Covert One 4 - The Altman Code (28 page)

With relief, he took a shower. In the steaming water, he scrubbed until
his skin glowed, forcing his mind away from the dead man and into the
future. As he toweled off, he made plans.

At last, he returned to bed. He lay awake for some time, trying to calm
his disquiet as he listened to the occasional night sounds of the hotel,
the scattered noise of traffic, and the mournful horns of ships and
boats in the harbor. All the sounds of life in a busy city on a busy
planet in a busy galaxy in a busy universe. An indifferent universe, and
galaxy, and planet, and city.

He listened to the beating of his own heart. To the imagined sound of
blood flowing through his veins and arteries. To sounds heard nowhere
but in his own mind. Sometime before daybreak, he fell asleep again.

And jerked awake once more. He sat bolt upright. Out in the corridor,
the wheels of a room-service cart ferried an early breakfast to someone.

The first rays of morning showed around the drapes, while city noises
rose and crescendoed. He jumped out of bed and dressed. When the
assassin did not report in, and he did not reappear–whether or not the
body had been found and the police called–another assassin would
eventually be sent.

Fully dressed in the same suit, fresh shirt, and new tie, he selected
items from his suitcase–his backpack, a pair of gray slacks, a gaudy
Hawaiian shirt, a seersucker sport jacket, canvas running shoes, and a
collapsible Panama hat. His black working clothes were already in the
backpack. He packed everything else in, too, including his folding
attache case.

Finally, he put on his dirty-blond wig and adjusted it in the mirror. He
was Major Kenneth St. Germain again.

After a final survey of the room, he left, carrying the suitcase and
wearing the backpack. The carpeted corridor was still empty, but behind
the doors, televisions had been turned on, and people were moving.

Jon rode the elevator down to the floor above the lobby and took the
stairs the rest of the way. From the doorway, he scanned the lobby east
to west, north to south. He saw no police, no one who acted like police,
and none of the killers from yesterday. There was no one he recognized
from Shanghai. Still, none of his precautions guaranteed no one was
waiting.

He stood out of sight another ten minutes. At last, he crossed to the
registration desk. If he left without checking out, the hotel might
notify the police, especially since it was only a matter of time until
the corpse upstairs was discovered. While he waited for the bill, he
asked the bell captain to call a taxi with an English-speaking driver,
to take him to the airport.

The cab was barely out of sight of the hotel when Jon leaned forward
from the backseat: “Change of plan. Take me to Eighty-eight Queensway in
Central. The Conrad International Hotel.”

Dazu, China.

A thousand years ago, religious artists carved and painted stone
sculptures into the mountains, caves, and grottos that surrounded the
rural village of Dazu. Now a metropolis of more than eight hundred
thousand, Dazu had terraces of well-maintained rice paddies as well as
high-rise buildings, small farmhouses nestled among trees, and mansions
surrounded by formal landscapes. The soil and climate of the green,
rolling land were favorable for city gardeners and suburban farmers, who
grew as many as three crops a year, most still using the methods of
their ancestors.

The prison farm was less than five miles from the giant Sleeping Buddha,
carved at Baodingshan. Secluded and isolated, the prison was a sprawl of
frame buildings and walkways, locked behind a tall, chain-link fence
that had raised platforms at each corner for the armed sentries. The
dirt road that led to it was never traveled by tourists or city people.

Inmates, who worked in fields and paddies operated by the distant
Beijing government, were marched to and from work by armed guards. They
had little contact with locals. Light as the confinement and security
appeared, China did not coddle those it branded criminals.

The old man was one of the few inmates excused from the fields and
morning march. He was even allowed some privileges, such as the cell–
almost a normal room–he shared in the barrack with only one other
prisoner. His offense was so long ago that neither the guards nor the
farm’s governor remembered what it was. This ignorance left them nothing
specific to condemn him for, nothing easy to cause hate or fear, nothing
longstanding to punish and feel righteous about. Because of this and his
advanced age, they often treated him like a grandfather. He was given
treats and a hot plate, books and newspapers, pens and writing paper.

All illicit, but known to and ignored by the usually stern governor, a
former PLA colonel.

