Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 24: BOMB

It's all very well for them. I haven't had a woman in three weeks, they think we're bloody robots?

All day.

I haven't seen him, sir. He said he was going on deck.

We'd been here all day.

I asked him, 'How long will those batteries last?'

'Thirty-six hours. That's their normal endurance.'

They'd been running since midnight and it was now seven in the evening. They'd been running for nineteen hours. We'd got until noon tomorrow.

So the judge asks him, what makes you rob banks, then? And this guy says, that's where the money is.

Laughter. TV show.

The shivering hadn't stopped. I don't know if Parks had noticed. It felt like a fever, without the temperature, cold, if anything, the skin clammy. I'd had a row with Kim: she'd said, 'You've got to sign in at a hospital for a bit. Shock needs treatment. It's as important to treat shock as if you were bleeding to death. I know this, I've been trained and I've seen what happens if people neglect shock. It can kill.'

The worst of it was that she probably thought I was carrying on out of bravado, but that was not the case, it was not, my good friend, the case at all. I would have given a great deal to report to a hospital and flop out onto a bed with nice clean sheets and a gentle nurse to wipe my fevered brow and hold my hand, a very great deal. But this, if you remember, was the last chance I'd got of bringing home Barracuda, however thin, however desperate.

We'll talk about that when we meet. Apostolos doesn't want anything said before then. We need to keep open minds.

Apostolos Simitis.

The voices coming in to the recorder weren't always as intelligible as that. They were coming through a mass of unrelated and conflicting sounds – other voices, music, static, interference, coming in on six channels from the six transmitters, and Parks was doing what he could to keep them separate and edit them before they went onto the tapes. He was sitting like a spider in the middle of a dense array of equipment – amplifiers, modifiers, input balancers, audio monitors, with signal-strength needles swinging across the dials the whole time.

He'd started editing and recording the moment I'd placed each transmitter and pushed the contact under the rubber shield; by the time I'd reached here at three this morning he'd filled three sixty-minute tapes, with nothing much on them in the way of voices: most of the crew and passengers had been asleep.

'You all right, are you?' he asked me.

'I'm fine.'

He'd noticed the shivering, then, but of course that wasn't all: I must have looked like something out of a car crash when I'd got here. She'd said the blood loss wasn't critical but I'd need to have the dressings changed in twelve hours. That thing had ripped flesh off the whole of the upper arm and left the triceps exposed. 'I'm not a doctor,' she'd said, 'I could be up on criminal charges, practising medicine on you and not even reporting it.'

I don't think the shock was because of the wound; there was the lingering horror of having been out there with the huge dark shape of the vessel blotting out most of the surface overhead while those bloody things had come at me through the open expanse of water like the angels of death.

'More tea?'

Said yes.

He was looking peeky himself, hadn't slept since transmission had started nineteen hours ago, hadn't taken a break, because I'd told him we mustn't miss anything, mustn't miss a word.

'Don't fancy anything to eat?'

'No. Don't let me stop you.'

I didn't think I'd ever want to eat again; I was just this side of nausea, slumped here in the big lopsided armchair stinking of iodine and God knew what else. 'It's normally the dog's bed,' Parks had said, 'but I've put him in the kitchen.'

But you shouldn't have come here, darling. This is a terribly small ship. I told you, I'll come to your cabin whenever I can.

That had been in French. So far we'd heard English, French, German, Russian and Japanese coming in to the tapes. There were five women on board, three of them secretaries. We'd heard several people identified by name during conversations: Takao Sakomoto, Simitis, de Lafoix, Lord Joplyn, Abraham Levinski, Stylus von Brinkerhoff. We'd heard only the first names of the women, except for Madame St Raphael.

He said he'd cover that sort of thing at the meeting. I couldn't make him budge.

Parks was watching me, and I nodded. It was the third time we'd heard people mention a meeting.

'I wish they'd say when,' I told him.

'That's what we're after, is it? Some kind of meeting?'

'We're after anything we can get.'

'I see.'

