Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  After a long time, perhaps a few seconds, I heard a man shouting in the distance of the freight-yards — 'You bloody fool?

  I opened my eyes. From this distance I couldn't see clearly what was going on at the bottom of the ramp. I could see one of them tugging at Karasov, pulling him over onto his back, but I couldn't see whether he was dead or not. I didn't need to.

  'You bloody fool?

  It was a scream of rage, and that was how I knew that Karasov was dead. It was the senior KGB officer yelling at the man whose shot had gone in. They would have had strict orders to take Karasov alive. The man who had shot him had made a mistake, that was all: he'd tried to stop his run by firing at the legs, but after the explosion it wouldn't have been easy to achieve any kind of accuracy.

  It had taken me an hour to crawl half the length of the train, because a lot of people were running across the freight-yards from the station to see what had happened, and I had to wait for a chance to crawl over the sleepers between one carriage and the next before I could climb again and swing my way along the framework. I'd assumed they'd search for me under the train because it was the nearest effective cover and I wanted to make as much distance as I could before the search began; but nobody came. I think they were too worried about Karasov, about his death, to take much notice of anything else. As the agent running with him I'd been incidental. Karasov was the man they'd been hunting for the past seven days and now they'd found him and their mission too was over.

  I sat with my eyes closed against the foetid turbulence. The air blew in a freezing gale from the front of the train and the wheels broke it up into gusts and eddies, sending sparks and chips of stone flying, one of them cutting my face and drawing blood, not a good thing because a mark like that can give you away when the hunt's up, it won't matter how good your papers are.

  But I didn't think there was going to be any hunt for me now; Karasov had been the shared objective for both missions: the Bureau and the KGB had both wanted him, and wanted him alive. Now he was dead, and it was over. The KGB would show a mild interest in finding the agent who had been operating against them on their own soil and who had flushed Karasov under their own guns, but it would be mainly out of frustration, out of spite. They would feel a bit better if they could put me against a wall or send me to break stones in the penitentiaries for the rest of my life, but that was all: they wouldn't mount a dragnet as they'd done for Karasov.

  And even if they did, they'd draw blank. They might find my body, but there'd be no identification that would tell them I was an agent. Because this was the way it was going to be, I knew that now. My body would be found along the railway, churned by that spinning steel below me and torn later by whatever beasts of prey could find me first and use me for sustenance, gorging their fill amid the winter's frozen dearth.

  That would be all right. The idea of piecemeal extinction under the busy claw and beak has never troubled me; I would be there to share the celebration of ongoing life as my blood and sinew passed into different creaturehood, sustaining the ecology. The show must go on, so forth. Better that than be shovelled up by a sanitation squad and strapped into a cardboard box and dropped into the ground by an indifferent and very minor civil servant for the worms to feed on. I can't stand those bloody things.

  But it isn't all right. You can't. Shuddup.

  You can't just give up. I don't want to the. I don't- Are you sure of that? Are you quite sure?

  You've got to hold on. Wake up and hold on.

  Wheels thundering below.

  You've got to get your senses back, or. In this cold? In this cold?

  Sparks flew up and a stone skinned my skull.

  Wake up. Wake up.

  The huge shape of the train swung me through the dark.

  Yes, wake up, I suppose. But this cold was. You'll pass out if you don't wake up.

  I thought yes that's probably true but when I moved one hand I lost my balance and my foot slipped off the beam and oh my God they're so murderous they're like a mincer they'll drag me under and flay me alive and spew me out like a red rag. Hanging on. I was hanging on. Awake now and hanging on with the fingers of one hand while my body swung above the void of dizzying movement below me, one foot still lodged on the edge of the metal beam and the other hanging down, the ankle burning from the onslaught of flying gravel. My fingers were slipping because the metal was smooth and covered with a film of oily soot, and as they went on sliding I could feel the edge of a rivet, round and smooth, its shape changing under the tactile recognition of my fingertips and changing so fast that I knew that to hang here like this wouldn't be enough. I would have to swing my leg up and get the foot lodged alongside the other one so that I wasn't swinging in the void — but to do that would put extra strain on my fingers and they were already on fire with fatigue.

  There wasn't, in the end, much choice. My senses were numbed now by the freezing air-rush and my lungs dragged at smoke; the thundering of the great steel wheels was dying away as my eardrums failed at last to register vibrations, and I closed my eyes and saw nothing different, only the dark, until a little while later my fingers reached the edge of the metal beam and came away and I began falling.

  20 SHUTDOWN

  'Fifty roses, yes.'

  'What colour, sir?'

  'I don't mind. Red. No, not red. Anything but red.'

  She stared at me. 'Not red. Of course.'

  Colour of blood.

  'And the address, sir?'

  'Hotel Les Jardins, Paris.'

  She wrote it down. 'And they are for Miss Moira Cavendish, is that right?'

  'Yes. But not fifty. Not fifty roses.'

  'Not fifty?' She began staring at me again.

  'No. One rose.'

  But of course she wouldn't understand. I'd long ago worked it out that fifty roses would be too many. Too vulgar.

