The Scorpion Signal q-9

by Adam Hall

  'And finally I got it,' he said, 'I got a connection going between Children's World and Lubyanka. It worried me, you see. I mean, it's like having one of our prisons with its execution chamber right across the street from Harrods. Could only happen in Moscow, couldn't it? Typically Russian — slightly short on good taste.' He got himself a cigarette before Misha could do it for him, and flicked the match away. 'I had to think up a connection, yes. Wandering a bit, am I?'

  'No.'

  Ignatov had finished clearing up and was squatting on a tea chest near the grandfather clock, watching Schrenk, not understanding a word but listening to the sharp dry sibilants that cut through the silence.

  'They're so clever these days, aren't they, at making mechanical toys. I mean that monkey, you know, that beats the two little brass cymbals together when you wind it up — that's old hat now, but I'm not thinking of anything more complicated. Surely they could make a small doll, with trousers and a moustache to show he's a man, and hang him upside down from a kind of trapeze with another doll beside him, also in trousers and with bushy black eyebrows slanting down towards the middle to make him look fierce, and a wooden stick in his hand — you see what I mean? It shouldn't be too difficult.'

  I think he was trying to laugh, at this point, or the laugh was just coming naturally because of his macabre sense of humour, I'm not sure; whatever it was it ended in more coughing, because of the cigarette smoke. I suppose his lungs were in a pretty bad way, with the ashtrays always full.

  'Then,' he said when he could, 'you'd wind him up and he'd move the wooden stick up and down, beating the bare feet of the doll who's hanging upside down from the trapeze. I'm sure,' he said and the laughter started now, and I hope I never hear a sound like that again, 'I'm sure all the little boys would tug their mummies along there to buy one — in this country it'd be a smash hit, don't you think?'

  The laughter went on, the strangest sound I have ever heard from a human throat, a kind of soft yelping, like the cry of an animal caught in a trap. I saw Misha staring at him, her plump hands going slowly to her face, while Ignatov watched him with his thick grey mouth slightly open, his eyes bewildered.

  Schrenk stood in a crouch as the breath came out of his body in spasms; his eyes were squeezed almost shut, with the glint of tears showing. 'You see,' he said painfully, 'I finally succeeded in making a connection, a connection between Children's World and that other world across the square. I could finally believe they existed within a stone's throw of each other. Of course there's always the funny side to these things, isn't there, I mean quite a lot of good citizens are taken inside Lubyanka for interrogation, sometimes for days on end if they prove obstinate, as you well know.' Ash dropped from his cigarette and he brushed it clumsily off his jacket. 'So you can easily imagine a young mother, worried about the fact that her Jewish husband has disappeared, buying her little boy the funny mechanical toy he's been pestering her for. Then, when he keeps on asking where Daddy is, she can tell him not to worry about him, just go and play with his toy.' He began laughing again, in soft little yelps. 'Don't you think that's an absolute — absolute scream?' But when he swung his head up to look at me I saw the hatred burning in his eyes with a white hot flame.

  Then I understood. His rage wasn't against me. It was against that jackbooted crowd of thugs in Lubyanka, and the regime in which they operated, and the order of command that structured it from the omnipotent Politburo down to the cocky little militia men in the streets. Dr Steinberg had been surprised that I hadn't grasped that most obvious of facts: that when you damage a man as they had damaged Schrenk, with your bare hands and with special implements and with humiliation, you will engender in what remains of him the most murderous hate. It does, after all, become personal.

  I could believe him now. Schrenk wasn't a defector.

  Misha had got him to sit down again on the settee, and for a moment sat with him, her head against his shoulder and her hand cupping his cheek. She looked at me with her face questioning, then withdrew into herself as she remembered what I had done to Ignatov.

  'Work for them?' Schrenk said bitterly. He shook off the girl and stared at me.

  'What does he say?' she pleaded to Ignatov. 'What is it about, this Lubyanka and this Detsky Mir?'

  'I don't know,' he said broodingly.

