Quiller Meridian

by Adam Hall

  ‘Don’t worry, then.’ I’d unnerved her, telling her they’d force her to expose her brother if she were arrested; but I’d had to do it because it was true, and if the worst happened she’d never forgive herself. It had also given her a healthy fear of a militia uniform: she’d followed the instructions I’d given her earlier out there in the waiting — room: If even one of them comes in here, go down that corridor and wait for me at the other end. Get out of his sight.

  There’d been five or six of them when I’d come back into the waiting — room, peaked caps, greatcoats and black polished boots, belts, night sticks, holsters and guns, five or six of them in the waiting — room and hundreds more outside in the streets, right across the city, a minefield on the move.

  I switched off the tubular lights to lower the stress on our nerves by a degree. ‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ I told Tanya,’ to lie down for a while.’

  ‘No. Anything can happen.’ she was watching my face, listening to the voices of the militiamen at the far end of the corridor, to the unmistakable tone of their authority. Then she surprised me: ‘Wasn’t it terrible, about the baby?’

  ‘What? Yes. Terrible.’

  I went to look for a telephone and found one near the emergency rooms and got out my two kopeks again and dialled and stood waiting, the sharpness of ether on the air and the ring of a scalpel in a metal dish, the moaning of someone in pain and then the click on the line and a woman’s voice and I asked to speak to T. K. Trencher.

  In a moment, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Executive.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Get me off the streets.’

  His name was Roach and he was a small man with a round pink face and baby — blue eyes that never looked at you or at anything for more than a second or two, his attention constantly on the move and his hands never still, their short pink fingers playing with each other, the nails ragged and bitten, a mass of nerves, I would have thought, and not therefore reliable, but Ferris had told me he was first class — he’d worked with him before, in Moscow.

  ‘More blankets in the cupboard there,’ he said,’ if you need them. The usual toilet things but not much soap — I didn’t know you were coming,’ his eyes taking Tanya in again but fleetingly, just a quick snapshot, nothing personal, ‘lots of tinned stuff in the kitchen, though, you’ll be all right for grub. There’s no heating or light because of the storm, no hot water, but if you feel like braving the shower turn it on slow or it’ll blow you out of the bathroom. Anything else?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’ll be on my way.’

  I went into the passage with him and saw the door to the fire — escape near the stair head and tried the handle to make sure it wasn’t locked; then I went down the stairs with him and asked him where the nearest telephone was.

  ‘It’s in the building, the end of that corridor. You got enough coins?’

  ‘Let me have what you can.’

  ‘I’m being picked up,’ Roach said, ‘so you can use my car, dark green Skoda out there.’ He gave me the number and dropped the keys into my hand. ‘You want to debrief?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He said you probably would. Make a rendezvous?’

  A woman in a bright red headscarf came out of one of the apartments and went through the main entrance, shouldering the spring door open.

  ‘Yes,’ I told Roach. ‘For 12:00.’ I needed sleep.

  ‘That’s in, what — ‘he checked his watch — ‘six hours’ time, okay. How far d’you want it from here?’

  ‘Give it a couple of miles.’

  He stood bouncing gently on his toes, tapping the tips of his middle fingers together as he stared through a window. ‘Okay, make it at Perovski Street and Volnaja, south — west comer — there’s a pull — in for deliveries. You got a map?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’ll be in a black Peugeot, front offside wing bent in a bit — he’ll lead the way, all right? 12:00.’

  We synchronized watches and I went back upstairs and heard Tanya in the bathroom, the water running, and got out the map and checked the rendezvous point and folded the map again and put it away as Tanya came into the room. She’d taken off her coat and boots and looked slender in her sweater and black leather skirt, would have seemed younger if it hadn’t been for the fatigue in her face, the ravages of the long night’s ordeal.

  ‘Sleep,’ I said.

