Quiller Solitaire

'How do you feel, Quiller' – and here it came -'about what happened last night? How do you feel personally?'

Tread carefully. 'It was a shock.'

'Of course. What else?

I looked away. 'I suppose I feel a bit responsible, or at least I did, for a while. But Tilney pointed out that I shouldn't blame myself, and Holmes agreed.'

'I see.' He waited until I was looking back at him. 'So you don't feel any lingering sense of guilt.'

'Not really.'

'Or anger?' Watching me carefully.

'Oh, I think I've got over that sort of thing by now. He's not the first man I've seen killed.'

Shatner waited, in case I made the silly mistake of adding something, of protesting too much. I didn't.

The phone rang again and the sound brought the sweat out on me, because that had been tricky going. 'You couldn't have been listening,' Shatner was saying on the phone. 'I asked for no more calls.' He dropped it and sat back again and I saw a look of sudden fatigue on his face. I suppose he'd been up most of the night too, because Signals would have passed on my message about McCane. This man had also had his executive wiped out on home ground and without any warning, and he must have had a lot to do in the last few hours.

'I don't know you,' he said, 'all that well. I'm not keen on running people I don't know.'

I didn't say anything. If I begged for this job I'd never get it.

Pressing the bridge of his nose, his eyes squeezed shut, You've got a reputation for giving your controls a bad time. I'm not keen on that either.'

I got out of the chair, and a spring twanged. Well there's only a couple of boards active, so you've got plenty of people to choose from.'

I was at the door when he said, 'I rather think this is a time for tolerance, don't you, on both sides.'

'I was trying to make it easy for you.'

He got up too and moved around, not looking at me now, needing to think: that was my impression.

I stayed by the door. 'I've called Westerby in from Bucharest,' he said.

'To take over?'

'Yes.'

'How's his German?

Shatner swung me a look. 'Had McCane talked about Germany, when he phoned you last night?'

'No.'

He went on moving around the small untidy room. I'd got Holmes to fill me in on McCane before we left the Caff, and he'd told me he'd come back from Berlin the night before, so I assumed that was where Shatner had been running him. I'd also asked Holmes about Shatner, and it was interesting. Apart from a few other things he'd run Tewson in Budapest earlier this year and flown there himself to direct the end-phase when things had got sticky, and not many of them will do that, only Croder, Loman, Childs, nobody else I can think of, because it's so dangerous at that stage. Shatner had also brought Farrow in from Sri Lanka with a broken thigh and a bullet in him, not personally that time, but he'd organised a last-ditch rescue operation through Signals with a dozen people in support and orders to use deadly force if they had to, no big deal in a place like Sri Lanka but the Bureau is terribly touchy about that sort of thing. I might not be in bad hands if Shatner agreed to run me in Berlin, give or take a stray shot or a blown cover.

Westerby's German is adequate,' Shatner said at last, 'but yours is rather better, from what I hear. You've worked there, haven't you?'

'Two or three times. I can pass for a native Berliner.'

'Can you now.' I was still standing by the door, and he said, 'For God's sake, come and sit down again.'

I compromised and perched on the arm of the chair, ready to get up and get out of here if he looked like arguing the toss for much longer. If he didn't give me the mission I'd do the thing I wanted to do some other way; I was ready to drop by now, and past the point where I'd lie staring at nightmares on the ceiling.

'You're more conversant, then,' Shatner said, 'with Berlin than Westerby is. That makes a difference.'

'I'm a bit surprised you didn't send for me in the first place.' He'd known my background; he must have. All the controls have got to do in this place is press a button and the computers throw you on the screen like an X-ray.

He stood still for a moment and looked at me. 'As I've told you, you're not my favourite executive.'

'That's a bloody shame.'

I was getting fed up with him.

'Now that we've got that over,' he said, 'let's remember that we've both had a rather trying night, and make mutual allowances. When can you take over from McCane?'

'The focus of this operation,' Shatner said, 'is on a man named Maitland. Or rather, on his death.'

We were already into preliminary briefing and the little room was full of smoke. He'd asked me if I'd mind his having a cigarette, which I thought was civil of him.

'Maitland was a cultural attache at our embassy in Berlin, fond of the city, active in his job, though for some reason not particularly well liked among his colleagues. A week ago he was murdered, and his body taken away. His flat had been broken into with some violence, and the police found evidence of massive blood loss. There were marks on the floor indicating that his body had been dragged out of the flat to the lift. The telephone was hanging by its cable – he'd been talking to a woman friend, who came forward, when the flat was entered. She reported sounds of the door being smashed in, an outbreak of voices and finally a cry. Maitland's car was also broken into and rigorously searched, the upholstery slashed open and the carpets dragged up.'

Shatner reached for the dented chromium ashtray on his desk. 'The Foreign Office suspected that the new generation of the Red Army Faction was involved, and asked us to make enquiries. I sent McCane out there.'

'The FO approached us, instead of DI6?

'We are able to do things, as you know, that DI6 cannot.'

'But I mean it's that sensitive?'

He flicked ash. 'I've been in Signals most of the night with some of our agents-in-place out there. They couldn't give me much more than a certain amount of raw intelligence, but the vibrations I'm getting are that there may be more to Maitland's death than some kind of crude wet affair.'

Yes indeed. They'd tagged McCane back to London and wiped him out as soon as they found him exposed. 'You didn't get anything useful from McCane when you debriefed him?'

'Surprisingly little. He ran into a lot of resistance when he started asking questions. His feeling was that people either didn't want to answer them, or were afraid to. That's not unusual, of course, when there's a strong terrorist faction at large and active.'

'Why did you call McCane in? For debriefing?' 'Partly.' He got up and went over to a window, freeing the fastener and thumping at the frame until it jerked open an inch, sending down flakes of paint. 'And partly because his enquiries led him to think that the person who might know more about what was going on is Maitland's wife. Widow.' He brushed bits of paint off his jacket and sat down again.