The Sinkiang Executive

by Adam Hall

  I didn’t know what the chances were: either they’d seen me or they hadn’t. They might have shouted to the driver but I wouldn’t have heard them because of the exhaust and the driver wouldn’t have heard them because the doors were shut and his window would be up; in any case it was academic: if they’d seen me they’d go back to the Moskwicz and head off the bus and I couldn’t drop off now because I could hear traffic coming up from the rear and it sounded like a truck or an army transport with heavy-duty tyres and no chains, keeping pace and sending a flush of light reflecting upwards from the snow against the mudcaked chassis just above my head.

  It was a strictly shut-ended situation because I didn’t know how much traffic there was behind the bus and it was going to depend on how long I could hang on like this: given a run of three or four green lights I’d have to drop and if I dropped I might just miss the wheels of the truck behind but there might be a whole line of traffic and sooner or later there’d be a blood-red smear on the snow, finis.

  My heels were dragging on sand now and I kicked upwards with one foot and hooked it sideways and felt nothing and kicked again and got it lodged across a brake rod but it slipped off and I tried the other foot, feeling for a cross-member and not finding one, trying again and hitting the open propeller-shaft and letting it drop back to the roadway. Technically my heels were taking some of the weight and relieving the strain on my fingers but there was sand along this stretch and my shoes could wear through and I didn’t know what was going to happen in the next fifteen minutes: I might have to run for my life and I could lose it if a shoe came off.

  Tried with my hands next, feeling for a girder where I could hook one arm through and hold the wrist to lock it in position, but I was too far forward and my face was just to the rear of the gearbox with one of the universal joints spinning within an inch of my head and if I moved too much the bolts would cut into the skull like a circular rasp: it wasn’t worth risking so I let my body hang limp and began waiting out the time, it was all I could do.

  Oil was dripping against my face and I turned it slightly to let it run downwards, clear of my eye. There was a leak in the exhaust pipe and the fumes were acrid and sickly, setting up an irritation in my throat that I tried to control by swallowing. The deep-cut tyres of the truck behind us were sending out a moan as they ran across the hard-packed snow and I could see other lights now, showing beneath its silhouette : there was a line of traffic, possibly a military convoy, and somewhere in the din of the exhaust pipe I could hear their chains jingling on the snow.

  My fingers were burning now with the strain of hanging on.

  Ignore.

  The oil dripped again and I turned my face away, feeling it creep down to the lobe of my ear. I was taking shallow breaths to keep the carbon monoxide out of my lungs but the muscles were working hard from the ringers to the shoulders and demanding oxygen and I began breathing more deeply because I couldn’t help it: there was no equation possible and at some distant point my hands would lose their grip because the gas had swamped the brain or because the muscles ran out of oxygen, one way or the other. If I could Slowing, we were slowing.

  No brakes yet: the rod against my shoulder hadn’t moved. Just a gradual deceleration with the exhaust note snarling lower on the overrun as the cylinders went dead.

  Assume traffic lights.

  Fingers burning but hanging on. If I dropped too soon there’d be nothing to save me: the truck couldn’t pull up on this kind of surface even if the driver saw me and if I tried rolling to the kerb I could get it wrong and his front wheel would The exhaust was throbbing again and the whine of the universals rose to their normal pitch and I saw the faint green spread of light on the snow along the gutter as the bus got up speed and the traffic behind followed suit: the lights had been at red and the driver had started slowing and they’d changed to green and I’d have to keep hanging on and I didn’t think I could do it now because a muscle is electro-chemical and the will can push its limits but not to infinity.

  My fingers are steel hooks.

  Nothing can break them.

  We were going faster than before and the gas began fluttering against the side of my head and I turned it the other way and felt the heat on my hair but that was all right, I could stand that, I could stand anything that didn’t increase the strain on the fingers because they’d got to hang on.

  They are steel hooks.

  Nothing can break them.

  But the throb of the exhaust was vibrating inside my head and the stink of the gas was sharp and sweet and permeating, stinging my eyes and making them water, making them close, making my thoughts drift, steel hooks, until my body sagged lower and the heels of my shoes began skating from side to side as the thigh muscles loosened, nothing, from side to side on the sand and the snow, nothing can break them, side to side, wake up or you’ll Tighten the fingers: tighten.

  And be aware of the gas because it’s lethal. Christ’s sake cerebrate: necessary to stay conscious, essential to review the situation and get it into normal perspective because it was simply a question of time. Soon the bus would stop and I could drop and roll clear and all I had to do until then was maintain the tension in the finger muscles and concern my mind with nothing else, nothing at all.

  My fingers are steel hooks.

  Nothing can break them.

  Sweat pouring over me and cooling in the freezing air, my hands burning, my arms burning, my shoulders, burning, steel hooks, and the sound of the drumming in my head and the sweet tang of the gas swirling inside and my body swimming, slowing, we were Slowing again.

  Hooks.

  Slowing.

