The Kobra Manifesto Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  The Kobra Manifesto

  Quiller Book Seven

  Adam Hall

  Chapter 1

  ZARKOVIC

  This year they’d added another layer of Armco on the outside of the bends and joined the two bottom rows with massive steel flitch plates to stop people forcing the rails apart and this must have saved a lot of injuries when Hans Strobel came round three laps from the finish and hit one of the uprights and bounced off it and spun twice and caught fire.

  There wasn’t a lot of noise from the crash itself, just a low roaring as the flames bannered back in the slipstream; but some people down there had started screaming and there was a kind of whimpering noise as the first of the emergency vehicles wheelspun on the hot tarmac as it pulled away from the pits.

  ‘Oh God,’ Marianne said and buried her face against me.

  ‘He’s all right,’ I told her, but of course she knew he wasn’t. He’d been hurled clear but the flames had caught him and he was rolling over and over like a small quiet fireball along the guardrails with no one to help him.

  Up to now we’d all been cheering him on. This was Strobel’s third year at Monaco and he’d been steadily getting the hang of the gear ratios and the characteristic front-end problem as the weight came off past the Casino, and in practice he’d notched up a diabolical 1 min. 25.35 sec. just before he came in, and for most of the time it had looked like his race and in another few minutes we would have heard the corks popping but now he was rolling along the guard rails, orange and black and flickering, le pauvre, the man next to me kept saying monotonously, oh mon Dieu, le pauvre, till he got on my nerves.

  The B.R.M. wasn’t in the way and the rest of the field were coming past in a strung-out line, slowing under the brakes and losing some of their traction on the hot tarmac. Rizzoli and Marks had begun shunting and one of the team Ferraris lost the back end and did a complete spin and tore off its nose aerofoil and that was about all I saw because Marianne had gone dead white and I wanted to get her away from the stands before the shoving and pushing began. People were standing on the benches to get a better view of the mess down there and that made it easier for me and we were going down the steps to the harbour car park as the P.A. system began sending out its near-unintelligible echoes round the circuit.

  They didn’t mention Strobe but just said the race was being abandoned and this wasn’t surprising because even if he were still alive they couldn’t bring the thing to a decent conclusion with wreckage and fire-foam all over the finishing-straight. A lot of people were already coming down from the stands, because there’d only been three laps to go and they wanted to avoid the traffic jam.

  ‘It looked worse,’ I said, ‘than it really was.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marianne said, ‘yes of course.’

  She clung to me as far as the entrance to the harbour car park and then freed herself and walked, apart from me for a little way, as if ashamed of her behaviour. I didn’t know her very well but I knew she had pride. She walked very straight but with her head down, the snakeskin bag swinging from her tanned hand, the gold bracelet sparkling in the sun. In a minute I put an arm round her and she brought her head up and we walked in step to the line of cars along the harbour’s edge where I’d left the Lancia.

  ‘Vous avez vos papiers, m’sieur?’

  Two Monegasque motards, their bikes heeled over on their stands, one in front of the Lancia and one behind. I showed them my passport and driving license and left them reading the things while I opened the door for Marianne. She looked up at me and managed a slightly lopsided smile.

  ‘C’est la vie,’ she said, and I nodded. She was talking about Hans Strobel, and she probably meant, c’est la mort. The loudspeakers were still echoing around the buildings but I couldn’t make out what they were saying because the Radio Monte-Carlo helicopter was making some low passes across the circuit where the crash had been. A whole crowd of people were moving into the car park now and the traffic police were taking up stations.

  ‘Merci, m’sieur.’

  He gave me back my papers and it occurred to me that the whole thing was a bit odd because you can’t break many regulations leaving your car parked in a nice neat row with the others; but I wasn’t really interested because I wanted to start battling a gangway through the traffic till we got to a quiet bar where I could give Marianne a cognac.

