by Adam Hall
There was something else on his mind, and I knew what that was too. If I had to work with a zero deadline I was going to feel the pressure and take risks.
When he spoke I think it was to break my train of thought.
‘How do you feel,’ he asked carefully, ‘about Tanya Rusakova? Roach told me she’s rather a stunner.’
‘Guilt,’ I said. ‘I feel guilt, chiefly.’
‘Because you exposed her?’
In the debriefing I’d told him we’d both checked in at the Hotel Vladekino, so he knew our names had been together in the register.
‘Because I bloody well exposed her, yes.’
My anger against myself was information for him, and I meant it to be. He needed to know my frame of mind, because his job was to handle me in the field, nurture and protect me as best he could and pull me out alive if that were possible, and he would be quite aware that my anger would diminish my instinct for survival by a degree, and the risks I decided to take would be greater.
The obvious had to be put into words to give it weight, to offer me atonement, bring the anger down, lessen the risks. ‘But of course,’ Ferris said, ‘you wouldn’t have checked in at that hotel if you’d known Rusakova was spotting the target for an assassin.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I would have kept clear, yes, but that isn’t in point of fact what happened, is it?’
He paced for a little time and I waited, hoping for more sops for my conscience, but he did better than that. ‘See if she’ll put you into contact with her brother,’ he said gently, ‘and then I’ll do what I can to fly her out of the city and ask Control to keep her safe in London or the country. Then you can clear your mind.’
He was being too bloody accommodating.
‘Listen,’ I said and went up to him, looked into those quiet honey — coloured eyes that can conceal his thoughts so well that it seems he’s not even thinking at all, that you’re looking straight through and into an empty skull. ‘Are you going to let me go on running?’
Nothing changed, nothing in his eyes, even though I’d just asked him, in effect, whether Meridian had quietly crashed, here in this freezing rat — infested hole, because of the debriefing, because of his assessment of it.
He said at last,’ that’s a good question,’ and I took it in the stomach.
He turned away and watched a rat fretting with something at the bottom of the garbage, its big tail threshing as it worked; and then I saw what it was working on, the entrails of the dog.
I looked away, looked at Ferris. ‘For Christ’s sake leave those fucking rats alone,’ I told him, and he turned to look at me with the faint cynical smile touching his mouth.
‘Give a lot,’ he said, ‘for a brick.’
‘I know.’
He turned his back on the garbage and took two seconds to put the whole thing into shape and said,’ the thing is, I can’t get you enough support. We —’
‘I don’t want support. You know —’
‘Oh yes,’ Ferris said, ‘you do. If I let you go on running you’re not going to bitch me about like you do other people. Remember me?’
All right, I’d agree to support in the field since this man was running me; he knew how to handle things, how to keep them out of my way until I needed them and how to get them to me in five seconds flat if things got sticky.
I didn’t say anything, didn’t tell him that. He knew it.
‘We can’t move too many people into this town because with all the frontier feuds going on across the whole of Eastern Europe there’s been a drain on manpower — executives, directors and support groups. You were lucky to get me for this one.’
‘You were a bargaining chip, you know that.’
He left it.’ the thing is, your chances aren’t terribly good, are they?’
‘Are you talking about timing?’
‘Partly.’
He meant the zero — deadline thing. ‘What else?’
‘You’re being hunted actively by the police and the militia and there’s a murder charge on your head. That alone means that you can’t even show yourself on the street without very high risk. You’ve also come close enough to the opposition — the generals — to be recognized by their aides, who in fact engineered that murder charge against you, and if you go closer to them again — which you’ll have to if you’re to pursue the mission — you’ll be up against a group of military professionals, and if —’
‘Christ, I’ve been inside Lubyanka and got out again — remember me?’
Ferris tilted his head. ‘You’re very competent, I know. I also know from experience that you possess a pathological fascination for the brink.’
‘That’s my problem.’
He turned it, instantly: ‘I agree.’ He gave it the weight of silence, then: ‘Apart from the Russian police and militia and the generals’ aides, you have a rogue agent in the field, if you’re right about that — and I suspect you are. And a rogue agent, difficult to track and difficult to trap, can be more dangerous to you than all those other adversaries put together.’ A beat. ‘You know this.’
I didn’t say anything. It was perfectly true: he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. He was just telling me things I didn’t want to know.
Ferris waited, then gave the slightest shrug. ‘To make contact with Captain Rusakov,’ he said, ‘without even being able to show yourself on the street is I think close to impossible, without the extreme risk of getting caught or trapped or shot out of hand. If you —’
‘Look, I can’t work like that. If I stopped to think of the bloody risks I’d never leave London.’
Ferris took a turn and came back. He’d lost the stillness I’d seen in him earlier, and it worried me. For this man to get up and walk about was like anyone else climbing the walls with their teeth.
He sat down on the crate again, and I felt a frisson: he’d been reading me.
