Quiller Solitaire

Chapter 1: HIT

I dropped the bundle onto the desk and pulled the string and opened up the crumpled newspaper and Tilney stood looking down at the stuff I'd brought in, the two blackened number plates, wrist watch, bunch of keys, ring, metal cigarette-lighter, the upper jawbone, the lower one, while the reek of burnt flesh began filling the little room, sickening me, sickening him too, I would imagine, Tilney, looking down at the stuff and then bringing his head up.

'That's all?'

That's all.'

'What does he look like?'

'Cinder.'

It was cold in here, or it felt like it. I shrugged a bit deeper into my coat.

'Nothing recognisable?' Tilney asked.

I gave him a dead stare. The object of the exercise,' I said, 'was to remove all traces of his identity. I did that.'

I suppose I would have put it differently if the rage hadn't been in me, burning in me like that bloody car, burning half the night out there among the trees.

In a moment: 'Have you had any sleep?' He'd caught my tone, the far faint echo of the rage. Others wouldn't have noticed.

'No. I had to watch over things.' A vigil over the dead, you could call it, but let's not be too dramatic.

'You could have phoned for someone.'

'I didn't want anyone out there.' It would have meant headlights arriving and everything, attracting attention. Things had been bad enough with the fire, though nobody had come running: last night was the Fifth of November, with bonfires all over the countryside. Trust McCane to get himself blown into Christendom on Guy Fawkes Night.

Tilney wrapped the things up in the newspaper again and jotted a note on a pad and said, 'Let's go along to my room, shall we? We need to debrief, then you'd better get some sleep.'

The clock on the wall said 6:21. There was still dark in the windows.

In the corridor I asked Tilney, 'Who was running him?

'Shatner. But there's no actual mission on the board.'

'Is he in yet?'

'Yes.' Tilney was giving me quick sidelong glances, still catching things in my tone. I couldn't do anything about that. They got him on the phone when your signal came in, and he -'

'I want to see him.'

Tilney broke his step and looked at me directly and said, 'You can, eventually, but first I'm going to debrief you on McCane's death.' He opened his door and waited for me to go through. Tilney has been known to put you in your place less gently than that, but he wanted to humour me, I think. He didn't know what was on my mind, why my control was so thin; I'd seen people killed before, and he knew that. 'Take a pew,' he said, and got behind his desk, pushing some stuff to one side. 'Spot of tea?'

'No.'

He got a tape-recorder from a drawer and set it going. 'So what happened?'

I still felt cold, though the radiators were on: you could hear the water gurgling in the pipes. 'He phoned me in my car. He said he was going to Reigate, and asked me if I wanted to follow him up.'

Tilney watched me, not looking away much, a thin man with glasses and ginger hair and pale freckled hands, straight out of some redbrick university, you would have said, the science department We'd been in this bloody place for years, he and I, and we got on well enough, even when the Signals room was running hot.

'He asked you to follow him up. Had he tried to phone you before, at your flat or anywhere?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'I mean, how important was it to him? Did he sound worried?'

'He just said it off-hand.'

'But he must have been expecting some sort of attack? To have asked you to follow him up?'

I didn't want to talk about it, but it was no use telling him that. 'Not necessarily attack. Perhaps surveillance. Wanted to know if there were any ticks on his tail.'

Tilney looked at me. 'McCane was a top shadow. He didn't need anyone to help him find out if he was being surveilled. If he -'

'All right, then he was expecting someone to try killing him, if you like, I don't know, how can I?'

Tilney looked away. He knew the score now: McCane had thought someone was liable to have a go at him and he'd asked me to cover his rear and I'd done that but I hadn't done it well enough and he'd ended up in a burning car and I was trying to think of some way of ever getting any sleep again.

'What actually happened?' Tilney asked quietly.

'He was about a hundred yards in front of me, most of the time, and just this side of Redhill when we were on a straight stretch another car came up from behind me and went past like a bat out of hell and cut across McCane's bows and he swerved and went into the trees and the tank burst and the whole thing went up.'

Tilney's eyes were wandering around the cluttered room. 'He would have been wearing a seat-belt, and therefore wasn't thrown clear, and the fire started so fast that you didn't have a chance of reaching him in time. Wasn't that it?'

'I should have -'

There was nothing you could have done, obviously.' He was watching me again now.

'I should have been ready for it.'

Tilney looked down, folding his pale hands on the desk beside the tape-recorder. 'It's going on record that in my opinion and from what you've described, there was quite clearly nothing you could have done to help McCane last night.'

I left it. The other car,' I said, 'kept on going. They hit the brakes once – I was waiting for them to turn and come back and make sure they'd done the job, but when they saw the tank go up they must have known he hadn't got a chance.'

'What kind of car did they have?'

'A dark Mercedes. I didn't see much of it – I was watching McCane's.'

'Of course. Then you phoned Signals?'

'Yes. I told them to pass it on to whoever was running him. I didn't know it was Shatner.'

