Quiller Meridian

Chapter 1: BUCHAREST

They found me in Rome and the embassy phoned my hotel and I went along there and talked to London, and Signals said something had come unstuck in Bucharest and 'Mr Croder would be grateful' if l could get on a plane and see if I could pull anyone out alive. They hadn't actually put it like that — they'd said 'if I could be of assistance in any way — but when Mr Croder can find it in his rat — infested soul to tell you he'd be grateful for something it can only mean that some kind of hell has got loose and he wants you to get it back in the cage.

That was soon after six and I caught the last night flight out of Rome and got into Bucharest at 9:34 and put my watch forward an hour and found someone waiting for me with a battered — looking Volvo. We exchanged paroles and he asked me if I wanted to drive and I said no because I didn't know this city and there was obviously a rush on and he could take short cuts.

His name was Baker and he was small and wrapped up in a bomber jacket against the cold and smelt of garlic and looked rather pale, but that was possibly his normal winter complexion.

'What happened?' I asked him.

'I don't know. The DIF just sent me to pick you up.'

'What's his name?'

'Turner.' He got past a meat truck and caught a wing, just slightly, because the streets were iced over in places. He was driving just this side of smashing us up but I didn't say anything because he knew what he was doing.

I hadn't heard of a director in the field called Turner. He must be new. New and inexperienced and at this moment sitting at his base with a dry mouth and a telephone jammed against his head listening to his control in London and trying to tell him it hadn't been his fault, and the best of luck, because when a mission hits the wall it must be the fault of the DIF because he's running the executive in the field and it's his job to keep him out of trouble.

'Where are we going?' I asked Baker.

'The railway station. Freight yard.'

We lost the back end and he touched the wheel and used the kerb to kick us straight and when he'd settled down again I asked him the question I'd been trying not to ask him ever since we'd left the airport.

'Who's the executive?'

He gave me a glance and stared through the windscreen again and tucked his chin in. 'Hornby.' He said it quietly.

I hadn't heard of Hornby either, and it didn't sound as if I ever would again. He must have been new, too — they were cutting down the training time at Norfolk these days and sending neophytes into the field without a chance of getting them home again if anything awkward happened. I'd told Croder how I felt about it and he'd said he'd pass it on to the proper quarters, but it wouldn't do any good: he felt the same way as I did, and those pontifical bastards in the Bureau hierarchy obviously hadn't listened even to him. Say this much at least for Croder: he's a total professional and one of the three really brilliant controls in London, and he doesn't get any kick out of going into the signals room and listening to those calls coming in from the field — I don't know if I can make it. They've cut me off and I haven't got long. Can you do anything, send anyone in?

There'd been a call like that reaching London this evening, some time before six, and Hornby's control had said yes, he'd find the nearest executive and send him into the field, and that was why I was sitting in this dog-eared Volvo skating through the streets of Bucharest a little bit too late — it's nearly always a little bit too late, because things happen so fast when a mission starts running hot that there just isn't time to pull people out.

'Was there a rendezvous?'

Baker glanced at me again. 'I don't know.'

Didn't want to know. All he wanted to do was get me to the freight yard and drop me off and go home and try and sleep. They're not all like this, the contacts; most of them are seasoned and they've learned to get used to things blowing up, but one or two hang on to a shred of sensitivity and this man was one of them, I could feel the vibrations.

'How long have you been out here?' I asked him.

'In Bucharest?'

'Yes.'

'Year, bit more.'

'Picking up the language?'

With a nervous laugh, 'Trying. It's a bitch.'

There was some black ice and we spun full circle across a waste of tarmac, perhaps a car park, and soon after that we picked up the coloured lights of signals on the skyline and Baker touched the wheel and hit gravel and sped up and we started bumping across some half-buried railway sleepers, and I told him to slow down and cut his lights and the engine and take me as far as the line of trucks below the big black water tank that stood silhouetted against the sky.

I got out and told him to go home, then I stood there for ten minutes in the shadow of the end truck and waited for my eyes to adjust from the glare of the headlights to the half-darkness here. I didn't know if the local supports had got the area protected, or whether they too lacked experience. Bucharest isn't a major field and you can't expect first class people wherever you go.

There was a film of cloud across the city, lit by the glow of the streets, but only a few lights in the freight yard, high up on swan-neck poles. Smell of coal, steel, soot, sacking, some kind of produce, potatoes or grain. Very little sound, but I was picking up low voices over towards the main passenger station. The air was still, cold against the face. The outline of the trucks was sharper now and I began moving, keeping my feet on hard surfaces, tarmac, sleepers, rails, going slowly, feeling my way in.

A plane was sloping down to the airport, its strobes winking against the ochre smudge of the horizon, the high thin scream of the jets fading across the sky. There was some kind of bell ringing, up there towards the main station; perhaps there was a train due in. I went on moving.

