Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  His black eyes glittered with amusement. 'Conceivably. Where is the bomb?'

  'I haven't found it yet.'

  He looked at the filthy engine. 'Are you an expert?'

  'I'm finding out. If your barn is still standing an hour from now you'll know I'm an expert.'

  'Perhaps I can help.'

  'Yes. You can go back and look after Karasov.'

  'I would rather stay here,' he said softly, 'and fiddle with the toy you think they've sent you.'

  'I know you would. You can't keep away, Volodarskiy, can you?'

  'From what?" 'The brink.'

  His eyes glittered again. 'That is a way of putting it, I suppose.'

  'You're like me.'

  'I think so, yes.'

  'But if I get it wrong, and this thing goes up, I want you to look after Karasov. I want you to contact my local control and tell him what's happened and ask him how he's going to get the objective out. Until he can do something I want you to keep that man with you and see that no one gets to him. He's the objective, Volodarskiy. The objective.'

  His eyes moved around the barn while he thought about this, then he looked down and shrugged. 'I will do what you say, my friend; I know how important your mission is. But do what you can to find that little toy of yours and make it safe. I have no wish to keep that craven wretch in my house for longer than I have to. He's not fit company for my dog.'

  'He's burnt out,' I said, 'that's all.'

  'And so am I. But there is heat there yet.' He came to stand close to me. 'I was fifteen years in the labour camps, but that was not so bad. When I came home they told me that my wife had been arrested for circulating subversive material — she was a poet, and she wrote of freedom.' His breath clouded on the cold air and his eyes never left my face. 'She refused to give away her friends, her collaborators, and so they beat her, and she died. The KGB men who killed her had received promotion and been transferred. But I have found one of them, and when I find the other, I have some work to do. So has my dog.' He turned away. 'He is hungry, and so am I.'

  I watched him moving back to his cave across the snow.

  It took me another forty minutes to find it because they can rig this kind of thing in a dozen ways and just because you've disconnected the battery it doesn't mean you won't detonate it if you move too fast or press too hard or touch the wrong terminal, the wrong wire, the wrong connection.

  It was lying under the front floorboards. I hadn't been able to see it from underneath the truck: I'd had to go in from the top, prying the floorboards upwards a centimetre at a time and shining the torch beam through the widening gap. I first saw the bomb when the floorboard was still raised only two or three centimetres and I stopped moving at once.

  It would depend on how good the man was at his job. He could have used any one of a dozen initiators — chemical, electrical, mechanical, acoustic, vibratory, magnetic — or he could have used a combination initiator to produce detonation whatever I did, so I got a spanner and took the driving mirror off its bracket and slipped it through the gap in the floorboards and used the torch again.

  These things are never pleasant to look at, simply because you know what they will do if you disturb them. This one had the squat shape of a giant slug and the stillness of a rattlesnake. Its potential for monstrous havoc gave it, in my mind, a kind of life: the brain refused to believe that this degree of power could be contained in such a small object. What I was looking at was something that could produce an air-blast pressure of a million pounds per square inch and a temperature of four thousand degrees centigrade and a fragmentation velocity of twenty thousand feet per second and it would do this if I made a single wrong move. The infinitely complex system of intelligence inside my skull was within two feet of the source of cataclysmic obliteration, and the forebrain was working out the options while the primitive stem kept the hairs on my arms lifted and the pressure in the arteries raised and the heart's rhythm racing.

  But there were no real options. The objective had to be taken across and that was what I was here for and it wasn't the time to weigh values — Karasov's life against mine, the ruthless demands of the mission against the executive's personal survival. I was here because the brink was here and if I'd wanted anything different then I could have walked out of that bloody building in Whitehall long ago and told them to stuff it, get off my back, leave me alone. But they knew what I wanted and they'd put it on the map and set my feet in its direction and told me how far it was and now I was there. On the brink.

  You can't keep away, Volodarskiy, can you? You're like me.

