Northlight q-11 Page 9

  They were giving me rope.

  'But you can't do that!'

  Her Russian was atrocious.

  'I'm sorry. It's the curfew.'

  'But listen, I'm an American citizen!'

  'We know.'

  He was in plain clothes, with the slight regulation bulge above the left hip.

  'Look, if I want to go out to get some fresh air, that's what I'm going to do. Okay?'

  She tried to push her way past him.

  'We'd prefer you not to make trouble.'

  'If you don't let me past I'm going to make so much goddamned trouble you won't even know what's happening!'

  It didn't sound exactly like that, because she was using only the present tense and the Russian for goddamned isn't translated as accursed, so forth.

  'It won't do any good,' I told her in English and she turned to face me with her eyes bright.

  'What the hell do you know about it?'

  'That it won't do any good.' I said to the KGB man in Russian: 'It's her first time here.'

  'Americans,' he said with a shrug. 'Are you American too?'

  'No. English.'

  'There's no difference. You cause trouble. You are in Russia now, do you understand? You are on the soil of the Soviet Union, and are expected to behave according to our laws.'

  'What kind of bullshit is he giving you?' the girl asked.

  'There's a curfew. The only thing you can do about it is calm down and come and have a drink.'

  'D'you always let these bastards have their own way?'

  'It's more comfortable.'

  'Whose side are you on, for Christ's sake?'

  'Come and have a drink.'

  She stared at me with her head flung back and her eyes still hot. 'Did you know about this curfew?'

  'No.'

  'Then why are you taking it lying down?'

  'Because this isn't my first time out here.'

  'How d'you know it's mine?'

  'It shows.'

  'Christ, I don't know which one of you bastards I hate most.'

  'You'd better choose, because I'm the one who's going to buy you a drink.'

  'Shit.' She turned and walked off, then swung back to look at me. 'I guess that's not very polite.'

  'It'll do.' I nodded to the KGB man and put an arm around the girl and took her into the bar. It was almost deserted. 'What would you like?'

  'A iManhattan.'

  She was young, though I couldn't tell which side of thirty: I'm no good at people's ages. In her blue parka and gloves she looked more like one of the jet set just off the ski slopes.

  'But why are they suddenly having a curfew?'

  I'd chosen a corner table with a view of the doorway. The three men at the bar were speaking English, but one was French; I could hear the accent.

  'The whole place is jumpy. You should know that.'

  'Why should I?'

  'You're a journalist.'

  'Jesus, I wish-' then she took her drink and looked down and said, 'I guess I need this.'

  'Cheers.'

  'What? Cheers.'

  The other two were German. The Frenchman was getting tight.

  'Where are you from?' I asked her. It was going to be fifteen minutes of small talk and then I was going up to my room because I wanted to do some thinking: I wanted to find out why they were giving me rope. It was like being on a pond in winter: I could hear the ice cracking.

  'Boston. What about you?'

  'London. My name's Clive Gage.'

  'Hi. I'm Liz Benedixsen.' She put out a cold hand. 'I don't normally blow my top that way. I just got fired.'

  'From your paper?'

  'Right. They called me home, but I'm not going.'

  'You like Murmansk in winter?'

  'You mean the cold? I don't mind that. Why did you order tomato-juice?'

  'I like it.'

  'Oh. Ex-boozer?'

  That's right.'

  'You don't look like a journalist, Clive.'

  'This is a disguise.'

  She had an interesting smile, it was private, confiding.

  'What's your paper?'

  'The Monitor.'

  'Class.'

  'A little conservative. Though not in your meaning of the word.'

  'Redneck?'

  'Quite. More blue-blooded.'

  She laughed again.

  A man had come in and was sitting at the far end of the bar and I watched him now and then but he was all right: he could have used the gold-framed mirrors to cover this corner of the room but he was sitting too far at an angle.

  'Your editor hasn't called you back?' the girl asked me.

  'No.'

  'Most of them have gone. Didn't you notice?'

  'Yes.' I hadn't. I'd thought they were out with a guide trying to rake up some local colour.

  'You know why they've gone?'

  'No.'

  She looked around at the three men sitting at the bar and the man at the end, then back to me, her eyes concentrating, weighing me up. 'I haven't seen you around much.'

  'I've been working in my room.'

  She considered this. 'You know we're about the last ones left? You, me, and these guys in here? That doesn't tell you anything?'

  'There's no story.'

  'Well sure, that puts it simply enough. But I mean why not? The summit meeting in Vienna's in jeopardy and there has to be the most tremendous amount of secret diplomacy passing between the Kremlin and the White House over the submarine sinking and we're sitting right here in Murmansk where it happened — and there's no story?'

  'But we're only here to make a gesture.'

  'A what?'

  'Secret diplomacy isn't for publication. All we can hope to get out of the Soviet Ministry of Information is continued denial.'

  I was wrong. He was using a mirror.

  'So what are we doing here?' Liz asked me.

  'We're here to report that the city housing the Soviet Union's major naval base is full of tension tonight, that a curfew has been ordered for the protection of foreign journalists because the good citizens here resent the United States sending a submarine to spy on their most secret defence installations, and that they've been queueing up for clogs all day in a temperature of 25 degrees below.'

