The Sinkiang Executive

by Adam Hall

  At intervals I listened to the sound background: a line of trucks crossing the bridge over the canal half a mile away, presumably a military convoy; men’s voices on the far side of the nearest building, and the scrape of snow shovels; a radio programme, much closer, coming from the apartment below and on the left side.

  The tension bar went into the keyway and I felt for the notch on the underside of the bolt, then gave it enough pressure to push the racking stump against the tumblers; I didn’t know how many there were but the standard number was three. My hands were freezing and I was clumsy, getting the pick into the keyway but having a lot of trouble finding the tumbler and raising it. I had to try three times before I could feel the gate lining up with the stump, and I made a time check at 5.43 to establish temporal orientation because you can fiddle with a lock for half an hour and think you’ve only been at it ten minutes: it’s concentrated work and you tend to forget the environment and that can be dangerous. Even with these small tools I was making a degree of noise and Liova could have left someone in the apartment: sister, neighbour, so forth.

  I had two of the tumblers raised and felt the third one lining up with the racking stump. My fingers were now partially numbed and I wasn’t sure whether it was the gate coming into alignment or the other tumblers moving laterally because of wear. Below the fire-escape a car had begun moving, accelerating into second gear and going slowly past the corner and into the square. I’d allowed for various contingencies as a matter of routine: the merchandise running out before Liova was at the head of the queue, her original errand becoming abortive, a neighbour giving her a lift back in his car and shortening the time element. As this stage I’d hear her coming in through the front door and the risk was minimal.

  I eased the pick away and increased the force of the tension tool and felt for movement and got it and steadied my right hand as the racking stump went through the gates of all three tumblers and the bolt slid back.

  5-47.

  Once I was inside I put the lights on because I could work faster and that was essential because the risk of being disturbed was greater than the risk of the light’s being noticed and bringing some kind of enquiry.

  Living-room, one bedroom, kitchen, small dining-room, bathroom, large closet, skylight, fanlight, four minutes to make certain there was no radio transmitter and no short-wave receiver, then steady work, every cupboard, every drawer, every contained space and every visual cover material - rugs, curtains, pictures - and every disguise feature - radio, lamp-bases, bookshelves, the big leaved table. Forty-five minutes and no go, a blank, try again. The deadline I’d estimated was one hour from the unlocking of the door but that was arbitrary and she could be back here at any next minute and I hadn’t worked out a cover story because I didn’t yet know her personal relationship with Kirinski and that was the key to what I could do here.

  Box mattress, clock-case, Chinese vase, sink-cupboard, cistern, gas geyser - the telephone rang and persisted and I waited and the room was quiet again and I went on working - pelmets, toolbox, sideboard base, cutlery cabinet, blank every time a blank and the deadline one minute away and I began sweating.

  Something had changed in the background sound and I went into the kitchen again and cracked the door open and listened and tried to fit this aural pattern against the one I’d heard before and finally got it: the radio was still going but I couldn’t hear it in the living-room because the walls were thick. Shut the door and went back and began working on surfaces: walls, wainscoting, panels, doors, cupboards, tapping and listening for hardness, softness, diaphragm tones, reverberation, echo effect, dissimilarities in texture sounds, inconsistencies in surface structures, drawing blank, drawing blank wherever I went.

  7.29 and an overrun on the deadline of forty-two minutes, it was no bloody go but this was the target centre and London had worked for three months on just getting me here and if Alexei Kirinski was clandestine in any way he’d have to conceal material where he lived.

  Sounds: clock, creak of the wood stove, a door shutting a long way off, she didn’t have to come through a door, otherwise total silence. I would hear her footsteps, first. Listen for those.

  Air vents, ledges, the skylight, the plumbing access panel at the end of the bath, blank, all of them blank. I began measuring, using the wooden spoon from the tray in the kitchen, comparing widths and thicknesses: the wall over the kitchen doorway, the side of the big closet, the depth of the sink recess, the base of the sideboard, the rear wall of the closet again where I’d tapped before, with nearly four inches unaccounted for, warmer, measure again, four inches, represented by seven spoon’s-lengths from the master wall outside the closet and six and a half lengths inside, try tapping again, higher this time, all the way up to the ceiling, a slight echo effect in this section two feet between the beams and the beams don’t go all the -way down so it must be a frame of some kind and this knot-hole is in a separate panel and it Slides.

  They don’t tell you everything, in London. The principle is that if you know the overall background to any specific mission you’ll tend to overthink and over-react to the point of actual purpose-tremor when you’re at the target centre picking a lock or laying a fuse or setting a trap: if you’re aware of the responsibility you’ll shy at an action you’d otherwise take in your stride. When Gary Powers was shot out of the sky in Soviet airspace the imminent East-West summit conference was cancelled and the cold war broke out again in Cuba, Laos and the Congo, and this was the direct consequence of one failed mission. It wasn’t his fault because the U-2 didn’t destruct: the point is that if he had known what the consequences would be he might have turned down the mission at the outset because he was only an executive in the field and he carried the built-in responsibilities of a five-star general in a hot war and that’s loading the dice in any language.

