ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

He dropped the lens into the foam-lined box and shut the drawer gently. “Next time you find yourself behind a long-distance rifle, you’ll know what the crosshairs are made of — if it’s a good one. This stuff’s stronger than platinum wire and about ten times as good as the plastic hairs they’ve got on the market now they’re too brittle and they’re not really black . Of course, I don’t get much call for this kind of thread these days they’re making everything of cold crap, aren’t they? No wonder civilization’s falling apart. What are you doing in Barcelona anyway?” He was looking at me over the edge of his half-moon glasses.

I didn’t answer.

“Silly question,” he nodded.

Charlie was one of our sleeper agents in the Mediterranean theatre, originally Codes and Cyphers, then operational for two years until the El Fatah took him for a Shin Bet executive and blew a Porsche from under him when he was nosing around in Cairo.

“I got thrown out of London,” I told him.

This must be the cleanest window in the whole of Barcelona: I suppose that was Pepita. A few dried brown leaves were still on the platanas down there along the Ramblas, and a wind from the harbour pulled at them Feliz Novedades ! a torn banner said in red and blue letters.

“ Thrown out?” He sounded concerned.

“Slung out, kicked out, what d’you want me to say?” I swung round to face him.

“What we want,” he said gently, wheeling his chair across to the living quarters, ‘is a nice little drop of Carlos Primero, which by good grace they named after me.” He picked up the bottle and poured two shot glasses.

“I’m on the wagon,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right. Never been off, now I come to remember.”

I knew he wouldn’t say anything more about the other thing so I poured myself some Orangina and tipped his glass by way of apology and said:

“I blotted my copybook, that’s all. They had to get me out of London so fast that that is what I’m doing in Barcelona it was the first available plane to anywhere.”

“Dear, oh dear.” He stared upwards from his chair. “I suppose that’s fairly typical. You tend to leave a suitable uproar behind you when you skip town.”

“This time it’s not quite as funny as that.”

“I wish I could do something,” he said in a helpless tone. “Wouldn’t you like to sit down?”

“You’re doing your bit,” I told him. “You’re my contact here.”

“Be my guest.”

Then I decided to tell him.

“My neck’s on the block, Charlie.”

He swung his chair round so that he was facing me.

“Spell out,” he said.

“I’m being fired.”

He sat perfectly still, looking up at me over his glasses. By the way I’d said it he knew I wasn’t joking.

“Did you say “fired”?”

“Invited to resign. Same thing.”

Very quietly: “What in Christ’s name for?”

“Breach of security.”

His large greying head tilted sideways, and I remembered his good ear was the left one.

“ You?”

My mouth tasted awful and I wished I hadn’t started this: in the course of sixteen missions I’d learned to keep things to myself, and what I was doing now felt like a confession under interrogation and I didn’t like it because I’d experienced interrogation a good few times and they’d never broken me.

But my voice went on. “It wasn’t anything professional. I mean I didn’t make a slip or blow cover or lose information,” I had to turn away from him now. “It was something I did in hot blood.”

Again he said, and as quietly: “ You?”

It made me turn back on him. “All right, “I’m ten-tenths reptile, is that what you mean?”

“How else could you do your job?” he asked gently.

“I’m not looking for excuses. I am what I am and I do what I do and a fractional hesitation in my mind while I asked myself exactly what I was, what I did ‘and it’s too late to make any changes.”

“Of course,” he said after a while. “It’s the same with most of us.” He didn’t glance down at the rug on the wheelchair but I sensed it was what he meant. “Who was the woman?”

I went across to the window, subconsciously looking for escape. I wanted to stop talking and get out of here: he knew me too well. I don’t like being known. “How’s business?” I asked him.

“Can’t grumble.”

I heard his chair moving behind me, the rhythmic squawk of the tyres on the polished floorboards. “You ever get out of this place, Charlie?”

“What do you think I am, a fucking cripple?”

“Not with those arms.” They were enormous; I’d seen the weights and pulleys in the corner when I’d come in here. He couldn’t run anywhere but if anyone got within reach of him and he didn’t like it I’d say they’d be better off with a black widow. “We could have a meal,” I said, ‘some time.”

“Delighted.”

“After it’s official.”

“Oh,” he said cheerfully, “that’s a lot of balls. They can’t do that to you you’re one of their top men, still in your prime.”

“I’ve heard it’s the best time to quit: when you’re winning.” I watched the man selling roast chestnuts down there in the winter sunshine, and realized it must be all written down somewhere. A mission was one thing, but life was another. In a mission you went in with everything worked out for you and all you had to do was stick to the instructions and watch out for traps, and by the time you’d been a few years at it you could handle pretty well anything because your mind turned into a computer, scanning the data and keeping you out of trouble. But life wasn’t circumscribed by the limits of your own experience, and you could run smack into a land-mine because you couldn’t see it: because it was all written down somewhere that you should do just that.

Katia. Novikov. Two names. Take them separately and you’d got two elements of a mission, one on our side, one on theirs. Put them together and you’d got the two components of the bomb that had blown me apart. Question: did I regret it? No, I would do it again, my arm round his neck, tightening, tightening, tremendously strong, stronger than Charlie’s. All that was left, really, was the shock-wave of knowing it had cost me everything I’d got.

“Where are you sacking out?”

I turned round.

“What?”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Internacional .”

“Ah. Just up the road.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give you a buzz if they signal.”

“It won’t be anything I want to hear.”

“Carlos?”

“Si?

“Yo tengo suo leche!”

“Pase usted Pepita!”

She came in, a vigorous dark-eyed woman still in black for her son, a birthmark livid on her face, her gold teeth flashing. She pulled the carton of milk from the bag of groceries and put it on to the table, eyeing me with the courage of her kind and daring me to think of her as anything but beautiful.

“Pepita, este es un amigo mio, Senor Turner. Senora de la Fuente y Fuente.”

“Mucho gusto de conocerla a usted Senora de la Fuente ,” I said formally.

“ Igualmente, Senor .”

Then the phone rang and Charlie spun the wheels of his chair and answered it.

“Yes,” he said. “Half an hour ago.” He looked across at me and held the receiver out and I took it and said hallo and that was when everything started.

“Can you do anything with suede?”

“ No entiendo, Senor. ”

“Suede. These things,” I said more loudly, pointing at them.

“ Ah — si sil Sientese, Senor !”

“What?”