  I think so, yes.

  There's one born every minute.

  Time check. 10:53. I'd been here almost an hour and the train from Murmansk was due in at the station in thirty-seven minutes and there wouldn't be a lot of time to check the environment of the freight-yards but if we delayed the rendezvous until 13:00 hours we'd risk exposure and I didn't want to do that, I wanted to get Karasov out before they came for him again.

  I moved the mirror in the gap, angling it and sliding it from one end to the other, lighting the underside of the floorboards with the torch. There were no contacts and I pulled the boards higher and took another look. The bomb was the size of a small brick and preserrated with a shrapnel sleeve. The end terminal carried the wire to the junction box underneath the dashboard and the side terminal connected with earth through the chassis: they'd scraped an area clean and used grip tape, a decent enough job. But I didn't like the flat back lever on the underside of the pack and as I turned it a couple of degrees for a better look I realized it was a grasshopper switch and knew that all I had to do was pick up the main pack to send the truck through the roof of the barn, so I worked on the terminals first and freed the pack from the wires and then picked it up slowly, inching my fingers underneath to keep the switch flat to the body.

  There was no sound of ticking. A timing device would have been visually evident; all we'd got here was two and a half pounds of TNT and provision for electrical initiation from an outside source and a liquid chemical in a glass tube to detonate internally by percussion: I could see the end of the tube recessed into the main pack and when I tilted it I could see the bubble.

  Think. Consider binding the lever with some string and then putting the bomb onto the curved bonnet of the truck and starting the engine and walking away and letting the vibration shake the thing off and send the barn up. It had worked in Berlin and it would work now. The Rinker people weren't likely to come here and poke among the wreckage to make sure there were bodies in it: they'd hear the bang and assume that what had been designed to happen had happened, simply because the human mind prefers to believe in success rather than failure. And even if they came as far as the barn they wouldn't have much time to poke about in the wreckage before Volodarskiy told Fido to tear their throats out.

  But it wouldn't work, in the long run. It would mean getting to a phone and asking Fane to organize some more transport for us and that could take days and I didn't know how long Karasov could hold out before his nerves tipped him over the edge and he went stark raving bonkers, which wouldn't please London at all. There was something on that man's mind that wasn't letting him sleep, wasn't letting him believe that I could get him out, something that was frightening him so badly that it could blow him out of his skull before I could get him to the West.

  This thing in my hand wasn't ticking, but Karasov was.

  Get him out. Get him out now.

  There was some string holding some empty sacks together in the corner of the barn and I cut off a length but it was rotten with age so I raked in the tool compartment of the truck and found some electric cable and used that, winding it round the grasshopper switch and putting the bomb on the floor under the front seat on the driver's side and chocking it with a bit of wood from the littered floor of the barn so that it couldn't roll about; a thing like that could come in handy. Then I connected the battery lead and started the engine and left it running to war
m up while I fetched Karasov.

  He was coming out of the cave when I got there. They'd heard the engine start.

  'So you found your toy,' Volodarskiy said.

  'Yes.' I sensed that he hadn't told Karasov what kind of toy it was: it would have pushed him right over the edge.

  'Then I wish you a good journey.'

  'Thank you.' I looked at Karasov. 'We're going.'

  He moved his head slowly, like a punch-drunk, and stared at me in the cold light of the morning, and all I could see in his eyes was the knowledge of death. As I led him across the snow to the barn it occurred to me that his mind, at the brink of hysteria, might be open to the dark voices of premonition that I could not hear.

  18 RENDEZVOUS

  The huge iron scoop slammed down and black gas rose. 'Back!' a man shouted, waving, and I reversed the truck again.

  The snow plough moved forward another ten yards, its diesel roaring under full throttle as it lifted another ton of snow and swung it clear of the road. The exhaust gas drifted past us like a smoke screen and I felt safe for a moment, because they would have known by now that the barn hadn't gone up and they might be short of time and bring a gun in. It wasn't certain they'd do that. You've got to take calculated risks.

