Quiller Solitaire

by Adam Hall

  In a moment I said, 'No. You're not.' Because there was a risk, yes, if I let personal considerations get in the way of the mission. It's one of the really critical dangers we face when we're out there in the field, because it doesn't come from the opposition: it comes from inside ourselves. Pull up the drawbridge and drop the portcullis, but the enemy within the citadel will undo you.

  Holmes lowered his head an inch, his eyes watching me from the deepened shadow of his brows. 'I know, of course, that there's nothing I can do to stop you. All I ask is that before you take a risk as big as that, you'll give it some thought before you see Mr Shatner. And if you still decide to see him, be very, very careful.'

  Chapter 2: SHATNER

  I was on the third floor when they paged me and I saw Shatner coming out of Clearance and waited for him while he ducked his head back through the doorway for a moment.

  'Tell him that if he can't get here in time, I'll send someone along to clear him on the plane.' He came into the corridor again and saw me and gave me a direct look, taking in the nerves and the fatigue. 'Oh yes, you want to talk to me, don't you?' He led me along to his room on the other side of Codes and Ciphers, dropping into one of the big leather chairs with the torn hide, stuffing coming out of them in places – they'd furnished this whole building from a discount junk shop, typical of them, won't spend a bloody penny if they can help it, you try fiddling your expense sheet and they'll go for the throat.

  'Tilney's spoken to me.'

  I took the other chair and got a whiff of ancient horsehair as I sat down. I didn't say anything.

  'You've nothing you want to add?' He watched me with no particular expression, a man with dark untidy hair and bags under his eyes and a flat night-shift pallor, leaning forward, attentive. 'Nothing you want to tell me, I mean, as McCane's control, that you might not have wanted to confide to Tilney.'

  'No.'

  When you're debriefed, you're debriefed; I never keep anything back unless it's to protect someone. Perhaps that was what Shatner meant. I'd never thought McCane was especially good on security, for instance, talked a bit too much when there were people around, didn't take overmuch care to check his environment for ticks, peeps, bugs. It could have got him killed last night: he might have talked to someone about where he was going, and then realised it had been dangerous; that could have been his reason for phoning me, to cover himself.

  Shatner said, Then I don't know why you want to see me.'

  'You were McCane's control. I was there when they got him. There might be questions you want to ask. I might not have covered everything with Tilney. Another thing is, I'd like to take over.'

  He moved his head up a fraction. 'From McCane?'

  'Yes.'

  Why?'

  I'd got it ready. 'I haven't been in the field for nearly two months, and McCane was on my level, so it must be something I'd be able to handle.'

  Then one of his phones rang and he reached across to the desk. 'Yes?' Stretched out like that, he'd got one foot half out of his shoe, a hole in his sock. Then tell them to route him through Paris. And Phyllis – no more calls.' He dropped the phone and sat back and looked at me and said, 'It's not your style to ask for a mission. You tend to play hard to get.'

  'Two months is a long time. I'm getting bored.' I tried to make light of it, but his eyes were on me and I knew what I looked like, cold with shock still and the nerves flickering. There was nothing you could have done. Bullshit. There's always something you can do. So I knew what I looked like, not quite your eager beaver just dying to see his name on the board again.

  'How do you feel, Quiller' – and here it came -'about what happened last night? How do you feel personally?'

  Tread carefully. 'It was a shock.'

  'Of course. What else?

  I looked away. 'I suppose I feel a bit responsible, or at least I did, for a while. But Tilney pointed out that I shouldn't blame myself, and Holmes agreed.'

  'I see.' He waited until I was looking back at him. 'So you don't feel any lingering sense of guilt.'

  'Not really.'

  'Or anger?' Watching me carefully.

  'Oh, I think I've got over that sort of thing by now. He's not the first man I've seen killed.'

  Shatner waited, in case I made the silly mistake of adding something, of protesting too much. I didn't.

