Quiller Meridian q-17

by Adam Hall

  'You may trust me in any circumstances.' His eyes held mine.

  'Fair enough. So look, if you find anything to report to me on the generals, phone that number and give your name. He'll be our liaison. Your name is also classified, so don't worry. I want to know whenever those people make a move. When they leave camp I want to know where they go. Can you have them tracked?'

  Rusakov thought about that, stroking a circle on the lined yellow clipboard sheet with his finger. Muster all ranks, 'B' Platoon, 18:00 hrs, for kit inspection had been written across the top, then crossed out. 'It might be difficult,' he said at last, 'to send out a vehicle at short notice. I'd have to submit an order for it beforehand, and give the destination and purpose — except in an emergency, of course. But it would be difficult, again, to claim an emergency at a time when the generals were initiating transit.'

  'Yes, blow the whole thing. Then see what information you can get hold of before they leave camp. See if you can get their destination from the transport section.'

  'That would be easier, yes.'

  Two men came out of the Harbour Light, slamming the door behind them, one of them bent over, laughing, the other one taking a leak against the wall, steam clouding up in the lamplight. 'All right,' I said to Rusakov, 'I'll leave it to you. Anything you can do to get me information will be a blow against the Podpolia. But you'll have to keep in mind the fact that sooner or later the militia's going to ask the army for your arrest.' I looked at him in the glow of the dashboard. 'Have you any kind of bolt-hole you can go to in the town?'

  He thought about that too. 'Yes.'

  'Where?'

  He looked down. 'The house of a friend.'

  'She'd be ready to shelter you? Keep you hidden?' He was silent. 'I've got to know,' I told him, 'because I want to keep in contact.'

  He looked up again. 'She would help me, yes.' He wrote on the pad and tore a strip of it off and gave it to me. 'Her name is Raisa.'

  The two men were lurching across the snow to a pick-up truck with a mast lying across the rear, a furled sail round it; the domed glass of the lamp at its head caught the light from the bar, a ruby eye in the fog creeping from the river.

  I put the strip of paper away. 'Is there a fellow officer,' I asked Rusakov, 'or one of the men under you, who has your absolute trust?'

  'Yes.' this time he hadn't had to think about it. 'A master-sergeant.'

  'All right. If you can't avoid arrest, can he take your place? Make contact with me?'

  In a moment,' I will ask him.'

  'You're not sure he'll — '

  'I will ask him as a formality. But he will do it.'

  'Name?'

  'Bakatin.'

  'Master-sergeant Bakatin. Then — '

  'But I must tell you,' Rusakov said, his eyes suddenly on mine, 'I shall resist arrest. I shall resist very strongly.'

  'Of course. You put an apparatchik thug out of the way, no earthly reason to suffer for it.' I took my glove off and offered my hand. 'Keep in touch, then.'

  I put the Skoda in the same place as before, under the cover of the fallen roof of the shed, and walked the half mile to the river, taking time to check the environment and going aboard the hulk just after half-past eleven, with the moon floating above the dark skeletonic arm of a grain elevator downriver.

  The starboard bow of the Natasha had been stove in when she'd been wrecked, and I spent an hour shifting loose timber, stacking it against the bulkheads to form a tunnel that ran aft from the entrance to the cabin below deck and led to the smashed hatchway at the stern. Rats ran in the beam of the flashlight; they couldn't get at the provisions but they'd scented them and moved in to reconnoitre.

  When the tunnel was finished I tested it out, checking for loose boards that might make a noise, leaving the flashlight in the cabin and feeling my way through the dark towards the hatch at the stern. I didn't think I'd need an escape route to deck level because Ferris would have tightened the whole support network after Roach had been blown, but these were confined quarters and if anyone came down here with a gun I wouldn't have any answer except to get out before he could use it.

  It's just a touch of the usual paranoia, that's all.

  Get out of my bloody life.

  I went through the escape tunnel half a dozen times in the dark to get used to it, the feel of the timbers and the lie of the ground, the smell of rope in the chain locker and the crack of light between the Boards just below the deck where a lamp on the shore made a gleam, establishing my bearings, making the journey twice as fast and in more silence the last time through.

