Quiller Salamander

by Adam Hall

  Running flat out, the Sony in my hand now to make sure it stayed with me, running flat out for the Mazda, a lot of noise side the villa, boots on the stairs like distant thunder as I closed on the car, twenty yards, fifteen, ten, with the air smelling sweet after the rain as I sucked it into my lungs, a night bird calling and then a burst of fire going into the roof of the car as I dragged the door open and pitched inside and got the engine going and gunned up and took the thing away with the lights still off and the rear wheels sending a mud-wave across the Peugeot standing alongside and then finding traction as I brought the power down and waited and then took it up again with the treads biting now as we headed for the crushed-stone track through an avenue of palms.

  Light began flooding from behind as I reached the track and gave the Mazda the full gun and switched my own lights on because there were buildings here, call them huts, white-washed and peeling and huddled among the palm trees, some of the windows lit by kerosene lamps inside. There wasn't a dog's chance of outrunning the pack behind me because it was less than half a mile away and closing, and the next group of shots smashed into the bodywork and I ducked and started looking for options as the rear window snowed and glass whirled inside the car from the backdraught. If I switched off my lights at this speed I'd crash, and if I left them on I'd present the Mazda as a perfect target and it was a matter of time, seconds, before a shot blew my head open so I hit the brakes when I saw a side track coming up and put the Mazda into a controlled slide with more huts looming in the swinging wash of the lights and then I cut them and drove blind and used the brakes again and slid to a stop and hit the door open and pitched out and slammed it shut behind me and broke into a run as the pack swerved into the side track and its lights flooded across the buildings and the leading gunner saw the Mazda and started work on it with a burst of shots, and by the time I reached the shelter of the huts they were putting enough fire power into it to blow a tank away, and the last I saw of it was a small metal carcass standing there frozen in the glare of their lights until a shot sparked the fuel and there was a fireball turning the buildings red in a man-made sunset as I went on running for the darkness beyond, just a steady jog because it was going to take time for them to move in close enough to see there was no charred relic sitting there at the wheel of the burned-out wreck.

  She was standing near the ferry station on the river, leaning against the rotting timber wall, part of it in the half-dark, had done some training somewhere, I wouldn't have seen her if this hadn't been the rendezvous.

  I stopped within fifty yards and waited. I'd picked up a battle-weary Mercedes 300D from another black market dealer near the airport, two of the wings bent and the air-conditioning on the fritz, got him out of bed and crossed his palm with 200,000 riel, enough to buy the bloody thing, but you get what you pay for and what I'd paid for was a fresh set of wheels under me and a shut mouth, he'd never know who I was unless he saw my face again and I wasn't going to let him. He could be a Khmer Rouge agent on the side, anyone could, you had to shake your shoes out whenever you put them on.

  She was walking slowly towards me, Gabrielle, across the broken boards of the quay, but I didn't get out of the car: I wanted to see if she'd picked up any ticks. She hadn't. She had a camera slung from her left shoulder as usual, and I saw fatigue in her walk, fatigue from looking for crippled children to photograph, from finding them.

  I pushed the door open for her and she got in.

  'Ca va?' she asked me.

  'Ca va.'

  I started up and took the Mercedes past the first wharf and found cover between two trucks, one of them spilling ropes and barrels, the other listing on three wheels. Moonlight sparked off the river as the ripples reached the quay.

  'What has happened?' Gabrielle asked me in French; she'd remembered my preference.

  'There's something I need your help with.' I reached across her and pulled the Sony out of the glove pocket. There was garlic on her breath, suddenly reminding me I was starving, hadn't eaten since early this morning; it was now nearly midnight. There was also a bush fire going on in my right shoulder, touched off by all those aikido rolls. 'I know you speak Khmer,' I told Gabrielle, 'but exactly how fluent are you?'

  'Perfectly fluent.'

