Leaning towards Gabrielle he said in careful English, ‘It would give me greatest pleasure if you may have dinner with me tonight.’

  I got up, leaving some money for the drinks on the table as Gabrielle said in pleased surprise, ‘I’d be delighted.’

  ‘You’re a dark horse, Boris,’ I said, ‘your English is better than mine. The best restaurant in this dump is Les Deux Magots, by the way, and I recommend the escargots and the coq au vin - but for God’s sake don’t eat any salad or anything else uncooked. Have a nice evening, and don’t worry about a single thing.’ I kissed Gabrielle’s hand and said in English, not to be outdone, ‘It is nice for me when I may see you again.’

  ‘Au plaisir, m’sieur.’

  The clock over the bar was at twenty past six when I left, and I was stationed in cover not far from the hotel entrance an hour later when Slavsky and Gabrielle came out and climbed into a cyclo, sitting side by side as it started off in the direction of Les Deux Magots.

  It was a simple tumbler lock on the door of Room 27 and I went inside and left it half open, going across to the window and opening that too, looking down. There was a drop of eight or nine feet onto a pile of what looked like empty crates outside the back entrance, be a noisy exit and I’d have to watch I didn’t get a foot stuck between the broken slats when I landed, would cost precious time, but there was no yard wall or anything to stop a clear run if I needed one.

  From the distance a bell tolled in one of the temples, like the incessant chiming of a clock; the relative cool of the evening crept into the stifling warmth of the room; through the plaster-and-lattice wall came the faint sound of voices, Asian by their tone.

  There was a flashlight on the bed table and I used that instead of putting the lights on, found Slavsky’s midnight-blue silk dressing-gown and hung it from the top hinge of the half-open door to cover the narrow gap. Then the bathroom: Slavsky wasn’t an espion, wouldn’t have had any training in clandestine operations, hadn’t shown himself to be terribly bright this evening in the bar, was simply a man who shipped munitions out and took the money home, but he might have learned that the underneath of the toilet cistern cover and the space between the bathtub and the wall are the only places where you can hope to hide anything from the amateurs.

  Nothing there.

  I didn’t know how long I had. I’d briefed Gabrielle to avoid putting any questions to Slavsky as to what he did for a living, simply to accept the standard cover he’d give her - that of an import-export agent. But at some stage he might think she’d been set up to coax information out of him, and that would put an end to their cosy little evening and he’d be back in this hotel in a panic trying to find a vacant line to his base in Moscow - have you heard of a man called Voss who’s meant to be working with the Dmitrovich group? He would also be through that doorway over there at a run to make sure the attache case was still where he’d left it.

  I checked for hairs drawn taut across the gaps between the tops of the drawers in the dressing-table, found none; the telephone directory wasn’t lined up in any particular way on the bedside table, didn’t have one corner exactly at the edge or anything; there were no match-ends anywhere, balanced on movable surfaces, no little traps of any kind. I hadn’t expected them - again, Slavsky wasn’t an espion, didn’t imagine anyone in Pouthisat would search his room; but I had to take the most extreme care while I was here, because if I left any sign of intrusion he’d telephone Moscow and change his plans for delivery and we wouldn’t know what they were.

  We wouldn’t necessarily know what they were now: I could come away with nothing, draw blank.

  A great deal would depend on Gabrielle Bouchard. I wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting Slavsky to open up in the bar this evening without the distraction she had offered to dull his thinking; I wasn’t sure I would even have approached him, despite the in-depth briefing I’d had from Moscow via Pringle. But with Gabrielle there it had gone off well enough - I’d got Slavsky at least to admit, however tacitly, that he was running arms to the Khmer Rouge. And at this moment Gabrielle was still working for the cause, keeping the Russian amused while I checked the drawers, the cupboards, the hidden spaces in the room, coming up with only toys so far: Madonna’s Greatest Hits on cassette, a plastic sachet of hard-porn photographs, a packet of exotic condoms with stars and stripes, an American DP51 high-capacity 9mm pistol, a half-empty flask of Smirnov.

