The Kobra Manifesto

Chapter Four: ALITALIA

I always go through Firearms like a dose of salts because a gun is more trouble than it's worth: you've got to conceal it across frontiers and get it through the airport peep-shows and look after it in strange hotels and you finish up babysitting for the bloody thing right through the mission. Some of the front-line executives carry them but don't often use them, so maybe they look on them as a suitable fetish for their trade, like garters for tarts.

I don't draw a capsule either.

Because if you're firing correctly on both frontal lobes you can often convince the opposition that you don't know anything of interest; but if they find one of those things on you they'll understandably believe you've got a headful of information more valuable than your life and they'll put you through the whole roller-coaster from electrodes to heroin-deprivation and you'll die with your hair white and only yourself to blame. It's strictly no go.

'Sign here sir, will you?'

No weapons drawn.

I wasn't long in Accounts either: Nothing to bequeath, no next of kin, so forth. The routine thought crossed my mind: at any given moment I'm not worth much in cold cash but why not leave it to Moira? But the routine answer came up: she got a quarter of a million in sterling for her last film so the only gesture I could make would be to put down on this form: Five thousand roses for Moira, to be delivered at dawn by six white horses from Harrods. But these arthritic old bags would only talk me out of it because their pet charity is the Salvation Army and they'd send the cheque round on a bike.

'Your medical card has come through.'

I took it over to one of the windows where there was a bit of light. String of normals, vision 20/20. Remarks: 12 lbs below ideal weight for height. Vitamin and mineral deficiences. Suggested supplementary intake daily as follows — 500 mg Vitamin C organic and 100 mg Calcium. They might as well print that last bit because in our trade we live on the nerves and the adrenals are under constant pressure, and there's nothing we can do about it except drink more milk and orange juice and see a bit more of the girls.

'When did this medical card come through?'

One of them looked up from her knitting.

'Last night.'

This is the sequence: when we come out of a mission we're sent to Norfolk for various tests including a medical and it normally takes a month to come through to London, and this is well in time for clearance on the next mission because the leave period is a standard two months. During these two months they can drop on us if something urgent comes up and we have the right to tell them to buzz off if that's the way we feel. In most cases we rally to the call because that's what we live for and the only reality is when we're working. The point is that I'd come off my last mission precisely seventeen days ago and they must have rushed the medical analysis in Norfolk so that I could get clear for a new mission in record time.

Typical Egerton. He'd got me into his office and I'd dug my heels in and told him no, repeat no, and I'd come out saying yes and I do not know how that bastard does it. There's always a reason but it's never the kind of reason he could possibly have manufactured: only this occasion some bloody fool in the hierarchy had made a mistake and set up a chain reaction that ended when Egerton picked up that phone. I think he would have told them what he did in any case: he doesn't like those people throwing their weight around where his executives are concerned. But this time he'd done it at the precise psychological moment: and I was into the mission.

No, you don't take on a job that's not in your particular field just because a director puts in a good word for you: if it's not in your field then you'll be uncomfortable and that can be dangerous and sometimes fatal. I'd taken on this one because Egerton had reminded me by pure chance that he always looks after his executives. I probably hadn't thought about it consciously: it had been civil of him, and that was about all. But the data had hit the organism on the subliminal level and got an emphatic response, because all the time the forebrain is driving you through a mission against grievous and increasing odds the organism is kicking and yelling somewhere down there inside you, desperate to stay alive.

In that priestlike scarecrow with the dull brown eyes my organism had sensed a friend. If I were going out on a new mission, this was the one Where I stood a chance. And there was another reason, appealing this time to the forebrain: whatever kind of mission Egerton was cooking up it didn't look like anything in my field because I'm a penetration specialist: the hole, the kill and the get-out. But that man is highly intelligent.and he wouldn't want a misfit in anything he was running and I therefore supposed that somewhere along the line in Beirut or Cairo or Tangier he was expecting the operation to take on the character of a penetration job and that was why he wanted to get me in.

Well he'd got me.

I took the medical card back and dropped it on to the desk.

'Get Sam along here for me, there's an angel.'

'My name is Miss Robinson.'

'All right, but for Christ's sake get Sam here, I'm on a count-down.'

I think they spray the air with carbolic after I've gone.

The security guard met me outside and took me along the corridor to Codes and Cyphers and unlocked the door for me and left me there.

