'Merde,' she said.
'Are you on the metropolitan flights?'
'No. I will be in Durban.'
She opened her eyes and looked at me for a minute and then curled her bare brown legs up on the seat and closed her eyes again and we didn't talk any more till we were rolling along the Promenade des Anglais, one motard still ahead of us and one behind. They'd taken us through most of the Corniche at a hundred kph and all we'd met were the La Turbie bus and a couple of deux chevaux but they'd used their hee-haws on sight and the indications seemed to be that London had sent a real phase-one priority to Interpol with the end result that these two anges de la route had been given instructions to get me through fire and water if it were necessary. It hadn't been necessary but they'd at least tried to show they were right on the ball in case any questions were asked later.
London doesn't normally fidget like that.
Marianne had an apartment in the Gustave V and I turned off the sea front and dropped her there, the rearguard motard following up and the front one meeting us from the opposite direction when he found out we'd made a deviation. She told me not to come up.
'All right,' I said.
She'd been quiet for most of the time since we'd left the Principality, because the Strobel thing was still on her mind. Also I think she'd been looking forward to the three days in we'd planned, and probably thought I should ring Paris and tell them I was down with the grippe or something; and that was what I would have done, if it had been Paris.
I got out of the Lancia and opened the little rusty iron gate of the Villa Madeleine, breaking another tendril of the morning glory that was twined round the hinges.
'Are you ever in Durban?' She gave a little moue and turned away and went up the tiled steps, finding the key in her bag; and when I was back in the car she'd gone, Marianne, with her slim brown legs and her smoky eyes and the way she made you feel it was the first time and never-coding.
Steadman had left a message at the desk saying he'd be in the Rotunda, and I saw him on the far side sitting alone at a table with a tray of tea. He looked at me over the cup.
'Took your time,' he said.
We went through the code-intro for the month, inter-national and unspecified, and he ordered me some tea.
'I had a fast police escort,' I said, 'what more do you want?'
He looked faintly surprised. 'I was just joking.'
He was a small man with sideboards and a huge tie and suede shoes and I wondered where they'd got him from. He wasn't Bureau. I looked around and saw it was all right: there aren't any bugs in the Rotunda at the Negresco and the dome doesn't throw any echoes because of the carpet and all those gilt-framed copies of Little Lord Fauntleroy.
'Where are you from?' I asked him, 'Liaison 9.'
That explained it: we call them the Wet Look. The thing is they spend their time liaising with the major services and therefore know a lot more than we do and we resent that Our only consolation is that we know one or two things they can never hope to get their hands on because they're filed in a heat-proof box with an all-eventualities cutout circuit and a bang-destruct and they'd never get near the thing, even if they took off their little suede shoes.
'All right,' I told him, 'what's the form?'
We spoke just above a whisper, because people could go past on the other side of the pillars to look at the onyx ashtrays in the display windows.
'There isn't any.'
He sipped.his tea, I didn't say anything. If I said anything it would get his back up and there wasn't any point in doing that because he wasn't anyone important: he was just a contact thrown in to early-warn the executive, that was all; and once the mission was set up they'd give me a first rank director in the field I'd have to live with and like it He'd have to be different from Steadman.
'You're on stand-by,' he said, and brushed his lips with the napkin.
'What phase?'
He gave a little laugh, displacing a lock of hair, 'Oh, it's nothing like that.'
Sometimes they try and shove a between-mission executive straight into a middle-phase or an end-phase assignment that's come unstuck and we all squeal like hell but never refuse it because we can hear the sound of distant bugles and we want to get in there where the bloodied banners are reeling through the fray. And there's another reason; we know there's always the chance that someone's managed to put most of an important mission in the bag before he caught a stray shot or hit a wall, so we can go in and tie up the end-phase and reach the objective and come out alive and take the glory for the poor bastard who couldn't quite make it-listen, if we weren't people like that we wouldn't be in this trade, work it out for yourself.
My tea came and when the boy had gone I said:
'Is it a mission?'
'It has all the earmarks, old boy.'