  The truck was still behind. I could hear it and see its lights. Its lights were yellow on the snow. Slowing. My feet dragged on the sand, from side to side, side to side, slowing.

  Hooks.

  The traffic shunting behind us, a bumper banging: they couldn’t pull up on the snow.

  Slow.

  A Mush of red somewhere below me, coming from a light.

  I watched the light on the snow, holding my breath because of the gas. My head was full of it.

  Slowing.

  Stop.

  Drop and roll clear.

  Chapter 17

  OBJECTIVE

  ‘These are copies,’ I said.

  ‘Of everything?’

  ‘Of everything I could find.’

  He looked at them in the light coming through the window.

  ‘This is all you found?’

  ‘Christ, I’ve just told you.’

  He looked at me and away.

  ‘What happened to you?’ he asked me.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I mean what sort of condition are you in?’

  ‘First rate.’

  I was getting fed up with him. You don’t throw yourself under a bus and come out looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy and he ought to know that. Come to think of it, of course, he didn’t know it was what I’d been doing.

  ‘There may be some other papers,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘With Kirinski.’

  A bus came in and filled the place with noise. It had the name Balkhash on the illuminated sign over the front. I supposed the lake was frozen now, though it hadn’t been when I’d flown over it to the north. Christ, that was a long time ago.

  I shut my eyes and let them water. The exhaust gas had been the worst, though I still couldn’t feel my ringers.

  ‘Opal Light,’ he said after a while, ‘was our operation.’

  I woke up very fast.

  ‘It was what?’

  He slipped the file back into the envelope with the films, and didn’t say anything. Someone came to the open doorway.

  ‘Excuse me, comrade. Is this the one for Alma Ata?’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘This is for Ust’Kamenogorsk.’ Thank you.’

  He went away, lugging a canvas bag with a hen in it. ‘Is that the one,’ I asked Ferris carefully, ‘where the wheel came o
ff?’

  ‘Didn’t you look at the file?’

  ‘Yes, but there wasn’t anything specific.’

  ‘That was the one.’

  I sat back and tried to think, but my clothes still stank of that gas and my stomach was sour with it and I wanted to sleep, sleep for days. Fat chance.

  ‘Kirinski,’ I said, ‘was doubling for two sides. That’s why -‘

  ‘Three.’

  I looked at him. They’d got neon lights in the roof of this place and the windows of the bus we were sitting in were tinted, so that his face was grey-blue and mottled by the spots on the glass. But it wasn’t just that he looked like death: I think there was more on his mind than he’d ever had before, and it was wearing him down, even Ferris.

  I said: ‘Three?’

  He took a breath. ‘Kirinski is our executive for Sinkiang.’

  I shut my eyes again, and let them stream.

  The passengers were getting off the coach that had just come in and I could hear someone laughing, it was a shrill sudden laugh that echoed under the enormous roof, and I can still remember it.

  ‘How long,’ I asked Ferris, ‘has he been working for the Bureau?’

  ‘Eighteen months.’

  ‘What’s his status?’

  ‘Third class. He doesn’t know anything about us.’

  ‘He knew enough,’ I said wearily, ‘to blow Opal Light.’

  ‘Yes. And he’s beginning to know more.’ I started to listen carefully.

  ‘Who got on to him, Ferris?’

  ‘We sent three people out, one after another, with Chechevitsin to liaise for them.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They sent some stuff back, but couldn’t get actual evidence.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘They were found dead.’

  He shifted on the seat, crossing his legs the other way and turning his head to look past me at the passengers out there. ‘What sort of chap is he?’

  ‘Kirinski?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Untrained, aggressive, physically strong. Nerves like castanets. Christ, so would mine be, trying to keep three in the air.’

  ‘Would you call him psychotic?’

  ‘No more than the rest of us in this trade.’

  I was still listening carefully to what he was saying, and to his silences. I was beginning to hear something that was only, as yet, in his mind.

  ‘Do you want me to go back to his place,’ I asked him, ‘and see if he’s got anything on the Bureau? ‘

  He thought about this.

  ‘No. He can’t have anything we’d want to destroy. But he’s been making too many contacts, and -‘

  ‘Not Chechevitsin?’

  ‘No.’ He looked at me with a wintry smile. ‘We wouldn’t have sent you to investigate a man and give you one of his contacts for your liaison.’

  ‘You bastards’d do anything.’ But it didn’t sound funny. This was the end phase, and the end phase is never funny.

  ‘London,’ he said absently, ‘is still working on your case, naturally.’

  ‘My case?’

  ‘Novikov.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Pressure,’ he said with slightly more articulation than usual, ‘is being put on the Prime Minister to make the Yard see the point. The point being that even in a cold war there are sometimes casualties.’

  It was all they could do. If you kill someone it’s murder, but if you kill someone who is a potential enemy working within the gates, there is a difference. Not that I’d slaughtered that man in the Queen’s name, but that was the argument the PM would use to get the thing wiped off the records.

  ‘Still got the shits,’ I said, ‘have they?’

