by Adam Hall
Quiller Barracuda
Adam Hall
In Miami, on the waterfront, a long-time agent has been turned. Quiller gets the call to find out why. It looks like a simple job.
But with Quiller, nothing is ever simple. That's because he digs. He finds a gigantic conspiracy, one of global importance, with nothing less than the future of the White House at stake!
"Tense, intelligent, harsh, surprising." (The New York Times)
Adam Hall
Quiller Barracuda
Book 14 in the Quiller series, 1990
Chapter 1: HUSH
'Then they started to -' Fisher began.
We waited.
He sat there like a schoolboy, legs together, head down.
I should have said no, I was busy or something. This wasn't my field.
It was very quiet. Tilson wasn't looking at me while we waited; he was looking at the ceiling, angled back on the chair with his thumbs hooked into his pockets. He didn't want to -
'Why the hell should I tell you?'
In a muted scream and we jerked our heads to look at Fisher and I said, 'You don't have to. We didn't -'
'You want to drag everything out of me -' near tears, his voice stifled, his knuckles white and spittle on his chin. Christ, what was he, twenty-two, twenty-three? 'You want me to go over the whole fucking thing for you -'
'No,' I said, 'we don't,' and I went over to him and sat on my haunches, so that I was lower and less threatening and he could concentrate on me and forget Tilson was in here, two against one. 'All we want to know,' I said, 'is how you feel now, now that it's over and you're back safe and sound. Just how you feel, that's all, about the future.'
The problem was that he wanted to know how we felt, and he didn't understand that it was totally beside the question. The question was: if you send out a man this age on his first mission in Beirut and they pull him into the camp and put a hundred and twenty volts through his testicles and keep him awake for six days until he breaks, what have you got when he finds a gap in the wire and gets a lift on a US army truck and comes back to London? Anything you can use again?
'We're not worrying -' Tilson began but I cut across him.
'You couldn't have told them anything important, and that's the -'
'I told them everything.'
'I know, but it wasn't critical and it doesn't concern us.' I didn't point out that you don't send a green executive into the field with anything in his head that's worth getting at. We'd got to save what was left of his pride.
He was sitting on his hands now, rocking on them, as if he'd just been bashed over the knuckles with a ruler, oh those schooldays, those bloody schooldays, they last you all your life, but his eyes weren't squeezed shut any more and he was looking at me with the patience of a trapped animal, waiting to know what I was going to do, kill him or let him go -
'Everything.' In a whisper.
'Most of us do,' I said.
Tilson had moved on his chair, making it creak, and I thought if he meant to start talking again I'd have to shut him up somehow. He'd caught me coming out of the Caff about half an hour ago:
Fisher had just got back from Beirut, in a bad way, would I mind giving a hand, so forth. Tilson had been moved up into Debriefing and I suppose he was competent, but he wasn't sure how to handle a wrecked schoolboy. I wasn't either, but I suppose he wanted someone who'd been through the same thing somewhere along the line, and now that he'd brought me into this thing I wanted to do it alone.
'That's not true,' Fisher said in another whisper.
'I've done it myself.' Not absolutely true, but it would help him.
'You?'
He thinks you're God, Tilson had told me on our way here. They need their mythic heroes, the young ones, the new ones, and we never tell them about the feet of clay bit because they crave belief, otherwise they'd never go out there.
'We're not expected,' I said, 'to be superhuman in this trade. We're expected to try holding out and you held out for a whole week, and on top of that you made your own escape and you got back here. We think that's -'
'You know what they did to me?'
'Yes, but that's -'
'Don't worry,' I heard Tilson say and I got onto my feet because Fisher was off the chair and it rocked back and hit the floor and he was standing with his face in his hands and shaking badly and a lot of what he was saying got lost in the sobbing… 'Told me… never see… mother again… light in my eyes… then they… wires all over me… kept screaming for them… stop but it went on and on… syringe with stuff in it… give me AIDS… something, do you know something? They could've eaten me.. .'
That bit was familiar because it's the feeling you get after a while when there's nothing more they can do to you: they're not human any more; they're just creatures with huge jaws and you go into the final phrase where you lose identity and you wait for them to swallow you up. The worst fear, the instructor had told me at Norfolk, is that of emasculation, and it had taken five missions before I found out that he was wrong: the worst fear is of annihilation, of being eaten, swallowed up.
He was still sobbing, Fisher, swaying on his feet with his face blotted out by his thin white hands, his hair sticking out, button off his cuff, his narrow shoulders hunched over the rest of his body to give it shelter. Someone tapped on the door and looked in and went out again, making a point of being quiet, and I glanced at Tilson once – he was just standing there miserably with his arms folded and I think he'd got the message: we'd have to let Fisher go through it all again because he still couldn't believe what they'd done to him out there, taken away his identity day after day until at last he was nothing but a piece of food. And if he could get over it, day after day and in front of other people, it would save him from the nightmare that could goad him into picking up a knife or wrenching a window open. But in any case he wouldn't be allowed to sleep without someone else in the room, perhaps for months. We'd lost Claypool like that, and Froom.
