Adam Hall - Quiller Barracuda

She knew by the number. 'We need to meet somewhere more private than a yacht club.'

'Afterwards. Look, if you can get here before, say, midnight, you should do that. This is a campaign party and it'll go on till the morning, and there's a man I want you to meet. I'll keep him here as long as I can. It shouldn't be too difficult – he has the hots for me.'

'What's his name?'

'Stylus von Brinkerhoff.'

'I could meet him somewhere privately.'

'It has to be low key, a casual introduction.' A beat, then because I hadn't said anything she went on. 'It's really very important for you to meet him, Mr Keyes. And there are some things I have to tell you. One is you don't need to look for George Proctor any more. You know what I'm saying?'

I didn't like the pressure she'd started to put on me. Or it could be nerves, a touch of apprehension before Barracuda was pushed headlong into a new phase.

'Look, I have to pick someone up and take them along, and I won't be able to talk in front of them. I don't have more than a minute. I'm going to leave you an invitation at the desk of the Marina Yacht Club and you can ask for it there. It's black tie. Mr Keyes, you just don't appreciate how important it is for you to be there tonight. All you have to do is trust me.'

The line went dead and I put the phone down.

'That was Cambridge?' asked Croder.

'Yes.' I filled him in, verbatim.

'How does it strike you?' This was Ferris and he spoke before anyone else could. The ranking here went from Monck through Croder to Ferris and me, but Ferris was my director in the field and the mission was running and it was his sole and sacrosanct responsibility to look after his executive and he was making that quite clear.

'She used rather a lot of obvious pressure, don't you think?'

'When she said you had to trust her, did she sound hurt or indignant?'

'No. Persuasive.'

'Did she sound out of tune?'

Argot: he meant out of character.

'I've only met her once.'

Croder said, 'Can you bring it down to the odds?'

'That it's a trap?'

'Yes.'

Purdom had begun tapping the tips of his fingers together, not making any noise, just doing it quietly, not knowing he was doing it, wished he'd stop. 'The thing is,' I said, 'we've taken a lot of trouble keeping me under cover since the Mafia thing last night, and we'd be coming right out into the open again if I went there. To the party.'

Monck had been shuffling around the room and now he stopped and said with his head on one side, 'Let's try it this way. How much do you think you could learn, if you met her there?'

'A lot. If she's genuine. If it isn't a trap.'

Beginning to feel the chill a little. I've walked into traps before, knowing once or twice what I was doing, but they'd been the kind where you stood a chance of doing something very fast or very deadly, a chance of getting out again with what you'd gone in for, the product, some kind of information, dragging a man back to base for interrogation or bringing away papers, photographs, tapes. I don't mind taking a risk as long as it's calculated, as long as it's worth taking, but the problem we'd got here was that we couldn't tell what the odds were, whether it was worth it or not, whether it was worth walking into the Marina Yacht Club and hearing, a long way off in the distances of the mind, the swinging of a hinge and the closing of steel doors and the dying away of the echo in the dark.

'Ferris?' This was Croder, asking for a decision from the DIP, from the man who knew the field better than anyone, who knew the executive and what he could do, what he couldn't do, couldn't be asked to do.

'If you went in there,' he spoke directly to me, 'you'd have all the support we can raise. Fifteen or twenty people.'

Trained, talented, armed and strategically dispersed.

'They couldn't stop a long shot.'

'They would check the environment, very carefully.'

Purdom was still tapping his fingertips together and it worried me and I turned my head but Ferris got in very fast and made a gesture and Purdom froze and looked down suddenly, turned away, hadn't known he'd been doing it, and I saw Monck and Croder pick up the score, all very nervy, we were all very nervy because if I walked into that place and we'd got it wrong we'd lose Barracuda , lose it to a single shot.

Sweat beginning, cold on the skin.

Said to Ferris, 'Do you think I should do it?'

With his customary care: 'I think you should consider doing it. But consider well. The chances aren't very good, and the last word, of course, is yours.'

Car going past in the street, someone calling out, faint laughter.

La dolce vita.

'I think it's worth the risk.'

'If von Brinkerhoff is there, we'll have him tagged, of course.'

There was a heat-haze right across the city as we swung into the approach path, and the lights glimmered through it, brightening as we lowered.

'Ask her about that script she was using for last night's show,' Ferris said. 'Does she remember working it out according to campaign logic, or did it just come to her from out of the blue, as a flash of inspiration? But I wouldn't suggest she might have been under subliminal direction, or that she might still be.'

'Why not?'

'It's delicate ground, and it might panic her. It panicked you.'

Flaps down.

I was feeling all right. He hadn't asked me how I felt because he'd got a pretty good idea. When I say I was feeling all right I really mean I was feeling normal, normal for this particular situation. I was going straight into a red sector and we couldn't hope to cover all the contingencies because a gun is a gun and they don't have to be very big and they can be quite accurate if people know how to use them and they can drop a man from a distance even in a crowd, even with a silencer in place.

'Ask her if she'd be willing to meet Mr Croder and Mr Monck.'

I half-listened. He wasn't really briefing me; he knew I'd got a rough idea of what we wanted out of Erica Cambridge. He was making conversation, covering the important points to see if I had any questions, yes, but giving me comfort at the same time, giving me someone to talk to as we levelled out and the blue lamps flickered past the windows and the bump came, the first of three, because what we were doing was executing a trade-off, balancing the odds and deciding that the life of the executive for the mission was worth putting at risk providing the chance of getting vital information was high enough.

So I was feeling normal for the situation, a hollow-ness in the stomach, a chill on the skin, the palms slightly moist. The feeling that I was on my way to an execution wasn't new: I'd had it a hundred times and as recently as last night when little fat Nicko was taking me across the darkling main to a rendezvous with the grim reaper, God rest his stinking little soul, I did not like that man, execution, yes, nothing new, but this was different because everything looked so civilised and I was sitting here in Monck's dinner jacket and there was going to be an invitation left for me at the Marina Yacht Club for this very plush party and I was meeting a rather attractive woman there, so forth, different but no better, no better, my good friend, because a trap is a trap and in this trade you don't often get out alive.

'You'll have immediate contact, of course, whenever you need it,' Ferris said, and pulled his valise from under the seat in front. He meant I could signal any one of his people in the environment and talk to them, tell them what I wanted, pine veneer and simple handles, nothing fancy, joke.

Draughty out here on the tarmac. Ferris had phoned from the plane for a chopper to stand by for our arrival in Miami and take us to the shuttle pad by the Yacht Club because the timing had been tight and it was now 11:43 and we didn't know how long Cambridge would be able to keep von Brinkerhoff there.