Quiller Salamander

by Adam Hall

  'Colonel Choen is cautioning the two women agents particularly against precipitate action. They sound excited, and he's getting angry with them.' She started the tape again, and there was half a minute of voices and then a break and the sound of wood splintering and then nothing much more until the shot. I hadn't had time to switch off the Sony when I'd gone over the balcony rail.

  Gabrielle turned her head to look at me. 'They saw you?'

  'Yes.'

  'Are you injured?'

  'No.' I touched her hand. 'I'm very grateful to you, Gabrielle.'

  'It wasn't much to do for you. Not nearly as much as you're trying to do for my people.' Soft red light was on her face, from the fire across the river. 'Will you go to Pouthisat tomorrow?'

  'I don't know.'

  'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked.'

  I had to make a decision, to do it on instinct, forget the book, let the subconscious weigh the risks, assess the gains, come up with the answer. 'The only reason,' I said, 'why I can't be open with you is that the more you know about me, the more dangerous it is for you. And of course for me, if at any time you're seized by the Khmer Rouge and forced to talk.'

  'Yes. I understand.'

  'But there's also this. I'm moving into something, simply as a paid agent, that could turn out to be quite significant to Cambodia at any given stage of the game. How long have you been out here taking photographs?'

  'Nearly two years, off and on.'

  She couldn't have sent anything sensational to Paris in the last two years: just pictures of crippled children, the elections, the UN pulling out, Sihanouk's coronation.

  'And how long will you stay here?'

  'Until Paris recalls me.'

  The blaze was getting out of control over there and the river was running red. A fire truck had reached the scene and was sending out a jet, backed up to the quayside and sucking water from the Tonle Sap. Whenever she saw a fire, this woman beside me, she was watching her home burning down again, her homeland, Cambodia.

  I took the Sony from her and stowed it in the glove compartment and started the engine. 'Where did you leave your car?'

  'I walked. It's safer.'

  'I'll drop you off at the hotel.'

  'All right,' she said.

  I stopped the Mercedes in the narrow street that ran behind the Royal Palace, and left the engine running. The decision had come up for me on our way here, and I looked at Gabrielle. 'In case anything happens in Pouthisat that you might want to photograph, you may decide to fly there tomorrow. If so, where would I contact you, if I needed to?'

  She watched me steadily, her eyes dark. 'I don't know. I've never left the capital, except to take a break.'

  'How soon could you find out, assuming you'd be interested?'

  'You don't have to do this for me.'

  'I know.'

  Two beats, and she said, 'I would stay at the French Catholic mission. There'll be one there.'

  I got out of the car and stood with her for a moment while she touched her mouth on mine and turned away and went through the gate to the hotel gardens, camera slung from her shoulder, not looking back.

  Chapter 9

  SPOOK

  'How soon can you get me to Pouthisat?' I asked Pringle.

  There was a brief silence. It had taken four rings before he'd picked up the phone but it didn't worry me: it was long gone midnight and the mission wasn't in a hot phase and he needed his sleep: later there might not be too much available.

  'There's no night flying,' he said.

  'In the morning, then.'

  'I'll need a little time.'

  I looked at the clock in the lobby. I'd given Gabrielle five minutes before I'd come into the hotel by the main entrance. 'I'll call you again in half an hour,' I told Pringle, 'that okay?'

  'It depends on how soon I can wake anyone useful. Why Pouthisat?'

  'I could have a lead.'

  Tobacco smoke hung on the air, drifting from the bar. There was another brief silence on the line. 'Indeed. Do you need to debrief?'

  'Yes.' I hadn't got any real information for him, but if that date - the nineteenth - was important, then yes, I should debrief on the principle that if the executive is in a hostile field he should send in whatever information he's got and as soon as he's got it, in case he gets killed or cut off. 'We'll need a rendezvous.'

  The Vietnamese girl by the big gilded doors took another step, another step back, glanced across me, leaned on the wall again, closing her eyes and letting her red lips part a little.

  'Do I bring London in?' Pringle asked me. He meant should he signal Flockhart.

  'No. All I've got is access, of a sort.'

