The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter One: KATIA

The winter rain had driven everyone off the streets and half London was down here in the Underground trying to get home in the dry. My train was packed and we stood crushed together swaying from the straps as the thing moaned through the curves. Flashes came now and then against the black windows as the contacts hit some dirt on the rail, making it look as if lightning had struck We stood with the patience of cattle, our clothes steaming from the deluge that had drenched us up there in the streets.

The man had got on at Knightsbridge. I was standing next to him now.

We stood reading the advertisement panels and watching the light bulbs dim and flicker intermittently. A couple of girls along at the end were getting some furtive attention, one of them still managing to look sexy under a colourless plastic mac and with hair like seaweed; but we were mostly men on this train: the typists had gone home punctually an hour ago, leaving the department and managerial staffs to goad their ulcers into overtime.

In the window I watched the reflection of the man standing next to me. I had forgotten his name but I knew who he was. It was two years since I’d seen him and at that time I hadn’t thought I would ever see him again.

“Is this Piccadilly?”

I looked down at the plump woman. “No. Hyde Park.”

“I’ve got to get off at Piccadilly,” she said, looking worried about it.

“I’ll let you know.”

“You can’t see what the names are, can you, with the windows so dirty?”

“Not really.”

The train rocked again and the man swayed against me; I eased away from him slightly, not wanting him to bump me too hard, in case he felt he should apologize. I didn’t want to look at him, for any reason whatever. He was jammed into the corner between the glass partition and the doors, so that I was the only person close to him. I could feel the draught slicing through the gap in the doors where the rubber had warped; they said it would freeze tonight.

“Is this it?” the plump woman asked me.

“No. This is Green Park.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The train was stationary now and I turned away from the man by a few degrees more, because that would suit his book. I didn’t want him to feel worried about me.

“When’s Piccadilly, then?”

I looked at the woman. “The next stop.” I didn’t want to tell her I was getting off there myself, because the man would hear, and behave differently from the way I wanted. “I won’t let you miss it,” I told her.

The train began moving again and I took a series of slow breaths, inhaling the smell of wet overcoats. When we were going at full speed I shifted my feet an inch for the sake of balance, and waited.

The woman was standing sideways-on to me with her shoulder against my chest; she had to turn her head quite a bit and look upwards when she talked to me, but that wasn’t good enough. I went on waiting.

Lightning came again on the black windows.

“Is it the next stop?” she asked me. “Piccadilly?”

“Yes.”

She nodded, turning back to stare at the windows. Then the train lurched and the waiting was over and I reached up with my left hand to brace myself against the partition; and now the woman couldn’t see my face any more because my arm was blocking her view.

The only sound was the moaning of the wheels, and someone saying, on the other side of the compartment, that it was going to snow. There was no other sound of any significance. But time was going by, and my right arm began tiring. I would have liked to rest it, but couldn’t.

Katia, I thought, Katia, remembering her name but not her face, or not very much. Just a girl standing there under the lamp with the two men on each side of her, standing there looking at me and smiling. It was all I needed, this thought.

And the memory of her name. Katia.

The train began slowing.

I kept my eyes on the opposite side of the compartment now. The Glow of Wundalite, a panel read, For a Festive Christmas! It was already late January. Perhaps they meant for next Christmas too, for every Christmas. That would be the message, really: that you could have a Festive Christmas with those things lit up all over the tree. I let my mind, or part of it, consider these ideas, surprised that I needed so desperately to hang on to something ordinary and acceptable as a focus for thought while the soundless ness went on, and the fierce primeval satisfaction.

The train came to a halt and as people started moving I pushed against the plump woman, forcing her towards the doors on the opposite side as they opened and some of the passengers got out.

“Is this — ”

“Yes,” I told her, “but we’ll have to hurry.” I took her arm and stopped her falling as we reached the doors.

“Are you sure this — ”

“Piccadilly,” I said, and made certain she didn’t turn round. “I’ll look after you, don’t worry.”

But as soon as she’d got her feet on the platform I turned away and didn’t look back. I was one of the first through the gates and a minute later I was walking fast in the blinding rain with my head down and my hands dug into my pockets and a kind of laughter coming that I tried to stop, but couldn’t.

“What the hell for?” I asked him.

Holmes shut the file and went back to his desk and sat down and said:

“It’s all I know. You’re on standby. Signal ends.” He picked up the phone.

“Put that bloody thing down,” I told him, and he did, looking up at me with his totally expressionless face. “I want to know who sent for me.”

Gently he said: “I was going to phone Tilson, to see if he knew.”

Holmes is like that: he manoeuvres you around till you shit on your own doorstep and then says now look what you’ve done.

