Quiller Solitaire

by Adam Hall

  Telephone.

  It was all I wanted: a telephone.

  Klaus said at once – 'You think there's the chance of a security leak?'

  'Not really. I run a tight show, like you. But nothing in this life's ever certain, is it? I think you're right: I ought to phone my contact.'

  He became very still. I was running things terribly close, but it was so tempting, because if I could get London direct on the dial and use speech-code and warn them off the rendezvous they'd have time to signal whatever forces they'd sent into Dar-el-Beida and clear them out before I got there with Ibrahimi. I'd have a clear field with no one to mess me up if I could do anything useful.

  'There's no time,' Klaus said, 'to phone anyone now.' He checked his watch. 'You're leaving here in fifteen minutes, and if your associate has left the rendezvous open to exposure it won't be my fault if you get shot. You understand me?'

  'I don't need fifteen minutes to -'

  'Do you understand?'

  He was standing in front of me with the look on his face I'd seen when he'd killed the dog and when he'd killed the Arab boy, and I was ready for him to blow, had the angles worked out as a matter of routine, the synapses flashing throughout the system and devouring data and sifting it and presenting the analysis for the motor nerves, and if Klaus had made any kind of move I would have gone straight into the killing area and he would have started choking on his own blood as the bullets went into me from the guards.

  I don't know if he knew I was ready for him, but I don't think so, because it would have been a challenge and he would have accepted it and come for me, just as a dog will do if you stare it down.

  Adrenalin running in the veins like strong red wine: I could taste it in my mouth. He went on staring at me. 'Yes,' I said, 'I understand.'

  'I want that warhead.'

  'Of course. And I simply hate to sound tactless, but does Monsieur Ibrahimi have the funds?' I looked at the Arab.

  'I have the funds,' he said, 'in cash.'

  'In hundred-dollar bills?

  'That is correct.'

  Klaus stood back, and Maitland joined him. 'I hope all goes well,' I said, 'with the operation. It'll give me a certain sense of satisfaction in the morning when I read the headlines, to think I played a minor part.'

  Klaus left his eyes on me for a moment and then swung away, didn't answer, knew I wouldn't see any headlines in the morning. Maitland went with him through the archway that led to the forecourt, where chrome glinted under the first faint light of the moon. Two of the guards followed them; two stayed behind. They were both men, both European, probably German; they were flat-faced, crew-cut and had eyes with the indifference in them that we see in animals, but I made them change, moving my hand suddenly to tug the zip of my jacket higher, and they became the eyes of the animal that sees the prey.

  'We shall make our way, then,' Muhammad Ibrahimi said.

  He walked beside me, the guards behind. No one else was in the courtyard now, and as our feet rustled through the fallen eucalyptus leaves and we reached the archway I had the feeling that a curtain would come down behind us.

  Exhaust gas was on the air as we reached the forecourt; the tail lights of a car showed among the trees where the driveway curved towards the road. Above the minarets of the palace the last of the daylight had gone from the sky, and with the coming down of the Sahara night a three-quarter moon was already silvering the chrome and cellulose of the 560 SEL Mercedes limousine that was waiting for us. An Arab driver and another European guard were standing beside it.

  Ibrahim! gestured for me to get into the back of the car, then followed. Two of the guards got in and pulled down the jump seats facing us; the third sat next to the Arab driver. The last door was slammed and the hydraulic locks clicked home. I felt for the seat-belt and buckled it. Ibrahimi folded his hands, leaving providence to Allah.

  'The funds,' I asked him, 'are in the boot?'

  It was just to keep the polish on my cover. Two thousand five hundred bills would need a suitcase, and I didn't see one here.

  'Yes,' he said.

  He would have a knife, Ibrahimi, a knife rather than a gun. The European clothes he'd changed into hadn't altered his image very much: with his beard and his hawk-beaked nose and his silences he was intensely Arabian, and would have been brought up with an affinity for the blade in time of need. It would be the same for the driver. The others would have guns.