  Colonel Choen.

  'Indeed.'

  I started feeling impatient. Pringle was blowing this whole thing up into a big deal. Access of a sort didn't warrant signals to Control, for God's sake.

  'Look,' I said, 'nothing's carved in stone. But I need to get to Pouthisat. I'll call you back in thirty minutes.'

  The Vietnamese girl took another step, drifted near me and laced the air with frangipani as I went out through the main entrance, my head turned away from the bar.

  The moon was higher in the south by now, its crescent perched with a touch of artistry on the silhouetted minaret of a temple near the river. Smoke still rose from the fire on the far side, and the sound of sirens moaned through the streets in a chorus of echoes.

  I waited in the Mercedes, watching the windows of the hotel, not knowing which was hers, Gabrielle's, and not knowing, with the warmth of her mouth on mine lingering in the memory, whether I should have told her I was going to Pouthisat, where it would be even more dangerous for her to know me, contact me. Her credentials were impeccable - she'd been screened, in effect, by Flockhart himself, my control for the mission – and she had her camera, a means of freezing images in the instant, of recording reality unimpaired by the eye's reliance on the brain's interpretation, which could sometimes show the bias of its own judgement. A camera could be useful, even invaluable, at some stage of the game, and if going to Pouthisat could give Gabrielle the chance of a major scoop for Paris I wanted her to have it. Not for the credit, but for Cambodia, the country she loved, was weeping for.

  But I was aware, as I waited in the car and watched the lights in the windows over there, that Gabrielle Bouchard had already stirred an undercurrent in the stillness of my psyche that had nothing to do with reasons. And that gave me no excuse for exposing her to danger.

  Scruple, thy sting is sharper than the serpent's tooth, therefore shall I pluck thee from my bosom, otherwise I'll never get any bloody sleep.

  Pringle picked up on the first ring this time.

  'Tomorrow at 0700 hours,' he said, 'there'll be a dark green Renault van waiting on the perimeter road to the south of the airport, opposite the Trans-Kampuchean maintenance hangar. It will have Mine Action Unit No. 6 on the side. The driver's name is Tucker. He'll be your pilot.'

  'Code intro?'

  'There isn't one. You've been presented simply as an "observer.” Choose your own name, and whatever you want to observe.'

  And keep the David Jones cover intact. I liked his thinking. I would have played it that way in any case, but the fact that he'd already got it worked out for me was reassuring; he was beginning to sound more like a pro.

  'I get into the back of the van?' I asked him.

  'Yes. Tucker will then drive you through the freight-area gates past the guard and take you onto the plane.'

  An elderly Chinese in a dark silk suit and brilliant shoes came out of the bar and slowed, seeing the girl and then nodding, going out with her through the tall gilded doors, shooting his cuffs and trotting jauntily by her side.

  'This is a routine flight?' I asked Pringle.

  'No, it's been chartered, through discreet approaches to Mine Action Committee Headquarters.' That wasn't bad either, gone midnight and with only thirty minutes to work with.

  'Will you be moving?' I asked
him.

  'Oh yes. You can telephone me at noon at the Hotel Lafayette. Then we'll meet and chat.' Make a rendezvous and debrief.

  'Will do.'

  'Any questions?'

  'No.'

  We shut down the signal.

  It was a Siai-Marchetti SM 1019A built for battlefield surveillance, turbo prop, observer's door, with a stack of mine detectors rattling aft of the seats as we lifted into the huge red orb of the rising sun and turned to the north-west.

  'The Killing Fields,' Tucker called out, pointing downwards as we cleared the airport, and I had a frisson because he sounded like a tour guide and those fields down there weren't a historic monument yet: the whole thing could happen again.

  We levelled out at 6,000 feet and the mine detectors stopped rattling.

  'Been here before?' Tucker asked me. He was stocky, bare-armed, handled the controls in his sleep.

  'Yes.'

  'Been some changes, right?' We were flying over rice paddies now, tobacco crops, savanna grass. 'Gonna be some more.' He turned his head to look at me, correction, look me over, his eyes intent. 'Who are you with? Or is that –'

  'I'm just observing. What's the medical situation now?'

