Quiller Solitaire

by Adam Hall

  Klaus left them, touching their arms in a gesture almost of affection, and clapped his hands for servants. Two of them brought bowls and small muslin towels, and as the pilot and his friend – copilot? – sat at their ease below the leaves of an olive tree the boys knelt in front of them, bathing their feet with an air of ceremony; other servants brought fruit and a bottle of Vichy water and pewter cups. None of the Europeans here took any notice, but the Arabs – Muhammad Ibrahimi and the servants – seemed interested, glancing across now and then. The pilot, Khatami, had the same look of quiet exaltation I'd noticed on the plane, and so did his friend.

  I made another routine check around the environment in case there was anything to be picked up. Klaus wasn't talking to Ibrahimi any more: I assumed the Arab had come to report on what he'd been doing to keep the dead boy's family quiet -they would have been told to say his body had been found somewhere else, victim of an unknown assassin, something like that. Klaus would get away with it if the truth came out – he had a perfect case for a plea of self-defence in front of witnesses – but he was a busy man: today he'd killed only a dog and an Arab boy, but there were more deaths than that on his agenda, perhaps hundreds, on the stroke of Midnight One.

  He was sitting alone now, leaning forward with his big hands interlaced, his eyes on the surface of the pool where the scimitar leaves of the eucalyptus floated, his mind absent, his fingers sliding together, sliding away, his whole body arched, flexed like a bow: he was in a form of meditation, deep in the theta waves, close to trance.

  Inge Stoph watched him, her bright eyes idolatrous. Geissler was talking in low tones to Ibrahimi. The guards weren't moving, weren't bouncing cockily on the balls of their feet any more: they'd been tested and found wanting, and I suppose would be fired and replaced, fired or left somewhere humped on the ground with an arm thrown out in mute testimony to their fuhrer's displeasure – I'd seen today that in this small sovereignty of terror Dieter Klaus considered himself and was considered to be omnipotent, with the status of a god and the rights of a god over life and death. It was the only way he could run this show, the only way he could live.

  Dolores had gone into the building after the scene with the Arab boy, and hadn't come out. Helen was lying down again, flat on her back, a sheen on her white face; I think she'd have liked to go into the palace too, or anywhere away from Dieter Klaus, but was afraid that if she stood up and tried walking she might feel dizzy and be sick.

  George Maitland wasn't back yet from taking his photographs in the native quarter. I expected him soon now: he'd be here with Klaus as the time brought them close to Midnight One. From what Helen had told me, he was one of its architects.

  One of the servants wasn't far away, and I beckoned him over. He was an older man with stubble on his dark thin face; his eyes had a light in them, a glint of inner fires. He didn't look at me as he waited for me to speak; I think if he'd looked at me I'd have felt the heat of his ferocity: I was a foreigner, an infidel, and it was a foreigner, an infidel who had killed the Arab boy.

  I asked him in French, 'Why are they bathing the feet of those men over there?'

  He didn't turn his head. 'It is holy water.'

  'I see. What does it signify?'

  He was looking down, his dark head turned slightly away from me, as if to hear me better, but it wasn't that. If he'd looked at me he wouldn't have been able to resist the urge to spit in my face.

  'It signifies,' he said, 'that they will die.'

  'When?

  'Before they sleep again.'

  Suicide run.

  Chapter 18: IBRAHIMI

  It was almost six o'clock, and the air was turning cool. The sirocco had died away from the south, from the Sahara; the leaves of the tall eucalyptus trees were still. Beyond them in the west the sun was low, the sky the colour of blood.

  Maitland had come into the courtyard a few minutes ago and spoken to Dieter Klaus; then he'd seen Helen by the pool and had gone over to her. They were talking now. He was in a dark jumpsuit and carried a padded jacket. He was talking seriously, no smiles.

  I could hear the pilots, speaking to each other quietly in Iranian, a language I didn't know. The boys had taken away the empty bowls and the muslin towels. The water – the holy water – had made a puddle on the tiles.

