Quiller Salamander q-18

by Adam Hall

  Quiller Salamander

  ( Quiller - 18 )

  ADAM HALL

  For the first time, Quiller, the seasoned shadow executive of the anonymous Bureau in London, takes on a mission kept secret even from the head of the Bureau himself. Its code name is Salamander, its theater of operations Cambodia, its target Pol Pot, the architect of the infamous Killing Fields. Even as he arrives in the steaming heat of Phnom Penh, Quiller knows that he can trust neither Flockhart, his control in London, nor Pringle, his director in the field. His only ally is Gabrielle Bouchard, a young Eurasian photojournalist, who is waging her private vendetta against the murderous guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge. Endangered at every turn by Flockhart's reticence and the treacherous jungle, Quiller undertakes a suicide mission in the hope of saving Phnom Penh from an eleventh-hour attack by the Khmer Rouge intended to reinstate its bloody rule in Cambodia.

  ADAM HALL

  Quiller Salamander

  1: TARANTULA

  The man came down the steps of the Hotel d'Alsace. He was alone.

  He came straight across the sidewalk to his car without looking around him. There was another car standing in front of his, and a Pakistan Airlines minibus behind. There was nobody near him; nobody nearer, at least, than fifteen or twenty feet.

  It was early morning, not long after first light, judging by the length of the shadows across the pink marble wall of the hotel.

  The man reached his car and opened the door. and got in and the blast blew the roof off and the light was dazzling for a second or two and then there was a lot of redness in the middle of things and one of the man's arms went sailing across the sidewalk and a long shiny red tendril began streaming out of what was left of his body — presumably the large intestine — as he went on flying upwards, a leg coming off and starting to fall, turning over and over. Then the main part of his body came down too, and the smoke began clearing.

  'Run it again,' Shatner said.

  The man at the VCR put it into fast rewind and we waited.

  Shatner was sitting on my left in a rickety deck-chair, not smoking but smelling of stale nicotine. The only other man in here apart from Shatner and the one working the VCR was Holmes. He hadn't said anything since we'd come in here, but then Holmes never says much anyway. Shatner was fidgeting with a pencil, wishing he could light up, I suppose, but in the screening room it's strictly verboten.

  I still didn't know what they wanted me here for.

  The tape hit the stop and began playing again, and the man came down the steps of the Hotel d'Alsace without looking around him.

  'We want you to tell us,' Shatner said, 'if you think any of these other people in the picture look as if they're surveilling the DIF.'

  Director in the field. His name was Fane, and he'd directed me once in Murmansk, had rigged a bomb like that one in a truck I was going to drive, did it on orders from Control in London because I'd become expendable, a danger to the mission. But I'd smelled the bloody thing out and my large intestine was still where it should be while his was snaking all over the video screen, a bit embarrassing for him when you think about it.

  He came across to the car again but I wasn't interested in him now. There were seven people in the frame apart from Fane: three Europeans standing together talking, identical suits, identical briefcases, two bearded Hindus shading their eyes and looking down the street for a taxi, and a woman in white holding a rose and waving to someone in a car just leaving, apres tout, c'est Paris. And the man reading a paper.

  Kerboom.

  'They must have all been killed,' I told Shatner. The screen had been going blank a couple of seconds after Fane's leg began coming down, but the blast had obviously started to reach the other people.

  'Yes,' Shatner said, and tugged at his rumpled trousers, a nervous habit I'd noticed in him before — he'd been my control for Solitaire. 'They were all killed. We're working, you see, with nothing much to go on. We want to know who placed the bomb. It obviously wasn't one of the people in the picture, but we just thought one of them might have been surveilling him, not knowing the car was hot.'

  The rickety chair creaked as he shifted his weight. The screen went blank again and the operator hit the rewind button. 'All we can hope for,' Shatner said, 'is to find a recognizable face and try to trace things from there.'

  The tape was running again, and after a bit I said, 'The man with the paper. Just a possibility, that's all. No one — ' 'I wondered.'

