Not feeling reaction.

  The voice of panic, vigorously to be ignored.

  He was very close now and I moved to the left along the sidewalk and picked him up again in the window standing at an angle in a shop entrance way.

  I hadn’t seen him before, on the quay or anywhere in the street.

  On my way, yes, to be hanged, in other words following a course that would take me to an imminent death, a course from which there was no possible deviation. A feeling of inexorability, of karma being fulfilled. It didn’t take away fear, terror, but it took away responsibility.

  These were my instructions, to make the rendezvous.

  Your instructions come only from the Bureau.

  But things have changed.

  I swung round very fast and he almost walked into me, had to jump sideways, his eyes round, surprised.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  The way, I suppose, the way, I am certain, actually, I was looking at him.

  ‘No.’ That is what I said to him, and I heard it. I was not okay, and things had gone terribly wrong.

  ‘You need some help?’

  But he was already eager to go, not wanting contact, involvement, with this cokehead, this junkie. He was, you understand, no more like an opposition agent of any kind than Mickey Mouse, and it had just happened that we’d been moving at about the same speed along the street. It happens all the time.

  ‘No.’

  No help.

  But he’d already gone, and I stood there with my head bared to the overwhelming weight of the sky and knew that I couldn’t in fact shrug off all responsibility, because that would indeed lead to the mortuary and the formaldehyde, but oh my God you can have no idea how far it was to the telephone at the end of the block, how many desperate encounters were played out as the insubstantial figures leapt from nowhere and from everywhere, how many times they came for me, squealing for my blood as they dragged me to the hangman, the stink of fish sickening to the stomach, his madman’s inane grin, go for the single chicks, they’re cheaper, lurching on my nerveless legs to the end, all the way to the end of the block with oysters this big as the sky crashed at last across the roaring chasm of the street and I reached the phone-box, smashing away the flimsy aluminium panel with my shoulder to break the momentum, digging for a quarter and forcing it into the slot, a pale girl with pimples staring for a little time before she hurried past, so that I buried myself against the phone-booth, into it, in it, my back to the street and the people, hunched like a pariah dog, like a leper ‘Yes?’

  Ferris.

  1330 West Riverside Way. At any time before midnight. Not later than that.

  ‘Yes?’

  Those are your instructions.

  Of course. Put the phone down, make the rendezvous. Of course. Without question.

  ‘Who is that? I am listening.’

  I tell you I had to use physical force to keep the phone pressed to my head while the other force did everything it could to pull it away and slam it across the hooks. I remember that very clearly.

  ‘I need — ‘ the breath blocking in my throat.

  ‘Yes? You need?’

  Force countering force while I waited in limbo for the outcome, the sweat drenching my body as the street reeled, roared, swept over me.

  ‘I need to debrief.’

  Clinging to the broken booth like a drowning man to a raft. ‘1200 block and Riverside Way. West Riverside Way. Hurry. For God’s sake hurry.’

  Chapter 7 : DEBRIEFING

  Four men.

  The clock - a jade clock in a gilt frame, standing on the desk - snowed 11:56. A little before midnight. 1330 West Riverside Way, not later than midnight, so forth. No longer important.

  One of the men was Ferris.

  It was a big room, ornate, in a way. Dark heavy furniture, velvet curtains, a pile carpet, all very substantial, reassuring. I felt reassured. I felt as if -let’s get it absolutely straight - I didn’t just feel as if. I had, in fact, come through something and reached the other side, and the other side was here, the here and now, the true reality. But dear God it had left me weak, punch-drunk.

  Greenspan was another of them. He was the only one standing up.

  ‘Did you pee in the jar?’ he asked me.

  Ferris was in one of the deep leather chairs, a thin leg draped over one of its arms.

  ‘What? Yes.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘And what is so fucking great,’ I asked him, ‘about peeing in a jar?’