'Did anyone -' he stopped, tilting his head; there'd been the slam of a door. He picked up the intercom phone and I waited, my body heavy in the worn leather chair, my eyes wanting to close. But I wasn't going to catch up on my sleep until I'd seen Shatner.

There was only one thing, really, I could do that would get me at least some of the way out of this appalling sense of guilt, almost of betrayal, and Shatner could help me do it. But I'd have to be very careful.

'You just come in?' Tilney was saying on the phone. 'Listen, there's some things on the desk in the store-room downstairs, the one next to Clearance. They're in some newspaper; you'll see what they are. I want you to deal with them.' He put the phone down and looked at me and asked, 'Did you get any instructions to blot out McCane's identity for us?

Blot out. I could feel the cold going through to the bone.

'No. I did it as a matter of routine.'

McCane had been a high-echelon shadow executive, and when one of us hits the ground there's immediate smoke put out. We're known to a dozen major intelligence networks and whether a given agent is alive or dead is strictly our own business.

The essence of intelligence is secrecy, of all and any kind.

'You were there all night,' Tilney said, and waited. The yellow pencil he'd picked up to play with was nibbled almost down to the lead, but I'd never seen him at it.

'The crash was soon after nine. Everything was too hot to touch until the early hours.'

The embers glowing and the smoke drifting in thin grey skeins among the trees, the smell of pinewood, and frost, and the other smell, from the thing inside the car, sitting there like a charred scarecrow, a human sacrifice to gross incompetence, rub the salt in, let me rub it in.

'And you don't know where he phoned you from,' Tilney was saying.

'No.'

'No kind of background noise, that you can remember? Was he in his car, or maybe a pub?5 'I didn't hear any background.' It was something you're trained to listen for; it can tell you a lot.

Tilney had the pencil between two fingers, and was swinging it up and down; it was getting on my nerves.

'You didn't see much of each other, did you, in the ordinary way?'

'I was in Budapest with him once, setting up a courier line. We did some infiltration work in Beirut a couple of years ago. He was first class, but I'm sure you know that. I enjoyed working with him.'

'And he clearly had a lot of respect for you.'

'I've no idea.'

'I mean for him to telephone you, instead of someone else, to ask for help.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, how do I know?' I got out of the chair and went across to the window, and there was the street down there, the lamplight and the first buses, the world waking up for all of us, but not for McCane. I was letting my nerves show, shouldn't have said that, I needed sleep, but couldn't have any. How long would it be, how long before this smell was out of my clothes, out of my soul, this smell of burning?

Tilney's voice came from behind me. Well, I think that'll do it for now.' He snapped the recorder off. 'Anything else occurs to you, give me a buzz.'

I turned round from the window. 'All right. Now get me in to see Shatner, will you?'

He looked at me. 'Don't you think you ought to crash first?'

'No.'

He puckered his lips, then picked up the phone and talked to a couple of people, trying to find Shatner. The controls aren't easy to run to ground in this place: they're either in Signals or briefing or debriefing or holed up with the top brass working out our destinies, where to put which ferret in the field and how soon, how to run him and when to call him in, how much risk to put on his back and how much mercy to show him when it looks like breaking. I was not, on this black winter morning, inclined to think good of anyone.

'He can see you in half an hour,' Tilney said, cupping the mouthpiece. That suit you?'

'Yes.'

'Where will you be?'

'They can page me.'

'Put your head down somewhere,' he said. There are a few rooms here, cubicles really, where we can get some sleep if we need to.

'I'll try.'

But when I left him I went along to the Signals room to put in time, not eager for the nightmares that sleep would bring.

There were only a few people at the floodlit mission boards – Stacey, Freeman, Holmes, and a couple of new recruits up from training at Norfolk. Only two of the boards were active, with their code names chalked at the top: Stingray and Scimitar. Croder, Chief of Signals, wasn't in here, so there couldn't be much going on.

I told them I wanted to talk to the ambassador, but it didn't do any good.

'They wouldn't let you into the embassy?' This was Freeman, manning the board for Scimitar. He didn't look worried.

They said I could come back tomorrow. Listen, I think… then there was some static and all we could hear was his voice behind it, nothing intelligible.

Holmes had looked up when I'd come in, and now he was wandering across, a cup of coffee in his hand.

… But I'd say what's happened is that he's caught some of the fallout from the palace coup and he's lying low, can't see me or anyone else. This whole scene's a mess – they've sacked God knows how many diplomats but they can't even get a plane out.

Holmes was standing beside me. 'What sort of night?

'Bloody.'

He was watching me steadily in the backwash from the floodlit mission boards. 'Flaying yourself, I assume.'

'Why don't you bugger off?' He meant well, but that wasn't the point. I didn't want to talk about it.

That was an hour ago, and she hasn't shown up.

At the board for Stingray one of the new people was looking edgy, leaning forward over the console. 'Do you think it's a trap?

