The Chinese Assassin Page 7

  ‘Would be tell me—if he knew?’

  ‘He never told anybody else.’ She squirmed back against his chest, still watching his face intently in the mirror.

  ‘But then, who knows? He might succumb to your more obvious charms if you ask him nicely.’

  ‘Does he work for the CIA then?’

  ‘He doesn’t wear any badge that says so.’

  ‘I’ll ask him for you anyway.’

  ‘He has a very legitimate-looking office at the State Department, so go carefully.’ He smiled at her. ‘Some Washington rumours did get into the papers, anyway. They said that Israeli intelligence, which has good contacts in the Kremlin, picked up details of Lin’s “coup” plans from the Russian end of the “conspiracy”. They passed it on and the CIA then tipped off Mao about the plot. All of which was presumably designed to encourage Mao to welcome Nixon with open arms when he dropped in to change the history of the world, as he modestly put it, in one week in February 1972.’

  Nina put down the hair brush and covered his hands with her own. She stared at his reflection for a moment, her expression suddenly more serious. ‘But do you really believe there’s a plot to kill Mao? And could they really want to involve you?’

  He shrugged and leaned forward until his face rested against hers, smiling suddenly at her puzzled child’s face in the mirror.

  At that moment the doorbell rang again. Nina turned and looked up at him over her shoulder with a mischievous expression in her eyes. That’ll be your books. I think you’d better go this time. I wouldn’t trust myself in the mood you’ve got me into—even with your prurient porter!’

  Folio number five

  Marshall Lin Piao suffered from a chronic affliction in adult life which, because it was a severe embarrassment to him, was. a closely-kept secret known only to those few of us who were dose and trusted comrades. This affliction often prevented him from carrying out official public duties and from making long public speeches or even attending such functions as dinner parties outside his own home. Along with the mental tension it induced, this disability was also an additional handicap in his personal relations with his fellow leaders. It helped cause much confusion too in the minds of the Chinese people and among outside interpreters of Chinese affairs because his erratic pattern of public appearances, which seemed so baffling politically, was almost solely attributable to it. The truth is, Marshall Lin suffered from acute amoebic dysentery and because of his sensitive nature this caused him great shame. Also he knew that the shrunken physical appearance of his wasted body and his unsightly baldness which forced him to wear a cap at all times, even indoors, made him an unattractive figure. Because I loved him and worked closely with him over many years I knew he could be courteous and considerate. But with those outside his circle, of close confidants he was sharp and difficult because of his deep inner unease.

  But why should I now be prepared to reveal such intimate details of Marshall Lin’s personal health after he is long dead? The answer is that a close knowledge of his character and his person is necessary to understand why, and how, he was murdered by the treacherous left-wing clique now plotting to seize supreme power in China. For his death was only the first part of their plans soon to be brought to fruition.

  By nature Marshall Lin was neurotic and highly strung. He had suffered more than one nervous breakdown in his life. He was, for instance, a compulsive eater of fried beans. He carried them with him everywhere in his pockets and consumed them constantly. Like many men of great physical courage forced by age towards inaction he lived increasingly through the written word. All day long he would sit at his desk reading party and army documents, writing memoranda and brooding—and all the time tossing the beans repeatedly into his mouth.

  Many times I remonstrated with him about this habit. ‘They are nutritious, yes, Marshall Lin,’ I would agree, ‘but extremely difficult to digest They do your body more harm than good.’ But he would always wave me impatiently away. Other people smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol or chewed gum, he would reply sharply—and he did none of those things.

  This bizarre compulsion to bean-eating was only one outward sign of the great internal stresses that knotted his intestines with anxiety throughout his waking hours. He suffered insomnia too, and he developed ulcers to add to the burden of residual pain from his war wounds. But these growing bodily hardships only seemed to temper further the fierce steely spirit at the very core of him— the spirit which had won him the battle nickname of ‘Tiger Cat’ during the years of his great generalship. Once I entered his study with the translation of a western press profile that wondered at his magnificent military record of victory in a hundred campaigns against the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. As he leafed through it I asked him how he would explain his miraculous successes to the world if a western newspaperman were sitting before him then.

