Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Read online

  He leaned over and adjusted something on the saddle of Mrs. Pollifax’s horse, except that whatever adjustment he made did not appear to please her horse. It snorted, reared in alarm and took off—there was no other word for it; her horse took off like a jet plane in ascension—so fast there was neither time for Mrs. Pollifax to breathe or to scream, the problem of survival being immediate and consuming as she struggled to stay mounted on this huge creature gone mad.

  Down the length of the meadow they flew, she and the horse joined together by only the most fleeting of contact: Mrs. Pollifax hanging on in desperation.

  “The United States’ most senior—and most eccentric—operative. Told with the incomparable wit and charm for which Dorothy Gilman and her heroine are justifiably famous. Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station will attract a host of fans, old and new, to match the success of her previous bestsellers.”

  Mystery News

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1983 by Dorothy Gilman Butters

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-45972

  ISBN 0-449-20840-0

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-5177-1

  This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  Mrs. Pollifax sat in Carstairs’ office with a cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other, her hat an inverted bowl of blue felt with such a cockeyed twist to its brim that Bishop guessed it had been frequently sat on and squashed. He saw her glance at Carstairs, seated behind his desk, and then at him, and now she said gently, “Yes, the weather’s been unseasonably cool for May, and my trip to Langley Field very pleasant, we’ve discussed my geraniums and how I met Cyrus Reed in Zambia, but I really do think—”

  Bishop put down his own coffee cup and grinned. He thought this must be how she appeared to her garden clubs—a cheerful, cozy little woman with fly-away white hair and a penchant for odd hats and growing geraniums—and he thought it a pity he couldn’t share with those garden clubs his first meeting with her in this office, just after she’d led an escape party out of Albania against incredible odds, and had been whisked back to this country by jet. She had sat in this same chair, wearing the voluminous clothes of a goat-herder’s wife, her face as dark as a gypsy’s after three days adrift in the Adriatic, and what she’d accomplished had staggered them all. He sometimes felt it was impossible to reconcile these two Emily Pollifaxes; his grin deepened as he said, “You’re suggesting we dispense with pleasantries and get on with it?”

  “Well,” she pointed out, “it’s difficult to believe you’ve brought me here to discuss the weather. Really difficult,” she added with a twinkle, “considering that you sent a private plane for me, which I must say was dashing of you.”

  “We do try to be dashing when we can,” Bishop told her gravely. “It counteracts the soiled trench-coat image that—” He stopped, remembering Mrs. Pollifax’s reproachful telephone calls to him when a scandal about the CIA surfaced. But that wasn’t our department, he would tell her, and point out that he really couldn’t relay her indignation to the White House. He supposed that it was this quality in her that led Carstairs to brief her more carefully than he did his other agents, but her responses were never more surprising to Bishop than the fruit cakes she sent at Christmas, which usually incapacitated the entire department, their brandy fumes lingering almost as long as the hangovers.

  Suddenly he remembered why Mrs. Pollifax was here, and what Carstairs was going to propose to her, and he felt that old clutch of horror that always hit him when she sat innocently on the edge of her chair, all eagerness and delight at a new assignment, and always chiding him for his concern. It was rather like an attack of violent indigestion, and he wondered if Carstairs was feeling it too; if so, he gave no evidence of it. Not yet at least. He would eventually, of course; he always did.

  “The job we have in mind,” Carstairs began smoothly, “is innocuous enough on the surface, Mrs. Pollifax, but because of the country involved could be extremely dangerous—extremely—if you came under suspicion.” He gazed at her thoughtfully. “Which is why I wanted you here personally, to make sure you understand this, and to ask whether you still feel—are still interested—”

  “What country?” she promptly asked.

  “The People’s Republic of China.”

  She drew in her breath sharply. “But how incredibly exciting,” she breathed, “and what an amazing coincidence! I’ve been so curious, so interested—”

  “Extremely dangerous,” Bishop heard himself say firmly.

  Her eyes widened. “But you say that about all the assignments,” she told him, “and surely we’re friends with China now?”

  “Exactly,” Carstairs said lightly, “which makes it all the more shocking if any suspicions should be aroused. But we have some business there that simply can’t be handled through diplomatic channels, and we’ve decided to chance it.”

  “Chance what?” asked Mrs. Pollifax cheerfully.

  “Roughly speaking,” he said, “we want to get a man out of China, but to do this we must first get a man into China—an agent, of course—to accomplish this. Your job, if you take this on, would be to provide cover for this agent, and at a certain point approach a certain native—not an agent—who’s known to have some helpful information.”

  Mrs. Pollifax said warmly, “Well, that sounds easy enough to—”

  Bishop interrupted her. “Of course it sounds easy and innocuous,” he said indignantly, “because he hasn’t mentioned that in making this contact in Xian you become absolutely expendable—all to guard the identity of someone else—and that this man in Xian, who is not an agent, could just as easily turn you over to the People’s Security Bureau, for all we know about him.”

