by Adam Hall
All I hadn't replaced was the razor with the fancy modifications and I didn't imagine Rumori kept things like that around. If I came across any locks that needed blowing I'd have to do it the hard way and go in shoulder-first.
I stopped again, near the top of the second flight of stairs. The whole thing was reeling and I held on to the banister and waited, you should take it easy for a couple of weeks, the specialist had told me, the banister rail tilting up and down under my hand, Rumori's pale ivory face looking at me from above, his deep eyes lost in shadow, take it easy, the roar of the flames again and the wail of the sirens.
'- right?' His voice coming and going.
'Perfectly,' I said, and began climbing again, one ankle weak and the shoe supping a bit on the edge of the stair, come on for Christ's sake, put some bloody effort into it, watching me carefully with his pale ivory face.
'You can rest here, of course. Nobody would disturb you.'
'Some other time.'
He watched me for a bit longer and then took me across the high-ceilinged landing to the small room at the end, where there were two ceramic cherubs above the door, one of them with an arm broken off. A fly buzzed against the coloured-glass skylight. He stood perfectly still for a moment with his head inclined and his eyes half-closed, listening to the uncertain run of notes from the music-room below. Then he straightened up with a slight sigh and unlocked the door of the room with a large iron key and led me inside.
This was the lumber room, full of Florentine stools and chipped porcelain lamps with their shades at all angles and the parchment torn away. A huge bronze lion on a marble base was wedged between a console and a hand-painted urn, and they were obviously on some kind of base because he twisted the lion's head and swung the whole thing round, sitting on the stool that was part of the base and nicking a switch.
'Q-15,' I told him.
'Yes,' he said, 'I know.' He began fiddling with the set until he got the station identification bleep sorted out from the squelch. After a minute he got a successful series of nines in three blocks and told mem I was waiting. It was now close on 10:00 hours in London and it was just conceivable that Egerton was sitting in at Signals: his standard practice when there was something big breaking was to stay with it until, three or four in the morning and then come in again about noon, but the Rome objective was dead and standard practice might no longer apply.
999 — 999–999.
Rumori leaned over the set, shifting the band-spread and watching the carrier needle to get the signal as pure as he could. All they were doing at the moment was keeping us open with the mission identity sequence: 9 was for Kobra.
Egerton had possibly told them to call him in if they got anything from Rome, but they wouldn't wait until he'd driven all the way to Whitehall from his place in Richmond: they'd only keep us hanging around if he were already in his office.
The arpeggios come faintly from below, both hands now.
999 — 000–000.
Control at console.
Perched on the packing case with his long legs dangling and his eyes wandering vaguely around the room. He is one of the few directors who sit in at Signals and respond at only one remove: through the scramble encoder. The others use their yellow telephones and demand memoranda in duplicate, according to the rules. Egerton doesn't do it for the benefit of his executives in the field: it's just that underneath his remote and donnish appearance he runs at very high voltage and likes to be close to the action. As a spin-off advantage his executives feel more comfortable because the exchange is a lot faster and we know there won't be any confusion, send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance, so forth.
2829–7476–0198…
Rumori cleared his throat and glanced round at me to see if I looked all right. I nodded and we began reading the signals as they came off the integral unscrambler. The voice we were listening to wasn't Egerton's because he didn't have the skill or experience to choose fast abbreviations and pick out routine phrase patterns to suit the messages, but some of Egerton's personal signature was coming through and I could tell he was worried.
There was another thing I noticed.
8387–9817 — 9166
An encapsulated summary of the info they'd received from Fitzalan. Then they asked me to talk and it didn't take me long: I hadn't been able to identify Heinrich Fogel with absolute certainty in visual terms but yes it was his face as I remembered it and yes the cranial scar was there. From the way he got clear of the airport I had recognized his thought patterns and I would go further towards identification on that score. Message ends.
Wanted to know if I required further medical treatment, whether I would ask to withdraw on physical grounds, whether I felt the Rome phase was terminally abortive, so forth.
No, no and no.
Then Egerton began talking again through his signaller and I began listening a little harder because the other tiling I'd noticed was the tone of his phrases: he was diffident ('would the executive feel prepared'), persuasive ('assuming a developing potential for the mission') and specious ('the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy').
These windy phrases had been designed by their lordships in Admin, but most of them had been chosen so that their initial letters could be transferred straight into numerals and shot through the scrambler at high speed. At the receiving end we habitually decode into the original phrases but what Egerton was telling me now was that he was desperate for me to remain in action because he was lining up something very big for me.
The specious bit was typical of Egerton. At this stage I could honourably tell London that there was nothing else to do out here and they hadn't got a mission assembled for me yet so I wanted to come in and do something more interesting. But the brief signal 7372 — the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy — is normally used when there's a wheel coming off in a shut-ended situation and the poor bastard can either get out or get killed. Egerton had thrown me the 7372 as a sly attempt to persuade me by an obvious association of ideas: if I'd got cold feet at this stage he was willing to replace me.