  He was using the long narrow mirror between the end of the bar and the heavy plush curtains. He was watching me now.

  'That doesn't sound like the Monitor.'

  'The Monitor does what every other paper does when it has to. It prints whatever news it can get, and what it can't get it makes up.'

  She looked down at her drink for a minute while I turned slightly and worked out the angles and found that I could watch him in the other mirrors while he was using the narrow one, and tell by the angle of his head when he was watching me. Or maybe I was being paranoid just because of the room search: he could be sitting there trying to make up his mind what the chances were of getting rid of me and moving in on Liz Benedixsen, who was quite attractive and the only woman remaining among the press contingent.

  'You know something, Clive?' She'd lowered her voice and was looking at me with her green eyes totally engaged. 'I believe I know why there's no story. I believe I know why most of the gang has gone home. I believe there's a major cover-up going on over the sinking of that submarine. I mean major. Like I say, involving the Kremlin and the White House, on a hotline level.'

  I drank the last of the tomato-juice. It tasted of brine.

  'Possibly.'

  She leaned nearer me across the low table. 'You remember what Claire Sterling did with the attempt on the Pope?'

  'Yes.'

  'She exposed a major cover-up, right? And they still wouldn't listen. Even the CIA. Even the New York Times. She said that even though there was actual evidence pointing directly to Andropov there was just no way the West could come out with a public accusation, because if it did, there was no way the West could go on maintaining diplomatic relations with people who had tried to murder th
e Pope. And if we couldn't go on maintaining diplomatic relations with the Soviets, it would be the end of our chances for peace.' She moved her glass round and round on the black marble table, the reflection of her drink playing across her eyes. Then she looked up again. 'Are you seeing any connection, Clive?'

  'You might not be far from the mark.'

  He wasn't lip-reading: he looked up at the mirror only at intervals. He wasn't KGB: his suit had been made in London and he was showing a tan. For the first time the idea occurred to me that Captain Bratchenko had been speaking the truth: it hadn't been his people who'd searched my room.

  'Okay,' Liz said quietly, 'the sinking of a submarine isn't so horrendous as the idea of a pope getting shot to death — which was their intention. Tragic as hell, with all those lives lost, sure, but nothing like as far-reaching diplomatically — until you consider how vital that summit meeting is for us all. And then we get the parallel, right? There's no way the American public would allow the president to talk to any country that has just wiped out all those lives without any attempt to warn them first. These bastards shot from the hip, and before they woke up to the fact they were also shooting the summit conference right out of the water.'

  I had begun listening.

  'That's quite interesting.'

  'I hope that's a good old British understatement, Clive, because I find the idea so goddamned interesting myself that when my editor cabled saying I had to go home like all the others I told him he could go screw himself.' She finished her drink.

  I had begun listening because the work of a shadow executive is normally close-focus. Some of the missions they give us in London carry international background but we don't have to think about it; sometimes we don't even know about it. For our own sakes we're told only as much as we need to get through the mission and secure the objective and bring it home, whatever it is, a man or a document or an article like the one I'd taken from Brekhov. But there were things I didn't like about Northlight. Ferris had refused to local-control me; Fane was shut in and uncommunicative, and I didn't think he'd be able to give me the kind of support I'd need if I had to go to ground in a safehouse or start a fast run for the frontier; someone had searched my room and it could be the man sitting at the end of the bar watching me in the mirror; and above all, the sleeper hadn't made contact as he should have done.

  It wasn't that these things made it difficult for me; it was that they didn't make an articulate pattern. The mission was out of focus and I couldn't see where I was going. I didn't trust Fane and I didn't trust Croder and I needed more information and I knew they wouldn't give it to me if I asked them, and there was no one else — unless this American journalist knew more about the background than I'd learned in No. 10 Downing Street or Eaton Place and could put it into focus for me.

  'He's cut off my expenses, of course.'

  She was moving her empty glass round and round, and I signalled to the barman.

  'Have you got enough to keep going on?'

  'If I sleep in the goddamned snow.'

  She looked close to tears of anger.

  'You think you're sitting on an exclusive,' I said.

  'I think I'm sitting on a goddamned powder keg.'

  When the man came I asked for the same again.

  'The Monitor isn't mean,' I told her.

  'What?' She'd been thinking of something else. Her green eyes watched me steadily.

  'I'll pick up the tab for you here, if it'll help you get your story.'

  'Look, I'm not bumming, Clive. I'll get by. I just mentioned it, you know?' She looked down again. 'The thing is, there's another parallel with this submarine story. Right?'

  'Korean Airlines Flight 007.'

  She swung her head up. 'Right. I believe some trigger-happy jerk in the Russian navy just went and let go with his torpedoes at the submarine before he asked anyone's okay.'

  'It's one of the theories.'

  'I believe it's the right one, Clive. And I'm not just guessing.' She looked at the other people at the bar again before she went on, lowering her voice. 'There's someone I know, in Moscow. An American. He-' she stopped and looked at me. 'Look, this is my story, okay?'

