Quiller Bamboo (q-1) by ADAM HALL

Author:ADAM HALL [HALL, ADAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: det_espionage

The apothecary had given me a dozen new needles, 23-gauge one-inch Becton Dickinsons, and I pulled one off the strip and fitted it to the syringe.

'You feel all right?'

'Yes,' Xingyu said. 'But I was worried.'

'I got delayed.' Drew five cubic centimeters out of the ampoule, pressed out the air. I didn't tell him he could save saved his worries if he'd just let me know he was out of insulin a bit sooner.

'You do not look well,' he said.

'Touch of indigestion.' Pulled the plunger, got no blood, put pressure on it.

Everything had become very clear, sensitive. Head was throbbing and I was still out of breath from climbing the ladder, but even in the light from the dirty windows things had a sharp outline and I could hear one of the monks chanting three floors below and could feel the plunger hit bottom before I pulled the needle out. Mental clarity was back too, heightened, the dance of conscious thought quick and coloured.

Put the plastic sheath back on the needle and dropped it into the waste box, pressed the cap on the syringe, everything orderly, the blood singing quietly through the veins, the beat of the heart strong and steady, vital signs, the vital signs that had come so close to getting cut off down there in the temple, and this was it, what it meant, this feeling of heightened awareness, I've had it before, it comes as a revelation when you realize that life is going on and not without you as you thought it must, were certain it would, the reek of cordite in the lungs and the crash of the last shot still roaring in the brain, the certainty of oblivion in the next breath and then the reprieve. It leaves you exalted for a little time, touched with grace.

I put the box in the corner of the cell, underneath the pile of hides that Jiang had given us for extra warmth at night. 'You know where it is,' I told Xingyu. 'If I'm absent at any time, remember where the stuff is, and do it yourself.'

Exalted, touched with grace, but touched also with the guilt when the struggle has been to the death, though we mustn't put it too dramatically, must we, but that was what it had been today, and the loser loses all, lying there in the dark with a rat's carcass his fellow traveller to the shades of Lethe, I can never take a life without adding it to the little wooden crosses in the shadows of the mind, of the memory, I'm never free of them, never shall be.

'What is that smell?' Xingyu Baibing asked me.

'Antiseptic. Where did you put your mask?'

He finished buckling his belt and went across to a part of the wall where the plaster had broken away and left a hole that he'd covered with a bit of loose timber.. 'In here.'

He stood with his arms hanging by his sides, head turned to look at me, something in

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