  He raised his pale, gaunt face from his papers and in the greying of his skin I could detect the pain he was suffering that day. But he smiled his curiously apologetic, vulnerable smile. ‘It is quite simple, Comrade Yang,’ he said. ‘Only ever engage the enemy when you can be certain of victory. Make that a rule of your life.’

  I have never forgotten that moment. Are those the words of a man who would make three clumsy and unsuccessful attempts on the life of the leader he had loyally supported and fought for unhesitatingly during forty years? Are those the guiding thoughts of a man who would fail in any task he chose to carry out, then flee across the enemy’s borders in shame?

  Marshall Lin uttered those uncompromising words of advice to me in the late summer of 1970. It was just a week before the fateful August meeting of the party Central Committee in the mountains at Lushan. It was there we discovered beyond any doubt that those evil forces closing around Chairman Mao Tse-tung had at last managed to poison his mind against Marshall Lin

  On the final day the Chairman himself, who had made no formal speech even at a dosed party meeting, for several years, astounded everybody by rising to launch a bitter personal attack on us. His intervention was astonishing because he had been unwell for some time and we sat staring in disbelief as he reared up, swaying unsteadily, before the microphone. The nurse at his side was so concerned that she was holding his sleeve, ready to leap to her feet and support him if he should falter.

  Despite the large doses of levodopa medication he was receiving for his worsening Parkinson’s disease, his palsied left arm was trembling uncontrollably. He stared slowly round the hall and finally his gaze came to rest with obvious deliberation on the places in which we were seated. His face had grown dark with anger and a tense hush fell in the hall. Suddenly be shouted into the microphone at the top of his voice.

  ‘I have never been a genius!’

  The effort racked his whole body and the entire gathering stared at him open-mouthed with amazement. He glowered round the hall again, gathering his strength. Then his voice dropped and we barely heard his next words. ‘I read Confucius for six years and capitalist literature for seven years. I began studying Marxism-Leninism only in 1918! How can I be a genius?’

  He lurched against the podium and it seemed he would fall. But he recovered. Swaying unsteadily on his feet, he glared slowly round the hall, again seeming, as he had always done, to search the soul of every one of us for some terrible hidden sign of guilt. Though sick at heart, I took jotted notes of all he said. I glanced quickly along the row at Marshall Lin. His face was white and he was pushing beans distractedly into his mouth in his agitation. The face of his wife, Yeh Chun, was drained of colour too. Everybody in the hall knew that Chairman Mao, quite out of the blue, was attacking Lin’s own loyal description of him given the previous day in a short speech. He had praised the historic ingenuity of Mao’s political thought and proposed that in recognition of this he should become both head of state and head of the party now that the Cultural Revolution was over.

  I looked across at those sitting on the other side of Chairman Mao. I saw that the feat
ures of his wife Chiang Ching were set impassively although many others in the hall were obviously distressed that the Chairman might be on the verge of some kind of collapse. No public audience had ever seen him so enfeebled, so manic and uncontrolled

  But the great mesmeric power of his presence hadn’t deserted him even then. His words had already produced an electric atmosphere of awe and apprehension in the hall. When his nurse tried to persuade him to sit down he pushed her roughly away and hunched over the lectern once more, clutching with both hands at the slender stem of the microphone for support.

  ‘They have said one sentence from a genius was worth ten thousand sentences.’ He paused and his voice, sank again to a fierce, growling whisper. ‘But no provision shall be made for state chairmanship!’

