Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 6: LIMBO

There was the long black weatherboard wall of a wharf on the right side and a row of capstans on the other side with the sheer drop to the water just beyond them and when I gunned up the rear wheels met a wet patch and slewed and sent the front end smashing through a stack of fish crates and I did what I could to get back on track before I killed someone but it wasn't easy because I was crouched as low as I could below the seat squab because they'd probably try again.

Pickup truck on the left and I grazed the side and tore some metal away, someone shouting, a two-tone cab pulling out from the gap between the wharves but keeping its distance as I pulled the rear end straight and looked for a clear passage but there wasn't one – three or four people with bags and fishing rods were walking down from the street and I hit the brakes and we slid and I let them off but the speed was still too high and I chose the only way out that wouldn't hurt anyone and put the car between a capstan and a rusting trailer and flexed the seat belt to make sure it was tight and then they tried again and after that there was just a lot of metal screaming as we ricocheted and hit the trailer at ten degrees and dragged the wings off and the car windows on that side burst into snow and we bounced and corrected and hit the rear end of a private car and swung it round, glass smashing again and the pop of a tyre bursting and then there was a shed straight in front of me and at this speed it was going to be a jolt and I sank lower into the seat and settled the belt again and waited with my foot hard down on the brake and the tyres shrilling across the concrete.

Hit the shed with an explosion and the daylight got shut off and the impact pitched me at an angle but I was ready for that because of the belt's diagonal and I used my right hand against the facia as the deceleration phase came in and there was the ripping of metal again and then flames bursting in the dark with an orange light and I was feeling for the belt release and the door handle but it was going to be awfully close because we'd hit some kind of flammable tank and all I could see was a mass of bright orange.

Waves of heat now and I got the door open and dropped and crawled to the rear of the car because we'd come straight through the wall and I wouldn't have to look for a door, but the fuel tank was at the rear and I got across the ground as fast as I could with the heat washing down across my back.

Someone yelling, In there? something like that, broken glass under my hands and I shifted them, pulling my legs after me, a face staring from the near distance with the eyes shielded by the hands, a man shouting again, Get you or something and then I was into the daylight, Roll over, roll over, roll! Clothes on fire presumably, then hands grabbed me and the face was close and the mouth said Barracuda.

Rolling and rolling and his hands beating at me, 'Okay now, that's it.'

'Get me clear,' I told him, 'I don't want the police.'

'I don't think there's time.' I could hear a siren from somewhere quite close, or maybe it was echoing off a wall.

'You've got to cover me and get me out.'

He turned away and I could see the two-tone cab turning broadside on to the flames and I crawled that way through the debris until the man turned and said, 'Wait – wait there.'

I couldn't see anyone else in the area because the whole shed was crackling and there were beams coming down and sending out sparks and I had to crawl further into the open but I kept my face down because I'd have to go to ground at this stage and hole up and work things out but that bloody siren was closer now and it didn't look as if -

'Come on – in here!' A man grabbing for me in the black rolling smoke. 'Make it quick!'

The door of the cab had swung open and I went for it with the man helping me because my eyes were streaming. 'Show them the bullet holes,' I told him, 'two of them from the rear – bullet holes, you got that?'

'Got it.' He slung me into the cab. 'Keep right down.'

'Listen,' I said, 'this is for Ferris, immediate. Proctor's been turned by the Soviets.' Said it again because of the choking, I wanted to make sure. 'Got that?'

'Yes, I've got that,' he said and slammed the door shut and told the driver to move it.

Throat still raw, kept drinking water.

Decker, name of the driver, one of ours, a Bureau cab – Ferris had kept it standing off with Decker on the peep even though I'd told him I did not want support. I'd sent Decker away after he'd brought new clothes for me and taken the old ones, old, Christ they were more than old, more like the coat off a scarecrow after a lightning strike.

The phone rang and I picked it up.

'Who?… All right.'

