Quiller Meridian q-17

by Adam Hall

  'Sergeant in charge, open this fucking gate, come on!'

  The NCO heard the order this time and gave a shout and two of us went for the wooden bar and swung it back and got the gate open and I stood clear as a body of men came plunging through and split up and started climbing the fire-escapes against the wall of the building while I went through the gate and turned and held my revolver at the ready. Two men were bringing the civilian down, going against the stream; I suppose it was the quickest way out of die building with all that fuss going on inside, and when they'd got him as far as the gate I turned again and took up the rearguard in case he managed to break loose.

  We took him to one of the vehicles half a block away; I think it was the prisoner transport van that had come with us from Militia Headquarters earlier. There was less light here and I left the escort party and took up station at the end of an alley, facing the street to watch for anyone attempting to escape; but the focus of action was still down there at the apartment block and nobody was looking in my direction so I turned and walked into the alley, the boots a bit on the loose side even though I'd pulled the laces tight; it's important in this trade that our feet are comfortable because sometimes we need to run and run flat out and if we' re not fast enough we can lose the whole thing.

  That had been at 7:41 and it was now 8:20 and they wouldn't give it much more than an hour down there, Gromov and Belyak, and there was something I'd have to remember: there'd only been one way I could have got out of that place and as soon as they gave their minds to it they'd put Shokin, Viktor back on the A.P. bulletin board described as possibly wearing militia uniform.

  They were there again, the lights.

  The support man was driving cautiously and I liked that You could wipe out the front end of whatever you were driving on streets like this if you didn't watch it, clouds of steam and rusty water pouring onto the ice and the timing-gear pushed through the cylinder block, and in these boots I didn't feel like walking.

  And that was the second time.

  I edged the throttle down a fraction to pull up on the Trabant in front of me and watched the mirror. It was the second time the car behind had gone through a red light, oh quite possibly, yes, with so little traffic on the streets after the storm there wasn't much attention being paid to the lights, just slow down a bit and take a good look and off you go again if there are no police around; on the other hand it's the first intimation you get when a tracker comes up on your tail: he can't afford to stay too close and go through the intersections I with you but he can't afford to lose ground to a red light and watch you sail away.

  All I could see from the profile of the vehicle behind me was that it was a private car, not a van or a truck or anything with emergency lights on the roof, unlit or otherwise.

  But you said you weren't worried about lights in the mirror.

  I wasn't.

  You gave us all that bullshit about watching mirrors with the ritualistic devotion of a priest, just because you thought it sounded good, and now -

  Bloody well shuddup.

  There was no way that anyone could have tracked us last night from the Velichko killing-site to the hospital without my knowing, but I used the throttle again and fought the ruts and pulled alongside the Trabant and signalled the driver to stop. His offside wing caught the side of my door as he slewed on the snow but it wasn't more than a bump, and then we were stationary side by side and our windows were down and we started talking.

  'I've got some lights in the mirror,' I told him.

  They were still there in the distance, but the car had stopped.

  The support man was watching me, a stubbly face with unsurprisable eyes under a black leather ski-cap. 'Was he there before I intercepted?'

  'He could have been.' there'd been more traffic, earlier.

  'He's not mine,' the support man said. 'I got there clean.' there was a note of censure in the tone, as if he'd just noticed I hadn't washed.

  'Where's the safe-house?' I asked him.

  'You peeling off?'

  'I might have to.'

  Our engines idled, echoing from the wall alongside.

  'Two kilometres east of here, and you're on the river. It's the wreck of a coaster, single mast with four deck hatches and the starboard bow stove in, the M. V. Natasha, but you can't make out the name very well. She's on the west bank, three berths down — that's south — from No. 7 Granary, Novosibirsk, black clapperboard with the Russian flag painted over the main doors, recently done.'

  He waited, watching me, his eyes in the shadow of his cap.

  'Vessels on either side of the wreck?'

  'Another coaster, north, and a dredger with a list on it. Place is a graveyard.'

  The lights were still in the mirror.

  'All right. Stay where you are, and if I'm wrong I'll be back and we can keep going. Give me half an hour.'

  'You need help?'

  'No.'

  It had better be done solo.

  I knew what had happened, now, and the chill of the night air was creeping through the skin and reaching the nerves, because it might not just be a case of throwing off the tracker and resuming operations without him. Meridian had been compromised, and even Ferris could be in hazard. It was perfectly true that no one could have tracked us through this city last night, that we'd been absolutely clean when Roach had picked us up at the hospital. But the lights back there were still in the mirror, and now I knew why.

  There must have been surveillance on the Skoda when I'd picked it up twenty minutes ago, and they'd started tracking me, were behind me now. But they couldn't have found it there by chance on that patch of waste ground in a city this size: they'd been surveilling this car since I'd brought it away from the safe-house, and before then; they'd been surveilling it when it had been standing outside the apartment block after Roach had left it there for me to use, and before then: they'd tracked Roach to the rendezvous at the hospital, must have got onto him when he'd started out to meet us there. The thread went back, and back, as far as the unthinkable.

