I listened to his breathing.
'Tae mien nehna tii non te?'
Then the shadow of his arm moved, lifting, and I felt the rush of adrenalin come surging through the system as the mind took a millisecond to rehearse the action of the sword-hand swinging up, power-driven from the heel through the hip, the shoulder, the entire organism now taut as a drawn bow as the hand of the man moved to the door and he closed it and went on his way along the passage, a janitor, security guard, someone like that, finding a door open and closing it, a trivial function of his duties done.
It took me less than ten minutes more to find what I hoped I would find, and as I stood looking at it in the beam of the flashlight with the unused adrenalin still shaking the muscles and souring the mouth, I saw that here, yes, I had the specific information Pringle had asked me for at our first meeting at the airport in Phnom Penh: the objective for Salamander.
16: SHADOW
There was a smell of pigs in here.
'I was able,' Pringle said, 'to get through to London almost immediately after you telephoned.'
Presumably because traffic through the Australian satellite was less heavy at night. I'd phoned him from the hotel with the information as soon as I'd left Room 27, according to the book: the executive is to debrief anything of importance as soon as he can in case he's got at, and can't. I'd simply given him the position marked on the map I'd found in Slavsky's room: 12°3′N x 103°10′E. The rest wasn't major.
'What did Flockhart say?' I asked Pringle.
'That he would take immediate action.'
'What action?'
Pringle gave a slight shrug. 'I really can't say.'
'But do you know?'
I was feeling sour, which is typical in this bloody trade when you've brought home the product and dropped it proudly on the doormat like a freshly-killed rat; there's a sense of let-down, especially when things have been easy, and tonight's work had been so easy it worried me. You wonder if you've missed something, some little thing that's going to come back at you like a whiplash. Paranoia, yes, but tonight the adrenalin was still in the bloodstream and there was no kind of physical action I could take to disperse it — you try jogging athletically through the streets of Pouthisat, Cambodia, at ten o'clock at night and you'll be shot on sight by some zealous lad in the police or the army on the safe assumption that you've either stolen a watch or set a land-mine somewhere.
'No,' Pringle said evenly, 'I don't actually know what kind of action Control is going to take. He keeps me less informed than some might suppose, as a matter of principle.'
What he was telling me was that I was forgetting that the director in the field is also at risk during a given operation, and that the less information he has in his head the less the opposition can get out of it when they start work with the burning bamboo sticks under the nails and so on. I hadn't forgotten; I just thought our smooth Mr Pringle knew more than he was ready to tell me. That was all right, provided he'd got good reason, but I didn't know what it was.
I let it go. 'What's that awful smell of pigs in here?'
'I really can't say.'
His favourite answer to whatever you asked him, you put the penny in and out it came. It was stifling in this place; the power station was on overload again so the ceiling fan wasn't working, and all we had for light was a kerosene lamp. Pringle had told me the building belonged to a volunteer mine-clearing unit; he knew them and had asked for the key, and this was also from the book — the executive and his director in the field never use the same rendezvous location twice unless it's considered secure. This place wasn't much more than a big shed, with mine detectors stacked against the wall and pairs of huge padded protective boots as big as snow shoes lined up on the concrete floor. Someone had started everything off with a flair for record-keeping when they'd set up shop: there was a map of the town on the wall with big red blotches on it and a sprinkling of little green dots; it looked as if they'd made a red dot every time a mine had exploded, and there'd been so many that the dots had become blotches, mostly around schools, bus depots, temples, where the most feet could be expected to pass. The green dots presumably marked the places where mines had been detected and brought here for defusing, but there weren't enough to become blotches yet.
Pictures on the wall, one of the queen, two of Charles playing polo, no Di anywhere. Photograph of three men and a woman, all smiling happily, black crosses above their heads, one of the men holding a small pig — that explained it — some words scrawled underneath the photograph with ornate serifs and curlicues to give them solemnity, They Did Their Job. A picture of the pig on its own with a red ribbon round its neck, caption, Little Stinker. A picture of a Cambodian girl, eleven or twelve, crutches, radiant smile, two men holding her in a bear hug, huge fatherly grins. On the wall opposite the cluttered desk was a dartboard with Pol Pot's face crudely painted on it.
'How do we know for certain,' I heard Pringle's cautious tones, 'that the position on the map in Slavsky's room indicates the main guerrilla base of the Khmer Rouge?' He was looking at the topographical map he'd brought with him.
'We don't.'
Bastard didn't like the look of my freshly-killed rat.
'How certain,' he asked, 'are you?'
'Put it this way. We think Pol Pot is ready to launch a new offensive, possibly on the nineteenth of this month. The only way he can do it is by remote control, because the Cambodian army is virtually on stand-by to counter any land operation. So we're talking about missiles.' The ceiling fan began turning again but the lights didn't come on: Pringle hadn't thrown the switch when we'd come in because the lamp was all we needed. 'Then I see Boris Slavsky, a known arms dealer — according to your briefing — land in a Khmer Rouge aircraft and Colonel Choen leaving him with an attache case full of Swiss francs, and we assume it's in payment for the missiles — or if you like it better, I assume. I assume also that the map was left with Slavsky to indicate the exact location where delivery is to be made. That location is buried in deep jungle, according to your topo, and even though it's not far from the coast there's a mountain range in the way with absolutely no roads — not even tracks — where any kind of transport can be used. If — '
'You studied the map thoroughly?'
Best left ignored. 'The nearest airfield,' I said, 'is at Phumi Tuol Koki on the coast, and the only access by sea is through a fishing village.' Pringle was leaning over his topo, following me. I didn't look at it, kept my eyes on the fly-encrusted ceiling fan, wanting him to know just how thoroughly I can look at a map when I'm searching someone's room for information. 'There's a minor road fifteen kilometres from the marked position, but fifteen kilometres of jungle is like fifty kilometres of open terrain, in terms of accessibility. So if the mark on Slavsky's map doesn't show the exact location of the main Khmer Rouge base, I can't think what else it could mean.'