  'Fair enough.' So at least we had a chance; I'd fast-forwarded the tape a couple of times while I'd been waiting for her, and things hadn't sounded too good: I'd known a mike this size would have to be moved in close to the source to pick up anything well and I'd tried to do that on the balcony of the villa, but it still hadn't been close enough: the voices were so faint that I couldn't have told what the language was if I hadn't already known. There were also squelchy patches of white sound, possibly because the heat in this place had got at the cassette.

  'How was your day?' I asked Gabrielle as I ran back the tape.

  'Okay. Yours?'

  'Okay.' I raked around in the glove pocket but couldn't find anything. 'Have you got a pad I can use?'

  'This.' She pulled out a small sketching-block from her bag. 'Will a pencil do?'

  'Fine.'

  'What will I be listening to?'

  'Voices.'

  Lights washed across the side of the wharf and I tilted both the sun visors down.

  'Are you expecting anyone?' Gabrielle asked. That is an exact translation, and I think she was mimicking the kind of dialogue you find in private eye novels, just for fun.

  'If I were expecting anyone, you wouldn't be here.' The lights fanned across the river and then swung full circle and were swallowed by the wharves.

  'I can look after myself,' Gabrielle said.

  'Of course. But you've got enough on your plate already, tiptoeing through the trip mines all day.' I hadn't wanted to bring her out tonight, but the stuff on this tape might give me a breakthrough if she could make out what any of the voices were saying.

  I pressed the start button.

  Light from a tall goose-neck lamp on the ferry station was bouncing softly off the clapboard wall of the wharf, faint and diffused but enough to guide my hand across the sketching-block - it had to be, because I couldn't use the dashboard lamp without switching on the parking lights and I wasn't going to do that.

  The voices began coming in and I rolled the volume higher, but it brought up the background too, and I rolled it back.

  They sounded so bloody faint.

  So I should have gone closer, yes, closer still, if the trick had been worth pulling at all.

  You went too close as it was. You could have –

  Perfectly right.

  It's happened before. You work out a good trick and you calculate the odds and they look okay - or put it this way, they don't look actually lethal - so you gird up the loins and put the turn-screw on the nerves till they're as tight as harp-strings and you go in with at least the thought that if something goes wrong and you end up spreadeagled across enemy terrain with a shot in the spine or a knife in the throat it won't have been your fault, it will simply have been a calculated risk that turned suddenly into a certainty, a dead certainty, finito.

  She wasn't getting anything, Gabrielle, the voices were too faint.

  And then afterwards, when you've got away with it, you look back and suddenly know that you were out of your mind even to think of going in at all, that the risk was too high, appallingly high, and all that had sent you in had been an overweening faith in your own abilities, blinding you from the start. And you were lucky, just plumb lucky, to have survived.

  But you can't run a mission on luck.

  I was sitting here sweating now; I hadn't wanted to think about this, it had just come and hit me in the face because I'd not only put myself in extreme and inexcusable hazard but I'd done it for nothing, I knew that now, because that's what we were getting from the Sony as we sat here listening - nothing, just the squelch from a flawed tape and a drone of voices so faint that even Gabrielle, fluent in the language, wasn't picking anything up to give me.

  Contact Pringle a
nd debrief, wouldn't take long, would it, Am still alive, have a nice day.

  No actual information, let's not be too ambitious.

  'They are to remain patient,' Gabrielle said.

  'What?'

  There was a faint barking now from the Sony, just as I'd heard it at the villa. This was the voice that had started to come through.

  'They want to do something,' Gabrielle said, 'but he's telling them to wait, to be patient.'

  I hit the stop button and rewound for five seconds. 'To do what, exactly?'

  'I couldn't hear. I'm not even sure about this - I'm having to fill in the gaps. But the word "patient" is definitely there.'

  I switched to play and she listened again while I watched the moonlight glinting along the river like a drawn blade. The barking began again and I looked at Gabrielle but she was shaking her head slowly.

