by Adam Hall
'Were they trying to kill you?'
'Not very hard.'
Her warm fingers pressed, smoothing it flat.
'Don't you find it odd, to be still alive?'
'I find it quite comfortable.'
She stood back and looked at me steadily, her quiet eyes preoccupied with working something out for herself, maybe the feeling of oddness she expected me to have, because she didn't know that in my trade the risk of extinction carries its own anodyne: familiarity. There's always of course the question suddenly in the mind when the glass comes fluting through the nitro fumes or the headlights burn in your skull while you sit there staring them out: is this the one? But afterwards, when the shrill of the nerves has quietened, the only answer is no,it wasn't the one.
She looked away and put the reel of Elastoplast back into the tin, seeing my blood on her fingertips and for a moment considering it and then doing nothing about it, shutting the tin and putting it back on the shelf, her movements slow, reflective.
'Where's my gear?'
She turned.
'Your what?'
'The radio and the camera.'
'Oh yes. We had it picked up at a rendezvous. It should be on board by now.'
The time-gap closed with a bang and the mission was there in front of me, ready to run.
7: MAGNUM
I waited for him.
The street was silent and nothing moved.
Naked bulbs stuck out here and there from the corners of walls, their yellow light defining the perspective of the street and the turnings from it. The curved fronds of the palms hung piled against the minarets and the filigree of window-grilles, their tips burned brown by the heat of never-ending noon; in them I could hear rats rustling.
10.25.
This is the moment, in the last phase of pre-mission activity, when we wonder why we do the things we do: psychologically the brakes are coming off and we are gathering speed and soon we shall be pitching headlong into the dark and it's unnerving and we try to busy ourselves while the deadline closes on us, so that we don't have to think too much. So it's uncomfortable to have to sit in a car and do nothing, while the last minutes run out. It's not a good time to think.
There was a handbasin in the corner so why the hell didn't she rinse them there, I didn't like it, the way she'd looked at them, what was she saying, that it was here on her fingers by grace of whatever gods had decreed that I shouldn't be too close when the thing went off, bloody nonsense, they'd cocked it up that was all, tuned the rocking-mechanism till it was too sensitive and then a bus had made a draught or something like that. It doesn't do, at a time like this, to think you're being looked after by some kind of providence: start walking round ladders and you'll only get run over because survival begins in the brain, not the navel.
Soft-eyed little philosopher with her downy arms, two hands to hold the bloody thing and no training for priority ops, Loman ought to be shot.
The street was narrow, running thinly into the dark of trees at its very end. That was where I would be going soon, accelerating through the perspective of the known into the unknown dark.
I would wait here another two minutes and then I'd have to take the first of the risks that I must run between now and the rendezvous. He was very good of course but he wasn't an executive in the field and therefore didn't have the training or even the experience: it's a weak point and we think it's dangerous and we're always asking the Bureau to do something about it but you might as well try selling a jockstrap to a eunuch.
The scent of mimosa was on the air, adrift in the starlight from blossom I couldn't see from here, and the sky dripped diamonds, Andromeda and Cygnus and Vega and a million more, their reflection ablaze in the gilded cupola where she was, we'll miss a lot of things, oh a lot of things, if we're not careful.
Sweating like a pig and cursing him now for not coming, checking too often — 10.29 10.29.15–10.29.30 — time you learned to count without looking all the time at the dial, risk it anyway and if the whole thing blows up you can say it was his fault, didn't leave me enough time to check him for ticks.
Front-end configuration amorphous, colour dark blue or dark green in this light, coming rather fast but that was normal, Capri, no. Taunus, no, Chrysler 160, the lights dipping over the sandy hollows, driver alone, the dust flying up in his wake — 10.30.15 — give him a minute and then go, running it close, blast his eyes.
He passed the Yasmina and did a square loop and parked in the side-street and walked, short neat steps like a bird's, looking from side to side in case he missed anything, the last time I'd be seeing him for a while or forever if I didn't watch out: and then I found myself admiring the little bastard just for still being on his feet because this time they'd really blown an egg all over him and for the last forty-eight hours he'd been busting a gut to set up an op and he'd done it and we were ninety minutes to the off and I suppose you could say that was something, you could rank him among the elite: the professionals.
Negative.
Distant throb of a truck on the highway south, somewhere a starved dog baying. No other sound but the rats among the leaves, no movement anywhere along the street's narrowing channel.
10.31.15 and still negative.
I got the engine going and the nerves quietened a bit because he was a director, not an executive, and he could have picked up a tag and led him to base without knowing and that would have blown it, the lot. But it was all right and whatever happened now I'd have the comfort of knowing that base had been intact at the moment when the brakes came off.
The lids of the bins banging back and the tumble of empty skins and the bones of birds, steam rising and swirling into the air-conditioning vents, the boys in bow-ties and the trays volplaning on their raised hands, the din of cutlery in the metal sinks.
'Je m'excuse — je suis trompe de porte!'
'Comment?'
'Je cherche le restaurant!'
'Passez par ici m'sieur — allez-y!'
The doors swinging and the trays coming back loaded with the detritus ofMelon glace, Canard a l'orange, the drillers dining late so as to get some drinking done first.