This made it more disconcerting to the prisoner when very early in the
morning, even before breakfast, his Chinese cell mate vanished to be
replaced by a younger, non-Chinese man. He had been brought in at dawn,
and since then he had been lying on his sleeping pallet. His eyes were
usually closed. Occasionally, he stared up at the unpainted barrack
ceiling. He said nothing.

Frowning, the old man went about his activities, refusing to let this
abnormality interfere with his routine. He was tall and rangy, although
on the thin side. He had a rugged face that was once handsome. Now it
was heavily lined, the cheeks sunken, the eyes set in hollows. The eyes
were intelligent, so he kept them downcast. It was safer that way.

That morning, he went to his clerical assignment in the governor’s
office as usual, and, when lunchtime arrived, he returned to his cell
and opened a can of Western lentil soup, heated it on the hot plate, and
sat alone at his plank table to eat.

The new prisoner, who was perhaps fifty, had apparently not moved from
his pallet. His eyes were closed. Still, there was nothing restful about
him. He had a tough-looking, muscular body that never seemed completely
at rest.

Suddenly he jumped lightly to his feet and seemed to flow to the door.

His face had a gray stubble that matched his iron-gray hair. He opened
the door and scanned the barrack, which was empty because most of the
inmates ate beside the fields. He closed the door, returned to his
pallet, and lay down again as if he had never moved.

The old man had watched with a kind of envy mixed with admiration and
regret, as if he had once been as athletic as that and knew he could
never be again.

“Your son can’t believe you’re alive. He wants to see you.”

The longtime prisoner dropped his spoon into his soup. The younger man’s
voice had been soft and low, yet somehow carried clearly to his ears.

The newcomer stared calmly up at the ceiling. His lips had not moved.

“Wha … what?” “Keep eating,” the motionless man said. “He wants you to
come home.”

David Thayer remembered his training. He bent to his soup, lifted a
spoonful, and spoke with his head down. “Who are you?”

“An emissary.”

He sipped. “How do I know that? I’ve been tricked before. They do it
every time they want to add to my sentence. They’ll keep me here until I
die. Then they can pretend nothing ever happened … I never existed.”

“The last gift you gave him was a stuffed dog with floppy ears named
Paddy.”

Thayer felt tears well up in his eyes. But it had been so long now, and
they had lied to him so many times. “The dog had a last name.” “Reilly,”
the man on the pallet said Thayer laid down his dented soup spoon.
Rubbed his sleeve across his face. Sat for a moment.

The man on the floor remained silent.

Thayer bent his head again, hiding his lips from anyone who might be
watching. “How did you get in here? Do you have a name?”

“Money works miracles. I’m Captain Dennis Chiavelli. Call me Dennis.”

He forced himself to resume eating. “Would you like some soup?”

“Soon. Tell me the situation. They’re still not aware of who you are?”

“How could they be? I didn’t know Marian had remarried. I didn’t even
know whether she and Sam were alive. Now I understand she’s dead.

Terrible.”

“How did you find out?”

“Sam’s visit to Beijing last year. I get the newspapers here. I … ”

“You read Mandarin?”

“Washington wouldn’t have sent me if I weren’t fluent.” Thayer smiled
thinly. “In nearly sixty years, I’ve become expert. In many of the
dialects, too, especially Cantonese.”

“Sorry, Dr. Thayer,” Captain Chiavelli said.

“When I read about Sam’s visit, his name jumped out, because Serge
Castilla had been my closest friend at State. I knew he’d been helping
in the search for me, too. So I did some calculations. President
Castilla was exactly the right age, and the paper said his father was
Serge and his mother Marian. He had to be my son.”

Chiavelli gave an almost invisible shake of his head. “No, he didn’t. It
could’ve been a coincidence.”

“What did I have to lose?”

The Covert-One agent thought about that. “So why did you keep quiet
until now? You’ve waited a full year.”

“There was no chance I’d ever get out, so why embarrass him? And why
risk Beijing’s finding out and vanishing me completely?”

“Then you read about the human-rights treaty.”

