The Chinese Assassin (24 page)

Scholefield motioned him in and he hobbled across to where Yang was sitting. He set the document case down by his chair and they heard the Chinese man’s quiet ‘Hsieh hsieh’ as he thanked him. Then the old man turned and left, closing the door noiselessly behind him. Yang nodded apologetically towards Scholefield and gestured with his hand for Stillman to continue. Outside in Pall Mall Razduhev’s black Mini slowed and stopped to pick up the Mongolian diplomat in a black Chinese cadre’s uniform as he emerged from the Institute’s front door. Once he was inside, the car edged out from the kerb once more, and merged inconspicuously into the rush hour stream of traffic flowing down towards St. James’s Palace.

Inside the basement lecture room, Sti
ll
man, who had held the foamed plastic cushion pointedly in front of him throughout the entire interruption to emphasise his displeasure, lowered
it
with exaggerated slowness onto the lectern a
g
ain. He lit another cigarette and lodged
it in
the corner of his mouth, screwing up
his eyes against the smoke.
‘To
prove beyond doubt what
that mysterious “common source” was, gentlemen,
I X-rayed this cushion from all
angles and
found literally
hundreds
of
tiny
fragments of
metal still
inside
it.
About the size of
specks
of
dust,
they were, that’s all. They didn’t weigh
much
more than a milligram.. Some of ‘em in fact
weighed
much less. Just like the hairs driven into that other
cushion
on the facing seat, they’d
been forced
in to a depth of two or three inches by a
very high velocity indeed.
Many of these
specks
of metal when we put ‘em under a stereoscan electron microscope were found to have fused
with the plastic
when they
came
to a standstill. This proved they were hot when they went in.
What’s
more, most of the little jiggers, turned out to be made of a mild type of
steel which hadn’t
been
used
at all by the
British Aircraft Corporation in the construction
of
the aircraft.’

He stopped and looked up to see how this
information was being received. In the front
row, Sc
h
ole
fi
eld
noticed,
Percy Crowdleigh from
the
Cabinet Office
had
begun to
shift restlessly
in his seat again.

‘To make absolutely sure at what velocity
these
bits of
metal and
the hairs had
been driven
into the
cushion,
I got the Soviets to fix me up a gas-launcher
and using
a replica of
our friend
here’—he
patted
the
foamed
plastic
cushion
with
something
approaching affection—’I fired
minute steel pellets
into it. I
used
my maths to
scale the sizes
down
and
came up with a provable conclusion that the
real bits in this cushion—like that human hair
I found—must’ve gone in at a rate of above
seven thousand feet a second.
Now—’

Crowdleigh
jumped
up suddenly, waving his
evening
paper again
and shaking
his head in irritation. ‘Doctor
Stillman, this is
all very
fascinating,
but at the risk of
appearing
ignorant I have to confess you’re
beginning
to lose me.’ Other voices
around
the
room
murmured
agreement. ‘This may
indeed be
all very convincing but I feel
obliged
to
ask
whether we’re going
to
be provided
with any documentary
evidence to support this
highly sophisticated
scientific
hypotheses.’

Still
m
an half turned towards Yang, his
eyebrows
raised in enquiry. ‘I think I can say
that copies of my
full report
have now
been
brought
here
for
distribution.’ Yang nodded
quickly
and indicated the document case that had just been delivered.

Stillman turned back to the man from the
Cabinet
office.
‘There is your answer, Sir. My purpose tonight is to give you a popularised and readily understandable introduction
to
my report. You will be able to take
it
away and study
it
at your leisure and no doubt subject
it
later to analysis by experts.’

The diplomat nodded with ill grace and sat down again still fanning himself with the newspaper. Stil
l
man pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead, rubbed the sockets of his eyes with two clenched fists, and peered out unseeing at his audience through screwed
up
eyes. ‘As I was saying, seven thousand feet per second, gentlemen—there is one thing and one thing only that will produce such a velocity and that
is
an explosion.’ He pursed his lips as though about to savour some invisible culinary delicacy.
‘Not to put
too fine a point
on it,
gentlemen, an explosion
brought about
by the
detonation
of a bomb.’