  ‘Eh bien, m’sieur,’ the big one said, ‘il y a un Monsieur Steadman qui vous attend a I’Hotel Negresco, & Nice. C’est assez urgent, et vous n’avec qu’h nous suivre; vous savez?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and got into the Lancia.

  ‘What is happening?’ asked Marianne.

  They’re going to give us a hand getting through all the traffic.’

  She kept her green eyes on me for a moment and then looked down and didn’t ask anything else. I’d told her I was in the diplomatic corps, one of the routine covers when we’re hanging around foreign parts between missions. There was the prescribed plate on the back of the car and I’d telexed the number to London and that was routine too. We’re never asked to report at intervals or tell them where we’re staying because we’re meant to relax between missions but we have to tell them the country we’re in and the car we’re driving, so that they can get their hooks on us if something blows up.

  The two motards had got their hee-haws going and the whistles began shrilling ahead of us as the traffic police began pulling the line of cars to one side to let us through. Marianne lit a cigarette and leaned her head back and closed her eyes and we didn’t talk until the cops had taken us in a loop along the Boulevard des Moulins to the frontier by the bus terminal. A pair of French motards were waiting for us there with their bikes ticking over and the Monegasques peeled off and left us to it. The main street through Beausoleil was almost deserted because everyone was down there by the sea, and the French cops put on a bit of speed, using their klaxons on the rising ‘hairpin bends to the Grande Corniche.

  ‘Will you have to go?’ asked Marianne. She was leaning her dark head sideways, watching me.

  ‘Probably.’

  Because London doesn’t grab you just for a giggle. I didn’t know who Monsieur Steadman was because it’d be a code name and it could be Ferris or Loman or Comings or anyone at all: it didn’t have to be a director in the field at this stage; it could simply be a contact. During the last few hours something had come up on the board and they’d flown this man out and asked Interpol in Paris to pick up the driver of the car with the number I’d given them and tell him where the rendezvous was: the Negresco, Nice, That is a shame,’ Marianne said.

  She always tried to speak English to me, because I said I liked her accent.

  ‘Yes.’ I turned to look at her, then away again.

  We’d planned three more days together before she had to go back on duty handing out trays at thirty thousand feet and I wouldn’t have let anything bust into a situation like that in the ordinary way, but this wasn’t the ordinary way: it looked as if the Bureau had a mission for me and all I could think about now was what I was going into and whether I was going to get out.

  They’ve got some trouble,’ I told her, ‘in French Guinea, and the UK has been asked to mediate.’ We were going through La Turbie at the correct speed and there wa
sn’t any traffic so they weren’t using their klaxons, which was a relief. ‘It just means they’ll want me back in Paris.’

  ‘Merde,’ she said.

  ‘Are you on the metropolitan flights?’

  ‘No. I will be in Durban.’

  She opened her eyes and looked at me for a minute and then curled her bare brown legs up on the seat and closed her eyes again and we didn’t talk any more till we were rolling along the Promenade des Anglais, one motard still ahead of us and one behind. They’d taken us through most of the Corniche at a hundred kph and all we’d met were the La Turbie bus and a couple of deux chevaux but they’d used their hee-haws on sight and the indications seemed to be that London had sent a real phase-one priority to Interpol with the end result that these two anges de la route had been given instructions to get me through fire and water if it were necessary. It hadn’t been necessary but they’d at least tried to show they were right on the ball in case any questions were asked later.

  London doesn’t normally fidget like that.

  Marianne had an apartment in the Gustave V and I turned off the sea front and dropped her there, the rearguard motard following up and the front one meeting us from the opposite direction when he found out we’d made a deviation. She told me not to come up.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  She’d been quiet for most of the time since we’d left the Principality, because the Strobel thing was still on her mind. Also I think she’d been looking forward to the three days in we’d planned, and probably thought I should ring Paris and tell them I was down with the grippe or something; and that was what I would have done, if it had been Paris.