  I looked across at the support man.

  'Change that,' I called to him above the drumming of the engines. 'Don't wait for me. Get away from here and watch your tail. 'He'd caught my tone, lifted his head an inch like an animal scenting. 'Signal the DIF as soon as you can,' I told him. 'Make sure the line's not tapped. Tell him I think your whole support base could have been blown, and tell him to look after Roach, if it's not too late.'

  Chapter 18: BLOOD

  Lights flashing.

  It looked like a militia patrol crossing the intersection behind us and coming this way, so I got into reverse and tucked in behind the support man's Trabant. The coloured lights began filling the mirror.

  It should be noted that the wanted man is possibly wearing a militia uniform at this time.

  I'd taken the fur hat off as soon as I'd got into the Skoda, but if a patrol took an interest in me and looked down through the window he'd see the uniform.

  But they couldn't be on to me yet.

  Oh yes they could. They've had quite enough time to -

  Shuddup and sweat it out, you snivelling little bastard.

  Flashing lights, filling the mirror and reflecting in the windows of die factory and the bus garage opposite, colouring the night.

  Then it was passing us and I heard banging and a voice raised, a muffled shouting, a drunk, perhaps, trying to break out of the car, giving the boys a hard time.

  The support man waited until it was out of sight and then started up and wagged his tail a bit over the snow and found traction and took it away, slewing into a side street and vanishing. The car behind me hadn't moved, was still standing a hundred yards away, its lights in the mirror.

  I reached across and put the window up on the passenger's side and got into gear and left the back end to dig for traction with the chains and then got a grip and moved off, going three blocks before I started playing with the gears and looking for patches of sand and using
them for acceleration while the headlights fanned from side to side across walls and doorways and parked and stranded trucks, cars and carts and the characteristic bric-a-brac of the dockland environment, while the tracker fell behind for a minute or two before he saw I was onto him. His own lights began swinging across and across the mirror as he went into a series of slides and then got a grip and lost it and found it again and started to close up a little.

  I chose a side street where the snow had piled into a drift against the wall of a warehouse and used it to get me through the ninety-degree arc, letting the rear end hit the snow and kick the Skoda straight again as I found traction in patches and put fifty yards behind me before the tracker's lights came flooding into the narrow street and threw my shadow ahead of me against the snow.

  It happens. It happens sometimes: the director in the field sets up a model deployment of his shadow executive and his support group and his contacts and couriers and whatever he needs for a given mission, spinning his small and delicate network of resources and testing it out for strength and making changes where potential danger threatens, sitting back in his inner sanctum plugged in to his communications system with its portable scrambler and its bug monitor and taking signals from the shadow out mere and relaying them through the mast at Cheltenham to the signals board in Whitehall, the whole thing running like silk through a loom, and then one man and one man alone can suddenly send the web shaking because he's made a mistake, talked to the wrong people, exposed a password, missed the half-seen face in a doorway or the figure humped at the wheel of a parked car or the broken hair across a drawer in the hotel room, and the network becomes an alarm system and all we can do is shut down signals to prevent interception and get out of the safe-house before it's blown, run for cover, go to ground, hole up somewhere as the smell of the smoke starts drifting through the field where the fuses have blown and someone reaches for the chalk in the signals room in London and writes it up on the board: Mission compromised, clear all channels and stand by.

  It was happening now.

  The shadow of the Skoda was flitting across the snow and the buildings ahead of me like a bat out of a nightmare as both vehicles swung and corrected and swung again over the treacherous surface. There wasn't any question of pushing the speed to more than thirty or forty kph through streets like this with dead traffic all over the place, parked or abandoned or stuck in a drift; there was only a question of the leading car's ability to outstrip the one behind, and it was already becoming clear that whatever the tracker was driving it was more potent under the bonnet than the Skoda, possibly a Merc or a Porsche or a Mazda with tight suspension and a pinpoint steering system. All I could hope to do was let him close in and then try to fox him with tricks.

  I kept seeing Roach, a short man with bright blue eyes and a round pink face, his fingers playing with each other as he transferred nervous tension, his nails bitten to pieces — I'd wondered about him when he'd shown us into the safe-house, but Ferris had told me he was totally reliable and had worked with him before. He wasn't a mole, Roach. He wasn't a changeling. We don't have any people like that, in the normal way of things, because the Bureau is conceivably the most elite intelligence organization in the western hemisphere, officially non-existent and responsible directly to the Prime Minister of the UK, and there are as many traitors in our ranks as there are in the SAS, whose number is reputedly sub-zero.

  I didn't think Roach was a traitor. I thought he'd made a mistake. But in practical terms it didn't make a lot of difference: Meridian was in hazard.

  Don't think about Roach. Think about survival.

