The Scorpion Signal q-9 Read online

  'Cutting it fine,' the contact said.

  The Humber was nearly abreast of us now and slowing under full brakes, the driver's door coming open a moment before it stopped. A man got out and came across to us as the contact hit the door open and left the wheel to me. I slid behind it as the other man got in and said, 'You'd better hurry.'

  A squeal came as the contact took the Humber away with the engine racing in low gear before the change. I hit the stick-shift and did a tight U-turn and found a side street and swung into it with my eyes on the mirror. There was nothing.

  'You'd better go south,' the man said. 'Get on to the ring road as soon as you can.' He sat back, stretching his legs out. 'But I think we're all right. I'm Bracken.'

  'Quiller.' I made two right turns, watching the mirror.

  'This is the car you'll use,' Bracken told me. 'The papers are in the glove pocket. I was getting worried about you.'

  'We had problems.' At each turn the street lights threw his reflection on to the windscreen and filled in what I remembered of him. He was a shut-faced man with a tight mouth and eyes that never came to rest on anything for more than a second: he was looking around him now with brief jerks of his head. He couldn't keep his feet still either; he kept on shuffling them against the floorboards. Maybe he wasn't always like that; he could be worried at the moment because he'd been cutting things fine. If they'd turned off the ring road after him he would have driven straight past us but there's always a risk and he could have come dose to blowing me. I didn't know much about him, only a few things I'd heard over cups of tea in the Caff between missions; someone had said he'd been thrown out of an instructor's job at Norfolk because he'd used a live charge to demonstrate his de-arming techniques, and someone else had told me he'd murdered his mistress and been acquitted because the Bureau had suppressed some of the evidence; I didn't necessarily believe either story but the truth was probably somewhere there in the background. There's usually something a bit touched about the field directors: look at Ferris, always strangling mice.

  'What sort of problems?' Bracken wanted to know.

  'Access. Croder's not as good as they say.'

  His blunt head turned quickly. 'Croder is very good. It couldn't have been his fault.'

  'He took a hell of a risk.'

  'Quite possibly. He takes on things that other people won't touch. So do you. That's why he wanted you for this one. Did you fly in?'

  'Yes.'

  'Where did you land?'

  'Domodedovo.'

  'What hotel?'

  'The Aeroflot.'

  'Are we still in the clear?'

  'Yes.' I'd been using the mirror at five-second intervals.

  He stopped shuffling his feet. 'Did you leave your passport with Immigration?'

  'Yes.'

  'I want you to ask for it back in the prescribed two days and then go to ground and come up as a Soviet citizen.' He took an envelope from his coat and put it into the glove compartment. 'Everything's there.' He talked for ten minutes without stopping except to answer questions; we covered liaison, contacts, signals, the safe-house and possible exit procedures. 'I want you to know that you'll receive every support from the people here in the field and of course from London. I'm not trying to boost your morale. We want Schrenk, badly, and we think you can pull him out for us.'

  'Where is he?'

  'We don't know. We've — '

  'You don't know?'

  He waited three seconds. 'We are looking for him very hard. We have a contact inside Lubyanka, watching for Schrenk to come in. At the moment we can't understand why he wasn't taken straight there from Hanover. We're therefore watching a lot of other places: the Serbsky Institute here in Moscow and the facilities they run in the Urals, the Komi Republic, Murmansk, the Potma complex, and of course — ' with the slightest pause- 'in Leningrad.'

  'They might have gone to Hanover to kill him.' I made another turn and got on to the ring road going south. The mirror was clear except for a trolleybus in the distance.

  'Not without trying again to break him, and they couldn't do that in Hanover. It's going to take time, and a lot of personnel. We know that.'

  'What about Leningrad?'

  His speech became slightly faster, pushed by his nerves. 'The cell is still intact. Obviously Schrenk hasn't been broken yet. Of course they might have gone too far: he might be dead. But we've got to know.'

  'What are their plans, if he breaks?'

