Chapter 8: Mask

Koichi opened one end of the big plastic bag and lowered it over Xingyu Baibing's shoulders with his head sticking out of the hole.

'Please excuse! Not polite to put gentleman in garbage bag! You have had cast taken before?'

'No.'

Xingyu was sitting upright in a deck chair under one of the binnacle lamps. Koichi had tried talking to him in Chinese when he'd come aboard, but either he wasn't fluent or the good doctor wished us all in hell and wasn't ready to exchange any courtesies. I shall wear no mask, he'd told Pepperidge.

'You have sometimes claustrophobia?'

'No.'

'Good! Sit still, please.' He pulled a bald cap over Xingyu's head and drew the hairline across it with a felt pen and used the glue and began mixing the alginate in a bowl. I'd seen this done before at Norfolk as a demonstration, not by this man but by the master himself, Robert Schiffer.

I was now watching the operation again, and very carefully, because I might have to put this thing on Xingyu myself, when he flew into Beijing.

Pepperidge was on the telephone again, talking in Chinese, presumably booking our seats on the charter flights; he would leave before us on an earlier flight to set up the safe house and a base for himself in Lhasa. When Xingyu had been using the head before the Japanese had come aboard, Pepperidge had told me, 'I spoke to Bureau One personally, and we agreed that the subject would be psychologically more manageable in Tibet — closer to his wife and friends — than if we took him to London. The point was made that we should let him feel endangered, just as they are, with the KCCPC hunting him down. What do you think?"

'I think you're right. He won't feel quite so much that he's left his people in the lurch.' But it took some saying. I didn't, quite frankly, fancy Tibet.

'Exactly. I don't believe, actually, that we would have stood much chance of getting him on a plane for London. I think he would've slipped us and tried to get back to Beijing.'

'I didn't expect him to be so bloody tricky. Now we know how he feels about his wife I'm surprised he ever agreed to coming out here to Hong Kong in the first place.'

Pepperidge had touched my arm. 'It was the only way he could get out of the embassy, and he wanted to get out of there to be with his wife. Hong Kong was the only place the Chinese would agree to, for obvious reasons.' The only place outside China that was saturated with their security agents. 'We've got to consider the man he is, and make allowances. He's always been ready, to defy his government openly and in public, and here we are trying to smuggle him through a security tunnel and he doesn't like that, doesn't like subterfuge, anonymity.'

It had been an apology, in a way. Pepperidge and Bureau One had agreed to push me through the mission right under the nose of the KCCPC, and I hadn't got a choice: these were instructions.

'Still, please. Keep still!'

Xingyu Baibing had started jerking his head around, trying to say something. The alginate was covering the whole of his face now, and I suppose he was feeling stifled.

'You say you do not have claustrophobia! Now I do this for you, and you breathe better!' The timer went off and Koichi reached around to the table and reset it.

From what I've seen at Norfolk it's not much of a joke: the stuff has got to be pushed right into the corners of the eyes and under the lashes, it wouldn't have made Xingyu feel any better to know what the Japanese was actually doing: he was making a death mask.

'As soon as you possibly can.' Pepperidge was on the phone to someone else now, in English. 'I want to leave here in the morning, not later than oh eight hundred. My flight's at nine-oh-five.'

Visas. Passports and visas. There must have been a hitch somewhere, because the Bureau forgers in Hong Kong who serviced our Far East sector would have got their instructions direct from London days ago.

'I'll pick mine up on my way to the airport. You'll bring theirs when you bring the car.'

Don't worry, he'd told me, but he wasn't trusting the Volvo out there. There was almost no chance that anyone had seen us switch cars on our way here from the airport, but if there was a chance in a thousand he wasn't taking it.

'Are all the bags ready?'

One for Xingyu, one for me, the clothes secondhand and worn a little, Hong Kong labels on them, the luggage tags already fixed, the initials on the bags matching our cover names. The only thing Xingyu would take from here would be the insulin and the needles.

'At whatever time,' Pepperidge said and rang off.

'Must wait now,' Koichi told us, and his smile was a fraction weary. To do that job really well is exacting. 'Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.' When he left here he'd be working most of the night to produce a positive from the negative and have it ready by morning.

'What about a drink?' Pepperidge asked him.

'Not yet. When finished, then some sake!' He touched the alginate here and there, his fingers as sensitive as a blind man's. 'Will make you look older, you understand, maybe ten years older. Depressing! But then-' He picked at the mask, dropping a fleck of the stuff into the bowl. 'But then when you take off, young again! Very cheerful then!'

It was nearly midnight when he peeled off the negative and studied the inside, holding it to the light, turning it, nodding and frowning; then the big grin came again. 'It is good. Will be good mask, finally!'

Pepperidge switched off the cabin lamps for a moment and Koichi slipped through the door and vanished into the rain. Xingyu went into the galley and washed his face, snorting and making a lot of fuss. 'You are taking a great deal of trouble,' he said as he used a towel, 'to protect me from the security forces, and you say you are in favour of a democracy in my country. But what possible interest could the British have in the fate of China?'

'We're traders,' Pepperidge told him, 'and China's a huge country, with a lot of potential profit for the West.'

'I see. You have no actual sympathy for the Chinese people and their predicament.'

'But of course. I would happily go to Beijing and lead your people to freedom, but my government believes that you can do it rather more effectively.'

Koichi was back before seven in the morning and fitted the mask and brought out his mirror for Xingyu and I had a feeling of slipped focus, putting myself in the place of the Chinese and getting a sense of what was going through his mind, because that wasn't his face in the mirror, nothing like it, an older man's, unrecognizable. All I could see of Dr Xingyu Baibing were his eyes, and they were frightened. I suppose he'd already begun to feel a certain loss of identity since he'd run through the doors of the British embassy a week ago and asked for asylum, to be sequestered among aliens and cut off from his wife and his friends, and now he was on foreign soil and staring into a mirror at a face he'd never seen before. He wasn't, after all, an intelligence agent; he was an astrophysicist.

'It's good,' Pepperidge said. 'It's good, Koichi.'

'Yes. Am satisfied. Sake now.' Huge grin. 'No, is joke, I go home now.' To Xingyu: 'When you leave here?'

'Eight tomorrow,' Pepperidge said. 'Eight in the morning.'

'I will come here half past seven, to fit mask again.' He peeled it off, and I noticed Xingyu grab at the mirror again and stare into it, and the fright go out of his eyes. Koichi laid the mask gently into a white cardboard box and went to the door of the cabin. 'Go home now.' A formal bow to Xingyu — 'Thank you' — and one for us — 'Thank you' — and he was gone.

The rain had stopped, and through the doorway I could see white mist clouding across the water of the bay and the bristling masts of the marina, half lost in the haze, their pennants hanging limp. In the stillness of the morning a voice sounded, a long way off, and the slam of a hatch cover.