Quiller Salamander q-18

by Adam Hall

  7: BOGEYMAN

  The point of no return was the ninth stair.

  That was my estimation.

  There were twelve stairs and I was now on the eighth, watching the crack of light under the door on the landing above me. It was at eye-level. It had taken me a long time to reach here, perhaps fifteen minutes; this was partly because the stairs creaked — the villa was old, with cracked plaster walls and rotting timber — and partly because the situation was so dangerous and I didn't want to hurry.

  Voices came from below the door, voices and tobacco smoke creeping blue-grey in the crack of light.

  I've told them so often at Norfolk when I'm roped in as a temporary instructor between missions: Never use a staircase when you're approaching a hot zone unless there's no other way. And even then think twice. To help get it into their heads I throw them the statistics from a report I remember reading on safety in the home: 'In dwellings of more than one floor, thirty-five per cent of fatal accidents occur on the stairs. Fifteen per cent of these involve the elderly, fifty-two per cent occur when something bulky is being carried down the stairs, and thirty-three per cent occur when hurrying.'

  Tonight, as I watched the light under the door, I was aware that my chance of a fatal accident on this particular staircase was closer to a hundred per cent because if that door opened and I had to go down the stairs there'd be a gun at my back and all I'd have to do in my hurry to get clear was break an ankle and it'd stop my run, finito.

  If the door opened when I reached the next stair, the ninth, the point of no return, I would have a gun in my face but there'd be a chance of dealing with it before it was fired.

  There was a balcony on this side of the villa. The room where the agents were talking would open onto it; so would the rooms on each side. When I approached the villa through the last of the rain some thirty minutes ago, following the dead man's brother at a distance from where we'd left the cars, I'd seen the balcony but hadn't been able to reach it from the ground: there was no creeper, no drainpipe, nothing but the sheer wall. That was why I'd had to ignore my own warning to the neophyte espions at Norfolk and use this staircase to the hot zone, the room where the agents were talking. I'd come in through the back door of the villa; it hadn't been locked; guerrillas armed to the teeth don't think of locking their doors.

  The voices behind the door rose and fell, fell sometimes to silence, then broke out again. I recognized the language, that was all: it was Khmer. They would be talking, some of the time, about the death of the hit man, a death to be avenged, and bloodily, as soon as they could find out who had killed him, so that his brother here could at least know that the score was settled.

  I listened on the stair.

  The way I worked things out was that if the door of that room opened at any next second and someone came out when I was still on the eighth stair my chances of getting clear would be better if I turned and crashed down the staircase and got out through the open back door before the agent had time to pull his gun and fire it with any accuracy. But once I was on the ninth stair, only three from the top, I thought I might stand a better chance of getting clear by taking the man head-on and dropping him cold and going through the vacant room to the right and onto the balcony and making a controlled drop to the ground before the fuss started.

  But when I talk about one chance being better than the other I mean of course by a hair, by the tenth of a second, by the reaction-time of the agent's nerves, the degree of friction between the gun and the inside of the holster, things like that, a thousand things. And there were other unpredictables: whether the room on the right was in fact vacant; whether the latch on the door was weak enough for me to smash open if it was locked or if the handle was loose and wouldn't turn fast enough to let me in there.

  The talking rose again and then one voice barked and there was silence. He would be their top dog — the man, almost certainly, I would need to meet, and talk to, or kill.

  I lifted my right foot to take the next step upward but froze as someone moved inside the room and the shadow of a boot darkened the crack under the door and I waited for it to come open, going over the distances and the angles that would be involved if a man came out and I had to get to him before he was ready, working against the glare of the light from the room before my pupils had time to retract but using my one advantage — the element of surprise — for all it was worth.

  Waited.

  Four stairs and a distance of three feet across the landing, say two seconds, two and a half, before the heel of the right palm reached the nose bone and drove it upward into his brain and dropped him, the gun in his hand by that time but too late, with any luck too late.

  The boot was still close to the door. I watched the handle, waiting for it to turn, to trigger the nerves, alert the muscles.

  Waited with my right foot lowered again and braced on the eighth stair with the heel raised and the ball of the foot burning as the energy surged from the brain to the muscles on hot waves of adrenalin.

  Soon?

  I watched the crack of light, the shadow of the boot.

  Now?

  The muscles burning, the organism triggered, the nerves drawn tight.

  Then a voice came and the boot moved and the shadow was gone and the handle of the door remained still, perfectly still, as the talking broke out again and I moved to the ninth stair and went on climbing and crossed the landing and went into the room on the right with no impediment, the door unlocked and the handle easy to turn but the heart still racing under the whip of the adrenalin and the mouth dry, the reaction bringing sweat out, itching on my face.

  It was darker in here than it had been on the staircase, because the lights had been left burning in the main room on the ground floor. I had spent a little time in there when I'd come into the villa, smelling the film of burnt cordite inside the barrels of uncleaned guns — most of them Chinese assault rifles stacked in the corners and lying around on a trestle table. I had also studied the picture gallery on the wall, a big spread of black-and-white photographs of men in camouflage dress holding weapons at the alert with dramatic look-mummy expressions, a lot of the pictures showing Pol Pot himself, carefully shot from below to make him look taller, others showing a younger man in jungle battledress with a peaked cap and a general's pips on the shoulders, one with his name below it: Kheng San, presumably the second-in-command of the Khmer Rouge forces.