Cardinal rule: we can't refuse.

There were two windows, north and west, because this was a corner room, and while I was waiting I took a look from both of them – the airport control tower a couple of miles away and some three-storey buildings nearer than that with billboards, United Overnight To These Ten Cities, Marlboro For Those Who Like To Smoke, Coors Is The Champion, no windows overlooking mine at a distance of less than fifty feet on the north, thirty on the west, a man in the doorway near the bus stop and another one at the corner and two more on the north side twenty yards apart and looking in shop windows and of course there'd be more of them on the south side of the hotel where the entrance was, prisoner of bloody Zenda but they weren't there only to give me moving cover whenever I left; they were also scanning the environment for possible pollution: field glasses behind windows or the hump of a magnum with a laser sight or an infrared night lens, so forth.

They would also note any opposition peeps standing off in the environment or coming into the hotel, leaving it, hanging around, it was ironic, if you will, that the first thing I always ask for at the start of a new show is that Ferris should direct me in the field, and here he was blocking me in with so much support that I wouldn't be able to move without saluting the troops.

'Come in.'

'Greenspan,' he said, a soft handshake and Charlie Chaplin eyebrows, dropped his bag on the bed and looked me up and down.

'Does anything hurt?'

'Bit of sunburn.'

'I'm not surprised. That was a gasoline fire, wasn't it?'

'Something like that. Are you from the consulate?'

'I look after their staff. I'd like your shirt off.'

It's a cardinal rule: you can't refuse a medical checkup after you've been through any kind of traumatising action, otherwise I wouldn't have let him come up, because I wasn't in the mood for coughing and saying ah when there was so much to think about, so many questions, did she set me up for those shots?

Take a full breath. Another one. Now, did you feel you were filling your lungs to capacity?'

'Yes.'

'Well you were lucky with that seat belt. I've seen osteo-chondritis of the cartilage around the sternum you wouldn't believe. You must have taken some of the shock with your right hand, even though there's no echymosis. I've had people with the belt go halfway through the side of the rib cage. Have you seen The Rainbow?'

'What?'

'It's a movie. You should see it. This hurt?'

'No.' The launch had moved in to the harbour parallel with the tug and they'd put me in the cross hairs from there, or come closer in a car or gone into one of the quayside buildings and climbed, though not more than two storeys because the first shot had smashed through the rear window and hit the speedometer at not much more than a fifteen degree angle from the horizontal. They 'Rock your head – gently. Now this way. Feels good?'

There wasn't any whiplash.' I'd got my head back on the support before we'd hit the other wall of the shed and bounced back. Are they friends of yours? With the field glasses. Friends, perhaps, of hers. But if -

'Look, I'm going to give you some Aloe Vera gel for these burns, and some propolis. I've brought some, because they gave me a rough idea what happened.' He raked around in his bag.

The sun was lowering across the ocean, reddening the wall in here. I would need to wait for dark before I moved.

'Use the propolis sparingly – it's quite sticky. You're sure you don't have any pain anywhere?'

'No pain.' Just a blinding impatience to find things out.

'You must keep yourself in pretty good shape. I'm going to leave you with some D-Phenylalanine, 500 mg. Take two tablets fifteen or thirty minutes before a meal and make it a total of six per day – it's on the label here. I want – '

'No drugs.'

'It isn't a drug, it's an amino acid, no toxicity, no side-effects. If you'd wanted aspirin and antibiotics and all that horseshit you'd have had to see someone else. It works with L-Phenylalanine to stimulate the neuro-transmitters and the body's own pain-killers.' Shutting the bag, soft hand-shake. 'Her Majesty's picking up the tab – is that how you guys put it? Two numbers there on the bed, the second one's my beeper. Call me any time, midnight, 3 am, whenever, if you need me – you can expect a bit of delayed shock in the night when the blood sugar's low. Call me, okay?'

Said I would.

At the door – 'And get to see The Rainbow. Make time. Trust me.'