  The man waved us forward again, standing back this time to let us through the gap: they were clearing the intersection, routing us through a detour.

  Karasov sat beside me, leaning his head back against the seat and gazing through the windscreen with his eyes narrowed. He had the look of a man in a tumbril on his way to the guillotine, slack with despair.

  'Was it a bomb?' he had asked me a little time ago. 'A bomb he was talking about, when he spoke of a 'toy'?'

  'Yes.' He might as well know.

  'How did you find it?'

  'Bit of luck.'

  I didn't tell him it was still here under the driving-seat. He would have got out and walked.

  We ground along in first gear, shunting between a coal truck and a beaten-up Zhiguli van.

  I didn't think they'd bring a gun in because they could have done that before: they could have dropped us as we'd come out of the cave. There were plenty of other ways, quieter ways, less public. But it was a calculated risk and every time we shunted to a halt I felt my head settling instinctively onto the top of the spine and my shoulders rising into the primeval startle attitude, because this was when they'd steady the aim and fire, when we were stationary. They would have to shoot twice or use two guns unless it was only Karasov they'd been trying to kill in the barn, expecting him to climb into the truck with me before I started the engine. My death could have been planned as incidental but that wasn't certain either: the Rinker cell could have reasons for taking me down, putting me out of their way.

  The windscreen was filthy but I hadn't wiped it clean before we'd started off; we wouldn't be hitting up any kind of speed and it gave us a degree — just a degree — of safety: they'd have to judge where our heads were if they meant to station a gun somewhere in front of us along the road.

  'Then they'll try again,' Karasov said suddenly. I didn't realize he'd been all that time thinking it out; there were a thousand things on his mind, I knew that. But I didn't know what they were.

  'Not necessarily.' We halted again, and my head settled.

  'Of course they will. When they know the bomb didn't kill us, they'll try again.'

  'They wouldn't have let us get this far, don't worry.'

  He didn't say anything to that, but put a hand into the pocket of his dark woollen coat and held something out to me. I glanced down and saw a cassette tape.

  'Take it,' he said.

  I put it into my pocket. 'What is it?'

  'The second tape.'

  We were stuck again by another snow plough and I turned off the engine so that I could hear better: not only his words but the tone. He was going to talk now. He was going to tell me why he was so deathly afraid. The sleeper had waked, now he would talk.

  A second tape?

  I didn't turn my head to look at him. It was already in my mind that what he would say to me would be in the form of a confessional. I'd sensed an element of guilt in this man before.

  'What's on it, Karasov?'

  'It's a duplicate of the one you took to London.'

  I remembered the debris pattering down in Eaton Place after the two boffins had climbed into their car.

  It had been for nothing, then. There was another tape.

  A man's face was at the window suddenly and I looked at it through the glass. He was saying something. His breath steamed as he waved his hand, shouting now. I wound the window down. He wasn't an agent; he was a farmer, his face weathered into a grizzled brick-red mask and his eyes sunk into their sockets, rheumy with the cold.

  'I'm out of petrol! Can you spare me a drop, comrade?'

  I could feel Karasov's fear beside me. He was going to be like this all the way to the railway station, all the way to the coast.

  "I'm almost out myself,' I told the man. 'That's why I've switched off the engine.'

  He threw up his arms and trudged forward through the snow to talk to the driver in the truck. I wound the window up and asked Karasov, 'Why did you take a duplicate?'

  It was a long time before he answered. 'For the others.'

  The man's voice came back to us as he shouted to the driver in front. Somewhere on the road ahead I could see the shape of another mechanical scoop clearing the snow. I gave Karasov time, but he wanted me to drag it out of him like a priest in the confession box. Guilt never comes out in a hurry.

  'What others?'

  'The Chinese.'

