Quiller Bamboo

Chapter 1: Hyde

It was 1:59 a.m., when the telephone woke me and I rolled over and answered it and Tilson said they wanted me there right away and I told him no, it was too soon.

The line went silent and then Tilson came back on again — I suppose he'd turned away to talk to someone.

'Fully urgent,' he said.

The raw chill of a November fog came drifting through the open window, and I could hear a taxi throttling up along Knightsbridge in the distance.

'I've only been back ten days,' I said.

Tilson's not often starchy but he said, 'I think you know what fully urgent means,' and rang off, so I got up and spent five minutes in the bathroom and went down to the car with my teeth clean but the stubble still there and brought the Aston up to a steady fifty along Piccadilly and went through the red when there was nothing coming and picked up a panda near the Ritz: he closed in and got his lights flashing but I didn't take any notice and he dropped back as he got the call from the dispatcher — Tilson had covered me as I knew he would, because 'fully urgent' means that everyone's got to move.

The panda took up escort station behind me as far as Whitehall and then peeled off when I got to the building and saw Holmes manning the door.

'Mr Hyde's office,' he said and got me into the lift.

'What's it about?'

'Not absolutely sure. He wants you at the Foreign Office.'

'So what am I doing here?'

'Briefing, clearance.'

'I've only just got back. I told Tilson.'

'Now you can tell Mr Hyde.'

We got out of the lift and went along the corridor with Holmes looking quiet and nervy, so I didn't ask him anything else. There were a lot of phones ringing behind the closed doors and Diane came out of Signals and darted into Codes and Cyphers with some papers in her hand, dropping a sheet and picking it up and not even seeing us as she went in there.

Someone else came out of the signals room and I heard a lot of beeping going on, more than usual at this time of night.

Holmes turned his head. 'How much sleep have you had?'

'Few hours.'

'Look in on me later if you want to. I've got to put a fire out in here.'

He went into Signals and I kept on going. Not strictly a fire: someone had come unstuck in the field, Beirut, Sri Lanka, Bogota, you name it, and he was lighting up his mission board for help.

Tilson was alone in Hyde's office, talking on one of the phones; by the look of him they'd dragged him out of bed too. I felt the adrenaline flushing the skin because I hadn't seen this kind of panic at the Bureau for months, but I was not going out again after only ten days, and they couldn't insist. Tilson nodded for me to have a chair but I stayed on my feet and went across to the window and looked at the street three stories below, deserted in the lamplight.

'I don't know,' Tilson said on the phone, 'it's only just come up. Quiller's here now, you should know; better tell Mr Shepley.'

I looked up at the reflection of Tilson's bland lopsided face in the window. In this place Shepley was another name for God.

'Do you want him briefed and cleared first, or is he to go along to the FO right away?'

I didn't really mind what the answer was, since I was going back to bed in any case. I was technically at rest, which meant I'd got another twenty-one days before they could sign me up again and send me out, and I was going to spend at least a week at Norfolk wallowing in the luxury of sauna baths and Swedish massage and meditation to bring the nerves down to their normal pitch, plus a bit of refresher training with Kimura-sensei in the dojo and some close combat work to get the reflexes back in tune.

They're holding a board open,' Tilson said on the phone, 'and they've brought Dawson in from Paris — he knows the kind of signals we're liable to get from Hong Kong.'

No way. Not Hong Kong. Norfolk. There was a drunk down there in the street, tottering with tremendous care along the pavement, holding on to the railings for a bit and then shoving off again.

Tilson cupped the phone and said, 'Are you still under any kind of treatment?'

'Yes.'

'What for?'

'Shark bite.'

'What's your condition?'

'Look,' I said, 'we've got to talk.'

Tilson took his hand away from the mouthpiece. 'Yes, but I'll tell him the situation, or leave it to Mr Hyde.'

The drunk was on a course forty-five degrees in error, and when his foot slipped off the curb he went down like a felled tree and lay with his head in the gutter.

'No,' Tilson said, 'it began as a simple request for asylum.'

I went across to the desk and picked up one of the other phones and pressed 9 and got the dial tone and pressed 999 and told them. Someone looked in at the door and Tilson shook his head and they went out again.

'I don't frankly know. We got it from MI6. They said they don't want to touch it.'

'It's too far away,' I said into the phone, 'to see if he's bleeding, but he's going to get his head run over if he stays where he is.'

Another phone started ringing and Tilson picked it up. 'He's not here.'

'Fifty yards north of the Cenotaph,' I said.

'Well, let me deal with what's going on at this end and then I'll get back to you, or someone will.' Tilson put the phone down.

'A minute ago,' I said. 'My pleasure.'

'Who's that?' Tilson asked me.

'Drunk down there, just reporting it.'

His eyes took on a stare. 'Down where?"

'The thing is,' I told him, 'I got back precisely ten days ago and my nerves feel like barbed wire and the dressings are still being changed every day. Shall I spell that?'

Tilson leaned back in the chair and levelled his eyes.

'I quite understand. But you don't even want to know the score?' And he waited.

In a minute I said, 'You really are a bastard.'

