The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Two: COCKROACH

The black widow dropped lower, until I could see the red hour-glass pattern on its abdomen. Soon it dropped lower again, stopping at intervals, the long thin legs spreading out.

The thread was visible now, very fine and very dark.

I moved my hand.

“Don’t do that,” Charlie said quietly.

I kept still. In a moment the spider dropped again, this time to the surface of the bench. Charlie turned the reel quickly, catching the thread fast enough to wind it into a helix on the twin rods.

“They’re sensitive,” he said, his voice quiet. “They don’t mind slow movements, but if you move quickly they get upset.” He took the probe and coaxed the spider on to its tip, endlessly patient. It was five minutes before he could lift it on to the reel again, and another five before it began dropping, letting out its thread. “She’s good for one more spin, this one. She’s made four today.”

The long pointed legs splayed suddenly and the widow stopped.

“I can feel a draught,” I said.

“So can she.”

He began winding the long reel as the spider dropped at regular intervals, sensing its environment.

“She’s out of sorts,” Charlie said, softly crooning. “They’re not normally active in winter.”

The widow began moving towards the edge of the bench and he teased it into the jar, giving it a fly to catch.

“They’ll only take living food they don’t eat carrion, like us.”

“Carlos!”

“Si?”

“Usted necesita leche?

“Por favor, Pepita!”

We could hear the woman going down the stairs.

“Voice like a foghorn, heart of gold. Does everything for me. Lost her son in the civil war. Now she’s got another one — me.” He wheeled his chair across to the other bench and took a hand frame out of the drawer, holding it up to the light. “I told you I’d show you. This thread’s four days old it’s dried now, lost its stickiness. This thing’s a micromanipulator. You put the lens in here they come already grooved. All I have to do is lay the thread into the grooves and Bob’s your uncle. Five dollars a go, okay? That little sweetheart spun me fifty bucks’ worth just now while you were watching.”

He dropped the lens into the foam-lined box and shut the drawer gently. “Next time you find yourself behind a long-distance rifle, you’ll know what the crosshairs are made of — if it’s a good one. This stuff’s stronger than platinum wire and about ten times as good as the plastic hairs they’ve got on the market now they’re too brittle and they’re not really black. Of course, I don’t get much call for this kind of thread these days they’re making everything of cold crap, aren’t they? No wonder civilization’s falling apart. What are you doing in Barcelona anyway?” He was looking at me over the edge of his half-moon glasses.

I didn’t answer.

“Silly question,” he nodded.

Charlie was one of our sleeper agents in the Mediterranean theatre, originally Codes and Cyphers, then operational for two years until the El Fatah took him for a Shin Bet executive and blew a Porsche from under him when he was nosing around in Cairo.

“I got thrown out of London,” I told him.

This must be the cleanest window in the whole of Barcelona: I suppose that was Pepita. A few dried brown leaves were still on the platanas down there along the Ramblas, and a wind from the harbour pulled at them Feliz Novedades! a torn banner said in red and blue letters.

“Thrown out?” He sounded concerned.

“Slung out, kicked out, what d’you want me to say?” I swung round to face him.

“What we want,” he said gently, wheeling his chair across to the living quarters, ‘is a nice little drop of Carlos Primero, which by good grace they named after me.” He picked up the bottle and poured two shot glasses.

“I’m on the wagon,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right. Never been off, now I come to remember.”

I knew he wouldn’t say anything more about the other thing so I poured myself some Orangina and tipped his glass by way of apology and said:

“I blotted my copybook, that’s all. They had to get me out of London so fast that that is what I’m doing in Barcelona it was the first available plane to anywhere.”

“Dear, oh dear.” He stared upwards from his chair. “I suppose that’s fairly typical. You tend to leave a suitable uproar behind you when you skip town.”

“This time it’s not quite as funny as that.”

“I wish I could do something,” he said in a helpless tone. “Wouldn’t you like to sit down?”

“You’re doing your bit,” I told him. “You’re my contact here.”

“Be my guest.”

Then I decided to tell him.

“My neck’s on the block, Charlie.”

He swung his chair round so that he was facing me.

“Spell out,” he said.

“I’m being fired.”

He sat perfectly still, looking up at me over his glasses. By the way I’d said it he knew I wasn’t joking.

“Did you say “fired”?”

“Invited to resign. Same thing.”

Very quietly: “What in Christ’s name for?”

“Breach of security.”

His large greying head tilted sideways, and I remembered his good ear was the left one.

“ You?”

My mouth tasted awful and I wished I hadn’t started this: in the course of sixteen missions I’d learned to keep things to myself, and what I was doing now felt like a confession under interrogation and I didn’t like it because I’d experienced interrogation a good few times and they’d never broken me.

