Northlight

1 RAIN

AT the intersection from Sloane Street into Knights-bridge I put on speed when the lights changed to amber but it was a mistake because the flashing began in the mirror right away and I pulled into the curb and waited with the engine still running. I'd known the police car was behind me since I'd come through Sloane Square but I didn't think they'd make a fuss about jumping the lights on a filthy night like this; there'd been a freezing rain coming down since late afternoon and the streets were black and silver now under the lamps, with reflections across the surface and the gutters beginning to stream.

I let the window down and got out my driving licence to save time. In my opinion, sir, you could have pulled up safely enough at the traffic lights when they changed to amber, and so forth. It was a temptation to show him my bureau card and drive on again without having to go through all the bullshit but it's strictly against the rules if there's no actual emergency.

His face came into the window gap, with rain dripping from his cap peak.

'May I see your driving licence, please?'

I gave it to him, and he checked it.

'Thank you, Mr Gage. I just wanted to be sure who you were.' He handed it back. 'They'd like you to phone in, as soon as possible.'

Nothing to do with the lights.

'All right.' I put the licence away and got into gear. I'd switched off the phone in the car a couple of days ago and started using the Ansafone monitor in my flat, because at this stage — three or four weeks after you're back from the last mission — they start getting fidgety.

'They said it was urgent,' the policeman said insistently, his face still in the window gap.

I knew that. I'd been mobile for the last ninety minutes and when they couldn't get through they hadn't just given up: they'd phoned the Yard and asked for an immediate all-points-bulletin by radio with my description and number plate — Black Jensen Interceptor with cellular antenna and bunched spotlights, BBT1872 — and a request to pick me up on sight and tell me to phone base.

I slipped the gears into neutral again and switched the phone on, because there was nothing else I could do and I knew that. We sometimes play with the idea of goofing off somewhere and not answering the phone, but it's like denying the voice of God and bringing down a whole bloody mountainside of fire and brimstone.

'You can stay here, sir, while you call in. We'll look after you.' The lights were still flashing in the mirror.

'Fair enough.'

His face vanished, and I touched out QU-1 and waited.

'Were you switched off?' a voice came.

'Yes.'

There was a short silence. He was the little shit at the operations switchboard, with enough experience to know that I'd broken the rules but not enough rank to tell me.

'Hold on,' he said.

I waited again.

'Quiller?'

'Yes.'

'We want you to make an immediate rendezvous.'

It sounded like Trench this time: cool, impersonal, the tone a shade touchy because I'd been difficult to contact.

'I can't do that.'

He said carefully: 'This is fully urgent.'

'I'm not on standby, you know that. I've got to meet someone at the airport and I'm already running late.'

'This is from Main Control,' Trench said, and left it at that.

Slight skin reaction: gooseflesh. When you've got your phone switched off and they still tell the police to pick you up and then tell you the instructions are coming direct from Main Control it's not because they can't find where you put the fruit gums.

'Why do they want me,' I asked him, 'particularly?'

'It was Mr Croder who told me to find you.'

Cold air was coming through the window, and I closed it. I don't like the cold. Through the windscreen the lights of the police car were sending an intermittent rainbow of reflections across the surface of the road, blue and white…flash-flash-flash…blue, and bone white…flash-flash-flash…while my skin reacted again to the nerves. I took a slow breath to steady them.

'Is this the submarine thing?'

'I don't know,' Trench said. There'd been nothing else in the headlines for the last four days. Of course he knew. He was high in the Control echelon, with powers to brief.

'Trench,' I told him, 'I've got to meet this man at the airport. He's a sixth dan coming in from Tokyo and it's my personal responsibility to escort him to the dojo. When I've done that, I'll phone you.'

'You'll have to get someone else to meet him.'

'There's no time. The dojo's south of the Thames, and they'd never reach the airport by nine-fifteen.'

'He must take a taxi, then.'

'We don't leave this man to get his own transport. This is Yamada.'

In a moment Trench said thinly, 'I'd rather not have to ask Mr Croder to come on the line. It shouldn't be necessary.'

The sound of the engine suddenly seemed louder and the lights in the wet street brighter. 'Listen, Trench, I'm not officially on standby and I'm not due to report back for operations until next week and you know that, so you've got a bloody nerve to put out a tracer on me and expect me to drop everything and give up the rest of the evening just because Croder's panicking all over the ops room. Tell him from me that as soon as I've met Yamada at the airport I'll-'

'Wait a minute.'

Silence again, while I tried to cool down. The Bureau is the sacred bull, and if you're in the shadow branch you're expected to make any sacrifice at any time its bloody disciples demand it of you, even unto death. But between missions you're technically allowed to unwind and lick your wounds and try to forget the frontiers and the searchlights and the cry of the dogs getting louder in the night and the thud of boots as the bastards come out of the van at the double with their guns drawn while you look for a doorway or an alley or a bit of wasteground where you can at least try zig-zagging flat out for dear life instead of just standing there with death already creeping into your body because you know that this time they won't let you go again, this time they want you badly and they're going to break you until you talk, until you scream, until you feel the slow surprise in the last remnant of conscious thought that it's happening this way, with the brains beaten out of the skull and the life draining out with the blood instead of the blessing of a cold clean shot from the distance to nail the spine to the dark and leave you hanging there with a shred of your honour still intact because you didn't talk, you didn't tell them, you kept the faith.

Faith in the sacred bull.

The Bureau.

'This is Mr Croder.'

'Good evening.'

'I realize I'm imposing on your free time, Quiller, but something rather urgent has come up.' His voice was heavy, measured and civil. 'It would really be very helpful if you could go along to No. 10 Downing Street with the greatest possible despatch. The PM is meeting some people there, and I'd like you to be present.'