  The side street opened onto a major road and I touched the brakes, trying to get as much deceleration out of the drums as possible before they locked, but the speed wasn't coming down all that much and I'd have to do better than this because a truck was passing the end of the street and there'd be other traffic on the move and I didn't want to splash this thing all over the side of a heavy-duty haulage rig or anything else, for that matter, so I put the nearside front wheel into the deeper snow along the kerb and felt the drag and touched the brakes again but the surface was more or less pack-ice and we span full-circle and fetched up with the back end clouting a sand bin. That was all right because it brought the speedwell down and the major road was fifty yards ahead and it didn't look as if I still had enough momentum going to hit anything out there, but I was losing ground in terms of getting clear of that bastard and if I led him into the major road he'd overhaul me without any trouble because his car was out of an elite sports stable of some kind and the Skoda was made for taking the kids to school in comfort and running Aunt Gertrude home, so I did the only thing that was available to me and sighted him in the mirror and swung the wheel and bounced the Skoda against a drift and swung through a hundred and eighty degrees and gunned up and got smoke out of the rear tyres as they bit through the ice and reached solid tarmacadam and pushed the car back the way we'd been coming.

  Part of the whole thing was going to depend on luck but I found enough steering to take the Skoda through the gap between the other vehicle and the sand bin — there was a lot of blinding light as we closed up and I think I heard a shout, he hadn't been expecting this and I suppose it worried him. We missed a total head-on thing but the sand bin was solid and the Skoda ricocheted to a certain extent and tore a door away from the other car and smashed quite I a lot of glass and I felt the sudden drag of deceleration and the Skoda [span half round and I saw the other car swinging much too wide and I much too fast, and one of the wheels came spinning past me as his front stub-axle sheared and he hit the wall of a building and bounced back and then went into a slow roll with the engine screaming and the bright red of a flame popping from inside the engine compartment as a fuel line was torn apart and a spark from the ignition found it.

  The engine went on screaming until the fuel in the injectors gave out and then there was silence of a kind and when I hit my door open it raised an echo in the narrow confines of the street. He was still inside, the tracker, sitting there like a crash-test dummy with blood coming bright from a head wound, seeping across his face. Black smoke was rolling from underneath the car as spilled engine-oil took fire and I went for his seat-belt but it had snapped at the buckle so that was what the head wound was all about. I dragged him out of the car and across the snow and pushed him into the front of the Skoda on the passenger's side and got in and span the rear wheels to get the chains through the snow and finally got moving and started looking for cover as we drove, any sort of cover where I could pull up and talk to this man, I wanted information.

  'Can you hear me?'

  He didn't answer, just keeled over a bit, that was all, so that I had to push him upright again. I had time now to realize that his head was a mess and by this time most of his face was covered in blood. Lights washed across the buildings from behind but there'd be no traffic coming this way: the burning car was on its side and blocking the street.

  'Can you hear me?'

  Nothing, only the metallic smell of his blood filling the car.

  The warehouse we'd passed coming the other way had a wide entrance and I pulled in there, cutting the engine and feeling for the carotid artery in the man's neck, finding it and sensing, shifting my fingers and trying again, finding no pulse-beat, trying again, watching his face, seeing how pale it was now between the streaks of blood, moving my hand inside his coat and sensing again over the heart, shifting and sensing and finding nothing, nothing at all There was mostly sand on the ground where they'd cleared the entrance way and I got him out as gently as I could and laid him on his back and held one hand behind his neck to tilt the head and put my mouth over his and began breathing for him, his blood sticky on my face, sticky and cold now, dear Jesus I wanted information out of this man.

  Lights again and a pick-up truck rolled past the warehouse, no chains, the tyres crunching across the ruts as the driver slowed, seeing the wreckage ahead of him along the street.

  Bre
athe one… two… three…

  Heel of the hand on the chest.

  Someone was running down the street, boots clumping across the snow, two people, two youths, their voices excited, breathe one… two… three… and press on the ribcage… the sound of an engine, the pick-up truck reversing, couldn't get through, his mouth cold against mine, the man's mouth, two… three… Come back, you bastard, I want to talk to you… press on the chest, his blood glutinous now and pulling at my mouth as it congealed, I want information, two… three… as the pick-up truck went crawling past the entrance in reverse, the smell of its exhaust gas on the air, don't go yet, you bastard, I want to talk to you… the back of his neck cold now under my hand, his eyes open, a pair of black buttoned boots behind his head, standing there on the snow and I looked up at the old woman, dumpy in her shawls, her eyes staring down at us, at our faces, at the blood.

  'Babushka,' I said, 'go and phone, get an ambulance, babushka!'

  The black boots turned quickly, scattering snow.

  Press on the ribcage and breathe… two… three, but I believed now that I was wasting my time. I would have liked to leave him there but they might have some basic resuscitation gear on the ambulance so I kept going, using deeper breaths, deeper and slower as he watched me, two… three… as he watched me perhaps from a little distance, puzzled by my efforts and already wishing not to be pulled back to it all by this busy stranger, press on the ribcage until at last I heard the ambulance klaxon echoing between the buildings and felt for his wallet and found it and straightened up, lowering his head gently and going down on my hands and knees like a dog at a water hole, scooping up snow to wash the blood off my face and rinse the rich salt taste out of my mouth.