Quiller: The Warsaw Document by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061005299
Google: DWlAnQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0061005290
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1978-12-13T22:00:00+00:00

From where I lay the window made a blank parallelogram, a screen where light came as a train went by, fading in the intervals to the background glow of the city. The glass had frosted over again, covering the clear patch I'd scraped with my nails, but it wasn't symbolic: I could see even farther now than I'd seen then. And I didn't like it.

There wasn't any light from the freight trucks, only their noise and the shake of the building; the light came from the passenger trains, though not from all of them because some had their blinds down, those for the east.

I didn't like it because most of what I could see was based on mission-feel and I couldn't discount it. Assumptions were unreliable: I assumed that there was an adverse party working the same field as Merrick and I and feeding the Polanski unit with doped info until its turn came to be wiped out and I assumed that the KG.B. had chosen to vet me and let me run and both these assumptions could be wrong. Mission-feel is never wrong: it's the specialised instinct you develop as you go forward into the dark like an old dog fox sniffing the wind and catching the scent of things it has smelled before and learned to distrust; and in the concealing darkness the forefoot is sensitive, poised and held still above the patch of unknown ground where in the next movement the trap can spring shut.

The feeling I had was close to that; but a man, being a more sophisticated beast, is caught with traps of greater complexity, and what I sensed was that behind all the logic I was trying to bring to the few facts available and all the attempts to make a pattern from random pieces, the opposition had a programme running, its engineering as smooth and massive as the iron wheels that rolled past here on their predestined rails; and that I was in its path.

Egerton didn't know what it was but he knew it was there and he'd sent me to find it and blow it up.

'Is it morning?'

'No.'

'I don't want morning to come.'

She'd told me before in a different way, saying she didn't want the night to end, crying for a long time naked against me, the saltiness on my face, asking me to hurt her, as if the mind's hurt wasn't enough: guilt for the dead, the abandoned, her leanness quivering and her mouth avid but far from love. Later she forgot and the body was enough, her skin burning under my hands and her thighs alive: she made love as if time was running out. Later still she told me about herself, speaking in Polish and half to someone else: to the person who must one day find again and recognise these pieces of identity and try to make them whole.

'They wanted Jan and me to go with them but Israel was only a place on the map and we had all Poland, where we were born.

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