The Tango Briefing

'Listen,' I said and turned away from her, 'what other facilities have been granted?'

When I turned back she was just standing still trying to think what I meant, trying to answer before I lost patience again. So I said: 'The UK's had permission to land a military aircraft here but I mean what else? Did Loman ask for any kind of assistance, police, army, secret service liaison?'

'I didn't hear of anything else. He didn't tell me about anything. I was there all the time while the signals were going through, till he sent me here to brief you.'

'All right.'

Paradox: the Tunisian government was prepared to receive a plane with RAF rondels in Kaifra but I couldn't go down to the reception desk and phone the police and say there are four cars outside please have their drivers arrested on suspicion. But it wasn't quite like that: the Tango mission had been' ultra-sensitive from the start and a visit from the Foreign Office type with a request for immediate military overflying and landing rights could have tightened things to the limit.

We were strictly an our own.

The thing that worried me most was the timing. The plane was down and the crew was expecting me and I was here in a trap and I didn't know how long they'd wait or what they'd do with the consignment I was meant to receive.

'What is this thing, d'you know?'

'Which thing, please?'

'Whatever the RAF are bringing in.'

'I don't know. Loman called it "the device".'

'The what?'

' «Device». It's the word he used for it in signals.'

'You didn't get any clues? Chemical antidote? Some sort of destruct system? Gas-mask?'

She thought back and then said no. This was logical because if Loman had been allowed to tell me what the thing was he would have briefed the girl, instead of which he'd obviously made sure she didn't pick anything up during the signals exchange.

I kept on walking, the mind exercising the organism, wouldn't be possible in this condition to do very much if they came in for us, effort required, keep on walking and do it properly.

'Is there any kind of a deadline on this?'

'He didn't say so.'

Logical too: the military aircraft had landed and I ought to be there to meet it because there'd be no point in letting it hang about the airfield. The deadline was already past.

I stopped by the window, the one at the front of the building, and looked down as I'd done before. It presented them with a model target, a silhouette with back-lighting, but that was all right because if they wanted to pick me off they'd have done it the first time and in any case they wouldn't have sent four vehicles with crews numbering up to sixteen if all they wanted to do was make a small hole in a skull.

It wasn't easy to see things through the reflections on the glass but the white oblong down there had a cross on the side and a pennant mounted on the windscreen pillar, French style. It was parked about halfway between the gates and the front entrance of the clinic and from this angle I couldn't see if it was in sight of the Merc and the 404. They were in the shadow of the palms on the road outside and there was a hedge of desert tamarisk in their general line of vision: if they could see the ambulance at all it would be through the gateway.

'How many are there?'

I shortened focus and looked at her reflection in the glass. At this distance I couldn't see her eyes but her voice had sounded steady enough, just a degree strident as if she'd made herself say it. She was young and inexperienced and would make the worst possible agent material and if they ever pushed her into a mission where she had to operate solo for five minutes that'd be as long as she'd live, but she looked as though she had guts and I thought the safest thing would be to tell her what the actual situation was so that she'd have a chance of saving herself if I forgot to duck.

'There are at least four cars.'

Her reflection gave a little nod. She didn't say anything.

I looked through the glass again. Conditions outside were the same as last night when I'd walked out of the Royal Sahara to the Mercedes: bright starlight, still leaves, moonless and windless. Low natural visibility without haze, acoustic irradiation conditions somewhere near a hundred per cent with the hygrometer down towards zero and the air totally static. I would have preferred low cloud and a moist wind, the dark to hide in, the wind to take sound away.

I turned and began walking again.

'What's the code-intro?'

She was watching me with very bright, very alert young eyes: she didn't understand what I meant and was trying hard to think and get it right and not look stupid.

'What's the code-introduction when I meet these RAF types? Password. What do I — '

'Oh yes — Firefly. They'll be carrying photographs of you and you'll be asked to show them the scar on your left arm. You must destroy the photographs immediately.'

'My Christ, is that all?'

She just shut her eyes and stood there hunched up but I wasn't even thinking about her because London had covered the code-intro with actual pictures and a physical feature so it wasn't just a gas-mask they were handing over: it was something so classified that the Air Ministry wouldn't deliver it before they'd forced the Bureau into providing treble-check identification. They couldn't be standard aircrew on that plane: they were seconded from D16 or Liaison Branch, or the Bureau wouldn't have let those photographs out of the files.

I suppose she thought she'd got it wrong again because of the way I'd said was that all. She only knew half of what was going on and whenever I asked her anything she'd only got a fifty-fifty hope of coming up with the right answer and it was wearing her down.

'What car did you come in?'

She opened her eyes.

'The Chrysler.'

'Loman's?'

'Yes.'

'You came from base direct?

'Yes.'

'You know the way back?'

'Past the mosque.'

'That's right.'

It was a three-minute trip.

If I could get her out of here she could be back in cover within three minutes but three minutes wouldn't give her anything like enough time to flush a tag and she hadn't been trained to overshoot base and take him on to neutral ground and do what I'd done to Mohamed. With four vehicles waiting out there I thought they'd probably just take her somewhere for interrogation and she wasn't trained to cope with that kind of thing either.

I'd have to leave her here and tell the staff to look after her while I drew off the opposition.

'What are your orders?'

'Orders?'

'What were you told to do, once you'd briefed me?

'Get back to base.'

She'd already briefed me: FO involvement, Tactical Command sortie, rdv, code-intro, there wouldn't be anything else; it was a simple pick-up job. So now Loman wanted her back at the Yasmina to man our communications and leave him free to make neutral-ground contact with Chirac and perhaps others soI couldn't leave her here and ask the staff to look after her while I tried to break out.

I'd have to take her with me.

'Are you frightened?'

'Yes,' she said, 'very.'

'That's good.'

She wasn't exactly shivering: there was a tension in her body that was making her contract, hunching herself into the windcheater as if she were cold. It was the classic animal posture in the face of a predator, the body drawn in on itself to protect the vital organs and present a smaller form, the limbs at the same time contracted in readiness to strike or spring if defence were changed to attack.

'Why is it good?'

'You're producing everything you need: adrenalin, muscletone, sensory alertness. No one else can do it, for you and you can't get it out of a bottle.'