'What've you got?'

The new seventh,' she said, 'or you can stay on one of the series.' She touched her blue-rinsed hair.

I tried out the new one but it was too complicated: you could commit it to memory inside half an hour including the inverted radicals and the alert numerals but if you got one of the prefixes wrong you could throw the whole pattern out and finish up with gibberish.

'I'd have to keep this on me, Harriet You got a sixth series, acid-destruct?'

'With or without abbreviations?'

'Without.' They can trip you unless you're phrase-perfect.

I finished up with a short, flexible pattern designed to pomp crude intelligence into the network without any frills, embossed in high relief on fifteen-second acid-soluble plastic.

'Be good, Harry?'

She looked up from her work, 'When are you going?'

'Any time.'

'Look after yourself,' she said.

'You know me.'

Credentials: Paul Wexford, overseas representative of Euro-press, London Division; passport with extensive frankings and selected western visas including Portugal; independent assignments, letters of introduction, continental references, so forth. It was light cover, unsophisticated and convenient at frontiers, with a press pass in five languages and some invitations to public seminars and grand openings. You could blow a hole right through it with a peashooter and as soon as the operation began taking on some kind of shape there'd be a directive from London to change it; but for the moment they couldn't provide me with viable specifics because even Egerton didn't know what I was going into.

Four American Express guest cards and the usual mnemonic aids, Paul Wexford running from the first line to the tenth in ten separate lists of names, so forth: the only thing they don't give you in Credentials are alphabet bricks. Driving licence, worn Polyphoto of current girl friend (not unlike the one Milos Zarkovic had carried in his wallet, and my scalp contracted for a moment).

'Keys?'

She dropped a bunch on the desk: two Yales and a tumbler model, two car keys and a Jaguar tab. They wouldn't ever open anything but you can keep the opposition fiddling about for hours if they snitch them on what they think is your home ground.

Going down the staircase on my way to Travel I saw Perkins coming out of Briefing and thought he looked a bit off colour: we're always superstitious about replacing a deceased executive in the field. I didn't talk to him.

In Travel they fitted me out with currency and credit cards and told me that Mr Egerton was in Signals and would be glad if I'd go along there as soon as convenient: typical Egerton again, courteous to a degree. I found him hitched angularly across a packing-case of new electronics with a set on his head. He saw me come in but went on listening, his eyes wandering forlornly from wall to wall. In this section of the room, currently reserved for his operation, one of the sets had gone dead and I knew it had been beamed on Milan.

'If you need to repack your things,' Egerton said at last, 'I think you might do that.' He got off the packing-case and hung the set on the hook.

One of the Signals wallahs across the room was bent over a speaker, monitoring some stuff that had come off the un-scrambler a few minutes ago: I could hear the interposed time slips.

'Surveillance secure… aid requested from local police and granted… discreet forces deployed in area Riff Hotel. I will come in at ten-minute intervals…

Tangier. And Egerton was pushing him hard, asking for ten-minute intervals on a gone-to-ground situation: the poor bastard could be on the air all night. He must have our man-in-place working with him: Glover, at the Oasis Bar.

Egerton was half-listening to the monitor tape.

'What am I on,' I asked him, 'immediate call?'

'Yes. Oh yes.' His eyes wandered over my face. 'You may have to leave directly from your flat, of course.' He was holding out a thin knuckly hand. 'I'm really most grateful, you know, most grateful. I didn't want anyone else, you see, not for this one.' He smiled wanly and turned away, forgetting my existence.

There was a break in the overcast and the sun was coming out for the last hour of the day as I reached Knightsbridge and sent up a wave from the gutter with the nearside wheels of the Jensen.

Fox to 15.

Base acknowledged and I cut the switch and clipped the mike back and got out and opened the boot. There are one or two obligations when you're on immediate call and one of them is to keep them informed of your travel pattern so that they can pick you up at once when they want you. Another obligation is that you remain on readiness at all times and that means you can't see a film or go along to the Turkish baths or visit a girl friend: most of our girl friends have telephones but the directors have agreed not to ring us unless there's something urgent and since any kind of signal is designated urgent when we're on immediate call we tend to live like monks during this period: the nerves are quite sensitive enough in the pre-mission phase and we don't want 13 risk being hauled out of bed by the telephone right in the middle of everything. The girls wouldn't like it either.

