by Adam Hall
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
The Warsaw Document
Quiller Book Four
Adam Hall
IDENTITY
This dramatized report of an Intelligence mission by a shadow executive controlled from London forms part of a series bearing the key-titles of Memorandum, Directive, Portfolio, and so on. It may seem curious that in all these reports the name of the executive rarely appears. The reason is as follows.
It is necessarily a codename. Further, the policy of the Bureau controlling him dictates anonymity even in confidential speech, as a point of routine security. During a mission the codename is never used, since a mission demands a cover and hence a cover name, which is used even in signals between the executive and his Control. This name itself must sometimes be changed if the cover is blown and he is thus exposed to great and immediate hazard: a new cover must be arranged and with it a new name.
The identities, therefore, of the Bureau’s active staff are confined strictly to its secret files, for the purposes of administration. For the record, the executive whose work is the subject of these reports bears a single codename: Quiller.
Chapter 1
LONDON
There would be no warning, I knew that.
In the total darkness I thought I could see things: the glint of his eyes, his bared teeth; and in the silence I thought I could hear his breath and the soft tentative padding of his feet as he looked for me; but all I saw and heard was in my imagination and I knew that soon my nerves were going to start playing up because of the worry: the worry that there’d be no warning when he came at me. He’d come the instant he found me. Breathing was difficult because this place wasn’t very big and we were so close that one drawn breath would be a give-away; also it would have to be expelled before the next inhalation and I was afraid of being caught with empty lungs. I breathed tidally, right near the top, part of my conscious mind registering the smell of hemp and coconut.
It was worse than I’d thought, the waiting. There was nothing to go on: no means of orientation. He was only a man but he was invisible and inaudible and these were the attributes of a phantom and my scalp was raised. It needn’t be true that he was where I thought he was: somewhere in front of me where my hands could get at him. Even in the dark there’s comfort if the enemy can be faced: the real dread is of being taken from behind.
That was where he came for me: from behind. We hadn’t touched; we had simply come so close that the instincts were triggered and the nerves galvanised and I was already in a throat-lock with my knees buckling a flat kick before I could hook at him but my hands were free and I caught him and reached his thumb as we pitched down, breaking the hold while he used his foot again and missed and tried again and connected a fraction too late, his breath grunting as I forced him over. We fought close, neither wanting to lose the other in the unnerving dark. My shoulder hit the wall and I used the chance, going down low and recoiling against him, but the momentum wasn’t enough and he deadened the spring and forced me into a spine-bending yoshida that paralysed the arms. Then some fool came in and switched the light on.
Kimura helped me up with his usual courtesy and we touched palms and looked for our towels.
‘It was good,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t.’ I wiped at the sweat, trying not to worry. I shouldn’t have let him throw that deadly yoshida so soon, when he was fresh enough to follow it through; it had left the plexus exposed and he could have killed me within the next five seconds if he’d wanted to, a straight chop to the heart from under the ribs. It was all right here in the gym but it wouldn’t be all right one day in some backstreet in Buenos Aires or wherever the hell I’d be when it happened again. ‘Can’t you,’ I asked Stevens, ‘shut that bloody door?’
‘Interrupted, did I?’ He turned and shut the fog out, pushing his face into his handkerchief again. He’d come up to Norfolk for a routine dose of what they call Refresher 5 and then caught a streaming cold before they could start work on him. He was better off anyway because Refresher 5 is the course where the instructors break every bone in your body unless you can giggle them out of it.
‘It was only the wall,’ Kimura told me. He knew I was worried. ‘I heard you go into it, and assumed you would make use of it, you see.’ He nodded his reassuring smiles at me, towelling the sweat off his small ivory-coloured body; under the wire-meshed lamps the sword-scar looked deep mauve, running from one shoulder to the top of his shorts like a zip-fastener. ‘You cannot execute such a rebound, you see, without leaving the abdomen unprotected. But of course you would have extricated yourself from my yoshida if this gentleman had not appeared.’
I didn’t think so.
‘London, old boy.’ Stevens stood like a forlorn penguin, mopping at his beak.
Kim was pretending to kick one of the coconut mats straight where we’d been milling about. I said: ‘Don’t worry, you made your point. The next time I get near a wall I shan’t leave myself open to a yoshida. That do you?’
He nodded quickly, pleased. He took his job seriously and if a report came in that somebody’d been found with their neck at the wrong angle, in the chain-locker of a Reykjavik-bound banana-boat he liked to feel it wasn’t his fault. He went across to the showers, walking like an independently sprung tiger.
‘What?’ I asked Stevens. A bruise was developing on the upper right arm and I’d taken care Kimura shouldn’t notice it because his chief conceit is that whatever he does to you he never leaves a mark; the other instructors aren’t so proud and we always look like a bunch of bitten-eared alley-cats while we’re at Norfolk.
‘London wants you.’ He was putting in his time as a duty-runner till he was fit enough for beating up.
‘On the phone?’
‘In the flesh.’
‘Stuff London’
‘Message understood’ He drifted dismally away in a nimbus of Vicks Vapour Rub.
