The Sinkiang Executive

by Adam Hall

  A man came in and sat down at one of the little tables, where the food cost ten per cent more. He looked all right but I went on checking him.

  ‘Is he jealous?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘He doesn’t want other men to do the things he can’t do.’ She pushed her bowl away and turned on the stool to face me, sweeping her hair from her eyes. ‘I want to see you again, Andreyev. Not at the apartment.’

  I was getting out some money, to pay for our soup.

  ‘I would’ve liked that,’ I said.

  She was watching me. ‘Isn’t that why you asked me to come here? So that we could talk?’

  ‘Yes. So that we could talk.’

  I put down a ruble and five kopeks.

  ‘We haven’t said anything, Andreyev.’

  ‘I’m going away.’

  She slipped off the stool and we went to the door together.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  We walked with her hand in my arm; the pavement was slippery. It was three or four minutes before she spoke again.

  ‘When will you be coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  Chechevitsin had got me a Wolga, the medium-sized model, and I’d picked it up from the car park outside the football stadium last night after Ferris had gone. It was waiting for me half-way down the street that ran at right-angles from this one, at the next corner.

  When you come back,’ Liova said, ‘will you let me know?’

  ‘Of course.’

  We turned the corner and I looked along the street and saw the Wolga standing where I’d left it. It was in the open, with no cover anywhere near; there was good cover farther along, where two trucks were still unloading into a warehouse, but I hadn’t used it.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked me.

  ‘I’m never quite sure.’

  Bitterly she said: ‘You’re like him. Why can’t you stop?’

  ‘We don’t know how.’ We were nearing the Wolga. ‘And we don’t want to know.’

  There were five other cars standing against the kerb in this area and the dark green Syrena was the farthest away; but even from this distance I could see that he was still sitting there behind the wheel.

  When we reached the first corner I said: ‘I’m going this way.’

  She stopped and I kissed her cold mouth and felt her gloved hands tighten in my own. She said nothing, and I let her go, watching her into the distance. She walked with her head down, taking care on the treacherous surface, a lock of dark hair lying across one shoulder, Liova, a Russian girl, last seen in the street of a city under snow.

  I turned and went back and got into the Wolga and started up and waited for the tyres to find a grip on the ruts, checking the mirror when I crossed the first intersection to make sure he was behind me.

  He needn’t have come: I hadn’t counted on it. There’d been two alternative procedures I could have used if this one hadn’t worked, but they were now academic: he was here. I turned west, soon after the park where the Lenin Monument stood, and took the major road out of the city so that he could follow without any trouble. There was sand along most of the route and we drove at thirty miles an hour, keeping up with traffic. This was the way I’d come into the city after the woman at the farm had cleaned my injuries; the farm was below the caves, six or seven miles into the foothills of the Khrebet Tarbagatay range, where I’d sheltered for a time, coming down from the mountain. Of course I’d told Ferris to go to hell. He’d expected that ‘I don’t think you’ve got any option,’ he’d told me sharply. ‘You know bloody well I’ve never done an execution.’

  ‘Things have changed, you see. The man in the train -‘

  ‘I killed him for my own reasons and I’m damned if I’m going -‘

  ‘The position taken by the Bureau is that you are expected to do for them what you readily did for yourself.’

  ‘I won’t kill a man in cold blood. I never have.’

  ‘Novikov was -‘

  ‘I was in a rage when I did that!’

  ‘You can’t be particularly fond of Kirinski. He destroyed one of our major operations down here and he killed three -‘

  ‘I don’t give a damn what he did. He didn’t do anything to me.’

  ‘There are, of course, certain other aspects. You are the subject of a manhunt throughout northern Europe, and Parkis believes he can get you reinstated at the Bureau if -‘

  ‘Fucking coercion. He can’t use me like a -‘

  ‘What do you think we’re running, Quiller, a garden party? You’ve been placed in the centre of a situation in which this man has to be eliminated, for the sake of -‘

  ‘Tell them to send out someone else.’

  ‘They sent three people out, and they didn’t take enough care.’

  ‘That’s their bloody lookout, if -‘

  ‘We think you can do it for us.’

  ‘Christ, I’ve never done it before, so how can they -‘

  ‘It’s not technically difficult, of course.’

  ‘You bloody directors never go near the edge, do you, you’re -‘

  ‘It simply requires skill in making your approach, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You’re as bad as that bastard Loman, you talk like a -‘

  ‘I wouldn’t throw this chance away, Quiller. I really wouldn’t.’

  Tell them to get someone else.’

  ‘If it’s a question of morality, you should -‘

  ‘Conscience, is that what you -‘

  ‘Not quite, after the incident in London.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, that was personal.’

  After a bit he’d said with enforced patience: ‘Very well, I’m obliged to put the matter into the simplest terms. We would expect you to defend yourself, if attacked.’

  That one shut me up and we’d left the bus station without saying anything else. Ferris hates having to spell things out but I’d been groggy from all that exhaust gas and not cerebrating too well.