  ‘Until the case can be closed,’ he said sharply, the Bureau will remain at risk.’

  I didn’t know at first why he’d brought the subject up. But now I knew, and I could feel the slight acceleration of my heart-rate under my ribs.

  ‘Ferris,’ I said very carefully, ‘did they plant Novikov on me in that train?’

  He looked away from the window. ‘Surely,’ he said with a certain impatience, that’s rather too extravagant.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past them,’ I said and he heard the edge on my voice but refused to look at me.

  Wings crashed against the window and I looked out. That bloody hen had got loose and they were all trying to catch it, running all over the place.

  I thought it was time to ask Ferris.

  ‘What is the actual objective for Slingshot?’

  Immediate reaction as the tension came into him, though there wasn’t anything to see: he was poker perfect I had to wait quite a long time.

  ‘As you know,’ he said with his voice a shade too bright, ‘we had to work out a suitable access. That’s why we had to get the air photographs, and we’ll be passing on some of these documents to certain organizations. But they were only the ticket for the trip.’

  They’d caught that bloody thing down there and it was flapping and squawking, trying to get away again. Some children were laughing, and clapping their hands. Then a man tucked the hen between his knees and took the head and gave a jerk and the squawking stopped.

  ‘The actual objective,’ Ferris said beside me, ‘is less complicated. They want you to kill Kirinski.’

  Chapter 18

  SILENCE

  She sat hunched on the stool, shivering, cupping the bowl of soup in both hands. Two men came in and I looked up at the fly-stained mirror and down again.

  ‘Because I’m afraid of him,’ she said in a moment.

  I’d asked her why she carried a gun.

  ‘But you had it on you when he was away.’

  ‘I always carry it. There are the others, too.’

  The two men were all right: they were railway workers. I’d checked Liova all the way in from Gromyko Prospekt, three blocks from here, and it had been satisfactory. This place was behind the station, not inside it, and of course if the KGB wanted to drop on me they could do that: I wouldn’t be able to stop them. Wherever they wanted to drop on me in this city they could do it, unless I went to ground; and I couldn’t go to ground because this was the end phase and in the next few hours I’d have to get out of Yelingrad and get out of Russia before the pressure reached the point where the whole thing blew.

  ‘What others?’ I asked her, but of course she meant the KGB.

  She put her bowl down on to the counter and I noticed she’d stopped shivering. I didn’t know her well enough to know whether it had been her nerves or the intense cold or both. When I’d called the apartment an hour ago she’d said Kirinski was there, but I’d wanted to talk to her, not him: if he’d answered I would have hung up without speaking. She said she’d meet me here.

  ‘I mean the KGB,’ she said.

  ‘You weren’t afraid of them when you called them up and put them on to me, the first time we met.’

  She closed her eyes and for a moment looked younger, a child asleep. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I was.’

  It could be true but I didn’t rely on that. I didn’t rely on anything now, even Chechevitsin, even Ferris, even London. They’d got me to the point of the wedge again where the risk factor was a hundred per cent and I’d have to get out alone if I could get out at all. This girl and I had made love yesterday and today she could pull her gun and blast me off this stool and show her KGB card to the proprietor and walk out of here without even paying for the soup or she could make a signal and any number of agents could close in on this place before I had time to see them coming, but there’d been no way of diminishing the risks without diminishing my last few chances of getting out of Slingshot alive, and even those were thinning out the longer I sat here drinking this bloody stuff.

  But there was no other way because time was too short now to plan anything foolproof.

  ‘Do you belong,’ I asked Liova, ‘to the KGB?’

  She looked up. ‘No. They asked me to
watch Alexei for them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A month ago.’

  ·Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. They just came to me. They asked me to report on his close friends, and anyone I saw him talking to.’

  ‘And any visitors.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I stirred the soup with my aluminum spoon, and found some more meat at the bottom. ‘Why are you afraid of him?’

  ‘Because of what he’s doing. I don’t understand it.’ She spread out her hands suddenly: ‘Listen to me, I am a doctor’s daughter and I work in an office for the agricultural department, and I’m not used to the kind of things Alexei is doing. He’s suffering under an enormous strain, and that’s why he’s on this-‘

  I waited.

  She looked away and picked up her bowl, shrugging with her head. ‘He frightens me.’

  ‘What is he on? Heroin?’

  She looked startled. ‘No. How did you -‘

  ‘Cocaine?’ I’d heard there was traffic across the border.

  Hesitation. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he mainlining?’

  She looked puzzled, I suppose because I’d used the Moscow argot. ‘Does he inject himself?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘How often does he get high?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it’

  He’d been high in the car, in the Trabant. It had been like struggling with a tiger. He’d probably been high when he’d killed the three people London had sent out here.

  ‘Are you on it too, Liova?’

  Her dark hair swung and her eyes were wide. ‘It’s killing him! You think I want to die too? Like that?’ In a moment she said quietly: There hasn’t been any sex for almost a year. It takes that away first. First sex, then life. I know about it.’