  The attache case was under the chest of drawers, pushed right back so that it didn’t show: Slavsky hadn’t trusted the hotel safe and didn’t want to attract attention by carrying the thing around in a town where a kid’s piggy-bank would be an instant target.

  Bundles of banknotes, denomination 500 Swiss francs, nothing underneath them. I shut the case and slid it back against the wall. If Slavsky had –

  Footsteps and I froze.

  They were on the stairs, climbing. Not, I thought, hurrying, but then a man as big as Slavsky might have been told not to hurry up any stairs, not to surprise the heart: cardiac arrest was the leading cause of death among the top international arms dealers.

  Climbing the stairs and reaching the passage now.

  The window exit was an option only if I’d finished here, and I hadn’t. The other option was to stay in the room and take Slavsky and give him to Pringle, have one of his agents-in-place grill the Russian to the point of death, suck him dry if he’d talk at all.

  So I moved across the floorboards, placing my feet in time with the footsteps of the man out there to give them sound cover, and stood behind the door.

  He sounded heavy, a heavy man. If he were Boris Slavsky his footsteps would slow as he saw the door was halfway open. The 9mm in the drawer might not be his only weapon; if he had something on him he would draw it, seeing the door like this. I hoped it wasn’t Slavsky out there: to take him would simply be an alternative to letting him take me, and it would undo everything I was here to do, even if I had him grilled, even if he talked. We needed him to go ahead with his plans for delivery: it was the only way we could hope to stop them.

  A cricket was singing somewhere outside the building, and as I waited, listening to the footsteps, I saw a flickering against the wall over there in the gloom as a salamander came in through the open window, tracing a shadow across the plaster.

  There was no mirror in the room. The man out there wouldn’t know where I was - wouldn’t know there was anyone here at all - until he came right through the doorway, and by that time I would see his hand with the gun in it, if he had one with him, and that was all I would need, this close, say three feet from my sword-hand to his wrist.

  The footsteps weren’t slowing, but he wasn’t yet within five or six doors of this one, wouldn’t have noticed from that distance and in the wan flickering light out there that this one was open.

  He might of course make a dramatic Drug Enforcement Agency entrance, hitting the door wide open and going into the shooting stance and yelling freeze. If he did that I’d have to move, and very fast; it could even be a little dangerous if he began sweeping the gun from this angle, be a matter of half a second to work in, all I’d get.

  Hadn’t slowed, they hadn’t slowed, the footsteps. And it’s sometimes like this in the course of a given mission, where the whole outcome, success or failure, the executive’s life or death, depends on something quite trivial: whether the opposition’s vehicle is closing in at three kph or four at a max of ninety, whether the drop from a roof is too high to use without critical injury, whether the footsteps along a corridor in the heat of the night are slowing, or simply coming on at a steady pace.

  Signal: The night hasn’t gone well, but for what it’s worth I’ve taken a prisoner. There’d be one of his bloody silences on the line. They think you don’t feel anything, the directors in the field, when things go wrong.

  If this was Slavsky coming it wouldn’t be Gabrielle’s fault; she had what the recruiting desk at the Bureau calls ‘espion-like qualities,’ an eye for shadows, reflections, artifice in a man’s walk; an ear for echoes, footsteps, deception in a man’s tone. Nothing of this was manifest in her; I simply recognized it as a mirror image - or I could never have asked her to help me with Slavsky.

  Now they were slowing, the footsteps, as the man out there reached the door of his room, or noticed the door of this one, half open.

  Slowing.

  I relaxed my legs, let my right arm hang loose, shook the tension out of the fingers like shaking water off, watched the floor where his shadow would come when he reached the doorway, breathed deeply, slowly, let the nerves receive the automatic signals from the brain - that in a little while, perhaps in fifteen seconds, ten, the organism might be required to undertake action at maximum speed and with maximum force - let the understanding build in the autonomic nervous system that copious quantities of adrenalin might be needed at an instant’s notice to fire the muscles, waiting, I was waiting now through the final count-down until suddenly the man was standing in the doorway, his shadow reaching across the floor.

  I listened to his breathing.

  ‘Tae mien nehna tii non te?’

