Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  'A trap?' He shook his head. 'Listen, I'm not as bad as that.' And suddenly he was crying, and I shut up for a while and let him get it done with. It was the strain, I suppose, and the feeling that he was letting everyone down — because they're like that, some of them, the mercenaries, the people who'll work for anyone who'll pay them, two at a time, three at a time, paying off the mortgage on their little place in Hampstead and looking for a bigger one, bribing the black market commissar in the back streets of Leningrad to put him higher on the list for a nice little Moscwicz, shifting a bank account from Paris to Cannes and commuting by Caravelle from wife to mistress and back, compared with which my good friend Karasov was doing rather less well for himself, stuck in a truck in the Arctic Circle in winter time and snuffling over his sins into a filthy handkerchief.

  Snow exploded against the windscreen and Karasov shouted something as his head rocked back against the seat squab. Fright, that was all. The big scoop out there had swung across the line of traffic and lost half a ton of snow in the process. I stopped the truck and got out and stood on the running board and kicked the snow off the bonnet and if they'd wanted to squeeze the hairspring at this precise moment they could have blown my head off. The other drivers were rechristening the man in the scoop, clumsy prick, whoreson, pox-ridden idiot, so forth, not at all popular.

  ''Get moving! Come on, get moving?

  I botched the gears in through their worn shafts and we went forward again, shunting into the truck ahead and sliding into the clearway and getting some speed up. No trap, then, according to Karasov's behaviour: I'd been overestimating things — whatever he'd been doing and whoever he'd been busy working for he was still a burnt-out case.

  'If you've got a gun on you, Karasov, I don't want you to use it. Do you understand?' He didn't answer. 'We may run into a road check between here and the coast and I don't want you to pull a gun on anyone. Do you understand?

  He flinched again and a hand disappeared and he brought out a Soviet military JK-3. I took it from him and checked the safety-catch and shoved the thing under the seat.

  'Who are they using? Who are the Chinese using?'

  'They're being serviced through Zurich.'

  The Rinker cell. Rinker had been a Swiss. But they'd used local agents: the two men on the train, one of them a Latvian. I didn't know about the third man, the other man: he'd looked European.

  So Peking was worried about Washington and Moscow getting round a table in Vienna next month and they'd seized a chance in a lifetime: if they could get hold of a tape or Karasov himself and hit the American news media with the message that the Soviets had indeed sunk the Cetacea with a hundred and five lives on board they could scuttle the summit conference and leave that on the bottom too.

  'So why didn't you sell them the tape?' He didn't answer. 'Wasn't the money good enough?'

  The truck ahead of us was putting on more speed and I took up the slack; we were making nearly forty kph over sanded ruts. There was a lot of honking behind us in the distance; I supposed the fanner's vehicle was blocking the road because he still couldn't find any petrol.

  'They wanted me to go in front of journalists, in Moscow.'

  'Didn't they know you'd done a tape for them?'

  'Yes. They knew.'

  'Then why — come on Karasov I want some fucking information.'

  'They knew I had a tape but they said they wanted me to be there too at the broadcast.'

  'What was their price?'

  'A million US dollars.' I looked at him. 'So why didn't you take it?'

  'I knew then how serious things were. There was some talk at the naval base about the summit conference having gone down with the submarine, that kind of thing. So I told my contact the tape had-'

  'Your contact for Peking?'

  'Yes. I told him the tape had been accidentally wiped out when I'd passed through one of the power-station rooms. They said they still wanted me to make a broadcast, and for the same money. They also said that if I wouldn't do it, they'd blow me to the KGB.'

  'That was when you got out?'

  'Yes.'