  A suicide run: hence the ritual and the look of exaltation on the pilots' faces. There were talking with their heads close together. Klaus watched them from across the pool, still crouched forward with his fingers interlaced. He watched the Iranians with a degree, I thought, of fascination. From the nearest archway I too was being watched, by my personal guard.

  A suicide run, but that didn't tell me the target. The other Iranian could be a pilot too, or at least aircrew: they'd both been through the ritual of their preparation for their ascent into heaven, had possibly been taken through a more elaborate ritual at the mosque. So it involved a big aircraft, with a crew of at least two. A bomber?

  The evening prayer was being called by the muezzin from the minaret of the mosque; the voice sounded tinny: I think they use tapes these days, in the bigger towns.

  Then the telephone began ringing again, and Klaus came over to it and picked it up. Two of his bodyguards had moved away from the wall, closer to him. This had become routine since the business with the knife.

  'Out. Un instant.'

  He took the telephone to Khatami, pulling the long cable clear of a deck chair. 'Pour vous.'

  'Merci.' Khatami spoke into the phone. 'Oui?' Klaus stayed where he was, on his haunches, arms across his knees. 'Non, c'est pas bon. Vous avez un crayon? Alors, ecoutez. C'est precisement 26°03' au Nord par 02°01' a I'Ouest. Repetez. Bon, c'est bon. Ecoutez, il faut synchroniser les montres, hein? J'ai maintenant exactement 18:04 heures. C'est ca. A bientot, oui.' He put the receiver down.

  I turned a page of the Tribune I was reading, got it creased, flattened it out, began reading again.

  'Tout va bien?'

  Klaus.

  'Oui. 'Tout va bien. 'Tout est en ordre.'

  Khatami.

  I wasn't all that far away, a dozen yards or so, and I'd heard them quite clearly. But I don't think that Klaus even realised I was there; I don't think it mattered. I was under close guard and I was going to remain under close guard until the flashpoint out there at the airport, and whether the Miniver was delivered on schedule or not, whether London had sent forces in or not, my expectations were that I would be silenced at that time and in that place. Klaus would have ordered it. So it didn't matter what I overheard, what information I might pick up: it would remain safe for all time in the chill of the shrivelling brain.

  But it was interesting, academically. I had the target.

  26°03' north by 02'01' west.

  Much good may it do me, so forth, that man Muhammad Ibrahimi had a bullet for me and he wouldn't leave anything to chance: if he failed to carry out his orders he wouldn't survive the day. I suppose it was the tinny ghost-voice of the muezzin wailing from the mosque that was giving me the creeps, that and perhaps the killing of the dog and the boy. The psyche was in despond, and this was dangerous, though difficult to change: time had started to run short. There was no The telephone rang again and Klaus answered it at once.

  'Ja. Jawohl!'

  George Maitland came across from the edge of the pool and the pilots got onto their feet. They're ready' Klaus said, and his voice was charged. 'Allons-y!' He went over to speak to Geissler and then made for the building, his bodyguards with him. The Iranians followed them, hurrying, their robes flying.

  I noted the time: it was 6:14.

  'I'm sorry you're going to miss this,' Maitland said. His bomber jacket was hanging across his shoulder from one finger. He was smiling, if you could call it that; there seemed a kind of light on his face, in his eyes, and I thought he'd lost colour a little. Yet I'd think he wasn't a man to get excited easily. It's going to be something quite spectacular.'

  'Klaus didn't invite me,' I said. 'Should I
ask him?' He shook his head slowly. 'He and I are the only ones going. Not even Geissler. Some of the minions, of course, but they're just monkeys, and won't be coming back.'

  I sensed Helen shiver, and she turned away. 'It's getting cold,' she said. 'I must go and get some clothes on.'

  'Did you talk to her much?' Maitland asked. He watched me with his eyes shining.

  'Not a lot,' I said.

  'Do you think she's attractive?'

  'Very attractive.'

