Covert One 4 - The Altman Code (19 page)

Her uneasiness infected Jon. As he dressed, he asked, “What are you
doing in Shanghai? Officially, I mean.”

“We’re studying to be teachers of teachers. Well, actually, Asgar and I
are. Some of the others are being trained as village leaders or agents
for Beijing. The rest are part of our underground network.”

He pulled baggy corduroy trousers up over his black jeans. “That’s a
damned dangerous game, Alani. For all of you.”

“We know the risks. They’ve arrested thousands of us already and
executed a hundred or so.” She looked him steadily in the eye. “Perhaps
it’s a game for you and the CIA, Colonel. It’s not for us.”

The worn, unpressed white dress shirt was tight over his sweater, but
the flannel shirt slipped on easily. “I’m not CIA,” Jon told her. “And
it’s never been a game for me.”

She considered him. “Yes, I can see that.” “No one’s asked me why I’m
here, what I came for. Not that I intend to tell you.”

“What we don’t know, they can’t get out of us. You’re against the
Chinese or working to ensure the human-rights accord. That’s good enough
for us.”

The harsh scraping of brick on brick interrupted their conversation.

Before the hole was completely open, Asgar climbed through. He was
dressed in the rough clothes of a farmer, with the riding boots of a
sheepherder. He also wore a decorated white skullcap under a straw sun
hat.

He studied Jon from a distance and then closer. “In lousy light, you’ll
pass.” He nodded to Alani. “We’re ready.” “Where are we going?” Jon
asked.

Asgar motioned to the kitchen table where they had eaten dinner. He
spread out a map of the Shanghai Municipal Region and surrounding area
and pointed to a spot south of the city. “There’s an abandoned pagoda on
a hill near the sea in the wider part of Huangzhou Bay, between Jinshan
and Zhapu. The shore’s a bit of a rock garden there, but there are also
a few more inviting beaches. Pebbly, but not bad. One in particular, a
little bigger, will suit fine.”

“How’s the water depth?”

“Not sure, Jon. But Toktufan says a small boat can get close. He’s
worked the waters around there.”

“All right.” Jon picked up his backpack, pulled out a black plastic
pouch, and extracted a detailed topographic map of the Shanghai area
laid over a satellite photograph. He checked the water depths, had Asgar
point out exactly where the pagoda and beach were, and wrote down the
latitude and longitude coordinates in his small waterproof notebook.

When they were finished, he rolled up the maps.

Alani reminded him. “Don’t forget your hats.”

Jon put on the decorated Uigher skullcap and then a brimmed straw hat.

The women started for the hole in the wall. Jon followed.

Asgar stopped him. “We go a different way.”

When the others had left, and the brick section had been restored, Asgar
led him through the rooms to the farthest bedroom. He pushed a box bed
aside, lifted a section of the linoleum-covered floor, and pointed down
in the narrow black hole it exposed.

“This way is for us.”

Jon was dubious. “Am I going to fit?”

“It widens below. Hope you don’t have severe claustrophobia.”

“I don’t,” Jon assured him.

“I’ll go first, old boy. Don’t worry. Piece of cake.” Asgar sat,
dangling his legs in the narrow hole. He looked down once and dropped.

Jon followed, barely squeezing past the floor. The tomblike odors of
dirt and rock filled his head. He scraped his shoulders all the way down
to the bottom of a dark, dank, wood-braced tunnel. A flashlight was
alight ahead, where the tunnel narrowed again. He saw Asgar’s feet and
legs.

Asgar’s voice was muffled. “Bigger men than you have passed through
fine. Just keep your eyes on my feet and the light. It’s about
twenty-five of your American yards.”

Then the light moved, and the feet faded into the dusty shadows ahead.

Jon followed, feeling for the first time in his life what claustrophobia
was– breathing when it felt as if there were nothing to breathe,
certain that in the next second he would be buried alive. His lungs
tightened, and blood throbbed at his temples.

Time seemed to stop as he told himself to inhale, to crawl. Inhale.

Crawl. Follow the feet, as the dark tunnel seemed to swallow him.

At last the air changed. It stank, fetid and thick. Jon gulped like a
dying fish.

“Hurry,” Asgar urged and crawled up to his feet.

