Northlight q-11 Page 19

  'Hello?'

  'Is that Mr Spencer?'

  'No. But perhaps I can help you.'

  'I may not have long so you'd better take this down.' Pleshakovna was making urgent signs to me from the entrance of the ward. 'This is Boris Antonov and my friend in Murmansk isn't answering the telephone. I'm extremely worried about him, so if you see anything of him please tell him I shall phone him again as often as I can.' I waited while he repeated the salient information as he wrote it down. He was a senior spook and knew immediately what I was talking about.

  'Where can I phone you back?'

  The little white-coated Pleshakovna was hurrying up to me and glancing over her shoulder. 'You've got to put that phone dorm, citizen! She's coming!' It wouldn't have mattered but I was going to have to use the telephone again and if I blew it now it could make things much more difficult later.

  'You can't phone me back. Please do everything you can.'

  I put the receiver back on the hook and came away as the little slut grabbed my arm and pulled me against her. I leaned on her for support as the matron came through from the ward, a Hero of the Soviet Union medal dangling on her massive chest.

  'Is this patient all right?'

  'He's overdone it a bit, comrade Matron. He-'

  'Then get him back into his bed, you stupid little bitch!'

  This was at two o'clock in the afternoon.

  Snow was falling again: in the ward we could see it through the tall grimy window panes, the flakes catching the light and then dying away into the dark. Night had come down four hours ago, soon after three o'clock.

  'With only one leg, things won't be so easy.'

  He'd already started whining.

  'You'll look like a hero.'

  I watched the snowflakes, aware of a creeping sense of limbo. The record had wound down through final discord, leaving silence. I was a man lying in a hospital bed, numbed still from exposure and extensively bruised — I'm quoting from my chart — with nothing to do except console or show contempt for the man in the bed next to me, as I felt inclined, nothing to do except watch the mesmerizing drift of the snowflakes whirled by the wind into the light and whirled away again out of sight.

  By the tone of the senior man on the line I was sure that he'd try to raise Fane for me and tell him to stand by his telephone again; but there was no guarantee. I didn't know at what time Fane had got the news of the ambushed rendezvous or how long it had been before he decided to shut down his base and leave me to whatever fate had overtaken me. All he would know was that if I were dead there was nothing he could do for me, and that if I were still alive I would do everything I could to reach the capsule in time if I were caught and had to protect the Bureau.

  'When can I use the telephone?'

  'That depends.'

  This wasn't my little waif: she'd finished her shift. This was a beefy Estonian woman, her arms folded across the bulwark of her breasts in a posture of impregnability, her dark eyes glinting with the secret exultation of power.

  I got a ten-ruble note from my box of effects, rolling it and keeping my hand over it on the blanket. A gesture had to be made to propriety: the state was coming down heavily on corruption these days, driving it deeper underground.

  'I'd like to make a phone call,' I told her, 'as soon as possible.'

  'What's so urgent, then, citizen?'

  'I'm worried about a friend of mine. He hasn't phoned to ask about me, and he knows I'm here.'

  She stood over the bed, her eyes aswim with avarice. 'Perhaps you're less popular than you imagined, citizen. Perhaps she knows you're in no condition to get it up any more.' A faint wheezing came from the little fleshy mouth and the eyes narrowed to slits. She was laughing at my attempt to deceive her: a «friend» could only be a woman, and a woman wanted only one thing.

  I put a second ten-ruble note with the first. 'Actually it's a male friend. He's a Party member, and it's his duty to find out if I need any assistance.'

  Her eyes changed instantly, darkening. She had a problem now: if she took the twenty rubles, I might report it. This could be a trap I was setting for her — it was being done all the time.

  'It's just that I don't want to get into trouble, citizen. You're not meant to use the telephone, you know that.'

  'Of course. That's why I need your help. You have the authority to assist me in the interests of the state. Look at it that way, comrade.'

  Her bright eyes were drawn to my closed hand for an instant. 'If I let you use the telephone, then, that will be my reason. I'll be assisting the business of the state, as any good citizen is expected to do. Is that what you mean?'

