Think of everything.

  Perhaps just the nerves. The aftermath of the Chepstow kill.

  Listen for Christ’s sake I know what I’m doing, I’ve taken on most things in this trade that’d kill a man if he didn’t know how to operate and get away with it time after time, get away with his skin. There’s nothing dramatic about it: you’ve just got to be cautious, that’s all. Push your luck a bit now and then, but not right out of the window.

  Faint voices.

  Not from inside this room: they were coming from Suite 9. The city was in flight and this hotel would be deserted if it weren’t for the few people staying on to the end: the brave, the stupid, the loyal, the ostrich-brained and the handful of international opportunists who were backing their chances of cleaning up by doing a deal with the Communists when they took over the place. But they weren’t many, and most of the rooms in the Royal Cambodian Hotel were gathering dust; on the ninth floor only Suite 9 and Room 91 were taken, and none of the skeleton staff felt like climbing this high to turn down the beds.

  For this reason the voices coming from Stern’s quarters were audible to me, and a new hazard was presented. These voices had only just become loud enough for me to hear and the immediate explanation was the simple and obvious: in human congress the volume of sound during greeting and farewell is higher than during normal speech, since the parties concerned are at a greater distance from each other: they begin their speech when moving closer and continue their speech when drawing apart, raising their voices slightly.

  Assume present visitor is taking his leave of Erich Stern.

  Make a decision.

  Not easy because vital factors unknown. I didn’t want to go into this room: my whole instinct was against it. But I didn’t want to be seen here in the corridor because Stern himself might emerge with the other man. When you are surveying an objective you will succeed only to the point when you are yourself seen: then you’re blown because there’s too big a hole in security and the next time the objective sees you he’ll recognize you. Finis.

  Once seen, you have to take so many precautions that the thing breaks down: you find yourself driving ten vehicles behind the objective instead of two, with ten chances of losing him instead of two; you get to the point when you have to go down a wall ledge by ledge over a sheer drop because if you take the stairs or the lift he’ll see you for the second time and recognize you for what you are: an amateur. Some, people do it - or try it. In a minor operation it doesn’t add up to anything because the situation isn’t loaded but if you’re on a major kick and the phase is sensitive and you chance your luck on a thing like that you’ll muck it up. Conway tried it, near the end-phase of the Bombay assignment when he was cut off from signals and directives and escape lines and had to keep on going or get out: and he kept on going and they saw him twice at the wrong time in the wrong place and some kid found his head on a rubbish heap when he was looking for cast-off shoes, Dusseldorf, 1973.

  So I didn’t want Stern to see me and I didn’t want to go into this room so I made the decision because the time was short: I had no practical data concerning this key or this door and if Stern or another man came out of Suite 9 I would turn my key and go inside before they saw me. It was a one way situation because there wouldn’t be time to reach the nearest alcove or the emergency stairs when their voices reached the pitch when it was certain one of them or both of them was coming out.

  Control new hazard.

  And concentrate on the immediate threat: the assumed danger of opening this door. Cover every aspect, analyse, and calculate the risk. Most of the necessary thinking had already been done and it had presented close to zero.

  Make a guess but don’t make it wild.

  During my absence someone had conceivably raided Room 91 and searched it or bugged it. Unlikely because security stood at one hundred per cent.

  Or: the lock had been tampered with and therefore the key had felt different when I’d inserted it. More likely because it would explain the sensory alarm-reaction when I’d done that.

  Or: nerves. Not totally discountable because my arguments against this theory could be based on pride.

  There were several other theories and I covered them and discounted them. The voices seemed progressively louder from the other end of the corridor but I waited because I could still use every available second for exploring the situation: once the door of Suite 9 opened I could get in here faster than they would be coming out.

  The key was still under my fingers and I hadn’t moved. Thought process is electronically quick and no more than nine or ten seconds had passed since I’d pushed the key into the lock.

  Recapitulate.

  But there wasn’t time because the voices became suddenly clear and I heard the click of the latch along the passage and acted on the decision I’d made and turned the key and opened the ‘door and the whole of the wall blew out and hurled me into the dark.

  Chapter Eight: FOXTROT

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  He drank up.

  ‘Which one are you down for, old boy?’

  ‘Foxtrot,’ I said.

  ‘Same as me. Cheers.’

  He gave a gusty laugh.

  His group had been here since dawn, he’d told me.

  There were thirty or forty of them in the breakfast-room and they were making a lot of noise and my present threshold of stress was close to zero and in another minute the whole place began swinging round and round and I shut my eyes and leaned my head back against the banquette.

  ‘You all right, old boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look a bit shot-up.’

  That’s my affair.’

  ‘No offence,’ he said.

  The thing was to keep still. Keep perfectly still.

  And do something about the anger. Control it ‘Who are you with?’

  ‘Agency,’ I said. It was no good saving Europress: he worked for Reuters and knew it didn’t exist.

  The anger was getting in the way of recovery and I thought up a few excuses but they didn’t really work because there was no excuse for doing what I’d done: none whatsoever. I’d been warned by mission-feel and ignored it and they’d put me into an ambulance and sent me to one of the foreign-national casualty groups at the US Embassy compound for early evacuation and I’d finished up at Pochentong Airport before I came to and found what was happening. That was an hour ago, at noon.