“Tilson won’t know,” I said with an edge. Tilson was in Briefing, and therefore one of the last people you go through on your way out to the field. “Only a director could have slapped me on standby when I’m due for leave and you ought to know that. How long have you been here?”

“Longer,” he said, “than you.”

I went out of his office and left the door open, going along to Debriefing. I passed Matthews near the stairway, leaning backwards behind a stack of files he was carrying. “Who’s got in?” I asked him.

“Where from?”

“Anywhere.”

He didn’t answer right away and I couldn’t tell whether he was considering the question or deciding not to say anything. He kicked open a door and called back: “Have to ask Tilson.”

He kicked the door shut behind him and I began worrying again. Matthews normally told you things, if he knew them, and if he didn’t know them he simply said so. This morning he was being evasive, like Holmes, giving me the same Tilson routine. Tilson was the traditional backstop for questions of any kind except those concerning your briefing: you might just as well ask a brick wall.

I found the big squareheaded character in Debriefing and he was surprised to see me and I could understand that, because he knew I wasn’t in from a mission, and that’s about the only time you ever go in there.

“Hallo, sir,” he said brightly. “How are things going?”

“Who’s just got in?”

He thought about this, without taking his eyes off me. He was an ex-Yard man with the knack of looking at you as if you’d got a lump of custard on the tip of your nose and he didn’t like to mention it.

“I expect you’re looking for Briefing, aren’t you? This is — ”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s a perfectly simple question.” I leaned over his desk. “Has someone just got in from a mission?”

He folded his square freckled hands and his eyes went stony.

“Well, sir, they come and go, don’t they?”

He didn’t have executive status and this was his way of telling me to get the hell out of his office.

“You must be a pain in the neck to your dentist,” I told him and went out and tried to find Thompson. Someone said he was down in the Cafe for a tea-break. He wasn’t.

I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a cup and didn’t drink it because the last thing my nerves wanted at the moment was caffeine and in this place the stuff tasted like something out of a horse.

“Is it too cold?” Maisie asked me.

“It’s fine.”

She went away.

The thing that worried me was that someone had slapped me on standby and they wouldn’t do that without checking the records and the records showed that I’d got back from Turkey a week ago and was due for special leave. Special leave is granted when you come in looking like something the dog has found in a rubbish dump, and we nearly always get it because no one ever comes in looking very fit: it’s in the nature of the job.

Being on standby isn’t the same as being on call. When you’re on call it means they’ve got a specific mission lined up for you and you have to be ready to hit the field at a moment’s notice, so you don’t go far from a telephone and you don’t leave your pad without telling them where you’re going. They let you see one of the girls but it’s on the understanding that if her phone rings you’ve got to put down the tiddlywinks and get to your car in zero seconds flat, so it’s no use complaining. Standby is less demanding and more general: it means they may have a job for you but you can leave home and travel around the Metropolitan area providing you call them at twelve-hour intervals.

The one alert phase often leads to the other, of course: from standby you can suddenly find yourself put on call and then you’re in line for briefing and transport, within minutes or hours or sometimes days: it depends on how soon the directors can work out things like access, cover, liaison, so forth. The one thing I knew at this moment was that they wouldn’t be putting me on call, because the Turkey thing had developed a lot of problems and we’d lost a courier and blown the escape route and I’d had to get out under fire from the frontier guards at Kazim Pasa. I’d had no cover for Iran and it had meant holing up in a freight yard for three days in the snow before I could reach the embassy. That was all right but I’d lost some blood because one of the guards had made a hit and it was the wrong time to go on a fast in a freight yard at five below zero.

“Hallo, old horse.”

Tilson sat down and began a little tattoo with his fingertips on the plastic table, not looking at me but gazing around at the tea urns and Maisie and the liverish yellow walls.

“Who put me on standby?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t know.” Then he turned his pale watery eyes on me and said under his breath: “What have you been up to, for Christ’s sake?”

I went instinctively deadpan and felt the heart rate increasing suddenly, whipped up by the shock. He hadn’t said much but it was enough. In the Bureau people talk so little that if someone says good morning you feel like dashing into Codes and Cyphers to find out what he meant. The Bureau doesn’t exist, so you don’t exist, and nobody else exists, so there’s very little to talk about.

I looked at Tilson.

“You want some tea?”

He shook his head, looking away again. “I’ve got a message for you, old fruit, that’s all. You’re requested not to leave the building. Okay?” He got up and wandered off in his red plaid slippers, saying a word to Maisie as he went out, leaving her giggling.

