Quiller Salamander

'Were you coming to see me?'

His face was square, bland, expressionless. 'Not actually,' I said. 'I thought Loman might be with you.' Loman had left here an hour ago.

'I haven't seen him.' Flockhart studied me with faint interest. ,No luck yet?'

'No.' He knew I was looking for a job; everyone did.

He wasn't moving on, was still watching me. 'Have you eaten yet?'

'No.'

'Come and have some macaroni.' He turned towards the stairs, and I followed.

It was a ten-minute walk through fine drizzle to a pasta place called the Cellar Steps, a basement room with red checked tablecloths and a mural of the Colosseum in Rome and one or two ceiling fans stirring the smell of garlic around. Flockhart chose a comer table under a signed framed photograph of Sophia Loren with an arm round the proprietor, Luigi Francesco.

There weren't many people here: the theatres had gone in ten minutes ago and half London had gone home.

We chose linguini.

'So how long has it been since you came back?'

'Six weeks,' I said.

'Care for some wine?' I shook my head. 'Six weeks is a long time, for someone like you.' He sat watching me, his face a mask, his eyes attentive.

'Someone like me?'

'You like to keep up the pace, from what I hear.'

'Lose momentum and you've got to deal with inertia.'

'How very true.' He broke some bread, looking past me, nodding to someone. I couldn't see who it was. 'Let's see, you were on Solitaire, weren't you?'

I didn't care for the 'Let's see' bit; it was meant to sound casual, and didn't. Everyone at the Bureau knew damned well I'd been on Solitaire: it had ended with quite a bang.

'Yes,' I said.

'Thought so. Who directed you in the field on that one?'

'Cone.' I waited. If Flockhart knew his facts about that mission he wouldn't let it go.

'Cone, that's right.' He dug some butter for his roll, and the light of the little red-shaded lamp on the table reflected off his knife, flashing across his eyes. He was looking down, busy. 'But wasn't Thrower directing you at first?'

He knew his facts, yes, and wasn't letting it go.

'At first,' I said.

A faint smile came, put on for the occasion. 'Not often we see two directors in the field on one mission. What happened?'

I could smell the dampness on my jacket left by the drizzle, was aware of the heated exchange of Italian going on behind the doors to the kitchen. My senses were tuned, alerted, because this man Flockhart was putting a probe into me, and I didn't know why. But of course he hadn't asked me to join him down here to discuss the cricket scores.

'What happened,' I told him, 'was that Thrower wanted to do things his way and I wanted to do things mine.'

He put his knife down carefully. 'So you had him replaced, is that it?'

'Yes.'

'In the middle of the mission?'

'Pretty well.'

'And Bureau One agreed to do it, is that right?'

'Yes.' Bureau One was the head of the whole organization.

'So you must have had good cause.'

' I had good cause whether Bureau One agreed with it or not.'

He took it easily enough, but looked down quickly. In Berlin I'd demanded the immediate attention of Bureau One to get rid of Thrower, and it had meant waking him up at two in the morning in Washington; it was the closest I've ever come to being thrown out on my neck.

'Linguini Francesco for the gentlemen,' and there was Luigi himself with the dishes, lowering them to the table with a flourish. 'But no wine? I have some Chianti Risadori that arrived — '

'We're working, Luigi,' Flockhart said, and this time the smile had surprising charm. 'Perhaps later.'

'There is time for work and there is time for Chianti Risadori,' Luigi said with nicely feigned indignation, and went away folding his serviette with another flourish.

'You get on well, normally,' Flockhart was asking, 'with your controls and your directors in the field?' I didn't answer right away, and he said, 'I hope you don't mind if we dispense with small talk while we're eating?'

'Not my language.'

'Jolly good.' He waited for my answer.

'I get on well if they're effective and don't try to bitch me about. Croder knows that, so does Loman.'

'You've crossed swords, is that it?' Offered with a slight smile, but not the charming one. It was the smile, bearing in mind what Holmes had said, on the face of the tarantula.

'We understand each other. I probably respect Croder more than any other control, and not just because he's Chief of Signals.'

Flockhart moved the shaker of parmesan towards me. 'How is the linguini?'

'First class.'

'Croder, yes, is quite formidable, isn't he, in terms of effectiveness. What about Loman?'

'He's effective,' I said. 'He ran me well in Singapore.'

'But?'

'I think it's the bow tie.'

Flockhart actually laughed. 'The bow tie, yes, I know what you mean. What about Pepperidge? Ferris?'

'Both impeccable. They could take me through.hell and back.' Had done so, in a way, and more than once.

'You know Pepperidge lost his sister, do you?'

'Yes.' I'd met her at his little house in Hampstead, a pretty woman with gaunt eyes and sallow skin, dying of cancer as gracefully as she could.

'What about Pringle?'

'He's never directed me.'

'Less experienced, perhaps,' Flockhart said in a moment, 'than the directors you're used to.'

'I don't know. Bit young, isn't he?' I'd only run into Pringle a couple of times in the signals room. 'Wasn't he on Switchblade?'

'He was,' Flockhart said, 'and he brought it home rather well. Pringle is young, yes, but he has style.' He was watching me intently now. 'Which is something you'd understand, I rather think.'

'Who was his control on that one?'

'I was.'

He looked past me as some people came down the steps, and I watched his face as he carefully checked them out. Quite a few of Luigi's clientele are spooks of some sort from DI5 and DI6, and some of our own people come down here.

I wasn't ready to think that this man Flockhart had a mission for me but it looked as if it could be on the cards: what he'd actually been asking me since we'd come down those steps was: How difficult are you to control in the field? And if you think I ought to have been blowing my fuses at the thought of a new mission after six weeks of wearing my bloody shoes out along those dreary corridors the reason is quite simple. I had a question of my own: Did I want to work for a tarantula?

Flockhart had finished checking out the people who had just come in, and was watching me again as I put my fork down and pushed my plate away an inch and sat watching him back.

'The thing is,' he said in a moment, 'I need someone to go and take a look at certain things in Cambodia for me.'

I waited. It was obvious I'd want to know more than that.

Someone gave a sudden laugh behind me, and I recognized it. It was Corbyn, that bloody fool in DI5. He was one of the people who'd just come in, and that was the first of the series of laughs we were going to hear at regular three-minute intervals if we stayed long enough: Corbyn treats counter-espionage as some sort of tiddlywinks, absolutely ripping fun.

Then Flockhart said, 'It's the sort of thing I wouldn't ask just anyone to take on.' He pushed his own plate away. 'It requires a rather high degree of discretion.'

That threw me. The Bureau is a strictly underground outfit that doesn't officially exist: we answer directly to the prime minister without going through those hysterical clowns at the Foreign Office, and one of the reasons for this is to give us the freedom to do things that no one else is allowed to do, and I'll say no more. And if that doesn't already require 'a rather high degree of discretion' then what in God's name does?