Quiller Salamander

'Bright green?'

'Yes, the bright green one. Quite small but more deadly than the cobra, even the king cobra. Some more wine?' She tilted the bottle, but I stopped her.

'No, it'll make me sleepy. I've got some work to do later.

She studied me for a moment. 'I cannot ever imagine you being sleepy. It would be quite out of character.'

The lamp began flickering and in a moment went out; below the window the streets had gone dark, and the lights on the ferry out there seemed brighter, reflecting across the black water.

'Is your husband in the media?' I asked Gabrielle. Tonight she'd changed from her paramilitary khaki into a simple white dress, with no jewellery except for the plain gold ring.

'I am a widow.'

Close as we were at the little table we could hardly sec each other now; we had become voices.

'For how long?' I asked her.

'Three years.'

'Did it happen out here?'

The silence went on for a little and then she said with a soft roughness in her voice, 'No. It happened in Paris, after we had been married only six months.' I wished now that I hadn't asked about him; I thought she was having to hold back tears, or wasn't managing.

'I'm sorry I — '

'It is quite all right. It helps, to talk about him, not to make him a secret.' Her English was so formal; I wished she'd use her native tongue: there was a need for its subtle nuances just at the moment. 'It was cancer. "An unromantic and ungallant way of departure," as he said. You can imagine how much I loved him.'

'And how much he loved you.'

The lamp and the lights in the street below began flickering, and we waited, both embarrassed, I think, by the tawdry intrusion. When the light steadied Gabrielle said with a rueful laugh, 'I didn't realize how bright it was, before.' Her eyes were glistening with the tears that hadn't come, and I switched off the lamp altogether.

'It is nice,' she said, 'like this.' We sat in the soft light rising from the street. 'You are sensitive, for a man of action.'

'A man of action?'

'Wasn't it you who saved the life of the Minister of Defence last night?'

This was why she seemed cautious this evening, wasn't sure now what kind of company she was keeping. In my copy of La Vie Cambodge they'd reported that shots were fired in the vicinity of Minister Leng Sim's automobile, but that 'a mysterious and fortuitous accident' enabled him to escape harm. A passenger in another vehicle died from his injuries.

Gabrielle was waiting.

'Not as far as I know,' I told her.

'Vraiment? But in the restaurant last night you asked one where the Pol Pot agent was sitting, and you asked me who the other man was, and I told you. Then when they both left there you went to make your telephone call.' She put her hand on my arm 'You can trust me you see, but I am not asking for your confidence if you do not wish to give it to me.'

She started to take her hand away, symbolically, I suppose, but I put mine over it and she didn't withdraw. 'It's not a question of that, Gabrielle. I know when I can trust people and when I can't.' It was, in point of fact, why I'd phoned her this evening: to find out more about Flockhart if I could, see if it looked all right to give him my trust at last, or at least some of it. Gabrielle had seen something of him when they'd met in Paris, but in London I'd only ever passed him sometimes in the corridors, seen him sometimes in the signals room, never spoken.

'And you believe,' her voice came softly in the shadows, 'that you can trust me?'

'Yes.' This was true: I can spot an actress fifteen miles from the footlights. What I didn't trust was what Flockhart might have put into her mind in Paris, because it could affect Salamander, and I didn't want to take this mission blindly into the dark. 'It's more a question of my becoming a danger to you,' I told her, 'the more you know about me. But for the record, yes, there was a hit of a dust-up in the street last night, and — '

'A dust-up — '

'Un fracas.' I went on in French now, because for secret reasons alone we didn't want tiny misunderstandings. 'And I preferred not to let the minister get shot. Rut there wasn't anything political in it. I mean on my part.'

'Very well, it was a "fortuitous accident", as it said In the paper. But if you are in Phnom Penh to take any kind of deliberate action against the Khmer Rouge, you should know that you are putting your head in the lion's den — '

'Mouth.'

'Pardon?'

'Never mind.'

She switched to French now too, taking the hint, and the stiff formality went out of her speech. 'Listen,' she said softly and quickly, 'it's just that if I don't try to make you understand what you're taking on, I might regret it later. I might regret it bitterly.'

Pringle had given me much the same kind of warning at the airport this afternoon: 'We acknowledge quite freely, of course, that the personal risk you'll be taking is very high. Very high indeed.'

I'd thought about that. 'You mean I'm expendable?'

He hadn't looked away. 'Let's say that if we didn't think you had a reasonable chance of pulling this one off, we wouldn't have offered it to you.'

'All right, but if I crash, are you going to replace me?'

He watched me steadily. 'For an operation like this, we believe you are irreplaceable.'

'So this is a one-shot thing?'

'I think you described it just now as "shit or bust". I can't hope to put it more accurately.'

I thought about that too, because this was another first: I'd taken over God knew how many missions when the executive in the field had crashed. I'd walked so many times in a dead man's shoes and every time I'd been sent out with a brand new mission I'd known perfectly well that if I came unstuck they'd shake the dice in London and send the next man in. This was a brand new mission but if I couldn't bring it home they'd write it off in the records: E'xecutive failed, mission abandoned,

It had never happened to me before, and it gave me a heady feeling of control, of identity. I wasn't working a mission I wasthe mission. I was Salamander.

Flockhart was breaking every rule in the book: he wanted me to operate with a single, unassisted control — himself — with no board opened in the signals room, no signals crew, no emergency supervision by Chief of Signals if a wheel came off, and no awareness, even, on the part of anyone else in the entire Bureau that there was a mission running at all. Just this isolated, ultra secret triumvirate operating in the shadows behind the scenes; control, a director in the field and the ferret. Correction, yes — the salamander.

The lights flickered again in the streets below the small high room, bringing me back to the present with a new thought flashing through my mind — I was trying to decide whether or not I could trust Flockhart, but for Flockhart to run this operation successfully on those terms he had to rely on me to honour his confidence. He had to trust me. Totally. And that was what he was doing now. He had no choice: I could pick up a phone and go through the government communications mast at Cheltenham and ask for Croder, Chief of Signals, and tell him that Flockhurt was running a rogue operation on his own and perhaps he ought to check it out, and Flockhart could be hauled upstairs to explain himself to those soulless ghouls in Administration and then get himself thrown into the street.

The lights steadied again and there was some shouting out there on the river; I think they'd got the ferry going again because there was a chugging noise coming across the water.

Another thought flashed across the dark and I caught it in time and looked it over, looked it over very carefully because so much depended on whether I got this thing straight or not, whether I went into the mission knowing everything I needed to know or risked crashing it through ignorance.