The Chinese Assassin Read online

  The label on the box of chocolates that Yang had presented to Nina caught his eye on the top of the bookcase and he shook his head at the banality of the choice. He put a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes hard, remembering suddenly how tired he was from the flight from Montreal. Then he stopped suddenly and went over to the bookcase and picked up the chocolates. The Cellophane wrapping was rumpled and when he turned the box over he noticed it had been refastened with Sellotape. He tore it off and opened the lid of the box.

  On top of the first layer of chocolates lay a folded wedge of thin pink paper. He put the box down and spread the sheets out on his desk. There were six large poster-sized pages each covered with a sea of closely-spaced lines of Chinese characters, handwritten in ink. A quick glance told him that the texts had been penned in the simplified characters that had been in use in the People’s Republic of China since the early 1950s. The first sheet was headed simply ‘Folio Number One’, and the rest were numbered up to Folio Six. Scholefield sat down at his desk and began reading the first page.

  Folio number three

  That night they took the bodies away was the first time I ever saw old Tsereng’s face. He was one of those Mongols with a high, hooked eagle’s nose who look so much like the American Red Indian. The light of the fire in the open hearth on the floor of the yurt danced on the silver ornaments of his belt as he carried the evening bowl of kumiss to where I lay half-paralysed on my pile of furs. The fever and delirium were at last dying down and I saw and heard dearly for the very first time the tinkling of the tiny silver bell on its chain.

  Old Tsereng must have noticed my vision had cleared for suddenly the belt and its ornaments disappeared from my view to be replaced a moment later by his pitted, lined face. The narrow, dark eyes stared at me in silence for a long time as he squatted beside me. ‘When he spoke, his voice was soft. ‘Who are you, Han? Why do your people seek to hunt you down like an animal?’

  In my fear I tried to rise up, but he restrained me with both hands. When he had calmed me he made me drink the life-giving mare’s milk. Then he told me everything he had seen since he had plucked me out of the burning grass four long nights before. He understood more Chinese than he spoke. He had learned it fifty years earlier in the southern part of the Mongol lands when rapacious capitalist Chinese traders feasted off Inner Mongolia by buying cheap from the nomads and selling dear. He had his people’s ingrained historical suspicion of the ‘great nation of China’. These horsemen of the grasslands, so different from my own people, had since time began been either defending themselves against China or attacking her. By comparison the small wandering tribes of Siberia to the north had caused them no trouble, had been of little historical account. That was why the tutelage of the Russians had been so easily accepted by the Mongols and that was why that night old Tsereng committed his life loyally and willingly to my protection and survival—to keep me from the clutches of those predators from Peking he had seen set up a hue and cry upon the finding of my shoe.

  ‘But why, Han? Why do they want to hunt your He always called me ‘Han’, the name of my race, and never once asked me my personal name. In his question he had used his native Mongol words soron moljikh, which are very powerful, meaning ‘to draw towards themselves and gnaw like a bone’. As he waited for my reply, the lines gouged into his face by time and the fierce wind of the steppes deepened with concern.

  Although weakened and in pain, I tried to explain. I told him of the great coincidence that had made him pitch his yurt on the night of 12 September on that point of the world’s surface that was identified on maps by the geographic co-ordinates 111.15 East and 47.42 North. This part of his beloved steppe land, I explained, was one of the remotest regions of the populated world. In China all maps of this region were forty years out of date. This fact had encouraged those in Peking who had plotted Marshall Lin’s death to print false charts indicating that a large military airfield had been built on the empty desolate spot where I now lay in his yurt

  As the yak-dung fire spluttered low in the open hearth and the wind moaned round the felt walls of the tent I explained how tin Piao and his wife were put aboard secretly in a closed compartment, unconscious, if not already dead, and bow a handful of others had been duped into flying with him in the doomed airliner.

  I explained how power-mad and ruthless plotters had cunningly involved other countries—America, Israel and Russia—in their violent intrigues and that since I had miraculously survived and was alive to tell of this great treachery I was a danger to the success of their plans. It was for this reason they would not sleep easily until my life was terminated and their terrible secret made completely safe.