  'I still don't understand why you turned them down.' He leaned towards me and a light came into his wet brown eyes. 'I was making a little on the side, don't you see, I was selling a few things to the Chinese from time to time because it wasn't doing London any harm, it wasn't anything I was keeping back from your people, it was simply a matter of duplication, don't you understand, I wasn't doubling, I was only augmenting my income. London came first with me. I'm not a man completely without loyalty, I didn't do anything that isn't done among — among-' he waved a gloved hand — 'among business people all over the world, but when I saw how serious things were, with the summit in jeopardy and the headlines talking about it every day, I backed out of my commitment with the Chinese and went to ground.'

  'You turned down a million American dollars?'

  'Yes. Do you think money is everything? Do you-'

  'You got frightened, that was all, it got too big for you?' He gave a kind of sob and I kicked the throttle and started a slide and smashed the sidelight off an abandoned trailer with the rear of the truck and got control again, slowed again, it wasn't for me to judge the poor bastard, what the hell did I know about the things I'd do if the pressure got too much or a deal got too hot to handle, I wasn't this man and I hadn't faced what he had faced, I wasn't my brother's keeper, nor his judge.

  'I would've done the same, Karasov. I would've got frightened.'

  I don't think he heard me. He was a man of conscience, I suppose, and what he was trying desperately to rescue from the ashes was some kind of pride.

  'Slow down! There's a detour! Slow dorm!'

  More men waving, and a truck overturned and half-smothered under a snow drift, someone sitting by a fire he'd made from some oily rag, warming his hands while the black smoke rose like a dead vine from the ground to the winter sky.

  We turned left, all of us, a dozen vehicles in front of me and a lot more behind, and I saw a railway signal poking up from the horizon: we were less than a mile distant now from the station and the freight-yards were this side.

  11:47.

  There wasn't going to be time to check out the environment: we were going to run in cold to the rendezvous and I couldn't do that with the objective for the mission on board. But the only option was to leave him somewhere safe while I went on and kept the noon appointment: this would leave him alive and available to London if anything came unstuck at my end, but it wasn't certain that Fane could ever find him again before he died of exposure or went trudging into the nearest KGB headquarters looking for a martyr's grave or waited for the next train and lay down on the sleepers with his neck on a rail — there was no knowing what he'd do.

  We could find a side turning and hole up under a drift until noon plus fifteen and then go in and check the environment but that would mean delaying the rendezvous until 13:00 hours and the longer we hung around Kandalaksha the bigger the risk we ran of drawing the opposition against us. There was no real reason for the KGB to be watching the freight-yards specifically: this was just paranoia on my part, a reluctance to take a calculated risk in broad daylight. The aura of this man's fear was reaching me, touching the nerves.

  Make a decision.

  A snow-clearing gang was filing along the railway lines towards a group of men hacking at frozen points with pickaxes. The truck directly in front of me was turning to the left, taking the ramp down to the main section and leaving me at the fork.

  Make a decision.

  If the train had been on time and the courier had got through without any trouble he'd be waiting under natural cover now for the noon rendezvous with the papers for Karasov, and the minute we had them we could head north and hope for clear roads and a final run in to the coast. We could be there in a few hours, before nightfall at mid-afternoon. By tomorrow morning we could be in Norway, in the West. And London by evening.

  Make Karasov, listen carefully. We're g
oing to make a rendezvous in a few minutes from now with a courier who'll have papers for you, good ones, reliable enough to get us to the frontier. I don't want you to do anything. Do you understand? I want you to sit there and look like the upholstery, keep your mouth shut and keep your hands on your lap. Do you understand?'

  He was watching me with his craven eyes, his bulk in the big coat cowering in the corner between the seat and the door.

  'What will happen if the KGB are watching the station?'

  'We're not going near the station. We're going into the freight-yards. The KGB won't be there. The rendezvous has been arranged by my own local control and he's extremely efficient. We can have absolute faith in him. You understand?'

  He was the only danger. It would only need a couple of railway workers to pass anywhere near the rendezvous zone and Karasov would take off on his own and we'd never find him again. It was like taking the cat to the vet.

  'If you think it is safe,' he said. His face was losing its colour and his eyes were dying another of the thousand deaths he'd been through since his nerve had gone.

