Quiller Meridian q-17

by Adam Hall

  Another rat dropped from the shelf onto the piled garbage; they were coming in through a hole in the wall, a gap in the boards. The garbage had been dumped in here from trucks, I would imagine, half-filled the place, it was a warehouse, though not quite that, too small, a bloody shed, then.

  'Things don't look terribly good,' I said.

  It was gone noon. I'd left Tanya sleeping.

  'They're not,' Ferris said.

  I'd meant that things couldn't be terribly good if this was the best he could do for a rendezvous, and he'd known that. He was squatting on a broken crate, thinning straw-coloured hair and a pale face and amber eyes behind a pair of almost square-tensed academic-looking glasses, thin, bony, trussed in a surplus Red Army coat with the insignia torn off, you saw a lot of them now, he would like to be thought of, Ferris, as some kind of university professor, and that's more or less what he looks like, and you'd never believe he's got a reputation for strangling mice in the evening when there's nothing worth seeing at the Globe.

  He was sitting there with his hands dug into the pockets of the coat, watching one of the rats. He wished he'd got a brick in his hand so that he could let fly with it and splash one of those little buggers all over the wall, and I knew this because I knew Ferris.

  I found another crate and perched on it.

  'It was meant for the markets,' he said, 'all this stuff, but it was already rotten when it finally arrived from the farms, so sayeth the sleeper who's in charge of this place; his adopted name is Vladimir Tchaikovsky, born in Birmingham, a real tease, but totally reliable. When a dog gets in here to stuff itself on the garbage the rats form a pack and stuff themselves on the dog, food chain thing. How much sleep,' he asked me with a swing of his head, 'have you been getting?'

  'I've just had five or six hours.'

  'Ready for duty, then. Where is the woman?'

  'At the safe-house. Why aren't things terribly good?'

  Ferris has what looks like the hint of a cynical smile on his pale face, the eyelids a fraction squeezed and the mouth a fraction compressed; I've never known whether it's just the set of his expression or whether there's a continual peal of hellish laughter going on inside his head as he surveys the human condition.

  'Because Novosibirsk,' he said, 'has become a distinctly hot zone in the past few weeks. DI6 is here in force, working with local agents-in-place, and so is the CIA. All the government offices are under covert surveillance by plain-clothes peeps and as soon as I got here I shut down the only two safe-houses we had because they were no longer safe. Yours was established only two days ago, but as far as we know you can rely on it, at least for a while. As far as we know.'

  One of the rats screamed as they fought among themselves. The only light in here came from a square of cracked glass set high in the wall. When I'd got here the noon sky had been a dirty grey sheet, the wintry sun staining it with sulphur as the smoke drifted upwards from the docks and factories.

  'Should I move the woman?" I asked Ferris.

  He looked at me with that stillness of his that can be unnerving. 'I've got surveillance on the place, of course.'

  'What the hell's the good of surveillance, if the militia roll up in a bloody jeep and go in there?'

  He waited until the slight echoes died, giving me time to listen to them and realize that I'd just thrown him a lot of information. 'How valuable to you,' he asked gently, 'is Tanya Rusakova?'

  I said it slowly for him.' she is the key to Meridian.'

  His narrow head tilted. 'You mean that, of course?'

  I didn't answer. He knew I meant it; he was just absorbing the information.'Then we must try,' he said in a moment, 'to find her somewhere a bit safer. But I need to know things first. Debrief?'

  'All right,' I said, and got off the crate, moving around to keep the circulation going: it was freezing in this bloody place, in the whole of Novosibirsk, the whole of Siberia. I took it from Bucharest and he didn't interrupt because he would already have been called in on the debriefing of Turner, the director in the field for Longshot. Then I began filling him in on Zymyanin.

  'He was tracking two former Red Army generals.' I gave him their names.'They were with a former KGB general on the train. I'd say they had him shot, just as they had Hornby put away in Bucharest. They — '

  'Zymyanin didn't set the bomb?'

  'He couldn't have. He was out for information.'

  'The bomb was meant for the generals?'

  'Yes.'

  'Why didn't it kill them?'

  I told him. I told him why the generals' aides had set me up for the killing of Zymyanin: because I'd been seen talking to him.

  'That was enough?' Ferris asked me.

  'The whole cell's very professional, and their security's first class.'

  'They're in the Podpolia?'

  The underground. 'Zymyanin said so.'

  Ferris hadn't moved, was still perched on the edge of the broken crate. I don't think he needs to keep his circulation going in the cold; I think he's cold-blooded. He said, 'Who placed the bomb?'

  'I don't know. But I think there's a rogue agent in the field.'

  He looked up sharply. 'Oh?'

  'The bomb could have been set and timed when the train was in Moscow, or anywhere along the line where it stopped. But I've been sensing an agent on the loose.'

  Ferris didn't ask me what I meant: he knew what I meant. There's a very great deal of tension in the air when a mission's running and you're close to the opposition, and your senses pick up things they'd normally miss, the shadows and the whispers and the faintest of scents in the labyrinth, the echoes and the wraiths of things gone by, warning of things to come.

