Quiller Barracuda

'What time?'

'Eleven.'

'What does he want me for?'

'I don't know.'

I put the phone down and went along to the Caff and found Tewkes chatting up Daisy by the tea urn, reeking of that bloody cologne.

'Croder was looking for you,' he said.

'I know.'

'How's the lad?'

There isn't a grapevine in this place, it's more like a fast-burn fuse.

'Very good,' I told him. Not, however, in point of fact, very good at all but that was the message I wanted to disseminate throughout the whole of the Bureau. Fisher was better, yes, but he'd been born with a thin skin anyway without the Beirut thing, and if they put him through it again today they'd draw blood without even using their nails.

I'd got him smashed on vodka by midnight and he'd more or less surfaced at the Key Club during the early hours and didn't remember, for a minute or two, anything about Beirut, and it hadn't been the ego suppressing it – the tension was off at last and he was on the other side of what they'd done to him and that was where he was going to start living again. Then he messed up the carpet in the Jensen and said he was terribly sorry and I could have wept because he was so bloody young for this game, and yet so very good, from what I'd seen of the stuff he'd sent into Signals from his base out there – I'd asked Tilson for a look at it this morning.

He was still at my flat: I'd phoned Harry and asked him to come round and look after him. I told him that if anyone from the Bureau located him there he wasn't to report to the building – that was an order and I would take the responsibility. Tilson knew where he was, and might have leaked it.

'Mr Croder,' Tewkes said, 'yet.'

'Oh for Christ's sake shut up.'

It hadn't totally escaped me that when Croder sends for a shadow executive it's reasonable odds that he's got a mission lined up and that soon after eleven o'clock this morning I'd be taken off standby and put into operations and cleared and briefed and sent out to God knew where, and the prospect was touching the nerves.

'Cuppa, love?'

'Yes.' Red, chafed hands at the big tea urn, powdered wrinkles, what would we do without our Daisy, the gentle dispenser of the universal anodyne? 'How's the arthritis?' It had been pouring for days on end, October rain.

'Gives me gyp now and then. What about that poor young man, though?'

'He's fine now.' Keep on saying it, telling people. The Caff was the only place where we could talk without the gag on and Daisy was an information centre second only to Signals itself.

There was no one in here I wanted to talk to and I'd had enough of that bloody cologne and it was still only 10:45 so I went along and kicked Holmes' door open, not exactly, but I was a fraction quick with the handle and he noticed.

'What are they going to do,' I asked him, 'about Fisher?'

'Steady, old fruit. Take a pew.'

You can't rush Holmes. He keeps his cool, and that was why I'd come to see him. He was also in Signals and Mr Croder was his chief and he might have heard something definite.

'I've only got a few minutes,' I said.

'Yes, you're down to see Mr C, aren't you?' Steady eyes under heavy brows, watching me carefully. He'd felt the anger as soon as I'd come in here. 'I can't tell you anything,' he said, 'about Fisher. Sorry.'

I had to start using control, not a good sign. 'Have they been looking for him?'

'Yes. Would you like some tea?'

'Has Croder been looking for him?'

'Not specifically. Various people have been sort of popping their head in to ask if I knew where he was.'

'Do you?'

Tilson said you'd sort of taken the chap under your wing.' Eyes very serious now, concerned. 'That could be tricky.'

'They're going to waste him,' I said, not particularly to Holmes, just thinking aloud, not quite sure why I was letting this Fisher thing rankle, not sure I wasn't simply using it as a focus for other kinds of anger in me, other kinds of fear, not sure whether I was afraid for him or afraid for myself, drifting in the limbo that isolates us between missions, bringing loneliness, uncertainty, while you find yourself looking at the calendar, at the clock, killing time on the way to the countdown.

'I don't know,' Holmes was saying, 'if Mr C has got anything for you.'

'I didn't ask.'

'I thought you might.'

I would have, of course, and he knew that. Staring at me gravely from behind his neat, orderly desk, worried about me, silver-framed picture of a deceptively-pretty girl, other pictures on the wall, some nice Arabians by Chaille, some sketches, a Henry Moore, a Chinese watercolour, will I see them again?

'It'd be better,' Holmes said after a while, 'not to fight with Mr C. He's a bit upset today.'

His voice sounded faint, and I realised I'd slipped into alpha, and that I would have to get some control back. It had been 'It's been almost two months,' Holmes was saying. That's a long time.'

'Beginning to show?'

He moved a hand, placatingly – 'Not to most people. The thing is,' leaning across the desk, his tone quietly urgent, 'I'd be very careful with Mr Croder. If he's got a mission for you, and you're in this -' avoiding the word mood – 'frame of mind, you could lose it.'

'Or turn it down.'

We can do that. It's in the contract, because we don't take anything on that might find us, somewhere along the line, in a red sector where the odds against our getting out are not worth counting. They can't force us, in other words, to sign away our life.

'I don't think you'll turn anything down,' Holmes said. 'He wouldn't offer you anything less than interesting.'

I was half-listening to him, half-listening to the voices that whispered urgently in the dark of the spirit, the thin, whining voices of fright, alarm, paranoia. It wasn't anything new: since the last time out I'd been moving on a collision course with the next one, and it doesn't get any better.

He was waiting for me to say something, Holmes, sitting patiently at his desk, long fingers interlaced, his eyes attentive. Will I see him again, be here in this room again? That was the essence of what was going on, the sense of seeing things, doing things for the last time.

Pre-mission nerves, enough to make you sick. 'I don't know how I stand you,' I said, 'you and your bloody intuition.'

Sudden white smile, head on one side. 'You made the choice, come in here or not come in here. Lesser of evils, or am I being self-indulgent?'

Then the chrome-framed government-issue clock on the wall moved to the hour and I got up and tapped my fingers on his desk to make contact with it, with him, in case it was the last -

'God knows how you got a girl like that,' I told him, the one in the photograph, and went to the door and saw him, as I turned to go out, sitting there looking solemn again.

'Heed the gypsy,' he said.

'Do you know what you're asking?'

'Not very much.'

'But it's not even your concern.'

'Everything that happens here is my concern.'

'That gives you no right to meddle.'

'It gives me the right to a hearing -'

'Not at present. Later on, you -'

'But this can't wait, you know that.'

Heed the gypsy.

'It's for me to know whether it can wait.'

'I want to be told, that's all, what you're going to do with him.'

'It is not your concern.'

He swung away, his shadow moving across the wall, thrown by the bright green-shaded lamp on his desk, the curtains drawn against the rain outside, night before noon, typical of him, Croder, thin and sharp-shouldered like a predator busy in the dark, his black hair brushed close to his head as if by the force of a stoop, his black eyes buried in the bone and lost in shadow, his nose cut by the sculptor's knife in a single stroke and jutting sharply, scenting carrion, a trifle, yes, a trifle exaggerated but it gives you the gist I hope, he's simply, shall we say, a man untouched by the humanities and therefore brilliant, admittedly, at his work, which is to bring his executives back in safety if he can manage it and throw them out if they don't match up to his own exacting standards and with no slightest thought of a second chance.