  He said in a moment, 'Some of them will try making a run for it, but they won't get across any of the frontiers because the guard posts will be alerted, and so will the airports. They can't quietly leave their jobs before the balloon goes up because most of them are entrenched very deeply in official positions and they'd expose the whole network. One or two have elected to take capsules if they have to, rather than face interrogation and the labour camps.' He took some kind of inhaler from his pocket and started using it: it smelt like Vick's.

  'How many people are there?'

  'Fifteen.'

  Headlights came into the mirror and I watched them. 'Can't any of them get clear?' Comstock was in Leningrad, and so was Whitman. I'd worked with both of them.

  'Not without putting everyone else at risk.' He'd begun shuffling his feet again. 'Incidentally the CIA is furious with us about Schrenk. They know Leningrad could blow.'

  'They've done all right for eleven years.'

  'That's why they're furious.' He inhaled again and then screwed the cap on. The whole car was reeking of menthol.

  'The papers for this car,' I asked him, 'are for which cover?'

  'You've got both.'

  'Get them out, will you? Put the East German papers in your pocket. These too.' I pulled out the credentials Floderus had given me. 'Start reading the Russian cover, do you mind?'

  'Aloud?'

  'Yes.'

  He didn't turn his head. 'Have we picked someone up?'

  'I don't know yet. It's just some headlights.'

  His hands began working busily, transferring the papers. 'Don't you trust the German cover?'

  'I'd rather be a local citizen if I'm going to be found with a foreign embassy man. Just a slight edge.' But I wasn't happy, because every minute we were together we risked being picked up and questioned. The whole operation was balanced on a knife edge and we had to keep very still.

  'Kapista Mikhail Kirov,' Bracken began reading, 'age 42, born Moscow, October 29th 1937, the Kuncevo district.' He paused briefly. 'Height, weight and description are all yours precisely. The — '

  'Faster.' The lights in the mirror were getting bright now.

  'Father, now deceased, Valery Kapista, died in an industrial accident, Troice-Lykovo district, 1976. Mother also deceased — '

  I took a right turn and gunned up with the tyres just this side of squealing-point and passed three parked trucks and crossed some lights at red and turned right again. Glare filled the mirror and died away.

  'This car's perfectly all right,' Bracken said.

  'They've picked up a radio call and they're sniffing out the area where you slipped them. They started calling the minute they lost you.' I turned off all the lights and waited as long as possible before I put the Pobeda into a side street a hundred yards before the next major intersection. There was a whole line of trucks parked along one side of the street and I gunned up again and found a gap and hit the brakes and pushed the stick into reverse and got a brief whimper from the rear tyres as the power dragged us against the kerb. I cut the engine and sat waiting.

  'Read more?' Bracken asked.

  'No time.'

  He sat with his feet perfectly still, his head turned slightly to the left, where he could pick up echoes and reflections from the buildings opposite. The wheel was locked hard over and I left it like that because they might be stupid enough to leave a gap if they came past and saw us and stopped: there was just a chance we could get out fast enough to confuse them before they could open fire. If they saw us and pulled up
and blocked the gap I could try making a break on foot: the trucks gave a lot of cover and there was no snow on the ground. It would depend on what Bracken wanted me to do.

  'Instructions,' I said.

  He waited two seconds. We both had to listen. 'If you can drive us out of it,' he said evenly, 'do that.' We listened again, and heard the distant sound of a car. 'But not unless the chances are good.'

  'All right.' The sound of the car was loudening. It was accelerating very hard in one of the indirect gears. 'Where do I drop you, if I can get dear?'

  'Any cab rank. I'm going back to the Embassy.'

  We listened again. The car had changed into top and was travelling flat out. Echoes were coming in now from the buildings at the intersection and they made it difficult to hear what was happening. I thought I was picking up a second car somewhere, also accelerating. I wasn't sure.

  'If I can't drive us out?' I asked Bracken.

  'Run.'

  'All right.' I sat listening again. Bracken wouldn't have a lot of trouble: they couldn't search him and they couldn't arrest him and at the moment they didn't have anything on him to justify kicking him out of the country. But if they caught me they'd question me and a Soviet citizen shouldn't make contact with any foreigners, least of all members of a diplomatic mission. The cover wouldn't stand up, if they wanted to put it under the light.

