“Only to be a congenial host.”
That settled, they ordered the buns, and, friends again, ate and discussed safely mundane topics such as the weather.
Then they got up and went to the bank.
Although they deeply resented these symbols of capitalism, the Communists nevertheless needed banks to conduct business, so several survived in Beijing, their staffs vaguely shamed and tinged with guilt by association.
“Which bank?” Chen asked when they got into the car.
“Banque de l’Indochine,” Nicholai answered.
“Of course.” Chen’s response was colored with mild irony. There were banks and there were banks — some kept a close eye on the transactions of their depositors, others were more famous for blinking. Banque de l’Indochine had a well-earned reputation for the latter, its censorial eyesight as stringently selective as that of Southeast Asia itself— cheerfully and self-consciously corrupt.
If a French arms dealer was going to conduct shady monetary business in Asia, Banque de l’Indochine was the place to do it.
Nicholai took a pack of cigarettes from his coat and offered one to Chen and the other to the driver, then lit all three.
“Xie xie,” the driver said, the first words he had spoken to Nicholai.
It took only a few minutes to get to the bank. The driver waited in the car while Chen took Nicholai inside and asked to see the manager.
All bank managers are the same, Nicholai thought as the man emerged from his office, looking slightly startled at having been interrupted for business this close to opening time. This one quickly affected the standard attitude that any transaction with a depositor was an interruption.
Nicholai had intended to speak Chinese, but now he used French instead.
“Do you speak French, Comrade?”
“Yes, of course,” the manager said, jutting his chin toward the window, into which the French “Banque de l’Indochine” was etched.
Nicholai thought the manager looked a little uncomfortable in his Mao jacket. Certainly he would have preferred the standard charcoal gray suit that was uniform for bankers back in the good old days.
“I wish to make a wire transfer and I wish to make it privately,” Nicholai said, deliberately rude so that the banker would instantly understand the difference in their social status, behave obediently, and want him to conduct his business quickly and leave. He didn’t want the manager to check too many papers or perform too much due diligence.
“You have an account with us, I assume?”
“Yes, of course,” Nicholai said. He handed the manager his passbook, created by the CIA’s forgers.
The manager glanced at it. “And your passport?”
Nicholai gave him the passport, and the manager looked from the photo to Nicholai and then back again. “Very well, Mon — Comrade Guibert. Please come with me.”
When Chen started to come with them, the manager snapped, “Not you.”
Nicholai followed the manager down a hallway to a glassed cubicle that contained a desk and a single chair. He gestured for Nicholai to sit down and then said, “Please complete these forms.”
Nicholai sat and filled out the complex paperwork as the manager discreetly turned his back. He handed the papers over and the manager asked him to make himself comfortable and wait.
As he waited, Nicholai hoped that Haverford had indeed deposited the necessary funds. The Chinese were serious about business and wouldn’t tolerate a deadbeat. If the funds are not in the account, Nicholai thought, I will be swiftly shown the door and just as quickly given the bum’s rush out of the country.
That was the best scenario. The worst possibility would be that the paperwork would trigger an internal alert of some kind, that there had been a leak from CIA, and that it would be the Chinese police, not the cowed manager, who returned to the room.
The phone rang in Haverford’s room at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.
“Monsieur Cartier?” the voice asked, speaking French with a heavy Vietnamese accent.
“Yes?”
“A large transfer of funds request has just come through our Vientiane branch,” the speaker said, “and triggered an internal notice that you were to be notified.”
“Yes?”
“From a Monsieur Guibert?”
“Routed to what destination, please?”
The speaker rattled off an account number in Lausanne.
“That’s fine, yes.”
“Thank you. Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
Twenty long minutes later, the manager returned with the happy news that everything seemed to be in order, and escorted Nicholai to a different room where a wire operator sat behind a broad wooden table. The manager handed the operator the papers and told him to effect the transfer.
“The funds will be available at opening of business in Switzerland,” the manager said, nonverbally according Nicholai more respect. It had been a very large sum indeed.
“Thank you,” Nicholai said.
“Thank you for banking with us,” the manager replied. Then, needing to let Nicholai know that he was a busy man, he added, “If there is nothing else?”
“That will be all, thank you.”
Nicholai met the insulted Chen back in the lobby.
“Finished?” Chen asked brusquely.
“The man is an officious fool,” Nicholai said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I would like to see some of the sights now,” Nicholai said, “if you would be kind enough to escort me.”
“With pleasure.”
They got back in the car and headed for the Great Wall.
38
THE PLAN, HAVERFORD THOUGHT as he stood at the Star Ferry landing in Kowloon, is coming together.
Hel had received the message sent through the Muslim restaurant. He knew where to go and how to get there. The members of the extraction team, composed of Hui, were making their way to the Temple of the Green Truth.
“We’ll need some talent,” Haverford warned. “Things could get tough.”
Benton answered, “The whole team is trained in a Muslim Chinese martial art — bajiquan. Very good for close-range work in confined spaces. Same art used by Mao’s personal bodyguard. The team leader is a master.”
