Quiller's Run

Loman looked trapped, but got out fast. 'I'm sure the Directorate would feel – as indeed we do – that some measure of compensation would be in order. After all, they -'

'Bullshit. You think they'd try and buy me back?'

'I wouldn't put it quite -'

'If you left the Bureau,' Calthrop cut in quickly, 'what would you do? Have you thought of that?'

'There's a life outside this bloody place, don't worry.'

'For someone like you?'

'Yes.'

'You won't find it easy,' Loman took over. 'And once you've gone, we can never ask you back.'

'That's a bloody shame.' I took a step towards him, and I suppose there was something in my eyes now that made him inch back before he could stop himself. 'You could never send me into another mission with any guarantee that you wouldn't do the same thing again, if you had to. So I'd always be looking behind me for some bastard with a knife – or a bomb. And it wouldn't work. I've got to know where my friends are, and I've none here. They're outside, and that's where I'm going.' I went to the door, and heard the creak of leather as Calthrop got out of his chair.

'Quitter?' I turned to look at him, and he brushed the air with his hand. 'Sorry.'

I pulled the door open and it swung wide and hit the rubber stop with a little thump as I went into the hall.

On my way through the building to the rear exit I tried to avoid people, but Charlie saw me through the doorway of the Caff.

'I thought you'd chucked it in.'

I went over to him in case he tried to get up: his last mission had left him with a smashed thigh and a few other things.

'Just covering traces.'

'You'd never be sure, would you?' Charlie said, a burned hand hooked round the teacup.

'Of what?'

'Never be sure they wouldn't try it again.'

'That's it exactly." I touched his shoulder and went out to the corridor again. Michalina was going into Signals with a file, but she didn't see me. A door came open near the staircase and Holmes came out, passing me absently and then stopping, looking back.

'Someone said you'd resigned.'

'Yes.'

'You'll go mad out there.'

'That should be interesting.'

I went to the end of the passage and through the narrow doorway of the screened rear exit into Whitehall and splashed through the puddles on my way to the Jensen, not looking back at the building, not looking back at anything at all as I got into the car and started up and took it westwards through Kensington and Chiswick and out to the M4, turning the phone off and switching the wipers to high and flipping the radarscope on, pulling the slack out of the seat-harness and letting it snap back, putting the lights onto high beam with nothing in front of me now but the steel-grey veil of the rain as I pushed the throttle down and kept it there, wanting only to put distance between myself and London, and the bitter, acrid smoke of a burned boat.

2 The Worm

'I' can't,' she said. 'I've got to be up bright and early.'

'Are you flying?'

'Not till noon.' She kissed me for the last time, her hair falling across my face, cool and scented.

'Then why not stay the night?'

'I've got an interview at nine. I'm trying to get onto Concorde – wouldn't that be fantastic? I mean, apart from the pay, I'd have the name on my uniform. All the other crews look when you go through the airport. Talk about prestige.' She slipped off the bed and looked across the room. 'Which door is it?'

'That one. Guest towels on the left.'

'God, I can hardly stand up. Are you normally like that?'

'No. It was the way you kissed.'

She stood looking down at me, the light from the street catching the sweat on her skin, turning it to satin.

'I always kiss like that, but it doesn't normally set up a tornado.'

'Then it should.'

She stood smoothing her thighs, maybe considering staying. That would be all right: I was feeling intolerably lonely.

'What are all those bruises?' She'd only just noticed them.

'I looped a motor.'

'Sounds expensive.'

'If you'll stay, I'll cook up some eggs and bacon.'

'That's not what I'd stay for, but anyway I can't. Tomorrow's the chance of a lifetime.' On her way to the bathroom she said over her shoulder, 'But I'm based in London.'

I got off the bed and put some clothes on, with strange thoughts coming into my mind – should I look for someone to marry now, someone like this girl? Settle down, open some kind of business? I'd been getting ideas like those since last night when I'd got back to London in a hired Porsche, but they were alien to me, not because a wife and a normal job wouldn't give me a certain amount of satisfaction but because ideas like that belonged to other people, not to me. It was like having a total stranger trying to get inside my head, and if I started to lose my sense of identity I could finish up in the funny farm.

You'll go mad, out there. Holmes. And possibly that was what I was doing. But marriage wouldn't work, or a normal life. I had to have absolute freedom. Satisfaction wouldn't be enough: I wanted risk, occasional terror, life at the brink. And you couldn't share a life like that with anyone.

'What do you do?' she asked me when she came out of the bathroom.

'I'm between jobs.'

'Are you an actor?' She was watching me in the mirror.

'No.'

'There's something different about you.' She combed her long hair and then began putting it up into a chignon. 'I mean, you looked after me absolutely marvellously in the restaurant, but I had the feeling that there was something on tout mind all the time. Have you been fired?'

'Close. I resigned. Leave -'

'What from?'

'Government work. Terribly dull. Leave your number, will you?'

'If you like.'

It was gone midnight when we went down to the street; the rain had stopped at last, and I managed to flag down a cab straight away.

'I hope you get the Concorde job.'

'God, so do I. Imagine:' She reached up and we kissed, while the cab's diesel went on idling. 'Thanks for such a good time, Martin. Give me a ring if you feel like it – I'll be back in London next week. Next Tuesday.'

The flat felt deserted when I went back, which was odd, because I normally enjoyed its space and its silence. She'd scribbled her phone number on the back of a British Airways check slip; it was lying on the dressing table under the lamp, next to a blond tangle of hairs, and I picked it up and tore it in half, and then in quarters, dropping them into the wastepaper basket and turning off the lamp. I wouldn't be in London next week, next Tuesday. God knew where I'd be, but it wouldn't be here.

'Well, well…'

It was Pepperidge, hunched over the bar with a glass of Mescal in front of him, the worm curled at the bottom.

I didn't want to talk to him, or anyone else; I'd come to the Brass Lamp to be alone, as a change from being alone in the flat; but I couldn't just walk away now that he'd seen me. I asked the man for a tonic and bitters, and looked at Pepperidge.

'How are things?'

He squinted under the brass-shaded light. 'I suppose they'll work out somehow.'

I hadn't seen him for months; he specialised in picking up classified info at ground level – cryptographic key lists and cards, message traffic, communications data, operations orders, whatever he could get, working mostly at the Asian desk at the Bureau.

'What happened?' I asked him.

'Bastards fired me.' He watched me with cynical eyes, his thin hair lying untidily across his scalp, his moustache at a kind of angle, sloppily trimmed, his shoulders hunched. 'I'm like you, old boy – sometimes I won't obey orders.' His hand shook a little as he picked up his drink. 'And I don't regret it, you know that? I don't bloody well regret it. Is that all you're going to drink?'