Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  Nothing had changed except that I was in a red sector I'd never experienced before. The primary and secondary and the whole range of hazards are common to most missions and you've got to deal with them in whatever way you can but you've always got your director in the field to support you and give you couriers if you need them and give you rendezvous if you need them and keep you in signals with London hour by hour and day by day, and if a fuse blows and you go pitching into a shut-ended situation and there's nothing at last between you and Lubyanka or the Gulag or an unmarked grave then you can still hope that your director can do something before it's too late.

  Not now. My only chance now was Ferris.

  'We'd better assume,' Fane said evenly, 'that you'll decide to complete your mission and take Zhigalin across whatever the circumstances. In which case I need to brief you.'

  'All right.' It made sense. If they sent Ferris out here I'd want to be ready for him.

  'I suppose we can't get any heating in this place, can we?'

  I think I remember laughing when he said that. It was so human, from such an inhuman man. He didn't think he'd said anything funny; he looked rather offended.

  I said, 'In this hotel?' He should have tried hanging underneath that bloody train all night. 'The old man would bring us some tea if you like.'

  He shook his head. 'I'd rather keep a low profile.' He lit another cigarette and studied the glowing tip, perhaps taking warmth from it in his mind. 'We have it from our contacts here in the Murmansk cell that Captain Zhigalin was put under close arrest in the naval barracks about an hour after the top brass learned that the Cetacea had been torpedoed and had gone down with all hands. It was probably a panic move. It was quite obvious that the summit conference was suddenly in grave jeopardy unless they could bind and gag the man responsible. From the reports I've received, Zhigalin was at first bewildered and then outraged. He told someone he expected a military honour for protecting the security of his country's most important naval base, not summary arrest and humiliation. This ties in with the dossier I was able to look at: Zhigalin is young for his rank and has received rapid promotion. He's said to be a staunch patriot, a fervent ideologist in terms of Marxist-Leninism and a dedicated officer.'

  'The type to break.'

  'Yes. We think he broke.'

  'You think it's genuine.'

  'From the reports. They're all we have to go on. I can't see any other reason for him to have escaped.'

  'Unless it was arranged.'

  He lifted an eyebrow. 'With what in mind?'

  'So that they could've had an excuse to shoot him down on the run. The Soviet navy isn't a rag-tag pack of pirates — they can't simply drop a full captain into a hole and lose him. He'll I I have a family, he'll have friends. There'd be an enquiry, and they wouldn't want that. They want a total blackout on the sinking of the Cetacea.'

  'There'd be an enquiry if he were shot dead.'

  'Nothing like as big. His escape would imply guilt, and his family wouldn't want any questions asked.'

  'I think he'd have been shot by now,' Fane said reflectively, 'if that's what they meant to do. He escaped soon after ten o'clock last night when they were transferring him from his cell to the medical block for a routine examination. If he were. dead by now, we would have heard. I'm in very close touch.'

  He was standing outside the door with a tray in his hands when I jerked it open.

  'Some tea, comrade.' He was bent almost double under the weight of the tray: it was solid brass and the teapot was copper, the real thing, none of your plastic pissware in romantic Russia. 'I thought you might like some tea.'

  I'd heard a stair creak only ten or fifteen seconds before I'd pulled the door open; he hadn't been standing outside for very long but that didn't mean he hadn't been going to. We've got all kinds of exotic cover in this trade from hotshot international journalist to butterfly collector but in local situations you don't need more than a tea tray.

  'Come in,' I told him.

  His faded eyes were taking in the room and resting now on Fane, but Fane had turned his back and was looking out of the window. He wouldn't say anything: the less they see of your face the better, and the less they hear of your voice.

  'Unfortunately, comrades, we have trouble with the boiler room. It is often so. Tea will warm you, however.' He lowered the tray onto the split mahogany dressing-table, the strain in his arms setting a tea-cup raiding.

  'Good of you,' I said.

