Yesterday's Spy by Len Deighton

speed to have to change down. There was the scream of a power-horn, and a small Renault sped past us on the wrong side of the road. There was a thud as his slush hit the door, and a fanfare of horns as the Renault prised open the traffic to avoid an oncoming bus. ‘Bloody idiot,’ said the driver. ‘He won’t get to Castellane, except in a hearse.’
    The equinoctial storms that lash the great limestone plateau of Provence provide Nice with a rainfall higher than even London. But as we hurried north the black clouds sped over us, tearing themselves to shreds to reveal their sulphur-yellow interiors and, eventually, the sun. The inland roads were dry, and as the traffic thinned out we increased speed. I watched the fields, and the huge flocks of birds that circled like dust-storms, but my mind calculated every possible way in which the threat of death might come.
    At first they pretended that it would be faster to take to the minor roads, but by the time we were as far as the military exercise zone they had grown tired of their game, or had decided that it was no longer necessary.
    Fabre, in the back seat with me, was watching the road with unusual attention. ‘You missed the turn-off,’ he told the driver. He tugged at his finger joints one by one, as if he was field-stripping his hand to clear a blockage.
    The driver made no sign that he’d heard, until finally he said, ‘I didn’t miss
anything.
There’s that tumbledown shrine and the wire,
then
comes the turn-off.’
    â€˜Perhaps you are right,’ said Fabre. His face was even whiter than white, and he chewed down on one of his tablets in a rare display of emotion. He became conscious of my stare and turned to me. ‘We must get the right road or we’ll be lost – it’s one of those short-cuts.’
    â€˜Oh, one of
those
short-cuts,’ I said. I nodded.
    He rubbed his hands together and smiled. Perhaps he’d realized that there had been undertones in that last exchange which denied any last chance that they were policemen.
    Fabre spotted a wayside shrine with a few miserable wild flowers in a tin at the foot of a tormented Christ. ‘You’re right,’ he told the driver. We turned on to the narrow side road.
    â€˜Take it easy,’ Fabre said to the driver, his face tightening as the suspension thumped the rutted track. He was nervous now, as the time came closer. They were both nervous. The driver had stiffened at the wheel, and he seemed to shrink even as I watched him.
    â€˜Not the right-hand fork,’ Fabre warned the driver. And then I suddenly recognized the landscape. A few stunted trees on rolling hills: I’d not seen this place since the war. We were taking the high road to the west side of the Tix quarry: Champion’s quarry, as it now was. The old open-cast workings had been abandoned since the late ’fifties, and the mine had proved so expensive that it had closed a few years later. The quarry: it would be an ideal place.
    As we came up the slope to the brink of the quarry I saw the same dilapidated wooden huts that had been there ever since I could remember. Fabre squirmed. He thought he was a hell of a hard kid, pulses racing and eyes narrowed. I saw him as a grotesque caricature of myself when young. Well, perhaps I was the same ‘yesterday’s spy’ that Champion was, but my heart wasn’t pounding. Shakespeare got me all wrong: no stiffening of the sinews, no summoning of the blood, not even ‘hard favour’d rage’. There was only a cold sad ache in the gut – no longer any need to simulate it. And – such was the monumental ego a job like mine needs – I was already consoling myself for the distress that killing them would inevitably cause me.
    I was concentrating on the pros and cons of striking while the driver had his hands full of car, and Fabre had his attention distracted. But because they were watching the