  He watched me quietly. No one spoke. It had helped, a little, the rush of anger, but had left me exhausted again. In a moment I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No problem,’ Greenspan said. ‘What is so great about it is that you remember doing it. And we took a little blood, right?’ The Chaplinesque eyebrows lifting.

  ‘Yes.’ Needle in the arm, out there in the hall, I think.

  ‘Very good. Your memory’s fine.’

  ‘My memory?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be fine, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Well I guess — ‘ a shrug, a glance across Ferris - ‘you’ve kind of had a busy day.’ A hand on my shoulder, ‘Feel okay now?’

  ‘I have never,’ I told him carefully, ‘felt better in my life.’

  ‘Well I can take a hint,’ Greenspan said brightly. ‘You don’t need me around here any more.’

  He fetched his bag from the desk, leaning across Ferris for a moment, saying something; then he slapped my arm with an excessive amount of good cheer and left us. It occurred to me that I wasn’t quite straightened out yet, too aggressive, too defensive; but then he was damned right - it had been a busy day.

  I shut my eyes for a while, less than a minute, and the firework show died down behind the lids and left mostly black. Then I opened them and saw Ferris watching me.

  ‘What’s this place?’

  ‘A safe-house,’ he said.

  I looked around the room again. Big geographical globe, a glassed-in case of ivory elephants, massive tomes on dark mahogany shelves, Existential Psychotherapy, Noyes’ Modern Clinical Psychiatry.

  ‘It’s a what?’ I got up and looked at the shelves, at some of the other titles. ‘Is this a psychiatrist’s office?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ferris said. ‘It’s also a safe-house. That’s why we’re here.’

  I had an urge to walk out and slam the door but a certain degree of reason stopped me. A Bureau safe-house can be anything and anywhere - there’s one in the basement of the British Consulate in Marseilles and there’s one in Madame Labhouet’s bordello in Abidjan on the Ivory coast and there’s one in the Horacio Escobar Clinic for Enteric Diseases in downtown Santiago - so a psychiatrist’s office in Miami, Florida, wasn’t untypical.

  Jade clock: midnight, the gilt hands together at the top of the dial in a prayer of thanksgiving. Rendezvous aborted.

  It is also a sacrosanct rule that once the opposition has made contact with the executive in the opening phase of a mission he is not to approach his director in the field at that director’s base, since it risks exposing him. The DIF can only function from an ivory tower, controlling the shadow from a distance and keeping clear of the action. Directors in the field, by their nature, amass an infinite store of intelligence data every time they go out, and their value to the organisation is beyond the price of pearls. Most retire after sixty and take up golf; most shadow executives are dead before thirty-five, or if not, uninsurable.

  So it was entirely reasonable that Ferris had ordered me brought here from the 1200 block on West Riverside Way for debriefing. Entirely reasonable.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I came away from the bookshelves and dropped into the armchair again, a dead weight.

  ‘Whose?’

  The shrink’s.’

  ‘Dr Xavier Joachim Alvarez.’

  ‘Are you going to have him check me out?’

  ‘Only if you ask.’

  The quietness came back into the room. Everyone seemed to be listening. ‘I’m in first-class condition.’ Said it straight to Ferris, carrying the weight of it in my eyes, the shadow executive formally reporting to his DIP that he was able to take on any kind of action if the need arose. ‘He didn’t put anything in, did he?’

  Ferris turned his head a fraction, and I realised I was tending to talk in ellipses, my thoughts jumping ahead. ‘Again?’ he said.

  ‘Greenspan. I mean he only took some blood, is that right? He didn’t give me any dope. Sedative or anything.’

  Quietly, ‘Would you like a sedative?’

  ‘No. What the hell for?’ Be warned: this was the second time it had happened. A minute ago I’d thought they were going to have me checked out by the shrink but it’d only been in my mind, not theirs - Only if you ask. And now it had been in my mind that they might have wanted to sedate me and I’d been wrong, dangerously wrong, putting ideas into their heads. Did I really want a shrink, sedation, but didn’t have the guts to ask for them?