  Carstairs looked at him incredulously; in an icy voice he said, “My dear Bishop, all our people become expendable when they take on a job, you know that and so does Mrs. Pollifax. I’ve already told her it’s dangerous.” He turned back to her and said stiffly, “Bishop is right, of course, and you would be risking exposure at that point, but to this I would add that it’s of value to us that you do not speak Chinese, and would not speak it either in your sleep or under drugs; that you’ve endured interrogations before, and have shown a remarkable ability to sustain the role of Aggrieved and Misunderstood Tourist. I have every hope that such talents wouldn’t be needed, of course, but still—despite Bishop’s inexplicable attack of sentiment,” he said, g
iving him a quelling glance, “he is perfectly right.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Bishop said lamely. “It’s just that—”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Pollifax, and drew a deep breath. “You’ve made it quite clear, I think—both of you—but of course I’d love to go. As soon as you said China—”

  Damn, thought Bishop, she’s going to go: Carstairs’ blood pressure will be up for days, and I’ll have to resort to tranquilizers. This is always what happens after she goes because all hell usually breaks loose around this woman and we have to sit here in Langley Field, Virginia, and worry about her. How could we have forgotten this?

  “Good—we did hope you’d take this on for us,” Carstairs was saying heartily, “because I can’t think of anyone who would provide a better aura of—well, respectability, but at the same time be resourceful enough to make a contact that is not going to be easy. You can leave in ten days, on June first?”

  Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “You once gave me exactly one hour’s notice. Yes, I can leave in ten days.”

  “And Cyrus Reed,” put in Carstairs. “I hear that it’s turned into quite a romance between you two, and that you’ve been seeing a great deal of each other since you met. Will he object to your doing another job for us?”

  “Cyrus,” she said, neatly fielding both comment and question, “is in Africa until June sixth. He left last week to visit his daughter. The daughter,” she reminded them, “who was on safari with us last summer and met and married a doctor there.”

  Both of them nodded. In any case, thought Bishop, the question had been a mere courtesy; both he and Carstairs knew very well that Cyrus was safely out of the country and could make no objections.

  “But what is it,” asked Mrs. Pollifax, “that you do have in mind?”

  “We’ll get to it, shall we?” said Carstairs, and left his desk, moving to the opposite wall where he pulled down a large map of the People’s Republic of China. “Our particular problem, as I said,” he began pleasantly, “is that it’s almost as impossible to get an agent into the country as it is to get someone out. Especially since the man we want to rescue—let’s call him X for the moment, shall we?—is in a rather inaccessible area. Actually,” he added casually, “in a labor camp.”

  “Labor camp!” exclaimed Mrs. Pollifax.

  “Labor reform camp, and roughly in this area.” Picking up a pencil he described a circle that enclosed a startling number of miles in the northwest corner, a region colored yellow-brown on the map, denoting desert and other inhospitable possibilities, with only the names of a few cities or towns interrupting the space.

  “But that’s a great deal of country,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax, taken aback. “And you don’t know exactly where?”

  “Not precisely, no,” said Carstairs. “That’s what we hope you’ll find out from the man you contact in Xian, who spent several years in that same labor reform camp. His name, by the way, is Guo Musu. He’s a Buddhist, and they suffered rather extravagantly during the Cultural Revolution. Many of their temples and monasteries were taken over or destroyed, and the monks sent off to communes or labor camps, where in either case they were given massive doses of Mao’s thinking … gems such as book learning can never be considered genuine knowledge, and how heroic it is to give oneself totally to one’s Motherland—and of course to Mao. Because of this we hope he’ll prove sympathetic enough to pinpoint the location of that camp for you.”

  “He’s a barber now,” put in Bishop.

  Carstairs nodded. “Yes, in Xian. He also speaks enough English to communicate,” he added parenthetically. “We gleaned this information from his brother, who fled China for Hong Kong, where refugees from the mainland are habitually questioned. It’s the right camp—Ching Ho Forestry Camp—which means Clean Stream in English. They have a penchant for giving camps and prisons delightful names,” he said dryly. “And contacting Guo Musu will be your job.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Pollifax, looking dazed. “But if Mr. Guo chooses not to pinpoint the location, or can’t be found in Xian?”

  “We’re not entertaining thoughts of failure,” Carstairs told her firmly. “This Mr. X has got to be found and brought out before the Russians get to him.”

  “Russians!” exclaimed Mrs. Pollifax.

  “Yes.” Leaning against the corner of his desk he said, “One of our agents who works for the Soviets—a double-agent, needless to say—has brought us information of X’s existence and of the Soviets’ interest in him. Before summer’s end the Russians will be mounting a major undercover operation to get this chap out of China, too.”