For a brilliant man he can be sometimes naive: he knew damned well I could see through that signal. But naivete is emotional, gut-think and not brain-think, and the thing that came through so clearly was that he was desperate to keep me running. Desperation, too, is emotional.
'Oh Christ,' I said softly, 'that bloody Egg.'
Emilio Rumori half-turned his head, 'Excuse me?'
'Don't send that,' I said.
But you can come full circle, you know.
Listen: if I did come in because there was nothing to do in Rome and there wasn't a mission lined up for me, I could never be certain that London believed those were my reasons. They'd be justified in believing that when you've been shot at and gone through a tanker explosion and come out with head injuries you're liable to get cold feet.
My feet can get as cold as the next man's. I'm in this trade to prove myself. I'm frightened of pushing things to the point where they might blow up, so I push things to the point where they might blow up, to prove I'm not frightened.
Egerton knows this and this was what he was working on and the whole thing was coming full circle: maybe he wasn't so naive. Maybe this was pure brain-think: he knew the one thing that could persuade me to stay in the field — an implication of cold feet. And to a certain degree it could even have some truth in it because that craven little organism was still making its voice heard in the dark roaring of the aftershock that was keeping one hand on the banisters: it didn't want any more tankers on fire; it wanted to go home now.
I said to Rumori:
'Tell them I'll stay in the field.'
'Yes.'
'Ask for directives.'
'Yes.'
He selected 938 and 635: Executive prepared to continue mission. Please brief as fully as possible. It wasn't accurate because
we hadn't got a mission yet and a — full briefing is only possible with a director in the field, but Rumori had picked the two phrases with almost no hesitation and got them through and the saving of time was vital. The whole idea of this method of sending is that you can put through quite a lot of information before the opposition starts getting on to you with a mobile D/Fing unit. There might not be a unit within miles but we always assume it's next door and for this reason the communication between two first-class signallers resembles championship table tennis: the ball seems to vanish because it's going so fast.
276 — 412 — 398
Routine stuff: Proceed solo — prepare to rdv — report arrival.
Then they said where.
Cambodia.
'Get it again,' I said.
He asked for a repeat. You can't make a phrase out of a place name, so they'd sent Kmbdia. Now they put it in full: 26358193.
'Are you reading?' Rumori asked me. His narrow dark head had been turned to look at me because I was sitting on the floor now with my eyes half closed.
'Yes.'
They stayed on the air for another six or seven seconds and he only asked for two repeats. Contact was to be made at the British Embassy with the second cultural attache and I was to retain my cover: I would be in Phnom Penh to liaise with a Berlin correspondent of Europress in an attempt to get the final stories from wealthy merchants fleeing the capital. By the phrasing I suspected that the Berlin correspondent of Europress was probably a replacement for Heinrich Fogel, because Europress doesn't actually exist and this presented the man as a shadow figure and the only shadow figure around would be in the opposition: I was proceeding solo and wouldn't have a local director. But reading between the lines of a signal exchange that's taking place in one-second flashes can be difficult and I shut my eyes and let it go.
Of course there was a lot of data that didn't appear in the stream of coded digits: it looked as if Heinrich Fogel was being replaced within hours of his death and it looked as if he'd been feinting his travel pattern by landing in Rome because the two places were a hell of a distance apart, considering the Kobra people were assumed to be zeroing in for a rendezvous. Further indications: Kobra now realised their operation was being surveyed (by the unnamed journalist in the Italian press) and might even be penetrated, but they weren't intending to call the whole thing off and go to ground and come up somewhere else. London wouldn't send me to Cambodia unless they had a strong lead, because Egerton was running this one and he didn't like shifting his executives around lime pawns. He was sitting there in Signals with the pattern spread out on the board as far as it was known: he was pouncing and missing and he'd pounced on Rome and missed Fogel and now he was pouncing on Phnom Penh and with luck I'd make a hit.
'Shut down?' Rumori asked me.
'Yes.'
Q — 15 — 000
He cut the switch and swung the tableau of bric-a-brac into place and got off the stool and stood looking down at me with his head on one side.
'You need medical attention,' he said reflectively. 'We have the services of a highly-'
'It's delayed shock, that's all. But you can get me some air tickers.' Phnom Pehn would be like a beehive someone had kicked over and the last scheduled airliners had stopped operating five days ago. 'Get me as close as you can, all right? Then I'll try cadging a lift on a U.S. Air Force chopper or whatever's available.'
'It will be very difficult,' Rumori shrugged.
'It'll be close to bloody impossible, but I've got to get in there. You heard what London said.'
A storm of dust whirled up, blotting out most of the airport building at Pochentong, and the pilot left the rotor spinning as the doors were thrown open.
'Whaddya want to come back here for, buddy?'
He sat loosely at the controls, a cigar jutting out of his stubbled face and his eyes red from fatigue as the armed escorts began dropping through the doorways.
'I'm here to get a story,' I called back above the noise.