  'It's that innocence of hers… I find it extraordinarily seductive.' He turned, looking across to the archway where she was just vanishing into the palace, long pale legs among the gathering shadows. 'God knows,' Maitland said, 'what she'll think when she sees the media break. She'll know we're responsible. She likes power, you see, the kind of power she knows I can wield.'

  'Or enjoys her fear of it?'

  'I've never thought of it that way.'

  He was dying to blurt things out; in times of great emotion we say things we know we shouldn't, can't possibly say. I think if I'd had him alone with me for a bit longer I could have got enough out of him to give Solitaire a final chance, reach a phone, bring London in. But there wasn't time, and it wouldn't get me anywhere: Klaus knew that as far as security was concerned I presented no risk, was already silenced.

  Ibrahimi came across to us. 'We shall be leaving in thirty minutes,' he said in French, 'For Dar-el-Beida.'

  For the flashpoint.

  I went in to change.

  Scorpion in my shoe and I tipped it out and it scuttled under the bed.

  I held my hands out and watched the fingers. They were perfectly steady. The nerves were singing quietly in that flat inaudible monotone that is simply a vibration, palpable but discernible to no other sense; perhaps it's what happens when a violinist tightens the string infinitesimally and hears, knows, that he has reached perfect pitch.

  A woman was keening somewhere below, and I could hear faint voices. Perhaps she was the boy's mother. The scent of jasmine came through the open window with its iron scroll-work, and I saw two men in flying jackets standing in the forecourt near one of the cars. They were the Iranian pilots, changed and ready and presumably waiting for Klaus.

  I put on the clothes I'd worn in Berlin, where it had been cold. It would be cold here tonight, though less so.

  There might conceivably be a chance of preempting the flash-point and getting clear, turning the car over as I'd done once in Moscow and taking advantage of the confusion. But I couldn't do that. It's not what we're for, the ferrets in the field. I could save my skin that way or by using some other crude but effective technique but that would mean abandoning the mission: I had got to stay with Nemesis for as long as I could in case there was the thousandth chance of blocking their operation, if possible destroying it. I couldn't simply bail out: to abandon the mission is against the most sacrosanct edicts of the Bureau, the Sacred Bull. If those bastards in London expect us to protect the mission with our lives – and they do, or they wouldn't give us capsules, they wouldn't hand out capsules like bloody Twinkies – it follows that they also expect us to stay with the mission until death do us part in the natural course of events, death from a bullet or a knife or a fifty-foot drop from a rooftop or a head-on smash or the last turning of the screw in the interrogation cell with the light blinding and the music blasting away at full volume – Brahms, they usually go for Brahms or Beethoven – death from whatever cause, then, it is in our contract, you understand, with the Reaper at our side we have said I will.

  I put on my shoes. The scorpion was running inquisitively along the wainscoting, and it was in my mind to go over there and step on it, perhaps out of envy, because it was liable otherwise to outlive me; but I left it alone, reminded of Ferris, that inestimable but sometimes revolting director in the field who takes dark and perverse pleasure in stepping on beetles. With a full-blown Algerian scorpion he would have had a ball.

  The guard outside my door was on the move: I heard his shoes squeaking on the marble floor -they were gym shoes, rubber-soled, making him sound athletic, impatient for me to do something wrong so that he could blow my head off and show the brains to Klaus in atonement for letting that Arab boy pull a knife. There was another guard below in the courtyard, watching the windows here.

  I was beginning to sweat a little in the cool of the evening, and this worried me, and not only because sweat makes the hands slippery. I had good reason to be frightened as the minutes ran out to the flashpoint: I was almost certain by now that Klaus suspected my cover, beneath the lust in his breast to possess a real live nuke for the icing on his cake. If there was no delivery made I would be shot, but the same thing would happen if London hadn't laid a trap and the Miniver was handed over: after that I'd be worse than useless to Klaus: I'd be a danger, knowing too much.

  The scent of woodsmoke was richer now as night began falling and more fires were lit and the couscous went into the beaten copper pans.