  'There'll be no trouble. Just leave everything to me.'

  In a moment he said, 'Very well,' and looked away.

  I swung the truck down the ramp and into the freight-yards and saw the footbridge, a frieze of black iron girders running across the pale sky. The time was 11:59. We jolted across frozen ruts with the chains crunching through clinkers where the snow had been cleared by the work gangs. There was a man standing under the end stanchion of the bridge, the tip of his cigarette making the only point of colour in this desolate place.

  'The courier,' I told Karasov.

  He was waiting this side of the freight sheds, immediately under the bridge. There was a train standing on the other side, with a fat woman swabbing the windows with a brush and a steaming bucket. There was no one else here.

  It was noon when I stopped the truck exactly under the bridge and the man dropped his cigarette and began making his way across the ruts towards us. The black van came from behind the train at the same moment, moving in very fast and spilling men with their hands at their holsters.

  KGB.

  19 FINIS

  I have never been so cold. You think you have been cold? Not like this. Not like this.

  This is the cold of the dead, when the blood itself is cold. When the heart itself is cold. This is the chill of death.

  The cold was the worst.

  I thought about it, recognizing it as something that I must try to stop, then realizing that there was nothing I could do to stop it. If I tried to stop it I would meet death of a different kind.

  The cold was the worst. No. The dark was the worst. It was the darkness of not existing, bringing with it the knowledge that you have arrived somewhere unfamiliar, not where it is dark but where there has never been light. Death, yes, the regions of death far beyond any knowing.

  The dark was the worst.

  No. The noise was the worst.

  It was the noise of infinite destruction, the never-ending tumult of holocaust, bringing the irreversible death of silence, the death of peace. I knew now that there would always be this thunderous noise, this all-extinguishing darkness, this killing cold.

  Spark.

  I was curled in the foetal position on one side, lodged between metal beams and plates. A rivet was against my head and I moved a little, for comfort.

  Comfort? You must be joking.

  Another spark and in the total darkness it brought light enough to throw a reflection on the rail immediately below me, on the shining rail, so that there seemed to be two sparks. My eyes seized on it, my soul drank from it: there was light, just for this little time. All had not been extinguished, then.

  Don't fall asleep.

  No. That would be unwise.

  Keep awake. If you don't keep awake you'll fall.

  Yes. I'll fall down there onto the. Wake up. Wake up or you'll- What? Yes — wake up, I'm waking up now, I'm — oh my Christ. Grab it, grab that beam, come on.

  Close. That was rather close.

  I sat up now with my back to the big iron plate that spanned the chassis, pulling my legs up and trying not to think of what would have happened to them, to my legs, if I'd dropped onto the rails, under the wheels.

  The stink of the locomotive raked at my throat and I shut down most of my breathing. Another spark flew and I took warmth from it into my mind. Not much, true, not much. But when you're as cold as this, a spark is like the sun.

  I would have to stay like this now, sitting up. There wasn't much room, about as much as a bicycle saddle to perch on with my feet resting on a three-inch ledge, one of the big I-section girders that ran the length of the carriage. I would have to keep awake now.

  Unidentified body found on railway lines, severely mutilated.

  Then on to the sports news.

  It wasn't fatigue. It was delayed shock. But all that was over now. Northlight was finished. The objective, Viktor Pavlovich Karasov, was a dead man. The sleeper had waked but was now sleeping again, his fears at rest forever.

  The sixth death for Northlight, and the worst.

  Karasov's death was the worst.

  Mission unsuccessful.

  We try not to think about it. In the ranks of the shadow executives — God, you can't call them ranks, that's ridiculous — we're more like rats in the wainscoting, scuttling our random way through the tunnels of unknown territory in the earthy dark, the nerves galvanized and the ears tuned to catch the distant song of the deathbringer as he comes on his way to meet us — in the wainscoting, then, in the tunnels if you will, we try not to think about one of those snivelling little clerks in the records room picking up his pen and writing it down in the space provided, neatly in the space provided, Mission unsuccessful.

