The Scorpion Signal

'Where are you putting us down?' I asked the pilot.

'Battersea Heliport. All right?'

'It's your toy.' We were lowering now, with the city lights swarming to meet us.

'You from the Yard, are you, sir?'

'That's right.' We never mind what they think we are.

A signal was coming through and the navigator leaned towards me, the glow of the instrument panel on his face. 'They want to know if our people can take your jag to Sloane Street for you. They're off their beat already.'

'Can you do that?'

'Easy.' He talked into the headset and signalled out.

'Well,' I asked him, 'did you arrange it?'

'Yes, sir.'

He could have told me.

Nerves.

There was a bump and we keeled-even under slowing rotors while Norton hit his seat-belt open and went down first and stood on the landing pad waiting to help me if I slipped on the rungs, bloody little nursemaid, they'd given him instructions to Bo-Peep me all the way home.

'Much obliged!' he called through the doorway, and pulled his collar up against the icy draught. We jogged across to the door of the building as the rotors sped up and sent a gust of exhaust gas against our backs.

They'd got their liaison worked out: there was a squad car waiting at the kerb when we went out through the front. Norton showed his card and they snapped the rear door open and got the flashers going the moment we turned out into the traffic stream, using the siren once or twice to get us some headway. Norton still didn't talk and by this time I didn't want him to. We tumbled out of the car across the slush of a recent thaw and slipped through the narrow doorway halfway down Whitehall and hit the lift button and waited, not looking at each other. Dirty water seeped from our shoes under the bleak security lights as I thought of Helena and wondered if I'd ever see her again.

Tilson met us as we got out of the lift.

'My dear fellow,' he said, and held out his warm dry hand. 'Long time no see.'

'Two weeks. That's not long.' Norton had gone quietly rushing off along the corridor: I suppose he'd been told to report somewhere the moment we got in.

'I know what you mean,' Tilson said with a slow blink. He was trying hard to look amiable and comforting, since it was his role in life; but tonight he couldn't manage it; he just looked frightened to death, right at the back of his eyes. 'What about a spot of tea?'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'We've got a few minutes, you see.' He guided me gently along the corridor as far as the Caff. 'We're not quite set up for you yet.'

'Look, Tilson, just give me a clue, will you?'

'It's not really for me to.say, old horse.' He shuffled across the room in his carpet slippers to a corner table, one of the few left. Maggie saw us and came over and mopped up some spilled tea, and when she'd gone again he said with his lips hardly moving, 'They've sent for Mr Croder. He's on his way in from Rome.'

'Croder?'

'He shouldn't be long.'

I shut up for a minute. Croder was chief of the base directorate and handled the ultra-sensitive operations and had a mortality rate for foreign actions higher than the rest of them put together, not because he wasn't brilliant but because he took on risks that most of the others shied at. I'd never worked for him, not even on the Sahara thing. I didn't want to.

I listened to Jessop and Wallis, sitting at the next table; but they weren't talking about the job: Jessop had bought a Piper three weeks ago and took one of his girl-friends for a joyride and wrapped the thing round a power pylon and got away with it, except that she was suing him for five hundred thousand pounds for a new face before she could model again.

I listened to some people talking on the other side, but couldn't pick anything up. I was desperate for clues, because I knew I wouldn't get any from Tilson. He was just here to make sure I didn't get away.

'Tilson,' I said evenly, 'I've been on leave exactly two weeks and I'm due for eight and I'm not coming in yet, okay? No mission. Nix, niet, ninguno, are you receiving me?'

He looked vaguely at the wall. 'I don't think there's a mission on the board, old fruit. Not officially.' The tea came and he began spooning sugar into it. He hadn't looked at me since he'd met me outside the lift and that wasn't like him; he's always been cagey but not this bad.

'What about unofficially?' I asked him.

'Nothing ever happens in this place — ' he turned his bland pink face to me for the first time- 'unofficially.'

I held on hard. 'I just want a clue, Tilson. Why has everyone started tearing up the pea-patch?'

He began sipping his tea; it was too hot but he was just making a gesture and trying not to look scared. 'You'll have to be a bit patient, old horse.' He gave a wintry smile. 'Not quite your forte, I know.'

O'Rourke was coming towards us between the tables, his hands dug into the pockets of his mack and pulling it tight round his thighs so he wouldn't knock anyone's tea over. I thought he was coming to talk to Tilson but he dumped himself down between Jessop and Wallis at the next table. I heard him quite clearly. 'They've lost Shapiro,' he told them, and I saw Jessop going slowly white, and in a couple of seconds he got up and went out, bumping into a table on his way and not noticing.

'Dead?' I asked O'Rourke.

He looked up. 'What?'

'Did they find him dead?'

'Who?'

'Shapiro.'

'I don't know.'

'Who found him?'

'I don't know.'

I shut up. Tilson wasn't looking at either of us; he was just listening, with his face down over his tea. O'Rourke didn't know anything. Nobody in this place knows anything, because that's the official policy: the staff has to have an overall view of operations but there's always a handful of field executives hanging around between missions or waiting to be sent out, and the less we know of what's going on, the less we can tell the opposition if we make a mistake out there and they pull us in and throw us under the bright white light and keep us there till it burns through to the brain while they're asking us questions.

'You did a bit of work,' Tilson said conversationally, 'with Shapiro. Didn't you?'

'A couple of times.' Cyprus, Tenerife.

He nodded and looked down and drank some more tea while I sat there trying not to think about Shapiro, trying not to remember him too well. There wasn't anything definite about that bit of news I'd just overheard; he could still be alive, and if he wasn't, there was nothing I could do about it. We come and go.

'I wonder if I can find anyone,' Tilson said plaintively, 'to look after you until Mr Croder shows up. I don't like your having to hang about like this.' He got up and wandered off and I noticed his tea wasn't finished; he just wanted to get me away from Wallis and O'Rourke before I overheard anything else. That suited me; the more we hear, up and down these bleak green-painted corridors, the more we become involved, the more we become exposed. We don't want that to happen. The Bureau doesn't exist, so we don't exist either, if we're wise. It's less painful like that, and infinitely less dangerous.

It was nearly nine in the evening before Tilson came and got me out of Monitoring, where I'd been passing the time listening to a lot of flak from one of our cells in Africa which was trying to pull itself out of the general bush fire that had gone up after the Kibombo massacre.

'Talk to you,' Tilson asked from the doorway, 'for a jiff?' It was terribly low key, and I started worrying again. He took me along the corridor, with our footsteps echoing from the high arched ceiling; there's still no carpeting in this bloody place: they say the parquet's got woodworm in it and they have to keep a watch on it.

'We've got Mr Croder for you,' Tilson told me and hustled me into Signals. From that moment I began going cold. We can always refuse a mission and we don't have to give our reasons; some of the operations look strictly shut-ended during the planning stage and we reserve the right to go on living if we think the risk is too high. But we can't refuse to listen to a director if he's got something for us to do, and sometimes he'll prick our conscience or our pride and lever us into a tricky one before we know what's happening. My nerves were still out of condition from the last operation, although you'd think we'd get over it, one day, and learn to live with it; maybe some of them have, but I haven't yet, and it's getting late.