Quiller: Quiller Balalaika by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9780786712656
Google: t_wJ6FutoYAC
Amazon: 0786712651
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Published: 1995-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

12 : KICK

I told Ferris, ‘Get Legge’s people to check on the Mercedes. It should still be in a side street near the Hotel Faberge.’

‘Check on it?’

‘It could go bang.’

‘I’ll tell him. What did you come here in?’

‘Nothing.’

I ate some more goulash, hunger beginning. We were in an all night greasy spoon cafe, as far as I’d been able to walk from Vishinsky’s hotel before I dropped.

I’d signalled Ferris from the phone box outside and he’d got here a minute ago, so we had to deal with the essentials first. I didn’t want some innocent policeman blowing himself up when he started investigating the abandoned Merc.

‘Are you operational?’ Ferris asked me. Another immediate essential.

‘No.’

He sat taking me in with his calm yellow eyes. He must have been distinctly edgy, over the last few hours. When the executive’s in a red sector his director in the field stays locked in his base with his nerves, counting the roses on the wallpaper while London comes through on the scrambler every ten minutes to ask for an updated report.

‘You need treatment?’

I said no. There was nothing broken. But it’d be a while before I could run flat out or jump a wall or take on more than one assailant at a time with any success, which was what operational meant. Perhaps tomorrow, if I could get any sleep in what remained of the night.

Ferris scraped the legs of his rickety aluminium chair on the tiled floor and went across to the counter and came back in a minute with a ragged cotton napkin and dropped it onto the table. I wrapped my left hand in it: the bleeding had started again.

‘Any down?’ Ferris asked me.

‘Three.’

He’d assumed I wouldn’t be looking like this without somebody having become terminal somewhere along the line. There was Jakub, on the roof, and two of Vishinsky’s bodyguards at the Hotel Nikolas.

‘Self-defence,’ Ferris said.

‘That’s right.’ He’d have to report it to London. I’d used a full jokari.

‘You reached the board?’ I asked Ferris. The board for Balalaika.

‘Oh, yes. As soon as you signalled.’

The stub of chalk would have gone squeaking across the slate: Executive clear of red sector. And Holmes would have gone over to pour himself some more coffee, celebrate, hallelujah.

‘So you’ve no transport?’ Ferris.

‘What? No.’

‘You phoned from here?’

‘Box is outside.’

I finished the gruel while he went and signalled Legge for another car for me to use.

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