I sat at the table with the cold cup of tea and didn’t want to move. My stomach had gone sour and I tried not to think about what Tilson had said what Tilson had meant. But I’d have to think about it and I left the Cafe and went up to the fourth floor and looked for Woods, because he might know the score. He was in Signals, perched in front of the mainline Asia console trying to get a director in the field some kind of access before his executive ran out of information they were so bloody good at kicking you into a red sector and leaving you there like a sitting duck while they sat around here in London working out the material they should have worked out before you were even briefed.

Not true. They sometimes did it. Only sometimes, or no one would ever get back with his skin on. I was just feeling paranoiac, that was all, and when Woods turned round from the console to look at me and turned right back without saying anything I gave it up and cleared out. I hadn’t expected him to say anything except hallo or something because he didn’t have time: the yellow was flashing and the director was asking for a signal and Woods had one for him because he hadn’t got the phone in his free hand; but it was his face that had rattled me: the quick surprise in it and then the shut-down as he looked at me for a moment without any expression at all before he went back to the set.

I was beginning to get the message.

For the next hour I hung around the upper floors but couldn’t find anyone to talk to. There was a lot of pressure on this morning and everyone looked as nervous as a cat on moving day. Harrison might have spared me some time but he was sending a group out to one of the African states and asked me to leave as soon as I went in there. In Room 12 there was a dental mechanic installing a three-phase micro-receiver in a wisdom tooth for one of the Moscow couriers, and I didn’t stay. Young Gray was fiddling about next door with a couple of Dinky Toys and the model of a street intersection. One of the buildings had a little flag and the whole thing looked terribly like a long-range elimination set-up for telescopic sights and I didn’t interrupt him, except to remind him to lock the door as soon as I’d gone: we get a few visitors to the Bureau and although they’re usually deep-screened people from the Foreign Office or DI6 we ought not to be seen playing games like that on the fourth floor, which is now the executive action complex.

I was sitting around in Monitoring with one ear on some stuff going out on the Chinese-speaking propaganda programme from Moscow when one of the phones rang and someone picked it up and looked around and said:

“Yes, he’s here.” He passed it to me and I gave my name and listened very intently because this was the call I’d been waiting for: it couldn’t be anything else.

It was one of the girls from Admin, asking if I could be in Mr. Parkis’s room as soon as possible and I said yes I could and put the thing down and went out, keeping my breath steady and my pace steady but finding it difficult, having to work at it. Because I knew what had happened, and I’d spent half the night and all this morning trying to tell myself that I didn’t.

A copy of the Telegraph was lying on the desk with the front page turned towards me as I came in. Parkis was looking down at it, his pale fleshy hands in the side pockets of his jacket with the thumbs hooked over the top. He didn’t speak.

When he saw I was looking at the newspaper he turned away and began walking in a short straight line between the window and the Lowrie on the wall, his soft elegant shoes leaving traces of dark and light as they disturbed the nap of the carpet. I didn’t spend long looking at the paper: I’d seen it already.

Parkis stood still and looked at me with his ice-blue eyes. He is made entirely of ice, this man, and one day when I blow my cover at the wrong time or spring a trap in the wrong place or walk into a red sector without checking it first I’m going to go out cursing Parkis. This I promise.

They’re all ruthless bastards, the London directors: they’ve got to be. They wouldn’t survive if they weren’t, and nor would we. But most of them understand what this kind of work does to us, and what it can do to us if it’s allowed to get out of hand. Most of them regard us as human beings even when they’re directing us into operations that no human being could be expected to bring off and keep his sanity. So we usually manage to get back, give or take a few exceptions; and this is partly because when we’re out there in the field we know there’s someone doing his best to look after us from London Control.

Parkis is different. He is like Loman, but infinitely worse. I’ve worked three missions under his control and since a year ago I’ve refused him and I’m going to go on refusing him. Parkis doesn’t think we’re human beings. He thinks we’re robots. And the only reason why he’s still among the top-echelon directors is because he plans his operations so meticulously that nothing can go wrong: providing you’re a robot. But there are situations in the field that even Parkis can’t control: it can rain and your foot can slip; a plane can be late; a shot can ricochet. Then if you’re still alive he’ll throw you to the dogs because there’s nothing else he can do: his operations are designed to tick with the precision of a watch, and they are thus too sensitive to accommodate the unpredictable.

So he wins on points: he brings back as many of us as the other directors do, and he does it by skill; but it’s the skill of a toy maker He finishes the paintwork and winds us up and sets us going and nine times out of ten we don’t hit the wall. It isn’t the odds I mind: they’re pretty good. It’s Parkis.

He spoke.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Not for long,” I said.

They could have found me in five minutes, wherever I was, since I’d come in this morning.

