Adam Hall - Quiller Barracuda

Life is necessary, we are moving ahead again, fanning slowly, and the truth is that one of two things will happen, I will continue to move, to leave behind me the frenzied dance of the big grey bloodied fish, or one of them will come for me again and this time use its jaws to better effect and close on my body and shake me, crush me, with my arms and legs obscenely sticking out from that great shape like the legs of a frog I had once seen in the mouth of a golden carp, and then shall it be written, finis, finito , on the final pages of this man's life -

Move your feet, keep moving -

Philosophy, a rush of cheap philosophy through this semi-conscious mind, I agree, will get us nowhere.

The water was still clear ahead of me through the mask, and I rose a little and broke the surface and let the full light of the moon strike down against my eyes. The Coral Rock, she had said, would be my marker to the east, and there it was, a red winking eye in the night, and behind me, as I turned my head, the lights of the motor-yacht afloat on the sea, quite a distance from me already – I'd come farther than I would have thought. I went down again, to swim below the surface for a time, the legs feeling stronger now and the head clearing.

Six of them. I had set only six of them, not eight, but the fish had come and there'd been no choice. It might be enough, six. let us hope so.

Fat lady sing, now.

Fat lady sing.

It's all very well for them. I haven't had a woman in three weeks, they think we're bloody robots?

All day.

I haven't seen him, sir. He said he was going on deck.

We'd been here all day.

I asked him, 'How long will those batteries last?'

'Thirty-six hours. That's their normal endurance.'

They'd been running since midnight and it was now seven in the evening. They'd been running for nineteen hours. We'd got until noon tomorrow.

So the judge asks him, what makes you rob banks, then? And this guy says, that's where the money is.

Laughter. TV show.

The shivering hadn't stopped. I don't know if Parks had noticed. It felt like a fever, without the temperature, cold, if anything, the skin clammy. I'd had a row with Kim: she'd said, 'You've got to sign in at a hospital for a bit. Shock needs treatment . It's as important to treat shock as if you were bleeding to death. I know this, I've been trained and I've seen what happens if people neglect shock. It can kill.'

The worst of it was that she probably thought I was carrying on out of bravado, but that was not the case, it was not, my good friend, the case at all. I would have given a great deal to report to a hospital and flop out onto a bed with nice clean sheets and a gentle nurse to wipe my fevered brow and hold my hand, a very great deal. But this, if you remember, was the last chance I'd got of bringing home Barracuda , however thin, however desperate.

We'll talk about that when we meet. Apostolos doesn't want anything said before then. We need to keep open minds.

Apostolos Simitis.

The voices coming in to the recorder weren't always as intelligible as that. They were coming through a mass of unrelated and conflicting sounds – other voices, music, static, interference, coming in on six channels from the six transmitters, and Parks was doing what he could to keep them separate and edit them before they went onto the tapes. He was sitting like a spider in the middle of a dense array of equipment – amplifiers, modifiers, input balancers, audio monitors, with signal-strength needles swinging across the dials the whole time.

He'd started editing and recording the moment I'd placed each transmitter and pushed the contact under the rubber shield; by the time I'd reached here at three this morning he'd filled three sixty-minute tapes, with nothing much on them in the way of voices: most of the crew and passengers had been asleep.

'You all right, are you?' he asked me.

'I'm fine.'

He'd noticed the shivering, then, but of course that wasn't all: I must have looked like something out of a car crash when I'd got here. She'd said the blood loss wasn't critical but I'd need to have the dressings changed in twelve hours. That thing had ripped flesh off the whole of the upper arm and left the triceps exposed. 'I'm not a doctor, ' she'd said, 'I could be up on criminal charges, practising medicine on you and not even reporting it.'

I don't think the shock was because of the wound; there was the lingering horror of having been out there with the huge dark shape of the vessel blotting out most of the surface overhead while those bloody things had come at me through the open expanse of water like the angels of death.

'More tea?'

Said yes.

He was looking peeky himself, hadn't slept since transmission had started nineteen hours ago, hadn't taken a break, because I'd told him we mustn't miss anything, mustn't miss a word.

'Don't fancy anything to eat?'

'No. Don't let me stop you.'

I didn't think I'd ever want to eat again; I was just this side of nausea, slumped here in the big lopsided armchair stinking of iodine and God knew what else. 'It's normally the dog's bed,' Parks had said, 'but I've put him in the kitchen.'

But you shouldn't have come here, darling. This is a terribly small ship. I told you, I'll come to your cabin whenever I can.

That had been in French. So far we'd heard English, French, German, Russian and Japanese coming in to the tapes. There were five women on board, three of them secretaries. We'd heard several people identified by name during conversations: Takao Sakomoto, Simitis, de Lafoix, Lord Joplyn, Abraham Levinski, Stylus von Brinkerhoff. We'd heard only the first names of the women, except for Madame St Raphael.

He said he'd cover that sort of thing at the meeting. I couldn't make him budge.

Parks was watching me, and I nodded. It was the third time we'd heard people mention a meeting.

'I wish they'd say when ,' I told him.

'That's what we're after, is it? Some kind of meeting?'

'We're after anything we can get.'

'I see.'

His tone told me he thought I was playing it close, shutting him up, and that was true. Anything at all going onto the tapes from the Contessa was by its nature ultra-classified, except for the private conversations, and if the batteries held out long enough to give us the scheduled meeting we could be listening to material as vital as the briefing that Erica Cambridge had brought off the ship. It could give us the whole of Barracuda .

'If we get what I'm hoping for,' I said, 'they'll want you to come with me to London for special debriefing. Consider this stuff Ears Only for Bureau One, you know what I mean?'

'Crikey.' The kettle was whistling and he said, 'Look, could you -'

'Stay exactly where you are.' I got up and went over to the stool where he'd set up the makeshift canteen, and the ceiling came right down at an angle and I threw a hand out behind me and broke the fall and lay on the floor listening to the constant rush of static and voices, and Parks got off his stool at the console and I told him to sit down again and get on with what he was doing, we mustn't miss, floating in front of me, the canteen floating in front of me, miss a word, not a word.

Got up and tried again.

'You ought to have something to eat,' Parks said.

So I found some bread and made the tea and went back to the armchair. 'Bread?' I asked him.

'Not just now.' Sitting there like a leprechaun on his toadstool, face pinched with fatigue, eyes nickering as he monitored the signals, all I'd offered him was some bread, poor little bugger, as soon as I felt a bit better I'd go and find some eggs or something.