The Scorpion Signal

1: SHAPIRO

I turned again, wheeling into the wind with the edge of the cliff a hundred feet below me. The air feathered against my face, numbing it, and tears crept back from the corners of my eyes, drying on the skin. A pale sun was turning the sea into hammered gold, below on my right side, and the waves were rolling in ice-blue arcs, hanging poised for an instant before they shattered along the shore.

It had been the twentieth turn: I'd been counting them. I was now half hypnotized by the sliding images of grass and cliff and sand and sea as they floated below my prone body, and by the periods of near-weightlessness as the wind gusts dropped me into the troughs and lifted me out again. A minute ago two gulls had come abreast of me and drifted alongside not far away, their sharp heads turned to watch me as they wondered what I was; inland I could see our three shadows gliding in perfect formation across the short brown grass of the cliff top, two small ones and the third much bigger but still the shape of a bird, not of a man. By a degree, however small, I was taking on their character, watching the land below and feeling the lie of the wind, the muscles compensating as evolution worked on my humanoid body and adapted its behaviour to the needs of a bird.

I broke the next turn at ninety degrees and went down-wind across the edge of the cliff to try out the air on the lee side. For a moment the car was directly below me and I saw Norton again, standing near it and gazing up. Another car was pulling in rather fast from the cliff road and bouncing over the grass, but I lost sight of it as the sail hit some turbulence. I worked on the bar, tilting it back to gain speed and pulling the nose up to get some more height; then I veered into the wind and crossed the cliff again, turning to drift parallel with it.

After the next turn I saw the other car had pulled up alongside Norton's MG. There were a couple of men in dark uniforms, and Norton started waving to me with wide urgent gestures. I checked the sail and rigging but couldn't see anything wrong. I didn't expect to: I had a rough idea of what had come up. At the end of the run I turned and moved inland again. All three of them were waving to me with flailing downward motions, putting a lot of expression into it; I could now see the white letters on the back of the second car. I didn't like it, any of it, because I'd been on leave only two weeks and my nerves were still trying to shake themselves out.

I made three more runs, trying to forget about them, but they began using the horns at me and a siren wailed into life and died again. They were still waving, so I compromised: I think I could have got enough height to come in and land on the grass and ask them what the hell they wanted, but I gave myself a final fling and put the nose down and swooped over their heads in a long arrowing dive across the cliff and the beach and the sea, wheeling against the beaten gold reflection and moving into wind again, lowering, the trailing edge fluttering near stalling point a few feet above the ground; then I put the nose down and ran in with my feet ploughing up the sand as I got the last of the wind out of the sail. I was still dismantling when Norton came sprinting along from the cliff path to help me.

'London,' he said.

'I'm frozen stiff,' I told him. 'Look after this, will you?' I left him and ran hard for a mile, as far as the pier and back, feeling better because I'd worked a bit of the frustration out: there was absolutely no point in getting annoyed just because he'd mentioned London. They couldn't send me out again, not this soon.

'Police escort,' Norton said as he strapped the spars together. 'Not my fault.'

'All I need,' I said, 'is a phone.'

'And the best of luck.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake shut up.'

I hated panic, and a police escort meant someone in London was panicking.

It was ten minutes before we got the kite up the steps in the cliff. The two cops helped us stow it on the rack of Norton's MG, asking a lot of silly questions, what did it feel like, wasn't it dangerous, so forth. They followed us to the hotel and I used the telephone and talked to three people, one of them Tilson; then I put the phone down and came back to the lobby and told Norton:

'You weren't joking.'

He puffed out his cheeks. 'Are you taking your car?'

'Yes. I'll need it to come back in, tomorrow.'

He didn't make any comment. The two cops were looking at us from the entrance doors and one of them called out:

'We were told to get a move on. It's up to you.'

I went over to the desk to pay my bill.

'Give me a lift?' Norton asked me.

'Where to?' I was thinking of Helena.

'London.'

I turned and looked at him. 'Do they want you too?'

'They might.'

I suppose he could have gone over to the telephone booth by the doors while I was calling London: the first line I'd tried had been engaged. Maybe they'd told him to make sure I got there.

'Look,' I told the cashier, 'there's a Helena Swinburn meeting me here in an hour from now. Give her this message and get the florist to bring round some gardenias, if not, orchids, if not, carnations, all right? Add twenty-five to the card to cover it. And I'm leaving my bags in the room.'

