Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 15: NIGHTFALL

'So who was firing on you?'

She was splicing a rope, making a loop-end, sitting on a box; she had a pair of khaki shorts on, nothing else, letting her back heal; all she'd asked me to do was throw sea-water over the abrasions.

'I don't know,' I said.

'I saw the whole thing. The fire and everything.' She worked at the rope. 'Did you think I'd set you up, Richard?'

'Why should I?'

'You were so wary of me, that day, is what I mean. So untrusting.' With a brief glance at me, 'But then I suppose you're wary of everyone, in your business, whatever that is.' Her tone changed, became more formal. 'There's nothing you want to tell me, and I understand that, but I need to know enough about last night, the boat crash, to satisfy myself that I'm not an accessory after the fact or concealing evidence or harbouring a criminal. I've got a good record and I work for the Miami police whenever they can use an extra diver, so I want to make sure I'm not getting involved in anything illegal. You've shown me your Foreign Office card but you can get those printed by some backstreet forger if you know where to find one.'

There were two steps down into the cabin and we were sitting at the forward end, out of sight from the sea. She knew about the surveillance: she'd seen the field glasses too.

The head of the Mafia,' I said, 'has put out a contract on me. Hence the shooting on the quay and hence my boat trip last night.' I told her about it. 'Hence also the surveillance they've put on us again. I want you to know,' leaning forward, 'that as soon as I'm taken off this boat I shall keep well out of your way.'

She looked up. 'Why?'

'Because it puts you at risk.'

'I know that. But I want to see you again.'

'One day.'

'Look, I'm hardly a tender blushing rose. I know Luigi Toufexis. I've met him. I did -'

'He's the Mafia chief?'

'Yes. I did a bit of undercover work for the police here once, got involved by accident and made myself useful. Toufexis is deadly, but you don't need telling that. Look, I pick up quite a bit of scuttlebut in my job – I know most of the boat owners and some of the Coastguard crews.' She looked down, making another splice. 'And the rumour that started going around a couple of days ago is that you're an international cocaine dealer working under UK Government cover and you came here to put Toufexis out of business. Hence, as you say, the contract.' She looked up to catch my expression. Wasn't any.

What she'd told me fell right into place: it had Proctor's signature on it. He wanted me blown away and he'd picked the most powerful weapon in Miami to do it with. Logical Bureau procedure.

'Is it true?' Kim asked me.

'No. George Proctor put that story out to bring Toufexis down on me.'

'You know that?'

'I know Proctor.' He would have preferred to make the kill personally, as a matter of honour, but he was obviously too occupied with other things. 'Does he use cocaine?'

'Yes. Or he did when I knew him.'

That fell into place too. Proctor had been known for his integrity, and that was why Croder was concerned about his lapses in signals to London. And he wasn't a man to blow his mind on cocaine just for kicks, so it must have been a response to his increasing frustration: the bullet near the heart had left him unusable as a shadow executive and he'd felt out of it, a has-been, felt emasculated, and the coke had given him back the strength-of-ten-men feeling, the grand illusion.

'Was he subject,' I asked Kim, 'to illusions of grandeur?'

'Sometimes. He told me once that he could run for the presidency if he weren't a foreigner.'

For the presidency. Fell into place again: he'd been exposed to subliminal influence and knew enough about Senator Mathieson Judd to imagine himself in Judd's position as a presidential candidate.

'Tell me about this man Judd, will you?'

Her mouth came open and for a moment she seemed disoriented; then she said without hesitation, 'Judd is not to be underestimated. He's a statesman with a world view that we haven't seen since Nixon, and he's not a megalomaniac. He's got to get into the White House because he's the only man in this country who can give it a new direction…'

My own thoughts dipped away and her voice sounded fainter; then I surfaced to the full light of consciousness and knew without any question that there hadn't been any time lapse: I hadn't missed anything she'd been saying.

'… It's not just the Americans who are concerned, this time – the whole world's involved, and much more than usual when there's a change of administration here. I very much hope the Thatcher government realises what we've got in Mathieson Judd, because the outcome of this election's going to have a major effect on the UK.'