  Be not sanguine, my good friend, upon this inauspicious night, 'tis hardly meet. We are not super-ferrets, we the ferrets in the field, we are but ferrets, and subject to the laws of nature, red in tooth and claw.

  Chapter 19: LIMOUSINE

  South along the rue Khelifa Boukhalfa and across the Plateau Sauliere district, with the scents of the evening coming through the ventilation system: the smell of broiling lamb mechoui from the Berbers' open-air kitchens, of jasmine arid donkeys and incense and bruised oranges and the acrid reek of the leather tanneries in the souks. Our driver knew his job, made detours around the congested areas where merchants lined the streets with their loaded carts and their rickety makeshift stalls.

  'What is his name,' I asked Ibrahimi, the driver's?'

  'I do not know.'

  We spoke in French, Ibrahimi and I, when we spoke at all. I would have liked to know the name of the driver as a matter of routine tradecraft: if you call a man by his name you establish immediate intimacy by however small a degree – you are no longer a complete stranger. And in a scene of confusion when other sounds are pervasive, call a man's name and you'll get his immediate attention.

  I didn't expect there to be any scenes of confusion on this cool Saharan night. Klaus had things running with the precision of a Swiss watch. But habit was ingrained in me and I let it work. It could save Solitaire at a pinch, given the advent of a miracle to help things along.

  I didn't expect miracles either.

  From where I sat I could see the digital clock on the softly-lit dashboard of the Mercedes, between the shoulders of the two hit men who sat facing me. The time was now 6:49: twenty-six minutes to the rendezvous, to the flashpoint. The airport at Dar-el-Beida is 20 kilometres from the city, and we were now nearing the motorway. Since I could see the clock I wouldn't have to look at my watch. I didn't want Ibrahimi to know I was interested in the time. The hit men sat watching my hands. I didn't know if they spoke or even understood French, but it was unlikely. Ibrahimi wouldn't need to give them any verbal instructions. If I made a wrong move they'd go for me: they were robots with guns, knee-jerk reflexive. I didn't move my hands; I left them folded on my lap. If I were going to move them with malice aforethought I'd need to do it very quickly.

  The limousine accelerated onto the motorway, its headlights sweeping over the moonlit landscape. There were twenty-four minutes to go. One thought kept obtruding as I looked over the options that were left: that fix I'd overheard couldn't be the target for Midnight One. 26°03' north by 02°01' west must be somewhere in the Sahara desert, because London was the zero east-west meridian and almost due north of Algiers, and Baghdad was somewhere about 30 degrees latitude. Klaus hadn't mounted this operation to blow up a lot of sand. It would be nice to look at a map, one of the maps in the leather pocket at the back of the driver's seat, but I couldn't think of any excuse to ask for one.

  Khatami, the Iranian pilot, had been quite insistent on the telephone at the poolside, making sure the caller got the fix correct and asking him to write it down and repeat it, even telling him to synchronise watches. But it couldn't be the target for Midnight One. Then was it the location of Midnight One? In the middle of the Sahara desert?

  There was a telephone set into the walnut console between the jump seats. It would also be nice to use the telephone, as well as a map, but I didn't think Ibrahim! would let me.

  The only viable option I had left was to pre-empt the flashpoint: move into some kind of action that could get me clear with a whole skin and leave Solitaire running. It would have to be calc
ulated but it was going to be messy: that was unavoidable. One scenario seemed attractive.

  There were five men with me in the limousine and they were armed, three with guns and two – I was going to assume – with knives. My immediate target would be Ibrahimi, and the technique would be an elbow-strike to the throat, and lethal. To do it effectively and with the certainty of a kill I'd need to work up the optimum degree of catapult tension in the arms to lend added momentum to the strike. At the moment my hands were lying loosely on my lap and I'd have to move them a little and quite naturally, settling them again with my left hand holding my right wrist. I must then change the hold into an actual grip, tightening it and pulling my arms against each other to the point where the maximum tension was reached before muscle fatigue set in. Then I would release my hands, and the time it would take for my right elbow to reach the throat of Muhammad Ibrahimi would be in the region of one-fifth of a second. This is the figure we've recorded in practice at Norfolk, where a lot of work has been done on this particular technique because it's quite often that an executive finds himself sitting captive in the back of a car.