  Paranoia. Relax. I was much better now, less scared about what was happening to me. It was going to be all right.

  ‘What is he going to test me for?’

  ‘Drugs.’ Ferris watched me steadily. There was a chandelier over the desk and that was where I was facing.

  ‘Can we have that thing out? Bloody bright. What sort of drugs?’

  Ferris turned his head and one of the other people got out of his chair and went to the wall switch. ‘Oh,’ Ferris said, ‘any sort, really. We’ll come to that.’

  He looked less cold now in the softer light from the wall lamps, less hostile. So we will come to that, will we? Meant, I suppose, that I’d been behaving a bit oddly of late. Damn his eyes, I’d nearly got my head shot off, enough to shake anyone up.

  The man sat down again and I said to Ferris, ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘Upjohn,’ he said, turning his head again. ‘And Purdom.’

  ‘I need to know more than that.’ Said it with an edge. The director in the field calls the shots at every phase of the mission but he is also there to succour, support and sustain the executive, who may indeed look like a snotty-nosed little ferret down in the catacombs but who is nevertheless the only man who can bring the mission home, and when I’m brought into a room to debrief and there are total strangers hanging around I want to know who they bloody well are, if you’ll be so kind.

  ‘Upjohn,’ Ferris said, ‘is a sleeper here. He knew Proctor, though not well. It’s possible that he can help us find him, if he listens to the debriefing. Unless you object.’

  A small man, Upjohn, with a spotty skin and a slanting eye and a pucker in the face for a mouth, terrible haircut, stuck up like bristles, the kind who can surprise you, former lieutenant-colonel in the special services or something like that.

  ‘I don’t object,’ I said.

  Thank you. Purdom,’ Ferris said evenly, ‘is here from London to get experience in the field.’

  I jerked my head to look at the man, saw red suddenly - ‘Experience in the what? You were in China, weren’t you, on Pagoda? You did Mirage, didn’t you, for that bastard Loman in Morocco? Jesus Christ, what sort of experience — ‘

  Watch it.

  It mustn’t happen a third time. This was the last thought I wanted to put into their heads - that I couldn’t keep my control.

  Silence opening like a grave.

  Then Ferris said gently, ‘Experience in the United States. He hasn’t worked here.’

  Of course. Entirely reasonable. But the thought was still there, chilling the nerves. I’d heard of Purdom, seen him in the Caff now and then, seen his name on some of the boards, certainly the board for Pagoda and the one for Mirage and possibly others: he was one of the high-echelon shadows and no one had sent him out here from London just to ‘get experience’.

  Looking at the wall, not at me, the wall or the door or whatever was there behind me, a dark man, big-boned, his body hunched in the chair, thick hands folded and his legs crossed, almost twisted together, a quietly-ticking bomb with some clothes round it and some hair on top, an exaggeration, of course, but you get the picture - it was his nerves I was picking up on, his held-in energy. I watched him for a moment, taking him in, not wanting to look at Ferris because if I looked at Ferris I was liable to put it straight into words, get it over with.

  Is Purdom out here to replace me?

  Someone was speaking, his voice very soft, reaching me as if from a distance. It was Ferris. ‘You’re among friends, Quiller.’

  He didn’t know what he was saying because he hadn’t been there in London when that bastard Loman had said exactly the same thing: You’re among friends.

  Friends? Loman had flinched. It was the time when they were trying to get me to think twice about resigning because they’d put that bloody bomb under the driving seat of that truck in Murmansk, deciding that I was expendable. I still couldn’t trust these people.

  Not even Ferris?

  ‘Am I?’ Among friends.

  ‘But of course.’ His voice still gentle as he watched me with his pale honey-coloured eyes. I’d have to think, you know, think a little more carefully, because this man had saved my skin so many times - Berlin, Hong Kong, Murmansk - where other people would have left me to rot in the red sector and vouchsafed their sleep with a lie. Communications compromised, opposition in control, executive unreachable..

