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

Took your time,' he said.

We went through the code-intro for the month, inter-national and unspecified, and he ordered me some tea.

'I had a fast police escort,' I said, 'what more do you want?'

He looked faintly surprised. 'I was just joking.'

He was a small man with sideboards and a huge tie and suede shoes and I wondered where they'd got him from. He wasn't Bureau. I looked around and saw it was all right: there aren't any bugs in the Rotunda at the Negresco and the dome doesn't throw any echoes because of the carpet and all those gilt-framed copies of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

'Where are you from?' I asked him, 'Liaison 9.'

That explained it: we call them the Wet Look. The thing is they spend their time liaising with the major services and therefore know a lot more than we do and we resent that Our only consolation is that we know one or two things they can never hope to get their hands on because they're filed in a heat-proof box with an all-eventualities cutout circuit and a bang-destruct and they'd never get near the thing, even if they took off their little suede shoes.

'All right,' I told him, 'what's the form?'

We spoke just above a whisper, because people could go past on the other side of the pillars to look at the onyx ashtrays in the display windows.

There isn't any.'

He sipped .his tea, I didn't say anything. If I said anything it would get his back up and there wasn't any point in doing that because he wasn't anyone important: he was just a contact thrown in to early-warn the executive, that was all; and once the mission was set up they'd give me a first rank director in the field I'd have to live with and like it He'd have to be different from Steadman.

'You're on stand-by,' he said, and brushed his lips with the napkin.

'What phase?'

He gave a little laugh, displacing a lock of hair, 'Oh, it's nothing like that.'

Sometimes they try and shove a between-mission executive straight into a middle-phase or an end-phase assignment that's come unstuck and we all squeal like hell but never refuse it because we can hear the sound of distant bugles and we want to get in there where the bloodied banners are reeling through the fray. And there's another reason; we know there's always the chance that someone's managed to put most of an important mission in the bag before he caught a stray shot or hit a wall, so we can go in and tie up the end-phase and reach the objective and come out alive and take the glory for the poor bastard who couldn't quite make it-listen, if we weren't people like that we wouldn't be in this trade, work it out for yourself.

My tea came and when the boy had gone I said:

'Is it a mission?'

'It has all the earmarks, old boy.'

So he'd been getting the lingo wrong, that was all: trust Liaison 9. He'd told me I was on stand-by and they only use that term when they want to throw you into the fire to look for the chestnuts and that's why I'd asked the obvious question, to find out what phase they'd got the thing running at. When you're down for a mission they don't put you on stand-by, they put you on call; and maybe it doesn't sound very different but it is: a full-scale mission is your very own little toy to play with and you take it very seriously indeed and that was how I was taking it now.

The nerves were on edge.

'What time are they, calling up?'

He sipped his tea.

'No special time.'

I sat back and looked at Little Lord Fauntleroy. Under the big glass dome of the Rotunda the silence was peculiar, made up of tiny sounds that ticked or scratched or bumped and then died away before you could place them; but they weren't the ones I was listening to. Up there on the far side of the Channel there were doors opening and closing along those dim-lit passages, and the gibberish was crackling through the static and out of the scramblers in Signals while a phone rang and was picked up and someone in Monitoring sent a memo to Egerton or Mildmay or Parkis and everyone waited for the word that would start this whole thing running. Somewhere in Beirut or The Hague or the Azores they were looking for the hole, and when they'd found the hole they were going to put the ferret down, and the ferret was me.

From where we sat in our plush chairs in this sepulchral calm we could hear the telephone, faintly, at the desk in the foyer. I listened to that sound, too.