In the showers Kim said: ‘Also one must narrow the eyes, you see, in the dark, and not stare about like that. With the eyes half closed, vision is only a little reduced, but the shine on the eyeballs is much less easy to discern.’ It was civil of him not to point out that this was how he’d come up from behind me: he knew I was worried about that as well.
‘All right, I’ll remember.’
‘Ah-ha-ha,’ he sang through the steam in approval, much as Mum does when Wee Willie hits the potty first time. I was getting fed up. He’d pulled off a first at the Tokyo Games and we weren’t expected to reach that standard but we weren’t expected to be shown up as amateurs’ either. I spun the taps to full cold and he noted the change in the noise. ‘Also one must finish off with warm water, you see, following a training-bout, since the muscles require to relax.’
In London the fog was worse and even the pigeons were feeling the cold, huddling in rows along the windowsills. Below me a long stain of light crept through Whitehall, the traffic nose-to-tail.
‘I’ll take you in now.’
So it wasn’t Parkis. He always keeps you hanging about to stop you getting ideas above your station. You never know who you’re going to see when you’re ‘wanted in London’ because the B
ureau doesn’t officially exist and if there’s ever been a door here marked Information it’s been wallpapered over.
She led me upstairs, her snagged heels ricketing on the rubber strips that were peeling away from the treads. On a landing I saw Fyson going into Reports, still looking a bit nervy about the eyes: someone’s bright little op. had come unstuck in Israel, so we’d all heard, and they were being flown home, those who were left.
This wasn’t the room with the Lowry and the smell of polish. It was originally a dormitory, I suppose, right under the mansard roof, the kind of place where the little frilled domestics had hacked at their lungspots through the winters of the nineteenth century. There hadn’t been much progress : Egerton was rubbing chilblain ointment into his raw blue hands when I came in, and looked up rather guiltily as if discovered in the enactment of a mystic rite.
‘Ah yes,’ he said vaguely, and fitted the lid back on to the tin.
An opaque grey panel showed where the window was, its grime and the fog outside filtering whatever daylight was still in the sky; a single bulb in a white porcelain shade dangled from a flex looped in paper-clips to keep it out of the way: we might have been at the bottom of a mine shaft.
Egerton gestured to the only chair for visitors, an incongruous Louis Quinze with little yellow puffs of stuffing exposed to the wan light. I’d only seen Egerton twice before, on any kind of real business, and each time it had been in this room. He was a thin and tired-looking man, his eyes weathered by too many winters of inclement thought, his mouth still slightly twisted from the shock of his first disillusionment, whenever that had come; it was said his wife had committed suicide during one of their seaside holidays at Frinton, and that the smell of a certain suntan oil made him physically sick; but then he might always have looked like this, a vessel of despair, and that might be why she’d done it. Facts are short at the Bureau, where nobody’s meant to exist, so rumours are a prime necessity of the resident staff.
‘How was Norfolk?’
‘Foggy.’
He smiled thinly. ‘We always consider we have a monopoly, here. Sorry to have fetched you away.’ His voice was beautifully modulated, an actor’s voice. ‘I expect you’ve heard what happened in Gaza.’
‘A wheel came off.’
Of course he hadn’t got a hope. They were still flying them in, what was left of them, and if they meant to send a second wave to mop up the mess they could count me out. I was strictly a shadow executive under contract for solo missions and these paramilitary stunts weren’t in my field.
‘Nobody’s fault,’ he shrugged. ‘Policy is changing from day to day. There was a time, once, to plan things properly, but now there seems a need for hurry, so instead of picking quietly at the lock we just hurl a brick at the window and grab at whatever happens to be in reach.’
He was talking about Intelligence. Even when Parkis or Mildmay threw in a scratch hit-and-run unit with clearance on explosives it was still purely an Intelligence operation or the Bureau wouldn’t be handling it at all.
Egerton said with a note of concession: ‘Of course that kind of exercise isn’t in your area.’
‘No.’
‘But policy affects everyone, really.’
It didn’t sound very good and I began digging my heels in, but the trouble was that Egerton was already softening up the ground I was digging them into. He was Control, not Bureau: a mission director, not admin. But if he’d fetched me down from Norfolk to give me a job it looked as if I’d have been better off up there as a daily breakfast for Kimura.
You can always refuse a mission: it’s in the contract. But you can’t ever judge the odds because when they send you in it’s in the dark. We don’t mind that. We know we’d be scared stiff by the size and scope of a big operation if we could see the overall picture, and all we want is our own little box of matches to play with in the corner while the boys at the top work out how to stop the whole house going up if we make a mistake. But it means you can’t assess a mission at the outset, so you don’t know whether you’re accepting a job that’s going to blow up in your hands because of someone else’s incompetence or refusing one that could turn out a real classic. Last year Dewhurst nearly refused a dull routine investigation of a hijack attempt on board a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 727 and finished up three weeks later jumping the Romanian frontier at Orsova with short-range shots of the heavy-water installations north of Piatra that everyone had thought was a sugar-beet processing complex. You can never tell. All I could tell at the moment was that if Egerton had a mission for me he was quite certain I wouldn’t like it and all I could hope was that he’d be wrong. Because I wanted one.
