Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  'You know, of course, that the Vienna conference may depend on whether we can bring this package across. That is why I sent — that is why I asked you to go along to Downing Street. You know we're not being specious. You know we're not just asking you to fetch and carry. We are asking you to do what you can to ensure that in four weeks' time the president of the United States and the Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet will meet in Vienna and call an armistice in the Cold War.'

  'Bullshit.'

  He gave a gentle sigh. 'If you're trying to test my patience, Quiller, it happens to be infinite.'

  That was true. The last time out, Wainwright had smashed up three Avis cars and left an Arab contact in a doorway of the kasbah with an icepick in his brain and got himself photographed in bed with the wife of the French ambassador to Morocco knowing bloody well that the KGB had stuck a camera in the wall of the Hotel Palais Jamai, and Croder had debriefed him personally and given him the keys of his flat on the Croisette with a chef and maid service and instructions to get his nerves back into shape. That was patience.

  'There just isn't enough to it,' I told him.

  'You're so terribly egotistical.'

  'Didn't anyone tell you?'

  'Oh yes. But I didn't realize how much it got in your way.'

  'So I go and bring this thing in and they tell the Soviets they've got proof about the sub and they'd better apologize or they'll wreck the summit and I get a pat on the back, is that it? For Christ's sake, give me something more interesting.'

  'I would have thought you'd be interested in the fact that Chief of Control has decided to stay up through the early hours to do his utmost to persuade one of his elite shadow executives to take something on that has international dimensions. Since you're not, why don't you think about him?'

  'Who?'

  'The courier.'

  'The courier from Murmansk?'

  'Yes.'

  I turned away from him again, and wished I hadn't, because he could see I was ready to think, and wanted to do it without his eyes on me.

  'Who is he?'

  'Brekhov.'

  I thought about him, about Brekhov. I'd only worked with him once, but he'd been very good: he'd taken three days to bring me something to my hotel in Moscow from our contact at the border, but that was quick because he'd had to get through a militia road check and hole up at a blown safehouse and chance his arm with the kind of papers I wouldn't even show a bus conductor. He even got to my room without going through the lobby, using a fire escape the KGB never bothered to watch because the bottom section had been taken away and they'd put chains across.

  Brekhov, a short man with sturdy legs and a big black moustache and a pair of mild brown eyes that could stare — had stared — a hundred militiamen in the face with the look of an innocent child. Brekhov, running hard now through the frozen ruts of Leningrad or Minsk or Lvov or Warsaw if he'd got across by now, with his sturdy legs working under him and never stopping, never tripping, never taking him an inch away from the course he'd set for himself through the night of a Russian winter, not literally of course — they could be flying him through or bringing him out by road in the hollowed floor of a vegetable truck — but he'd be moving as steadily as that, as doggedly, all the way from the Arctic Circle to some overheated gasthaus west of the wall, where he'd sit with a beer and swap code-identities and look around him before he took out the package and put it down on the table, covering it with his hand until you were ready to take it, here it is, what about another beer, here it is, it's warmer in here than up there in the north, I can tell you, here it is.

  A good courier, Brekhov. Reliable. The best.

  Croder hadn't spoken. He'd wait for me all night, but he knew now that he wouldn't have to. The bastard had got right inside me when I wasn't looking.

  'I worked with him once,' I said. 'With Brekhov.'

  'Did you?'

  He knew bloody well I had: it was only a year ago, on the Corridor thing, when he was already Chief of Control.

  'How are they sending him through?'

  'We're not quite sure.'

  'When will you know?' I turned around and looked at him, and he offered a faint, deprecating smile.

  'I think at this point the questions ought to stop, don't you?'

  I took a deep breath, slowly so that he shouldn't notice. 'Not necessarily.'

  He shrugged. 'We had a signal in from Leningrad an hour ago. He was trying to get onto a plane for Potsdam, using permanent cover for the run out, a maintenance engineer for Aeroflot. We-'

  'Are Signals keeping open for him?'

  'Oh yes.'

