Quiller Salamander

'What has happened?' Gabrielle asked me in French; she'd remembered my preference.

'There's something I need your help with.' I reached across her and pulled the Sony out of the glove pocket. There was garlic on her breath, suddenly reminding me I was starving, hadn't eaten since early this morning; it was now nearly midnight. There was also a bush fire going on in my right shoulder, touched off by all those aikido rolls. 'I know you speak Khmer,' I told Gabrielle, 'but exactly how fluent are you?'

'Perfectly fluent.'

'Fair enough.' So at least we had a chance; I'd fast-forwarded the tape a couple of times while I'd been waiting for her, and things hadn't sounded too good: I'd known a mike this size would have to be moved in close to the source to pick up anything well and I'd tried to do that on the balcony of the villa, but it still hadn't been close enough: the voices were so faint that I couldn't have told what the language was if I hadn't already known. There were also squelchy patches of white sound, possibly because the heat in this place had got at the cassette.

'How was your day?' I asked Gabrielle as I ran back the tape.

'Okay. Yours?'

'Okay.' I raked around in the glove pocket but couldn't find anything. 'Have you got a pad I can use?'

'This.' She pulled out a small sketching-block from her bag. 'Will a pencil do?'

'Fine.'

'What will I be listening to?'

'Voices.'

Lights washed across the side of the wharf and I tilted both the sun visors down.

'Are you expecting anyone?' Gabrielle asked. That is an exact translation, and I think she was mimicking the kind of dialogue you find in private eye novels, just for fun.

'If I were expecting anyone, you wouldn't be here.' The lights fanned across the river and then swung full circle and were swallowed by the wharves.

'I can look after myself,' Gabrielle said.

'Of course. But you've got enough on your plate already, tiptoeing through the trip mines all day.' I hadn't wanted to bring her out tonight, but the stuff on this tape might give me a breakthrough if she could make out what any of the voices were saying.

I pressed the start button.

Light from a tall goose-neck lamp on the ferry station was bouncing softly off the clapboard wall of the wharf, faint and diffused but enough to guide my hand across the sketching-block — it had to be, because I couldn't use the dashboard lamp without switching on the parking lights and I wasn't going to do that.

The voices began coming in and I rolled the volume higher, but it brought up the background too, and I rolled it back.

They sounded so bloody faint.

So I should have gone closer, yes, closer still, if the trick had been worth pulling at all.

You went too close as it was. You could have -

Perfectly right.

It's happened before. You work out a good trick and you calculate the odds and they look okay — or put it this way, they don't look actually lethal — so you gird up the loins and put the turn-screw on the nerves till they're as tight as harp-strings and you go in with at least the thought that if something goes wrong and you end up spreadeagled across enemy terrain with a shot in the spine or a knife in the throat it won't have been your fault, it will simply have been a calculated risk that turned suddenly into a certainty, a dead certainty, finito.

She wasn't getting anything, Gabrielle, the voices were too faint.

And then afterwards, when you've got away with it, you look back and suddenly know that you were out of your mind even to think of going in at all, that the risk was too high, appallingly high, and all that had sent you in had been an overweening faith in your own abilities, blinding you from the start. And you were lucky, just plumb lucky, to have survived.

But you can't run a mission on luck.

I was sitting here sweating now; I hadn't wanted to think about this, it had just come and hit me in the face because I'd not only put myself in extreme and inexcusable hazard but I'd done it for nothing, I knew that now, because that's what we were getting from the Sony as we sat here listening- nothing, just the squelch from a flawed tape and a drone of voices so faint that even Gabrielle, fluent in the language, wasn't picking anything up to give me.

Contact Pringle and debrief, wouldn't take long, would it, Am still alive, have a nice day.

No actual information, let's not be too ambitious.

'They are to remain patient,' Gabrielle said.

'What?'

There was a faint barking now from the Sony, just as I'd heard it at the villa. This was the voice that had started to come through.

'They want to do something,' Gabrielle said, 'but he's telling them to wait, to be patient.'

I hit the stop button and rewound for five seconds. 'To do what, exactly?'

'I couldn't hear. I'm not even sure about this — I'm having to fill in the gaps. But the word «patient» is definitely there.'

I switched to play and she listened again while I watched the moonlight glinting along the river like a drawn blade. The barking began again and I looked at Gabrielle but she was shaking her head slowly.

'It wasn't any better. But some of them want to act in some way, and this man won't let them, at least not yet. He's in authority.'

'You're not getting any names?'

'No.'

I let the tape run on, sliding lower against the seat-back, scanning the wharfside, the ferry station, the river. Light had washed across the far end of the wharf a couple of times from the main street as a police patrol had passed, a police patrol or perhaps a military vehicle: there wouldn't be much other traffic n this city now because of the curfew.

'He is a colonel,' Gabrielle said in a little while.

'The one with the bark?'

'Yes.'

'Name?'

'I don't know.'

'Shall I run it back?'

'No.' She angled the Sony nearer her on the arm-rest and hit the stop button. 'If I need to, I'll do it myself.' With her head turned to watch me: 'How close were you to these people?'

'Not close enough.'

'They sound like agents of the Khmer Rouge. You knew that?'

'Of course.'

She gave a little shrug and pressed the play button again.

I left it to her now, and she stopped the tape three or four times and rewound, replayed, stopped it again, rolling the volume up sometimes, rolling it down when the colonel's voice came in, getting rid of the background whenever she could, and after fifteen minutes she switched the thing off.

'This is the gist of what I'm getting so far. The man in authority is Colonel Choen. He is visiting the Phnom Penh cell of the Khmer Rouge in order to give its agents their latest orders from General Kheng San.'

I remembered the man in the photograph I'd seen on the wall of the villa, his name below it, a general's insignia on his battledress.

Have you heard of him?' I asked Gabrielle.

'General Kheng? No.' She waited for another question but I left it. 'The local cell appears excited about something they're planning to do in Phnom Penh — or something they've been ordered to do. But Colonel Choen is telling them to hold on, to wait for the right time. This is the gist, as I've said, and I'm trying hard not to jump to conclusions of my own.'

'I understand that.' It wasn't easy for her: given a snatched word here and there, and her imagination would start inventing scenarios, and that would amount to unintended disinformation, could take us dangerously off track. 'Have you done any intelligence work before?' I asked her.

She turned her head. 'No.'

'You're a natural.'