by Adam Hall
‘Zarkovic,’ I said. ‘Can you talk?’
Intelligence came into the narrowed brown eyes and they watched me without bunking.
‘I was sent to meet you,’ I said, ‘from London.’
He watched me, a spasm passing across his face. He didn’t take his eyes off mine. Then his thin mouth moved.
‘What?’ I asked him. It had sounded like ‘coder’, His eyes squeezed shut and I waited.
A flash of light sparked from the reeds on the horizon, then another. They would be the emergency vehicles along the road beyond the marshland, the sun striking reflections from then-windscreens.
‘Listen,’ I said against the cuffing of the wind, ‘I’m going to-‘
‘Cobra.’
‘What?’
I watched his lips, ‘Cobra.’
Another spasm came and I waited but it wasn’t any good because the eyes were losing their intelligence: they were staring at me but I wasn’t there anymore. Nothing was there.
The klaxons sounded urgently as the wind shifted and I tugged at the zip of his flying-suit and found his wallet and felt for other things like that, flat things, any kind of papers, documents. Nothing. Only the wallet I took it and pulled the zip shut and got to my feet and began running. They were coming from the south and would have to leave their vehicles on the road and bring their equipment here on foot across the soggy ground. The Lancia was standing beyond the fringe of reeds north-west of here and I could reach it in ten minutes if I tried and I was going to try. In any case they wouldn’t take any interest in me till they’d examined the body, so I had plenty of time.
But London wouldn’t be pleased, It was raining hard and they had the gas mains up from one end of Whitehall to the other and I left clay all over the floor of the lift. Matthews was trudging along the corridor with a wad of papers, which is the only thing I’d ever seen him doing.
‘Oh hello, Q - how was the Grand Prix?’
‘Bloody awful, where’s Tilson?’
‘What? Monitoring, the last I saw.’
There were only three people in Monitoring and none of them was Tilson. They were sitting there like waxworks and I picked up a spare set and heard a lot of Asian coming through, probably from Laos. Everybody was worried about Laos these days, which made a change from Ireland. I went along to Incoming Staff and knocked and opened the door. They’ve got a man there now, instead of the two women clerks, because Incoming Staff is the place where you report first thing at the end of a mission or at the end of whatever phase of a mission you managed to reach before the whole thing blew up in your face. We don’t always look very well-groomed when we come in here, and some of us have to go on to a head shrinker or a nervous disorders ward or somewhere Like that; and finally the two women clerks couldn’t stand it anymore and I don’t blame them.
‘Interim debriefing,’ I said, ‘who wants me?’
He looked up with a swing of his big square head. I didn’t know his name because in the Bureau we never know the names of people below active rank because it isn’t necessary;
is a matter of fact we don’t know anybody’s name at all, Because they’re just convenient labels thought up in Personnel. The Bureau doesn’t exist, and that allows it to take on operations that no one else wants to be seen dead with: and that’s not a bad metaphor. The intelligence lords on the lop floor run the place as if it were a secret munitions ship moving at dead slow through a minefield by night: they like there to be a hush over everything, a permanent blackout, reducing to a calculated minimum the risk of an odd spark sending the whole outfit into Kingdom Come, ‘Where from, sir?’ the big man asked me.
‘Istres, south of France.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He checked the board that would tell him which mission I was on, and who was running it. He didn’t find anything because no one had given me a mission yet, so he opened a drawer and moved his colourless eyes twice from left to right.
‘Room 6,’ he said and shut the drawer. ‘Just let me tell him you’re here.’ He picked up a phone.
They’ve put numbers on some of the doors now; their lordships went a bit too far in the beginning, when even the doors had to be anonymous; it had worked up to a point but there’d been a couple of cases where a visitor had wandered into Codes and Cyphers without an escort, scaring the daylights out of us all; and they kept having to haul Thompson out of the Ladies, though God knows what he was doing in there because most of the ladies at the Bureau have brogues and rimless bifocals.
