ADAM HALL - The Kobra Manifesto

The bandage was too bloody tight round my arm, and my hand felt numb. I decided to ask him to help me re-tie the thing before I left here. They'd done a reasonable job at the clinic but the nurse had been a real bitch and I'd finally got out of the place at dawn this morning, down the fire escape: they'd kept me for more than five hours and wanted to make a lot of tests because there'd been a head injury and they weren't satisfied with the reflex response. Good at their job, I'm not saying they weren't: it was just that I was so bloody annoyed about the Fogel thing that I wanted some action to drain off some of the adrenalin.

At the first landing Rumori looked at me attentively for a moment.

'You are feeling well?'

'Fantastic,' I said.

He'd been ahead of me on the stairs but he'd noticed me stop, halfway up: his thoughts weren't so far away as he liked people to think. It was the result of long habit: he'd been our agent-in-place for seven years and Macklin said this was the safest house in southern Europe.

'If you need anything…' he murmured, and we began on the next staircase.

He'd almost certainly seen the report in the press: they'd held over some space for this one because it wasn't often they lost a 747 on the ground because some maniac blew it up with a fuel tanker. The Italian police were playing it close to the chest: a person whose identity had not yet been revealed had caused an accident on the tarmac, killing four members of the maintenance crew and a freight loader. The 747 was totally gutted. A British journalist, as yet unnamed, had driven his automobile through the flames and hit a maintenance trolley a hundred yards away on the far side without having caught fire. He had been dragged to safety by the emergency crews. Unfortunately it was impossible to reach the occupant of the other car, since it was hi the heart of the conflagration.

No mention of the carabinieri , or the chase, or the exchange of shots.

Rome, like Marseille and other focal points, is a centre for every major intelligence network including Africa, South America and Japan. The Italian police knew who the occupant of the burned-out Alfa-Romeo had been, and so did the monitoring sections of every major intelligence network. The Italian police were very interested in the British journalist but I'd given them the Interpol routine and they'd called Paris and then asked me a lot of questions and got a lot of answers that didn't tell them very much and finally called off the two men they'd stationed outside the door of my ward. The third one had tagged me from the hospital as far as the nearest intersection, where I'd got rid of him for the sake of practice.

The thing was that the intelligence networks would also be very interested in the British journalist. They hadn't asked any questions yet but if they could get hold of me they certainly would. London would have got the story through Fitzalan right away, and the Bureau's sleeper agents in Rome would have been alerted. Emilio Rumori had got it direct on the air from London or from Fitzalan, long before he saw the newspapers. Fitzalan had rung me at the hospital twice in the name of Jones, asking for news of my progress. He'd been hanging around the out-patients department when I'd gone down there to see if I could get away, so he knew I was back on my feet and presumably he'd cleared the area because I was hot and if anything happened to me he wouldn't be involved.

That nurse had been such 'a bitch that I finally had to bribe one of the cleaners to get my clothes back for me so that I could do the fire-escape thing. They were in a pretty bad condition because I'd been dragged out of the Fiat and there'd been a lot of fire-foam about, and I had to re-kit in a man's shop and pick up another suitcase, real pigskin because I liked the look of it and because I was so bloody upset about blowing the Fogel assignment that I thought I'd pass on some of the angst to those withered old crones in Accounts.'

All I hadn't replaced was the razor with the fancy modifications and I didn't imagine Rumori kept things like that around. If I came across any locks that needed blowing I'd have to do it the hard way and go in shoulder-first.

I stopped again, near the top of the second flight of stairs. The whole thing was reeling and I held on to the banister and waited, you should take it easy for a couple of weeks, the specialist had told me, the banister rail tilting up and down under my hand, Rumori's pale ivory face looking at me from above, his deep eyes lost in shadow, take it easy, the roar of the flames again and the wail of the sirens.

'- right?' His voice coming and going.

'Perfectly,' I said, and began climbing again, one ankle weak and the shoe supping a bit on the edge of the stair, come on for Christ's sake, put some bloody effort into it , watching me carefully with his pale ivory face.

'You can rest here, of course. Nobody would disturb you.'

'Some other time.'

He watched me for a bit longer and then took me across the high-ceilinged landing to the small room at the end, where there were two ceramic cherubs above the door, one of them with an arm broken off. A fly buzzed against the coloured-glass skylight. He stood perfectly still for a moment with his head inclined and his eyes half-closed, listening to the uncertain run of notes from the music-room below. Then he straightened up with a slight sigh and unlocked the door of the room with a large iron key and led me inside.

This was the lumber room, full of Florentine stools and chipped porcelain lamps with their shades at all angles and the parchment torn away. A huge bronze lion on a marble base was wedged between a console and a hand-painted urn, and they were obviously on some kind of base because he twisted the lion's head and swung the whole thing round, sitting on the stool that was part of the base and nicking a switch.

'Q-15,' I told him.

'Yes,' he said, 'I know.' He began fiddling with the set until he got the station identification bleep sorted out from the squelch. After a minute he got a successful series of nines in three blocks and told mem I was waiting. It was now close on 10:00 hours in London and it was just conceivable that Egerton was sitting in at Signals: his standard practice when there was something big breaking was to stay with it until, three or four in the morning and then come in again about noon, but the Rome objective was dead and standard practice might no longer apply.

999 — 999–999.

Rumori leaned over the set, shifting the band-spread and watching the carrier needle to get the signal as pure as he could. All they were doing at the moment was keeping us open with the mission identity sequence: 9 was for Kobra.

Egerton had possibly told them to call him in if they got anything from Rome, but they wouldn't wait until he'd driven all the way to Whitehall from his place in Richmond: they'd only keep us hanging around if he were already in his office.

The arpeggios come faintly from below, both hands now.

999 — 000–000.

Control at console.

Perched on the packing case with his long legs dangling and his eyes wandering vaguely around the room. He is one of the few directors who sit in at Signals and respond at only one remove: through the scramble encoder. The others use their yellow telephones and demand memoranda in duplicate, according to the rules. Egerton doesn't do it for the benefit of his executives in the field: it's just that underneath his remote and donnish appearance he runs at very high voltage and likes to be close to the action. As a spin-off advantage his executives feel more comfortable because the exchange is a lot faster and we know there won't be any confusion, send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance, so forth.

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