he had kept in close touch with Nayland Smith, and this awful sense of loneliness which weighed him down now had not swept over him. Once he had overcome his stage fright on first assuming the part of Chi Foh, a Hong Kong fisherman, he had begun to enjoy his mission . . .
There were faint movements in the corridor, but they ceased, and Tony returned again to the recent past which now seemed so distant . . .
Anyway, he had penetrated the Second Bamboo Curtain—was still behind it. Of the mystery brain which Sir Denis Nayland Smith believed to be that of the fabulous Dr. Fu Manchu he had learned less than nothing. But in one part of his mission he had succeeded. The discovery had been made because of the thoroughness with which he identified himself with his assumed part of a Hong Kong fisherman seeking a missing fiancee. He had selected a remote riverside village not far above Chia-Ting on the Ya Ho River as the place to which his mythical girl friend had been taken by her family.
Quite openly he canvassed the inhabitants, so that if questioned later he could call witnesses to support his story. And it was from a kindly old woman whose sympathy with his quest made him feel an awful hypocrite that he got the clue which led him to his goal.
She suggested that the missing girl might be employed in “the Russian camp.” It appeared that a grand- daughter of hers had worked there for a time.
“Where is this camp?” he asked.
It was on the outskirts of the village.
“What are Russians doing here?” he wanted to know.
They were employed to guard the leprosy research centre. Even stray dogs who came too near to the enclosure were shot to avoid spreading infection. The research centre was a mile outside the village.
“When did your grand-daughter leave, and why?” he inquired.
To get married, the old woman told him. She left only a month ago. The wages were good and the work light. She and her husband now lived in the village.
Tony interviewed the girl, describing “Nan Cho”, his missing fiancee, but was assured that she was not employed at the Russian camp. He gathered that there were not more than forty men there in charge of a junior officer and two sergeants . . .
How vividly he remembered his reconnaissance in the grey dawn next morning!
The camp was a mere group of hutments, with a cookhouse and an orderly room displaying the hammer and sickle flag. He estimated that even by Russian standards it couldn’t accommodate more than forty men. From cover he studied it awhile, and when the sleeping camp came to life decided that it was the most slovenly outfit he had ever come across. The entire lack of discipline convinced him that the officer in charge must be a throw-out sent to this dismal post as useless elsewhere.
There was a new and badly-made road leading from the camp up into the hills which overlooked the river. He was still watching when a squad of seven men appeared high up the road, not in any kind of order but just trudging along as they pleased. The conclusion was obvious. The guard on the research center had been relieved.
He made a wide detour. There was plenty of cover on both sides of the road, oaks and scrub, and not a patch of cultivation that he could see. It was a toilsome journey, for he was afraid to take to the winding road even when far out of sight of the camp below. This was fortunate; for suddenly, beyond another bend of the serpentine road, he came in sight of the research station.
It was unlike anything he had anticipated.
A ten-foot wire fence surrounded an area, or so he guessed, of some twelve acres. Roughly in the center of the area, which had been mown clear of vegetation and looked like a huge sheet of brown paper, he saw a group of buildings roofed with corrugated iron. One of them had what he took to be a smokestack or ventilation shaft.
The road ended before a gate in the wire fence. There was a wooden hut beside the gate, and a Russian soldier stood there, his rifle resting against the hut. He was smoking a cigarette.
And presently another man appeared walking briskly along outside the wire. The smoker carefully stubbed out his cigarette, stuck it behind his ear, and shouldered his rifle. The other man stepped into the hut—evidently the corporal in charge, who had posted the remaining five men of his squad at points around the circumference of the fence.
The cunning of Soviet propaganda! Leprosy is a frightening word, although leprosy had rarely appeared in Szechuan. But the mere name was enough to keep all at a distance.
This was the germ factory . . .
Where had he gone wrong?
Chung Wa-Su? Was it possible that Chung had betrayed him? It would be in line with Chinese thinking (if he. Tony, had aroused suspicion) to plant a pretended helper in his path. Yet all that Chung Wa-Su had done was to admit that he worked for Free China and to give him directions how best to cross the Yangtsze into Szechuan without meeting with frontier guards.
It was hard to believe.
There was the man he knew simply as Li. Who was Li? True, Tony hadn’t trusted him very far although he had given sign and countersign, but all the same it was Li who had put him in touch with Chung Wa-Su.
Had Li been seized, forced to speak? Or was it possible that a report of his, Tony’s visit to Hua-Tzu had preceded him down the river? Questioned, he had spoken freely about the visit; for although he knew, now, what was hidden there, he couldn’t go back on his original plan without destroying the carefully built-up evidence of the purpose of his long journey.
He fell into an uneasy doze. He could hear, and smell, the rats in his rice bowl. As he slipped into sleep, his mind carried him back to his last examination by the dreadful creature called Colonel Soong . . .
“If you searched this village you speak of, looking for some girl, you can tell me the name of the former mandarin who lives in the big house.”
“There is no large house in Hua-Tzu.”
“I mean the house is in the hills.”
“I saw no house in the hills.”
His heart warmed again in his near-dream state. There were few Americans, or Europeans either, who could have sustained the character of a love-lorn fisherman from Hong Kong under the fire of those oblique, ferocious eyes.
Yes, Sir Denis Nayland Smith was a good picker. No man could be better fitted for the job than one born in China, whose maternal grandmother had belonged to an old Manchurian family . . .
In a small room, otherwise plainly furnished, a man sat in a massive, high-backed ebony chair behind a lacquer desk. The desk glistened in the light of a silk-shaded lantern which hung from the ceiling, so that golden dragons designed on the lacquer panels seemed to stir mysteriously.
The man seated there wore a loose yellow robe. His elbows rested on the desk, and his fingers—long, yellow fingers—were pressed together, so that he might have suggested to an observer the image of a praying mantis. He had the high brow of a philosopher and features indicating great intellectual power. This aura of mental force seemed to be projected by his eyes, which were of a singular green color, and as he stared before him, as if at some distant vision, from time to time they filmed over in an extraordinary manner.
The room, in which there lingered a faint, sickly smell of opium, was completely silent.
And this silence was scarcely disturbed when a screen door opened and an old Chinese came in on slippered feet. His face, in which small, twinkling eyes looked out from an incredible map of wrinkles, was that of a man battered in a long life of action, but still unbowed, undaunted. He wore an embroidered robe and a black cap topped by a coral bead.
He dropped down on to cushions heaped on the rugs, tucking his hands into the loose sleeves of his robe, and remained there, still as a painted Buddha, watching the other man.
The silence was suddenly and harshly broken by the voice of the dreamer at the lacquer desk. It was a strange voice, stressing the many sibilants in the Chinese language and emphasizing the gutturals.
“And so, Tsung-Chao, I am back again in China—a fugitive from the West, but a power in the East. You, my old friend, are restored to favor General Huan Tsung-Chao, a former officer of the Chinese Empire, now Communist governor of a province! A triumph for the Si-Fan. But similar phenomena have appeared in Soviet Russia. You have converted Szechuan into a fortress in which I am secure. You have done well.”
“Praise from the Master warms my old heart.”
