Northlight q-11 Read online

  'By all means,' Fane said, 'tell me how you like to work. I've had a brief picture from Control, of course, but I'd like it from the horse's mouth.'

  'No backups, shields or low-echelon contacts.'

  'Strictly solo.'

  'That's right.'

  A jet was sloping down the sky beyond the gold domes, lowering into Sheremetyevo, its strobes pricking the winter dark.

  'Of course,' Fane said, 'I can't guarantee anything like that.'

  'I know.'

  'That doesn't sound too difficult, then. You're not making demands I necessarily have to meet.'

  I didn't say anything. He was being too punctilious. If there's one thing that can bog a mission down it's a bureaucrat working as local control.

  'Tell me some more,' I said, 'about Karasov.'

  He thought for a moment, then decided I wasn't going to let him set out the ground rules. This isn't a game: it's a trade. 'All right.' We began walking across the bridge, and I found it was impossible to tell whether he'd moved first or I had. 'As I said, he's probably frightened. Although he's been up there in Murmansk for over five years, it's been tricky for him because he's sent so much excellent stuff across. He took a lot of risks. I'd say his nerve isn't what it was any more. You know how-' he broke off with a slight shrug, which was civil of him, because the nerves of a shadow executive are just as vulnerable. Most of us go out with what they put down as mission fatigue, which can mean anything from hitting the bottle to visions of angels pissing in our beer. 'I would also say that Karasov is acutely aware of the stakes. The summit conference has been in jeopardy ever since that sub went down, and there are people who think that world peace is likewise in jeopardy, if we can't get round a table with die Russians.' He shrugged again. 'Even if Karasov hadn't decided to get out and go to ground, we'd have had to bring him in before we could tell the Soviets we've got the tape. The moment they know that, they'll go through their sonar station at Murmansk with killer dogs. I'm not quite sure he wasn't right to get out straight away before the trouble started.'

  I watched the strobes of the jet touch the skyline of the Palace of Congress and vanish. The chill wind blew through the railing along the bridge, moving the coat of the man standing beyond the next lamp.

  'Has Karasov made any kind of rdv with us?' I asked Fane.

  'Not yet.'

  'When did he last signal?'

  'Two days ago.'

  'Saying?'

  'That he'd gone to ground and would surface later.'

  I turned my back to the wind. He'd been there ever since we'd come onto the bridge: the man whose coat was moving. I wondered where the other one was: they normally go in pairs.

  'Is there anything,' I asked Fane, 'that seems a bit odd to you, about him getting out so fast, and on his own initiative?'

  'I'd say he panicked. That's not odd, in the circumstances.'

  'That's out of character.'

  'With Karasov?' He turned to me. 'When did you-'

  'No. With a sleeper."

  We stopped walking, and Fane stood watching me. 'What's on your mind?'

  'I don't like the way we're having to wait for him to contact us. We should have given him very precise instructions on what to do when he got out, where to go and wait for us, who his contact would be, the whole thing. He should have let us look after him.'

  'You want things done by the book.' Without looking away from my face he said, 'What's that chap doing all on his own?'

  'Maybe they're short of staff.'

  'Your papers are perfect. I suppose you know that.'

  'I bloody well hope so.' The wind cut our faces. 'Is there any chance that Karasov has reached Moscow?" 'I doubt that.'

  'You think he's still somewhere around Murmansk?'

  'Yes. Sleepers don't normally run.'

  'When people panic they'll do anything. When are you going to send me up there?" 'That's what we're waiting for. They're trying to tell us all the hotels are full.' He lit another cigarette.

  'Why?' This was local briefing.

  'The background is that while the Soviets are stonewalling and denying everything and the US is trying to make up its mind whether or not to accuse them outright and on presidential level, the longer they can keep the international press out of Murmansk the better. But they'll have to allow a quota, or it'll look too obvious.'

  'How are you going to make sure I'm on the quota?'

  'I can't. London can't. The minister here can simply say okay, get them in a crowd at a gate and let the first ten through. And we shan't know which gate.' He sounded slightly impatient: I suppose he didn't like having to admit he couldn't just wave a wand and bring the whole of the Kremlin down to show what a good little local control he was.

  It occurred to me that I ought to make an effort and stop disliking him. It could be dangerous: at any next hour my life could suddenly be in his hands. But it went on nagging me, about Ferris. I didn't believe they wouldn't have called him in from Hong Kong to local-control me if they'd wanted to, and I didn't believe he wouldn't have agreed to do it, unless there was something going on that I didn't know about.

  Had they asked him, and had he refused?

  We're never told more than they want us to know. The less we know, the safer we are if we're caught and put under a bright light and worked over.

  I thought of contacting Ferris and asking him. But how long would it take to make a phone call from Moscow to Hong Kong?

  This was just nerves, the normal paranoia you've got to deal with in the first few hours in the field. I'd slept most of the day since I'd flown in; those had been my orders and I didn't complain. Lack of sleep doesn't help you at this stage; it's when the nerves need an awful lot of tender loving care.

  'What happens if you can't get me on the quota?' I asked Fane.

