05 The Tango Briefing Page 3

  So it was odd that Tilson should do so human a thing as to get up from his desk as I turned for the door, and stand there awkwardly with his plump arms folded and his round pink head on one side as he watched me go.

  It told me that however much or little they’d briefed him about this mission, he knew that it was deadly.

  ‘Take care,’ he said, ‘old horse.’

  3 : SHOCK

  We began sweating as soon as they opened the door and by the time we’d crossed the tarmac to the Tunis-Carthage No. 2 Airport building the soles of our shoes were hot and I thought oh you bastards, sending me to Africa in a heatwave.

  Vous n avez rien a declarer?

  Rien.

  A man in a fez waving a chalked board: PETROCOMBINE SOUTH 4. Half a dozen drillers were heading towards him, bearded and sunbaked and one of them half-seas over. That was meant to be my mob but so far I didn’t sense any kind of surveillance so I didn’t join them just for the look of the thing.

  Avis? par la, m’sieur.

  Merci.

  Another chalked board: MR ROBINSON.

  If anyone was here to meet Mr C. W. Gage they wouldn’t chalk it up on a board and I took the long open passage to the Consigne and back and then double-checked the main hall before I tapped at the window and noted that in Tunis they not only try harder but they look prettier while they’re doing it.

  ‘Yes, Mr Gage, we have a Chrysler waiting for you.’

  ‘Any messages?’

  London would contact me here if there was any change of plan and you never know your luck: Loman might have ricked a kidney on a camel and I could go home.

  ‘There’s no message.’

  She led me outside with a light jigging high-heeled step and I studied the blue-black hair and the silky eyelashes and the white flashing smile as she showed me how to open the door and where the steering-wheel was and everything, then I clipped the belt on and began butting a gangway through the pack of clapped-out Minicabs towards the main gate.

  There was a crosswind along the Khaireddine Pacha and the tall feathery eucalyptuses blew restlessly against the sky. I don’t like wind: it disturbs me. I began checking the mirror because in this trade you can’t always tell when a cipher’s been bust somewhere along the line and even in the first few hours of a new mission you can sometimes pick up ticks.

  This evening it looked all right and I started wondering where they’d pulled Loman in from: there was obviously a flap on because they’d bounced me Tokyo-London-Tunis with only one night-stop and had to leave the final briefing for Local Control. The last I’d heard of Loman he’d been setting up a classified document snatch at one of the ministries in Bonn and he wasn’t the kind of director who’d appreciate being turned round in the middle of an operation. This was another reason why I knew this aeroplane thing must be strictly urgent.

  I hadn’t been briefed yet but there was one obvious aspect to this job: Control in London didn’t only want me to go and have a look at that wreck in the desert - they wanted me to go and have a look at it before anyone else could. So I kept a routine check on the mirror.

  If anyone had ticked a kidney it was the poor bloody camel because Loman was there in the Caravaniers Bar at the Hotel Africa at precisely 18.00 hours and he got up right away without looking at me and signed his bill and went out. I waited thirty seconds and followed him.

  I know people by their walk. The eyes are expressive but if you’re good at it they can be used for hiding things. But there’s nothing people can do about their walk because locomotion is a life-long habit and it expresses their attitude towards the environment.

  Loman walks like a bird, his hands behind him like neat tucked wings. his head turning frequently from side to side in case there’s something to peck at: he never misses anything and if you get in his way he’ll peck you to death.

  The Arab room was at the end of a tiled passage and he was waiting for me there, his bland face half masked by the shadows of arabesque screens. There were no chairs here, just cushions massed along the stone plinth and on a dais where incense burned in a brass bowl. Light came from lamps high in the atrium outside where tropical plants grew, their leaves like sword-blades and their shadows sharp.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Tokyo.’

  ‘You’re still under flight-disorientation?’

  ‘I’ll settle down.’

  He nodded and got a map out but didn’t open it.

