Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  'In Russia?'

  'He didn't say that. He just said friends.'

  'So you phoned the British embassy?'

  'Yes.' She darted a glance at the window again and at the glass-panelled door.

  She says she's Karasov's mistress, the message had told me. It had been in read-through code with the name changed, handed to me by a small man in a duffle coat as I was getting out of the lift at the hotel, a perfect pass — I'd hardly seen his face as he'd turned away. Fane hadn't told me he was running couriers, and I didn't know how the embassy could have made contact with him: the rooms were bugged. We suggest you meet her and see if she can be useful in any way. The telephone number had followed.

  'Have you heard from him?' I asked her, and she looked back at me from the window.

  'No. That's why I'm so worried.'

  I didn't know if she'd seen anyone outside, or was simply frightened. For me there wasn't much risk: I'd gone from covert to clandestine when I'd left the hotel, putting my London papers inside a door panel of the car and bringing the others — Boris Antonov, Moscow work and residence visa — because a visiting foreign journalist had no business talking to a Soviet citizen in the waiting-room of a Murmansk railway station and they'd send me out of the country at a minute's notice after the interrogation was done with. At best. If I made some kind of mistake they'd keep me here and go to work on me.

  I took one of her gloved hands. 'It's all right if the militia come in here. I'm a Soviet citizen with full visa.'

  She looked surprised, then relieved.

  'Then what is your name?'

  'You don't know it. You came in here because I was pestering you, but I still followed. With your looks, they'd believe that.'

  She glanced away with a little dipping motion of her head.

  'Very well.'

  'Just go with whatever I say. You're perfectly safe.' I took my hand away. 'He hasn't tried to get in touch with you, even, through friends?'

  'No.' She looked suddenly desolate. 'I love him. I love him very much.'

  'Are there friends he could use as a go-between?'

  'No. We… meet very privately.' Suddenly she asked, 'Do you think he's dead?'

  'No. Why?'

  'Because even if they'd arrested him, he would have got a message to me.'

  'How?'

  Her head came down. 'I don't know. Somehow.'

  'There's no reason why he should be dead. You should be hearing from him at any time.'

  She seemed to know I was just trying to make it easier for her. 'Do you think he's a spy?'

  'Why should he be?'

  'Because he's missing from his unit, and has British friends. And there's this news about the American submarine.'

  'We don't know very much about him.'

  'Then why did you come to meet me, when I asked?'

  'We're always interested in any Soviet citizen who contacts the embassy, in case they need our help.'

  Her hands gripped mine quite hard. 'Would you give him asylum, if he asked for that?'

  'Probably.'

  'I love him so much, you see.'

  'We understand.'

  Laughter came suddenly from outside, raucous, masculine. She didn't look up; she wasn't afraid of laughter, only of eyes in the shadow of peaked caps, only of questions.

  'If he makes contact with you,' she said with less despair, 'will you tell me?'

  'Of course. Will you be at the same number?'

  'Yes. It's my apartment.'

  'What's the address?'

  She gave it to me, and I wrote it down.

  The laughter broke out again, and I saw the heads of three sailors passing the window, their breath steaming. I said: 'Did you go to any bars together, any cafes?'

  'Sometimes.'

  'Which ones?'

  'It was never the same ones.'

  'But you've gone there, asking if they've seen him?'

  'No. I'm afraid.'

  'Have the naval police questioned you?'

  'No. We-'

  'Has anyone?'

  'You mean the KGB?'

  'Why the KGB?'

  She shrugged. 'That's what we always mean when we say «anyone». But nobody has questioned me. They don't know I'm his friend.'

  'If anyone asks you about him, I'd like you to tell me.'

  'Where will I find you?'

  'At the embassy. We'd like to help him.'

  Then the tears were in her eyes and creeping down her face, though she made no sound, but just looked down and let them come, and let me brush them away with my finger while we sat like that for a time, listening to the sailors laughing on the platform outside and the first rumbling of a train nearing the station.

  'If they send him to a labour camp, it will kill me.'

  'He'll be back.'

  'I would like-' and then she was really sobbing, lowering her head so that I couldn't any longer see her face, just her fur hat as she brought her arms across the table and let her shoulders go on shaking while I put my hands over hers and waited, wondering for the first time if Karasov had even had a chance in hell of making a clear run out of Murmansk when the whole of the Soviet navy was in a state of freeze in the international limelight. He couldn't have done it in uniform; he'd gone to ground as a civilian. He'd had to; it was the only way, if he'd got clear at all.

  Whatever else happens, Croder had said, you've got to bring that man across.

  When the sobbing died away I said, 'He hasn't been in touch with you because he doesn't want you involved. That must have occurred to you.'

  'Yes.' She straightened up from the table and blew her nose. She smelt of musk, and her coat had fallen open to reveal the softness of small breasts under her sweater; she was, I supposed, with her bronze eyes and that huskiness in her voice and a capacity for loving so desperately, the kind of woman who could hope to see Karasov again, if he were free.

