ADAM HALL - Quiller Salamander

Tonight, as I watched the light under the door, I was aware that my chance of a fatal accident on this particular staircase was closer to a hundred per cent because if that door opened and I had to go down the stairs there'd be a gun at my back and all I'd have to do in my hurry to get clear was break an ankle and it'd stop my run, finito.

If the door opened when I reached the next stair, the ninth, the point of no return, I would have a gun in my face but there'd be a chance of dealing with it before it was fired.

There was a balcony on this side of the villa. The room where the agents were talking would open onto it; so would the rooms on each side. When I approached the villa through the last of the rain some thirty minutes ago, following the dead man's brother at a distance from where we'd left the cars, I'd seen the balcony but hadn't been able to reach it from the ground: there was no creeper, no drainpipe, nothing but the sheer wall. That was why I'd had to ignore my own warning to the neophyte espions at Norfolk and use this staircase to the hot zone, the room where the agents were talking. I'd come in through the back door of the villa; it hadn't been locked; guerrillas armed to the teeth don't think of locking their doors.

The voices behind the door rose and fell, fell sometimes to silence, then broke out again. I recognized the language, that was all: it was Khmer. They would be talking, some of the time, about the death of the hit man, a death to be avenged, and bloodily, as soon as they could find out who had killed him, so that his brother here could at least know that the score was settled.

I listened on the stair.

The way I worked things out was that if the door of that room opened at any next second and someone came out when I was still on the eighth stair my chances of getting clear would be better if I turned and crashed down the staircase and got out through the open back door before the agent had time to pull his gun and fire it with any accuracy. But once I was on the ninth stair, only three from the top, I thought I might stand a better chance of getting clear by taking the man head-on and dropping him cold and going through the vacant room to the right and onto the balcony and making a controlled drop to the ground before the fuss started.

But when I talk about one chance being better than the other I mean of course by a hair, by the tenth of a second, by the reaction-time of the agent's nerves, the degree of friction between the gun and the inside of the holster, things like that, a thousand things. And there were other unpredictables: whether the room on the right was in fact vacant; whether the latch on the door was weak enough for me to smash open if it was locked or if the handle was loose and wouldn't turn fast enough to let me in there.

The talking rose again and then one voice barked and there was silence. He would be their top dog — the man, almost certainly, I would need to meet, and talk to, or kill.

I lifted my right foot to take the next step upward but froze as someone moved inside the room and the shadow of a boot darkened the crack under the door and I waited for it to come open, going over the distances and the angles that would be involved if a man came out and I had to get to him before he was ready, working against the glare of the light from the room before my pupils had time to retract but using my one advantage — the element of surprise — for all it was worth.

Waited.

Four stairs and a distance of three feet across the landing, say two seconds, two and a half, before the heel of the right palm reached the nose bone and drove it upward into his brain and dropped him, the gun in his hand by that time but too late, with any luck too late.

The boot was still close to the door. I watched the handle, waiting for it to turn, to trigger the nerves, alert the muscles.

Waited with my right foot lowered again and braced on the eighth stair with the heel raised and the ball of the foot burning as the energy surged from the brain to the muscles on hot waves of adrenalin.

Soon?

I watched the crack of light, the shadow of the boot.

Now?

The muscles burning, the organism triggered, the nerves drawn tight.

Then a voice came and the boot moved and the shadow was gone and the handle of the door remained still, perfectly still, as the talking broke out again and I moved to the ninth stair and went on climbing and crossed the landing and went into the room on the right with no impediment, the door unlocked and the handle easy to turn but the heart still racing under the whip of the adrenalin and the mouth dry, the reaction bringing sweat out, itching on my face.

It was darker in here than it had been on the staircase, because the lights had been left burning in the main room on the ground floor. I had spent a little time in there when I'd come into the villa, smelling the film of burnt cordite inside the barrels of uncleaned guns — most of them Chinese assault rifles stacked in the corners and lying around on a trestle table. I had also studied the picture gallery on the wall, a big spread of black-and-white photographs of men in camouflage dress holding weapons at the alert with dramatic look-mummy expressions, a lot of the pictures showing Pol Pot himself, carefully shot from below to make him look taller, others showing a younger man in jungle battledress with a peaked cap and a general's pips on the shoulders, one with his name below it: Kheng San, presumably the second-in-command of the Khmer Rouge forces.

I had studied his face with particular care, going from one shot to another and letting the flat black-and-white features saturate the memory while the imagination supplied the third dimension and added colour. I knew the face of Pol Pot from press photographs and the television screen, but it might be as important for me to know the face of General Kheng.

I listened now to the voices coming through the plaster wall from the room next door. One of them I had learned to recognize: it belonged to the top dog, the one who barked when everyone else started talking at once. He could possibly be General Kheng, but I didn't think so: the forces of the Khmer Rouge were twelve thousand strong and would have the normal number of officers of all ranks.

This could of course be their secret base, the one they'd moved to when they'd gone underground. In the normal run of things a hit man is low in the echelon, but a hit man ordered to target a government minister would rank higher, and his brother might be persona grata at headquarters. Or he could simply have come here on orders to debrief, as the driver of the Russian Zhiguli on the night of the attempted assassination.

Two of the voices were women's, sharp and shrill, the voices of fanatics. In a culture where female citizens were looked upon as cattle and female soldiers as whores they had done well, these two, to have risen this far in the ranks.

I put one ear against the wall and listened. The volume was increased but it still wasn't good enough: I'd be wasting my time. I felt in the darkness for the French doors to the balcony and found them and turned the oval handle, drawing the vertical bolts clear at the top and bottom, taking time, keeping pressure against the doors with one shoulder to stop the bolts springing free with a bang — I couldn't afford to make a sound, the slightest sound during the brief silences that came from the next room.

As I inched open the doors the night air came softly in, humid after the rain but cooler than in here. But it was the light that stopped my movements dead, the light and the sound of their voices. Through the slats of the shutters I could see the floor of the balcony in the light that came from the other room: they'd opened the shutters there and the French windows as well, possibly to let the smoke out or cool the air or both. I hadn't expected that.