  'Why did the man hit you like that? Should I get the police?'

  'You know better,' he said, 'than to get the police.'

  Schrenk patted the girl's hand. 'There's nothing to worry about, sweetheart. But your Viktor would like some tea. Would you make some tea for us?'

  'There's some in the samovar,' she said eagerly, sensing a return to normal.

  'That would be very nice.'

  She hugged him in relief and I saw pain flicker across his face; then she bounced off the settee and ran across to the urn, leaving him staring at me.

  'We've got a mission on the board,' I said, 'and I'm the executive in the field. Guess what they want me to do.'

  He brushed ash off his knees. 'Tell them I'll make my report when I'm ready. I'm not ready yet.'

  'The objective,' I said patiently, 'is to get you out of Russia.'

  'Sorry I can't help you.' He drained his glass of vodka and put it on to the rickety little stool at the end of the settee, getting it wrong and letting it fall to the carpet. Ignatov ambled forward to pick it up for him.

  'Leave it there.'

  'Of course, Viktor.'

  'I can pick things up for myself, don't you know that?'

  'I was forgetting.'

  We watched Schrenk double over and feel for the glass, his hand swinging like a hook till his fingers connected with the rim; then he put the glass back on to the stool with ostentatious care, though it rattled to the trembling of his hand before he could stop it.

  'You mean,' I asked him, 'you're staying in Moscow?'

  'I've got friends here.'

  'If they're anything like this son of a bitch here then you're welcome to them.'

  He laughed and said: 'He's not too fond of you either. Why do they want me out of Russia?'

  'They want to debrief you on the interrogation.' I could tell him so much and no more. He was going to lie when it suited him and he was going to do it convincingly, and if I shot questions at him I was going to get as much out of him as they'd got out of him in Lubyanka. All I could do was feel my way softly into the rage, into the silently roaring battlefield they'd made of his mind, and hope to intercept a few signals when he was off his guard, and try to come out alive and get the message to Bracken. 'They want to give you some leave. You've earned that, God knows.'

  'I'll pay my own way,' he said, and fumbled in the black and yellow packet for another cigarette.

  It meant nothing at all. It was just a spark coming out of the volcano. I had to find a way of reaching him. 'Natalya hopes to see you again.' At the edge of my vision field I saw Misha turn her head to listen.

  'Natalya's dangerous,' Schrenk said at once. 'Don't forget that.' He didn't ask me how I'd got on to her: he knew that when I'd come into the field I would have started by contacting his friends.

  'Noted,' I said. 'But she's got her heart in the right place. They're all worried about Borodinski.' It was an oblique shot and I got a hit though he kept most of his control.

  'Certainly they're worried about Borodinski.'

  'D'you think he'll get off?'

  'Get off?' No control now. 'He'll get life, you know that.'

  I took it further. 'There's a lot of protests going on.'

  'Protests? They're not protests, for God's sake! There's only one thing those bastards'll listen to.' Then he angled his head and watched me steadily. 'You're not interested in Borodinski.'

  No go.

  Ignatov moved and I whipped a glance at him, but he was only helping the girl with the tray of tea. The room was full of comfortable sounds: the clinking of cups on saucers and the slow tick of the clock. But the company was wrong. Give Schrenk a few more days in
here and he'd wire himself to that clock and blow the whole building apart.

  'Thank you, sweetheart,' he said, and took his cup from her. 'The thing is,' his head turning to me, 'I want to be left alone for a bit. I've done enough for London, for the moment, you've said that yourself. I applied for a job here as an a-i-p but you know what happens to an application in that bloody place, it's like a snake trying to scratch its arse, can never quite find it.' He sipped some tea. 'So you see I don't want anyone coming here, you or Bracken or anyone else. And that makes it difficult, doesn't it?' He didn't look at me when he said that. He wasn't going to enjoy this, and neither was I, but it was something we had to do, had to work out.

  Misha brought some tea for me, standing directly between Schrenk and me with her plump country-girl's body and whispering, 'Who is Natalya?'