  'Who's at the console?'

  'Fletcher.'

  'Listen, has Brekhov got any backups, any relay people, anyone in the field with him?'

  'No. He only ever runs alone.'

  I stuck my hands in the pockets of my mac, feeling the cold now, the cold of the nerves, of the night, as the knowledge of total commitment began spreading through the organism like a drug, sending a slow awareness through the infinitely manifold receptors that things had changed, that soon it would be as it had been not too long ago, only weeks ago, when I had believed, crossing the narrow neck of water from Tangier, that they were still with me, and would never leave me until they'd done for me.

  This feeling would go, soon. The cold would go. It was just a kind of shock, extended in time to lessen its impact. The organism looks after itself, if only you'll let it.

  'There's a lot more,' I said, 'to this thing, isn't there, than picking up a package from a courier?'

  Croder turned away and turned back and said when he'd thought it out, 'I'll put it this way. Whoever we send out to meet Brekhov, we'll be putting on continuing standby in case there's more to be done. And with this kind of background — the business of the American submarine — it would be logical to think that there will indeed be more for him to do, a very great deal more. He might not even find himself alone any longer, but the nucleus of quite a complex cell.'

  'I only ever work alone. You know that.'

  'The mark of the true professional is that he's flexible.'

  'Damn you,' I told him, 'don't keep putting up obstacles. I want the job.'

  He stood with his feet carefully together and the light playing in his eyes as he watched me, while through the glass of the window I listened to the rumbling of a late taxi turning a corner down there in the rain, and then silence, and then, I swear it, the sound of steadily running feet.

  'But of course.' He went to the desk and picked up a phone and pushed three buttons and waited. Someone came on the line and he said, 'Quiller has agreed to go. Set it up, will you?'

  'You know, of course,' Charlie said, stirring the whisky in his tea, 'that Croder is a non-fattening, sugar-free, artificially-flavoured turd. Don't you?'

  'He's all right.'

  'But he's conned you into another mission, three weeks after you got back from Tangier.'

  'I let him do it.'

  Charlie watched me for a bit and then drank from his cup.

  'Lucky bastard.'

  I wanted to leave him, but we never do, or not without a good excuse. It's been a year now since they took him off the books and he's been sitting here in the Caff ever since, talking to anyone who'll listen. He says he's waiting for them to send him out again, not on his own — he knows that's over now — but to help a spook who's messed things up so badly that they can only send someone who's totally expendable to get him out alive if he can. It could even happen, but it would only be a gesture, something to tell the widow: we sent a man out there to help him, but things were just too difficult.

  'Go home, Charlie,' I said. 'It's gone four.'

  'When the rain stops.'

  He's afraid he won't be here when they need him, as a gesture, as comfort for someone's widow. That's why you can never get him to go home when there's something big running, with the main console in Signals manned twenty-four hours a day and the Chief of Cont
rol sleeping here and that unearthly sense of quiet that settles over the building in ways that a stranger wouldn't recognize, not knowing, for instance, that Daisy and the other girls don't normally put the china down as carefully as this.

  'You want a drop more, love?'

  'I shall be pissed.'

  She took his cup away.

  'I shall be pissed,' he said to me with his red eyes narrowed with fatigue, 'and then I shall go out of this fucking place and walk under a fucking taxi. But that's not my game.'

  His game is to wait, if necessary forever, for them to send him out again on a last hopeless mission, so that he doesn't have to be picked up in the street or in whatever bleak one-roomed flat gives him shelter. He sits here waiting to go out, and take his own death with him to the rendezvous.

  'You say it's gone four?'

  'Five past,' I said.

  He fiddled with his Seiko. 'Synchronize watches, gentlemen.'

  Then I saw Binns coming in. He looked round and saw me and came between the tables and stood looking down with the rain still dripping off his mac.

  'You're waiting for clearance, right?'

  'Yes.'

  'Let's go.'

  I put my hand on Charlie's shoulder as I got up. 'It's nothing interesting this time. Nothing you'd even touch.'

