Adam Hall - Quiller Solitaire

He watched me steadily with his pale expressionless eyes, not saying anything yet, letting me listen again in my mind to what I'd just said, to how I'd just said it, too forcefully, too emotionally. Then he said, 'You've just come through some action that almost cost you your life, and your nerves are going to take their time to settle down. When you've got your control back, 'we'll talk again. Now let me drive you to your hotel.'

He didn't understand. He wasn't thinking.

'Thrower, I'm going in to the centre of the opposition and I've got to do it alone because they'll have people deployed in the environment, and if you put people in as well I shan't know one from the other if it's a night action and I could easily kill one of them, one of ours – but more important than that, you can't put support in close enough to help me without exposing them, and an arms dealer doesn't move around with a crowd of peons, he's a businessman and he behaves like one, so if you put support on the scene when I go in you'll blow my cover before I've got a chance in a thousand to make it work, can you hear what I'm saying, you'll blow my cover . Do you think that's what I want from my director in the field?'

He turned away, turned back, hands in the pockets of his dark elegant coat, his head tilted slightly, his voice smooth, placating. We'll talk about it later. I have my arguments too, but I don't feel that at the present moment you're sufficiently receptive.'

I took a step towards him. My head was throbbing because of the wound, and because of what was happening to the mission, to Solitaire , just when I'd got access, just when I was ready to move in on the opposition and destroy it if I could, and if I couldn't, get clear and try again, try again until I found the way, and went in for the kill.

Thrower,' I said, 1 want you to tell me something. If there's no time to talk, if I don't have time to listen to your arguments, if I have to go in to this rendezvous at a moment's notice, will you send in support anyway, despite all I've said?'

He didn't hesitate. 'Yes. I would have to.'

So I turned away and went down the stairs and found Jim showing one of his kids a gedan kosauke and asked him if I could make a call and he showed me his little office in the corner of the gym and I picked up the phone and dialled the number and the code extension and blew the board for Solitaire all over the Signals room in London.

'Executive. Get me Control.'

Smell of sweat in this place, Jim's office, not much bigger than a cupboard.

'Control.'

Shatner.

I said, 'I want a new director in the field.'

There was a short silence and I wasn't surprised.

'What is the problem?' he asked me.

'Incompatibility.'

Grounds for divorce. The relationship between the DIF and the executive is very much like a marriage: trust is involved, and above all else, understanding.

Shatner said, 'I need to know more than that.'

I think I heard quiet anger in his tone. As I've told you , he'd said to me in his office yesterday, you're not my favourite executive .

'There isn't much time,' I said. 'I'm going into a strictly red sector and he's insisting on sending in support.'

Shatner thought about that. Then he said, 'I imagine he thinks you need it.'

'It could kill me.'

There was another silence. I could only wait, only keep what patience I had, because this was thin ice and I could crack it if I didn't take care how I walked.

Is he there?' Shatner asked.

'Yes.'

'I'll talk to him.'

Shatner didn't understand, any more than Thrower understood. I'd only come into the field last night and I'd secured access to the opposition and at any time the call could come through from Inge Stoph arranging the rendezvous and I was in a position to go right into the centre of Nemesis and blow it apart and these two hidebound bloody bureaucrats were trying to stop me dead in my tracks.

'You can't talk to him,' I told Shatner. 'You don't understand the situation. The executive in the field is in a fully active phase of the mission and he's urgently requesting a change of the DIF and he's got every right to do that, and his Control is expected to bear in mind that in these circumstances the executive makes the decisions, not his DIF.'

In the silence I could hear the ice cracking. The thing is that Control picks the director in the field very carefully from those available, making sure he's the right choice for the mission: Thrower knew Berlin and was fluent in German, so forth. But what Shatner hadn't done was make the right choice for the specific executive and that's even more critical. But I was taking an appalling risk in asking for a new DIF in the first twenty-four hours of the mission because those bloody people in London can come back at you like a boomerang and leave the director in the field and call the executive in and send a new one out in his place and you won't work for the Bureau again and for me that would be the end of things, finis, finito.

'I rather think I understand,' Shatner said, 'my responsibilities as your Control. I am asking you to put your DIF on the line.'

There was a mug, a ceramic mug on Jim's desk, in the middle of a mess of papers and bottles of ink and hand-grips and rubber bands and paper clips and curled photographs of Japanese martial artists, and in the mug were some pens and pencils, and one of them was vibrating as another jet was cleared for take-off and thundered into the sky, and I was glad to hear the small intimate sound of the pencil sending its message to me, if I wanted to hear it. In the complex chemistry of life there are always messages for us, if we make time to listen, and this one was perfectly clear: Any next flight.

I had to get the words exactly right. 'I request the immediate attention of Chief of Signals.'

The ice cracked again and I heard it. I've talked to a lot of my own kind in the Caff and other places, but I've never heard of anyone telling Control to his face that they wanted higher rank to talk to.

In the silence I could hear things going on in the underground Signals room: voices, beepers, the sharp clink of a teacup. They were there under the floodlit Signal boards, hunched over the mikes or leaning back to check the progress of a mission, reaching for the bit of chalk. Executive requires backup, Rendezvous established, Courier down, red sector . As the data went in, the decisions would be made, and -

'Chief of Signals.'

Croder. We'd never got on well, but I respected him above most others. He wasn't a bureaucrat.

'I'm asking for a new DIF.' I told him why.

He was standing there at the board for Solitaire – he roves the room, Croder, from board to board, taking over in a crisis, keeping the heat down, bringing people back sometimes from the edge of a certain grave.

'Thrower is a very good man,' he told me. 'He is very experienced.' Standing there under the floodlight with his black reptilian eyes scanning the board, his steel hand hanging like a hook. 'I know your style,' he said, 'and you're quite possibly misjudging things after going through a difficult action-phase. Am I correct?'

I felt a shiver. It sounded like clairvoyance: Thrower hadn't had time to send my debriefing to the board, stuff on the underground garage.

Croder was inside my mind.

I had to cut corners, save time, because of the pencil. 'Do you know Thrower's style?'

I waited. In a moment: 'Yes.'

'Then you'll know that he and I can't work together.'

It meant a lot more than it sounded: it meant that if a wheel came off we wouldn't be able to agree on a decision and the mission would crash; it meant that if I went into a hot rendezvous with support I hadn't asked for, people could get killed.