Quiller has turned his back on the Bureau, but the boredom is really beginning to get to him. When a mysterious freelance mission in south-east is offered, he can’t turn it down. Probing the shadowy secrets of a deadly arms deal, he comes up against Shoda - 'Little Kiss of Steel'. The enigmatic and quite ruthless Cambodian beauty becomes his most deadly opponent. Their duel takes them from the teeming backstreets of Singapore to the dense jungles of Cambodia. But the true battleground is in the mind - and never has Quiller been closer to the edge...

Quiller 12

1 : Smoke

The whole place was tight with tension when I got there, people huddled in hushed groups along the cor- ridors and hanging around the Signals Room, Croder standing outside Codes and Cyphers with one of the cryptologists, his eyes pinning the poor bastard against the wall and his voice like a knife being sharpened: ''Then why the hell didn't you get me on the phone, I don't care what time it was, you ought to know that by now?" I went on past them and thought, for God's sake if Grader's lost his cool then something big must have blown and the fallout was still coming down - but the thing was, the thing was, you know, I couldn't have cared less . Loman had asked me to meet him at six in his office but he wasn't there and I had to stand listening to Radcliffe talking on the phone with his mouth tight and his face pasty under the lights. Fensing is no longer in service.' He glanced up at me and gave a nod and went on talking. 'No, officially we're calling it suicide.' Now that was spelling it out, wasn't it, not pretty but at least honest - 'no longer in service' was one of those coy little euphemisms coined by the bureaucrats on the third floor: why couldn't they put us down in the records as dead when we came unstuck, or was there something offensive about the idea, something not quite nice, not to be talked about? 'Of course we are,' his pale fingertips drumming on the desk. 'We've called Howatch in from Belgrade and Johns from Rome and they're trying to locate Hockridge through his director in the field.' I stood with my raincoat dripping - it'd been drizzling the whole day again, bloody spring for you - they'd called Johns in, what on earth for? The last I'd heard of him he'd been passing the hat round to the sleeper agents right across the communist bloc for any leftover scraps of information they could give him because there'd been five red-sector contacts supporting Sable One when it had come apart and left them 'terminally exposed', as those snotty-nosed twits on the third floor called it. 'No,' Radcliffe said, 'he's still unaccounted for.' I got fed up with waiting and went outside and along the corridor to see if I could find Loman anywhere, and if I couldn't I'd check back at his office and if he still wasn't there he could go to hell. But when I got to the stairwell I saw him standing against the banisters on the floor above, talking to someone. Then he sud- denly looked down and saw me.