Quiller Meridian q-17

by Adam Hall

  A drunk was in there somewhere and a girl was squealing, and the sound pierced the nerves like chalk on a blackboard.

  'How do you expect me to do that?' the woman asked me.

  'Say it's your birthday. Come on, you're smarter than I am.'

  'I would lose my licence,' she said.

  'You haven't got a licence. Not for the whips and chains.'

  She offered me vodka.

  'I haven't got long,' I said. 'One thousand, take it or leave it.' I got up to go.

  She watched me, still as a toad. 'Are you on the run?'

  'No.'

  'You'll have to tell me more about yourself.'

  'There's nothing to know. One thousand, cash.'

  'Fifteen hundred. I'll do it for that.'

  'A thousand's all I have.'

  I got as far as the door.

  'And suppose I get into trouble with this?' she asked me.

  'If you don't know how to keep out of trouble, Marina, nobody does.'

  'Let me see the cash.'

  She counted it. 'All right.' Her face began creasing, and a wheeze started coming out of her that almost sounded like laughter.' I would have done it for half,' she said, and tears glistened in the folds of flesh.

  'I know,' I said, 'but the other five is to make sure you don't cross me.' I went close to her and smelled her foul body smell as I looked into the little black slits of her eyes. 'If you cross me, you fat stinking bitch, I'll see that you croak, they'll find you sitting in this chair like a stuck pig with your throat cut and your blood running under that door and into the street for the dogs to drink.'

  I told Mikhail to drive me back to within two city blocks of the safe-house and check for a usable phone booth on the way.

  Ferris answered at once.

  'I've got things set up,' I told him.

  There was a short silence. He hadn't known, before the phone had rung, that I wasn't already in a red sector at Militia Headquarters and desperate for help.

  'I haven't told London,' he said.

  He meant he hadn't told London I was going to try getting Tanya Rusakova out of Militia Headquarters. Control would have wanted to talk to me direct on the phone and I didn't have time for that; he would have said no in any case, would have gone through the roof and ordered Ferris to call me in, would have created a strictly monumental fuss, and I'd started moving too fast now for London to block my run; of course Ferris hadn't told them, he knew better than that, he was a seasoned director in the field, and quite possibly the only DIF who was in fact capable of running this particular shadow executive through a mission without calling on London for instructions, because this particular shadow executive is difficult to control — as Ferris himself has said — isn't amenable to discipline, so forth, is not your most popular ferret in the Bureau, and that's a bloody shame.

  I am a little nervous, my good friend, as perhaps you note.

  We are going in very soon now.

  It hadn't surprised me when Ferris had said I'd have his full support. He'd had no choice. He's run me before, and through some extremely sticky operations — Mandarin, Northlight — and he's learned to read what it says on the bottom line: if I've decided to take a mission into a new direction with some really significant risks attached I 'm not going to back off if the director gets cold feet, I'm going to do it anyway and if I can't do it with his support I'll do it solo. Ferris understands that.

  But I felt for him. He wasn't going to get any sleep tonight, and when I signalled him again he would pick up before the second ring.

  'What's the score?' he asked me now. His tone was particularly cool, and I heard the control in it.

  'I've made contact with Rusakov,' I told him, 'and we've got a tentative rendezvous. There's no time to go into details. Now here it is — I need two support men and two cars. The first one is to pick up Tanya when she leaves Militia Headquarters. The second one is to do a relay.' To take Tanya over from the first one and leave a cold trail.

  'Timing?' Ferris asked me.

  'I'll come to that. 'I'd have to work it out; it could be two hours from now, three hours, four, midnight, possibly, even as late as that, it'd depend how things went. 'You should deploy the first car just off the square in front of Militia Headquarters, out of sight and in a street with a clear run.' I went over the details with him, told him the car should be parked facing away from the square, told him how I wanted the relay set up, though it wasn't really necessary to spell it out: a relay is a relay and it's designed to do one thing — to throw off pursuit.

  'What else?' Ferris asked me.

