Assigned to the infinitely sensitive task of interrogating a 'rogue' agent in Miami, Quiller moves straight into a red sector when the mafia controlling the drug-infested city puts out a contract on his life. Working his way through the sun-drenched, but dangerous, streets and treacherous waters of the Caribbean, Quiller struggles to bring home a mission that will leave him permanently scarred.

Quiller 14

1 : Hush

'Then they started to —' Fisher began. We waited. He sat there like a schoolboy, legs together, head down. I should have said no, I was busy or something. This wasn't my field. It was very quiet. Tilson wasn't looking at me while we waited; he was looking at the ceiling, angled back on the chair with his thumbs hooked into his pockets. He didn't want to — 'Why the hell should I tell you?' In a muted scream and we jerked our heads to look at Fisher and I said, 'You don't have to. We didn't —' 'You want to drag everything out of me —' near tears, his voice stifled, his knuckles white and spittle on his chin. Christ, what was he, twenty-two, twenty-three? 'You want me to go over the whole fucking thing for you —' 'No,' I said, 'we don't,' and I went over to him and sat on my haunches, so that I was lower and less threatening and he could concentrate on me and forget Tilson was in here, two against one. 'All we want to know,' I said, 'is how you feel now, now that it's over and you're back safe and sound. Just how you feel, that's all, about the future.' The problem was that he wanted to know how we felt, and he didn't understand that it was totally beside the question. The question was: if you send out a man this age on his first mission in Beirut and they pull him into the camp and put a hundred and twenty volts through his testicles and keep him awake for six days until he breaks, what have you got when he finds a gap in the wire and gets a lift on a US army truck and comes back to London? Anything you can use again? 'We're not worrying —' Tilson began but I cut across him. 'You couldn't have told them anything important, and that's the —' 'I told them everything.' 'I know, but it wasn't critical and it doesn't concern us.' I didn't point out that you don't send a green executive into the field with anything in his head that's worth getting at. We'd got to save what was left of his pride. He was sitting on his hands now, rocking on them, as if he'd just been bashed over the knuckles with a ruler, oh those schooldays, those bloody schooldays, they last you all your life, but his eyes weren't