  He straightened up, turning his weathered face to me. 'I try to be of service, comrade.' On his way to the door his head swung slightly but not enough to afford him a direct look at Fane's back. He knew the delicate intricacies of the situation; a fifty-ruble note gets you more than a tray of tea: it gets you privacy so inviolate that you can have a visitor in your room without any questions asked. But he couldn't resist turning his head just that fraction. Who was the man standing there at the window? A dealer in sables and gems? A magician who could move your name to the top of the waiting list for a little Volga saloon, an official with one life in the corridors of Party power and another in the dockside labyrinths of international crime? 'This is dangerous,' Fane said when the concierge had gone.

  'Yes, but the risk is calculated. Milk and sugar?'

  'No.'

  The cord round the handle of the huge copper pot was coming unwound and I got one of the thin grey towels from the washstand. 'You'll be out of this soon,' I told Fane, 'don't worry.' It's easy for the directors: they keep their foreign cover.

  'That will depend on Mr Croder.' He took his tea and sniffed the steam that rose thickly in the chill of the room. 'On whether he can get Ferris.'

  'He'll have to.' I picked a strand of sacking out of the coarse brown sugar and put some into my tea, adding some milk. 'This is rather cosy. Quite Tunbridge Wells.'

  'You really do have a weird sense of humour.'

  'Takes all sorts. You worried?'

  'That man.'

  I sipped some tea; it was scalding, and half the chill went out of the room. 'A calculated risk is one that you have to forget you've taken, once you've taken it. If that man is going to bring the KGB here he'll have called them by now and there's nothing we can do about it.' The directors are never happy when they have to leave the security of their grand hotels and hobnob it with the ferrets out in the field. 'How did you get on to the Zhigalin escape?'

  'He contacted the embassy.'

  'The US embassy?'

  'No. Ours.'

  'Ours? Why?'

  We were briefing again. Fane said: 'It seems he's ready to turn his back on the mother country and take his revenge by offering himself to the West. But he said he was afraid that if he put himself directly into the hands of the Americans they'd lynch him on sight.'

  'Did he actually say that?'

  'Not directly to me. I got the gist of this through the DI6 chief of station. But it's accurate thinking on his part: he'll need a lot of protection from the Company if he gets to America.'

  'Does Zhigalin speak English?'

  'Very little. A few naval phrases he's picked up on the ship's radio bands.'

  'Where is he now?'

  'He refused to say. He's to phone me as soon as he can find somewhere safe to hole up.'

  'Then he'll ask for a rendezvous?'

  'Yes.'

  'Give me everything you've got, then.' If Zhigalin phoned the hotel and Fane wasn't there, we might lose him. The longer he stayed on the run the bigger the risk of his getting caught or shot.

  Fane pulled a folded sheet of paper out and turned it to catch the light. 'Zhigalin is five foot nine, stocky, dark brown hair, brown eyes, clean-shaven, a scar below his left ear. He's wearing a merchant seaman's clothes — dark blue sweater and coat, dark blue trousers. That's his provisional cover, as-'

  'He hasn't got new papers?'

  'No.'

  'Is he trying to get any?'

  'No. He's leaving it all to us.' I poured him some more tea. 'That does
n't worry me,' he said. 'I wouldn't expect a dedicated naval officer to know what he's expected to do when he's suddenly the subject of a manhunt. I'd say his mind is in a state of some turmoil at the moment.'

  'What are the chances of his thinking twice and giving himself up?'

  'We don't know. But DI6 treated his call with extreme caution. They didn't promise him anything, except to respond to any further contact he might make.'

  'This isn't a KGB trap?'

  'It can't be. They're dependent on our cooperation.'

  'Still?'

  He looked up from his tea rather quickly. 'No.'

  'So tell me the score now, Fane. Whether I believe you or not is my business.'

  He looked offended. 'I really wish you-'

  'You weren't there. You didn't get into that truck and sit within an inch of getting your guts plastered all over the roof of the barn.'