But my voice went on. “It wasn’t anything professional. I mean I didn’t make a slip or blow cover or lose information,” I had to turn away from him now. “It was something I did in hot blood.”

Again he said, and as quietly: “ You?”

It made me turn back on him. “All right, “I’m ten-tenths reptile, is that what you mean?”

“How else could you do your job?” he asked gently.

“I’m not looking for excuses. I am what I am and I do what I do and a fractional hesitation in my mind while I asked myself exactly what I was, what I did ‘and it’s too late to make any changes.”

“Of course,” he said after a while. “It’s the same with most of us.” He didn’t glance down at the rug on the wheelchair but I sensed it was what he meant. “Who was the woman?”

I went across to the window, subconsciously looking for escape. I wanted to stop talking and get out of here: he knew me too well. I don’t like being known. “How’s business?” I asked him.

“Can’t grumble.”

I heard his chair moving behind me, the rhythmic squawk of the tyres on the polished floorboards. “You ever get out of this place, Charlie?”

“What do you think I am, a fucking cripple?”

“Not with those arms.” They were enormous; I’d seen the weights and pulleys in the corner when I’d come in here. He couldn’t run anywhere but if anyone got within reach of him and he didn’t like it I’d say they’d be better off with a black widow. “We could have a meal,” I said, ‘some time.”

“Delighted.”

“After it’s official.”

“Oh,” he said cheerfully, “that’s a lot of balls. They can’t do that to you you’re one of their top men, still in your prime.”

“I’ve heard it’s the best time to quit: when you’re winning.” I watched the man selling roast chestnuts down there in the winter sunshine, and realized it must be all written down somewhere. A mission was one thing, but life was another. In a mission you went in with everything worked out for you and all you had to do was stick to the instructions and watch out for traps, and by the time you’d been a few years at it you could handle pretty well anything because your mind turned into a computer, scanning the data and keeping you out of trouble. But life wasn’t circumscribed by the limits of your own experience, and you could run smack into a land-mine because you couldn’t see it: because it was all written down somewhere that you should do just that.

Katia. Novikov. Two names. Take them separately and you’d got two elements of a mission, one on our side, one on theirs. Put them together and you’d got the two components of the bomb that had blown me apart. Question: did I regret it? No, I would do it again, my arm round his neck, tightening, tightening, tremendously strong, stronger than Charlie’s. All that was left, really, was the shock-wave of knowing it had cost me everything I’d got.

“Where are you sacking out?”

I turned round.

“What?”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Internacional.”

“Ah. Just up the road.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give you a buzz if they signal.”

“It won’t be anything I want to hear.”

“Carlos?”

“Si?

“Yo tengo suo leche!”

“Pase usted Pepita!”

She came in, a vigorous dark-eyed woman still in black for her son, a birthmark livid on her face, her gold teeth flashing. She pulled the carton of milk from the bag of groceries and put it on to the table, eyeing me with the courage of her kind and daring me to think of her as anything but beautiful.

“Pepita, este es un amigo mio, Senor Turner. Senora de la Fuente y Fuente.”

“Mucho gusto de conocerla a usted Senora de la Fuente,” I said formally.

“Igualmente, Senor.”

Then the phone rang and Charlie spun the wheels of his chair and answered it.

“Yes,” he said. “Half an hour ago.” He looked across at me and held the receiver out and I took it and said hallo and that was when everything started.

“Can you do anything with suede?”

“No entiendo, Senor.”

“Suede. These things,” I said more loudly, pointing at them.

“Ah — si sil Sientese, Senor!”

“What?”

He motioned me into the chair at the end, taking the crutch away and leaning it against the bar, getting a wire brush and looking at my shoes with his head to one side. There wasn’t much suede left: I hate buying new shoes.

The man at the bar looked English.

“He could pretty well use polish on them,” he said with a silly laugh.

I looked up at him. “No offence,” he added quickly.

“It’s his problem,” I told him shortly, “not yours.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“Americano?” the woman asked me.

“What?”

“You American?” She picked a piece of fluff off her sweater, just over the left nipple.

“No. And I haven’t got any money. Or I wouldn’t be in this stinking hole.”

“Too bloody right!” the man at the bar said. “By the way, do you happen to know where I can get a gas refill for my lighter? They don’t seem to stock any here.”

“Christ,” I said, “I wish I had your problems.” The bootblack had got the rest of the suede off by now so I stopped him dead with fifty pesetas and told the Englishman, “There’s a place round the corner I’m going past there now.”