We could hear a siren cut in and die away again as a police car came around Parliament Square into Whitehall, heading for the Cenotaph.

'I can't tell you much,' Tilson said, 'because they slapped a your-ears-only on this thing the minute it started coming in, but you're not the only one they got out of bed and Mr Shepley himself has been alerted, so it's just conceivable that if they're going to pick you as the shadow executive you won't let the odd shark bite get in the way.'

'It's the nerves,' I said, 'more than that.' In an ideal world you could come off a mission and get a few nights' sleep and drink lots of Sanatogen and see Deirdre or someone and report back for work, but the Caribbean thing had been very busy and the whole organism still felt tender. 'It's Hong Kong, is it?'

'That area.'

'Who's available for the DIF?' If they could give me a really first-class director in the field it could make a difference.

'I'd have to check on that. But if you-' He broke off as the door opened again and Hyde came in.

'Did they alert Mr Shepley?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Is he on his way?'

'He just said he'd monitor his phone.'

'All right.' Hyde gave me a nod and stood for a minute looking around him at nothing at all, his large head tilted back and his tongue poking at his cheek, his big hands hanging by his sides and his feet splayed a little to support his weight. He didn't react when a phone rang and Tilson took it and told them he wanted priority calls only from now on and put the receiver back.

Hyde was in a dinner jacket; I suppose they'd beeped him at a nightclub or somewhere. He went on looking around him while he thought things over, then he brought his head down and told Tilson, 'This is where the focus is, until we can open up the board in there. Can you handle it?'

Tilson said yes and Hyde turned to look at me. 'You're resting, they said.'

'Technically.'

'Technically. What kind of shape are you in?'

'Not bad.'

'Not good?'

'It depends on what I'd have to do.'

He left a dead stare on me, miles away, and then his eyes focused again. 'All I know,' he said slowly, 'or all I can tell you at this stage, because there's a blackout on, is that it's Far East and I'm running it and I want you in the field.' There were beads of sweat on his forehead where the hair had thinned back; they always turned up the heating in this bloody place in the wintertime, but it wasn't that. This thing had obviously been dropped into Hyde's lap without any warning and he was trying to size it up. 'As far as I know,' he said, 'you wouldn't be going into anything terribly active in the opening phase, but' — his huge shoulders in a shrug — 'nothing's ever predictable. I want you for this one very much, but I do not want you to go into the field if you don't feel ready for it.'

I thought about it, because if I made a mistake at this stage it could be disastrous. 'I'll have to know a bit more; then I can made a decision. Isn't there anyone else available?'

'It's not quite that, you see. There's no one else, in my opinion, who could do this one better than you. And you know the territory, I believe.'

'Some of it. I've been to-'

Tilson,' Hyde said, 'for God's sake tell them to turn the thermostats down to something reasonable. Say seventy.' He swung his head back to me. 'Sorry. You've been to — ?'

'Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, but that's all.'

'Not Beijing?'

'No.'

'Seventy,' Tilson was saying on the phone.

'Do you have any Chinese?'

'No.'

His head tilted back again like a well-balanced boulder and he stared at the ceiling for a bit.

'Mr Hyde's personal request.'

He'd never run me, Hyde, but I knew that people liked him as a control. He'd run Fielding in Malaya and Parkes in Hungary and they both said he was good, knew his signals and support sources better than anyone and knew how to keep things going when there didn't seem to be a hope in hell of completing the mission. And he'd brought that bloody idiot Bates back alive across the border near Chernovtsy into Romania after he'd botched his signals and blown his escape route. We tend to appreciate a control like that.

'You are still the one I want,' he said as his head came down again to look at me, 'whether you have Chinese or not. It won't, I think, be crucial.' To Tilson: 'Are they going to do it?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Like a Turkish bath in here. Get Holmes on the line for me, will you?'

'He's in Signals,' I said.

'Get him in Signals for me, then, and ask him where the hell they are and why they haven't kept me informed.'

'Those people?'

'Those people.'

Your-ears-only.

'There are only two others available for this one,' Hyde told me, 'and I don't much care for either of them. I want someone I can rely on when it comes to the crunch. Not,' he said with his stare fixing me, 'that you yourself are all that angelic to deal with, by repute.'

'I don't suffer fools gladly.'

'You have a tendency to bitch about accepting a new mission, so they say, but you seem to be in a fairly reasonable state of mind at the moment, considering you're meant to be at rest."

I suppose that was true, and it surprised me a bit because they'd dragged me out of bed and they didn't think a shark bite was any more interesting than a chilblain and here was a top control trying to con me into the field, there's no one else, in my opinion, who could do this one better than you, so forth, and the whole thing was a wonderful excuse for me to kick the door down and bite the rug and threaten all manner of mayhem, but I wasn't doing that. I suppose it was the moth-and-the-flame thing.

'I'm meant to be at rest, yes, but on the other hand Tilson said it was fully urgent and the signals room sounded like an electric organ when I passed it just now, and it's got me interested.'

I was the moth.

In a moment he said slowly, 'This mission has, shall we say, potentially major dimensions.'

And that was the flame.

'Sticks out a mile,' I said.