  'Right. No one else.'

  'Freeze it,' Shatner told the operator. 'Then make a still and we'll blow it up and send it to the field to work on.'

  'Good luck,' I said.

  He turned to me then, and I saw the worry in his eyes. 'Yes,quite. He's standing in profile, isn't he, and the picture's foggy. But we've got to try.'

  His worry was understandable. We've only lost two directors in the field — including this one — during the whole of my time with the Bureau, compared with God knows how many executives. The DIFs don't take an active role in a mission; they just hole up somewhere safe, usually a hotel, and direct things from there, keeping the executive in signals with London. The only other time we lost a director was when his executive blew him to the opposition under interrogation, the sin of sins: we're expected to pop our capsule if we can't trust ourselves, before things get too rough.

  Now there was Fane, and the same thing could have happened. I said, not looking at Shatner, 'You're the control for this one?'

  'Yes.' The way he said it, I wished I hadn't asked.

  'Do it again?' The operator was rewinding.

  Shatner looked at me and I shook my head and he told the man no, and we got up and Holmes switched the light on.

  'I appreciate your time,' Shatner said, and pushed his deck-chair against the wall.

  'Anything else I can do?'

  'No.'

  'Who's the executive?'

  'Kearns.'

  'He's out there now?' In the field.

  'No.'

  As we left the screening room I said, 'He was doing a routine check, was he, the cameraman?' Sometimes the support people in the field run some film over the DIF's base as he goes in or comes out, to make sure there's no surveillance on him. The DIF is the queen bee of the mission, protected and held precious.

  'Yes,' Shatner said. 'Of course he'd no idea what was going to happen.'

  'So where's Kearns?'

  We stood together in the corridor, the three of us. Shatner was obviously finished with me and wanted to go. Holmes was just hanging around, I didn't know why. I'd been called in simply to give an opinion, as a seasoned shadow executive who spends his whole life watching to see if he's being followed or surveilled.

  'Kearns,' Shatner said, 'is still here in London.' He was fumbling in his worn tweed jacket for a cigarette.

  'The DIF was sent out ahead of him?'

  I felt Holmes touch my sleeve, but didn't take any notice: I'd been inactive for six weeks and the nerves were getting a bit strung out. I needed a mission, would steal one if necessary.

  'Yes,' Shatner said, and looked at his battered wrist-watch.

  'Why don't you send me out,' I asked him, 'now this has happened?' Kearns wasn't a senior shadow, would have his own nerves on edge now that his intended DIF had been blown all over the front of the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris.

  Holmes touched my arm again, and this time I looked at him and got the message in the dark of his steady eyes.

  'Oh,' Shatner said, 'I don't really know what's going to happen next. We might call the whole thing off.' He ducked his shaggy head and went hurrying along the corridor before I could say anything else.

  'Spot of tea?' Holmes asked me.

  'Not in the Caff.'

&
nbsp; 'Why not?'

  'I've seen enough of that bloody place in the last six weeks.'

  'Let's go and see a little more,' he said gently. I suppose Holmes knows better than anyone in this beleaguered backwater of the keyhole game that I can be led but not driven.

  There were three other people in the Caff, a couple of them wearing club ties — down here from Administration to show how terribly democratic the Bureau is — and Kearns, sitting alone in a far corner staring into his teacup, legs crossed and one foot swinging the whole time, understandably. He hadn't looked up when we came in; I don't think he would have looked up if a herd of buffalo had come through.the door; all he could see was his very own director in the field going through the roof of his car — they would have shown him the tape, of course.

  'Bun?' Holmes asked me.

  'Are you serious?' They're like overdone concrete in this bloody hole.

  'Tea, then,' Holmes said courteously, and signalled to Daisy. This man's courtesy is one of his many strengths, and guaranteed to drive you up the wall at times when you're ready to strangle the first person who's got the nerve to say good morning.

  'Relax,' he said, 'old horse.' He watched me from under his thick black eyebrows, his eyes intent.