  'It'd depend on London, of course.'

  'I'd have to go clandestine.'

  We'd been walking again to keep the circulation going, in the other direction from the KGB man, and now Fane stopped again and looked at me with a long-suffering blink. 'Quite possibly, yes. But I don't want you to go clandestine without instructions. Please understand that.'

  'I can't guarantee it.' One of his own phrases.

  He humped his shoulders. 'They were perfectly right. You're difficult.'

  He'd raised his voice slightly. I didn't like that. If you're going to local-control a shadow through the field you've got to keep your cool.

  'How many times have you been out, Fane?'

  He went on staring at me, and I wondered how far I'd have to push him before he lost his cool completely. If he did that, I'd signal London and tell them to send someone else.

  'One loses count,' he said levelly. 'Doesn't one?'

  He'd seen the danger and taken the heat off at once.

  'How many clandestines have you run?'

  'We don't keep an actual score like the shadow executives. But quite a few. And I didn't lose anyone.'

  This time I made the first move and we went on walking again in the other direction, towards the hotel. I wanted to get out of this bloody wind. I hate the cold. 'Then you'll know,' I said conversationally, 'that at any given time I might have to go clandestine, either-'

  'Yes. I know that.' He had a swinging walk, perhaps to make up for his short legs; or it could simply have been an expression of his inward anger because I was being difficult. 'And you know what I'm saying, I'm sure. I don't want you to go clandestine unless you have to.'

  When we passed the solitary man he turned his back to us, staring down into the river. He smelled of black tobacco.

  'The thing is,' I told Fane, 'you can cut a lot of corners that way.' There was a big difference between a covert and a clandestine mission, and he knew that. When you're sent out with a cover and a legend you've got to stick to it and that can slow you up: you can't go anywhere you like, you can only go where your cover takes you. Tonight I was here as a journalist for the Monitor, and it would be all right as long as I stuc
k with that cover: I could go to the press club and my embassy and the Soviet Ministry of Information, places like that, but I couldn't just wander about in the streets without an obvious destination: journalists don't rubberneck. I couldn't do any kind of surveillance if anyone interested me and I couldn't pop into a phone-box without my own KGB surveillance people noting the fact and if I stopped to talk to a Soviet citizen they'd haul me along for questioning and it doesn't matter how perfect your papers are, you 're never certain that your cover's going to hold up. And that's when you suddenly realize it's too late to go clandestine. You can't run. As a clandestine you're a free agent, using light cover if you want to — Boris Antonov, Soviet citizen, so forth — but running free through the tunnels and the night hours and the back streets and following your own instincts, sniffing the wind for smoke.

  'You can cut corners,' Fane said, 'yes.' We turned from the bridge into the Rausskaja nabareznaja towards the Bukarest, and the wind was less sharp. 'I simply want you to do it only if you have to.' He stopped and looked up at me again. 'I don't mind your being difficult, you see, if that's your character. But I don't want you to use it as a policy.'

  I'd never had to spell out the parameters of a mission with my local control before. It unnerved me.

  'They've never given me anyone,' I said carefully, 'who didn't turn out to be first class, even if we finished up hating each other's guts. All I ask is that you get me home alive. Even if it's the last thing you want to do.'

  He went on watching me with his level eyes, perhaps not knowing whether I was being funny. 'From someone as boorish as you, I suppose that's a compliment.'

  'Sorry. It must have slipped out.'

  In the hotel lobby Fane picked up a message and used an outside line while I looked at a display of dolls in regional costumes and had the odd thought that there actually were children like this dancing somewhere on some village square to the music of a pipe band while I stood here living my lies and practising my deceits on the pretext that I was doing my bit to keep the Cold War from hotting up. Which was the real world, those children's or mine? It can only ever be the one we create, the one we have to design for ourselves to give us shelter from confusion and sustenance for our needs. I don't dance so well to a pipe band as to the tune of my own dark drummer.

  Fane was coming away from the telephone.

  'They've put us on the quota. We're flying to Murmansk.'

  'When?'

  'As soon as they've got the runways cleared up there. They've had snow.'

  9 TANYA

  Night was coming to Murmansk. There had been no sun. This was winter. The light was changing from steel grey to gunmetal blue, so slowly that it mesmerized. Shadows deepened as the weight of the dark came down, because the light wasn't leaving; it was simply changing, from the monotone arctic wash of the daytime, sunless and moonlike, to the trembling and fragile glow of the northern lights across the snow.

  Only here, and in places along this latitude, does die coming of the night bring shadows. In its strangeness there is a certain quality of safety, if you are being watched: you can find concealment in the kaleidoscope of light and shade. And if you are watching, you can more easily detect abnormal configurations among the formal geometry of streets and buildings, such as the shape of a man's head.

  Tonight I was watching. Soon I would know if I were also being watched.

  The last I'd seen of Fane, an hour ago, was his short neat body with its swinging walk disappearing into die lift at die hotel. I was glad to see him go. In the days ahead I would need him, of course, perhaps desperately; but if I could make my way through this mission without his help I would like to do that.

