Pangolin, p.8
Pangolin, page 8
The United States Consulate General was housed in a modern L-shaped building occupying what was, in effect, a large traffic island at the junction of Garden Road and Lower Albert Road, a short way above Central and overlooking the harbour. It was not this building that interested him, however, but another one tucked away behind the long leg of the L. It was squat and square, three storeys of bronze-tinted one-way glass, looking like some cheap new classroom block in the grounds of a distinguished school. You would hardly notice it from Garden Road; if you did, you might think of it as a mundane functional adjunct to the consulate: the trade commissioner’s office, perhaps.
The view from above exposed a flat, felted roof bristling with low-profile radio antennae. It also showed a basement garage entrance that could not be seen from below, the approach to it dug out of the hillside to the south and connecting with the main traffic entrance from the consulate.
At twenty-one minutes past eight the steel door to the garage had been briefly raised from within to admit the Plymouth bringing Kiley to work. Pritchard, following at a discreet distance in the Volkswagen, had shot past the entrance and carried on up the hill.
The building was the Annex, headquarters of the CIA in the Far East. It housed one of the biggest concentrations of Company operatives outside the United States, and Kiley was bang on top of them.
Pritchard lowered the binoculars and stood up. The sun was hot now, beating down on him in his exposed position on the hillside. He would learn nothing more by continuing to stare at the inert bronze mass of the Annex. What he had found out so far, he thought as he began to walk down Boundary Path towards where his car was parked, was useful enough. Kiley was guarded round the clock; he moved from his home to his office as if between two fortresses, both of them fairly impregnable.
The fact that he was so closely protected did not dismay Pritchard. It was a challenge. It also confirmed what he had believed from the start—that Kiley was a very worthwhile target indeed.
8
Baxter collected him early on Tuesday. They drove through the tunnel and out of Kowloon to Pak Sha Wan village in the rural New Territories. From there it was a short drive down a bumpy track to the shore of the small sheltered bay of Hebe Haven, where the Lady Belinda rode at her mooring. They got out of the car with their bags of provisions and called to the boatboy, who was working on the deck of another junk. He was a ‘look-see’ man whose wages were paid jointly by the owners of the moorings to look after the boats and carry out small repairs. He climbed into his sampan and paddled it swiftly, with the single oar that was lashed to the stern, across to the jetty.
‘All well, Ah Leung?’ Baxter asked, heaving his cold-bag full of beer and sandwiches into the small boat. ‘No opium hangover today?’
‘Opium?’ Ah Leung turned an expressionless face up to him.
‘Get on, you know what I’m talking about. Chasing the Dragon. Monday is his day off,’ Baxter explained to Pritchard. ‘Every Monday he spends in a divan in the Walled City, smoking himself stupid. Still, that’s his only vice. As long as it doesn’t interfere with his work we turn a blind eye, don’t we, Ah Leung?’
The boatboy said nothing. Pritchard, clambering into the sampan behind Baxter, said, ‘What happens if you want to get out to your boat on a Monday?’
‘Yeah, what does happen, Ah Leung?’
‘Mondays I leave sampan here,’ he said. ‘You use.’
He paddled them out to the Lady Belinda. As soon as they were aboard, Baxter started the two diesel engines, which both coughed satisfyingly to life. Pritchard unlocked the double doors leading down to the big saloon and stowed their provisions away. Baxter used the boathook to pull the mooring buoy inboard and cast off the line. Returning to the cockpit, he pushed the throttle levers down to half speed, brought the junk round to face the narrow mouth of the bay and headed her out to sea.
They travelled southeastwards for about five miles, passing between Tiu Chung Chau and Shelter Island, where the picnic had been nine days ago, into the open sea. Then Baxter brought the junk round 90 degrees to port, heading for the channel that would bring her out on the seaward side of Basalt Island.
Away from the mainland there was a breeze, making the water choppy and occasionally, as the slender prow dipped into a wave, flinging a handful of spray over the top of the deckhouse. Pritchard, exhilarated, stood in the cockpit beside Baxter, drinking beer and looking round appreciatively at the seascape, the grey-brown islands standing like ghostly hills above the haze. Most of them were uninhabited, for lack of fresh water if nothing else. Even the larger ones had only one or two villages sited in sheltered coves where fishing boats could be drawn up on the beaches.
