Quiller's Run

'All right,' she said.

'Tell him to see if he's being watched. Tailed. If he is, tell him to lose them before he goes to your building. If he can't lose them, he doesn't go there.'

In a moment: 'Is he in danger?'

'No.' Chen could handle whatever came up; that was the way he lived. 'Finally, tell him that when he's found the bug, I want it.'

'The bug.'

'When he finds it, let me have it.'

'All right.'

Sound of a shot and I reacted. Somewhere on the far side of the street but quite loud, a heavy calibre.

I said: 'That's it for -'

'What was the bang?'

'Car backfired.'

Short silence, then, 'Shit.' Didn't believe me. 'Look after yourself, Martin.'

I rang off at once in case there was more shooting. Someone out there was yelling his head off and there was another shot and he stopped. I'd have said it was just the life-style in this place; when I'd got here along the half-obliterated jungle track the first thing I'd seen were three burnt-out aircraft near the airstrip and a troop of Laotian soldiers guarding the mule-train coming in from the mountains and half a dozen ranking police officers and an army colonel, guns on their hips. In the street there'd been people with attache cases chained to their wrists on their way to the refinery and more soldiers guarding a flat-bed cart leaving the refinery for the airstrip. Everyone looked tense except the local workers, and a lot of those were stoned out of their minds. In this heat I wouldn't have thought it needed much to provoke some gunplay.

I'd been surprised at first to find a phone in the room here because it didn't go with the rusty wash-basin and the burnt-out fan and the caked fly-papers and the peeling walls, but this was the only hotel I'd seen and this was where a lot of the business must be done, so they'd need telephones.

I tried calling Cheltenham but the girl on the switchboard told me it couldn't be done, so I stripped off and lay on the bed under the mosquito net reeking of citronelle and waited for Chen to call and tried not to think that he might not do that. I didn't know how long that bug had been there – it could have been for months, a routine narcotics operation by the Singapore police, or it could have been put there recently by people who'd decided to move in on Chen, and it'd be logical for them to stake out his place with surveillance. On the other hand we'd got into the van perfectly clean the night he'd taken me to the airport and flown me out, so it could be just the narcs.

They couldn't have done the same thing at Cho's place, but it was too late anyway because I was past the point of no return and in the end it was going to depend on karma, kismet, whatever the hell you wanted to call it, running with sweat, the bastards were after me, I could hear them, teeth like knives Phone ringing.

Woke me, I'd drifted off, yes, nightmare, are you surprised, for Christ's sake, you didn't see those dogs, thought they'd got me.

'Yes?'

'Jordan?'

'Yes.'

'Chen.'

18:00 on my watch; I'd slept for two hours after that bloody trek.

'Where are you calling from?'

'The British High Commission.'

'You weren't tailed there.'

'No.' By the way he said it, he was sure.

'Did you find the bug?'

'I haven't had time to look. What do you want it for?'

'In case I want to talk to Colonel Cho. Johnny, can you fly me out of here?'

Silence, thinking.

'No. But hold it a minute.' I heard the sound of paper scuffing on the line. The bed was hitting the wall again; one of the girl's rooms, then, poor little bitch, one of them told me once that bordeom's the worst thing about it. 'You there?'

'Yes.'

'There's a guy named Tex Miller, a Yankee. He's putting a Partenavia P.68 Victor down on that strip some time around midnight. You got a pencil?'

'Yes.'

'The ID number's NK6-75832. Tex is okay, talks a lot, but he'll do whatever I want. He'll get you as far as Nah Trang on the Vietnamese coast – they're shipping his goods from the seaport. It's a civil airfield and you can get a scheduled flight from there to Singapore, if that's where you're aiming for. Got that?'

Said yes.

'If you don't have the right papers, ask Tex to get you through – he can do that, they earn big from him. Okay?'

'I'm grateful.'

'Think nothing. Telling me about that fucking bug, you don't know what you might be saving me from.'

I thought of asking him to tell Katie I'd be back in Singapore soon but didn't. Never chance fate.

The whole village was blacked out except for a few chinks of light where the blinds didn't meet. All I could see from the edge of the airstrip was the glint of metal as the soldiers moved in the moonlight, some of them carrying rifles. Cigarette smoke hung on the still night air, laced with marijuana.

I thought he was running late but that was because I hadn't picked him out from among the stars: he was coming in with no lights on; there was just the sound of his twin engines gunning up for the approach and then a generator tripping in from somewhere near; then the strip lamps came on, only six of them, and half-hooded. His landing lights blazed suddenly a thousand feet from the ground and the plane's shape began blotting out the stars as it passed against them. The wings yawed as he corrected the angle and he gunned up some more and then settled, throttling back, and as his lights threw a pathway down the strip I could see how rough it was, pitted and undulating. As the edge of the jungle was tit beyond it there were cries of alarm; it sounded like monkeys and parrakeets, some night-birds.

By the time the P.68 had come to a halt it was surrounded by troops, and as Miller dropped to the ground a police captain flashed a light on him briefly and then asked for his papers. I waited for him in the half-dark, then stopped him as he came through the group.

'Jordan.'

'Who?' He peered at me. 'Oh. Yeah. C'm'on over here, okay?'

Metal attache case chained to his wrist, cold cash. He peered at me again as light from a window passed over us, and stopped suddenly. 'Jordan, okay. You got some ID?'

I showed him my Thai papers and he held them to the thin ray of light, squinting, a short man, pot-bellied, red-haired, a pilot's cap stuck on his head at an angle, a gun outlined under his bush shirt, his left hand loaded with rings: diamond, ruby, emerald, one with a snake sculpted from gold and topaz.

'Okay, yeah. Johnny briefed me.' He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deep. 'Jesus, that's better, you can't smoke up there.' Gave me my papers back. 'Let's go in here, I got a little business to do first.'

Under the tube lights of the refinery he looked ready to drop, red-eyed, pouchy, his skin sallow, his hands shaky as he unlocked the wrist-chain and pushed it into his pocket.

'Pakdee here?' he called out.

'He's on his way, Tex.'

'Well, Christ, I hope so. I'm down on time.'

Stink of ammonia in here. It was a small hangar, tin-roofed, with twenty or thirty girls working at the lab benches, five or six supervisors walking constantly down the aisles, two offices at the end, their doors closed.

'You been in places like this?'

'No.'

'They stink, right?' Put a hand out. 'I'm Tex Miller, I guess you know that. What's your first name, Jordan?'

'Martin. It's good of you to offer to take me out.'

'My pleasure, I guess I owe Johnny the ride.' He was watching the girls. 'This is Kuhn's operation, the whole village, I mean it's just one of them. He'll pay around a couple of thousand bucks for a batch of raw opium out of the fields up there in the mountains and then they do the refining in this place and a good few others like it, spread around the Triangle. Jesus, look at those tits, big for a coolie girl.' He dragged on his cigarette. She looked about sixteen. They all did. Sixteen and dull-eyed and half dead.