“What were you doing in Monitoring?”

“Keeping an ear open.” We’re not supposed to wander about on the fourth floor unless we’re on call or briefed.

I looked down at the Telegraph again, just for a second. They’d got a picture of the train, empty and with the doors open. The headline was across the three right-hand columns: Murder in London Underground.

I turned away from it and looked at the rain on the windows.

“Time is very short,” Parkis said thinly.

“Then let’s get it over.”

He said in a moment: “I have a question for you, Quiller. How many men have you been obliged to kill, in the course of a mission?”

“What? God knows. Not many. Half a dozen.”

Bangkok. East Germany. Warsaw. Tunisia. Hong Kong. The States.

Other places.

“Half a dozen,” he said tonelessly. “Possibly more.”

“Possibly.” Zade had taken one or two with him, in that jet.

Parkis swung round and said with soft fury, “Do you think that gives you a licence?”

“Not really.”

He waited to see if I was going to add anything. I let the silence go on.

“This man Novikov,” he said at last.

“Is that his name?” I looked at the paper again.

“Yes. His cover name was Weiner.”

“I didn’t know.”

There must have been someone else there. Or they’d -

“You didn’t know his name?” he asked sharply.

“No. I only — ”

“But you knew who he was?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Parkis, I don’t go around doing that sort of thing to strangers. If you — ”

“Very well. I am now asking for your explanation.”

I took a breath and wondered if there was any point in giving him some carefully-considered lies. I didn’t think there was. And some remnant of human faith was averse to my playing Judas to the dead.

“It was a personal thing,” I told Parkis. “I — ”

“ Personal?”

I shut up again. If he wanted an explanation he’d have to let me give it in my own way, without interruption. But this wasn’t going to be my game anyhow: I’d already lost. I knew it and they all knew it Matthews, Woods, Tilson, and all the rest of the people who’d looked at me this morning as if I was some kind of zombie. And Parkis knew it. “Be good enough to proceed.”

“Without interruptions?”

He stood gazing at me in silence and I could feel the chill.

“It was in Czechoslovakia,” I told him defensively, ‘a couple of years ago. The Bratislava thing. Mildmay handled that one, with Loman in the field.” I looked away from him. “Well, there was a girl.”

He waited. I was trying to remember things about her, but all I could think of was her name. Katia.

“It was the end phase,” I said in a moment. “I’d been in there and sent the stuff out and London was satisfied and my orders were to save myself if I could. Loman was still directing me in the field, with signals through Prague. But they had the girl, so I made a deal. I said they could take me for interrogation if they let the girl go.”

I was trying to remember the details but it’s often hard to go back over the end phase of a mission: we’re usually concerned with saving our skin and I suppose there’s a certain amount of retrogressive amnesia that sets in to protect the psyche; otherwise we’d never go out again. Today, talking to Parkis in a different environment, I found that particular scene was still in sharp focus, fogging out most of the background: Katia standing there under the lamp, scared to death and still smiling for me because that was the way she wanted me to remember her; and those two bastards standing one on each side.

“They agreed to the deal,” I said absently. “And I saw her walk away, free.”

He asked too casually: “You submitted to interrogation?”

“What? Of course not. I knew I could get out: Loman had a plane lined up and I’d got papers for Austria. So that’s what I did.”

I listened to the rain on the window. It had been raining then, in Bratislava; she’d been wet with it, her hair shining as she’d walked away, out of the lamplight, free.

“When I was back in London I heard what they’d done to her.”

That was all I wanted to tell him,

I watched the streaks running down the window, distorting the skyline across Whitehall; it looked as if the roofs were slowly melting out there in the January cold, and the buildings dissolving.

“You failed to keep this 'deal' of yours,” Parkis said.

“So did they.”

“Did you ever imagine they’d keep to it?”

“I think they would have.”

“If you had.”

“Yes.”

“So the blame was yours.”

“Indirectly. But I didn’t kill her. They did.”

He looked at the carpet, his feet together, his hands coming out of his pockets and clasping themselves in front of him. It looked as if the bastard was praying for something. Patience, probably.

“So I am to believe that for the sake of avenging this girl you speak of, you killed a man in a public place and put the Bureau in extreme hazard.”

“Believe what you like,” I told him.

His head came up sharply. “But she wasn’t even working for us! The Bratislava operation was — ”

“She was liaison. She’d been helping us to — ”

“Not Bureau liaison. Loman would have — ”

“Of course not. She was Czech, working through their — ”

“But if you were on the point of getting out, her work must have been finished! You had no further use for her!”

“Use for her?” I realized I was backing off a little, in case I hit him. It wouldn’t do any good. “You mean she was expendable?”