The
members
of the Fast Asia Study Group
stared
back
at
him,
accepting his
announcement
in total
silence.
Then slowly
Harvey Ketterman
rose to his feet, scratching his head. ‘What you’re
saying,
Doctor
Stil
lm
an,
unless my
unscientific
American
mind isn’t
very much mistaken, is
that Lin
Piao’s Trident couldn’t possibly have
crash-landed after running
out of f
u
el. You
say that
it
was
quite
definitely
blown out of
the sky
by a deliberately
planted high
explosive bomb, put aboard
secretly
by persons
unknown
before it
left
China. Is
that
it,
in
a nutshell?’

Stil
l
man nodded. ‘Just so.’

‘And
you claim that your
scientific evidence is
conclusive beyond
any
shadow of doubt whatsoever?’

Stillman
nodded again. ‘When you
come
to read my
report
you will
find
it
runs
to some
250
pages. There are more than a
hundred
photographs
showing
everything I have told
you
in tabulated
detail. All my
conclusions about the
explosion are
borne
out by
diagnostic
m
icrotopography.’

Ketterman, still
on his
feet, leaned
forward easily on the chair in front of him, grinning broadly. ‘If that’s some
kind
of new scientific religion, I have to
tell
you right away Doctor
Stillman
I’m going to
reserve
my judgement until I’ve had a chance to put your
full report under some of
our
own highly agnostic
microscope.

Stil
l
man bared his yellow teeth in a tolerant grin then poked another cigarette under
the straggling
fronds
of his moustache. ‘There’s a great deal I haven’t told you
yet, gentlemen,’
he
said
quietly. ‘I haven’t told you about bow the pathologists
dug
the big fragments that made those
needle-sized holes
in the
cushion out
of the charred back
muscles
of
the body
lying strapped to the
seat.’
He stopped
and
drew
hard
on the
cigarette.
‘I haven’t told you about the
mock-up
of the
Trident’s fuselage that I had
the
Russkies
build for sue to prove my
theories beyond
doubt. I
simulated
the explosion from the
same place underneath the
seat, you see. I
deduced
from the
velocities and the position that
it
was a three pounder packed
in a cold steel tube
that had been exploded
with a military
“pencil” detonator.
It blew a
four-foot
hole in the
side
of the fuselage,
gentlemen, and ripped open an
underfloor
fuel
tank at
the same time, starting an
im
m
ediate
fi
re. The controls
to the tail were
smashed too, locking
it
horizontally. That’s how it glided in to
land.

‘The blast even
ripped the cushions
fro
m
the nearest seats and
they were sucked out of the hole—which explains why,
quite
remarkably, they survived
the fire.’
Sti
llma
n’
s
eyes glittered and
again Scholefield noticed
that
in
his
excitement his head was wagging slightly on his shoulders.

‘All that, gentlemen, is in my report—and more. I found evidence of
other incendiary devices that bad ensured that the fire started
by
the
bomb would spread rapidly. The pathologists’
report, which
appears as an
appendix, will show
you
that the victims
all died by
inhaling flames directly into their lungs—except
the pilot, who died more slowly of
carbon monoxide
poisoning.’

‘Doctor
Stil
l
man,
your
s
cientific
expertise is most
impressive.’ Scholefield spoke quietly from his chair without
rising.
‘But it’s all entirely
irrelevant, isn’t
it, unless you can prove something
else that
nobody
else has managed
to do
positively so far—that
Li
n
Piao was actually
on the
plane?’

Several of the other
men in
the
room stirred in their seats, watching
Stil
l
man’s face
carefully
to see bow he dealt with the question.

‘I’m an
aircraft accident
investigator, not a
medical expert.’ Stillman
paused
and
lit another
cigarette.
‘The Soviet pathologists produced
dental charts which they say they had kept since the Thirties
when Li
n
spent
several
years in Moscow undergoing
treatment for
war
wounds. These dental charts are presented side by
s
ide with a
matching
chart of the
teeth from
one of the
nine charred bodies, in an appendix
to my report.’ He
tapped
the
document
lying on the
lectern
in front of him with a note of finality.
‘That
is all I have to
say
on the subject. Comrade Yang will
distribute
my report.’ He
picked
up his sheaf of
papers and
sat down,
glancing
at Yang, who had sat through most of the
address staring expressionlessly
in front of him.