by Adam Hall
'Then it can only be the Rinker cell.'
'As far as my briefing tells me,' Ferris said, 'they're the only active people in the field.'
Three lights, red, green and white, crossed the oblong of the window as the plane climbed into the circuit. They vanished quite suddenly into the fog layer. It was getting worse, creeping in from the sea.
'I couldn't be absolutely sure,' I said, 'when I came here.'
'Of course not.' He said it at once and with emphasis.
I always know when I'm being followed. No one had followed me here to the rendezvous. They'd used chain surveillance, and at a distance: two or three of them taking up positions at strategic points and using field-glasses — they'd be totally undetectable. If they'd used more people than that, they would have been some of the men with shovels among the work gangs: again, undetectable. It wasn't important any more to question how they'd got a fix on me at the hotel. It could have been the courier in Kandalaksha turned by the Rinker cell to work for them under duress or a bugged line or the hotel porter or simply efficient field work. What was important now was how to leave this hulk alive and if that were possible then how to lose them before I went to meet Zhigalin.
Ferris took a card out of his pocket and passed it to me, a regulation issue made of wide-grain wood fibres treated with magnesium and designed to burn in less than one second or dissolve into pulp in water. On it was an address in Murmansk.
'Your safehouse,' he said, 'though you may not need it for more than a few hours; it depends on what my people can arrange for you. The phone number is mine, though I may have to move in with you until we can secure Zhigalin. If you lose contact with me you can still call that number and they'll put you in direct touch with the chief of station in Moscow.' He stared through the window again. He couldn't see the man with the lens from this angle; he wanted to be ready if anybody came past the window from that direction: there would be one or two seconds' warning before they opened the door.
I put the card into my wallet.
'If someone else answers the phone when I call that number, do I speak English or Russian?'
'It doesn't matter. They're fluent in both.'
'Is it strictly secure?' Briefing terminology for bug-proof.
'Yes.'
'I don't think Fane's line was.'
Ferris turned from the window to gaze at me. 'Possibly not. Mine is. You're safe with it in any eventuality.' He paused to give it emphasis. 'If there's no answer, it just means they've had to abandon.'
'They'd cut the phone?'
He looked faintly shocked. 'No. Blow it up.'
'Sorry.'
'You really have been slumming it, haven't you?'
This was why I'd demanded Ferris from London. He's not only highly experienced in handling a shadow but he's also technically faultless. Most people would cut a phone line and leave it at that if they had to clear out, but a line can be joined together again and you can call up and blow the whole of the mission if you don't know they've done that. Ferris had rigged a bang.
'Any briefing?' I was getting impatient now. I wanted to know what was going to happen when I went through that doorway, whether I was going to get my brains blown all over the place or whether I could go back through the snow and find a cafe and sit with a bowl of soup by the steamy windows and let everything else wait while I celebrated life as the warmth reached my stomach.
It happens often during a mission but you never quite get used to it. It's the feeling that comes to you when you know you've moved into a close-focus red sector that can prove terminal, when you can't go back and you can't stay where you are and you can't move forward without risking the absolute totality of all that your life has meant until this point in time. The feeling is like hunger but less physical, more ethereal, almost mystical, because you're close to the final answer and it might not be what you hope.
'No further briefing,' Ferris said, and put on his gloves and looked at his watch. '22:14?'
I checked my own and had to set it back half a minute. It doesn't ever matter what the time is by your own watch or by the local clocks: the time is what your local control says it is, because everything depends on him.
Without my gloves on the cold was already numbing my hands; as soon as I'd reset my watch I put them on again but the cold didn't go; it was everywhere in my body now, in my bones, because I would have to go out there first. One field director could run a dozen missions, a dozen executives: he was normally an older man with infinitely wider experience and infinitely greater responsibility to the Bureau; he would always get home safely because his papers were unimpeachable, unless he ran foul of a strike or a trap that was set for the man he was running.
So I got up first, pulling my gloves tighter and stepping past Ferris to the door as the wrecked fuselage creaked to the shifting of my weight.
