar, knelt, and said his prayers.
VOROSHENIN SAT and thought.
There was something about the name Kishikawa.
A few minutes later, he thought he recalled something and got on the phone. Half an hour later, he was on the line to Moscow, in touch with an old colleague, Colonel – now General – Gorbatov.
“Yuri, how are you?”
“In Beijing, if that answers the question.”
“Ah. To what do I owe -”
“Does the name Kishikawa mean anything to you?”
“I was the Soviet part of the joint Allied prosecution of Japanese war criminals outside of Tokyo back in ‘48,” Gorbatov answered. “Kishikawa was my biggest fish. Why do you ask?”
“Did you execute him?”
“We were going to,” Gorbatov said. “Didn’t get the chance.”
“Why not?”
“It was extraordinary, actually,” Gorbatov said. “Quite the story. There was this young man who worked as a translator for the Americans and was somehow a friend to Kishikawa. Actually he was the son of a Russian aristocrat… hold on… it’s coming to me… Ivanovna. A countess, no less.”
“Do you remember his name? The young man’s?”
“He was quite a memorable chap. Very self-possessed -”
“His name, Piotr?”
“Hel. Nicholai Hel.”
Voroshenin actually felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. “What happened to the general?”
“That’s the extraordinary part,” Gorbatov answered. “Young Hel killed him. In his cell. Right in front of the guards, some sort of Japanese strike to the throat. Apparently he wanted to save him the shame of hanging.”
Voroshenin felt his own throat tighten. “Is this Hel in our custody?”
“No, the Americans took him. We were happy to see him go, believe me.”
“Do we know what happened to him?”
“I don’t,” Gorbatov said. “Glad to wash my hands of it. Very spooky, the whole thing, if you ask me. On which subject, why are you asking, Yuri?”
“A favor, Piotr?” Voroshenin asked. “Forget I called?”
He hung up the phone.
NICHOLAI PUSHED A CHAIR against the wall to create some space in his room, then he stripped down to his shorts and did twenty repetitions of the demanding hoda korosu “Caged Leopard” kata.
He selected this particular form because it stressed close-in fighting – precise strikes that demanded the buildup of force at short range. Starting with the entire room, he performed the kata in increasingly smaller circles, until by the end he barely moved his feet as he fought in the tightening bamboo cage of his imagination.
Although the form included brutal elbow and knee strikes, its principal feature was its unique “leopard paw” hand posture, the fingers bent at the second knuckle but not closed to make a complete fist. The striking surface was therefore thin, just the second knuckles, intended to penetrate a narrow space.
Precision was key.
That, and the concentration of force, and Nicholai practiced until he could generate explosive power in a strike that traveled just two inches before striking its target. He thought he might have as much as six inches to two feet in the actual situation, but didn’t want to allow himself the mental leisure of that luxury.
Physically exhausted but mentally invigorated when he finished, Nicholai sat on the floor, pulled himself into a rigid meditation posture, and envisioned the plan of the Zhengyici Opera House.
He had the floor plan perfectly in mind, and now he worked from the box Voroshenin had reserved, out the hallway, and down a set of stairs. A left turn would take him into the main part of the theater, then into the lobby and out the main doors. But a right turn at the bottom of the stairs led to another short corridor and a door that would lead to the backstage area.
At that point, he could turn right to go backstage or left into the alley behind the theater.
So there it was, and he mentally walked through the escape route. Out of the box, left down the hallway, down the stairs, right down the hallway, left out of the building. He “walked” it twenty times in his mind before adding the next mental level.
Obstacles.
First would be Voroshenin’s guards, but if he performed the strike properly, they would not know anything was wrong for another crucial minute. But he had to consider the possibility of having to fight his way out. There was no way to know how the guards would be positioned, so that would have to be improvised on the spot. But that was the purpose of kata, to train the body to react instantly to any threat, without the fatal necessity of thought.
So he dismissed the guards from his mind.
The hallway outside the boxes should pose no problems. There might be Chinese police, but if the killing of Voroshenin raised no outcry, he should simply be able to walk past them on his “way to the toilet.”
But he mentally slowed his pace, “walking” casually, not as a man who has just killed, but as one who simply needed to empty his bladder.
He walked down the stairs and took a right. At the end of the hallway was a door to the backstage, and there would almost certainly be an employee of the theater, a doorman, to bar the way of adoring fans.
Killing the man would be easy.
But killing the innocent doorman would be a shameful dishonor, out of the question, so now Nicholai mentally rehearsed a nonlethal blow to the side of the neck, to the carotid artery, to disable but not kill. He threw the strike, lowered the man to the floor, and opened the door.
The next door was just to his left, and he stepped out into the cold night air.
Simple, he thought, then chuckled at his self-delusion.
Simple, if you get within lethal proximity to Voroshenin.
If you perform the perfect strike that renders him quietly dead while still sitting up in his seat.
If the guards notice nothing amiss.
If you don’t have to kill three more men and then fight your way through the Chinese police.
If all of it goes your way, it’s simple and easy, but those are a lot of ifs. Small wonder Haverford had given him a one in a hundred chance of success and survival.
And if not? he asked himself.
If not, then that is your karma, your “joss” as the Chinese would have it, and you will be killed.
Are you prepared for that?
Yes.
Kishikawa’s words came back to him. When one is prepared to die, that is settled. There is then only the action to consider. Think then only of success, because failure will take care of itself.
Nicholai sat for another hour and envisioned the entire operation, step by step, going perfectly. He got up, coaxed hot water from the taps, and bathed. Then he dressed and went down into the lobby, where Chen was waiting to inflict more hospitality on him.
THE ACROBATS WERE wonderful.
Superb athletes, they performed amazing feats of strength, balance, and courage. It all brought back to Nicholai happier childhood days in Shanghai, going to the street circuses and marveling at the performers.
The show tonight was held under a huge tent, dangerously warmed with gas heaters. The floor was pounded dirt and the audience – even the important officials and foreign guests such as Nicholai – sat on rough wooden benches, ate peanuts and tossed the shells on the ground, but it all added to the ambiance.
The other difference was in terms of theme – the acrobats of Nicholai’s childhood had been colorfully dressed as kings, generals, courtesans, monkeys, dragons, and tigers and performed their tricks to ancient folktales. The performers tonight were clad in PLA uniforms and arranged their tricks around heavy-handed political tableaus such as “The PLA Liberates the People from the Evil Imperialists,” or “The Peasants Successfully Struggle Against the Landlord,” or the ever piquant, oh-so-whimsical “Dijuan Factory #10 Produces a Record Annual Output of Ball Bearings.”
Still, the acrobatics were fantastic and entertaining, even wedged into the relentless propaganda. If the costumes lacked color, the performers did not, and Nicholai found himself absorbed in admiration of their skill. They tumbled, did double somersaults, swung from the tops of bamboo poles, balanced on wires, created impossibly high human towers.
“Amazing, aren’t they?” Voroshenin said in French as he stepped over the bench and squeezed between Chen and Nicholai. “Sorry.”
A somewhat sorry-looking man stood behind Voroshenin, and Nicholai noticed that the Russian didn’t bother to offer him a seat. He was clearly an underling of some sort, but not, judging by his spindly frame, a bodyguard.
Nicholai turned and introduced himself. “Michel Guibert.”
“Vasili Leotov.”
“ ‘Dijuan Factory #10’ is one of my all-time favorites,” Voroshenin observed, ignoring the introductions, and Nicholai couldn’t tell if he discerned irony in his tone. Certainly he could discern the vodka on his breath.
“It’s superb,” Nicholai said.
The circus ring became a sea of red, as some of the performers unfurled enormous flags, then turned them flat as other acrobats used them to leap from one flag to a higher one to a higher one, as if they were climbing the sky on the red clouds of dawn. The audience gasped as the final performer reached the pinnacle. Steadying himself with one hand on a skinny bamboo pole, he used the other to pull a final flag from inside his jacket, and waved it as all the actors sang “We Rise Ever Higher on the Wings of Chairman Mao.”
“Soon,” Voroshenin said, “there will be no art, no grace or charm in this country. Only ‘Mao thought.’ It will be a wasteland.”
“Surely you’re having a joke on me.”
“It will be dull as the proverbial dishwater,” Voroshenin added. He tilted his head toward Leotov, still standing over his shoulder. “Dull as this one, if that’s possible.”
Nicholai felt embarrassed for Leotov, slid over on the bench as far as he could, and asked, “Wouldn’t you care to sit down?”
“He wouldn’t,” Voroshenin interjected. “He is as you see him, a post. Besides, if you aren’t bored enough already, you soon would be with him as a companion. His conversation is as vapid as his face, which strains credulity, I understand. I mean, look at the fellow.”
Leotov’s humiliation was palpable, but he said nothing. Then Voroshenin leaned in toward Nicholai and whispered, in Russian, “Your mother was my whore, Nicholai. I rode her like a sled.”
Nicholai felt the insult burn, but he didn’t flinch. “I’m sorry?”
“I’m sorry,” Voroshenin said. “I lapsed into Russian there for a second. One forgets sometimes what country one is in.”
But had there been the slightest blink? Voroshenin asked himself. The slightest glimmer of self-consciousness in the eye?
Nicholai wondered the same thing. He fought to keep the fury off his face as he asked, “But what did you say?”