He was making notes. 'You'll be keeping the room, then, sir?'

'Yes. I'll be back tomorrow some time.'

I could hear Norton whistling under his breath. He'd caught some of the panic from London when he'd phoned, typical admin reaction. I went over to the cops. 'What's the form?'

'You follow us. If you can't keep up, just give a toot.'

'Bloody cheek,' I said and went out to look for the jag.

In the next ten minutes we cleared all the red lights in the town with the siren and flashers going and settled down into the nineties as soon as we got on to the motorway north, reaching Mitcham in seventy minutes flat.

'Chopper,' Norton said. He hadn't spoken before.

I'd been watching it. The patrol car was slowing hard in front of us and taking us across the common, pulling up close to the spot where the helicopter was touching down on skis. It was a police machine with the coat-of-arms of the Royal Borough of Westminster on the side; I suppose they hadn't been able to get the Sussex constabulary to fly us in from the coast. Everyone had obviously been playing about with the radio and I began feeling depressed because this was fully-alert procedure and I was meant to be on leave.

The door slid back and a voice came above the sound of the blades. 'No baggage?'

'No'

'Hop in.'

Norton's foot slipped on the metal rung of the step as he swung up.

'Watch it.'

They slammed the door and gunned up and lifted off with the first of the neon lights falling away below. Norton was still untalkative; he sat puffing his cheeks out, trying to get rid of the tension. He'd been with the Bureau nearly as long as I had and he knew the signs. This wasn't a mission they wanted me for: someone had blown a fuse and the whole network had gone out of whack. It had happened twice before, during my time: once when Fraser had been pulling a Polish intelligence colonel across the frontier at Szczecin and the checkpoint had shut down on them, and once when they'd hauled me out of Tokyo to look for some nerve gas some bloody fool had dropped all over the Sahara. Whatever they wanted me for this time it was no go.

London was coming up, a haze of light from horizon to horizon under the late January fog. Norton was rubbing his hands together, though it wasn't cold in the cabin; I felt sorry for him, with all that adrenalin sloshing about before we'd even started.

'Never mind,' I said above the beat of the rotors, 'it's probably some bloody fool in Signals getting his homework wrong.'

'Oh shit,' he said and swung to face me, and I realized he'd been startled out of his thoughts by the sound of my voice. I began wondering if he knew something that I didn't: something about the panic going on.

'Where are you putting us down?' I asked the pilot.

'Battersea Heliport. All right?'

'It's your toy.' We were lowering now, with the city lights swarming to meet us.

'You from the Yard, are you, sir?'

'That's right.' We never mind what they think we are.

A signal was coming through and the navigator leaned towards me, the glow of the instrument panel on his face. 'They want to know if our people can take your jag to Sloane Street for you. They're off their beat already.'

'Can you do that?'

'Easy.' He talked into the headset and signalled out.

'Well,' I asked him, 'did you arrange it?'

'Yes, sir.'

He could have told me.

Nerves.

There was a bump and we keeled-even under slowing rotors while Norton hit his seat-belt open and went down first and stood on the landing pad waiting to help me if I slipped on the rungs, bloody little nursemaid, they'd given him instructions to Bo-Peep me all the way home.

'Much obliged!' he called through the doorway, and pulled his collar up against the icy draught. We jogged across to the door of the building as the rotors sped up and sent a gust of exhaust gas against our backs.

They'd got their liaison worked out: there was a squad car waiting at the kerb when we went out through the front. Norton showed his card and they snapped the rear door open and got the flashers going the moment we turned out into the traffic stream, using the siren once or twice to get us some headway. Norton still didn't talk and by this time I didn't want him to. We tumbled out of the car across the slush of a recent thaw and slipped through the narrow doorway halfway down Whitehall and hit the lift button and waited, not looking at each other. Dirty water seeped from our shoes under the bleak security lights as I thought of Helena and wondered if I'd ever see her again.

Tilson met us as we got out of the lift.

'My dear fellow,' he said, and held out his warm dry hand. 'Long time no see.'

'Two weeks. That's not long.' Norton had gone quietly rushing off along the corridor: I suppose he'd been told to report somewhere the moment we got in.

'I know what you mean,' Tilson said with a slow blink. He was trying hard to look amiable and comforting, since it was his role in life; but tonight he couldn't manage it; he just looked frightened to death, right at the back of his eyes. 'What about a spot of tea?'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'We've got a few minutes, you see.' He guided me gently along the corridor as far as the Caff. 'We're not quite set up for you yet.'