Quickly, Jon followed. They had emerged into a dark culvert at the end
of a stench-filled alley. For Jon at the moment, he could not remember a
more beautiful sight.

Asgar trotted ahead, and Jon, still breathing deeply, stumbled after
until they passed through an open iron gate and entered a street where
two Land Rovers waited at the curb. Hands pulled him into the second
vehicle, and he found himself packed into the rear, where the seat had
been removed. Three men and two women pressed against him. He recognized
Toktufan, Mierkanmilia, and the two makeup artists. The fifth was a
stranger, but all were dressed with bits and pieces of traditional
Uigher clothing. Alani rode in the front passenger seat, and Asgar
drove.

“Why two Land Rovers?” Jon whispered.

“Decoy. In case the police are watching.”

The first Land Rover, similarly loaded, headed off.

They waited. Then, five minutes later, they left, too, turning through
dark streets in the early morning hours, until they reached a lighted
main road where there was traffic, but not much.

Asgar glanced back. “We’re going to take the Huhang Expressway toward
Hangzhou. We’ll stand out like a sore thumb: Eight country bumpkins from
Xinjiang, heading south for Hangzhou, like your Okies in the
nineteen-thirties. We’ll look like a joke, not a threat–we hope. If the
Public Security people aren’t already following us, or fell for the
decoy, we might just make it.”

Huhang Expressway, China.

Under the black night sky, the countryside took on a spectral air of
shadows and wavering mists. Jon used a public phone in Gubei New Town in
the Changning District to dial a number in Hong Kong. In French, he
discussed a proposed business deal that was legitimate, if checked upon.

The conversation contained his innocent-seeming code for a rescue by
sea, and it related the time and coordinates. As soon as he hung up, the
contact would relay the information to Fred Klein.

“The line sounded clear, no sign of being tapped,” he told Asgar as the
Land Rover resumed its tortuous passage over the bad road that sliced
through the rocky, rolling land.

“They were listening,” Asgar assured him. “Any long-distance call will
be checked, especially to Hong Kong. What’s good is that low-level
employees do the monitoring, and for them it’s routine. They seldom
catch anyone unless they’re terribly obvious. This time though, the
service knows you’re here, so they’re certain to have ordered a special
alert. But if your contact’s a solid, long-term cover, you may be all
right.”

Jon grimaced. “Thanks.”

They had been stopped twice at routine checkpoints before they left the
city, causing amusement among the police. They had been let through with
little trouble. Jon began to relax. Thirty minutes later, they were on
the expressway, lightly traveled at this late hour, and more than
halfway to Hangzhou. A few kilometers later, they turned off onto a
two-lane rural road near Jiaxing, heading southeast toward the coast and
the East China Sea.

Even in the darkest hours before sunrise, there continued to be other
vehicles–a few passenger cars and an intermittent stream of pickups
driven by small farmers, their produce piled perilously high in their
truck beds. Smaller entrepreneurs rode bicycles, pulling two-wheeled
carts with specialty items to sell in Shanghai.

Asgar drove steadily but slowly, not wanting to attract attention. “If
the security police are watching, they’ll wait until we hit the beach
and the mission’s in progress. They’ll want to capture the rescue team,
too. But we’ve got time, so there’s no sense in taking unnecessary
chances by speeding. With luck, they’re not following us anyway.”

Jon agreed. He settled back and closed his eyes. Everyone but Asgar
dozed, awaking occasionally to the clean salt tang of the open sea and
the sour odor of mudflats.

At Zhapu, they turned northwest toward Jinshan. Here on the coastal
road, the pickups and bicycles flowed in both directions–north to
Shanghai and south to Hangzhou. An occasional police car passed, but the
officers either paid no attention or grinned broadly at the sight of the
unsophisticated rubes.

Finally, the Land Rover pulled off, so Asgar and Alani could check their
position. They consulted and used a penlight to scan the map. Alani
looked back and said something in Uigher. Toktufan squeezed into the
front seat between them. A heated discussion in Uigher began, with
Toktufan pointing at the map and then ahead, and Alani trying,
apparently, to pin him down to an exact location.

She offered him a pen to mark the map. He shrugged, waved off the pen,
and continued to gesture insistently.