  'That's all. We just need to get Tanya clear and into your safe keeping.'

  'Will you be going with her?'

  'No. I'll be making my own way out.'

  In a moment, 'When do I send in the support?'

  I gave it some thought. 'Make it an hour from now. No later than that.'

  'Five forty-one.'

  I checked my watch.

  'Yes. I'm synchronized.'

  Tentatively Ferris said, 'You know, don't you, that if you get stuck in Militia Headquarters there'll be absolutely nothing I can do.'

  I translated that in my mind: was I prepared to push the mission right to the edge at this stage and risk sending it over? Because the director in the field for Meridian would be put through a rigorous debriefing when he got back to London, and Control would want straight answers. Yes, I warned the executive that there'd be nothing I could do for him if he placed the mission in final hazard.

  'The thing is,' I told Ferris,' there are no options. We're working with a zero deadline and we can't slow up, we've just got to go for it'

  The executive felt there was no choice but to proceed with the mission, despite the risks.

  'I'm sure you'll do well,' Ferris said, and I didn't like the polite formality: it showed nerves.

  I left it. 'Final thing,' I said, 'I'm going to call the peep off the safe-house. It's going to get blown in any case, sometime before midnight.'

  He took it cold, didn't ask why. 'But you still need a new one.'

  'Yes. With spare clothes, provisions, the usual thing.'

  'I've been working on it.'

  "Then it's over and out,' I told him and put the phone back onto the hook.

  In the crown of the night sky the stars were huge, fading as they sank into the smog that clouded the city. The snow was brittle under my boots as I finished circling the block and closed in on the safe-house.

  'You're free to go,' I told the man in the doorway. 'Report to the DIF by phone.'

  He was huddled into his coat, his eyes peering from above the scarf he'd wrapped round his head. 'No one relieving?'

  'No. Go and get some grog.'

  He left a patch of bare wet concrete in the doorway where he'd cleared the snow with his heels. I walked on and checked the windows of the building and then went in.

  The bedclothes were still rumpled and Tanya's bag was gone, but she'd left the toilet things in the bathroom and a message on the mirror scrawled with a lipstick.

  Thank you. Forgive me. Tanya.

  I wiped it off with some toilet paper and flushed it and looked around; there were no other signs that a woman had been here.

  The shower head in the bathroom was dripping, rhythmic as the ticking of a clock.

  It was time to go.

  You 're mad, you know that? You've gone mad.

  Shuddup.

  You 'll be walking straight into a trap.

  Oh for Christ's sake shuddup and leave me alone.

  I took a last look round and left the curtains almost closed and the light on and the door unlocked and went down the stairs and into the street and across to the Skoda and started it up, letting the engine warm while I scraped away the ice that had formed on the windscreen. Then I drove three miles east towards the suburbs and left the car on some waste ground and locked it and had to walk nearly five blocks before I saw a militia patrol car and stopped it and told the driver I was V
iktor Shokin, the man they were looking for.

  Chapter 15: VIOLETS

  'You are giving yourself up?'

  'No.'

  The colonel looked at me, his head going down a degree and his eyes remaining on my own. The light wasn't too bad in here; this wasn't an interrogation room, just a holding cell by the look of it, with a small barred window and a steel door with a look-through panel in it. The door wasn't closed; there was still quite a bit of bustle going on out there, militia tramping about, phones ringing; I heard my cover name several times: Viktor Shokin was quite a catch.

  'Then why are you here?' the colonel asked me.

  He had an intelligent face, unsurprisingly in terms of his rank, and didn't seem to think I was playing the fool when I'd told him I wasn't giving myself up. If he'd thought I was playing the fool he would have given immediate orders to have me beaten into a different frame of mind.

  'You've got a woman here,' I told him, 'Tanya Rusakova. Is that correct?'

  He went on watching me while he thought it over. He was a big man, bigger still in his greatcoat, and had the kind of eyes that would be able to watch a war-trained Doberman tearing a fugitive to pieces, for instance, without showing anything, except possibly a hint of amusement.