Perkins hadn't been on immediate call but they'd still got on to his known girl friends because it was urgent.

I lugged the suitcase out of the boot and slammed it shut and went up the steps and opened the front door. The obvious choice was a full yoharka and I did it very fast and one of his shoes came off and smashed into the mirror on the wall as he went down with the breath grunting out of his kings. Part of the butt was showing through the gap of his jacket and I pulled the thing free of the holster and took the magazine out and put it in my pocket and kicked the gun across the floor where he couldn't reach it. Then I checked his eyelids and saw he was still well under. The trouble with the yoharka is that you tend to use it only when there's no time to prepare anything more subtle, so you can't always place it correctly or work out how much force the situation requires: it's a very fast nerve blow and strictly for killing unless you pull the momentum a little, and I'd used it about halfway between because I didn't know whether he was armed.

I felt for the heart and it was all right so I went into the kitchen and got an ice tray and came back and propped him up and stuffed some cubes inside his jacket in line with the spine. He took three or four minutes to surface. 'How do you feel?'

His eyes rolled a bit and his hand went at once to the holster. He was a middle-aged Slav with a gold tooth and slight stubble and garlic on his breath. He was focusing at last and trying to move so I used a pressure point progressively to stop him from fidgeting. There hadn't been time to shut the front door after me and I could hear the rain starting again, pattering on the roof of the porch.

'Who do you work for?' I asked him.

He didn't say anything and I realized he wasn't feeling too happy about this because he shouldn't have' let it happen. He'd got into the place from the kitchen window-there was mud on the floor by the fridge — and the first thing he'd done was to prepare an exit on the other side of the house and he'd been too close to the front door to get the gun out in time when I'd opened it. This was the third since last July: it's almost routine and we just phone the Bureau for someone to come round and clean the place up. Accounts get terribly fussed because we always insist on reasonably decent furniture and of course they have to replace it, but it's mostly drawers and in my case the Chinese lacquered cabinet in the study because it looks as if it ought to have a lot of secret panels so they always rip it to bits, and the best of luck.

'Who do you work for?'

I put some pressure on and he began going white.

They're going to get in, whatever we do, and we're damned if we're going to have two-inch-diameter steel bars at all the windows and electronic alarms everywhere because in between missions we like living in a fairly civilized way. Of course we never keep anything useful in our flats or wherever we live, but they can never be certain about that and I suppose it's tempting.

'Who do you work for?' I said it in Russian and Yugoslavian as well, just in case there was any connection with Zarkovic. He still didn't say anything and it annoyed me and I used quite a lot of pressure and he gave a reflex jerk and passed out for sixty seconds.

We don't often bother the Bureau, except to clean up and take the broken stuff away for replacement. The Bureau has been established ten years or so and in the early days we used to report a break-in by phone right away and they'd send a whole team along and if we'd caught anyone they'd take him back for interrogation because we were very keen to build up files on anything we could get our hands on; but these types never turned out to be interesting: they mostly second assistant economic attaches or local characters making a bit on the side while they're out on parole. At this level the major international networks leave each other alone and it works perfectly well: otherwise we'd never get any work done. We know all the restaurants and girl friends' flats where.we can drop on any number of lower-rankers in the opposition field but there wouldn't be any point; they don't know enough to warrant the trouble and they'd only start tagging us everywhere and trying to get us into a corner and the whole thing would grind to a halt.

On an active mission it's totally different.

Some of his colour was coming back.

I lifted 'his eyelids. He wasn't ready yet.

Give him five minutes, then I'd have to get someone to take him away and leave him outside a police station because I wanted to put most of the stuff in my suitcase into a laundry bag for picking up, and find some clean shirts. If Egerton was sitting in at Signals it was because he was expecting something to break and he hadn't put me on immediate call just for a laugh.

'Right, I want some answers now.'

We're all of us sensitive to our own peculiar points and I shifted about and got him interested at last, giving him slow periodic stimulation just this side of syncope, 'Who are you working for?'

'I don't know.'

A certain amount of writhing about, but it looked like transfer: I was offering physiological fear rather than actual pain and he was worried about what I was going to do next, 'Who pays you?'

'Nobody. I come to steal,' Slav accent.

I thought the quickest way would be to take him into a steady pressure-reaction rhythm, and within fifteen seconds he couldn't stand it any more because his nerves were having to deal with repetition, the equivalent of the aural situation where a loud and monotonous noise begins driving you up the wall.

