The Chinese Assassin (51 page)

As Scholefield’s pen raced
across
his notebook, a soft
footfall behind
him made him turn suddenly.
In
the darkness the indistinct
outline of a woman
was
visible standing motionless
beneath
the archway.
Scholefield
turned
back to
the couch
to find
the
eyes in the sunken face staring intently in the
same
direction. ‘Several
years
ago
the Americans warned
me of the
treacherous
assassination plot formulated by
Li
n
Piao.’ He spoke in a
rising
tone, as though
suddenly he was making
a public speech. ‘Now
the Russians say that
my
own
closest
supporters intrigue against
me.’ He paused gathering his
strength,
and
his voice
fell to a whisper. ‘They
say
that even my wife is involved
in
the plotting.’

His
breathing
h
ad become fast
and shallow and
he raised
his
head and
shoulders
suddenly from the pillow with a visible effort ‘The
burden
of
leadership
in
China has
always been
too
weighty for a single
mind
to bear! I
said many
times I have felt
like
a man attending his
own funeral—enduring veiled glances,
the whispers
behind
a
hundred hands!’
His rheumy
eyes widened and
he stared up slack-mouthed towards the blank ceiling. ‘Now
I know the feelings
of a
man
dying
in the sands
of
the Gobi!
Watching
the vultures
swing down out of
the burning
vault of heaven, their
open throats
stretching for his
Living flesh!’

Twin circles
of
reflected
light
flashed
on her
spectacles
as the
woman stepped forward out- of the shadows. She stopped at the foot of the couch and stood looking down without speaking, her f
a
ce a mask of fury. She drew breath quickly as though preparing to speak—then stepped back with a cry of surprise as the dark coverlet was suddenly flung aside. Scholefield found himself staring at the black revolver clutched in a claw-like hand. The muzzle of the weapon was pointed direc
tl
y at her throat.

‘To be rid of the gun, you must take up the gun!’ He uttered the words in a rasping whisper, holding the revolver steadily in his right hand, his arm at full stretch. His eyes burned again with the sudden unnatural brightness. ‘If I had to obliterate all the truths I have written, save one—I would choose to preserve those few
characters.’

The double gleam of the lamp mirrored in both lenses of her wire-rimmed spectacles bid her eyes as she stared transfixed into the mouth of the gun barrel. The fleshless finger began to tighten on the trigger and she opened her mouth to scream. But no sound came out. Then abruptly the hand began to tremble and the long black barrel wavered. With a great effort he steadied his aim and brought the muzzle to bear again. But the moment the talon-like finger in the trigger guard contracted a second time, the hand shook wildly once more. And this time the trembling became uncontrollable. The revolver swung erratically from side to side for a moment then slipped slowly from the palsied
fingers
and clattered to the floor.

He moaned and his chest heaved as he struggled for breath. His feverish gaze remained riveted for a moment on the motionless figure at the foot of the couch. Then his eyelids fell and his head sank forward onto his chest.

A band touched Scholefield’s arm and he looked up to find Tan Sui-ling motioning him silently to leave. He turned to find the door already open. The vestibule under the archway was empty. The shadowy figure of the woman had departed as silently as
it
had come.

28

Scholefield heard the
cl
ank
of
his
heavy an
kl
e chains before Yang
himself
came
into
sight.
A moment later he appeared round a
bend
in the tunnel, shuffling
painfully
forward a
foot
or
two
at a
time, his wrists manacled
in front of him. His head
was
bent forward,
his
eyes cast down watching the ground. The hollow
-
chested cadre
and the two
guards followed dose
behind.

Sc
h
olefi
el
d stepped aside to let him pass. The
cl
ose-cropped
head
of
the Chinese remained
bowed as he moved slowly on
down
the
tunnel
He
did
not raise his eyes to look at Scholefi
e
ld or
Tan
Su
i
-ling as he edged past them.

The four
guards
at
the
archway
halted Yang with a
shouted order
and
immediately began searching him. Scholefield watched the
m
rip
at
his
jacket, pushing
and
pulling hi
m
roughly back
and
forth between them. One of the younger guards spat
contemptuously
in
his
face .

‘The Chairman is resting,’
said Tan
Sui-ling crisply,
turning
to
address the
hollow-chested
cadre.
‘He is to receive us again after he
has talked with
the prisoner Yang. You will
escort
Scholefield to his
quarters and
post the guard outside for his security!’ She turned to check on
the progress
of the search on Yang. ‘I will remain here to conduct the prisoner into the Chairman’s presence.’