The man out there would be cold too, crouching against the trunk of a tree and unable to move, impatient, as I was, but for a different reason: he'd want to get it done with successfully, get it over and report back to base while the blood still seeped from the body and the whiff of cordite tainted the stillness and the arm lay outstretched with the hand reaching for what now it could never hold.
'Probably just field-glasses,' I heard Ferris say as I pushed open the door.
'Yes.' I stepped down onto the snow.
27 DEADLINE
The first time I telephoned Ferris was at noon on the next day. He answered himself and at the second ring.
'It's difficult,' I told him.
One of my feet was bleeding.
'How difficult?'
She didn't go back to her desk as the man had done at the last hotel: she went out of the lobby and left me alone in the phone-box, an immense woman, immense.
'They simply won't let me go,' I told Ferris.
I'd been trying to shake them off the whole morning but the militia checkpoints were all over the place and that made it impossible to use the normal routine for getting clear of surveillance because the risk of running into a checkpoint or a two-man patrol was now appalling and the Rinker cell knew that: they had me in what amounted to a mobile trap.
'You'll have to keep trying,' Ferris said. 'I'll have a deadline for you any time now and it'll be close.'
Sweat was clammy on me: I'd been scrambling through those bloody streets and into buildings and out again and onto buses and off again and all they'd done was switch stations with their field-glasses and keep me comfortably in sight.
'How close?' I asked Ferris. I don't like close deadlines, they can be murderous.
'Some time today.' He didn't like saying that. He knew what I was up against.
'In daylight?' (If you could say that: it was already like dusk.) 'If it can be done. If not, as soon after nightfall as we can do it.'
I didn't need to ask him what the deadline was for: it was for making contact with the objective, Zhigalin. Ferris wouldn't set it up until he knew he could get us both out: we were running right into the final phase of the mission but the whole bloody place was a bright red sector and I didn't know what the chances were of throwing off the Rinker cell. Until I could do that, I couldn't go to meet Zhigalin. He was their main target: the moment I was with him they'd close right in and shut the trap and throw me onto a scrap heap and take him underground.
There were five of them. I'd seen four of them at one time and when I'd gone round a corner and into an apartment block and out through the fire escape on the second floor I'd seen the fifth there waiting for me as if he'd known my next move and when I'd got clear of his surveillance zone I'd run right into one of the others at a distance of fifty yards, close enough to recognize him if I saw him again. That was when I'd cut my foot on something buried in the snow, the blade of a shovel or something.
The blood seeped into my boot.
'They're extremely good,' I told Ferris.
'They must be.' He meant if I hadn't been able to get clear of them by now; I'd been working at it t
he whole morning.
I'd had my bowl of soup last night. Sat there with it, savouring the warmth in some stinking little railway cafe while a drunk had told me all about his bitch of a wife and the way she looked down on him because she'd landed a job in the post office as a sorting clerk. Now she's in government service she thinks she's running the bloody Politburo, leaning over the table with his face stuck into mine and one black-nailed hand so close to my bowl of soup that he kept getting drops on it and once or twice raised it to his mouth and licked it, three times a week I have to get my own supper, the bitch, the satanic bloody stuckup strumpet, but I listened to every word because I loved the man, because Ferris was right last night, it had just been a pair of field-glasses under the trees and my brains hadn't gone all over the place when I'd stepped down onto the snow — life is sweet, my friend, and never sweeter than when you believe it's no longer yours for the living, so why don't you, I asked the poor bastard — he was a huge man — just pick her up and sit her down on a red-hot samovar and don't take her off again till she promises to get your supper?
Soup in my stomach, blood in my shoe. And never sweeter, so forth, because any time now they were going to drive me so hard that I'd end up making a mistake and go pitching straight into a checkpoint, finis.
But they knew the danger of that. They were extremely efficient. They knew that if they drove me too hard they could lose me to the KGB and lose Zhigalin too because I was the only way in to him. I'd never been in this kind of situation before when the very people who'd trapped me were doing all they could to protect me from the host-country security services: one of them had actually given a little signal when he'd seen I was going to run into a KGB patrol on the far side of a work gang: he'd actually warned me.