  'Only an acquaintance,' I whispered back, but of course she didn't believe me.

  'It makes it difficult,' Schrenk said, 'because when you leave here you're going to signal Bracken and tell him where to find me. And I don't want that.' I noticed the colour was leaving his face as he sat squinting through the smoke, and his voice took on a forced quality as he made himself tell me the rest. 'The KGB must be hunting you pretty hard if you gave them the slip in Lubyanka. So when you leave here I'm going to blow you as I did before, and there's no way you can stop me.' Then his head went down. 'Sorry.'

  15: PENDULUM

  The clock ticked.

  We listened to it. No one spoke.

  He liked clocks. He liked the measured inevitability of time and the events it would bring. He liked watching fuses burn: I'd seen him do that. He liked mechanics-automatic relays, timed release units, delayed detonation devices. Even to bridge the philosophical gap between Lubyanka and Children's World he'd had to invent a mechanical toy.

  It might be logical, though dangerously mistaken, to think he was therefore predictable, so that one knew what he was going to do next.

  Where was the telephone?

  He dragged on his cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs: he needed it more than food; he needed it more than life, because he was dying of it. But he'd got things to do first, and I was in his way.

  He'd need a telephone.

  Ignatov and Misha were absolutely quiet. They hadn't understood what Schrenk had said to me, but they had seen what an effort it had cost him to say it, and they had seen his head go down like that as he had quietly offered the executioner's apology. Sorry.

  'There is a way,' I said, 'I could stop you.'

  I could leave them both dead and the girl in shock when I left here.

  'No,' he said, 'there isn't. But we don't have to go into that.'

  Would he need a telephone, though? Ignatov might not be his only contact: he might have a dozen of them, one in the next apartment, one in the apartment opposite, any number of them. There was something he had to do and he might have got a whole cell established to help him do it.

  'They're hunting pretty hard,' I said, 'for you too.'

  He got up impatiently, twisting his body upright and holding it stiffly for a moment before he started pacing the worn carpet. 'But that isn't the position, is it? You're not going to have me picked up — your objective is to keep me out of their hands:

  'I didn't mean that. I meant that you might not have much longer before they find you anyway. You must have left a trail and this isn't a safe-house — you can get a knock on the door any minute.' I tried to forget what this man had done to me and what he was going to do again if I couldn't stop him. 'I came out here to get you safely home, and with a bit of luck I can do it. You don't need Moscow any more.'

  He came up to me quietly, one thin leg swinging slightly more than the other as he tried not to hobble, and looked into my face and said with his eyes bright: 'But Moscow needs me.'

  It was the first indication I'd had that his mind had been affected, that there was more going on inside him than a hurricane of rage. It stopped me dead.

  'Come on home,' I said. 'You're too dose to it all. You can always come back if you want to.'

  'Humouring me?'with his eyes burning.

  Oh my God, yes, that fitted too: they hate it when you refuse to believe they're Napoleon.

  'Not really,' I said.

  He watched me with his bright eyes for a moment, his small gnome's head on one side. 'You have to go now,' he said, and hobbled away from me across the threadbare carpet. 'He's leaving,' he told Ignatov in Russian. 'Don't do anything. Stay where you are.'

  'Yes, Viktor.'

  Where was the telephone?

  There'd be one in the front hallway, a pay phone. If I went through there I could pull out the wire. But Schrenk knew I'd think of that because he'd think of it himself. This wasn't a half-trained novitiate I was having to deal with.

  'I think you're making a mistake,' I told him.

  'One more won't do me any harm.'

  'You're relying on me not to get you picked up the minute they arrest me.'

  Ignatov was halfway between the door and the window, nursing his temple. The girl was over by the stove. I began noting other things, because the trap was closing now and the organism was aware of the need to escape; but I didn't think I was going to be able to do that: Schrenk was a professional and he knew he had the advantage.

  'You won't get me picked up,' he said, and turned to face me, squinting above his cigarette. 'They'd start work on me again and this time they might break me and then I'd have to blow London. I'm perfectly safe in your hands.'

