Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  His nerves had begun showing, and I noted it. It might not have happened to him before. It had happened to me only twice: at the moment we had access to the objective an unknown network had sent its agents into the field to surveille my travel patterns, and this time the reason was the same. The Rinker cell was hunting for Karasov and trying to use me as a tracker dog. It wasn't going to make things any easier: Karasov himself had lost his nerve and would need dragging like a dead weight to the frontier.

  'Questions?' asked Fane again.

  'Put a capsule in the bag, will you?'

  His eyes moved slightly towards me. 'Didn't you draw one in London?'

  'Yes.' I left it at that.

  In a moment he said: 'Very well. It'll be inside the head of the electric shaver.'

  When the service was over he moved away from me, and I gave him time, hanging back until half the people had shuffled to the massive doors; then I began moving, going out of the candlelight into a night so black that the sky was like a shroud thrown across the city.

  She had rings of dark pigment around her nipples, and a way of moving like a swimmer, long-legged and flowing.

  'Then I lost my folks, when I was quite young. They were in a car and there was a drunk. By the time I could sleep the whole night through and not wake up crying I was into the cults from coast to coast. A lot of the kids I got to know had lost their parents, except that they were still alive, you know? Then there was this bad cocaine trip and I woke up in a clinic tied to the bed with restraints and everything — but somehow they pulled me out of it. Not too many can survive that amount of coke.'

  She was huddled against me like a child, no longer a lover, and in the glow from a street light I saw a tear glistening below her dark lashes.

  'And then — oh God, this is going to sound so corny — after two pointless marriages I realized I wanted to spend my life with something much more than a man. I wanted to marry a cause. It sounds more like California than Boston, Massachusetts, doesn't it? But that was the way it was.' She lifted herself onto one elbow so that she could look down at me. 'I kind of found myself standing back and seeing the whole human race caught up in lunacy — war and the fear of war and the threat of war, hot wars, cold wars, wars to end wars, you name it, it comes in all flavours. I saw high school kids on TV saying they didn't feel there was any future any more because they weren't quite sure they could go on waking up and not see a mushroom cloud through the window one day. And finally I discovered — out of anger, I guess — a sense of direction, a conviction there was something I had to do. And I've been doing it ever since, Clive, in my own way, hurling myself at the barricades while everyone else is busy making a detour and maybe getting home sooner. But the barricades are still there, and until I can bring them down, I don't believe-'

  'What are they, your barricades?'

  'Lies. I don't mean the ones we all tell ourselves and other people, I mean the big ones, the world-class international lies dial talk peace and mean war. Like the ones we were all told about the attempted assassination of the Pope, and like the ones we were told about the Korean airliner. Like the ones we're being told right now about the sinking of the Cetacea.'

  'Which ones are they?'

  'There's no direct lie, except that the Soviets say they didn't have anything to do with it. There's a cover-up going on, and dial's lying by default. Do you really think we, the people, ever really get to know what goes on behind the scenes? Are we meant to believe there's no quiet diplomacy going on right now between the White House and the Kremlin? Do you believe-' she broke off and gazed at me for a moment and then let her breath out in a quick soft laugh. 'Jesus, Clive, I guess this isn't your night. After a glorious fuck like that you find you're in bed with a poor man's Joan of Arc.' She lowered her body over mine, and I felt the tears dropping one by one on my bare shoulder, while the soft laughter went on. 'You know when people say they don't know whether to laugh or cry?'

  'It's a revelation,' I said.

  'A what?' She leaned away and watched me again, her eyes liquid in the glow from the street, the colour of green chartreuse.

  'I'm not often close to anyone who lets their feelings go.'

  'I know. You're a lone wolf type. But that's what you want. Right?'

  'It's what I've got." She was beginning to stir questions in me that I'd spent all my life refusing to ask, since the day I had looked down from the window at the broken body of the schoolboy on the flagstones a long way below, while a master hurried from the cloisters with his black gown flapping in the winter wind, to see what had happened: the day when I was suddenly old enough to understand that I had a choice. I could either do what that other boy had done, or I could spend the rest of my life outside society, where it was safe.

  'The kind of loneliness I feel,' she said, 'is different.'

  I hadn't thrown him, of course. But I knew why he'd done it.

  'What kind is that?'

  'I get so involved in this idealistic crusade of mine that I don't notice anything else going on. It's like, you know, you're acting on a stage someplace and pulling out all the stops, giving a performance that's going to go down in history, and suddenly you look up and see there's nobody out there, all the seats are empty and the whole place is dark.'

  'Yes, that must be lonely.'

  'But that's about me again. What about you, Clive? You really enjoy the lone wolf bit?'

  I could see, beyond the curve of her naked shoulder, white flakes drifting across the aureole of a street lamp, whirling slowly in the wind.

  'I expect I do.'

  If there were more snow, the courier might not get the car through to Kandalaksha. It might even hold up the train.

  'You expect you do?' She was watching me again. I'd put my wrist watch on the heavy darkwood table by the bed, and could see its figures. It was gone midnight, and I would need to leave here at three, in case of snow on the road to the station.