But the rope was shortening. Ferris couldn't keep Zhigalin underground forever. The Rinker team couldn't keep on running me through the streets like this forever. One of two things was going to happen: they would unintentionally run me slap into a checkpoint or they'd close right in and pick me up and take me somewhere with thick walls and turn up the stereo and ask me where they could find my local control and get him to lead them to Zhigalin with a gun at his back, and that would be all right because I couldn't tell them where Ferris was but they'd still have to risk leaving me on the floor in a mess with the stereo still blaring away. But it would be their last chance and they knew that. They would only come for me if there was no other way.
'Can you give me any kind of picture?' I asked Ferris.
He wouldn't want to do that at this stage. At this stage there was the risk of getting caught and grilled.
'All right,' Ferris said. 'We've got Zhigalin safe for a few hours, but not much longer than that. The moment you can make contact with him we can get you both out, but that depends on how fast we can move.'
'How fast we can move from the time I meet him?'
'From that time, yes.' He paused for a few seconds and I think it was because he wanted to get the tone of his voice right. He had to warn me but he didn't want to scare me off. 'From that time you'll be in good hands, but until then — until you make contact with Zhigalin — we're working with diminishing chances.'
Ferris is as bad as Croder sometimes: it's like talking to a bloody schoolmaster. 'For Christ's sake spell it out, will you?'
He thought for a moment. 'I would say that unless you can reach Zhigalin within a couple of hours from now, we won't have any chance left at all. This is the final run.'
The final run, with Croder sitting in London nagging the guts out of the signals people at the console while the monitor sat in front of the board of Northlight with scum gathering on his cup of tea while he waited to know if the crooked cross was going to stay there much longer or if he could hit the switches and shift the status for the mission according to what Signals was giving him — executive has made contact with the objective or executive compromised or action ends here.
Compromised: caught, killed or capsule-terminated.
'Two hours?'
'Sorry,' Ferris said.
'But they've got me like a rat in a trap.'
'You'll have to get out.'
The whole bloody town was down in the Metro and I'd expected that because the streets were still under snow.
Boot full of blood and getting dangerous now: the wound was trying to heal but every time I walked it opened up again and I was worried that it was going to bring attention.
Two of them were on the same train with me, standing jammed in with everyone else and watching my reflection in the steamed-up windows. It had been the only thing to do: they would have run me through those streets for the rest of the day before I finally hit a checkpoint so I'd moved into this phase because it was the last chance and so far it was working all right — I'd broken their chain surveillance mode and forced them closer, close enough for me to recognize them whenever I saw them next, a critical advantage. I'd also lost three of them because I'd gone through a ticket barrier so fast that only these two had time to follow me onto the train. They couldn't cause any fuss; they couldn't do what the militia could do; they were as worried as I was about bringing attention to themselves.because their papers were probably check-proof but if they were asked to show them it would hold them up and give me time to get clear.
'Who are you shoving?'
'I'm going to be sick.' That got him out of the way very fast and I made some more progress, nudging through the packed bodies towards the end of the compartment. I estimated that we were halfway between stations and if I could reach the doors first I could hit the platform running and get clear.
'Get off my bloody foot!'
'Sorry, comrade.'
Stink of garlic, garlic and sweat and wet astrakhan, wet rabbitskin, soaked boots and bad breath and tobacco, the tobacco was a real help.
'What's the bloody rush?'
'I'm on the wrong train.'
Swaying together round the bends, lurching forward and lurching back with the flicker of the tube light casting a sickly glow across our faces, a small boy clutching a red plastic windmill and a huge Mongolian with fish-scales like sequins on his longshoreman's jacket fast asleep on his feet, a young woman pressed to the glass panel with no room to move away from the thin furtive-looking man until he went too far and she heaved herself back and brought her hand up and across his face in one beautiful swing, much rough merriment from our good fellow-passengers.
They were starting to move now, one of them looking directly at me instead of in the window, getting a little worried, shoving his way closer as the train began slowing and someone dropped a horde and the intercom speaker came alive and made some grating noises until the voice sounded: Proletarskaja… the next stop is at Proletarskaja… stand clear of the doors!
