The Sinkiang Executive

by Adam Hall

  Alternatives: keep back and let the courier go by without seeing me and put it down as a missed rendezvous; let them trap him if that was what they’d come here to do. Or let him see me and let him go by and try to make a rendezvous later; this would depend on his degree of training and if he wasn’t any better than Gorodok he’d foul it up and blow both of us and therefore Slingshot. Or tag him and get him alone in a clear field and made the rendezvous then; this would call for miracles and I hadn’t got any because Kirinski had been very strong and my right bicep was still numb from one of his strikes and the neck-blow from the edge of the back seat had left me with nerve shock and I’d never had to tag a contact and throw my own tags, three of them, except in training at Norfolk - and a lot of the stuff they give us at Norfolk is too sophisticated to work in practice: it’s on the curriculum as a mental exercise.

  Five Red Army officers in shiny boots and enormous greatcoats, one of them a general with his jowls overflowing his collar; three Tadzhik women in traditional costume; another man with a musical instrument and now a plump woman smiling over her bouquet of faded carnations while the man explained to her that they were all he could find.

  Decision: I wouldn’t let the courier go by without seeing me. I would make eye contact and take it from there.

  A group of men came past in black coats and Homburgs, most of them with beards and gold-rimmed spectacles, their Muscovite accents chipping at the air as they herded together towards the main doors. I glanced at their faces: I glanced at every face and looked away to the next, forming the habit. At this moment I was under close scrutiny and had to take the utmost care, because my eyes, staying too long on one face among all the others, could condemn a man to death.

  It had happened in Oslo and it had happened in Singapore: an opposition-surveyed eye-contact situation can be the same as an identity parade and in Oslo the executive had taken the slightest step forward when he’d seen his cutout coming down the gangway and in Singapore a courier had glanced down quickly when his man came through the gate at the airport and we’d lost two good operatives because of it. For this reason it’s a situation we don’t get into if we can help it but today I’d arrived here shortly before a plane was due in and I’d left the observation deck shortly after it had landed and the first tag was already on to me and the only thing to do was to conform to the pattern: I was obviously here to meet someone off the Moscow flight and so I must stand here looking for him.

  Five young girls in red woollen scarves and pom-pom hats, their arms interlinked as they came past me, singing and giggling.

  A woman in a wheelchair, her face grey and her eyes already dead; a young man pushing her, watching the girls.

  An Air Force captain, eating the last of an apple down to the core.

  Ferris.

  He was looking vaguely around him and our glances met for a half-second and passed on and this was when we could have blown Slingshot if we hadn’t worked together long enough to know each other’s style.

  I went on waiting, watching the rest of the passengers as they came through and wishing to Christ that Chechevitsin had put a little more information into his last signal: I was in the target area with the KGB moving in and the last thing I wanted was a top field director dropping out of the sky to make a rendezvous. The signal had said courier and if it had been a courier I could have left him to fend for himself and take the risk that Gorodok had taken and I could have handled these tags on my own. If I’d known London was sending Ferris here I would have made damned sure of getting a different car and I would have waited outside this bloody place and watched from cover without even showing myself because Ferris is a veteran and knows precisely what to do.

  He was doing it now, walking straight through the hall and out by the main doors, no hat, a light gaberdine coat, a tan brown overnight case. I was watching his reflection in the three glass panels along the wall beyond the stream of passengers and now he had gone.

  When the last of them came through I gave it another minute, going up to the gate and looking along the passage and coming away disappointed, checking my watch and then going out through the main doors at a steady pace. This was when they would have made the snatch if they’d received the instructions and I was sweating because I had the films on me to give to the ‘courier’ and they were enough to get me a life sentence and those places aren’t easy to get away from because of the barbed wire and gun towers and guard dogs: Cosgrove had tried it six months ago at the Potma Complex in Chita Province and he was badly savaged because they couldn’t control one of the dogs. I hate those bloody things.

  Ferris had got it right: he’d had a rough idea of how many more passengers there’d been behind him and he’d known I’d have to wait till they were through and he’d used time outside the building and was now walking steadily north along the airport boulevard, his fuzz of thin hair blowing around his head. Most of the passengers were getting into the terminal bus or sharing cabs but a dozen or so were walking along the boulevard and Ferris was keeping pace with them, swinging his case and not looking around him anymore. He couldn’t be feeling very happy: a rendezvous is normally secure and I hadn’t had time to warn him and he’d seen immediately that we had a problem when I let him go by.

  I wasn’t very happy myself. Parkis had put an executive and a director into the field in Central Asia and at this precise moment they were in a KGB trap and I didn’t know if we could get out of it because this was the third alternative I’d begun working on and it was the one that needed miracles.

  Ferris hadn’t been sent down here personally for nothing. I didn’t need a director in the field because the operation was close focus and London knew that: the target was one man, Kirinski. So Ferris was here to slam something new on the board for me to handle and I wasn’t ready for it but I had to know what it was and that meant I had to bring him to some land of rendezvous in a safe place and there weren’t any safe places in this city now that the KGB were into the action: they’d hold off until the point came when they could see they’d never drive us to ground and then they’d pull us in, finis.

