Noble House

“Yes … yes I … will. Yes she’s the best.”

  They heard Suslev pour a bucket of water into the toilet and come back.

  “Here, old chum!”

  “Thank you.” The sound of thirsty drinking. “I … I think … I think I want to lie down for … lie down. A few minutes …”

  “A few hours more like! Don’t you fret, I’ll cook breakfast. Here, wanta ’nother drink….”

  The policemen in the van were listening carefully. Crosse had ordered the bug put into Clinker’s apartment two years ago. Periodically it was monitored, always when Suslev was there. Suslev, always under loose surveillance, had met Clinker in a bar. Both men were submariners and they had struck up a friendship. Clinker had invited him to stay and from time to time Suslev did. At once Crosse had instituted a security check on Clinker but nothing untoward had been discovered. For twenty years Clinker had been a sailor with the Royal Navy. After the war he had drifted from job to job in the Merchant Marine, throughout Asia to Hong Kong, where he had settled when he retired. He was a quiet, easygoing man who lived alone and had been Rose Court’s caretaker-janitor for five years now. Suslev and Clinker were a matched pair who drank a lot, caroused a lot and swapped stories. None of their hours of talk had produced anything considered valuable.

  “He’s had his usual tankful, Brian,” Crosse said.

  “Yes sir.” Brian Kwok was bored and tried not to show it.

  In the small living room Clinker gave Suslev his shoulder. “Come on, it’s you for a kip.” He stepped over the glass and helped Suslev into the small bedroom. Suslev lay down heavily and sighed.

  Clinker closed the drapes then went over to another small tape deck and turned it on. In a moment heavy breathing and the beginnings of a snore came from the tape. Suslev got up soundlessly, his pretended drunkenness gone. Clinker was already on his hands and knees. He pulled away a mat and opened the trapdoor. Noiselessly, Suslev went down into it. Clinker grinned, slapped him on the back and closed the well-greased door after him. The trapdoor steps led to a rough tunnel that quickly joined the large, dry, subterranean culvert storm drain. Suslev picked his way carefully, using the flashlight that was in a bracket at the bottom of the steps. In a moment he heard a car grinding over Sinclair Road just above his head. A few more steps and he was below Sinclair Towers. Another trapdoor led to a janitor’s closet. This let out onto some disused back stairs. He began to climb.

  Roger Crosse was still listening to the heavy breathing, mixed with opera. The van was cramped and close, their shirts sweaty. Crosse was smoking. “Sounds like he’s bedded down for the night,” he said. They could hear Clinker humming and his movements as he cleared up the broken glass. A red warning light on the radio panel started winking. The operator clicked on the sender. “Patrol car 1423, yes?”

  “Headquarters for Superintendent Crosse. Urgent.”

  “This’s Crosse.”

  “Duty Office, sir. A report’s just come in that the Floating Dragon restaurant’s on fire …” Brian Kwok gasped. “… Fire engines’re already there, and the constable said that as many as twenty may be dead or drowned. It seems the boat caught fire from the kitchen, sir. There were several explosions. They blew out most of the hull and … Just a moment sir, there’s another report coming in from Marine.”

  They waited. Brian Kwok broke the silence. “Dunross?”

  “The party was on the top deck?” Crosse asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  “He’s much too smart to get burned to death—or drowned,” Crosse said softly. “Was the fire an accident, or deliberate?”

  Brian Kwok did not answer.

  The HQ, voice came in again. “Marine reports that the boat’s capsized. They say it’s a proper carve-up and it looks like a few got sucked under.”

  “Was our agent with our VIP?”

  “No sir, he was waiting on the wharf near his car. There was no time to get to him.”

  “What about the people caught on the top deck?”

  “Hang on a moment, I’ll ask….”

  Again a silence. Brian Kwok wiped the sweat off.

  “… They say, twenty or thirty up there jumped, sir. Unfortunately most of them abandoned ship a bit late, just before the boat capsized. Marine doesn’t know how many were swamped.”

