There was a Malaysian Airline flight out of Nah Trang at 16:58 and I booked on it and tried Cheltenham five times while I was waiting and drew blank again. That bloody man was as much use to me as a dead duck.
We were ten minutes late on take-off but landed early on a tail wind at 19:47, the moon behind clouds and puddles on the tarmac after rain, the air humid and scented with blossoms. I used my Thai papers and they didn't hold me up with any questions and I used a side exit marked Airport Personnel Only and found myself in an alleyway and came round to the rear of the taxi station and began looking for cover, man in a raincoat stepping from a doorway 'Excuse me.'
Not quite sure of me in the pilot's cap and sunglasses. Then he nodded.
'Good flight?'
Pepperidge.
'Yes. What-'
'First thing is to get you off the street, come on.'
He took me to a car with smoked windows and diplomatic plates, Katie at the wheel.
Style, give him that.
22 The Clinic
'What did you try?'
'I tried to overdose on Valium.' Thin, pale, hollow-eyed, still young, thirty-odd. 'But you can take a whole bottle of that stuff and it won't work for you.'
'That was the last time?'
Two male nurses zeroed in on a man going towards the door and got hold of him gently.
'Yes.'
'How long ago?' I asked him.
'A week. That's why they sent me here.'
Wife and two kids killed in a car smash. He'd just picked up the phone and the police clerk had said, 'Is that Mr David Thomas, please?'
How do people stand it?
'Feel any better?' I asked him. 'Any different?'
'I suppose so. Thing is, when I get out of here, and go back to the house where we all -' He couldn't go on.
'Let it all come out, David.'
'There's nothing left in there.'
'Hit the wall, then.'
'It wouldn't bring them back, you see.'
Nancy Chong was waiting for him and he looked up. 'Excuse me,' he said and followed her.
I was down as paranoid, suicidal tendencies, non-violent, general health good but traumatised following airline accident. Voluntary patient, agreed readily to curfew and confinement to clinic limits pending initial psychiatric evaluation.
'The advantages,' Pepperidge had told me in the car, 'are manifold. Everything's found for you there as a patient, so you won't have to go into the open. You can also make and receive unlimited phone-calls, so that you'll be in close and constant touch with me, either directly or through someone manning the phone, night and day.'
'How did you get me in there?'
He was different, sharper than when I'd last seen him in London. Perhaps it was just that he'd knocked off the booze.
'The clinic is British-managed, and I talked to the resident doc at the High Commission. Your cover will be simply that you've been through a tricky time and need to rest. They won't ask any questions and you won't be evaluated or given counselling or anything. Understood?'
'Yes.' Was it just the lack of booze? There was something else. He'd turned professional and was doing a good job, had got Katie out of her office and a car with CD plates: he would have needed first-class credentials for that.
'So this little problem's taken care of,' he said, and pulled a copy of the Times out of his raincoat and slapped it onto my knees.
Front page: photograph of Veneker.
Following the car-bomb incident of last Tuesday night the police had identified the victim as James Edward Veneker, a British national. Enquiries being pursued with utmost rigour, so forth. It was the photograph that clinched it: the Shoda hit team wouldn't think I'd just changed my cover name.
I gave him back the paper. 'Do you know where Kishnar is?'
'No. But you'll be safe at the clinic.' His yellow eyes watched me, clearer than they'd been before in London, his gaze direct. 'Trust in me.'
'I'm beginning to.' He took it well, didn't look down. 'What brought you out here?'
'We'll come to that later.'
The Radison Clinic was in Pekin Street and Katie got us there without losing her way. As Pepperidge got out she looked back at me once.
'You all right, Martin?'
'Yes. You?'
'I am now.'
Pepperidge was scanning the street and I waited.
'All right,' he said, and I touched Katie's hand and got out and crossed the pavement with him.
When I'd signed in he took me to the small rectangle of lawn in the centre of the building and we sat in shadow on garden chairs still damp from the rain, the grass soggy underfoot. There were lamps along the verandahs, and people moved there, some in white coats. The air was steamy, oppressive.
'What brought me out here,' Pepperidge told me, 'was partly that McCorkadale phoned me in Cheltenham and said she thought you'd hit on something important. She said you'd got access to some kind of electronic surveillance on Mariko Shoda. That right?'
'Yes. She had your number in Cheltenham?"
'I gave it to her a few days ago, the last time I phoned her at the High Commission. For an amateur, she's extremely bright – I'm sure you've noticed.'
'Yes. But I don't want her to get too involved, now that Kishnar's back in the picture. I don't want her at risk.'
He thought for a moment, then said quietly, 'She can look after herself, you know. Pretty accomplished.'
'Just keep her well in the background, Pepperidge.'
'Message understood.'
He was sitting more or less sideways on to me and I watched his profile, angular against the distant lights, pensive as he worked something out; then he faced me suddenly.
'Look, we need to put this whole thing on the line. As I've told you, I've been doing a great deal of work in London, and a great deal more out here, through unimpeachable sources -particularly on Mariko Shoda and her background.'
He waited.
'Are you here to brief me?'
'No. I'm here to tell you that I've compiled a massive amount of raw intelligence right across the board, and I'm in the process of analysing it. When anything comes up that I decide you should know, I'll tell you.'
He waited again but I let the silence go on, because I knew now what his drift was and I needed time to think about it.
'Your mission, Quiller, is now at the stage where you can break right through and go for the objective. But you can't do that without a director in the field.'
'I know.'
'Of course you do.' He angled his head. 'I'm putting myself up for the job. That's why I came out here.'
I'd already had enough time. In London he'd looked like just another burnt-out spook and all he'd had were a few connections in the trade he was hanging on to, people like Floderus and a few chums down at Cheltenham with an ear at the mast, and if I'd known what it was going to be like to work in a distant overseas field without a director there I wouldn't have touched the mission he'd offered me, I'd have turned it down flat; but I'd been smarting from the meeting I'd had with that bastard Loman at the Bureau and I was scared to death that I'd been out for the last time and was going to finish up training recruits or helping Costain with the industrial counter-espionage network he was trying to set up – industrial, Jesus, an arm-chair operation, the end of the bloody line and no future, no brink, so I'd done it without thinking, taken this one on and wished to Christ on half a dozen occasions that I'd left it alone.
But it was different now. Pepperidge had changed. He'd straightened himself out and got off the booze and established his credibility at the British High Commission and found me a safe-house at a time when I couldn't have survived without one and now he was sitting here in the shadows watching me and waiting, and I knew he wouldn't say another word until I'd made up my mind and told him yes or no. And the reason why it wasn't an easy choice was that the relationship between director in the field and his shadow executive is close, circumscribed and demanding. If I said yes then I was going to put my life in his hands, my life and the whole of the mission, and he was going to have to move heaven and earth if necessary to safeguard them both. He'd have to feed me with info and provide for my welfare and get me contacts if I needed them, couriers, drops, signals facilities and local liaison, whatever I asked him for. He would also have to deal with my nerves, the accelerating risk of paranoia that always gets into the ferret when he's down there in the dark and starts smelling blood – his own or someone else's, theirs by the grace of God or the luck of the Devil, according to how you look at things.