  'Look,' I said, 'it's been six weeks.'

  'I know.' He asked Daisy for some tea and she limped away with her arthritic hip, her red wig wobbling.

  'Let me tell you,' Holmes said quietly, 'about friend Kearns. He — '

  'They shouldn't send him out there, for Christ's sake, after what happened. How many missions has he been on — five, six?'

  'The point,' Holmes said with careful emphasis, 'is that he needs to go out there more than ever, if in fact they don't call the whole thing off, as Shatner says.' He lowered his voice, keeping his rather hypnotic eyes on mine. 'He didn't do terribly well the last time out, went much too fast into the end phase and left his support people behind, wanting to impress London with a race to the finish. He brought the mission home, but — '

  'This was Bolero?'

  'Yes. But of course he nearly came unstuck, and his control had him on the carpet when he got back to London. He — '

  'Who was his control?'

  'Mr Loman.'

  'That bloody man. Kearns is a neophyte, wants nurturing, not kicking.'

  Holmes looked down and said nothing, didn't agree. I heard the door of the signals room slam as someone came out; the Caff was right next to it in the basement.

  'So Kearns needs this one,' Holmes said at last, 'if they push ahead with a new director.' His eyes were on me again. 'You could probably twist their arm and get it for yourself, since you're more experienced and everything. But — ' he left it with a shrug, didn't take his eyes from me.

  Then the door opened and Baker came in, one of the shadows, and dropped into a chair and tilted it back, one hand on the stained plastic table. 'Jesus Christ, they'll never get him out at this rate.' He must have been the man who'd just come out of Signals.

  'Vereker?' Holmes asked him.

  'Yes. Support can't get near him, radio contact's gone and his DIF hasn't got a clue where he is. Caffeine, Daisy old dear, for the love of God.'

  Vereker had been on all our minds for the last sixteen hours. When you're mission-hungry you spend half your time in the Caff and the other half in the signals room listening to the stuff coming in from the various fields, so I knew what the score was with Vereker. He was in the thick of a sticky end phase in Bosnia and had started asking for help at one o'clock this morning, GMT, the transmission fading and coming back, and his director had been signalling through the mast at Cheltenham for instructions every hour from then on.

  It's the worst place there is, the signals room, when some poor bastard's got a wheel off out there in the field; it's like sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's listening to a drill going next door.

  'He'll be all right, love,' Daisy told Baker as she brought him his tea. 'Don't you worry.'

  She always said that, but often the truth is different.

  Holmes was still watching me, waiting. He'd made an appeal to my hypothetical better nature: let Kearns keep his mission, try and do things better this time, earn his stripes.

  I was aware of anger simmering. A mission where the DIF was already a dead duck before the action had even started was the kind of thing I could handle better than most.

  'That man Vereker,' I said, 'is in the shit. And you want to see Kearns in the shit too?'

  'It's not quite like that,' Holmes said.

  'What is it quite like?'

  He spread his fingers on the table. 'The first few times you went out, things didn't always go well. But you had to push through with it, like a rite of passage. And you're still here. Give him his chance too.' He lifted his fingers, let them drop. 'Not much to ask.'

  I looked across the room at the man in the corner. He was still sitting with his legs crossed, one foot swinging, his eyes on his empty cup: I'd seen him finish his tea minutes ago. He looked so bloody young — but then they always do, the neophytes, it stands to reason.

  'He's cannon fodder,' I said. 'You know that.'

  Holmes nodded quickly. 'Yes. But that's only part of it. If you didn't want his mission for yourself you wouldn't mind so much, would you? You'd let him go out, take his chance.'

  It took away the feeling of anger, and immediately, because it had been against myself, for wanting to steal the mission from Kearns over there; and Holmes had put it on the line for me.

  'Point taken,' I said. 'I withdraw.'