It was just after midday when they headed in towards the rocky east coast of Basalt, another uninhabited mound, featureless and stark, dominated by a peak that rose steeply on the north side to five or six hundred feet and then fell away more gently to a broken coastline on the south. A couple of hundred yards offshore, Baxter turned the junk to run parallel to the coast. In a few minutes he had found what he was looking for: a small bay with a low, rocky promontory jutting out to sea at its southern end. At the centre of the inlet was a beach, a sliver of pale sand fifty yards wide at the foot of a steep, brush-covered hillside—a place that would be easy to miss from further out at sea.
Baxter nosed the junk towards it. About thirty yards short of the beach he put the engines in neutral, ran forward and dropped the stockless anchor into the pale green water. It got a good grounding at once, the chain tautening as the Lady Belinda strained against it and came round into the wind.
While Baxter went aft to cut the engines, Pritchard gazed round him, impressed by the breadth of the view. He could see all the way from the northeast tip of the mainland to what he guessed was Tung Lung Island at the entrance to the main harbour of Hong Kong. In all that expanse there was not another vessel in sight; they were alone in the world.
They lowered the swimming steps over the side, stripped to their shorts and dived into the clear, blood-warm water. As they scrambled out on the beach Baxter said, ‘Now look around you, Alan. Notice anything unusual?’
Pritchard studied his surroundings carefully—the scrubby grey hillside, the sickle curve of the bay. Then he looked further afield, out to sea, trying to define the horizon through the haze.
‘Not a thing.’
‘Closer in,’ Baxter said, enjoying Pritchard’s puzzlement. ‘It’s really very close.’ Neither of them had yet mentioned the subject of the discussion Pritchard had promised. Baxter seemed to sense that it would be delicate.
Pritchard dutifully gazed around him again. Then suddenly he felt his eye drawn back to the jumble of rocks at the base of the promontory, just twenty yards away, focusing on some unnatural regularity of form. There was a flat rock there, or rather a low shape that seemed too flat and square to be a rock even though it shared the colour and texture of the dark volcanic boulders around it.
He glanced at Baxter, who nodded, smiling. Then he plodded across the sand towards the thing. Stopping a few yards short of it he made the flat surface out to be a roof, supported by low walls nestling among the rocks. A sloping flat boulder formed the rear wall; the other three, all facing out to sea, had narrow horizontal slits in them. Now, too, he made out the rectangular doorway, screened by the shadow of a flat overhanging rock, and recognized the structure for what it was: an army pillbox, long abandoned. Weathering over the years to dark grey, its thick reinforced-concrete walls had acquired a perfect natural camouflage.
‘I stumbled on it last year,’ Baxter said from just behind him. ‘And I mean stumbled—there’s no other way you’d know it was there. Go on in.’
Pritchard, feeling a slight, irrational trepidation, stood for a moment by the doorway. It had been hacked roughly out of the rock to the right of the pillbox and a few feet above it, and the entry tunnel to which it gave access went down two steps before turning left. He entered the tunnel, took the turn, and then another one. He went down three more steps in the gloom and then he was inside the pillbox. It was trapezium-shaped, about twenty feet by twelve, and between the concrete roof and the sandy floor, set well below ground, there was a bare six feet of headroom.
There was a dank smell about the place and a coolness that felt sticky, somehow, in spite of the relief it gave from the midday sun. Pritchard stood in the centre of the floor and looked around. On the wall to the left, a line of cursive Japanese characters had been traced in the concrete before it had set. The date beneath them was in Arabic numerals: 11/4/1942.
‘That was three years before the Japanese surrender,’ said Baxter, who had followed him in and seen him staring at the writing. ‘The Japs spent a fair bit of time strengthening the defences in the first year or so of the occupation. This place is no different to what it was in ’forty-five: completely forgotten now, probably. That was mine.’ He pointed to a rusty San Miguel beer can lying in one corner. ‘Nobody’s been here since me. There are no KILROYS on the walls, no shit on the floor. I bet nobody even knows it exists.’