  'Keep still,' she said.

  I always got them to write it down very carefully when I was being cleared. All my savings to the abused wives thing, and a rose for Moira.

  'He's coming round,' she said. For some reason she was speaking in Russian.

  'Only one rose, sir?'

  'Oh Christ, you'll never understand.'

  Pain burned through me like a lava tide.

  'Get Dr Novikova.'

  But what about the roses? 'Aren't I dead, then?'

  Her pale face looked more surprised than ever.

  'What did you say?'

  Watch it. I'd spoken in English.

  In Russian I asked her: 'What kind of condition am I in?'

  I didn't ask her where I was. By the smell of the ether this wasn't a bloody flower shop.

  Another woman was standing over me now, dark and greasy-looking with her stained linen coat bursting at the buttons, a stethoscope round her neck.

  'How do you feel?' she asked me with monumental disinterest.

  'Fucking awful.'

  She gave a bellowing laugh, full of silver teeth, and poked me in the ribs. It was enough to make me pass right out, and things looked different when I came to again. They'd moved me into a ward that smelled of stewed cabbage and human sweat. The ether had been more pleasant.

  'What time is it?'

  'Can't you see the clock?'

  I craned my neck and noticed the pain was quite a bit less than before. I felt better in terms of morale, too, and decided that if the good Dr Novikova came along and tried to poke me in the ribs again I'd have her finger off.

  A lot of questions were clamouring for answers inside the skull, rolling around like dice. Then it was light again and they brought me soup. I bent the handle of the aluminium spoon more or less straight and thought: Who blew the rendezvous!

  Nobody here could tell me that, but I kept watching the doors at each end of the ward because at any given time a couple of men in plain clothes could walk in here and they would be able to tell me who blew the rendezvous, if they wanted to.

  Karasov?

  It would explain the aura of
doom about him: he'd looked like a man on his way to the guillotine. But he hadn't known they'd shoot him. He hadn't known I would throw the toy.

  And he'd tried to run clear: he hadn't just picked himself up and let them take him.

  Not Karasov.

  'You want some more?'

  A slut with the eyes of an angel, pulling a lock of hair as wet as seaweed away from her brow.

  'No thank you.'

  I let her take the bowl away. There wasn't anything else I had to ask them: I'd wanted to know the usual things, which town was this, where had they found me, what day was it, so forth. They'd found me between the railway lines in Murmansk station early yesterday morning, unconscious from exposure: the train had pulled in late the previous evening. So I must have grabbed something when I'd started falling and saved myself, though I didn't remember anything about it. The organism, when left alone, when left to invoke the powers of zen, can do surprising things.

  Volodarskiy?

  No. Without any question: no. I knew that man. I'd known him in the first five minutes. Deadly, yes, but not to his friends, not to his guests.

  'Do you know what they've done? They've taken my bloody leg off!'

  He leaned over and spat on the floor.

  'Are you sure?'

  He turned his head and looked at me with that slow stare of appraisal we save for the mad. 'Don't you know,' he said with a throat filled with rage, 'when you've got one leg or two? Can't you count?'

  'Sometimes we get strange ideas,' I said, 'in hospitals.' But in this region he was probably right: frostbite or gangrene set in quickly.

  Phantom limb. My breath blocked in my throat and the ward rocked until I shut my eyes, one hand going down under the sheet, reaching down lower and lower and then at last from side to side until I was sitting up, feeling my feet. Then I began breathing again. That poor bastard was wrong: you can't always tell. You've got to count.

  I lay back and stared at the ceiling, where the husks of last summer's flies still dangled from deserted webs. It could only have been the courier, the one who came in on the train from Murmansk with the papers for Karasov. He'd been a double operator and Fane hadn't known.

  He would have to know. He would also have to know that he could go home now and tell them the show was over. I'd have to get out too: he would see to that. But it wasn't urgent: I was in no hurry to present myself for debriefing at Grader's desk.

  'I want to use a phone,' I told the angel-eyed slut when she came past my bed.

  'There isn't one. Not for patients.'

  'Where are my things?'

  'Things?'

  'Possessions.'

  She got the point and brought the stout cardboard box with the metal fastener and waited while I fished inside it and found a ten-ruble note.

  'You'll have to wait,' she said, 'till the coast's clear.'

  'Soon as you can.'

  The ward started rocking again half an hour later, but not as badly as it had before when I'd gone along to the loo. The girl went with me, running a gauntlet of whistles from those patients whose libido had survived gross injury, amputation, concussion and the stink of Lysol and cabbage stew.

  As we reached the telephone against the wall she said, 'Are you a Party member?''

  'No.'

  'If anyone asks what you're doing at the phone, tell them you're a Party member.' She draped her lock of seaweed higher across her brow and pouted her little egg-sized breasts at me under her soiled white coat, turning away with her eyes lingering seductively. You don't earn much in Murmansk, nursing.

  I took the phone off its hook and asked for the number.

