The Chinese Assassin (31 page)

Ketterman finished
scrutinising
the
documents
and tossed them onto the bench. He watched as the point of
the
drill broke
through
the zinc
lining then put a restraining hand on his shoulder.
‘Okay
Cooper?
that’s enough. Now
open
up the garage door.’

Cooper licked his
lips nervously and
hurried
over to the garage
door. When
he’d opened it
Ketterman
slipped
through
and waved a
signal
to the driver behind the wheel of the truck. A
minute later
it had been reversed into the garage.
Cooper
replaced
the
padlock
with hands
that were now trembling violently. His face twitched as be watched the black taxi driver
and the f
a
ir-haired man
climb up into
the mobile
surgery
to lift
the
stretcher out. It
was
covered
with a white
sheet but the outline of a
man’s figure
was discernible
beneath
it. The two
men
m
anoeuvred it carefully down into the
garage, then looked
enquiringly at Ketterman.

At that
instant Cooper glanced
up over his shoulder at the window behind him for the hundredth
time—and
found hi
m
se
lf
staring
into
the distorted
face of
Vladimir Razduhev. Ketter
ma
n
swung round as Cooper
let
out a shriek of fright.
The Russian was peering
through
the
narrow strip of clear glass at the
top
of
the
frosted windows, his f
a
ce
unrecognisable under
the
pressure
of a nylon stocking. As
Ketterman
looked up at him he
dropped
quickly out of sight.

The American shouted
and
wav
e
d
frantically
to the
two men
holding
the stretcher. Immediately
they lowered Yang to the
floor
and slid
h
im
beneath
the heavy
carpenter’s
bench.
Ketterman
snatched a pistol from his briefcase
and
backed against
the bank
of refrigerators
that
lined one wall, co
v
ering
the
‘window where Razduhev’s head had appeared. The black
taxi
driver
and the fair-haired man
drew
hand guns
from
inside their
jackets
and
dragged Cooper down
behind the
carpenter’s
bench.

In the silence
that
followed
Ketterman
pointed mutely to an empty stretcher
and
motioned
towards
the embalming table where the dead Libyan
was
lying. The
two men nodded
quickly and dashed bent double across
the
workshop. They
lifted
the dead Arab
between
them,
dropped
him onto the empty stretcher
and
pulled the sheet up to cover his face. Then they
ran
back across the workshop to where Ketterman had set up two more empty
trestles
beside the open casket
and
lowered the stretcher hurriedly onto them before dropping
behind
the bench again.

For a moment there
was silence,
broken only by
Cooper’s intermittent whimpering from behind the bench where he was hiding. Then
the
distant
rumble of another train approaching along the overhead track
began
to
make
the coffin racks tremble once more.
Ketterman glanced
up suddenly
and
caught sight of Bogdarin’s face
watching these
preparations
intently
from a small square window in
the opposite wall
above
the
refrigerators. But he
dropped
from
sight too
as the sound of the train thundering onto the viaduct
became
a deafening roar. A moment later the
sound
of the
glass shattering was
drowned in the roar of
the train’s
passage and
the barrels
of the sub
machine
guns that
Razduhev
and
Bogdarin
had carried dismantled in their tool boxes burst through a window
and began
stitching
uneven threads
of
bullets
along the racked cons a few feet above the
ground.

The
Americans pressed themselves
to the
floor
beneath this lethal barrage
and
watched helplessly as one of the
Russians
directed a long burst of fire at the stretcher beside the open casket. The body
under
the sheet leapt
and
jerked spasmodically as the
bullets
slammed into it and
eve
n
tually
the trestles broke and collapsed under it. The attack lasted about
fifteen seconds in
all,
and
the shooting ceased as abruptly as it had
begins
when both
Russians
dropped out of sight.

Gradually
the noise of the train faded slowly into the distance. The coffin racks
stopped shaking and silence settled
slowly over the chilly embalming room once more. Even Cooper’s whimpering which the others had
heard
intermittently
throughout
the
attack,
had
stopped at last.

15

For a
full minute after
the Russians
disappeared Ketter
m
an
allowed nobody to move.
Then
he stood up slowly himself and1
still
watching the windows carefully, walked over to where the stretcher had been concealed. He took hold of
Yang under
the armpits
and
dragged him out from
under the carpenter’s bench.
The black taxi driver
took his feet and
together they lifted him gently into
the
open
“Connaught” casket. The expression
on the face of the
Chinese was peaceful and
relaxed. His eyes were closed
and his breathing was
even. A
puzzled
frown creased Ketterman’s brow for an
instant and
he
glanced
up
uneasily
at the
window
where he’d
caught
sight of Bogdar
i
n’s face. Then he
shrugged and returned his attention to
the job in hand. When
they had
settled Yang
satisfactorily with
a pillow under his
head, Ketterman looked
round
for
the
little undertaker.

Silent and
apparently even now petrified
with fright,
he
was
still
crouched motionless behind
the carpenter’s bench.
‘Okay
Mr. Cooper, the bully boys have gone,’
said Ketterman
soothingly, ‘you can come out now.’

When Cooper didn’t move
K
etterman walked
over
and
patted
him
consolingly on
the shoulder.
The
instant the American’s fingertips
touched
him, Cooper pitched
forward.
His
head thudded dully
against the
stone floor
and
he
r
olled slowly onto his back. When
Ketterman saw
the ragged hole above his left eyebrow he lifted both hands to his temples and stood motionless
with
his eyes closed for fully half a minute. When he opened them again the
fair-haired man and
the black taxi driver were
standing looking
at him expressionlessly,
waiting
for
instructions.