Peering back into those green eyes, Voroshenin switched to French. “Just that I’m looking forward to the opera tomorrow night.”
“No more than I.”
“I hope you can still come.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Cymbals and gongs clashed as the voices rose to a climax.
The two men held their gaze.
HE KNOWS, Nicholai thought.
Chen droned on in his enthusiasm about the acrobatic troupe.
Voroshenin knows.
The car slowed to negotiate a patch of black ice.
He knows my real identity.
Or does he? Certainly, he suspects. Your mother was my whore, Nicholai. I rode her like a sled. Did I react? To the language, the name, the insult? Even for a second? If even for a fraction of a second, Voroshenin would have picked it up.
Assume the worst, he told himself. Assume that Voroshenin now thinks he knows that you are Nicholai Hel. What does that mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows you are here to assassinate him. It only means that he knows you are not who you claim to be.
Bad enough, but not necessarily fatal.
But why, Nicholai pondered, is Voroshenin keeping the appointment at the opera?
Because he doesn’t know. He only suspects, which is why he was probing, why he stretched a line of stones deep into my defense. A risky move, because he’s given so much of his thinking away. But Voroshenin is no fool, he must have thought it worth the risk. And was it?
Face it, you don’t know. He’s a chess player, not a Go player, Nicholai thought, cursing himself for not knowing more about the Western game. It was linear, though, he knew that, and geometrical – rich in forward, machinelike thinking, poor in subtlety and nuance. Voroshenin believes that he sacrificed a minor piece – a “pawn,” I believe – to expose a more important piece of mine, and now he invites my countermove.
I’m looking forward to the opera tomorrow night.
No more than I.
I hope you can still come.
Why wouldn’t I?
A lot of reasons, Nicholai thought, including the very real possibility that my purpose here has been discovered, “compromised,” in Haverford’s jargon.
By rights, he knew that he should use one of the dead drops to report this development to the American, but he also knew that he wouldn’t. Haverford might call the mission off – “abort” – and Nicholai didn’t want that.
He wanted to kill Yuri Voroshenin.
Fine, he thought, envisioning the Russian’s florid face as he delivered his adolescent insult.
You play your chess game, I will play Go.
We shall see who wins.
VOROSHENIN WAS furious.
Livid with himself.
Clumsy, ham-handed, and stupid, he thought as he pushed open the door of the Russian Legation. How could I have thought he would fall for such an elementary trick?
But was there a glimmer? Just a trace?
He walked up the stairs to his office and immediately went for the vodka bottle. It’s improbable, he told himself. Improbable, unlikely, and so anachronistic, the offended son coming to settle a score older than he is, to redeem his mother’s honor. No one kills for honor anymore, that died with the Romanovs.
And assuming that Guibert is Hel, he doesn’t necessarily know who I am, or that I had any relationship to his mother.
So, if Guibert is Hel, what the hell is he doing here?
In the guise of a French arms dealer.
His paranoia rising, Voroshenin pulled the shades on the window. He sat down, but soon found himself pacing back and forth in the room.
Assume he is Hel, he told himself.
What of it?
Why is he here?
To know that, you must first answer the question of who he’s working for. Well, you know that he was last in the control of the Americans. Did they simply turn him loose after a few years? He killed a Jap general whom they were going to hang anyway, so easy come, easy go?
Highly unlikely.
In the first place, the rigid Americans don’t possess that level of moral flexibility. In the second place, Hel couldn’t obtain a “cover” without professional help and backing. The Guibert cover – if that’s what it is – is both sophisticated and deep. Someone went to a lot of trouble and expense to place Guibert in Beijing, and no intelligence service of any government would do that so some young man with a grudge can pursue his romantic notion of revenge.
For what, then?
Voroshenin walked to the window, edged the bottom corner of the curtain open, and peeked out onto the street. It was empty, quiet, a gentle snow falling.
He let the curtain fall back.
Hel was in American control, but he appears now as a French national.
Is this a French operation? Doubtful – the French were still supine from the war, and more than had their hands full in Vietnam. They were not about to do anything that would bring China into that mess.
All right, so Hel was in American control, appears as a French national, albeit with a Chinese background. Is this a Nationalist operation? Is Hel on loan from the Americans to the Nats, and if so, for what purpose? It didn’t make sense – why would the Nats use a Westerner when they had thousands of disaffected Chinese available?
So that leaves the Americans, Voroshenin concluded.
Don’t dismiss the obvious just because it’s obvious.
Hel was in American control and still is. Quite a useful tool, really – familiar with China, speaks the language. Has Russian and French as well. Born to be a spy, when you think about it. You’d have recruited him yourself, and it’s a pity that Gorbatov didn’t when he had the chance.
So assume Hel is working for Washington.
What’s his task?
His cover as an arms dealer puts him in touch with the Ministry of Defense and he was hosted at dinner by -
Liu.
General Liu.
Mao’s chief and only rival.
Could the Americans be using Hel to make overtures to Liu? Or has he already accepted them? His smile genuine for the first time that night, at last Voroshenin saw the entire board, his next move, and its potential result.
I’m sorry, Alexandra, he thought, your son will have to die under exquisite torture, but that is the cost of allowing oneself to become a pawn in someone else’s game.
He looked at his watch.
It was only midnight.
Kang Sheng would still be up.
NICHOLAI SLIPPED OUT OF the hotel.
He simply took the elevator down to the basement, had a pleasant chat, and shared a few cigarettes with the men in the kitchen and then went out the delivery entrance at the back of the hotel.
Then he walked briskly into the Legation Quarter. The streets were almost empty now, this late at night, with most of the Beijingren securely tucked away inside their living units. Lights were on, of course, in the Russian Legation, and Nicholai stood across the street under an elm tree and watched the front door.
A car pulled up and waited, its tailpipe smoking in the cold.
Voroshenin, trailed by his faithful hounds, came out a few minutes later and got into the car, which quickly pulled out.
A nice piece of luck, Nicholai thought, for the move he contemplated was a terrible risk. But Otake-san had taught him that very often not taking a risk was more dangerous than taking one.
Cupping his hands against the bitter wind, he lit a cigarette, moved to a spot under the glow of a streetlight, and waited.
It took twenty long minutes for Vasili Leotov to work up enough nerve to come out. Chin tucked into his collar, hands jammed into his coat pockets, his head on a swivel looking nervously about, he crossed the street.
Nicholai walked slowly away, out of range of the listening devices that doubtless studded the Soviet building. He could hear Leotov’s footsteps crunch on the snow, following him. He shortened his step and slowed his gait, allowing the smaller man to catch up with him.
If I have guessed right, Nicholai thought, I might become a wealthy man.
If I have guessed wrong, I will certainly be a dead one.
KANG SAT BACK and savored his Dragon Well tea – the finest in China, supplied only to Mao and himself – as he regarded the Tang Dynasty painting on the wall. The overall effect was sublime, so Kang was more than annoyed by the interruption.
What was that mao-tzi Voroshenin doing here after midnight?
Kang sighed and gave permission to allow him in. Then he put a smile on his face and walked out to greet his unwanted and uninvited guest.
“An unexpected pleasure,” Kang said.
Voroshenin caught the tone. “It’s urgent.”
“Apparently,” Kang said. “Please come in.”
Kang walked him into the large sitting room, which was filled not only with paintings but also with bronzes, rare ceramics, and ancient seals, all liberated from the former possessing classes. His collection of fine art was worth many thousands of yuan; his assemblage of erotica only slightly less valuable in terms of money, far more precious in the influence it purchased with Mao, a fellow enthusiast.
Had Voroshenin, the poor lonely fellow, come on some pretext to see if there was new pornography? The Russian looked at the Tang painting, a classically formed depiction of a southern mountain.
“New?” he asked.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s good.”
The mao-tzi wouldn’t know good from garbage, Kang thought. That being the case, he didn’t offer him tea – which anyway wouldn’t be appreciated – but some rice wine instead. The Russian was an incipient drunkard, it would sooner or later kill him, and Kang hoped it was sooner.
The drink having been offered and accepted, the Russian said rudely, “Quite an art collection you have here.”
Kang didn’t like the smirk on his face. “I do what I can to preserve our cultural treasures,” he said, “at least the ones not already stolen by Europeans.”
They both knew that the best collections of Chinese art were to be found in the Hermitage and the Louvre. One day, Kang thought, we shall get them all back. “You said something about an urgent matter.”
“What if,” Voroshenin said, “Liu could be linked to the Americans?”
“What if shit were gold?” Kang responded.
“What if,” Voroshenin countered, “Guibert were made to say that this arms shipment to the Viet Minh was a sham, to cover up something else?”
“Such as?”
“What if he were to confess,” Voroshenin asked, carefully selecting his words, “that the weapons were not for the Viet Minh, but were to be diverted to counterrevolutionaries in Yunnan instead?”
“Then I am very much afraid,” Kang said, “that would implicate General Liu in an imperialist plot to overthrow the People’s Republic. The Chairman would be shocked and heartbroken, of course.”
It was a delightful thought. Kang had been searching for years for a pretext to arrest Liu, one that the army and public would accept, and this dissolute Russian might just have handed it to him.
