Adam Hall - Quiller Solitaire

The smell of woodsmoke was on the air as fires were lit for the evening; it would be cool tonight in Algiers. A less attractive smell of chlorine came from the pool. I watched Klaus, Geissler and the guards, simply to keep them surveilled as a routine: the ferret doesn't often have the chance of surveilling the chief of the opposition in every movement he makes without attracting attention, without attracting bullets for that matter.

On the board for Solitaire the bit of chalk moves in the floodlight: 17:06 hrs local time, executive maintaining close surveillance on opposition . That ought to create a lot of interest in Signals, not to say a discreet degree of jubilation, an occasion perhaps for another cup of tea, providing the bit of chalk doesn't go on moving: He is also their captive under guard and is liable to be shot dead tonight at the flashpoint.

In most missions there's a flashpoint: it's when the executive is to perform a distinctly hazardous operation, to break into, for instance, the official intelligence headquarters of an unfriendly host country and try to get out again with something so classified that all the windows would blow out if anyone knew, or to get a wanted subject away from a fully-armed mantrap outside Hong Kong Airport with the public and the police looking on, or to make a last-ditch break for the frontier ahead of a pack of war-trained Doberman Pinschers, that sort of thing, flashpoint is what it says and the one that was coming up for Solitaire would be in two hours' time at the airport at Dar-el-Beida, when the man from London stopped his car and got out and came over to the black Mercedes 560 SEL we were sitting in and the counter-terrorist units closed in for the snatch with their floodlights and assault rifles and the shooting started and the executive for the mission went down first because those would be the orders from Dieter Klaus, the prearranged orders, the ones he would give before he left here this evening on his way to Midnight One.

That was the flashpoint for Solitaire unless I could reach a phone but they weren't going to let me do that, and I was starting to feel the familiar tingling at the nape of the neck as I sat here in my deck chair sipping hot mint tea because the organism was going to need the sugar, sipping hot mint tea as the boys in their kaftans moved quietly around the pool in their sandals and the snake moved again and this time one of them saw it.

He was sixteen, perhaps, seventeen, not one of the guards, just one of the palace servants, and he was young enough to enjoy playing a little prank now and then, especially if there were foreign girls around to tease, and he put down the tray and went over to the snake' and grabbed it by the tail before it could coil and swung it around in the air and smashed its head against the wall and held it up for a moment and then threw it into the pool with a bright boyish laugh.

The girls screamed and Klaus looked round and saw the dead snake on the surface of the water and got to his feet at once and went across to the Arab boy and shouted at him in French, bringing his big hand across and across his face until the boy's hand vanished into his kaftan and the blade of a knife flashed in the sunlight and Klaus parried it and tore the hilt free and slashed the boy's throat and pushed him away as the blood came spurting. The bodyguards had moved very fast when they'd seen the knife and were now forming a ring around Klaus, their guns out.

'Get Ibrahimi!'

One of them turned and ran into the building.

'Where were you, then? ' Klaus asked the others. 'Was that as fast as you can move? As fast as you can shoot?' An Arab came through one of the archways with the bodyguard, black-bearded, his robes flowing, and saw the boy sprawled across the tiles with his blood reaching the edge of the pool and trickling into the water, its rose-red colour spreading.

'He attacked me!' Klaus told the Arab, not shouting now but with the hoarseness of rage in his voice.

Dolores had climbed out of the pool and was on all fours, hump-backed, retching. Inge was staring at Klaus with her ice-blue eyes shining as she absorbed the joy in the scene: her fuhrer had killed, as he would always kill any who dared oppose him. Helen had climbed out of the water and was lying on her back with her eyes closed, her face ashen.

'These people saw him attack me with his knife!'

Ibrahimi stared at Klaus, then at the boy again.

'Now get him out of here, take him to his family, tell them that if anyone breathes a word about this I'll tell the police what happened and shame his memory – he tried to murder me, Ibrahimi, you understand me, do you understand?'

The guards stood waiting, their guns at the hip. They might have been hoping – must have been hoping – that Ibrahimi would make some kind of move against Klaus, even a gesture of protest against the death of a fellow Arab, so that they could shoot him down and show this time how fast they could work. They were out of luck.

'Yes,' he told Klaus, 'I understand.' He moved across to an archway, clapping his hands, and three or four boys appeared there, listening to Ibrahimi and then coming to the poolside, lifting the limp body in the kaftan and bearing it away.

'The mess!' Klaus called. The mess, Ibrahimi!'

More servants came, one of them an old man with gaps in his teeth, his head shaking on its thin neck as he mopped at the blood with towels. I think he was going to wash one of them out in the pool, but caught a glance from Klaus; the surface was already clouded. He stood watching them, Klaus, in his gold-toned swimming trunks, big hands on his hips, until they went away with their towels and their buckets, leaving the tiles clean and shining; then Klaus turned away and rose on his toes and made a flat racing-dive into the shallow end of the pool where the blood of the boy still swirled.

I went over to Helen and pulled a deck chair nearer. The time was right, now, to tell her; she might not have listened before.

'How do you feel?' I asked her.

She didn't look up at me, didn't open her eyes. Softly she said, 'I must be mad. I must be mad.'

Dolores, her dark skin yellowed, was telling a servant to wash the tiles near the diving-board, where she'd vomited. No one else was moving except for Klaus, who climbed out of the pool and reached for a towel, saying something to Geissler that I didn't catch: they were too far away.

Where's George?' I asked Helen quietly.

'He went into the casbah.'

'Why?' 1 needed to know what everyone was doing.

'To take snapshots.'

'Where's the Iranian? The pilot?

'He said he was going to the mosque.'

To pray, but to pray for what? Perhaps the blessing of Allah on Midnight One.

'If I can,' I told Helen, 'I'm going to destroy Nemesis . You know that. Have you thought about how it's going to leave you?'

'No. I just want to go home now.'

That surprised me. 'You're willing to leave George?' 'That's what it would amount to, wouldn't it?'

'Yes.' She'd been doing some thinking, then.

I had to do some thinking myself, as the sun lowered and sent shadows leaning across the courtyard from the eucalyptus trees. I heard a car door slamming; the forecourt of the little palace was on the other side of the wall. George, back from the casbah? The pilot, back from the mosque? I might not have much time left.

'I haven't done anything wrong,' Helen was saying, with an innocence that would have touched me if she hadn't been in such appalling danger.

As gently as I could I told her, 'You have been consorting with the most notorious group of left-wing terrorists in the world, and this is what you've got to say if you get arrested when everything blows up. You've got to say that when you went to Berlin to join your husband you hadn't the slightest idea he was mixed up with Dieter Klaus and his operation, and that by the time you found out, there was nothing you could do about it. You've been their captive – and this is perfectly true: they couldn't have risked your wandering off and giving them away, intentionally or otherwise.'