Adam Hall - Quiller Barracuda

'Is it true?' Kim asked me.

'No. George Proctor put that story out to bring Toufexis down on me.'

'You know that?'

'I know Proctor.' He would have preferred to make the kill personally, as a matter of honour, but he was obviously too occupied with other things. 'Does he use cocaine?'

'Yes. Or he did when I knew him.'

That fell into place too. Proctor had been known for his integrity, and that was why Croder was concerned about his lapses in signals to London. And he wasn't a man to blow his mind on cocaine just for kicks, so it must have been a response to his increasing frustration: the bullet near the heart had left him unusable as a shadow executive and he'd felt out of it, a has-been, felt emasculated, and the coke had given him back the strength-of-ten-men feeling, the grand illusion.

'Was he subject,' I asked Kim, 'to illusions of grandeur?'

'Sometimes. He told me once that he could run for the presidency if he weren't a foreigner.'

For the presidency . Fell into place again: he'd been exposed to subliminal influence and knew enough about Senator Mathieson Judd to imagine himself in Judd's position as a presidential candidate.

'Tell me about this man Judd, will you?'

Her mouth came open and for a moment she seemed disoriented; then she said without hesitation, 'Judd is not to be underestimated. He's a statesman with a world view that we haven't seen since Nixon, and he's not a megalomaniac. He's got to get into the White House because he's the only man in this country who can give it a new direction…'

My own thoughts dipped away and her voice sounded fainter; then I surfaced to the full light of consciousness and knew without any question that there hadn't been any time lapse: I hadn't missed anything she'd been saying.

'… It's not just the Americans who are concerned, this time – the whole world's involved, and much more than usual when there's a change of administration here. I very much hope the Thatcher government realises what we've got in Mathieson Judd, because the outcome of this election's going to have a major effect on the UK.'

It was word perfect: I could hear the echo of my own voice in my head. 'His understanding of the internecine struggle for power inside the Kremlin is infinitely deeper than we've seen before in any US president, thanks partly to the lifting of the veil by glasnost , sure, but Judd isn't missing a trick.'

She stopped, and in a moment looked down and pulled another strand into the splice. The swell lifted the boat again and I leaned lower, sighting along the stern rail. The yacht was still at the same distance. I couldn't see the light on the lenses this time.

'Go on,' I said.

She looked up. 'What?'

Tell me more about Judd.'

'That's all I know.'

A point, then, for the debriefing: Kim Harvester had come under the subliminal influence only in Proctor's flat, and not for very long. We could assume there was no radionic device on board the tug. She was not therefore a target, like Proctor. My own exposure had been different: I'd picked up some background material on Judd and also picked up instructions , which hadn't necessarily been for me.

The swell lifted us again and I checked the sailing yacht. It hadn't moved. It was nearly sundown, and I said, 'Are you heading back to port after they've taken me off?'

'Yes. I've got three morning lessons, the first one at six.'

'Is this boat faster than that one over there?'

'Quietly she said, 'I can look after myself, Richard.'

'Do you keep a gun on board?'

'Of course.' She dropped the spliced rope and leaned back, stretching, her slight breasts touched by the light of the setting sun. 'It's rather nice,' she said. 'You know I've played about with bombs and done some undercover work against the Mafia and you've seen what I do with sharks, but you still seem to think of me as a woman, and in need of protection. I like that.'

'Dates me, I suppose.'

'No. Becomes you.'

'We're going to Nassau,' Ferris said, 'to meet Monck and a few other people.'

He was watching me steadily with his pale champagne-coloured eyes, watching for nerves, fatigue, signs of disorientation. I'd told him I'd been in that wreckage down there. We'd seen the Mafia boat hanging from a crane at the quayside when we'd taken off.

Toufexis would assume I'd been killed with the others because no one had seen me come ashore, but it was risky to rely on that because of the surveillance they'd mounted on the tug out there: I could have been recognised. I'd never seen such tight security and for once I was glad of it. Two of the Bureau people had picked me up at sea in a converted motor torpedo boat at nightfall and got me from the harbour to the airport in a short-bodied limo with tinted windows and brought it across the tarmac and right up to the Cessna 500 Citation and I didn't see Ferris until I went aboard.

'When did you eat last?'

'A couple of hours ago.'

'Sleep?'

'I caught up.'

'Injuries?'

'Minor.'

'Morale?'

'Very good.'

Because I'd got the diary from Nicko's wallet, and it could give us access to Proctor. I gave it to Ferris and he began peeling the pages apart: it had got soaked and dried again.

'A Mafia type used it when he phoned Proctor.'

'He got the number from it? Proctor's?'

'Or a number where Proctor was, at the time.'

He went through the pages, taking care. Some of the ink had run. Light spread against the cabin roof as we banked over the city's brilliance.

'G.R.P.,' Ferris said, and snapped his belt open and got out of his seat.

'Are you going to use the phone?' I asked him.

'Yes.'

'Then do me a favour. I want some protection for Kim Harvester – can you manage that? Two men?'

'When?'

He didn't ask why, because that could wait. And he didn't cavil. It would mean diverting the services of two men in shifts round the clock and London would want a very good reason indeed and Ferris knew that and he'd have to take the responsibility, and this was one of the things I liked about him: he trusted the man he was running and he didn't ask questions. That little bastard Loman would have wanted forms in triplicate sent from London with a ten-sheet questionnaire and a request for notarisation and God knew how I could ever persuade him to push all that lot past his sphincter muscles.

'As soon as you can arrange it,' I told Ferris.

'Two men, taking shifts?'

'Yes. And they'll need a boat available. Could they use the MTB?'

'Yes.'

'She's bringing the tug in to port early tonight; she would have started back as soon as I was taken off. Berth 19, at the place where they shot me up. Decent of you.'

He went forward into the cockpit and I loosened the laces of my shoes because they'd shrunk a bit when they'd dried out and I'd have to get another pair as soon as I could, because if your feet aren't absolutely comfortable it can take the edge off your speed at a run and that can be fatal if you're pushing things.

Ferris came back. 'I didn't phone that number direct. I'm having it checked for the address.'

'The odds are,' I said, 'that it's 1330 Riverside.'

'It could be anywhere.'

Point taken. The executive tends to get tunnel vision the deeper he goes into the mission, while his director in the field can keep a more open perspective and see things the shadow can miss.

'I haven't,' I said in a moment, 'picked up any more instructions.'

I'd seen it in his eyes when I'd mentioned Riverside. He didn't look relieved. He didn't necessarily believe me. I could have had further subliminal instructions piped into me with an injunction to keep them secret.

He didn't say anything.

'I'm fairly certain,' I told him, 'that there's nothing electronic on board Harvester's boat. She didn't have any more to say about Mathieson Judd; I checked her for that and she just gave me a repetition of what she'd given me before.' He pulled out a mini-recorder and pressed a button. Debriefing had started. 'So she'd picked up that bit at Proctor's – it was the same thing I'd picked up myself when I went there that night. The reason I want her protected is that they're still surveilling the boat and they might make a snatch and force her to give them all the information she'd got about me. None of it's vital but I don't want her to go through interrogation at the hands of people like that.'