A man's weight came against me as the train went on slowing and I turned sideways and let the momentum carry him past me and felt the glass panel behind me and pushed past the upright stanchion and got a curse from a man trying to shield his little girl from the crush, we're getting off here too, damn it, a miniature gold Party emblem on his coat. I'm sorry, comrade, but I'm very late, and my need is more urgent than yours, my friend, you wouldn't believe.
The brakes came on harder now and I grabbed a rail and got to the doors and saw one of them shoving his way along the packed aisle with his eyes on me through the glass panel, the hard stare of the hunter in a square implacable face as the intercom sounded again and two other men started crowding me at the doors. I let them because I needed them — I needed cover, shields, obstacles, distractions, time and distance and I suppose luck but we never count on that, it can be fatal.
When the train jerked to a halt and the doors opened I forced my way through the widening gap and dropped onto the platform and shoved a path through the crowd, working so hard that someone swung a fist from behind me and sent nerve-light flashing through my head as I pressed on and reached a clear area, along the curved wall of the platform where two militiamen were standing so I had to
slow, the last thing I wanted to do, but only to a fast walk because a lot of people are in a hurry at one o'clock on the Metro, it's the end of the lunch break, pulling the ticket out of my wallet to keep my head down and longing to run because the nearest of those bastards wouldn't be far behind me now, not far behind. A shout came but I didn't look round because I was now on the far side of that critical line that divides the two worlds of the executive during the final phase of a mission, the world where he can still claim a legitimate identity and behave as a lawful citizen and even without reliable papers turn back and somehow cheat his way out of a confrontation with two militiamen and the world where he must keep going and even break into a run and turn his hand to every available device to keep his freedom and survive and complete his mission.
Now I began running and people turned their heads to stare at me as I reached a break in the wall and ducked into the passageway between the platforms and ran harder, ran very hard now with one foot squelching in its boot and the. sharp pain of the wound flaring through the nerves — 'Stop!' — but this time fainter because I'd got it wrong: he'd been shouting at the man behind me because he must have panicked and started running too soon and the militia had noticed it and become interested. That was nice but I didn't slow down because I was still in the crowded warrens of a Metro station and those wouldn't be the only two militiamen on patrol and there's always the odd comrade around who's mindful of his civic responsibilities when you're doing some thing suspicious and once the fight starts they all pile in and this place would shut down on me like a bloody portcullis, keep running and think about something more pleasant, more pleasant than that.
Then I had to double back because there were two more militiamen at the ticket barrier and I managed to turn before they heard my running footsteps, managed to reach the cover of the tiled wall and slow to a walk, turning again and finding some stairs with people crowding down them with snow dropping off their boots, someone holding a huge bag of onions on his shoulder to keep them out of the way and a man carrying a toilet seat above his head like a halo and two militia — not militia, no, Metro staff — dragging a trolley down the stairs with a crate on it, bang bang bang, mind your backs there, mind your backs! Then a crowd of sailors coming down with their whooping laughter sending echoes along the curved ceiling, out of the barracks on a week-end pass with their boots clattering on the stairway and their blue canvas bags swinging above the heads of the crowd as they raced each other to the platform below, it was uphill work for me, I can tell you, uphill work, and when I turned to look down the stairs to see if the man had decided not to stop for the militia, had decided to follow me instead and at all costs, I didn't see him, I only saw the other man, the one who'd been with him on the train, the more professional one if you want to look at it that way who'd stayed at the other end of the compartment and gone through the doors and followed me more easily and without attracting attention — or that was perhaps the plan they'd agreed on, one of them setting out to follow me at close range while the other — this one — covered the possibility that I would go in the opposite direction past the stationary train — but in any event he was here now and only two or three stairs below me and since we were both hemmed in by the pack of people and I couldn't move any faster in the hope of getting away from him there was no real choice for me in this last hour of the mission when it was paramount, absolutely paramount that I should reach the objective and get him out, so I turned right round and let the weight of the crowd force me down against him and then I went for the one area that will kill without a cry and watched his eyes open very wide before I turned again and went on up the stairs, no excuses, this is the trade we're in and this is the way we ply it.