Adam Hall - Quiller Solitaire

'I need more information,' Croder said.

'There isn't time.'

'You will have to make time.'

So I went in blind, didn't think about it, otherwise I couldn't have done it. 'I request the immediate attention of Bureau One.'

Shepley, king of kings, host of hosts, head of London.

It was all I could have done and I'd had to do it. Some people would have called it professional suicide, and I would have agreed.

'Bureau One is in Washington.'

His voice hadn't changed, Croder's, but he was now in what amounted to a towering rage. That's one of the things I like about him: he's a complete master of control. But it can be deadly.

I said, 'I need his immediate attention.'

There were some voices in the background, louder than before; one of them could be coming over a speaker at the console, some beleaguered shadow in extremis , calling for help. They would want Croder at the board.

His voice came again. 'Give me your number.'

I read it to him off the base of the telephone.

'Be available,' Croder said, and shut down the line on me.

I stood there with a sense of being in limbo, cut off from the day and its affairs, lost, isolated, disenfranchised. The throbbing went on in my head with the rhythm of a slow drum beat. I would have liked to sit down somewhere, rest a little and then wash my face, feel civilised for a few minutes before I went into the rendezvous with Nemesis, because once I was there it could turn out to be difficult, not civilised at all, it could turn out to be bloody murder.

There was a grimy bit of glass here next to the door, call it a window, and through it I could see Thrower out there in the gym, standing on the other side of the punch-bag, not watching anything that was going on, watching the wall.

I opened the door and stood just outside it, waiting for the phone to ring. In Washington it was three in the morning and Shepley would almost certainly be in bed, but they'd wake him. The Signals room in London can reach him within seconds wherever he is, by calling direct to his pager, and his pager is never switched off: it's the equivalent of a presidential hotline. And Croder wouldn't fail to signal him: when the executive is in the field he's considered to be in hazard, whether he's in a red sector or not, and London undertakes to keep Bureau One in constant touch with him: it's in our contract.

Thrower was coming across the gym, walking carefully; his footprints on a sandy beach would make a straight line – and this was my problem with him; you can tell a lot about people by the way they walk, and this man's mind, like his footprints in the sand, was unwilling to deviate.

When he reached me he asked, 'You were signalling London?'

He'd seen me through the window, known what I must be doing.

'Washington.'

His expressionless eyes rested on me. 'Bureau One is in Washington, I believe.'

'Yes.'

'You're signalling Bureau One?'

'Yes.'

He looked away, watching two of the kids struggling on the mat, one of them trying to get out of a choke-hold, pulling and tugging. I felt his frustration.

'I've always heard,' Thrower said, 'that you are intractable.'

'I expect you have.'

'It is in my mind,' he said smoothly, with no rancour, no rancour at all in his tone, 'to ask that you are replaced. I assume that doesn't surprise you.'

'No.'

I didn't want to talk to him; we didn't speak the same language, and it was so bloody cold in this place that my mouth felt clamped by it, by the cold, my jaws felt frozen, but it was a consolation that with a bit of luck I would shortly be on my way to a hot rendezvous, joke, my good friend, that is a little joke, we must do what we can to keep cheerful, must we not.

'Perhaps you would give him my respects,' Thrower was saying.

'What?

'Bureau One.'

'Of course.'

The kid on the mat got free suddenly, and I felt a bit better.

Yes?

We've just got a signal, sir, from the executive for Solitaire. He requests your attention.

It's the correct term, you see, straight out of the book, requests your attention, means the poor bastard stuck out there in the field wants to talk to you, for Christ's sake, can't they speak the Queen's English?

Cold. I wanted to move my feet to get some warmth in them but I didn't because this bastard was here, Thrower, sign of weakness, cold feet, wouldn't do.

Is he in a red sector?

Sitting up in bed in his pyjamas, Bureau One, host of hosts, just a touch difficult to imagine the godhead in pyjamas.

No, sir, but there's a problem with his DIF.

Shatner, in the floodlit Signals room, standing there at the board with his arms folded, looking at his shoes, his cracked and rather ancient suede shoes, the hole still in his sock, standing there looking down at them because he didn't want to look at Croder, because Control's responsibility had been passed on by the executive to the Chief of Signals and that was a little embarrassing.

He's in Berlin?

Yes, sir.

Croder, in the Signals room, walking up and down like a bloody vulture with its wings folded behind it, he looks like that, actually, Croder, he's got a thin neck and it tends to disappear into his collar, and that hook he's got for a hand is so very like a claw, walking up and down and looking at nobody because the Chief of Signals' responsibility for the mission had been passed on by the executive to Bureau One, and that too was embarrassing.

He's talked to Mr Croder?

Yes, sir.

Head throbbing, my head was throbbing, the pulse-rate would be a degree elevated, say 73, 74, because epiphany was setting in and I was beginning to wonder whether it was a terribly good idea to bring the mission to a dead stop and risk crashing it over a difference of opinion, there were so many lives in the balance, all those people in the plane.

No, I refuse that. Their lives would be at a greater risk if I let this dictatorial bureaucrat get in my way, because I knew what to do , in the deep reaches of the psyche where everything is known I knew what to do.

Then I'll talk to him myself.

He'd got to. He was party to my contract.

But it was a long shot, Christ it was a long shot despite all the wonders of technology and telephones because it might not be like that at all in the Signals room – Croder could have taken Shatner outside to work out some kind of decision, rather than disturb Bureau One at three in the morning five thousand miles away, they could very well be agreeing to hold things off, wait until this infamously intractable executive had cooled down a little, seen some sense, because -

Phone ringing.

Jim looked up from the mat and I said I thought it was for me and he said go ahead and I went into the cluttered little office and picked up the phone.

'Yes?

'Bureau One. What is the problem?'

'Incompatibility.'

'In what way?'

I couldn't say there wasn't time to tell him: he was as high as I could go and if I couldn't make him understand that the mission was jeopardised I'd have to play the last card I'd got, and I didn't want to do that, it would make things infinitely more difficult, more dangerous. So I told him about the impasse we'd reached, Thrower and I, on the subject of sending in support when I went in to the rendezvous, and told him also that my DIF didn't seem to understand the way I worked, the way I had to work if I was to bring the mission home. Then I waited.

Play the last card, yes, if I had to. If Shepley called me in or if he told me I'd have to work out my differences with my DIF, I would go to ground, cut myself off from the DIF and from London and go it alone, let them chalk it up on the board in Signals, Executive withdraws , a graceful way to put it, typically euphemistic, because what it would really mean was that I would have to find myself a burrow in the bowels of Berlin and operate from there, surface from there and do what I could to infiltrate Nemesis, penetrate to the centre, blow it up on my own without any help, without signals, without franchise, without authority.