Quiller Meridian q-17

by Adam Hall

  Then their voices began coming out of silence, and I moved my head, trying to lift it off the stair, nerve-light flashing, an awareness of time passing, the pain of a splinter driven into my hand when I'd slumped, losing focus again.

  '… And that together, as one ideologically homogeneous federation, we would claim no less than one fifth of the earth's total territory and comprise no less than one fourth of its population, a potential work force of one thousand three hundred million people dedicated to the socialist cause…"

  I got onto my feet, the flat of my hands against the wall, stood there for a minute or two, feeling my way back to full consciousness before I began climbing again.

  '… In the future. On the one hand the Russians will enjoy free and unencumbered access to the whole of the eastern seaboard of China from Korea to Vietnam, bringing Hong Kong and the Philippines within closer reach, while on the other hand the Chinese will enjoy direct access to the borders of Western Europe — including Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, once the independent states and the Balkans have been brought into the protection of the Federation. The opening up of new channels for international trade and the physical presence of the forces of the Federation in areas at present under the control of the West will be on a scale of unprecedented global significance…'

  I reached the higher gallery, sighting along it through half its circle as the voices echoed from the dome of the rotunda. I still couldn't concentrate on this preamble of theirs but it occurred to m: that this wasn't normally the language of military men, however high their ranking: they were delivering this ground-breaking address of aims and intentions with a phraseology sufficiently rounded and structured to bear repetition through those generations of children and grandchildren, to be handed down through history with the weight and solemnity of the Magna Carta and the American constitution.

  Easy to see it as an expression of mass megalomania, but in the still recent affairs of man the scions of a dozen nations had amicably established the most powerful union of states on earth. Nothing in the flux and turmoil of human enterprise could ever be termed inconceivable.

  Not mine, thank God, to ponder. This was for London, if I could manage to get it through, for the presidents and their ambassadors and their ministers of defence.

  If I could get it through.

  I saw nothing here on the half-circle of the gallery I could observe, and when I moved, with infinite caution, to the point where I could see the whole of it, there was still nothing that I could make out as a face and shoulders, of a sloped barrel, nothing.

  I hadn't expected him to be here. I'd expected him to be on the lower gallery, and when I'd checked that one I'd had to check this, in case I'd been wrong. But he was nowhere.

  Nowhere in the entire building, perhaps.

  The nerves caught this thought in a closed loop, reacting even before I'd had enough time to assess the conclusion — the pulse was accelerating and the blood leaving the surface as the survival mechanism tripped in."

  Given the possibility that it had been Talyzin who had bombed the Rossiya, I might expect him to go for the two generals surviving Velichko in the same way and by the same method. He'd known where they were going when they left the camp: they were coming here. He'd been here before, then, and if that were the case then he wouldn't be here now, inside the building, he'd be somewhere outside, wouldn't he, concealed in the SAAB, waiting with his hand on the remote control as the generals and their aides and interpreters sat together in the well of the rotunda around the ornate redwood desk with the gold scrollwork at the comers.

  Talyzin is a bomber.

  That is his way.

  Everything slowing down.

  He is waiting out there now. With a remote control in his hand A detonator.

  General Kovalenko is sitting at the ornate redwood desk, turning a sheet of paper. I can see him through the bars of the balustrade What will I see first, floating upwards into the great dome of the rotunda? His head?

  No. Their heads. All their heads, as the initial percussion at the core of the charge expands, billowing outwards over the milliseconds, its force thrusting its way hugely into its immediate environs finding the panels of the redwood drawer and sending their million splinters into the air an instant before they are consumed in the white and orange fire, finding the live bodies of the men gathered there and blowing them into nothing more substantial than a fountaining of blood, a flowering of crimson tissue and cartilage and skin, the whiteness of bared bones.

  A spark crackles in the hearth below and deafens me, sending a shock-wave through the nerves.

  And then the whole building, the galleries and the walls and the dome, blowing outwards like a drum, bellowing, radiant with apocalyptic fire.

  And the body of this hapless ferret, too, blown out of all proportion, joke.

  '… Later — ' and his voice woke me from nightmare — 'we shall go into the details for you, gentlemen — ' the Chinese interpreter rendering the last word as "honourable comrades" — 'and specify the target cities where we shall incite simultaneous rebellion by the populace. We shall present to you the blueprint, if you will, of our entire operation, in order that you shall understand that for our par we are committed to an undertaking of heroic and historic proportions, comparable with the equally heroic and historic decision of the Chinese military authority not only to bury past disagreements but to submit their present format of socialistic ideology to the radical changes necessary to meld it with that of our own, thus ensuring the unification of purpose essential to the creation of a federal world power of greater strength, of greater resolve and of greater military capacity than has ever been seen before.'

  The echoes of their voices died within the hollows of the dome.

  But then, honourable comrades, you are not aware, are you, that if such a grandiose enterprise should come to pass, you will not be there to pluck its fruits.

  Tell them then — go down there and push the armed guards back as they close in on you, address the honourable comrades: There's a bomb in that desk there and if you don't get out of this place as fast as you can run you 'll go through the bloody roof.