  I got my jacket. It was the same kind as Maitland's, black, padded, Berlin style. I like them; they're good in cold climates and short, hip-length: you can't run in an overcoat, you can't turn, spin, kick, roll, rebound, dear God, my brain was working like a chicken's with its head cut off- those buggers had guns, it wouldn't matter what I was wearing, how fast I could run, they'd pick me off, concerted fire power.

  I left my bathroom stuff and the flight bag where they were and hung the swimming trunks a servant had lent me to dry on the window sill; then I went to the door and jerked it open and the gun was in his hand before I took another step, they were nervous, these people, didn't want to have Klaus shouting at them again. But I could have taken him, this one little peon, because I was alone with him and there are so many moves you can make if you've done it often enough; his weak point was that the gun gave him confidence while I was barehanded, and I'd work on that. But I couldn't do it before he'd got the first shot out and even though it'd go wide of the mark it would make a noise and the others would come and Klaus would have me wiped out because I would have blown my cover and he'd know there wasn't a nuke waiting for him at Dar-el-Beida, finito.

  'That way!'

  I was going down the arabesque staircase in front of him and took a wrong turn at the bottom and not by accident, I wanted to rile the little bastard, ease the resentment. I turned the other way and went into the open courtyard. It was quiet here, deserted except for Maitland: he was standing at one end of the pool, staring down into the water. It was still now, and no longer tinged with the blood of the Arab boy. The voice of the muezzin had stopped, and the only sound beyond the high white walls were women's voices and the distant ring of cooking pots.

  A ripe orange fell, on the far side of the courtyard, and burst among the dry scimitar leaves of the eucalyptus. I felt, for these few moments, a profound peace settling like gossamer on my soul, something close perhaps to what the two Iranians were feeling, and for the same reason: we weren't long for this world now.

  'Hello,' Maitland's voice came from across the courtyard, and I remembered how it had been when I'd first found Helen, this man's wife, standing as still as this on the frozen lawn in Reigate, the day before yesterday. She'd sensed my presence and turned and said, Hello.

  'Where's Klaus?' I asked him.

  'Coming. We'll be taking off at seven.'

  I went over to him, not hurrying, looking into the pool, watching his short dark reflection. 'The deal I made,' I said, 'is for the exchange to take place at 7:15.'

  'We're not taking the warhead on board.' Maitland's eyes were still shining; his excitement was burning in him like a fever. 'It's going on a later plane.'

  With the conventional explosive: with the teddy bear.

  'Fair enough. I wouldn't want any last-minute complications – this is quite an important deal for me.'

  He watched me for a moment, his eyes bright, and I wondered if he knew what the orders were that Klaus had given Muhammad Ibrahimi: that I was not to survive the rendezvo
us. Maitland would probably know, yes, had possibly advised it, even insisted on it, for the sake of absolute security, and some of the unholy light in his eyes could be there because he knew he was talking to a dead man. I'd seen a degree of fascination in Klaus's look when he'd been watching the two Iranians.

  'Dieter Klaus,' Maitland said slowly, 'hasn't planned this operation to include the risk of last-minute complications.'

  He didn't know I was English, this man, as English as he was. It'd be funny if we'd been to prep school together – he looked about my age. Not that it would have made any difference to our relationship. KGB Colonel Kim Philby had been an Englishman too.

  'I'm reassured,' I said, and then Klaus came into the courtyard with his four bodyguards and an Arab in a jump-suit and a military-style jacket, compact and black-bearded.

  'I don't think you've been formally introduced,' Klaus said in French, 'have you? Muhammad Ibrahimi – Hans Mittag. I know you'll get on very well. You'll be going to the airport with a driver and three guards for your own protection.' He was in a black flying-jacket with a fur collar, had a pair of military field-glasses slung round his neck. 'I'm sure your associate has taken every precaution' -his black eyes were locked on mine – 'and that he too has protected the rendezvous from unwanted attention. Or am I perhaps over-confident?' His French was stilted but I got the message.

  'The counter-terrorist people,' I said in a moment, 'are quick off the mark these days. You know that. It wouldn't be the first time an arms dealer's come unstuck.'