It was word perfect: I could hear the echo of my own voice in my head. 'His understanding of the internecine struggle for power inside the Kremlin is infinitely deeper than we've seen before in any US president, thanks partly to the lifting of the veil by glasnost, sure, but Judd isn't missing a trick.'

She stopped, and in a moment looked down and pulled another strand into the splice. The swell lifted the boat again and I leaned lower, sighting along the stern rail. The yacht was still at the same distance. I couldn't see the light on the lenses this time.

'Go on,' I said.

She looked up. 'What?'

Tell me more about Judd.'

'That's all I know.'

A point, then, for the debriefing: Kim Harvester had come under the subliminal influence only in Proctor's flat, and not for very long. We could assume there was no radionic device on board the tug. She was not therefore a target, like Proctor. My own exposure had been different: I'd picked up some background material on Judd and also picked up instructions, which hadn't necessarily been for me.

The swell lifted us again and I checked the sailing yacht. It hadn't moved. It was nearly sundown, and I said, 'Are you heading back to port after they've taken me off?'

'Yes. I've got three morning lessons, the first one at six.'

'Is this boat faster than that one over there?'

'Quietly she said, 'I can look after myself, Richard.'

'Do you keep a gun on board?'

'Of course.' She dropped the spliced rope and leaned back, stretching, her slight breasts touched by the light of the setting sun. 'It's rather nice,' she said. 'You know I've played about with bombs and done some undercover work against the Mafia and you've seen what I do with sharks, but you still seem to think of me as a woman, and in need of protection. I like that.'

'Dates me, I suppose.'

'No. Becomes you.'

'We're going to Nassau,' Ferris said, 'to meet Monck and a few other people.'

He was watching me steadily with his pale champagne-coloured eyes, watching for nerves, fatigue, signs of disorientation. I'd told him I'd been in that wreckage down there. We'd seen the Mafia boat hanging from a crane at the quayside when we'd taken off.

Toufexis would assume I'd been killed with the others because no one had seen me come ashore, but it was risky to rely on that because of the surveillance they'd mounted on the tug out there: I could have been recognised. I'd never seen such tight security and for once I was glad of it. Two of the Bureau people had picked me up at sea in a converted motor torpedo boat at nightfall and got me from the harbour to the airport in a short-bodied limo with tinted windows and brought it across the tarmac and right up to the Cessna 500 Citation and I didn't see Ferris until I went aboard.

'When did you eat last?'

'A couple of hours ago.'

'Sleep?'

'I caught up.'

'Injuries?'

'Minor.'

'Morale?'

'Very good.'

Because I'd got the diary from Nicko's wallet, and it could give us access to Proctor. I gave it to Ferris and he began peeling the pages apart: it had got soaked and dried again.

'A Mafia type used it when he phoned Proctor.'

'He got the number from it? Proctor's?'

'Or a number where Proctor was, at the time.'

He went through the pages, taking care. Some of the ink had run. Light spread against the cabin roof as we banked over the city's brilliance.

'G.R.P.,' Ferris said, and snapped his belt open and got out of his seat.

'Are you going to use the phone?' I asked him.

'Yes.'

'Then do me a favour. I want some protection for Kim Harvester – can you manage that? Two men?'

'When?'

He didn't ask why, because that could wait. And he didn't cavil. It would mean diverting the services of two men in shifts round the clock and London would want a very good reason indeed and Ferris knew that and he'd have to take the responsibility, and this was one of the things I liked about him: he trusted the man he was running and he didn't ask questions. That little bastard Loman would have wanted forms in triplicate sent from London with a ten-sheet questionnaire and a request for notarisation and God knew how I could ever persuade him to push all that lot past his sphincter muscles.

'As soon as you can arrange it,' I told Ferris.

'Two men, taking shifts?'

'Yes. And they'll need a boat available. Could they use the MTB?'

'Yes.'

'She's bringing the tug in to port early tonight; she would have started back as soon as I was taken off. Berth 19, at the place where they shot me up. Decent of you.'

