Quiller Barracuda Read online

  'On whose orders?'

  'London ordered it when -'

  'I mean whose orders locally for Christ's sake, who told the man with the screwdriver?'

  'I did.'

  'And did you know what time I'd be there?'

  'Yes. They -'

  'You bugged my phone too?'

  'I do wish you'd sit down. You'd be much more comfy.'

  I had to centre to get the control back before I spoke.

  'Not very good manners, was it?'

  A sigh. One of his characteristic and calculated sighs. 'I really think this is a job for Meddick, you know. He'd be so much easier to handle.'

  I moved around a bit and came back and sat on the floor with my back to the wall, slight smell of carpet and a shift in the acoustics: less traffic noise from the window. 'Fuck Meddick.'

  'Now that'll make you feel better.'

  'So you've got the whole of my meeting with Proctor on tape?'

  'Yes.'

  'And you don't, therefore, need to debrief me.'

  'Except for the visuals, and the ambience.'

  'He's in good shape, works out.' I went on talking normally to let the angst dissipate of its own accord. The only physical alternative for getting rid of the adrenalin would have been to hit Ferris and he'd saved my life too many times for me to touch him and in any case that too would have been bad manners. 'He started off all right but turned hostile. He -'

  'Did you antagonise him?'

  'No. I played him very carefully. He's lost some weight and he's living on his nerves – you'll pick that up in his voice too. Shabby flat, renting it furnished, air-conditioning not working – this was before the storm hit the power off. Very pretty black popsy who left without a word. He's -'

  'Tart?'

  'No, unless she's flying extremely high, Washington or somewhere like that. She's sophisticated, and potential dynamite. Raw silk dress, platinum Pinochet watch.'

  'Yes, the tag reported on her. Did Proctor introduce her?'

  'Yes, the name was Monique.'

  Talking about her, thinking about her, brought the hint of patchouli back to me and by association something else that had been there in Proctor's flat, something I hadn't seen or heard, some kind of presence, an element, and it was this that had got my nerves strung up, and what I was afraid of most was a question about it from Ferris. He hadn't asked me yet and he might not ask me at all but if he didn't I'd know the worst.

  Paranoia.

  'Did you arrange to see him again?'

  'What? Yes. We're meeting for lunch tomorrow at the Oyster Pick.'

  'Despite his hostility.'

  'He wants to know more.'

  'About?'

  The phone rang.

  'Why I'm here. He suspects I'm checking on him.'

  'Oh really.' He picked up the phone and listened and said, 'Come on up.'

  He dropped the receiver back and I asked him where Monck fitted in.

  'He's very seasoned,' Ferris said, 'and quite high in the overseas staff echelon, so if he contacts you, listen with care.'

  'Is he directing anyone over here?'

  'You mean plumbers and people?'

  'Yes.'

  'He is not. He's too far away and he is much too elevated to look after plumbers. Think of him as a liaison figure between Barracuda and the operations in Zurich and Cape Town and Hong Kong, and in direct signals of course with London – which is why you were sent to Nassau for local briefing.'

  'Who's looking after the plumbers?'

  Knock on the door and he went over there. By plumbers we mean engineers of some kind, mostly electronic and mostly concerned with bugs and counter-bugs. 'We've got a man called Parks who does that,' Ferris said, and opened the door.

  I got off the carpet as he came in, a small man with quick movements, clerical, deferential, terrible tie.

  'Truscott,' Ferris said, 'this is Mr Keyes. It shouldn't take long, I know it's late.'

  We nodded and Truscott looked around for a chair and got his briefcase unzipped and then Ferris looked at me and said, 'Why do you think, by the way, that Judd should get in?'

  Sudden chill and the skin crawling, the senses of reality drifting away.

  And the faint scent of patchouli.

  'Judd?' Quick. 'Oh, Proctor was full of it – you've got it on the tape.'

  'Of course.' As if he'd forgotten.

  He hadn't forgotten. 'Actually -' be careful, be very careful – 'anyway, it's all on the tape.'

  Ferris had turned away and I said to the man, Truscott, 'You're here to clear me?'