  'Situation? It's a bloody tragedy. There's one doctor for twenty or thirty thousand people in this country, so most of the health care's done by volunteer services. Call it health care, but a lot of it's a matter of sterilizing the stumps before gangrene can set in. My sister's in the Red Cross out here, Christ knows how she does it, she had a kid in yesterday, fell right across a mine, and my sister - her name's Mary - she just started work trying to stop the blood flow while the doctor was throwing up - the doctor.' His eyes were hot now, simmering. 'You know what I'd do if I ever came across Pol Pot? I'd hang him by the testicles from a sugar palm and watch the crows come in.'

  In a moment I said, 'Is he still dangerous?'

  Tucker thought about that, tapping out a tattoo on the control column. Then he said, 'Ask me, he's planning a final strike. Look at it this way, he's out there somewhere in the jungle with one fucking dream in his head - bring Communism back to Cambodia before he dies - and he's pushing, what, sixty-five now, seventy? But he'll never do it politically, so what are his options? There's only one.' He moved his head an inch to watch an aircraft below us on the starboard side, its strobes flashing as it neared. 'He's done it before and he knows he can do it again, because the UN won't come back into Cambodia if things blow up, any more than it went into Bosnia.'

  'Do you see anything,' I asked him, 'of Pol Pot's troops?'

  'Oh, sure. They come and go, mostly on wheels, camouflaged transports and battledress. But we steer clear of them, be stupid not to, I mean we're not fuckin' kamikaze, you go near those bastards and that's your lot, even the government troops leave 'em alone.'

  'Have they got a base in Pouthisat?'

  'Sure.'

  'Where is it?'

  He turned to look at me. 'If I told you that, and it got out to them I told you, I'm dead meat.'

  'They've got an intelligence cell in Pouthisat?'

  'You could call it that. Nothing organized, maybe, it's just that wherever you are you've got to be bloody careful who you talk to. People have disappeared, you know what I'm saying?'

  I watched our shadow slipping ahead of us across the savanna grass, rippling as it met groves of sugar palm and then steadying again across the plains.

  'Pol Pot's main base,' I said, 'in the jungle. Is that still in the north-west?'

  'I don't know. We get rumours every bloody day - he's moved his army here, he's moved it there. Ask me, he's putting out the rumours himself to keep everyone confused. He could be anywhere.'

  'You think he's planning an armed coup? At this moment?'

  He gave it thought again. 'I can't see him fading out gracefully in his old age, which is the only alternative. I'll tell you what one bloke says - and he knows what he's talking about because he runs dope out of Thailand, got his own air service, keeps his eyes open, has to. He says Pol is in the queue for the missiles coming out of Russia illegally and as soon as he gets enough of them he'll put Phnom Penh in his sights and give 'em the good news - either they let him walk in and take over the capital without a shot fired or he'll take it over anyway, what's left of it.'

  'You think he'd do that?'

  'It's like what Mao said, remember? The ultimate power is in the muzzle of a gun, something like that. And Christ knows it's even truer today, with a missile leak in Russia as big as a main drain, not to mention the nukes. Certainly I think Pol Pot would do that, you bet your arse, and it wouldn't be anything new - he used a missile a couple of weeks ago, shot down a plane right after it took off from Phnom Penh one night, wheels weren't even up, blew it out of the sky, Piper Seneca, government owned, kerboom.'

  'Is that why there's no more night flying?'

  'Right on. It's not been officially banned, it's just that you won't find any pilots daft enough to take off. It's less easy to set up a missile shot in broad daylight.'

  'Why was the Seneca shot down?'

  Tucker turned his head to look at me. 'The one I hear most often is that it had a government intelligence agent on board, famous for putting his nose in Pol Pot's business.'

  'It sounds as if he was careless.'

  'Right on. You've only got to make one little mistake with Pol Pot, and that's your lot.'

  'Have you heard,' I asked in a moment, 'of a General Kheng?'

  ' Kheng? Can't say I have. But I mean this place is full of bloody generals. Why?'

  'Just trying to catch up, my first day here for a while.' 'Right, go ahead. I don't know too much but I hear plenty of rumours.'