There was something I didn't know. London had called me in either because I was the nearest shadow executive to this area or because this was something that needed a lot of experience to handle. Neither idea seemed to work: there must be shadows closer to Bucharest than Rome, and the Bureau couldn't have had a mission running in a minor East European state that would need a high-echelon executive to handle the mess when it crashed. I would have to ask London what the score was, when I got into signals with them.

The air was colder still here, away from the line of trucks; something of a night breeze was getting up.

'It's all right,' I said softly.

I was behind him and my left hand was across his mouth: I didn't want any noise.

He struggled quite hard until I put a little more pressure on the throat; then he slackened, and I took it off again. 'Don't worry,' I said. 'I know Mr Turner.' I released most of the hold so that he could half-turn and look into my face. I didn't offer him the parole I'd exchanged with Baker at the airport: this man could be anyone, not one of ours. I took the last degree of pressure off his throat and he asked me who I was, good English, recognizable red-brick U accent. I didn't tell him, but I asked him for the parole and got it, the code-name for the mission, Longshot.

'When you're protecting an area,' I said, 'try and find some really deep shadow, and try to stand where there are no hard surfaces around you — look for gravel, or whatever loose surface there is. If you'd done that, I wouldn't have seen you so easily, and you'd have heard me coming.'

'Jesus,' he said. He'd already been upset by the Hornby thing.

'Amen.' It was routine, especially in minor fields where people hadn't been through full training. We're expected to help them along, and I'd shocked him first to drive the lesson home, because one day it could save his life. 'Where is everybody?' I asked him.

'Over there.' His breath clouded in the faint light.

'Was it a rendezvous?'

'Yes.'

'Hornby and who?'

'A Russian.'

Not a Romanian. That could be the answer to the question I had for London.

'What was the Russian's name?'

'I don't know.'

'Find some shadow,' I said and left him, moving along a rail under the cover of the next line of trucks until I came to three people standing there close together. One of them spun round very fast and had a gun out and I stopped and lifted my hands. 'Longshot,' I said.

The man lowered the gun but didn't put it away. 'Where are you from?'

'Rome.'

'Who sent you?'

'Mr Croder.'

He put his gun away and told me his name was Fry. He looked appallingly young.

'What happened?' I asked him. The other two backed off a bit to let me into the group. One of them had been sick somewhere; I could smell it.

'Hornby was to make contact with a Russian here.'

'What was his name?'

'Zymyanin.'

'Did he turn up?'

'We don't know.'

He was a thin man, Fry, with eyes buried deep under his brows, so that in this light I couldn't see them, just caught a glint now and then.

'Where's the head?' I asked him.

'On the other side of the rail.' I could hear one of the other people shivering, his mouth open, shivering through his teeth, hands stuck into the pockets of his leather coat, his head down, probably the one who'd been sick.

'Well, put him into something,' I said. 'Not you,' I told Fry, 'we've got to talk.'

'We weren't going to move him,' Fry said.

That was out of the book, but not everything in this trade's in the book, in fact very little that really matters, none of the deadly vibrations you pick up in a red sector, nothing of what we call mission feel, the unnamed sense that allows a single photon of light to hit the retina and alert the brain, the sound of a sleeve folding in the dark as the knife is raised, the smell of gun-oil. We were standing here at the site of a blown rendezvous and the contact on our side had been killed and the contact on the other side was missing and we didn't know how many of the opposition might be standing off in the shadows waiting for the right time to move in, waiting perhaps for the man from Rome to get here.

They were worried about booby traps, that was all, Fry and the other two. It's in Chapter 3 of the Practical Field Manual with its red cover: Never move a dead body without first considering that it might conceal a booby trap or other explosive device.

'Get a sack,' I told Fry's people, and went across to the body and turned it over to show them it was safe. In terms of security the opposition had been unusually sensitive: when you blow a rendezvous by killing the opposite number you don't normally take the trouble to disguise things, but the people who'd blown this one had staged an accident or a suicide for the local police and left Hornby's body on one side of the rail and his head on the other, so they wouldn't have triggered them with explosives as well — it would have spoiled the picture.

'Where from?' one of the men was asking.

I looked up. 'What?'

'Where do we get a sack?'

'Oh for Christ's sake,' I said, and went across to the flatbed freight truck and got out my penknife and ripped open one of the sacks and poured out the grain and came back and got Hornby's body into it and picked up the head, my hands more tender now because this husk, this coconut, this Yorick-thing with its matted hair and its staring eyes and its gaping mouth had recently been the vessel of all this man's experience, and now it was here between my hands, a bony urn containing the traces of a human life, etched among the infinitely-complex network of nerve synapses and cerebral electronics until only a little while ago they had burned out like a firework show and left a shell of ashes for the world to grieve on.

I took off his watch and put it into my pocket. Wives and mothers sometimes ask for them as keepsakes.