  Then the shadow of his arm moved, lifting, and I felt the rush of adrenalin come surging through the system as the mind took a millisecond to rehearse the action of the sword-hand swinging up, power-driven from the heel through the hip, the shoulder, the entire organism now taut as a drawn bow as the hand of the man moved to the door and he closed it and went on his way along the passage, a janitor, security guard, someone like that, finding a door open and closing it, a trivial function of his duties done.

  It took me less than ten minutes more to find what I hoped I would find, and as I stood looking at it in the beam of the flashlight with the unused adrenalin still shaking the muscles and souring the mouth, I saw that here, yes, I had the specific information Pringle had asked me for at our first meeting at the airport in Phnom Penh: the objective for Salamander.

  16 : SHADOW

  There was a smell of pigs in here.

  ‘I was able,’ Pringle said, ‘to get through to London almost immediately after you telephoned.’

  Presumably because traffic through the Australian satellite was less heavy at night. I’d phoned him from the hotel with the information as soon as I’d left Room 27, according to the book: the executive is to debrief anything of importance as soon as he can in case he’s got at, and can’t. I’d simply given him the position marked on the map I’d found in Slavsky’s room: 12°3’N x 103°10’E. The rest wasn’t major.

  ‘What did Flockhart say?’ I asked Pringle.

  ‘That he would take immediate action.’

  ‘What action?’

  Pringle gave a slight shrug. ‘I really can’t say.’

  ‘But do you know?’

  I was feeling sour, which is typical in this bloody trade when you’ve brought home the product and dropped it proudly on the doormat like a freshly-killed rat; there’s a sense of let-down, especially when things have been easy, and tonight’s work had been so easy it worried me. You wonder if you’ve missed something, some little thing that’s going to come back at you like a whiplash. Paranoia, yes, but tonight the adrenalin was still in the bloodstream and there was no kind of physical action I could take to disperse it - you try jogging athletically through the streets of Pouthisat, Cambodia, at ten o’clock at night and you’ll be shot on sight by some zealous lad in the police or the army on the safe assumption that you’ve either stolen a watch or set a land-mine somewhere.

  ‘No,’ Pringle said evenly, ‘I don’t actually know what kind of action Control is going to take. He keeps me less informed than some might suppose, as a matter of principle.’

  What he was telling me was that I was forgetting that the director in the field is also at risk during a given operation, and that the less information he has in his head the less the opposition can get out of it when they start work with the burning bamboo sticks under the nails and so on. I hadn’t forgotten; I just thought our smooth Mr Pringle knew more than he was ready to tell me. That was all right, provided he’d got good reason, but I didn’t know what it was.

  I let it go. ‘What’s that awful smell of pigs in here?’

  ‘I really can’t say.’

  His favourite answer to whatever you asked him, you put the penny in and out it came. It was stifling in this place; the power station was on overload again so the ceiling fan wasn’t working, and all we had for light was a kerosene lamp. Pringle had told me the building belonged to a volunteer mine-clearing unit; he knew them and had asked for the key, and this was also from the book - the executive and his director in the field never use the same rendezvous location twice unless it’s considered secure. This place wasn’t much more than a big shed, with mine detectors stacked against the wall and pairs of huge padded protective boots as big as snow shoes lined up on the concrete floor. Someone had started everything off with a flair for record-keeping when they’d set up shop: there was a map of the town on the wall with big red blotches on it and a sprinkling of little green dots; it looked as if they’d made a red dot every time a mine had exploded, and there’d been so many that the dots had become blotches, mostly around schools, bus depots, temples, where the most feet could be expected to pass. The green dots presumably marked the places where mines had been detected and brought here for defusing, but there weren’t enough to become blotches yet.

  Pictures on the wall, one of the queen, two of Charles playing polo, no Di anywhere. Photograph of three men and a woman, all smiling happily, black crosses above their heads, one of the men holding a small pig - that explained it - some words scrawled underneath the photograph with ornate serifs and curlicues to give them solemnity, They Did Their Job. A picture of the pig on its own with a red ribbon round its neck, caption, Little Stinker. A picture of a Cambodian girl, eleven or twelve, crutches, radiant smile, two men holding her in a bear hug, huge fatherly grins. On the wall opposite the cluttered desk was a dartboard with Pol Pot’s face crudely painted on it.