  It was like a bullet coming through the windscreen. I hadn't been ready for it.

  'Go on,' I told him. He wanted goading.

  'I-' and that was all for another minute. I didn't prompt him again, because he'd hear fury in my voice and that would frighten him off altogether. He wouldn't know that the fury wasn't against him but against myself, against Fane, against Croder. None of us had known and, we should have known. We should have known that an international incident big enough to threaten the summit conference would inevitably involve triangle diplomacy and the China card.

  'I–I've been giving product to them for a long time now,' Karasov said.

  Mother of God.

  ''How long?

  I felt him jerk in fear as his head swung to look at me. He'd heard it: the fury. I would have to do better than this but by Jesus Christ I was sitting here in a stinking farm truck with our run to the coast blocked off by snow and the objective for the mission sitting beside me and telling me he'd been working for both major intelligence networks, East and West, for a long time, eight days into Northlight and already five on the deathroll and a live bomb under my legs and someone out there putting the windscreen into the crosshairs or signalling ahead of us to get a trap set or coming up from behind us like the man who was out of petrol and there was nothing I could do about it until I could get this bastard to the frontier and take him to London and leave him there to spill his guts all over Croder's debriefing desk and then I was going to ask questions, an awful lot of questions about the man running our Murmansk cell and why the hell he'd let his sleeper go on working for London and Peking without checking on his product and his couriers and his contacts and his communications because somewhere he could have been caught, could have been seen slipping a package into a furtive hand in the shadows of a crowded bar or on a bus or in a brothel or wherever they'd set up their drop, somewhere they could have tapped a line or checked a crossed signal or questioned the travel patterns or stood close to a talker, catching a hint of smoke on the air, a whiff of something burning.

  'What?'

  'Years,' he was saying. 'Years.'

  I didn't answer him until I'd got control again. Keep cool, yes, absolutely, nothing to get into a tis-was over, just sitting here thinking I'm working exclusively in the Soviet zone and all the time there's a Chinese cracker rigged to go off, love fr
om Peking, bit of a joke really, something funny happened to me on my way to Murmansk, this one's going to kill you.

  That, too, yes.

  'Have you been giving them everything?'

  He waited until I'd dragged the gears in: we'd started moving again. 'Not everything. Only the stuff they'd be interested in.'

  'Only the stuff they'd buy?' Rather rude, that, yes, but I wasn't really in the mood for good manners.

  'They were only interested in naval matters,' he said with an attempt at dignity, 'affecting the security of their own coastline.'

  'And how precisely did the sinking of the SSN Cetacea affect the Chinese coastline?'

  He didn't answer, and I realized he didn't even need to. Of course it was nothing to do with the Chinese coastline: it was to do with the summit conference in Vienna.

  'Keep aver this side? someone was yelling, and I wound the window down for a better view and slowed the truck. Two men with shovels were out there levering a rusty Volkswagen clear of the ruts. I turned my front wheels and got the rear chains working at the surface and nudged the VW onto the cleared surface with its tyres slewing across the sand. It pulled his offside wing off but he was out of trouble now. One of the road gang picked up the wing and threw it across the snow.

  'Keep going! Keep your wheels moving!'

  The VW sent a cloud of exhaust gas into the air and I shut the window. 'Karasov,' I said, 'have you got a gun on you?'

  He looked at me sulkily. 'No.'

  He could be lying: his eyes hadn't given anything away. It occurred to me that he might have brought a gun along to use on someone or on himself.

  'Are you taking me into a trap?

  Because anything was possible now. A few minutes ago he'd been a blown sleeper dependent on me to get him across but now he could be anything, any kind of Judas working for London, Moscow and Peking, raking in pounds sterling, rubles and yen while he kept the product coming and reported to the KGB through a backstairs courier. Maybe all that frightened him was the idea of sitting next to someone who was going to see the bits of glass coming at him first and then the flat-nosed slug as it moved into the target just above the eyes.