Pritchard nodded slowly, imagining how the Japanese machine-gun crews must have felt, manning this wretched outpost probably for months at a time; waiting for a boat once a week, perhaps, with water and rations from the garrison stores in Hong Kong; waiting for an enemy who never came.
The post had been sited here for the view it commanded. Its field of fire covered the whole of the northeastern approach to Hong Kong. It was settled in among the rocks as though it had always been there; only from the air—and from pretty directly above, at that—would the regular shape of the roof be likely to give it away.
A strange excitement filled Pritchard. It wasn’t just the knowledge that this place was ideal for his purpose; it went deeper than that, satisfying some strong instinct of the human animal to make his own lair. He remembered a similar sensation from his boyhood in Malaya, at a time when his stepfather had been in charge of a rural police station in Penang. On an over-grown hillside behind the police kampong young Alan had discovered a bunker—a trench three feet deep, with corrugated iron laid over it and that in turn covered with earth—which apparently had been used by Chinese guerrillas during the war, as a food or ammunition dump. He made it his own den, a place where he could hide from the world and indulge in his fantasies. It was there—and the memory sliced through his mood like a knife through a nerve—it was there that he had planned to murder his stepfather.
All at once the inside of the pillbox seemed gloomy, cold, menacing. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to Baxter, and they turned and climbed out into the sunshine.
When they had swum back to the junk they opened their packets of sandwiches and some more beer and had a leisurely lunch at the table in the saloon. When he had finished eating, Baxter wiped his fingers up his bare thighs and said, ‘You’ve got something to discuss with me, Alan.’
‘Yes.’
‘You brought me out here for two reasons: to talk, and to have me show you this place. All right, I’ve done my part.’
‘Then let’s talk. I think you’ve got some idea why I wanted to see this spot.’
‘I’ve got an idea you’re going peculiar, if you really want to know.’
‘Why?’
‘Well,’ Baxter said uncomfortably, ‘the only time I mentioned this place to you . . . it was in a pretty crazy context.’
‘We were having a conversation about kidnapping. You said you knew an ideal place to hide the victim. Now that I’ve seen it I have to agree: it’s perfect.’
‘Conversation, you call it! It was all bullshit!’
‘I wouldn’t agree.’
‘Jesus, you’re so serious! I wasn’t being serious.’
‘Don’t back down on me, Bax.’
‘Back down? What the hell from?’
‘From an idea you put in my head at that picnic. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. In fact I’ve been working on it. And I’ve begun to think I can make it really happen. I’ve taken your fantasy, Bax, and begun to turn it into reality—like you said, about that experiment when you were a kid, turning pennies into half-crowns. Only I don’t intend to come up with green pennies.’
‘Neither do I, Alan.’
‘You got the formula wrong. I think I’ve got it right.’
Baxter rolled his eyes to the pine-panelled ceiling of the saloon. ‘Just what the hell are we talking about?’
‘I think you’ve already guessed, up to a point. But let me spell it out bluntly: I want to kidnap somebody, Bax, and bring him out here to this place of yours. And I need your co-operation.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Baxter shifted on his seat and puffed out his plump cheeks in distress. ‘Jesus Christ, listen to him!’
‘If I can convince you that we can make it work, will you go along? If I can’t, then, okay, we’ll forget about the whole thing. The point is, it can’t work without you.’
‘A kidnapping, for God’s sake! Alan, what’s got into you?’
‘Call it desperation, if you like. Let’s level with each other, chum. How badly are you strapped for money?’