'That right? Listen' — he poked a thick gloved finger at me — 'there's only one story about this goddamn place. we're gettin' out, and we shoulda stayed, okay? Tell 'em that from me!'
I nodded and someone gave a yell and we all crouched, waiting. Dirt flew up fifty yards away and the debris pattered across the windscreen of the helicopter. They said the airport had been under mortar fire for the past five days, and as I dropped through one of the doorways I saw a big 3-130 standing keeled over near the end of the runway with its tail blown off. The Communists had pushed a unit within a mile and a half of Pochentong and I could feel a series of thumps under my feet as the mortars kept up their fire.
'Okay, let's get goin'!' a man yelled and we spread out as we ran through the dust, half-blinded. Dirt fountained again on our left as the transport vehicles started from the main building towards the helicopter, packed with refugees. A line of US Marines were strung out towards the road, holding back a crowd of Vietnamese civilians; and blobs began darkening in the sky as the next wave of choppers came in from the carriers lying off the coast. Somewhere a siren was screaming an alert, as if no one could hear the mortars or see the earth flying up.
A military jeep was making a close turn on the tarmac with a bunch of Europeans clinging on, so I grabbed one of the hand-grips and got some kind of a purchase as it gunned up and headed for the roadway past the line of Marines.
'Where's this thing going?'
The US Embassy!' someone shouted back.
I got a better grip and hooked one leg inside and relaxed and felt the throbbing in my head take on a slower rhythm. Maybe there'd be time to get a rest, somewhere along the line: at the moment I wasn't physically mission-ready and if London threw me anything serious to do I didn't know how I was going to do it.
The British Embassy wasn't far from where the jeep dropped me off, and I walked there in the hot sun with my jacket sticking to my back and the glare of the sky in my eyes, trying to think of even one good reason for an international terrorist being holed up in this place on his way to the Kobra rendezvous. One possible answer could be that he wasn't in fact an international terrorist: he could be any kind of contact with connections London wanted me to use. His cover was Europress but he wasn't on the Bureau staff because they would have told me, and if he were in fact a Berlin correspondent for anyone there were possible links with Heinrich Fogel and Baader-Meinhof.
I went through the doors of the embassy, 'Are you looking for HE?'
'No,' I said.
The thin youth turned away and said to the girl at the reception desk: 'Then who was looking for HE?'
'Pretty well everyone,' she said, tucking a curl in. 'He's at lunch anyway, so you won't get near him.' She turned to me with a direct stare and said: 'Can I help you?'
'I'd like to see the second cultural attache.' I dropped my Europress card on her desk but she didn't look at it 'Have you been hit?'
'No. I always look like this.' I was getting fed up.
She gave a sudden bright laugh and ducked and waited, looking away from me. Something like a wall went down, not The US Embassy still is,' he said, 'obviously.' One of the files hit the floor and he picked it up, turning it the right way round. 'We got all our people out five days ago,'
The phone rang and he jumped slightly.
'No,' he said into it. 'I can't. Not now.' He put it down.
'Is your cypher room still manned?' I asked him.
He looked at me quickly, 'The telex is open, if that's what you mean.'
'No,' I said, 'I don't.'
He considered this, half-listening to the mortars and perhaps wondering if there was going to be a plane left to take him out. I was getting a bit annoyed because this contact had been lined up for me by Control and he didn't seem to know what the situation was. The telex was no use to me: I had to get into signals because one of the routine directives received in Rome was to report my arrival in Phnom Penh.
'You're the second cultural attache, is that correc
t?'
'Yes.' He tried to concentrate. 'Have you got a passport I can see?'
I showed it to him and he gave it a quick glance and said: 'Fair enough. Sorry, but things have been a bit confusing here for the last few weeks. Mind telling me the name of your editor?'
'Frank Wainwright.'
He nodded, swinging the case off the desk and dumping it into a corner. 'I'll take you along.'
The cypher room was at the end of the passage on the floor at the top of the building, where all embassy cypher rooms are if they're located with an eye on security.
Chepstow introduced me to the man at the console and said he'd vouch for me, though he didn't sound too certain. The man gave me a stuffy look and said he couldn't send anything for the press, and I told him the station and asked him to do it through Crowborough. He went rather shut-faced because the station I'd given him was number three in the secret log and I doubt if he'd ever made contact before.
'When you're ready,' he said.
The thing was an ordinary diplomatic wireless and hadn't got a scrambler so we used speech-code while the second cultural attache stood listening near the window, sometimes turning round and then turning back.
As soon as London came in I reported arrival and asked for directives. There was an awful lot of static, partly because of aircraft movement; and someone was trying to jam us but not very successfully: Crowborough was seven-tenths audible and we didn't talk for long because London didn't have anything new for me. I was to survey and report on the objective until the situation was critical and I had to leave the city. The key contact was still the second cultural attache. I thought of questioning this because Chepstow didn't seem as if he could help me much, but that was possibly because he wasn't sure of me yet, and the fact that I was in signals with the number three station on the secret log should give him a lot more confidence than a passport.