So he'd been getting the lingo wrong, that was alclass="underline" trust Liaison 9. He'd told me I was on stand-by and they only use that term when they want to throw you into the fire to look for the chestnuts and that's why I'd asked the obvious question, to find out what phase they'd got the thing running at. When you're down for a mission they don't put you on stand-by, they put you on call; and maybe it doesn't sound very different but it is: a full-scale mission is your very own little toy to play with and you take it very seriously indeed and that was how I was taking it now.
The nerves were on edge.
'What time are they, calling up?'
He sipped his tea.
'No special time.'
I sat back and looked at Little Lord Fauntleroy. Under the big glass dome of the Rotunda the silence was peculiar, made up of tiny sounds that ticked or scratched or bumped and then died away before you could place them; but they weren't the ones I was listening to. Up there on the far side of the Channel there were doors opening and closing along those dim-lit passages, and the gibberish was crackling through the static and out of the scramblers in Signals while a phone rang and was picked up and someone in Monitoring sent a memo to Egerton or Mildmay or Parkis and everyone waited for the word that would start this whole thing running. Somewhere in Beirut or The Hague or the Azores they were looking for the hole, and when they'd found the hole they were going to put the ferret down, and the ferret was me.
From where we sat in our plush chairs in this sepulchral calm we could hear the telephone, faintly, at the desk in the foyer. I listened to that sound, too.
'You must have some idea,' I told Steadman.
Sat cursing myself. Perfectly normal for the executive to be on edge when he's on call but we always try not to show it and we always try not to show it especially to little ticks like this one.
He looked at the shine on his nails.
'There's someone trying to get across.'
I sat forward an inch, 'Where from?'
'We don't know.'
'Oh for Christ's sake, you must know where the-'
Stopped.
He looked around him, terribly casual, hamming it. The executive is requested to keep his cool and not shout the place down so that strangers can hear.
'Correction,' he said blandly, his gaze passing across my face as if by accident 'For «we» don't know, read "I" don't know.'
He let three seconds go by and added gently: 'Possibly that's why they're going to phone.'
It was twenty-five past six and at ten past seven the little bastard got up and wandered about looking at the costume jewellery in the display window and the brass plates at the bottom of the picture frames and then came wandering back. I'd counted twenty-three calls to the desk out there, 'M'sieur Steadman?'
'What? Oh, yes.'
They never got used to their cover names.
'A telephone call for you.'
'Thanks.'
The waiter took him to the foyer and came back to get our trays.
'Vous avez termini, m'sieur?'
'Bien sur. Dites moi, il y a des nouvelles de ce pilote, Hans Strobel, a Monte Carle?'
His waxed eyebrows lifted slightly in a gesture of desolation.
'Il est mort. Dans l'ambulance, vous savez. Eh, oui.' The delicate porcelain tinkled as he stacked the cups, gilt and rosebuds and tea-leaves. 'Je crois que c'est le destin qu'ils cherchent, hein, ces types-la?'
'C'est possible.'
A fireball rolling along the guard rail. Death or glory, make up your mind because you can't have both.
I got up and went over to the line of windows, Cartier, Chanel, and then some Hermes scarves like the one Marianne was wearing, reminding me of the bars of sunlight and shadow thrown by those peeling Venetian blinds across the white carpet, across her gold body. But already she seemed a long time ago and in a distant place, because the moment you know they've sent for you it's like dropping over a brink and into a void, and the memory tends to blank off.
His reflection came against the window glass.
'What about a little stroll along the promenade?'
'All right.'
When we left the hotel I checked and got negative and checked again after we'd crossed the two roads to the sea front and got negative again and felt totally satisfied because anyone trying to tag us across that hellish traffic would never make it alive. He'd probably picked up some ticks in London because the Liaison 9 people can hardly avoid it: their routine travel pattern takes them from one intelligence base to the next and they're fair game, and when they board an aircraft for anywhere abroad they're liable to be overtaken by signals and find someone on the peep for them wherever they land. But he'd obviously flushed them, and I could believe he was clever at it because people like Steadman dislike human contact.
'It's for tomorrow morning,' he said.
'They can't do that.'
'I think they can, old boy.'
