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

Kim was pretending to lack one of the coconut mats straight where we'd been milling about. I said: 'Don't worry, you made your point. The next time I get near a wall I shan't leave myself open to a yoshida. That do you?'

He nodded quickly, pleased. He took his job seriously and if a report came in that somebody'd been found with their neck at the wrong angle in the chain-locker of a Reykjavik-bound banana-boat he liked to feel it wasn't his fault. He went across to the showers, walking like an independently sprung tiger.

'What?' I asked Stevens. A bruise was developing on the upper right arm and I'd taken care Kimura shouldn't notice it because his chief conceit is that whatever he does to you he never leaves a mark; the other instructors aren't so proud and we always look like a bunch of bitten-eared alley-cats while we're at Norfolk.

'London wants you.' He was putting in his time as a duty-runner till he was fit enough for beating up.

'On the phone?'

'In the flesh.'

'Stuff London.'

'Message understood.' He drifted dismally away in a nimbus of Vicks Vapour Rub.

In the showers Kim said: 'Also one must narrow the eyes, you see, in the dark, and not stare about like that. With the eyes half closed, vision is only a little reduced, but the shine on the eyeballs is much less easy to discern.' It was civil of him not to point out that this was how he'd come up from behind me: he knew I was worried about that as well.

'All right, I'll remember.'

'Ah-ha-ha,' he sang through the steam in approval, much as Mum does when Wee Willie hits the potty first time. I was getting fed up. He'd pulled off a first at the Tokyo Games and we weren't expected to reach that standard but we weren't expected to be shown up as amateurs either. I spun the taps to full cold and he noted the change in the noise. 'Also one must finish off with warm water, you see, following a training-bout, since the muscles require to relax.'

In London the fog was worse and even the pigeons were feeling the cold, huddling in rows along the window-sills. Below me a long stain of light crept through Whitehall, the traffic nose-to-tail.

'I'll take you in now.'

So it wasn't Parkis. He always keeps you hanging about to stop you getting ideas above your station. You never know who you're going to see when you're 'wanted in London' because the Bureau doesn't officially exist and if there's ever been a door here marked Information it's been wallpapered over.

She led me upstairs, her snagged heels ricketing on the rubber strips that were peeling away from the treads. On a landing I saw Fyson going into Reports, still looking a bit nervy about the eyes: someone's bright little op. had come unstuck in Israel, so we'd all heard, and they were being flown home, those who were left.

This wasn't the room with the Lowry and the smell of polish. It was originally a dormitory, I suppose, right under the mansard roof, the kind of place where the little frilled domestics had hacked at their lungspots through the winters of the nineteenth century. There hadn't been much progress: Egerton was rubbing chilblain ointment into his raw blue hands when I came in, and looked up rather guiltily as if discovered in the enactment of a mystic rite.

'Ah yes,' he said vaguely, and fitted the lid back on to the tin.

An opaque grey panel showed where the window was, its grime and the fog outside filtering whatever daylight was still in the sky; a single bulb in a white porcelain shade dangled from a flex looped in paper-clips to keep it out of the way: we might have been at the bottom of a mine shaft.

Egerton gestured to the only chair for visitors, an incongruous Louis Quinze with little yellow puffs of stuffing exposed to the wan light. I'd only seen Egerton twice before, on any kind of real business, and each time it had been in this room. He was a thin and tired-looking man, his eyes weathered by too many winters of inclement thought, his mouth still slightly twisted from the shock of his first disillusionment, whenever that had come; it was said his wife had committed suicide during one of their seaside holidays at Frinton, and that the smell of a certain suntan oil made him physically sick; but then he might always have looked like this, a vessel of despair, and that might be why she'd done it. Facts are short at the Bureau, where nobody's meant to exist, so rumours are a prime necessity of the resident staff.

'How was Norfolk?'

'Foggy.'

He smiled thinly. 'We always consider we have a monopoly, here. Sorry to have fetched you away.' His voice was beautifully modulated, an actor's voice. 'I expect you've heard what happened in Gaza.'

'A wheel came off.'

Of course he hadn't got a hope. They were still flying them in, what was left of them, and if they meant to send a second wave to mop up the mess they could count me out. I was strictly a shadow executive under contract for solo missions and these paramilitary stunts weren't in my field.

'Nobody's fault,' he shrugged. 'Policy is changing from day to day. There was a time, once, to plan things properly, but now there seems a need for hurry, so instead of picking quietly at the lock we just hurl a brick at the window and grab at whatever happens to be in reach.'