by Adam Hall
I reached across and put the window up on the passenger’s side and got into gear and left the back end to dig for traction with the chains and then got a grip and moved off, going three blocks before I started playing with the gears and looking for patches of sand and using them for acceleration while the headlights fanned from side to side across walls and doorways and parked and stranded trucks, cars and carts and the characteristic bric-a-brac of the dockland environment, while the tracker fell behind for a minute or two before he saw I was onto him. His own lights began swinging across and across the mirror as he went into a series of slides and then got a grip and lost it and found it again and started to close up a little.
I chose a side street where the snow had piled into a drift against the wall of a warehouse and used it to get me through the ninety — degree arc, letting the rear end hit the snow and kick the Skoda straight again as I found traction in patches and put fifty yards behind me before the tracker’s lights came flooding into the narrow street and threw my shadow ahead of me against the snow.
It happens. It happens sometimes: the director in the field sets up a model deployment of his shadow executive and his support group and his contacts and couriers and whatever he needs for a given mission, spinning his small and delicate network of resources and testing it out for strength and making changes where potential danger threatens, sitting back in his inner sanctum plugged in to his communications system with its portable scrambler and its bug monitor and taking signals from the shadow out mere and relaying them through the mast at Cheltenham to the signals board in Whitehall, the whole thing running like silk through a loom, and then one man and one man alone can suddenly send the web shaking because he’s made a mistake, talked to the wrong people, exposed a password, missed the half — seen face in a doorway or the figure humped at the wheel of a parked car or the broken hair across a drawer in the hotel room, and the network becomes an alarm system and all we can do is shut down signals to prevent interception and get out of the safe — house before it’s blown, run for cover, go to ground, hole up somewhere as the smell of the smoke starts drifting through the field where the fuses have blown and someone reaches for the chalk in the signals room in London and writes it up on the board: Mission compromised, clear all channels and stand by.
It was happening now.
The shadow of the Skoda was flitting across the snow and the buildings ahead of me like a bat out of a nightmare as both vehicles swung and corrected and swung again over the treacherous surface. There wasn’t any question of pushing the speed to more than thirty or forty kph through streets like this with dead traffic all over the place, parked or abandoned or stuck in a drift; there was only a question of the leading car’s ability to outstrip the one behind, and it was already becoming clear that whatever the tracker was driving it was more potent under the bonnet than the Skoda, possibly a Merc or a Porsche or a Mazda with tight suspension and a pinpoint steering system. All I could hope to do was let him close in and then try to fox him with tricks.
I kept seeing Roach, a short man with bright blue eyes and a round pink face, his fingers playing with each other as he transferred nervous tension, his nails bitten to pieces — I’d wondered about him when he’d shown us into the safe — house, but Ferris had told me he was totally reliable and had worked with him before. He wasn’t a mole, Roach. He wasn’t a changeling. We don’t have any people like that, in the normal way of things, because the Bureau is conceivably the most elite intelligence organization in the western hemisphere, officially non — existent and responsible directly to the Prime Minister of the UK, and there are as many traitors in our ranks as there are in the SAS, whose number is reputedly sub — zero.
I didn’t think Roach was a traitor. I thought he’d made a mistake. But in practical terms it didn’t make a lot of difference: Meridian was in hazard.
Don’t think about Roach. Think about survival.
The side street opened onto a major road and I touched the brakes, trying to get as much deceleration out of the drums as possible before they locked, but the speed wasn’t coming down all that much and I’d have to do better than this because a truck was passing the end of the street and there’d be other traffic on the move and I didn’t want to splash this thing all over the side of a heavy — duty haulage rig or anything else, for that matter, so I put the nearside front wheel into the deeper snow along the kerb and felt the drag and touched the brakes again but the surface was more or less pack — ice and we span full — circle and fetched up with the back end clouting a sand bin. That was all right because it brought the speedwell down and the major road was fifty yards ahead and it didn’t look as if I still had enough momentum going to hit anything out there, but I was losing ground in terms of getting clear of that bastard and if I led him into the major road he’d overhaul me without any trouble because his car was out of an elite sports stable of some kind and the Skoda was made for taking the kids to school in comfort and running Aunt Gertrude home, so I did the only thing that was available to me and sighted him in the mirror and swung the wheel and bounced the Skoda against a drift and swung through a hundred and eighty degrees and gunned up and got smoke out of the rear tyres as they bit through the ice and reached solid tarmacadam and pushed the car back the way we’d been coming.
