Quiller Meridian q-17

by Adam Hall

  'I want you to make certain,' I told him,' that I go soft class. Understood?'

  'We'll do our very best'

  'No,' I said, 'I want you to make certain, for security reasons.'

  'Very well.'

  They could do it if they tried. If the train was full and there wasn't a berth available they'd have to buy someone off and a soft class passenger would ask for more cash, but they'd have to pay it. It wasn't a question of comfort — although eight days on a train would be a sight more bearable with only one companion — it was a question of routine mission security: I'd be operating under light cover and three passengers would be less easy to convince than one.

  'There's an embassy car on its way to you now,' the man on the line said, 'with the complete travel package: visa, maps, vouchers, cash. Questions?'

  'Where do I find my director, for debriefing?'

  'We're putting him into Novosibirsk, where the train makes a stop. Look for him near the main booking-office. You're mutually recognizable, I understand.'

  'Yes.'

  'Further questions?'

  'No. Just put me back with Signals.'

  Medlock picked up the line and I asked for Croder.

  In a moment: 'COS.'

  'No support,' I told him, 'unless I ask for it.'

  'I've ordered none. I know you prefer that.'

  'Thank you.'

  We shut down. He was being distinctly cooperative, Croder. I usually have to fight Control and the DIF over the deployment of support groups, because they think the shadow's safer with a whole bloody platoon in the field, but it doesn't work that way — it works the other way.

  Jane got off the floor as I came away from the telephone.

  "There's a list of do's and don'ts,' she said, 'on the pad here for you to read. I've been on that train.' she fetched her windcheater and shrugged her small thin body into it. 'I 'm going down to warm up the car and bring it round. We need to pick up some other things but we can do that at the station — food, toilet roll, rubber ball, stuff like that.' she found her black fur gloves. 'Stay here and get your gear together and be ready to leave.' At the door she turned with a swing of her pony-tail, her eyes dark and intent.' they're running it bloody close, but we'll manage.'

  Snow had drifted among the streets but there was no more coming down. The sky was oppressive, bruise-blue and swollen among the spires and minarets and rectangular termite nests of the housing complexes. Jane was watching the mirrors — from habit, I thought — as we turned along Kirov ulica past the Ministry of Works. She'd had field training, wasn't just a codes and cyphers specialist at the embassy. I felt safe in her hands, don't always, with strangers.

  There was a traffic jam outside the enormous redbrick station and when we left the car we were immediately among a crowd of milling people, most of them staggering under the load of blankets and clothing and a week's supply of food. A man in a Royal Navy dufflecoat broke from the crowd and brush-passed a package to Jane and melted again. He would have been from the embassy.

  'I'll see you at the end of the platform,' Jane said, and gave me the package.' the train's in — it's that one, the second along. But we've got a bit of time because they're still loading stuff into the dining galleys. I'll go and do the shopping.'

  I made my way through the huge cavernous hall to the nearest lavatory, edging among Caucasians, Indians, Mongols, a lot of Chinese — the Rossiya was going to end its run in Beijing — their faces jaundiced in the sulphurous light of the massive chandeliers that hung below the roof in the sooty haze. There was an unoccupied stall and I stood with my back to the door — the lock was broken — and studied the three mug shots of Vladimir Zymyanin, turning them to catch the light from the flickering tubes in the ceiling and learning the bony, compact face with its tight mouth and its blank uncompromising eyes, the jaw thrust forward a little and suggesting belligerence, the face of a man not to be found off his guard, who would not hesitate for a second if in the course of his business he deemed it necessary to kill — necessary or expedient, to save time or to save trouble, even a little time, a little trouble. I knew his kind, as well I should: he was one of us, and of this I would have to beware.

  I don't need to tell you, of course, that he may be very difficult to handle by now.

  Croder, shredding his words carefully into the telephone.

  I put the photographs away and went back through the crowded hall, not missing a face as I made for the end of the platform.

  Jane was already there. 'You'll have to make room for this. The food on the train's not uneatable, providing you feel like boiled chicken twice a day for eight days.'

  She stuffed the bulging plastic bag into the zipped case we'd bought this morning. I thought I saw him, Zymyanin, turning away from the ticket gate and going down the platform, but wasn't certain.

  He could have been caught and turned and given new instructions. Is that what you mean by 'difficult to handle'?

  Something along those lines.

  Whistles had begun shrilling faintly from the front end of the train, and others sounded, getting nearer. Women with coats over their white aprons were still heaving crates and containers into the dining galleys, and gusts of steam came clouding from some of the windows.

  'They've got the samovars up to scratch,' Jane said. 'It'd be a good idea if you went aboard now. You've got everything and you won't be lonely — six hundred people, this one's full.' she stood looking up at me, her black fur gloves held together in front of her like a muff, her small face white and pinched in the cold.

  'First class,' I said.

  'What?'

  'You did a first class job.'

  'Oh. Thank you.' she looked down, then up again, her eyes going dark. 'Good luck and everything.'

  She turned and walked as far as the end of the platform and didn't look back. I picked up my bags and went along to Car No. 7.

  Six hundred people, and one of them Zymyanin.

