Satori (17 page)

52

E
MILE
G
UIBERT LEFT
his mistress’s flat in Hong Kong’s Western District.

In a nice part of town, the flat was expensive—
merde, la femme
was expensive — but both well worth it. A man comes to a certain age and success, he deserves a little comfort, not a tawdry assignation in some “blue hotel” over in Kowloon.

He decided to walk to his club for his afternoon pastis. It was a pleasant day, not overly humid, and he thought that he could use the exercise, although Winifred had given him quite the workout.

A lovely girl.

A Chinese pearl, Winifred, delightful in every aspect. Always beautifully dressed, beautifully coiffed, always patient and eager to please. And not some foulmouthed
salope,
either, but a young lady of refinement and some education. You could have a conversation with her, before or after, you could take her to a gallery, to a party, and know that she wouldn’t embarrass herself or you.

Winifred was the new love of his life, in fact, a new lease on life itself, the very renewal of his youth.

Lost in this reverie, he didn’t notice the three men come in. One stepped around him toward the elevator, the other went to check his mail at the boxes along the opposite wall. The third barred the doorway.

“Excuse me,” Guibert said.

He felt a forearm come around his throat and a cloth held against his face.

53

H
AVERFORD SAT
in the “situation room” in the Tokyo station and finished his coded cable to Singleton in Langley.

ALL IN PLACE. + 6 HRS. ADVISE PROCEED OR ABORT.

Part of him still hoped that Singleton would call the whole thing off. It was so risky from so many angles. Fail or succeed, Hel could be captured. If captured, he might talk. If he talked, Kang would quickly wrap up the whole Beijing network, from the White Pagoda to St. Michael’s to the Muslims in Xuanwu. Liu could be terminally weakened and China forced even deeper into the Soviet orbit.

“Great rewards demand great risks,” Singleton had said.

Fine, Haverford thought.

In fact, everything was in place.

The extraction team was embedded in the mosque, its leader had successfully been infiltrated into the country. A string of “sleeper alerts” about a Chinese attempt on Voroshenin’s life had been successfully planted into the Soviet intelligence services through double agents and would be triggered after his assassination. A similar string — indicating that the killing was a disinformation plot by the Soviets and laying the blame on an apparatchik named Leotov — had been laid with the Chinese.

As for the assassination itself, Hel had done a brilliant job of luring Voroshenin onto the killing ground. Hel was fully briefed on the site, the opportune moment of the opera, and his “escape route.”

Haverford looked at his watch, a graduation gift from his old man. Five hours and fifty minutes until the opera commenced. An hour or so after that, the termination.

The train was in motion.

Nothing could stop it now, unless Hel backed out — which he wouldn’t — or Singleton called it off, which was unlikely.

Still, Haverford hoped he would and sat waiting for the “abort” cable.

54

V
OROSHENIN SAT
by the phone.

The damn thing was quiescent and the clock not his friend. Barely three hours now until his appointment with Hel.

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that “Guibert” was Hel and the more concerned he became that whatever Hel’s assignment with the Americans, he had really come on a mission of vengeance.

If this were Russia or one of the Eastern European satellites, he would simply have the young man killed. Or if it were a city in Western Europe, he could arrange for his quiet disappearance. Even in China, just a few years ago, a few coins and a whisper in the right ear and the young Hel would be fish food by now.

But not in China these days. Even with the Soviets’ enormous influence, Beijing wouldn’t easily tolerate an unsanctioned killing on its territory. There would be an incident, and an incident could very well send him back to a cell in Lubyanka.

Better there than dead, though, he thought, fingering the pistol he had slipped into his belt that morning before leaving his quarters. If it is Hel, and if he does intend to kill me for some fancied transgression against his slut of a mother, I do not have to play the sacrificial lamb.

They say he killed that Jappo general with a single strike to the throat.

Well, let him try.

I have three bodyguards, all trained in judo, all armed. And if somehow he gets through them … Voroshenin touched the gun butt again and felt reassured.

But why is my hand shaking? He took another sip of vodka. When this is over I shall have to do something about the drinking, he thought. Perhaps go off to one of those spas in the mountains. Clean air, exercise, and all that.

Hopefully it won’t come to my shooting Hel, he thought. Hopefully they will have picked up the elder Guibert, sweated him, and made him admit that his real son died in that car crash. Then I will not have to worry about it at all. I can enjoy the opera knowing that young Hel will be singing a different kind of aria, to a tune of Kang’s composition.