  I didn’t know the background to Slingshot and I couldn’t have turned down the mission in any case because those bastards had me over a barrel and indirectly this was a help as I slid the panel back and found the spring release and swung the flat zinc box away from the wall and lifted the lid.

  Two compartments, each of them a foot square and with separate serial numbers: Z-A23V2/S and 8-1289, the suffixes presumably belonging to one file and the main body reference belonging to two different systems. A lot of material: photostats, diagrammatic printouts, two sets of holocryptic gammas with red and black pages printed on nitrated cellulose, KGB/GRU Monome-Dinome tables with complete matrices and side and top coordinates, so forth.

  Local military deployments and facilities.

  Airfields, underground communication channels, silos.

  Names, file references, variable cypher drafts.

  One code-word heading: Opal Light. The first and last pages were slashed across with a graphite pencil and the whole sheaf was stapled top and bottom.

  I didn’t begin hurrying because there was no point: the deadline had burned out and all I had time to do was to swing the zinc box back and slide the panel across before she said:

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  Chapter 14

  FUSILLADE

  She stood there watching me for two or three seconds with that total stillness of hers, her large eyes intent on me. The brown paper package she was holding looked heavy and I said:

  ‘Let me take that.’

  ‘No,’ she said and put it down on the desk near the door and picked up the telephone and pulled a short 9-mm. automatic from inside her astrakhan coat. There wasn’t time to reach her but I was close enough to the low table and didn’t move.

  ‘Operator,’ she said into the phone without looking away from me.

  ‘You’ve got the safety catch on,’ I said, ‘so you can’t -‘

  She looked down and I went for the big piece of jade on the table and swung it in a curving vector and pulled the table upwards against me and the shot sent splinters whining across my face an instant before the jade hit the gun and she cried out in pain and I got ac
ross to her before she could try it a second time.

  The gun had slid across one of the Chinese rugs and she wrenched herself free and got half-way there before I caught her again and threw her against the settee and went for the gun myself and got it and hit the magazine out and slipped it into my pocket and kicked the gun hard and sent it spinning across the floorboards into the kitchen as she came at me with her nails and got close before I caught her wrists and crossed them and put some pressure on, twisting her round so that she had her back to me, snow on her astrakhan coat and her neck cold against my face as I whispered to her.

  ‘If you make any noise I’m going to kill you.’ It was the closest I’d been to a woman since that stupid bitch in Furstenfeldbruck and she smelt of woodsmoke and damp hair and the oils in her skin.

  A door had opened. I only just heard it.

  She leaned her back against me and took deep breaths, moving her arms slightly to find out how much strength she’d need to free herself. I didn’t have to warn her about this; the pressure I was using was already cutting off the circulation.

  They were outside now.

  I whispered again, close to her ear. ‘When is Kirinski coming back?’

  She didn’t answer. They were knocking at the door. Kirinski wouldn’t do that. I brought more pressure on her wrists until a sound came from her throat; then I stopped because I didn’t want any noise. They began calling through the door.

  ‘Liova! What happened?’

  ‘It was nothing,’ I whispered. ‘You broke a light bulb.’

  I gave a quick twist to inflict pain as a warning and then let her arms free because she had to get her voice steady and I wasn’t sure she could do it.

  ‘Liova Kirinski? Are you all right?’

  Then she called back to them, doing it well, even getting the hint of a laugh in her voice as she told the woman it was a light bulb, that was all, she’d dropped it and frightened herself with the noise.

  We listened together and in a moment heard them moving away along the passage; then she swung her head to look up at me and lifted her hands and I parried them with a wedge lock because I thought she was going to try for my eyes with her nails but she cried out softly, don’t, and put her arms round me and kissed me through the wing of dark hair that lay half across her face, bringing her thighs against me and moving them from side to side as she went on kissing, drawing her hair away and using her tongue, using her pelvis against me until my body began responding and my mind warned me that she’d tried to kill me once and would try again the instant I was off my guard.

  But there was nothing she could do without a weapon and if she broke free and reached the gun it wouldn’t do any good and if she began screaming and managed to throw something and smash glass I could be clear of the building fast enough for total security so I let her go on and began using my own hands to open her coat and bring her against me as she asked on a breath who are you, again and again, as the girl had done in the snows of Prague, who are you.

  We were on the floor now and she was already in orgasm as she pulled me in with her nails burning across my thighs and her dark head rolling from side to side as she moaned softly, from side to side in a rhythm she couldn’t stop. Part of my mind became occupied with impressions as twilight cerebration went on: the curved head of a dragon on a Chinese rug, an empty gun lying on a kitchen floor, a telephone dangling on its cable with a faint continuous whine coming from its black plastic, the glow of a huge iron stove and above it a bright copper samovar, and her name, Liova, and her sweat slipping on me, her breath against my face and her sharp hands everywhere, wanting to hurt and draw blood. And the smell of cordite still in the room.

