Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

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, giving 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,