  There was a flap on all right and it shook me. The pace was too fast. The minute they’d slung this op at Loman to direct he must have said I want Quiller for it and he hadn’t even asked them where I was, couldn’t care less. The pace ought not to be as fast as this right at the outset of a mission: people could make mistakes in the planning stages and that could be dangerous, could be fatal.

  Then I knew suddenly how much the flight had upset my personal clock because there was something sticking out a mile and I’d only just seen it. This wasn’t a new mission. It had been running for some time and it had seemed to be blowing up and they’d thrown it at Loman like an unexploded bomb because of all the high-echelon directors he was the one who could stay cool enough not to drop it.

  I could feel the whole network quivering.

  ‘Someone’s mucked it, have they?’

  He didn’t answer.

  It wasn’t a good start because he knew I was bloody annoyed. I watched him while he moved around a bit,, his small feet nervous, the light glinting on his polished-looking head and the neat polka-dot bow-tie and his brightly-polished shoes: and I remembered what I thought about Loman the first time we worked together - I could stand his massaged face and manicured hands and immaculate tailoring and his brilliant reputation for efficiency if only he’d have the grace to make a human gesture now and then, leave his fly unzipped or something.

  He still wouldn’t answer because he hadn’t been given enough time to work out the initial phase of the operation, but that was his problem and I wanted to know the score so I said:

  ‘How bad is it?’

  He turned on me fussily.

  ‘There’s no need to panic.’

  ‘Just let me in, Loman.’

  I knew I shouldn’t rush the poor little bastard but it was the hangover from the Tokyo-London bounce and maybe the wind here, disturbing me. That was for Loman too: it’s part of a director’s job to kick out any kinks in his executive’s psyche and set him running straight when the whistle blows.

  ‘You’ve seen the reconnaissance photographs?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘We want you to go and inspect that aircraft. You knew this, of course.’ He began haltingly, but already I could see he’d decided to shoot me the whole thing before he’d got it set up in his own mind, because yes, I was panicking, and he had to do something about it. ‘It’s a medium cargo machine and its call-sign in the phonetic alphabet code is Tango Victor. After a routine takeoff in the UK one of the Customs and Excise officials noticed what appeared to be a false signature on the freight declaration form. An .enquiry was made and subsequently the Special Branch was called in. By this time Tango Victor was reported missing.’

  Wind gusted across the atrium and the green sword-blades quivered. I watched Loman thinking. He thought with his feet, placing them neatly together, turning and taking short steps as he square-searched the data and decided how much to tell me, how much to leave out: because the executive in the field has to go in with his nerves tuned like a cat’s and his wits light and if he’s been overloaded with too much info on the brink of the mission he’s going to sprain his brain when he needs it most.

  ‘The findings deriving from the Special Branch enquiry were significant enough to persuade the Minister that the RAF should attempt to locate the aeroplane, put a fix on it and take photographs. This, as you know, was accomplished.’ He talked like a bloody schoolmistress.

  ‘How did they know where to look?’

  He spread out the map on the dais.

  ‘Its course was known, and it was last heard of in an area where a violent sandstorm had been reported. The RAF made their initial reconnaissance sortie on the assumption that Tango Victor had been forced down by it. This was proved to be correct.’

  Carte Internationale du Monde Sheet NH-32-Hassi Messaoud Area - Scale 1/1.000.000 - Longitude 6-12, Latitude 28-32-Elevations, dunes, rock outcrops, reefs, wells, oases, camel-tracks, so forth.

  ‘Is this the sandstorm area?’

  ‘Yes. The cross is the site of the wreck.’

  South in the Great Eastern Erg. Nearest camel-track almost thirty miles away, Tunisian frontier ninety miles, nothing else but sand, not an oasis, not even a well, not even a palm-tree. ‘No wonder they didn’t survive.’