“But why would Guibert confess to something like that?” Kang asked, his eyes alight with wry amusement. Actually, he could think of a dozen reasons – “Toads Drinking,” “Monkeys Holding a Rope,” “Angel Plucking a Zither,” or perhaps some new technique that had yet to be discovered or named. “And how are the Americans involved in this?”
“Guibert,” Voroshenin answered, “is actually an American agent named Nicholai Hel.”
He told Kang what he knew of the Guiberts and of Nicholai Hel, omitting, of course, his own past with Alexandra Ivanovna.
“Do we know this for a fact?” Kang asked.
“No,” Voroshenin admitted. “But I’m reasonably sure.”
“ ‘Reasonably sure’ is not good enough,” Kang said. “I can’t arrest a foreign national on ‘reasonably sure,’ torture him, and then find out that he really is this Michel Guibert. Even the French might object to that.”
It is tempting though, Kang thought, so tempting. The thought of parading an American spy down to the Bridge of Heaven and having him shot… The titillating image of that bastard Liu following him a few days later… It would solve so many problems. But this “Guibert-Hel” connection – it was tenuous at best.
“What would you need?” Voroshenin asked.
Kang leaned back and thought about it for a few moments. “Perhaps if the father were to tell us this is not his son…”
NICHOLAI ROSE BEFORE DAWN, performed ten “Caged Leopards,” and then got dressed to go out for his morning run.
The very real prospect that this might be his last morning sharpened the air, brightened the colors, and lifted the mundane sounds of the city’s waking to the level of a symphony. The rumbling of a truck engine, the jingling of a bicycle bell, the clatter of a trash can being dragged across the pavement all had a clear, crystalline beauty that Nicholai appreciated for the first time.
The trees, then, took on a startling fresh beauty, artful compositions of silver, white, and black, delicately and perfectly balanced, changing tones with the gathering light. The ice on the lake reflected their images back to themselves as a friend reveals to a friend his best qualities.
The morning was truly beautiful, the tai chi players truly beautiful, China itself was truly beautiful and Nicholai realized with some sorrow that he would miss it all if he should, as was probable, die tonight.
But that is tonight, he thought, and this is this morning, and I am going to enjoy every moment of it.
As he ran onto the arched bridge to the Jade Isle, another jogger fell in behind him.
This was new, and Nicholai was aware of the interloper’s footfall behind him. He flexed his hands, preparing them for the leopard paw, if necessary. The runner was catching up with him, and Smiley and the Greyhound were a good twenty yards behind.
“The Dream of the West Chamber,” he heard the runner puff.
“What about it?”
“Be quiet and listen.”
In short bursts, the runner gave him the bones of the story, then said, “Near the end, the sheng and the dan find each other again…”
The runner sang:
I have helped the lovers come together
Although I have suffered hard words and beatings
The moon is rising in its silvery glow
I am the happy Red Maid.
“There will be much noise – gongs, drums, cymbals, then a moment of darkness…”
“Yes?’
“That is your moment.”
The runner picked up his pace and sprinted past Nicholai onto the island, then disappeared around a curve. Nicholai held his own pace and then saw an odd sight.
A lone monk walked toward him on the bridge.
He had a strange gait, as if walking were painful or he had some old injury that still troubled him. He came in small, delicate steps, as an old man would who feared that the bridge was slippery with ice, but as he came closer Nicholai saw that he wasn’t really old.
His eyes were old, though. They stared straight at Nicholai’s as if searching for something, and Nicholai recognized that those eyes had seen much, too much, things that no eyes should be made to see. Eyes that held knowledge that no man should be forced to know.
Nicholai stopped in his tracks.
The monk said softly, “Satori.”
“What?”
“Satori. To see things as they really are.”
The monk turned around and limped back toward the Jade Isle.
Nicholai hesitated and then followed him. “What am I not seeing?”
“The trap,” the monk answered. “And the way out of it.”
The vegetables were delicious, the steamed bun delicious, even the ordinary tea outdid itself.
I should “die” more often, Nicholai thought, if this is what the possibility of imminent death does for the senses. He could only imagine how making love to Solange today might feel. One might die from just the heightened pleasure.
A silly thought, he chided himself. You won’t die from pleasure – you’ll die in the trap, unless you find the way out. But, like all traps – in Go or life itself- the way out is never back the way you came.
Once in, you can only get out of the trap by going through the trap.
Chen arrived to take him to the Ministry of Defense.
“That acrobatic troupe was good last night, eh?” Chen asked, sitting down at the table. Sharing breakfast with Guibert had become a habitual perquisite.
“Superb. Thank you for taking me.”
“Too bad that Russian had to show up.” Chen looked around, leaned across the table, and muttered, “Tell you something?”
“Please.”
“I hate those mao-tzi bastards.”
“I’m not overly fond myself.”
Chen smiled with satisfaction at the shared intimacy. “Good buns.”
“Quite good.”
“I’m sorry you’ll be leaving soon,” Chen said, looking down at his plate.
“Am I leaving soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Ah.”
“We should be going.”
The day was now bright and sunny. A warming front had come in -jackets were left unbuttoned, scarves hung loosely around necks, people tilted their faces to catch the warmth of the sun. Nicholai insisted they take a detour into Xidan to buy some roasted chestnuts.
“You’re cheerful today,” Chen observed as they munched on the treats.
“I love China.”
They got back into the car and drove to the Ministry of Defense.
“The payment went through,” Colonel Yu said.
“Of course.”
Yu handed Nicholai a sheaf of travel papers. “Your train to Chongqing leaves tomorrow morning at nine. Please be on time. Rail tickets are difficult to acquire.”
“What do I do when I get to Chongqing?”
“You will be contacted.”
Nicholai looked skeptical. In truth, he couldn’t care less, but the role had to be played out to the end. “You told me you would give me an exact location.”
“I’m afraid that is not possible at the moment,” Yu said. “Don’t worry. We wouldn’t cheat you.”
“It’s a long train trip to Chongqing,” Nicholai answered. “I don’t want to run into some accident. Or find myself wandering about the city and not hearing from you.”
“I give you my word.”
“I gave you my money.”
Yu smiled. “Again, it always comes back to money.”
“I didn’t hear that you declined the payment.”
“What will you do on your last night in Beijing?” Yu asked.
“I’m going to the opera.”
“An imperial relic.”
“If you say so.” Nicholai stood up. “If I get to Chongqing and do not hear from you within twenty-four hours, I will go to the Viet Minh and explain that they were cheated by the revolutionary comrades in Beijing.”
“Comrade Guibert, you are an arms merchant…”
“I am.”
“So you will sell these weapons to our Vietnamese comrades.”
“Yes.”
“For a profit.”
“That’s the idea, yes.”
Yu frowned. Torn between candor and courtesy, he finally said, “I do not understand how a man can live without ideals.”
“It’s easy when you get used to it,” Nicholai answered.
“And it does not bother you,” the young colonel said, “that these weapons might be used to kill your own countrymen?”
“I have no country,” Nicholai said, realizing that this was a rare statement of truth.
“The people are my country,” Yu said with practiced conviction.
Nicholai looked at his fresh face, aglow with idealism. With any luck, he thought, he’ll have time to grow out of that.
He walked out of the office and the building.
EMILE GUIBERT LEFT his mistress’s flat in Hong Kong’s Western District.
In a nice part of town, the flat was expensive-merde, la femme was expensive – but both well worth it. A man comes to a certain age and success, he deserves a little comfort, not a tawdry assignation in some “blue hotel” over in Kowloon.
He decided to walk to his club for his afternoon pastis. It was a pleasant day, not overly humid, and he thought that he could use the exercise, although Winifred had given him quite the workout.
A lovely girl.
A Chinese pearl, Winifred, delightful in every aspect. Always beautifully dressed, beautifully coiffed, always patient and eager to please. And not some foulmouthed salope, either, but a young lady of refinement and some education. You could have a conversation with her, before or after, you could take her to a gallery, to a party, and know that she wouldn’t embarrass herself or you.
Winifred was the new love of his life, in fact, a new lease on life itself, the very renewal of his youth.
Lost in this reverie, he didn’t notice the three men come in. One stepped around him toward the elevator, the other went to check his mail at the boxes along the opposite wall. The third barred the doorway.
“Excuse me,” Guibert said.
He felt a forearm come around his throat and a cloth held against his face.
HAVERFORD SAT in the “situation room” in the Tokyo station and finished his coded cable to Singleton in Langley.
ALL IN PLACE. + 6 HRS. ADVISE PROCEED OR ABORT.
Part of him still hoped that Singleton would call the whole thing off. It was so risky from so many angles. Fail or succeed, Hel could be captured. If captured, he might talk. If he talked, Kang would quickly wrap up the whole Beijing network, from the White Pagoda to St. Michael’s to the Muslims in Xuanwu. Liu could be terminally weakened and China forced even deeper into the Soviet orbit.
“Great rewards demand great risks,” Singleton had said.
Fine, Haverford thought.
In fact, everything was in place.
The extraction team was embedded in the mosque, its leader had successfully been infiltrated into the country. A string of “sleeper alerts” about a Chinese attempt on Voroshenin’s life had been successfully planted into the Soviet intelligence services through double agents and would be triggered after his assassination. A similar string – indicating that the killing was a disinformation plot by the Soviets and laying the blame on an apparatchik named Leotov – had been laid with the Chinese.
