Quiller Solitaire

by Adam Hall

  I first noticed the snake soon after Klaus took the third telephone call; it was moving very slowly along the bottom of a wall, half-lost among the leaves and the fallen tangerines. It wasn't very big; I would have said it was a horned viper, a native here.

  'Are you asleep?'

  Helen was watching me, hanging onto the tiled rim of the pool, her slim body rising and falling in the water.

  I said I wasn't, no.

  'Isn't it nice here?'

  I said it was. She was so different from the other two girls, apart from her quietness. Inge sported her rich blonde body-hair, lifting her arms a lot and shaking the water from her head, laughing into the sun as the models do in Vogue and Elle; Dolores was less active but swam with studied grace, her long muscles moving under the dark skin, her eyes sleepy as she looked across at Dieter Klaus. But Helen was just thin, bobbing in the water with one shoulder-strap of her black costume hanging down and her slight breasts hardly noticeable. It was her innocence – even of this, the loose shoulder-strap – that glimmered with a sexuality the other girls could never hope to express; and when she smiled it was heart-breaking, or so I found; what turns me on most in a woman is her unintended invitation to my tenderness.

  'I expect I look rather gawky,' she said, 'in a bathing costume.'

  'Not really.'

  'It's something I shall always remember my father saying.' The sun was in her eyes, and they were narrowed to slits of shimmering light as she watched me. 'He was in the garden, trying to bend a croquet hoop straight, and I was going to tell them tea was ready in the summer-house, and I heard him say to my mother, 'Here comes that gawky girl of yours.'

  'Quite a lot of fathers are like that,' I said. 'It's a kind of birth defect.'

  'You don't think I look gawky then?'

  'I think you look rather like the goddess of willow trees, though a bit younger perhaps.'

  A flush came to her pale face – and this is what I mean, she could still be moved by the clumsiest compliment – and she looked down, letting her long pale fingers slip from the tiles. 'I think that's going rather far,' she said, and swam away, not meaning it, hoping it might be just a little bit true. Beyond her I saw the snake move again.

  Servants brought us things during the long hours of the afternoon, boys in kaftans and sandals, bringing us trays of tangerines, slices of ginger, kab el ghzal, mint tea', whatever we fancied, it was rather pleasant, he was a man of style, Klaus, regaling us with the fruits of the earth as the sun lowered towards the evening and the rendezvous and Midnight One. He couldn't do anything about the sand: it was everywhere, brought in by the light sirocco, gritty under our feet and the deck chairs when we moved them and even between our I teeth, forming a pink film across the copies of El Moudjahid and the London Times and the International Herald Tribune.

  The telephone was getting on my nerves, not because it rang sometimes but because it was there, near the edge of the pool and almost within reach. Klaus had always answered it on the spot: he hadn't taken it out of earshot or lowered his voice, and I knew why. It wasn't that he trusted me; he knew I was safe, because if I had any reason to report to anyone, at any time, on anything I'd overheard this afternoon, I'd never be able to. I looked like a guest here, but I wasn't. I was a captive.

  If I could use that phone, pick it up and call London and use speech code, it could change the end-phase of Solitaire from certain disaster to the chance of survival, even success. Tell Charlie not to bring any friends: this is strictly a private party.

  In the signals vernacular of the Bureau the word strictly has the same weight as fully urgent. They both mean that everybody has got to listen, including Bureau One.

  But it wasn't on because one of the bodyguards let out a shout in German when I picked the telephone up and Klaus jerked his head round - 'What are you doing? '

  Everyone else froze, watching me.

  'It looked like getting splashed,' I called across the pool to Klaus. I'd picked the whole thing up, not just the receiver. The receiver would have been next if no one had taken any notice. The guard who'd shouted had moved closer, was watching Klaus for any orders.

  'Would you like,' Klaus asked me, 'to make a telephone call, my friend?' He had a big chest, a powerful voice: he could put a silkiness into the tone even at this distance.

  'If I want to make a telephone call I ask you first, isn't that the drill?

  'I am delighted you understand.'