  She didn’t move, stood watching me. There was a narrow vinyl — covered settee with a soiled cushion on it against the wall, and I got the spare blankets from the cupboard and caught a whiff of camphor and thought briefly of Jane in Moscow and dropped them onto the settee, going over to the window and pulling the heavy velour curtains across to shut out the leaden sky.

  ‘Turn off the light when you want to,’ I told Tanya. ‘I shan’t need it’

  I went into the bathroom and picked over the toilet things. The toothbrush had a wooden handle and real bristles and the plastic cups were in a bag from the Hotel Mokba and the soap was a dirty yellow, the same colour as the stuff I’d seen the women washing the floor with on the Rossiya. The water was numbing and the copper shower head, rimed white with calcium, gave a kick when I turned on the tap, as Roach had warned; the blood from my leg pooled rust — red, diluted, on the chipped ceramic tiles.

  The light was off when I came back into the room and in the gloom I saw that Tanya was lying on the bed with her legs drawn up in the fetal position, hadn’t felt able to get between the sheets with a stranger here, so I took the spare blankets off the settee and laid them over her.

  Her head moved. ‘You’ll be cold,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘No. You must share the blankets with me.’

  So I lay down with her back curved against me and eased my arms around her and felt her shivering; then after a while the warmth came into us and the shivering stopped, but later I felt her hands giving sudden little jerks as sleep came to her at last and she was dragged out of my reach and beyond my help into the first of the nightmares that would be lying in wait for her in the years to come.

  Chapter 12

  DEBRIEFING

  ‘Christ, what is it?’

  I meant the smell.

  ‘A dead dog,’ Ferris said, ‘probably.’

  Another rat dropped from the shelf onto the piled garbage; they were coming in through a hole in the wall, a gap in the boards. The garbage had been dumped in here from trucks, I would imagine, half — filled the place, it was a warehouse, though not quite that, too small, a bloody shed, then.

  ‘Things don’t look terribly good,’ I said.

  It was gone noon. I’d left Tanya sleeping.

  ‘They’re not,’ Ferris said.

  I’d meant that things couldn’t be terribly good if this was the best he could do for a rendezvous, and he’d known that. He was squatting on a broken crate, thinning straw — coloured hair and a pale face and amber eyes behind a pair of almost square — tensed academic — looking glasses, thin, bony, trussed in a surplus Red Army coat with the insignia torn off, you saw a lot of them now, he would like to be thought of, Ferris, as some kind of university professor, and that’s more or less what he looks like, and you’d never believe he’s got a reputation for strangling mice in the evening when there’s nothing worth seeing at the Globe.

  He was sitting there with his hands dug into the pockets of the coat, watching one of the rats. He wished he’d got a brick in his hand so that he could let fly with it and splash one of those little buggers all over the wall, and I knew this because I knew Ferris.

  I found another crate and perched on it.

  ‘It was meant for the markets,’ he said, ‘all this stuff, but it was already rotten when it finally arrived from the farms, so sayeth the sleeper who’s in charge of this place; his adopted name is Vladimir Tchaikovsky, born in Birmingham, a real tease, but totally reliable. When a dog gets in here to stuff itself on the garbage t
he rats form a pack and stuff themselves on the dog, food chain thing. How much sleep,’ he asked me with a swing of his head, ‘have you been getting?’

  ‘I’ve just had five or six hours.’

  ‘Ready for duty, then. Where is the woman?’

  ‘At the safe — house. Why aren’t things terribly good?’

  Ferris has what looks like the hint of a cynical smile on his pale face, the eyelids a fraction squeezed and the mouth a fraction compressed; I’ve never known whether it’s just the set of his expression or whether there’s a continual peal of hellish laughter going on inside his head as he surveys the human condition.

  ‘Because Novosibirsk,’ he said, ‘has become a distinctly hot zone in the past few weeks. DI6 is here in force, working with local agents — in — place, and so is the CIA. All the government offices are under covert surveillance by plain — clothes peeps and as soon as I got here I shut down the only two safe — houses we had because they were no longer safe. Yours was established only two days ago, but as far as we know you can rely on it, at least for a while. As far as we know.’