  Ignatov wasn't moving. He was watching Schrenk, trying to understand what he was saying. Misha stood rocking on her black strapped shoes, her hands to her face, waiting, watching the man she adored and ready to claw my eyes out if I tried to hurt him.

  'You're perfectly safe in my hands,' I said, 'till they start work on me again and break me and ask me to tell them where you are, as they did before. This time I'll have the answer and I'll have to give it to them.'

  He said immediately: 'That's all right. I won't be here.'

  We watched each other. We weren't telling each other anything we didn't already know: each wanted the other to know that he knew. The scene going on in this tawdry little room in a Moscow suburb was the exact epitome of the cold war: the war that is kept cold by the ceaseless efforts of intelligence forces to assure the opposition that nothing can be done in secret, that no attack can be made without an immediate counter-attack. The danger cannot be contained simply by finding out what the opposition is doing: the opposition must be informed that it is known.

  We knew this, and we had to go through the situation point by point in an attempt to contain the danger. We also knew we had to fail. It was going to be his life or mine. He wasn't going to have me picked up: he'd only wanted to know my thinking, and I'd told him. He couldn't risk making a phone call when I left here because it wouldn't give him time to get out when the KGB closed in and found him in the same net.

  He couldn't afford to let me leave here alive.

  'Give yourself a bit of time,' I said, 'to think.'

  'I've done all the thinking.'

  'There's no special hurry.'

  'Yes,' he said, 'there is.'

  The clock ticked, with a rhythm that was slightly off balance: it needed a wad of paper a sixteenth of an inch thinner, or a sixteenth of an inch thicker, to equalize the swing of the pendulum. Perhaps it worried him sometimes in the night, disturbing his sense of mechanical precision. Perhaps, every morning, he added a thickness of paper to the wad, or removed a thickness, to equalize the rhythm; it would be like him to do that; I could see him doing it, with his thin body twisted as he crouched at the base of the grandfather clock with Misha watching him, as a mother watches a small boy. I knew him quite well, and this made it so much worse for me to do what I would have to do.

  If I didn't do it, I wouldn't leave here alive.

  What happens if I find him but can't get him out?

  The lamplight sending the rain patte
rn creeping in rivulets down Croder 's face, his dark hooded eyes glancing away as he instructed me, bestowing on me the powers of an executioner.

  That would make it easier for you. All we want is his silence.

  There was, then, no impediment. I had sanction from on high and there would be no record made of the incident. The file on Scorpion would simply note: Mission accomplished as per instructions. Physically there was no problem offered: I could reach him in three steps and use a sword-hand to the larynx with killing power.and there would be nothing he could do because he didn't have enough speed left, enough strength left, to defend himself. It would occupy perhaps four seconds of my time.

  Then I could go home, get out of this bloody place and try to forget. Mission accomplished, good for you, old horse, you did it again, and two months' leave on the Sussex coast with Helena, a dozen gardenias, you shouldn't be so extravagant, two months to forget the twisted thing on the floor with the black bruise on the throat and the sound of a girl screaming, the comfortable smell of boiled cabbage.

  God damn their eyes. This man had done good work for them time and again, put his life in hazard for them time and again, stood up to that hellish assault on his psyche in Lubyanka without breaking, without exposing Leningrad or London, and now they were asking me to leave him on the floor like a bit of rubbish we'd thrown out, God damn their eyes.

  Mine not to reason why, of course. The ferret in the field obeys orders and goes down the hole and comes up again if he's lucky, leaving behind him those unnameable things in the dark that he had to deal with. Dear God, how long ago was it when they'd said to me: if you decide to go into the field you'll have to bear in mind the fact that you'll be asked to do things you'll find it hard to do, we don't mean dangerous things, you seem all right on that score, we mean dirty things, rotten things that may well give you nightmares afterwards… We're just giving you fair warning, you understand, so that you'll know what you're going into, if that's what you finally decide…