‘Yes sir,’ the big man said into the phone and put it down and looked at me. ‘Would you care to wait five minutes?’
‘All right.’
So it wasn’t going to be Parkis, and it wasn’t going to be Egerton. Parkis always keeps the executives waiting for half an hour because he’s paranoid on the subject of status; and Egerton is too courteous to keep anyone waiting, though it comes to the same thing in the end because no one can ever find him.
‘How did it go?’ the big man asked, ‘Got a negative.’
‘Ah.’ He eyed me without looking at me, in the way ex-Scotland Yard men have learned, but he couldn’t see any cuts or bruises or anything wrong with my nerves, only some clay on my shoes and that wasn’t too bad because five months ago Bateman had come in from a nasty one in Tangier and been told to wait and couldn’t manage it: he just went along the corridor and dropped over the banisters into the stairwell before anyone had a clue what was in his mind. These cases are mostly when there’s been some kind -of implemented interrogation by the opposition, leaving the nerve-ends bared; but nobody comes off a mission or an interim phase feeling very jolly.
We listened to the rain pattering on the windowsill, and the distant hammering of a road drill where they were doing the gas mains.
‘Smoke, sir?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Trying to give it up myself.’ He lit one and dropped the match into the ashbowl and hit the chrome knob.
‘Who is it,’ I asked him, ‘in Room 6?’
‘Couldn’t say, sir.’
He said it so fast that I knew it was routine.
It could be Mildmay. Or Sargent. The rest of them had something on the board, I knew that. In any case I was reaching the point where I didn’t give a damn who was going to run me: all I wanted to do was get into the field and start moving. The Zarkovic thing had left me feeling hooked and I wanted to know more. There’d been nothing in his wallet, not a damned thing: passport, medical card, Communist membership papers, picture of a dark-haired girl smiling with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, nothing else, nothing to go on. Whatever Milos Zarkovic had brought over from Yugoslavia he’d brought in his head.
I’d taken the Lancia to Marseille and used the phone and they’d told me to come in by air through Paris and here I was, hanging around this bloody office talking to a man I didn’t know.
‘Looks like setting in, sir,’
‘What?’
The rain,’
‘Yes.’
I gave it another five minutes and told him I was going along to the Caff, so if anyone wanted me they knew where to find me.
‘Okay sir, I’ll tell-‘ then the phone rang and he asked me to hold on. I tried to recognize the voice at the other end but all I could tell was that it wasn’t Parkis and it wasn’t Egerton.
‘They’re ready for you now, sir, in Room 6.’
It was the next floor up and I took the stairs and met Woods coming out of Signals with his tie under one ear and a cigarette in his mouth and a cup of tea in his hand.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘three changes in the last twenty-four hours.’ He limped along to the Gents. God knew which current operation he was doing the signals for, but anyone having to change his code three times in twenty-four hours was running it very close.
Room 6 was along in the briefing complex and I knocked and went in.
‘Who are you?’
‘Quiller.’
‘Ah yes. Sit down, won’t you?’
/>
He was behind the desk, sliding a ruler across some paper in a series of angled jerks, presumably making a graph. He was slightly rumpled-looking, with black hair and a grey face and sooty bags under his eyes. I’d never seen him before. His ruler went on sliding and I watched the deft working of his hands. He sat very still with his head angled down to look at the desk, and I took no notice when one of the telephones buzzed. After a while I got the impression that he was a remote-controlled robot with orders to fiddle here while some kind of Rome went burning down.
‘Yes.’
He slid the ruler to one side and looked across at me. It was the first time I’d seen his eyes; they were the same unhealthy grey as the rest of his face, and gave away nothing.
‘We haven’t long,’ he said, and got up and began walking about. ‘I’m sending two of you people across to Lisbon by the first available flight - direct, of course. They are Pritchard and Mailer. Have you worked with them before?’
‘No.’
