Not surveillance, then. They were running a hit.
I was still forty or fifty yards behind the Zhiguli and the distance was increasing now because it was gunning up suddenly with a squeal from the rear tyres to close on the minister's car and I did the same with the Peugeot and felt it shift through the gears and hit what speed it could with the throttle wide open and the rear wheels whimpering as we shortened the distance and the Zhiguli pulled out to overtake the minister's car to give the agent a steady target at close range.
I was right behind the Zhiguli by now and took the Peugeot to the offside and swung in again and rammed the rear quarter of he Zhiguli and sent it skewing and rammed it again as the driver over-corrected and lost control and tried to get it back in a rag-tag action to kill the momentum but didn't manage it, lost the whole thing and hit the kerb and bounced once and rolled as a burst of shots came and some glass flew into a glittering kaleidoscope as the Zhiguli skated on its roof until it smashed against a wall and ended its run.
The minister's car was in the distance now and I let it go and gunned up again and took the first side street to get my rear number plate out of sight. I didn't know whether the agent had tried to make a last-chance hit with that burst of fire or whether he'd triggered it by accident while the Zhiguli was doing its loop, but anyway I wasn't all that interested, the thing now was to get clear of the scene.
It was just gone one o'clock in the morning here in Phnom Penh when I telephoned Flockhart.
I'd driven the Peugeot ten kilometres out of the city and left it on a smashed vehicle dump and ripped the number plates off and dropped them into the river and got a lift back in a Foreign Aid Service jeep. The police might take the trouble to look for a recently-damaged car in the morning if one or both of those people in the Zhiguli had finished up in a hospital, so I didn't want to leave the Peugeot standing outside the Royal Palace Hotel and I didn't want to take it back to the auto-rental because they'd want to know why the front end was smashed in.
The line opened and I heard Flockhart's voice.
'Yes?'
'Salamander.'
'Good evening.'
In London it was still six o'clock yesterday. The call had only taken a couple of minutes to put through because we were going via the Intersputnik satellite link-up in Moscow.
I told Flockhart, 'I'm pulling out.'
In a moment: 'Why is that?'
'You'd need a whole battalion, you know that.'
It wasn't only because he wanted me to operate out here in total isolation, unknown even to the local agents-in-place, that he'd asked Gabrielle Bouchard to meet me and ‘settle me in’.
He'd also known she was a fierce supporter of the Cambodian people and would tell me what was on her mind, exposing me to the mood of terror that was leaving this city numbed. And him message was quite clear: the objective for the mission was the leader of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla forces, Pol Pot.
Flockhart was off his bloody rocker.
He didn't comment on what I'd just said about needing a battalion; he just asked me, 'How are things out there at the moment?'
'Fairly quiet.' This was an open line but we weren't using speech-code, just not dropping names. 'Power station's up the pole, that's all, and we've had a bit of rain.'
I didn't mention the brush with the Zhiguli. I didn't want hint to know I'd done anything at all against the Khmer Rouge since I'd got here, even en passant. It wasn't my job, wasn't in any case a job, God only knew, for one man.
'How was your evening?' Flockhart asked next.
His tone was quiet, his questions riddled with innocent didn't trust him, I tell you I did not trust this man.
'Delightful.'
'A rather attractive young lady,' he said. 'I wanted you to start enjoying things as soon as you got there.'
Bullshit.
When the silence had gone on for a bit he said smoothy; 'Our friend is on his way out there as we speak. Would you feel like meeting him when he lands? I told you he'd contact you when he arrived, but it's been difficult to fix up transport.' He meant Pringlc, of course.
'I'll be gone,' I said, 'by then,' The next long-haul flight wouldn’t be in until the afternoon.
There were voices in the corridor outside my room, and I watched the thin line of light below the bottom of the door. It was dark in here; I'd pulled the shutters back and opened the window on the warm night air.
'Surely,' I heard Flockhart saying, 'you wouldn't object to amusing yourself for a few hours more, now that you're there. I'd rather like you to listen to what our good friend has to say — I really think you'd be interested.'
The voices loudened outside the room and shadows moved across the line of light; then things were quiet again and a door opened somewhere farther along. I was perfectly secure here; I'd come into Phnom Penh under impeccable cover and there'd been no witnesses to the Zhiguli thing, none, anyway, who could have got a good look at my face inside the car.
'Is our friend,' I asked Flockhart, 'bringing a battalion for me?'
It sounded like gentle laughter on the line, a sound designed to assure me that he knew I was joking. 'Wouldn't it be frustrating for you,' he said, 'to come all the way home and have me prove to you that you'd missed the chance of a lifetime?' His tone was silky, more dangerous than steel. He could have reminded me that I'd undertaken a mission for him and that he wasn't going to have me backing out before I'd even started. But that wasn't how he was going to play me, and I sensed he'd done an awful lot of clandestine research in the Bureau files on my track record and personality profile after we'd parted company in the Cellar Steps that night.
The chance of a lifetime. Oh, the bastard, he'd got me rising to the fly. The chance of a lifetime for an active shadow executive means the chance of bringing home a mission that will go down in the archives of the Bureau as one of the really momentous operations in its history, a model for all others to come, the equivalent, if you like, of the Nobel Prize, except of course that no whisper of it would ever pass through the walls of that phantom fortress of intelligence in Whitehall. He was appealing, Flockhart — as they all do, those bloody controls — to my vanity.
In a moment I asked him, 'What flight?'
He affected surprise, didn't miss a trick. 'He'll be covering the final leg with Lao Aviation from Saigon, Flight 47. The ETA is 18:53, local time.'
I said I'd be there.
The Antonov AN-24 hit the runway in heavy rain, bouncing a lot and settling in its run with its lights flashing in the haze and the blast of its reverse thrust booming back from the terminal building.
Pringle had only one bag and went straight into Customs and Immigration without going through the baggage claim. They only kept him twenty minutes so he must have been swinging a lot more clout than I had — it had taken me an hour yesterday — and this didn't endear him to me. But then, the director in the field is expected to wield the maximum clout available, and it has sometimes saved the executive's hide for him and brought him back alive. It was simply that nothing about Pringle was likely to endear him to me, because he was working for the smoothest con-man in the business, and if I didn't love Flockhart I could hardly love his dog.
'It's good to see you,' Pringle said as he came into the main hall. 'I hope I didn't keep you waiting too long.'
He wanted to shake hands and I obliged; he was young and of the new school, liked conducting the social side of the business as if it were a cocktail party, even though the social side of this clandestine trade is traditionally comparable with the scene in an underground lavatory, where the glance is carefully averted on the understanding that nobody else down here actually exists.