  One of the rats screamed as they fought among themselves. The only light in here came from a square of cracked glass set high in the wall. When I’d got here the noon sky had been a dirty grey sheet, the wintry sun staining it with sulphur as the smoke drifted upwards from the docks and factories.

  ‘Should I move the woman?” I asked Ferris.

  He looked at me with that stillness of his that can be unnerving. ‘I’ve got surveillance on the place, of course.’

  ‘What the hell’s the good of surveillance, if the militia roll up in a bloody jeep and go in there?’

  He waited until the slight echoes died, giving me time to listen to them and realize that I’d just thrown him a lot of information. ‘How valuable to you,’ he asked gently, ‘is Tanya Rusakova?’

  I said it slowly for him.’ she is the key to Meridian.’

  His narrow head tilted. ‘You mean that, of course?’

  I didn’t answer. He knew I meant it; he was just absorbing the information.’ then we must try,’ he said in a moment, ‘to find her somewhere a bit safer. But I need to know things first. Debrief?’

  ‘All right,’ I said, and got off the crate, moving around to keep the circulation going: it was freezing in this bloody place, in the whole of Novosibirsk, the whole of Siberia. I took it from Bucharest and he didn’t interrupt because he would already have been called in on the debriefing of Turner, the director in the field for Longshot. Then I began filling him in on Zymyanin.

  ‘He was tracking two former Red Army generals.’ I gave him their names.’ they were with a former KGB general on the train. I’d say they had him shot, just as they had Hornby put away in Bucharest. They —’

  ‘Zymyanin didn’t set the bomb?’

  ‘He couldn’t have. He was out for information.’

  ‘The bomb was meant for the generals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t it kill them?’

  I told him. I told him why the generals’ aides had set me up for the killing of Zymyanin: because I’d been seen talking to him.

  ‘That was enough?’ Ferris asked me.

  ‘The whole cell’s very professional, and their security’s first class.’

  ‘They’re in the Podpolia?’

  The underground. ‘Zymyanin said so.’

  Ferris hadn’t moved, was still perched on the edge of the broken crate. I don’t think he needs to keep his circulation going in the cold; I think he’s cold — blooded. He said, ‘Who placed the bomb?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I think there’s a rogue agent in the field.’

  He looked up sharply. ‘Oh?’

  ‘The bomb could have been set and timed when the train was in Moscow, or anywhere along the line where it stopped. But I’ve been sensing an agent on the loose.’

  Ferris didn’t ask me what I meant: he knew what I meant. There’s a very great deal of tension in the air when a mission’s running and you’re close to the opposition, and your senses pick up things they’d normally miss, the shadows and the whispers and the faintest of scents in the labyrinth, the echoes and the wraiths of things gone by, warning of things to come.

  ‘You sensed him on the train?’ Ferris asked me.

  ‘No, after the crash. I saw a man taking a lot of trouble to get past the checkpoint they’d set up and into one of the transports, just as I was doing.’

  This bloody smell was getting on my nerves. If they’d killed that dog it must have been days ago. We support things like bad smells or too much noise with less tolerance, don’t we, when the nerves are _ touchy, and mine were like that now because in any given mission the presence of a rogue agent in the field can burden our operations with the need to find out who he is and what he’s doing, whether he’s dangerous. It can sometimes crash the whole thing for us if he thinks we ‘re getting in his way and manages to put a bullet into the shadow executive’s back. They’re difficult to see, those people, difficult to catch, because they haven’t got a cell running them — hence the name we give them, ‘rogue’ — and they flit from one sector to another like a bloody bat in the dark.

  ‘So he must have been,’ Ferris said, ‘on the train. You just didn’t sense him there.’

  He got off the crate and walked about — minced, almost, taking tiny steps, head down and hands behind his back, your archetypical professor on the lecture platform. It had got him worried, this rogue agent thing.

  I said yes, he must have been one of the passengers.’ I think I saw him later, in the town. He —’

  ‘To recognize?’ Ferris swung his head up.

