"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 03 - The Striker Portfolio 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

The normal routine would be to take separate taxis to different hotels and he still didn't say anything until we were through Customs and I thought he was leaving it very late this time.

'Start by seeing Lovett.'

'Where?'

'The Carlsberg.'

'All right'

Outside at the taxi-rank he said: 'Did you pick anything up in Firearms?' 'Only the pox.'




Chapter Three

SELBSTMORD


There was no wind in Hanover. It was cold.

From the outside the hotel looked like a cinema organ designed by Steinberg. Inside it was an ornate cave full of lamps and shadows. It was quiet even for one in the morning, though people were about.

'But of course it isn't your fault'

There were some piles of baggage near the main doors and more people were coming out of the lift, hardly any of them talking.

I said I didn't want to see the room. Number 14. Lovett was 31 in the register.

'It's just that my wife is sensitive about things like that' The American was consoling the manager and then consoling his wife, looking around secretively as if for a bar where he could console himself.

'If you will follow the page, Herr Martin.'

The other people were coming silently across from the lift.

'We don't have to stay, honey, but that doesn't mean it's their fault now, does it? We have to be fair.'

When my bag was in Room 14 and the page had gone I went up two floors and walked along the passage. It didn't seem worth waking Lovett if he'd already gone to bed. There was a light from under his door but there were voices from inside so I went down again because we would have to talk alone.

A piece of grit had got lodged under my top lid when we were crossing from the plane at Amsterdam and I spent some time poking about with the corner of my handkerchief and thinking about Lovett.

It was a name from the past and I hadn't seen him for more than a year. He used to be with the Liaison Group and I'd worked three times under his direction, then they sent him to Rome on the Carosio thing and one of the adverse party found him alone and left him for dead. It finished him for operations and the Bureau put him into their political section to sit in on summits and report any rot. He could still move about without crutches or things like that but he was full of platinum tubing and bone-rivets and his face was attractively lopsided so he never went short of a bed.

There was a NATO conference going on in Hanover this month and I suppose the Bureau had sent him to sit in on it.

It was a bit of metal, which explained why it had got lodged in so efficiently. The room looked watery now.

That sort of job must be irksome for a man like Lovett because he'd been very active before and spent most of his leaves in the Box of Squibs showing people how to break a door down without any noise and things like that: the Box is the house in Norfolk where we're sent at intervals for refresher training. But Lovett was good in subtler ways and perhaps he now passed the time trying to get two frames of micro under one full-stop without any tweezers.