After a quick reread, "The Peking Target" may have Quiller's best getaway. Certainly he is never faced with escaping a tighter net than "the opposition" throws around him here in China and then Seoul.
Classic Quiller. Quiller books are the most eloquent spy novels out there. Here, despite one or two false, Hollywood notes, "The Peking Target" is filled with memorable scenes and Hall's tight, tense writing. Among the highlights:
- Quiller is trapped in a hospital, with a number of hitmen guarding different exits. He kills a young thug during his escape. "Footsteps filled the alley, but the walls echoed and reechoed them in the narrow confines and they might only have been my own. The first of them had stopped, perhaps, to check the dead boy on the ground, giving me time to get clear, as if the boy had reached out from whatever cosmic field of consciousness sustained him now, and chosen to offer me grace."
- After fleeing Peking for Seoul, Quiller is immediately in trouble. His escape in a river, following a car chase and crash, is among Q's greatest survival moments.
- There's a touch of humanity here, too, among Bureau assets. At one point when Quiller is stretched close to the breaking point and his every move seems covered, Ferris, Quiller's favorite "director in the field," says to him, "Why don't you go home, Q. Anyone else would."
"This is home," Quiller responds.
"On the edge?"
"Yes."
- Toward the end, when Quiller is in a Korean hilltop monastery facing his Triad adversary and the KGB, there's an amazing bit where a KGB colonel, Tung Kuo-Feng (the Triad chief), and Quiller are transmitting via shortwave radio, each with his own agenda and in different languages. Master class.
- After Q escapes from a would-be Korean assassin in a monastery cell, he begins working his way barefoot, in the moonlight, across the compound toward Tung Kuo-Feng's cell. There's a fountain in the courtyard, and Quiller stops: "Not far from the pagoda there was a fountain in a basin carved from the solid rock, and I stopped to lean over the water's surface and plunge my face where the moon's reflection lay afloat, opening my mouth and cleansing his blood from it, drinking deeply and slaking my bruised skin with its cooling touch, my body hunched at the basin's rim like a beast at a waterhole, easing the ravages of the hunt before moving on."
Up there with "Quiller," "The Mandarin Cypher" and "The Tango Briefing" as among the best in a great, great series.