The Scorpion Signal

There were only four people manning the room tonight, two of them handling separate missions at the main console with the code names Flash point and Banjo on the boards above their heads, and two others waiting for us at the unit nearer the door.

'Where is he?' I asked Tilson.

'Mr Croder? He's in Geneva.'

'He was flying from Rome, the last — '

'Never mind,' Tilson said amiably, and looked at the big international clock.

'He's coming through on the hour,' one of the operators said, 'using the booster at Lausanne. Would you like to sit down?'

'No.'

They waited quietly with their hands on their laps and the light of the panel on their faces.

I'll need a shield, a sharp voice came from the main console, but you'll have to hurry. It sounded like Symes, but I didn't think they'd use him for an Asian job; both missions were designated Far East alongside the code names and he was a Latin-country specialist, you could smell the garlic the minute he came in for debriefing.

The operator flicked the switch for direct contact with the base director and started talking, but I didn't hear the rest because a light started winking on our unit and the man with the chewing-gum opened the signal and set to scramble and clarify.

'A-Alpha. Channel 3. Clarifying.'

We waited. The light went on winking.

'Croder.' There was a long pause. 'The weather's closing down everywhere, and the London flight was laid off.' His voice was thin and precise, the scrambler giving it a metallic echo. 'Have you brought Quiller in?'

'Yes, sir.' The operator slipped out of the padded chair and motioned me to take it.

I sat down. 'This is Quiller.'

'Ah yes.' A couple of seconds went by. 'You were on leave, I understand.'

'I still am.'

There was a much longer pause. 'Yes. I am on leave too. But I want you to listen very carefully. I don't think I can reach London with any immediate predictability, since a lot of flights are either being cancelled or diverted. But I can reach Berlin before midnight, according to current reports. I would like you to meet me there, as soon as you can get a plane.'

In a moment I said: 'Look, I'm still on leave and I need to relax. It's too soon.'

I felt Tilson move an inch, beside me.

'I understand that,' the thin, precise voice came from the speaker. 'But something rather exceptional has happened, and we've got to deal with it as soon as we can. Or if you prefer, I've got to deal with it. I was rather hoping you'd agree to help me, but — what can I say? You are on leave.'

The silence was so long that I thought he'd gone off the air again, like some kind of ghost, fading and reappearing. I was very cold now, and sat with my hands folded into my arms and my neck hunched into my coat. There was something weird about this whole thing: Croder was sitting on some sort of time bomb and he was having to use an awful lot of control in the way he handled me. He wasn't used to that. Finally I couldn't stand the silence any more.

'Is it a mission?' I asked him.

'It is a rescue mission. We — I — have to get someone out.'

I waited for more, but he'd stopped. T didn't ask him 'out of where' because that didn't make a lot of difference. He meant out of trouble.

The air in the room seemed to shiver suddenly as the sharp voice came from the main console across from us — I tell you we can't hope to go in without a shield.

Tilson moved again beside me, unnerved. He's normally a stoic type and can keep as still as a lizard for hours.

I said to Croder: 'Why can't someone else do it?'

He came back a little faster this time. 'Of those people available, I think you stand the best chance. If there's a chance at all.'

'I'm not available. Listen, I came off the last thing two weeks ago, didn't anyone tell you that? Two weeks.' My voice had risen a fraction and I didn't like that, but it might give him a clue as to the condition I was in.

'I know that, yes.' He paused again. 'You did rather well.'

I left that one. Every word he said was a baited hook.

'A very great deal depends, you see, on whether we can do anything for this man. It touches all of us.'

He was being as specific as he could, on the air. It was no use asking him to spell anything out: he couldn't. He was trying to get me to read between the lines and I wasn't interested. I didn't want to know.

The operator with the chewing-gum was on my other side, opposite Tilson, and I swung my head up. 'Would you go and spit that bloody stuff out for Christ's sake? I can't stand the smell.'

My hands were frozen. I was afraid of what Croder was going, finally, to make me do, by pricking my conscience, or my pride. I listened to the rain beating at the row of narrow sooty windows and wondered who the poor bastard was, and where. We have to get someone out. He couldn't be done for, yet; he was lying on a rooftop somewhere in the pouring rain with the patrol lights sweeping the streets, waiting till he had to show himself; or hunched between rocks in a frontier zone like a wild dog with a broken leg and no hope of food or shelter or mercy when they found him; or sitting in a basement propped in an upright chair with the bright light probing into his eyes till he couldn't see them any more, could only hear what they were asking him, feel what they were doing when he didn't answer. It touches all of us.

The man with the chewing-gum had moved away but I could still smell the stuff, like toothpaste.

I spoke into the console. 'Is it Shapiro?' Tilson moved again.

'Yes,' Croder said. I could tell by his tone that I wasn't meant to know. I wanted to say well what about O'Rourke and Wallis and Jessop, shouting the bloody odds all over the Caff down there? Security stank, in this place, always did, half the staff trying to keep the lid on things and the other half yelling their heads off.

Shapiro. A small quiet man with sharp pointed ears and a passion for chess and a girl in Brighton and a scar the length of his forearm where the knife had got him before I could throw the rest of them off and reach him in time, glass all over the place from the explosion and the sirens coming in, Tenerife, with a full moon and the night temperature still in the nineties and Rosita sobbing her heart out in a bar at the end of the jetty because they'd got Templer, nothing we could do. 'I'll take this one,' he'd told me the night before; 'they know you, but they don't know me.' But it was just that he'd been frightened, and wanted to prove that he wasn't. We've got a few things in common.

So he wasn't dead.

'What theatre?' I asked Croder.

'Europe.'

That was all I'd get. There wasn't anything more I could ask him. He could have switched to selective code but he obviously wasn't prepared to. In a couple of seconds he said: 'You know him quite well, I understand.' Shapiro.

'Not too well. But I know him.'

The bloody thing had been ticking all the time and he'd stood looking at it with his small gnome's head on one side: 'the best thing'd be to disarm it, don't you think, take it apart, before it can do any harm.' He'd worked at it for nearly three hours without a break, his pale grey eyes wide open, staring at God all the time while his nicotine-stained fingers stroked and caressed the matt-black metal components and the sweat ran off his face and dripped on to the bare boards where I sat waiting, hunched into my own ghost and unable to look away. 'I think that's it,' he said at last, and pulled the detonator clear and reached for a cigarette and put it into his mouth with fingers that shook so badly now that he knocked the flame out and I had to strike another match for him.