  'Yes. That should be its own reward. But I'm of the old school, comrade, and I've always thought there's only one reward that's really worth anything.' I opened my hand.

  It was another half an hour before she reported the coast was clear. A new matron had taken over the night shift, and I assumed that five of the twenty rubles would have been sacrificed to oil the wheels.

  I unhooked the black bakelite receiver and asked for the number and waited.

  Two rings.

  An orderly came past with a trolley, swerving every now and then because the woman shuffling beside it was holding the man who lay there, his face moon-white and his eyes clenched shut, a blue-veined hand exposed at the edge of the sheet, clutching a small ikon. Tears trickled on the frail parchment face, but they were not his — they were the woman's, falling on him as she leaned over the trolley. I didn't think he would cry again; she had to have tears enough for both.

  'I can't push on, citizen,' the orderly said irritably, 'if you won't get out of the way.'

  Four rings.

  I was counting from habit. There were a lot of reasons why the embassy might not have been able to raise Fane — the lines could be down between here and Moscow under the weight of the snow; Fane could be on his way to Leningrad by now to catch a plane for London; Croder could have signalled him with a change of plan.

  Six rings.

  The trolley banged through the doors of the ward, leaving the sickly smell of gangrene in the corridor.

  'Hello?'

  Flicker along the nerves. Fane's voice.

  'This is Boris Antonov.'

  Short silence. 'I see. I didn't quite know what to make of his tone but I didn't care. Contact had been re-established and my lifeline held strong again. Then relief brought its natural reaction: anger.

  'Where the hell were you?'

  In a moment he said: 'I received bad news.'

  I thought vaguely that it was civil of him to put it like that. He was the type of director who considered any executive expendable, and on the slightest excuse.

  Or did he mean some other kind of bad news? 'What did they tell you?'

  'That you'd been killed.'

  'I'm not surprised. The rendezvous was a trap.'

  A longer pause. 'Where are you now?'

  I told him. I also told him that a hostile agency — probably directed from Peking — had put a bomb on the truck. I told him the rendezvous in the freight-yards had been blown. I told him that the objective was dead.

  Then I waited.

  He would be reaching for his sharkskin cigarette-case now and pulling out a flat Egyptian cigarette, lighting it with care, his poker player's eyes gazing quietly at nothing while he absorbed my information.

  A Chukchi woman, slant-eyed, blubbery, with skin like candlewax, came heavy-footed from the ward and pulled a pair of crutches from the pile leaning in the corner, dropping one of them with a noise that brought a cry from someone along the line of beds.

  'Peking?'

  'According to the objective. He was selling product to them too.'

  'I see.' A cool man, Fane: he could absorb entire horror stories without even flinching. 'How was he killed?'

  'They shot him down in error, while he was trying to get clear.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'I was there.'

  'He didn't have any
thing on him?'

  'No. I'd already burned the papers he was carrying.'

  There was a question he hadn't asked yet.

  'You clumsy bitch? a man was shouting from just inside the ward. The Chukchi girl was having trouble with the crutches: every time she stacked them back against the wall they fell down again with a noise like the roof coming in.

  'What is that?' Fane asked.

  'Someone dropping crutches. Have you got a safehouse lined up for me?'

  In a moment he said slowly, 'There's a place you can try.'

  'They'll be throwing me out of here any time now. I want to hole up for a day or two before I start the trip home.'

  'I see. What sort of condition are you in?'

  'I'm not ready for any games yet. I'll need a day or two.' «Games» was our word for anything demanding, like running a frontier under gunfire or wrecking a checkpoint. He still hadn't asked how the rendezvous had been blown. It worried me.

  After a while he said: 'All right. I don't know yet how I'm going to get you across, but we'll work something out.'

  'You didn't expect you'd have to, did you?'

  A very long pause.

  'No.' I thought he wasn't going to say anything more, but his voice came back on the line. 'You can go to Apartment 12 in the Old Harbour complex. It's on the north-east corner of Lenin Prospekt and Vernadskogo Street. Are your papers intact?'