The phone rang a minute after he'd gone and I let it go on ringing till it stopped. It would be Ferris, wanting to make a rendezvous for debriefing, and I wasn't ready yet. There'd been too much data coming in and I wanted to do some analysis first on my own.

Flat on the bed with my eyes shut, but the muscles wouldn't let go and I couldn't shift into alpha waves because there is no excuse, there is no conceivable excuse for putting off debriefing by your director in the field at any given time during the mission.

Delayed shock, just as the man said.

Bullshit. There is no excuse.

Sweating a little, cold on the skin, you must surely allow me to express at least a token reaction to being shot at with a trajectory two inches from the back of my skull before that thing smashed into the speedometer, to being shot at twice and hitting a shed full of petrol cans, maybe more than twice – they could have put half a dozen more shots into the inferno and I wouldn't have heard them above the crackling.

Proctor?

The muscles still tensed, the beta waves still whipping me along when all I wanted to do was rest, and wait for nightfall.

1330 West Riverside Way.

Nightfall because I'd need to go there alone, leave them all down there watching the hotel.

The crimson light in the room deepening against the closed lids, the nerves sending multicoloured firecrakers across the retinae, the blood singing through the tympanic membranes, the sweat coming faster now and more copiously because there was no excuse to delay debriefing and yet I knew it was what I had to do.

Question it.

Accept. Don't worry.

But the muscles wouldn't let go because the subconscious was in panic, aware that the organism had gone out of balance, that something was wrong, appallingly wrong.

Those are your instructions.

Hearing voices, send the poor bastard to the funny farm before he starts foaming at the mouth and rolling over the floor embarrassing everyone, are these my thoughts, get him to a cool white ward with gentle nurses and the goodnight kiss of an anodyne, give him another Valium, shivering in my sweat now, they are not my thoughts, no, hallucinating perhaps, they're not always wrong, those bloody medicos, you can expect a bit of delayed shock in the night, so that's all it is, my good friend, there's no need to worry, just relax.

It is not all it is.

Deep breaths, deep regular breaths to stem the high wild racing of the heart, the eyes open now because when the organism is in extreme danger we must tune the senses, deal how we may with the onrush of desperation to know, to understand what is happening, to divine how to rescue the beleaguered self, how to survive.

1330 West Riverside Way. At any time before midnight, but not later than that.

All, then, in that place, would be answered.

Some kind of sleep came, a swirling world of random phantasmagoria, carrying me along through the dark and keening streets of nightmare and throwing me at last onto the bedrock of reality, the sweat running as I woke and caught a breath and let it go, drained and bereft of strength but somehow purged and at ease again, ready to accept, and follow the instructions.

On the way to the bathroom my legs faltered and I knocked into the door but didn't fall, ran the cold tap and filled the basin, leaning on it and burying my face, my head, as I drew water into the parched body, seeking to quench the insatiable thirst that burned in it now – because fear does that, terror does that, it leaves the mouth dry as a husk.

Back in the room the wash of ruddled light had gone from the wall and in its place was the acid sheen from the street-lamps outside the north window, and it was nightfall.

'As far,' I told him, 'as your next stop.'

He didn't answer, but got another crate and took it into the building. The engine of the van was still running, stink of carbon monoxide filling the yard. It served both buildings, the yard – the Cedar Grove and the restaurant next door.

I was feeling all right now. Not perfectly balanced, but all right, I mean not terrified any more, with only a shred of consciousness telling me that I should be, nothing had changed.

'Which direction?' he wanted to know, a shock-haired blond boy with a half-grin on his face the whole time, amused, perhaps, or almost certainly, by this weirdo he'd found in the yard.

Did I look so odd?

A mirror would do nothing, though, I don't mean look, I mean behave – am I behaving oddly?

'Any direction,' I said.

'You don't mind where you're goin'?' Humped another crate. Fish, by the smell.