'Look, Tilson, just give me a clue, will you?'

'It's not really for me to.say, old horse.' He shuffled across the room in his carpet slippers to a corner table, one of the few left. Maggie saw us and came over and mopped up some spilled tea, and when she'd gone again he said with his lips hardly moving, 'They've sent for Mr Croder. He's on his way in from Rome.'

'Croder?'

'He shouldn't be long.'

I shut up for a minute. Croder was chief of the base directorate and handled the ultra-sensitive operations and had a mortality rate for foreign actions higher than the rest of them put together, not because he wasn't brilliant but because he took on risks that most of the others shied at. I'd never worked for him, not even on the Sahara thing. I didn't want to.

I listened to Jessop and Wallis, sitting at the next table; but they weren't talking about the job: Jessop had bought a Piper three weeks ago and took one of his girl-friends for a joyride and wrapped the thing round a power pylon and got away with it, except that she was suing him for five hundred thousand pounds for a new face before she could model again.

I listened to some people talking on the other side, but couldn't pick anything up. I was desperate for clues, because I knew I wouldn't get any from Tilson. He was just here to make sure I didn't get away.

'Tilson,' I said evenly, 'I've been on leave exactly two weeks and I'm due for eight and I'm not coming in yet, okay? No mission. Nix, niet, ninguno, are you receiving me?'

He looked vaguely at the wall. 'I don't think there's a mission on the board, old fruit. Not officially.' The tea came and he began spooning sugar into it. He hadn't looked at me since he'd met me outside the lift and that wasn't like him; he's always been cagey but not this bad.

'What about unofficially?' I asked him.

'Nothing ever happens in this place — ' he turned his bland pink face to me for the first time- 'unofficially.'

I held on hard. 'I just want a clue, Tilson. Why has everyone started tearing up the pea-patch?'

He began sipping his tea; it was too hot but he was just making a gesture and trying not to look scared. 'You'll have to be a bit patient, old horse.' He gave a wintry smile. 'Not quite your forte, I know.'

O'Rourke was coming towards us between the tables, his hands dug into the pockets of his mack and pulling it tight round his thighs so he wouldn't knock anyone's tea over. I thought he was coming to talk to Tilson but he dumped himself down between Jessop and Wallis at the next table. I heard him quite clearly. 'They've lost Shapiro,' he told them, and I saw Jessop going slowly white, and in a couple of seconds he got up and went out, bumping into a table on his way and not noticing.

'Dead?' I asked O'Rourke.

He looked up. 'What?'

'Did they find him dead?'

'Who?'

'Shapiro.'

'I don't know.'

'Who found him?'

'I don't know.'

I shut up. Tilson wasn't looking at either of us; he was just listening, with his face down over his tea. O'Rourke didn't know anything. Nobody in this place knows anything, because that's the official policy: the staff has to have an overall view of operations but there's always a handful of field executives hanging around between missions or waiting to be sent out, and the less we know of what's going on, the less we can tell the opposition if we make a mistake out there and they pull us in and throw us under the bright white light and keep us there till it burns through to the brain while they're asking us questions.

'You did a bit of work,' Tilson said conversationally, 'with Shapiro. Didn't you?'

'A couple of times.' Cyprus, Tenerife.

He nodded and looked down and drank some more tea while I sat there trying not to think about Shapiro, trying not to remember him too well. There wasn't anything definite about that bit of news I'd just overheard; he could still be alive, and if he wasn't, there was nothing I could do about it. We come and go.

'I wonder if I can find anyone,' Tilson said plaintively, 'to look after you until Mr Croder shows up. I don't like your having to hang about like this.' He got up and wandered off and I noticed his tea wasn't finished; he just wanted to get me away from Wallis and O'Rourke before I overheard anything else. That suited me; the more we hear, up and down these bleak green-painted corridors, the more we become involved, the more we become exposed. We don't want that to happen. The Bureau doesn't exist, so we don't exist either, if we're wise. It's less painful like that, and infinitely less dangerous.

It was nearly nine in the evening before Tilson came and got me out of Monitoring, where I'd been passing the time listening to a lot of flak from one of our cells in Africa which was trying to pull itself out of the general bush fire that had gone up after the Kibombo massacre.

