Quiller Barracuda

'Yes. Is he alone?'

'That's right.' His tone was overly casual. Holmes enjoys understatement at a time of tension and he knew exactly how I'd reacted to the name Ferris: he was one of the elite directors in the field who were sent out only to look after something really major, the only DIF I always asked for but didn't always get. 'The second thing is,' Holmes said, 'we've opened a new board, Barracuda, and it's yours.'

Lowering in the night sky.

'What's the ETA?' the driver said.

'11:37. British Airways.'

'Sure, that could be it.'

The nose coming up, the lights of the town silvering the wings. 'How long can you wait here?'

'Maybe a minute. Fuzz here don't have no patience.'

'Then go in and check the arrival time for Flight 293.'

'I can't leave the cab.'

'I'm a generous man.'

He came back and said the flight was on time.

'All right, make a circuit.'

'A what?'

'Go round again.'

'Come back here?'

'Yes.'

Reversing thrust, the roar waking the night. The cop said something as we pulled out but I only heard the driver.

'Gimme no shit, man. I wasn't no more than a half-minute.'

Reek of kerosene blowing through the driving window.

Ferris.

I nursed his name, going over all the things it meant: a major mission, for one thing, because of his status and his track record and because I'd seen his name on the board for Catapult when I'd looked into the signals room before I'd left, so they'd pulled him in from Paris overnight and sent him out here direct with no local briefing from Monck unless it had been done on the phone between Nassau and London. Monck would have given Ferris everything he knew without keeping selected material back as he'd done with me, because that's the way it works: the shadow executive in the field is told only what he needs to know at any given time; the background to a major mission can be infinitely complex with areas of ultra-classified material on a government level right up to your-eyes-only files exclusive to the Prime Minister.

'Go round again.'

Even Ferris wouldn't have all of it in his hands. His job was to direct the shadow in the field, see that he was fed and watered and kept in signals with London, give him the information he needed to know and send him wherever he had to be sent, wherever the mission took him, protect him from the opposition and from his own paranoia when things got rough, and finally bring him home with enough life left in him to stand up to debriefing for days on end, weeks on end, while they turned off the light over the board in the signals room and got on with something else.

'Shit, man, I'm getting giddy.'

'How does this bloody window open?'

'It's broke.'

There was reflection on the glass but I could see him now, Ferris, coming through the arrival area but not from the baggage claim; he'd have only one case, prepacked for him and stored by the travel section in the Bureau and marked F.I.P. – For Immediate Pickup.

'Can you pull in here?'

Between a limo and a dirty red VW, luggage all over the place, two men with sideboards and black coats and padded shoulders and Panda-style smoked glasses ducking into the Lincoln, a college boy lurching under the weight of a surfboard and scuba gear, somebody's maiden aunt with a carnation corsage and blue hair. And Ferris.

'That man there,' I said, 'Tall, thin, glasses -'

'I got him.'

'Fetch him in here.'

Exhaust gas thick on the air as the door came open and I shifted over.

'Where we go now, man?'

Ferris said the Flamingo on 30th street and the driver pulled out and gave the cop the finger and I told him to turn up the radio nice and loud.

'It's two blocks from your place,' Ferris said, but I told him I'd need to move out because someone had searched my room at the hotel and I'd been tagged there from Proctor's in the storm.

'You've made contact already?'

'Yes. Or they have.'

Chapter 4: PATCHOULI

'While you were at Proctor's?'

'Yes.'

'He sent someone round to your hotel?'

'He could have. I phoned him when I left there, to say I was coming. No one else knows me here, and there was no tag from the airport when I got in.'

'No contact until you called on Proctor.'

'No. But I suppose Monck could have been blown.'

The light caught his glasses as he turned his head. 'No. He keeps his cover in the bank.'

Meaning that Monck was unblowable; so no one had got on to me from there. 'Then it was Proctor. Monck said he might have been turned.'

'Who by?' Ferris dropped a pair of new socks onto the bed. 'I do wish they'd get it right. Look at this, dogshit brown.' He was already half unpacked. We hadn't talked much in the taxi, even with the music. Ferris is impeccable with his security.

'I don't know. Anyone could've turned him, especially out here.'

He glanced at me again, a black shoe in his hand, brilliantly polished. 'Out here?'

'It wouldn't have to be anyone political. There are people here earning a million dollars a week running cocaine in from the south. A good sleeper with Proctor's communications could monitor the US Coastguard rather efficiently, and make a pile.'

'I see. Look at the polish on these bloody shoes, they think I'm Loman?' He had a soft, rather sibilant voice, like a snake shedding its skin. I wouldn't want to be whoever it was in Travel who'd packed his bag. 'All right,' he said, 'you know Proctor well. That's why they sent you out here. Would he be likely to bust his career for big money?'

'I can't say.' I got up to walk about, not near the window blinds: there was only meant to be one of us in here. 'He's changed. He's changed a lot.'

'Oh really.' He took a black leather toilet bag into the bathroom and came back, fingering his thin straw-coloured hair. 'Then who'd be sending the product in?'

'Possibly Cheyney. He -'

'But you don't mean turned.'

'I've been out here,' I said, 'for twenty-four hours and I talked to Proctor from ten till eleven tonight, thereabouts. I can't give you processed feedback.'

'I don't expect it. First we've got to beat the air.' He put a Kent brush on the dressing-table, setting it at a precise angle. They hadn't moved surface things in my room at the hotel but they hadn't remembered that the second drawer down in the bureau had been left half a centimetre open, for one thing.