Quiller Barracuda

'Yes,' Ferris told him, then looked at me. 'When you phoned for us to bring you in, you sounded in a bad way. What had happened?'

It was like thinking back through a veil, having to reach for the past. 'Nothing.'

'But you sounded dead beat.' Amber eyes watching me.

'Thank you.' I drank the whole tumbler straight off. It tasted odd.

'Did I? It tastes a bit odd,' I told Alvarez.

'Everything will, for a little while. Your body chemistry has to adjust. There was a great deal of adrenaline in the system, and then there was the Valium. I'm so pleased,' he said, 'to see you in such good shape.'

'Thank you.' I got off the couch and found a chair and dropped into it. Purdom, the top-echelon shadow, got up and went across to the decanter and filled my glass again, which I thought was nice of him. 'Yes,' I told Ferris, 'I was dead beat, that's absolutely right. I was fighting something off.'

'And you won.' Alvarez, at the desk again, his feet on it. 'But it left your reserves critically depleted.'

Ferris asked: 'Fighting what off?'

It meant going back, and it frightened me. I had never known such a force applied against me, such dominance. 'I – I'd been told to go there, and I knew I shouldn't. But I had to. Kind of – compulsion.'

Upjohn came back from the phone and couldn't find a chair; I think I was sitting in it now. 'You did well,' Alvarez said, still pleased. 'Others would not have resisted.'

'You've no idea how strong it was. The compulsion.'

'Oh, but I have. It was so strong that your resistance left you "dead beat", to the point where you couldn't resist any further. When you were asked why you left the hotel covertly, you lost consciousness rather than explain.' The intercom on his desk began ringing. 'It was a remarkable manifestation.'

He picked up the phone. 'Si, mi querida?'

Ferris got up and dragged the carved oak chair closer to mine and sat down again with his pad. 'You also said, when you were coming out from under, Those are your instructions. Do you remember that?'

'Todavia no. Es una emergencia.'

'Yes. I was following instructions.'

'Don't worry,' Ferris said.

I'd started shaking, hadn't thought it showed. More water.

'Date vuelta y duermete, mi querida.'

Alvarez put the phone down. Ferris asked me quietly:

'Where did they come from? The instructions'

'I don't know, damn you, I don't know.'

They all brought their heads up. It had sounded very loud. Alvarez hadn't moved. Perhaps I'd woken his wife, upstairs, shouting like this: he'd just told her on the phone it was an emergency case. I had to get control.

Alvarez said to Ferris, 'He really doesn't know, you must understand. It's very frustrating for him.'

Ferris was watching me. 'Don't worry. Take your time.'

'We haven't got any time.'

The mission had been running only forty-eight hours and Proctor had gone to ground and the opposition had put the executive into the cross-hairs and got right inside his mind and left instructions there and I'd come appallingly close to walking straight into a trap. There wasn't a chance to -

Run that through again.

'Ferris,' I said, 'there's something that doesn't match. They wouldn't go for me with a hit and get inside my head with subliminal instructions at the same time.' Ferris was making notes. 'They wouldn't have told me to go to that address if they didn't mean it. They'd set it up as a trap, and I couldn't walk into it if I'd been shot dead first.'

Upjohn said, 'Unless you were given the instructions after they'd failed with the hit.'

'What? No, I was given them before we were back in harbour. Before the shooting.'

Ferris asked quickly – 'How do you know when?'

'Because of her breasts.' Straight from the subconscious.

He tilted his head. 'Say again?'

Alvarez was leaning forward now.

'When I was coming to, I had visual impressions of the girl on the boat, Harvester. But I don't – '

'There was a voice,' Alvarez said, 'overlying the visual impressions?'

Feeling of panic suddenly. I reached for the glass and drank, hand not quite steady, did they notice? 'Yes, the voice was in the background. She was talking, too, but in the foreground.'

Panic because it had just occurred to me that there could be other instructions still inside my head, like a worm in an apple.

'There was music?' Alvarez. 'A radio playing?'

'No.'

Purdom looked across at him. 'It could be radionic. Remote beamed.'

'At what distance?' I asked him.

'I'm not too conversant.'

'I'll talk to Parks,' Ferris said. He was the electronics man who'd checked Proctor's flat for bugs.

'There was a launch,' I said, and told him about the field glasses. 'It followed us into harbour.'

'Noted. But this inconsistency – they wouldn't have put those instructions into your head and then put you under that gun.'

Upjohn said, 'Be unwise to assume it was the same cell. I mean the whole thing's open, isn't it? The drug scene's very big here – eighty per cent of the cocaine used in the States comes in from Cuba, a lot of it by sea. The Harvester girl could be running stuff herself or for one of the cartels. They might've thought you were an undercover man for the Coast Guard or something, bang bang. Happens all the time.'

'Do you think she's in drugs?' Ferris.

'Christ,' I said, 'I wouldn't know. If – '

'She's American?'

'English.'

He turned the top sheet of his pad over and said, 'All right, can you take a debriefing on Harvester?'

'Yes.'

It took forty minutes, because there was a lot of materiaclass="underline" her relationship with Proctor and her present feelings about him – he's trash – and the phone call she'd overheard and everything we'd said on the boat and of course the points Ferris picked on:

'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.