Adam Hall - The Quiller Memorandum

When I was outside I shut the door after me and sat down with my back to the garage wall. There would be no breaching of the wall itself because of the partitions, but most of the roof would get up and go and there'd be a certain amount of old-fashioned brick-dust and splinter fall-out.

I could hear the engine of the Mercedes throbbing very faintly. Sixty seconds had gone by. I went on waiting, and thought: London isn't going to like this. There was a lot of private property in the place. But Pol had said a million lives so London would have to lump it.

Ninety seconds. I had misjudged the slope of the bonnet, put the thing too high. The throb of the engine was settling, with the automatic choke easing off and the mixture thinning. The sharpness of carbon monoxide soured the air. Time-check: 05.49. Eleven minutes to zero but that didn't come into it now. Along the high wall that made one boundary of the courtyard there was the first light of the new day showing; a spire pointed its grey finger at a star. Far away the sounds from the freight yards were getting louder. Then the first cock crowed.

Two minutes. Either there was a resinous adhesion setting up between the plastic and cellulose or the thing had slid to one side and was lodged in the trough of the fairing. If it had lodged, it might stick there forever or it might go on creeping and finally drop. I didn't want to go and have a look. The engine was barely audible now; the temperature gauge would have moved out of the cold sector; oil pressure would be dropping a fraction.

There would be three phases. Initial percussion, audible blast and air shock-wave. Fire was a certainty because of all the petrol about.

Two minutes and a half. The sweat-glands began working again. There was absolutely no way of timing a check-up safely; the whole thing would have to be worked out by chemistry (plastic-cellulose inter-reaction, allowance for heat change due to warming of engine), kinetics (movement of bomb across slope of bonnet, references weight, momentum potential of mass, gradient of slope), vibration theory (effect of given rate of mechanical oscillation by metal of bonnet against given mass) and algebra (terms of deduction in all three spheres). A whole team of picked scientists could sit here for weeks without succeeding in telling me when it would be safe for me to go and find out what was happening to that bloody thing.

Three minutes. The light was strengthening on the far spire and the matt uniformity of the sky was curdling into cloud.

If nothing happened in another ten minutes I'd have to go and take a look because they'd start moving in on the same principle and I couldn't afford to -

Three phases now operating. Percussion – the ground shook and the wall shuddered at my back. Audible blast – a crash of wild music as the roof went up and the glass over the courtyard shattered and fell away in a drift to the ground. Air shock-wave – the hot wind of it fanned past my face, stinking of sodium-chlorate.

I stayed where I was until the yard was ringed with people standing agape in the light of the flames, then I edged my way behind them. Another fuel-tank went up and the first fire-bells began sounding from the distance. Then the clock in the spire chimed six.

The taxi put me down in the Unter den Eichen and I went into the passage next to the hat shop, using the double-edged key. We had a notice on the service lift saying it was out of order, to discourage people. The ninth-floor button operated the lift and also switched on a red winking lamp in both rooms.

Five people were there including Hengel. They looked pasty and red-eyed because they'd been up all night waiting for me to signal. There was a tray of cups so I said: "Have you got some coffee?"

Hengel was already using the direct-line telephone, asking for Pol.

They kept looking me up and down and I remembered I was still wearing the white chef's coat. There would have been a whole bunch of tags in the crowd watching the fire and I'd had to get clear unrecognised.

I took off the coat and dropped it over a chair. We all talked a bit and in ten minutes Pol came, while I was holding my second cup of coffee in both hands to warm them. A chef's coat isn't much for a winter morning.

Pol had just gone to bed after the night-shift and Hengel had got him out again. The room had gone very quiet. A hot operator doesn't just show up at Control and ask for coffee.

I gave Pol the report I'd written during the early hours at the hotel and they all watched him reading it. He said:

"This will do for a start."

"It's all you'll get for the moment."

He told someone to get on to London and while we waited he said: "We'll have to go in, you know." He was speaking in English and I thought again of England and how much I needed her.

I said: "Give me till noon. Then you can go in."

"Why noon?" His featureless face was blanker than ever without the glasses.

"I need the time."

He dropped the report on to a desk and asked for copies.

"It depends on London," he told me.

I was feeling tired so I said: "Just for a few hours, London depends on me."

The call came through and they gave me the phone. I talked for a minute and finally had to persuade him. "You can send them in if you have to, sir, but we shall go off at half cock unless you can give me till noon. Once you raid their base they'll try to put calls out and they might succeed. Give me till noon and I'll give you the whole set-up."

He said I was putting a gun at their heads. Bloody fool. We had guns at all our heads. He asked if I couldn't make it earlier than noon.

"I'll try, sir. It should work out well before that, but it's just a reasonable deadline for me to aim at."

He still went on nagging and I had one of my regrettable impulses: "Things got very tricky, sir. I even had to blow up a garage and seven cars, all private property." I listened for a minute to give myself the pleasure and then handed the phone to Pol.

While Pol was trying to smooth things over I drank some more coffee and asked someone to get me the Public Prosecutor on the other phone.

"Which one?"

"Ebert."

I could hear the phone ringing for a long time and then the Generalstaatsanwalt came on. His voice was perfectly alert, though it was still only a quarter to seven. I asked if I could see him.

"It must be very urgent, Herr Quiller."

"Yes."

He said he was at my disposal and rang off.

Pol had finished with London.

"They don't like it," he said.

"Do them good."

"I don't like it either."

So they were all going to nag. I drank the coffee as fast as I could without burning my tongue. I would need the caffeine because I would be feeling the fatigue as the work of the morning went on. I was going to do something for the first time in my life and it would be very unpleasant.

"You'll be all right," I told Poll.

"We shall be here until noon, of course." He almost said ‘at our posts.’ I knew he would keep the rest of them here too, to help him sweat it out. All the time I was on the loose there was the danger of being picked up and made to talk. They had lived with this over their heads ever since Pol had given me the Q memorandum, but now it was worse for them because time was running short. They didn't want to be sitting here like so many ducks when Phoenix sent a party up here in the lift, or opened fire from the windows across the street with a battery of submachine-guns. They didn't want to be picked off one by one as they left the passage by the hat shop, dropping cold on to the pavement before they could warn the next man out.

It wasn't easy for them and they had my sympathy. I always get on better with a Local Control, wherever it is, than those bloody people in London.