The restaurant full, the lobby empty except for a few staff. Check, double-check. Negative.
'M'sieur?'
'Trente-sept.'
Door-boy, desk clerk, telephonist, a man from Hertz.
I used the main stairs. It was possible that I could now be seen through the glass facade above the entrance but the panels were solar-tinted and it had to be risked and in any case there was no alternative route. I'd gone through the kitchens because they were nearer where I'd left the car, below the third lamp from the group of yuccas where I could see it from my room, and if they were watching the main entrance for me they'd draw blank.
10.37.
The estimated schedule was ninety seconds from locking the 220 to reaching the windows of Room 37 and that didn't give them time enough to rig anything.
Loman would have left the shutters closed and the curtains drawn but they wouldn't necessarily be lightproof so I stopped halfway along the corridor and took a bulb out and dropped a 100-millime piece across the contacts and blew the lot and went into 37 without swinging the door too wide.
Total dark, hit a chair, touched the curtains.
The slats of the shutters were angled at forty-five degrees and I couldn't see anything above the horizontal and this was the first floor of a five-floor building so I opened a shutter, taking a full minute to swing it wide enough to let me through on to the balcony.
Check 220: negative.
Above the wax cascade of the yucca-blooms the balconies of the east wing were ranged in unbroken lines. Most of the outside lamps were burning but the rooms were dark: the restaurant was full. The building was in the tourist-Moorish style, an elongated complex of arches and carved screens with two arabesque lamps and a tubbedorangier on each balcony and creeper climbing from the lawns below, and he was observing me from the third floor, seventh ro
om from the left.
The lamps were lit on the two balconies on each side of mine but it didn't help because he was using binoculars and their lens-hoods would be cutting out the peripheral glare. There was almost no glint on the lenses and I might have missed them except that he'd forgotten to mask the chrome thumb-screw on the tripod.
It was difficult to judge how much light I was reflecting but the likelihood that he was able to identify me at this range was critically high. Despite this, there was a chance that he hadn't seen me so I moved my head and not my eyes because the reflective capacity of the whites is greater than that of the iris and pupil by a factor of more than double and in certain lights it can make the difference between being seen or overlooked, shot dead or only winged.
I was now directly facing the Mercedes 220 and computing the angle and the thing I didn't like was that there was no visual obstruction between the car and his balcony: he'd watched me arrive and unless I could do anything about it he would watch me leave.
Time probably 10.38.30 couldn't look.
It was difficult because I was scheduled to leave here in a minute and a half from now and there wouldn't be time to call up a taxi and I couldn't commandeer the nearest private car I found outside because those drip-nosed Agathas in London have got the whole thing written out underPublic Involvement (Standing Orders) and if you blot your copybook they'll suspend you from missions and for the next twelve months you'll pass the time breaking hieroglyphs in Codes and Ciphers or standing-in for a sandbag at the thousand-yard range in Norfolk.
He wasn't doing anything, not moving about or anything. I couldn't see a barrel coming up but of course there could be two of them and the other one could be inside the room where there was no light to pick up surfaces and my skin began crawling because at this range I wouldn't hear the detonation before the skull was blown.
They were being inconsistent.
Inconsistency is dangerous because it brings in the unpredictable: if you don't know which way the opposition's going to jump you can't tell where they'll land.
They grilled O'Brien and then they killed him.
They surveyed Fyson and then they broke his nerve across a telescopic rifle without firing a shot and they didn't wipe him out before they'd finished with him as a contact control that led to my own exposure.
With me they went straight in for the kill and when they fouled it up they didn't try again: they changed their minds and decided that since I was still alive I was worth tagging and that was so bloody inconsistent that it brought out the sweat on me because at any minute they could change their minds again and I could be standing here against the wall with my forehead coming slowly into the centre of a 3x scope while his finger took up the tension on the spring.
I'd seen all I wanted to out here but I didn't hurry because speed can be fatal if it isn't dictated totally by brain-think and this was stomach-think, this sweat on me and the crawling of the skin, I knew what Fyson had meant, the threat of a long gun can bring you to the pitch when all you can think about is the sudden air-rush, wherever you are, walking in a street or coming down some steps, the silence of the small bright beautifully-turned object as it nears you so fast that the fine tune of its passage is outstripped so that you never hear it, or driving along a road where the buildings are strange to you, their windows open, while the little cylindrical stub of lead and copper-zinc alloy spins towards you, intimately to invade the consciousness and turn it into mindless chemicals, bringing an end to all you ever were.
Slowly, my fingers behind me, finding the varnished wood of the shutter, guiding my feet until the shadow of the terrace screen came to fall across my eyes and I passed inside the room and stood filling the lungs with oxygen for the nerves while the telephone began ringing and I let it go on until I was ready to answer it.
'I am leaving now,' he said.
'All right.'
I hung up.
10.40.
He'd been punctual. It was a help. It is a help,mon ami, when you are in a spot and someone demonstrates his reliability. It gives you hope.