  Swaying from side to side and breathing heavily, he stood for a long time saying nothing more. For a moment he looked round again in our direction. Then he lifted his head and dosed his eyes as though listening to some sound nobody else in the hall could hear. ‘A tall thing is easy to break, a white thing is easy to stain.’ He stopped and breathed deeply, still keeping his eyes dosed. ‘The white snow in spring can hardly find its match. A high reputation is difficult to live up to.’ In the total silence that followed the sound of his laboured breathing rattled clearly through the loudspeakers on the walls. He opened his eyes and glared slowly round the hall again. ‘Li Ku spoke well five hundred years ago! I use his words now to tell you I will not serve as state chairman. I have said so six times. If each time I spoke one sentence there should have been ten thousand sentences then there were sixty thousand refusals! But still they have not listened to me.’

  With an effort Chairman Mao straightened up. Although his shoulders sagged with age and infirmity and his jowls quivered, the fierce pride that continued burning inside him made him a commanding figure still. The hall was utterly hushed and the only sound was the rustle of the mountain pines brushing against the windows in the afternoon wind.

  ‘On the surface they are talking about enhancing my prestige,’ he said, speaking softly now and nodding his head repeatedly. ‘But who knows what is really in their minds? Could it not be a clever attempt to enhance another reputation?’ He paused again and turned very slowly in Marshall Lin’s direction. He stared directly at him and spoke this time without taking his eyes from his face. ‘Couldn’t a certain person be anxious to become state chairman in my place?’

  At the back of the hall a cadre in the green uniform of the People’s Liberation Army stood up and shouted something unintelligible and waved his clenched fist in our direction. We learned later this incident bad been carefully stage-managed by our enemies. But Chairman Mao ignored this interruption. He continued, without taking his eyes from Marshall Lin. ‘Couldn’t it be that a certain person is anxious to split the Party?’

  ‘There was an excited buzz of reaction-from the hall, although the soldier who bad shouted had sat down again. Mao turned back to the microphone and lifted his good arm above his head in a dramatic gesture calling for silence. When the hall quietened he waited for a moment then raised his voice suddenly in a final quavering shout. ‘Could it be that a certain person is really anxious to seize power—’ He stopped, looked round quickly at Lin then turned back to the microphone. ‘—for himself!’

  There was complete silence for several seconds. Then Chairman Mao sank down, suddenly exhausted, into his seat. A murmur rose all round the hall as Chiang Cling stood up from her place to run and bend solicitously over his chair. But he waved her and his nurse away and straightened in his seat to stare out belligerently across the heads of his audience. His eyes burned with a feverish brightness in his crumpled face as he swung his gaze triumphantly round the gathering.

  The murmur grew slowly and uncertainly into a muted roar of applause and approval. Then above the growing din the single voice of that same soldier who had interrupted earlier from the rear of the hall suddenly rang out again. ‘Down with Lin Piao! Down with Yeh Chun!’

  Hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, other scattered voices began taking up the chant.

  MOSCOW. Saturday—Medical experts who reconstructed the charred remains of nine bullet- riddled bodies found in a Chinese aircraft which crashed in, Soviet-dominated Mongolia last September, now feel reasonably certain that two of the bodies were those of Lin Piao and his second wife Yeh Chun—though there still seem to be some misgivings that they could be doubles planted by Peking.

  The Observer, 1 January 1972

  5

  The high-gabled, crimson-brick Victorian fortress on Kensington Gore that houses the half—million maps and written archives of the Royal Geographical Society glowed ominously under the fiery glare of the mid-morning sun, giving off the dull flesh-searing radiance of a red-hot poker. As Scholefield’s taxi pulled into the courtyard the taxi driver cursed the heat humourlessly and lifted a rattling thermos flask of iced water to his mouth. As Scholefield paid him off the breathless voice of a Radio London newsreader on the driver’s radio was announcing that Parliament had just passed an Emergency Powers Bill to deal with Britain’s worst drought in 250 years—and for the first time in history MCC members at Lord’s were being allowed to watch the cricket from the pavilion with their jackets off

  ‘They ought to be in this bloody cab, that’s where they ought to be,’ said the driver sourly. Already stripped to the waist, he scowled at Scholefield’s perfectly reasonable tip as though it should have been more because of the heat, and roared away without thanking him. Scholefield stepped out of the burning sun into the shadow of the entrance lobby a moment before a mini-cab with a Gerrard Street proprietor’s name on it cruised past the entrance and stopped fifty yards along the Gore.