He turned away impatiently. “They had no reason to kill her in any case, did they?”

“She’d blown one of their cells.”

“That would be no reason.”

“I thought so.”

But this was why I’d lost. If it had been anyone but Katia I would have chanced it. The risk wasn’t high: but the risk was to her. And I couldn’t tell Parkis because he wouldn’t have understood.

“How deeply involved were you, Quiller, with this girl?”

“That’s none of your bloody business. I went into Bratislava, I did the job and I got out again. That’s all Control was concerned with.”

He turned away and took a couple of steps and turned back and asked tonelessly: “How did you kill him?”

“Windpipe.” My arm still felt the strain: I hadn’t been able to use my left hand to increase the force because the plump woman might have turned round again and seen his face. He’d gone down slowly, sliding against me as I eased him to the floor. My strength had appalled me, because I knew it was abnormal, fired by the rage; but I had exulted in what I was doing. The only unpleasant thing was that he’d had bad breath.

Parkis wasn’t looking at me. He said: “He’d been following you. Did you know?”

“Of course I knew!”

“Where had he first got on to you?”

“Knightsbridge.”

He swung into movement again and said with sharp emphasis: “We received a complaint.”

“Oh, really? So you weren’t certain it was me.”

“Not until you admitted it. But surely that’s academic?”

He meant I would have admitted it anyway, if he’d asked me point blank.

I suppose I would have.

“Yes.”

We’re allowed some kind of a private life outside the Bureau; and this thing between Novikov and me had been a private matter. Parkis wouldn’t normally have the right to question me on it but of course I’d stirred something up and there was a risk of the Bureau’s being involved unless they could put out a massive smoke-screen. I thought there must have been another man on that train; someone who’d seen what happened; and I was relieved there hadn’t been because I’d been thinking I must have missed him.

“You realize, of course,” Parkis said, and one of his phones rang, ‘that the police are looking for you at this moment, and with great energy?” He picked up the phone and spoke with his back to me. “No. No clearance. No briefing. The first available. I would say within ten minutes.” He put the receiver back and faced me. “Well?”

“Looking for someone,” I said, but I didn’t feel so casual as I sounded.

“You killed Novikov,” he said with soft anger, ‘and they are looking for his killer. They are looking for you, don’t you understand? And you were seen on that train, by a great many people. The Yard is now questioning every passenger they can trace, asking for a description of anyone acting strangely.”

“No one saw me do it. They — ”

“How far do you think you’d gone before they saw him lying there dead? You imagine — ”

“Descriptions are notoriously vague, you know that.”

He came up to me and stared into my face with his ice-blue eyes and his voice was soft, though not quite steady. “Even if the police never found you by routine investigation, they’ll receive every possible help from the Russian Embassy, however anonymously. Don’t you realize that?”

I didn’t say anything; it wasn’t really a question. He was just getting rid of some shock and setting me up for the pay-off, in whatever form it would take. Of course he was perfectly right about the Russian Embassy: they’d give my description to the police out of sheer indignation. On any given day there are scores of people moving around London with a tag on their tail, with the action concentrated at the embassies and consulates; the Foreign Office and the headquarters of MI5 and DI6 are also under uninterrupted surveillance. The tags are second-class material for the most part: trainees, executives earning their pension after action in the field, sometimes an odd spook who’s after someone specific. All the services do it and everyone knows about it and we settle for that; it’s the routine chore of keeping tabs on each other in case the pattern changes and we can learn something new. And the thing is that we could all knock each other off if we wanted to, but there wouldn’t be any point; we’re doing our job and they’re doing theirs and if anyone really wants to go somewhere in strict hush then he first makes bloody sure he’s got a clean tail.

It’s been an unwritten law since the services became organized, and last night I broke it.

“Have you anything to say?” Parkis was asking me.

Wearily I said: “What like?”

“In your own favour.”

I thought about it.

“Not really.”

He went and sat down behind his desk and now I caught so much of the chill in the air that it reached my spine. I suppose I’d been holding back from the brink that I knew was there, hoping for some kind of luck that’d save me. As Parkis began speaking I knew it was strictly no go.

“I wasn’t able to see you the moment you arrived here this morning, Quiller, because I was in emergency conference with Administration. Two decisions were reached. One: that you should be sent out of London as soon as possible and in the utmost secrecy. Two: that your immediate resignation would be received with our unqualified approval. You will draw an overnight bag on your way out of the building, and there is transport waiting for you at the door. Your escort will facilitate your passage through London Airport Immigration as best he can.” He paused briefly. “Unless, of course, it’s already too late.”