‘Finally,’ he said, ‘your target for information — Captain Rusakov — is at risk himself, and he’d also be the subject of a manhunt if his sister got herself arrested and they put her into an interrogation cell. He couldn’t go near you and you couldn’t go near him, and I would have to get you both off the streets.’
A wind had got up, a light wind, and it was fretting at a bit of loose corrugated iron on the roof. It would also bring a chill factor across the city, and the air was going to skin us alive out there when we left this place. Extreme cold can work on your system in so many ways, numbing your hands and your thoughts and what’s left of your ambitions, but it wasn’t the cold, really, that worried me — it was simply that the director in the field for Meridian was telling his executive to drop the mission and go home. That was the real chill factor.
I looked at Ferris and asked him: ‘What are you going to tell London?’
He took his time. ‘What do you think I should tell them?’
‘Say that if you don’t keep me running I’ll go underground.’
I think he drew a deeper breath: his body straightened a degree as the lungs filled. Then he said: ‘You’d do that to me?’
‘I’ve no choice.’
But it had taken some saying. If I broke contact with him and got off the streets and went underground, found a foxhole somewhere and operated from there, they’d give him hell in London. The DIF is totally responsible for the man he’s running in the field and if that man breaks off and goes solo it means his director hasn’t done his job, hasn’t protected him, hasn’t kept him on track, hasn’t even managed to bring him home.
‘If you go underground,’ Ferris said, ‘you won’t have a chance.’
‘Then keep me running.’
Screaming broke out and slashed at the nerves.
‘I’d have to tell London how things stand,’ Ferris said. ‘And you know Croder. He’ll instruct me to pull you in.’
It wouldn’t work.
‘You’d never find me,’ I said.
‘He’ll instruct me to convince you that
you must break off the mission. You can still be useful to the Bureau. They’re not ready to throw you out.’
That wouldn’t work either.
‘Why should they be?’
‘You’re not easy to control, you know that. They like discipline in the field. This time you could blow your credit.’
‘That’s a bloody shame.’
He got off the crate and stood there with the light slanting across his glasses, and I couldn’t see his eyes. It didn’t matter; they wouldn’t have told me anything.
‘I want you to report to me,’ he said, ‘as often as you can. If I decide to put support into the field I want you to accept it. And I want you to bear in mind that the minute you let yourself fall for the death — or — glory thing I ‘m going to cut you loose and throw you to the dogs.’
‘I’ll toe the line.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you won’t.’
The wind cut between the buildings and blew flotsam across the snow, bits of paper and a milk carton and a plastic bag. I left Roach’s Skoda on some waste ground half a block away from the building where the safe — house was, and approached it slowly, making a circle. The early afternoon sky pressed down on the city, leaving the pale orb of the sun sinking towards the west as if through dark water.
Ferris had come with me to the door of the shed, and it had taken both of us to wrench it open on the frozen runners. ‘As soon as you’ve made contact with Rusakov, I’ll get his sister out of Novosibirsk.’ It was the last thing he’d said to me.
The wind brought the river smell from the east, foul water and coal — smoke, tar and diesel gas. The Ob wasn’t far from this part of the city, three or four miles; earlier I’d heard an ice — breaker working, its engine roaring as the bows thrust and drew back and thrust again.
I moved in closer, completing the circle. Traffic was thin, most of it trucks; no one was walking in the streets: all I’d seen on my way back were a drunken militiaman throwing up in a doorway and a pack of stray dogs lurching from one garbage bin to the next, ravenous and out of luck — it was winter and times were lean.
The peep was standing in a doorway; he’d seen me from a distance and hadn’t moved out of shadow, but now he lit a cigarette and in a moment flicked it away, the glowing tip tracing an arc through the lowering light before it hit the snow and went out. I kept walking and crossed the street, stopping when I reached the doorway. I’ve got surveillance on the place, of course, Ferris had told me. The man took a few steps to meet me.
‘Everything all right?’ I asked him.
‘No.' he said.’ the woman’s been arrested.’
Chapter 13
WHORES
What that man Roach hadn’t known when he’d told me there was a telephone booth in the building was that the cord had been cut by hooligans, and I had to drive two miles before I found a booth that didn’t have the glass smashed or the cord cut. I didn’t expect to find a directory, took the phone off the hook and dialled for Information, the wind fluting through the gap in the door.
‘Yes?’
‘Military Barracks.’
‘Which department?’
‘Administration.’
‘Wait.’
I waited.
Arrested. Mother of God.
I could look along the street from here, both ways. I’d left the Skoda round the comer where I could see its reflection in the window of the No. 3 Dock — workers’ Union of Novosibirsk Meeting Rooms.
Someone had carved some crude letters on the tarnished aluminum panel behind the telephone — WHERE IS THE FOOD?
Jabbing at the panel, slashing at it with the force of desperation.
‘Here is the number,’ the woman said on the line. She rang off before I could repeat it or thank her.