  He would have signalled London.

  I checked the mirror again and saw the dark green Syrena sliding about and trying to keep up, so I slowed a little. There were no more buildings now: the last thing we’d passed was some kind of processing plant with steam pluming into the grey winter sky. The caves were two miles ahead and the traffic was thinning out after the road forked, with the military stuff taking the southern route towards the border.

  The foothills were coming up on the right, a sloping waste of snow with dark crags exposed on the lee side. The first of the farm buildings were now spread out on the left of us and I passed them at the same speed and then began accelerating. We had a mile to go and I didn’t want to let him pull up behind me when we stopped because he’d have a gun and he’d use it at once.

  The sand was patchy along this stretch and the Wolga was breaking away at the rear all the time until I got the nearside wheels stuck well down on the camber and used the grass verge as a cush. I saw him twice in the mirror, a long way behind but still on the move, and I kept my foot down until I came to the caves.

  They were high on the hillside, their entrances strung out along a ledge that ran a hundred feet or so above the lower slopes. At this point the road had no particular border but the ground was obviously flat and I ran the Wolga through virgin snow and left it angled against the bank higher up. The stuff I’d taken from the consignee this morning was on the floor in the rear and I left it there, slamming the door shut and starting the climb on foot. The Syrena was still half a mile distant and the air here was quiet, giving me privacy.

  I suppose there were other places as convenient for what we had to do, but I’d made my way instinctively from the city, seeking the wilds as animals do when the presentiment of death is on them. And I suppose there were alternatives: I could have gone to ground and spent the rest of my life in uneasy hibernation, or I could have lain low for a year or two and then gone back to that bloody place to ask them for a jo
b in one of those offices where the halt and the lame and the superannuated finish up, complete with a pen and a pension, to hell with that.

  The thing that had brought me here was the fact that a mission was still running and I was the ferret they’d sent down the hole and they were waiting for me to come up with something, and this was the situation that had shaped my whole life since I’d first gone into the trade, and it had become a habit.

  I watched the Syrena coming.

  Kirinski had contacts and by this time he might have found out I was from London, and that would be sufficient incentive for him to kill me, as he’d killed the others. He knew I’d taken a copy of the material, and he would want that copy and would kill for it if he could, at the same time destroying the information stored in my brain. But I had wanted to make absolutely sure he would attack me, so I had kissed her there in the open street while he was watching.

  I climbed higher, and reached the ledge where the caves made holes in the snow. The car had slid to a stop below me, not far from the Wolga, but he didn’t get out immediately and because of the reflection on the window glass I couldn’t see what he was doing; his gun would already be loaded, and he was probably using the needle. Cocaine works fast, within a minute of the injection, and he would have left it until now, so that by the time he reached me he would feel that overwhelming power flowing through him. Without it he could look after himself well enough: he was bigger than I was, and heavier. With the cocaine in him he would be galvanized, unstoppable.

  The door of the car snapped open and as he got out I could see him clearly enough to recognize that great wedge of a nose sloping down below the eyes, and that odd backward-tilting walk of his as he came across the snow, his knee-boots kicking at it. He looked upwards now, and saw me; and I had the thought that in different circumstances I would have waved to him.

  It was at this point that conscious linear cerebration broke up suddenly into random flashes, as if a bare wire had been dropped across an electronic circuit. I’d been briefed for this mission and I’d been given enough information to see it as a logical attempt to achieve logical goals, but there was always the unknown background to any mission and as I stood here watching Kirinski climb the slope I was thinking of Parkis … It would save us the unpleasant task of later ensuring that the threat to security he would continue to represent was nullified … Parkis and Novikov … Did they plant him on me in that train? … Novikov and Ferris and the way Ferris had looked away when I’d asked him if they’d worked out an escape-phase for me once I’d reached the objective.

  Uninformation, and a background to Slingshot that could make total nonsense of the understanding I thought I had of it: for all I knew I could be one unimportant component of a design so complex that only Parkis could make the changes necessary to remove that one component and render it harmless to the overall plan. My instructions were that the objective for this operation was Kirinski’s death, but who was Kirinski - the objective, or a reliable Bureau man with instructions that the objective for his operation was to kill me?

  In this trade we see the world in mirrors and I’m used to that but when I go out it’s got to be someone from Moscow or Peking or Havana who finds me in the dark or pulls me into a trap or centres me in the crosshairs: someone in the opposition, not someone in London putting a small black cross at the point where the expendable executive is required to cease functioning, not someone I thought I could trust.

  A final thought flashing through my head as I watched the man climbing the slope: You can’t trust Parkis.

  When Kirinski was half-way from the road below I turned and moved towards the mouth of the nearest cave and the shot smashed into the rock close to my face.

  ‘Rashidov!’

  Even at this distance his voice was loud enough to echo in the cave as the second shot chipped fragments away and sent them whining past me. I went right inside now, and felt my way along the rock until faint light came into the darkness ahead of me: these weren’t isolated caves but a whole network tunnelling the hillside above the ledge, parts of it broken from above and blocked with boulders that had rolled down from the heights - I’d lost my way when I’d come here before, and had to climb back up the slope to get out.

