Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  28 PANIC

  It took me almost an hour to find the right place. Dark was down now but the streets were still crowded with snow-clearing gangs, and the floodlamps they were running from mobile generators cast a kind of sick daylight among the buildings. They'd brought the lamps in because someone had shoved his spade into a body buried under a drift: an old man had died from exposure and no one had seen him before the snow had covered his corpse.

  This was the perfect place, a long alleyway with blank walls at each end, deep under snow but that didn't matter: what I needed was an isolation zone to make absolutely certain.

  He hadn't dropped. He couldn't have dropped right away.

  The other one must have been stopped by those militia — he hadn't caught up with me by the time I'd walked out of the Metro station. In the normal way I would have moved back to the safehouse without making more than a few visual checks from random cover to make sure I'd lost them, but there was no time to go anywhere now but to the rendezvous Ferris had for me; we were already ten minutes past the deadline at 2:10 pm. There'd been two or three chances to signal him on the way through the streets but I'd resisted them because the moment I telephoned him he would steer me to the rendezvous and it was the objective I was going to meet and I had to be absolutely certain I'd broken the Rinker surveillance.

  I'd known he couldn't have dropped in a heap on the stairs because it would have caused confusion and I would have heard it before I reached the street. I'd counted on that. The crowd on the stairs was so thick that it would have carried him with it on the way down and when he eventually hit the ground he would've been taken for just another drunk until somebody noticed the bluish area.

  I do not care.

  The alley was quiet after the clanging of the shovels and the drumming of the engines in the open street. Halfway along it I looked ahead and saw no one. I looked back and saw no one. Then I went on.

  I tell you I do not care. He would have done the same if it had been necessary. It was his life or a dead mission and a lost summit, what the hell do you expect of me for Christ's sake?

  But this was the hand.

  The snow was so deep here that it reached almost to the top of the walls on each side. Even the dustbins were buried: I kept barging into them as I clambered my way through. I looked ahead again and saw no one. I looked back and saw no one. I'd broken their chain surveillance when I'd lost three of them in the Metro and from then on there'd been only two and one of them was on the slab now and that left only one, and even if he'd managed to satisfy the militiamen and follow me this far from the Metro he wouldn't have let me into this alley without taking up his position to keep me in sight, because I could climb over these walls if I wanted to and disappear altogether and he would know that. But he wasn't there.

  This was the hand, yes, and that makes all the difference you see, it's so very personal, so very intimate, I mean they're not just beasts in the field reared for the slaughter-house any more than we are, they had a girl for the first time and played football and lived like other men until they felt the strange insidious affinity for the shadows, for the devious ways and the serpentine turns of the warren that runs in the dark below the surface of society where we finally choose to make our way through a different kind of life and to a different kind of death. He'd been one of us and this was the hand.

  They'd been uneasy about this at Norfolk when I'd been put through my first psychological evaluation. Until you can bring yourself to face this aspect of the work, Quiller, you 'II be a danger to yourself and to those working with you. Fowler, with his degree in abnormal psychology and his totally blank eyes and his frightened-looking wife. During your mission it will occasionally be necessary to take life, and we shall expect you to do it only when the need is vital to the mission or to your own survival but with no hesitation, no compunction, no regret. Fowler, with his cultivated penchant for the telling phrase. During your missions you must learn to travel light, and leave your conscience behind.

  Another bloody dustbin, this one with the lid off and my foot breaking through something that felt like bones, some kind of carcass, perhaps a dead dog or perhaps only a figment of my own morbidity.

  I looked ahead again and saw no one. I looked behind and saw no one. Then I went to find a telephone-box and call Ferris.

  'I'm ready to meet the objective.'

  Short silence.

  'My salutations.' He didn't ask me if I were now certain of a secure environment; he knew I couldn't rendezvous with Zhigalin unless I could go there alone.

  He also knew that I had broken a major surveillance chain in not much more than two hours because he'd pushed me to a deadline and it might have meant my taking what the Bureau officially refers to as extraordinary measures. It's sometimes possible for a local director to cover the resulting commotion in both the host country and in London, but we didn't have a consulate in Murmansk to put out a diplomatic smokescreen and London wouldn't make a fuss because the subject had been working for an opposition network: he hadn't been militia or KGB.

  'One of them came too close,' I said.

  'One of the Ranker people?'

  'Yes.'

  'And no one is looking for you?'

  'Not in that connection. I was clear before anything was noticed.'

  'Well done.'

  A man of no conscience. Ferris is very sinister beneath the owlish looks and the silken tone. They say that when there's nothing on the telly he strangles mice.

  'I'm halfway along the North Harbour Prospekt,' I told him.