'I just need to get away.'

'Got cabs, in front.'

Shivering in the warm humid air, but not enough to show, I believed. 'I need to get away discreetly.'

He never looked at me. He refrained from looking at me in the way that we refrain from looking at a drunk or some poor cretin child, because our sense of inadequacy in the presence of the abnormal troubles us. He looked at me in that way, Billy. Billy, it said on the name-tab stitched to his overalls.

He took another crate in and I stood there in the yard and later remembered standing there in the yard like a figure in a surrealistic painting, as I waited for this bloody fish peddler to come back, taking his bloody time while the deep indigo sky roofing the yard rang with the clamour of drums and alarms as the little lamps winked across the board for Barracuda in far Londinium and the whole of the network trembled to the urgent tenor of the signals going in, Subject is missing… Reported to have gone over to the Soviets… Executive in the field has failed to appear for debriefing following attempted hit… Director requests instructions re procedure... while the executive in the field, this hapless weirdo, stood waiting for assistance, God help him, and those dozen people out there in the streets stood ready to give him all the assistance he could ever want.

But I couldn't ask them. Not now.

'Discreetly,' he said, Billy said, not looking at me. 'I can't take anyone in my van, see.'

'Look, I'm going to be frank with you, Billy. I can't use a cab because they're out in front of the hotel and he's waiting there for me.'

'Who is?'

'Her old man.'

Big grin now, bright with the light of understanding.

'You Australian, are you?'

'Limey.'

'My dad was over there once, in the war. Kenley. See, I can't ride anybody in my van. Rules.' Taking for the first time a glance at me, conspiratorially, emboldened by my not being, after all, abnormal, 'little bit of love in the afternoon, was it?'

I started with twenty but he didn't give it more than a flick of his eye, taking two more crates in and coming back whistling, a man with a sense of covert communication. I gave him fifty and he looked at it long enough to make it seem he was giving it his careful consideration, and then folded it and put it into his worn plastic wallet.

'Mind you don't slip, okay? It's a metal floor.' Gave me a push and slammed the two doors and dropped the bar and went round to the cab and got in and started up.

Darkness and the ammoniac reek of fish, the empty crates shifting as the van took the turns, a faint whistling from the cab, and deep within me the feeling of having missed the road, of going in the wrong direction, the nagging urge to turn back.

'Cab rank across there, mate,' stressing the 'mate', proud of the bit of Cockney slang he'd picked up from his dad. We were four blocks from the hotel, on NW 6th Street. 'Wanna take a bit of advice? Go for the single chicks, they're cheaper in the long run.'

This was at 8:14.

'The 1100 block at Riverside Way.'

'You don't know the address?'

'That's close enough.'

Cracked black vinyl and the scent of stale cigarette-stubs, a blue silk garter thick with dust hanging from the driving mirror, Albert Miguel Yglesias on the identification plaque, the photograph nothing like his face.

'You wanna good place to eat?'

'No.'

'I know a good place to eat. Fillipo Grill, fantastic, oysters this big!'

Said really.

In twenty minutes we turned east into the 1100 block and I got out.

'Open till midnight, great bar too, fantastic!'

8:41. The street was quiet, the restaurants full.

I began walking.

They would expect me there, at 1330 West Riverside Way, sometime before midnight, not later. But they might also expect me to hesitate, as I grew close, even to change my mind. They might, then, have people out here in the streets, in the rendezvous zone, to trap me, cut me off, if in point of fact I decided to turn and go back the way I had come. So I took in the environment as I walked. In the cab I would have had no chance of going back, if Albert Miguel Yglesias had dropped me anywhere in the 1300 block. Approaching on foot, I would have a chance.

Step after step, observe.

A late signal going in, perhaps: Attempted to phone the executive between 20:05 and 20:40 hours but received no answer.