He went forward into the cockpit and I loosened the laces of my shoes because they'd shrunk a bit when they'd dried out and I'd have to get another pair as soon as I could, because if your feet aren't absolutely comfortable it can take the edge off your speed at a run and that can be fatal if you're pushing things.

Ferris came back. 'I didn't phone that number direct. I'm having it checked for the address.'

'The odds are,' I said, 'that it's 1330 Riverside.'

'It could be anywhere.'

Point taken. The executive tends to get tunnel vision the deeper he goes into the mission, while his director in the field can keep a more open perspective and see things the shadow can miss.

'I haven't,' I said in a moment, 'picked up any more instructions.'

I'd seen it in his eyes when I'd mentioned Riverside. He didn't look relieved. He didn't necessarily believe me. I could have had further subliminal instructions piped into me with an injunction to keep them secret.

He didn't say anything.

'I'm fairly certain,' I told him, 'that there's nothing electronic on board Harvester's boat. She didn't have any more to say about Mathieson Judd; I checked her for that and she just gave me a repetition of what she'd given me before.' He pulled out a mini-recorder and pressed a button. Debriefing had started. 'So she'd picked up that bit at Proctor's – it was the same thing I'd picked up myself when I went there that night. The reason I want her protected is that they're still surveilling the boat and they might make a snatch and force her to give them all the information she'd got about me. None of it's vital but I don't want her to go through interrogation at the hands of people like that.'

In a moment he said without looking at me, 'What's the personal relationship at this point between you and Harvester?'

'None of your bloody business.'

He hesitated a fraction and then pressed rewind and play and got the tape back to hands of people like that and reset for record.

'You ought to know I don't let personal relationships cloud my judgement during a mission.'

'Except for the man you wiped out in the Underground three -'

'That wasn't during a mission. Look -' I hitched round in my seat to face him – 'if you want to make an issue of my relationship with -'

'I don't,' he said, and his eyes stopped me dead.

'What time do we get in?' Making bloody conversation, you notice, to bring the tension down. What annoyed me was that you can't ever win a point with this man. The way I'd reacted to his question about Harvester had told him precisely what he wanted to know.

'Seven,' he said, 'give or take a few minutes.' In the same tone, 'How close did you come to buying it, in the Mafia boat?'

'Oh for Christ's sake, I got my nerve back hours ago.'

Easy, now. You see, my good friend, what I mean? He'd got his answer. I had not got my nerve back hours ago, despite Kim's tender ministrations.

'Do you feel like a little more debriefing?'

'Of course.'

He pressed for record again and I told him about the execution thing on the Mafia boat, naming names and getting the timing right as close as I could remember.

This woman Monique,' Ferris said at last. 'What about her?'

'I don't know. She was with Proctor that night when I went to his place but we didn't say anything more than hello and goodbye – he made it clear he wanted to be alone for the meeting. But on the quay last night she did her best to convince Nicko he'd got the wrong man. Did her very best.'

'Check on the woman Monique,' Ferris said into the mike. To me: 'So you came out of it with the diary. Anything else?'

'My life.' Bridling again, quick to anger.

'It's well understood,' he said courteously, 'that the diary could locate Proctor for us. It's understood that even if you'd brought nothing out of the incident, the life of the executive for Barracuda is of inestimable value. We -'

'You've got Purdom,' I said, 'standing by.' Came out with it very fast and the tone was bitter and the instant it was over I was appalled, because the bloody thing was still running and there was the loud, clear and irretractable record of my hitherto hidden fear: that Purdom had been brought in to follow the mission in the background in case I bought it and he had to take over.

Sweating a little, the nerves heating the blood, debriefing, you see, is not always easy; they'll dig right down into your soul and drag it into the sour light of inspection.

Ferris said quietly, the expression in his amber eyes guileless and to be trusted, 'If Purdom had been down as the executive for Barracuda, I would have refused it, and if he is ever obliged to take over, I would ask London to replace me as the director in the field.'