“He’ll need to be,” Haverford said.
“Don’t worry,” Benton answered. “He’s quick and clean.”
Quick, maybe, Haverford thought, but nothing about what we do is ever clean.
It would be good to get out of Hong Kong. Haverford never really liked the city, and the British were ridiculously sensitive about the “cousins” poaching on their turf. Just this morning, his British counterpart, Wooten, had accosted him at the breakfast table at the Peninsula before Haverford could even get down a cup of the less than mediocre coffee.
“Good morning, Adrian,” Haverford said. “A little early for you, isn’t it?”
“A Bloody Mary’s on the way over,” Wooten answered. A large, bluff man with, if Haverford recalled correctly, a rugby background, Wooten looked out of place in China. Looks were deceptive — Wooten was a noted Sinologist, a first at Cambridge and a lifetime in Asia attesting to the fact. “What brings you onto my patch, Ellis?”
“It isn’t the coffee, I’ll tell you that.”
“Then what is it?”
“Awfully direct, Adrian.”
“It’s early and I’m hungover.” The waiter arrived with the Bloody Mary. Wooten took a grateful sip.
“Just passing through,” Haverford said, “on my way back from Macau, checking in with some of the tea-leaf readers there.”
“Anything my king should know about?”
“Not unless he’s awfully bored,” Haverford said. “It’s the usual unusual — the Chairman is winnowing his enemies, what opposition he has are keeping their heads low, anti-this and anti-that campaigns are going on.”
“My boys reported a Benton sighting yesterday.”
>
“Everybody gotta be someplace,” Haverford answered, echoing the old Myron Cohen joke. He’d have to catch him the next time he was back in New York. But damn Benton and his leadfootedness.
Wooten nodded. “But a Benton sighting and a Haverford sighting. Raises the hackles, you must admit.”
Haverford shrugged.
Wooten’s red face turned unusually serious as he said, “I don’t want you mucking around on my pitch, Ellis. You, or Benton, or the both of you. Do I make myself clear?”
“I’m just back to Tokyo, Adrian.”
“Didn’t mean to be inhospitable,” Wooten said. “How are you getting to the airport?”
“Taxi.”
“No need,” Wooten said. “I’ll get one of my boys to drive you. Otherwise they just sit around all day quaffing beer.”
So I’m being escorted out of the colony, Haverford thought.
All right by me, the planning here is about done anyway.
39
WU ZHONG SMASHED his elbow into the wooden post.
A bolt of pain shot up from his forearm, through his wrist, and into his hand, still open in the distinctive “rake” posture that gave bajiquan its name, but Wu exhaled it away and looked back at the splintered wood. His elbow had put a hole three inches deep into the post.
That was bajiquan — it relied on quick, single, devastating strikes. Its great master Li Wu Shen once said, “I do not know what it feels like to hit a man twice.” Had this post been a man, the explosive force of the blow would have shattered his throat or his forehead, or simply stopped his heart. Wu would have continued practicing, but heard the call for prayer from the minaret just a block away.
He slipped into a white kaftan, put on his cap, and stepped out of the dojo onto Nelson Street. The mosque was the largest in Hong Kong, servicing the island’s small but devout Muslim community. The ulama had grown in recent years, as refugees fled from the mainland and found a more congenial home in cosmopolitan Hong Kong than in Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan.
As he walked toward the mosque, Wu was glad to be going to prayer. Tonight he would be infiltrated through the New Territories across the border into his homeland. The assignment itself should be nothing, the danger lay in getting in and getting out. A wushu instructor with the KMT Army for years before he retired to civilian life, he would find rough handling if he fell into Communist hands.
Now thirty-five years old, Wu had a wife and three young children who needed him. Still, he could not refuse an assignment like this. It paid well; moreover, it allowed him to strike a blow against the hated Communists, godless Kaffirs who oppressed his people. Not only would he bring home a year’s worth of income, but the American agent promised to provide a shipment of rifles to the nascent rebel movement in Xinjiang.
A tall man with impressively broad shoulders, he had to turn sideways to get through the old doorway of the mosque. He shucked off his slippers, found the prayer mat in its accustomed place, walked into the sanctuary, and knelt. Several other men, all friends from the neighborhood, were already there and had begun prostrating themselves.
Stretching his forehead to the floor, Wu could not get the assignment out of his mind. Killing was as nothing. He had used his mastery of bajiquan to kill many times before — Communists in Shanghai, Japanese in Hunan, and then the Reds again until Chiang gave up the fight and left so many of them to flee for their lives.
Now he was in a new war — a jihad to save his people. If killing helped to achieve that, then so be it. He would do it and if it was God’s will that he survive and come home to his family, then inshallah. If not, at least he knew that the ulama would not let his family starve. A brother would marry his widow and take care of his children.
Comforted by that thought, Wu gave himself over to prayer, and the ritual, as always, felt good to him. Old, solid, and reliable. There was joy in pure worship, peace in the repetition of the ancient words as he chanted, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.”