  He turned away and went on talking to Geissler. Inge Stoph gave a quick laugh and stuck her tongue out at me. I think she was peeved because I hadn't wanted to roll on the bunk with her on the plane; she couldn't have been used to refusals.

  It was quieter now in the courtyard; the two girls – 'concubines' was the word Inge had used at the Eissporthalle – had stopped splashing and playing for Klaus's attention. The guards weren't moving around any more or bouncing on their feet; my own personal guard was closer to me now, his red fez making a Blob of colour against the white wall behind. I could hear a donkey braying, some way off, and Inge flashed me another look, a silent laugh, meaning perhaps that I'd been a donkey to try a trick like that with a man like Dieter Klaus, the fuhrer.

  The smell of woodsmoke was on the air as fires were lit for the evening; it would be cool tonight in Algiers. A less attractive smell of chlorine came from the pool. I watched Klaus, Geissler and the guards, simply to keep them surveilled as a routine: the ferret doesn't often have the chance of surveilling the chief of the opposition in every movement he makes without attracting attention, without attracting bullets for that matter.

  On the board for Solitaire the bit of chalk moves in the floodlight: 17:06 hrs local time, executive maintaining close surveillance on opposition. That ought to create a lot of interest in Signals, not to say a discreet degree of jubilation, an occasion perhaps for another cup of tea, providing the bit of chalk doesn't go on moving: He is also their captive under guard and is liable to be shot dead tonight at the flashpoint.

  In most missions there's a flashpoint: it's when the executive is to perform a distinctly hazardous operation, to break into, for instance, the official intelligence headquarters of an unfriendly host country and try to get out again with something so classified that all the windows would blow out if anyone knew, or to get a wanted subject away from a fully-armed mantrap outside Hong Kong Airport with the public and the police looking on, or to make a last-ditch break for the frontier ahead of a pack of war-trained Doberman Pinschers, that sort of thing, flashpoint is what it says and the one that was coming up for Solitaire would be in two hours' time at the airport at Dar-el-Beida, when the man from London stopped his car and got out and came over to the black Mercedes 560 SEL we were sitting in and the counter-terrorist units closed in for the snatch with their floodlights and assault rifles and the shooting started and the executive for the mission went down first because those would be the orders from Dieter Klaus, the prearranged orders, the ones he would give before he left here this evening on his way to Midnight One.

  That was the flashpoint for Solitaire unless I could reach a phone but they weren't going to let me do that, and I was starting to feel the familiar tingling at the nape of the neck as I sat here in my deck chair sipping hot mint tea because the organism was going to need the sugar, sipping hot mint tea as the boys in their kaftans moved quietly around the pool in their sandals and the snake moved again and this time one of them saw it.

  He was sixteen, perhaps, seventeen, not one of the guards, just one of the palace servants, and he was young enough to enjoy playing a little prank now and then, especially if there were foreign girls around to tease, and he put down the tray and went over to the snake' and grabbed it by the tail before it could coil and swung it around in the air and smashed its head against the wall and held it up for a moment and then threw it into the pool with a bright boyish laugh.

  The girls screamed and Klaus looked round and saw the dead snake on the surface of the water and got to his feet at once
and went across to the Arab boy and shouted at him in French, bringing his big hand across and across his face until the boy's hand vanished into his kaftan and the blade of a knife flashed in the sunlight and Klaus parried it and tore the hilt free and slashed the boy's throat and pushed him away as the blood came spurting. The bodyguards had moved very fast when they'd seen the knife and were now forming a ring around Klaus, their guns out.

  'Get Ibrahimi!'

  One of them turned and ran into the building.

  'Where were you, then? ' Klaus asked the others. 'Was that as fast as you can move? As fast as you can shoot?' An Arab came through one of the archways with the bodyguard, black-bearded, his robes flowing, and saw the boy sprawled across the tiles with his blood reaching the edge of the pool and trickling into the water, its rose-red colour spreading.

  'He attacked me!' Klaus told the Arab, not shouting now but with the hoarseness of rage in his voice.

