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
NICHOLAI 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
NINETY 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.