  There was something wrong about him. There was some-tiling wrong about their not giving me Ferris. I knew this without questioning how I knew, just as I knew without any question that the man at the end of the platform had missed the last train. But I didn't want to pay too much attention to there being something wrong until I knew more about North-light. That was the name across the top of the board at London Control, the name for the mission. It could still be a matter of nerves, though I'd been long enough in this trade to know that your nerves will tell you things more accurately, on a primitive level where sensitivity is subconscious, than your brain, which can make up answers of its own to explain the inexplicable, rather than admit to having none.

  When the next train came in, its steam clouding against the pale luminosity of the sky and its hot smell reaching me and bringing warmth, I saw the man get into a carriage and slam the door. He hadn't, then, missed the last train: it wasn't going where he wanted to go, that was all.

  'My name is Tanya.'

  You can't tell much over a telephone. Her voice had been low, a little husky, that was all. But there'd been caution in the tone, a note of vigilance. There'd been silences, after I'd spoken, in which she had listened a second time to what I'd said, sifting it for danger.

  'Why did you want me to telephone?' I asked her.

  'Because of…' she'd hesitated, 'the snowbirds.'

  She should have brought it in straight away, the moment she'd told me her name; but perhaps some idiot at the embassy hadn't told her that; or she'd forgotten. 'Snowbirds' was the code-introduction.

  'What do you want me to do?' I asked her.

  'To meet me.'

  'Why?' This was routine. I already knew, but I wanted her to go on talking in case there were anything wrong, anything dangerous.

  'Because-' she hesitated again — 'because of the snowbirds. That is all I can say, over the telephone.'

  'All right. In an hour, then.'

  'Very well.' She didn't ask where. They'd told her that it was for me to make the rendezvous. She was getting things right.

  'At the east railway station,' I told her. 'How far is that from where you are now?'..'Not far. Perhaps five kilometres.'

  'All right. In the small waiting-room at the north end of Platform 4. Repeat that.'

  When she'd finished I said: 'Tell me what you look like.'

  She hesitated again. 'I am young, and not very tall. I will be wearing an old sable coat, and-'

  'What colour are your eyes?' Everyone here was wearing fur; it was twenty-five degrees below freezing.

  'They are dark.'

  'Brown? Blue?'

  'Brown.'

  'All right. Don't approach anyone. I'll approach you. Wear an odd pair of gloves, that don't quite match.'

  That had been an hour ago and as the train pulled out I saw the man opening a paper behind the grimy glass. He didn't glance out.

  In this unearthly light the station had the aspect of an illusion. With the snow-covered roofs reflecting the sky and the shadows darker than they'd been at noon, definition was lost, and the shadows seemed more solid than the buildings themselves. Her short figure had the same sense of unreality: her shadow, moving across the open expanse of snow between the lamps, leaned and turned with a movement of its own as the light changed around it.

  I let ten minutes go by after she'd walked into the little waiting-room, checking and double-checking the configurations in the environment: the line of three taxis alongside the iron railings; the black Pobeda with snow on its roof, parked facing the gates; the two men talking near the cafeteria, their breath clouding under the lamps; the group of children stamping their feet to a rhythm that was becoming a dance and leading to laughter; and the sailors over by the huge red tea-wagon. It had taken me fifteen minutes to get here from the hotel and the rest of the time I'd spent absorbing the changing patterns of movement in the whole of the area overlooking the waiting-room, and I was satisfied.

  London doesn't warn you to take care when it sends you into a rendezvous. It's your responsibility to check the other party for surveillance and for traps: you're expected to go in and get out and leave no trace, but we don't look at it as a tactical regulation because if we get anything wrong it's our own skin.

  'Good evening.' I stood looking down at her for a moment.
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  She turned quickly to face me, half-catching her breath, her bronze eyes staring into mine with something like fear. She brought her hands upwards across the front of her worn sable coat as if protecting herself, though it was probably to show me her gloves didn't match.

  'I thought you weren't coming,' she said huskily.

  'Sorry I'm late. It was the snow.'

  'Did you-' she left it.

  'Did I what?'

  'Did you come in a car?'

  'We're better off in here. Nobody can watch us. The car's in the open.'

  She looked quickly through the small smoke-grimed window, her lips parting as if to say something. Then she looked back at me but said nothing. A shiver went through her.

  'Come and sit down.' I led her across to the wooden bench. There was no heating in here; that's why I'd chosen it: so that we'd be alone. It was the best of the four or five places I'd checked out yesterday when the embassy in Moscow had prepared me for an imminent rendezvous.

  'Do you know where he is?' She'd been holding the question back: it came out with a little rush, her breath clouding under the light that hung from the ceiling.

  I ignored the question.

  'Why aid you call my embassy, Tanya?'

  She took it as an accusation. 'I… I hoped someone there might know where he is.'

  'It's perfectly all right to call us. I just want to know why you did. I mean, why us.'

  She was watching my eyes intently, either not trusting what I was saying or believing there was a hidden meaning.

  A lot of rdv's are like that, with strangers.

  'I…' She looked down, then up again. 'He said sometimes that he had "British friends".'