  'Yes,' I told her, and pulled her gently down against me my hands moving along her body from the warmth of her hi — to her long swimmer's thighs, the thought in my mind, as.. comes always to us when we've just received briefing in the field, that Liz Benedixsen might be the last woman I would ever have known. 'I'm going to let you get some sleep,' I told her.

  'You don't have to go.'

  It wasn't easy to leave her. With the slow drifting down of the snow from the dark sky there was a sense of foreboding.

  Post coitus, so forth.

  I got into my clothes and took my watch from the table, leaning down to kiss her for the last time. When I reached the door she was sitting up in the bed with her arms round her knees, watching me, her eyes the only colour in the shadows.

  'Take care,' she said.

  13 MIRRORS

  The conditions were unpropitious. Snow was still falling but less heavily, and on the northern horizon a crack of light shimmered, thrust between the dark earth and the dark sky like a bright sword blade.

  The conditions were unpropitious for detecting surveillance.

  The light was blinding if you looked at it directly. It was the edge of the sun's reflection on distant cloud banks, flooding across the polar ice cap. If you looked away it vanished. It was too distant to reach into the darkness here, where only the gooseneck lamps of the railway station kept back the night. Dawn would be hours yet.

  The conditions mere unpropitious for detecting surveillance, it would be reported, if anything of this would ever be reported in the file on Northlight.

  It's one of those stuffy phrases coined by the bureaucrats upstairs, hunched at their desks with a drip on their nose and frayed cuffs and patched elbows, their chilblained feet squeezed into their cracked patent-leather shoes and a mug of cold tea beside them as they scratch the epitaph across the file in longhand, like vultures picking at the bones of a dead mission.

  They thumb through their mildewed copies of Roget's Thesaurus for euphemisms designed to give stark truths a burial more decent than the facts will
allow. By reporting that the conditions were unpropitious for detecting surveillance they mean that the executive in the field checked and rechecked and couldn't see anyone but there must have been someone there because they got to him just the same and tripped his run and slammed him into an interrogation cell or waited until he was right in the middle of the piazza and then put him in the crosshairs and dropped him like a dead duck or set up the road-block on the far side of a blind curve and pulled him out of the wreckage while it was still burning.

  There are other phrases.

  He endeavoured to evade termination. That one's easy enough: the poor bastard broke a door down and took the stairs and got to the top floor but they'd been waiting for that and he went through the window because they'd opened fire and there was nothing he could lose but this time he wasn't lucky because there was only a glass canopy below to break the fall and it wasn't enough, finis.

  They are the phrases we sometimes find in our minds, like official notices pasted on a wall, when a wheel comes off and we're suddenly on the brink. It would be amusing, I suppose, if we weren't so bloody frightened at the time.

  The reason why the conditions were unpropitious this morning was mainly the snow. I'd got out of the hotel through the kitchens and the rear service door to avoid the KGB men in the lobby: the curfew was still on for foreigners and in any case I wanted to gain time and get as far as I could on the way to Kandalaksha before the chambermaids reported the man in 203 was missing. I'd gone clandestine now and there shouldn't be anything to connect the English journalist from the Leningrad Hotel and the Soviet engineer in the train except facial characteristics, which didn't amount to much considering the photographs. But you don't take chances.

  The car started all right but the snowfall had piled up around it and I had to put it into gear and get the wheels spinning and then climb out and heave it across the ruts and get in again before it took off on its own. The main streets were still under ploughing and they'd thrown sand down but the traffic was chaotic: the early shift at the dockyards was at five o'clock and buses were taking to the side streets as an alternative to jamming up in lines at the main intersections and sometimes backing into the ploughed streets again because they couldn't get through the drifts.

  In the three miles to the station I saw one car three or four times and a KGB van had followed me half the distance before peeling off, but it wasn't possible to detect any consistent surveillance operation going on: quite a few private cars were making detours and coming back again like the buses because they couldn't get through. A man — a dozen men — could have followed me on foot over the whole distance, and I wouldn't have been able to pick them out among the others along the pavements. The conditions, so forth.

  It wasn't much easier on the platform here. There was too much cover: corners, doorways, shadows. Sailors were tramping along the edge of the platform, some of them dropping onto the rails and hopping from sleeper to sleeper, making a game of it to keep warm until an official waved a flag and yelled at them. There were two KGB men on routine observation duty near the booking office, keeping to the small area that gave them a good panoramic view of the platform. Two others were across the lines, watching their own territory; I didn't know whether this was the normal scene for Murmansk, but there would have been more of them in the streets and public places since Karasov had been posted as missing.

  Across from where I was standing was the little waiting-room at the end of platform 4 where I'd met Tanya Kiselev. I'd phoned her from the post office on my way back from the church. She'd picked up the phone on the second ring.

  'He's alive and safe,' I told her.

  There was a sudden breath on the line and then she said, 'Where is he?'

  'Not far. I'll tell him you were worried.'

  'Yes. Please tell him I-' It sounded as if she was crying, or just trying not to. 'But where is he, please? I want to see him.'