'Talk to you,' Tilson asked from the doorway, 'for a jiff?' It was terribly low key, and I started worrying again. He took me along the corridor, with our footsteps echoing from the high arched ceiling; there's still no carpeting in this bloody place: they say the parquet's got woodworm in it and they have to keep a watch on it.

'We've got Mr Croder for you,' Tilson told me and hustled me into Signals. From that moment I began going cold. We can always refuse a mission and we don't have to give our reasons; some of the operations look strictly shut-ended during the planning stage and we reserve the right to go on living if we think the risk is too high. But we can't refuse to listen to a director if he's got something for us to do, and sometimes he'll prick our conscience or our pride and lever us into a tricky one before we know what's happening. My nerves were still out of condition from the last operation, although you'd think we'd get over it, one day, and learn to live with it; maybe some of them have, but I haven't yet, and it's getting late.

There were only four people manning the room tonight, two of them handling separate missions at the main console with the code names Flash point and Banjo on the boards above their heads, and two others waiting for us at the unit nearer the door.

'Where is he?' I asked Tilson.

'Mr Croder? He's in Geneva.'

'He was flying from Rome, the last — '

'Never mind,' Tilson said amiably, and looked at the big international clock.

'He's coming through on the hour,' one of the operators said, 'using the booster at Lausanne. Would you like to sit down?'

'No.'

They waited quietly with their hands on their laps and the light of the panel on their faces.

I'll need a shield, a sharp voice came from the main console, but you'll have to hurry. It sounded like Symes, but I didn't think they'd use him for an Asian job; both missions were designated Far East alongside the code names and he was a Latin-country specialist, you could smell the garlic the minute he came in for debriefing.

The operator flicked the switch for direct contact with the base director and started talking, but I didn't hear the rest because a light started winking on our unit and the man with the chewing-gum opened the signal and set to scramble and clarify.

'A-Alpha. Channel 3. Clarifying.'

We waited. The light went on winking.

'Croder.' There was a long pause. 'The weather's closing down everywhere, and the London flight was laid off.' His voice was thin and precise, the scrambler giving it a metallic echo. 'Have you brought Quiller in?'

'Yes, sir.' The operator slipped out of the padded chair and motioned me to take it.

I sat down. 'This is Quiller.'

'Ah yes.' A couple of seconds went by. 'You were on leave, I understand.'

'I still am.'

There was a much longer pause. 'Yes. I am on leave too. But I want you to listen very carefully. I don't think I can reach London with any immediate predictability, since a lot of flights are either being cancelled or diverted. But I can reach Berlin before midnight, according to current reports. I would like you to meet me there, as soon as you can get a plane.'

In a moment I said: 'Look, I'm still on leave and I need to relax. It's too soon.'

I felt Tilson move an inch, beside me.

'I understand that,' the thin, precise voice came from the speaker. 'But something rather exceptional has happened, and we've got to deal with it as soon as we can. Or if you prefer, I've got to deal with it. I was rather hoping you'd agree to help me, but — what can I say? You are on leave.'

The silence was so long that I thought he'd gone off the air again, like some kind of ghost, fading and reappearing. I was very cold now, and sat with my hands folded into my arms and my neck hunched into my coat. There was something weird about this whole thing: Croder was sitting on some sort of time bomb and he was having to use an awful lot of control in the way he handled me. He wasn't used to that. Finally I couldn't stand the silence any more.

'Is it a mission?' I asked him.

'It is a rescue mission. We — I — have to get someone out.'

I waited for more, but he'd stopped. T didn't ask him 'out of where' because that didn't make a lot of difference. He meant out of trouble.

The air in the room seemed to shiver suddenly as the sharp voice came from the main console across from us — I tell you we can't hope to go in without a shield.

Tilson moved again beside me, unnerved. He's normally a stoic type and can keep as still as a lizard for hours.

I said to Croder: 'Why can't someone else do it?'

He came back a little faster this time. 'Of those people available, I think you stand the best chance. If there's a chance at all.'

'I'm not available. Listen, I came off the last thing two weeks ago, didn't anyone tell you that? Two weeks.' My voice had risen a fraction and I didn't like that, but it might give him a clue as to the condition I was in.

'I know that, yes.' He paused again. 'You did rather well.'

I left that one. Every word he said was a baited hook.

'A very great deal depends, you see, on whether we can do anything for this man. It touches all of us.'

He was being as specific as he could, on the air. It was no use asking him to spell anything out: he couldn't. He was trying to get me to read between the lines and I wasn't interested. I didn't want to know.

