Chapter 15: Drunk

'We couldn't do anything,' Pepperidge said. 'The police were already there.'

My skin crawled.

'What time was that?'

'My chap got there just before noon.' He took another spoonful of soup.

'He was fast,' I said.

'Adequate.'

'New to the field?'

'Oh, no. Been here a year.'

'English?'

'Chinese. How are you feeling?'

'Bit skewed, still. Listen, when you debriefed him, did he say how long he thought the police had been there when he turned up?'

'He said not long. They hadn't brought the body out.'

'How long did he stay?'

'A good hour. He was in a Jeifang, made out-'

'What's that?'

'Sorry — truck, big as a dinosaur, always breaking down, so it was good enough cover, he had the bonnet up, got some spanners out.'

'He's Bureau?'

'Yes. Reports to Hong Kong.' His yellow eyes were on me suddenly. 'You're active, are you?'

'Call it eighty percent.' He hadn't been satisfied when I'd told him I was a bit skewed. I shouldn't have done that, got to play by the book, and the book says the shadow executive has to give his director in the field his exact condition when asked for. All right, say eighty percent. Fully active would mean I was fit enough to do anything at all, nothing barred, run a mile flat out or swim submerged or deal with any sort of attack and defeat it and get clear. I couldn't do that, not as I felt now: the head was still a degree dizzy and I could feel the effect of the altitude in the lungs.

'Look,' I said, 'they couldn't have got onto it that fast, I mean from their end.' They couldn't in other words have put down that agent as missing and started a search for him and found him at the temple: there hadn't been time. 'Someone must have heard the shots and reported it.'

Pepperidge was quiet for a moment. The inference was there all right and it gave me the creeps: if anyone had heard those shots they could have seen me leaving the temple soon afterward, and given the police my description.

'Possible,' Pepperidge said at last.

Two people came in, peasants, slamming the door, and it reached my nerves. 'It's not very good,' I said, 'is it?'

'Not very.' Spooned some soup. 'Nil desperandum.'

Easy to say. The KCCPC had suspected that Xingyu Baibing was here in Lhasa because he'd blown it at the embassy in Beijing, and now they'd found that body it wouldn't be long before they identified it even though I'd made a gesture and changed coats and taken his papers, and they'd check their assignment roster and find that the agent posted on watch at the apothecary's wasn't there anymore and that'd be all they'd need.

'How did you do it?' Pepperidge asked me. The agent?'

This was for Norfolk, for the new recruits. 'I broke the thyroid cartilage with a half-fist, immediate internal hemorrhage.'

'He had a gun?'

'Yes.'

'And he fired it.'

'Yes.' He could smell the cordite on me.

'How much light was there?'

'Not much. Practically dark.'

Tell those poor bloody children at Norfolk to try that one against a loaded gun and they'd get their brains blown out. Don't do as I do, and so forth.

'How did you get here?' Pepperidge asked me.

'There was a tourist bus at the monastery down the road, just starting back.'

He thought about that. 'Who was running it?'

'Couple of Australians. There weren't any Chinese,' I said, 'on board.'

'Good-o.' He finished his soup and pushed the plate away and said, 'I've been in signals with London, as you can imagine.' Because of the temple thing. 'They asked me what I thought our chances are now." His yellow eyes on me.

'Chances of what, specifically?'

'Of protecting the subject.'

'What did you tell them?'

Head on one side, 'What would you have told them?'

I gave it a minute, not the time for making a wild guess. 'I'd have said our chances are fifty-fifty.'

He looked away. 'You're that sanguine?'

'I'm not a bloody amateur at this kind of thing.'

'No offence, of course. But you see, you're operating on foreign soil with the police, the public security forces, the intelligence services, and the military already searching for the man you're assigned to protect. On top of that, this town is under martial law and there's a curfew.' His fingers drummed softly on the bare-wood table. 'I don't think your chances are fifty-fifty.'

'Tough shit.'

'I understand how you feel.'

'So what did you tell them?'

'I told them that in my considered opinion our position is close to untenable.'

If he'd been Loman or Fane I'd have walked out and gone underground and taken Xingyu with me. But this man I could respect, and he wasn't getting cold feet; he was seeing things as they were, or as he thought they were.

'Most of the situations in most of the missions we're given are untenable, for Christ's sake. It's part of the job, you know that.'

He leaned closer, tracing the edges of the stains on the tabletop with a finger. 'There's so much stacked, you see, on this one. We have to play for safety, can't go taking risks. We-'

'So what did they say?'

His finger tracing the stains, 'Your instructions are to get the subject to Beijing as soon as possible, without waiting for the deadline.'

Bloody dog sniffing around my feet and I kicked out and got a yelp. 'Shepley said that?'

'Hyde. But of course it would have come from Bureau One.'

'They're out of their bloody minds.'

'At first glance, perhaps. But they have a point.'

Door slammed again, they wanted a bit of rubber or something on that door, stop it banging all the time, got on your nerves. 'They're not out here in the field,' I said. 'They're five thousand miles away in London looking at a chessboard, what the hell are you talking about?'

'I don't think,' he said, 'that they're asking the impossible.'

The thing was to keep my voice down, keep control, but it wasn't easy. 'The whole of this operation's built on timing and coordination. He can't go into Beijing until they're ready for him there, until the tanks have taken control and they can meet him at the airport and escort him to Tiananmen Square. You know that. And now London's pushing the panic button and telling me to go pitching into a precipitate last-ditch sauve qui peut that's going to cut right across Bamboo and blow it to hell.'

He waited for a while, looking past me at the people in here, fingers drumming softly on the bare stained wood, giving me time to listen again to what I'd just said, test it out perhaps, perhaps re-assess.

It didn't work. Let the defence rest. Bloody London.

His eyes came back to rest on mine, and his voice was gentle.

'The overall timing is important, yes, but not to us. We are local. Our bailiwick is here. All we're being asked to do is to get the subject out of Lhasa and into Beijing, and the only difference is that they want us to do it now, instead of later.'

Head throbbing, wouldn't leave me alone. That worried me, because it wasn't the injury so much, it was the stress, and if the executive was starting to lose his cool at this stage of the mission then God help us all.

The door opened again and I tensed, waiting for the bang.

'I don't see anything precipitate here,' Pepperidge said. 'Right or wrong — and I think I'm right — I've reported that our position here is nearly untenable, and London is simply changing procedure to protect the mission. When we started out, we believed that Beijing was too hot for our subject, so we brought him here — the last place, as he told us, where they'd expect him to be. Now things have changed. Lhasa has got too hot for him, and the last place they're going to look for him is in Beijing. We've got plenty of people there, and they'll keep him underground till everything else is ready.' He leaned forward, touching my arm. 'There's no real problem, you see.'