  In a moment she was lifting me with her thighs, faster and faster, her breath coming desperately as if she were drowning; so I hurt her as I knew she wanted me to and her second orgasm came at once like an explosion and she cried out and I put my hand over her mouth and she bit the palm with the sharpness of a snake but I kept it there because she was supposed to be alone here.

  After the third time she let go and went limp against the floorboards with her arms flung out and her hands open, and I watched her face, bright with sweat and as if sleeping, the dark lashes throwing soft crescent shadows in the light of the stove’s embers, her hair spread like a wing across the edge of the rug, her mouth quiet and her breath inaudible.

  I wondered what her fantasy had been. I didn’t think it was Kirinski.

  The swing of headlights passed across the ceiling, faint in the room’s illumination, and I came away from her.

  ‘Stay with me,’ she said. Her eyes were open, watching me.

  I said: ‘You don’t know who I am.’

  My body was too relaxed, the nerves too quiet.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said.

  I went over and put the phone back on the hook.

  ‘Why do you carry that thing?’ I asked her.

  ‘What thing?’ She got up from the floor, tousled and drowsy.

  ‘The gun.’

  ‘He makes me.’

  ‘Why?’

  To protect myself.’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ and she was suddenly angry, either because I wouldn’t stay or because I’d reminded her of something. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘You know him, don’t you?’

  ‘Nobody does.’ Her face was white, some kind of reaction, the shock of the gun going off and then the animal need and now the real world still going on, something like that or of course I could be wrong, she could be the head of the local KGB for all I knew.

  ‘When is he coming back?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  I didn’t think she meant to answer: she did it without thinking, her head swinging to look at me, as if caught out.

  ‘Who did you call, when I left here this morning?’

  Her eyes went down. No, she wasn’t working for anyone: she was unsuited and untrained. ‘I didn’t call anyone,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t call them again, when I leave here.’ I went up to her and waited until she looked at me. ‘Kirinski wouldn’t like it.’ That was a direct hit: she looked frightened.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Andreyev Rashidov.’ I turned away. ‘The telephone rang about an hour ago. Would that have been Kirinski?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who were you going to call just now, when you came in?’

  She hesitated. She couldn’t get anything right.

  ‘The police.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was afraid of you. I didn’t know how you’d get in.’

  ‘It’s not important.’ She was an amateur and they’re unpredictable and therefore dangerous and I didn’t want to know any more, not from her. ‘What time do you expect him here? Kirinski?’

  She hesitated again and I said, ‘Come on, what time?

  I saw her flinch: the tensions were coming back in her faster than in me. I went up to her again and said: ‘You’re in too deep, Liova. For God’s sake get out while there’s time. Go away, where he can’t find you. There’s no future in this game, even for the professionals.’

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know whether to trust me, and I knew I couldn’t trust her. Living things only bite when they’re frightened and she was frightened sick.

  ‘What time,’ I asked her quietly, ‘is he coming back?’

  In a moment she said: ‘In the morning.’

  ‘All right.’ I went across to the kitchen and picked up the gun and snapped the magazine back into it and gave it to her. ‘Tell him to meet me on the north side of the Lenin Memorial tomorrow at noon.’

  She looked down at the gun as if she’d never seen it before, then dropped it on to the settee.

  ‘Tell him to be there alone.’ I picked up the telephone and tore the cable away. Tell him I can get him a life sentence at a forced-labour camp if he makes a mistake.’ I went out and down the stairs and into the snow.

>   His name was Gorodok.

  This must be one of the military roads: it had been cleared after the last snow and I’d only seen three private cars and a produce truck: the rest of the stuff had the Red Star on it - jeeps, transports, armoured cars, a mobile gun with a full crew muffled up to their ears in their greatcoats. There was a camp somewhere: these weren’t convoys.

  I drove steadily, not too fast. I didn’t want any attention.

  It was 9.32.

  Of course he could be from London - some bright spark from the reserve pool on his first Russian assignment or one of the agents-in-place working the area south of the Omsk-Novosibirsk line, it could be anyone, cover name Gorodok, it didn’t mean anything.

  I wanted to drive fast because my mind was racing but this had to be done with care and there was quite a bit of traffic on this stretch and if I hit anything I’d have to argue the point with the military and that could screw the whole thing up if someone hadn’t done that already. It was freezing cold in the Trabant but I was sweating because Chechevitsin had only given me the action signal and nothing else, no explanation.

  He’d got pretty desperate because there were three messages for me at the hotel when I’d got back there and all of them were for me to call him. I did it from the pay phone round the corner at the household store because this one obviously wasn’t for the hotel connection.

  Three military trucks in a line and I felt their windblast as they went by and left the night black again after the glare of their lights. The road was tricky along this bit because there were hedgerows and the traffic had blown the loose snow across the surface and it had got packed down over the sand.