  “Stand by.” Crosse thought a moment. Then he spoke into the mike again. “I’m sending Superintendent Kwok there at once in this transport. Send a team of frogmen to meet him. Ask the navy to assist, Priority One. I’ll be at home if I’m needed.” He clicked off the mike. Then to Brian Kwok, “I’ll walk from here. Call me the moment you know about Dunross. If he’s dead we’ll visit the bank vaults at once and to hell with the consequences. Fast as you can now!”

  He got out. The van took off up the hill. Aberdeen was over the spine of mountains and due south. He glanced at Rose Court a moment, then down across the street below to Sinclair Towers. One of his teams was still watching the entrance, waiting patiently for Tsu-yan’s return. Where is that bastard? he asked himself irritably.

  Very concerned, he walked off down the hill. Rain began to splatter him. His footsteps quickened.

  Suslev took an ice-cold beer from the modern refrigerator and opened it. He drank gratefully. 32 Sinclair Towers was spacious, rich, clean and well furnished, with three bedrooms and a large living room. It was on the eleventh floor. There were three apartments to each floor around two cramped elevators and exit steps. Mr. and Mrs. John Chen owned 31. 33 belonged to a Mr. K. V. Lee. Arthur had told Suslev that K. V. Lee was a cover name for Ian Dunross who, following the pattern of his predecessors, had sole access to three or four private apartments spread around the Colony. Suslev had never met either John Chen or Dunross though he had seen them at the races and elsewhere many times.

  If we have to interview the tai-pan what could be more convenient? he thought grimly. And with Travkin as an alternate bait….

  A sudden squall whipped the curtains that were drawn over open windows and he heard the rain. He shut the windows carefully and looked out. Great drops were streaking the windows. Streets and rooftops were already wet. Lightning went across the sky. The rumble of thunder followed. Already the temperature had dropped a few degrees. This’ll be a good storm, he told himself gratefully, pleased to be out of Ginny Fu’s tiny, sleazy fifth-floor walkup in Mong Kok, and equally happy not to be at Clinker’s.

  Arthur had arranged everything: Clinker, Ginny Fu, this safe house, the tunnel, certainly as well as he himself could have done in Vladivostok. Clinker was a submariner and cockney and everything he was supposed to be except that he had always detested the officer class. Arthur had said it had been easy to subvert Clinker to the cause, using the man’s built-in suspicions, hatreds and secretiveness. “Ugly Ernie knows only a little about you, Gregor—of course that you’re Russian and captain of the Ivanov. As to the tunnel, I told him you’re having an affair with a married woman in Sinclair Towers, the wife of one of the Establishment tai-pans. I told him the tape-recorded snores and secrecy are because the rotten Peelers are after you and they’ve sneaked in and bugged his flat.”

  “Peelers?”

  “That’s the cockney nickname for police. It came from Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister of England, who founded the first police force. Cockneys’ve always hated Peelers and Ugly Ernie would delight in outwitting them. Just be pro-Royal Navy and he’s your dog until death….”

  Suslev smiled. Clinker’s not a bad man, he thought, just a bore.

  He sipped his beer as he wandered back into the living room. The afternoon paper was there. It was the Guardian Extra, the headlines screaming, MOB MURDERS FRAGRANT FLOWER, and a good photograph of the riot. He sat in an armchair and read quickly.

  Then his sharp ears heard the elevator stop. He went to the table beside the door and slid the loaded automatic with its silencer from under it. He pocketed the gun and peered through the spy hole.

  The doorbell was muted. He opened it and smiled. “Come in, old frie
nd.” He embraced Jacques deVille warmly. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes, yes it has, comrade,” deVille said as warmly. The last time he had seen Suslev was in Singapore, five years before, at a secret meeting arranged by Arthur just after deVille had been induced to join Sevrin. He and Suslev had met just as secretly the first time in the great port of Lyons in France in June ’41, just days before Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia when the two countries were outwardly still allies. At that time deVille was in the Maquis and Suslev second-in-command and secret political commissar of a Soviet submarine that was ostensibly in for a refit from patrol in the Atlantic. It was then that deVille was asked if he would like to carry on the real war, the war against the capitalist enemy as a secret agent after the fascists had been destroyed.

  He had agreed with all his heart.

