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

is a matter of fact we don't know anybody's name at all, Because they're just convenient labels thought up in Personnel. The Bureau doesn't exist, and that allows it to take on operations that no one else wants to be seen dead with: and that's not a bad metaphor. The intelligence lords on the lop floor run the place as if it were a secret munitions ship moving at dead slow through a minefield by night: they like there to be a hush over everything, a permanent blackout, reducing to a calculated minimum the risk of an odd spark sending the whole outfit into Kingdom Come, 'Where from, sir?' the big man asked me.

'Istres, south of France.'

'Ah, yes.' He checked the board that would tell him which mission I was on, and who was running it. He didn't find anything because no one had given me a mission yet, so he opened a drawer and moved his colourless eyes twice from left to right.

'Room 6,' he said and shut the drawer. 'Just let me tell him you're here.' He picked up a phone.

They've put numbers on some of the doors now; their lordships went a bit too far in the beginning, when even the doors had to be anonymous; it had worked up to a point but there'd been a couple of cases where a visitor had wandered into Codes and Cyphers without an escort, scaring the daylights out of us all; and they kept having to haul Thompson out of the Ladies, though God knows what he was doing in there because most of the ladies at the Bureau have brogues and rimless bifocals.

'Yes sir,' the big man said into the phone and put it down and looked at me. 'Would you care to wait five minutes?'

'All right.'

So it wasn't going to be Parkis, and it wasn't going to be Egerton. Parkis always keeps the executives waiting for half an hour because he's paranoid on the subject of status; and Egerton is too courteous to keep anyone waiting, though it comes to the same thing in the end because no one can ever find him.

'How did it go?' the big man asked, 'Got a negative.'

'Ah.' He eyed me without looking at me, in the way ex-Scotland Yard men have learned, but he couldn't see any cuts or bruises or anything wrong with my nerves, only some clay on my shoes and that wasn't too bad because five months ago Bateman had come in from a nasty one in Tangier and been told to wait and couldn't manage it: he just went along the corridor and dropped over the banisters into the stairwell before anyone had a clue what was in his mind. These cases are mostly when there's been some kind -of implemented interrogation by the opposition, leaving the nerve-ends bared; but nobody comes off a mission or an interim phase feeling very jolly.

We listened to the rain pattering on the windowsill, and the distant hammering of a road drill where they were doing the gas mains.

'Smoke, sir?'

'No, thanks.'

'Trying to give it up myself.' He lit one and dropped the match into the ashbowl and hit the chrome knob.

'Who is it,' I asked him, 'in Room 6?'

'Couldn't say, sir.'

He said it so fast that I knew it was routine.

It could be Mildmay. Or Sargent. The rest of them had something on the board, I knew that. In any case I was reaching the point where I didn't give a damn who was going to run me: all I wanted to do was get into the field and start moving. The Zarkovic thing had left me feeling hooked and I wanted to know more. There'd been nothing in his wallet, not a damned thing: passport, medical card, Communist membership papers, picture of a dark-haired girl smiling with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, nothing else, nothing to go on. Whatever Milos Zarkovic had brought over from Yugoslavia he'd brought in his head.

I'd taken the Lancia to Marseille and used the phone and they'd told me to come in by air through Paris and here I was, hanging around this bloody office talking to a man I didn't know.

'Looks like setting in, sir,'

'What?'

The rain,'

'Yes.'

I gave it another five minutes and told him I was going along to the Caff, so if anyone wanted me they knew where to find me.

'Okay sir, I'll tell-' then the phone rang and he asked me to hold on. I tried to recognize the voice at the other end but all I could tell was that it wasn't Parkis and it wasn't Egerton.