The Tango Briefing

'Get you a taxi?'

'I'll walk.'

'In this rain?'

'It'll cool me off.'

'We could put it down,' he said comfortably, 'on the expenses. Let's say the operation's running, as of now.'

'From what I can smell about this one you can stuff it, along with the taxi-fare.'

Her breasts were marbled in the greenish light and her face looked cold and blind. The shadow of the window cut half across her body, leaving her long legs in darkness, silvered with moisture.

The rain had stopped a long time ago but now and then a diamond drop flashed down from the guttering. Taxis were still about, their tyres hissing along the roadway; in here the air was stifling, even with the window open.

She moved and I looked down at her, she'd opened her eyes and they were brilliant in the half-dark.

'Okay?' she asked.

'Okay.'

She smiled and uncurled herself, getting off the bed and shaking her hair out, moving lazily in the glow from the street lamps, her hands idly smoothing her body as she stretched a little, her eyes closing again as she took pleasure simply in being alive, turning slowly in a kind of dance and forgetting I was here.

I hadn't meant to be.

But Tilson had seemed so certain they'd got me, and he wouldn't be stupid enough to think I'd take onany kind of job. He knew enough about the background to know that I'd finally fall for this one after I'd put up a preliminary squeal to show I had a choice.

So I'd gone dripping wet into a phone-box and tried four numbers before I could find anyone with enough time on their hands to take in a nerve-case who wanted a woman and wanted her badly because he knew that once the mission was running he wouldn't get another chance and that if somewhere along the line a wheel came off she'd be the last one he'd ever have.

'You're quiet.'

'I was watching you,' I said.

She smiled again, just a lazy movement along her mouth. 'You weren't.'

Her name was Corinne. I'd only seen her twice before but we liked things the same way, it was a kind of natural. 'There's another job,' I said, and found my clothes

'How long for?'

'You can't ever tell.'

She got her cigarettes and held one out and I shook my head and she lit up. 'Where is it this time?'

' Italy. Whole coach-load, want to see the Tower of Pisa before the bloody thing falls down.'

I dropped my keys and she picked them up, stooping naked in the light, giving them to me, smiling with her brilliant eyes. 'I just can't see you doing it.'

'Why not?'

'I just can't see you standing up with a microphone and saying on the left there's the statue of Marco Polo and on the right there's the Co-operative Spaghetti Works.'

'Well, I've got to do something for a living.'

The smoke curled across the slanting light, quickening to an air current from the window.

'I wish I was going with you.'

On a coach-trip in a heatwave?'

'It'd be a different kind of grind, and there'd be you.' She moved around the room, unconsciously making stylized turns on her slim bare feet. 'You know something? It isn't the cutthroat bitchiness of the competition that gets us down in the end, it's the strain on the shoulders, lifting our arms to get in and out of the dresses. You're right on the point of throwing it in, then you get a break and see your face on the front ofGo-Girl so you think you've hit it big, and you're back in the grind again.'

I tied the second lace.

'You ought to get married.'

'Oh futz, spare me the suds and the sink.'

'Someone with a sack of loot.'

I got my coat and we kissed and I opened the door and looked back and she was standing perfectly still in the small airless room, the after-rain smell coming in and the light striking obliquely across her, across a thin willowy girl with blue-veined breasts and a slowly-dying smile as she watched me go, a girl called Corinne whom I'd met only twice before and wouldn't, maybe, ever see again.

Room 43 was on the fifth floor and I was standing by the window when he came in.

'Sorry I kept you. You're Mr Gage?'

'Yes.'

'I'm Eastlake.'

'You've got quite a birdseye view from up here.'

'Appropriate word.' He was going to add something but the phone buzzed and he picked it up. 'Squadron-leader Eastlake. Yes, I told him to get three while he was at it. Well,tell him to pull his finger out, and listen, I'm going along to Projection and I don't want anyone to come barging in, so put someone on the door.'

I came away from the window and he gave me a slow probing look, wondering what a nondescript civilian was doing in here with a code-introduction. I'd used the name Gage because that had been stuck on for Tokyo and if they'd changed it when they'd arranged this meeting Tilson would have told me.

'Let's go along. Nobody with you?'

'No.'

In the small room smelling of acetate and overheated guide mechanism he introduced me to a WRAF operator and three flight lieutenants: 'Hinchley was piloting this sortie, Pierce was navigating, and Johnson's the photographic interpretation officer responsible for the analysis of the imagery material. Can we have those curtains drawn, someone?'

There were three or four rows of tip-up seats and we sat down and the WRAF hit the button and threw a desert on the screen and I remembered Tilson saying, 'I think you'll need tropical kit.'

Eastlake said: 'Ask what questions you like as we go along, will you? We did this with a cluster of four 35mm Nikons and a restricted field of 25 degrees. Filters were yellow, green and two reds and the film's been cut and joined for continuity, all right?'

'What altitude?'

'Sixty-five thousand feet.' He'd hesitated a fraction because it was classified so I thought this must be the Mk II version of the Albatross and started looking for missile installations dolled up as mosques.

But so far there was only desert, a sugar-brown terrain filling the screen and looking like a sheet of corrugated cardboard with a fold here and there.

'What are those rocks?'

'Shale upthrust, nothing very high, perhaps twenty or thirty feet.'

The pattern of dunes and rills spun slowly as we circled clockwise so I focused my eyes on the centre but couldn't see anything.

'This isn't a dummy run?'

'No. These are the pix we went for.'

I still couldn't see anything interesting on the screen but 1 was beginning to see a lot more of the job that Tilson and those other bastards were trying to pitch me into: a stinking Robinson Crusoe lark in an area defined on this frame-scale three miles across with nothing in it but a bunch of rocks and something else so small that only people like these could see it.

The ground resolution looked close on ten-tenths, with a shade of grain on the light-exposed side of the shale upthrust but the rest very clear, and I began getting frustrated because they'd sat me down to show me something and they knew I couldn't see it and I felt a bit of a lemon.

'Have you got those rocks on a static 3-D viewer?'

'We have, but I wouldn't bother.'

Eastlake had obviously been briefed. Last night Tilson had just told me to keep the rendezvous and that was all, so I hadn't reported at the Bureau this morning on my way here; but they'd briefed these chaps to run this film without telling me what I had to look for and there must be a good reason.

The desert spun and tilted, the group of rocks changing shape as the angle of view turned through its conic vector, the light-and-shadow corrugations of the dunes shifting definition like water flowing in slow motion. It was all I could see.