Part of the whole thing was going to depend on luck but I found enough steering to take the Skoda through the gap between the other vehicle and the sand bin — there was a lot of blinding light as we closed up and I think I heard a shout, he hadn’t been expecting this and I suppose it worried him. We missed a total head-on thing but the sand bin was solid and the Skoda ricocheted to a certain extent and tore a door away from the other car and smashed quite I a lot of glass and I felt the sudden drag of deceleration and the Skoda [span half round and I saw the other car swinging much too wide and I much too fast, and one of the wheels came spinning past me as his front stub — axle sheared and he hit the wall of a building and bounced in back and then went into a slow roll with the engine screaming and the bright red of a flame popping from inside the engine compartment as a fuel line was torn apart and a spark from the ignition found The engine went on screaming until the fuel in the injectors gave out and then there was silence of a kind and when I hit my door open it raised an echo in the narrow confines of the street. He was still inside, the tracker, sitting there like a crash — test dummy with blood coming bright from a head wound, seeping across his face. Black smoke was rolling from underneath the car as spilled engine — oil took fire and I went for his seat — belt but it had snapped at the buckle so that was what the head wound was all about. I dragged him out of the car and across the snow and pushed him into the front of the Skoda on the passenger’s side and got in and span the rear wheels to get the chains through the snow and finally got moving and started looking for cover as we drove, any sort of cover where I could pull up and talk to this man, I wanted information. ‘Can you hear me?’
He didn’t answer, just keeled over a bit, that was all, so that I had to push him upright again. I had time now to realize that his head was a mess and by this time most of his face was covered in blood. Lights washed across the buildings from behind but there’d be no traffic coming this way: the burning car was on its side and blocking the street.
‘Can you hear me?’
Nothing, only the metallic smell of his blood filling the car.
The warehouse we’d passed coming the other way had a wide entrance and I pulled in there, cutting the engine and feeling for the carotid artery in the man’s neck, finding it and sensing, shifting my fingers and trying again, finding no pulse — beat, trying again, watching his face, seeing how pale it was now between the streaks of blood, moving my hand inside his coat and sensing again over the heart, shifting and sensing and finding nothing, nothing at all There was mostly sand on the ground where they’d cleared the entrance way and I got him out as gently as I could and laid him on his back and held one hand behind his neck to tilt the he
ad and put my mouth over his and began breathing for him, his blood sticky on my face, sticky and cold now, dear Jesus I wanted information out of this man.
Lights again and a pick — up truck rolled past the warehouse, no chains, the tyres crunching across the ruts as the driver slowed, seeing the wreckage ahead of him along the street.
Breathe one… two… three…
Heel of the hand on the chest.
Someone was running down the street, boots clumping across the snow, two people, two youths, their voices excited, breathe one.. two… three… and press on the ribcage… the sound of an engine, the pick — up truck reversing, couldn’t get through, his mouth cold against mine, the man’s mouth, two… three… Come back, you bastard, I want to talk to you … press on the chest, his blood glutinous now and pulling at my mouth as it congealed, I want information, two… three… as the pick — up truck went crawling past the entrance in reverse, the smell of its exhaust gas on the air, don’t go yet, you bastard, I want to talk to you… the back of his neck cold now under my hand, his eyes open, a pair of black buttoned boots behind his head, standing there on the snow and I looked up at the old woman, dumpy in her shawls, her eyes staring down at us, at our faces, at the blood.
‘Babushka,’ I said, ‘go and phone, get an ambulance, babushka!’
The black boots turned quickly, scattering snow.
Press on the ribcage and breathe… two… three, but I believed now that I was wasting my time. I would have liked to leave him there but they might have some basic resuscitation gear on the ambulance so I kept going, using deeper breaths, deeper and slower as he watched me, two… three… as he watched me perhaps from a little distance, puzzled by my efforts and already wishing not to be pulled back to it all by this busy stranger, press on the ribcage until at last I heard the ambulance klaxon echoing between the buildings and felt for his wallet and found it and straightened up, lowering his head gently and going down on my hands and knees like a dog at a water hole, scooping up snow to wash the blood off my face and rinse the rich salt taste out of my mouth.
I went back to the Skoda and got into motion and reached the end of the street and did a skid turn and gunned up through the gears as the ambulance arrived on the scene with the blare of its klaxon filling the night with alarm.
Chapter 19
CHRISTMAS
Night and silence.
I stood in shadow, smelling the river smell.
Ice drifted on the water, breaking away upstream and floating down through the channels gouged by tugs and dredgers and coasters big enough to make headway. The ice made soft xylophone music as the floes touched and bumped together.
I had left the Skoda half a mile away, buried under an iron roof that had slid at an angle when the walls of a shed had collapsed some time ago, perhaps under the weight of snow, to lie like a broken box in the thickets of weeds. It was almost invisible, the Skoda, but I had no illusions. That was a hot car. It had been under extensive surveillance ever since Roach had blown his cover and got into it and picked up a tracker without knowing it. I’m not blaming him. Support people don’t get the training they give the shadow executives at the Bureau, though some of them apply for the higher echelons and graduate.
Dark shapes moved as I watched: a small high — decked freighter with coal smoke curling behind it on the motionless air, to lie in skeins along the water; a truck on the far bank, sliding among the wharves, its diesel rattling. Nearer to where I stood, nothing moved, but I had no illusions about that either. Watchers keep still. The motor — vessel Natasha lay in her berth some sixty or seventy yards distant from the stack of rusted freight containers that I was using for cover. I needed to know if the Natasha were being watched.