But ring, damn phone.

55

T
HE OLD MAN WAS
tougher than he looked.

“I have met the Sûreté,” he told them, “the Gestapo, L’Union Corse, the Green Gang. What do you
bande d’enfoirés
have to show me that I haven’t already seen?”

They threatened to kill him.

He shrugged. “I’m old. I take one decent shit every three or four days, get one good hard-on a week, if I’m lucky. I sleep three hours a night. Be my friends, kill me.”

They threatened to hurt him.

“What can I tell you that I haven’t told you?” Guibert answered. “You show me pictures, I’ve told you, yes, that is my worthless son. The one who thinks that money squirts out of chickens’ asses and that you should always hit on sixteen. Hurt me.”

He was a tough old bird, and one that didn’t sing.

“ ‘Is Michel in Beijing’?” he parroted after they had wrenched his thin shoulders almost out of their sockets. “What can I say except that he’s supposed to be. Does that mean he really is? You tell me.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Supposed to be buying guns,” Guibert said, “but if I know my boy, he’s chasing pussy. Is there still pussy in Beijing? If you’re looking for him, look there. If you don’t find him, look for a pair of loaded dice. He’ll be betting against them.”

“Your real son died in a car accident,” they told him. “This man is an imposter.”

“I don’t know my own son? Why do you bother to ask questions of a man who doesn’t know his own child? How stupid must you be?” Then the old man got aggressive. “This is Hong Kong. There are laws here, not like the shitholes you must come from. I know every cop and every gangster. The tongs call me ‘sir.’ You let me go right now, I’ll forget about this, call it a mistake. You don’t, I’ll be tickling your feet while you’re hanging from meathooks. Now untie me, I have to take a piss.”

They untied him and walked him into the toilet.

The phone rang.

Voroshenin had the receiver in his hand before the ringing stopped. “Yes?”

“He’s tough.”

“So?”

“We think he’s telling the truth.”

Voroshenin didn’t. He looked up at the wall clock. Three hours and fifteen minutes. “Have one more go.”

“I don’t know what to —”

“I’ll tell you what to do,” Voroshenin said.

When Guibert came out of the toilet, Winifred was on her knees in front of the chair, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth wrapped around the pistol barrel that his interrogator held in his hand, his finger on the trigger.

The interrogator looked at Guibert and said, “Three, two …”

56

N
ICHOLAI EASED
into the steaming bath.

Karma’s gift to him, he thought as he lowered himself into the near-scalding water, took a deep breath, and then exhaled, relaxing away the slight pain. Then he lay back and let the hot water soothe his muscles and his mind.

As a boy he would spontaneously slip into a state of total mental relaxation, his mind taking him to lie down in a serene mountain meadow. But the vicissitudes and sorrows of the war had stolen that tranquility from him and he mourned that loss deeply, as he also regretted the loss of his freedom and control over his own life.

The best that he could do now was to control his breathing and clarify his thoughts.

That this was in all likelihood his last night in the trap of life saddened him only because of Solange. Recalling the Buddhist tenet that all suffering comes from attachment, he acknowledged that he was in love with her, in a very Western, romantic way, and that the thought of leaving her was painful.

The thought that Diamond and his minions would escape justice also saddened him, but he comforted himself with the idea that karma was perfect.

So if I live, he thought, I will avenge myself; if I die, let them be reborn as maggots on a dung heap.

He turned his mind to his mission.

Envisioning it step by step, he walked himself through the evening. Chen would pick him up at the hotel and drop him at the theater. He would go to Voroshenin’s box, sit down, and enjoy the opera. At precisely the right moment — as the drums pounded and the gongs clanged — he would strike his mother’s tormentor with a single, explosive blow to the heart. Then he would simply walk out of the theater, elude his watchers, and make his way to refuge at the mosque.

Suddenly, something about it troubled him.

He reenvisioned it, and the same troubling feeling lingered, but he could not discover its source.

Switching paradigms, he envisioned the scenario as the Go board, set his black stones down, and played the game. It had its expected challenges, but nothing more. If, Nicholai thought, Voroshenin knows my real identity and recalls his treatment of the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna, then I might well be moving into a trap, but I already know that and am prepared.