  Through the windscreen I could see a big jet sloping towards Dar-el-Beida with its strobes flashing against the deep indigo' sky. By the clock on the dashboard we were now nineteen minutes to the flashpoint.

  So at any given time Ibrahimi could be sitting beside me with a smashed larynx and the blood flowing into his lungs: this is a death, oddly enough, by drowning. But the two hit men would also be fast. Their hands were resting on their thighs, a matter of inches from their guns, and I'd have to reach their eyes to blind them and inflict diversionary pain before they could fire, and that would take time, perhaps a full second, a second and a half, while my arms rebounded from the strike to Ibrahimi and I turned my hands into a four-finger eye shot as I drove them forward. It wouldn't be difficult: these men were facing me and even if they saw my hands coming and flinched or moved their heads I could change the eye shot into a claw hand with their eyes still the target and if they had time to reach their guns at all they'd have to fire blind and I'd be into a double outward rake to drive their hands away.

  But there was a risk. He was the man up front with the driver.

  The big jet was flattening out for the approach, floating above the black frieze of the date palms to the south.

  'Have you known Monsieur Klaus,' I asked Ibrahimi, 'For very long?'

  I didn't expect him to tell me. I wanted to know how far he was simply prepared to talk, because soon I was going to talk to him and it would involve London. He wouldn't know that.

  'I have known him,' Ibrahimi said, 'some time.'

  Meant nothing.

  The jet melted into the palm trees, vanished. The speedometer stood at a steady 100 kilometres per hour, the speed limit on this stretch. At 100 kph a lot of things would happen if the driver lost control. He was no obstacle to me, the Arab at the wheel: his hands were tied and he must watch the road. But even supposing I could control the two hit men in the back of the limousine there was the third man sitting in front and he was a real hazard because I'd have to hit the seat-belt buckle release before I could reach him and in a car this size it was a long way from the back seat to the front and any initial momentum I could get from the upholstery wouldn't be enough to pitch me forward with the necessary speed to do anything effective: there wasn't the leverage. The third man would hear the action going on behind him the moment I started work and I wouldn't be halfway through what I needed to do with the other two before he span round with his gun drawn and fired at the skull to drop me with a single shot. The timing, as it concerned that man in the front there, was brutal, impossible.

  Rule out the idea, then, of pre-empting the flashpoint. There was nothing I could do before we reached the airport at Dar-el-Beida, before we reached the rendezvous.

  I could feel the adrenalin flowing into the bloodstream again, the resonance along the nerves as the digital clock flicked to 6:58 at seventeen minutes to the flashpoint. There wasn't a lot of time and I didn't see a single chance of doing anything even when we got there, anything effective. The most I could do would be to take Ibrahimi with me, Ibrahimi and the two men in the rear of the car, simply as a matter of principle. But if I could do anything at all it would have to be in a clear field with no disturbance: it was the only way I could work at the brink. So I'd better phone London, tell them to leave me alone, get their CT units out of Dar-el-Beida before we arrived.

  'I've only known Monsieur Klaus,' I told Ibrahimi, 'a few hours.'

  I shifted on the seat a little, half-turning to look at him, and the hands of the two men jerked.

  'Relax,' I told them in German. 'I'm not going to hurt you.'

  They'd hate that, did it for a giggle.

  'What did you tell them?' Ibrahimi asked straight away.

  'I told them to relax. They're fidgety.' His face was turned towards me, his black beard jutting, his eyes on mine in the shadows, a shimmer of black in the pale olive skin. 'Only a few hours,' I said. 'I met him only last night, as a matter of fact, about this time. But I know he's difficult to deal with, as I'm sure you've discovered yourself.'

  He turned his face away from me, stared through the windscreen again, a glint coming into his eyes as headlights brightened from ahead of us in the opposite lane.

  I wasn't waiting for an answer; it hadn't really been a question. I said, 'You remember, probably, the difficulty I was having with Monsieur Klaus a little time ago, at the palace.'