‘One
of the
individual refrigerators I guess.’
He waved a hand wearily over his shoulder.
‘And
make sure you lock
it.
It’s
far
from
ideal
but it
might just give us the time
we
need.’

Ketterman walked
over
and lifted
the sheet covering the dead Libyan. The
fusillade
of
bullets had
done surprisingly little damage to the
bloodless
corpse.
Dry puncture
marks spread
thickly across
the trunk of the body but
the
face and neck were unmarked. ‘There’s a casket
addressed
to Beirut in that rack by the door. Drag it out
and
open it up with this.’ He picked up a plumber’s chisel from the workbench. ‘Put
our bullet-riddled
friend inside and dump the
Lebanese
on the slab. We
just
gotta hope the imam won’t notice the
difference
when he comes to wash him.’

Ketterman
took off his jacket
and
picked up
the zinc
inner
lid for Yang’s
casket.
He lowered it carefully over the face of the
Chinese and fitted
it into the side
grooves.
He watched with
satisfaction
as the
unconscious man’s
breath fogged the glass of the
identification
window a few inches above his face. Then he
connected
up the acetylene gas cylinder to a burner, picked up a
foot-long
strip of
solder and directed the flame
onto it
until
it began
dripping
into the runnel
around
the edges of the
zinc
panel.

When
the
other
two
men had opened up
the
coffin bound for Beirut they undressed
its
corpse and removed it to the embalming slab. Then they put the bullet-riddled Libyan inside
and using
another
acetylene
set, soldered a new lid into place. Ketterman told them to turn round all the coffins that
had been raked
by
the
gunfire so
that
the holes wouldn’t be discovered immediately. They also cleaned up the glass from the broken
windows and fitted sheets
of opaque polythene over the
missing
panes
with
sticky tape.

When he’d finished soldering,
Ketter
m
an
stood
looking
down at the f
a
ce of the
Chinese
beneath the
inspection
panel. Yang’s breath
was still misting
the glass regularly as he
exhaled.

‘What
in God’s
name happens
to him if he wakes up while he’s
still sealed in?’ asked the black driver in an awed voice. ‘
I
t would take me all of thirty seconds to go permanently insane in there.’

‘Sedation will last him twenty-four hours,’ said Ketterman
crisply.

They lifted
the
wooden coffin top into place and screwed
it
down, then
t
ugged
the
tailor-made hessian cover around
it.
They checked to make sure that
it wasn’t
torn and that
none of the
breathing holes were visible. Then
the fair-haired man sewed up
the
end
with a
long
string bodkin.
With the
hessian
stretched
tight
around it, the
casket looked, as was intended
by
those
who made the rules,
like any
other
innocent
freight package. They loaded it
into the
back of one of
the collecting ambulances and Ketterman
drove it out.
The fair-haired man took
the five-ton
truck and
the black driver
followed in his cab
along the
quiet, lunchtime street.

Two miles away
near a junction
with the
M4 motorway Ketterman handed
over the
ambulance
to the black
driver,
who took it to
Hatton
Cross
and delivered
the
coffin
on
behalf
of
Mr. Arthur Cooper
of
Jarvis’
to the
Pan American cargo supervisor,
at five
minutes
to two. The fair-haired man parked the
truck in a car park
of a nearby public
house and
checked in for
his shift using
the
fake identity card
he’d carried with him in his stolen
Pan
Am overalls.
Ketterman
took
a
ta
xi
to the Post
House hotel, dose to
the
Heathrow passenger terminals, and booked into a single room.

At five
o’clock
he
left again, took a taxi to Terminal Three and checked
onto
the six o’
cl
ock Pan Am flight
to
Washington. Because
of the
long queues
for routine
security checks
on
hand
baggage
and
body
searches,
the
Boeing
747
didn’t trundle
out onto the taxiing
runway until six thirty-five. When
it
finally made its
long
lumbering run
along the
southbound runway ten minutes
later,
Ketterman was sitting in a seat in the first class section,
sipping a
glass
of
chilled champagne.

Somewhere
beneath him
in the underbelly of the aircraft a
partly-tranquilised
dog in a
straw-lined crate raised its head and
howled in fear when it
detected faint
but
unmistaka
bl
e
signs of
human life
coming from the box
lying beside
it.

Half an hour
later
as the
airliner headed
out over the Irish
Sea
the dog cocked
its
head
again to listen. Against
the
dull background
roar of the engines it
heard
the noise of a man crawling
clumsily across
the floor of the
darkened
hold
and
it began to whine once more. It heard the
scrape of metal
on metal as the fair-haired
American
struggled among the closely packed
freight
cases, carrying a torch in one
hand and
a
knife in
the other. When he found Yang’s casket he cut away the
hessian until he had
uncovered the screw
heads countersunk
into the lid. He removed
these with
the
knife and
eased the lid aside.
By the
light of the torch he
saw the viewing window in the zinc
panel
had
now
misted
over completely. He
quickly fitted
suction pads from his
pockets
onto all four
corners and
cut round the edge of the
glass with
a
diamond tipped
cutting tool
Then
lie lifted the
glass and
touched Yang’s forehead
with
his
fingertips.
His skin
was
burning hot
and his breathing was fast and shallow.

The
American took
a pad of cloth soaked in
surgical
spirit
from
a
small medical satchel
strapped around his waist inside his overalls and wiped the
perspiration
from Yang’s face. Then he
extracted a flat
vacuum pack of ice cubes from
the satchel, wrapped several inside
the cloth,
and
held them gently
against the
Chinese
man’s
burning forehead. With his free
hand
he loosened the cloth around his
throat to
ventilate his
body as
far as possible.