"Hall, Adam - The Sinkiang Executive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

He didn't answer right away and I couldn't tell whether he was considering the question or deciding not to say anything. He kicked open a door and called back: 'Have to ask Tilson.'

He kicked the door shut behind him and I began worrying again. Matthews normally told you things, if he knew them, and if he didn't know them he simply said so. This morning he was being evasive, like Holmes, giving me the same Tilson routine. Tilson was the traditional backstop for questions of any kind except those concerning your briefing: you might just as well ask a brick wall.

I found the big squareheaded character in Debriefing and he was surprised to see me and I could understand that, because he knew I wasn't in from a mission, and that's about the only time you ever go in there.

'Hallo, sir,' he said brightly. 'How are things going?'

'Who's just got in?'

He thought about this, without taking his eyes off me. He was an ex-Yard man with the knack of looking at you as if you'd got a lump of custard on the tip of your nose and he didn't like to mention it.

'I expect you're looking for Briefing, aren't you? This is -'

'Oh, for Christ's sake, it's a perfectly simple question.' I leaned over his desk. 'Has someone just got in from a mission?'

He folded his square freckled hands and his eyes went stony.

'Well, sir, they come and go, don't they?'

He didn't have executive status and this was his way of telling me to get the hell out of his office.

'You must be a pain in the neck to your dentist,' I told him and went out and tried to find Thompson. Someone said he was down in the Caff for a tea-break. He wasn't.

I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a cup and didn't drink it because the last thing my nerves wanted at the moment was caffeine and in this place the stuff tasted like something out of a horse.

'Is it too cold?' Maisie asked me.

'It's fine.'

She went away.

The thing that worried me was that someone had slapped me on standby and they wouldn't do that without checking the records and the records showed that I'd got back from Turkey a week ago and was due for special leave. Special leave is granted when you come in looking like something the dog has found in a rubbish dump, and we nearly always get it because no one ever comes in looking very fit: it's in the nature of the job.

Being on standby isn't the same as being on call. When you're on call it means they've got a specific mission lined up for you and you have to be ready to hit the field at a moment's notice, so you don't go far from a telephone and you don't leave your pad without telling them where you're going. They let you see one of the girls but it's on the understanding that if her phone rings you've got to put down the tiddly-winks and get to your car in zero seconds flat, so it's no use complaining. Standby is less demanding and more general: it means they may have a job for you but you can leave home and travel around the Metropolitan area providing you call them at twelve-hour intervals.

The one alert phase often leads to the other, of course: from standby you can suddenly find yourself put on call and then you're in line for briefing and transport, within minutes or hours or sometimes days: it depends on how soon the directors can work out things like access, cover, liaison, so forth. The one thing I knew at this moment was that they wouldn't be putting me on call, because the Turkey thing had developed a lot of problems and we'd lost a courier and blown the escape route and I'd had to get out under fire from the frontier guards at Kazim Pasa. I'd had no cover for Iran and it had meant holing up in a freightyard for three days in the snow before I could reach the embassy. That was all right but I'd lost some blood because one of the guards had made a hit and it was the wrong time to go on a fast in a freightyard at five below zero.

'Hallo, old horse.'

Tilson sat down and began a little tattoo with his fingertips on the plastic table, not looking at me but gazing around at the tea urns and Maisie and the liverish yellow walls.

'Who put me on standby?' I asked him.

'I wouldn't know.' Then he turned his pale watery eyes on me and said under his breath: 'What have you been up to, for Christ's sake?'

I went instinctively deadpan and felt the heart rate increasing suddenly, whipped up by the shock. He hadn't said much but it was enough. In the Bureau people talk so little that if someone says good morning you feel like dashing into Codes and Cyphers to find out what he meant. The Bureau doesn't exist, so you don't exist, and nobody else exists, so there's very little to talk about.

I looked at Tilson.