I was unaware of the pulse in the carotid sinus, and that was normal at a time like this; but the psyche is more subtle than the cardiovascular system and I didn't know whether the elevated pulse was because of excitement or fear.

'Holmes,' Tilson said, 'has asked the switchboard to put their call through to his own office, to yours, and to Mr Croder in Signals.'

Hyde prodded his tongue into his cheek and in a moment said, 'And Mr Shepley is monitoring?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Very well. I think,' he said, turning to me again, 'I'm going to do something rather nasty. I can't, you see, tell you anything useful about this one until and unless you have agreed to do it.' Watching me carefully.

'Oh for Christ's sake — you want me to go in blind?'

Dipping his head, 'Not quite. To go in under whatever conditions you care to name, provided of course I can meet them.'

The pulse went up again by a few more beats, and the bloodstream became palpable, like a quiet fire coursing through the veins, not unpleasant. Not much more than an hour ago I'd been asleep in bed, the sores and the spectres of the last mission still lingering but not offering any threat: I'd been safe; and now I was standing in this room with the choice of going or being safe for a little time longer, at least a few weeks, or letting these people pitch me headlong into the field again, of signing that form, the next-of-kin thing, without even knowing what I was taking on. I could tell the difference, now, between excitement and fear.

I was afraid. But there burned the flame, bright and beckoning. There are various forms, as I'm sure you know, of madness.

But there was still a chance. Conditions, Hyde had said.

'You would be my control, at the board?'

'Yes.' His bright stare rested on me.

'No support in the field unless I ask for it.'

'We can do that.'

'In terms of my being expendable-' I said, and stopped right there. I'd tried this once with Shepley and he'd refused. It's something you don't have to sign your name to, but it's implicit in your general terms of service: if you're out there in a red sector and you're blown and there's nothing you can do, London will try to get you out, but if it hasn't got the manpower or the firepower or it can't raise support or send specialists in or if there's a risk to the Bureau, to the mission, then they'll leave you there, crouched against a wall or sprawled on a rooftop right in the line of fire or trapped in a building with every door covered, wherever you are they will leave you there, and all you owe them, if there's time to pay, is to pop the capsule and protect the Sacred Bull, the Bureau, and go in silence and in peace. In terms of our being expendable, there is nothing we can ask. So I told Hyde, 'Ignore that.'

'Ignored.'

Conditions.

'I pick my own DIF.'

'There aren't very many,' he said, 'available.'

'Ferris?'

'We sent him out to Tehran," Hyde said, 'straight from your debriefing on Barracuda.'

'Something major?'

'We wouldn't send Ferris out to wash the dishes.' Perhaps he thought it sounded discourteous, so he said, 'We reserve people like Ferris for people like you.'

'Fane?'

A flash of surprise came into the stare. Fane had betrayed me once, but I'd had the edge and I'd survived, and he was no longer a danger: you're perfectly safe with someone you know you can't trust.

'Fane is down with the flu,' Hyde said.

'Pepperidge?'

'Is available.'

I looked at Tilson. 'Is he in London?'

'Yes.'

'Then I'll take him, if he's willing. He's fluent in Chinese and the dialects.'

'Very well.'

'Do we need to get him here tonight?'

'No. We needed you here because you are the key. If you so choose.'

'If we can't get Pepperidge, who else is available?'

'No one,' Tilson said from across the desk, 'at your level.'

Hyde: 'If necessary, Mr Croder would direct you in the field.'

Croder. He was Chief of Signals. I was beginning to feel the size of this thing.

One of the phones rang and Tilson took it and said all right and rang off and looked up at Hyde. 'They're on their way over there now.'

Hyde angled his watch to the light. 'Very well.' He turned to me again. 'Have you any further conditions?'

Silence in the room.

We can always refuse a mission. It can be in a locale too far away for our liking, or too hot, too cold, too hostile, too dangerous. Or we can simply be too tired, too exhausted after the last time out; or we can feel the tug of intuition not to take it, this one, not to risk it. We grow old, in this trade, before our time; we grow canny, cunning, cynical, steeped in subterfuge, versed in stealth.

We grow obstinate, difficult; we grow intractable. And we grow afraid.

Their eyes on me, Tilson's, Hyde's, in the lamplight, in the silence of the room.

'No,' I said, 'there are no further conditions.'

Hyde broke his stare. 'You accept the mission?'

'Yes.'

'Then we must be going,' he said. 'We're to meet these people at the Foreign Office as soon as we can get there. Did you come in your car?'

'Yes.'

'Will you take me there?'

'Of course.'

'Taxis are so laggardly. Tilson, will you set everything up? I'll brief Quiller as soon as we're back, then you can put him through Clearance.'

On our way down Whitehall in the car, Hyde sat with his bulk hunched against the passenger door, watching the road and sometimes watching me as he talked.

'Go right here.' I turned into Victoria Street. 'Keep going,' he said.

'Not the Foreign Office?'

'We just said the Foreign Office, but actually no. Too many moles. This matter, you see, is rather important, and we don't want people listening. Since you are now committed, I can give you the whole thing in a nutshell. If all goes to plan, we should be able to overthrow the Communist regime in Beijing and establish a democratic government within a matter of days.'