'What do you think?' Tilson was beside me, unsettled.
'He needs time.'
'Is this all right? What he's doing?'
'It's all he can do. He's got to get to the other side of what they did to him.'
'But I mean -' he thought about how to put it.
I said, 'You can't throw him out.'
'It won't be up to me.'
'Standing behind me… I could feel it… back of my head… kept pulling the trigger…"
Rocking and swaying: it might have looked as if we weren't even here, but that wasn't true – he remembered we were here all right; he needed us for his survival. This was the confessional we were listening to, the confessional and the statement for the defence and an appeal for the court's clemency, the whole thing coming out as fast as it could because if it stayed locked in there for much longer it was going to kill him.
'You won't get anything useful out of him,' I told Tilson, 'until he can face himself again. Could take weeks.'
'He sent in quite a bit of stuff before they got him, stuff we can use. I suppose,' he said, watching Fisher, 'we ought to have some kind of resident shrink, for people like this.'
'I've told Loman that till I'm sick. Policy is, if they can still stand up, send them out again, and if they fall down, throw them into the street. They've lost good people like that.'
'They're going to do it again,' Tilson said, didn't look at me.
I could feel anger quickening. 'What have they said?'
'Give him the rest of the day, and if he's no better, sign him out. He -'
'Shit. Who said that?'
'Mr Croder.'
'Quick,' I said and left it to Tilson because he was nearer the boy and he caught him halfway to the window and Fisher went mad, then, and Tilson
couldn't hold him so I went over to help and had to work on the median nerves, get them numb enough to stop him using his hands, and then I said, 'Listen, 'I'm taking you to my place and tonight we're going to get smashed out of our minds.'
'What time?'
'Eleven.'
'What does he want me for?'
'I don't know.'
I put the phone down and went along to the Caff and found Tewkes chatting up Daisy by the tea urn, reeking of that bloody cologne.
'Croder was looking for you,' he said.
'I know.'
'How's the lad?'
There isn't a grapevine in this place, it's more like a fast-burn fuse.
'Very good,' I told him. Not, however, in point of fact, very good at all but that was the message I wanted to disseminate throughout the whole of the Bureau. Fisher was better, yes, but he'd been born with a thin skin anyway without the Beirut thing, and if they put him through it again today they'd draw blood without even using their nails.
I'd got him smashed on vodka by midnight and he'd more or less surfaced at the Key Club during the early hours and didn't remember, for a minute or two, anything about Beirut, and it hadn't been the ego suppressing it – the tension was off at last and he was on the other side of what they'd done to him and that was where he was going to start living again. Then he messed up the carpet in the Jensen and said he was terribly sorry and I could have wept because he was so bloody young for this game, and yet so very good, from what I'd seen of the stuff he'd sent into Signals from his base out there – I'd asked Tilson for a look at it this morning.
He was still at my flat: I'd phoned Harry and asked him to come round and look after him. I told him that if anyone from the Bureau located him there he wasn't to report to the building – that was an order and I would take the responsibility. Tilson knew where he was, and might have leaked it.
'Mr Croder,' Tewkes said, 'yet.'
'Oh for Christ's sake shut up.'
It hadn't totally escaped me that when Croder sends for a shadow executive it's reasonable odds that he's got a mission lined up and that soon after eleven o'clock this morning I'd be taken off standby and put into operations and cleared and briefed and sent out to God knew where, and the prospect was touching the nerves.
'Cuppa, love?'
'Yes.' Red, chafed hands at the big tea urn, powdered wrinkles, what would we do without our Daisy, the gentle dispenser of the universal anodyne? 'How's the arthritis?' It had been pouring for days on end, October rain.
'Gives me gyp now and then. What about that poor young man, though?'
'He's fine now.' Keep on saying it, telling people. The Caff was the only place where we could talk without the gag on and Daisy was an information centre second only to Signals itself.
There was no one in here I wanted to talk to and I'd had enough of that bloody cologne and it was still only 10:45 so I went along and kicked Holmes' door open, not exactly, but I was a fraction quick with the handle and he noticed.
'What are they going to do,' I asked him, 'about Fisher?'
'Steady, old fruit. Take a pew.'
You can't rush Holmes. He keeps his cool, and that was why I'd come to see him. He was also in Signals and Mr Croder was his chief and he might have heard something definite.
'I've only got a few minutes,' I said.
'Yes, you're down to see Mr C, aren't you?' Steady eyes under heavy brows, watching me carefully. He'd felt the anger as soon as I'd come in here. 'I can't tell you anything,' he said, 'about Fisher. Sorry.'
I had to start using control, not a good sign. 'Have they been looking for him?'
'Yes. Would you like some tea?'
'Has Croder been looking for him?'
'Not specifically. Various people have been sort of popping their head in to ask if I knew where he was.'
'Do you?'
Tilson said you'd sort of taken the chap under your wing.' Eyes very serious now, concerned. 'That could be tricky.'