  In a moment he said: 'Very well. The situation with Karasov was that although he was a Soviet national he was working for the West. The Soviets knew that the only thing he could do, once he'd deserted his unit, would be contact us and request transit out of Russia and asylum. They therefore came to us with a deal and we agreed to it. They could have hunted Karasov for weeks or even months without finding him, but we could find him very easily: as soon as he made contact with us.'

  The light from the yellow bulb in the ceiling was reflected upwards from the surface of his tea, and played across his eyes; they were looking down, not at me. As I listened, I had to catch the import and tone of every word, and decide, now or some time later, whether he was telling me the truth or setting a trap for me as he'd done before. 'The situation with Zhigalin,' he went on 'is different. He too is a Soviet national but he has no ties with the West. They won't expect him to make contact with us, and so they won't suggest another deal. We shall deny strongly any report that we are involved with him. They'll hunt him themselves, and are doing so now, and vigorously. That makes it infinitely more difficult for us to take him across. For you, perhaps-' he looked up — 'to take him across.'

  I turned away, going to the window. There were lights out there now, breaking the near darkness of midday. I could hear the ringing of shovels as work gangs moved along the street.

  'All right,' I told Fane. 'But the rest of it is the same as before. Zhigalin is now the objective for the mission. We want him. The Soviets want him. The Chinese want him.'

  'The only difference,' Fane said from behind me, 'is that we want to take him across.'

  'Yes.' I turned to face him again as he went to the dressing-table and squeezed his cigarette butt into the ashtray. 'That's the only difference. This time, when I rendezvous with the objective, you might not have plans to blow us both into Kingdom Come.' I went over to him, bringing out the small steel cylinder from the pocket of my coat and unscrewing the end, dropping the capsule into the ashtray. 'But if I find out you're following any new instructions to endanger me, I'll go straight into the nearest KGB headquarters and blow London. Tell Croder that.'

  24 VIOLIN

  'And then they wait till it's been snowing for twenty-four hours before they call us out. Is that intelligent?'

  'What would you expect of the civic leaders in this place? They spend all day round the stove playing dominoes!'

  'Or in the whore-house.'

  'That too!'

  'Which is not inappropriate, if you think of it, since they're a pack of whoresons!'

  Much laughter.

  My shovel hit on stone and sent a shockwave up my arm.

  'What are you, comrade, a volunteer?'

  'Yes.'

  'More fool you.' He spat.

  A navy transport went past, mud dripping from its dark green paintwork, and jeers went up from the work gang. Jeers came back from the bus. We were left choking on diesel gas with our legs soaked again from the slush-wave.

  When I next looked at my watch it was midnight. It was eleven hours since Fane had left the hotel and I'd been back three times to see if there'd been a telephone message. In between I'd worked at the snow with the volunteer gangs, taking a break for a bowl of potato soup at the Red Dawn cafe, hunched by the steamy window in a soaked coat, sure now that Croder wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it, couldn't locate Ferris or persuade him to take over from Fane and local-control me for Northlight.

  'Volunteers are all very well, comrade, very patriotic, but what have they done with the taxes we pay? We let them bleed us white and then do the snow-clearing ourselves!'

  'Mind my foot with that bloody shovel, that's all I ask.'

  After eleven hours of waiting for news I was certain that Croder would leave Ferris in Tokyo and crash-brief one of the shadow executives on standby and put him on a plane in London — one of the Soviet specialists, Hopkins or Bone or Reilly — with instructions to report to Fane in the field. I'd signalled Croder to let him know I was outraged, that was all, to make demands he couldn't hope to meet, simply as a way of easing my injured pride. He had known that.

  Another bus crawled past, its wheels spinning on slush and its windows opaque with steam; an open truck followed it, packed with volunteer workers.

  'Come on home, you bloody lunatics! It's gone midnight!1 Gravel drummed under the mudguards, thrown up by the tyres.

  Fane had put it perfectly well. Tokyo was seven thousand miles from here, twenty-four hours by air even if Ferris had boarded a plane the moment London had signalled him, even if he could get instant connections in Calcutta or Karachi or Tehran and an instant connection in Leningrad. And he'd need high-level Overseas Trade Commission cover to get him through Leningrad to Murmansk: that too was true.