He put some money on the bar and came with me into the street.

“You seem to know your Barcelona pretty well,” he said, as if impressed. “It’s my first trip here.” We crossed over to the central boulevard, where the goldfish hung in clusters from the surface of their bowls, trying to get oxygen. The chico said we should buy some for our girl-friends.

“I’ve been here before,” I said. “The thing is, I took a calculated risk. I mean it wasn’t anything clumsy, or slack or anything. I could understand them blowing their bloody stack if I’d dropped a pad or something.” That would be dangerous, any kind of mistake. You can make a few mistakes when you’re new to the game, but not when you’re a veteran. At my age it can only mean you’re losing your grip, and they’ll sling you out before you can blink. “How did those bastards pick it up anyway?”

“It wasn’t difficult. He was tagging you on orders. When he was reported killed, they didn’t need to look anywhere else, did they?”

He wandered away from me and put his foot on something and I saw a yellowish splodge on the paving stones as he came back. “I wish to Christ you wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“I know.” He gave a soft laugh.

Ferris isn’t specifically a bastard, like most of them, but he’s got a thing about insects. About bigger creatures too, for all I know. I’d hate to see him with a mouse: I can’t stand that kind of thing.

“How did they get the complaint?” I asked him. They for Bureau.

“The Russ told MI5, and they shoved it over to Liaison 9.”

“It’s getting too bloody easy. We used to be totally nonexistent, and — ”

“And that’s what you relied on. But they didn’t send me out here to ask for excuses.”

There was a bench and we sat on it, both of us checking the street for ticks from force of habit. It wasn’t necessary because yesterday they’d smuggled me out of Heathrow like a leper and I’d made a thorough check when I’d got off the plane.

Obvious question: “Why did they send you after me?”

He sighed gently, pushing back his thin sandy hair with his fingers and for a moment glancing at me, though nothing showed in the pale amber eyes. “To help you frame the wording of your resignation. They’re fussy in Admin. as you know; they don’t want to feel they’re being unfair to a trusted employee after years of good service and all that sort of thing. On the other hand they insist on your record showing you’d broken the rules and had to go.”

“Screw them,” I said.

“Point taken.” In a moment: “I told them I’d rather not come out here.”

“They could have done worse.” I got up and stood helplessly with my hands dug into my pockets, looking along the boulevard past the flower stalls and the goldfish man and the stacks of cheap multicoloured comics on sale by the roadside. Ferris had local-directed me in quite a few theatres: East Germany, Hong Kong, the States, Teneriffe. He’d been very good: underplayed everything, the way I like it, no dramatics, plenty of leeway when the odds were short. I suppose, as a director in the field, he’d saved my skin more than once by watching the way I was running. Today he was going to take it back on a salver to London.

“No formal enquiry,” I said.

“It’s been made.” He got slowly to his feet.

“No appeal.”

“On what grounds?”

I didn’t answer that. There weren’t any grounds.

I’d broken the First Rule and I’d confessed to it. The Bureau is the Sacred Bull and I’d violated its sanctity. While Ferris and I were standing here in the pale sunshine in Barcelona there was a full-scale murder hunt going on in England and if I went back there I’d risk being caught because people had seen my face on that train and they had been interviewed by the police, and if the Russ could leak the fact that it was one of their spooks who’d been on my tail at the time he’d been killed then they’d do that: and the hunt would at once concentrate within the closely circumscribed limits of the secret service milieu. And the Sacred Bull could find itself in the limelight: a non-existent shadow organization responsible solely to the Prime Minister and with extraordinary powers in the international field that would be brought into immediate question in the House if they were ever acknowledged.

The outcome would be unequivocal. The Bull would be sacrificed. Finis.

I didn’t like those people in London because they were ruthless and they were implacable but I’d worked with them through sixteen operations and we’d learned mutual respect of the kind a wolf learns for the rest of the pack and there’d been no complaints on either side: until now. And now I knew they were doing the only thing they could do, choosing to sacrifice a disciple of the Bull to protect the Bull itself. I wouldn’t expect them to do anything else.

Ferris had wandered over to look at the magazine stall, giving me time to think. Now he came back. I got off the bench and said:

“Why Parkis?”

He said with a wintry smile, “Nobody else had any stomach for it.”

“He enjoyed it, of course.”

“What else would you expect?”

I looked along the perspective of the boulevard, catching at a stray thought or two, finding nothing of value. I felt disorientated: time and place had changed and I was lost and it hadn’t happened to me before and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Sixteen missions, then phutt.

“How many people knew?” I asked Ferris.

He considered this. “Three.”

“Three?”

He looked up. “Parkis and two others. Why?”