His tone told me he thought I was playing it close, shutting him up, and that was true. Anything at all going onto the tapes from the Contessa was by its nature ultra-classified, except for the private conversations, and if the batteries held out long enough to give us the scheduled meeting we could be listening to material as vital as the briefing that Erica Cambridge had brought off the ship. It could give us the whole of Barracuda.

'If we get what I'm hoping for,' I said, 'they'll want you to come with me to London for special debriefing. Consider this stuff Ears Only for Bureau One, you know what I mean?'

'Crikey.' The kettle was whistling and he said, 'Look, could you -'

'Stay exactly where you are.' I got up and went over to the stool where he'd set up the makeshift canteen, and the ceiling came right down at an angle and I threw a hand out behind me and broke the fall and lay on the floor listening to the constant rush of static and voices, and Parks got off his stool at the console and I told him to sit down again and get on with what he was doing, we mustn't miss, floating in front of me, the canteen floating in front of me, miss a word, not a word.

Got up and tried again.

'You ought to have something to eat,' Parks said.

So I found some bread and made the tea and went back to the armchair. 'Bread?' I asked him.

'Not just now.' Sitting there like a leprechaun on his toadstool, face pinched with fatigue, eyes nickering as he monitored the signals, all I'd offered him was some bread, poor little bugger, as soon as I felt a bit better I'd go and find some eggs or something.

… He is to be eliminated.

But how can that be done? Toufexis is protecting him.

We own Toufexis. He will be given the task of eradicating crime throughout the United States, once the new order is established. He'll do as we tell him.

Interference came in and saturated the voices, then cleared a little.

… He's too dangerous now. We used him to work on the tapes for the selected commercials at the studios and that was fine, but then Apostolos brought him aboard here and gave him too much trust, in my opinion. He's now privy to very sensitive information on the whole project, and his behaviour is becoming a little irrational, as perhaps you've noticed. Brink agrees with me. He is to be allowed to go ashore once more, and Toufexis will be given instructions… This is… but no later than…

We were both crouching, Parks and I, watching the console, but static was coming in overwhelming bursts.

'Talking about Proctor?'

'It sounds like it,' I said.

Parks knew about him; Ferris had sent him in to search Proctor's flat for bugs the day after he'd cleared out and gone to ground. I wasn't surprised they'd decided to put him out of the way. The last time I'd talked to him he'd looked perilously near the brink, with his psyche undermined by cocaine and subliminal indoctrination, and by now he could be coming slowly apart.

… You brought me aboard as your mistress, Baptiste, not as your servant. I would like some sleep, if you'll be so kind… When I have… Otherwise…

Eight. Eight in the evening.

At nine Parks showed me how to adjust the volume and selector controls to keep the stuff channelled as it came in, and went into the kitchen and made us some eggs on toast and some coffee.

By midnight I was feeling stronger, and took over from Parks while he got an hour's sleep. The signals flow was down to a trickle now, mostly comprising private conversations and snatches of speech from the bridge.

I slept between two o'clock and six, and then went through the only tape that Parks said might interest me; but it wasn't anything to do with the project and there was only one reference to a meeting, with no time mentioned.

… And in that case you have my full authority to arrange the takeover. If they wish to contest our offer of three and a half billion US dollars, I'm prepared to listen to a counter offer, but the bottom line must be three and a quarter billion. I am calling Weiner today, to get his opinion…

Ten in the morning.

'Doesn't look too good,' Parks said.

I do wish people wouldn't state the obvious. Of course it didn't look too bloody good when we'd got two hours left, two hours before those bloody batteries ran out, did he think I didn't know the situation? Those bloody things coming at me with their jaws wide open and putting the fear of Christ in me and in the end what'd we got, nothing, nothing I could take to Ferris.

Eleven.

Eleven o'clock.

Most of it was useless. Talk of corporate infrastructures and aggressive trade policies, snatches of talk shows and dirty stories below deck, the imbecilic beat of heavy steel and the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Average on the financial services programmes, long discussions on the advisability or otherwise of asking the Vatican if it wanted limited participation in order to persuade the South American states to accept the proposed status quo without the inconvenience of rebellion.