  They’d wanted to ship me out in one of die helicopters because I was down as a concussion case with possible complications but I said there was someone I’d left behind and I had to go and get them and they didn’t argue: these were the last planes out of Phnom Penh and they could fill them ten times over.

  A lot of the telephone lines were still intact and I rang the Royal Cambodian Hotel and asked for Mr Erich Stern and they said that Mr Erich Stern had checked out early this morning and that was why I had so much anger to control because I’d put myself out of commission for nearly eighteen hours and lost the objective.

  ‘Weren’t you in Warsaw, old boy? For the talks?’

  ‘Not me,’ I said, but that was where he’d seen me. I’d been using a second cover, journalist, working for Dur Urheber.

  ‘Seeing doubles.’ He laughed again.

  I went on sitting still. Perfectly still.

  Four zero Alpha. This is D Donald.

  The head of each evacuation group had been issued with a walkie-talkie. Considering the proximity of the Khmer Rouge batteries the whole thing was incredibly well organized.

  Assemble your group at my location please.

  I opened my eyes. Fifteen or twenty of them were putting down their drinks and moving towards the hotel foyer, hitching their cameras and recorders.

  ‘Christ,’ said Burroughs, ‘when’s our turn going to be?’

  He went to get another drink. He’d been on foreign assignments for years but I assumed this was the first time he’d got mixed up in a last-plane-out situation and it was getting on his nerves.

  I finished my glass of pineapple juice and shut my eyes again and tried to put some of the pieces together. There were quite a lot of questions but the answers to a few of them were obvious.

  The booby-trap had been set ineffectively: it should have been triggered to go off when i was going through the doorway and not when I opened the door. The work was probably done by a European because the Asians are subtle technicians: they invented explosives and know how to handle them.

  Erich Stern hadn’t known about the booby-trap: if he were running a cell or a hit-man and wanted me wiped out he would have ordered the work to be done in the open, as in the case of Chepstow. Stern wouldn’t have wanted an explosion taking place so close to Suite 9: it could conceivably have damaged his own person and/or caused a fire that could have spread to Suite 9 before he’d had time to get out with his belongings. The kind of operator who sells freedom for a price when the buyer is desperate is a discreet man, working with one foot in the bank-vault and the other in the stirrup.

  He doesn’t like loud noises or any kind of confusion to disturb his quiet activities.

  The question of mission-feel was also answered in part: I still didn’t know which precise sense had alerted me but that was now academic. The door of Room 91 was no longer a normal door: it had been tampered with and rigged with an alien device and this had produced subtle changes, one of which had been noted at the level where the conscious merges with the subliminal - the slight movement of the door as I had pushed the key in, or the faint scent of the explosive material, recalling associations with similar devices I’d handled m the past.

  I couldn’t find any obvious answers to the other questions: M Erich Stern hadn’t ordered the killing, who had? If Stern had left Phnom Penh, where had he gone? Had he been ‘be objective of a single phase in the Kobra mission like Heinrich Fogel or was he the objective for the whole mission? ; Put it another way: had I blown a local fuse or the whole [ assignment?

  London was no help.

  The ambassador had left the embassy when I’d got there and the wireless operator was on the point of destroying the set in accordance with instructions. The jamming by the Khmer Rouge had been pretty bad by that time but we put through a few words in formal code for the mission: objective no longer under survey, request directives. It had taken them nearly twenty minutes to make up their bloody minds and there was only one directive and it didn’t tell me anything except a change of phase: reservation made Fit 373 Pan Am 21:00 today Taipei-Washington.

  I didn’t think they meant it.

  ‘Get you another drinkie, old boy?’

  I thought they meant it for a feint-jump in the travel pattern or some kind of rdv in transit. They wouldn’t throw a complete change of phase at the executive’s head without any local briefing. In any case I couldn’t reach Taipei by 21:00 hours today.

  ‘No,’ I said, and opened my eyes.

  ‘One for the road,’ Burroughs grinned, his eyes still frightened. ‘They say Foxtrot’s coming up any time. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  I suppose I should have told them about the bang but it had got stuck in my throat because it’s bad enough losing the objective without letting yourself get into a terminal situation you could have easily avoided. I wouldn’t have heard the last of it because this is the kind of fishwives’ gossip that goes around the Caff while the tea’s getting cold: what, that old bastard couldn’t even sniff out a booby-trap! Jesus, what are things coming to?

  All right, I should ‘have told London anyway because they ought to know about any attempts by the opposition to knock out the executive: it helps Control to work out the next moves. But my answer to that was that if they imagined I could operate close to the objective in a place like Phnom Penh without getting the same attention that Harrison had got in Milan and Hunter had got in Geneva then they weren’t thinking straight.

  In this case Egerton was Control and Egerton always thinks straight and he would have realized that the minute I landed in this city I’d be in a red sector.

  ‘Can’t think why they’re so bloody slow,’ Burroughs said.