  'That's convenient.' There was a faint crackling sound on the line and I listened to it with extreme care.

  'Ferris? Can you hear-'

  'Just looking at a map.' In a moment he said: 'You're within a kilometre.'

  That close to the objective.

  A man was standing outside the phone kiosk.

  'Go to Quay 9,' Ferris told me. 'That's near the end of North Harbour on the east side. There's a seagoing barge tied up there with the serial number K-104 on the bows. There's no security guard: it's waiting for dry dock maintenance,'

  The man wasn't looking in at me through the dirty glass panel; he was looking along the street, shrugging himself into his fur coat against the freezing night. I didn't think he was a danger.

  'The objective is there,' Ferris told me. 'He's expecting you, and the parole is Potemkin. Repeat.'

  I went over the quay and the barge numbers and the parole.

  'The timing is very critical,' he went on slowly, articulating with care. This was not only the most important briefing for the whole of Northlight but also the last, if things went well. 'There will be a dark blue Zhiguli van within sight of the barge and just north of it, facing the shoreline. A courier will be waiting at the wheel. The parole is the same. He will take you both to the airport.'

  I looked through the glass at the skyline but it wasn't possible to see how bad the fog was; since the full dark had come down the fog had been visible only in the floodlit areas. But this was why Ferris had been forced to give me a deadline: he was going to fly us out.

  The man was peering into the kiosk now, getting impatient.

  'At the airport, you'll be driven straight to a Beriev BE-12 twin-engined domestic aircraft with private markings, standing at the north end of runway Two. The pilot has flown for us twice before in the past five years and was found satisfactory. He is a mercenary. The parole is the same. Your flight time will depend on the weather conditions and on foxing the radar stations along the border, but we expect you to land in Hoybuktmoen, Norway, within roughly an hour from takeoff. I think that's all. Any questions?'

  'Christ, you worked fast.'

  'Fane set up most of it.'

  Slight reaction in the stomach nerves.

  'Have you checked everything thoroughly?'

  There was a brief silence and I knew he wasn't going to answer that. 'All right, I know you did but I don't trust that man. He-'

  'That's paran
oia.'

  I let the muscles go slack. Paranoia, yes, probably, but that bastard had taken on an execution for Croder and I didn't know where he was, he could be still in Murmansk. I was within a kilometre of the objective and we were triggered for the final run out and it was Fane who'd set most of it up and I didn't like it, I could feel the gooseflesh under the coarse sleeves of my coat as the skin shrank and stomach nerves went on crawling just as they'd crawled when I climbed into that van in Kandalaksha and sensed extinction.

  'Do you know what you 're asking?'

  The man was rapping at the glass door now and peering in again and I mouthed at him that he was a fucking whoreson and he seemed quite surprised.

  'I am asking you to understand,' Ferris was telling me on the line, 'that I came here at your request to get you out if I could. It wasn't convenient, but I came, and now I can in fact get you out, and I'm not going to allow mission-fatigue and a touch of paranoia to stop me. It hasn't occurred to you that you owe me your trust.'

  Sweat running down my flanks, the bloody little organism shit-scared to make the final move, take the final chance, teetering on the brink with cold feet and a sickening stomach, typical bloody end-of-mission panic because the nerves had taken enough and they didn't want any more, they wanted peace.

  Using Fane as an excuse.

  Fane.

  A twitch in the stomach nerves every time I thought of him, Pavlov's dog syndrome but this won't do.

  He tried to get you killed.

  Relax. Let the muscles go, they're in knots again.

  Fane. He might still be. Shuddup.

  Fane might. Shuddup.

  Standing here in a bloody phone-box running with sweat and scared to try the final run because it might not work, it might leave me here in this stinking hole with my blood icing in the bullet holes because somewhere along the line that murderous bastard. Fane. Shuddup will you for Christ's sake this is just-Relax. Sweat it out. Relax.

  Slow down. Deeper breaths. Slow down.

  Easy does it, so forth.

  It's like coming up from dark water.

  Have you ever panicked? There's only one way out, you've got to do it yourself and it's like coming up from the dark water. You'll know what I mean if it ever happens to you, you'll know.

  Panic's a killer.

  He hadn't said a thing. He was waiting. It hadn't been as long for him as for me because time slows down when the psyche gets pushed close to the edge of things.

  'Do you think that's all it is? Paranoia?'

  My voice sounded extraordinarily calm.

  'Of course,' Ferris said.

  'Sorry.'

  'Don't worry, I've been waiting for it. As a matter of fact I was expecting it to happen sooner.'