  Perhaps fortunately I did not know then what I know today. This awful knowledge that I have would perhaps have undermined my very will to recover and survive. But I could not know then that in 1976 these same vicious demons would be plotting a greater and more terrible crime—the killing of our great leader Chairman Mao Tse-tung himself!

  On that bleak and windswept night on the Mongolian steppes in the autumn of 1971, however old Tsereng in the warmth of his tent listened to my words in silence, nodding his hoary old head from time to time. He lit and relit his slender pipe while I talked, puffing the smoke towards the fire, but never speaking a word. He sat without moving until long after the animals had quietened and his wife and daughter had begun snoring on their beds of fur.

  Then he bent over me to make me comfortable for the night and spoke in a whisper in my ear. ‘Soon horsemen will come riding up from the south. They will be looking for you. They can travel here from China overland in a three-day journey.’ He rested a gnarled hand gently on my shoulder in a gesture f reassurance and grinned a sudden, toothless grin. ‘But they shall not find you. We shall move on—and keep moving.’ Without another word he stretched himself out then on the ground beside the fire and went to sleep.

  When I woke at the next dawn he was gone. He didn’t return until the sun was high in the middle of the day and then he reported that he had again been secretly observing the activity around the crashed Trident. At first light he had seen a new group of high ranking Russian officers arrive. They brought with them a strange man, he said, in crumpled civilian clothes whom he had not seen before. He was a white-skinned European, but he did not have the tense severity of demeanour of the Russian comrades. He was a small, thin, hunched man with a shock of white hair, a shaggy white moustache and thick spectacles. His face was deeply lined and very pale and Tsereng guessed he was almost as old as himself:

  Old Tsereng had watched him closely through his binoculars. Immediately on his arrival he had waved his arms and shouted, dismissing all the Russian officers and ordering them to retreat several hundred yards. Then he had wandered very slowly among the wreckage on his own for two hours staring intently at the ground, shaking his head and muttering to himself. All the time he kept his hands in his pockets, touching nothing. He chain smoked, but never removed the cigarettes from his mouth. From time to time this white-haired man drew a flask from his hip pocket and drank from it—old Tsereng again reported this gleefully because it was silver and flashed in the sun. When he had made a thorough inspection of the whole area the man began taking photographs with a tiny camera he carried in his pocket. About this time a convoy of articulated lorries and cranes appeared, rumbling across the plain from the direction of Ulan Bator. They drew up and waited until the white-haired man had completed his inspection. Then he gave a signal and began supervising the removal of the wreckage from the scene. First wooden boxes were brought by the soldiers and he directed them to collect together small fragments of blackened metal and ashes from different parts of the site. Then he motioned the cranes forward and directed them with great care as they hoisted what was left of the main sections of the dismembered aircraft—the two wings, the fuselage and the tail section—onto the lorries. When this was done he gave more orders to the soldiers, and several hundred brushes were issued to them. They lined u
p in long files across the flat grassland and began moving back and forth sweeping the tiniest shreds of wreckage together and packing them away in canvas sacks.

  Finally this white-haired man got back in his car with the officers and led the convoy of low-loaders and cranes slowly away across the steppes to the West When old Tsereng left his hiding place for the last time, only the long lines of Russian soldiers were left still, slowly sweeping the grassland with their brushes and carefully filling up their little canvas sacks with what was left of the black dust from the Trident

  The rest of that day before dark was spent in making preparations for our departure. The long strips of cheese and solid cream laid out on the roof of the yurt to lose moisture were removed and stored. Belongings were baled and when night fell the yurt was taken down. Other chattels were folded and loaded onto two-humped camels and a litter of tent poles was built for me and attached to an aging and gentle horse. Old Tsereng’s two sons, themselves no longer young, also struck their tents, prepared their families and bunched their herds ready for the journey.