As for the assassination itself, Hel had done a brilliant job of luring Voroshenin onto the killing ground. Hel was fully briefed on the site, the opportune moment of the opera, and his “escape route.”
Haverford looked at his watch, a graduation gift from his old man. Five hours and fifty minutes until the opera commenced. An hour or so after that, the termination.
The train was in motion.
Nothing could stop it now, unless Hel backed out – which he wouldn’t – or Singleton called it off, which was unlikely.
Still, Haverford hoped he would and sat waiting for the “abort” cable.
VOROSHENIN SAT by the phone.
The damn thing was quiescent and the clock not his friend. Barely three hours now until his appointment with Hel.
The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that “Guibert” was Hel and the more concerned he became that whatever Hel’s assignment with the Americans, he had really come on a mission of vengeance.
If this were Russia or one of the Eastern European satellites, he would simply have the young man killed. Or if it were a city in Western Europe, he could arrange for his quiet disappearance. Even in China, just a few years ago, a few coins and a whisper in the right ear and the young Hel would be fish food by now.
But not in China these days. Even with the Soviets’ enormous influence, Beijing wouldn’t easily tolerate an unsanctioned killing on its territory. There would be an incident, and an incident could very well send him back to a cell in Lubyanka.
Better there than dead, though, he thought, fingering the pistol he had slipped into his belt that morning before leaving his quarters. If it is Hel, and if he does intend to kill me for some fancied transgression against his slut of a mother, I do not have to play the sacrificial lamb.
They say he killed that Jappo general with a single strike to the throat.
Well, let him try.
I have three bodyguards, all trained in judo, all armed. And if somehow he gets through them… Voroshenin touched the gun butt again and felt reassured.
But why is my hand shaking? He took another sip of vodka. When this is over I shall have to do something about the drinking, he thought. Perhaps go off to one of those spas in the mountains. Clean air, exercise, and all that.
Hopefully it won’t come to my shooting Hel, he thought. Hopefully they will have picked up the elder Guibert, sweated him, and made him admit that his real son died in that car crash. Then I will not have to worry about it at all. I can enjoy the opera knowing that young Hel will be singing a different kind of aria, to a tune of Kang’s composition.
But ring, damn phone.
THE OLD MAN WAS tougher than he looked.
“I have met the Sûreté,” he told them, “the Gestapo, L’Union Corse, the Green Gang. What do you bande d’enfoirés have to show me that I haven’t already seen?”
They threatened to kill him.
He shrugged. “I’m old. I take one decent shit every three or four days, get one good hard-on a week, if I’m lucky. I sleep three hours a night. Be my friends, kill me.”
They threatened to hurt him.
“What can I tell you that I haven’t told you?” Guibert answered. “You show me pictures, I’ve told you, yes, that is my worthless son. The one who thinks that money squirts out of chickens’ asses and that you should always hit on sixteen. Hurt me.”
He was a tough old bird, and one that didn’t sing.
“ ‘Is Michel in Beijing’?” he parroted after they had wrenched his thin shoulders almost out of their sockets. “What can I say except that he’s supposed to be. Does that mean he really is? You tell me.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Supposed to be buying guns,” Guibert said, “but if I know my boy, he’s chasing pussy. Is there still pussy in Beijing? If you’re looking for him, look there. If you don’t find him, look for a pair of loaded dice. He’ll be betting against them.”
“Your real son died in a car accident,” they told him. “This man is an imposter.”
“I don’t know my own son? Why do you bother to ask questions of a man who doesn’t know his own child? How stupid must you be?” Then the old man got aggressive. “This is Hong Kong. There are laws here, not like the shitholes you must come from. I know every cop and every gangster. The tongs call me ‘sir.’ You let me go right now, I’ll forget about this, call it a mistake. You don’t, I’ll be tickling your feet while you’re hanging from meathooks. Now untie me, I have to take a piss.”
They untied him and walked him into the toilet.
The phone rang.
Voroshenin had the receiver in his hand before the ringing stopped. “Yes?”
“He’s tough.”
“So?”
“We think he’s telling the truth.”
Voroshenin didn’t. He looked up at the wall clock. Three hours and fifteen minutes. “Have one more go.”
“I don’t know what to -”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” Voroshenin said.
When Guibert came out of the toilet, Winifred was on her knees in front of the chair, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth wrapped around the pistol barrel that his interrogator held in his hand, his finger on the trigger.
The interrogator looked at Guibert and said, “Three, two…”
NICHOLAI EASED into the steaming bath.
Karma’s gift to him, he thought as he lowered himself into the near-scalding water, took a deep breath, and then exhaled, relaxing away the slight pain. Then he lay back and let the hot water soothe his muscles and his mind.
As a boy he would spontaneously slip into a state of total mental relaxation, his mind taking him to lie down in a serene mountain meadow. But the vicissitudes and sorrows of the war had stolen that tranquility from him and he mourned that loss deeply, as he also regretted the loss of his freedom and control over his own life.
The best that he could do now was to control his breathing and clarify his thoughts.
That this was in all likelihood his last night in the trap of life saddened him only because of Solange. Recalling the Buddhist tenet that all suffering comes from attachment, he acknowledged that he was in love with her, in a very Western, romantic way, and that the thought of leaving her was painful.
The thought that Diamond and his minions would escape justice also saddened him, but he comforted himself with the idea that karma was perfect.
So if I live, he thought, I will avenge myself; if I die, let them be reborn as maggots on a dung heap.
He turned his mind to his mission.
Envisioning it step by step, he walked himself through the evening. Chen would pick him up at the hotel and drop him at the theater. He would go to Voroshenin’s box, sit down, and enjoy the opera. At precisely the right moment – as the drums pounded and the gongs clanged – he would strike his mother’s tormentor with a single, explosive blow to the heart. Then he would simply walk out of the theater, elude his watchers, and make his way to refuge at the mosque.
Suddenly, something about it troubled him.
He reenvisioned it, and the same troubling feeling lingered, but he could not discover its source.
Switching paradigms, he envisioned the scenario as the Go board, set his black stones down, and played the game. It had its expected challenges, but nothing more. If, Nicholai thought, Voroshenin knows my real identity and recalls his treatment of the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna, then I might well be moving into a trap, but I already know that and am prepared.
There is something else.
He switched mental models again and decided to play the white stones against his own black.
It was a revelation.
Oddly, he found that he counted among the white stones not only the Russians and the “Red” Chinese, but the Americans as well. His mind lined them up as white stones and, examining the board as he would if he were playing that side, he saw it.
Satori.
NINETY MINUTES from operational status.
Unable to contain his nervous energy, Haverford paced the situation room. In thirty minutes they would go “dark,” all substantive cable and telephonic traffic would cease. Some “flak” would be thrown up – run-of-the-mill crap to let the Soviets and Chinese think that it was just business as usual, but there would be no communication between Langley and the situation room.
Singleton would go off to some affair at the White House. Diamond was going hunting with his buddies.
If this went south, it would all be on the Tokyo station.
“Do a final status check.”
“We just did -”
“Did I ask you what you just did?”
They ran another check.
Alpha Tiger: In place.
Bravo Team: In place.
The Monk: In place.
Go Player: In place.
Papa Bear…
Papa Bear.
“Papa Bear’s off the radar.”
“What?”
“Papa Bear,” the nervous young agent said. “He’s off the radar.”
“Run it down.”
Frantic phone calls to Hong Kong turned up nothing. Emile Guibert wasn’t at his house on Victoria Peak, not at his office downtown, his club in Western. Not at his mistress’s pad. Off the radar.
They were thin on the ground in HK because of British hypersensitivity. In fact, Haverford briefly considered reaching out to Wooten for help. The MI-6 man had the Hong Kong police on his payroll and could scour the island quicker than the small American contingent.
But he decided that he couldn’t answer the questions that Wooten would ask, and that the payback would be too ferocious, so he had to leave it to Benton’s people.
The search took twenty-eight endless minutes.
Haverford jumped on the cable.
P-BEAR OFF GRID. ABORT? ADVISE.
John Singleton took his wool overcoat off the coat rack and put it on. His left shoulder suffered from bursitis, so it took a few seconds. He wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck, put on his hat, and headed out the door of his office.
For most people, going to the White House was a thrill; for Singleton, it was a chore. He was halfway down the hall when his assistant scurried up behind him.
“Yes?”
“An urgent cable from Tokyo.”
He glanced at it and said, “Not now.”
“You don’t want to res -”
“I can’t very well respond to something that you didn’t give to me, can I?” he said. “I had already left the building. I’ll look at it when I come back.”
The elevator doors slid open.
“We’re dark,” the young agent said.
That is not good, Haverford thought.
Singleton had hung him out to dry. The old spymaster would take credit for the success, but dump blame for the failure on Haverford.
“It’s your call.”
“Just find Emile Guibert,” Haverford snapped, “and spare me your observations of the obvious.”
“Sorry.”
Fifty-nine minutes out.
Once operational, Haverford had the authority to abort the mission at his discretion. He could flip the “kill switch,” which would trigger an alert that Hel knew to look for. In that case, Hel would simply walk out of his hotel, a preplanned diversion would occupy his surveillance, and he would go straight to the Niujie Mosque.
“Keep trying on Papa Bear.”
“Yes, sir.”
Assume the worst-case scenario, Haverford told himself.
Assume that Voroshenin has Guibert and is sweating him.