  ‘The conditions were unpropitious, highly.’ His manicured finger whispered across the map. ‘This oasis, Sidi Ben Ali, is the nearest point of habitation in Algeria itself. Control sent O’Brien there to assess the local situation and report. He was briefed to find out whether. any other party knew where Tango Victor had come down, and if so, who that party was and whether it had any intention of going out to examine the wreck. Unfortunately London received no report.’

  He turned away as he said that. Not that he had any scruples: his tone was petulant. It had been remiss of O’Brien to fail in this most elementary of tasks and there was no excuse for clumsiness.

  ‘Was he actually found?’

  We always hope that when it comes it’ll be short and sweet, a bullet in the brain or something.

  ‘His incinerated remains were found on a rubbish tip. Some Arab boys had heard a disturbance and told the police. Despite the condition of the body there was evidence that O’Brien had been subjected to interrogation -‘ he turned to me quickly - ‘but the most exhaustive checks throughout the network have established that this was ineffective. All signal matrices are intact and codes, access facilities, safe-houses and personnel-monitoring units reveal no indication of surveillance, blowing or penetration. This aspect, at least, is satisfactory.’

  I went on looking at the map.

  There were six of us at the Bureau with the suffix 9 to our code name: Reliable under Torture. Now there were only five. That’s not many. It’s not many because there’s only one way of earning a 9 and nobody ever sets out to get it, I mean it’s not a basket of fruit or a marble clock, and they don’t add it to your dossier posthumously because the whole record goes into the shredder once you’ve bought it. All the 9 means is that you’ve got yourself in a jam at some time and been grilled and got out again without blowing your cover or the mission or the whole network and with enough of you left in one piece to go on working. It also means that those bastards in London are going to pick you for the jobs where there’s a high risk of the opposition treading all over your face when they want to know the time, and that sort of selection makes for a brisk mortality rate and that’s why there aren’t many of us. Five.

  ‘Am I taking over from O’Brien?’

  We often have to do it but we don’t like it. We like to make our own mess of things, not clear up someone else’s.

  ‘No. They sent Fyson in next. He blew his cover.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Of course I realize -‘

  ‘You call this a mission? What kind of -‘

  ‘I wasn’t directing it when these -‘

  ‘That’s bloody obvious.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Then we both shut up while he worked out an argument good enough to keep me in the act and I tried to decide how much it was worth shoving my head right down the barrel just because I’d accepted the mission.

  He wiped the sweat off his face with a spotless linen handkerchief, not looking at me, and when I knew I couldn’t do anything else about it I asked him

  ‘Did either of them get any info on the opposition before they folded up?’

  ‘Very little.’ He was trying to keep the relief out of his voice: if I ducked this one he’d have to call someone else in and there wasn’t enough time. ‘But at least we know that there is another party interested in Tango Victor and that they’d prefer we didn’t go near it.’

  ‘Did Fyson see any sign of their trying to reach the wreck overland?’

  ‘You can ask him yourself. He’s here in the hotel, at your disposal.’

  ‘Is he still in the operation?’

  Slight pause.

  ‘No.’

  I looked at him but he was gazing at the map.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You prefer working alone. Don’t you?’

  The bastard was lying but I let it go. When you’re working alone you can still have a dozen people manning the base or the radio or the access-lines and there was some other reason why Fyson wouldn’t be doing it and Loman wasn’t going to tell me and I wasn’t going to ask him again.

  I didn’t like it, anything about it, the whole thing stank, the activity killed off right in phase I and a cover blown without any real info coming in and the situation so desperate now that they’d had to call in a man like Loman to try holding the roof up while I ferreted around in the dark.

  ‘You know something, Loman?’ He looked up from the map. ‘I think you’ve lost me.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  I knew half a dozen first-line executives who’d turn this thing down flat - Simmons, Cockley, Foster, people like that - because you don’t spend three years in training and the rest of your time working your way through the elementary intelligence-assessment fields with a Curtain embassy military attache cover to the major assignments at M-Classified level and then risk all your experience, all your capability, all your professional expertise to a chancy job in the dark that someone else has mucked up for you on his way in.

