Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 3: CONTACT

A tile crashed and the pieces whined through the dark near my face and I got closer to the buildings, not wanting to cross the street to the sheltered side because there was debris flying on the wind and it was difficult to see anything coming through the driving rain. The storm had knocked out the power station feeding this area and the only light came from the few late cars making a run for home.

He'd tried two or three numbers, Proctor, for a taxi, but they weren't turning out.

Something hit a big shop window and the glass burst like a bomb and I ducked and found a doorway and stood there soaked by the rain with my back to the open street as the gale took the shards of glass and flung them through the air. A car forced its way past the doorway against the gusts, throwing silvered beams of light as it wallowed through the floodwater surging at the storm drains, a woman screaming somewhere, inside the car I suppose, terrified or just excited, the sound whipped away by the wind.

It was less than half a mile to my hotel and I got back onto the sidewalk again with my head down, leaning against the force of the rain, fingers against the face as a shower of debris hit me with the dying impetus of shrapnel. More sirens, and the crimson flicker of lights in the distance as a firetruck ploughed through the intersection with its sirens going, a police car taking up station.

Assignment, kept calling it an assignment, just because I'd said there was no actual mission running for me.

Strong wind-gust and I braced against it, the rain beating, lights throwing my shadow in front of me across the littered sidewalk, sound of an engine and a sudden shout – 'Wanna get in?' – speeding up again as I made signs for no and thank you, not easy, I must have looked like a soaked scarecrow trying to keep the birds away. The hotel was only half a block now and I started a slow run to raise the odds against catching something really lethal on my head.

'There's not much to it,' I'd told Proctor. 'There's been no briefing yet.'

'I see,' with the bright understanding smile, the eyes no more than a shimmer between the lids, half his face in shadow under the lamp. 'But I'm sure it'll turn out pretty interesting.'

'Not necessarily -'

'I mean they didn't send someone like you out here just for a bit of housework. I'm surprised -' taking another swallow of bourbon – 'I'm surprised I didn't get wind of it. After all, this is my bailiwick.'

'Got lost in all the buzz.' Signals term for heavy traffic. Nassau and the Florida peninsula formed a tight network with its own console at the Bureau, since the US stations presented a major information exchange between London and Foggy Bottom, and Cuba's proximity offered a rich lode of signals traffic for infiltration and analysis, providing a window on Moscow's interests in the region.

'I'm very good,' Proctor said, chin tucked in, 'at sorting out buzz.'

They're very pleased,' I said. 'I got it from Croder.' Slip but it was too -

'I send to Bracknell.'

'He's on Croder's watch.' It was true and he knew that but it had been a close thing. But use the chance – 'You still happy out here?'

In a moment, the smile not there any more. 'Is that what you're here for, in fact?'

'Not sure I'm with you.' Sweat itching on the skin.

There was no danger, of course, no physical danger unless he'd got a gun and I'd already walked into a trap, not out of the question that he's been turned, it's a rotten word, frightening, with its sense of turning to show a different face, once an ally's and now an enemy's, with trust knocked away and betrayal springing suddenly to life, betrayal and treachery. But if Proctor had been turned I didn't think there was a case for trapping me into anything, not physically: I'm not that paranoid. Yet in a way it could be worse than that: I could be moving into territory where I could become lost before I had time to see the danger.

I knew at least that Moscow wasn't involved. Proctor had never liked them over there since they'd put him through five weeks in a psychiatric ward in an attempt to make him break and speak; it had taken him six months to get the shock out of his system. But he could have been got at by any one of a hundred international factions in need of a spook of his experience, and these days the money was big and the girls much more sophisticated.

Who was Monique?

'It's just that it occurred to me,' Proctor was saying, 'that they might have sent you out here to check up on what I'm doing.'

Out in the open now.

I needed time and there wasn't any. 'Not quite that. They asked me to look you up while I'm out here on the Castro thing, to see if you're happy.'

Tilting his head a fraction: 'Is that how they put it?'

'No. It was Croder. He called it a psychological evaluation – you know bloody Croder.'

