Quiller Salamander

ADAM HALL Quiller Salamander

1: TARANTULA

The man came down the steps of the Hotel d'Alsace. He was alone.

He came straight across the sidewalk to his car without looking around him. There was another car standing in front of his, and a Pakistan Airlines minibus behind. There was nobody near him; nobody nearer, at least, than fifteen or twenty feet.

It was early morning, not long after first light, judging by the length of the shadows across the pink marble wall of the hotel.

The man reached his car and opened the door. and got in and the blast blew the roof off and the light was dazzling for a second or two and then there was a lot of redness in the middle of things and one of the man's arms went sailing across the sidewalk and a long shiny red tendril began streaming out of what was left of his body — presumably the large intestine — as he went on flying upwards, a leg coming off and starting to fall, turning over and over. Then the main part of his body came down too, and the smoke began clearing.

'Run it again,' Shatner said.

The man at the VCR put it into fast rewind and we waited.

Shatner was sitting on my left in a rickety deck-chair, not smoking but smelling of stale nicotine. The only other man in here apart from Shatner and the one working the VCR was Holmes. He hadn't said anything since we'd come in here, but then Holmes never says much anyway. Shatner was fidgeting with a pencil, wishing he could light up, I suppose, but in the screening room it's strictly verboten.

I still didn't know what they wanted me here for.

The tape hit the stop and began playing again, and the man came down the steps of the Hotel d'Alsace without looking around him.

'We want you to tell us,' Shatner said, 'if you think any of these other people in the picture look as if they're surveilling the DIF.'

Director in the field. His name was Fane, and he'd directed me once in Murmansk, had rigged a bomb like that one in a truck I was going to drive, did it on orders from Control in London because I'd become expendable, a danger to the mission. But I'd smelled the bloody thing out and my large intestine was still where it should be while his was snaking all over the video screen, a bit embarrassing for him when you think about it.

He came across to the car again but I wasn't interested in him now. There were seven people in the frame apart from Fane: three Europeans standing together talking, identical suits, identical briefcases, two bearded Hindus shading their eyes and looking down the street for a taxi, and a woman in white holding a rose and waving to someone in a car just leaving, apres tout, c'est Paris. And the man reading a paper.

Kerboom.

'They must have all been killed,' I told Shatner. The screen had been going blank a couple of seconds after Fane's leg began coming down, but the blast had obviously started to reach the other people.

'Yes,' Shatner said, and tugged at his rumpled trousers, a nervous habit I'd noticed in him before — he'd been my control for Solitaire. 'They were all killed. We're working, you see, with nothing much to go on. We want to know who placed the bomb. It obviously wasn't one of the people in the picture, but we just thought one of them might have been surveilling him, not knowing the car was hot.'

The rickety chair creaked as he shifted his weight. The screen went blank again and the operator hit the rewind button. 'All we can hope for,' Shatner said, 'is to find a recognizable face and try to trace things from there.'

The tape was running again, and after a bit I said, 'The man with the paper. Just a possibility, that's all. No one — ' 'I wondered.'

'Right. No one else.'

'Freeze it,' Shatner told the operator. 'Then make a still and we'll blow it up and send it to the field to work on.'

'Good luck,' I said.

He turned to me then, and I saw the worry in his eyes. 'Yes,quite. He's standing in profile, isn't he, and the picture's foggy. But we've got to try.'

His worry was understandable. We've only lost two directors in the field — including this one — during the whole of my time with the Bureau, compared with God knows how many executives. The DIFs don't take an active role in a mission; they just hole up somewhere safe, usually a hotel, and direct things from there, keeping the executive in signals with London. The only other time we lost a director was when his executive blew him to the opposition under interrogation, the sin of sins: we're expected to pop our capsule if we can't trust ourselves, before things get too rough.

Now there was Fane, and the same thing could have happened. I said, not looking at Shatner, 'You're the control for this one?'

'Yes.' The way he said it, I wished I hadn't asked.

'Do it again?' The operator was rewinding.

Shatner looked at me and I shook my head and he told the man no, and we got up and Holmes switched the light on.

'I appreciate your time,' Shatner said, and pushed his deck-chair against the wall.

'Anything else I can do?'

'No.'

'Who's the executive?'

'Kearns.'

'He's out there now?' In the field.

'No.'

As we left the screening room I said, 'He was doing a routine check, was he, the cameraman?' Sometimes the support people in the field run some film over the DIF's base as he goes in or comes out, to make sure there's no surveillance on him. The DIF is the queen bee of the mission, protected and held precious.

'Yes,' Shatner said. 'Of course he'd no idea what was going to happen.'

'So where's Kearns?'

We stood together in the corridor, the three of us. Shatner was obviously finished with me and wanted to go. Holmes was just hanging around, I didn't know why. I'd been called in simply to give an opinion, as a seasoned shadow executive who spends his whole life watching to see if he's being followed or surveilled.

'Kearns,' Shatner said, 'is still here in London.' He was fumbling in his worn tweed jacket for a cigarette.

'The DIF was sent out ahead of him?'

I felt Holmes touch my sleeve, but didn't take any notice: I'd been inactive for six weeks and the nerves were getting a bit strung out. I needed a mission, would steal one if necessary.

'Yes,' Shatner said, and looked at his battered wrist-watch.

'Why don't you send me out,' I asked him, 'now this has happened?' Kearns wasn't a senior shadow, would have his own nerves on edge now that his intended DIF had been blown all over the front of the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris.

Holmes touched my arm again, and this time I looked at him and got the message in the dark of his steady eyes.

'Oh,' Shatner said, 'I don't really know what's going to happen next. We might call the whole thing off.' He ducked his shaggy head and went hurrying along the corridor before I could say anything else.

'Spot of tea?' Holmes asked me.

'Not in the Caff.'

'Why not?'

'I've seen enough of that bloody place in the last six weeks.'

'Let's go and see a little more,' he said gently. I suppose Holmes knows better than anyone in this beleaguered backwater of the keyhole game that I can be led but not driven.

There were three other people in the Caff, a couple of them wearing club ties — down here from Administration to show how terribly democratic the Bureau is — and Kearns, sitting alone in a far corner staring into his teacup, legs crossed and one foot swinging the whole time, understandably. He hadn't looked up when we came in; I don't think he would have looked up if a herd of buffalo had come through.the door; all he could see was his very own director in the field going through the roof of his car — they would have shown him the tape, of course.

'Bun?' Holmes asked me.

'Are you serious?' They're like overdone concrete in this bloody hole.

'Tea, then,' Holmes said courteously, and signalled to Daisy. This man's courtesy is one of his many strengths, and guaranteed to drive you up the wall at times when you're ready to strangle the first person who's got the nerve to say good morning.