  I had studied his face with particular care, going from one shot to another and letting the flat black-and-white features saturate the memory while the imagination supplied the third dimension and added colour. I knew the face of Pol Pot from press photographs and the television screen, but it might be as important for me to know the face of General Kheng.

  I listened now to the voices coming through the plaster wall from the room next door. One of them I had learned to recognize: it belonged to the top dog, the one who barked when everyone else started talking at once. He could possibly be General Kheng, but I didn't think so: the forces of the Khmer Rouge were twelve thousand strong and would have the normal number of officers of all ranks.

  This could of course be their secret base, the one they'd moved to when they'd gone underground. In the normal run of things a hit man is low in the echelon, but a hit man ordered to target a government minister would rank higher, and his brother might be persona grata at headquarters. Or he could simply have come here on orders to debrief, as the driver of the Russian Zhiguli on the night of the attempted assassination.

  Two of the voices were women's, sharp and shrill, the voices of fanatics. In a culture where female citizens were looked upon as cattle and female soldiers as whores they had done well, these two, to have risen this far in the ranks.

  I put one ear against the wall and listened. The volume was increased but it still wasn't good enough: I'd be wasting my time. I felt in the darkness for the French doors to the balcony and found them and turned the oval handle, drawing the vertical bolts clear at the top and bottom,
taking time, keeping pressure against the doors with one shoulder to stop the bolts springing free with a bang — I couldn't afford to make a sound, the slightest sound during the brief silences that came from the next room.

  As I inched open the doors the night air came softly in, humid after the rain but cooler than in here. But it was the light that stopped my movements dead, the light and the sound of their voices. Through the slats of the shutters I could see the floor of the balcony in the light that came from the other room: they'd opened the shutters there and the French windows as well, possibly to let the smoke out or cool the air or both. I hadn't expected that.

  The options were unattractive: their voices were clear now and I could set the recorder going and leave it running for thirty minutes and turn the tape over and run it for another thirty but there was the distinct risk that during the hour someone would come into this room and raise a shout when he saw me and before I could reach him, call it a hornets' nest.

  Or I could open these windows wider and ease the shutters hack and move onto the balcony, but it ran past both rooms and I'd risk being seen and if that happened there'd be no point in going back through the room and down the stairs because there wouldn't be time before they pulled their guns and put out a fusillade, finis.

  Or I could abort the operation now, get out of this room and go back down the stairs while I had time, the risk factor zero unless that door opened onto the landing and someone came out within the next twenty seconds, the time it would take me to reach the ground floor.

  I stood listening to the voices coming through the shutters.

  There was no laughter, not even occasional. That wasn't a party they had going in there. One of their hit men had been killed and they'd be debriefing his brother on that; they would also be discussing other business, and that was why I'd bought a Sony 309 compact cassette recorder at the Marche Olympique yesterday on the chance that when I went to the funeral it would give me a lead. The objective for Salamander was information, and all I needed was to hear people talk.

  Their voices rose and fell.

  I was terribly disinclined to abort.

  You'll get yourself killed if you don't.

  Shuddup.

  I didn't like the idea of the staircase as an escape route. I was already this side of the ninth stair, the point of no return, and even if I ignored that, the scene projected for me in the imagination was unpleasant: the shadow executive for the mission crashing down the stairs with his hands flung out and the steel-nosed slugs from the Chinese rifles going into his spine before he could even start counting. The space was too confined and once on the staircase I wouldn't be able to dodge or turn or break for covet, I'd be like a dog in a drainpipe.

  Discount staircase.

  One of the women was speaking, using a lot of emphasis, her eyes watching the moon for the first time not so long ago, the round white toy in the sky, while her mother told her its ancient name, the name of a goddess, told her it was much too far to touch as the tiny hands reached out for it, using a lot of emphasis now as she pulled herself to her full height with her eyes brighter than the moon and burning with the light of the crusader, her small breasts flattened under the battledress and the bandolier and her small hands calloused by the long hours at the firing range, a lot of emphasis, her voice chopping at the air as she spoke of the things she had learned in these few years, how to bring bloodshed back to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek in the cause of Communism for Kampuchea.

  Try the last option next, then, get it out of the way: abort the operation.

  Yes, because if you don't

  Oh for Christ's sake shuddup.

  I'd come here for information and it could be a breakthrough if I got it, a breakthrough within three days of coming into the field, so the only option I was prepared to take was going out onto that balcony and hitting the record button and letting this thing go on running until we had a bit of bad luck and one of them saw me there or heard me there and I had to use the balcony itself as the escape route, make a controlled drop, and that wouldn't be anything new because -

  You'll kill yourself

  God's sake piss off will you, because I'd already allowed for it in my original plans, to make the drop and get to the corner of the building and out of the gunsights and get clear. The balcony faced west and I'd left the Mazda on the east side of the villa and that made the whole thing possible: I'd have time to get as far as the car and take it away before they set up the fusillade, it could work, let's put it like that, if things went wrong it wouldn't be a certain death.