  I didn’t know how good his cover was but in a sense it was only as good as I could make it: at the moment there was no connection between us and technically he was in a clear field but as soon as I went too close to him they’d get the point and put the drop on us and start interrogating.

  A black Moskwicz saloon went slowly past from the airport, chains biting on the snow and scattering it across the ruts, a face at a steamy window, featureless, the acrid scent of exhaust gas as the car gathered speed and turned the corner. Shoes crunched faintly behind me and on the other side of the boulevard a short dark figure walked insubstantially through the reflections on the Intourist windows, a man with a sloping shoulder. Far ahead of me, Ferris.

  He could only go on walking, or stop: he hadn’t got the training or the experience to take any kind of initiative and we both knew that. The one move he could make would be to hole up in public cover and wait for me there but it wouldn’t be easy and it might be impossible because this operation was based on geometry and involved angles, distances and vectors: we would be moving, he and I and these other men, across a chessboard as the light of the day began lowering across the streets.

  He turned left and I stayed on this side of the boulevard and began looking for cover. This too might be impossible to find in time but it was my main concern. Without Ferris on the scene I could have flushed these tags within minutes because a city is a warren and I am a ferret who knows its way and who knows how close to go and how far: I’ve done it before, a hundred times, and I could have done it again today but there was Ferris and I mustn’t lose him.

  I crossed at the intersection and for the first time turned my head to watch for the traffic and saw five of them among the people who were walking from the airport, five or conceivably more because I couldn’t see farther than the second group who were crossing farther down, hurrying before the bus came, one of them slip
ping and finding his balance again. They were men with coats and hats and gloves and they didn’t look any different from the others in actual appearance: I knew who they were because I’d seen them before, hundreds of them, Russian and Czechoslovak and Polish and French and Italian and Turkish, average and undistinguished men in respectable suits and worn shoes, their movements casual and their faces noncommittal as they worked their daily round like pilot fish. Of course they vary in their temperaments: the subtlest are the French and they’ll hang on whatever you try to do; the Italians will do well until they see a girl and then they’ll go off with her and leave you flat; the Turks will hound you to the ends of the earth and then drive you into the ground; and the Russians will keep their distance but never lose you unless you can pull something totally unexpected, because they are logical and trained to move in straight lines as these were doing now.

  A hundred yards after I’d crossed at the intersection and started west along this street the black Moskwicz came past again, but faster this time: it had turned left along the side street parallel to the boulevard and come up and turned left again and found me crossing from the first to the second block and it would now make a series of right turns and come back and look for me two blocks ahead and that was all right, providing it went on doing the same thing and didn’t stop. I liked the pattern as it was, because at this stage I knew where people were and what they were doing.

  I suppose London had waited until I was down on Soviet soil and still alive before they’d pulled Ferris out of Furstenfeldbruck and shot him into Moscow with instructions to come down here; it’s relatively easy for the field directors to cross frontiers because they’re never in action and their cover is conservative: most of them double as cultural attaché’s or commercial first secretaries as the major embassies and at least half of them are permanently down on the Intourist waiting lists for educational travel-group tours through Russia and the slave states: it’s infinitely easier to get out of a country if you can prove how you came in.

  The Moskwicz was turning right.

  Ferris was a good fifty yards ahead of me and I lost him sometimes because he was using the environment and doing it well, staying with a chance group of people and finding another before they split up, keeping to the right-hand side of the pavement and pacing his way steadily, sometimes looking at his watch to express purpose and a sense of destination: it was a model performance and it kept my nerves off the limit as we hauled the five men and the Moskwicz westwards along Lenin Prospekt and past the square.

  It was now twelve minutes since we’d left the airport and there had been no chance of shaking off these people and I was getting worried because the longer Ferris and I remained in the same street within sight of each other the sooner they’d see the connection and start working on him too. At the moment he was perfectly clear and they weren’t taking the slightest interest in him, any more than they were taking an interest in the other twenty or thirty people moving with us along the Prospekt.

  Moskwicz.

  Its number was half covered in slush but there was a small triangular dent on the rear wing and that was good enough. It went past at the same pace as the traffic; it wasn’t observing me: it was standing by in case I decided to find a taxi or get on a bus. If that happened they Ferris had gone.

  I kept walking.

  Clothing store. Warehouse. Three unidentified offices in a row. Bus station.

  The Inter-Kazakh State Lines, a vast roofed area with water puddling below the mudflaps of three long distance buses that had just come in, one of them still discharging passengers in the blue-grey artificial light. No sign of Ferris: he was too good for that.

  I walked steadily for three blocks and checked everything twice: every doorway, every parked vehicle, every wall, basement and side entrance to every building, and drew blank all the time. I didn’t want to alter the basic pattern but the time factor was now taking over: Ferris couldn’t wait for me indefinitely at the bus station and I had to get back there and locate him as soon as I could. His own timing might be critical: he was in this city to rendezvous with the executive but there could be other things he had to do here, involving Chechevitsin or a mobile Bureau cell or Kirinski himself through any one of a dozen Central Asian channels. I didn’t know the background and I wasn’t going to assume anything at this stage. The one thing I had to do was to get back to that bus station and if I couldn’t find a chance then I’d have to make one and risk blowing Slingshot.