  ‘How do we know for certain,’ I heard Pringle’s cautious tones, ‘that the position on the map in Slavsky’s room indicates the main guerrilla base of the Khmer Rouge?’ He was looking at the topographical map he’d brought with him.

  ‘We don’t.’

  Bastard didn’t like the look of my freshly-killed rat.

  ‘How certain,’ he asked, ‘are you?’

  ‘Put it this way. We think Pol Pot is ready to launch a new offensive, possibly on the nineteenth of this month. The only way he can do it is by remote control, because the Cambodian army is virtually on stand-by to counter any land operation. So we’re talking about missiles.’ The ceiling fan began turning again but the lights didn’t come on: Pringle hadn’t thrown the switch when we’d come in because the lamp was all we needed. ‘Then I see Boris Slavsky, a known arms dealer - according to your briefing - land in a Khmer Rouge aircraft and Colonel Choen leaving him with an attache case full of Swiss francs, and we assume it’s in payment for the missiles - or if you like it better, I assume. I assume also that the map was left with Slavsky to indicate the exact location where delivery is to be made. That location is buried in deep jungle, according to your topo, and even though it’s not far from the coast there’s a mountain range in the way with absolutely no roads - not even tracks - where any kind of transport can be used. If –’

  ‘You studied the map thoroughly?’

  Best left ignored. ‘The nearest airfield,’ I said, ‘is at Phumi Tuol Koki on the coast, and the only access by sea is through a fishing village.’ Pringle was leaning over his topo, following me. I didn’t look at it, kept my eyes on the fly-encrusted ceiling fan, wanting him to know just how thoroughly I can look at a map when I’m searching someone’s room for information. ‘There’s a minor road fifteen kilometres from the marked position, but fifteen kilometres of jungle is like fifty kilometres of open terrain, in terms of accessibility. So if the mark on Slavsky’s map doesn’t show the exact location of the main Khmer Rouge base, I can’t think what else it could mean.’

  I waited.

  Pringle let a few seconds go by, possibly to show he’d noticed I’d ignored his question about my having studied the map, and was not pleased. That was a shame, because if he asked me another stupid question I was going to walk out of here - what precisely did he mean, had I studied the map? Did he think I was - steady now, yes, it’s just the adrenalin talking, no need to go overboard.

  ‘I think I agree with your assumption,’ Pringle said, ‘that we now know the exact whereabouts of Pol Pot. I’m just not sure that London will be convinced.’

  Something tried to alert me when he said that, but I couldn’t pin it down. He’d said Pol Pot, not the Khmer Rouge base. Was there a difference? I let it go.

  ‘It’s up to London,’ I said.

  ‘Of course. It’s up to Mr Flockhart.’ He went on staring at the map, then after a while folded it and turned his cool grey eyes on me, and I thought again how young he looked for this job, for running an executive through a field where the opposition was an army twelve thousand strong.

  Was Pringle the only man Flockhart had been able to find for this one? The only DIF prepared to run the executive through the mission unknown to the signals room, unknown even to the Bureau itself? Or had Pringle been like me a week ago, prowling the corridors of that bloody building in Whitehall desperate for a job?

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ I heard him saying, ‘how the assumed missiles will be delivered?’

  ‘By air.’

  ‘You discovered this?’

  ‘I didn’t have to. The only –’

  ‘By the way,’ he cut in, leaning forward slightly, his face earnest in the lamplight, ‘I meant, of course, had you had time to study the map thoroughly.’

  It took a second for me to realize what he was talking about. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘of course.’ But Christ, had it been simmering in his mind all this time, until he’d had to blurt it out so that I’d know he hadn’t wanted to give offence? Had Flockhart briefed him to be this careful with me? Make quite sure you don’t offend the executive - he’s touchy and we can’t afford to lose him. So what made them think I might drop this one cold at any given minute and take the next flight home?