  The door porter wrote out a visitor’s slip and Scholefield carried it across the polished floor, of the main hall, past huge antique globes mounted on ornate wooden pedestals, and into the silent, high-ceilinged map room.

  A slender, heavy-breasted girl wearing jeans and a thin cotton T-shirt that had ridden up to reveal several inches of bare back, looked down at him from the top of a ladder propped against a high bookcase and raised her eyebrows. ‘Mongolia?’ She mouthed the word silently, smiling a warm, conspiratorial smile, and peered round among the maze o oaken map cabinets filling the room below her. Scholefield smiled back and nodded mutely.

  The girl climbed nimbly down and brought him a roll of maps she’d set on one side. She looked quickly over her shoulder then leaned across the counter and whispered again. ‘What did you say the co-ordinates were— 111.15 East, 47.42 North?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s nothing there, nothing at all—what’s it supposed to be?’

  ‘I thought there might be an airfield or something.’

  The girl giggled prettily. ‘I don’t think there were many aeroplanes around even, when these maps were made. Let alone airfields.’ Her hand flew to her mouth and she coloured faintly as an elderly woman with a severe expression emerged suddenly from one of the little corridors between the map cabinets.

  ‘May I help you?’

  ‘My name is Scholefield. I rang about large-scale maps of eastern Mongolia earlier this morning. I spoke to this young lady here. She’s being extremely helpful.’

  The older woman shifted her spectacles a notch higher up her nose, to enhance her authority. ‘Miss Pepper is new and not qualified yet to assist in research. If you would care to proceed to the adjoining map consulting room I will have the maps brought in for your inspection. If you have any queries I’ll try to help you with them after luncheon.’

  The girl tucked her T-shirt in at the waist with exaggerated care and picked up the maps without looking at him. Walking with a very straight back, she led the way to a gloomy brown chamber supported by black marble pillars. It was furnished with refectory tables and tubular metal chairs that had seen better days. She put the maps down, pulled an apologetic face and walked out.

  Scholefield settled down in a tub
ular chair and pored over the maps. Prom the shadowy walls the fading images in oil and bronze of David Livingston, John Hanning Speke, Captain James Cook and Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic gazed sightlessly over his head. Outside the tall windows, the Society’s neatly-trimmed lawn had been burned brown and arid like the bush grass of Africa through which Speke and Livingston trod in their high days of glory.

  Scholefield wiped his sweating palms on a handkerchief then began tracing the coordinates across the brown and orange wastes of Mongolia with one finger. He encountered no relevant features of any kind on the first two sheets, and as he turned to the third be sensed a presence at his elbow and looked up.

  The girl was standing with one hand on a jutting hip, smiling down at him. ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘I thought you weren’t qualified to help me?’

  ‘She’s gone to lunch, so I’m qualified now. I’ve got a damned degree, you see, but I’m only here for the holidays.’

  She leaned over him and pointed to a tiny block of print in the bottom right hand corner of the first map. ‘But I told you, look.’

  Scholefield bent over the map until his nose almost touched the paper. ‘For use by War and Navy Department agencies only, not for sale or distribution.’

  ‘No, no, silly, the next bit.’ She picked up the sheet and screwed up her eyes. “Prepared 1943 by the Army Mapping Service, Topographic Centre Washington D.C.—copied from a USSR map of ‘937.” Unless there was an airfield there in 1936 for the Russian Tiger Moths, that’s not much help, is it?’

  Scholefield picked up the second map and held the bottom corner close to his eyes. “Army Map Service, Corps of Engineers, US Army—Washington D.C. compiled in 1957”—Well, that’s a bit better, isn’t it?’