Assume that Guibert has given it up.
Given that scenario, Voroshenin knows that Guibert is a cover, but Guibert couldn’t have given him Hel’s real identity. All Voroshenin knows is that “Michel Guibert” is a cover under British control, which is what Guibert believes. Voroshenin will take the next logical mental step, though – he’ll believe that the British were subbing in for us. He’ll know it’s an American operation.
So what does he do?
He gives it to the Chinese, to his buddy Kang.
What does Kang do?
Either he lets Hel stay operational to see where it leads him, or he picks Hel up and tortures the truth out of him. Everything they knew about Kang indicated the latter course of action.
“You confirmed that Go Player is in place?” Haverford asked.
“He signaled.”
Their watchers outside the hotel had seen Hel go in but not come out, and they observed the correct arrangement of the window curtains. Only ten minutes ago, Hel had called room service to request a fresh thermos of water for his tea, so there was every reason to believe that he was safely in his room and not in Kang’s hands.
But for how long? Haverford wondered.
Abort, he told himself.
Get a signal to the Monk, hit the kill switch now.
NICHOLAI STEPPED OUT on the little balcony.
Across the boulevard, lit by the amber streetlamp, the monk still stood under the tree, facing south.
The mission was a “go.”
Nicholai started to pull a cigarette out to light it and acknowledge.
Then the monk moved.
“WE HAVE Papa Bear.”
“Kill the abort signal,” Haverford said. “Where the hell was he?”
It turns out that Papa Guibert found himself a new honey and took her to her place. He was surprised and a little indignant to find out that handlers were looking for him.
“So I wanted a little variety,” he told the Brit who was under Haverford’s employ. “So what, I am French.” He didn’t really expect a Brit to comprehend a man’s sexual needs. The British were about as sensual as their food.
“Keep him on ice,” Haverford ordered. “Did you signal the Monk back?”
“Confirmed.”
Haverford sat down and looked at the illuminated wall clock.
Twelve minutes out.
VOROSHENIN WAS on the phone.
The old man had broken – no Frenchman of his generation would let a beautiful woman have her brains spattered all over the walls – and confirmed that his son had died in the car crash, and “Michel Guibert” was the cover of an agent working for the British.
The British my liver, Voroshenin thought. The British are assclenching happy just to hold on to Hong Kong, they’re not going to wake the dragon by messing about in China. Besides, it wasn’t London that had control of Nicholai Hel, it was Washington.
Kang finally came on the line.
“Wei,” he asked blandly, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
“The father confirmed my hypothesis,” Voroshenin said.
There was a long pause, then Kang said, “Enjoy the opera.”
I will, actually, Voroshenin thought.
NICHOLAI SAW THE MONK start to turn to the north, then change his mind and face south again.
The mission had been aborted, then just as quickly revived. That didn’t trouble Nicholai – the go-kang was a kinetic field that required fluid thought and action.
But then the monk did something unexpected. He turned to face the hotel and looked directly up at Nicholai. Even from that distance – five floors down and across the street – Nicholai could feel the monk’s eyes, almost as he had once sensed the intensity of Kishikawa-sama and Otake-san.
Nicholai nodded.
Cupping one hand around his cigarette, he lit it – the signal that he was ready to proceed. He took a long drag, then stepped back into the room and shut the doors behind him.
Then he left the room and went downstairs.
“GO PLAYER acknowledged.”
“Roger that.”
Now all Haverford could do was sit and wait.
Worst part of the job.
DIAMOND MADE A POINT not to be in, or even near, the office. But he left word where he could be reached and an order that he be immediately briefed on any developments coming out of Beijing.
Waiting around is the shits, he thought.
THE NORTH WIND had picked up again and Nicholai wrapped his scarf around his neck as he stepped out into the cold night air and waited for Chen and the car. Where were they? Chen was usually pathologically prompt.
Across the boulevard the monk walked away, toward the south.
The last check, Nicholai thought with a twinge of sorrow. The last chance to stop this thing literally just walked away.
The car came up the street, its red flags snapping in the stiff breeze. It pulled up in front of the hotel, the back door opened, and Chen got out.
“Sorry to be late,” he said. “Traffic.”
He looked afraid.
Chen ushered Nicholai into the backseat and got in beside him.
Nicholai started to greet Liang, but saw that it was a different driver.
“Where is Liang?” Nicholai asked.
“Sick,” Chen said. The smell of fear came off him. A sheen of greasy sweat shone on his cheeks.
Nicholai took two cigarettes from his pack and offered one to Chen. The escort took it, but his hands shook as Nicholai held the lighter up to the cigarette. He steadied Chen’s wrist and said, “Perhaps it was catching.”
“Maybe.”
“You should go home and take care of yourself.” Nicholai looked into his eyes. “It’s all right.”
“I’m so sorry,” Chen answered, “that I was… late.”
“Truly, it doesn’t matter.” He let go of Chen’s wrist. Nicholai sat back in his seat, smoked, looked out the window, and pretended not to notice when the car turned not for Xuanwu, but toward the Bell and Drum Towers.
KANG READIED THE STAGE.
He wanted it perfect, a flawless setting for the drama that he was about to enact, the play that he had already written.
This Nicholai Hel person would speak his intended lines. Maybe not at first, when his masculine pride would force him to resist; but eventually he would give in and pronounce the words. He would come in as a man but leave as a eunuch, enter the stage as a sheng but exit as a dan, shamed and pleading to die.
But the dignity of a private death was not on the page for this Hel. Kang would save what was left of him for another performance, his humiliation played before an audience of thousands at the Bridge of Heaven. Hel would have a placard on his back instead of an embroidered robe, he would be bound with heavy ropes, and he would take a final bow to the bark of rifles and the roar of the crowd.
Kang fingered the exquisitely thin, stiff wire – sharpened at one end, looped at the other – with which he intended to skewer Hel’s masculinity.
“Drawing the Jinghu Bow Across the Strings” is what Kang had titled this new technique, and he could already imagine the notes that Hel would achieve as the wire was pushed and pulled back and forth through his testicles.
Kang had dressed for the occasion – a black jacket with black brocade over black silk pajamas and black slippers. He had slicked his hair back carefully, trimmed his eyebrows, and applied the most subtle, indistinguishable layer of rouge on his cheeks.
He looked forward to matching the rhythms of the mental torture along with the physical – show Hel the agony that was inevitable, then offer to rescind the sentence, and then apply it anyway. Draw the strings back and forth between despair and hope, terror and relief, anguish and cessation, building to a climax in which there was only pain.
As in any worthy opera, the music would be punctuated by passages of speech, as Hel recited his monologues. Yes, he was an American agent, yes he had been sent to pull the strings of the puppet, the traitor Liu, yes they conspired to deliver guns to antirevolutionary elements in Yunnan, yes, they hoped to murder Chairman Mao.
He heard car doors close, and then footsteps on the pebbled walkway.
The opera was about to begin.
THE LIGHTS IN THE HOUSE dimmed as the stage lamps came up.
Voroshenin, comfortable in his private box, leaned forward and looked down at the black square stage, traditionally placed to the north of the audience. He loved this old theater, with its red gilded columns framing the stage, its old wooden floor, the vendors milling around selling peanuts and steamy hot towels, the chatter, the laughter.
The chair beside him was empty.
Hel had not arrived.
Voroshenin knew that the foolish young man was attending an opera of his own, one in which he would unwillingly sing the lead role.
After a moment of anticipatory silence, the orchestra struck its first notes, and the audience hushed as Xun Huisheng stepped onto the stage. Dressed as a huadan – a saucy young woman – Xun wore a long scarlet Ming-era robe with flowers brocaded on the shoulders and wide “water” sleeves. He stood center stage and gave his shangching, the opening speech, identifying himself as the Red Maid.
Then, waving his hand with a grace born from decades of practice, he produced a scroll from the sleeve, paused, and began the famous first aria.
This letter is the evidence of the affair.
Commanded by my lady, I am on my way to the West Chamber.
In the early morning silence reigns supreme.
Let me, the Red Maid, have a little cough to warn him.
Voroshenin was delighted.
“GO PLAYER IS off the radar.”
Haverford felt his blood go cold and his stomach flip. “What?”
“He didn’t arrive at Point Zero.”
“Didn’t or hasn’t?” Haverford asked.
The young agent shrugged. A few seconds later he asked, “Do you want to give the scramble code?”
A scramble code would do just that – send the extraction team in the Niujie Mosque scrambling for cover before they could be rounded up, send the Monk, the Hui agents, all of them, running for the border.
He considered the possibilities:
The mundane – Hel was simply delayed, tied up in traffic.
The treacherous – Hel had chickened out and was running on his own.
The catastrophic-Hel was in Kang Sheng’s hands.
The last scenario would definitely trigger a scramble code.
“No,” Haverford said. “Let’s give it a while longer.”
Where are you, Nicholai?
THREE POLICE AGENTS hauled Nicholai from the car, pushed him over the hood, and handcuffed him behind his back.
He didn’t resist. This wasn’t the moment.
They straightened him back up, and an agent held him by either elbow.
“Spy!” Chen yelled at him, his eyes begging forgiveness. Flicks of spit hit Nicholai in the face as Chen screamed, “Now you will feel the people’s righteous fury! Now you will know the anger of the workers and peasants!