  'You sensed him on the train?' Ferris asked me.

  'No, after the crash. I saw a man taking a lot of trouble to get past the checkpoint they'd set up and into one of the transports, just as I was doing.'

  This bloody smell was getting on my nerves. If they'd killed that dog it must have been days ago. We support things like bad smells or too much noise with less tolerance, don't we, when the nerves are _ touchy, and mine were like that now because in any given mission the presence of a rogue agent in the field can burden our operations with the need to find out who he is and what he's doing, whether he's dangerous. It can sometimes crash the whole thing for us if he thinks we 're getting in his way and manages to put a bullet into the shadow executive's back. They're difficult to see, those people, difficult to catch, because they haven't got a cell running them — hence the name we give them, «rogue» — and they flit from one sector to another like a bloody bat in the dark.

  'So he must have been,' Ferris said, 'on the train. You just didn't sense him there.'

  He got off the crate and walked about — minced, almost, taking tiny steps, head down and hands behind his back, your archetypical professor on the lecture platform. It had got him worried, this rogue agent thing.

  I said yes, he must have been one of the passengers.' I think I saw him later, in the town. He — '

  'To recognize?' Ferris swung his head up.

  'No. You don't see much of anyone's face in this weather. I think I recognized his walk, the way he moved. 'I'd seen him on the way to the hotel when I'd been tracking Tanya, but not after that, even though I'd started watching out for him.

  In a moment Ferris looked at me and said: 'Paranoia?'

  It was a legitimate question: paranoia becomes part of your psychological makeup as you go through the missions: you see shadows, hear footsteps. 'Possibly,' I said. 'But the man avoiding the checkpoint out there was real.'

  'Could have been anyone.'

  'Yes.'

  'I think I've got a gap,' Ferris said, "in the debriefing. Why did you follow the Rusakova woman to that hotel?'

  'I lost track of the generals when they were choppered out, and I thought there was the slightest chance that she'd agreed to meet Velichko in Novosibirsk. She'd — '

  'An assignation?'

  'Yes. She'd been having
dinner with him, and it looked rather cosy.'

  'Not a bad shot,' Ferris said.

  'It didn't pay off — the minute I caught up with him he was dead.'

  'Then why is Tanya Rusakova still the key?'

  'Because she could put me in contact with her brother.'

  'He could know something about the other two generals?'

  'He's in the army, and might have his ear to the ground — '

  'Or might be persuaded — '

  'Yes.'

  'You think the generals are here to meet some top brass in the Russian army?'

  'Impossible.'

  Ferris didn't answer, took a turn and minced for a while with his back to me, didn't want to point out how very thin our chances were of picking up the track again. I went over to the big timber door and found a gap in the boards and stood there with my nose to it, breathing in the sooty smell of the city instead of the sickening stink in this place, freezing my sinuses until my eyes watered, couldn't win.

  A rat screamed and my scalp drew tight.

  'How long have we got?' I turned away from the door and looked at Ferris. 'Have we got any kind of a deadline?'

  He stood still, feet together, thinking it out. There was a whole mass of undigested information in his head, culled from the stuff that had been flooding Signals and Codes and Cyphers in London since Longshot had crashed in Bucharest and every Bureau sleeper and agent-in-place had been called on to send in whatever they thought was useful. Ferris wouldn't be giving it to me en masse: it would clog my perspective in the field, and the field is local, and the executive must concentrate totally on local events. What Ferris would give me, if he decided to give me anything at all, would be a minuscule condensation of the heap of raw intelligence that was burying the analysts in London as the uncut rolls of print came out of the fax machines by the mile.

  'Yes,' he said at last, 'we have a deadline. It's zero.'

  I listened to the echo of his voice. A zero deadline means just what it says: whatever we have to do will have to be done within every next minute. No leeway, no rest, and no respite.

  'The generals were Zymyanin's target,' Ferris said, 'for information. That's what he told you before he was killed. They arrived here yesterday. We don't know that they might not have already finished what they came here to do. They could be leaving Novosibirsk tomorrow morning.'

  'Or tonight.'

  'Or tonight. Or they might be on their way out of the city now.'

  I waited until I could get some kind of conviction in my voice. 'All right, we'll take it from there. I'll try to get Tanya to put me in touch with her brother.'

  Ferris watched me, didn't answer. We'd worked together half a dozen times and this is the man I always ask for as my director in the field but don't always get; he is the man those bastards at the Bureau offer me when they're trying to con me into a mission that nobody else will take on. I like working with Ferris because he knows how to get inside my head and I know how to get inside his, which is ironical because we both cherish privacy. But we can cut comers, he and I, dispense with the bullshit and the rigmarole and come down to the bone without touching the flesh, and I knew exactly what he was thinking as he stood there watching me in that reeking hell-hole: he was trying to decide whether to let me go on running with Meridian, because the chances of making any progress with it were critically slight and the chances of my getting picked up by the militia before he could fly me out of the city were infinitely strong. Even the safe-house he'd put me in was a hazard: you don't normally put surveillance on a place like that, there's no need.

  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?'