  'Does the nineteenth mean anything to you?'

  'That's a date?'

  'Yes. I don't know which month, but probably this one.'

  'Search me, then. It's not a feast day or anything - Chaul Chhnam's next month, Cambodian New Year, that's the nearest.'

  'Okay. How many British nationals are there in Pouthisat at the moment, as a rough estimate?'

  'Not all that many, now the UN's pulled out. But I run across them in the Food Services and the church missions and the Red Cross, places like that, all volunteers, of course.'

  'Would you imagine,' I asked carefully, 'that any of them could be undercover intelligence people?'

  'Brits?'

  'Yes.'

  Specifically, DI6. If they were operating out here they wouldn't be likely to tell the Bureau.

  'Search me,' Tucker said. 'I mean, how would I know, if they're undercover?'

  'Some people aren't too careful. Like the man in the Piper Seneca.'

  'Right, but there's nobody,' he said, giving himself time to think, 'who comes across as a shadow, to my mind.'

  I watched the patches of sugar-palm jungle slipping below us, wondering where Tucker had picked up that particular word. Not many people outside the intelligence services use it - no one I've ever met.

  'You talk to a lot of Brits?' I asked him.

  'We've got one or two in Mine Action, of course. Volunteers again, along with some French and Italians, Germans, Aussies, Yanks, you name it, people left over from the UN forces. I dropped out of the Royal Engineers myself, thought I'd put my training to a bit of good use out here where it's wanted. Never thought I'd make Cambodia my field, but life's full of surprises, isn't it?'

  'How very true.' Because that was another word - 'field'.

  Standing on its own it didn't amount to much - scientists had fields, doctors, lawyers. But coupled with 'shadow' it was more interesting. The problem with another intelligence service working the same field is that we can sometimes trip over each other's courier lines; it's not even unknown for an agent to find himself on another's terrain, especially at night, when a lot of the work is done - and that can be dangerous. Feldrake was operating a photo-reconnaissance assignment in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War and crossed paths with a DI6 agent in a night action, and they surprised the
hell out of each other and Feldrake took the DI6 man for an Iraqi shadow and put him down, and there are still representations going on with the prime minister aimed at liaison between the two services. But it couldn't ever work: the Bureau doesn't officially exist, and it's got to stay that way. All we can do is check out the field as we go in, to see if there's anyone else in the shadows.

  'When do we land?' I asked Tucker.

  'Half an hour.' He looked at me deadpan. 'But if you want to get into signals, you can use the radio.'

  'You bastard,' I said and he exploded into a laugh. 'Get into signals' was strictly Bureau-speak.

  'Think I was DI6 or something?' Deadpan again, the tone indignant.

  'Are you still active, Tucker?'

  'No. I played it too wild, got sacked, went into the REs for a bit, worked on bomb disposal, more fun, less bullshit. But I can still spot a shadow when I see one. After Pol Pot, are we?'

  'I'm after information.'

  'On that bastard? You must be off your fuckin' rocker - you like life short and sweet, is that it?' He reached for his headset and put it on, calling up the tower in Pouthisat.

  The flat white waters of the Tonle Sap lake were already spread diagonally across the plains ahead of us, and we came down with the sun three diameters high above the east horizon and the air already heating up as we crossed the dusty apron from the plane to the freight sheds.

  'You need a hand with those mine detectors?' I asked Tucker.

  'Nope, there'll be a crew coming. But you'll want some wheels, right?'

  'Yes. All terrain.'

  'We'll go and see Jimmy. And leave the talking to me, okay? He'll have the skin off your back if he doesn't know you.'

  Jimmy was an energetic young Vietnamese, holed up in a huddle of tin-roofed sheds on the airfield perimeter track, a flash of gold teeth and lots of nodding as Tucker spoke to him in his own language, then switched to English.

  'Jimmy, this guy's a friend of mine, you know what I'm saying?' He turned to me. 'Jimmy says he doesn't understand the Queen's English, but that's just so he can screw you on the deal - hey, Jimmy, your flies are undone - there he goes, see what I mean?'