  The windows began vibrating as another wave of helicopters passed overhead towards Pochentong. There’d been very little mortar fire today but we’d heard rockets in action while I was at the airport. The insurgents were reported to be at the outskirts of the city but it didn’t seem to affect the evacuation programme: there were still several hundred US Marines protecting the operation at the embassy. At the airport they’d checked my papers and said the foreign-national journalists were holed up in the breakfast-room of the Hotel Le Phnom with walkie-talkies, so I’d got a lift here on a fire-tender ferrying medical supplies from Pochentong to the downtown area where some mortar-bombs had hit a skyscraper.

  Four zero Alpha. This is F Foxtrot.

  That’s us, old boy!’

  Please assemble your group at my location.

  ‘In God we trust,’ Burroughs said and drained his glass and hitched his tape-recorder and began lurching to the doors.

  Then the whole thing began falling into place and I knew Control didn’t mean it for a feint-jump in the travel pattern because as soon as the Foxtrot group was put down on the flying deck of the USS Okinawa I was sent for by the secondin-command and accorded an interview.

  ‘I don’t know who you are, Mr Wexford, and maybe that doesn’t happen to be my business anyway.’ He broke off and looked down across the flying deck as another wave of choppers began spiralling in. ‘I’ll just give you the instructions I’ve received through Washington, and you should be informed these instructions are classified. You will be flown from this ship by helicopter to one of our bases in Thailand, which presently will not be named. You are requested to report to the commander of that base immediately on arrival. You will then be out of my hands, but for your information you will be flown from there to Taipei, Taiwan, under classified cover of a one-flight military exercise. Is that understood?’

  ‘I think so. Very good of you.’

  It wasn’t a feint-jump because with the deck cluttered with choppers they probably couldn’t put a medium-range machine into the air. From Thailand to Taiwan there couldn’t be any kind of rdv in transit because I’d be in a military plane, but there could possibly be some degree of local direction from Taipei across the Pacific or from the transit point across the North American continent.

  Egerton had been thinking very fast: I could reach Taipei by 21:00 hours today providing there was no holdup at the US base in Thailand. There were two other considerations and they were both major.

  I’d only blown the phase in Phnom Penh, not the mission.

  There was an American connection.

  Add: Kobra was still running.

  Were these instructions duplicated, Captain?’

  ‘Duplicated?’

  ‘You’ve got more than one carrier standing off this coast.’

  ‘Oh.’ He folded his hands behind his back. ‘No, we began checking on you in Phnom Penh. That’s why you were assigned to the Foxtrot group: it was directed to this ship.’ He studied me for three seconds. ‘Do you need any food before you take off?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Protein tablets, medical supplies or attention, any personal comforts?’

  He was signing a form at his desk, ‘Not a thing, thank you.’

  ‘Okay. Your escort’s waiting for you outside and I’ll have him take you down to the flying deck. Just report to the senior officer of operations there and 111 alert him by phone so he’ll expect you. It’s been my pleasure to have you on board, Mr Wexford.’

  ‘You’ve been most hospitable, Captain.’

  He came to the door with me. ‘What’s it like over there?’

  ‘In Phnom Penh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bit of a shambles.’

  ‘Uh-huh. How are those Marines making out?’

  Inter-service rivalry is universal and I knew he wanted me to say they were making a balls-up.

  ‘Bloody marvellous,’ I told ‘him and went out to join my escort.

  Taipei Airport, Taiwan, 19:15 hours.

  A hot damp wind blowing off the sea.

  They cut up a bit rough in Customs: they didn’t like a British journalist getting out of a US Air Force plane without any luggage but I couldn’t help that. When they finally let me out I spent thirty minutes going through the main hall and drew blank. It wasn’t really necessary because the only place where anyone could have picked me up was the tarmac itself and the only people who knew I was arriving at Taipei Airport tonight were the US Navy and Air Force and the operation was down as classified.

  But I wanted to get it right this time. In Phnom Penh I’d assumed security was total and then I’d opened a door and got a wall in my face and it had sobered me up a little and I didn’t want anything like that to happen again, because one of the most terrifying moments in the life of an active executive in the field is when you make a mistake twice in the course of a single mission and begin to wonder whether you’ve been in this trade too long, whether you’re getting too old, whether you’ll have the nerve to take on a new assignment if you get out of this one alive.

  So this time I wanted to get it right.

  Findings at the end of thirty minutes: it was a clear field, except for the man in the mackintosh.

  Absolute certainty in this situation is of course impossible. If an opposition cell has set up surveillance for your arrival you can’t assess their significance until they’ve seen you. There could be a dozen people here in the main hall on the peep for a given objective: but that objective didn’t have to be me. Those two plain-clothes men at Fiumicino hadn’t been looking for me: they’d been looking for Heinrich Fogel. Until they’ve seen you, it isn’t possible to know who they’re looking for; but once they’ve seen you they’ll start giving themselves away because they can’t help it: if they’re going so keep you in their sights they’ll have to look in your direction from time to time, especially if you move near a doorway or behind some kind of cover. So all you have to do a survey the field and look for someone watching you.