  The phone rang again and the sound brought the sweat out on me, because that had been tricky going. 'You couldn't have been listening,' Shatner was saying on the phone. 'I asked for no more calls.' He dropped it and sat back again and I saw a look of sudden fatigue on his face. I suppose he'd been up most of the night too, because Signals would have passed on my message about McCane. This man had also had his executive wiped out on home ground and without any warning, and he must have had a lot to do in the last few hours.

  'I don't know you,' he said, 'all that well. I'm not keen on running people I don't know.'

  I didn't say anything. If I begged for this job I'd never get it.

  Pressing the bridge of his nose, his eyes squeezed shut, You've got a reputation for giving your controls a bad time. I'm not keen on that either.'

  I got out of the chair, and a spring twanged. Well there's only a couple of boards active, so you've got plenty of people to choose from.'

  I was at the door when he said, 'I rather think this is a time for tolerance, don't you, on both sides.'

  'I was trying to make it easy for you.'

  He got up too and moved around, not looking at me now, needing to think: that was my impression.

  I stayed by the door. 'I've called Westerby in from Bucharest,' he said.

  'To take over?'

  'Yes.'

  'How's his German?

  Shatner swung me a look. 'Had McCane talked about Germany, when he phoned you last night?'

  'No.'

  He went on moving around the small untidy room. I'd got Holmes to fill me in on McCane before we left the Caff, and he'd told me he'd come back from Berlin the night before, so I assumed that was where Shatner had been running him. I'd also asked Holmes about Shatner, and it was interesting. Apart from a few other things he'd run Tewson in Budapest earlier this year and flown there himself to direct the end-phase when things had got sticky, and not many of them will do that, only Croder, Loman, Childs, nobody else I can think of, because it's so dangerous at that stage. Shatner had also brought Farrow in from Sri Lanka with a broken thigh and a bullet in him, not personally that time, but he'd organised a last-ditch rescue operation through Signals with a dozen people in support and orders to use deadly force if they had to, no big deal in a place like Sri Lanka but the Bureau is terribly touchy about that sort of thing. I might not be in bad hands if Shatner agreed to run me in Berlin, give or take a stray shot or a blown cover.

  Westerby's German is adequate,' Shatner said at last, 'but yours is rather better, from what I hear. You've worked there, haven't you?'

  'Two or three times. I can pass for a native Berliner.'

  'Can you now.' I was still standing by the door, and he said, 'For God's sake, come and sit down again.'

  I compromised and perched on the arm of the chair, ready to get up and get out of here if he looked like arguing the toss for much longer. If he didn't give me the mission I'd do the thing I wanted to do some other way; I was ready to drop by now, and past the point where I'd lie staring at nightmares on the ceiling.

  'You're more conversant, then,' Shatner said, 'with Berlin than Westerby is. That makes a difference.'

  'I'm a bit surprised you didn't send for me in the first place.' He'd known my background; he must have. All the controls have got to do in this place is press a button and the computers throw you on the screen like an X-ray.

  He stood still for a moment and looked at me. 'As I've told you, you're not my favourite executive.'

  'That's a bloody shame.'

  I was getting fed up with him.

  'Now that we've got that over,' he said, 'let's remember that we'
ve both had a rather trying night, and make mutual allowances. When can you take over from McCane?'

  'The focus of this operation,' Shatner said, 'is on a man named Maitland. Or rather, on his death.'

  We were already into preliminary briefing and the little room was full of smoke. He'd asked me if I'd mind his having a cigarette, which I thought was civil of him.

  'Maitland was a cultural attache at our embassy in Berlin, fond of the city, active in his job, though for some reason not particularly well liked among his colleagues. A week ago he was murdered, and his body taken away. His flat had been broken into with some violence, and the police found evidence of massive blood loss. There were marks on the floor indicating that his body had been dragged out of the flat to the lift. The telephone was hanging by its cable – he'd been talking to a woman friend, who came forward, when the flat was entered. She reported sounds of the door being smashed in, an outbreak of voices and finally a cry. Maitland's car was also broken into and rigorously searched, the upholstery slashed open and the carpets dragged up.'