In a moment: 'I see.' The tone was icy now and even that false bright smile was dying away. 'And why would he want to have me psychologically evaluated?'

'I think it makes sense. Otherwise I'd have told him to let someone else do it: Cheyney's still in the area. But we've done a few jobs together, so I know you better than most people – that was their thinking.'

And now I'd found out it was wrong. I'd known Proctor, not this man. This wasn't Proctor. Fencing with him, having to listen with every nerve and watch every word, I didn't have time to think what could have happened to him, but the obvious answer was drugs.

'You know me better than most people,' he said. 'You think that's true?'

'In this trade no one knows anybody else too well, do they? It's relative. But look, if you'd rather Cheyney or someone else talked to you, all you've got to do is signal Croder. I didn't ask for the job.'

'Quite so.' He was on his feet suddenly and moving around with his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his worn blue jeans, his shadow swooping on the walls as he passed the hanging lamps. To see if I'm happy, yes, that's how you put it, not Croder,' swinging to look down at me, 'but why shouldn't I be happy?'

I got up too because we were about the same calibre and I didn't want to be on the floor if he decided to start anything; his tone was silkily hostile and if he was on angel dust or something he could suddenly take fire.

'Look at it this way, Proctor. You were into a lot of action in those missions and you were bloody good – I know you that much. But since the bullet thing you've been doing what amounts to a desk job and frankly if it had happened to me I'd have blown up by this time.'

Coming close suddenly, watching me with the glimmer between the lids – 'Do I look as if I'm about to blow up?'

'With you, it wouldn't show.'

But that wasn't true: it was showing very clearly; he'd lost the ability to keep his nerves under the skin. In Czardas and Lighthouse we'd both come as close to Christendom as we'd ever been but he'd had a face like a mask the whole time, even when they'd taken him out of the interrogation cell in Zagreb and he'd looked back at me with his eyes absolutely steady and the signal perfectly clear but only to me: Don't worry, they didn't find the pill. Capsule, potassium cyanide, the instant exit.

Then let me assure you,' he said with the accents honed, 'that I am not about to blow up. I'm perfectly happy here and I can quite believe that Croder is pleased with the product I'm sending in.' His blunt head turned as the shutter banged again and some glass crashed somewhere in the street. A wind was getting up, fluting through a crack in the door.

'Here we go again,' Proctor said, his tone suddenly normal. He went to the phone and sat there on his haunches, pressing out a number and looking up at me. 'You said your hotel's ten minutes from here?'

'Yes.'

'You mean walking or driving?' I said walking and the line came open and he asked them to send a taxi but it obviously didn't work and he tried some other numbers, looking at the pad by the phone, then getting up. 'We've left it a bit late; they're all staying put.' Looking at his watch, 'I'd ask you to stay for some spaghetti or something, but -'

'I've got to go anyway.' Not long, he'd said to the woman on the phone.

'Let's keep in touch, then.' The tone still normal, no trace of hostility, no bright smile. I found it unnerving – it was like suddenly talking to someone else.

'Let's do that,' I said. He came to the door with me. 'In the meantime I'll tell them you're perfectly happy, is that right?'

In a moment he said, 'Perfectly happy', as if he wasn't sure what I was talking about but felt it was the right answer.

The rain had started soon after I left him but there was nothing I could do about it and for most of the journey I was hardly aware of getting soaked because the chance of fetching something conclusive on top of the head was more of a worry – that, and the knowledge that the Bureau had a sleeper out here manning a sensitive network and going through some kind of personality change.

And there was something worse, something that had a degree of horror to it that I couldn't quite identify as the rain whipped through the streets and the sirens began again in the distance. And then as the blacked-out facade of the hotel loomed up the chill truth came into my mind and I broke my run is if I'd hit something.

It wasn't only that Proctor had started to go through some kind of personality change. There was this: He didn't know it.

The red light was blinking on the phone in the hotel room and I asked for messages but there was only one. The name was Mr Jones, code identity for the Bureau, with only an extension number, 59. I used the prefix and dialled long distance direct. It was coming up to 05:00 hours in London.

'Are we clear?'

Holmes' voice. He meant were there any bugs.

