ADAM HALL - Quiller Salamander

I didn't have information on things like that, or I would have told him already, debriefing is debriefing, you don't leave anything out, he should know that, knew that. He still wasn't looking at me, just listening with his head half-turned as he kept up his bloody pacing, getting on my nerves.

Then he stopped, as if he'd picked it up, and stood with his back to the plaster wall, moving his shoulder blades against it rhythmically, unconsciously, like a bear scratching itself.

Pringle looked up to ask him something but didn't, changed his mind, saw something in Flockhart's eyes, perhaps, I don't know, all I wanted was sleep, get in a few hours so that tomorrow I'd be fit for whatever had to be done, a long tussle with Gabrielle, for one thing — she'd want to hold out here, shoot as many KRs as she could before the capital went up in flames and the survivors were driven into the killing grounds, she herself among them if I didn't make absolutely sure she listened to reason, run like hell and fight again another day, so forth, make sure she was on the last flight out of Phnom Penh before the whole thing blew.

My eyes closing, opened them again, wondered how much time had gone by, Pringle still sitting there with the pad in front of him, Flockhart still scratching himself on the wall, probably not that exactly, more like thinking things out, trying to get his mind to accept that there was nothing else he could do, anyone could do, or trying, like a well-seasoned control in a trade where we accept nothing we don't like until we're actually dead, to find a way out, dream up a last-ditch eleventh-hour nil desperandum sauve-qui peut circus act that in the final analysis would count as a success of sorts because it would at least leave the battlefield strewn with the corpses of the well-intentioned, never say die and all that, go down with banners flying, I think — I've thought more than once, you know — that your Mr Flockhart is that kind of clown, a closet romantic beneath the trappings of the steely espion.

Sleep, listen, get me some sleep now.

'Is there an airstrip at the base camp?'

'Is there a what? '

'I didn't see one. There's nothing on the film. Only a chopper pad.'

My eyes fully open again because here we are, the control and the DIF and the executive in the field convened for debriefing, a time to keep awake if only for the sake of appearances.

'A helicopter pad?' Flockhart.

'Yes.'

'General Kheng, then,' his shoulders coming away from the wall, his head swinging to look down at me, 'will fly there by helicopter. Is that so?'

'The only way,' I said, 'without a strip.'

He looked at Pringle, their eyes holding for a moment before Pringle looked down.

'I did in fact have in mind,' Flockhart said, 'an alternative move, if there were to be no air strike.'

What did I tell you? Here was his last-ditch sauve-qui peut trick coming out of the bag before your very eyes.

'It would succeed,' he was saying, 'only if you were prepared to take the ultimate risk, to achieve the ultimate goal.'

Pringle was staring down at the table, thin shoulders hunched a little as if he expected fallout from somewhere.

I got out of my chair, fed up now, I didn't want to hear about it, I was going, been a hard day last night.

I was halfway to the steps when I heard Flockhart saying from behind me, 'I am asking you to assassinate General Kheng.'

'What the hell do you take me for, a hired gun?'

Pringle was on his feet too, couldn't sit still. This was the fallout he'd been expecting: he'd known what Flockhart was going to ask, known what I would answer.

'You mean you refuse?' Flockhart, pale suddenly with rage.

'Of course I refuse.'

He stared at me, his eyes murderous, swung away and showed me his back, shoulders lifting as he took a deep shuddering breath and got some of his fury under control before he turned again and faced me, his voice icy, the sibilants honed. 'I know your principles on this subject, of course; they are well documented. But you were prepared to kill once, were you not? In Bangkok?'

'I was. The man I was trying to protect was close to the queen.'

'That's right. I rather admired you for that. For once you chose to set aside your principles.'

The word came whittled from his tongue. 'You haven't much time,' I said, 'for principles?'

'Of course. But wouldn't there be a place somewhere in yours for the consideration that if you were to fire one shot you could save a million people?'

'There's no — '

'Or is it that they haven't the privilege of being close to the queen?'

Watching me, his eyes frozen.

'You should have given this,' I said in a moment, 'a lot more thought.'

'I gave it six weeks.'

I began listening carefully. 'Six weeks?'

'Ever since you got back from Meridian. The Chief of Signals had two new missions for you during that time, but I asked him to keep you on stand-by. I didn't tell him why. I just assured him it was important.'

'You kept me off two missions?' Prowling those bloody corridors with my nerves losing their tune while this bastard was pushing me around the board behind the scenes.

'I wanted,' Flockhart said, 'to line things up over here. I also wanted to bring you to the point where you were ready to take on anything. Anything at all.'

Bastard. 'Then you were wasting your time.'

He shrugged. 'There was also that man in the train, wasn't there, in London? The Soviet.'

'He'd gone back on his word and killed a woman, one of my couriers.'

'How romantic.'

'That was the only time I've ever killed except in self-defence, you know that, you've done your research. And i f I ever do it again it'll be on my own decision, not because I was conned into it.'

'Shall we rather say coerced?'

'All other things apart,' I said, 'I do this — even if it's possible — and then what? You send me after Saddam Hussein? Ghadafi? Zhirinovsky? I'm an intelligence officer, not a hit man.'

'Your records show — '

'My records show everything but the man himself. And that's what you're up against now.'

'As an intelligence officer you are of course first class. The information you brought in tonight is without price.' His head went low and his voice was so quiet that I only just caught what he said. 'Could be without price.'

His rapid switch of mood made me think for an instant of manic-depression as stillness settled into the room. Pringle hadn't moved for a long time, was standing with his arms folded and his eyes nowhere.

In a moment I said, 'Flockhart, what got you into this Cambodia thing?'

His head came up and he looked at me with a flash of hate. I think he just didn't like the way I'd put it, and perhaps he had a point, mea culpa.

'I became involved in the fate of the Cambodian people,' he said in a low voice, 'when I was here in the late seventies, during the holocaust. I was here as a clandestine observer for the Bureau. Even at that time there was the feeling in London that someone should do something to stop the bloodshed.' He moved suddenly, as if wanting to free himself of memories. 'To have been here during that time was to be changed by it, if one had any feeling at all for one's fellow humans, whatever the colour of their skin or the language they spoke.'

That was understandable, but I thought there must be more: a more personal motive for turning himself into a rogue control, for mounting a rogue mission.

Then intuition flashed, and I paid immediate attention. 'When I went into your office,' I said, 'in London, you made a point of hiding a photograph on your desk.'

He looked away. 'I did.'