‘It affects training,’ he said, ‘particularly.’ He meant policy did. ‘People are being hustled into sensitive areas without preliminary experience even in minor operations. I’m not talking -‘ he looked at me quickly - ‘about this unfortunate debacle in Gaza.’
‘No.’ He was.
In his dead eyes I could see two red sparks, the reflections of the little electric fire with its cracked insulators that was perched on a pile of split-spined encyclopaedias near my chair. ‘To a limited degree we can resist these dangerous changes in policy - or at least avert some of their dangerous results.’
When the telephone rang he didn’t look at it for a moment, as if deciding not to answer it. Then be picked up the receiver, the ointment gleaming on his knuckles.
‘Yes?’ All I could hear was a name - Gilchrist - from the speaker, but Egerton was saying sharply: ‘Couldn’t they?’ He tilted his narrow head back as he listened, his eyes cast down. ‘I’ll go and talk to his wife. Don’t let her get the news from anyone else. Warn Matthews particularly; they were close friends.’ He put the receiver down and said with slight irritation: ‘They shouldn’t get married; it’s inconsiderate. Where was I?’
A small cracked 250-watt fire like this would never get the chill out of Egerton’s room. I thought they must have been after something pretty serious to throw in a man like Gilchrist. I’d never liked him but he’d been first class. So had Lovett, only last year in Hanover. I’d liked Lovett. We seemed to be getting a bit too cheap.
‘Changes in policy,’ I said. ‘Averting dangerous results.’
‘Yes.’ He studied his shiny hands. ‘We’ve just taken on someone new.’
‘Long live the king,’ I said.
He looked at me quickly but there was no reproof in his tone. ‘He’s not replacing Gilchrist. He’s too young. And he’s been given his first mission before he’s had time to feel his way.’ Carefully he said: ‘That is my opinion. Unfortunately it’s for me to send him out. The exercise isn’t inherently dangerous but you know better than I do how easily things can turn awkward.’
No, I thought, I won’t bloody well play.
He was hunched over his clasped hands, as if without any heat of their own they could warm each other. ‘His name is Merrick. Good background in the Foreign Office; he was in Prague as an assistant attaché during August 1968 and was deeply affected by events there; he is now with a different embassy and is at present here in London on sick leave, following a slight accident. His father is Sir Walford Merrick, an equerry of the Queen’s Household. Would you like some tea?’
‘Not really.’ I got out of the chair, not wanting to sit there while he tried to truss me up. In the raw chill here I felt suffocated by the deadness of his eyes and the smoothly intoned innuendoes and the way he’d thrown the epitaph across the wreath: It’s inconsiderate. ‘Look,’ I asked him, have you got a mission for me?’
‘No.’
‘Well it’s time somebody had. I’ve been out for nearly three months and I’m going to seed.’
‘That’s why I thought you might like a little trip abroad.’
‘Where to?’ Durban would be all right, or Mexico. Anywhere out of this freezing hole.
‘Warsaw.’
‘Christ, in winter?’
‘It would be convenient, I know, if w
e could choose -‘
‘It’s all I’d get out of it, a bit of sunshine. Send him far enough south and I’ll do what you want. I’ll go with him and hold his hand.’
He didn’t say anything. Maybe I was raising my voice too much: you don’t do that till you start feeling you’re on a loser. Among all the stuff on his desk I could see my dossier and among all the things it said in there was the fact that I spoke a bit of Polish. Not many of us do: it’s like stuffing your tongue in a jar of used razor blades.
I quieted down, so that he’d know I wasn’t worried, that I wasn’t going. ‘You’ll have to find someone else.’
He waited five seconds and then said:
‘You needn’t decide immediately. Not for a few hours yet.’
‘Hours? You called me in a bit late, didn’t you?’
‘Everyone else has refused.’
I looked away.
It wasn’t in my dossier. Or if it was, it was written between the lines. That was where he’d been busily reading. It said if you want to find Quiller look for the man who stands facing the wrong way in the bus queue just to show the world he can do without a bus, look for the man who wants the window open when everyone else wants it shut. The awkward bastard who’s going to kill himself one day trying to prove he’s bullet proof. And if you want him for a job that he’d normally throw back in your face, tell him that everyone else has refused it.
I was looking at the little electric fire. The coiled filament had broken in two or three places and someone - probably Egerton - had twisted the ends together; the joins were glowing brightly, absorbing so much of the current that the rest of the filament wasn’t more than cherry red. I knew he wouldn’t speak next.
‘What sort of mission have you given him?’
‘Nothing complicated.’ The phone rang again and he said ‘yes’ to someone and hung up. ‘I haven’t met him yet, myself. He was rather wished on to me.’ He sat back now, his donnish head tilted to watch me. The chilblains made red cobbles on the blue skin of his hands and I thought vaguely that as soon as I’d gone he would get up and hold them near the fire again. ‘That’s why I’m really most grateful to you for helping me out. Really most grateful’