  Heating some water and washing, I tried to feel that Meridian had got back on track tonight: the generals were still hi Novosibirsk and I had their exact location and it looked as if we could rely on Rusakov at least to signal a warning when they made a move, and that was about as good as I could expect at this stage of the mission.

  I don't know if I'd managed to convince myself about this but it didn't really matter because it was less than an hour later when I heard the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony come whistling softly through the dark and the support man came below deck with the radio for me and said he couldn't raise Ferris any more on the telephone, the night porter at the Hotel Karasevo said that room was empty now.

  Chapter 21: ROGUE

  He stood there watching me, Frome, he'd said his name was, the wavering light of the candle moving the shadows across his face, its reflection in his eyes, two pale flames, his breath clouding on the air.

  Floating ice, colliding with the stem of the hulk, rang in the silence.

  'And the woman?' I asked him. 'Rusakova?'

  'She's gone too.'

  He watched me, hands in bus-driver's gauntlets hanging at his sides, moisture glistening on his fur hat where he'd caught it, I suppose, when he'd ducked down through the hole in the timbers up there, bringing away snow.

  'And all measures are being taken,' I said, a statement, not a question, something to say while I thought things out, of course all measures were being taken to find the DIF, at least find his tracks.

  I felt like an astronaut — this is the nearest I can get to the idea of what it's like — losing one end of his life-line when he's out there on a space walk, floating away.

  'Did he leave anything in his room?' I asked Frome.

  'I don't know.'

  'What about her — did she leave anything?'

  'I don't know,' he said again.

  'Then what the bloody hell do you know?'

  Ice clinked out there on the river.

  He watched me, Frome, the two pale flames in his eyes.

  'Sorry,' I said.

  'That's okay. I mean, there's not much to know, see. I tried phoning him several times and the switchboard said he couldn't be in his room, so I went round there and checked, found his door unlocked and the room empty, same as hers on the same floor.'

  'No signs.'

  'None I could see. I took a good — '

  'Toilet things?'

  'Still there. So were — '

  'Scrambler gone?'

  'Yes. And the bug sniffer.'

  It didn't mean much. If anyone had got in there and managed to take Ferris they'd have taken those things as well, they weren't cheap and you'd never find any more like that in Russia.

  'Bitch, isn't it?' I heard Frome say.

  'What? Yes.' He was still standing there. 'You want to sit down?'

  'No. I don't like leaving the car out there too long, bit of a giveaway. Try the walkie?'

  I picked up the unit and switched it on and moved the dial off the squelch and pressed CALL and said Meridian a couple of times and got a response from support base.

  'Executive,' I said. 'Two numbers for you.' Rusakov's at the camp, and his woman friend's in the town. 'If Rusakov can't signal, a man named Bakatin might come through, replacing him. Any news?'

  Of Ferris. He'd know that.

  'No. I'll raise you if he calls. The minute he call
s.' Remembering to hope, scratching around for straws, they all were, Frome was, I was, any straw of comfort we could find.

  All right, yes, that's putting it a fraction too dramatically, about the astronaut thing, I mean that poor bastard's going to finish up somewhere on the far side of Pluto one day with his super-trained athletic body shrivelled inside its metal-alloy shell and his wife remarried and his kids middle-aged, and when one of us poor bloody ferrets loses his DIF he loses his life-line in a way, but it's not that bad, we can go on foraging for ourselves, get home with our heads still on if we're lucky, it's just that when the mission's running hot we tend to get a bit edgy and the last thing we want to hear is that we're cut off from our director and hence from London Control.

  Make a note, we should perhaps make a note here, should we not, my good friend, to get it put into the training manuals at Norfolk: Do not learn to regard the director in the field as your bloody mother.

  'I'll need your radio manned,' I said into the unit, 'round the clock.'

  'Yes, sir, understood.'

  I shut down the signal and looked at Frome. 'Mind your head when you go back up there.'