‘They are exceptionally talented. You will be making covert rendezvous with them tonight at 21:00 hours and the code introduction will be concomitant with the third series.’ He stopped walking for a moment and stood looking down at his shoes with his hands tucked behind his back and his grey face intent. It was perfectly genuine: he’d forgotten I was here. I waited.
‘You speak Portuguese?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very good. Pritchard is fluent, and Mailer has been swatting up a handbook of phrases for tourists. The three of you will be working close together, you understand. Communication will be via open channels unless there is a need for a code, in which case you will of course signal through Crowborough.’
He was telling me about access lines when I got up and went out and looked for Tilson and found him in Firearms, ‘Who’s that bloody fool in Room 6?’
‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘when did you get in?’
Twenty minutes ago and the only thing that’s happened so far is that I.S. pushed me into Room 6 for debriefing and some idiot tried to sell me a lot of crap about working with two other executives in Portugal.’
Tilson put down the submachine gun and looked for a phone.
‘I wish someone had told me, old horse.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, can’t they get their records straight?’
‘There’s a flap on,’ he said, and pushed the button again.
‘Does that mean the whole system’s gone on the blink?’
He started talking to someone and I went back into the corridor and walked up and down for a bit, getting control by degrees and finding it difficult and not liking it: when we’re called in for a mission the nerves react because this branch of the trade is the tricky one and it’s like playing Russian roulette. There’s an ambivalent attitude towards the situation that pulls us both ways: we’re desperate to get back into some kind of action because that’s the way we tick and if we didn’t tick that way we wouldn’t be here, but at the same time we know what we’re doing-we’re sticking our neck out a bit farther every time and one day we’re going to get the chopper. It’s a question of watching the odds stack up against us, mission after mission.
But I shouldn’t have lost my cool so easily.
They note things like that.
The bulbs glowed yellow in the stairwell and I leaned on the banisters for a minute, listening to the raindrops hitting the skylight in the roof. Someone had made a mistake, that was all: the character in Room 6 was running a minor operation in Portugal with the local telephone for communication and a code series no one had used since I’d got back from Tunisa-it hadn’t been blown anywhere but C and C had worked out some rather more sophisticated matrices with a computer for the mainline operations and these days the first-to-fourth series were given the trainees to play with.
‘It’s all right now,’ Tilson said.
He was shuffling along the corridor in his plaid slippers, his round pink face radiating reassurance.
‘Who is he, anyway?’
‘Who is who, old fruit?’
That bloody fool.’
He gave a slight wince, and looked back along the corridor for a moment, lowering his voice. ‘He’s from upstairs.’
Now I got it. At the Bureau ‘upstairs’ is the rarefied territory where Administration has its offices. Normally their lordships leave us alone but sometimes one of them asks the directorate if he can run a minor operation to keep his hand in, and of course the directorate can’t refuse. I suppose there’s a point in it somewhere but that kind of thing can get out of hand: we could find one of those amateur heroes running a mission the wrong way round and getting the poor bloody executive caught in the works. We don’t appreciate that sort of thing: it’s our life, not theirs.
‘All right Tilson, get me debriefed.’
‘Of course,’ he said comfortingly. ‘What about a spot of tea first?’
‘Listen, will you, they told me to make contact and escort on the French coast and the poor bastard killed himself and I’ve got his papers for whoever wants them and all I’m asking for is some service and I’m asking you to get it for me.’
The tone of my voice was pitching up again and I heard it and was warned. There wasn’t anything to worry about: they must have a mission lined up for me or they wouldn’t have sent me to Istres like that, through a Liaison 9 cut-out: they’d have told those Monegasque cops I had to telephone London. And if they had a mission lined up for me I’d be sent into the field within a matter of days and then I’d be all right.
Tilson was shuffling along beside me.
‘Where the hell are we going now, Tilson?’
‘Debriefing,’ he said, ‘then briefing.’