In a moment: I don't know. Yes, by his tone, he thought it was a trap, but didn't want to say so, didn't want to make it real. The name on the board was Flecke, shadow executive in the field, and in a way I wasn't surprised: he was a world-class womaniser and therefore a target for any kind of honey trap the opposition wanted to set up. He'd been warned more than once about this, and Ferris had refused to work with him on Pagoda in Bangkok, said he could endanger the mission.

'If it's a trap, what are your options? Have you got any support out?' No. The voice coming from the speaker sounded a little tight now. I came here alone.

Holmes left me and went over to the central console and picked up one of the phones, presumably to ask the Chief of Signals to get here. With a new man at the board and Flecke out there in Thailand caught in a trap they'd need Croder to take over.

'Are you under surveillance at the moment?'

I can't tell. This is the market area, with people milling about.

Holmes came back from the phone and looked at me and said, 'Come on, I need a break,' and we went down to the Caff together, because he needed to do this and if I didn't let him he'd be miserable.

'Tilney phoned me,' he said, 'just after you left him. I know you don't want to talk about it but at least you can listen.' Daisy came limping over with some tea for us and wiped the table down and left wet streaks and went away again and Holmes turned his dark serious eyes on me and said, 'From what I gather, you couldn't have done anything. If you'd blocked off the Mercedes when it came up in the mirror it could have gone off the road and you could have found out it was a perfectly innocent citizen out for a joy ride and going a bit too fast and you could have got him killed. When you realised what that car was going to do you had about half a second to get in its way and you were something like a hundred yards behind, not terribly easy.' He sipped his tea reflectively. 'So what we finish up with is a perfectly competent shadow executive sitting here flaying himself alive in front of his old friend Holmes without the slightest justification, and said Holmes finds it thoroughly distasteful.'

I didn't say anything. He didn't want me to.

The first of the winter daylight was coming through the small high windows. It would be creeping among the trees out there, touching the blackened wreck, giving it highlights.

'It isn't,' Holmes said, 'that I don't know how you feel. I just want you to stop feeling it. If you like, we could go along to a funfair tonight and bash the bumpers off the dodgem cars and get some of that lovely adrenaline out of the bloodstream. Would that be nice?'

He watched me from under his thick black brows, trying to size up exactly how bad things were with me. He would have a rough idea. Holmes is the most sentient being in the whole of this bloody building.

In a moment I said, 'It'll pass.'

He said quietly, 'Not with you, it won't. Not so soon.'

'Take a bit of time, yes. There's no hurry.'

Most of the really shitty situations in life don't have an immediate answer; they have to work themselves out. The problem with this one was that they were absolutely, right, Tilney and Holmes: nobody could have stopped McCane getting killed last night, given the set up obtaining. But in a bleak shadowed corner of my mind the excoriating monologue kept up its whispering… He asked you to protect him, and what happened? He was killed.

'What bothers me,' Holmes said, 'a bit, is that Tilney says you're suddenly very keen to see Mr Shatner. I don't like that. I don't like that at all.' Watching me steadily.

He'd made the quantum leap, and it jarred me, because Shatner might do the same, and refuse me the mission. My only chance was that Holmes knew me very well and was exceptionally sensitive, even intuitive, whereas I'd never seen much of Shatner: we were almost strangers. He might not see what I was after.

'Would you like a nice buttered bun, old horse?' 'You go ahead,' I said. Even if I could have eaten anything, the buns in here were like bits off a boulder, and for butter read margarine.

'I don't think I will.' He stirred the scum on the surface of his tea. 'On the other hand, if you can get away with it, I realise a thing like that would deal with quite a lot of the angst going on in your soul, and that of course would please me. The eye-for-an-eye principle really does do the job, despite the fact that in my opinion it's morally indefensible. But then again, you're not passionately concerned with my opinion on the moral indefensibility of anything in the world, are you?'

'Not really.'

I took another go at the tea. It tasted like sewage but it was hot and there was enough caffeine in it to keep sleep away for a bit and give me the edge I'd need for my meeting with Shatner.

'But in the final analysis,' Holmes said, and I began listening carefully because his voice had gone very quiet, 'what really worries me is that if they decide to put a mission on the board to deal with the McCane incident, and if they give it to you -since you're obviously going to ask for it – you might easily, somewhere along the line, blow everything up.' His eyes watched mine. 'Blow everything up,' he said, 'just because you're a man of too much overweening pride and you can't stand the idea that you've failed someone. Tell me,' he said gently, 'if I'm talking absolute rubbish.'

In a moment I said, 'No. You're not.' Because there was a risk, yes, if I let personal considerations get in the way of the mission. It's one of the really critical dangers we face when we're out there in the field, because it doesn't come from the opposition: it comes from inside ourselves. Pull up the drawbridge and drop the portcullis, but the enemy within the citadel will undo you.

Holmes lowered his head an inch, his eyes watching me from the deepened shadow of his brows. 'I know, of course, that there's nothing I can do to stop you. All I ask is that before you take a risk as big as that, you'll give it some thought before you see Mr Shatner. And if you still decide to see him, be very, very careful.'