  He could have been told to stay out of contact with London and draw me into a trap.

  That is also possible.

  The provodnik clipped my ticket and I slung my bags aboard and climbed into the train.

  Chapter 4: NIGHT-MUSIC

  'Slavsky, Boris.'

  He put out a pale bony hand.

  'Shokin, Viktor,' I said.

  He was tall, hungry-looking, his dry hair thinning, the dark-framed glasses too big for his face, his body curving in an academic stoop. 'Have you done this trip before?'

  'No.'

  He reached up to the shelf over the doorway and pulled down a paper bundle and slit it open and dumped it into my arms, bed linen, heavily woven, the real thing, none of your fancy nylon. He got his own bundle down and opened it and shook out the sheets.' I do this trip three times a year,' he said, and looked towards the open door of the compartment, lowering his voice. 'So let me tell you something. We have to be nice to our provodnik. A little tip here, a little tip there, you understand?' He had the tone of a lecturer, was waiting for me to say I understood. I said I did. 'I know most of them,' he went on, nodding his domed head, 'but not this one. She must be new. You've seen her, of course. Bit of a battle-axe, wouldn't you say?'

  She was the woman, I supposed, who'd checked my ticket when I'd come aboard — large, heavy-boned, lavishly lipsticked and with hair the colour of a copper samovar, the shoulders of her blue uniform unnecessarily padded, the brass winged-wheel emblem glinting on her forage cap, her small bright eyes taking me in as I'd squeezed past her with my bags.

  'She didn't look easy to tame,' I told Slavsky.

  'Ha! Well put. But it has to be done. It has to be done.' He started making up his bunk, thumping the massive pillow.

  Our berths were on each side of the narrow gangway, with a folding table under the window and ajar with some rather pretty blue-flowered weeds in it, the most one could ask for, probably, in the depths of a Russian winter. There was more than enough space for our bags — we could have brought a truck
-load — and the compartment in general looked habitable, even for eight days at a stretch. The only critical problem was the lack of security: once anyone saw you going into the compartment or coming out of it they had your address, and there was no back door.

  'Don't be upset,' Slavsky said as he peeled off his jacket, 'about the heat in here. The windows are sealed to keep the dirt out, and nothing can be done about it.'

  People were moving along the corridor, heaving bags and packages, among them an English couple with their voices raised on the understanding that since the natives couldn't speak their language they couldn't be heard.

  'But George, you'll have to look at things the way Clarence does. He says this is World Adventure Number One — that's exactly how he put it last night — World Adventure Number One. The Trans-Siberian Express.'

  'Clarence is out of his bloody mind about bloody trains.'

  A group of Chinese struggled past with little red-and-white flags sticking out of their knapsacks; then there were a few passengers on their own, and these I noted. One of them looked in and gave me an expressionless stare and lumbered on with his body angled under the weight of a black canvas bag. This was why I'd asked Croder not to put any support people on this train: if anyone took an interest in me I'd know they weren't Bureau.

  'Did you bring some food?' Slavsky asked me.

  'Yes.'

  'And toilet paper? Rubber ball?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then you booked through a good travel agent.'

  'Yes.'

  'The main thing to remember,' he said, and then broke off and staggered suddenly as the floor jerked under our feet and the heavy steel couplings out there took up the slack and rang like a peal of bells under the huge roof of the station and the crowds lining the platform started calling and waving and holding children up and the passengers filling the corridors waved back, and I never came to know what the main thing to remember was, but I thought Slavsky would tell me sooner or later.

  Through the windows of the corridor the hazy glow of the station gave way to a string of lights lining the track, and when the acceleration had evened out I told Slavsky I was going to stretch my legs, but he was buried in a book under the reading lamp and didn't look up.

  People were going back into their compartments and leaving the corridors clear, but some girls in grey overalls with the state insignia on them were washing down the walls, and others were trundling vacuum cleaners in and out of the compartments nearer the dining car.

  'How many carriages are there?' I asked an apple-faced woman with a mop.

  'On this train? Twenty-two.'

  'A lot of carriages.'

  'A lot of work!'

  I stepped over her grey galvanized bucket and went through the rubber-walled booth into the next carriage, taking my time, noting every face, looking into the compartments when the curtains were open, scanning the faces of the men who stood in the vestibules at the end of the carriages coughing in the clouds of smoke from their cigarettes. Twenty-two carriages, six hundred people, and I might have to walk the entire length of the train a dozen times, fifty times before I found him, Zymyanin. A lot of work, yes indeed, you were right, little mother.

  He would know, Zymyanin, that the Bureau would have wanted to bring him to a second rendezvous with a second contact, because the information he'd got for us was still shut in his head. He would know that when he'd failed to signal London to set up a new rendezvous, Control would make it his business to put a watch on his movements and have the new contact standing by to force him into a meeting if he could. He would know that I was on this train.

  'I'm sorry,' I said, 'babushka,' as I got in the way of her mop.

  'I shouldn't be working as late as this!' A stainless steel tooth flashed in the bluish light. 'It was the snow, after St Petersburg, that held everything up!'

