Quiller KGB

'Entspannen, bitte, loslassen.'

I went as limp as I could. It was mainly the right shoulder, where I'd been thrown against the rear quarter of the Mercedes. The rest consisted of abrasions and wasn't serious, wasn't hampering.

The curtains were open and the glow from the floodlit Wall was on the ceiling, like the reflection of snow.

'I'll ask him, sir.' Louder, 'Morale?'

'Not very high,' I told him. 'We'll have to talk about that.'

I couldn't see his face from where I was lying on the massage table but he was quiet for a moment before he spoke again, repeating what I'd said to Shepley. A bruised shoulder and a few abrasions and the lingering effects of hypothermia didn't amount to anything major, considering how close I'd come, but the morale of the executive in the field is vital to his operation and if I couldn't deal with the angst it was quite likely that Shepley would pull me out and replace me before I endangered Quickstep and the critically sensitive Bureau-KGB relationship.

'Bleiben entspannen fur zehn Minuten, bitte.'

'Ja. Danke, Fraulein.'

'Bitte.'

I rolled off and went over to the bed and lay there while she folded the legs of the portable table and went lumbering out with it.

That bloody Audi: he'd have to explain that.

'Sir? No, the opponent was lost. Yes, I'll be getting a report for you. No, the only product amounted to a few words. There was — 'he broke off and listened and then said, 'Ash, can you take the phone?'

I sat up on the bed and he gave it to me.

'Executive.'

'What did you get out of him?'

This was going over scrambled: that man Binns had hooked up a T3 to the phone. 'He said the target is Gorbachev.'

'And that is all?'

'Yes.'

'Do you consider it was worth the consequences?'

He meant Skidder's death. 'It confirms who the target is and it's knocked out one of their hit-men.' I thought I was going to stop at that but the anger needed relief. I didn't raise my voice. 'If you think I should have got more out of him I'll remind you that we weren't sitting in a cosy interrogation room; we were up to our necks in freezing water and he didn't break easily.'

'I implied nothing. Have Cone come to the telephone again, will you?'

I passed it to him and tuned out what he was saying. It wasn't totally unlikely that Bureau One would order him to pull me out of the mission for mishandling the Skidder thing and letting it affect my morale.

'Something for us to work on,' Cone said, when he'd put the phone down. 'One of our sleepers out here got his wavelengths crossed with someone's transmitter and picked up Werneuchen Airforce Base as the site of a clandestine operation. Mr Shepley suggests you do some work on it.'

I opened my eyes. 'Volper's operation?'

'They don't know.'

'Werneuchen,' I said, 'is a bomber base.'

'See what you can find out. But I need your report before we do anything else. Feel up to it?'

I said yes and he got the recorder and put it on the edge of the bed and pulled his chair closer and switched the thing on and said, 'Report on terminal incident, DIF Cone, executive Quiller.' He gave the time and the date and sat back.

'The loss was unintended,' I said into the recorder. 'I had to judge how far to go with the subject, and how fast. This was difficult because there was very limited time and we were both feeling the onset of hypothermia.'

His blunt, heavy face bobbing at the surface of the water, his eyes not looking at me, though we were face to face.

'There was no personal element involved. It's my feeling that if I hadn't pressed him he would have lost consciousness before I got anything out of him at all. Or he would have gone on blocking.'

The weight of his body under my hands as we swayed together in that freezing river, both of us near death, thrown together like flotsam on the tide of circumstance and performing our little danse macabre to the tune of sirens in the night.

'I have no compunction. I feel no remorse.'

But I'm depressed, I tell you, I'm bloody depressed.

The compunction and remorse bit's always asked for in these reports because some of us can take a man's life like swatting a fly but others find it affecting their work, the mission, and they're often pulled out.

'The subject had been trying hard to kill me and that had been his intention; the trap had been set specifically to accomplish that. Hence no remorse. I regard it as having been in the day's work, but I admit to a feeling of depression and this is normal for me after a terminal incident.'

Words, words, oh my God words, it does matter when you cut down a human life and the fact that he was trying to wipe me out had got nothing to do with it. There was that awful sound, the gurgling, and that had got everything to do with it, the sound of someone drowning like a dog while I went on pushing him under and blocking the force of my natural instinct to save him.

'I contend that I got as much information as was possible in the circumstances, and that I didn't hasten the loss by poor judgement.'

Bullshit, but they wouldn't know that. All those snivelling bloody clerks want is what they call a clear picture, just give us a clear picture, told boy, can you, so they can peck it all down on their neat little keyboards and go home to their steak and kidney pudding and watch the telly, damn their eyes, do they really think you can give them a clear picture when you were up to your neck in a river and freezing to death and trying to decide just how much to put the fear of Christ in a man to make him squeal? They don't -

'Anything else?'

'What?'

'Is that all?'

'Yes.' A killing, nicely wrapped up. Oh my God how I hate bureaucrats.

'Did you look for any identification on him?'

'No. There wasn't time — the Vopos were coming.'

In a moment: 'How do you feel now?' But I noticed he switched the thing off before he said that.

'Bloody awful.'

Rather vague, yes. This man was my director in the field and it was his job to support, nurse and succour his executive, test him out at every major phase of the mission and decide whether he was still operational, still competent to go ahead, unaffected by fear, guilt, remorse or emotion of any kind. And if he thought fit, to warn London to pull him out.

'What sort of bloody awful?' Squinting at his nails.

It'd need time. I got off the bed and moved around, checking things out — pain in the shoulder but only when I moved it; other areas, left thigh, left shin, rib cage, where I'd been flung around on the back of the Mercedes; but nothing wrong with the feet or ankles: I could still run flat out if I had to and that's the first thing you worry about when you've come through the wrong end of the mangle — whether you can still run fast enough if you've got to.

'For one thing,' I said, 'I'm pissed off. Was that your Audi?'

'Which one?'

'I.ook, when I went to meet Pollock at Charlie's Club I checked the area very carefully and it was clean. So how did you know I'd gone into the river?'

'We don't use an Audi, as far as I know.'

'It was a blind?'

'It could have been.'

'So you did put a tag on me?'

'Yes.'

Gott straffe the bastard.

When the traffic conditions are too light for comfort in a vehicle-tag operation you can slip a third car in the middle with instructions to stay there until some innocent vehicle gets in between, and then peel off and come back when it's needed again. The object is to make sure there's always something between the tag and the target and that could've been why the Audi had gone down a sidestreet when the Fiat had come up, but it was academic now: Cone had said yes, he'd ordered someone in.