  Shatner reached for the dented chromium ashtray on his desk. 'The Foreign Office suspected that the new generation of the Red Army Faction was involved, and asked us to make enquiries. I sent McCane out there.'

  'The FO approached us, instead of DI6?

  'We are able to do things, as you know, that DI6 cannot.'

  'But I mean it's that sensitive?'

  He flicked ash. 'I've been in Signals most of the night with some of our agents-in-place out there. They couldn't give me much more than a certain amount of raw intelligence, but the vibrations I'm getting are that there may be more to Maitland's death than some kind of crude wet affair.'

  Yes indeed. They'd tagged McCane back to London and wiped him out as soon as they found him exposed. 'You didn't get anything useful from McCane when you debriefed him?'

  'Surprisingly little. He ran into a lot of resistance when he started asking questions. His feeling was that people either didn't want to answer them, or were afraid to. That's not unusual, of course, when there's a strong terrorist faction at large and active.'

  'Why did you call McCane in? For debriefing?' 'Partly.' He got up and went over to a window, freeing the fastener and thumping at the frame until it jerked open an inch, sending down flakes of paint. 'And partly because his enquiries led him to think that the person who might know more about what was going on is Maitland's wife. Widow.' He brushed bits of paint off his jacket and sat down again.

  'And she lives in Reigate.'

  'Yes. McCane was going there last night, to put up at a hotel and see her this morning.'

  'That's where I start?

  'That is where you start.' He crushed out his cigarette. 'I don't think I need to point out that you may well attract the attention of these people simply by showing up in Reigate. You don't normally like support, do you?

  'Only when I ask for it.'

  'That's a pity. It could finish you off, one fine day. I just hope it doesn't happen while I'm running you.'

  I went back to my flat in Sloane Square and showered and slept for three hours. When I got up I put the clothes I'd worn last night into a plastic bag and phoned Harry and asked him to take them to the cleaners as soon as he could; the smell of burning was pervasive, lingering. Then I phoned the stage door at the St James's, but Thea was in the middle of rehearsal and I left a message saying I couldn't make it this evening, and phoned The Conservatory and asked them to send flowers for the opening night tomorrow.

  It was eleven o'clock when I checked in again at the Bureau. They told me they'd arranged for me to have tea with Helen Maitland in Reigate at four, and that gave me time to look over the documented briefing that Shatner had given McCane and go over the present situation in Berlin regarding the Red Army Faction's activities. Shatner said there was no need for me to go through Clearance at this stage; a lot was going to depend on how much Helen Maitland was prepared to help us and whether she could give us any positive information to work on.

  When I left Whitehall and drove south along Millbank by the Thames I didn't have any sense of professional engagement. Shatner had officially started running me but there was no actual mission on the board and the truth was, after all, that the reason that was driving me south from London on this cold November afternoon was purely personal. I owed a man a death.

  Chapter 3: HELEN

  She was standing in the middle of the lawn behind the house, perfectly still, her back to me. There was frost on the grass, and dead leaves, their edges silvered in the last of the winter daylight. A birdbath stood on a stone pedestal with ice in it, and something else, a small rounded object, perhaps a dead bird: I couldn't quite see from here. I'd rung the doorbell at the front of the house but couldn't hear any sound. I'd knocked, but not too hard; this was a house of grief. Then I'd come along the narrow redbrick path and through the gate by the hedge and seen her there on the lawn, a thin figure hunched in a sheepskin coat, facing away from the house. I couldn't see that she was watching anything in particular; there was a tennis court and a summer house and, farther away, a shed with some gardening tools leaning against it and the door half open. It was intensely quiet here, but in the distance there was traffic, its sounds muted, it seemed, by the cold and the lowering dark.

  She turned round and saw me.

  I hadn't gone close, not wanting to startle her. We stood facing each other for a time in silence. Then she spoke.