'Tony.'

'What?'

'Tony pays me,'

'When?'

He didn't say anything so I tried again and succeeded, 'Monday,' he said on his breath.

'Monday nights?'

'Yes.'

'Where?'

'In pub.'

'Which pub?'

'Beefeater Arms, the one — '

'All right.' I knew which one.

He was losing colour again so I gave him a rest.

'Is that where you give your information?'

'No.'

'Where do you give your information?'

'I leave in library.'

'Come on then, I want the details. Don't keep stopping.'

'In library, between page ninety and ninety-one of Economic Lexington.' He began sweating a little,

'Lexicon?'

'Yes, is-'

'What time?'

'Five minutes till hour, when I have information.'

That meant they must have someone in place: one of those earnest little librarians with ginger' hair and rimless glasses and a portrait of Lenin pasted behind the Landseer in their room at the boarding-house.

'What do you do if you have some urgent information?'

'I already tell you that.'

'Come on.'

His leg jerked and he took a few seconds to get his breath.

'When urgent information, I telephone number in Kensington and wait under tree in Park, where — '

'All right, that's all I want.'

I'd found a packet of Gauloises when I'd searched him for spare ammunition, and I got it out and put a cigarette between 'his Lips and lit it for him. 'Just sit still for a minute or two and you'll be all right.'

I went into the sitting-room and my study: there was nothing out of place and this agreed with my theory that he'd come straight from the kitchen to prepare an emergency exit in the hall when I'd opened the door. But I checked the upper floor just in case and found it in order. When I came down the stairs he was standing in a shadowed corner of the hall with his gun trained on me.

'Come on,' I said, 'I'm going to drop you home.'

'Where is safe?'

'What?'

'Where is safe?' He jerked the gun.

It's all spelt out laboriously for these local domestics in the little maroon booklet they issue at the Embassy: Al-ways look for the wall-safe be-fore any-thing else, and that sort of thing. There's a translation into their idea of English and we keep a copy in the Caff to read to each other when we feel like a giggle.

'Don't muck about,' I said, but he kept on his Al Capone expression and wouldn't budge so I went right up to him and panicked him into pulling the trigger and he heard the click and 'his face went blank, like a baby's when you take away the bottle. 'Now you've got the message,' I said. 'Listen, I'm going to take you home — you can't walk there in all that rain.' It was pouring again, with big drops coming through the half-open door.

He was all right after that, and followed me down the steps and into the car and sat there in a despondent hump. I started up and got the wipers going and undipped the mike.

Fox mobile.

They said okay and I put the mike back and got past a bus that was sending up a filthy stern-wave. It wasn't far, but before we got there he keeled over and came to rest with his head against the door. I don't know exactly what happened: probably delayed reaction to the whole thing. I left him like that till we pulled up outside No. 13 Kensington Palace Gardens. There were a couple of men at the doors but they didn't come out and I didn't blame them in this downpour. I got him in a fireman's lift and took him up the steps and propped him there and went back to the car already half soaked. They were coming out to take a look at him as I drove away.

We don't normally deliver Ruskies back to their Embassy but I suppose I was sorry for this one and felt a bit guilty. But until he'd given me the typical pattern of operation (pubs and libraries and trees in the Park) I hadn't been sure he wasn't a Yugoslav with some conceivable connection with Milos Zarkovic and I couldn't just let it go.

Halfway back to Knightsbridge they called me up.

Base to Fox…

Read you.

Communicate 4 soonest.

Five minutes.

Roger. Over and out.

There was time to spare because they'd accepted my five minutes instead of switching to speech-code and giving me a directive but I put my foot down slightly and took the short cut through the mews because Extension 4 was Travel and it looked as if Egerton had made up his mind to set me running.

Within three and a half minutes I had the Jensen standing outside the fiat and got the ammunition clip out of my pocket and dropped it down the drain and went in and picked up the phone in my study, checking for bugs. Negative, 'I think we're clear, aren't we?'

'Yes,' I said.

It was Jeffries, in Travel.

'All right, you're booked out on Flight AZ279 by Alitalia, Terminal 2 Heathrow, depart 19:15 today, minimum check-in time thirty-five minutes. Your night is non-stop to Fiumicino Airport, Rome, arriving 22:30 hours and the aircraft is a Douglas DC9. Your ticket is waiting for you at the check-in counter and we have a dark blue Fiat 1100 for you at Fiumicino. Any queries so far?'

