"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 06 - The Scorpion Signal 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

'Give me a lift?' Norton asked me.

'Where to?' I was thinking of Helena.

'London.'

I turned and looked at him 'Do they want you too?'

'They might.'

I suppose he could have gone over to the telephone booth by the doors while I was calling London: the first line I'd tried had been engaged. Maybe they'd told him to make sure I got there.

'Look,' I told the cashier, 'there's a Helena Swinburn meeting me here in an hour from now. Give her this message and get the florist to bring round some gardenias, if not, orchids, if not, carnations, all right? Add twenty-five to the card to cover it. And I'm leaving my bags in the room.'

He was making notes. 'You'll be keeping the room, then, sir?'

'Yes. I'll be back tomorrow some time.'

I could hear Norton whistling under his breath. He'd caught some of the panic from London when he'd phoned, typical admin reaction. I went over to the cops. 'What's the form?'

'You follow us. If you can't keep up, just give a toot'

'Bloody cheek,' I said and went out to look for the Jag.

In the next ten minutes we cleared all the red lights in the town with the siren and flashers going and settled down into the nineties as soon as we got on to the motorway north, reaching Mitcham in seventy minutes flat 'Chopper,' Norton said. He hadn't spoken before.

I'd been watching it. The patrol car was slowing hard in front of us and taking us across the common, pulling up close to the spot where the helicopter was touching down on skis. It was a police machine with the coat-of-arms of the Royal Borough of Westminster on the side; I suppose they hadn't been able to get the Sussex constabulary to fly us in from the coast. Everyone had obviously been playing about with the radio and I began feeling depressed because this was fully-alert procedure and I was meant to be on leave.

The door slid back and a voice came above the sound of the blades. 'No baggage?'

'No.'

'Hop in.'

Norton's foot slipped on the metal rung of the step as he swung up.

'Watch it.'

They slammed the door and gunned up and lifted of! with the first of the neon street lights falling away below. Norton was still untalkative; he sat puffing his cheeks out, trying to get rid of the tension. He'd been with the Bureau nearly as long as I had and he knew the signs. This wasn't a mission they wanted me for: someone had blown a fuse and the whole network had gone out of whack. It had happened twice before, during my time: once when Fraser had been pulling a Polish intelligence colonel across the frontier at Szczecin and the checkpoint had shut down on them, and once when they'd hauled me out of Tokyo to look for some nerve gas some bloody fool had dropped all over the Sahara. Whatever they wanted me for this time it was no go.

London was coming up, a haze of light from horizon id horizon under the late January fog. Norton was rubbing his hands together, though it wasn't cold in the cabin; I felt sorry for him, with all that adrenalin sloshing about before we'd even started.

'Never mind,' I said above the beat of the rotors, 'it's probably some bloody fool in Signals getting his homework wrong.'

'Oh shit,' he said and swung to face me, and I realized he'd been startled out of his thoughts by the sound of my voice. I began wondering if he knew something that I didn't: something about the panic going on.

'Where are you putting us down?' I asked the pilot 'Battersea Heliport. All right?'

'It's your toy.' We were lowering now, with the city lights swarming to meet us.