Quiller's Run

'Another thing' – and I was, yes, thinking aloud but that was good – 'is that I can't confront Shoda without getting her isolated somehow.' And I knew when I said it that it was a key word, isolated, though I didn't know why. 'I don't mean separated from her bodyguards, I couldn't hope for that. I think I mean away from the public somewhere, in case people get hurt. It's not going to be a tea-party.'

Long silence, but this time useful, potentially constructive, so forth. And something had got through.

I 'Isolated,' Pepperidge said. He got off the couch and stood with his hands shoved into his pockets, looking through the wall. 'Not in her house.'

'No. I'd never get in there alive.'

Loman was staring into the middle distance too but he didn't say anything for a minute, couldn't hit on anything. Then he turned and started walking again and said, 'We've got the full cooperation of the Singapore police, but there's nothing they can do against Shoda. She's politically untouchable. Diplomatically. She could bring almost any democratic government down in Asia simply by hitting its economy or exposing any one of the half-dozen corrupt officials in high places.' He gave me a direct look. 'We can't help you there.'

'I understand that.'

In any case I couldn't see us going into the end-phase with any kind of police action. They couldn't touch Shoda. The government couldn't touch her. It wasn't a question of an operation; it was a question of infiltration, very focused, very specific, just one man going in.

'Would anyone like some lunch?'

Katie.

Loman stopped pacing as if he'd hit a wall and stared at her as if he didn't understand the word. Perhaps she should have said luncheon.

'Good thinking.' Pepperidge.

'Some kind of protein?' I said.

She passed close to me on her way out, saying softly, 'and a little zabaglione?' And left her scent on the air, my God, there's nothing like a woman's presence to bring the tension down, she doesn't even have to touch you.

'Look,' Pepperidge said, and didn't finish it because Flood came through the doors just then and told Loman there was a call from one of the contacts in Cambodia and Loman went out to take it and from that minute the final action of the end-phase started running and we were pitched into it headlong.

30 Mr Croder

'Where?' Loman asked them.

We were in the smoking-room off the main salon, reproduction antique brass telephone and plush armchairs and gilt ashtrays and a thin Chinese nude on the wall with exaggerated nipples.

'When?'

Loman looked very calm. One of the things I dislike least about him is that when a mission's in a slow phase he's like a fart in a collander and he can drive you stark raving mad but when it swings into momentum again he quietens down and starts running like a well-oiled dynamo. Flood had told him the signal was from our second unit in Cambodia.

'What time tomorrow?'

Pepperidge was hitched on a bar stool, his yellow eyes deceptively sleepy. Flood was standing under a lamp, plaster cherub holding the shade aloft. Flood behaved like a subordinate and called me sir but that was just because he was a bit younger and he probably found the presence of a top control from London intimidating. But I knew who he was now.

I'd asked Pepperidge a bit earlier, 'Is this man Flood my replacement?'

Pepperidge had looked away, looked back again. 'Yes, old boy. But he'll never get the job, of course.'

It didn't actually bother me. In fact there was a certain comfort in the knowledge that if I got things wrong in the next few hours and bought the Elysian fields thing at least I'd know they'd got someone standing by to take over.

'Wait a minute,' Loman said, and blocked the mouthpiece I and looked at Pepperidge and me and said briefly, 'They've traced the consignment. It's on its way to Prey Veng by air.'

'Where's that?' Pepperidge asked him.

'Across the Mekong from Phnom Penh.' He looked at me now, waiting. Half the component of the mission was in place and I was the second half and he wanted to know if I had any questions. I did. This was a breakthrough.

'Can they open the crates and switch the contents?'

'Can they what?'

'Permission to talk to them.' Strictly formal, right out of the book, because he was a control and the final decision-making was going to be his or Croder's but I'd got the whole thing in my head now, the end-phase, ready to run, and the timing was so critical that we'd have to work by the minute all the way down to zero and that was why I was being formal with Loman because I didn't want to get his back up and put everything in hazard, not now.

He hesitated, then passed me the phone.

'Executive.'

'Salutations.'

My opposite number.

'Listen, this is fully urgent. Can you switch the contents of those crates and let them go through on schedule?'

Short silence. I hadn't made their end-phase any easier.

'You mean shove some pig-iron in them, or something?'

'Yes, whatever you can find. We want them to arrive at their projected destination and ETA as if they'd never been touched. That possible?'

Another silence, then, 'Like fucking things up, don't you?'

Meant yes.

'Christ,' I said, 'I wouldn't mind working with you again.' He'd got us this end of the mission.

'That's not mutual,' he said, 'because you've gone and pissed on the chips, but I suppose that's life.' His tone changed. 'All right, you want everything left intact, shipping labels, manifest, routing, the whole thing. Yes?'

'Yes.'

'And once the crates are there, our end's in the bag and we're completed, that right?'

'Except for getting the Slingshots to the Thai army.'

'Oh yes, we shan't be leaving those things around for the kids to play with in the park, don't worry. Look, can I have confirmation from your control?'

'Hold on.' I turned to Loman. 'You heard what I've asked them to do and they say they can do it and I've worked out our end-phase and it'll give us the only chance we've got, so are you prepared to give me full discretion over this?'

He stood there staring at me with his hands behind him and his feet together and his head on the tilt and I watched him computerising the whole situation including what would happen to him in London if it turned out that he'd let me screw up the mission and drive it into the ground.

Pepperidge had taken a step closer and he was watching me too, his eyes blanked off and his mouth a tight line because he'd catch some of the flak if he let his executive talk his control into a last-ditch spectacular fiasco.

Then Loman made a curt gesture and I gave him the phone and he said, 'Control. I am placing the completion of your operation into the hands of the executive here.'

Gave me the phone back.

'Thank you, sir.'

More than I'd asked for, more than I could have expected, much more – he was giving me immediate responsibility for the whole show.

I said into the phone, 'What's the ETA for that consignment in Prey Veng?'

'21:14 today.'

'Where are you going to make the switch?'

'In Phnom Penh.'

'At the airport?'

'Yes, in a holding warehouse.'

'Clandestine?'

'We've bought two customs people.'

'Not a lot of risk, then.'

'Not a lot. I'd say we've got, you know, around ninety per cent in our favour.'

I whipped through the main essentials to see if I were missing anything, didn't think I was.

'How long is it going to take them to unload the consignment and check on the contents, open up a crate?'

'I can't say, sir. I mean, it's up to them. But it wouldn't take more than a half hour to get the stuff off the kite and then all they'll need is a crowbar.'

So I'd be working inside a time bracket of thirty minutes minimum. But then they'd go through all the crates before they contacted Shoda.