'They're going to waste him,' I said, not particularly to Holmes, just thinking aloud, not quite sure why I was letting this Fisher thing rankle, not sure I wasn't simply using it as a focus for other kinds of anger in me, other kinds of fear, not sure whether I was afraid for him or afraid for myself, drifting in the limbo that isolates us between missions, bringing loneliness, uncertainty, while you find yourself looking at the calendar, at the clock, killing time on the way to the countdown.
'I don't know,' Holmes was saying, 'if Mr C has got anything for you.'
'I didn't ask.'
'I thought you might.'
I would have, of course, and he knew that. Staring at me gravely from behind his neat, orderly desk, worried about me, silver-framed picture of a deceptively-pretty girl, other pictures on the wall, some nice Arabians by Chaille, some sketches, a Henry Moore, a Chinese watercolour, will I see them again?
'It'd be better,' Holmes said after a while, 'not to fight with Mr C. He's a bit upset today.'
His voice sounded faint, and I realised I'd slipped into alpha, and that I would have to get some control back. It had been 'It's been almost two months,' Holmes was saying. That's a long time.'
'Beginning to show?'
He moved a hand, placatingly – 'Not to most people. The thing is,' leaning across the desk, his tone quietly urgent, 'I'd be very careful with Mr Croder. If he's got a mission for you, and you're in this -' avoiding the word mood – 'frame of mind, you could lose it.'
'Or turn it down.'
We can do that. It's in the contract, because we don't take anything on that might find us, somewhere along the line, in a red sector where the odds against our getting out are not worth counting. They can't force us, in other words, to sign away our life.
'I don't think you'll turn anything down,' Holmes said. 'He wouldn't offer you anything less than interesting.'
I was half-listening to him, half-listening to the voices that whispered urgently in the dark of the spirit, the thin, whining voices of fright, alarm, paranoia. It wasn't anything new: since the last time out I'd been moving on a collision course with the next one, and it doesn't get any better.
He was waiting for me to say something, Holmes, sitting patiently at his desk, long fingers interlaced, his eyes attentive. Will I see him again, be here in this room again? That was the essence of what was going on, the sense of seeing things, doing things for the last time.
Pre-mission nerves, enough to make you sick. 'I don't know how I stand you,' I said, 'you and your bloody intuition.'
Sudden white smile, head on one side. 'You made the choice, come in here or not come in here. Lesser of evils, or am I being self-indulgent?'
Then the chrome-framed government-issue clock on the wall moved to the hour and I got up and tapped my fingers on his desk to make contact with it, with him, in case it was the last -
'God knows how you got a girl like that,' I told him, the one in the photograph, and went to the door and saw him, as I turned to go out, sitting there looking solemn again.
'Heed the gypsy,' he said.
'Do you know what you're asking?'
'Not very much.'
'But it's not even your concern.'
'Everything that happens here is my concern.'
'That gives you no right to meddle.'
'It gives me the right to a hearing -'
'Not at present. Later on, you -'
'But this can't wait, you know that.'
Heed the gypsy.
'It's for me to know whether it can wait.'
'I want to be told, that's all, what you're going to do with him.'
'It is not your concern.'
He swung away, his shadow moving across the wall, thrown by the bright green-shaded lamp on his desk, the curtains drawn against the rain outside, night before noon, typical of him, Croder, thin and sharp-shouldered like a predator busy in the dark, his black hair brushed close to his head as if by the force of a stoop, his black eyes buried in the bone and lost in shadow, his no
se cut by the sculptor's knife in a single stroke and jutting sharply, scenting carrion, a trifle, yes, a trifle exaggerated but it gives you the gist I hope, he's simply, shall we say, a man untouched by the humanities and therefore brilliant, admittedly, at his work, which is to bring his executives back in safety if he can manage it and throw them out if they don't match up to his own exacting standards and with no slightest thought of a second chance.
The thing is, I'd be very careful with Mr Croder.
A little too late for that.
He'd offered me a chair when I'd come in, how was I, so forth, the niceties, he's not an unmannered man, but I decided to get the Fisher thing over before he told me why he wanted to see me, told him I was worried and asked him if he'd let me look after the new recruit for a day or two, didn't, as you may have noticed, go down at all well.
'Look, I'm not talking about giving him charity. He did a good job out there -'
'And came to pieces the moment he got back – I tell you this is not a refuge for burnt-out apprentices.'
'That's not burn-out, it's delayed shock. I've been through it myself -'
'And so have I -' swinging back to face me with his head down and his eyes hooded – 'and so have I,' his artificial hand catching the light.
'Then you can understand -'
'But I did not go to pieces as soon as I came home.' Stood with his eyes on me, black, glittering, green-flecked with the reflection of the lamp.
'Look, they took away his identity but he'll get it back in time. The real -' '
'You will please -' '
'The real problem is guilt because he broke and spoke and he can't live with himself unless he's given a chance to atone. Send him to Norfolk for a couple of weeks, run him through the survival course and then run him through it again, tell them to flay him alive. He's desperate for punishment and until he gets it he won't be able to find his self-esteem and if you don't do it he'll do it on his own – he's tried the window trick already and he'll try it again. But if -' '
That is self-pity -' '
