"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 01 - The 9th Directive 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

It might have been Varaphan's daughter who came in to answer the bell, a willowy child with a mane of black hair. Loman said to me, 'I haven't very much grasp.'

I told her in English, 'We'd like something to drink, is that possible? Scotch, soda, lime juice and ice.'

'I will bring, yes.'

'You play the pinai beautifully.'

She denied it in delight and left us.

'It's the lingua franca,' I told Loman.

'Well, you'd better give yourself a crash refresher course in Thai. You'll be meeting people who don't speak anything else. Also you will want to be able to hear things. How proficient are you?'

'I'm all right outside esoteric terms.'

He got up, feeling restless again. 'What I meant when I said that there was no rush now that you're here is that if you'd been too long delayed we should have had to pull Styles out of Java, and he's very busy there. You know Bangkok as well as he does and you're between missions.'

'Or I was.'

'That's right.'

'It's nearly two years since I was here.'

There is a simple tradition in the Bureau that protects any given operation from failure. We can refuse a mission. There has to be a reason and we have to give it and it has to be a good one but in the final analysis we have a get-out if we want it. This is intelligent because it means that nobody is ever sent into the field with misgivings. Any operator taking up a mission has therefore a positive approach and is self-orientated toward success. There is only one thing London Control can do when a man wants to opt out; they have to give him an incentive that will make him opt in again. They tried this on me once in Berlin and it worked: they gave me a man to go after, a man I could hate. Talking now to Loman I was already putting up the odd objection, rationalizing the situation to cover the one main misgiving which was simply that we didn't like each other. The work we had done together in the past was Bureau stuff: intelligence breakdown, communications, liaison, so forth. But now he was going to be my director in the field and that was different because the success of a mission and even your life could sometimes depend on whether you got on well with your director. You had to like him, trust him, respect him and live with him. My opinion of Loman, despite his brilliance and his record, was that he was a well-polished little pimp. It didn't help that he looked on me as a rough-haired sheepdog with more guts than gumption and a chip on each shoulder and one on the wick.

'After two years,' I told him, 'I don't remember much about this place.'

'You will now that you're back.'

His point. The memory relies strongly on environment. Recollective recall. If examinations were taken in the familiar surroundings of the lecture rooms where the stuff was learned there would be fewer failures.

'I don't know this place for a start. Who's Varaphan?'

'The Embassy gave us his name.'

'Don't tell me you trust the Embassy.'

'We've checked on him, of course. He was educated on the Burma Road, liaising with our escape parties. Since then he's been useful, very useful, to several of our operations. He travels a lot, with gems. That takes him to London a great deal.'

'He's not an agent?'

'Not strictly.'

'He took a good look at the street to see if I'd been followed before bringing me in here.'

'He's not a fool.'

We had to stop talking because the girl was coming in with drinks. As soon as she had gone we set on the lime juice.