  “But—one may ask why?”

  “Because our friend X knows a great deal about China’s fortifications along the Russian border,” Carstairs said. “In fact, he designed a good share of them—the below-ground sections added in the late sixties and early seventies, at least. By our good fortune no one in the government has remembered him yet. Apparently somewhere along the way, through some error in the records or through being mistaken for a prisoner who died, our Mr. X has acquired the name and identity of another man. I don’t want to confuse you with names, but if I tell you that X’s true and proper name is Wang Shen, and that his current name is Wong Shen, then you can share speculations on what happened.”

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “I see … He’s an engineer, then. But how did he end up in a labor camp?”

  “That we don’t know,” Carstairs said. “Some indiscretion or other, a confidence shared with the wrong person, a banned book seen in his possession—it scarcely matters; it happened to so many people during Mao’s time.” He nodded toward the map. “What matters is this seven hundred miles of shared border between the two countries, between Russia—her former mentor and big brother, now an uneasy and threatening neighbor—and China, struggling to assert her rightful position in the world. It’s worth a great deal to the Soviets to learn in precise detail what booby traps face them along that frontier—and no one in China realizes that Wang Shen, with all that information in his head, is still alive.”

  “Astonishing,” said Mrs. Pollifax, blinking at this.

  “It’s especially important to prevent Wang from falling into the Russians’ hands,” went on Carstairs. “We could, of course, notify the Chinese of the Russians’ interest in the man, but frankly we’re not sure what the government would do about it. He is presumably listed as a counter-revolutionary, a revisionist, a capitalist-roader, or some such, or he wouldn’t be in a labor reform camp. He’s also thousands of miles from Peking, in a country still heavily weighted with Mao bureaucrats. Someone just might decide that killing him would be the simplest solution.”

  Mrs. Pollifax, considering this, could see his point.

  “And,” he continued, with a faint smile, “lest you think we’re being altruistic here, we’d be delighted to have a chat with Mr. Wang ourselves in the interest of preserving the balance of power on this fragile planet.” He sighed. “Very touchy thing, that border. Our satellite photos can’t tell us very much because so many of China’s defenses are underground. The Chinese military can be charmingly frank about being years behind in defense, but they can also be charmingly vague about what they have over there to hold Russia back—other than a billion people, underground shelters, and anti-aircraft on every hill, of course.”

  “I begin to understand,” said Mrs. Pollifax dryly.

  “Yes. A great deal depends on China’s being strong enough to keep the Russians in check. Since we’d never attack through Russia, it’s obviously a matter of reassurance for us, but there’s also the fact that if Wang is valuable enough for the Russians to want we’d like to take a whack at getting him ourselves.”

  “But with difficulty,” she pointed out.

  “Good Lord, yes. Travel in China is very circumscribed. China watchers we have, and compilers of statistics, and news from any Chinese who leave by way of Canton for Hong Kong,” he explained, “but our Embassy people in Beijing—the new name for Peking—are still pr
etty much confined there, except for carefully arranged inspections of communes and factories. The country is extremely security conscious. The Chinese themselves can’t travel at all unless they’re given special permission by their units—which, when you come to think of it,” he said thoughtfully, “is a damn clever way of keeping track of a billion people.”

  Mrs. Pollifax, frowning, said, “Then how—?”

  He nodded. “Exactly. What we’re up against here is China’s hinterland—Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, thousands of miles from any official points of entry. High mountains. Desert land that’s being reclaimed by irrigation. A region of minority peoples, and X—Mr. Wang—hidden somewhere in the middle of it. Remote, to say the least.”

  “To say the least,” murmured Mrs. Pollifax, startled.

  “However, the area is being visited by occasional tourists now, looking for the unusual and the offbeat—always, of course, led by a China Travel Service guide, but nevertheless a pleasant way to reach the area.”

  “Ah,” murmured Mrs. Pollifax, leaning forward now attentively.

  “It’s too risky, sending you and another agent together, just the two of you, with a guide. What we’re putting together for June first is a small group of what are known in the tourist-agency trade as ‘wait list’ people. Markham Tours here is cooperating without knowing the real reason. ‘Wait list’ people are those who signed up too late with Markham Tours, and have been placed on a waiting list, and would be willing to forego an American tour guide with the group in order to go there. Bishop, the brochure.”

  Bishop stoically handed Mrs. Pollifax the glossy colorful booklet whose words he already knew by heart … an extraordinary tour of Marco Polo’s Silk Road presented only by Markham Tours … archaeological sites, among them the Yunkang Caves of Datong, the Imperial Tomb in Xian of Qin Shi Huang …

  “The Imperial Tomb of Qin Shi Huang?” gasped Mrs. Pollifax, scanning the first page. “But I’ve read about that—all those lifesized terra-cotta warriors and horses they found! How thrilling—and the Silk Road, too?”