See Charlie Run

‘Me?’ said Irena. She was tightly controlled, another professional after all, but the fear was there, like it had been in the exclamation at the church.

‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie honestly, because he didn’t. When the fuck was something going to make sense!

‘Where are we going?’

Something else he didn’t know. Charlie said: ‘Kowloon.’ It was the only place they hadn’t been: he didn’t bother to consider whether it would be safe or not, because nowhere was safe. Charlie emerged tight-muscled again from the protection of the car: there were a lot of people at the ferry terminal but it was not as jam-packed as the Macao alleys. Charlie hurried Irena through, arm around her back, guiding and hopefully protective, manoeuvring always to maintain space around them. He made her stand in front of him – minimizing her as a target – at the ticket kiosk, and aboard the hovercraft managed to get her into a bulkhead seat at the rear, so no one could sit behind, with himself blocking her from the left.

And as the craft throbbed back from the moorings, to become airborne, Charlie looked around the crowded cabin and decided that if the killer had got aboard with them, all the attempted precautions wouldn’t be worth a bugger and they were dead.

But Olga Balan wasn’t aboard. She was back down in the alleys, walking without direction or awareness, knowing that she’d failed and knowing, too, that she couldn’t try again. There’d been the opportunity, when they’d crouched over the body: she’d actually tried to aim again, squinting down the barrel and fixing Irena Kozlov in the sights, but she couldn’t pull the trigger that second time. Or when they’d fled down the steps, the steps she’d later stumbled down herself, waiting for the shouted discovery which never came. She tried to focus her mind, decide what to do. Get away, she supposed, before the authorities sealed the colony: put a search-check on the ferries maybe. Dump the incriminating weapon. Contact Yuri. Tell him she’d failed. That they were trapped, still trapped. More than ever now.

Fredericks and the CIA team spread the word about Harry Lu throughout their informants and sources and the word came back within an hour of the body being found, on Macao.

‘Right person, wrong place,’ said Elliott, when Fredericks announced the wrapping up of the now pointless Wanchai surveillance.

Assembled back at the Peninsula Hotel, Fredericks said: The way I see it, Charlie Muffin hasn’t got Kozlov. His own people have. The Soviets somehow stopped him but missed the woman, when they blew the plane. Now they’re chasing.’

‘Makes her the only prize left,’ judged Hank Levine.

‘Which we’re still going to have,’ said Fredericks.

There’s something from the airport,’ disclosed Jamieson, the Special Forces colonel who’d been awaiting their return. There’s a British military flight on its way from London.’

The prize we’re still going to have,’ repeated Fredericks.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Charlie’s first thought was to go for one of the book-by-the-hour short-time whorehouse hotels in central Kowloon, among the clothes-festooned tenements, but then he realized how easily two round-eyes could be located in such complete Chinese surroundings and so he came closer – but not too close – to the waterfront and took a room in the Asia, which dollar-a-day vacationing students shared with working girls. There were still clothes- festooned tenements and cooking smells from outside streets zig-zagged with neon and inside rooms where some people really were on a dollar a day. There was a perpetual rustle and stir of noise, too, from outside again, but competing against quick-breathed bed sounds from rooms around them and a further away competition, from transistor radios. Their room was at the back of the hotel, kept in a permanent half-light from the overshadowing buildings. The netted curtains against the window were grey with dirt and the bed covering was grey, as well, and probably from the same cause, although it was difficult to be sure even from the additional illumination of the single bedside lamp with its lopsided shade. The lamp was on a table containing the only drawers, and when Charlie opened the plywood wardrobe a solitary bent metal hanger clattered at him. Light in the adjoining bathroom was better. There was a tide-mark of blackness at the water level of the lavatory and several more, at varying heights, around the bath, the bottom of which had completely lost its enamel and was uniformly black. When Charlie put the light on, three fatly contented cockroaches made for the safety of the skirting board but unhurriedly, more confident of their permanence of occupation than he was. Just the sort of place where Harkness would expect him to stay, thought Charlie.

‘We are occupying the same room?’

Charlie turned hack from the bathroom at Irena’s question, and said: ‘Do you want to be alone then, after today!’

She seemed to have difficulty in replying, the demanding confidence still not recovered. Instead she said: ‘Who tried to kill me?’

‘I told you before I didn’t know,’ reminded Charlie. ‘I’m still unsure.’ There was so much to think about, maybe reconsider. He could find – just, and then certainly not justify – a rationale in the Americans blocking an escape route by destroying the plane, but today didn’t have any logic. Irena Kozlov wasn’t any advantage to them dead, and if he and Harry had been the targets of a professional CIA kill-and-snatch operation – and the weapon had most definitely been professional – why was he still alive and why hadn’t Irena Kozlov been taken? He had been a sitting duck, incapable of any effective resistance. And it would have been obvious to anyone after their first week of basic intelligence training. So if not the Americans, then who? There was only one obvious answer – an answer supported by the use of the special assassins’ gun that fired without noise – but against that were the same arguments as before. If the Russians had somehow found them there would have been a squad, and a squad of trained experts would not have let them get three feet from today’s ambush. Why the hell was the world full of questions without answers?

‘That man, the one who was killed; you said he was a friend of yours?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Charlie, reminded. ‘He was.’ Poor Harry, he thought: he wouldn’t after all be taking a family with tinkling names to settle in Cockfosters, the next stop after Oakwood.

‘I am sorry someone has died, because of me.’

Charlie looked intently at the woman, surprised by the expression of regret and the continued humility, neither of which seemed in character. ‘So am I,’ he said. Wilson didn’t like soldiers getting killed and Charlie didn’t like his mates – even mates who’d made him temporarily suspicious – getting killed.

‘What are we going to do?’ It was a little-girl question from someone who wasn’t a little girl.

Charlie moved closer to her but then didn’t know what to do because Irena Kozlov wasn’t the sort of woman to feel out to and offer some reassurance through physical contact. He did anyway and she further surprised him by responding, reaching out to take his hand. ‘We’re going to get out,’ he said, wishing he believed it himself and hoping she did. Already rehearsed from his earlier reflections, Charlie went on: ‘They tried to kill us but we got away, so we must have lost them. Otherwise they would have tried again. So we’re safe.’

She looked back at him uncertainly, but didn’t openly challenge him. She said: ‘It’s got to be the Americans, hasn’t it?’

Charlie caught the doubt in her mind, wondering if the fear of her own people in pursuit had brought about the changed attitude. While he preferred it to her earlier demeanour, Charlie decided it would be better if she only had the fear from one source. He said: ‘Yes, it’s the Americans.’

‘They’ll lose,’ she announced.

‘Lose?’ queried Charlie. Her hands were very soft.