‘Badly.’ Baxter lifted his shoulders in a shrug and nodded several times, staring down at the table. ‘Pretty badly. I got screwed right at the start, by a Chinese banker and a smart team of lawyers. He staked me the money to set myself up here, in exchange for every cent’s worth of collateral I would ever have, now and in the hereafter. The business just didn’t work as well as I expected, that’s all. And then the overheads—Christ, the money you have to spend just to try and prove to people that you’ve got money! I told you I’d probably have to sell the junk. Well, that’s just the beginning. If I sold her and everything else I owned, down to the kid’s tricycle, I’d still be in the hole for two hundred thousand Hong Kong. Maybe a quarter of a million. Look, you’ll keep this to yourself, Alan, won’t you? Nobody knows quite how bad it is, not even Liz. Just me and the banker, and he’s started to make nasty noises about sending me into liquidation. That’s just for the fifty thou I owe him on the initial stake. But once he makes a move the other sharks will get the scent—the backlog I owe on rent, for instance. Quite frankly,’ he said, raising his eyes to look squarely at Pritchard, ‘I’ve been thinking of doing another bunk.’
‘The way you did from Simpang?’
‘It wasn’t half as bad down there. It wasn’t even my fault. There was this offshore investment-trust outfit I was involved in that went bang. There was a threat of prosecution against two or three of us, the directors, for misapplying trusts funds. Luckily we had the Chief Minister on our side, old Salim—I may have mentioned his name to you. Frankly, he’d been getting a kickback for arranging permission to operate there in the first place, and he gave us timely warning to leave before things got too sticky. For him as well as us, you see, because he couldn’t afford to have his connection aired. Anyway—’
‘I want to talk to you about Salim later,’ Pritchard interrupted, opening another can of San Mig. ‘Meanwhile, I said I’d level with you. I’ll tell you this—I’ve lost my job. I have no prospects of finding another one—or if I do it’ll be the same sort of grinding piss-willy nonsense job I’ve had until now. I’m in a hole just as much as you are, Bax, and I want out. I think I know a way of getting out, if you’ll go along with it.’
Baxter gave him a long, level look. ‘You’re really serious, aren’t you?’
‘I am. You come in with me and you can write off those two hundred grand’s worth of debts and still have enough left over to live like a king. I’ll tell you why I need you, Bax. I want three things from you. I want the use of this place of yours, the pillbox out here. I want the use of your junk. And I want your connection with this man Salim. Are you still on good terms with him?’
Baxter shrugged, ‘I haven’t been in touch with him since I left Simpang, but we parted cordially.’
‘Could you get back in there? Arrange a meeting with him?’
‘I suppose so, if he gave me the okay. But what—?’
‘Just listen. In a few days’ time I’ll have the whole story ready to unwrap. And then I can convince you that it’ll work.’
‘Is it just you and me who are in on this?’
‘We’ll need two more. I want Fong to be one of them.’
‘Fong!’
‘He was in on the original discussion, remember? Leaving him out would be a security risk. Just as it happens, he had a talent that we can use.’
‘You think you’ll be able to persuade him to come in?’
‘He needs money as badly as we do, doesn’t he? The way I see it, though, you and I are the senior partners. You supply the three things I mentioned; I supply everything else—including the victim.’
‘Including weapons perhaps?’
‘Just one gun.’
‘Where do you find a gun in Hong Kong? They’re worth their weight in gold.’
‘That problem is already solved. Look.’
Pritchard delved into the bag on the seat beside him and took a heavy package from the bottom of it, something wrapped in a square of oilskin and tied with string. He set it down on the table between them, untied the knot and unwrapped the oilskin, and took out the biggest revolver Baxter had even seen.
‘Webley .455,’ Pritchard said proudly. ‘Service job. Obsolete now, of course, but it’d still blow the head off an ox.’
‘Where in Christ’s name did you get a thing like that?’
‘I’ve had it for thirty years. And never once fired it.’ Pritchard hefted the gun in his hand—a massive weapon, a foot long and two and a half pounds in weight, unloaded. ‘One of the biggest hand guns made this century, or so my stepfather used to say. He was a collector, in a small way. He liberated this from a Japanese prison-camp guard at the surrender of Singapore. The Jap had taken it from a Royal Navy petty officer four years earlier, so it was untraceable.’
‘And your stepfather passed it on to you?’
‘Not exactly. I nicked it from him, together with fifty rounds of ammunition. I was going to kill him, you see.’
