People with Pekingese grow to look like Pekingese.
The Bureau doesn't officially exist, so everyone there has grown to look anonymous. They are flesh and blood but you never quite know whose flesh or whose blood they consist of today: you get the odd feeling that during the night there was enacted an unspeakable rite involving flesh-eating and blood-letting by some refined form of extrasensory transference and that the A-positive you were talking to yesterday is now Rhesus-negative.
The permanent staff at the Bureau have another thing in common. Whenever I show up there they look as if someone has left a dead rat on their desk. They looked like that when I flew in from West Germany and asked to see Parkis. It took nearly an hour to get into his room: he is very high in the Whitehall 9 Echelon and his room is behind what amounts to a series of distorting mirrors constructed on the principle of the Chinese Box, the idea being that halfway through the system you give up and ask for the street.
But I wanted to see Parkis about the fly so I kicked up a bit of fuss and they finally got the message and sent me into his room. This is the room with the smell of polish and the Lowry. It's a good picture but it has associations for me. I was standing under this picture the day Parkis invited Swanner to resign. Swanner had mucked up a mission and three of us were present when Parkis stood there with his hands clasped in front of him and his small feet together and broke the man up while we listened. We didn't like it. Parkis should have told us to get out first. I was standing under this picture the day when Lazlo put a pill in his mouth before we could get to him. That was all right: he was finished and knew it and did the sensible thing and at least he died in civilized surroundings instead of where they would have put him if we'd thrown him back over the frontier. But he was on the floor and already turning green when Parkis told us to 'take it away and get it buried'. We didn't like that either: it was said for effect.
The worst thing about Parkis is that he is the most anonymous-looking of all at the Bureau. His face is so ordinary that it could only be a mask and his eyes are like holes in it because they are colourless. He stands so still that you feel you could walk up to him and go on walking right through him and not notice anything but a slight chill on the skin. But you'd come out Rhesus-negative.
I was standing under the picture now. It's the only place to stand, because of the disposition of the desk and the filing cabinets and the briefing table. It may be arranged like that because when Parkis talks to you he looks at the picture most of the time, just above your head, to remind you that you don't exist any more than he does, any more than the Bureau does.
He had got up when I came in. He stood in front of me with his hands clasped together, looking at the Lowry.
'How was Munich?'
'All right.'
They'd pulled me out of Munich to watch the fly.
'Did anything happen there?'
'Munich?'
'Yes.'
'I sent in my report.'
'Ah.' It sounded as if he hadn't seen it but I knew he had. They would have pulled me out before long anyway for lack of 'positive lead-in data', by which they mean the smell of anything fishy.
'I expect you'll be going to Paris, will you?'
'No one mentioned leave,' I said.
'Waring is due back.' He looked at me instead of the picture.
'There was nothing doing in Munich. That was as good as leave.'
'Not quite Paris, is it?'
'This aeroplane,' I said.
'It isn't for you.'
'Why not?'
'You're a shadow executive.'
He turned away.
'Why was I sent there?'
To observe.'
'Well I did.'
'But you didn't observe anything. It just fell down, so you said. We wanted to know why.' He was staring out of the window at the winter sky.
The portfolio on his desk had a word on the cover.
'That's all I saw. You read my report. It just came down like a ton of bricks.'
The word on the cover was Striker.
'Quite.'
'Look, is it because I mucked up the Bangkok thing?'
'I don't think you mucked it up, did you?' He turned round again and I could watch his face, the mask with the colourless holes. 'We're giving this one to Waring.'
'Why him? He doesn't know anything about aeroplanes. He doesn't know which end the flint goes in.'
Parkis stood very still. 'It's not really about aeroplanes.'
I was getting fed up. 'You send me out to a precise map reference just in time to fetch a Striker SK-6 on top of my head and now you say it's nothing to do with aeroplanes.'
The thing that nettled me was that I wanted to know something and I couldn't ask him. He'd sent me to observe a Striker crash that he'd known was going to happen, even to the time and the place. I wanted to ask him how he'd known.
'Not really,' he said.
I tried an oblique level. 'You wanted confirmation.'
'We have to put someone on it.'
'Waring.'
'Yes.' 'Why him?' Nobody likes Waring because he can't work without a closed-circuit transmitting system and a bullet-proof jock-strap: he's got a 'low threshold of psychological stress', which is Bureau terminology for being shit-scared. 'Because he's due back from leave and sufficiently refreshed.' 'I've never been fitter.'
