He put some money on the bar and came with me into the street.
“You seem to know your Barcelona pretty well,” he said, as if impressed. “It’s my first trip here.” We crossed over to the central boulevard, where the goldfish hung in clusters from the surface of their bowls, trying to get oxygen. The chico said we should buy some for our girl-friends.
“I’ve been here before,” I said. “The thing is, I took a calculated risk. I mean it wasn’t anything clumsy, or slack or anything. I could understand them blowing their bloody stack if I’d dropped a pad or something.” That would be dangerous, any kind of mistake. You can make a few mistakes when you’re new to the game, but not when you’re a veteran. At my age it can only mean you’re losing your grip, and they’ll sling you out before you can blink. “How did those bastards pick it up anyway?”
“It wasn’t difficult. He was tagging you on orders. When he was reported killed, they didn’t need to look anywhere else, did they?”
He wandered away from me and put his foot on something and I saw a yellowish splodge on the paving stones as he came back. “I wish to Christ you wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“I know.” He gave a soft laugh.
Ferris isn’t specifically a bastard, like most of them, but he’s got a thing about insects. About bigger creatures too, for all I know. I’d hate to see him with a mouse: I can’t stand that kind of thing.
“How did they get the complaint?” I asked him. They for Bureau.
“The Russ told MI5, and they shoved it over to Liaison 9.”
“It’s getting too bloody easy. We used to be totally nonexistent, and — ”
“And that’s what you relied on. But they didn’t send me out here to ask for excuses.”
There was a bench and we sat on it, both of us checking the street for ticks from force of habit. It wasn’t necessary because yesterday they’d smuggled me out of Heathrow like a leper and I’d made a thorough check when I’d got off the plane.
Obvious question: “Why did they send you after me?”
He sighed gently, pushing back his thin sandy hair with his fingers and for a moment glancing at me, though nothing showed in the pale amber eyes. “To help you frame the wording of your resignation. They’re fussy in Admin. as you know; they don’t want to feel they’re being unfair to a trusted employee after years of good service and all that sort of thing. On the other hand they insist on your record showing you’d broken the rules and had to go.”
“Screw them,” I said.
“Point taken.” In a moment: “I told them I’d rather not come out here.”
“They could have done worse.” I got up and stood helplessly with my hands dug into my pockets, looking along the boulevard past the flower stalls and the goldfish man and the stacks of cheap multicoloured comics on sale by the roadside. Ferris had local-directed me in quite a few theatres: East Germany, Hong Kong, the States, Teneriffe. He’d been very good: underplayed everything, the way I like it, no dramatics, plenty of leeway when the odds were short. I suppose, as a director in the field, he’d saved my skin more than once by watching the way I was running. Today he was going to take it back on a salver to London.
“No formal enquiry,” I said.
“It’s been made.” He got slowly to his feet.
“No appeal.”
“On what grounds?”
I didn’t answer that. There weren’t any grounds.
I’d broken the First Rule and I’d confessed to it. The Bureau is the Sacred Bull and I’d violated its sanctity. While Ferris and I were standing here in the pale sunshine in Barcelona there was a full-scale murder hunt going on in England and if I went back there I’d risk being caught because people had seen my face on that train and they had been interviewed by the police, and if the Russ could leak the fact that it was one of their spooks who’d been on my tail at the time he’d been killed then they’d do that: and the hunt would at once concentrate within the closely circumscribed limits of the secret service milieu. And the Sacred Bull could find itself in the limelight: a non-existent shadow organization responsible solely to the Prime Minister and with extraordinary powers in the international field that would be brought into immediate question in the House if they were ever acknowledged.
The outcome would be unequivocal. The Bull would be sacrificed. Finis.
I didn’t like those people in London because they were ruthless and they were implacable but I’d worked with them through sixteen operations and we’d learned mutual respect of the kind a wolf learns for the rest of the pack and there’d been no complaints on either side: until now. And now I knew they were doing the only thing they could do, choosing to sacrifice a disciple of the Bull to protect the Bull itself. I wouldn’t expect them to do anything else.
Ferris had wandered over to look at the magazine stall, giving me time to think. Now he came back. I got off the bench and said:
“Why Parkis?”
He said with a wintry smile, “Nobody else had any stomach for it.”
“He enjoyed it, of course.”
“What else would you expect?”
I looked along the perspective of the boulevard, catching at a stray thought or two, finding nothing of value. I felt disorientated: time and place had changed and I was lost and it hadn’t happened to me before and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Sixteen missions, then phutt.
“How many people knew?” I asked Ferris.
He considered this. “Three.”
“Three?”
He looked up. “Parkis and two others. Why?”
“Christ, the whole place was like a funeral home when I went in there yesterday morning.”
He said: “That was about something else.”
“You’re lying.”
He looked surprised.
I said: “They were all looking at me as if I’d shit on the rug. Tilson Woods Matthews everyone I tried to talk to.”
Another faint smile. “You’re a little paranoiac, remember.”
I swung away and swung back. “So it was something else. What like?”
“They’ve had a wheel come off,” he said quietly, “in Central Asia.”
I waited before I spoke again. It had been a mistake, telling him he was lying. They don’t lie to you. If you ask them something they don’t want to answer, they say so or say nothing. We call it un information and it covers a large and specific area in the work we do: they tell us as much as we need to know so that we can operate efficiently, and nothing more.
But this wasn’t an operation. Ferris didn’t have to tell me anything. Parkis had been appointed to tell me as much as I had to know, and there wasn’t going to be any appeal because there weren’t any grounds. Ferris had been sent out here for one purpose and all I was doing here in the winter sunshine of a Barcelona street was dodging around in the dust while he waited to put his foot on me.
So I didn’t want to keep still.
“What land of wheel?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“Who was running it?”
He looked around him with his yellow eyes screwed up against the sun, as if he wasn’t really listening. But he was listening. And so was I. “It’s not in my area,” he said at last.
“Did anyone get hit?”
“It’s possible.” A dead leaf blew against his shoe and he looked down at it with quiet attention.
“Are they switching controls?”
“Wearily. “They don’t really know what they’re doing.”
The leaf blew away and he watched it go, and noticed the cockroach swivelling through the maze of dust round the manhole cover not far away. He walked over there and I swear to you I heard the faint crunch above the noise of the traffic. He came slowly back.
Taking a breath, I asked him: “Are they going to send someone else out there?”