Nothing I could use, no statement of aims, no commitment to illegal acts, no material on rigging the imminent elections, nothing on Mathieson Judd, nothing on the Moscow connection, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Noon.

Fifteen minutes later Parks said, 'The first one's starting to fade.' He was fiddling with a volume knob, watching a dial.

'Batteries?'

'Yes.'

'You can't amplify?'

'You'd just amplify all the slush as well.'

I let my eyes close, shutting out the glare between the slats of the blind. My arm had started throbbing, and I remembered she'd said I'd have to get the dressing changed in twelve hours. She'd given me some antibiotics but I hadn't swallowed them because I needed a clear head.

… Or not at all. Spain, of course, must be invited.

At twenty minutes past noon the next transmitter began fading and went out.

Limpets.

They were becoming no more than limpets out there, clinging to the hull of the motor yacht Contessa, where the shoals flickered silver in the underwater light and the anchor chain hung like a rope of black pearls.

… And let me reiterate the salient points for you, so that we can go over them later in more detail. The key agent is of course Gordon Schaffer…

The voice of Apostolos Simitis.

… We have persuaded Senator Judd that Schaffer is the best man, by far, to assume the post of his premier aide at the White House. It will be for Schaffer to install the radionic transmitters in the Oval Office itself, in order to bring President Judd under the continuous influence of our directives…

'Parks,' I said, 'stay with that. Don't lose that.'

'If the batteries go, there's nothing -'

'All right. All right.'

It was a time for praying, for what it was worth.

… Hellstrom has estimated that it will require something in the region of twelve months' continuous subliminal suggestion to inculcate the main schema into the President's subconscious, and if that seems a rather long time we should bear in mind that the changes we envisage for the social environment of humankind are greater than any seen since the beginning of man's history.

A thin bar of light leaned from one of the shutters to the linoleum, and motes of dust floated through it, brightening suddenly and going out again as they passed on, in a microcosmic mimicry of the constellations, each star moving from light to darkness, from life to death.

… We will remember that there are certain factions within the Kremlin who could not be counted upon, to say the least, to lend their influence to our project. We have begun to suspect that the Englishman, Proctor, may be in the process of breaking our trust in him, and working for those factions in the role of what may be called a double agent. We have agreed to eliminate this problem at the earliest opportunity.

There was a pause, and we were left with the rush of static and interference, and I looked across at Parks.

'We're starting to lose it,' he said.

'Get the volume up. Slush and all. Keep it up.'

… Joplyn, can you assure us that Great Britain would ally herself to our aims?

I can assure you that once President Judd has persuaded the United States… and the end of war on… no option but to ally herself… impossible for Europe to stand on its… massive dimensions of this enterprise, but… on the understanding… we may assume… not… interests of military… when it… compromise… outset… if only…

Slush, a deafening tide of slush in the room as Parks brought the amplifiers up to full strength and sat watching me and I lifted a hand and he cut it.

'Leave the others going,' I told him, 'while they last. Can you start making duplicates of that one at the same time?'

'How many?'

'Six.'

'No problem.'

The last transmitter went dead soon after one o'clock, and Parks hit a switch and all we could hear was the dog in the kitchen scratching to get out.

'Sounded heavy stuff,' Parks said hesitantly. 'That what you wanted?'

I suppose I was a bit groggy, and not quite able yet to realise what we'd got on that tape, because I just said, 'What? Yes, I think so. Look, is there any way that stuff could get wiped out, in here or in transit?'

'I'll take good care, and put it in a shielded box, if that's what you mean.'

'Do that, yes. Do that. Handle it,' I said, 'as if it were a live bomb, because that's pretty well what it is.'

Half an hour later I asked him if I could use the telephone, and he showed me where it was.

I hadn't even attempted to work out the risk, but at the back of my mind I knew of course that it was appalling. But it was something that had got to be done, so that made it easier, in a way.