The cadre nodded. He motioned to Schole
fi
eld to follow him
and
set of
f
up the slope of the tunnel. Sc
h
ole
fi
eld hesitated, look
ing back at Yang. He saw the guards stand back respectfully as Tan Sui-li
n
g
approached. She
snapped orders
to two of them and
walked
on stiff-backed, through the archway. Yang raised his head sharply as she
passed
him. For a
fleeting instant
his eyes lost
their
defeated, hangdog look
and
he gazed fiercely at her retreating back until she
disappeared
through the arch. Then
immediately
he
dropped
his eyes, bunching once more into a
submissive crouch
as he shuffled forward
between two guards.

Scholefield’s
escort nudged him roughly with their rifle
butts, and gestured impatiently in the
opposite
direction. Reluctantly he turned away and
started
up the long slope. They climbed in silence for three or four
minutes and
when they
reached the
top, the hollow-chested cadre turned
off
into a dimly-lit
acco
mm
oda
ti
on tunnel lined with
numbered doors
on either
side.
They
walked
on for a further
quarter
of a
mile
then halted outside a door without a number.
The cadre
produced a
key, unlocked
the door
and stood
back, motioning Scholefield inside.

The floor
and walls
of the room
were rough, undecorated
concrete
. A tier of
metal-framed bunks
stood against one
wall and
there was a plain
wooden
table
and four chairs in the
centre. In a smaller, connected room Scholefield
could see
a
sink with taps and a lavatory pedes
t
al. The rooms
were lit by a
buzzing fluorescent tube fixed
to
the ceiling. On
the table stood a large thermos flask decorated
with
red
Chinese characters spelling ou
t
a
quotation from the Collected Works of
Mao
Tse-tung.

‘You will
remain here until
you
are summoned
again!’ The cadre waved towards the
flask
on the table. ‘There is boiled water to drink
.
The
two guards will be stationed outside.
I shall lock the door—for your
own security.’

He went out
quickly
and
sla
mm
ed the
flimsy, wooden door
behind
him.
Scholefield
heard the key turn in
the lock.
There was a murmured burst of conversation between the cadre
and the two
guards, then silence. Scholefield looked at his wristwatch. It was
exactly three thirty
a.m. He
pulled
out one of
the
rough
wooden chairs from
the
table and sat down.
He took
out his
notebook, opened it on the table
and
closed his
eyes
for a long
moment.
Then he plucked a pen from his pocket
and began writing
rapidly.

*
*
*

The ten
thousand seats
in the main assembly
auditorium
of
the
Great Hall of
the
People stood silent
and
empty as Wang Tung
-
hsing hurried across the rear of the red-draped podium. He
was taking
a short
cut
from
his office
to
the little-used chamber reserved
for formal
meetings
of the
Standing
Committee of
the Party
Politburo.
The
auditorium
was
almost in
darkness.
Only the twin spotlights, lodged against the high ceiling to illuminate the
giant
coloured portrait of the
Chairman hanging
above the podium, were lit.

Wang came
out onto a high, broad, marble-floored corridor, turned left
and
stopped
outside a closed
door
guarded
by
two
834
1
soldiers with fixed bayonets on
their
rifles. Even though
they
were
standing motionless, beads
of sweat stood out on
their
faces in the
suffocating heat. As h
e
lifted
his left han
d
to knock Wang
glanced
at his watch. It
was
three-thirty two. He rapped once crisply on the door
and entered
without
waiting
for a
response.

Although
the four men
and
one woman
seated
round the table inside
looked
up at
him
warily as he entered, no greetings were
exchanged.
He
walked
briskly towards them
and
dealt five bulky, buff-coloured files
quickly
round the table onto
their empty
blotters. While they were
still in the
act of opening them he began, talking rapidly.
‘Reports are
continuing to proliferate from all
quarters
of the north
east.
The communication systems of the public security apparatus are
fast
becoming clogged by the reports. In addition to the
animal
behaviour
anomalies, fluctuations
in the telluric current, changes in the radon content of well water
and
other macro-seismic phenomena all point to the
same
con
cl
usion.’ He turned
and
hurried to one wall covered with large-scale
sectional
maps of the People’s Republic of China. He reached up
and
jabbed a finger onto a
map
of the northern provinces hal
f w
ay
betwe
en
Peking
and
the Yellow
Sea
coast. ‘The epicentre could be somewhere here—and
time is running
out fast.’ He
glanced down again at his
watch.
The minute hand
had
crept round to three thirty-five.

He looked up to say
something
further but his gaze lighted suddenly on a tray of glasses
and
bottled
mineral
water on a side table. He
waddled
quickly across the room, twisted
the
stopper from a bottle
and
emptied
its
contents into a glass. When the
last
drop
of
liquid had dripped
out, he turned the bottle upside down on the
table, balancing
it on
its
slender neck. He looked up at
the
five
members
of the
Standing
Committee to
find
them watching him
intently.
‘May I suggest that if
the
bottle
falls
of its
own
accord,’ he
said
quietly, ‘we evacuate
the building
immediately— but go
outside
at
ground
level
Do not use the
underground
tunnel
route to Chung
Nan Ha
i
’

There
was an intense silence in
the room for a moment.