  'Yes,' he said at last. "That is correct'

  'I want her released, Colonel.'

  I left it at that for the moment. I wanted to feed information into him slowly, so that I could catch and weigh his reactions, because this was the man who was going to decide, at some hour of this long and perilous night, whether he was going to let me walk out of here or hand me over to Homicide Investigation and start the machinery of justice rolling over me.

  Someone in the passage outside was asking where Colonel Belyak was, and in a moment a junior officer was standing in the doorway, glancing at me and away again.

  'Telephone, Colonel. In your office.'

  'Who is it?'

  'OIC Catering, sir.'

  'Take a message. Are you monitoring my telephones?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Then go on taking messages and don't come to me with anything unless it sounds urgent. Are those not the orders passed on to you?'

  'Yes, sir. I'm — '

  'Catering is not urgent, you clod. Get out.'

  Everyone brought themselves an inch straighter — the junior officer and the two guards at the door and the sergeant who stood behind and to the left of Colonel Belyak. The sergeant was a short square man with a pock-marked corpse-coloured face, its eyes lost in hollows, its nose broken and its jaw skewed. He hadn't spoken since I'd been brought in here ten minutes ago. He watched Colonel Belyak when he asked me questions, and watched me when I answered them. He would be the one, this sergeant, who would be ordered to beat me up if I looked like playing the fool, or refused to give the information the Colonel was looking for, or in any way tried bitching him about.

  'So you want the woman released.' Belyak watched me steadily with the polished black stones in his face.

  'Yes.'

  'Why?'

  'Because she's innocent of any wrongdoing. She was set up.'

  'Explain that for me.'

  'She was set up as bait in the assassination of General Gennadi Velichko.'

  He brought his head down a degree and left his eyes on mine, a mannerism I was beginning to understand. I'd caught his attention.

  'Continue,' he said. His voice had the tonelessness of a surgeon's asking for another scalpel.

  I must have moved on the chair, because it creaked. It was a straight-backed kitchen chair and I'd noticed stains on it when the Colonel had told me to sit down. I've seen chairs like this one before, stained and gone in the joints; professional interrogators all over the world use the same tricks, and one of them is to sit the detainee down so that he has to look up at the other people, which makes him nervous, and so that he's conveniently positioned if they decide to make him still more nervous by smashing him backwards onto the floor, chair and all. They use the back of their fist or their boot or whatever they choose, and although I know how to stop that kind of thing right in its tracks I never do, unless there's a chance of turning the odds and getting clear.

  Tonight there was no question of that: I'd come here of my own free will.

  'I'm not going to tell you very much at this stage, Colonel Belyak. First the woman has to be released. We shall need Chief Investigator Gromov here, won't we, for his authority.'

  'He is on his way,' the Colonel said 'How long will it take him to get here?'

  'Why do you ask?'

  'Because we've got to hurry.'

  Colonel Belyak lifted his head slightly, still watching me; I'd seen him do that before when I'd told him something he didn't intend to take.

  'We have all night, Mr Shokin.' He used Gospodin, as Chief Inspector Gromov had done on the train when he'd questioned me; its closest equivalent in the West was 'Mr'. Tovarishch was out now in Russia, a quaint Leninist trapping. 'We have as long as I decide we shall have,' the Colonel said.

  He was standing with his feet apart, the polish on his jackboots glinting in the light from the bare electric bulb overhead, his shadow huge against the wall. His hands were behind him, and there was nothing in them; they'd been empty when he'd come in here. There was nothing in the sergeant's hands either; he was a man who liked the feel of bone on flesh when he went to work, a former pugilist with the gloves off now and real toys to play with.

  'I want you to realize,' I told the Colonel,' that you're going to be very pleased indeed with the information I shall be giving you eventually, once Gospozha Rusakova has been released. I'm not setting any kind of deadline, you see; it's just a fact of life: we can't afford to waste any time.'