  'Yes.' He looked surprised. Well of course, Ferris would have told him but I suppose I was just making conversation while I waited for Ferris to turn round again – I wanted to see his eyes, see what was there. Sweat cold on the skin.

  Then he was looking at me, and of course there wasn't anything at all I could see in his eyes because he wouldn't be showing it.

  'Is it on?'

  As if nothing had happened. Had anything happened, or was it just in my head?

  'On?'

  Reality creeping back.

  'The mission,' he said, watching me all the time.

  'Yes.' Said it without thinking, but there was no question, because I wanted him, Ferris, and the Bureau, wanted their help. 'Yes of course.'

  'Hot in here,' he said, and went across to the thermostat. Over his shoulder, 'Get him cleared, then, will you?'

  I suppose it took ten or fifteen minutes, I don't remember: there's not a lot to do at this stage, just forms to sign.

  'Next of kin?'

  We started into it, while I watched for Ferris' reflection to come into the bathroom mirror through the doorway, into the glass of the picture on the wall, the seascape, because I didn't want to look at him directly. But the worst was over now and I wouldn't have to think about it until later, in the night perhaps, in the still of the whinnying dark when the dreams bring demons 'The same bequest, sir?'

  'What was it last time?'

  'Shoreditch, the battered wives' -'

  'Yes, right, let it stand.'

  Took it from there and got through by 01:00 hours, no weapons drawn, no courier requested, no support, so forth. Signed all the bumph.

  Went off, Truscott, bobbing his head, briefcase under his arm, almost too big for him.

  'In terms,' Ferris said before I left him, 'of final briefing, your primordial task is to latch on to Proctor and get everything you can from him, get right inside his head and work from there.' His hands held out in front of him with the long fingers spread – 'Proctor is the access we've got to have before we can even start running Barracuda', and I said yes I understood.

  But in the morning he phoned me and said that Proctor was missing, cleared out during the night.

  Chapter 5: LANGOUSTE

  She was below me, looking upwards through her mask.

  Two of them had worked all through the night.

  Down, with her hands beckoning. I pretended not to see. Looking at all the sea fans, very pretty, so forth.

  They'd gone through the flat with counter-snoop equipment and hadn't found a thing, nothing of his, anyway, only the bug that Monck had ordered put in there without telling me, but I'd stopped worrying about that by now because this wasn't going to be like other missions; this was a Classification One they'd got on the board and they were going to run me like a rat through a maze and I couldn't expect any manners.

  Down, she was saying with her hands, encouraging me, nodding slowly, her light hair streaming in the current, so I tilted and went down to where she was waiting just above the sand, four atmospheres on the gauge. Okay! with her thumbs up. I made a bit of token fuss with the faceplate and then nodded yes, okay.

  I've never seen Ferris move so fast, though he didn't seem to hurry: he just got a lot more done, calling people out of the woodwork and signalling London and Monck, telling me to get to the Cedar Grove on South River Drive and make certain I was clean when I got there; my hotel
was blown and Ferris had got my things collected and sent to the new place.

  This morning he'd used every trick in the book and got hold of Proctor's phone bills for the last three months and we'd gone through them and the most frequent local number we'd turned up had been called in the period of August 3rd to 19th and it was hers, Kim Harvester's, the woman drifting beside me with her long greenish eyes watching me through her mask.

  Okay, so let's go on up now, her hands palming upwards and her flippers beginning to stroke, the stripes on her suit rippling in the underwater light and her hair drawn straight and then billowing as she slowed, waiting for me, then drawn straight again like pale seaweed in the current.

  They'd known he'd gone for good because the peep Ferris had stationed in the building opposite had seen him pile a lot of his stuff into the seven-year-old soft-top Chevrolet in the street below; he'd even taken the stereo and the rowing-machine.

  Up we go. Feel okay? Bubbles rising against the flat white surface.

  They should have known the man they were handling. He'd seen the tag in the Toyota three cars behind him along Biscayne Boulevard and stopped at an Arco station to make a phone-call and then got back into the Chewy and driven on, and the police car had moved in before they'd gone three blocks and put the tag through the breathalyser while the Chewy had kept on going.