“Christ, the whole place was like a funeral home when I went in there yesterday morning.”

He said: “That was about something else.”

“You’re lying.”

He looked surprised.

I said: “They were all looking at me as if I’d shit on the rug. Tilson Woods Matthews everyone I tried to talk to.”

Another faint smile. “You’re a little paranoiac, remember.”

I swung away and swung back. “So it was something else. What like?”

“They’ve had a wheel come off,” he said quietly, “in Central Asia.”

I waited before I spoke again. It had been a mistake, telling him he was lying. They don’t lie to you. If you ask them something they don’t want to answer, they say so or say nothing. We call it un information and it covers a large and specific area in the work we do: they tell us as much as we need to know so that we can operate efficiently, and nothing more.

But this wasn’t an operation. Ferris didn’t have to tell me anything. Parkis had been appointed to tell me as much as I had to know, and there wasn’t going to be any appeal because there weren’t any grounds. Ferris had been sent out here for one purpose and all I was doing here in the winter sunshine of a Barcelona street was dodging around in the dust while he waited to put his foot on me.

So I didn’t want to keep still.

“What land of wheel?” I asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“Who was running it?”

He looked around him with his yellow eyes screwed up against the sun, as if he wasn’t really listening. But he was listening. And so was I. “It’s not in my area,” he said at last.

“Did anyone get hit?”

“It’s possible.” A dead leaf blew against his shoe and he looked down at it with quiet attention.

“Are they switching controls?”

“Wearily. “They don’t really know what they’re doing.”

The leaf blew away and he watched it go, and noticed the cockroach swivelling through the maze of dust round the manhole cover not far away. He walked over there and I swear to you I heard the faint crunch above the noise of the traffic. He came slowly back.

Taking a breath, I asked him: “Are they going to send someone else out there?”

“They’d like to. But they can’t get anyone to go.”

“It’s that bad?”

He shrugged slightly and began walking and I fell into step and didn’t say anything more in case he was going to answer. “It’s not so much a question of its being bad,” he said reluctantly, “although that has a lot to do with it. They’re also stuck for someone with peculiar qualities, and there’s almost nobody at base who could tackle it, even if they could be persuaded to have a go. We’re trying to get Flack in from Delhi, but he’s not responding to signals.” I was slowly getting cold.

They’re like that, in London. Two-faced, devious, treacherous. They are worse, really, when you’re between missions than when you’re working, because then you’re relaxed and not looking for traps or thin ground or a rigged bang or a missing stair in the dark. You shouldn’t ever relax: it can be fatal.

“Why can’t those bastards put it on the line?” I asked Ferris suddenly, and he stopped walking.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

And of course he’d go on like that. Those would be his orders: to deny any suggestion that they were asking for me. I had to volunteer, for the sake of their conscience. I had to ask them — if I could muster the guts. There wasn’t even any room for bargaining: I wasn’t in any position to do that, and they knew it.

“Tell them to go to hell,” I said.

“All right.”

He stood gazing at me with his quiet cat’s eyes, until looked away.

“They’re bloody usurers, you know that?”

He smiled faintly. “But they don’t advertise.”

He meant you had to go to them, when you were broke. And I was broke. They’d done this with Tucker and Wayne and Fosdyck and not many people knew about it but I was one. They’d been for the high jump, all three of them, and at the last minute they’d been thrown a final chance on the principle that letting a man go out doing something useful is sound economics: there’s a chance of some profit in the stuff he sends back before he blows up and it saves the expense of the end-of-the-line debriefing that has to be done before he can be sent out to grass without any risk to the Bureau. It worked with Tucker and it worked with Fosdyck: they never got back. The last I saw of Wayne was in a clinic in Northampton, where they were teaching him to write with his foot.

I looked at Ferris.

“There’s one thing I’ve got to know,” I said, “isn’t there?”

“I could think of several.”

“Just one. I don’t care about the rest.” I looked around at the bare trees, the coloured magazines, the goldfish hanging from the surface in the bowls, while I tried to think how to put it, so that he couldn’t fox me. He wouldn’t lie, because if he lied this time if would amount, in sensitive and subtle ways, to attempted murder. “If I don’t take this thing on, are they still going to fire me?”

He didn’t hesitate because he knew I’d have to ask,

“Yes.”

“With no other chance?”

“With no other chance.”

I turned away from him and we walked on through the shadows of the bare boughs.

“All right,” I said.

He nodded. “I’ll find a phone.”

Something small was moving along a crack in the paving stones and Ferris took a step towards it and I caught his arm and said through my teeth, “Leave that one, for God’s sake. Just that one.”