  It had been easy for Suslev to subvert him. Because of deVille’s potential after the war, the KGB had secretly had him betrayed to the Gestapo, then rescued from a Gestapo prison death by Communist guerrillas. The guerrillas had given him false proof that he had been betrayed by one of his own men for money. DeVille was thirty-two then and, like many, infatuated with socialism and with some of the teachings of Marx and Lenin. He had never joined the French Communist Party but now, because of Sevrin, he was an honorary captain in the KGB Soviet Security Force.

  “You seem tired, Frederick,” Suslev said, using deVille’s cover name. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Just a family problem.”

  “Tell me.”

  Suslev listened intently to deVille’s sad story about his son-in-law and daughter. Since their meeting in 1941 Suslev had been deVille’s controller. In 1947 he had ordered him out to Hong Kong to join Struan’s. Before the war deVille and his father had owned a highly successful import-export business with close ties to Struan’s—as well as family ties—so the change had been easy and welcome. DeVille’s secret assignment was to become a member of the Inner Court and, at length, tai-pan.

  “Where’s your daughter now?” he asked compassionately.

  DeVille told him.

  “And the driver of the other car?” Suslev committed the name and address to memory. “I’ll see that he’s dealt with.”

  “No,” deVille said at once. “It … it was an accident. We cannot punish a man for an accident.”

  “He was drunk. There is no excuse for drunk driving. In any event you are important to us. We take care of our own. I will deal with him.”

  DeVille knew there was no point in arguing. A gust of rain battered the windows. “Merde, but the rain’s good. The temperature must be down five degrees. Will it last?”

  “The storm front’s reported to be big.”

  DeVille watched globules running down the pane, wondering why he had been summoned. “How are things with you?”

  “Very good. Drink?” Suslev went to the mirrored bar. “There’s good vodka.”

  “Vodka’s fine, please. But a short one.”

  “If Dunross retired are you the next tai-pan?”

  “I would think it’s between four of us: Gavallan, David MacStruan, myself and Linbar Struan.”

  “In that order?”

  “I don’t know. Except Linbar’s probably last. Thanks.” DeVille accepted his drink. They toasted each other. “I’d bet on Gavallan.”

  “Who’s this MacStruan?”

  “A distant cousin. He’s done his five years as a China Trader. At the moment he’s heading up our expansion into Canada—we’re trying to diversify and get into wood fibers, copper, all the Canadian minerals, mostly out of British Columbia.”

  “How good is he?”

  “Very good. Very tough. A very dirty fighter. Thirty-eight, ex-lieutenant, Paratroopers. His left hand was almost ripped off over Burma by a tangle in the shrouds of his parachute. He just tied a tourniquet around it and carried on fighting. That earned him a Military Cross. If I was tai-pan I’d choose him.” DeVille shrugged. “By our company law only the tai-pan can appoint his successor. He can do it anytime, even in his will if he wants. Whatever way it’s done it’s binding on the Noble House.”

  Suslev watched him. “Has Dunross made a will?”

  “Ian’s very efficient.”

  A silence gathered.

  “Another vodka?”

  “Non, merci, I’ll stay with this one. Is Arthur joining us?”

  “Yes. How could we tip the scales for you?”

  DeVille hesitated, then shrugged.

  Suslev poured himself another drink. “It would be easy to discredit this MacStruan and the others. Yes. Easy to eliminate them.” Suslev turned and looked at him. “Even Dunross.”

  “No. That’s not the solution.”

  “Is there another one?”

  “Being patient.” DeVille smiled but his eyes were very tired and shadows lurked there. “I would not like to be the cause of … of his removal or that of the others.”

  Suslev laughed. “It’s not necessary to kill to eliminate! Are we barbarians? Of course not.” He was watching his protégé closely. DeVille needs toughening, he was thinking. “Tell me about the American, Bartlett, and the Struan-Par-Con deal.”

  DeVille told him all he knew. “Bartlett’s money will give us everything we need.”

  “Can this Gornt effect a takeover?”

  “Yes and no. And possibly. He’s tough and he truly hates us. It’s a long-term rival—”

  “Yes, I know.” Suslev was surprised deVille kept repeating information he already had been given. It’s a bad sign, he thought, and glanced at his watch. “Our friend’s twenty-five minutes late. That’s unusual.” Both men were too seasoned to worry. Meetings such as this could never be completely firm because no one could ever control the unexpected happening.

