Quiller Solitaire

My head was still throbbing, I think because I was feeling under pressure with so much information to take in against the clock.

He deals in everything from Brazilian tanks to helicopters and army uniforms, sometimes legally but not always. There are widespread thefts that go on at military bases all the time.

Twelve noon.

He's rather touchy when people tell him he's a merchant of death. He asks them how the big chemical manufacturers feel, selling the stuff they do – if they don't feel guilty, why should he?

13:00 hours.

He couldn't have been in Europe, then, Cone, when Signals had called him in.

They don't have allegiance to any flag or organisation, remember, and they need wars in order to prosper. It makes them different.

I wanted to phone Kleiber and ask him if he'd had instructions from London to mount a search for Helen Maitland, but it would tie up the line and I had to stay open for Cone, for Kleiber.

A TWA jumbo dropped through the sky on its approach path, trailing a skein of exhaust gas through the winter sunshine.

We must remember 'that because arms dealers meet so many people in government and military circles, they pick up some very sensitive information, and there are those who trade that information for as high a price as they can get, and that is often very high indeed. They -

The phone began ringing and the nerve-light flashed behind my right eye, the side where I'd banged my head. I picked up the receiver.

'Bitte?'

'Mr Jones?

'Yes.'

Cone.

'Your place or mine?'

I asked him: 'Does Kleiber know you're here?

'I phoned him from the plane.'

'You'd better come to my place,' I told him. It was Kleiber's number I'd given to Inge, and this was where he'd call me.

'Bring anything?' Cone asked.

'No.'

I shut down and switched on the tape again.

There was another incident in Kansas, USA, during a propellent transfer for a recycling operation. A pipe broke loose from the missile in the silo and there was a release of nitrogen tetroxide.

Samala was talking about the availability of nerve gas from legitimate sources when Cone arrived, his footsteps picking their way across the bare boards of the corridor with deliberation. I opened the door and he came in and took a quick look around.

'Economy class.'

'It's good in terms of security.'

'Oh yes.' He would have noticed the fire escape and the fact that the room was at the other end of the building from the stairs, so that you could hear people coming.

'Sit down,' I said, and he looked carefully at the iron bedstead and the two art deco chairs and sat down in one of them and pulled a manila envelope out of his coat and gave it to me.

'Stuff on the Miniver missile. You wanted it, didn't you?'

'Yes.'

'They gave it to me in London. It's also been faxed to Thrower's hotel, and I'll have it picked up there. Its nothing classified, just the specifications, mostly from Jane's. Bit of action was there?'

I suppose my eyes were still a bit nervy.

'Yes. Nothing serious. Bump on the head.'

'Doesn't show. Anything else?'

'Bruised shoulder.'

'Still use it?

'Yes.' I showed him.

'How d'you feel?'

'First class.'

He nodded and stopped talking. He'd been like this in Moscow, fussing about injuries, part of his job. One of the responsibilities of the director in the field is to make sure his executive doesn't go into any kind of action unless he's fit. He sat watching me with his bright attentive eyes, the window throwing light across his raw peeled-looking face, the cheekbones sharp under the skin, the ear nearer the window so thin that it was translucent. Cone, wherever he is, even in summer, looks as if he's walking against a blizzard, and more than that, as if he created it for himself, perhaps as a penance.

'Did you get any briefing in London?' I asked him.

'The lot.'

'From Shatner?'

'Yes.'

'How was he?'

'Pissed off.'

'He could've got me killed, giving me that clown. What about debriefing on this side?'

'I was an hour with said clown at the airport – London set it up. He was told to wait for me to come in before he booked out.'

I would have expected London to do that, to have Thrower go through the whole of the debriefing he'd given me so that I wouldn't have to do it all over again for Cone.

'Let's hope it was accurate,' I said.

'It sounded all right. He's got a good memory. What about timing, then?'

'I'm waiting for a call from Inge Stoph through Kleiber. Whatever time she suggests, I'll have to be there.'

'So tell me what's got to be done before you leave.'

'As soon as you can, tell Kleiber to send someone along to the taxi-rank outside the Steglitz Hotel. Ask them if Helen Maitland got into one of their cabs and if so, where she was taken. The doorman offered to get her one but she said she felt like a walk.'

'Description?'

I gave it to him.

'All right. You trust her, don't you?

'We can't. She's naive and she's totally subservient to men. If anyone told her to walk into a trap, that's what she'd do.'

'And that's what you think she's done.'

'Possibly.'

'And if anyone asked her the wrong questions?'

'That's why Thrower moved me out of the Steglitz right away.'

Cone got out of the chair, moving around. 'Better not phone Kleiber yet.'

'Not until he phones us. You can tell him then.'

'Right.'

I was going through the documents in the envelope; they were a breakdown on the Miniver, specifications, capability, technical drawings, disposition of all known models, mostly in the USA, some in the UK, some in Germany.

'That what you wanted?' Cone asked me.

'It's perfect.'

'Thank goodness something's perfect, then.'

I dropped the documents onto the bed. 'I hope you're not worried,' I said.

He leaned one shoulder against the window frame, looking down at me, sometimes turning his head as a plane moved through the pale sunshine outside. Thrower said you're going to try getting into Nemesis on your own and with no support, and you'll be relying on your cover and nothing else, is that right?'

'Yes.'

In a moment he said, 'You did this to me before, in Berlin.'

'Then you should be used to it.'

'True.'

He watched me steadily for a moment and then turned away, and I've seen that look before when the mission's running hot and there's no place for the shadow to go except into a red sector: they wonder if it's the last time they're going to see you. It used to worry me, but it doesn't any more.

'There's no other way,' I told him.

You couldn't stop anyone putting a bomb on a plane by relying on conventional security measures, with forty or fifty thousand commercial flights a day going through the airports worldwide. The high-tech plastic explosive, Semtex, was colourless and odourless and it could be moulded into any shape, a shoe or a hairbrush or a teddy bear, and at the moment there was no equipment in Europe that could detect it in a suitcase or a handbag. Cone knew that.

'The only way,' I told him, 'is to get inside the organisation that's planning to plant a bomb and wipe it out in time.'

He watched an Air France 727 nosing into the sky. 'Oh, I'm not arguing. So are you going to use any kind of base?'

'A car.'

'Where?

'I don't know until I know where the rendezvous is.'

He came and sat down again, facing me, his arms across his knees. 'You want somebody to watch the car?'

'No.'

It could be a night action and I wouldn't be able to identify him. Nemesis could find out that the car was mine and put a watch on it too.