Clearly Toktufan was the one who knew exactly where they were going but
strictly by visual aids in the dead of night and from the seat of his
pants. This did not make Jon feel secure, or apparently Alani or Asgar.

Swearing under his breath in Uigher, Asgar pulled back onto the road and
drove on, while Toktufan surveyed the shadowy gloom.

“You sure he can find this beach?” Jon asked.

“He’ll find it,” Alani said. “The only question is when.”

“It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours.” She turned in her seat and smiled
her small, mocking smile. “You wouldn’t want your life to be dull now,
would you, Colonel? Excitement and adventure. That’s why you became an
agent, isn’t it? Incidentally, if you aren’t CIA, what are you?”

Jon kicked himself for saying that earlier. Damn. “State Department.”

“Really?” She seemed to study him, as if she knew what a State agent
looked like. Maybe she did.

Asgar’s voice was harsh. “Ahead!”

Jon saw the uniforms. A police car blocked half the road. It was a
checkpoint.

“Toktufan, in back again!” Asgar ordered.

Toktufan slid out of the front of the slow-moving Land Rover and
squeezed in among the others in the rear once more. The Land Rover
inched ahead in a snakelike line of pickups, old cars, and bicycles. At
the head of the line, drivers and cyclists held up papers. The officer
in charge was leaning sleepily back against his car, yawning. Every now
and then, he barked an order.

The policemen, however, were busy. They checked identifications and
lifted canvases covering loads, whether small or large. When the Land
Rover reached the front, the sleepy officer did a double take. He
straightened alertly and snapped an order.

The two patrolmen gaped at the eight packed into the Rover. One scanned
the papers held out by Alani and Asgar as the second grinned,
entertained. The officer barked again, marched forward, and took the
papers. He studied them and peered up at Asgar and Alani. Alani smiled.

A winning, almost flirtatious smile this time. The officer blinked and
stared.

Jon scrunched low to hide his height and build, and the others pressed
closer. One of the policemen trained his light across all their faces
and said something in Han that included the word Uigher.

The officer, still gazing at Alani, nodded and snapped another order.

The policemen turned their attention to the next two cyclists in line.

The officer smiled, nodded to Alani, and waved them on.

As Asgar drove away, Jon resisted the urge to look back. Everyone
breathed deeply, relieved. The night enclosed the Land Rover with
anonymity, and they smiled and whispered among themselves.

But Jon did not smile or whisper. He asked Alani, “Are checkpoints like
that common?”

“Sometimes in the city, not usually in rural areas.”

“They’ve been alerted by the Public Security Bureau to look for
someone.”

Asgar nodded. “But not for Uighers.”

“An American like me,” Jon agreed.

“It means they don’t know where you are, who you’re with, or what you’re
going to do next. If they did, they’d be swarming the coast right now.”

“They’re obviously thinking I could be trying to leave, or they wouldn’t
have alerted the police so far from Shanghai.”

“That’d be true for any agent whose cover was shattered.”

Jon liked none of it. Someone in Public Security suspected he would call
for help so had ordered the coastal area around Shanghai on alert.

Patrol boats and fighters might be prepared to scramble, too. The patrol
boats did not worry him particularly. Jets were another matter.

But he soon had something else to think about. Toktufan leaned forward,
spoke in Uigher, and gestured eagerly to the left, away from the sea.

Through the press of bodies and heads, Jon caught a glimpse of a narrow
building high on the top of an inland hill. Its roof lines were
up-curved, in the silhouette of a Chinese pagoda. Excitement rippled
through the group.

With a spin of the wheel, Asgar drove the Land Rover abruptly off toward
the ocean. The Rover rattled down into a gully hidden from the road.

Asgar pulled under the cover of a willow and parked. The sudden quiet of
the vehicle made all of them sit still a moment, appreciating it. Shaken
by the long, bone-jarring ride, everyone crawled stiffly out and
crouched in a circle around Asgar and Toktufan. Trees and bushes
surrounded them.

Asgar did the talking in Uigher, with Toktufan throwing in comments and
pointing in various directions in the waning moonlight. When they
finished, one of the women stood up and vanished among the growth,
heading back toward the road above the gully.