There was chanting at Trafalgar Square, protesters walking up and down with plaques that said WHAT DO THEY WANT? THEY WANT POWER and A MANIFESTATION TOO MANY, and it started to rain, not the usual kind of drizzle but the temporary, great outpouring of the sky, and I cursed and flagged down a cab.
I’d been back in London for more than a month and I'd been getting restless.
They know that, and they play with you, trying to make sure that when they really need you, when they can’t find another poor fool, they have you. “Killarney,” they say, in their cold quiet rooms. “Just the ticket, Killarney. The girl who won’t turn down the mission everyone else has turned down, and you know why, old boy? It’s pride, old obstinate pride because she wants to be the person who does it and gets it done and comes out again.”
I got off a few streets before the Bureau--habit, really--and walked the rest of the way to the squat, brown office building and went inside, and the heaters didn’t work.
“You might want to come round when you have a moment.” Oldham had called me at nine in the morning; outside the windows it still looked like midnight.
“Anything important?”
“Oh, not really, dear girl, might have something for you, never know.”
“How’s the kid?”
“Doing well. She’s going to Oxford next year. Listen, Killarney, must dash, pop round if you have some time.”
Click.
They wanted me and they didn’t want to let on. You don’t get calls from Oldham or anybody else at the Bureau asking you to come in unless they need you--but they were playing it very cool, and that had me worried.
I walked down the corridors and ran into Berlyne coming out of the cipher room. “Meta,” went the speakers inside, a voice stretched almost to its breaking point, “Tron,” the sequence repeating, “Meta, Tron, Meta Tron, Metatron,” and I had to snap out of the hypnotic quality of the recording, and Berlyne shut the door, cutting off the noise.
“Metatron up to something?”
Berlyne just looked at me. “Metatron is always up to something, Killarney. Every Archangel is, at any given moment, up to something. Following which, unpleasant things inevitably happen.” It seemed to cheer him up.
“So what’s going on, Berlyne? Any idea why I was called in?”
“Were you called in? Can’t imagine why. Place is as dead as a church. And the heaters don’t work.” He rubbed his hands together as if warmed by the thought. “Might be an idea for you to see Turner though.”
I left him there, still rubbing his hands, and I went to find Turner, thinking how casual, how debonair everyone suddenly seemed round here.
Malcolm, Turner’s personal assistant, was outside the door smoking a cigarette. He grinned and proffered his BH pack when I walked up.
I waved it away.
“Is he busy?”
“Be done in a minute. Meeting.”
“Anything I should know about?” I was getting tired of asking questions, but I was edgy again, the fake calm serving to heighten my awareness that something was being put into motion behind the scenes and when it came out, more likely than not, I would be caught in the avalanche.
Malcolm shrugged. “Nothing much happening this time of year. We’re trying to get someone to come in and fix the heating but the union is on strike, can you believe it?”
I couldn’t believe any of it. Malcolm finished his cigarette and knocked on the door. “She’s here,” he called, and opened the door for me, closing it behind me softly and leaving me in the room.
Turner perched at the end of an ancient desk like an owl in mourning. Rain streaked down the naked windows. A small, rusting electric heater, dark red like the colour of a used bullet, lay at his feet.
“Sit down.”
They say his wife left him and then drowned herself, and that he never forgave himself, or her. Whatever the reason, Turner is cold; if you froze him in ice for a hundred years and then defrosted him, he’d just come alive again like those fish they found in Antarctica.
“Might have a little job for you,” Turner said. He rubbed his hands in front of the electric bars.
“So I keep hearing.” A flash of lightning outside, followed by thunder.
“We lost someone in Paris.” He said it without emotion, as if offering a biscuit at tea time. “We’d like you to get him back.”
I was going to say, “What do you mean, you lost someone in Paris?” but of course I didn’t because the Bureau doesn’t, doesn’t lose people, and what he meant was that, whoever the poor bastard was, he was probably dead by now, that or working for the other side.
“Who?”
He pulled out a thick file from the cabinet behind the table and lay it in front of me. It opened onto a series of black and white photographs showing a man in his middle thirties, pasty complexion, thick black moustache, round glasses, and I committed his face to memory because, from now on, that would be a face I’d be looking for.
“It’s nothing drastic, Killarney,” Turner said, and I watched the reflection of the heated bars twist and melt in his glasses. “A man by the name of Eldershott. An academic, really.” He said that almost apologetically. “Cryptography, though you couldn’t tell to look at him, good solid work but he wasn’t that important. He was on holiday in Paris, alone--he’s not married, seemed to lead a quiet life--and Paris is clean; it’s friendly ground. Then he just...disappeared.” His hands raised in a shrug, palms open upwards as if to say, Such inconvenience.
“We had a couple of people watching him, and they swore he never left the hotel all night.”
Playing a hunch: “What did the hotel say?”
Turner looked at me accusingly. “The hotel said he never checked in that night.”
We locked stares. I broke contact first. I said, “KGB?”
Not SDECE, the French are friendlies, and not the Chinese, either--they don’t have angels, and since the Coming they mainly stick to themselves.
Turner smiled. The owl shaking its wings. “We were hoping you could find that out for us.”
They were making every effort to put me at ease, and Paris, for Christ’s sake, that was almost home ground, and a part of you thinking maybe this one will be a breeze--which is when you cross that line, the one that keeps you alive. Keep thinking like that and the next thing is your brain is splattered on a pavement, a rifle shot hitting home, just like they did to Bergman, Bergman in Barcelona with the shorts and the beach hat and the funny sunglasses, Bergman because he thought, this one’s going to be easy.
“You’ll be doing us a favour,” Turner said, “Paris, you’ll be there in half a day, root round the city for a bit, see if you can dig up Eldershott from wherever he got himself to, get back.” He shrugged again, offered me half a smile like a sliver of ice. “You could turn it down, of course.”
Of course I could turn it down. We can always turn down the mission, and he’d only mentioned it to see if I’d take the bait, by offering me an exit line on what he tried so hard to describe as a routine mission. Only you didn’t just lose your own people on your home turf, and I knew that, and he knew that I knew.
And I didn’t care. It was a mission, and I was going to take it. Just like he knew I would.
“Paris?” I said. Fleeting thought: mussels in Bastille, red wine in Montmartre...
Turner nodded encouragingly. “Think of it as a holiday.”
...and Metatron in Notre Dame, I thought, and a shudder ran through me.
Holiday my arse.