  We would do anything rather than see it written down, to avoid the knowledge, as we lie angled across some rubbish dump listening to the sirens, waiting for the headlights, fumbling at last for the capsule and trying to find our mouth, the knowledge that it will later be written down, our failure spelled out letter by letter in that crabby hand, for others to see.

  Not everyone, of course. The records are classified. And there's a gentleman's agreement that along those creaking and half-lit corridors our secret shall forever be sacrosanct, that we shall all of us conspire to protect what rags of pride may still be left in the bosom of a failed brother-rat.

  Did Thompson get back?

  Oh yes. Came in last night.

  What sort of condition?

  Bit done up.

  What happened? He'd only just gone out.

  Called off, I believe. They scratched it.

  Change of plan?

  That's right. Are you coming along for some tea?

  And we sit in the Caff for longer than usual, wanting company but not to talk about anything significant, just not wanting to be alone with the creeping nightmare thoughts that one day this could happen to us. Because our pride is pretty well all we've got. None of us do it for the money. Do you know the kind of money we get paid? Then you know what I'm talking about. We do it from vanity, from the arrogant and overweening urge to prove that we can go out there and take anything on and get away with it and bring back the product. So the worst thing that can happen to us is failure.

  Northlight: finis.

  The train thundered through the night.

  Dark had come down an hour ago at three in the afternoon. Black snow clouds, driving in from the north, had thrown shadow across the freight-yards, blotting out the light from the polar cap. Images weren't too clear, but of course we could recognize the van all right and the men running with their hands on their guns.

  'Did you know about this?

  He didn't answer.

  I still couldn't trust him, at the last. This was a trap and I think he could have known about it, could have made some kind of sordid pact with the KGB to lead me into them and then do what they wanted of him. I'd asked him before: 'Are you
taking me into a trap? And soon afterwards he'd asked me: 'What will happen if the KGB are watching the station?'

  But there wasn't much time to think about that now. I'd got the objective for the mission with me and my local control had got an escape route set up and the one thing I was not going to do was sit here and shut down Northlight and let them put our sleeper under the thumbscrews and blow our Murmansk network out of the ground so I got the toy from the floor under my legs and made a rough estimate of the weight and the range and the force needed to land it where it would give us a flamescreen and swung it through the open window, but the tip of the lever caught the frame and sent the thing spinning and slowed it down and it fell too close and the whole truck came up and smashed down on its side so we couldn't get away in it after all.

  In the twilight the blast was blinding and the shockwave brought debris up from the ground and hurled it across the truck and for a couple of seconds I stayed where I was, sprawled across the clinkers with snow against my face and stones still ringing on the girders of the footbridge and pattering down. I heard Karasov screaming but I couldn't see where he was: he'd been thrown clear of the truck and was somewhere in the snow that had drifted against the bank. Then the first shot came and I got up and began running because at least one of them was still alive and had a gun and there was no point in staying put. I didn't know why he was firing but I supposed it was because Karasov was on his feet and running too.

  There was a lot of smoke drifting across the ground by now and I went for the freight office and dropped behind it, crawling for a while and finding new cover behind sand-bins alongside the train. It wasn't until I was under the train that I saw what was happening over there: Karasov was running for the ramp leading to the road above and he tripped and fell and that was when the last shot went into him. He didn't get up.

  You know when a record's playing and a fuse blows and the record-player slows down and stops? That was how Northlight ended, in my mind, as I crouched under the train with blood seeping into my shoe from the gash in my leg and the flash of the explosion still bright on the retinae whenever I blinked, that was how the mission wound down, like a slowing record, the rhythm broken and the music dying to a medley of strange moans before the silence came and I closed my eyes and watched the bright flare of the explosion again until that too died away and left the dark.