I could feel the subtle rise in the pulse rate throughout my body. ‘They’ve got something for me, have they?’
That’s right.’ He turned a bland smile on me. Thought you’d be pleased.’
We went down the stairs, ‘Who’s my director?’
‘Mr. Egerton.’
I slowed. Egerton was a mainliner, one of the top echelon people in the London directorate. So it was something big.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘this isn’t the way to -‘
‘I do wish you’d take your foot off, old fruit, just till I can get you sorted out. The thing is, he’s not in his office. I tried, from Firearms.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve told everyone to ransack the entire building, and I can’t do more than that for you, can I?’
We walked under the yellow bulbs, passing the grimy windows where the rain was leaving streaks. There was nothing along here except the Caff and some storerooms.
‘Something big, is it?’
I wanted to know more. I wanted to know everything. But I wouldn’t know anything at all, until they found Egerton.
To judge by the size of the flap,’ Tilson said, ‘yes.’ He wasn’t normally communicative: he didn’t like committing himself. His job was to shunt people from one department to another, make sure they never got lost in transit, and occasionally brief them on behalf of a director.
There’s a flap?’ I said.
‘Rather an understatement, old boy. I don’t mind telling you, we’ve got four people out there trying to find access for the executive, and one of them is playing it so close that he’s keeping Signals up all night changing codes.’ We went through the door at the end of the passage and he said above the clatter of crockery: ‘Meanwhile I thought you might like a spot of tea. My treat, of course.’
Chapter 3
BRIEFING
It was no go.
For fifteen minutes Egerton had sat behind his cluttered desk in the room right at the top of the building, giving me a rough outline of the mission, his voice quiet and modulated, his dull brown eyes wandering about behind his glasses as he sketched in the problems with access, the lack of direction, the uncertainty about objectives. He didn’t make apologies for anything, and he didn’t try to persuade me. He ju
st hoped, with that wistful smile of his, that I might want to ‘have a go’, I didn’t.
‘It’s not my field,’ I said, ‘you know that.’
‘Of course.’ He gave a shrug of resignation. ‘It’s just that I didn’t feel like handing this operation to - well - someone who might drop it.’
I got out of the Louis Quinze chair and moved about, feeling trapped. The room was claustrophobic, part of the servants’ dormitories at the turn of the century when the place was built; and he’d crammed it with tropics from Petticoat Lane - old bulb horns and a stuffed owl and a whole rack of Coronation mugs. The rain beat at the high dormer window, and I could hear pigeons scratching along the ledge below.
‘The point is,’ I told him, there’s no mission lined up. I mean nothing with any shape.’
He knew my field. I’m a penetration agent. We’ve all got our specialty: Heppinstall likes a difficult objective with a complicated access so that he can work like a slide-rule and use positive and negative feedback to take him to the target. Vickers is a socialite and likes keeping his hands clean: put him in pinstripes and send him into a Palace garden party with white gloves and a carnation and he’ll bring out the KGB man we’ve been hunting for months, and none of the guests will know it’s happened. I happen to be a ferret: I want them to specify the target zone and the objective and send me down the hole and leave me alone in the dark. Then I can do something: but only then.
There’s no access,’ I told him. ‘And no objective.’
‘Not yet, no.’
I looked down at him, leaning against the fireplace; he’d covered it with some French tapestry but I could still feel the draught. ‘How long will it take?’
‘Not long,’ he said. His dull brown eyes surveyed my face.
Egerton was a good man to work for: you couldn’t hope for a better Control if a wheel came off halfway through a mission and you needed support from London to get you through. He was slow, calculating and ruthless, and if he had to throw you to the dogs he wouldn’t do it because he didn’t value you or because he’d lost patience with your lack of progress: he’d do it because he had to, because if he left you alive he’d expose the Bureau itself to hazard. I’ve worked for Egerton quite a few times and come up with a whole skin and a bit of pride still left; but I don’t work for anyone who can’t give me access, an objective and a free hand.