  You think there's a chance of a security leak? Klaus, speaking in French. Ibrahimi had been there: we'd just been introduced.

  Not really. I run a tight show, like you. But nothing in this life's ever certain, is it? I think you're right: I ought to phone my contact.

  'I expect you remember,' I told Ibrahimi, that all I was suggesting to Monsieur Klaus was that I should get on the telephone and make quite certain the rendezvous at Dar-el-Beida was uncompromised.'

  He would know the particular meaning of the word, in this context. I waited now, but he said nothing.

  'Do you in fact remember, Monsieur Ibrahimi?'

  In a moment he said quietly, 'Yes.'

  Of course he did. Monsieur Klaus had been quite forthright. There's no time to phone anyone now. You're leaving here in fifteen minutes, and if your associate has left the rendezvous open to exposure it won't be my fault if you get shot.

  'I'm afraid,' I told Ibrahimi, 'that Monsieur Klaus was perhaps a little over-confident, when he refused to let me use a telephone. But then he's like that, isn't he? I admire confidence in people, but in this case he should have given a little more thought to what I told him.' I waited, didn't expect an answer, received none. 'Do you remember what I told him, Monsieur Ibrahimi? I told him that we can never be quite certain there hasn't been a security leak, during the process of an illegal arms deal. And I suggested I should telephone my contact. You were there, I remember, Monsieur Ibrahimi.'

  I waited again, just to give him time, sat watching him, the glint of headlights reflected in his eyes from the oncoming traffic. 'I rather feel,' I said, that you're a more patient man than Monsieur Klaus, a more careful man. I hope so, because if there has indeed been a security leak since the Miniver warhead left Britain, and if I can't telephone to find out, this car could be surrounded by armed counter-terrorist commandos the moment we reach the rendezvous, and we shan't have the fire power to shoot our way out.'

  I looked away from him, swinging a glance past the flat expressionless faces of the two hit men to take in the clock on the dashboard behind them. I had fourteen minutes left, which didn't worry me because I could do all I needed to do on the telephone in that time. But it worried me that London might not be able to call off whatever forces they'd sent in before we got to the rendezvous.

  I looked back at Muhammad Ibrahimi and found his eyes on me. 'But there's time,' I told him, for me to make quite sure we're not heading straight into an ambush, you and I. All I need is to use
the telephone.'

  It would have been nice if I could have pressed him harder, told him he'd be a bloody fool if he didn't let me use the phone, so forth – it would have saved time. But that wouldn't be the right approach for a man like Ibrahimi; he was infinitely more refined, more subtle than Dieter Klaus, and he was involved with Nemesis, perhaps, not because he was in essence a violent man but because he had a violent antipathy, like most Arabs, to the West, and in this operation the West was probably the target.'

  'Why didn't Monsieur Klaus,' Ibrahimi said at last, 'permit you to use the telephone?'

  'He didn't trust me.'

  'Why should I trust you?'

  'You don't have to.'

  'You would agree to speak to your contact in French?'

  'Of course. And we can leave the receiver on the console and I'll use the microphone.' Doing it like that, he could listen in to London.

  I waited, and through the windscreen watched a light aircraft making a turn on its way in to Dar-el-Beida, the top of its wings flashing silver as it caught the moonlight.

  7:02 on the clock. We were running it terribly close, but I couldn't hurry him, Ibrahimi.

  Then he said: 'You may use the telephone.'

  'May the wisdom of Islam be praised.' The console was between the two jump seats and I told the guards in German, 'I'm going to make a call. Don't get excited.'

  As I leaned towards them to touch out the number they went for their guns at much the same speed as a striking snake and held them against their thighs with their fingers inside the trigger guards, a pair of Walther PPK.22s, all right at close range but not man-stoppers. The number I touched out belonged to the signals link unit in London that we use if we're being watched: it's untraceable even by British Government agencies.

  There was quite a bit of crackle going on, possibly because we were near a major airport. 7:03 on the clock. Then the ringing tone began and someone picked up almost at once.

  'Hello?