  Dolores had climbed out of the pool and was on all fours, hump-backed, retching. Inge was staring at Klaus with her ice-blue eyes shining as she absorbed the joy in the scene: her fuhrer had killed, as he would always kill any who dared oppose him. Helen had climbed out of the water and was lying on her back with her eyes closed, her face ashen.

  'These people saw him attack me with his knife!'

  Ibrahimi stared at Klaus, then at the boy again.

  'Now get him out of here, take him to his family, tell them that if anyone breathes a word about this I'll tell the police what happened and shame his memory – he tried to murder me, Ibrahimi, you understand me, do you understand?'

  The guards stood waiting, their guns at the hip. They might have been hoping – must have been hoping – that Ibrahimi would make some kind of move against Klaus, even a gesture of protest against the death of a fellow Arab, so that they could shoot him down and show this time how fast they could work. They were out of luck.

  'Yes,' he told Klaus, 'I understand.' He moved across to an archway, clapping his hands, and three or four boys appeared there, listening to Ibrahimi and then coming to the poolside, lifting the limp body in the kaftan and bearing it away.

  'The mess!' Klaus called. The mess, Ibrahimi!'

  More servants came, one of them an old man with gaps in his teeth, his head shaking on its thin neck as he mopped at the blood with towels. I think he was going to wash one of them out in the pool, but caught a glance from Klaus; the surface was already clouded. He stood watching them, Klaus, in his gold-toned swimming trunks, big hands on his hips, until they went away with their towels and their buckets, leaving the tiles clean and shining; then Klaus turned away and rose on his toes and made a flat racing-dive into the shallow end of the pool where the blood of the boy still swirled.

  I went over to Helen and pulled a deck chair nearer. The time was right, now, to tell her; she might not have listened before.

  'How do you feel?' I asked her.

  She didn't look up at me, didn't open her eyes. Softly she said, 'I must be mad. I must be mad.'

  Dolores, her dark skin yellowed, was telling a servant to wash the tiles near the diving-board, where she'd vomited. No one else was moving except for Klaus, who climbed out of the pool and reached for a towel, saying something to Geissler that I didn't catch: they were too far away.

  Where's George?' I asked Helen quietly.

  'He went into the casbah.'

  'Why?' 1 needed to know what everyone was doing.

  'To take snapshots.'

  'Where's the Iranian? The pilot?

  'He said he was going to the mosque.'

  To pray, but to pray for what? Perhaps the blessing of Allah on Midnight One.

  'If I can,' I told Helen, 'I'm going to destroy Nemesis. You know that. Have you thought about how it's going to leave you?'

  'No. I just want to go home now.'

  That surprised me. 'You're willing to leave George?' 'That's what it would amount to, wouldn't it?'

  'Yes.' She'd been doing some thinking, then.

  I had to do some thinking myself, as the sun lowered and sent shadows leaning across the courtyard from the eucalyptus trees. I heard a car door slamming; the forecourt of the little palace was on the other side of the wall. George, back from the casbah? The pilot, back from the mosque? I might not have much time left.

  'I haven't done anything wrong,' Helen was saying, with an innocence that would have touched me if she hadn't been in such appalling danger.

  As gently as I could I told her, 'You have been consorting with the most notorious group of left-wing terrorists in the world, and this is what you've got to say if you get arrested when everything blows up. You've got to say that when you went to Berlin to join your husband you hadn't the slightest idea he was mixed up with Dieter Klaus and his operation, and that by the time you found out, there was nothing you could do about it. You've been their captive – and this is perfectly true: they couldn't have risked your wandering off and giving them away, intentionally or otherwise.'

  Ibrahimi came through the archway at the far end of the courtyard. He wasn't a tall man but his robes gave him height arid a certain grace, and his black beard added a look of strength. I needed to know all I could about him in the little time left before the flashpoint. He would be going there with me, to receive the Miniver warhead.

  'Helen,' I said, 'I'm going to give you a couple of designations. How's your memory?5 She opened her eyes at last and sat up, turning to look at me, the shoulder strap still hanging down, her eyes narrowed against the late sunlight. 'My memory's very good,' she said.