  'Who are you?' 'Victor Locke. I'm sorry to disturb you.' I meant her reverie. She'd known I was coming; it was just four.

  She seemed not to connect, then said, 'Oh yes. You're coming to tea.' She still didn't move. At this distance she looked insubstantial, a small cold face above the coat, her hands tucked into the sleeves, her feet together in their fleece-lined boots. There was a toy railway engine not far from where she stood, lying on its side among the frosted leaves. I hadn't been briefed that the Maitlands had any children.

  I went towards her. That's right. I'm sorry about your husband.'

  There was no expression in her cool grey eyes, though she looked at me without blinking. Not at me, perhaps, but at all the things I meant, because I was here, all the things she was going to have to do now that she was a widow. That was my impression. I was breaking into the small Confusing world that was taking its place between the old one, where her husband had been, and the new one, where he would not be.

  'Oh,' she said at last, not having heard what I'd said, perhaps, or not knowing how to answer. 'Are you in the Foreign Office?'

  'I'm in one of their lesser-known departments.' Not true, but the lesser-known' bit should give her the idea that she shouldn't ask for specifics. She thought about that. She was pretty, in an ethereal way, pale and cool and still. I couldn't see her playing tennis, but of course she might have looked quite different a week ago, before it had happened.

  'We'd better go in,' she said, but it had the sound of a question.

  'Not unless you want to.' She might not feel like being in the house now that it was empty. Perhaps that was why she'd come out here.

  'But you'd like some tea.'

  'Not really.'

  'Oh.' She watched me quietly for a moment, then looked around and said, 'We could sit down, I suppose.' There were some rustic-looking chairs at the edge of the lawn, where the tennis court began, their white paint beginning to peel. 'Am I being terribly unwelcoming?' She said it without a smile, dipping her head, so that her long fair hair swung a little.

  'Look,' I said, 'this isn't a social visit, and I want to make it as painless for you as I can.'

  In a moment: 'Painless?'

  That was the first clue. 'I need to ask you about Berlin. They told you, didn't they?

  'Yes. But that's all right.' She moved at last, walking across to one of the garden chairs, her suede boots leaving streaks on the frost; she walked with a slight sway, as if through water. 'I don't mind talking about Berlin. I expect I seem a little distrait. Everything wa
s rather sudden. And of course beastly.'

  She perched on the arm of the chair, throwing her hair back and looking at me a little defensively, I thought. No one likes questions about something they'd rather forget. I said, 'We want to know what happened over there. Your husband was -'

  'His name is George. Was George. You can call him that.'

  'All right. He was well into the scene in Berlin, knew a lot of people. He did a good job at the embassy, so I imagine he was pretty popular there.'

  'Not very.'

  'People tend to envy success, don't they?' I dragged a chair over and hitched myself onto the arm.

  'I don't think it was that, quite. He was rather cocky, you see.'

  'He wasn't too well-liked outside the embassy, either? Would you say?'

  'Not enormously.'

  There was a face over there in the hedge, in a gap in the hedge. 'But not so unpopular,' I said, 'that people would want to… harm him?'

  'Oh, no. He was just – I mean he was just George. Rather supercilious. No, I think it was the Red Army Faction that killed him. The police think so.'

  'Do you?'

  She seemed surprised. 'I've never thought otherwise.' Then she said, 'He was provoking them, I believe.'

  'Oh really. How?

  'Asking too many questions, I'd say.'

  'Why was he interested in the Faction?'

  She swung her head a little, perhaps trying to clear her mind; or it was just a mannerism; some women do it to show off their long hair, without thinking.

  'Are you feeling better now?'

  The voice came from the hedge, from the small round face in the gap in the hedge.

  'Yes,' Helen called. 'Yes thank you, darling.'

  'Who's that man?

  'He's just a friend.' She threw me a quick little smile, the first one I'd seen. It changed her completely.

  'What's his name?