  'That wouldn't be wise.'

  'I want to be near him, don't you understand?'

  'Of course. But if anyone questions you, the less you know about him the better.'

  'I wouldn't tell anyone, ever.'

  'For his sake, it's better. I'll ask him to phone you.' Then I'd just rung off because she would have gone on being insistent and it would only have wasted time. At least she didn't have to go on thinking he might be dead.

  A green light had begun winking beyond the end of the platform and the public address speakers came on, announcing the departure of the train in five minutes. They were running it close because the locomotive was only just rolling in from the yards. I began another slow search of the environment, noting changes and new elements, walking to the end of the platform to check the shadows and coming back, passing the man with the shapeless leather bag who'd come from the booking office five minutes ago, and the other man who'd arrived earlier, no bag, but a briefcase under his arm. So far they'd avoided looking in each other's direction but that could mean nothing: I simply noted it. But they interested me more than the KGB. The people I was looking for — and the people who might at this moment be looking for me — would belong to the Rinker cell.

  They'd put me under specific and close-focused surveillance and Rinker's death wouldn't have given them any reason to call off their operation: if a professional agent with instructions to use a capsule to protect his network had been given the job of surveilling me then it was important to them — it was that important. They had the same objective as the Bureau had: the sleeper, Karasov. And since Rinker's death I'd remained at the hotel for another six hours — ample time for his cell to replace him with a fully covert operator.

  He could be the Lithuanian with the shapeless leather bag or the man with the briefcase or any one of the people who were inside the booking office or one of the waiting-rooms, and even if I could check all of them there'd be nothing to tell me who they were. I'd made three attempts to flush any surveillance since I'd got here, going into the main waiting-room and out through the emergency exit at the rear, moving into the deep shadow alongside the freight office and taking a turn round the building, going into the subway between the platforms and waiting for ten minutes on the far side of the station, but no one had followed, no one had provided any kind of image with partial cover concealment.

  I'd drawn blank but it didn't mean they weren't simply sure of me, sure that I'd board the train. Once on the train it would be too late to do anything and in the normal way you don't let that happen: you don't move into a confined environment like a train or an aeroplane without making absolutely certain you're clean, and above all — above all — you don't start out to keep a rendezvous with a key contact until you're certain you won't expose him. But today we were going to throw the book away and take the risks as they came. Control wants the objective aver the frontier just as soon as you can get him there.

  So when I went aboard the train I looked for a compartment at the end of a carriage in the «soft-seat» second class section and chose a place alongside the corridor. Nobody else came in before the train started; at this hour there weren't many people in spite of the fact that the roads were snowed under. I suppose that only a bloody fool would want to travel anywhere inside the Arctic Circle in midwinter and I was one of them.

  They'd done their best to clean the windows but there were streaks of grime on the glass. Beyond the lights of the signal box I could see flares burning, silhouetting the huge shapes of the tractors and snow ploughs trying to clear the main road from the city, with a line of trucks crawling in their wake.

  'Your coupon, comrade.'

  I gave it to him and he clipped it.

  We were getting up a fair speed: a train this size with a plough scoop on the front would go through a mountain. The sky was clearing in the east, the thin crack of light broadening and spreading an expanse of flat slate-grey across the sky in the wake of the snow clouds — the false dawn of an Arctic day. I turned my face away from it; on this trip I'd have preferred the dark.

 
'KGB.'

  I showed him my papers while his colleague stood in the corridor. I'd seen them get into the train earlier, and presumably there'd be more. They were looking for Karasov.

  'What's taking you to Kandalaksha?'

  'There's a job going at the steel foundry.'

  'You've got no work in Murmansk?' He was looking at me with that expressionless stare that will turn your blood cold if you can't trust papers or if you're carrying product or if you're not sure you can get through the act without his finding something to pick on, something to develop into a full-scale interrogation. These weren't the papers I'd shown at their headquarters; these hadn't been tested yet.

  'Yes,' I told him. 'But the pay's better at the foundry — they can't get engineers of my grade.'

  He studied the papers again under the yellow light from the ceiling bulbs. 'You didn't care for Moscow?'

  He'd noted my Muscovite accent. 'Anyone who can find a job in that place has got a cousin in the Komitet.' A bit risky because it carried a hint of corruption, but it was also a compliment, flattering his authority.

  His eyes glanced up from the papers and stared into mine for three seconds: I measured the time for something to do, to take my mind off the trickle of cold that had started along the spine. It's not the thought of what they'll do to you later that chills the blood. It's the thought of getting trapped, of feeling the sudden shock as the thing closes on you with a single wrong word, cutting you off from the world you knew a minute ago where you ate and slept and moved freely along your way through the labyrinth, and shutting you into the new world of black vans and doors and bars and keys and dangerous, questions, dangerous answers, and finally the bright light and the brute force and the long journey through the long nights until they're forced to go beyond the point when they can get anything out of you, when the aminazin or the sulfazin or the reserpine has blunted the intellect and destroyed the emotions and wiped out the memory and left them with nothing but a husk to throw onto the trash heap where once there had been a man.