He looked stone-hard at O’Hara for a moment, then laughed.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what son of a bitch would kill a buddy for a lousy twenty-fiver, right?’
‘Maybe that’s why that cheap bastard got such bad help,’ O’Hara said.
Falmouth took off his shirt and threw it on top of the catch box. ‘To begin with,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to tell you a little story, for it to make sense, if there is any sense to it at all, Sailor. It will put the whole thing in proper perspective. But you won’t mind. It’s one helluva yarn.
‘This was in the fall, eighteen months ago. I had pulled a really shit job. But for two years, most of them had been. I got to tell you, Sailor, I was fed up with the Service. Squalid little executions. Agents who’d turned around. Doubles. Defectors. This one was up in Scotland. M15 — which, as you know, is basically counterespionage — had turned up a mole in a very sensitive spot in one of our nuclear installations, way the hell and gone out in nowhere. A place called Tobermory, on the Island of Mull, over in western Scotland. Colder than a banker’s heart and as dreary as a Russian love story. This chap had been sleeping for twelve years, moving slowly up the ladder until he was where they wanted him. I don’t remember now what turned him up. Like I said, it was an edgy situation. He was politically connected, an earl, something like that. Home Office didn’t want to go through a messy trial. So they sent me in.
My cutout was this pissy little bastard named Coalhelms, who did everything as inconveniently as possible. He was a typical civil servant. A really horrid little man. Anyway, there I was, waiting for Coalhelms to show up with the background on the mark. We were to meet at the Thieves’ Inn, an ale house right on the sea, up over the rocks. Got to be the loneliest pub in the bloody fucking world, Always foggy and damp so it cuts through you. I was taking a dram and sitting there, letting my eyes get accustomed to the place, for it s all candlelit, and I was looking across the room, kind of not focusing on anything in particular and suddenly I realized I was staring at this giant of a bugger sitting at the bar and he’s looking back at me with the coldest pair of eyes you’ve ever seen in all your life. Yellow-haired he was, and wearing tweeds with one of them country-squire, gnarled-up shillelaghs. And a tweedy cap over one eye. Beard and moustache, curled up and waxed at the corners, like a Highland colonel. He looked the perfect Scottish squire.
‘And he was — except when I knew him he had red hair, and when last I saw him he was wearing a navy wet suit and his name was Guy Thornley. I recognized him quickly, even though I hadn’t seen him for eight years or more.
‘You may have forgotten who Guy Thornley was, although I’ll wager the name is familiar to you. Thornley was attached to M15, and his specialty was underwater surveillance and sabotage. But he was a bit of a rogue agent. Did what he wanted. The summer of nineteen sixty-eight, the Russians brought several warships up the Thames for some kind of political shindig and among them was a wireless trawler, an electronic spy ship. It was much too tempting a morsel for Sir Guy to pass up, so he decides to go down and take a peek at her underbelly.
‘Nobody ever saw him again. The Thames didn’t give him up. There was never another word from him. He vanished.
‘The accepted theory is that the Russians had a scuba lock team down there, they wasted Thornley, then took him aboard the trawler and dumped him when they were well out at sea.
‘An acceptable and logical theory. I believed it myself until that October night eighteen months ago. Sitting there in the Thieves’ Inn, looking at him, I knew there was no mistake on his part that I recognized him, and no mistake on mine that he made me.
‘What I did, I went outside and lit up a fag. I figgered whatever he was up to, I might as well give him some room. If I had known what he was up to, I would have got out of there straightaway, although I doubt I would have got far.
‘I wasn’t two puffs into the butt, he comes sauntering out. There we are, in fog as thick as chocolate syrup, and he says, “Coalhelms isn’t coming, old man.” Just like that.
‘Twas like I stuck my finger in an open socket. The hair on my arms stood up as straight as the Queen’s Guard. It was a setup, of course; the worrisome thing was that I had walked into it eyes open. I was in the drop because I had trusted that office monkey and suddenly there I was, standing there in the fog with the ocean crashing down below us, talking to a bloody ghost. Worse, I knew we weren’t alone. Someone else was close by. I could feel him breathing down my neck. I figgered to hear Thornley out, however it played.
‘He had seen my K-file, that was obvious, for he knew about Guardio and Trujillo and that take-out in Brazil four years ago. He knew almost every job I’d ever done, Coalhelms had obviously lifted the file for him.
‘Top-secret information, right?
‘Not on your life. Because it wasn’t Thornley on some deep cover job, nothing like that. What happened is, he offered me a bloody job! Guaranteed me a hundred thousand a year. Told me I’d be called in only when needed. I could live anywhere in the world I wanted to, and all the transactions would be cash deposits in any bank of my choosing.
“We’re non-political,” he says. “This is strictly business. Our clients are the biggest companies in the world. You might say we’re a personal service for world industry. You handle your first assignment, which is a breeze, properly, and you can take early retirement from the Service and live as good as Prince Charlie.”
‘I was that stunned, I could hardly talk. And then he tells me some of the other chaps who’re in on the Game, counting them off on his fingers, and it was then the scope of this Service, as he called it, came clear to me, for he was talking about the best lads in the business.
‘Gazinsky, the KGB man who kidnapped Zhagi Romoloff, right from under the West Germans’ noses; Kimoto, the dapper little Japanese saboteur; Charley Simons, probably the best electronics man in the CIA, maybe in the world; Taven Kaminsky, the tough Jew who set up Israel’s antiterrorist outfit; Kit Willoughby from Australia; Amanet, the Iranian arsonist from the Savak; a couple f lads from the British antiterrorist group.
‘And to top it off, a couple of real beauts: Danilov, the Bulgarian jeweller turned assassin, maybe the most dangerous - man in the bunch. Those skilled hands of his developed a pellet no bigger than the head of a pin infused with a single drop of riticin. Do you know about riticin? A drop no bigger than a grain of sugar can kill a horse. The pellet is air-injected, right through clothing.
‘And finally, the Frenchman known only as Le Croix, who was in charge of the French torture squad in Algeria for two years, had all pictures of himself destroyed, and got his name because he used to crucify his victims.
‘An impressive rogue’s gallery of the keenest and most cold-blooded operatives in the world. Not a thimbleful of warm blood in the lot.
‘My options were pretty bleedin’ thin. Try to take out Thornley, and some shooter lurking behind me in the fog? A dead man’s choice.
‘Go along with it until I got out of the drop, then turn up Thornley and run for my life? There’d always be a Gazinsky or a Lavanieux or a Danilov behind me, waiting to drop the curtain on me.
‘Or listen to his proposition, buy a little time maybe? It wasn’t the money. Hell, there wasn’t any option. I knew that somewhere in that fog my executioner was waiting for my decision.
‘It was join or die. They had made up their minds they wanted me. They left me little damn choice in the matter.
‘What’s a feller to do —right? And now that I’m in, what’re my options? Stay in until I fuck up and either they kill me — or somebody else does. Or run.