'Come on,' I said, 'I need some help.' Hornby's arms and legs were difficult because rigor mortis had set in. 'How long have you been here?' I asked Fry when we'd finished.

He checked his watch. 'Nearly two hours.'

In the faint hope that Zymyanin had got clear before the pounce and would come back here to do business as arranged. It sometimes happens.

'If he doesn't show up,' I said, 'have we lost him?'

'Not if he's still alive. He's been keeping in contact with our DIF. Are you taking over as the executive?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I'm here to clean up the mess, for the moment.' I didn't mean Hornby, I meant the whole mission: there was going to be a lot to do, and the first thing was to trace the Russian contact, Zymyanin, if we could. If, yes, he were still alive. 'But you'd better tell me all you can, because there might not be a DIF for this mission any more.' That sometimes happens too, even though the director in the field is required to stay out of the action in his ivory tower throughout the duration. He's not always safe there: it depends on how bright he is. They'd got Hornby and they might have got Turner too, by now.' When did you last signal him?' I asked Fry.

'Soon after we got here. There's a public phone up there at the station.'

'How long did Turner tell you to wait here? For Zymyanin?'

'My discretion.' He didn't sound complaining. He should have. The director hi the field isn't meant to leave anything to the discretion of the support groups or anyone else except the executive, he's meant to direct them.

'Who's the control in London for Longshot' I asked him.

'Mr Pritchard.'

That wasn't surprising: Pritchard was halfway over the hill and tad done his bit for the Bureau, due for his pension, give him a minor job in Bucharest to end his career with. But Zymyanin was a Russian, and the Russians still weren't playing a minor role in international intelligence. If London wanted me to take over Longshot and get the wheels back on I'd need a new control, someone like Croder.

The bell sounded again from up there at the station, and a whistle blew. It was rather comforting on this stark and deathly night to know that someone was playing at trams.

'How many people have you got,' I asked Fry, 'protecting the 'Four.'

That was a lot of people, seven in all, for the support group of a minor mission. Turner must feel there was safety in numbers.

'You can pull them out,' I said. 'Zymyanin won't be coming back.'

'How do you know?'

His tone was challenging and I said, 'Because I've been in this trade for seventeen years and the number of missions I've seen blown by totally incompetent directors in the field would make your hair stand on end, and since we're on the subject there's one of your people up there with shit in his pants because I came up on him from behind while he was watching the pretty blue and green signal lights, so find someone who can train him before you put him into the field again, you want to get him killed?' That was how the poor devil lying down there in his sack had got killed: he hadn't checked out the area or surveilled local traffic before he'd moved in for the rendezvous, he couldn't have, and he was meant to be an executive. I turned to the man standing next to Fry, not the one who was shivering. 'Go and phone the embassy and ask for their DI6 man and tell him you're Bureau and give the parole and the code-name for the mission and ask him to get a car sent here to pick up the body and send it back to England.'

He took his hands out of his pockets. 'He'll want to know what — '

'He'll want to know where the body is and that is all you'll tell him, you understand? There's no scrambler on that phone up there. All right, get going.'

'Yes, sir.'

He swung away and I looked at Fry again. 'How many cars have you got here?'

'Three.'

'Where are they?'

'In the station yard.'

'Which is the newest one?' This was Bucharest.

'The Honda.'

I asked him for the number and the keys and he gave them to me, taking his time, resentful, a very resentful man, understandably.

'All right, pull your people out as soon as the body's been picked up.' I got Hornby's watch out of my pocket. 'Give this to the embassy people and ask them to put it into the diplomatic pouch addressed to the Bureau, property of Hornby's estate. Where do I find your DIF?'

Fry put the watch into his pocket. 'I'm afraid I can't tell you.'

Not afraid at all, he was delighted, had read the book. The location of the director in the field is sacrosanct, never to be disclosed if there's the slightest doubt as to the bona fides of the inquirer. This man didn't have any doubts: he'd been told by his DIF to expect someone sent in from Rome by Mr Croder and I'd satisfied him on that and I'd also known the code-name for the mission. He was just getting a bit of his own back, that was all.

'I respect your reticence,' I told him. There was still nothing more than the glint of reflected light in the shadow of his brows. 'But it'd save me having to call London.'

'Sorry,' he said.

'That's all right.' I went over to the shape in the sack and put my hand on it, a shoulder I think, and held it for a moment, requiescat in pace, so forth, there but for the grace of God. Then I came away and asked Fry, 'How many missions have you been with?'

'Four.'

'This the first crash?'

'Second.'

'Oh, Jesus, two out of four, what stinking luck.' I touched his arm. 'Hang in there, it gets better as we go along.' I moved away along the line of trucks towards the passenger station and heard his voice behind me.

'Hotel Constanta.'

I turned and nodded and walked on again.