  Not in fact true. Certainly I was setting a deadline, because I had to keep up the pressure. If I gave these people all the time they wanted they'd simply put me through intensive interrogation and I'd come out days later with not much more than pulp where the flesh had been, with a torn urethra and clouded conjunctivae and the kidneys contused and pouring blood into the urine and my sight gone and my brain out of synch and Meridian blown to hell.

  There was also the risk of Tanya Rusakova's brother losing patience. I'm no good at waiting, doing nothing, he'd said on the telephone. If I'm not there — at the rendezvous — it will mean I changed my mind.

  He could wreck everything I was trying to do.

  'If there were any deadlines to be set,' Colonel Belyak was saying,' I would set them myself.'

  'Of course.'

  He was touchy and I'd have to watch it. I had begun paying out a thread so fine that one wrong word could break it.

  'Tell me what you know,' the Colonel said, 'about the assassination of General Velichko.'

  There was the sound of snow-chains locking across concrete outside the building and the slamming of doors, so I took a chance and left the question unanswered, turning my head as the tramping of boots loudened and voices began echoing along the passage and Chief Investigator Gromov came in, shouldering his way between the guards and nodding briefly to the Colonel and staring down at me with his hands dug into the pockets of his coat.

  'So we have you.'

  Cold air was still coming in from the passage, laced with exhaust gas.

  'Not quite that,' I said.

  'What, then?'

  I missed the patience in his caramel-brown eyes that I'd seen on the Rossiya. He'd had all the time he needed, then, but now he was more energized: he'd thrown a net across the city of Novosibirsk and here suddenly was the minnow, squirming, and he wanted facts and he wanted them fast.

  'I decided to come here of my own free will,' I told him, 'to obtain the immediate release of Tanya Rusakova. She did nothing wrong, intentionally, and I want her out of here.' I spoke carefully, articulating; it wasn't a time for misunderstandings. 'I will then deliver into your hands — if it's not too late — the man who shot Zymyanin on board the Rossiya the night before last, who also set a bomb in one o
f the compartments with the intention of killing General Velichko, General Chudin and General Kovalenko, and — having failed — shot General Velichko to death last night in the street'

  The cell was very quiet. There were telephones ringing in the offices along the passage, and boots sounded constantly over the bare boards.

  'Shut that door,' Colonel Belyak told one of the militiamen, 'and stay on guard outside.' He swung his head to look at Gromov, wanting to tap into his thinking, but Gromov had his eyes on me.

  'In the case of Zymyanin,' he said, 'you had witnesses against you on the train.'

  'They were lying. But please remember that I just told you I can deliver the actual perpetrator if there is time.' I gave it a beat. 'When I last talked to him — ' I checked my watch — ' forty-two minutes ago, he was making plans to set another bomb.'

  Colonel Belyak was first. 'Where?'

  'I can't tell you. He thinks he knows where the other two generals are, and he still means to kill them.'

  'Do you know where they are?' Gromov asked quickly.

  'No. I asked him but he refused to tell me.'

  Belyak: 'Who is this man?'

  I looked at my watch again. 'With respect, gentlemen, you will have to use your heads. I can't give you this man if we stay here talking. Nor can you hope to stop another tragedy like the one on the Rossiya, with further loss of innocent lives. The responsibility is yours.'

  Silence came in again. It was warm in here with so many bodies, and the sweat was beginning to run on me. The thread was still intact, but I'd have to go on playing it out in the hope of drawing them with me, and there'd be a lot of strain.

  'Why should we release this woman?' the Colonel asked.

  'Because she's done nothing. She — '

  'That's beside the point. Why do you want her released?'

  'She's been traumatized by the whole thing and — '

  'The "whole thing"?'

  'Velichko's death.' He was right: I'd stopped choosing my words and we couldn't afford misunderstandings. 'You may consider it beside the point that you're holding an innocent person here and putting her through further suffering but I do not. The release of Tanya Rusakova is my only condition, but if you don't meet it I won't deliver the agent into your hands. But of course he could have left his base by now.'