  'Don't tell me anything you don't want me to send in.'

  She thought about that, watching me steadily. 'I don't think you're like that.'

  'You might be wrong.'

  'No. I don't think I'm wrong. Let's put it this way. If I can get anything big, it goes in to my paper first. Then yours. Okay?'

  'I thought you said you were fired.'

  'Honey chil', when I send them this one they're going to put me back on the payroll so fast it'll look like sleight of hand. Where did this come from?' She looked down at her drink.

  'The man brought it.'

  'I didn't even notice. Okay, Clive, it's going to hit my page first, before yours. Is it a deal?'

  'All right.'

  'Okay. Like I said, there's someone I know, in Moscow. I can't tell you who he is because he'd scalp me. But he's got a theory too, and if he's right it puts him way ahead of the game. He thinks some guy in that naval base duped a tape of the action when that sub got sunk, and now he's holed up somewhere in this city with half the KGB hunting for him. Now if we could talk to him… that would be quite a story, wouldn't you say?'

  11 CYANIDE

  Where are you speaking from?'

  'The post office.'

  'Which one?'

  'In Obolenskij prospekt.'

  I counted the seconds of silence. Four.

  'What do you need?'

  'There's something wrong.'

  'In what way?'

  I listened carefully to his voice.

  If it had been Ferris local-controlling me it would have been easier. I didn't know Fane well enough to know what the sound of his voice was like in the field. He didn't sound tense, but that might not mean anything: he could have reserves of nerve fibre that I didn't know about.

  The thing was, I'd done some work on the room-search thing and the only reason for the KGB to do that was because Fane had been blown, and had talked, and if that had happened he could be speaking to me now with a gun at his head.

  'Are you clear,' I asked him, 'at your end?'

  Three seconds. I tried to remember the conversation we'd had on the bridge in Moscow, and whether he'd always paused like this.

  'In what way?'

  'Bugs.'

  'Perfectly clear. I told you this number was all right.'

  'I know.'

  'What's happened?'

  I'd decreased the risk as far as I could. This was a post office but it wasn't in Obolenskij prospekt: it was in Bockova ulica, and if anyone else were on the line and sent out a van they'd draw blank at the other place.

  'My room was searched.'

  A long pause but I'd expected that.

  'Tell me about it.'

  I just said I'd complained and the KGB had denied everything.

  'How did they treat you?'

  'They were civil.'

  'I mean did they… ask any awkward questions?'

  'No.'

  The silence drew out, but I wasn't worried now. I'd been listening hard enough to have picked anything up, anything wrong. He was thinking, that was all.

  'Your set-up is absolutely all right.'

  He meant my cover.

  'If you say so.'

  'There is just no way they could have got anywhere near you. I know this.'

  'So what's your answer?'

  'You've been protected,' he said, ignoring my question, 'all die way from London through Moscow and into your hotel here. I've been in constant signals, and Croder is handling you with die most extreme care. You're absolutely sure, of course?'

  'That my room was searched?'

  'Yes.'

  'Oh, come on, Fane.'

  'Just making sure. It's so extraordinary. Have you any ideas?'

  'I thought they might have got onto me and decided for some reason to give me rope.'


  'I would have known.'

  'How?'

  'This is the most sensitive assignment I've ever been given, and Croder himself is running it. If anything had started to go wrong — in terms of Galina — we would have known at once.'

  Galina Borisovna was spook terminology for the KGB.

  'All right,' I said.

  'What about you? Have you got any ideas?'

  'Only one. There's a journalist at the hotel, a French-Swiss by his accent. He's been taking an interest in me.'

  Another pause. 'What sort?'

  'He's watching me now.' | The strange, saffron light of dusk was seeping through the grimy windows. It was three o'clock: the nights were long here.

  'Is he in the post office?'

  'No. He stopped short when I came in. He'll be outside waiting for me.'

  'Does he know you've seen him?'

  'No.'

  I was facing the main doors and already knew the answer to what Fane would ask me next.

  'Can you go out the back way?'

  'No.' It would mean going past the counter and through the sorting room.

  'You say he's a journalist. You mean that's his cover?'

  'Yes.'

  'How do you know that?'

  'I know a spook when I see one.' He'd only made one mistake on the way here through the streets from the hotel: he'd hurried a little when I'd walked round a corner and slowed, looking back. It hadn't been easy for him, over the snow. Figures stood out.

  'Do you know his name?'

  Fane's tone had become almost casual now, and I recognized for the first time that the more the pressure came on the quieter he got. That was good: there was more to him than I'd thought. But I didn't like this new situation. It had unnerved me to the point of thinking that Fane might have been blown.

  'Yes. Rinker.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I got a look at the reservation book.' He asked a lot of questions, never taking me for granted.

  'What does he look like?'

  'Short, compact, maybe thirty-five, in training, works out with weights, or it's some form of martial art. He-'

  'Eyes?'

  'Brown. Dark hair smoothed back. Good tailor. Why?'

  'I thought I might recognize him as some kind of opposition tool. So what are you going to do?'

  I thought about it. 'Do you have any instructions?'