I hadn’t any one — or two — kopek coins so I used a ten and dialled. Not at the safe — house: she hadn’t been arrested at the safe — house, Tanya. She’d left there soon after I had, the peep told me, when I’d gone to meet Ferris at noon. The peep had followed her. He was surveillance, not support: he would have told us where she’d gone — that was his function, and he’d had no instructions to stop her. But she hadn’t gone anywhere, hadn’t arrived.
‘she was crossing the street,’ he’d told me, ‘down by the bus station, and the militia stopped her and checked her papers —’
‘A patrol on foot?’
‘Yes. Then he used his walkie and called a car and they put her inside and that was it. 11:51.1 got to a phone by 12:03 but the DIF didn’t answer.’
Because he’d been with me in that stinking shed.
Ten rings, twenty, they were taking their bloody time.
This was so very risky.
‘Military Barracks.’
‘I want to speak,’ I said, ‘to Captain Vadim Rusakov.’
‘Wait.’
So very risky because I couldn’t get an introduction to Rusakov now from his sister; I’d be talking to him cold, and when I told him what had happened he could duck out and run for cover in case she broke and talked and exposed him. I wouldn’t expect much chivalry from a man who’d talked a woman into spotting the target for him, bringing her right onto the scene of the shooting. Anything could have happened and he must have known that.
The wind gusted through the gap in the door, flapping at an official notice that said vandals would be arrested for damaging the property of the Intercity and International Telephone Service of Novosibirsk, that did not say that accomplices in the assassination of former Red Army generals would also be arrested and would face imprisonment for life, were they going to answer this bloody telephone or weren’t they?
Steady there.
Yea, verily, but time was of the essence: once they put Tanya Rusakova under the five — hundred — watt lamp in Militia Headquarters it wouldn’t be long before she told them what they wanted to know, before she blew her brother and the safe — house and Meridian.
I had to make contact with Rusakov before that happened.
‘Ordnance Unit Three.’
I asked again for Captain Vadim Rusakov.
‘Wait.’
It was going to be like this until at some hour in the future I would secure Meridian and keep it running and find the means of bringing it home, or leave its ashes here in this dark and frozen city and make my way out, with luck, with luck and nothing more, nothing to show them in London.
‘Captain Vadim Rusakov is not present.’
I cut in fast before she could ring off — ‘When will he be there? This is a matter of urgency.’
‘I cannot say.’
‘Do you know where he is? Is there another number I can try?’
‘He is not here.’
The line went dead.
I dug another ten — kopek piece out of my pocket, dropping a glove and bending to pick it up, caught my temple on the corner of the metal shelf and felt the freezing draught against my face from the gap in the door, straightened up and pushed the coin into the slot and dialled. It was the last one I could use in a telephone; I’d have to get change as soon as I could.
‘Hotel Karasevo.’
I asked for Gospodin T. K. Trencher.
‘Yes?’
Ferris.
‘You heard the news?’ I asked him.
A brief silence, then: ‘Tell me.’
He would have gone straight back to the hotel after leaving me because he was the signals centre for the field, but it could have taken him longer than I’d taken to reach the safe — house, and the peep hadn’t yet made his second call.
I told Ferris what had happened.
Silence again. Then he asked questions, but all I could tell him was what the peep had told me.
A militia patrol car had turned out of the intersection half a mile away and I watched it.
‘What are your plans?’ Ferris asked me at last.
‘I’m trying to contact her brother.’
‘He could be at risk, yes, before long.’
/> ‘I’m going to use him, if I can. He’s in the military. He might know where the other two generals are.’
It sounded thin, a last desperate chance. It was.
‘The safe — house could also become hot,’ Ferris said. He wasn’t impressed with what I’d said about using Rusakov.
‘Yes,’
The militia patrol car was heading in this direction, going slowly. But then all the traffic was going slowly because of the snow and the ice.
‘I’ll find you a new safe — house,’ Ferris said. ‘You’ll need somewhere to stay while I make plans to fly you out under a new cover.’ He was speaking in a monotone. Tanya Rusakova had been the key to the mission, and he didn’t expect me to rope in her brother as an ally without her introduction. His hands were still red and he’d startle easily.
There was a man walking alone past the dock — workers’ meeting rooms, head down and hurrying, and when the car was alongside it dipped on its springs and slid to a stop and a militiaman got out.
‘I’m not ready,’ I told Ferris, ‘to fly out yet.’
‘It’ll take time,’ he said. ‘Your new papers will have to come in through the consulate. We haven’t anyone here who can do that kind of thing for us.’
The militiaman was asking the civilian to show his identity. Novosibirsk was a big city but the militia had thrown a net right across it in the past twelve hours because Zymyanin had been shot dead on the train and then the train had been blown up and the man who’d been charged with Zymyanin’s death had escaped custody and General Velichko had been gunned down, and a red alert had gone out to all forces: militia, police, investigative and the army. It was understandable.
‘They’re stopping everyone,’ I told Ferris, ‘on the—’ and broke off because of the click on the line.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ferris said. ‘I’ve got sniffers out.’ Line detector, bug detector.
‘They’re stopping everyone on the street,’ I said. ‘Checking identities.’