  Perfect handling. This was a model of perfect handling by a local director of an executive in the field suffering from a totally characteristic bout of mission-fatigue at the moment when he felt the final pressure coming on, at the moment when he longed so much to get out and go home that the thought of failing to do that was scaring the guts out of him. Ferris had known it had to come and he'd waited for it and simply held off and let me deal with it alone, which is the only way.

  'God knows,' I told him, 'why I got you all the way from Tokyo.'

  'Perversity. Any questions?'

  'Only one. The objective's likely to be in an unpredictable state of mind. What do I do if he changes it suddenly and decides he ought to stay here in Mother Russia and face the music and all that?'

  'Get him out.'

  'Regardless?'

  'Yes. Get him out.'

  'Understood.'

  'I shall be here at this number the whole time, until I get the signal that you're down safely in Norway.'

  'Fair enough. See you in the Caff.'

  I put the receiver on the hook and pushed the glass door open and nearly knocked the silly bastard over.

  'I thought you were going to be in there all bloody night!'

  'Bollocks.'

  I reached the North Harbour soon after four o'clock, an hour and a half later. There were still checkpoints all over the place and I had to make a lot of detours through streets under deep snow, keeping away from the floodlit areas. No one followed me. A dark blue Volga saloon with the KGB insignia on the number plate had passed me twice when I'd had to leave cover and go through a main street but it looked like a routine patrol and I didn't let it worry me. The bout of eleventh-hour nerves was over, and as I walked through the ruts of the harbour road towards the final rendezvous I believed that whatever happened now, Ferris would get me out with the objective.

  It was a black-painted hulk with snow thick on its decks and the mooring cables pulling at the rings to the movement of a swell rolling in from the sea. The dark blue Zhiguli van was standing against the wall of a wharf just north of the barge, and I went up to it and exchanged parole and countersign with the driver.

  In the distance the headlights of the traffic swept the snow drifts and picked out the dark figures of the work gangs; I couldn't identify individual vehicles from here but some of them would be militia and KGB patrols. None of them turned along the quay in this direction.

  It was 04:34 hours when I checked my watch and broke cover and walked across the packed snow to the barge and went aboard. The snow had been packed down between the landing-plank and the open hatch amidships by the passage of feet, and the outlines of boots had frozen into hard grey ice. I didn't call out because there was no need: the briefing had been perfectly clear and there should be only one man on board — the objective.

  I went down the companion ladder into the pitch darkness and the acrid stench of coal, and when I reached solid planks I turned and looked for signs of life.

  'Freeze.'

  Light struck across my eyes and I put a hand up to shield them but all I could see in the glare was the blued steel of a gun.

  'Potemkin,' I said.

  'You are the Englishman?'

  'Yes.'

  The torch-beam was lowered and the gloved hand reversed the gun and handed it to me barrel-first. 'Captain Kirill Alekseyevich Zhigalin, Soviet Navy. I am at your command.'

  'Clive Gage.'

  I put the gun into my coat. It would have offended him if I'd thrown it into the scuppers.

  'Can you understand my humiliation?' He gripped my arm, moving the torch higher to watch my face. 'The dishonour?'

  'What? Yes of course, but we-'

  'Did I fail them in my duty? Did I neglect-'

  'Come on Zhigalin, get moving.' I took the torch from him and pushed him towards the companion ladder. 'There's an aircraft waiting for takeoff and the fog's closing in, do you understand?'

  His boots clanged their way up the metal rungs. Bloody ideologists, all they could think about was their bloody honour. I switched off the torch and climbed after him to the deck. He was standing there looking across at the shore lights in the distance, a short man in a duffle coat with his hands by his sides as if he'd lost something.

  'Here I was born,' he said softly, 'in this land.'

  I had to jerk him into motion again and he went on telling me about the "primordial necessity" of mutual loyalty between a man and his country — Christ knows where he was educated but it sounded like a mail-order course. I got him to shut up because he had a voice that carried.

  'Get into that van, Zhigalin, and don't talk. This town's crawling with KGB patrols and we're going to be lucky if we get through.' I slammed the rear door after him. 'If anything happens, leave it to me, is that clear?'

  'I am at your command, comrade Gage.' An odd kind of whimpering started as I got into the front and shut the door. I think he was actually weeping.

  'Airport?' the driver asked me.

  'Yes. Have you been over the route?'

  'Of course.' He sounded hurt. 'We're running late, do you know that?'

  'Best I could do. What's your name?'

  'Antonov.' That's what we all said.

  'Are you carryin
g arms?'

  He looked at me as we got into second gear along the frozen ruts. 'I have a gun. Why?'

  'If there's any trouble. I don't want you to use it. If you get clear on your own that's your own business but all the time you're with me you don't even show your gun, now is that understood?'