There were people milling around the car, trying to swarm across the road before the lights changed, and a Boeing went sloping weightlessly down the night sky towards Kai Tak on the other side of the harbour. Maybe they'd told me about the reserve because London was narked about my refusing a shield, and Ferris wanted me to know what Control's thinking was: he was very good about that, and tried not to keep you in the dark even if it meant telling you something you didn't want to know. There was no time to think about it anyway, because they were holding the gun hard against my left temple and I couldn't even turn my head to see who it was.
Chapter Ten: MIME
The Boeing drifted lower, its port light flicking on and off as it vanished behind the buildings and reappeared again, its attitude slightly nose-up as it settled along its flight path. Most of the people milling across the road were Chinese, coming up from one of the ferry piers, but there were also a couple of American sailors and a group of Japanese tourists and an airline steward, Royal Dutch. The lights were still red.
Not many things in this scene were registering on a conscious level because they weren't significant, except for the lights. When the lights changed to green I'd have to drive off. The forebrain was very active, triggered by the sensation of pressure against the temple. Before we do anything physically we go through the performance mentally, as an automatic projection of intention to find out if it's really a good idea. If we think it is, the motor nerves are fired and the muscles ordered. There's still time to cancel the whole thing halfway or at any other stage: the freedom of choice is infinitely variable. But it's normally better to go right through with the intention once we're committed, because we've seen it happen mentally and we're fairly confident it's going to work: otherwise we wouldn't have put it into action.
There didn't seem a lot I could do. A mass of data was streaming in from the sensory systems and it had to be computed before anything useful could be done. Movement was restricted: with the people thronging in front of the station wagon I couldn't drive off. This was one of the countless combinations presenting themselves for review: a strike upwards with the right arm and a stab downwards with the right foot, leaving it for the sudden vacuum in the induction manifold to kick the automatic shift into low and send thrust into the final drive. Most of the combinations involved both movable components: man and machine. This one got an instant negative because I couldn't drive through the people and because the computing element of the cortex didn't estimate sufficient time for the right-arm action to hit the gun away before it was fired.
I assumed it was a gun but that was all it was: an assumption. Electrical impulse was pouring data into the brain and there was so much to handle that normal thought was ceding the field to imagination and instinct, and it wasn't logical to imagine they were pressing a fountain pen to my head, or a lipstick case. The image of a face flickered for one microsecond among all the others, the memory plundering its archives as a contribution to the welfare of the organism. It was a smooth round face, always rather sulky until you knew the man, Heppinstall's face, in my mind for this instant because we'd laid bets one day, the three of us (Stoner was the other), on whether it was possible to tell the calibre of a gun pressed to the back of the neck. We used several guns, alarming the fellow in Firearms because we weren't on duty at the time, and Stoner lost his money because he said one of them was a.38 and it was really the end of a scent bottle.
The lights went green.
A rickshaw got on the move, the other side of the station wagon, the man between the shafts butting his way through the stragglers. Two girls ran giggling to the crowded pavement, hobbled by their cheongsams, and on the far side of the intersection a bus driver began tapping his horn as he moved slowly forward. No one was taking any notice of what was happening around them: at this hour they were hurrying into the town from the ferries or along to the restaurants and.brothels and bars of the Wanchai district or eastwards to the hotels and supper clubs and theatres of Causeway Bay. A few were strolling, going where their fancy took them: this was their first sight of Hong Kong by night and they circled like moths.
He was a professional.
Quite a lot of the data concerned this man. Memory suggested he was Chinese because the competition on this operation was Chinese, and sensory perception tended to confirm this: he smelt of incense and the faint distorted image in the chrome strip of the window was Oriental. The pressure against my head was steady and constant and I knew he was a professional because he was speaking to me and laughing a little, presenting the image of someone talking to a friend through the window of his car, even though he realized it was hardly necessary when the passers-by were so preoccupied.
The station wagon swayed an inch as the rear door was pulled open on the far side. As far as I could tell there was only one man getting in. Then the front passenger door came open and someone else got in and slammed the door and pushed the muzzle hard against my left side, below the rib-cage. The taxi in the mirror began honking because the lights had changed a few seconds ago, but we wouldn't be long now because the man who had been talking and laughing to me took his gun away and got into the back, leaning forward on the edge of the seat to talk again, bringing the gun to the nape of my neck and covering it with his left hand: I could feel the warmth of his little finger just above the muzzle.
The man beside me spoke now, prodding me, and I drove off across the intersection, going east. It was obvious what he'd told me to do, though I didn't understand: he spoke in Mandarin, the common language of the new China, as the first man had done.
'What do you want?' I asked them in English. Just a slight tremor of alarm in the voice, a couple of snatched glances at the man next to me. My cover was that of a man who dealt in rare coins and bullion and I must have had a few brushes with violence or attempted violence in my profession: a safe-break or a mugging or a bag-snatch, things like that; so I shouldn't be too frightened by this turn of events, but merely alarmed.
There was a flat half-muted singing of Mandarin again and I shook my head hopelessly. I was waiting for a bit of Cantonese but I wasn't going to understand that either because there's a distinct advantage in the language barrier: it invites the competition to speak freely among themselves in their own tongue and it slows the action down quite a bit when they bark out an order, because if you don't understand what they're barking out they can't expect immediate obedience.
I was now being searched, as far as was possible in the confines of the station wagon, and they were surprised not to find a gun. The ones they carried were now pressed a little harder against me, possibly because they were suspicious. Intelligent agents normally use guns.
Some more Mandarin, then some rather inept attempts at Cantonese when I kept shaking my head. These were hit men, recently arrived in Hong Kong, uneducated and no more than action-trained. Probably they'd been flown in from Pekin when the people down here had found my photo in the files. There were a lot of them here, anything up to a hundred, and it didn't even have to stop at that because the population of China is embarrassingly large. They were here in force, presumably, because one operator can often mean a whole cell has moved into the field, and a cell would depend on a network.
'Down along!' he kept saying in Cantonese, while I looked suitably puzzled. He jerked a hand across the windscreen, showing me where I had to go: down towards the harbour.