I switched off the engine.

'In what capacity?'

'Quite unofficial. But I'd like you to hear what they're talking about.'

'The submarine.'

There was brief silence. 'Yes.'

The wipers had stopped when I'd switched the engine off, and I watched the rain making serpentine rivulets down the windscreen. We'd all known, of course, that the sub thing would send waves as far as London sooner or later.

'Are you offering me a mission?' I asked Croder.

'Not immediately.'

'When?'

'I'm afraid I can't tell you. There's quite a lot going on, as you can imagine, and things will need time to sort themselves out. But I really would be most grateful, Quiller, if you could do this for me.' He allowed a pause. 'As a personal favour.'

I owed the man nothing. He was chief of Main Control, the administrator, coordinator and organizer of any given number of shadow operations that might be going on at the same time. He was good at this. Before him, Strickland hadn't been: he was too wild, too ready to commit an executive to uncalculated risks, too inclined to influence the control who was actually running the mission. With Croder you felt safer; he saw us as chessmen, yes, to be pushed around; but he didn't push us blindly over the edge of the board, as Strickland had.

With Croder you could hope to live longer.

I glanced at the digital clock on the facia.

'Look,' I said, 'I'm running it close tonight. You'd have to get a police car to pick someone up at Heathrow for me and take him down to Streatham.'

'That can be arranged.'

'All right. His name is Yamada and he's coming through from Tokyo via Karachi on JAL Flight 287, ETA 9:15 at Heathrow, our time.' I didn't repeat anything because ingoing calls were automatically taped. 'I want him brought off the plane through the VIP lounge and cleared through customs and immigration without formalities. Take him to the Shotokan Karate Dojo in Gracefield Gardens, Streatham.'

If he said no, then he could send someone else along to No. 10.

'That too can be arranged.'

'You'll see to it personally?'

'Of course.'

'All right.'

I got out and walked back to the police car. 'I've got to get to Downing Street rather fast. Will you help me cut the corners?'

'Okay, sir.' The call to pick me up had come from the Yard and they must have given him my operational status. When it has to, the Bureau can request assistance from public services and get it so fast that you'll miss it if you blink. 'We'll proceed ahead of you,' he said.

By the time I got back behind the wheel and switched the engine on the police car had swung out and slowed in front of me with its lights still flashing and the siren starting up. I got into gear and we did a tight U-turn across Knightsbridge and went east with the rear end of the Interceptor waltzing a fraction as the tyres lost their grip on the wet surface and then found it again through the gears. They'd been using their radio, and before we reached Hyde Park Corner another police car had fallen in behind and was keeping station as the evening traffic slowed and pulled over to let us through.

We touched sixty in places and my nerves were settling down again. It's always like this when you catch the scent of a new mission; it's like the smell of smoke to an animal. But we don't have to go out again. We have to report to operations four weeks after debriefing from the last time out, but that's all: we're simply on standby again, available but not committed. And when they offer us something we can tell them we need another week or two, even another month or two, before we're ready to take on whatever they've got for us — and even then we can refuse if we don't like the look of it. It wouldn't work in any other way: it's our life on the line and we're not in the army, we're on our own once we're into the field and too far for our local control to help us.

This is the waiting time, between missions, when we've got a chance to look back and think about what we were doing the last time around, how close we came, how lucky we were to get back at all, whether or not we had the product they'd sent us to get: documents, tapes, maps or plans or diagrams or sometimes a defector for debriefing if we can bring him across alive, whatever it is that's going to give us an edge over the potential enemy when it comes to the push. And when we look back, we don't like it. We know we came too close to mucking it up and digging ourselves an idiot's grave in the rubble of some alien city with a bullet in the back or the wreckage of a car for a tombstone or the glass splinters of the capsule still in our mouth if we had a chance to use it.

So this is when the nerves start working on us, and they know that, the people in operations. They know that if they don't handle us with kid gloves they're going to lose an agent, not out there in the field but safe at home here in London, ready at any second to take offence, to read double meanings in whatever they say to us, to flare up at the slightest thing, at a tone of voice, like tonight when that bastard Trench tried to throw his weight around, I'd rather not have to ask Mr Croder to come on the line, as if he'd been talking to a bloody trainee down from Norfolk on his first bloody mission, as if. Slow down. This is just the waiting time, the worst time. I'd seen Bradley coming out of Clearance last week — he hadn't even got that far — with his face white and his hands flying all over the place for something to hang onto, some sort of spiritual lifeline, while he'd gone on shouting at them — You'll have to get someone else for this one, God damn your eyes, you'll have to get someone else. He'd been back only ten days from the Beirut thing and his nerves were still like a disco hall after what they'd done to him in the interrogation cell.

When you're that far gone, it's finis. They'll write you off the books and send you home with a final handshake, their eyes not quite meeting yours, and you'll end up pruning the roses and washing the Mini to pass the time before you can go along and pick up your pension cheque. Mother of God, don't let it ever happen to me: let them find me out there somewhere with my arms spreadeagled on a minefield and the earth still coming down and the stink of cordite on the air, not with a whimper, gentlemen, with a bang when it's got to come.

Slow. Slow down. This is the waiting time, that's all.

Take it easy. Go and see what's happening at No. 10. Then ask Croder what he's got lined up for you, because you've got to go out again some time, you know that.

We swung into Whitehall with the sirens still going, then slowed for the right hand turn into Downing Street, and when I pulled up at the curb I cut the ignition and looked at my spread fingers and saw they were steady, because the waiting was nearly over.