  That too surprised me, and I felt a touch of admiration for her. That's the first time,' I told her, 'I've ever heard you say anything good about yourself. Do it again, get into the habit. It'll work wonders for you. Now listen, Klaus and George will be leaving you behind when they complete this operation of theirs, and back here the pressure will be off a little. If you can get away from here safely, take a taxi straight to the British Embassy and ask one of the staff there to pay the fare. They get a lot of tourists running out of money and trying to get home, so tell them this is prime ministerial business and ask them to put you on the line to the Foreign Office in London. Just keep on insisting. When you're through to the Foreign Office, ask for Liaison 5. If some new clerk says she doesn't know that department, tell her to get her boss on the line and keep on telling them you want Liaison 5. But you shouldn't have any trouble: Liaison 5 is known to all senior Foreign Office officials.'

  It was the Bureau.

  At the far end of the pool, Ibrahimi had begun talking earnestly to Klaus. He hadn't bowed when he'd gone up to him from the archway but it had been close. The German had total power over the members of his cell, whoever they were. He'd even killed an Arab and then told an Arab to get the 'mess' cleaned up – The mess, Ibrahimi, the mess!

  When they put you through to Liaison 5, ask for Desk 19. You'll be given access right away.' Desk 19 was Holmes. 'The man at Desk 19 will recognise your name. Ask him to get you on a plane for London, priority. Now give me those designations.'

  'Liaison 5, then Desk 19.'

  I got out of the chair and looked down at her. 'Go into the palace as soon as you can and write them down, keep them hidden away. However good our memory is, we can forget the most vital things in a crisis.' She watched me with that stillness of hers, her eyes attentive, and I would have liked to stay talking to her, would like to think that one day, one fine day beyond the dark and ominous horizons of Midnight One, I might pick up a telephone and dial the number in Reigate and ask her if she'd like me to go round there for a cup of tea. That would be nice. 'Don't take any risks,' I said in a moment. Wait for the right chance. And after all this is over for you, tell yourself again that you have a very good memory, just as you told me. And tell yourself all the other things your father's chosen to ignore, that despite his attempted sabotage you've managed to grow into a beautiful woman, poised and gracious and quite stunningly attractive. It's time to understand that now.'
/>   I turned away and left her, going across to a chair nearer the deep end of the pool, taking my time, talking to one of the servants who'd come back to stand near the walls, asking him where I could buy the best souvenirs among the souks. I was close enough to the group now – Klaus, Geissler and Ibrabimi – to hear snatches of French. It was the second language here and Ibrahimi was fluent; the two Germans were less at home with it.

  I'd told Klaus we needed a name for when the delivery of the Miniver was made, and he'd given me one. When your people approach at that time, one of the men in the car will get out and meet them. His name is Muhammad Ibrahimi.

  He would be there with me at the flashpoint, and what would happen, the way things would go, would depend critically on what kind of man he was and what I could do with him, if I could do anything with him at all.

  Sand gritted softly under sandals, and two more Arabs came into the courtyard in plain white kaftans. Klaus went across to them straight away, and they greeted one another in the Moslem fashion, which I hadn't seen the German do before: so far he hadn't shown too much respect for Arabs. Then I recognised one of them. He was Khatami, the Iranian pilot: I hadn't seen him in native dress before. Perhaps they'd arrived in the car I'd heard just now. He said he was going to the mosque, Helen had told me. Klaus spoke to them for a few moments in his halting French; I caught only a word or two but it sounded like an exchange of courtesies, or it could have been more than that: he was asking them how they felt, rather than how they were – Comment vous sentez-vous and not the formal Comment allez-vous. I thought this was interesting, because nothing had happened to them as far as I could see. But Klaus wasn't necessarily asking them how they felt now – after something had happened – but how they were feeling at this time when something was going to happen, as when we ask an athlete how he's feeling before a race. I played with it in my mind because I thought it was important, and might offer a clue; but I was desperate now for clues as we neared the flashpoint and it could have been simply that I was reading too much into things.