  'Two?' he asked suddenly.

  'What?'

  'Two cars?'

  We listened again.

  'Yes.' The first one was close now; the second one was still piling up the speed in an indirect gear, somewhere in the distance. 'What is there in the envelope,' I asked Bracken, 'on Schrenk?'

  'Quite a lot. Everything you ought to have.'

  'Local friends, movements, contacts?'

  'Everything. Croder instructed me.'

  'Fair enough.'

  We sat waiting. Light swept suddenly across the face of the buildings opposite, brightening and going dark as the first car crossed the intersection flat out with its echoes drumming and fading over the next few seconds.

  'One.'

  'Yes.'

  Tyres started howling and light came again on the buildings as the second car turned at the intersection and sped up towards us with a gear botching and the power coming on and the exhaust sending out a hollow rising roar until the gears shifted and the power came on again. I got comfortable in my seat and moved the stick into low and kept my foot down on the clutch and put my fingers against the starter key and watched the light flood brightly across the buildings as I waited to know if the trap we were sitting in was going to spring shut.

  5: NATALYA

  'Good evening, little mother.'

  Her head came up sharply. She was sitting with her back to the wall of the hallway, her cracked black shoes resting on the edge of a slow-combustion stove, the naked bulb throwing light on her white hair. Some mauve knitting was on her lap, and she had been nibbling at a sausage when I'd come in.

  'What do you want, comrade?' Her small eyes were narrowed, focusing on my face.

  'I want to see the upravdom. Is he here?'

  She eyed me up and down again, noting my clothes, needing to find a pigeonhole for me in the infinitely-varied strata of Moscow society. 'I will see,' she said, and took another small bite of sausage.

  I waited while she reached and took a brass bell from the shelf of her vestibule, and swung it three times. I was standing halfway between the stairs and the entrance doors, with the street exposed to my peripheral vision. This was just routine: I'd left Bracken at a taxi rank along Narodnaja ulica ten minutes ago and got here clean. The second militia patrol had gone hounding straight past us and I'd used the back streets towards the ring road, working my way out of the search area. 'Reach me through the Embassy,' he'd told me. 'I shall be in signals with London direct. We're on the board as «Scorpion» and you'll use that in paroles and countersigns.' I'd had to ask him for my East German papers back: he hadn't thought of it first. Not a good sign: he was here to direct me in the field and the field was dangerous and already he'd missed a trick because the brush with the militia patrols had unnerved him.

  I felt vulnerable and exposed.

  Footsteps sounded on the stone stairway. 'I am Yuri Gorsky.' A fleshy man with watchful eyes and a shock of stiff graying hair, his worn suit smelling of black tobacco. His hand was steady and strong.

  'Kirov,' I said.

  He led me upstairs to a room at the end of the passage on the third floor and showed me in. It was small, cluttered and stifling, with the fumes of a charcoal heater sharp on the air. One door, one window, one light bulb and one narrow bed. No telephone.

  'I have been expecting you,' Gorsky said in a low voice. He stood waiting.

  I was looking for signs everywhere, signs of something wrong, of a hundred things wrong. He understood this, and I could feel his understanding as we waited the time out, unsure of each other. That was on the air, too, as strong as the charcoal fumes: the scent of creatures met by night, their hairs lifted and their eyes watching at the edge of vision, their breath held and their muscles tensed by the knowledge of where they stood on dangerous ground.

  Bracken had said he was totally reliable, but I didn't trust that. I trusted my own feelings. 'Is this the top floor?' I asked him.

  `Yes.' He closed the door quietly and went to the window, lifting the lower sash so easily that I knew the wooden frame must have been soaped. He beckoned to me.

  The freezing air came into my lungs as I leaned and looked down, tracing the skeletonic pattern of the fire escape downwards to the ground, where a street lamp stood. There was nothing running upwards, against the wall; the guttering passed across the top of the window, two feet higher; it looked strong but that meant nothing.