'No.'

Rome was somewhere new, unless it was Brockley doing that one. According to Macklin, Smythe had last reported from Cairo and Hunter was doing Geneva and Fitzalan was keeping tabs on Fogel in Tangier.

'All right, are we still clear?'

'Yes.'

'Your contact in Rome will be Fitzalan. You will — '

'Say again?'

'Your contact in Rome will be Fitzalan. Any queries?'.

'No.' We don't keep the office on the line arguing the toss: if Travel said my contact was to be Fitzalan they weren't making any mistake. But the last I'd heard of him was in Tangier and he must have been getting on a plane while they were playing his report on the monitor tape in Signals: he'd said that Fogel had gone to ground but he must have come into the open again very fast and he'd broken for Rome.

Jeffries was talking.

The rdv is to be outside the Cielalto office on the ground floor and at this time we don't know who will arrive there first. No code-intro necessary. Now I'll give you the routine checks.'

He began going through them and I half-listened: they were just fail-safe reminders to leave private keys behind or in a deposit box at the airport, look for a message at Heathrow and Fiumicino, so forth. What interested me was that Fitzalan and Fogel must be arriving in Rome on the same flight from Tangier and since they were in a surveillance situation Fitzalan was going to have his work cut out to make a rendezvous with me and keep the peep on the objective at the same time. Not that I was worried: you learn to have faith in people like Parkis and Mildmay and Egerton when they've controlled you through half a dozen missions. If they said that Fitzalan would make contact with me and keep surveillance on his objective at the same time then that was precisely what was going to happen.

Jeffries finished the routine checks and asked for queries.

'Any backups?'

'We don't know at this stage.'

'Who's his local control?'

'There hasn't been time.'

I should have known. Egerton had been expecting something to break because he'd been sitting in at Signals but he couldn't have known what was going to break or he would have sent out a director to local-control Fitzalan before he got there. That man Fogel had broken ground with the speed of a ricochet and nobody in the Bureau had been given time to set up the necessary machinery to contain his travel pattern: at this stage they were relying totally on Fitzalan.

'No more questions?

'No,' I said. 'But tell Egerton there was a Ruskie in here, and get someone to put the kitchen window right when they come to shut the place up.'

'Is that the only damage?'

'I got him in time.'

'Noted. All right, we want you to keep in continuous con-tact between 15 and Heathrow, and we'll have your car picked up and put in the garage, so leave the key in the usual place.'

'Will do.'

I hung up and got some clean shirts and things and dropped them into the suitcase, stopping once to listen to the small sounds in the house: the spitting of rain on a window, me creak of a swelling timber, the drip of a tap. The place seemed already abandoned, and in the morning they'd send someone to see to the kitchen window and turn off the electricity and take the laundry bag; and afterwards there'd only be these sounds here, and sometimes the ring of the telephone that no one would answer.

Normal introspection at this stage: ignore. It was just that we never know, for certain, whether well be back.

I took the suitcase downstairs and passed the puddle where the ice cubes had melted and shut the front door, dropping the case into the boot of the car and starting up, reporting mobility to base.

There was a delay going through Richmond because some bloody fool had lost traction on the wet road and wrapped his Vauxhall round a traffic-light standard and someone else had gone into 'him: glass all over the place and bobbies' capes and flashing lamps while the time ticked away and I sat listening to Signals telling one of the executives to cancel niner-niner and freeze all movement: I suppose he's blown a fuse somewhere and they'd got a flap on.

There'd be another one on if they couldn't get this road cleared in the next ten minutes and I started tinkering with the idea of going across to one of the police cars and asking them to get me to the airport without touching the ground anywhere, but the breakdown crew had swept most of the glass into the gutter and the ambulance had made a U-turn and gone off into a No Entry street with its headlights on and five minutes later the nearside lane of traffic began moving and we did a slow crawl for the next half mile until the whole situation was back to normal except that some of us were doing well over the limit to make up for lost ime.

Terminal 2, Heathrow, 19:07.

No problem at the check-in counter.

No message on the board.

But I noticed a headline on the newsstand and bought a copy on my way to the departure gate and didn't like it much. Innocent bystander shot dead in Geneva. He was a British tourist and his name was Hunter.

Things were getting rough out there.