Quiller Salamander

I took him along to the small bleak coffee-shop where not too many people go because when it's raining the leak in the roof tends to flood most of the floor, making the place look like a sinking ship. I dropped the newspaper onto the table, the one I'd seen on the stands.

Pringle put his suitcase on a chair and ordered two soda kroch chhmars and sat back with his hands folded on his lap and gave me his steady gaze, a faint socially-pleasant smile on his mouth. He had the looks of a junior barrister, already adept at disarming a jury with a display of visible charm; but his cool grey eyes were watchful within the smile, and I was aware of being carefully appraised. That was all right; I expected to be. If we ever decided to start Salamander running we'd need to know each other as well as we could for the sake of the mission, perhaps for the sake of its executive's survival. But I didn't think we had a chance of starting anything running at all, with Pol Pot as the objective.

I was here, we may remember, simply by reason of vanity, and one of the problems with vanity is that it can be lethal.

'Mr Flockhart,' Pringle said in a moment, 'has briefed me that you feel your services would be inadequate for this particular mission. Is that right?'

'It's one way of putting it.' I didn't like his opening move: it was obviously intended to rile me.

'How would you put it?'

'I told Flockhart that if you want to stop Pol Pot you'll need a battalion. Forgive my stating the obvious.'

'It would depend on how it was done. And perhaps we should be wary of using names in public.'

There were only two Chinese in here, sitting in a far corner, and they'd been there when we'd come in and the rain drumming on the roof made perfect sound cover, so I'd thought it safe enough to drop the Pol Pot name to see if it bothered Pringle, I was glad it did: it should have. He'd run a few missions but he'd never been my DIF and I needed to know his standard in tradecraft.

'How d'you expect me to stop him,' I asked Pringle, 'without a battalion?'

'By gaining information about him for others to use.' He left it at that while the boy came up with his blue rubber flip-flops splashing across the floor and put our two sodas and half a lemon onto the table.

When he'd gone I asked Pringle, 'So the specific objective for the mission is information on that man?' Pol Pot.

He squeezed some lemon juice into my soda. 'That about right?'

I nodded.

'Yes,' he said, 'in the first instance.'

He was so bloody smooth, this man. 'I don't know how many times you've directed in the field,' I told him, 'but you can't have an objective for any mission in the first instance. The objective is the final goal, shit or bust.'

In a moment he squeezed some juice for himself and put the lemon carefully back into the little lotus-pattern ceramic bowl and looked up at me with his very open gaze and said, ' I directed Thurson in Switchblade, among others. I also directed MacKinley in Whiplash.'

'MacKinley's in a nursing home now.'

'But I got him back.'

I left it. They'd been two of the more notable missions, one in Moldavia and the other in Beijing, where the police had given MacKinley the works. But yes, if Pringle had run those two he wasn't a novice.

'If I decide to do anything here,' I told him, 'for Flockhart, I'd need a specific objective, no bullshit about first instances.'

Pringle picked carefully at the label on his soda bottle. 'This is an operation, you see, like no other. I'm sure that has become clear to you. You'll be responsible to one man alone: to Mr Flockhart. This means' — he looked up at last to get my reaction — 'that you won't have the usual bureaucratic red tape to worry about. Whatever you want — support, aircraft, smoke screens, money — you'll get immediately, since Mr Flockhart won't need to go through the normal formalities. We can promise you immediate attention.'

Watching me for my reaction, not seeing anything because in this trade you've got to keep it all behind the eyes, rage, fear, surprise, the emotions we're so familiar with after our first ten or eleven missions that we can deny them, blank them out on demand. But Pringle knew how very attractive he was making things sound, knew, I'm certain, that I don't suffer gladly those fools upstairs in Administration.

'So you must he prepared to play this one by ear. Your first objective is to gain information on that man. We don't think it's a lot to ask. You've operated in jungle terrain before and proved equal to its demands.'

'I'm a round-eye in a slant-eyed country.'

'There are quite a few of them here, what with the various Foreign Aid Services and Catholic missions and the remnants of the world media still hanging on. And you've got an impeccable cover.'

'I don't understand the Khmer language.'

'You've worked several missions without understanding the language — in Thailand, Czechoslovakia, as it then was, Tibet. Rather successfully.'

He'd done his homework. I thought it was time I put a question that had been on my mind since I'd talked to Flockhart in the Cellar Steps.

' The world in general,' I said, 'doesn't seem all that interested in a very minor state that's economically on its knees. There wasn't much help for Cambodia at the time of the Killing Fields — the rest of the world stood by and said what a bloody shame it was. So why is Flockhart interested in helping these people'?'

Another plane came in, shark-shaped through the dirty window panes, its lights colouring the rain out there. Our soda bottles vibrated on the iron table and the PA system began putting out its tinny message, first in Khmer, then in French: Flight 19 from Hanoi had arrived.

'I don't know,' Pringle said at last.

'If you knew, would you tell me?'

I think he would have liked to look down, or away, but didn't allow himself. The expression in his cool grey eyes was just shut off for an instant. 'If the progress of the mission demanded it.'

That could mean anything.

'Is it something personal, with Flockhart?' I wasn't letting it go, at least not yet. Because why had Flockhart been in such a seething rage when he'd talked to me in the Cellar Steps? Whose photograph was it on his desk, the one he'd thrown the papers over when I'd gone into his office? And why had he sent this very smooth operator here to pull me deeper into the quicksands?

'I don't know,' Pringle said again. 'Perhaps he simply wants to save Cambodia.'

I let it go. He wasn't being offensive, didn't believe I'd take him literally; it was just his way of telling me to shut up about Flockhart's motives — they were to remain under wraps.

The rain drummed on the roof, splashing around the broken tile and sending a constant trickle onto the concrete floor. The two Chinese over there had started playing mah-jong.

'Have you any other questions?' Pringle asked.

'Yes. Put yourself in my place for a minute. Why — '

'Questions concerning the mission.'

'I am the bloody mission! So put yourself in my place — why would you take on an operation that simply stinks of tricks before we've even got off the ground, that doesn't have official backing or a signals board or access to London except through a rogue control working on his own and for his own clandestine motives?'

The passengers from Flight 19 began straggling through the main hall past the doorway to the cafe.

'Because you gave Mr Flockhart your word,' Pringle said.

'I didn't have all the facts. I still don't.'

I needed time, that was all. If I took on this job the first of the lives that were going to be saved out here in this stinking hole was going to be my own, and that might prove difficult if Flockhart's intention was to throw me into a fire to see if I came out cooked. To use me, in other words, for his own purposes, and certainly not the Cambodians'.