Chen turned to get back into the car, but the driver was out of the car, pulled a pistol, and held it at Chen’s head. “Li Ar Chen, I arrest you for treason against the People’s Republic.”
The third policeman grabbed his arms, twisted them behind him, and cuffed him.
“No!” Chen yelled. “Not me! Him! Not me! I did everything you said!”
The driver holstered his pistol, slapped him hard across the face, then ordered, “Take him.”
The policeman pushed Chen in front of Nicholai.
Without a word, they frog-marched him through a stone garden to what looked improbably like a cave. One of the cops knocked on the thick wooden door and a moment later Nicholai heard a muffled, “Come.”
The door opened and the agents pushed Nicholai inside.
It was indeed a cave, or at least an effort to replicate one in concrete. Communists, Nicholai thought, they do love their concrete. The ceilings were curved and the walls painted with streaks to imitate geological striations.
This “cave” was beautifully furnished with rosewood tables and chairs, a lounging sofa, and the machinery of torture. There was a bench of sorts, obviously used for beatings and perhaps sodomy, a staggering variety of whips and flails hung neatly from assigned hooks, and two straight-backed chairs, the seats of which had been removed, bolted to the floor.
The cops shoved Nicholai down onto one of the chairs, removed the cuffs, and used heavy leather straps to tightly fasten his wrists to the arms of the chair. Nicholai watched as they took Chen, roughly stripped off his clothes, and then hung him by the handcuffs from a steel rail that ran across the ceiling. Then they tied his ankles down to bolts in the floor, so that he was spread-eagled.
His chin on his chest, Chen hung, quietly weeping.
An interior door opened and Kang Sheng made his entrance.
Nicholai had to admit that it was dramatic – the lighting perfect, the moment correct, and he held an ominous prop that glistened in the lamplight.
A wire, perhaps a foot long, needle-sharp on one end.
“Good evening, Mr. Hel, I believe it is?”
“Guibert.”
“If you insist.” Kang smiled.
Nicholai fought the terror that he felt rising in his throat and forced himself to keep his mind clear. Kang has already made the first mistake, he thought. He has shown his opening position on the board by revealing his knowledge of my real identity.
“Perhaps,” Kang said, “when I have shown you what I have planned for you, you might decide to be more cooperative.”
“There’s always that chance,” Nicholai answered.
“There is always that chance,” Kang agreed pleasantly. Hel’s bravado was delightful, so very sheng. And how thoughtful of him to play his role so beautifully – the fall of a falcon is so much more dramatic than the fall of a sparrow. He turned his attention to Chen, who would play the perfect chou, the clown. “Counterrevolutionary dog.”
“No,” Chen blubbered. “I’m a loyal -”
“Liar!” Kang screamed. “You were part of this conspiracy! You helped him every step of the way!”
“No.”
“Yes!” Kang yelled. “You took him to the church, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but -”
Nicholai said, “He had nothing to do with -”
“Be quiet,” Kang snapped. “It will be your turn soon enough, I promise you that. Just now it is the fat pig’s. How many yuan do you eat a day, pang ju? Is that why you like entertaining foreign guests, so that you can fatten yourself on the backs of the people?”
“No…”
“No, it is because you are a spy.”
“No!”
“ ‘No,’ “Kang said. “I will give you one chance to confess.”
This was the boring part of the play. The shangching, the preamble. Prisoners never confessed at this point, knowing that they would be signing their own death warrants. They knew the pain they were about to suffer, knew that they would eventually confess to the capital charge, but human nature is such that they must first struggle to survive.
Chen was silent.
“Very well,” Kang said.
Nicholai saw Chen’s eyes almost bulge out of their sockets as Kang approached him with the needle. Kang giggled. “I have never done this before, so it might take a little experimentation.”
Chen jerked as Kang touched the point of the wire to one of his balls.
“The problem is the flexibility,” Kang said.
He pulled the wire back a couple of inches and then pushed.
XUN HUISHENG HIT a marvelous note, rich in tone, pitch-perfect, rising in an oblique ze.
Look, my poor mistress frowns every day
And the young man is sick and skinny.
Despite the punishments imposed by the Old Lady
I, the Little Red Maid, will help their dreams come true.
Voroshenin clapped as the audience below shouted, “Hao! Hao!” in approbation of the superb performance.
COLONEL YU SAT in his office and worried.
The so-called Michel Guibert had not arrived at the opera, nor was he in his room, and none of the watchers knew his location. All they could say was that they had seen him get into the car outside the Beijing Hotel.
Was he in Voroshenin’s hands?
Or in Kang’s?
Either way it was a desperate situation. Who knew what Kang would make him say? If Mao was ready to make a move against General Liu, this could be the prime moment. “Guibert” would confess to the murder plot against the Russian commissioner, and Kang would make him implicate General Liu.
Escape routes had been set up through the south.
Was it time for the general to flee?
Activate “Southern Wind”?
Perhaps, Yu cursed himself, it had been too bold a move – premature perhaps – for them to have allowed the American plot to move forward. Perhaps they should have tossed Guibert out of the country five seconds after he stepped in. But it had been so tempting to set Stalin and Mao back at each other’s throats. The Russians would move Gao Gang into place prematurely. Mao would respond but lack the strength to succeed. General Liu would move in to fill the power vacuum.
So tempting, so rich with possibilities…
And the idea to kill Voroshenin at the opera was lovely in its irony. Very un-Western, but then again, this “Guibert”…
Should I go and tell the general? Yu asked himself. Actualize the escape plan and demand that he leave immediately? Years of long work would be wasted, hopes squandered, dreams of a truly Communist country indefinitely delayed, perhaps destroyed… But can you take the chance of the general being arrested, tortured, shot?
Where is this man “Guibert”?
NICHOLAI STRUGGLED not to vomit.
Chen screamed and screamed, his body tossed against the chains as Kang sawed the wire back and forth through his testicles, all the time offering advice on how to better vocalize.
“Hum qi,” he coached, using operatic terms. “ ‘Exchange breath’ – slow in, slow out. Now ‘steal breath’ – a sharp intake, please, sudden, fierce. That’s it… very good…”
Nicholai made himself focus on his own breathing. In deep through the nose, force it down into the lower abdomen, hold and store, release… deep through the nose, force it down into the lower abdomen, hold and store, release… hold and store, hold and store, deeply in the abdomen until you can feel it in all your muscles…
He tuned out the sound of Chen’s agony.
“I confess, I confess I confess!” Chen screamed.
But Kang appeared not to hear him and continued “Drawing the Jinghu Bow Across the Strings” until Chen shrieked at a pitch that was scarcely human. He would not stop until Chen demonstrated all the mouth shapes of a proper opera singer: kaikou – open mouth; qichi – level-teeth; houkou – closed mouth; and, finally, cuochun – scooped lips.
Kang pulled the wire out and Chen’s neck dropped. His body went limp. Sweat dripped off his skin onto the concrete floor.
“I am a spy,” Chen said between sobs. “I was part of the conspiracy. I helped him every step of the way.”
“To send arms to rebels in Yunnan?”
“Yes.”
“To murder Chairman Mao?”
“Yes.”
“Who gave you your orders?” Kang asked. “Was it General Liu?”
“Yes, it was General Liu.”
Nicholai knew that Chen would say anything now, agree to anything, to prevent Kang from resuming the torture.
And Kang had revealed more of his strategy.
Remain calm - Kishikawa-sama came to him - and keep your thoughts as clear as a pool. Breathe and store your ki.
Liu is the target, he realized, and you are only a string of stones on the way to that target.
Very well.
Kang turned to him and said, “Now, Mr. Hel, it is your turn.”
He held up the wire.
“IT REALLY ISN’T NECESSARY,” Nicholai said. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
Kang smiled. “Admit that you are not ‘Michel Guibert.’ ”
“I admit that I am not Michel Guibert.”
“Admit that you are Nicholai Hel.”
“I admit to being Nicholai Hel.”
“Why did you come to Beijing, Nicholai Hel?”
Nicholai leaned forward in his chair as far as the straps would allow. He looked straight into Kang’s eyes and answered, “I came to Beijing to kill Yuri Voroshenin.”
Kang turned pale.
“GET THAT PIG out of here,” Kang ordered. “Wait outside.”
Position on the board changed, Nicholai thought. Not wanting underlings to hear anything that sensitive, Kang has removed those stones for me. Breathe and store your ki. Breathe and store your ki.
The agents unhooked Chen and dragged him out of the room. When the door closed, Kang asked, “You admit that you came to assassinate Voroshenin?”
“Admit it?” Nicholai said. “I proclaim it.”
“Why?”
Nicholai jutted his chin toward the wire in Kang’s hand. “I wish to spare myself needless pain. And I wish to make a deal.”
“You are in no position to make any deal.”
“How do you know?”
Kang waved the wire in front of his face. “I will make you tell me without any ‘deal.’ ”
“Probably,” Nicholai agreed. “But possibly not. You know that I was raised as a Japanese. What is your experience with Japanese under torture? And what if you make a mistake? What if you miscalculate and I die under your ministrations? Then you will never know.”
This is delightful, Kang thought. Exciting. A different script, a departure from the usual. He asked, “Know what?”
“How you can get power over Voroshenin.”
He saw it in Kang’s eye. It was fleeting, but it was there. Power over Voroshenin was a very desirable prize. Kang was desperate to get out from under the Soviet thumb.