  It would be pointless to ask her about his wife, to ask if there were any chance he'd gone there for shelter. That was the last place he'd go; they'd expect him to do that, and she'd be under distant but intense surveillance day and night. If he went anywhere for help, where he knew it would be immediately granted, it would be to this woman who sat humped in the chilly waiting-room of a railway station, the only hope we had, at this moment, of finding Karasov and getting him across to the West and bringing the president of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union to a conference table in Vienna in eight weeks' time.

  'The best way you can help him, Tanya, when you see him again, is to let us know. It's perfectly true: he does have British friends, and they're very powerful.'

  Then I was watching her small figure again crossing the snow the way she had come, Tanya Kiselev, leaving me with salt on my fingers and the lingering scent of musk.

  1 °CURFEW

  'Why have you come here?'

  'To complain.'

  'Of what?'

  'My room at the hotel was searched.'

  'So?'

  'I want to know why.'

  He gave me a long stare.

  'Why do you think we should know that?'

  'Who else would search a foreign visitor's room?'

  'A thief.'

  I didn't answer.

  'Perhaps that didn't occur to you?'

  'Frankly, no.'

  I had to watch my idiom.

  'Then perhaps you should think again. It may have been someone with a grudge against you.'

  He wore a captain's insignia and he was young, smooth, educated: one of the new school, not to be underestimated.

  'Perhaps,' I said. My Russian was supposed to be adequate, not fluent. I was no longer clandestine. 'But I'd like your personal assurance that the KGB knew nothing about it.'

  'You know your rights. Your famous civil rights.'

  'I'm not an American.'

  'You don't have civil rights, in England?' 4 I ignored that. a Bright lights, sticky warmth, a puddle of water near the door where the snow had c
ome off my shoes. KGB headquarters Murmansk was the last place I wanted to be but there hadn't been any choice: they'd searched my room while I'd been at the railway station and I couldn't just let it go: an intelligence agent would expect the odd search somewhere along the line if he became suspect, but a bona fide journalist wouldn't expect it and he'd be pretty sure to notice it and he'd make a bloody great fuss. I was here to protect my cover, that was all.

  But I didn't like it.

  'Please take a chair.'

  Thank you.'

  He picked up a phone and asked for a Captain Bratchenko.

  I didn't like it because it could be a trap. They'd had time enough, over an hour: they'd watched me leave the hotel and would have gone up to my room straight away. Their expertise varies: it depends how concerned they are that you shouldn't notice. This time they'd done a reasonable job — the razor was only a quarter of an inch out of place and the top drawer of the dressing-table was almost shut and my spare shoes were still touching the wall of the cupboard, that sort of thing — but it was in fact the razor that I'd used as one of the monitors and this tied in with the telephone's being five or six degrees turned away from the line from the edge of the bedside table to the mirror. They hadn't broken the hair I'd left across the medicine cabinet door in the bathroom but they'd made a mistake with the copy of Pravda I'd dropped on the floor by the armchair: it was turned over back uppermost. That didn't tie in with the care they'd taken generally and the thing that worried me was that they might have relied on that to get me in here, thinking I might not notice the other things.

  'Bratchenko? This is Demichev, Headquarters.'

  My papers were all right. I knew that. It's never a danger: the Bureau prides itself on certain things and that's one of them. The danger is always that these people are all-powerful, and they could simply take me from here to a cell with a barred door and play with me until I made a mistake, and when I made the mistake it wouldn't matter how hard the British ambassador tried to get me out: he wouldn't succeed.

  You don't of course make any mistakes while you're fresh in from the street and on your toes and ready to go through with the whole thing as a technical exercise; but after a few hours of bright lights and shouting you begin to get worried and that's when you can make your first mistake and that one is going to be all they'll need because they'll seize on it and put you through the hoop until you make another one and then you're done for, finis.

  I would very much like to have stayed in my comfortable hotel and let them think I hadn't noticed anything, but that would have been dangerous, more dangerous than coming along here and facing them on their own ground. To show them that I was prepared for a room search at any given time would be to blow my own cover.

  'No, he's just making a formal complaint.' He looked up at me with a smooth swing of his head — he reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of Eichmann: a soft, delicate face with the eyes of a predator. 'Was there anything missing?'

  'Missing?'

  'From your room.'

  'I don't think so.'

  'Don't you know?'

  'I didn't pay much attention. I was so annoyed that I came straight along here.'

  Under the subheading Caver in my briefing papers someone had written a quite amusing bit about the British journalist: He is typically polite, a degree arrogant — as befits a scion of perfidious Albion — but often tests the authority of the host country, even be it the Soviet Union, by demanding fair treatment and respect. Indignation is expected by the law enforcement, bureaucratic and secret police agencies from any British journalist placed in an annoying or embarrassing situation. The objective is to exasperate the officers of these agencies to the point of giving you what they demand, offering their apologies or simply kicking you out without pressing whatever charges may have been laid.

