Adam Hall - Quiller Solitaire

I felt a certain degree of relief. You can sometimes push a lot of the way through a mission on your own if it's low key and there's no hurry, but with this one the deadline was any next flight of a US airliner and the first one of the day was due for takeoff in three hours from now, destination New York via London, I'd checked the schedules in the paper.

'You've put him into the Steglitz?' I asked Matthews.

'Yes.'

'Room?

'510.'

On the same floor as Helen Maitland. I felt reassured. 'Ask him to phone me as soon as he can.'

'Will do.'

'Is Control at the board?' Shatner.

'I think he's resting up, but he's in the building. You want me to -'

'No, but listen. Norfolk's sent a support man out here, name of Home, with absolutely no experience in the field – he's just graduated. He's quite good but he shouldn't be working on a major mission for at least twelve months and they should know that.'

The sound of a vehicle was coming into the environment, some kind of truck. 'This isn't a complaint, as far as he's concerned, it's not his fault, but for God's sake tell Norfolk to watch what they're bloody well doing, they can get people killed like that.'

In a moment Matthews said, 'This is to go on record?'

'You're dead right. It's for COT Norfolk, Control, COS and Bureau One.'

Chief of Training Norfolk, Shatner, Chief of Signals and the head of the entire Bureau, host of hosts. Life's cheap in this trade and on our way through the labyrinth of a mission there's often a dead spook left behind in the shadows when it's all over but with Solitaire we'd got civilian lives to look after, hundreds of them, and if any one of us made a mistake somewhere along the line then yes indeed, it should go on record.

'I'll see to it,' Matthews said, and I shut down and watched the flood of light sweeping across the front of the houses over there as the banging began, garbage truck.

The ashtray still stank so I pulled it away from the dashboard and threw it out of the window. There hadn't been time to eat anything because sleep had been more important, so I was having to take the stink of someone's nicotine fix on an empty stomach.

Bang of the garbage truck – I could see it now, a humped silhouette against the wall that ran the length of the canal.

04:51 on the digital clock.

I was feeling all right at this time, the nerves quiet. They'd start tightening up a bit before long because of what we had to do, but for the moment I felt relaxed, the smell of the hotel's sandalwood soap on my skin; I'd had some sleep and I was clean, and when you feel clean you feel in control again, as I'm sure you've noticed.

At 05:03 faint light began flooding from somewhere behind, and I tilted the mirror and waited, watching the things the light began picking up in the environment as it brightened: a parked baker's van, three bicycles chained together, one with a pedal missing, a wrecked brass bedstead leaning against a shed. Then a black VW came onto the wasteground and made a U-turn and swept its lights across me and straightened up and stopped not far away and the headlamps went off and I watched the man get out, watched him carefully.

He walked slowly across the littered ground, a short fat man, his arms hanging at his sides and held a little way out from his body, the posture recognisably harmless, and when he reached the Audi I ran the window down on the passenger's side.

' Solitaire ,' he said, his face dark, bearded, smiling sweetly as he peered into the car. I could see him better than he could see me, because of the street lights over there. 'Ahmad Samala,' he said, garlic on his breath.

I answered the parole. 'I'm sorry they got you up so early, Mr Samala.'

'It is of no importance. Here is what you want.'

I reached for the cassette, still watching him, not looking at the cassette, because if anyone is going to do anything inconvenient you see it coming in their eyes first, before their hands move. I was virtually sure of him, because the Bureau doesn't often send the wrong people to a night rendezvous with the executive, but in this trade you can't take anything on trust: look what those clods had done at Norfolk.

'Thank you,' I said, and put the cassette on the ledge below the windscreen.

'I would have liked to talk to you about it all,' Samala said, 'but they told me this way was better.' He sounded infinitely sad.

He'd wanted, I suppose, to go through the whole thing with me, enjoying the role of tutor, bringing his sweet smile to bear upon the business of trading a consignment of Heckler and Koch HK91s for a dozen bags of cocaine on the dockside in Istanbul, or of buying Semtex by the square yard without blowing up the freighter. It would have been amusing to hole up with him for an hour or two in some kind of safe-house; he was obviously an interesting man. I have been bathed in smiles as sweet as his before, sometimes over the muzzle of a gun.

'Perhaps we can meet again,' I said, 'when it's more convenient.'

'I would enjoy that.' He offered his hand, not knowing any better, and I broke every rule in the book and shook it politely. 'Now I am going back to bed,' he said, and backed away and went over to the VW and squeezed himself into it. He made a U-turn again, this time with his lights off.

London had done well: it had been 12:00 this morning when I'd called Signals to debrief and ask for an update on the arms dealing scene to secure my cover, and they must have got onto Samala in Berlin not long afterwards and asked him to get it onto a cassette for me, and then they'd had to phone him soon after 04:10 to give him my precise location for the rendezvous. Even without my DIF in the field, Signals and support services were running efficiently, and it calmed the nerves.

The windows of the house beyond the end of the street were still dark. One of them, or more than one of them, would show a light when August Sorgenicht got up and began his day. Then I would move in a bit closer.

Calmed the nerves, but only a little: they were starting to tighten now as the minutes went by, because the opposition knew what had happened to him at the bottom of the flight of stairs at the Cafe Brahms last night. It had looked like a simple mugging, with the wallet gone; I hadn't taken his keys because he would have had all his locks changed right away, and in any case it would have been less interesting to look around his house than to track him to whatever contacts he would make during the day, because one of them could lead me to Nemesis, right to the centre. When I'd signalled London that I'd secured access, this is what I had meant.

But Nemesis would know it hadn't been a simple mugging, because Sorgenicht would have told them what I'd said to him. Y ou're to phone Dieter Klaus right away. Tell him that Hartman has just got here . He'd assumed I was one of them, a new recruit he hadn't seen before, but when he'd come to in the men's room he had known better.

The five distant windows were still dark. Traffic on the far side of the canal was on the move now as the city's longitude swung towards morning.

He would have known better, yes, Sorgenicht, he would have known that the opposition cell from London had now got his address, and this was why the nerves were starting to tighten a little as the minutes went by, because Dieter Klaus was a professional and he wouldn't leave me free to track Sorgenicht through the city today. It had been good news for London that I had access to Nemesis. The bad news was that when I began tracking Sorgenicht, Nemesis would have access to me.

Despite the proliferation of sources of supply, mainland China still remains important, and I would place it about eighth on the list of the major world suppliers.