  Or words approximately to that effect but they wouldn't believe me because the generals' aides would recognize me as the man on the train they'd framed for the killing of Zymyanin and they'd have me under armed escort in five seconds fiat — All right then, look in the bloody desk, see for yourself — but that might not do anything useful either because there could be nothing there, the whole idea could be a product of my imagination.

  But you don't think it is —

  I can make a mistake, you know, like anyone -

  We've got to get out of here before it goes off, we —

  Oh for Christ's sake shuddup, the sweat crawling on me because yes, I thought it was true, I thought there was a bomb down there and I hadn't got a great deal of time to think, say two seconds, you name it, three, not long enough, so go down those stairs and out through the boiler room and work your way round that bloody SAAB 540 and get him before he can press the tit, wouldn't be terribly easy, would it, getting past the military guards out there, they were surrounding the whole place, so I can't get out of the building and I can't warn those people down there and I can't stay here and wait for the time to run out to the big ker-boom, so what action can I take?

  Survive.

  Go down the stairs and through the boiler room and tell those gallant soldiers out there that they can take me in charge, blow Meridian off the signals board and survive, but tell one of them they really ought to pop in there and tell the grand architects of the new world order that if they don't watch it they'll go through that bloody roof.

  I started moving towards the staircase, might be time, there might be time, the scalp tight and a lightness in the chest, everything still slowing down, and then I saw him.

  Chapter 24: CURTAIN-CALL

  He was in shadow, on the gallery below.

  I'd expected him to be
there but had still missed him, earlier, perhaps because of the angle of view. I was watching him between two uprights of the balustrade.

  Sound of vehicles outside.

  He was sitting at one of the little tables near some bookshelves, watching the delegates below. Not waiting, then, in the SAAB. Waiting in here.

  The vehicles were nearing the building, snow-chains ringing, voices, orders shouted, the slamming of doors.

  We have just learned that Marshal Trushin should be arriving very soon — his plane was delayed by bad weather.

  The thudding of boots on the marble outside, a door banging open.

  I used the background noise to move quite fast along the gallery until I was immediately above Talyzin, the bomber. There was light on my face but no one was looking upwards; they were watching Marshal Trushin and his aides making their entrance.

  He was sitting at his ease, Talyzin, and on the little table beside him was the detonator.

  The time gap narrowed with a slam and I knew precisely when he would reach out and press the button. It would be when Marshal Trushin sat down with the others. But it couldn't be a suicide run — there was no need for that. Talyzin could go outside if he wanted to the way he'd come, and make a run through the guards and press that thing before they could take him. They wouldn't know what he'd got in his hand; they'd go for him because he was running, that was all; but he'd use the remote and they'd be too busy watching the building go up to feel like running after him.

  But he wasn't going to do that. He was comfortable here. The electric shock treatment and the sensory deprivation chambers and the other tricks they'd used on him inside the psychiatric hospital had left him just a teeny bit skewed in his skull, still cunning enough but skewed, and now that he'd got all these old friends of his together he was ready to give them the message: they shouldn't have done what they did to him, it wasn't fair.

  And he wanted to see it happen.

  Boots banging again down there, snow coming away from their and glistening on the parquet floor, chairs scraping back and people getting up.

  'Marshal Trushin, let me present Marshal Jia Chongwu of the Chinese Red Army…'

  He wanted to be there when it happened. He wanted to watch us all for those few milliseconds as the big ornate desk blew apart one the men around it began jerking backwards in a reflex action before the edge of the blast wave reached them and their uniforms began wrinkling, he wanted to watch everything he could before he could see no more.

  And since time has a way of slowing down when our attention is locked in with reality he might be given quite a show, two or three minutes, even, as each minuscule stage of the explosion followed the last, an hour, even, long enough to start a mini-series.

  '… Major-general Yang Zhen…'

  Salutes, bows, handshakes, while Talyzin watched them from above, a puppet master with their last curtain-call in his hands.

  He hadn't moved the detonator, or reached for it yet. He would wait for them to sit down. He wanted them to be comfortable too.

  '… Lieutenant-general Zou Xinxiong…'

  The voice of General Kovalenko drifted upwards into the great dome of the rotunda, left echoes rippling.

  '… Colonel Rui Zhong… Colonel Wang Yongchang…'

  Then they were moving towards the chairs, ushering gestures the order of the day as the senior ranks were given precedence and Marshal Trushin was invited to sit at the ornate redwood desk in the place of the Chinese.

  I cleared the balustrade and dropped.

  Talyzin had been directly below me on the lower gallery but I went down in a slight arc because of the balustrade and caught his shoulder, spinning him round on the chair as his hand went out for the detonator. He reacted with great strength, empowered by shock, rage, dementia, and smashed his knee into my ribcage as we went down together, the breath coming out of me in a soft explosion as I twisted over and felt for a target, not in the killing area because I didn't think it would be necessary, just in the nerve-centres to incapacitate.