  We left before the moon was up, travelling south-west The camels, laden with 500 lbs of baggage each, could easily cover up to twenty-five miles in a night’s journeying, but the slow- moving herds travelled more ponderously. The trek was very painful for me. My splinted limbs were jarred constantly. But I was prepared to endure any depths of pain to remove myself from the scene of horror where the Trident had crashed—and where, if I stayed, I would certainly lose any life

  With the coining of autumn, the arats usually begin to move their flocks and herds out of the lush river valleys and marshlands to less protected areas where the purifying winds sweep away the autumn insects that otherwise afflict the animals. When winter approaches the herds are moved into sheltered valleys to endure the cold weather there, and do not emerge onto the southward facing slopes of the mountains until spring, when biting winds blow from the north. So although our going was perhaps early and we were travelling at night instead of during the day, the other nomads we encountered accepted our ponderous passage without question, calling friendly greetings from the darkness as though pleased that the rhythmic, shifting pattern of their own restless lives was being reaffirmed afresh for them by our passing.

  We travelled only at night and camped by day, because we wished no questions to be asked about why an injured Chinese army man was being dragged along on a litter. In four nights we covered a hundred miles, swinging southwest in a long arc to give the capital, Ulan Bator a wide berth. Old Tsereng reported gleefully on return to the yurt on the fourth day that our trek was already stirring other herdsmen to strike their camps early. The whole region began to seethe with movement and herds were soon criss-crossing on the plains as they each sought out their favourite autumn grazing grounds. This would make it much more difficult old Tsereng said delightedly, for pursuers to search the yurt camps that had been pitched in the region of Jibhalantayn Bulag at the time of the crash All were now quickly dispersing to the four winds across the steppes.

  We journeyed on for six weeks without cease, rising night after night over new mountain rims and moving down under clear, star-lit heavens into other plains all speckled thick with their own herds of cattle, sheep and horses. At each summit old Tsereng, an unashamed shamanist, dismounted to place another stone reverently on the neat little piles of rocks that had grown slowly over the centuries in all high places. This was to placate spirits believed to dwell there and give thanks for our successful scaling of each height

  Old Tsereng seemed to grow straighter in the saddle with each ascent. His eyes gleamed with a new fire. His own ancestors and those of the horse beneath him had once conquered their way from Asia to Europe and now he was again taking on the greatest enemy of all from south of the Great Wall in his last struggle! Although it was taking the form of a strategic retreat, his stiffly proud posture as he topped the crest of each mountain pass betrayed the deep satisfaction he felt that he was outwitting and outriding them again across his own fierce grasslands and mountain ranges.

  TOKYO, Friday—Rumours circulating here say the Kremlin has strengthened military units massing along the northern frontier of China. American intelligence advice speaks of the movement of at least five and possibly ten new Soviet armoured divisions into the frontier area.

  The Daily Telegraph, 26 September 1971

  3

  The cine camera with the telephoto lens that had been trained silently on the entrance to Scholefield’s block of fiats for the past eight days began whirring the moment Yang appeared limping down the steps. Mounted by an attic window in a mansion block on the other side of Bentinck Street, it had first begun rolling to record Scholefield’s arrival home. It had been restarted to film Yang as he approached hesitantly, along the pavement on foot half an hour later, and now the Chinese operating it swung the camera on its tripod to follow him back the way he’d come.

  Because the evening was stiflingly humid and the sky overcast, the light was fading early. But the cameraman kept rolling anyway as Yang neared the end of the street and he was rewarded when he picked up a black Mini with smoked windows as it pulled out of a side turning. It drove slowly alongside the limping Chinese and a door swung open before the car had stopped. The moment Yang had clambered awkwardly inside it shot off at high speed and turned right into the one-way flow of traffic heading north up Gloucester Place.

  In the shadowy interior a man with a chalk-white face wearing steel-rimmed spectacles was sitting smiling on the back seat. He dropped an enquiring hand on Yang’s arm and asked solicitously in Russian how the interview had gone.