  He wouldn't recognize me, Zymyanin, had never seen me before and would not have been given the photograph of a high-echelon shadow executive; but he would come to know me, come to know who I was, who I must be, when he noticed I was searching the train for someone. And once he'd got a fix on me I'd move immediately into a red sector, if that man had in fact set up a kill for Hornby in the freight yard in Bucharest and had now set one up for me.

  That would be all right in the streets of a city or in open countryside where there was adequate cover: the risk would be calculated, the kind we thrive on if we play them right. But here in his long thin tube stretching through the wilderness there were risks Dependent on sheer chance, and at any given time Zymyanin could catch sight of me from the far end of a corridor before I saw him. Then he'd bring me under his surveillance, and I might not have enough time to realize it before he made his move.

  The thing is, I'd asked Croder, is it worth the risk?

  I was expecting your question. Yes, we believe it is.

  It was the only excuse I'd got for taking it, the only justification. Croder's word.

  When I came back to the compartment the night sky through the windows of the corridor was sable-black and jewelled with stars as the Rossiya ran through open country and the dark.

  Slavsky was asleep, I think; he didn't say anything when I changed into the track suit we'd bought at the used-clothing shop this morning in Moscow, and stretched out on my bunk. The heating bad been turned off not long before midnight and now the air was cold, and tainted with the constant smell of disinfectant from the lavatories. I'd strip-washed half an hour ago, using the big iron bucket in the nearest toilet, the water rust-coloured and near freezing; but that hadn't been the main problem, which was to keep things from dropping through the big uncovered drainpipe onto Russian soil, artifacts for posterity. But the little black rubber ball had worked well enough in the handbasin, a stand-in for the missing plug. In the last five hours I had covered the whole length of the train three times, waiting in the queue for a late supper in the nearest dining car and surveilling for more than an hour and then moving on, using other passengers — Caucasian, and in groups when I could find them — as mobile cover, wandering with them along the rocking corridors and meeting with bands of gypsies, some Americans with the Stars and Stripes sewn proudly onto their jeans, a French army colonel in full uniform, a gang of Russian hooligans shouting the odds about the coming revolution, gaggles of winsome little ballet students on their way to the Academy of Dance in Novosibirsk, a Scottish Highlander in a Campbell clan kilt and a party of singing drunks.

  I had also met our senior provodnik again, Galina, the muscled redhead, and chatted with her for a while before she signed off her shift, putting reasonably direct questions about working conditions on the train and especially the rate of pay, and expressing mild shock at its inadequacy considering the daunting responsibilities of her job. There was no excuse for crossing her palm with silver at this stage, but expectations were carefully stirred.

  It wasn't that I felt the need for extra comforts of any sort, but for a recruitable agent-in-place with an unbreakable cover who could ferret out information for me that might indirectly further my progress in the mission or even protect my life — because there was a second possible scenario in my mind: Zymyanin might be perfectly reliable, a good agent understandably scared off by the Bucharest thing and unwilling to risk another rendezvous, in which case he was no danger to me. But if the opposition had tried to kill him off along with Hornby in that freight yard, they might have followed him onto the train, to try again.

  Zymyanin's own life could be in hazard as the Rossiya plunged headlong through the night, and if I made contact with him it could be lethal. A thousand roubles in Galina's bank account to buy her secret services could prove a profitable investment, and to hell with that carping old crone in the counting house. We play our little games, we, the brave and diligent ferrets in the field, with wit and sinew as our weapons when we can, but if base money can provide the means of our salvation as we burrow through the dark and treacherous labyrinths then we will use it. We're not proud, my good frie
nd, we are not proud: we find we live longer if we are practical.

  On my way through the corridors tonight I stopped to talk to any of the staff who had the time, though not many did: one of them, a weary-eyed girl with calloused hands and stained overalls with the seam torn at the shoulder, told me that the coach attendants, security guards, waiters, cooks and cleaners worked for nine days at a stretch on the run from Moscow to Beijing, then took a week off in Moscow or Vladivostok, in turn.

  'But the pay is good,' she said, pulling a lock of damp hair away from her eyes. 'I earn 150 roubles a month, with free keep.'

  'That's quite good,' I said. It was terrible. 'But so you should.'

  She dragged chips of wood from the rocking floor of the galley and pushed them into the furnace below the huge copper samovar. 'Yes, and then one day I shall be a provodnik, in a uniform.'

  I spent more than an hour in the dining car, because of the three men there, and watched the waiters tussling with a pack of beatniks who were trying to hog a table for a game of cards, swigging their beer from the bottle and making up a dirty song about the revolution — I'd seen them before, along the corridors.

  The three men were in their fifties, their faces sharp-boned and weathered, their dark woollen suits well-cut and their shoes polished. Four other men, younger and quiet-faced, observant, seemed to be in the same party, although they were sitting at different tables, two of them on each side of the table where the older men were. One of them, the quietest, with the totally expressionless eyes of a wolf, got out of his seat and moved slowly along the dining car and spoke to the party of youths. One of them talked back and there was a hoot of laughter, which died away as the man showed them something. Talk at the other tables had also broken off, and the whole dining car had gone quiet, so that I heard him saying, 'Now get out, and stay out.'