  'The complainant is very annoyed,' the captain said into the telephone, and had the courtesy to keep his face straight while I heard a faint laugh from the other end. I should have liked him for that, but I didn't. He had his role to play just as I did. He'd been trained in the new school of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti to show foreign visitors — especially journalists, who would be writing it up when they got home — an official image of courtesy, authority and efficiency. This didn't mean that if he found anything wrong with my papers or I made some kind of mistake he wouldn't order me into an interrogation room and get enough out of me to send me to a forced labour camp for ten years, and the fact that he'd be doing something perfectly understandable in protecting his country from the activities of an espionage agent wouldn't do anything to soften the guards' clubs or break the ice in the buckets or give me more than a bowl of watery gruel with only the roaches in it to crunch for protein.

  'Please show me your papers.' He leaned forward slightly with the phone still to his ear and took them from me. I'd already shown them to the guard at the desk outside but I couldn't refuse. He studied them, taking his time.

  'Clive Gage,' he said into the telephone. 'He is in Room 45 at the Hotel Leningrad.' He waited, occupying himself by gazing at my papers, turning them to the light with his eyes narrowing slightly: I think he was simply trying to frighten me, but he did it well.

  Please tell me what is happening.

  The prime minister had a reputation for phoning people before they could phone her.

  As far as me know, ma'am, Karasov is still somewhere in Murmansk. We've now placed our agent there to bring him across the moment he makes contact. We also have a lead that should enable us to do this before very long.

  That wouldn't satisfy her but she wasn't aware of the difficulty. There was only one, but it was a facer. Karasov wouldn't make contact.

  The 'lead' was of course Tanya Kiselev. I suppose they could call her that. London knew their sleeper well enough to be sure that if he was more likely to go to anyone else for shelter, they'd know about it, and instruct me accordingly. But the longer time went on and he didn't surface, the more difficult it was going to be. A shadow executive or a cutout or a courier would break for a frontier within an hour of closing down his mission and he'd expect instant help and he'd get it — I'd brought three of them across like that, earning one down a mountainside into Bavaria and throwing another into a meat truck on the drug route across the Isonzo Bridge and shoving a third man into a plane in Topolovgrad with a bullet still in his shoulder blade but a lot of life left in him and a photocopy schedule of the Warsaw Pact military exercise still taped round his leg. It's difficult work but it's fast and you don't have to rely on signals or changes of plan from London: you just make your run and bring him with you and there isn't time to think about frontier rifle-fire or airfield security forces or sirens in the night — you're running hard and you can only keep up the pace by going into Zen, and it works, it really works, because the instant you switch off and leave it to the alpha waves you're moving into a protection zone where you can do things that would otherwise kill you off.

  But with a sleeper it's different. He's like a mole, deep underground, and when he surfaces he finds the light too bright and it frightens him and he's liable to go back and stay low for a while. In the case of Karasov the temptation to do this was greater than usual: from the moment he was reported missing, the KGB would have started a massive search — they'd already been looking for the man who'd copied the tape of the submarine kill and he was the obvious target.

  The thing that worried me most was that he hadn't contacted Tanya, simply to reassure her: it was the first thing he'd be expected to do. But the answer to that could be that he hadn't gone back underground: he could still be on the surface somewhere, running, and running too hard to stop.

  'Very well. Thank you, comrade.'

  Demichev put the phone down and dropped my papers onto the desk for me to pick up and said carefully, 'I have talked to the officer who would have been in charge of any search made in your room at the hotel. He assures me that no search was in fact made. I can only assume that it was a
thief, or one of the staff, or that you were perhaps mistaken after all. I wish you a pleasant stay.'

  He didn't get up. I put the papers into my coat.

  'All right.' I turned back, halfway to the door. 'What's your opinion, Captain? Do you think this submarine thing is going to stop the summit?'

  He laughed nicely. 'You people never miss an opportunity, do you?'

  'We can't stop anyone in the street and ask them, without getting them into trouble.'

  He let that go. 'I think it depends a great deal on whether you go back and vilify us as usual in your popular press. We are looking for mutual understanding, you see, and without it there's very little chance of a summit meeting.'

  His smile had died away and as I left the office he was simply staring at me through narrowed lids, and as I touched the door handle a frisson passed through my nerves because I was suddenly sure it wouldn't turn, that the door was locked. But that feeling is quite normal, when you walk out of a KGB building.

  On the way to the hotel through the unearthly night glow from the sky it occurred to me that I'd missed something. I'd fallen into the occupational hazard of identifying too closely with my function: I was an intelligence agent, and expected to be caught — or at least suspected — at any given time. But I carried a journalist's papers and there was absolutely nothing to connect me with any kind of deception. If the KGB had thought there were any cause for suspicion they wouldn't just have searched my room: they would have taken me along to their headquarters and put me under a light and yelled and gone on yelling until they found something. The only reason they'd have for making a room search would be to turn something up and confront me with it later; but they didn't normally work like that: they didn't need to.

  If they'd made that search they'd found nothing: my Boris Antonov papers were in the door panel of the car. But that wasn't so important. Why would they have made it at all?

  There was no reason.

  I didn't like that. The only possible answer was that they'd found something wrong with my cover, and that frisson I'd felt along the nerves was justified. The door handle had turned and the door had opened and I'd gone into the street by virtue of one thing alone.