06- The Mandarin Cypher by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061005312
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1970-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Page 83

'It is now.'

I rang off and sat down in the corner of the bar with my left shoulder against the wall, the mirror on the other side of the room and the door facing me. I was clear of the Taunus trap but they were getting very insistent and I could be picked up anywhere, anywhere at all, because of the photograph.

'Coffee.'

To help chase some of the adrenalin out of the system: there was no chance of physical exercise.

The eyelid had stopped flickering, I should bloody well hope so, I must be getting old or something. Relax, switch off, leave things to Ferris. He'd be on to the police by now, telling them where to find the Taunus and what to do with it: check it for an explosive device, check the suitcase, take the car back to Fleet-way and put the case into the harbour or wherever they liked, because i wouldn't get it back: they'd hold it for me but they wouldn't part with it or with me either without asking me an awful lot of questions Hong Kong is just like other places: the police don't like being rung up and told to look for bombs in abandoned cars without wanting to know why. Ferris could pull enough rank to tell them to shut up but it'd mean revealing the fact that we were on the island and we didn't want to advertise it.

I'd asked him to do a couple of other things for me while he was about it: pay my bill with Fleetway, and get a dozen gardenias sent to El Caliph before eight o'clock tonight with a message: Please forgive, been called to Rome due to the devaluation crisis, tried four times to ring you but not home. Will never forget you. Clive.

I put on the mask.

The nerves were back to normal and it hadn't taken so long as I thought: for three hours I'd been moving around Central as free as a tourist and nobody had tried to raid me or even get on my tail, besides which Ferris hadn't been mean: it was a white summer-weight linen suit and quite a good fit and I felt a bit less like a lavatory brush with the mange. I'd kitted up again at Lane Crawford's: new suitcase, shaver, toilet things, shoes, so forth, and the case was genuine leather because I can't stand plastic, so that scaly old hell-hag in Accounts was going to cough up her brimstone when she got the bill.

I breathed in through the nose and the faceplate tightened satisfactorily and I took it off. We spent a lot of time getting a good fit for the fins: he was a helpful little man, five feet high with a crew cut and a jolly smile and the right hand off at the wrist, said it was a shark and I believed him.

'You fromEngland?'

'Yes.'

'What part?'

'London.'

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