  Trust, then, perhaps, this one man among them all. Because, in any case, if you can’t trust your own director in the field you’re dead. I’d proved that in Northlight: I hadn’t been able to trust Fane and I’d come close to getting blown into Christendom in that truck.

  ‘All right,’ I said, heard myself saying, meaning all right, I was ready to believe I was among friends. ‘I’m a bit tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course.’ His voice still gentle. ‘And there’s a bit of delayed shock hanging around, according to Greenspan.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘So you might not feel quite ready for debriefing.’ Paused, giving me a chance to say no, not quite ready. I said nothing. ‘But if you’re willing, we could make some progress. London’s a tiny bit fidgety.’

  ‘Why?’

  In a moment, ‘First Proctor was missing. Then you.’

  I sank into the chair, letting the muscles go, trying to centre. It wasn’t going to be easy. ‘You sent signals?’

  ‘I had to. I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘It was only for a short — ‘ and left it. I didn’t remember how long it had been, didn’t want to.

  ‘I need to know,’ Ferris said, ‘why you left the hotel covertly.’

  ‘I wanted to walk for a bit, without a whole troop of people around me. You know I hate support.’

  The other two were looking at me now; I’d noticed their heads turn, the light catching their eyes. They shouldn’t watch me. It made me nervous. Ferris ought to tell them not to watch me. He was unzipping a flat pigskin briefcase and getting a book out, a ballpoint from his pocket, opening the book.

  He asked me: ‘To walk where?’

  ‘Oh, just around, for the exercise.’

  1330 West Riverside —

  ‘You were shot at,’ Ferris said, ‘and were therefore revealed as a target for the opposition, whose intention it was to kill. Having been recognised, then, and set up as that target, you obviously realised that this town has become a red sector for you.’ A beat. ‘Yet you went for a walk in the open street, “for the exercise”.’

  I got out of the chair and turned my back on him because it was the only way I could talk to him without letting him see my eyes. ‘Is this a debriefing, for Christ’s sake, or an inquisition?’ Wheeled on him, anger in the eyes now and I wanted him to see it. ‘You don’t consider that the executive hand-picked by Bureau One himself for this mission isn’t capable of deciding whether he can safely walk in the bloody streets or not?’ Folded my arms, wrong posture because defensive but too late to change it, not one of these bastards looking at me, all looking down or into the middle distance, embarrassed perhaps because my voice was hitting back from the glass panels of the display case and the lacquered Chinese screen in short-range echoes, shouting, you might call it, you might call it that. ‘I’d been cooped up in that stinking hotel for hours on end and I was still full of adrenaline from the lark on the quay and I wanted some exercise, yes, and I didn’t want half a regiment keeping me under mobile surveillance because it could have attracted attention.’ Tried to keep my voice under control, failed. ‘I think that makes sense but if you think I’m out of my mind then you’d better send for your bloody shrink.’

  Watching me now, Ferris was watching me.

  ‘Why don’t you come and sit down? You’ll feel more comfortable.’ Turning his head to the man on his left, Johnson, no, Upjohn, saying quietly, ‘See if he’d mind joining us for a few minutes.’

  The man got up and went out through the door behind him, not the one I’d come in by, leading to the hall, the other one. I looked down at Ferris. He was making notes in the debriefing book.

  I said: ‘The shrink?’

  ‘Yes,’ Went on writing.

  A quietness on me suddenly, the anger fading. ‘You said you weren’t going to send for him.’

  He looked up. ‘Only if you asked. I think you just did that.’

  I turned away, moved about. He was perfectly right. Then you’d better send for your bloody shrink. It had come right out of the subconscious because I knew I needed help and I’d been frightened to ask for it in so many words. I could have gone on lying, trying to protect my ego, but I didn’t, because we’d got a mission running and something had gone terribly wrong and I had to face it, deal with it somehow. Listen, if nothing else I am a professional, for God’s sake give me that.

  ‘Can I have a drink?’

  The thirst still burning.