‘It is not
the
most
scientific instrument
for predicting an
earthquake and
it
does
not give a great deal of advance warning— but it is one the
peasants in
my home province have used for many centuries.’

‘What
instructions did
the Chairman give to the man
who
has been his beloved bodyguard since those romantic far-off days in the Yenan caves?’ The
sharp, sarcastic
question came from the bespectacled woman. There
was a
sneer on her face
and
her voice was half
scornful,
half
resentful

Wang walked
slowly back to the table, his face stretched tight
with anxiety.
‘The
Chairman
refuses to be moved from Peking. He
declines
to flee before what he calls “the omens of pigs
and
rats”.’ He directed his words at the tabletop, avoiding the eyes of all those
watching him.
‘I urged him at least to remove himself from the
tunnels
to ground level. But he insists absolutely on remaining where he is.’

‘Perhaps he is
too busy
receiving clandestine foreign
guests—’
Wang looked up sharply.
‘—and
shackled
prisoners in
clanking
chains.’
Her eyes
glittered
behind her spectacles
and
she smirked in
triumph
when she
saw
the surprise on his
fa
ce. ‘It
seems his
confidences with
Comrade Tan, his
empress of foreign intelligence, are withheld even from his old and trusted chief bodyguard.’

Wang drew a deep breath and with an obvious effort directed
his
gaze into
the
empty air above their heads. ‘The
Chairman intimated
that he
was
prepared to
permit his
authority to be lent to whatever emergency action
this meeting may decide—even mass
evacuation. The issue is now extremely urgent, in my view.’ He glanced
down quickly
at his watch
once more.
‘With your permission I
shall
now absent
myself
from your presence for a moment to allow you to
deliberate
in co
n
fidence on your decision.’

Without
waiting
for a response, he turned
and hurried from the room. As soon as he had
closed the door
behind him,
to
the
amazement of the
two
sweating
guards
outside, he broke into a
lumbering,
fiat-footed run down
the centre
of the broad corridor.

The uniformed general,
standing
by the
leaden door
a
hundred
feet beneath the
foundations
of
the Forbidden
City,
stared
hard at the hunched
figure
of
Yang as
he shuffled into the light of the outer vestibule, dragging his
ankle shackles
noisily
across
the concrete floor. Tan Sui-ling stood aside
waiting, her chin
held
high,
watching him approach
with a coolly
contemptuous expression in her eyes.

Yang
hesitated
as he reached the
edge
of the carpeted area, but
didn’t
raise his eyes from
the floor.
The general barked an order for him to
advance and gestured for the
two
guards behind him to remain
where they were.
‘He has been given a
thorough
body search?’
The
two guards nodded vigorously in affirmation, shouting their replies dutifully in unison.

When
Yang
was only three or four feet from him, the general
ordered him to halt. Drawing his pistol from
its
h
olster, be
stepped forward and grabbed the chain linking
Yang’s
handcuffs with his free hand. He tugged at
it roughly,
checking its strength,
then shouted at Yang
to raise his arms in
front of his face. He pressed the pistol into his ribs and
inspected
every link of the wrist manacles individually, holding them inches from his eyes. When he was
satisfied,
he barked another order at Yang to lift his arms higher, then dropped to one knee and jabbed
the muzzle
of the pistol roughly into his groin while he inspected the steel
bands
around his ankles. Again he tested
each
link of the
chains
joining them,
as
he had done with the handcu
f
f
s
, before
rising
to his
feet
once more.

He looke
d
coldly across at Tan Sui-ling. For a moment
their
eyes locked in a stare of mutual hostility. Then with slow deliberate movements, the general unhooked the key
chained
to his left
wrist and inserted
it into the
lock.
Before turning it be
hesitated and glanced back over his shoulder once more at Yang, as
though
beset
by a last moment of
uncertainty.
Yang, however, was
still standing with shoulders bunched, staring down at his
shackled
wrists.

The general eyed him in silence, then as
though making up his mind
finally, slipped his pistol back into
its
holster. He
unlocked
the door
with
a quick movement then turned
and
stepped to
one
side so that Yang could shuffle past him.
Tan
Sui-ling followed him
through the
doorway without
looking
left or right,
and
together they disappeared slowly
into the
gloom
inside.
After a
last glance
at
Tan’s retreat
ing
back the general closed the door and
locked
it carefully
behind
the
m
.