The evening air sticky on the face: the noon temperature had been ninety-three degrees and the hygrometer touching seventy-five. Under my clothes I was shivering again – it came in spasms, triggered by each new onset of nerves. Do you know what I felt like on this warm Miami evening? I felt like a man on his way to be hanged.

Attempted to have a visit made to the executive at 20:45. There was no answer to the knock. Forced entry revealed the room empty, no sign of disturbance, no message left.

People window shopping. The sidewalks were wide here and observation was easy because of so many reflecting glass surfaces and the lack of shadow. He was a white Caucasian, thirty, medium build, a slow walk with a certain degree of strut.

So what decided you, Ferris would ask me, to leave the hotel without notifying the support?

But I wouldn't be seeing Ferris again.

The sky bore down across the tops of the tall buildings, its weight buckling them, bearing down through the thick and steamy air to press on my head, to crush me, while the street's perspective widened, bellying out like a scene through a fish-eye lens, but then I suppose it had been a long day and the bullets had come very close and there's always, you know, a shift in the state of consciousness when you're still walking about, still doing ordinary things, when by a small margin you have just missed being carried to the ice cold slab and filled with formaldehyde. I was feeling the reaction, that was all.

Not feeling reaction.

The voice of panic, vigorously to be ignored.

He was very close now and I moved to the left along the sidewalk and picked him up again in the window standing at an angle in a shop entrance way.

I hadn't seen him before, on the quay or anywhere in the street.

On my way, yes, to be hanged, in other words following a course that would take me to an imminent death, a course from which there was no possible deviation. A feeling of inexorability, of karma being fulfilled. It didn't take away fear, terror, but it took away responsibility.

These were my instructions, to make the rendezvous.

Your instructions come only from the Bureau.

But things have changed.

I swung round very fast and he almost walked into me, had to jump sideways, his eyes round, surprised.

'Are you okay?'

The way, I suppose, the way, I am certain, actually, I was looking at him.

'No.' That is what I said to him, and I heard it. I was not okay, and things had gone terribly wrong.

'You need some help?'

But he was already eager to go, not wanting contact, involvement, with this cokehead, this junkie. He was, you understand, no more like an opposition agent of any kind than Mickey Mouse, and it had just happened that we'd been moving at about the same speed along the street. It happens all the time.

'No.'

No help.

But he'd already gone, and I stood there with my head bared to the overwhelming weight of the sky and knew that I couldn't in fact shrug off all responsibility, because that would indeed lead to the mortuary and the formaldehyde, but oh my God you can have no idea how far it was to the telephone at the end of the block, how many desperate encounters were played out as the insubstantial figures leapt from nowhere and from everywhere, how many times they came for me, squealing for my blood as they dragged me to the hangman, the stink of fish sickening to the stomach, his madman's inane grin, go for the single chicks, they're cheaper, lurching on my nerveless legs to the end, all the way to the end of the block with oysters this big as the sky crashed at last across the roaring chasm of the street and I reached the phone-box, smashing away the flimsy aluminium panel with my shoulder to break the momentum, digging for a quarter and forcing it into the slot, a pale girl with pimples staring for a little time before she hurried past, so that I buried myself against the phone-booth, into it, in it, my back to the street and the people, hunched like a pariah dog, like a leper 'Yes?'

Ferris.

1330 West Riverside Way. At any time before midnight. Not later than that.

'Yes?'

Those are your instructions.

Of course. Put the phone down, make the rendezvous. Of course. Without question.

'Who is that? I am listening.'

I tell you I had to use physical force to keep the phone pressed to my head while the other force did everything it could to pull it away and slam it across the hooks. I remember that very clearly.

'I need – ' the breath blocking in my throat.

'Yes? You need?'

Force countering force while I waited in limbo for the outcome, the sweat drenching my body as the street reeled, roared, swept over me.

'I need to debrief.'

Clinging to the broken booth like a drowning man to a raft. '1200 block and Riverside Way. West Riverside Way. Hurry. For God's sake hurry.'