40
A BLEARY-EYED LEOTOV stood in front of Voroshenin’s desk.
He had worked all night and now Voroshenin didn’t as much as offer him a glass of tea, although he sipped his own, the white sugar sitting at the bottom of the glass like sand under a lake at one of the vacation dachas that Voroshenin could use but Leotov couldn’t.
“So?” Voroshenin asked.
Leotov started with Guibert.
It all seemed to check out. The Guiberts were indeed a Languedoc family of arms merchants with loose ties to the French Communist Party. Papa Guibert opened a Hong Kong office to take advantage of the business opportunities presented by the incessant warfare between Chinese warlords following the 1911 Revolution. He appeared to have ceased operations during the Japanese occupation, owing his survival to that discretion and to the Vichy French status as noncombatants. There were rumors, however, that he continued to work, with American collusion, with Vietnamese rebels fighting against the Japanese, especially but not exclusively Ho Chi Minh and that lot.
His leftist ideology appeared to be somewhat flexible, as, after the war, he dealt with both Nationalists and Communists in China, as well as with independence movements in French Indochina.
“Connections with L’ Union Corse?” Voroshenin asked, citing the Corsican mafia that controlled the drugs and arms between France and its Southeast Asian colonies.
“Naturally,” Leotov answered, “although Guibert isn’t Corsican, so the relationship is strictly business. Certainly he dealt with La Corse during the war.”
“What about the son?” Voroshenin asked.
“Michel?”
Voroshenin sighed. “Yes.”
Again, all appeared to be as it seemed. Leotov laid some grainy photographs on the desk. The son was born in Montpellier but raised in Hong Kong, hence his fluent Cantonese. He had the reputation of a gambler, womanizer, and ne’er-do-well, out of his father’s favor until after the war and the auto accident.
“The what?”
“There was a car crash in” — Leotov checked his notes — “the summer of ‘50, in Monaco. Michel had apparently dropped a bundle at the casino, drowned his sorrows, and crashed the car halfway through a wicked S-curve.”
Apparently it was touch and go for a while, and Guibert fils needed extensive surgery to repair his face. The surgeries seemed to have accomplished a character transplant of a sort — the son emerged a changed, more serious man, eager to take his place in the family business.
“That’s interesting,” Voroshenin said.
Leotov shrugged. He really didn’t see what was so interesting about it.
Voroshenin did. He hadn’t survived the Stalinist purges by being tone deaf, and this auto accident struck a discordant note. Reconstructive facial surgery followed by a moral metamorphosis?
“Where is the father now?” he asked. “Do we know?”
“I suppose in Hong Kong.”
“You suppose? Find out.”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“All right, what about Ivanovna?”
“I have a full report.” Leotov started to recite his findings.
“Leave it.”
“But there are —”
“I said to leave it.”
Leotov set the file on the desk and left.
Voroshenin opened the desk drawer. He had a feeling he would need a stiff drink to read this file.
41
THE GREAT WALL certainly is, Nicholai thought.
A monumental, as it were, achievement of architecture and organization. But, like a static Go defense, it never fulfilled its function of keeping out an invader. There is no point building a wall when the gatekeepers can be purchased.
Still, the wall was a marvel to see, as it stretched along the rises and falls of the ridges and hills, flexible as a giant snake, its stones resembling the scales of a reptile. Or a dragon, perhaps, Nicholai thought, in the Chinese zoological cosmology.
No, he decided, the Go analog
y is more apt. The wall was like a thin long line of stones, vulnerable by its very length, unsupported by defensive depth.
A lesson to be had there, certainly.
Chen fell asleep on the drive back to Beijing, sparing Nicholai the necessity to make small talk. Instead he began to prepare his mind for the task at hand, and as he thought about it, he realized that he was soon to become a professional assassin.
He had killed three men in his young life — nothing by the standards of his generation, which had endured the slaughters of the war.
His first had been Kishikawa, his father figure, and he had done it to spare his mentor shame. So it was a matter of filial duty, almost as if he had assisted the general in committing seppuku.
The next two had tried to kill him first, so they were acts of self-defense.
But this would be an intentional act of murder for profit. He could rationalize it by thinking that he was reclaiming his own life, and Solange’s, but the fact remained that he was about to take another’s life to benefit his own, and moral evasions were as useful as the towers of the Great Wall.
Yet the monetary compensation from the Americans was almost irrelevant.
This was a matter of honor.
Voroshenin was not just another man, another human life.
Shortly before she died, Nicholai’s mother had told him the story of what happened between her and Yuri Voroshenin.
Petrograd was frozen and fast running out of fuel.
The winter of 1922 was unusually harsh, the small supply of coal had already dwindled, and the Communists were tearing down private homes for firewood. The famed lindens of Taurichesky Gardens had been stripped of the branches for firewood, and the trees looked like execution stakes.
It was a miracle — no, not a miracle but a testament to her iron will — that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna’s family house, occupying half a block on Kirochnaya Street, still stood, although the Soviet Petrograd had forced her to turn most of it into a kpmmunalka, housing several dozen workers’ families.