There was something wrong and I didn't like it because there just wasn't enough time to set me up overnight: they had to brief me and push me through Clearance and drop me into the target zone and set me running with everything I needed — communications, access channels, escape lines, so forth. And there wasn't enough time for that: I couldn't even make London before midnight unless there were a flight with a delay on it Then I saw I was missing the obvious, too bloody impatient to think straight. This was local.
'This chap's going into Istres,' he said, Local.
'You know where that is?' he asked me.
'Bouches du Rhone.'
'Yes. There's an airfield there. Have you got a Michelin 84 in your car?'
'I've got the whole set.'
'Well I never, they don't do that at Hertz.'
We stood for a minute watching the rollers breaking white across the stones, the spindrift catching the light of the tall Lamp-standards.
'His name is Milos Zarkovic, and he-'
'Name, or cover name?'
'What? I don't know. I'm just repeating what they told me on the phone, so please try not to interrupt, or I might forget something.' He gave a little smile with his chin tucked in. I'm only joking, of course. This chap is using a Pulmeister 101 single seat interceptor, which is apparently the longest-range machine he can pinch without anybody noticing too much.'
'Where's he coming from?'
'One of the satellite air force bases near Zagreb. Ostensibly he'll make for Madrid but the weather's going to take him off course slightly and he's going to run out of fuel and do a belly flop near the airfield at Istres.'
We reached one of the car park kiosks and turned back, walking slowly. He was very good: he'd checked the two men over by the rail and the one sitting on the bench reading Nice Matin and they hadn't made a move, 'How do I get him out of Istres?'
'That's up to you.' He glanced at me sharply. 'If you want any kind of backup laid on you'd better tell London right away. But they're expecting you to handle it solo. Up to you, as I say.'
I thought about it. London knew I didn't want any backup: I work solo or not at all and they know that; but there were things like communications and alternative action and the availability of a safe-house. The area around Istres was nearly all marshland and that made it perfect for the forced-landing cover story but Marseille was close and Marseille is one of the nerve centres for half a dozen major networks with permanent agents-in-place, and this was a daytime operation. It wouldn't be more than ten minutes before the first people showed up to the landing site, but I didn't have to get the aircraft away: all they wanted was Milos Zarkovic, 'All right,' I told him. They want him in London?'
'Yes.'
'How soon?'
'Soonest'
'Will he be carrying papers?'
'Oh yes. Yugoslavian passport. Communist Party membership, everything quite above board — I mean there won't be any trouble from the local police if you can manage to get him out of sight straight away, not till the news gets around that he's wanted in Yugers for pinching the plane. It's the spooks, you see, that you'll have to contend with; Marseille is rather like a fly-paper, as doubtless you're aware.'
We waited by the traffic lights and he pressed the button.
'What time is he coming in?'
'As soon as it's light enough for him to see the ground. The idea is that there won't be a lot of people about at that hour.'
'How far's the landing site from Istres?'
'I'm going to show you.'
The little green man flickered into life and we went across and opened the Lancia and got in and took Section 84 out of the glove compartment. He had a red felt pen in his hand.
'Just here, okay? A kilometre south of St-Martin-de-Crau.'
The place would be visible from the tower at Istres airfield through a pair of 7X50s but that wasn't critical because the minor road ran north and then west behind a low elevation and that was where I could lose people, 'All right,' I said.
'You want to recap?'
'No.' I wanted to find a phone and tell London they could screw the Pulmeister 101 and screw Milos Zarkovic because tins wasn't a mission they were handing me, it was a contact and escort operation and they could have used Coleman or Matthews or Johnson or anyone from the general facilities pooclass="underline" they didn't need a first-line shadow executive for this thing and they knew it. But I was between missions and not far along the coastline from Istres and they thought they'd save the expense of flying someone else out from London and risking the operation through lack of experience so they'd winkled me out and sent this little jerk to local-brief me and sell me the thing about 'handling it solo' to give it the look of a first-line penetration job.
His cologne was rather heavy and I folded the map and put it back with the others and got out of the car and stood watching an Air Force Boeing sliding down to the airport across the bay.
'You don't seem very happy, old boy.'
Screw Steadman too.
'If London wants this character, I'll bring him in.'