  4 RUNNING

  'You don't use a gun, do you?'

  'No.'

  'Why not?'

  'None of your bloody business.'

  Binns gave a faint grin and made a note: No firearm.

  It's just that I prefer to use my hands.

  'Next of kin?'

  'None.'

  He looked up again, then thought better of it and said nothing, making a note. They'd got all this stuff already in the files, but some of us go through changes in our habits or our personal lives and they want to catch things on our way through Clearance. We don't get any younger and we don't get any braver in this trade; there's a diminishing return syndrome at work, and when they take a shadow exec, through his clearance and find he's asking for additional things like a larger-calibre gun or a flak vest or extra cyanide capsules or permission to kill at discretion they'll fail his clearance and send him up to Norfolk for refresher training, and if he can't put out his usual score they'll give him an office job or retire him. Charlie isn't the only one; a lot of us go that way.

  'Bequests?'

  'The usual.'

  Binns looked up. 'What's the usual?'

  You're asked to be precise, in Clearance. They want statements, because they could be your last. 'Home Safe.'

  'Is that a bank?'

  'How did you get so bloody ignorant, Binns?'

  He twisted in his chair and prodded the computer and the screen lit up. Shelter for Abused Wives.

  'Sorry.' He made a note. 'Current languages?' "French, German and Russian.' I picked a splinter from the edge of his pinewood desk. Some of us pull up our chair close enough to do it, and it already looks as if the rats have been at it; we do it to leave a weird kind of signal, I suppose; or perhaps we think subconsciously that if we go on long enough we'll pick the whole bloody building down and we can all go home.

  But I was feeling better now. The cold had gone, and the nerves had settled down; being committed is like that: you're in it again and there's nothing you can do about it now.

  'Who's going to run me?' I asked Binns. He'd get to that part eventually, but I wanted to know now.

  'Croder.'

  'Personally?'

  That's right.'

  'Jesus.' The Chief of Control normally ran three or four operations at the same time, if there were no paramilitary involvement. 'Is he giving me a local control in the field?'

  'Not yet. You won't need one. There's just the rdv with the courier and you're back home again.'

  He asked the rest of the questions and pulled a medical printout from the file and went through it with me and then scratched his chest through the gap in his shirt and slid the drawer shut and said, 'Now maybe I can go home and finish my beauty sleep.'

  'It's not doing you much good. Who's on watch tonight?'

  He checked the roster. 'Kinsley.'

  I went through Codes and Cyphers one floor down and picked up a Box 9 grid system with short-cut phrasing and saw Watts in the room next door and conned him into giving me a journalist's cover — he's always trying to push you into off-duty aircrew identities — and then took the stairs again to the floor above and went along to the room right at the end, next to Signals, and found Kinsley sitting at his desk cleaning a gun.

  'Have you got a minute?'

  'Sure. Sit down. Bryce-Whitney Monitor, 1912, automatic safety-catch, they only made a couple of hundred, how much do you think?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Four hundred quid, isn't that fantastic?'

  'If you say so.' I thought about going home to bed but they might call me at any time now and I could sleep on the flight out; besides, I wanted to know a few things.

  'Are you going out again, Quiller?'

  'Yes.'

  'Can't leave it alone, can you?' He put the cleaning kit away and laid the gun down on the desk with exaggerated care and gave me all of his attention, his wide unsurprisable eyes noting my stubble and untidy hair and my general air, I suppose, of someone who's been up all night. 'What can I do for you?'

  'Tell me about the American sub.'

  'Okay. Going to meet Brekhov, are you?'

  'How did you know?'

  'I was talking to the Chief. He said you'd be coming in here to ask me about the sub.' He got up and stretched his arms out at right angles and flexed them backwards a couple of times and then limped across to the shelf in the corner, a short, square-bodied man with stiff black hair and a beaky nose and a national gold medal for weight lifting and a framed police record on the wall from the time when he'd been arrested for bending some railings with his bare hands outside Buckingham Palace and fined one hundred pounds for causing malicious damage to a public monument, which was twice as much as the bet he'd won for doing it; but they had to use a car jack to get the railings straight again, which was what had pleased him the most.