  'Yes.'

  'Knock at the door and you'll be let in. Do you want that again?'

  'No.' I repeated the address and instructions. 'Then I want a meeting with you.'

  'Of course. That too will be arranged in good time.'

  I wished he didn't sound quite so unshakably cool about all this. I'd called him up and told him the objective was dead and Northlight shut down and it should have rattled him badly: he wasn't going to get an awful lot of bouquets from Chief of Control for letting- it happen. This too worried me.

  Nerves, that was all. Did I want a local director hi the field who panicked every time a wheel came off?

  The last thing I said to him was: 'If I phone your number again I'll expect an answer. I want to go home. You're not going to leave me to the in this bloody country.'

  'Of course not.'

  It went on snowing all night and by morning the ploughs were rumbling past the hospital and traffic had come to a standstill.

  She gave me her address, little Pleshakovna, as I walked out of the ward, writing it on a dirty scrap of paper and thrusting it into my hand. 'I'm always home in the evening, after I get off here.' Her starved face creased into a seductive smile, leaving the desperation staring naked from her eyes as a guffaw sounded from one of the men in the row of beds.

  I put the scrap of paper into my pocket and slipped her a fifty-ruble note, more than she'd earn under the brutish loins of a dozen visitors. What would I put it down as on my expense sheet for those arthritic hell-hags in Accounts to quibble over? Child maintenance? They'd go straight into terminal palsy.

  I walked out onto the pavement, picking my way across greying drifts of snow and through patches of sand and clinker, feeling — as I had felt before — like a soldier groping his way home from a battlefield where the cries of the dying had faded, leaving only the scratching of a pen across the documents of surrender. I wasn't quite sure if I could ever pick up the step again, or even hear the drummer.

  They were breaking ice in the harbour when I reached there, dim figures moving in the haze of the drifting snow, hauling on ropes as a barge nosed along the quayside, sending miniature ice floes ringing out discordant music as they jostled together on the dark water. The Old Harbour complex loomed on the other side like a mausoleum, and I picked my way towards it over the iron bridge. There was no point in trying to check out the environment before I closed in on the safe-house: the intersection at Lenin Prospekt and Vernadskogo Street was deserted except for an abandoned truck with its belt of snow scoops hanging from a broken pulley. Anyone waiting here for me would by now look like a snowman, invisible under camouflage, and if a watcher had been posted at one of these hundred dark windows I wouldn't see him either. I had been given the address of a safehouse over an untapped line by my local control and that should be enough: I wasn't expected to question it. The executive in the field needed shelter, and it was a responsibility of the highest priority in London to see that he got it. This was why, when I climbed the stairs to Apartment 12 and the door was opened to me, my mind lurched instantly into a state of shock.

  21 WHO?

  And you turn over?'

  The room swung and I was looking upwards into her sea-green eyes.

  'It feels good,' I said.

  'Sure. I had some training once. But Jesus, it's a wonder you're still alive.'

  The smell of the Tiger Balm was sharp, pulling me out of my lethargy for a while until I slipped back. More than anything I wanted to sleep, because here it was so quiet after the hospital.

  'Does that hurt?'

  'Don't worry.' The light from the cheap table lamp shadowed her cheekbones and the curve of her pensive mouth.

  'You didn't look surprised,' she said after a while, 'when I opened the door.'

  That gave me comfort: the shock hadn't shown.

  'I already knew you were CIA.'

  She stopped massaging and looked down at me with her eyes narrowed. 'How?'

  'You didn't behave like a journalist when the KGB stopped you leaving the hotel. And your friend in Moscow couldn't have known there was a duplicate tape and a man running with it unless he was in the Company.'

  She considered this, and then began massaging slowly again. 'So I guess you're kind of pissed off about the whole thing. Your case officer warned us that you prefer working alone.'

  'It makes things less difficult for other people.'

  'That figures. Who else needs to drag themselves around black and blue all over?' She took one foot and eased a knee-joint, carefully folding my leg. 'Does that feel okay?'