There is something else.

He switched mental models again and decided to play the white stones against his own black.

It was a revelation.

Oddly, he found that he counted among the white stones not only the Russians and the “Red” Chinese, but the Americans as well. His mind lined them up as white stones and, examining the board as he would if he were playing that side, he saw it.

Satori.

57

N
INETY MINUTES
from operational status.

Unable to contain his nervous energy, Haverford paced the situation room. In thirty minutes they would go “dark,” all substantive cable and telephonic traffic would cease. Some “flak” would be thrown up — run-of-the-mill crap to let the Soviets and Chinese think that it was just business as usual, but there would be no communication between Langley and the situation room.

Singleton would go off to some affair at the White House. Diamond was going hunting with his buddies.

If this went south, it would all be on the Tokyo station.

“Do a final status check.”

“We just did —”

“Did I ask you what you just did?”

They ran another check.

Alpha Tiger: In place.

Bravo Team: In place.

The Monk: In place.

Go Player: In place.

Papa Bear …

Papa Bear.

“Papa Bear’s off the radar.”

“What?”

“Papa Bear,” the nervous young agent said. “He’s off the radar.”

“Run it down.”

Frantic phone calls to Hong Kong turned up nothing. Emile Guibert wasn’t at his house on Victoria Peak, not at his office downtown, his club in Western. Not at his mistress’s pad. Off the radar.

They were thin on the ground in HK because of British hypersensitivity. In fact, Haverford briefly considered reaching out to Wooten for help. The MI-6 man had the Hong Kong police on his payroll and could scour the island quicker than the small American contingent.

But he decided that he couldn’t answer the questions that Wooten would ask, and that the payback would be too ferocious, so he had to leave it to Benton’s people.

The search took twenty-eight endless minutes.

Haverford jumped on the cable.

P-BEAR OFF GRID. ABORT? ADVISE.

John Singleton took his wool overcoat off the coat rack and put it on. His left shoulder suffered from bursitis, so it took a few seconds. He wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck, put on his hat, and headed out the door of his office.

For most people, going to the White House was a thrill; for Singleton, it was a chore. He was halfway down the hall when his assistant scurried up behind him.

“Yes?”

“An urgent cable from Tokyo.”

He glanced at it and said, “Not now.”

“You don’t want to res —”

“I can’t very well respond to something that you didn’t give to me, can I?” he said. “I had already left the building. I’ll look at it when I come back.”

The elevator doors slid open.

“We’re dark,” the young agent said.

That is
not
good, Haverford thought.

Singleton had hung him out to dry. The old spymaster would take credit for the success, but dump blame for the failure on Haverford.

“It’s your call.”

“Just find Emile Guibert,” Haverford snapped, “and spare me your observations of the obvious.”

“Sorry.”

Fifty-nine minutes out.

Once operational, Haverford had the authority to abort the mission at his discretion. He could flip the “kill switch,” which would trigger an alert that Hel knew to look for. In that case, Hel would simply walk out of his hotel, a preplanned diversion would occupy his surveillance, and he would go straight to the Niujie Mosque.

“Keep trying on Papa Bear.”

“Yes, sir.”

Assume the worst-case scenario, Haverford told himself.

Assume that Voroshenin has Guibert and is sweating him.

Assume that Guibert has given it up.

Given that scenario, Voroshenin knows that Guibert is a cover, but Guibert couldn’t have given him Hel’s real identity. All Voroshenin knows is that “Michel Guibert” is a cover under British control, which is what Guibert believes. Voroshenin will take the next logical mental step, though — he’ll believe that the British were subbing in for us. He’ll know it’s an American operation.

So what does he do?

He gives it to the Chinese, to his buddy Kang.

What does Kang do?

Either he lets Hel stay operational to see where it leads him, or he picks Hel up and tortures the truth out of him. Everything they knew about Kang indicated the latter course of action.

“You confirmed that Go Player is in place?” Haverford asked.

“He signaled.”

Their watchers outside the hotel had seen Hel go in but not come out, and they observed the correct arrangement of the window curtains. Only ten minutes ago, Hel had called room service to request a fresh thermos of water for his tea, so there was every reason to believe that he was safely in his room and not in Kang’s hands.

But for how long? Haverford wondered.

Abort, he told himself.

Get a signal to the Monk, hit the kill switch now.