  I got out of the Lancia and opened the little rusty iron gate of the Villa Madeleine, breaking another tendril of the morning glory that was twined round the hinges.

  ‘Are you ever in Durban?’ She gave a little moue and turned away and went up the tiled steps, finding the key in her bag; and when I was back in the car she’d gone, Marianne, with her slim brown legs and her smoky eyes and the way she made you feel it was the first time and never-coding.

  Steadman had left a message at the desk saying he’d be in the Rotunda, and I saw him on the far side sitting alone at a table with a tray of tea. He looked at me over the cup.

  Took your time,’ he said.

  We went through the code-intro for the month, international 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.

  ‘You must have some idea,’ I told Steadman.

  Sat cursing myself. Perfectly normal for the executive to be on edge when he’s on call but we always try not to show it and we always try not to show it especially to little ticks like this one.

  He looked at the shine on his nails.

  ‘There’s someone trying to get across.’

  I sat forward an inch, ‘Where from?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, you must know where the-‘

  Stopped.

  He looked around him, terribly casual, hamming it. The executive is requested to keep his cool and not shout the place down so that strangers can hear.

  ‘Correction,’ he said blandly, his gaze passing across my face as if by accident ‘For “we” don’t know, read “I” don’t know.’

  He let three seconds go by and added gently: ‘Possibly that’s why they’re going to phone.’

  It was twenty-five past six and at ten past seven the little bastard got up and wandered about looking at the costume jewellery in the display window and the brass plates at the bottom of the picture frames and then came wandering back. I’d counted twenty-three calls to the desk out there, ‘M’sieur Steadman?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’

  They never got used to their cover names.


  ‘A telephone call for you.’

  Thanks.’

  The waiter took him to the foyer and came back to get our trays.

  ‘Vous avez termini, m’sieur?’

  ‘Bien sur. Dites moi, il y a des nouvelles de ce pilote, Hans Strobel, & Monte Carlo?’

  His waxed eyebrows lifted slightly in a gesture of desolation.

  ‘Il est mort. Dans [‘ambulance, vous savez. Eh, oui.’ The delicate porcelain tinkled as he stacked the cups, gilt and rosebuds and tealeaves. ‘Je crois que c’est le destin qu’ils cherchent, hein, ces types-la?’

  ‘C’est possible.’

  A fireball rolling along the guardrail. Death or glory, make up your mind because you can’t have both.

  I got up and went over to the line of windows, Cartier, Chanel, and then some Hermes scarves like the one Marianne was wearing, reminding me of the bars of sunlight and shadow thrown by those peeling Venetian blinds across the white carpet, across her gold body. But already she seemed a long time ago and in a distant place, because the moment you know they’ve sent for you it’s like dropping over a brink and into a void, and the memory tends to blank off.

  His reflection came against the window glass.

  ‘What about a little stroll along the promenade?’

  ‘All right.’

  When we left the hotel I checked and got negative and checked again after we’d crossed the two roads to the sea front and got negative again and felt totally satisfied because anyone trying to tag us across that hellish traffic would never make it alive. He’d probably picked up some ticks in London because the Liaison 9 people can hardly avoid it: their routine travel pattern takes them from one intelligence base to the next and they’re fair game, and when they board an aircraft for anywhere abroad they’re liable to be overtaken by signals and find someone on the peep for them wherever they land. But he’d obviously flushed them, and I could believe he was clever at it because people like Steadman dislike human contact.

  ‘It’s for tomorrow morning,’ he said, They can’t do that,’

  ‘I think they can, old boy.’

  There was something wrong and I didn’t like it because there just wasn’t enough time to set me up overnight: they had to brief me and push me through Clearance and drop me into the target zone and set me running with everything I needed - communications, access channels, escape lines, so forth. And there wasn’t enough time for that: I couldn’t even make London before midnight unless there were a flight with a delay on it Then I saw I was missing the obvious, too bloody impatient to think straight. This was local.