Stone moved.
Breathe and store your ki. Breathe and store your ki.
Kang laughed, but the scoff was unconvincing. “And you can tell me how to get Voroshenin under my power.”
Nicholai nodded.
“How?”
“Put down that wire.”
Kang set the wire down. “How?”
“Blackmail.”
“Specifically?”
Nicholai shook his head. “If I tell you, how do I know I walk out of here alive? How do I know I leave China alive?”
“You’ll have my word.”
“You think me a fool.”
Kang nodded toward the wire. “If you make me perform ‘Drawing the Jinghu Bow Across the Strings,’ I promise that you will tell me. As you said, spare yourself that agony. As for your life…”
Breathe and store your ki. Breathe and store your ki. Do not waste effort negotiating over lies. Lull him now, lure him into overconfidence, draw his stones into the trap.
“Yuri Voroshenin,” Nicholai said, “extorted my mother into handing over a considerable fortune, which he placed into various bank accounts and investments. It was quite some time ago, but interest accrues, and Yuri is now an extremely wealthy man. I am sure that he wouldn’t want Beria to hear of it, much less Uncle Joe. Do you have a tape recorder?”
“Of course.”
“Get it,” Nicholai said. “I will relate the whole story, and Voroshenin will be yours.”
Breathe and store your ki. Breathe and store your ki.
Kang got the tape recorder and Nicholai passed on to him the whole story that his mother had told him about what happened in Petrograd thirty years ago.
“HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN?” Haverford asked.
“Thirty-one minutes.”
The “traffic” scenario was out. Either Hel had taken off or he was under adverse control.
Give the scramble order, he thought.
Sauve qui peut – every man for himself.
But if you pull the extraction team and Hel is alive…
COLONEL YU GOT UP from his chair, left his office, and walked down the hallway.
The general was at his desk. He heard the door open, looked up from his work and quietly said, “Yes?”
“I’m afraid it’s time, sir.”
“For?”
“Southern Wind.”
He explained the situation. When he had finished, General Liu said, “Make some tea, please.”
“General, I really think that -”
“Make tea,” Liu repeated softly. “And steep it three times.”
NICHOLAI FINISHED his speech.
Kang said, “So that is why you wish to kill Voroshenin.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No,” Kang said. “I hated my mother.”
“I’m sorry.”
Kang shrugged.
“But certainly the Americans didn’t sponsor you to come on a matter of personal revenge,” Kang said. “Why did they send you?”
“To kill Voroshenin,” Nicholai answered.
“Why?”
Nicholai told him all of it – the whole plot to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow.
Because it didn’t matter now.
All he needed now was for Kang to make the anticipated move. There was a chance that he wouldn’t, but Nicholai discounted it. A man’s nature is his nature – Kang had revealed his – and he would act according to that nature.
Kang did. “You have told me everything now?”
“Everything.”
“Very well,” Kang said. He picked up the wire. “It is time to resume the opera.”
Breathe and store your ki. Breathe and store your ki. Nicholai allowed fear to seep into his throat as he said, “But why? I told you everything!”
“Exactly.”
“But there is no point now!”
“The point is,” Kang said as he squatted in front of Nicholai, “that I will enjoy it.”
Stones in place.
Nicholai forced all the energy into his legs, felt it course through the veins and muscles as Kang reached up to unbuckle his belt and pull down his trousers.
Store and-
– release.
The energy exploded from Nicholai’s feet and through his legs as he surged upward with all the ki he had stored in his body. The chair shattered from its bolts. Kang sprawled back, then got to his feet. Nicholai spun twice to develop momentum and then whirled into him and struck him with the legs of the chair, sending Kang spinning toward the wall. Then Nicholai threw himself into Kang, smashed him into the wall, and heard the air come out of Kang’s lungs.
Nicholai backed off and did it again, then again, then pinned the shocked and rattled Kang against the wall and pressed all his weight against the smaller man, trapping his hands.
Kang still clutched the wire, and Nicholai counted on his next move.
Desperate, Kang pressed the point of the wire to Nicholai’s throat.
Nicholai let it come, felt it bite into his throat, felt the blood start to come and saw Kang smile in triumph.
Then he craned his neck down, grabbed the wire with his teeth, jerked his neck back, and yanked the wire from Kang’s grasp.
Kang’s eyes went wide with surprise.
Nicholai stretched his neck as far back as it would go, then jammed it forward.
The wire went into Kang’s eye. He screamed in agony, wriggled against Nicholai, trying to escape.
Nicholai held the wire just there for a moment… then said, “For Chen.”
He pushed and sent the point through Kang’s eye and into his brain.
Kang stiffened.
Groaned.
And died.
Nicholai let his body crumple to the floor. Then he lowered himself down and started on the buckles of the leather strap with his teeth. It took five long minutes to free one wrist, then he unbuckled his other hand. He took a few deep breaths, gathered his energy, got up, and then took the tape out of the machine and put it in his pocket.
Looking at his watch, he saw that there was still time to go kill Voroshenin.
THE THREE AGENTS were tormenting Chen in the outer room.
One looked up in surprise as Nicholai came through the door, the more so as Nicholai killed him with a kick to the head. The second went to pull his gun but was dispatched with an elbow to the throat. The third tried to escape, but Nicholai grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his head into the door, crushing his skull against the heavy wood.
All of this took no more than five seconds, and then Nicholai knelt over Chen, who lay quivering on the cold concrete floor.
“Did you kill him?” Chen asked, his voice rattling.
“Painfully,” Nicholai answered. He placed his index and middle fingers on Chen’s neck, along the carotid artery. “Xiao Chen, think of bowls overflowing with pure white pearl rice, and dishes of pork in hot brown sauce. Do you have those things in mind?”
Chen nodded.
“Good,” Nicholai said. He pressed until he felt Chen’s life slip away.
Nicholai found the corpse of the largest agent, took off his coat, slipped it on, and then put on the dead man’s hat. He walked out of the “cave,” through the beautiful garden, and outside, where he saw the glow of a cigarette inside the car. The engine was running, the heater on.
Nicholai walked over and rapped on the window. “Open up.”
The driver rolled down the window. “What do you want? It’s fucking cold, brother.”
“Let me in,” Nicholai said in Chinese. “The bastard wants us to go for some hot noodles and pork.”
The locks unclicked and Nicholai slid in the back.
He pressed the agent’s pistol into the guard’s neck. “Zhengyici Opera House. And I know the route, brother, so don’t fuck me around.”
“Kang will kill me.”
“Actually, he won’t.”
The driver put the car in gear and pulled out.
The drive took twenty minutes.
Nicholai used the time to try to restore his energy. He was exhausted – the exertion it had required to break the chair from the floor had drained his ki, and now he was uncertain if he had sufficient energy left to perform the perfect strike required to silently kill Voroshenin, much less make his escape.
He also realized that emotion had sapped his energy. The terror of the torture chamber, the effort to maintain his self-control, the horror of Chen’s agony, the genuine sorrow over the man’s death – all had taken a toll. Over the killing of Kang and his three minions, Nicholai felt not a jot of remorse.
If the Buddhists were right, Kang would spend long ages in bardo, the limbo-like stage between death and rebirth, before returning to the earth for a lifetime of suffering.
Now Nicholai concentrated on his breathing, on attempting to recuperate his strength. He felt it slowly coming back, but whether it would be enough, and in time, was a real question.
The car arrived at the opera house.
“Go another block,” Nicholai said.
The driver went up a block and pulled over. Nicholai set the pistol down and then hit the driver with a shuto strike to the base of the brain. As the driver fell dead over the steering wheel, Nicholai got out of the backseat and walked to the Zhengyici.
A guard at the front door stopped him.
“My name is Guibert,” Nicholai said. “I am guest of Comrade Voroshenin.”
“The opera is almost over,” the guard complained.
“I was… otherwised engaged,” Nicholai answered, sliding his index finger back and forth through a “V” he made with his other hand.
The guard chuckled. “Go in.”
Nicholai stepped into the lobby, which was almost empty. Recalling the plan of the theater, he quickly found the stairs, bounded up, and walked down the corridor. Two of Voroshenin’s guards leaned against the wall outside his box. They straightened as they saw Nicholai, and one reached his hand inside his jacket.
Now, Nicholai thought, either Voroshenin has played his cards very close to his chest, or I am dead. He strode toward the guards and put his hands up in a “What are you going to do?” shrug.
The guard without the pistol was sullen. He patted Nicholai down from his armpits to his ankles, found nothing, and opened the door to the box.
The encroaching light caused Yuri Voroshenin to turn around.
Even in the dim light, Nicholai could see the surprise in his eyes. That’s right, he thought, I’m supposed to be dead. He edged past the guard standing inside the door and sat down next to Voroshenin.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” he whispered.
In Russian.
On the stage below, the sheng, lit by a vermilion lamp, his face vertically divided into a white-and-black design, delivered a speech bemoaning the loss of a battle. It was beautifully performed, every syllable perfectly in place.
Before Voroshenin could respond, Nicholai added, “I was unavoidably detained.”
XUE XIN SAW NICHOLAI go into the theater.
He turned to a small boy huddled against the flaming trash can and said, “Run. Tell your sifu that the performance has not ended.”
The boy ran.