  ‘No. You don’t see much of anyone’s face in this weather. I think I recognized his walk, the way he moved. ‘I’d seen him on the way to the hotel when I’d been tracking Tanya, but not after that, even though I’d started watching out for him.

  In a moment Ferris looked at me and said: ‘Paranoia?’

  It was a legitimate question: paranoia becomes part of your psychological makeup as you go through the missions: you see shadows, hear footsteps. ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But the man avoiding the checkpoint out there was real.’

  ‘Could have been anyone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think I’ve got a gap,’ Ferris said, “in the debriefing. Why did you follow the Rusakova woman to that hotel?’

  ‘I lost track of the generals when they were choppered out, and I thought there was the slightest chance that she’d agreed to meet Velichko in Novosibirsk. She’d —’

  ‘An assignation?’

  ‘Yes. She’d been having dinner with him, and it looked rather cosy.’

  ‘Not a bad shot,’ Ferris said.

  ‘It didn’t pay off — the minute I caught up with him he was dead.’

  ‘Then why is Tanya Rusakova still the key?’

  ‘Because she could put me in contact with her brother.’

  ‘He could know something about the other two generals?’

  ‘He’s in the army, and might have his ear to the ground —’

  ‘Or might be persuaded —’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You think the generals are here to meet some top brass in the Russian army?’

  ‘Impossible.’

  Ferris didn’t answer, took a turn and minced for a while with his back to me, didn’t want to point out how very thin our chances were of picking up the track again. I went over to the big timber door and found a gap in the boards and stood there with my nose to it, breathing in the sooty smell of the city instead of the sickening stink in this place, freezing my sinuses until my eyes watered, couldn’t win.

  A rat screamed and my scalp drew tight.

  ‘How long have we got?’ I turned away from the door and looked at Ferris. ‘Have we got any kind of a deadline?’

  He stood still, feet together, thinking it out. There was a whole mass of undigested information in his head, culled from the stuff th
at had been flooding Signals and Codes and Cyphers in London since Longshot had crashed in Bucharest and every Bureau sleeper and agent — in — place had been called on to send in whatever they thought was useful. Ferris wouldn’t be giving it to me en masse: it would clog my perspective in the field, and the field is local, and the executive must concentrate totally on local events. What Ferris would give me, if he decided to give me anything at all, would be a minuscule condensation of the heap of raw intelligence that was burying the analysts in London as the uncut rolls of print came out of the fax machines by the mile.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘we have a deadline. It’s zero.’

  I listened to the echo of his voice. A zero deadline means just what it says: whatever we have to do will have to be done within every next minute. No leeway, no rest, and no respite.

  ‘The generals were Zymyanin’s target,’ Ferris said, ‘for information. That’s what he told you before he was killed. They arrived here yesterday. We don’t know that they might not have already finished what they came here to do. They could be leaving Novosibirsk tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Or tonight.’

  ‘Or tonight. Or they might be on their way out of the city now.’

  I waited until I could get some kind of conviction in my voice. ‘All right, we’ll take it from there. I’ll try to get Tanya to put me in touch with her brother.’

  Ferris watched me, didn’t answer. We’d worked together half a dozen times and this is the man I always ask for as my director in the field but don’t always get; he is the man those bastards at the Bureau offer me when they’re trying to con me into a mission that nobody else will take on. I like working with Ferris because he knows how to get inside my head and I know how to get inside his, which is ironical because we both cherish privacy. But we can cut comers, he and I, dispense with the bullshit and the rigmarole and come down to the bone without touching the flesh, and I knew exactly what he was thinking as he stood there watching me in that reeking hell — hole: he was trying to decide whether to let me go on running with Meridian, because the chances of making any progress with it were critically slight and the chances of my getting picked up by the militia before he could fly me out of the city were infinitely strong. Even the safe — house he’d put me in was a hazard: you don’t normally put surveillance on a place like that, there’s no need.