Free The Chinese Assassin by Anthony Grey Page A

Consulate General in Hong Kong they just rip their bolts loose and get up off their pedestals and rush round shaking their heads and chanting, “Lies, lies, all lies”.’
    ‘I think I’m beginning to get a glimmer, Professor, of why you preferred cuddling those pink folios on the kitchen table all night
    —though I can’t say I admire your choice.’ She waggled her hips provocatively at him and disappeared grinning into the kitchen.
    He heard her clattering the cups in the sink, then the door bell rang and she went to answer it. When she returned a moment later she was clipping her long hair up on the top of her head in preparation for a shower. ‘It was your uniformed voyeur, Moynahan. His eyes nearly fell out of his head. He said an American left some books for you while you were away. He’s going to bring them up.’
    Scholefield nodded and began to get out of bed. ‘Some new American publications from Harvey Ketterman. He’s a State Department Pekinologist. A good chum of mine. You’ll meet him, he’s over here for a couple of seminars.’ He padded barefoot down the ha l l behind her to the bathroom.
    ‘The mystery of Li n Piao would make a good plot for an old Hollywood B movie, w ouldn’t it?’ she said over her shoulder. ‘If it wasn’t true.’
    ‘It gets more like that the further you go into it.’ He soaped his face and watched her long body in his shaving mirror as she tucked her hair inside a shower cap and climbed under the warm water jet. ‘We know what fantasies the Chinese rank and file were asked to believe because facsimiles of their secret documents leaked out to Hong Kong and Taiwan. They make it sound as though Li n had a mixture of Buster Keaton, the Keystone cops and Harold Lloyd as co-conspirators.’ He fitted a new blade carefully into his razor and began to scrape creamy lather from the side of his face.
    ‘A soldier deputed to blow up Mao’s train is supposed to have gone into a blue funk at the last moment and got his wife, who was a doctor, would you believe, to give him an injection to blur his vision so he couldn’t see the train when it went by. Then further up the line they allegedly tried to kill Mao by leaking gas into the train’s heating system—but found too late the vents in the Chairman’s carriage were blocked. Then another would-be assassin fluf fe d a stabbing attack because he became totally overawed by Mao’s charisma after tricking his way into the great man’s presence in the Forbidden City in Peking.’
    Nina drew back the shower curtains and poked her head out. ‘A case of first-knife nerves, do you think?’
    ‘Okay, I know it sounds hilarious now. And Chou En-lai practically admitted to another foreign delegation later that all that was bunkum. But we might never know how close China and Russia came to the crunch over it. Or what it might have meant for the rest of us. Kissinger had just made his first secret visit to Peking a few weeks before—and America and China had been sworn enemies for twenty years up to then, remember. The Russians couldn’t have bee n altogether happy about finding an unidentified aircraft heading out of China towards their heartland, in the middle of the night shortly after that event—if they didn’t know it was coming.’ He put down his razor and turned to wrap a large bath towel round her as she stepped out of the shower.
    ‘But how could the Chinese hush up a plane crash like that in a foreign country for ten months?’
    ‘They didn’t hush up the crash itself The Mongolians and the Russians forced their hand by putting out a bald official news agency report from Ulan Bator. Tass carried it too. But even that didn’t appear until seventeen days after the crash—at the end of September. The Chinese had to .ad m it then they’d lost a Trident. But they insisted it was a civilian plane. And they didn’t come anywhere near admitting then they’d lost Mao’s heir- apparent.’
    Scholefield stepped under