Xue Xin waited until he saw Nicholai get into the theater, and then he ambled off, slowly working his way to the alley in back.
“GO PLAYER IS on the screen.”
“Jesus Christ.” Haverford felt limp. Sweaty and exhausted. Hel was a roller-coaster ride. “Where?”
“At Point Zero.”
“No shit.”
“No shit, sir.”
COLONEL YU RAN DOWN the hall and burst into Liu’s office.
“He’s at Zhengyici.”
Liu considered the development. It was one thing for the American agent to have made it to the opera house, quite another for him to complete his mission there. But if he did kill Voroshenin… then there was something to consider.
“Good tea,” said Liu.
DRUMS BOOMED and gongs clanged as the handsome sheng came back onstage.
The dan, beautifully garbed in a silk brocade robe, crossed the stage in tiny steps as delicate and light as falling cherry blossoms. She waved her fan, saw her lover, then looked up to the “moon” – a solitary white spotlight – and began her aria.
It was beautiful.
Her voice was a revelation, a seamless blend of form and emotion. As she built to her high note, Nicholai saw Voroshenin’s right hand slowly ease into his jacket at his waist.
Knife or gun? Nicholai asked himself.
Gun, he decided.
And what is he waiting for?
The same thing that you are – darkness and more noise. If he waits for the climactic moment, he can shoot you and have your body hustled out of here before anyone can notice, avoiding a public incident. Very smart of him, very disciplined.
The music began its rise.
Nicholai leaned over toward Voroshenin.
“I relate greetings” he said, whispering into Voroshenin’s ear, “from the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna. My mother.”
He felt Voroshenin’s body tense, his hand inch toward the pistol.
“Nicholai Hel.”
“I’m going to kill you in a moment,” Nicholai said, “and there’s not a single thing you can do about it.”
Xun Huisheng warbled:
I have helped the lovers come together
Although I have suffered hard words and beatings
The moon is rising in its silvery glow
I am the happy Red Maid.
The drums rattled.
The gongs clanged.
The theater went dark.
Voroshenin went for the pistol.
Nicholai trapped his hand, breathed deeply, and released all the ki he had left into a single leopard paw strike to Voroshenin’s chest.
He heard the Russian grunt.
Then Voroshenin slumped back in his seat, his mouth a frozen oval.
The guard started forward.
“Too much vodka,” Nicholai said as he got up. Down in the orchestra, the audience was applauding wildly.
Nicholai walked out the door of the box.
“Your boss is sick,” Nicholai said.
They rushed inside.
Nicholai let his mind take over and walk him through the escape. Down the stairs and to the right. Down the hallway toward the interior stage door, where an old man sat on a stool.
“You can’t go in here,” the old man said.
“I’m sorry, liao,” Nicholai said as he swung his right hand in a lazy arc and struck him as gently as possible on the side of the neck. He caught the old man and lowered him gently to the floor, opened the door, found the next door to his left, and stepped out into the alley.
It was only as he walked out the back end of the alley that he felt something warm running down his left leg, then a jolt of burning pain, and realized that Voroshenin’s gun had gone off, and that he was shot.
Then he saw the monk standing at the end of the alley.
“Satori,” Nicholai said.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
The monk limped off in one direction, Nicholai in the other.
He saw it clearly now.
What would happen in the Temple of the Green Truth.
Satori.
The way out of the trap.
“SIGNAL.”
“What?” Haverford asked. He stubbed out his thirteenth cigarette of the night and rolled his chair over to the young agent who sat by the cable.
“Go Player is on the move toward Point One.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Haverford said, half in surprise, half in admiration.
Nicholai fucking Hel.
THE BLOOD FROZE on his skin, forming a bandage of sorts.
It didn’t hold up, as Nicholai walked quickly through the hutongs of Xuanwu, his heart beating strongly, pumping blood into his leg and breaking the intermittent clotting. But the cold slowed the blood loss and eased the pain.
Nicholai wasn’t thinking about his leg.
He placed a map of the district in his head, remembered Haverford’s instructions, and moved swiftly past the few people out on the streets in the winter night. Some watched him, most had their faces wrapped against the cold and were indifferent to this tall kweilo as he strode past them. None of them noticed when he dropped the crumpled tape recording into a trash-can fire.
Police sirens started to wail, headed toward Zhengyici Opera House.
Voroshenin’s body had been discovered.
Nicholai put the Go board in front of his eyes and scanned the new situation. The Kang stones had been removed, the Voroshenin stones captured. But Voroshenin’s corpse had been revealed, and soon – if it hadn’t already happened – the Chinese National Police would discover that their master Kang was also dead.
Murdered, if you care to call it that.
They would be coming for him, and the move now was to get to other black stones on the board.
He had an appointment in the Temple of the Green Truth.
WU ZHONG WAITED in the sanctuary.
A team member, a Muslim brother, had relayed the signal that “Go Player” was on the way.
Inshallah.
He got to his feet, stretched, and prepared his muscles for the task at hand.
The American had told him what to do.
NICHOLAI TURNED onto Niujie Street and saw the mosque, its three sections roofed in green tile, a small minaret with a crescent rising above the center section. A white-capped Hui Chinese waited by the iron gate.
“Go Player?”
“The opera is over.”
The Hui took Nicholai by the elbow, looked around, and quickly ushered him through the small courtyard and into the door of the section farthest to the right.
It was dark inside, lit only by oil lanterns, and Nicholai blinked to adjust his eyes as the door shut behind him. His escort led him through the foyer to a narrow set of stairs, then showed him into the basement and closed the door.
A tall, wide-shouldered man stood in front of him.
“Welcome, Go Player,” the man said in heavily accented Mandarin.
“Thank you,” Nicholai answered.
The man glanced down at Nicholai’s leg and then observed, “You are hurt.”
“Shot, I’m afraid.”
“The target?”
“Terminated.”
“You are certain?”
“Terminated,” Nicholai repeated. His leg started to throb and, worse, felt weak underneath him. This was very bad, because the Chinese man in front of him, struggling with his English, carefully pronounced, “Haverford sends his regrets.”
WU ZHONG MOVED with unbelievable speed for such a large man, and Nicholai just managed to slip the elbow strike that would have crushed his throat. The blow missed by a thread as Nicholai turned sideways and raised his forearm to block. He pivoted to throw a punch of his own at the man’s exposed temple, but his leg gave from under him and he toppled to the floor.
Wu Zhong turned, saw Nicholai on the floor, and raised his leg into an axe kick to cave in his opponent’s chest.
The leg came down, Nicholai rolled away, and Wu Zhong’s heel left a hole in the wooden plank. Wu followed with a low front kick to the head. Nicholai got his arm up in time and took the force of the blow on the shoulder, but his arm went numb. He rolled onto his back just as Wu Zhong reached down to grab him, slipped his kicking leg between Wu’s arms, and struck him full on the chin with the ball of his foot.
Wu Zhong flew backward. The kick should have killed him, or at least knocked him out, but Nicholai hadn’t fully recovered from the ordeal in Kang’s cave, was weak with loss of blood and the blow he had just sustained, so the lethal power wasn’t there.
But it gave him time to jump back to his feet and set himself as Wu Zhong came in, throwing powerful left and right punches to drive Nicholai back toward the wall. Blood flowed freely from his wounded leg now, he felt lightheaded, and knew that if he allowed the larger, stronger man to pin him against the wall, he was finished.
He ducked under the next two punches and drove into Wu’s midsection, his leg sending a fierce jolt of pain through him as he pushed off the floor and drove Wu to the floor. Wu tried to wrap his forearm around Nicholai’s neck to snap it, but Nicholai jerked his head out of the trap as they fell to the floor. Wu did wrap his own leg around Nicholai’s right leg, trapping it, so Nicholai had no choice but to use his wounded leg to pry Wu’s legs apart. Then, despite the pain, he drove three successive knee strikes straight into Wu’s exposed groin.
The man groaned but didn’t yell, and he didn’t change his position. Instead, he brought his big arms up behind Nicholai and pounded his fists into the back of his neck and head.
Nicholai felt the fog gather around him.
First would come fog, then darkness.
He raised himself up to avoid the fists, and that’s what Wu needed. He bucked his hips and threw Nicholai off. Sprawling backward, Nicholai struggled to get up, but his wounded leg wouldn’t let him.
Wu struggled to his feet as Nicholai pulled himself backward along the floor, now seeking the wall so that he could ball himself up against it and try to weather the storm he knew was about to break on him.
The first kick came to the kidney, the next to the small of the back, the next to his wounded leg.
Nicholai heard himself howl in pain.
He pulled himself back, but his arms were too weak now and his feet could find no purchase on the floor.
He wanted to die standing.
He tried to push himself up, but his arms collapsed and he fell flat. All he could do was roll over so that he could at least die facing his opponent. In the clarity before death, he saw the Go board and knew the answer to why Haverford would leave the black stone in place.
He wouldn’t.
He didn’t.
Wu Zhong chambered his leg for the lethal axe kick.
“Salaama,” he said.
Peace.
The bullet struck Wu Zhong square in his broad forehead and he fell backward.
Nicholai turned his head in the direction of the shot.
Colonel Yu lowered his pistol.
The monk, standing behind Yu, squatted beside Nicholai and said, “Satori.”
“You’re late,” Nicholai said.
Then he blacked out.