  “Did you hear about the fire in Aberdeen?” deVille asked at the sudden thought.

  “What fire?”

  “There was a bulletin over the wireless just before I came up.” DeVille and his wife had apartment 20 on the sixth floor. “The Floating Dragon restaurant at Aberdeen burned down. Perhaps Arthur was there.”

  “Did you see him?” Suslev was suddenly concerned.

  “No. But I could easily have missed him. I left well before dinner.”

  Suslev sipped his vodka thoughtfully. “Has he told you yet who the others are in Sevrin?”

  “No. I asked him, judiciously, as you ordered, but he nev—”

  “Order? I don’t order you, tovarich, I just suggest.”

  “Of course. All he said was, ‘We’ll all meet in due course.’”

  “We’ll both know soon. He’s perfectly correct to be cautious.” Suslev had wanted to test deVille and test Arthur. It was one of the most basic rules in the KGB that you can never be too cautious about your spies however important they are. He remembered his instructor hammering into them another direct quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which was obligatory reading for all Soviet military: “There are five classes of spies—local spies, inward spies, converted spies, doomed spies and surviving spies. When all five categories are working in concert, the state will be secure and the army inviolate. Local spies are those who are local inhabitants. Inward spies are officials of the enemy. Converted spies are the enemies’ spies you have converted. Doomed spies are those fed false information and reported to the enemy who will torture this false information from them and so be deceived. Surviving spies are those who bring back news from the enemy camp. Remember, in the whole army, none should more liberally be rewarded. But if a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he or she must be put to death, together with the person to whom the secret is told.”

  If the other AMG reports are like the one already discovered, Suslev thought dispassionately, then Dunross is doomed.

  He was watching deVille, measuring him, liking him, glad that again he had passed that test—and Arthur. The last paragraph of The Art of War—so important a book to the Soviet elite that many knew the slim vo
lume by heart—sprang into his mind: “It is only the enlightened ruler and wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying. Spies are the most important element in war because upon them depends an army’s ability to move.”

  That’s what the KGB does, he thought contentedly. We try for the best talent in all the Soviets. We are the elite. We need spies of all five categories. We need these men, Jacques and Arthur and all the others.

  Yes, we need them very much.

  “Arthur’s never given any clue who the others are. Nothing,” deVille was saying, “Only that there are seven of us.”

  “We must be patient,” Suslev said, relieved that Arthur was correctly cautious too, for part of the plan was that the seven should never know each other, should never know that Suslev was Sevrin’s controller and Arthur’s superior. Suslev knew the identities of all the Sevrin moles. With Arthur he had approved all of them over the years, continually testing them all, honing their loyalties, eliminating some, substituting others. You always test, and the moment a spy wavers that’s the time to neutralize or eliminate him—before he neutralizes or eliminates you. Even Ginny Fu, he thought, though she’s not a spy and knows nothing. You can never be sure of anyone except yourself—that’s what our Soviet system teaches. Yes. It’s time I took her on the trip I’ve always promised. A short voyage next week. To Vladivostok. Once she’s there she can be cleansed and rehabilitated and made useful, never to return here.

  He sipped his vodka, rolling the fiery liquid around his tongue. “We’ll give Arthur half an hour. Please,” he said, motioning to a chair.

  DeVille moved the newspaper out of the way and sat in the armchair. “Did you read about the bank runs?”

  Suslev beamed. “Yes, tovarich. Marvelous.”

  “Is it a KGB operation?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Suslev said jovially. “If it is there’s promotion for someone.” It was a key Leninistic policy to pay particular attention to Western banks that were at the core of Western strength, to infiltrate them to the highest level, to encourage and assist others to foment disaster against Western currencies but at the same time to borrow capital from them to the utter maximum, whatever the interest, the longer the loan the better, making sure that no Soviet ever defaulted on any repayment, whatsoever the cost. “The crash of the Ho-Pak will certainly bring down others. The papers say there might even be a run on the Victoria, eh?”