  He flashed his quick white smile. 'I rather hoped you would.' He was more pleased than he wanted to show: he'd expected a tussle. But that's the way he fights, Holmes, for what he wants: he goes in and picks over your conscience and when he finds what he wants he gently pricks it for you. The only way to thwart him is not to have a conscience for him to pick over, but of course in this trade the very idea is hilarious.

  'Now let me offer some good advice, old fruit.' He looked around him, back at me. 'For the last few weeks you've been prowling the corridors like a bear — not to put too fine a point on it — with a sore arse, looking for a mission. One of the reasons you haven't got one yet is that there aren't many available, and another reason is that not every control is willing to suffer — not to mince matters — your notorious pigheadedness.'

  I sat listening. I always listen to Holmes. He's probably the only man I trust in the whole of this treacherous hell-hole. He also keeps his ear to the ground and therefore knows the score before anyone else has started the game.

  'So the risk you're running,' he said softly, 'is that before very long someone is going to drum up an excuse for sending you out to some remote and benighted region of the globe just to get rid of you.'

  'More tea, loves?'

  Daisy stood over us with a chipped enamel teapot, the brave colours of King George the Fifth's coronation emblem still half-visible under the stains.

  'That would be nice,' Holmes said cheerfully.

  Daisy poured for us, slopping the tea over as an expression of her generosity, and limped away with her arthritis. She dispenses her undrinkable tea and uneatable buns, does our Daise, with the clumsy grace of a benediction, and if she ever got tipsy and fell into the Thames the entire staff of the Bureau would be there before she hit the water. Cloistered as we are in a covert haunt of subterfuge, we prize the presence of this single innocent soul.

  'So what do I do?' I asked Holmes. He'd mentioned good advice.

  He looked around him again, at Baker, at Kearns, and back at me, his voice softer than ever. 'You know Mr Flockhart?'

  'Not well.' Flockhart was one of the controls, but he'd never run me through a mission.

  'He's quite good,' Holmes said. 'Some people find him a bit on the enigmatic side, doesn't give much away. He also comes and goes, runs a mission or two and disappears for a while. Of course, he's fairly senior, he can pick and choose.' He spread his fingers on the table again, kee
ping clear of the pools of tea. 'My advice, then, is that you should perhaps cultivate his company in the next day or so, and see if he's got anything interesting for you. Don't push it; just listen, and remember that one must handle Mr Flockhart with the tender care demanded by — shall we say — a tarantula.'

  2: LINGUINI

  It was gone eight in the evening when Flockhart came out of his office. I'd been hanging around in the corridor since five and was getting fed up.

  He shut the door, locking it, his back to me. He hadn't seen me yet, so I started walking towards him, casual pace, and we met near the stairs.

  'Were you coming to see me?'

  His face was square, bland, expressionless. 'Not actually,' I said. 'I thought Loman might be with you.' Loman had left here an hour ago.

  'I haven't seen him.' Flockhart studied me with faint interest. ,No luck yet?'

  'No.' He knew I was looking for a job; everyone did.

  He wasn't moving on, was still watching me. 'Have you eaten yet?'

  'No.'

  'Come and have some macaroni.' He turned towards the stairs, and I followed.

  It was a ten-minute walk through fine drizzle to a pasta place called the Cellar Steps, a basement room with red checked tablecloths and a mural of the Colosseum in Rome and one or two ceiling fans stirring the smell of garlic around. Flockhart chose a comer table under a signed framed photograph of Sophia Loren with an arm round the proprietor, Luigi Francesco.

  There weren't many people here: the theatres had gone in ten minutes ago and half London had gone home.

  We chose linguini.

  'So how long has it been since you came back?'

  'Six weeks,' I said.

  'Care for some wine?' I shook my head. 'Six weeks is a long time, for someone like you.' He sat watching me, his face a mask, his eyes attentive.

  'Someone like me?'

  'You like to keep up the pace, from what I hear.'

  'Lose momentum and you've got to deal with inertia.'

  'How very true.' He broke some bread, looking past me, nodding to someone. I couldn't see who it was. 'Let's see, you were on Solitaire, weren't you?'