Quiller's Run

'Yes. Yes, of course. I shall do that. One day.' He drew a slow breath. 'Meanwhile I shall find someone to take this thing over, because it's too good to miss and I'm buggered if I'll give it to the Bureau. They couldn't touch it anyway; it's too sensitive. Have another drink, if that's what you call it.'

'I've got to be going.' It wasn't the first time I'd seen a wrecked spook pushing his doom. He was only just this side of a breakdown, and I didn't want to be here when he pulled something out and blew his head off with it, as North had done.

'You've only just come, for God's sake.' He lifted a hand for the barman. 'You know Floderus, don't you?' he asked me.

'Which one?'

He gave a wintry smile. 'Good question. Charles, of course. Charles Floderus.'

The other one, I remembered, had broken up a courier line through Trieste and wiped out a Queen's Messenger before the Bureau caught a whiff of something rotten: the man had been doubling for five years before he blew his own cover because of a woman. Charles was different; they were distantly related but the blood was thin, and Charles was known for his total integrity throughout the secret services. He was also a very high-echelon director of operations for the SIS.

'What about him?' I asked Pepperidge.

'He was the one who made me this proposal.' He watched some people coming in, behind me. 'I'd done him a bit of good, you see, at one time. Decent of him to remember.'

I'd begun listening. Floderus had approached him? That had been decent of him, yes. He was very cautious, very demanding.

'I got it over the phone,' Pepperidge said. 'We didn't actually meet.' His eyes dipped away. 'He didn't know I was… not quite at my best. Just the main drift, you see, over the blower, no names or anything, absolute security." When the barman came over Pepperidge asked for the same again, and then told me, 'Also, as I said, he knew I'd done quite a bit in Asia.' His head swung up. 'You were out there too, weren't you, a couple of times?'

'Yes. Are they anyone we know?'

'What? Nobody 7 know. Are you worried?'

'No.'

'It's just a man and a woman, holding hands across the table.'

'As long as you're happy.'

He frowned. 'Am I talking too loud?'

'Everything's relative.' If Floderus had really offered him an operation then he should keep it well under cover. A lot of people who came to the Brass Lamp were from the corridors of codes and cyphers, together with a few second or third secretaries of foreign embassies.

Pepperidge kept his eyes on the other table for a bit longer and then said, more quietly, 'They're just spooning. But anyway, old boy, this one isn't for you.' The barman came with their drinks and Pepperidge said, 'Cheers. What've you got, an ulcer or something?'

That's right.'

Reflectively he said, 'It'd mean working for a foreign government, you see, and I'd hardly imagine you ever doing that.'

'Which one?'

'Friendly to the West. Does it matter?'

'Not really.' I shook a few more drops of Angostura into my tonic and watched it fizz. Working for a foreign government would be totally strange. I was used to the ultra-sophisticated services of the Bureau: meticulous briefing, prearranged access to the field – even across the Curtain -a signals board in London with only my name on it and a 24-hour staff and a director in the field who could get me anything 1 needed; contacts, couriers, papers limitless and progressive briefings as the phases of the mission changed, and liaison through GCHQ Cheltenham with the Chief of Control in London and his decision-making authority, which gave him immediate access to the Prime Minister, wherever she might be.

'Fabulous money, of course,' Pepperidge said.

'That's what Loman told me.'

He gave a derisive grunt. 'Loman? He couldn't get you enough to buy a bag of chips. I mean the real thing.'

'I wouldn't know what to do with it.'

'Buy some more Jensens. Aren't they what you use?'

'I mean, apart from toys.'

'Then give it to the dog's home and do it for kicks.' He was watching me steadily again. 'You've got me interested, you know that?'

'What in?'

'Handing this thing over to you.'

'Forget it.' I wouldn't work for Floderus or a foreign government.'

'Have you got a card on you?"

'No.'

'Well, here's mine.'

I took it out of courtesy, and pushed my chair back. I wanted to be out of there before he got down to the bottom of his drink again and swallowed that bloody worm.

You 'II go mad, out there.

Holmes.

Dead right.

It was eight o'clock and a lot of the options had run out: Giselle was playing at Covent Garden but I'd never get in without booking. It'd be the same thing at the theatres: the only shows I could get a ticket for wouldn't be worth seeing. I didn't want to go down to the club because the only people I'd see there would be talking shop, and I'd just had a gutful of that with Pepperidge. Eating out alone was a bleak enough thought: food was a celebration of life and had to be shared. Moira was in Paris and Liz on her way to New York again; Yvonne was in London and might be available, but what was it coming down to – that I had to find a girl because I'd got nothing else to do? Better not tell her that.

I could go along to the dojo and hope to find Tanaka there and knock some of the rough edges off Kanku Dai, but even though I could use the exercise he'd see I was out of condition and that would embarrass me because he wouldn't say anything. I could go up to Norfolk and ask for a session at the long-distance night range and blast Loman's face all over the sandbags — they'd let me in, even if they knew I'd left the Bureau; the bastards would let me do anything I liked in the hope of getting me back. But there wasn't any point in going to Norfolk, as if nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

I'd known it would feel like this in the first few weeks. I'd cut myself off from a way of life that had exposed me to the most deadly risks, time after time, and pushed me into that frightening, ethereal zone where I had to face those things in myself that in cold blood I'd never have the stomach for: weakness in one form or another, cowardice, a blind eye to the need for mercy, lack of grace. I'd expected, yes, to feel like an electric circus with the plug pulled out, the tension gone and the noise dying away and the dark coming down; but I wasn't ready for this sense of loss, of loneliness.

Bloody shame. Get used to it.

Some time after nine I made some toast and opened a tin of sardines and got out The Too of Physics and wrestled with it, no sound in the room but the occasional muted horn of a taxi and the fretting of a casement as the night wind got up. The phone hadn't rung since I'd got back from the Brass Lamp, and at some time or other I went across and checked to see it was still working. Later I went to the safe behind the sliding Japanese-lacquered panel and took out the experimental cypher grid that Tilney had asked me to evaluate, and slipped it into its black self-destruct container and broke the seal and let the acid go to work. Then I found myself standing in the middle of the room with the book in my hand again, not knowing why I was trying to read it. The weight of the most appalling depression was pinning me down, so at last I forced myself to move, and it was then that I did what I must have known I would do, sooner or later, and dropped the book onto the sofa and picked up the phone and rang Floderus.

3 Ducks

'Perfectly true. Absolutely.'

Floderus grabbed the strap as the cab lurched past a bus. He'd asked me for a mobile rendezvous with maximum security and I'd picked him up in Carlton Street. Last night on the telephone he'd kept the conversation down to careful monosyllables; now he was more relaxed, though not much.

'I offered it to him because this is something we can't possibly touch ourselves, since we're government. So is the Bureau, of course, What on earth made you -'