He looked down from the Lowry. 'Why are you so upset, Quiller?'
'I want the mission.' 'Yes, I can see that. Why?' 'I was there.'
'Ah.' He waited, and I knew I'd have to give him more than that.
But it was personal. The fly in the lens. His loneliness up there eleven miles away from the nearest human being: myself. The silence in the sky and then the long scream and the crater and the shadow I'd lurched against in the weird white light of the chalk-cloud. Personal.
'And I'm interested,' I said, 'in aeroplanes.' 'Ah.'
I wanted to hit him. Everyone does. 'Look, is it something I could be good at?' 'Something…?' The mission. Is it my cup of tea?'
He turned slightly and stared at the wall-clock. 'It isn't really a question of that. It's a question of time. I've already assigned a director.'
'That doesn't affect me. I can start getting my clearance straight away, then he can brief me.' 'We might have to change him.' 'Why?'
'You might not want to work with him.'
'Who is it?'
'Ferris.'
'I'll work with Ferris.'
He looked at the clock again. 'It's an overseas area.' 'You can jump me in.'
He smiled. It was the fixed smile of a ventriloquist's doll. 'You really want this one, don't you?'
I knew then that I'd sold it to him. It hadn't been difficult. Later I knew why it hadn't been difficult.
There was a flap on when I went through the departments for clearance and it took longer than usual because everyone was under pressure. I went through Accounts, Codes and Ciphers, Credentials, Firearms, Field-briefing and Travel. Accounts made me go through the motions of examining my last will and testament — did I want to make any changes? There was nothing to change: the wording had stood like this for years Nothing of value, no dependents, next-of-kin unknown'.
When I left the building there was one of the Federal Republic Embassy cars outside but it might not have been anything to do with the flap.
They drove me to the airport alone and I didn't see Ferris until I was weighing in. We didn't say anything before we got on to the plan.
Ferris was a thin man with hollow cheeks and horn-rimmed glasses and the remains of some straw-coloured hair that blew about when he walked. He looked like a clever young electronics engineer on the verge of a nervous breakdown, except for his steady eyes.
'How much did Parkis tell you?'
The power was easing off and we slipped our belts.
'Nothing much. Someone tipped them off that another SK-6 was due to hit the deck and I was sent there to confirm.' I watched the lamps of London dimming away below.
'Have you had anything to eat?'
'No.'
'Eat while I talk.'
The girl was wedging the trays in and we helped her. The seats behind and in front of us were empty; a woman with two small children was across the aisle. I knew Ferris had checked this; he was good on security. When I began on the mutton he said:
'You'll know some of this because it's in the papers. West Germany's got five hundred Devon Aviation Striker SK-6 swing-wing aircraft in service with the Luftwaffe as part of NATO's nuclear and conventional air force. It's a good machine, adaptable, versatile, got a flexible performance although it's sophisticated, and it can cope with reconnaissance, interception, ground support and bombing. The German Defence Ministry's cost estimates were too optimistic and the development outlay escalated the production bill to six hundred million pounds sterling, but it's a firstclass strike plane and everyone was happy with it until it started falling out of the sky. In the last twelve months they've lost thirty-six of them in high-impact crashes and the pilots can't tell them what happened because they're dead. The pattern's always the same as the one you saw.'
I wondered where Ferris had been when I was on top of the chalk quarry. 'When were you called in?'
'They had to brief me before I could brief you.'
That was all I'd get as an answer. I'd worked with him before and he only told you what he thought you needed to know.
'I had to persuade Parkis,' I said.
'Did you?'
'It wasn't difficult.'
'How's the chop?'
So I shut up and he said: 'Nobody's at all happy now. Devon Aviation are bothered and they've sent out some of their people to work with the Accident Investigation Branch of the Ministry. They've had a permanent A.I.B. team of wreckage-analysts over there since the tenth pattern crash. They've got bits at Farnborough and they've rebuilt most of one Striker from a few thousand fragments. The aviation physiologists are trying to be busy but they haven't got much to work on — you saw that crash so you can imagine what the pilot looks like afterwards. So far no one's turned anything up. Everyone's miserable. West Germany's worried because it's their plane and the U.K's worried because we built it and NATO's worried because the Luftwaffe squadrons are part of their striking-force. You want some more of that?' He edged his dish of French beans on to my tray. He'd let the girl give him a tray in case I needed seconds.
'When do I eat next?'
'It depends how busy you get.'