I left the shutter as it was, half open: there wasn't any technical advantage in closing it; on the contrary he'd pick up the movement because I didn't have the time to do it slowly. There was a slight advantage in leaving it half open because psychologically it suggested presence: you normally shut things when you leave a place. I left the curtains drawn.
Sound and I froze. Corridor: voices.
The lights, oh yes, they were wondering why they'd fused.
I picked up my flight-bag and went out. It wouldn't be a good idea to go through the kitchens again so I took the swing door to the gardens, going past the swimming-pool on the far side where there was shadow and thinking as fast as I could because the place was a trap: they wouldn't put surveillance on me from that direction alone — they'd cover the whole scene.
The hurry wasn't at this end: Chirac would wait for takeoff until I was ready to go. But London wanted me to reach Tango Victor soonest possible and that pulled the whole schedule tight and I wasn't going to accept his midnight ETD because with a bit of luck they might finish slapping the dope on before then and we could get off the ground while it was drying.
The path turned left and I took it and kept to the shadow of the oleanders until I was within thirty yards of the 220 and then I stopped because at this point I'd be moving into the surveyed area and even if he didn't recognize me from behind and above he'd know who I was when I got into the car.
I didn't want to do a thing like this without being quite certain there was no other way. Technically it looked like suicide but sometimes it has to be done: we have to move deliberately into known surveyance even when it isn't done to deceive. We have to do it for various reasons: because the schedule of the mission has become critical to the point of jeopardizing it by delay or because the threat to life is so immediate as to justify a lesser risk or because there's a fair chance of dodging mobile surveyance once we've left the immediate area.
Two of these reasons were valid for me now; if I didn't reach the wreck on the sand before anyone else got there the mission would come to nothing and it was therefore at this moment jeopardized and London would agree. There would be mobile surveyance taking over from the man on the balcony because tonight they wanted to know where I was going and the fact that one of them had got killed trying to find out wouldn't deter them since it was now obvious that I was going somewhere interesting, and I had a fair chance of dodging a mobile tag because it was something I'd learned how to do.
10.42.
So I broke cover and the skin begancrawling again because it was reasonably certain that on the balcony of the seventh room on the third floor the hooded lenses were now swinging down on the tripod swivel and steadying.
Ignore.
Range sixty yards, angle of fire thirty-five degrees low, target centred.
Ignore and keep on walking and think of other things.
Chirac was rather good material: he'd got the point. After all, he was only helping us out: he wasn't a professional spook and he didn't possess the bruised lopsided sense of loyalty to the Bureau that's always there like a scarecrow wherever we go. Kaifra tonight was a red sector and he was in it and if they gota fix on him and managed to take him and grill him I'd be walking straight into an ambush when I kept the rendezvous at the Mosque Hamouda Pasha.
They knew how to conduct interrogation: they'd operated on O'Brien and got enough out of him to blow a five-star field-executive like Fyson as soon as he'd arrived in Sidi Ben Ali and they'd finished him off in Tunis and got the name of Kaifra out of him or theywouldn't be here now because Loman and I had got here clean. If they did it to Chirac we wouldn't expect him to protect me or the Bureau or his own mother because they were experts, so I'd thrown him the alert and told him to phone me at the Royal Sahara at exactly 10.40 and use four words and those four words precisely unless he was under duress and then he could use any variation he liked: I am on my way orIam
starting now, so forth.
It would give him total protection because it allowed him to keep to the truth: I have arranged to rendezvous with him at the Mosque Hamouda Pasha but he won't go there unless I telephone him to say when I am leaving.
They couldn't blame him if I didn't turn up: I could have caught a cold or something.
Fiat 850, Volkswagen, Peugeot 504, Toyota Land Cruiser with spades strapped on, Citroen DS, nobody in them and nothing else in sight of the 220 so they must have put him round a corner or somewhere in total shadow. He'd moved off when I did but this insistence on concealment at the beginning of our run seemed a bit pointless because he couldn't get on my tail without spreading himself all over the mirror and they knew that. It was another nasty little inconsistency and I didn't like it.
Oleanders, tamarisk, deep cover ten feet from the Mercedes on the other side and I slowed as I walked towards it because they might not like using a rifle in the hotel building — it would make a lot of noise and people would get inquisitive — so the best thing would be for the man up there to have signalled my arrival so they could put someone in cover here where the noise wouldn't be so loud.
I walked towards it.
If they let me get as far as the car I could stop worrying: they hadn't had time to rig a bang because I'd kept it under observation except for the ninety-second period when I'd gone into the hotel through the kitchens. The timing from Room 37 to the swing door I'd used as an exit wasn't much more than half a minute.
Five paces and I reached the 220 and got in and started up, not looking at the hotel but checking the Vauxhall and the hardtop GT-6 that had now come into sight from where I sat, nobody in them, nobody anywhere. No sound of a starter and I was waiting for it and it didn't happen and I thought blast their eyes for not playing it by the book: they'd let me get as far as the car but I still couldn't stop worrying because they wouldn't just put one isolated observer up there to log my arrival and departure times at the Royal Sahara. They knew I was pushing the deadline because they'd already had a mobile tag on me tonight and now they ought to be hooking a new one on to me, or a dozen, and they weren't.