The radio base was at the end of the building and I followed Loman in. From the size of the domed ceiling we were now underneath one of the great gilded cupolas I'd seen from the street. Faded arabesque screens, cracked mosaic floor and the minimal mod. cons. of a fifth-category package-deal hoteclass="underline" bed, washbasin, curtained shower.
'This is Diane Bowman, our radio operator.'
There wasn't anything in his tone.
He made it sound just like a casual introduction. But he didn't look at me: at least he had the grace to look away as he showed me how far things had gone towards perdition, how desperately he'd been driven by London to rig up this mission they'd asked for, to rig the thing up with no time for selective staffing or initial briefing and no established access facilities and not a hope in hell of doing anything more than send this whole operation staggering blindly on till it finished both of us.
Tonelessly he said: 'This is Quiller, the executive in the field.'
I think she came forward a pace to greet me, I don't remember, and then I supposed stopped, seeing I didn't move.
Fair hair and a young face, the mouth surprised and the eyes waiting, uncertain of me, the stance defensive, the bare arms hanging loose but the hands tensed, a slight girl, a girl out of a fashion magazine, thin-bodied in a fisherman's vest and slacks and sandals, this summer's gear for Brighton or the Broads and all the rage and oh Christ a mission to run and this child caught in its machinery.
When I could, I looked at Loman.
There was nothing in my tone either; we'd both of us been trained, long ago, out of our habits; but he knew what was in my mind.
'How long has she been operating on priority missions?'
He stood with his hands tucked neatly behind him, head on one side but still not looking at me, maybe prepared for me to blow up in his face and get it over, maybe deciding on policy not to answer me till I forced him.
'Long enough,' the girl said, 'to know how to do it.'
Her eyes were steady now, no longer uncertain of me. She stood with her arms folded and her chin lifted a fraction.
Loman spoke suddenly. I suppose the anger in her voice had encouraged him.
'When I direct a mission I choose first-class people and if this radio operator has my approval then you can have every confidence in her.'
He couldn't even make it sound right.
My mind had partially blanked off and I couldn't think of anything useful to say: he and I both knew what the situation was and there wasn't anything to talk about. Professional instinct was still functioning, though, and I crossed the uneven mosaic to the window and pulled down the venetian blind and fixed the catch.
'Keep it shut.'
She said
'I like the view.'
It was very quiet here: the post-meridian heat of the August sun was lying like a dead-weight on the town and we were among the few people who weren't deep in a siesta. No sound came from outside this room, no sound at all.
Loman took out his damp silk handkerchief and wiped his polished face. The sweat trickled on me as the organism tried to reduce the body-temperature. I didn't move. I was beginning to lose the fine-tuned sense of direction, of shape, of purpose, the thing we call mission-feel that develops by infinite degrees as we go forward, step by step, into the area where we have committed ourselves to unknown tasks in the teeth of unknown hazards: the sense that tells us, at every step, that it's now toolate to turn back.
This I was beginning to lose.
'Loman. It's no go.'
He made an impatient gesture but said nothing.
I didn't look at the girl. It wasn't her fault.
Under the big dome my voice echoed strangely.
'You'd better signal London. Get some professional staff.'
He was standing perfectly still, a listening bird, his small eyes bright and his neat head tilted. I knew there wasn't anything he could say because it was beyond him now: there wasn't time to get anyone capable from London and it wasn't his fault but I was getting fed-up.
'I can get killed this way, Loman. We all can. For nothing. Just because those incompetent bastards in London have taken on a job that's got to be done so fast that we can't even hope to survive for as long as it takes to do it. This isn't an intelligence operation, it's a suicide pact.'
Loman could think quite fast but he couldn't talk while he was doing it and he didn't talk now so I shut up and let him get on with it because this was his pigeon: when the director in the field sends the executive in there's got to be a professional set-up. We didn't have one.
I suppose he'd thought of a dozen angles of attack in those few seconds and obviously the one he chose was the one he thought was right and he was wrong.
'I think you're showing an unreasonable bias towards — '
'Isthat so?' I was really very fed-up. 'We've been called in by a panic directive to clear up the wreck of an operation that went off half-cocked and killed one man and blew another and by a bit of luck I missed a bomb and last night they picked Fyson out of Tunis harbour and it'd be nice to think that when they grilled him he didn't break but the last time I saw him alive his nerve had gone so they wouldn't have had any trouble. How safe's our base now, Loman? And all you can do about it is pick a kid out of school who leaves her radio in direct sight of a building at fifty yards' optical range even through low-powered glasses and doesn't pull the blind down because she likes the view.'
In ten seconds he looked at me and said:
'She is an efficient radio operator. Highly efficient'
When I turned she was watching me, angry because of what I'd said about her, frightened because of what I'd said about Fyson.
'All right she's an efficient radio operator but who's going to look after her if I'm in the desert and you have to leave base for five minutes?'
Before he could answer she said:
'I can look after myself.'
'How?'
She drew very fast and I hit the thing before she'd finished and it spun high and chipped plaster off the wall and curved down and skittered across the mosaic.
'You have to be faster than that.'
Loman said bleakly:
'I would undertake to man the base personally at all times.'
'Good of you.'
I went over and picked the gun up and wiped the plaster off and checked for damage and gave it back to her, a half-pound six-shot.25 standard lightweight, wouldn't stop a mouse.
'And leave the safety-catch off. There's no point in a fast draw if the trigger's locked.'
She took it but wouldn't look at me, her eyes were down and she was breathing fast, the heat and of course the frustration. I must have bruised her hand but she didn't let herself nurse it, a point for that but one point wasn't enough to qualify her for running the radio liaison of a mission with the death-roll rising before we were even on our marks.
Loman was still thinking but he couldn’t find what he wanted: an argument that could keep me with him. It was too late now for an easy trap like the one he'd used on me before.
'She was head of signals at the Embassy in Tunis and monitoring the Egyptian-Israeli frontier-incident reports direct for London. She has fluent French, Italian and Arabic with five dialects.'
I looked at the radio, its facia striped by the shadows of the sunblind. It was a KW 200 °CA single-sideband transceiver with four channels on the dial and an auto-scrambler.
'What's your frequency coverage?'
Her head came up.
'3.0 to 19 mc/s.'
'Channels?'
'Four preset crystal controlled.'
'Receiver sensitivity?'
'Better than one microvolt for one watt output.'
'What frequencies would you use in this area?'
'7 MHz for daytime propagation conditions, 3 MHz at night.'
'How long have you worked with this type?'
'Over two years.'
'Did you choose it because of that?'
'No. Because it's perfect for the conditions here.'