  'It's the best room,' Gorsky said, and I believed him. People from the other rooms on this floor would have to run the length of the iron balcony before they reached the fire escape. The lower floors were more dangerous: they would be searched first, if anyone came. 'Don't worry,' he said in his low voice, 'about the little dezhurnaya in the hallway. She has a grandson in the labour camps. But give her money if you want to. Not too much.'

  'How long has she been in this building?'

  'Nearly seven years. As long as I have.'

  I slid the window shut. 'Was Schrenk here?'

  'Yes.' He offered me a black and yellow packet and I shook my head.

  'When?'

  'Before they arrested him.' He took a cigarette and lit it, throwing the match into the charcoal heater. I went absolutely still, and he sensed it. 'Don't worry,' he said, `they arrested him in the street, nowhere near here. They wouldn't have been interested in where he came from; they would have been interested in what he was doing. If they had wanted to know where he came from, they would have asked him, and if he had told them, they would have come here.' He drew the cigarette to a bright red glow, and then blew the smoke out in a slow cloud, watching me through it. 'So don't worry. You will be safe here.'

  I looked at the bed, and the cracked handbasin, and the flimsy bookshelves, one end wired to the wall where a calendar was pinned, two years out of date and with a portrait of Lenin on the yellowed paper.

  `Was he here in this actual room?'

  `Yes,' said Gorsky. 'He was comfortable.' Gorsky was responsible for the safe-house, not for people who got arrested in the street.

  `Telephone?' I said.

  `You must not use the one in the building. I cannot send messages, either. You must use the telephone box in the street, at the first corner. The light in it doesn't work, but if you need it, screw the bulb in tighter.' He drew deeply on the black tobacco. 'Will you have visitors?'

  'No.'

  `That is better. I won't write your name on the residence record, of course. We shall agree, if it is ever necessary, that I forgot.' He gave a faint smile. 'Though it would be too late for excuses, by then. Tell me,' he said as he moved to the door, 'if there is anything you need. There is
an alleyway, quite narrow, not far from the building; you go past the telephone box and turn right, and you will see it. It is useful.'

  When he'd gone I looked round the room again, at the armchair with the stuffing out and the cracked mirror askew over the handbasin and the pile of dog-eared magazines on the floor by the window. Schrenk had been here, then, before they'd arrested him. I was that close. And that far.

  I had the new cover by heart in thirty minutes: Kapista Mikhail Kirov, Moscow representative for the state factory complex in the Ukraine, plastics and allied products. Current Moscow visa for three months, schedule of meetings at the Ministry of Labour; references, employment card, food and lodging vouchers, transport allowance rates per day; members of family and next-of-kin; Party membership card, Izmajlovo chapter.

  There were voices and I listened. They were a man's and a woman's, nearing along the corridor. A door opened and closed and the voices went on, muffled now. I would have to get to know the voices here, so that one day if strangers came I'd be warned. I trusted Gorsky, but he was human and therefore fallible. A safe-house is a safe-house until it's blown.

  There was a dossier on Helmut Schrenk, with photographs and a description; I didn't think he'd look much like that now. He was described in his cover as a demolition worker, which was typically close to reality: he'd been trained at Norfolk in explosives. It said that four months ago when he'd been doing a low-key penetration job in Moscow he'd applied for a post as agent-in-place. Why had he done that? I went over the material again: in the last three years he'd completed seven successful missions, apart from his 'liaison work in the north' — Leningrad. At the age of thirty-five he had a lot of steam left and he wasn't the type to sit at a desk and play about with microdots: there was a tremendous amount of latent aggression in the man and he used his executive work as a safety-valve; I'd seen him in action.

  I'd have to ask Bracken. It was the second thing that didn't fit Schrenk's character; the first had been Dr Steinberg's reference to his bearing a grudge against his interrogators in Lubyanka.

  I laid the destruct material on top of the charcoal until it caught fire and then held it at the mouth of the galvanized chimney so that all the smoke would go out. Then I put the East German cover and car papers inside the third magazine from the bottom of the left-hand pile and went down to talk to Gorsky again. It was then he told me about Natalya.