  'It wasn't any better. But some of them want to act in some way, and this man won't let them, at least not yet. He's in authority.'

  'You're not getting any names?'

  'No.'

  I let the tape run on, sliding lower against the seat-back, scanning the wharfside, the ferry station, the river. Light had washed across the far end of the wharf a couple of times from the main street as a police patrol had passed, a police patrol or perhaps a military vehicle: there wouldn't be much other traffic in this city now because of the curfew.

  'He is a colonel,' Gabrielle said in a little while.

  'The one with the bark?'

  'Yes.'

  'Name?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Shall I run it back?'

  'No.' She angled the Sony nearer her on the arm-rest and hit the stop button. 'If I need to, I'll do it myself.' With her head turned to watch me: 'How close were you to these people?'

  'Not close enough.'

  'They sound like agents of the Khmer Rouge. You knew that?'

  'Of course.'

  She gave a little shrug and pressed the play button again.

  I left it to her now, and she stopped the tape three or four times and rewound, replayed, stopped it again, rolling the volume up sometimes, rolling it down when the colonel's voice came in, getting rid of the background whenever she could, and after fifteen minutes she switched the thing off.

  'This is the gist of what I'm getting so far. The man in authority is Colonel Choen. He is visiting the Phnom Penh cell of the Khmer Rouge in order to give its agents their latest orders from General Kheng San.'

  I remembered the man in the photograph I'd seen on the wall of the villa, his name below it, a general's insignia on his battledress.

  Have you heard of him?' I asked Gabrielle.

  'General Kheng? No.' She waited for another question but I left it. 'The local cell appears excited about something they're planning to do in Phnom Penh - or something they've been ordered to do. But Colonel Choen is telling them to hold on, to wait for the right time. This is the gist, as I've said, and I'm trying hard not to jump to conclusions of my own.'

  'I understand that.' It wasn't easy for her: given a snatched word here and there, and her imagination would start inventing scenarios, and that would amount to unintended disinformation, could take us dangerously off track. 'Have you done any intelligence work before?' I asked her.

  She turned her head. 'No.'

  'You're a natural.'

  'Thank you.'

  Then suddenly I thought it might have sounded patronizing, and wished I hadn't said it; she didn't need anyone to grade her homework; she was a world-class photo journalist working in a flashpoint theatre of operations. I decided to leave it, didn't apologize, it could make things worse.

  'There's a date,' Gabrielle said, 'that's come up three or four times. The nineteenth.'

  'Of?'

  'I don't know.'

  'This month, then.' Today was the twelfth.

  'Perhaps. Colonel Choen says they must all wait for the nineteenth.'

  'Big day.'

  'Perhaps.'

  White light flushed the walls of the wharf again and I watched it, some kind of vehicle on the move, sending shadows funning out until they vanished into the peripheral dark. Then a glare came suddenly on the windscreen of a parked truck, throwing reflections like silver fish flickering along the walls. I could hear the engine now, a small one, maybe a jeep's. There'd been no vehicle coming as close as this to the ferry station while we'd been here.

  'I heard another name,' Gabrielle said. 'Leng Sim, the Minister of Defence. The colonel was –'

  'If this is a police patrol,' I said quietly, 'I'll just do the usual thing and pay them off. If it's anyone else, and there's any problem, I want you to get down low as soon as I start driving out. Understood?'

  She turned her head to look at me for a moment, her face lit and shadowed, her eyes deep. 'Yes.'

  I found my seat belt and snapped the buckle, and Gabrielle did the same.

  There was a narrow gap ahead of us between a gantry and the corner of the warehouse, and I'd parked the Mercedes in line with it. That was our point of exit from the scene: the gap. Beyond it was an alleyway wide enough to take the Mercedes, provided I didn't need the outside mirrors any more, and I didn't, because in a night escape you don't need to see behind you: all you need to do is watch for your own shadow on each side of your headlight beams on the turns, see how it swings across the buildings, see how close the tracker is and which way he's moving and how far away he is and whether he's gaining or falling back.