  Sunlight bursting against the eyes, the body heavy again.

  'You did very well,' she said when she'd pulled off her mask.

  'Thank you.'

  I'd told Ferris I wanted him to play the tape they'd made when I'd been in the flat talking to Proctor and do it now: I didn't want London to think I'd frightened him off with anything I'd said. Ferris had cleared me, called it a model exercise.

  'How did you find me?' she wanted to know; we were stripping off our wet suits on the quay, where she'd got a shed full of equipment and lobster pots and some deep-sea fishing gear. 'I'm a bit out of the way.'

  'Someone I was talking to yesterday said you were good. When did you leave the old country?'

  'Years ago.' Shaking out her wet hair, 'My father was a small-boat skipper in Dover, but he finally couldn't stand the winters.' She hung up our suits and hosed them and then the air tanks, sluicing out the masks. 'What about you?'

  'I'm just visiting.'

  Looking down, then up again. 'You don't need scuba lessons.'

  'It's been a long time. I'd lost confidence.'

  There was a squawking of seagulls suddenly from the water beyond the boats and she swung her head and looked across at them, a square face but small, with a firm mouth, marks on the cheeks still from the mask, thirty, I would suppose, her skin ageing too fast in the sun. 'No,' she said, 'you haven't lost confidence. You were just making it look like that.' She smiled for the first time since I'd come down here.

  'How long have you been teaching?'

  'Oh, years.' She put a brush through her hair. 'So who told you where to find me?'

  'George Proctor.'

  She straightened – 'Oh.'

  'He said you were a good teacher.'

  'He's trash,' she said off-handedly as she looked away and then began stowing the air tanks.

  'Can I give you a hand?'

  'I do it in my sleep.' Lean-bodied and strong, turned-up khaki shorts and a tee-shirt, its back dark from her wet hair.

  I was waiting for her to ask me how he was, Proctor, because he'd phoned her every day, sometimes twice a day, the last time nearly a month ago, but she just said, 'I didn't catch your first name.'

  'Richard.' But then I suppose you wouldn't ask about someone's health if you'd dismissed them as trash.

  'Since,' she said, 'you don't need scuba lessons and you haven't lost your confidence in the water, why did you come down here?' With a full frank stare.

  'I hoped you might know where he's gone.'

  'Oh.'

  Someone was bringing a Chris Craft in, throttling the diesels down, two or three people on deck, very tanned, one of them with a line ready, and she waved back to them when they saw her. There was still a lot of flotsam swirling on the surface from the storm. There was flotsam all over the bloody place as a matter of fact: Ferris had put three men on me as an exercise in caution. A lot had happened last night – my room at the hotel had been gone through and someone had tagged me back there and then Proctor had got out very fast indeed and left no tracks, so anything could happen now and if anyone picked me up again and moved in, Ferris would want to know who they were and where they came from.

  'Proctor is the key,' he'd said. 'He's also the access.'

  Croder, at the board for Barracuda, would not have been pleased with that signal. Subject missing, no trace.

  'Would you like some lobster?' the woman asked me.

  'To eat?'

  'What else would you do with a lobster? Don't tell me you're that kinky.' With a freezing smile, loathing me for even having known Proctor, but still too interested to let me go.

  I said I liked lobster.

  'Actually she's a tug,' Kim said, 'still is, really, though I've made a few changes.'

  We'd put out a couple of miles, as far as the warning buoys on the reef, and dropped anchor.

  'She was my father's, his one great love, apart from me. Two-inch oak on double-sawn oak frames, my God, the way they used to do things! She's still registered for coastwise and harbour work. Are you starving?'

  'There's no hurry.'

  'I've got to catch it first. There's some Scotch in that cupboard, unless you'd like wine. Help yourself.' She went into a berth and came back in a black bikini, hooking the bra and shutting the door with her bare foot. 'Aren't they handsome?' I was looking at the blown-up photographs of sharks all over the cabin. Brushing against me in the close quarters she said, 'I was rude to you back there on the quay.

