Free The Chinese Assassin by Anthony Grey

of the time? In combination with that devastating academic mind of yours, of course.’
    He smiled. ‘Maybe that has got something to do with it.’
    The traffic hum from outside was growing into a dull roar wi t h the advancing day. They lay contentedly side by side, Nina with her eyes closed, Scholefield staring at the ceiling, drifting into their separate thoughts. For a long time neither of them spoke.
    When she opened her eyes she saw his brow was again furrowed in a frown. She raised herself to look into his face. ‘What’s so important about how Lin Piao died, Richard? If it happened in 1971 isn’t it all rather old hat now?’
    ‘ I n one way it is. But still it happens to be one of the greatest unsolved political mysteries of our times. And if the folios are genuine and he was murdered as they suggest and those responsible are now plotting to assassinate Mao, there might be the odd crank in Washington and Moscow, not to mention Peking itself, who’d be interested in the details.’
    She punched him quickly on the solar plexus with a small fist and he jack-knifed into a sitting position, clutching at her wrist. ‘Don’t be so bloody sarcastic. The arcane doings of 8oo million Chinese may be child’s play to you and your clever friends—.
    He grinned and dropped her wrist. ‘Wrong. If you laid all the Sinologists in the world end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because they just don’t know any more than you do about what really happened to Comrade Lin.’
    ‘What do the Chinese themselves say happened to him?’
    ‘For ten months after the Trident crash there was a deafening silence out of Peking. Then suddenly the following July they started to gush out statements saying he had, after all, died in the crash in Mongolia with his wife and son and a few hangers-on when the Trident ran out of fuel. Trying to defect to the Soviet Union, he was, they say, after three bungled attempts to do away with Mao and take over as the great sun in all their Chinese hearts. And they’ve stuck to that colourful story ever since, through thick and thin.’
    She hugged her knees in front of her chest and rested her chin on them, smiling wickedly at him. ‘And why do all you smug Sinologists lying end to end think they shouldn’t?’
    ‘Because in the absence of any evidence really worth that name t h ere’ve been contradictions by the score. The Russians got the wreckage and the burned-out corpses—and may still have ‘em in some grisly deep freeze under the Kremlin for all we know. But although they’ve never said anything official about their findings, Kosygin told Pierre Trudeau casually on a trip to Ottawa that they’d dug bullets out of some of the barbecued carcasses. Now, unless all the Chinese comrades suddenly wanted to read the empty fuel gauge at once and started taking pot shots at each other for that sole privilege, that makes Peking’s story a bit suspect from the start, doesn’t it?’
    She reached out a hand and stroked his hair. ‘I’d believe anything you said, darling I’ m sure you’re right.’
    He brushed her hand away impatiently. ‘The Mongolians and the Russians said the bodies were burned beyond recognition— but Chou En-lai told a group of visiting American newspaper editors much later that Chinese diplomats had gone to the scene and ide n tified Lin and the others on the spot. And buried ‘em there, what’s more. There’s a lot else besides, but do you begin to see what I mean?’
    He leaned across the bed to reach for his bathrobe but Nina beat him to it. She wrapped it round her shoulders, danced swiftly out of reach, picked up the tea tray from the bedside table and moved towards the door. As she passed him Scholefield reached out and patted her rump affectionately. ‘And what’s more, my lissom love, whenever all the evidence available in the West is fed into the big China-watching computers in places like Harvard and the American