'As far as I know.' There could be a lot of stuff all over the place but it was unlikely because I'd switched rooms as soon as I'd booked in, as a matter of routine.

'A couple of things,' Holmes said. 'Mr C wanted to tell you himself but they've had a wheel come off with Snapdragon and he's at the console now. First thing is, he wants you to meet Ferris. He's -'

'Spelling?' There was some lightning around but the line wasn't too bad: I just wanted to make absolutely sure. He spelt it and a flicker went through the nerves.

Ferris.

'He gets in to Miami in thirty minutes,' Holmes said, 'your time, unless that storm's still on. Is it?'

They've started traffic again.'

'All right, he's British Airways Flight 293 direct from Heathrow. I'm sorry I couldn't give you more notice, but you weren't there earlier. Can you meet him?'

'Yes. Is he alone?'

'That's right.' His tone was overly casual. Holmes enjoys understatement at a time of tension and he knew exactly how I'd reacted to the name Ferris: he was one of the elite directors in the field who were sent out only to look after something really major, the only DIF I always asked for but didn't always get. 'The second thing is,' Holmes said, 'we've opened a new board, Barracuda, and it's yours.'

Lowering in the night sky.

'What's the ETA?' the driver said.

'11:37. British Airways.'

'Sure, that could be it.'

The nose coming up, the lights of the town silvering the wings. 'How long can you wait here?'

'Maybe a minute. Fuzz here don't have no patience.'

'Then go in and check the arrival time for Flight 293.'

'I can't leave the cab.'

'I'm a generous man.'

He came back and said the flight was on time.

'All right, make a circuit.'

'A what?'

'Go round again.'

'Come back here?'

'Yes.'

Reversing thrust, the roar waking the night. The cop said something as we pulled out but I only heard the driver.

'Gimme no shit, man. I wasn't no more than a half-minute.'

Reek of kerosene blowing through the driving window.

Ferris.

I nursed his name, going over all the things it meant: a major mission, for one thing, because of his status and his track record and because I'd seen his name on the board for Catapult when I'd looked into the signals room before I'd left, so they'd pulled him in from Paris overnight and sent him out here direct with no local briefing from Monck unless it had been done on the phone between Nassau and London. Monck would have given Ferris everything he knew without keeping selected material back as he'd done with me, because that's the way it works: the shadow executive in the field is told only what he needs to know at any given time; the background to a major mission can be infinitely complex with areas of ultra-classified material on a government level right up to your-eyes-only files exclusive to the Prime Minister.

'Go round again.'

Even Ferris wouldn't have all of it in his hands. His job was to direct the shadow in the field, see that he was fed and watered and kept in signals with London, give him the information he needed to know and send him wherever he had to be sent, wherever the mission took him, protect him from the opposition and from his own paranoia when things got rough, and finally bring him home with enough life left in him to stand up to debriefing for days on end, weeks on end, while they turned off the light over the board in the signals room and got on with something else.

'Shit, man, I'm getting giddy.'

'How does this bloody window open?'

'It's broke.'

There was reflection on the glass but I could see him now, Ferris, coming through the arrival area but not from the baggage claim; he'd have only one case, prepacked for him and stored by the travel section in the Bureau and marked F.I.P. – For Immediate Pickup.

'Can you pull in here?'

Between a limo and a dirty red VW, luggage all over the place, two men with sideboards and black coats and padded shoulders and Panda-style smoked glasses ducking into the Lincoln, a college boy lurching under the weight of a surfboard and scuba gear, somebody's maiden aunt with a carnation corsage and blue hair. And Ferris.

'That man there,' I said, 'Tall, thin, glasses -'

'I got him.'

'Fetch him in here.'

Exhaust gas thick on the air as the door came open and I shifted over.

'Where we go now, man?'

Ferris said the Flamingo on 30th street and the driver pulled out and gave the cop the finger and I told him to turn up the radio nice and loud.

'It's two blocks from your place,' Ferris said, but I told him I'd need to move out because someone had searched my room at the hotel and I'd been tagged there from Proctor's in the storm.

'You've made contact already?'

'Yes. Or they have.'