15 Bamboo by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘What time was that?’

‘My chap got there just before noon.’ He took another spoonful of soup.

‘He was fast,’ I said.

‘Adequate.’

‘New to the field?’

‘Oh, no. Been here a year.’

‘English?’

‘Chinese. How are you feeling?’

‘Bit skewed, still. Listen, when you debriefed him, did he say how long he thought the police had been there when he turned up?’

‘He said not long. They hadn’t brought the body out.’

‘How long did he stay?’

‘A good hour. He was in a Jeifang, made out—’

‘What’s that?’

‘Sorry - truck, big as a dinosaur, always breaking down, so it was good enough cover, he had the bonnet up, got some spanners out.’

‘He’s Bureau?’

‘Yes. Reports to Hong Kong.’ His yellow eyes were on me suddenly. ‘You’re active, are you?’

‘Call it eighty percent.’ He hadn’t been satisfied when I’d told him I was a bit skewed. I shouldn’t have done that, got to play by the book, and the book says the shadow executive has to give his director in the field his exact condition when asked for. All right, say eighty percent. Fully active would mean I was fit enough to do anything at all, nothing barred, run a mile flat out or swim submerged or deal with any sort of attack and defeat it and get clear. I couldn’t do that, not as I felt now: the head was still a degree dizzy and I could feel the effect of the altitude in the lungs.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘they couldn’t have got onto it that fast, I mean from their end.’ They couldn’t in other words have put down that agent as missing and started a search for him and found him at the temple: there hadn’t been time. ‘Someone must have heard the shots and reported it.’

Pepperidge was quiet for a moment. The inference was there all right and it gave me the creeps: if anyone had heard those shots they could have seen me leaving the temple soon afterward, and given the police my description.

‘Possible,’ Pepperidge said at last.

Two people came in, peasants, slamming the door, and it reached my nerves. ‘It’s not very good,’ I said, ‘is it?’

‘Not very.’ Spooned some soup. ‘Nil desperandum.’

Easy to say. The KCCPC had suspected that Xingyu Baibing was here in Lhasa because he’d blown it at the embassy in Beijing, and now they’d found that body it wouldn’t be long before they identified it even though I’d made a gesture and changed coats and taken his papers, and they’d check their assignment roster and find that the agent posted on watch at the apothecary’s wasn’t there anymore and that’d be all they’d need.

‘How did you do it?’ Pepperidge asked me. The agent?’

This was for Norfolk, for the new recruits. ‘I broke the thyroid cartilage with a half-fist, immediate internal hemorrhage.’

‘He had a gun?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he fired it.’

‘Yes.’ He could smell the cordite on me.

‘How much light was there?’

‘Not much. Practically dark.’

Tell those poor bloody children at Norfolk to try that one against a loaded gun and they’d get their brains blown out. Don’t do as I do, and so forth.

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