"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 07 - The Kobra Manifesto 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

'They're ready for you now, sir, in Room 6.'

It was the next floor up and I took the stairs and met Woods coming out of Signals with his tie under one ear and a cigarette in his mouth and a cup of tea in his hand.

'Jesus Christ,' he said, 'three changes in the last twenty-four hours I' He limped along to the Gents. God knew which current operation he was doing the signals for, but anyone having to change his code three times in twenty-four hours was running it very close.

Room 6 was along in the briefing complex and I knocked and went in.

'Who are you?'

'Quiller.'

'Ah yes. Sit down, won't you?'

He was behind the desk, sliding a ruler across some paper in a series of angled jerks, presumably making a graph. He was slightly rumpled-looking, with black hair and a grey face and sooty bags under his eyes. I'd never seen him before. His ruler went on sliding and I watched the deft working of his hands. He sat very still with his head angled down to look at the desk, and I took no notice when one of the telephones buzzed. After a while I got the impression that he was a remote-controlled robot with orders to fiddle here while some kind of Rome went burning down.

'Yes.'

He slid the ruler to one side and looked across at me. It was the first time I'd seen his eyes; they were the same unhealthy grey as the rest of his face, and gave away nothing.

'We haven't long,' he said, and got up and began walking about. 'I'm sending two of you people across to Lisbon by the first available flight - direct, of course. They are Pritchard and Mailer. Have you worked with them before?'

'No.'

'They are exceptionally talented. You will be making covert rendezvous with them tonight at 21:00 hours and the code introduction will be concomitant with the third series.' He stopped walking for a moment and stood looking down at his shoes with his hands tucked behind his back and his grey face intent. It was perfectly genuine: he'd forgotten I was here. I waited.

'You speak Portuguese?'

'Yes.'

'Very good. Pritchard is fluent, and Mailer has been swatting up a handbook of phrases for tourists. The three of you will be working close together, you understand. Communication will be via open channels unless there is a need for a code, in which case you will of course signal through Crow-borough.'

He was telling me about access lines when I got up and went out and looked for Tilson and found him in Firearms, 'Who's that bloody fool in Room 6?'

'Oh my God,' he said, 'when did you get in?'

Twenty minutes ago and the only thing that's happened so far is that I.S. pushed me into Room 6 for debriefing and some idiot tried to sell me a lot of crap about working with two other executives in Portugal.'

Tilson put down the sub-machine gun and looked for a phone.

'I wish someone had told me, old horse.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, can't they get their records straight?'

'There's a flap on,' he said, and pushed the button again.

'Does that mean the whole system's gone on the blink?'

He started talking to someone and I went back into the corridor and walked up and down for a bit, getting control by degrees and finding it difficult and not liking it: when we're called in for a mission the nerves react because this branch of the trade is the tricky one and it's like playing Russian roulette. There's an ambivalent attitude towards the situation that pulls us both ways: we're desperate to get back into some kind of action because that's the way we tick and if we didn't tick that way we wouldn't be here, but at the same time we know what we're doing-we're sticking our neck out a bit farther every time and one day we're going to get the chopper. It's a question of watching the odds stack up against us, mission after mission.