In the signals vernacular of the Bureau the word strictly has the same weight as fully urgent. They both mean that everybody has got to listen, including Bureau One.
But it wasn't on because one of the bodyguards let out a shout in German when I picked the telephone up and Klaus jerked his head round - 'What are you doing? '
Everyone else froze, watching me.
'It looked like getting splashed,' I called across the pool to Klaus. I'd picked the whole thing up, not just the receiver. The receiver would have been next if no one had taken any notice. The guard who'd shouted had moved closer, was watching Klaus for any orders.
'Would you like,' Klaus asked me, 'to make a telephone call, my friend?' He had a big chest, a powerful voice: he could put a silkiness into the tone even at this distance.
'If I want to make a telephone call I ask you first, isn't that the drill?
'I am delighted you understand.'
He turned away and went on talking to Geissler. Inge Stoph gave a quick laugh and stuck her tongue out at me. I think she was peeved because I hadn't wanted to roll on the bunk with her on the plane; she couldn't have been used to refusals.
It was quieter now in the courtyard; the two girls – 'concubines' was the word Inge had used at the Eissporthalle – had stopped splashing and playing for Klaus's attention. The guards weren't moving around any more or bouncing on their feet; my own personal guard was closer to me now, his red fez making a Blob of colour against the white wall behind. I could hear a donkey braying, some way off, and Inge flashed me another look, a silent laugh, meaning perhaps that I'd been a donkey to try a trick like that with a man like Dieter Klaus, the fuhrer.
The smell of woodsmoke was on the air as fires were lit for the evening; it would be cool tonight in Algiers. A less attractive smell of chlorine came from the pool. I watched Klaus, Geissler and the guards, simply to keep them surveilled as a routine: the ferret doesn't often have the chance of surveilling the chief of the opposition in every movement he makes without attracting attention, without attracting bullets for that matter.
On the board for Solitaire the bit of chalk moves in the floodlight: 17:06 hrs local time, executive maintaining close surveillance on opposition. That ought to create a lot of interest in Signals, not to say a discreet degree of jubilation, an occasion perhaps for another cup of tea, providing the bit of chalk doesn't go on moving: He is also their captive under guard and is liable to be shot dead tonight at the flashpoint.
In most missions there's a flashpoint: it's when the executive is to perform a distinctly hazardous operation, to break into, for instance, the official intelligence headquarters of an unfriendly host country and try to get out again with something so classified that all the windows would blow out if anyone knew, or to get a wanted subject away from a fully-armed mantrap outside Hong Kong Airport with the public and the police looking on, or to make a last-ditch break for the frontier ahead of a pack of war-trained Doberman Pinschers, that sort of thing, flashpoint is what it says and the one that was coming up for Solitaire would be in two hours' time at the airport at Dar-el-Beida, when the man from London stopped his car and got out and came over to the black Mercedes 560 SEL we were sitting in and the counter-terrorist units closed in for the snatch with their floodlights and assault rifles and the shooting started and the executive for the mission went down first because those would be the orders from Dieter Klaus, the prearranged orders, the ones he would give before he left here this evening on his way to Midnight One.
That was the flashpoint for Solitaire unless I could reach a phone but they weren't going to let me do that, and I was starting to feel the familiar tingling at the nape of the neck as I sat here in my deck chair sipping hot mint tea because the organism was going to need the sugar, sipping hot mint tea as the boys in their kaftans moved quietly around the pool in their sandals and the snake moved again and this time one of them saw it.
He was sixteen, perhaps, seventeen, not one of the guards, just one of the palace servants, and he was young enough to enjoy playing a little prank now and then, especially if there were foreign girls around to tease, and he put down the tray and went over to the snake' and grabbed it by the tail before it could coil and swung it around in the air and smashed its head against the wall and held it up for a moment and then threw it into the pool with a bright boyish laugh.
The girls screamed and Klaus looked round and saw the dead snake on the surface of the water and got to his feet at once and went across to the Arab boy and shouted at him in French, bringing his big hand across and across his face until the boy's hand vanished into his kaftan and the blade of a knife flashed in the sunlight and Klaus parried it and tore the hilt free and slashed the boy's throat and pushed him away as the blood came spurting. The bodyguards had moved very fast when they'd seen the knife and were now forming a ring around Klaus, their guns out.
'Get Ibrahimi!'
One of them turned and ran into the building.
'Where were you, then? ' Klaus asked the others. 'Was that as fast as you can move? As fast as you can shoot?' An Arab came through one of the archways with the bodyguard, black-bearded, his robes flowing, and saw the boy sprawled across the tiles with his blood reaching the edge of the pool and trickling into the water, its rose-red colour spreading.
'He attacked me!' Klaus told the Arab, not shouting now but with the hoarseness of rage in his voice.
Dolores had climbed out of the pool and was on all fours, hump-backed, retching. Inge was staring at Klaus with her ice-blue eyes shining as she absorbed the joy in the scene: her fuhrer had killed, as he would always kill any who dared oppose him. Helen had climbed out of the water and was lying on her back with her eyes closed, her face ashen.
'These people saw him attack me with his knife!'
Ibrahimi stared at Klaus, then at the boy again.
'Now get him out of here, take him to his family, tell them that if anyone breathes a word about this I'll tell the police what happened and shame his memory – he tried to murder me, Ibrahimi, you understand me, do you understand?'
The guards stood waiting, their guns at the hip. They might have been hoping – must have been hoping – that Ibrahimi would make some kind of move against Klaus, even a gesture of protest against the death of a fellow Arab, so that they could shoot him down and show this time how fast they could work. They were out of luck.
'Yes,' he told Klaus, 'I understand.' He moved across to an archway, clapping his hands, and three or four boys appeared there, listening to Ibrahimi and then coming to the poolside, lifting the limp body in the kaftan and bearing it away.
'The mess!' Klaus called. The mess, Ibrahimi!'