“No. It won’t be announced in the Chinese papers until it’s signed. The
Uigher political prisoners told me.” Thayer pushed the soup bowl away.

“At that point, I allowed myself to hope. Maybe there was a chance I’d
be overlooked among the crush of releases and accidentally let go.” He
stood up and walked to his hot plate.

Chiavelli watched with half-closed eyes. Despite Thayer’s advanced age–
he had to be at least eighty-two, according to Klein–he walked
energetically, steady and firm. His posture was erect but relaxed. There
was a spring to his step, now, too, as if he had shed years in the
fifteen minutes they had been talking. All of this was important.

Routine had saved Thayer’s sanity. He picked up a chipped enamel kettle,
carried it to the scarred sink, filled it, and put it on the hot plate.

From a little cupboard, he brought out two chipped cups and a tin
canister of black tea. His method of making tea was an unusual mixture
of traditional English and traditional Chinese. He poured the boiling
water into the earthenware pot, rinsed it, poured it away, then measured
in four teaspoons of tea. He immediately poured more boiling water onto
it and let it steep less than a minute. The result was a pale,
golden-brown liquid. The pungent aroma filled the cell.

“We drink this without milk or sugar.” He gave Chiavelli a cup.

The undercover agent sat up and leaned back against the wall, cradling
it.

Thayer sat at the table with his. He sighed. “Now I’m beginning to
believe getting out because of the treaty is just the pipe dream of a
man at the end of his years. They’ve held me in secret far too long to
admit that they’ve held me at all. It’d make their human-rights record
look even more despicable.” Chiavelli drank. The tea was light-bodied
and mild for his Italian-American palate, but it was hot, a welcome
improvement to the underheated barrack. “Tell me what happened, Dr.
Thayer. Why were you arrested in the first place?”

Thayer set down his cup and stared into it as if he could see the past.

When he looked up, he said, “I was working as a liaison with Chiang
Kaishek’s organization. My job supposedly was to bring about some kind
of detente between his Nationalists and Mao’s Communists, so I thought
it’d help the process along if I personally went to Mao and reasoned
with him.” He gave a smile that was half grimace. “How ludicrous. How
naive. Of course, what I didn’t see was that my real mission was to keep
Chiang in power. I was supposed to make deals, hold talks, and stall
until Chiang could destroy Mao and the Communists. Going to Mao was the
quixotic notion of an inexperienced intellectual who believed people
could talk rationally together even when power, values, cultures, ideas,
classes, haves, have-nots, and geopolitical spheres of influence were in
conflict.”

“So you really did it? You actually went to see Mao alone?” He sounded
both amazed and horrified.

Thayer gave a thin smile. “I tried. Never got to him. His army decided I
was an agent of the West, or of Chiang, or both. Of course, they
arrested me. I would’ve been shot by the soldiers, if Mao’s politicians
hadn’t intervened because I had diplomatic status. Over the years, I
often wished I had been shot on the spot.”

“Why did they report you dead and then hold you like the Soviets held
Wallenberg?”

“Raoul Wallenberg? You mean the Soviets did have him?”

“Denied they did, never released him, and for fifty years continued
denying they ever had held him. He died early on, in custody.”

Thayer seemed to sag. “I expect what happened to me was what happened to
him. They couldn’t believe he was nothing more than he appeared. That’s
the direct result of paranoia, the kind that happens when anyone who
speaks out is ruthlessly suppressed. At the time I was captured, the
Communist revolution was sweeping China. There was such chaos …
endlessly changing commanders, new civilian orders, confounding
proclamations, and bureaucrats who had no idea what was going on. I
think I must’ve been simply lost in the machinery. By the time
Zhongnanhai stabilized, it was too late to send me home without creating
an international incident and losing face.” He turned the warm cup
between his gnarled fingers. “And here they intend for me to stay. Until
I die.” “No,” Chiavelli said firmly. “What happened to Wallenberg isn’t
going to happen to you. You won’t die in captivity. When the treaty’s
signed, China will release all political prisoners. The president will
make a point of bringing you to the attention of Niu Jianxing and the
rest of the Standing Committee. I’ve heard he’s called the Owl, because
he’s a wise man.”