Quiller Barracuda

'Did she try seduction?'

'No.'

'But you mentioned her breasts.'

'She was in a bikini and bra.'

'There would have been,' Alvarez said, 'a certain amount of dream content surfacing when you were coming to. We tend to undress women in our sleep.'

Ferris thanked him and turned back to me.

"The launch,' he said. 'Did you think she knew what it was doing there?'

I got out of the chair, weakness in the legs, getting up quickly to make it look all right, but Ferris caught it.

'When did you last eat, Quiller?'

'Lunch. On the boat.'

'Protein, then,' Alvarez said at once and came out from behind his desk. 'You need some protein. Cheese, yes? Would some mozzarella appeal?'

Debriefing went on.

'The field glasses. You say she noticed them.'

'This is complicated.' I thought it through and then said, 'One scenario is this: I noticed them and of course said nothing. She saw them, innocently, and called attention to them, a bit annoyed. Or: she noticed I'd seen them and called them to my attention to clear herself in case I thought she'd seen them and wasn't saying anything because she knew all about them. Knew all about the launch.'

'Did she make anything of the fact that the launch followed you in?'

'No.'

'Do you think she saw that it had followed you in?'

'I was watching for that but I can't be certain. I was tying up the boat.'

'We've got photographs of her, of course. I had a man with a zoom on the quay.'

'When did you put her under surveillance?'

'Before you got there.'

'You're keeping her under surveillance?'

'But of course.' His amber eyes on me. 'I know it hasn't escaped you that she might have set you up for that hit, on Proctor's orders.' In a moment, 'Does that trouble you?'

'No.' But I said it too quickly and he caught it. He can catch flies in flight.

'Perhaps a little.' Making a note. 'She's not unattractive, and you've got some sympathy for her because of what happened to her father.'

'Are you putting down what I think or what you think?' Tone with an edge. I was leaning with my back to the bookshelves, wanting to move about, restless, not able to because of the weakness, not wanting to sit down because I was being put on the defensive – debriefing always has that element in it because you're asked to give reasons for things you said and things you did, to justify every move you made and take responsibility for every signal, every strike, every mistake, and what makes it difficult is that you said those things and did those things in hot blood with the dark coming down and nothing between you and the unmarked grave but a random blow or a desperate last-ditch run that in the cold light of enquiry are seen as ill-advised and potentially hazardous for the mission: the one sin above all others.

Debriefing can leave the spirit naked, and sometimes we rebel. Are you putting down what I think or what you think?

He didn't answer, and with good cause. As the director in the field he had the right, the sacrosanct obligation, to record events as he saw fit, because when the executive's back is to the wall he'll say anything to protect himself.

Some morose and mission-weary shadow with a penchant for statistics has worked it out, slumped over a tea-stained table in the Caff with his busy abacus, that in the first three phases of a mission the executive in the field has been pulled out and replaced on four occasions out of ten because his debriefing proved that he couldn't handle the demands on him, couldn't control the field, couldn't proceed without increasing the risk of blowing his own operation or half the Bureau's ultra-classified files. And whoever they are we forget their names because it scares us to remember them.

'When you asked her for a diving lesson, did she get you to sign a waiver in case of accident?'

'What? Yes.'

'What address did you give?'

The hotel. The first one.'

'She phoned you there.'

'When?'

'Twenty-three minutes after the shots were fired.'

'What did she say?'

'She left a message, asking you to phone her back. She sounded – ' he checked his pad – 'agitated.'

Then she must have seen me pushed into the cab.'

'Not necessarily. She could simply be living in the hope that you'd got clear in some way.'

'No one,' Upjohn said, 'saw him getting into the cab. I was there.'

'Her number?' This was Purdom.

'You'll get all that,' Ferris told him, 'if there's anything you can do.'

Purdom shut up again. I wished he wouldn't just sit in that bloody chair and brood. I could feel vibrations coming out of him that jarred the nerves and I tried the whole time to ignore the man because the truth couldn't be faced: he could have been called out here to replace me the minute the debriefing was over, and he'd seen what the opposition had already done to the shadow in the field, and didn't like it.

What would I do, then, if London sent instructions to pull me out of Barracuda'?

Go to ground.

Vanish and work from the dark, from the silence of the catacombs. A pox on them.

There is nothing worse, my friend, for the executive in the field than to be replaced, to be sent home crippled with his inadequacies, bringing nothing with him but the news of a lost cause and leaving behind him nothing but his bloodied tracks. Nothing worse, you understand, than professional ignominy, the irretrievable loss of face.

Correction, yes. There would be, at this phase of this particular mission, one thing worse.

'You said – ' Ferris, 'that Harvester repeated word for word a political diatribe you'd heard before, from Proctor.'

'Yes.'

I noticed Alvarez shift in his chair.

Ferris said quietly, 'How could you remember it word for word?'

'I – ' and left it. I didn't know.

'Could you repeat it now – ' Alvarez – 'word for word?'

'Yes.' Beginning to sweat because I remembered how Kim Harvester had looked when she'd gone through the same material on board the tug, stabbing at the peach stone with the knife, withdrawn, robotic.

Ferris looked at Upjohn. 'Tape?'

'Sure.' He got the recorder and waited with his finger on the button.

'When you're ready,' Ferris said.

It was frightening because I went straight into it without any hesitation, bringing it out at a measured pace, He's a statesman with a world view that we haven't seen since Nixon… half his face in shadow beside the brass hanging lamp… very much hope the Thatcher government realises what we've got in Mathieson Judd… the first stirring of the wind as the eye of the storm began moving across the town… his understanding of the internecine struggle for power inside the Kremlin… my voice distant-seeming, the words unnaturally paced, until it was finished and the voice stopped, and I looked up to see Alvarez watching me, leaning forward, intent.