  A man was leaning against the wall between the telephone and the door of the ward, thin as a skeleton and bearded like the Ancient Mariner, his bones shaking so hard that I could hear the brushing of his hospital gown against his legs. In the yellow light from the one bulb hanging from a hook in the ceiling his eyes glinted as he stared at me, and I looked away.

  The number began ringing.

  Good form, I supposed, should be observed when I spoke to Fane and told him what had happened. He was my local control and in a way this would constitute an interim debriefing.

  The rendezvous was blown. The mission is now shut down. The objective is dead.

  He would light a cigarette, slowly, before he answered. Then he would ask, because London would ask him, who blew the rendezvous and how did the objective meet his death.

  It could only have been the courier. The objective was shot down by the KGB, in error, as he was trying to run clear.

  The phone went on ringing.

  I began counting.

  He would ask me where I was now.

  I'm in No. 2 General Maritime Hospital in Murmansk.

  He would ask. Twelve rings. Thirteen.

  He would ask me what I needed, and if I were in good enough shape for him to get me through the frontier.

  I need a safe house first. They'll be discharging me any time now.

  Sixteen. Seventeen.

  The hairs were lifting at the nape of my neck. The number I was calling was the number where Fane had said I would always find him in this city. Always. For the executive in the field, sometimes hard pressed, sometimes hunted, sometimes dying, the telephone number of his local control is his lifeline. For as long as I remained in the field, Fane would man that line or leave someone with total trust to take over from him in shifts.

  Twenty. Twenty-one.

  The skeleton with the frosted beard was still staring at me in the yellow light, one of his knees knocking rhythmically against the wall, his thin shadow behind him, waiting to follow him to the grave. He seemed to be listening, but might not be, or if he was, there might not be anything left inside his bone-white head to understand.

  Did he know, even, what a telephone was?

  Twenty-five. Twenty-six.

  Did he know there was a shadow behind me too, coming closer one step at a time, one step closer as the telephone went on ringing?

  Fane had shut down.

  The trickle began at the top of my spine, the familiar visitation of terror that comes when we know it's certain that we are done for. I'd known that much already when I'd asked for a telephone, and I'd managed to contain the idea by concentrating on the practical considerations of who could have blown the rendezvous and how I would get home. But this measured, insistent ringing on the line brought confirmation. No one was there. The ringing was going on in an empty room, echoing against the blank glass of a window, its vibrations disturbing the motes of dust that had begun settling since the door had closed and the footsteps had died away.

  'There is no answer,' the operator said, and the line went dead.

  The executive in the field had been abandoned.

  The man's knee knocked against the wall like a nail going into a coffin. Can't you go back to bed for Christ's sake? Is that all you can find to do?

  Steady.

  'Have you finished, lovey?'

  I looked at her. I'd seen her somewhere before.

  'What?'

  'You'll get caught if we're not careful.'

  The nurse, yes. Her big eyes frightened.

  'I will?'

  That would be terrible, to be told off by some fat cow for breaking the rules here.

  I put the receiver back on its hook. Fane had already got the news, that was all. He thought I was dead, so he'd shut everything down.

  Executive deceased.

  Not an unreasonable assumption, actually, and not a bad guess at the future if I had to get home alone.

  'You feeling all right, lovey?' She wiped my forehead with her dirty towel.

  This was at ten in the morning.

  I tried three times to reach the British embassy in Moscow during the day, finally getting a connection and speaking to one of the DI6 cypher clerks in Russian and telling him that my friend in Murmansk wasn't answering his phone and that I was worried about him because he hadn't been well lately.

 
The clerk wasn't in too much of a hurry to get the point: the Bureau doesn't post staff in any of the embassies because our network isn't meant to exist, so we're given courtesy access to DI6 stations abroad with certain signalling facilities and they do this simply because the prime minister tells them to do it, and it makes them sulky.

  'Your friend?'

  'This is Boris Antonov speaking.' It was the standard name for any accredited Bureau agent operating anywhere in Soviet Russia with privileges of requesting assistance. In Paris I would introduce myself as Jacques Lafayette, in Bonn as Karl Heidi, in Rome as Julio Napoli — they were the names in the secret files in those embassies and this simple-minded bastard should know that, and he should know that the designation «friend» meant one thing and one thing only: the agent's local control in the field.

  'Can you spell it out for me?' he asked oafishly.

  Little Pleshakovna — I knew her name now — was hanging around near the doors to the ward, keeping watch. She didn't understand that I couldn't care less about getting a lecture from the comrade matron but that I would care a very great deal if she stopped me using this telephone.

  'No,' I told the cypher clerk, 'I can't spell anything out for you. Get Mr Spencer on the line.' Spencer was the code name for the DI6 chief of station in all embassies.

  'I'm afraid he's out to lunch.'

  'Then get his best friend.'

  'I'm sorry, I don't-'

  'Listen, this is a 909 call and if you don't do what I want you to do extremely fast you'll hear direct from little mother.'

  There was a brief silence.

  'Okay, just a tick.'

  He was getting the idea. The 909 designation had replaced the original BL565 Extension 9 call a year ago but it meant the same thing: it amounted to an inter-intelligence services hotline and the little mother he'd be hearing from was the prime minister.