  'Everything in life is relative.'

  'I mean really. Is it damaged?'

  'No. I walked two miles from the hospital.'

  'Okay. Just relax again.'

  'Liz,' I said, 'who else knows you're here?'

  'Only my own case officer.'

  'He's your friend in Moscow?'

  'Right.'

  'Does he know I'm here too?'

  Her hands stopped sliding across the bruises again. 'Gee, Clive, I don't know. He just told me to get here and wait for further instructions. He didn't say you were coming. Is it important?'

  'No.'

  What had shocked me when she'd opened the door wasn't that I'd been sent to a safehouse run by the CIA but that Fane hadn't told me. If Northlight hadn't shut down on me I would have signalled London through the embassy in Moscow and our line through Cheltenham and told Croder to get Fane out of Russia and send me a local control who knew how to keep his executive informed. When you set up a safehouse you do it with the knowledge dial it can make the difference between the life and death of a hard-run ferret and you don't tell anyone — anyone at all — where it is, not even a friendly service. It's not a matter of trust; it's a matter of total security. We can trust someone with our lives but we can't know for certain that they won't hit a trap and go pitching into an interrogation cell before they can reach a capsule to stop themselves blowing the safehouse out of the ground and the ferret with it.

  A safehouse is sacrosanct.

  The slow pain of the bruises was seeping into my head, into my mind and burning there, becoming anger. Fane was going to get me killed at this rate: the mission was dead and buried in Karasov's grave but I still had a chance of reaching home if I had a local control experienced enough to get me there.

  Fane wasn't.

  Or had he established liaison with the CIA on instructions from London?

  No. Croder was a crack professional. He was a bastard and he would drive you into the ground but he wouldn't throw you to the dogs unless by the nature
of the mission you became expendable. He wouldn't blow your safehouse the minute he'd set it up for you.

  'Does that feel okay?'

  'Yes.'

  My eyes were almost closed, and I watched the outline of her head against the pool of light on the ceiling, the swing of her chestnut hair and the shadowed face where her eyes were set like liquid jade.

  'Stop me if it hurts.'

  'It's fine.'

  Her hands slowed, their pressure sliding across the pain and giving it recognition, making it acceptable instead of something I wanted to hide.

  'It doesn't bother you,' Liz asked reflectively, 'to come out of the cold and have your wounds licked by a mere woman?'

  Only half of what she said got through to me: I was thinking about Fane. I supposed she was a feminist.

  'Where else would a man go, but to the earth mother?'

  She gave her soft, private laugh. 'I can't see why the hell anyone would divorce a man like you.'

  'Her psychiatrist assured me she wasn't in her right mind at the time.'

  She laughed again and her hands stopped moving as she lowered her head and put her face against mine for a moment; her hair lay across my eyes and I closed them and let the lethargy- well over me in a warm tide, forgetting Fane, forgetting how very unlikely it was that I would ever leave this alien and snowbound city alive, and giving myself instead to the peace of the winter solstice the earth mother had brought me. 'Sleep,' she whispered, 'if you want to.'

  The phone rang just before nine o'clock hi the evening and Liz answered it.

  'It's for you, Clive.'

  'It's been difficult,' Fane's voice came on the line, 'to find a secure location for the rendezvous.'

  'As long as it's better than the last one.'

  Short pause. 'Quite so.'

  'I can't come to your hotel,' I told him. The chip of gravel that had flown up from the track had left a scar across my face, the last thing I wanted: Petr Stepanovich Lein, the engineer checked by the KGB on the Murmansk-Kandalaksha train, had been missing when it had arrived in Kandalaksha and a dead man had been found later near the track; a bomb had killed an unknown number of KGB officers in the freight-yards and a wanted fugitive had been shot down; later the engineer Petr Lein had been picked up unconscious on the rail track in Murmansk and taken to the General Maritime Hospital for treatment. Those were good enough leads to raise a hunt as soon as they put the pieces together and the latest information they'd have would be from the hospital. Oh yes, and there's one other thing — we treated him for a face wound on the left side.