Quiller's Run

'Why?'

It was a whisper.

'It would have killed me.'

Silence. At the edge of my vision I saw another rat on the move, and heard its faint squeaking.

'Then I shall throw you to the others. But not yet.'

There was something coming into his voice, too, a different tone that I couldn't quite identify; but it reminded me of the way Fosdick had spoken to us when he'd got back from Marx-Stadt.

One of the dogs barked outside, the sound coining a deep chest, resonating; others took it up, excited by some-thing, an animal they'd sighted. I showed nothing.

'Who is your sensei?'

'Yamada.'

'In London.'

'Yes, Sempai.'

He was still sighting me in that strange way, as if hiding behind himself – this impression was quite clear; it wasn't my imagination. It was bringing a chill to the nerves: they were vulnerable at the moment because I hadn't law whether I was going to come down the wrong way and smash my legs on the building and then there'd been the Doberman with its jaws wide open and then the sickening business stopping the thing short and now there was Cho standing there and I was perfectly sure he meant what he'd said about throwing me to those bloody hounds.

'You may rise.'

'Os.' I made the ret and got to my feet, and then something screamed outside and the sound of the dogs took on a different note: it was a kill. He was listening to it, Cho. His maimed head lifting a fraction. But his eye was still sighting me.

'How many are there?'

I hesitated. 'Dogs?'

'No. There are seven dogs.' His eye disappeared as his head was turned, and then sighted me again with an expression of exaggerated cunning, aided by the set of L mouth. 'Six, now.' A flash of revelation came to me, then vanished before I could grasp it. 'How many men?

'Where, Colonel?'

'Out there. How big an army?'

Mother of God.

Yes, the same tone that had been in Fosdick's voice when he'd got back from Marx-Stadt with the burns from the electrodes still on him and that strange light in his eyes – the East Germans had put him through implemented interrogation for three weeks and it had driven him mad.

'I don't know,' I said carefully.

Because what could I say?'

I didn't know what they'd done to this man before they'd tried to kill him but it could have been that massive head injury alone that had affected his brain. He was probably as big a danger to me as anything out there in the jungle and if his mind were damaged he could blow up at any minute and come for me or call the dogs in. The only chance I might have could be in humouring him.

'But you must have seen it,' he said.

The army.

'I came down in moonlight, Colonel. All I could see was jungle.'

His face was changing again as he brought his head back by infinite degrees, and I noted this. The movement could be significant: his way of 'sighting', of seeming to hide behind himself, might indicate the times when his brain went out of phase. He was facing me now and asking normal questions again.

'Why did you come here by air?'

'I was told you like your privacy.'

'Yet you still came.'

'Yes. I-'

'Why?'

'I think we can help each other.'

His head began turning again, and the hairs on my neck rose in reaction. He said nothing, and I waited. This time the phase didn't last long, and his head moved back.

'To do what?'

'To destroy Shoda.'

You must have seen a cat facing a dog – the eyes narrowing and the ears flattening and a hiss coming from the open jaws. It was like that. It's not enough to say that he recoiled. He tensed, drew back, threw up his guard, all those things, without making much movement or much sound, and somehow it looked worse for that: it was an expression of total hate, total menace, barely contained, about to detonate.

If Shoda had been here now she would have been ripped into pieces. This man didn't need those dogs.

It took time for him to recover, and the aftermath was a grimace of pain, not of physical pain now, but the pain he had felt when that monstrous blow was struck, cleaving his face, and the pain he'd been feeling ever since, day after day, remembering what he looked like and what people -especially women – would think if they ever looked on him again. He was still young, say forty, and that must be his photograph I'd seen on the wall near Funakoshi's, the picture of a handsome Asian, high cheekboned in the Yul Brynner mould, large-eyed, sensual. Colonel Cho would have loved many women; now he was a creature, a Caliban, self-imprisoned in a hermit's cave.

A whisper came. ''Shoda…'

Something was moving in the background behind him, and I noted it, even though it wasn't defined. Cho was watching me intently, as if I'd offered some kind of revelation. His expression was perfectly sane now, and it occurred to me that in simply mentioning Shoda's name I'd recalled memories he'd been keeping forced down under his need to forget; but I couldn't tell what this would do to him, bring him increased sanity through release, or drive him deeper into madness. I had the feeling of stepping through a minefield in the dark.

Snake.

That was the movement behind him, high among the creeper that itself was winding its way through the beams and girders of the fourth wall. The bloody thing was hanging from the leaves by the tail, its head down and moving from side to side, heat-sensing the earthen floor.

Still in a whisper, 'You said, destroy?

'Yes. The whole of her organisation.'

He was chief of intelligence in an insurgent group, Chen had told me, affiliated with Shoda's organisation. He was clever, but he wanted to handle things his way, and she didn't like that. She had him arrested and slated for execution, but he got away with it mehow, with a head wound you'd never believe.

'Come.'

He led me across to a corner, and that was when the snake dropped and the rat squealed and my skin crawled, though he took not the slightest notice. He shared the life of the jungle here and was used to it; but it came to my mind that if he were ever struck down with a fever or couldn't move around he'd the with the jungle too, or the dogs would scent easy meat and pick him clean. 'Tell me," he said, 'why you wish to destroy Shoda.'

I was his guest at table, towards noon; we sat on the floor, Japanese-style, on each side of a slab of redwood with a great crack in it; he'd lashed thin cord across and across to keep it together.

'You know, of course, that there have been many attempts to kill her?'

'Yes.'

We ate some kind of root, peeled and sliced, with dried fruit and a bowl of mashed turnip, by its taste.

'And you are confident that you can achieve what so many others have failed to achieve?'

'No. But I shall try. It's a matter of intelligence, Colonel – the gathering of intelligence. Information. That was your own field, I believe.'

He didn't answer that. 'Who told you that I might have such information?'

'One of the pilots who flies into the village here told me you'd once been involved with Mariko Shoda's military forces.'

He didn't ask Chen's name. I wouldn't have given it.

God knew how many rats were in this place. One of them was moving close to the table, smelling the food.

'I doubt,' Cho said carefully, 'if I would have any information that would be useful to you.' But the problem was that his head was moving again, turning, his one eye sighting me. It was like having to learn a language: he was distrusting me, so whatever he said could be almost the opposite of the truth. I knew perfectly well that he'd got information for me, or Pepperidge and Katie wouldn't have told me to see him.

'Then I was misinformed,' I told him. Go with whatever he said, don't contradict.

The sleek brown rat jumped onto the table; not much of a feat; it was only about a foot and a half from the ground. It looked rather pretty, but presumably had rabies.