  Light from the noon sky gave a leaden sheen to the ice that had formed below the snow mass, covering the walls where the arched roof had fallen in, and I moved again and noted distances and widths and gradients, listening for him as I went forward.

  ‘Rashidov!’

  It was the bellow of an animal, much closer now but impossible to locate because of the echoes. The cocaine was roaring in his veins and he would be feeling invincible and would behave accordingly. The heart-rate and breathing would be accelerated and the body temperature raised, with increased blood sugar and muscle tone; but it was the psychic effect of the drug that would give him the strength to deal with anything that got in his way and leave it broken behind him. Anything.

  I picked up a stone and threw it against the angle of the rock face where I’d turned, and the light of the explosion flared as the shot crashed in the confines and left the mountain singing.

  Three.

  I moved again as the reek of cordite came on the air. There were faint regular sounds and I noted them as being less than immediately threatening, until I realized that my ears were still half deafened by the noise of the shot and that he could be much closer than he sounded.

  The walls narrowed and the ground rose and I couldn’t see the light anymore but there was no point in going back: he was close now and quiet, listening. I could be moving into a dead end but the risk had been calculated: to kill Kirinski I had to empty his gun and I couldn’t do that in the city streets and I couldn’t do it across open ground so I’d thought of the caves and I would have to do it here, where there’d be a chance of dodging him long enough to wear him down and come up on him from behind.

  I didn’t think I could do that. I only thought there was a chance.

  The ground was steep and I waited, keeping still. If I tried to go higher I might slip and he’d hear and fire. The silence was total except for the singing of the blood through the aural membrane. A minute later I heard a sound but it was brief and I had to examine it in retrospect; it had been sharp and metallic: he’d probably caught his gun against a jutting rock. I couldn’t hear his breathing, although he’d just climbed the slope from the road and was under the influence of the cocaine; but the acoustics in here were deceptive and I didn’t think he was far away.

  He was waiting for me to move.

  The retinal nerves were switching from cones to rods and a faint area of light was forming to my left, higher than where I stood, and as I watched it I could feel the gooseflesh reaction along the arms because if Kirinski was this side of the corner where I’d turned a minute ago he would see my silhouette forming gradually against the light. It was possible that I was part of the rock’s configuration and that he wouldn’t identify the human outline, so that if I kept still he wouldn’t shoot; but I couldn’t be sure of that. If in fact the outline was becoming recognizable he would now be selecting his target - the head or the torso - and tightening his finger, and I must move in the hope of distracting him. But if I moved I might present the target by showing him that this configuration was not rock.

  I listened.

  Silence.

  The light became stronger as the retinae accommodated, and I watched it. I could have been alone here in the mountain, in the stillness, a single creature isolated and without movement; but I knew he was dose.

  Tidal breathing.

  Heart-beat.

  Nothing more.

  He was waiting, and so was I.

  ‘Rashidov!’

  Explosion of light and sound and I flung myself down with my hands going out and as the echoes rang around the walls I went forward, pitching across the open space I’d seen when he’d fired, hands and knees and then running until my shoulder hit the rock and I bounced, spinning and going
down and kicking upright as the dark burst into light again and the mountain boomed.

  There was more room here and I rolled sideways and found rubble and lay there while he ran past me with his boots scattering stones and the sixth shot crashing somewhere ahead of me and numbing the ears. It was the cocaine: he was overwhelmingly confident and functioning without recourse to reason, hurling himself into the confines with the certainty I was there.

  ‘Rashidov!’

  Christ how he hated me … it was in his voice.

  Stones scattered again and I lay with my face to the rock because my clothes were dark and he wouldn’t see me here unless he came back and I didn’t think he would do that because his mental process was unidirectional: he thought I was somewhere in front of him and therefore I would always be in front of him until he found me and killed me.

  I could still see the faint area of light and the silhouette that was now moving across it, until suddenly his clear figure was standing there at the bottom of what must be a shaft open to the sky. He stood with his head cocked and his nose jutting, his feet spread apart and the gun moving in a slow arc as he looked for me.

  ‘Rashidov! Where are you?’

  The echoes ran from cave to cave and died away.

  I couldn’t tell how much he was still capable of reasoning. Cocaine doesn’t dull the brain: it stimulates it, but to the point where confidence takes over from reason. He was standing there with a monumental arrogance expressed in his stance and the set of his head: he was omnipotent, lord of the mountain, and his question to me had been meant as a command - I must come out of hiding and show myself, so that he could shoot and this time kill.

  ‘Rashidov!’

  He was getting impatient.

  When he moved next I would know by how much he was capable of reasoning. If he moved away it would mean that he still thought I was somewhere in front of him; if he came back it would mean that his brain could still follow logic: the logic that if I had gone ahead of him he would have seen me passing through the light where he was standing now.