  This was normal. In any given mission you’re operating right on the very edge.

  Three doorways, two deep, one shallow. A line of Red Army vehicles, one of them an armoured car with a gunner perched on the roof struggling with the antenna. I stopped and called up to him.

  ‘Comrade! Is this the way to Central Station?’ He looked down, his eyes dark with frustration: it looked as if they’d hit the antenna on something hard enough to bend it at the base, and his hands were too cold to straighten it. ‘Where?’

  ‘The station. The main station.’

  ‘Straight on.’

  I nodded and walked away, checking my watch and looking around for a taxi. The station was three miles from here and the first of the street lights were coming on and it was logical for me to hurry. They knew I’d abandoned the Trabant because of me windscreen and the railway station was a plausible destination and in any case they wouldn’t question it because they would go wherever I took them.

  The nearest tag would now be questioning the soldier: what had I asked him, so forth. I’d done it to reassure them, and if I’d only succeeded by one degree my chances were by that one degree improved.

  Doors, windows, railings, a parked truck, blank, drawing blank.

  Three blocks and I was walking through the night, with the streetlamps taking over the evening sky. Three taxis had gone past and I’d tried to stop them because sharing was an established custom but they were obviously full.

  Moskwicz.

  This time it turned at one of the prescribed U junctions and went back the other way, a blurred face checking me before it turned right and began working its way back to Lenin Prospekt.

  One of the tags was quite close behind me: I’d seen his reflection twice in the past few minutes. The light was less reliable now and they were tightening their distances. I was getting a better look at them now because whenever I heard a car I turned round to see if it was a taxi and they knew what I was doing because I’d shown them.

  Two more went past but I got the third and it was empty.

  ‘Whereto?’

  ‘Central Station.’

  One of them had broken into a short run but the Moskwicz had made its circuit and come back into the Prospekt and he left it for them to take up the tag in its mobile phase and we moved off with the black saloon a reasonable distance behind and with one small Syrena between us.

  It was no use relying on the traffic lights: the Moskwicz would cross on the red if it had to, even in snow conditions. Unless I did something to change the pattern we’d head slowly for the station and with every yard we’d be heading away from the bus depot where Ferris was waiting and I couldn’t let it go on for too long because the Moskwicz had a radio and they’d bring in mobile support: they’d have to.

  I didn’t want to wait for them to do that.

  ‘Are we going to get more snow?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘What was that, comrade?’

  There was a glass division, grimed and cracked and repaired with adhesive tape, and he cocked his head towards the opening.

  ‘Is there more snow on the way?’

  ‘It says so, on the radio. From the southwest. But I can tell you, we don’t need it!’ Checking, checking. Blank.

  Of course if you wait for a chance you may never get it but if you decide to make one for yourself you can often use the environment even if it presents only one positive feature. The alley was on the right as he braked for the lights and when I looked round I saw there was still another car
between the taxi and the Moskwicz so I waited another two seconds for the speed to go down to a crawl and then I hit the door open and got out and swung it shut and the driver didn’t start shouting before I was across the pavement and into the alley, running some of the way and sliding the rest. A flare of headlights came and my own shadow flew ahead of me: they’d slung the Moskwicz across the pavement and lit up the scene and I heard a door snap open and then another one and there were three shadows now, two of them enormous and flitting like giant bats across the face of the building as I got half-way and tripped on something frozen under the snow and went headlong, sliding head-first and hitting the wall with my hands and bouncing away, get up, sliding across to the other side while the bats hovered in the dazzle of the lamps and I hit out with one hand to stop the momentum, get up they’re coming, another door banging and a shadow bigger than the others and the sound of running feet.

  Got up and got going and found sand near the end of the alley but the shadows were smaller now and therefore closer and I knew I’d blown it because the terrain was the biggest hazard and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, their footsteps very close in the confines, thudding behind me, no go, it was no go.

  Ferris. They didn’t get Ferris. I’d kept him clean. Feet flying and the street empty when I got to the corner and turned to the right, slithering and fetching up against a lamp standard and using it to change direction, empty except for a car moving towards the intersection and a bus starting off within a few yards of the alley, its doors shut against the cold and its windows steaming and not a hope in hell of jumping on, but the rear wheels were spinning on the snow in spite of the chains and I let my own momentum take me across the kerb and then I had to be careful because if I got it wrong it was going to be nasty: the rear end of the bus was sliding into the gutter and the wheels were churning for grip in the piled snow and I had to throw myself flat on my back and kick at the kerb and slide underneath the thing before it got under way, hooking my hands upwards and hitting the muffler and burning them, hooking again and finding a strut running sideways across the chassis, a strut and a brake rod that flexed under my weight but held me until I could find a purchase on one of the cross-members, my feet dragging now as the wheels got a grip and the bus moved faster, swinging out from the kerb and getting into second gear and accelerating again, the heat of the exhaust pipe against my face and its sound throbbing, beginning to deafen me.