  Loman knows this. It takes a long time to rear a good ferret. So I couldn’t understand what the hell they were doing.

  ‘What the hell are they doing?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Control.’

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘Throwing us this bloody auction.’

  He walked about again while I stood there sweating and listening to the hot fluttering wind that was hitting the top of the atrium and shaking the sword-blade leaves, sending them rattling with a dry dead sound.

  Then Loman stopped and stood neatly in front of me with his hands tucked behind him and his alert bird’s head lifted to look me in the eyes and I knew he was going to keep me in this operation and work me to death if he had to, or save my skin if he had to, because there was no choice, because it was too late to call in someone else, simply because of that.

  ‘I want you to know two things, Quiller.’

  Prissy, fussy voice, talked like a bloody schoolmistress.

  But I knew he’d get me.

  ‘One is that you can dismiss entirely your fears that we are engaged on a mission that has started off badly. O’Brien and Fyson were trying to pick up intelligence and pass it back to Control, and they failed. But you are not taking over from them: the original field - Sidi Ben Ali in Algeria - has been closed from operations and our base will be the oasis town of Kaifra in Tunisia. Our mission is to examine the wreck of Tango Victor and report on it. The operation is exclusively ours, and the task of inspecting the aeroplane exclusively yours.’

  Bird’s eyes bright, watching me. Giving me a lecture, Loman all over, not even trying to talk persuasively because he didn’t have to, all he had to do was work on my weak point and he knew what it was. Couldn’t ever stand the little tick.

  ‘The second thing is that although our objective for the mission is a small commercial aircraft forced down in the desert, and nothing more than that, the importance of the operation is very great.’ He was watching for my reactions and he knew he wouldn’t got any and he wasn’t getting any but he went on watching. ‘An hour ago I was in the radio room of the British Embassy here, talking to the Prime Minister himself. He wished to inform me personally that your mission is the key to a critical situation of the highest international proportions.’ Head on one side, the tone informative, impersonal. ‘I had been told that before, of course, on the highest authority. The fact that they were asking a director of my experience to take charge of the operation confirmed its importance.’

  He turned away and took a pace and took a pace back and stood with his feet neatly together and finished me off.

  ‘This task calls for the highest professional talent. I accepted it on the sole condition that I could have you, Quiller, as my executive in the field.’

  Little bastard.

  He was in shock.

  ‘You mind if we don’t have the lights on?’

  This was why Loman had hesitated when I’d asked him if Fyson was still in the operation.

  ‘It was so bright down there.’ I suppose he meant in Sidi Ben Ali. ‘It’s done something to my eyes.’

  He went and sat down, hurrying a little to reach the chair. He sat with his hands on his knees, as if he had to hold his body together, looking straight in front of him. In the dull light coming from the bathroom I could see he was shivering.

  You see them like this at the Bureau when a mission’s blown up or they’ve just been too long in the field; they come in like a rag doll and Tilson says hallo old horse, bit of a rough time, was it?

  ‘Just give me the essentials,’ I told him, ‘then I’ll buzz off.’

  ‘It’s all - ‘it sounded as if he was afraid of stuttering - ‘I dunno.’ Best he could do, I suppose, for the moment. I looked interestedly around the room, print of a fourth-century tapestry, coloured photo of a mosque, a slight gap in the curtains so I went to fix it and he said Don’t! in a kind of sob and I left it. He thought I’d been going to open them.

  But he couldn’t have been tagged here or Loman wouldn’t have let me contact him. It was just his nerves.

  There was a bottle of Scotch on the bedside table and he’d already hit it for half but it hadn’t done anything, he was ice-cold sober. I poured some out and he took it and drank and squeezed his face shut and I got the glass before he dropped it.

  ‘Six months’ leave,’ I said, ‘marvellous, think of the fishing.’