  ‘To plan, Comrade Razduhev. I left the folios and offered the appointment for mid-day at the market.’ Yang made his reply in halting Russian, staring straight ahead through the windscreen. He sat rigidly upright until Razduhev had removed his hand from his sleeve. Then he sank back against the upholstery and mopped his sweating face with a handkerchief:

  ‘Did Scholefield seem to rise to the bait?’

  ‘I think so. He can’t miss the folios.’

  ‘But you gave him no hint of your real purpose during the conversation?’

  ‘No, Comrade Razduhev.’

  The Russian sighed loudly. ‘Yang Tsai-chien, how many times must I ask you? “Comrade Razduhev” is not friendly, is it? Be more familiar. We are friends. Although only for a short time more. Listen, I won’t even have you call me Vladimir. Call me Valodi.’

  Yang didn’t reply.

  ‘And Comrade Bogdarin would like you to call him Boris. Wouldn’t you, Boris?’ The driver of the car nodded and smiled a token smile into the driving mirror without turning.

  ‘We would like to think you remembered your four years in the Soviet Union with some pleasure. Wouldn’t we, Boris?’

  The driver nodded again and smiled grimly to himself; concentrating on the road.

  ‘There are many worse jobs in Moscow, Tsai-chien, than working as an improver for the Chinese section of the Foreign Languages Publishing House.’ He laughed unpleasantly. ‘I know you had to work privately in your apartment under constant guard—but it was among the most luxurious and comfortable in Moscow. I hope you feel you were treated in accordance with your high political importance.’

  Yang drew a long breath and nodded. ‘I feel the strain of the past week and the past hour, Comrade Razduhev. I would prefer to rest quietly now.’

  The Russian patted his arm again. ‘And so you shall, Tsai-chien,’ he said exaggerating the concern in his voice. ‘And so you shall. No more work or worry now until you go to market tomorrow.’ The Russian paused and looked quickly at the Chinese. ‘We have arranged a little surprise. You will catch a glimpse of your cousin there. In the propaganda kiosk. Just to reassure you that all is arranged.’ He removed his spectacles and polished them absently on his sleeve. ‘Madame Tan is one of your party’s more attractive comrades, isn’t she, Tsai-chien?’

  Yang closed his eyes without replying. He slumped lower in th
e seat and let his head fall backwards as if exhausted. The Russian continued patting his arm unnecessarily. ‘It will not be possible of course for you to speak or betray any sign of recognition.’ He stopped patting Yang’s arm and gripped it with a sudden fierceness. ‘You understand that quite clearly, don’t you, Tsai-chien?”

  Yang’s eyes opened wide suddenly with the pain. Not until he had nodded his acquiescence did the Russian relax his grip.

  The Chinese at the attic window switched on the camera and turned to pick up a telephone. He dialled the number of one of the illegal basement gambling dens on the south side of Gerrard Street in Soho’s Chinatown and settled down comfortably in a chair by the window, prepared for what he knew might be a long wait.

  Inside the dingy club a hard-core residue of the afternoon gambling crowd was still hunched round the line-covered fan tan, table, clutching sheaves of purple twenty pound notes in their hands. The bare stone floor was littered deep with apple and orange peel, broken monkey-nut shells and spilled tea. A bent, arthritic cleaner pushed a broom with painful slowness among the gamblers’ feet, going through the motions of sweeping up in preparation for the evening session. Under the garish glare of the naked light bulbs hanging above the table the unsmiling male faces stared transfixed at the little heap of white shirt buttons which the croupier, a thin, hollow-chested Chinese with quick glittering eyes, had just scooped out of a saucepan sunk into the table-top. When he glanced round the table the gamblers avoided his gaze.

  The telephone began to ring behind a closed door as he concealed a random fistful of buttons under a small saucepan lid. But he ignored the ringing, waiting patiently while the last notes were pushed onto the four chalked squares at either end of the table. When all movement had ceased and a hush of expectancy had fallen over the crowd, he lifted the lid and spread the heap of