The operator with the chewing-gum was on my other side, opposite Tilson, and I swung my head up. 'Would you go and spit that bloody stuff out for Christ's sake? I can't stand the smell.'

My hands were frozen. I was afraid of what Croder was going, finally, to make me do, by pricking my conscience, or my pride. I listened to the rain beating at the row of narrow sooty windows and wondered who the poor bastard was, and where. We have to get someone out. He couldn't be done for, yet; he was lying on a rooftop somewhere in the pouring rain with the patrol lights sweeping the streets, waiting till he had to show himself; or hunched between rocks in a frontier zone like a wild dog with a broken leg and no hope of food or shelter or mercy when they found him; or sitting in a basement propped in an upright chair with the bright light probing into his eyes till he couldn't see them any more, could only hear what they were asking him, feel what they were doing when he didn't answer. It touches all of us.

The man with the chewing-gum had moved away but I could still smell the stuff, like toothpaste.

I spoke into the console. 'Is it Shapiro?' Tilson moved again.

'Yes,' Croder said. I could tell by his tone that I wasn't meant to know. I wanted to say well what about O'Rourke and Wallis and Jessop, shouting the bloody odds all over the Caff down there? Security stank, in this place, always did, half the staff trying to keep the lid on things and the other half yelling their heads off.

Shapiro. A small quiet man with sharp pointed ears and a passion for chess and a girl in Brighton and a scar the length of his forearm where the knife had got him before I could throw the rest of them off and reach him in time, glass all over the place from the explosion and the sirens coming in, Tenerife, with a full moon and the night temperature still in the nineties and Rosita sobbing her heart out in a bar at the end of the jetty because they'd got Templer, nothing we could do. 'I'll take this one,' he'd told me the night before; 'they know you, but they don't know me.' But it was just that he'd been frightened, and wanted to prove that he wasn't. We've got a few things in common.

So he wasn't dead.

'What theatre?' I asked Croder.

'Europe.'

That was all I'd get. There wasn't anything more I could ask him. He could have switched to selective code but he obviously wasn't prepared to. In a couple of seconds he said: 'You know him quite well, I understand.' Shapiro.

'Not too well. But I know him.'

The bloody thing had been ticking all the time and he'd stood looking at it with his small gnome's head on one side: 'the best thing'd be to disarm it, don't you think, take it apart, before it can do any harm.' He'd worked at it for nearly three hours without a break, his pale grey eyes wide open, staring at God all the time while his nicotine-stained fingers stroked and caressed the matt-black metal components and the sweat ran off his face and dripped on to the bare boards where I sat waiting, hunched into my own ghost and unable to look away. 'I think that's it,' he said at last, and pulled the detonator clear and reached for a cigarette and put it into his mouth with fingers that shook so badly now that he knocked the flame out and I had to strike another match for him.

Shapiro.

Say this much: he was a professional.

'You know his work, at least.' Croder's voice came insistently.

'Yes.'

'What would be your opinion of him,' in slow and reasonable tones, 'as an executive in the field?'

I felt Tilson listening, beside me. I thought of lying, then realized I didn't have to. In the end I could refuse, I could refuse, repeat it like a litany, I could refuse.

'First class.'

'Quite so. You wouldn't,' Croder said with a certain silkiness, 'consider him expendable.'

Like a dog with a broken leg.

'No.'

Stonewall the bastard, don't give him any rope.

'All I would ask is that you would at least meet me in Berlin, so that I can give you the details.' Three seconds, four. 'That is all I would ask, for him.'

The lights glowed on the console. I could hear the voice of the man in the field coming faintly across the room, where they were running Flash point. Tilson hadn't moved. The smell of peppermint had gone now, or I was getting used to it. I leaned forward towards the console so that Croder would hear me clearly, and know by my tone that I meant what I said.

'I'm on leave. I haven't got my nerve back yet — it was close to the crunch, that time, and I'm lucky to be here. So you'll have to find someone else, because I refuse.'

I got out of the chair and went past Tilson without looking at him and opened the door and threw it shut behind me and walked down the green-painted corridor to the lift and pressed the button for down.

It was a deluge outside and there was a traffic block near Hyde Park Corner and I sat waiting for fifteen minutes before I took the phone off the clip and got Tilson and told him I wanted a police car to get me out of this mess and I wanted a flight to Berlin, the first he could find for me. And tell Croder.