  Heard shouts from below, boots on the staircase, Talyzin's hand on my throat and squeezing strongly, triggering reflex and freeing my arm for an elbow strike that reached the side of his head and he lurched and went down and I thought it was over but he came up suddenly like a diver surfacing and went for the table and got his hand on the detonator and I couldn't reach it, went for the throat, for the kill, the fastest way, the only way to get the strength out of his arm, out of his fingers as his weight dropped and the table crashed over and the detonator hit the floor and he reached for it again but his arm was exposed and I doubled it backwards at the elbow and heard it snap, dropped him against the bookshelves and picked up the detonator and backed off as the first two guards reached the top of the stairs and aimed their rifles, shouting.

  Talyzin didn't move.

  'One of you look after this man,' I told the guards.' He's injured but watch him. I want the other one to follow me down the stairs — now move!'

  There were more of them waiting for me in the well of the chamber but I told them to get back, called out to the generals. 'You know what this is?' Held the thing up.

  It seemed to fox them, understandably. Here they were planning the creation of the new world order and suddenly there was a dishevelled-looking clown standing in front of them holding up a remote control for their TV set.

  No one said anything, didn't matter, I'd spell it out for them. 'Marshal Trushin, this is a remote-control detonator for the bomb. installed in the desk you're sitting at now.' I gave it a couple of beats to let him think about it, and they woke up, all of them, I could hear the body movements going on, the rustle of uniforms as they shifted on their chairs, reacting.' I am not going to detonate that bomb if you agree to follow my instructions. Do you agree to follow my instructions, Marshal Trushin?'

  In a moment he asked in a flat voice, 'Who are you?'

  'Do you agree?'

  Trying to get my breath back under control, I think he broke a rib up there, Talyzin, with that knee strike, the lung didn't feel as if it had much room on that side.

  I waited.

  If the marshal didn't agree, I was done for. I couldn't detonate that bloody thing anyway, I wasn't tired of life and we'd still got a mission running, I wanted information out of these people, the information that Kovalenko had told the Chinese delegates he'd give them later.

  But all he would need to say, Trushin, was Take that man, and there'd be nothing I could do.

  Behind me I heard the guard coming down the staircase, his boots thudding laboriously under a weight: Talyzin. I didn't know if the killing strike I'd made had got right through to the larynx; he'd moved a little after I'd made it, tried to reach the detonator. I took four paces back to bring him into sight; he was hanging across the guard's shoulder, the broken arm dangling.

  From the centre of the rotunda Marshal Trushin was staring at me, stone-faced, jowls of a bulldog, black eyes locked on mine as he listened to one of the generals' aides, the one who had framed me on board the Rossiya for the death of Zymyanin. His voice was unintelligible at this distance because he was speaking softly, urgently, saying — I very much hoped — Marshal, this man was on board the Rossiya two days ago, and could well have set that bomb. Perhaps we should listen to him…

  A log tumbled in the hearth and I heard a man catch his breath.

  I went on waiting.

  Marshal Trushin was still watching me. The aide was silent now.

  'I agree to follow your instructions.'

  Et voila.

  'Very good. If anyone in this chamber leaves his chair, I shall detonate. Is that clear?'

  Silence.

  'Is that clear?'

  'It is clear,' Marshal Trushin said.

  I turned round so fast that the guard flinched, his eyes on the detonator. 'Make him as comfortable as you can,' I told him.'tell him there's a medical officer coming.' those bastards over there had wrecked Talyzin's brain and I didn't thank them.

>   There was a telephone in the first office I came to and I picked it up, watching the well of the chamber through the doorway as I dialled.

  'Military Barracks,' the woman at the switchboard said.

  I asked for Ordnance Unit Three.

  Took an age, stood listening to the static on the line.

  I shall resist arrest. I shall resist very strongly.

  But it wouldn't do any good. He'd be outnumbered, and — 'Captain Rusakov.'

  'Vadim,' I said,' this is Viktor Shokin, and I'm with the generals. You know where they are?'

  'Yes.' A lot of energy in his voice, a lot of questions I didn't have time to answer.

  'I need you here. We've got to contain the generals' military escort — their orders are to protect the generals and they're not going to listen to me. Do you trust them, Vadim?'

  In a moment, 'Not necessarily.'

  'How many trusted men can you muster for an emergency sortie?'

  'Two hundred, under my own command.'

  'Tanks?'

  'One squadron.'

  'All right. I need you to surround this building and take the generals out and put them into detention. At the moment they're inn under my control. Bring a medical officer, will you? We've got a man with a broken elbow. And a bomb disposal unit. I've got some work for them. How soon can you get here?'

  'Allow forty minutes.'

  'I can handle that. Any questions, Vadim, even from your CO, tell the officer commanding the military police to put him under arrest — this is a national emergency.'

  'I understand.'

  I put the phone down and opened up the radio.

  'Frome?'

  'Hear you.'

  'Where are you?'

  'Haifa mile from the building, south edge of the park, but listen, the DIF got through to base an hour ago, wants you to signal.'

  Ferris.

  I asked Frome for the number.