'What's a «pattern» crash?'
The ones that go straight in, like the one you saw. They've been getting normal accidents as well — control-locking, power-failure, bird-strikes — but they've only lost four planes and one pilot from those. Without the pattern crashes the SK-6 would have a comfortably low accident rate. Of course they've had a few cases of the pilot baling out in a muck-sweat from sheer panic. The Striker's a rogue aircraft and they've only got to notice the clock's a minute slow and they're hitting the ejection tit'
'Are these things crashing anywhere else?'
'Not on that scale. The U.K. and French accident rates are normal-low.'
'It's particular to Germany.'
That's why they say someone must be getting at the planes.'
It was Peach Melba again. I took his as well.
'Why are we interested?'
'We're not.'
He was trying to be cagey again so I said: 'Then what the bloody hell are we doing in this aeroplane?'
'We're not interested in helping Devon Aviation or the Luftwaffe or NATO. It only happens to be Strikers crashing: it could be cruisers sinking or reactors blowing up.'
This agreed with what Parkis had told me: 'It's not really about aeroplanes.'
I said: 'We're interested in why somebody's trying systematically to knock out a cold-war weapon.'
'Why,' Ferris said, 'and who.'
That's not all.'
'All for the moment.'
I sulked for a bit and he didn't break the silence. I don't like being used as a hooded falcon. I couldn't do anything about it, of course. You're cleared, briefed and sent in, and if you ask any questions outside the prescribed limits of the briefing they think you're nosey or windy and they're usually right. The man in the field isn't given the overall picture because there are always background factors that might worry him if he knew what they were. It works all right but on the other hand we always go into a mission knowing there's an awful lot going on in the background on any level from the Foreign Office to the hot-line and we tend to worry about it because we don't know what it is.
When the girl came for the trays I pulled out the stuff they'd given me in Credentials. My name was Martin and I was an aviation psychologist attached to the A.I.B. team operating at the Luftwaffe base at Linsdorf where two of the pattern crashes had happened. I assumed they'd picked on Martin because it could be either English or German according to which I wanted to be at any given time. There was nothing special in this lot and it looked a bit thin on the face of it but that might be because I'd pushed them into dropping Waring at the last minute.
Ferris saw me looking at the papers.
'How's your German?'
'West Hartlepool accent.' I said to show him I was still narked at not being told anything.
'You shouldn't need much cover.'
Perhaps that was why it looked a bit thin.
'Where do I start?'
The thing is, there are two ways of going at the Striker problem.
You can analyse the bodies and the wrecks to find how the planes or the pilots are being got at. That's what everyone's already doing at Linsdorf and other places and they've not turned anything up. Or you can jump the queue and try to find who's getting at them and why.'
'You've said that.'
'Now I know you were listening.'
In half an hour the pressure came off our haunches and we began the run in to Amsterdam.
It was blowing a half-gale and as we came broadside on I could feel the mainplane lifting on the starboard side. Dust from the freight area stung our faces and a hat took off and a man ran after it. We had to hang about for an hour before they called us for the Hanover flight and Ferris wasn't hungry and I'd just had a meal and neither of us talked because he wasn't going to and I wasn't going to try to make him. He wandered round and round the souvenir stall peering through the glass at the varnished clogs and packets of Clan, his thin straw-coloured hair blowing to and fro as he moved.
I'd stopped sulking now. Ferris was all right I'd done two missions with him and he hadn't let me down. Now we were at it again: he was here to guide me, show me the way in and set me running like a ferret down a hole. Later he'd support me, feed me information and get my reports to London through the protected communications net; he'd pull me out of trouble if I was worth it or he'd abandon me and throw me to the dogs if I got in too deep and couldn't get out and looked like being a danger to them; then he'd call in a replacement and there'd be someone else eating his Peach Melbas for him while he told them as much as he thought they needed to know. It wouldn't be Waring. If I stopped anything nasty they'd never get Waring into the same area.
'Why do they have to varnish the bloody things?'
'To make them shiny.'
'But they don't look nice, shiny.'
'They don't know that.'
It was after midnight when we touched down in Hanover.
The normal routine would be to take separate taxis to different hotels and he still didn't say anything until we were through Customs and I thought he was leaving it very late this time.
'Start by seeing Lovett.'
'Where?'
'The Carlsberg.'
'All right'
Outside at the taxi-rank he said: 'Did you pick anything up in Firearms?' 'Only the pox.'