  And that was as much as I would ask: to know that the risk was calculated.

  Kheng was barking again, if that was his voice in there, General Kheng San's, and silence fell and I didn't touch the right-hand shutter until the voices came in again and provided sound cover. I chose the right-hand shutter because it opened away from the other room instead of towards it and would reflect less light from the angled slats on the floor of the balcony.

  As the shutter swung back by a millimetre at a time I sighted along the balcony with one eye in the gap. The other room was open to the night as I'd thought, but all I could see were a few inches of the wall inside and a rifle leaning in the corner. They weren't troubled, these people, by the thought of being overlooked, overheard, shot at by a sniper: the villa stood in its own grounds and there was no traffic on the muddy track we'd taken here tonight, the agent and I.

  The night air came against my face as I pushed open the shutter far enough to let me through in the prone position, with the Sony 309 held in front of me. Then I began crawling.

  On my left, the wall of the villa, with the open doors twelve feet away; on my right, the balcony rail with the sheer drop beyond it. My world had become narrowed, together with the margin of error. If one of those people came onto the balcony now it would simply be a question of my luck having run out; but on top of the chance factor, mistakes could also be made, and as I pushed the record button on the little Sony I noted the dark crescent of tape under the transparent window as it began running, because in thirty minutes the automatic shutoff would be triggered and would produce a definite click, and if that happened during one of those silences in there they'd hear it, no question. Luck was out of my control, but mistakes would need to be avoided.

  Crawling.

  The Sony wasn't big; I'd chosen a micro because I might have to make a run with it: there'd been no choice. But it made things trickier, because the microphone wouldn't pick up distant sound, and I had to get as close as I could to the source — the voices that rose and fell in there, punctuated by the top dog's bark and lightened by the shrill tones of the women.

  Cigarette smoke drifted through the open doors, blue-grey and curling, as if someone had thrown a bomb in there.

  Crawling, holding the Sony as far in front of me as I could, until direct light touched it from the open doors and I pulled it back an inch and froze. This was as far as I could go, and all I could do now was lie here to wait this thing out as the tape ran silently in the little recorder, the dark crescent narrowing on one side under the plastic window, widening on the other.

  The beat of the heart against the wooden boards of the balcony, the deep slow rhythm of the breath bringing oxygen for the muscles, the adrenals producing fuel to fire the blood in the instant if something went wrong — if the toe of a boot moved into the light six feet, less, in front of me, as one of them came out to take the air.

  Watch the little plastic window.

  I would have liked to lie here with both palms flat on the boards, ready to push up if I had to, but that wasn't possible: I must keep hold of the Sony with my right hand, and that made things awkward. But what do we expect, we the doughty ferrets in the field, when we go out on the limb — a six-month guarantee that the bloody thing won't break?

  I don't like this

  Nor do I, so shut up, I'm trying to concentrate.

  If someone comes out, you won't have time.

&nbs
p; God's sake piss off, I'm busy.

  The tape narrowing on one side, widening on the other through the little window, reek of the tobacco smoke, the rough grain of the boards under my left hand, under my right wrist, the sound of a truck in the distance, its lights sending a silver spark of reflection moving across the chrome case of the Sony, watch the tape, watch it, we've been here fifteen minutes now, don't let that thing shut off, it'll sound like a bloody bomb, we seem, we seem to have bombs, don't we, bombs on the brain, quite so, images of violence in the mind as we lie here like a corpse, a cadaver, shall we do that if we see a boot suddenly in the doorway, if one of them comes onto the balcony, just go on lying here like a corpse, play dead with our paws in the air?

  Conceivably ill-advised.

  Watch the tape. Just watch the tape and clear the mind of boots and bombs and pandemonium and things that go bang in the night as they grab the rifle and bring it into the aim, bang and you're dead before you're even on your feet, my good friend, my good late friend with your blood all over the — watch the tape, that's all we have to do, we clear the mind of the bogeymen and watch the tape.

  Widening on one side, narrowing on the other through the little window, the voices pitching up and falling again, the smoke drifting across the light.

  Watch the tape. Twenty minutes now.

  But it's no go — look.

  Boot of the bogeyman.

  8: PLAYBACK

  I saw his eyes in the instant before I was on my feet and he was going for his gun when I hit the balcony rail and it broke as I tilted across it and began falling with the air-rush against my face, pushing the Sony into my field jacket and kicking out to keep my body vertical, kicking again and tilting forward so that I could let the legs jack-knife to absorb the initial impact, and when I hit ground at that angle I went straight into a forward aikido roll with my head tucked down out of the way and the right shoulder taking the worst of it, sending me spinning as the vertical momentum became rotational and I rolled twice, three times before it was exhausted and I could straighten my legs and start pitching forward into a fast run, and by this time a lot of shouting had broken out above me and in the blur of images I saw a gun come up from the hip and heard the shot thud into the rain-sodden earth a foot distant as I reached the corner of the building and rapid fire began puckering the ground.