  Echoes were coming in as the engine of the vehicle was revved a little, pulling away from a corner. The light was bright now.

  At the other end of the alleyway was a stack of crates and a blind T-section, and if I managed things right we could go in fast enough to lose the rear end of the Mercedes in a side-swipe and bring the crates down behind us and provide an instant barricade. I'd arrived ten minutes early for the rendezvous and looked around, simply as a matter of routine procedure, and set up an escape route in case we needed one.

  Light very bright now.

  'The Minister of Defence?' I said. 'Oh yes, he was the one they tried to wipe out.'

  'The one whose life you saved.'

  'So what were they saying about him?'

  'I don't know. I just heard his name mentioned.'

  'Do you think he was the target of the orders they'd received? They're mad keen to try it again and get him this time? And the colonel's telling them to wait, be patient?'

  'I don't know. That is absolute conjecture.'

  The light burst from the far end of the warehouse and flooded the environment as the jeep went bouncing across the intersection and vanished behind the buildings, its engine note fading.

  In a moment I said, 'Right, absolute conjecture, but I'm just trying to put things together, to see if some of the gibberish you're hearing suddenly makes sense. Sometimes it works.'

  'It's very dangerous.'

  'Yes, it's very dangerous. And if it doesn't sound patronizing, I'll say it again: you're very good.'

  She rested her hand on my arm and said with quiet intensity, 'I just want to be sure I don't make any mistakes, that's all, any mistakes that could put you in harm's way.'

  'I can look after myself.'

  'Touché.'

  The lights of the jeep flashed in the far distance as it turned a corner, then the darkness came down again.

  'Do you think,' I asked Gabrielle, 'that is as much as you've got, so far?'

  'Yes.'

  Three names, a date, and a brief scenario: Colonel Choen was in the capital to stop the local cell from jeopardizing some kind of action timed to go off on the nineteenth, a week from tonight. Not a great deal, not even enough to debrief to Pringle, but if that date were important it would mean we had a deadline, and that would affect things: whatever Flockhart wanted me to do out here would have to be done within a week.

  And honour was mine again: it had been worth it after all, the trick I'd pulled at the villa tonight. We

  Noth
ing can excuse what you did

  Shuddup.

  Colonel Choen was barking again as Gabrielle started the tape. She gave it five minutes and started rewinding, her eyes closed as she listened; then she switched it off.

  'That was a little better. You were nearer, then.' Right, edging the Sony as far as I could along the balcony, watching for a boot to show. 'Colonel Choen is flying to Pouthisat in the morning,' Gabrielle said. 'I think he could be meeting General Kheng there, or someone else - all I can hear is that he'll be "talking" to him, so it could mean by telephone, though I doubt it: the lines are pretty bad everywhere.' I think she was waiting for me to make notes, but I didn't need to; I could keep what little we'd got in my head. 'I heard King Sihanouk's name mentioned, but couldn't get the context. I think Colonel –'

  An orange flash bloomed in silence across the river, spreading against the dark, and in a second or two the sound reached us, a deep thudding cough. Faint cries came keening, leaving echoes among the wharves.

  'More funerals tomorrow,' Gabrielle said softly, 'more flowers.'

  ''That was bigger than a mine.'

  'Sometimes they rig bombs in vehicles, when they're left unattended. Their aim isn't specifically to kill people, but to keep up the atmosphere of terror in the city. They do it very well.'

  The blaze had caught the timbers of the ferry station over there, and a siren began wailing.

  Gabrielle closed her eyes. 'I think Colonel Choen is flying on to somewhere else, when he leaves Pouthisat.'

  'Somewhere other than Phnom Penh.'

  'Yes.'

  I didn't ask her where: if she'd caught it, she'd have told me. She pressed the play button again and we sat listening to the tape as another siren started up across the river.