"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 04 - The Warsaw Document 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

'The chill of Poland in winter wraps itself round this complex tale of a Soviet plot to set up a bogus spy-trial...'



Adam Hall

The Walsaw Document (1971)



IDENTITY

This dramatized report of an Intelligence mission by a shadow executive controlled from London forms part of a series bearing the key-titles of Memorandum, Directive, Portfolio, and so on. It may seem curious that in all these reports the name of the executive rarely appears. The reason is as follows.

It is necessarily a code-name. Further, the policy of the Bureau controlling him dictates anonymity even in confidential speech, as a point of routine security. During a mission the code-name is never used, since a mission demands a cover and hence a cover-name, which is used even in signals between the executive and his Control. This name itself must sometimes be changed if the cover is blown and he is thus exposed to great and immediate hazard: a new cover must be arranged and with it a new name.

The identities, therefore, of the Bureau's active staff are confined strictly to its secret files, for the purposes of administration.

For the record, the executive whose work is the subject of these reports bears a single code-name: Quiller.




1 LONDON


There would be no warning, I knew that.

In the total darkness I thought I could see things: the glint of his eyes, his bared teeth; and in the silence I thought I could hear his breath and the soft tentative padding of his feet as he looked for me; but all I saw and heard was in my imagination and I knew that soon my nerves were going to start playing up because of the worry: the worry that there'd be no warning when he came at me. He'd come the instant he found me.

Breathing was difficult because this place wasn't very big and we were so close that one drawn breath would be a give-away; also it would have to be expelled before the next inhalation and I was afraid of being caught with empty lungs. I breathed tidally, right near the top, part of my conscious mind registering the smell of hemp and coconut.

It was worse than I'd thought, the waiting. There was nothing to go on: no means of orientation. He was only a man but he was invisible and inaudible and these were the attributes of a phantom and my scalp was raised. It needn't be true that he was where I thought he was: somewhere in front of me where my hands could get at him. Even in the dark there's comfort if the enemy can be faced: the real dread is of being taken from behind.

That was where he came for me: from behind. We hadn't touched; we had simply come so close that the instincts were triggered and the nerves galvanised and I was already in a throat-lock with my knees buckling to a flat kick before I could hook at him but my hands were free and I caught him and reached his thumb as we pitched down, breaking the hold while he used his foot again and missed and tried again and connected a fraction too late, his breath grunting as I forced him over. We fought close, neither wanting to lose the other in the unnerving dark. My shoulder hit the wall and I used the chance, going down low and recoiling against him, but the momentum wasn't enough and he deadened the spring and forced me into a spine-bending yoshida that paralysed the arms. Then some fool came in and switched the light on.

Kimura helped me up with his usual courtesy and we touched palms and looked for our towels.

'It was good,' he said.

'No,' I said, 'it wasn't.' I wiped at the sweat, trying not to worry. I shouldn't have let him throw that deadly yoshida so soon, when he was fresh enough to follow it through; it had left the plexus exposed and he could have killed me within the next five seconds if he'd wanted to, a straight chop to the heart from under the ribs. It was all right here in the gym but it wouldn't be all right one day in some back-street in Buenos Aires or wherever the hell I'd be when it happened again. 'Can't you,' I asked Stevens, 'shut that bloody door?'

'Interrupted, did I?' He turned and shut the fog out, pushing his face into his handkerchief again. He'd come up to Norfolk for a routine dose of what they call Refresher 5 and then caught a streaming cold before they could start work on him. He was better off anyway because Refresher 5 is the course where the instructors break every bone in your body unless you can giggle them out of it.

'It was only the wall,' Kimura told me. He knew I was worried. 'I heard you go into it, and assumed you would make use of it, you see.' He nodded his reassuring smiles at me, towelling the sweat off his small ivory-coloured body; under the wire-meshed lamps the sword-scar looked deep mauve, running from one shoulder to the top of his shorts like a zip-fastener. 'You can not execute such a rebound, you see, without leaving the abdomen unprotected. But of course you would have extricated yourself from my yoshida if this gentleman had not appeared.'

I didn't think so.

'London, old boy.' Stevens stood like a forlorn penguin, mopping at his beak.