  'Sugar?'

  'No.'

  He plugged in the rusty water-heater and dropped a couple of teabags into two cups and said over his shoulder, 'What particularly interests you?'

  'How they decided it must have blown up near Murmansk.'

  'Ah. The way I heard it from Cheltenham was that when the Norwegian coastguards spotted the debris it was quite close inshore and drifting due west on the current. This was-'

  'How far from the Russian border?'

  'Damn close. Roughly north-west of Grense Jakobselv. That was at dawn on the second — last Monday — and the current was running at five knots and pretty well due west. I'd say there isn't any doubt about it, wouldn't you? D'you know that area?'

  'All I know is that it's where the Iron Curtain ends in the Barents Sea.'

  'Right. The Norwegians looked at their seismographs and worked out the timing of the explosion and the speed of the current and put the estimated location of the sub as due north of Murmansk, give or take a couple of kilometres, when it was hit.'

  'There's no way of telling whether it was inside the twelve-mile limit at that time?'

  'They're still working things out. We-'

  'Who are?'

  'The US Navy, Norwegian Navy and coastguards, and the NATO team. But it's pretty unlikely they'll ever get a fix in retrospect.' He unplugged the water-heater and filled the two cups and brought them over. 'Want some milk?'

  'No.' I dunked the teabag up and down. 'It was the Cetacea, was it?'

  'Oh, yes. There were five bodies found among the general debris that morning, and they were identified within a few hours; two of them had limbs missing and so on, but their faces were unharmed and the water's not much above freezing in that area. No question.'

  'Are they still searching for the sub?'

  'As a token gesture. They
can't look for it inside Soviet waters and even if they could they wouldn't want to: the Americans are saying that the sub was outside the twelve mile limit and the Soviets are saying they didn't know it was in the Barents Sea anyway. Politically, it's a kind of stand off, and both sides are trying to keep the matches away from the powder keg, because of the summit.'

  'Is that why they-'

  'Hang on.' The phone was ringing and he picked it up. 'Kinsley.' He listened and then put his cup down and went around behind the desk and reached for his pad and a ballpoint. 'When? Okay, see if you can get him on any direct flight with takeoff fifty minutes from now and not later than ETA 08:00 hours today.' He glanced up at me and said, 'Brekhov missed the Potsdam plane but he's on an Aeroflot to Berlin, arriving 08:15. Did you ask Clearance for a bag?'

  'Yes.'

  'When did you last eat?'

  'I'll get something on the plane.'

  'Okay.' He spoke into the phone again. 'No, not unless we have to. Try Lufthansa, then.' He pulled open a drawer and dropped the composite airline schedules onto the desk, reaching for his tea. 'There might be time to call in a chopper to take him from Battersea to Heathrow, but I'd rather find-' he broke off and listened again. 'Look, I'll do that while you tell Jones to take his bag along to the checkout room, with his clearance stuff ready for final signature, okay?' Another phone rang and he picked it up. 'Yes, sir, I've just got it from Signals and we're getting him ready now. I'll tell him.' He rang off and looked up at me again. 'Chief says good luck.'

  I nodded and he began work on the airline schedules and made a note and spoke into the open phone. 'George?' He listened. 'Shit.' His pen ran down the flight times again and he made another note, turning a page and then hearing a voice on the line. He picked up the phone again. 'What? No, this is better: there's a Lufthansa leaving at 05:45' — he checked his watch — 'in just under an hour from now. Get him on that. I know, but we can't help it. They'll have to put him on the flight deck or a cabin-crew jump seat if they have to — just make absolutely sure they get him on it and have his pass waiting for him at the gate, not at the counter, the gate, okay? Flight 190. We're cutting it fine so call in whatever help you need, right up to the Chief of Control if Lufthansa object to an extra bod — he can request assistance on Line 5.'