  I pushed the shovel under the snow and swung it upwards across the side of the truck, feeling ready now to go back to the hotel again after twelve hours' more or less constant exercise. In that freezing garret I'd have gone crazy listening for the phone to ring in the hall below, and my muscles would have lost their tone.

  'Come on, comrade!'

  'What?'

  'Room for one more!'

  Men waving from the truck. I slung my shovel into the bin with the others and climbed onto the running board, hanging on as we lurched through the slush, the mudguards scraping between the snow drifts that loomed under the flickering lamps.

  On the other hand Croder might not find anyone available, anyone with my degree of experience. Reilly had come back from the Budapest thing two weeks ago looking like death and Bone was in Norfolk pounding his way through a refresher course in unarmed combat. I didn't know where Hopkins was, but he'd left Bureau-DI6 relations in a mess at the end of his last mission in Rome and Croder would think twice before he sent him out again.

  It could conceivably be that the only competent agent available for Murmansk was already there now, jolting his way back to his hotel with ice forming in his boots and the chill of a different climate forming along his nerves because there might, yet again, not be a message.

  The concierge was asleep behind his desk when I got there, and shone a torch on me through the glass door before he'd open it up.

  'You are asked to ring this number, comrade.' He unfolded a scrap of dirty paper. 'They called an hour ago, but I didn't know where to find you.'

  Fane answered.

  'They can't locate Ferris. My instructions are to ask you whether you are willing to continue the mission under my local direction.'

  Water seeped from my boots across the worn parquet floor, reflecting the light from the cracked white globe above the doors. An engine rumbled outside as a truck spun its wheels, sending gravel hammering against the wall like machine-gun fire.

  Fane was waiting.

  I didn't trust him.

  The concierge was sitting behind his desk with a newspaper, turning the pages — as he waited for me to speak again into the telephone. How many English words did he know, apart from football and chewing-gum and rock 'n' roll?

  I didn't trust Fane and I didn't trust Croder. Croder would instruct my local contro
l to set up a trap for me if it suited Northlight, if it would protect the infinitely delicate machinery of East-West relations at this crucial time, if one lone man's death could make safer the lives of millions. And my local control would follow the instructions, as he'd done before.

  I will risk death in the labyrinthine tunnels of a given mission, ferreting my way through the dark and through the dangers, alert for the footfall, for the shadow, for the glint of steel that must be seen in time and dealt with, dog eat dog, for this is the way, the only way to the objective: this is my trade and this is how I ply it. I always know, when I leave the open streets of public life and slip into the alleyways of private peril, that this time it may lead me to that last dead end, that this time there may be a rose for Moira.

  But I won't let my own controls plot my destruction, however vital the issue, however great the gain. I reserve the right, gentlemen, to face my deathbringer in my own good time.

  'Are you there?'

  Fane.

  'Tell Croder no. Tell him I'm resigning the mission.'

  It was the first time I'd shut the trap for myself.

  Quite a breakthrough. Something new every day.

  No regrets.

  Master of my own fate, so forth. If I can't parry the knife in time I'll take it into the heart, not in the back.

  Bullshit. Bravado.

  You 're cut off from London.

  Aye, there's the rub.

  Cut off from London, yes, the lifeline snaking away across a white-capped sea, or any other bloody metaphor you can think of.

  Militia.

  I bent over the map, concentrating on the frontier. It didn't give much idea of what I would find there, if I ever reached it.

  Two militiamen. They'd come through the doors a minute ago and were standing still, looking around. Routine. What did they expect to find in a public library, an English spy or something?

  I concentrated on the map, leaving the two still figures at the periphery of my vision, where only movement was registered. I had my papers on me but they could be dangerous now, fatal. It would depend on what connection they'd made in their minds between the dead Lithuanian they'd found alongside the railway lines and the explosion in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha and the engineer Petr Lein, who'd been found by the railway in Murmansk and taken to the hospital. The man with the scarred face.