'Interim debriefing,' I said, 'who wants me?'
He looked up with a swing of his big square head. I didn't know his name because in the Bureau we never know the names of people below active rank because it isn't necessary; as a matter of fact we don't know anybody's name at all, Because they're just convenient labels thought up in Personnel. The Bureau doesn't exist, and that allows it to take on operations that no one else wants to be seen dead with: and that's not a bad metaphor. The intelligence lords on the lop floor run the place as if it were a secret munitions ship moving at dead slow through a minefield by night: they like there to be a hush over everything, a permanent blackout, reducing to a calculated minimum the risk of an odd spark sending the whole outfit into Kingdom Come, 'Where from, sir?' the big man asked me.
'Istres, south of France.'
'Ah, yes.' He checked the board that would tell him which mission I was on, and who was running it. He didn't find anything because no one had given me a mission yet, so he opened a drawer and moved his colourless eyes twice from left to right.
'Room 6,' he said and shut the drawer. 'Just let me tell him you're here.' He picked up a phone.
They've put numbers on some of the doors now; their lordships went a bit too far in the beginning, when even the doors had to be anonymous; it had worked up to a point but there'd been a couple of cases where a visitor had wandered into Codes and Cyphers without an escort, scaring the daylights out of us all; and they kept having to haul Thompson out of the Ladies, though God knows what he was doing in there because most of the ladies at the Bureau have brogues and rimless bifocals.
'Yes sir,' the big man said into the phone and put it down and looked at me. 'Would you care to wait five minutes?'
'All right.'
So it wasn't going to be Parkis, and it wasn't going to be Egerton. Parkis always keeps the executives waiting for half an hour because he's paranoid on the subject of status; and Egerton is too courteous to keep anyone waiting, though it comes to the same thing in the end because no one can ever find him.
'How did it go?' the big man asked.
'Got a negative.'
'Ah.' He eyed me without looking at me, in the way ex-Scotland Yard men have learned, but he couldn't see any cuts or bruises or anything wrong with my nerves, only some clay on my shoes and that wasn't too bad because five months ago Bateman had come in from a nasty one in Tangier and been told to wait and couldn't manage it: he just went along the corridor and dropped over the banisters into the stairwell before anyone had a clue what was in his mind. These cases are mostly when there's been some kind — of implemented interrogation by the opposition, leaving the nerve-ends bared; but nobody comes off a mission or an interim phase feeling very jolly.
We listened to the rain pattering on the windowsill, and the distant hammering of a road drill where they were doing the gas mains.
'Smoke, sir?'
'No, thanks.'
'Trying to give it up myself.' He lit one and dropped the match into the ashbowl and hit the chrome knob.
'Who is it,' I asked him, 'in Room 6?'
'Couldn't say, sir.'
He said it so fast that I knew it was routine.
It could be Mildmay. Or Sargent. The rest of them had something on the board, I knew that. In any case I was reaching the point where I didn't give a damn who was going to run me: all I wanted to do was get into the field and start moving. The Zarkovic thing had left me feeling hooked and I wanted to know more. There'd been nothing in his wallet, not a damned thing: passport, medical card, Communist membership papers, picture of a dark-haired girl smiling with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, nothing else, nothing to go on. Whatever Milos Zarkovic had brought over from Yugoslavia he'd brought in his head.
I'd taken the Lancia to Marseille and used the phone and they'd told me to come in by air through Paris and here I was, hanging around this bloody office talking to a man I didn't know.
'Looks like setting in, sir,'
'What?'
'The rain.'
'Yes.'
I gave it another five minutes and told him I was going along to the Caff, so if anyone wanted me they knew where to find me.
'Okay sir, I'll tell-' then the phone rang and he asked me to hold on. I tried to recognize the voice at the other end but all I could tell was that it wasn't Parkis and it wasn't Egerton.
'They're ready for you now, sir, in Room 6.'
It was the next floor up and I took the stairs and met Woods coming out of Signals with his tie under one ear and a cigarette in his mouth and a cup of tea in his hand.
'Jesus Christ,' he said, 'three changes in the last twenty-four hours!' He limped along to the Gents. God knew which current operation he was doing the signals for, but anyone having to change his code three times in twenty-four hours was running it very close.
Room 6 was along in the briefing complex and I knocked and went in.
'Who are you?'
'Quiller.'
'Ah yes. Sit down, won't you?'
He was behind the desk, sliding a ruler across some paper in a series of angled jerks, presumably making a graph. He was slightly rumpled-looking, with black hair and a grey face and sooty bags under his eyes. I'd never seen him before. His ruler went on sliding and I watched the deft working of his hands. He sat very still with his head angled down to look at the desk, and I took no notice when one of the telephones buzzed. After a while I got the impression that he was a remote-controlled robot with orders to fiddle here while some kind of Rome went burning down.
'Yes.'
He slid the ruler to one side and looked across at me. It was the first time I'd seen his eyes; they were the same unhealthy grey as the rest of his face, and gave away nothing.
'We haven't long,' he said, and got up and began walking about. 'I'm sending two of you people across to Lisbon by the first available flight — direct, of course. They are Pritchard and Mailer. Have you worked with them before?'
'No.'
'They are exceptionally talented. You will be making covert rendezvous with them tonight at 21:00 hours and the code introduction will be concomitant with the third series.' He stopped walking for a moment and stood looking down at his shoes with his hands tucked behind his back and his grey face intent. It was perfectly genuine: he'd forgotten I was here. I waited.
'You speak Portuguese?'
'Yes.'
'Very good. Pritchard is fluent, and Mailer has been swatting up a handbook of phrases for tourists. The three of you will be working close together, you understand. Communication will be via open channels unless there is a need for a code, in which case you will of course signal through Crowborough.'
He was telling me about access lines when I got up and went out and looked for Tilson and found him in Firearms, 'Who's that bloody fool in Room 6?'
'Oh my God,' he said, 'when did you get in?'
Twenty minutes ago and the only thing that's happened so far is that I.S. pushed me into Room 6 for debriefing and some idiot tried to sell me a lot of crap about working with two other executives in Portugal.'
Tilson put down the sub-machine gun and looked for a phone.
'I wish someone had told me, old horse.'
'Oh for Christ's sake, can't they get their records straight?'
'There's a flap on,' he said, and pushed the button again.
'Does that mean the whole system's gone on the blink?'
He started talking to someone and I went back into the corridor and walked up and down for a bit, getting control by degrees and finding it difficult and not liking it: when we're called in for a mission the nerves react because this branch of the trade is the tricky one and it's like playing Russian roulette. There's an ambivalent attitude towards the situation that pulls us both ways: we're desperate to get back into some kind of action because that's the way we tick and if we didn't tick that way we wouldn't be here, but at the same time we know what we're doing-we're sticking our neck out a bit farther every time and one day we're going to get the chopper. It's a question of watching the odds stack up against us, mission after mission.