ADAM HALL - The Warsaw Document

This dramatized report of an Intelligence mission by a shadow executive controlled from London forms part of a series bearing the key-titles of Memorandum, Directive, Portfolio, and so on. It may seem curious that in all these reports the name of the executive rarely appears. The reason is as follows.

It is necessarily a code-name. Further, the policy of the Bureau controlling him dictates anonymity even in confidential speech, as a point of routine security. During a mission the code-name is never used, since a mission demands a cover and hence a cover name, which is used even in signals between the executive and his Control. This name itself must sometimes be changed if the cover is blown and he is thus exposed to great and immediate hazard: a new cover must be arranged and with it a new name.

The identities, therefore, of the Bureau's active staff are confined strictly to its secret files, for the purposes of administration. For the record, the executive whose work is the subject of these reports bears a single code-name: Quiller.

There would be no warning, I knew that.

In the total darkness I thought I could see things: the glint of his eyes, his bared teeth; and in the silence I thought I could hear his breath and the soft tentative padding of his feet as he looked for me; but all I saw and heard was in my imagination and I knew that soon my nerves were going to start playing up because of the worry: the worry that there'd be no warning when he came at me. He'd come the instant he found me. Breathing was difficult because this place wasn’t very big and we were so close that one drawn breath would be a give-away; also it would have to be expelled before the next inhalation and I was afraid of being caught with empty lungs. I breathed tidally, right near the top, part of my conscious mind registering the smell of hemp and coconut.

It was worse than I'd thought, the waiting. There was nothing to go on: no means of orientation. He was only a man but he was invisible and inaudible and these were the attributes of a phantom and my scalp was raised. It needn't be true that he was where I thought he was: somewhere in front of me where my hands could get at him. Even in the dark there's comfort if the enemy can be faced: the real dread is of being taken from behind.

That was where he came for me: from behind. We hadn't touched; we had simply come so close that the instincts were triggered and the nerves galvanised and I was already in a throat-lock with my knees buckling a flat kick before I could hook at him but my hands were free and I caught him and reached his thumb as we pitched down, breaking the hold while he used his foot again and missed and tried again and connected a fraction too late, his breath grunting as I forced him over. We fought close, neither wanting to lose the other in the unnerving dark. My shoulder hit the wall and I used the chance, going down low and recoiling against him, but the momentum wasn't enough and he deadened the spring and forced me into a spine-bending yoshida that paralysed the arms. Then some fool came in and switched the light on.

Kimura helped me up with his usual courtesy and we touched palms and looked for our towels.

'It was good,' he said.

'No,' I said, 'it wasn't.' I wiped at the sweat, trying not to worry. I shouldn't have let him throw that deadly yoshida so soon, when he was fresh enough to follow it through; it had left the plexus exposed and he could have killed me within the next five seconds if he'd wanted to, a straight chop to the heart from under the ribs. It was all right here in the gym but it wouldn't be all right one day in some back-street in Buenos Aires or wherever the hell I'd be when it happened again. 'Can't you,' I asked Stevens, 'shut that bloody door?'

'Interrupted, did I?' He turned and shut the fog out, pushing his face into his handkerchief again. He'd come up to Norfolk for a routine dose of what they call Refresher 5 and then caught a streaming cold before they could start work on him. He was better off anyway because Refresher 5 is the course where the instructors break every bone in your body unless you can giggle them out of it.

'It was only the wall,' Kimura told me. He knew I was worried. 'I heard you go into it, and assumed you would make use of it, you see.' He nodded his reassuring smiles at me, towelling the sweat off his small ivory-coloured body; under the wire-meshed lamps the sword-scar looked deep mauve, running from one shoulder to the top of his shorts like a zip-fastener. 'You can not execute such a rebound, you see, without leaving the abdomen unprotected. But of course you would have extricated yourself from my yoshida if this gentleman had not appeared.'

I didn't think so.

'London, old boy.' Stevens stood like a forlorn penguin, mopping at his beak.

Kim was pretending to kick one of the coconut mats straight where we'd been milling about. I said: 'Don't worry, you made your point. The next time I get near a wall I shan't leave myself open to a yoshida . That do you?'

He nodded quickly, pleased. He took his job seriously and if a report came in that somebody'd been found with their neck at the wrong angle, in the chain-locker of a Reykjavik-bound banana-boat he liked to feel it wasn't his fault. He went across to the showers, walking like an independently sprung tiger.

'What?' I asked Stevens. A bruise was developing on the upper right arm and I'd taken care Kimura shouldn't notice it because his chief conceit is that whatever he does to you he never leaves a mark; the other instructors aren't so proud and we always look like a bunch of bitten-eared alley-cats while we're at Norfolk.

'London wants you.' He was putting in his time as a duty-runner till he was fit enough for beating up.

'On the phone?'

'In the flesh.'

'Stuff London'

'Message understood' He drifted dismally away in a nimbus of Vicks Vapour Rub.

In the showers Kim said: 'Also one must narrow the eyes, you see, in the dark, and not stare about like that. With the eyes half closed, vision is only a little reduced, but the shine on the eyeballs is much less easy to discern.' It was civil of him not to point out that this was how he'd come up from behind me: he knew I was worried about that as well.

'All right, I'll remember.'

'Ah-ha-ha,' he sang through the steam in approval, much as Mum does when Wee Willie hits the potty first time. I was getting fed up. He'd pulled off a first at the Tokyo Games and we weren't expected to reach that standard but we weren't expected to be shown up as amateurs' either. I spun the taps to full cold and he noted the change in the noise. 'Also one must finish off with warm water, you see, following a training-bout, since the muscles require to relax.'

In London the fog was worse and even the pigeons were feeling the cold, huddling in rows along the windowsills. Below me a long stain of light crept through Whitehall, the traffic nose-to-tail.

'I'll take you in now.'

So it wasn't Parkis. He always keeps you hanging about to stop you getting ideas above your station. You never know who you're going to see when you're 'wanted in London' because the Bureau doesn't officially exist and if there's ever been a door here marked Information it's been wallpapered over.

She led me upstairs, her snagged heels ricketing on the rubber strips that were peeling away from the treads. On a landing I saw Fyson going into Reports, still looking a bit nervy about the eyes: someone's bright little op. had come unstuck in Israel, so we'd all heard, and they were being flown home, those who were left.

This wasn't the room with the Lowry and the smell of polish. It was originally a dormitory, I suppose, right under the mansard roof, the kind of place where the little frilled domestics had hacked at their lungspots through the winters of the nineteenth century. There hadn't been much progress: Egerton was rubbing chilblain ointment into his raw blue hands when I came in, and looked up rather guiltily as if discovered in the enactment of a mystic rite.