The sensible thing to have done would have been to phone Ferris and ask him to send someone out with another car, leave the Skoda back there in the side street and take over whatever they brought me. But the time for doing the sensible thing had run out now because Meridian was compromised, and the new car they brought me could be hot too, the subject of undetected surveillance. I would think that Yermakov had been the only man tracking the Skoda, and that it was therefore safe to use for the moment. It was still hot, because it could be recognized later, but it could only be by chance, and that chance I was ready to take.
That was his name: Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. His wallet was still in my pocket. I didn’t think he’d been the rogue agent loose in the field. The surveillance of the Skoda had been the work of a cell, at least of a cell, possibly of an organization. It had needed at least two peeps to maintain the operation, because that car had been watched for more than twelve hours, from the time when Roach had picked it up to the time when I’d driven it away from the patch of waste ground at two minutes past eight tonight. A rogue agent would work alone; it is their nature.
A night bird screeched and a ring of light flashed inside my skull and died out like a firework. I’d seen cormorants, earlier, wheeling under the lights of a warehouse crane. I had been here for twenty minutes and hadn’t moved; I too was a watcher, and kept still. There are good and bad among the ranks of the peeps; some can stay silent for hours on end, moving only by indiscernible degrees when they have to, flexing the leg muscles to keep the blood flowing and the brain supplied, turning their heads as slowly as the hands of a clock, sweeping the environment continuously. Others, less professionally trained, can’t go for long without needing to release tension, and they’ll shift their feet or yawn or cough or even stretch their arms, and they’re blown.
Night and silence, who is here?
A rat ran squealing in the shadows and the light flashed again behind my eyes. It didn’t worry me: it was reaction, that was all. I hadn’t expected to get out of that place, out of Militia Headquarters, but I was only aware of that now: the heat was off and the blood was cooling, and looking back at the whole enterprise it seemed as if I must have been clean out of my gourd to have taken a risk that size.
I told you. I said you’d gone mad, but you wouldn’t listen.
Nor will I ever, you little shit. You can get away with things in hot blood that’d never work if you thought about them. Ask any tightrope walker — they never look down.
The broken ice rang like a peal of bells in the distance as a tug moved upstream, towing a barge, blacking out the lamps along the far shore and then relighting them. But nothing was moving, had moved, closer than that. I believed the Natasha was clear, and I broke cover and walked across the snow — covered boards of the quay. The gangplank had been cleared by whatever support man had brought the provisions here for me, and he hadn’t found it an easy choice: to leave evidence that the hulk was in some kind of use, or to leave me to make footprints on the snow and testify to the very same thing.
I dropped onto the deck and stood there, watching and listening again. The cabin had been wrecked and there was no door, just a hole through smashed timbers; I would have thought a crane had toppled or the boom had run its brake discs, coming down on the cabin. Snow had drifted inside the wreckage, its minuscule facets diamond — blue under the light of the moon.
Something splashed into the water and I swung my head and saw ripples crossing the surface some distance away, near the third vessel downriver, a sailing boat with the mast lying like a dead tree across the quayside. Yellow light came from its dark hulk, burning steadily, and I turned my head away. Watchers do not burn lamps to mark their presence, nor throw garbage out.
The support man had dropped a rope mat over the snow where the lower part of the steps was still solid, and I went down into the smell of rotting timber and rope and lamp — oil, ducking my head under abeam and seeing the glow of a night — light showing the way to the stairs down to the lower berths. I stood listening again, hearing nothing but the slap of water against the vessel’s beam. The light grew stronger as I went below: there was a brass hurricane lamp burning with a good flame on the table of the main cabin below deck, with supplies stacked around it: black bread,
cheeses, canned milk, dried fruit, half a dozen military — issue cans of self — heating soup, a plum cake… and I felt a moment of warmth for Ferris: all he’d been able to scrounge in the way of a safe — house for me was a rotting hulk among the ice floes, but he’d told the support man to raid the black market for what he could find to make it look like Christmas, on this unholy night.
I could still taste that man’s blood in my mouth and I got the little black iron kettle and filled it and put it onto the butane stove for warm water to wash with and brush my teeth, we are not here to stint ourselves, my good friend, it’s Christmas, remember, and have you ever tried to clean your teeth by biting on bloody icicles?
9:15 on my watch and I did only the necessary, getting out of the uniform and putting on warm sweaters and sheepskin boots. There were no rats here but they wouldn’t be long in coming once they caught the scent of human habitation; I stowed all the vulnerable food packages in the cupboard with the torn poster on the door, girl in a fur hat and slacks and fur boots to the knee, I think it says a lot for a country where the women can look sexy in the depth of winter without a single bikini in sight.
I turned down the wick of the lamp and looked around for a bit of rope and took the militia uniform and boots on deck, burying the standard — issue Malysh ‘Little Boy’ automatic pistol inside the clothes and weighting the whole bundle with a rock I’d marked down when I’d crossed from the Skoda to the ship. Then I crouched at the quayside watching the bubbles break surface under the light of the moon.
At 9:461 signalled Ferris.
‘Location?’
‘The Harbour Light.’
I’d taken fifteen minutes to check the environment when I’d arrived here, but it was simply an exercise in security: any danger would come from inside the bar.