9th Directive by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Espionage, Fiction, General, Intelligence service, Quiller (Fictitious Character)
ISBN: 9780515094985
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Published: 1988-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

15 : The Snatch

I didn't want to talk to Loman yet because he would have a lot of questions to ask and I wanted to be sure I knew the answers. When I had given the signal to Room 6 I left the bar and walked along the Link Road. The crowd had broken up but the roadway was still full of people talking about the accident. The scene in the centre was different now; the police had made a barrier and there was a water cart at work where the royal car had come to a stop. The last ambulance had gone. Steam rose as the sun began drying the water that streamed from the pavement onto the road. The sense of shock still hung over the people and I passed women in tears, their husbands comforting them. Those near the scene of the accident would not easily forget. Reporters were interviewing people and photographers hurried about. There was no one anywhere near the condemned building because the crowd was still attracting people to the scene at the curve of the Link Road, and I climbed to the top floor in the clammy heat. Looking down from the window of my room I composed the whole picture in terms of geometry. Find- ings: Kuo's mission had been to place the shot. Loman and I had known that. The shot was the pivot of the en- tire operation. But after the shot had been placed the course of his mission had changed completely, and this we had not known. Kuo was a professional and his intelligence was far beyond that required for the efficient handling of a rifle. As precisely and as carefully as a rifle is pieced together from its components he had dovetailed every part of his mission with my own, assembling a set-up in which I took my place as obedient- ly as if I were under his direct orders. His mission was a total success and all I had to show for weeks of work was the dead man in the Phra Chula Chedi, the seventh man that Pangsapa had told me about, a man who was not Kuo because he wore no cuff links and because his cheap Yungchow carbine was a weapon that a marksman of Kuo's calibre would never demean himself to use. All I had done was to kill a decoy while Kuo placed his shot. Rage against one's own stupidity does no good but in the heat of the room I stood shivering.

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