  'Sorry, but he really is such an absolute bastard. I won't be long – you can get some water on the boil if you like, that pan there, half full.'

  Over the side in a perfect curve, no splash. The lobster-pot marker bobbed in the ripples.

  I kept in the shade, under a canvas awning she'd rigged up aft of the cabin; the sun struck out of a full noon sky and the deck was giving off the smell of pitch. There was the glint of field-glasses again from the stern of the motor-launch that had nosed its way along this side of the reef soon after we'd dropped anchor.

  Things had gone better in the night than I'd expected; the hags of Morpheus had been kept back by Ferris's telephone call reporting that Proctor had gone, and there'd only been a couple of hours after that, sometime before dawn, for sleep or nightmares. But there was still a sensitive area in my consciousness that I was deliberately avoiding, because it frightened me. It was about Senator Judd, and the way Ferris had put his question.

  I'd face it later, when I had to, when I was forced to: and I would be, I knew that.

  'Langouste a la Setoise ,' she said, 'but I think I should have marinated it. Garlic, tomatoes, oil, mainly – the olives are extracurricular because I dote on them. I had a French mother, not French, actually, Belgian. She met my father on the Dover ferry one night in a storm. Lonely people talk a lot, don't they?'

  'Do you talk a lot?'

  'You haven't noticed?'

  'Are you lonely?'

  'My God, four questions in a row. Is this any good?'

  'C'est exquise.'

  After a silence that wasn't obtrusive – 'Lonely in a way, yes, I suppose. Or this is the aftermath. He dropped me flat, only a few weeks ago.'

  For Monique.

  'You're well rid, aren't you?'

  She looked up at me, her green eyes deeper in the shade of the cabin. 'It never really matters, you know, what they're like. He was the only man I've ever loved. Not loved, actually – been obsessed by. Why didn't you just – ' waving her fork – 'come to me and tell me what you wanted?'

  'I didn't know how sensitive you might be feeling.'

  She watched me for a moment. 'That was nice of you. But it cost y
ou fifty dollars.'

  Flash, flash from the launch near the reef.

  I hadn't answered, and she said, 'You told me he's "gone". You mean cleared out altogether?'

  'He took all his things.'

  'But you said you'd been talking to him yesterday. He went last night?'

  'Yes.'

  'This really calls for the Chablis, you know.'

  'I have to keep off it.'

  'Oh. Are you some sort of official, then? I mean is he wanted for anything?'

  'Not as far as I know.'

  'That's a bloody shame.' Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. With a big effort that only showed in her voice, lightly, casually – 'Did he talk about me?'

  'We were talking business the whole time.'

  A gull swooped and perched on the aft rail and she swung her head, then looked back at me. 'But you said he told you I was a good scuba teacher.'

  'That was a lie. I couldn't think of a better introduction.'

  'An honest liar – that's unusual. Then how did you really find me?'

  'He'd cleared out in a hurry and left the flat in a mess, papers all over the place, including some phone bills.'

  She was looking at me less often, and listening carefully, her eyes down. 'So how many numbers did you call? The whole lot?'

  The one he'd called the most often, first.'

  'Mine.'

  'Yes'.

  Looking away, 'There wasn't another number, since then, that he'd called often?'

  'No.' She didn't want to know about Monique.

  'Well it won't be long.' Pouring herself some more wine – 'So you found my phone number, but you didn't call me.'

  'I got your answering machine.'

  'And didn't leave a message.'

  'You're listed.'

  She drank some wine. 'I'm a careful soul, you see, and when a man comes here for lessons and uses his gear like an expert I want to know more.' She looked up at last. 'And I think I believe most of what you've said. Have you ever been rejected, Richard?'

  'It happens all the time.'

  'I doubt that,' holding my eyes for a moment. 'It's not the missing so much, the sex and all that. It's the colossal blow to the ego. You know? I mean I can find another man, the place is full of them – but even that isn't certain any more. He's made me suddenly feel unattractive, and I sense you're the rare kind of man who knows what that does to a woman.'