  I should have got used to the broken bells by now, but as the dark body of the river moved under its scales of ice the sound kept sleep away for a time, and then I lay drifting at last, the current turning me and turning me back as I kept the fur of the dead cat close against my face, using it as camouflage to deceive the men who were waiting there along the bank with their guns swinging as they moved, watching for the target, for me, on the surface of the river, but that must be a dream, perhaps of an earlier mission, I'm always having them, they never leave us, I've talked about it to others in the Caff, and now the feeling of movement across the scalp, the delicate exploratory scratching and then the first nibble, with the small sharp teeth rooting more boldly among the hair — Oh Jesus Christ and I swung up an arm and felt the soft warm body before it vanished into the shadows, not a dream this time, no, and I got up and found a length of timber and lay down again with one end of it under my hand, waiting but drifting down again after a while, down into the lulling silence of the delta waves before I felt it again, this time on my foot and I hit out with the bit of timber and felt a splashing across my cheek and hit out again and then sat up and saw it lying there, big as a boot, its blood pooling across the boards in the candlelight, some of it on my face.

  It was gone four o'clock in the morning when I woke next time, swathed in the extra blankets with a hole for breathing through. I hadn't felt them again; perhaps they'd recognized the scream that thing had given for what it was, had heard death in it and kept their distance. I impressed future time on the subconscious and it woke me accurately at seven, an hour before first light. For my breakfast, turtle soup from one of the self-heating cans, with two hard-boiled eggs and a slice of that Christmas cake, 'twas the season, if not to be jolly, to indulge the appetite, on the sound and ingrained principle that I didn't know when I would eat again.

  Then I opened the map Frome had brought me and spread it out in the candlelight, walking my fingers around the wooded area where the army camp took up three-quarters of a square kilometre. It was served by two minor roads that joined and made a fork three kilometres from the main gates of the camp. Then I folded the map and picked up the radio unit and left the hulk and put Meridian into extreme and imminent hazard, because I had no choice.

  The crackle of gunfire came again, and the rooks took off from the poplars that laced the eastern horizon, wheeling and cawing. The rifle range was out of sight from here, below a fold in the ground, and the sound of the guns was muffled, echoing from the long corrugated iron huts that formed most of the camp.

  The new day was frozen, as the days before had been, the earth invisible under the snow, the bare trees standing in a black iron frieze across the hill to the south. The air was motionless, its cold clamped to my face as I studied the landscape from beside the car.

  Gunfire again, its echoes mimicking.

  He could have been anyone, the man they'd seen watching the camp from his car, but I thought I knew who he was, and if he'd been there yesterday he would be there today; he'd driven away before he could be challenged, but he would have come back, must have come back, standing off at a greater distance now, finding cover in the trees. They'd nothing to fear from him, the soldiers in the camp; they were an armed battalion. They wouldn't have sent out scouts to hunt for him; they'd been curious, that was all.

  He could have been anyone, but I thought he was the rogue agent in the field — Talyzin, if Ferris were right.

  There was a man in the Ministry of Defence called Talyzin who spoke out rather too loudly against the generals… From raw intelligence data going into London, he might be your agent.

  I'd sensed his presence in the environment ever since the Rossiya had been blown up, had thought I'd seen him once, getting clear of the militia blocks at the scene of the wreck, as I had. I didn't think he'd had anything to do with the death of Roach: he'd had no motive; and I didn't think he'd had anything to do with the surveillance on the Skoda that had brought that man Yermakov on my track, may he rest in peace. But I thought he might have set that bomb, the rogue agent, and if so, his motive would obviously have been to wipe out the three generals and their entourage, because it doesn't take high explosive to destroy life force in a single human being — Velichko, say — you can do it with one bullet, as Rusakov had done. So if it was the rogue agent who had set that bomb, then he would still be locked onto his private — personal? — mission: the death of the two generals who were still pursuing their own operation in Novosibirsk, pursuing it just over there, in point of fact behind the wire fence of die camp.

  So I would expect him to be here, the agent, somewhere in the immediate environment, observing the generals — perhaps that mar. on the hill between the trees, sitting in the car.

  He'd been there before I arrived, or I would have seen him drive up; he would have had to use the further road branching from the fork, and I could see its whole length, from the fork to the hill. The minor road didn't go up the hill, only around it, but he was nevertheless on higher ground there, with a good view of the camp. He was also in rather good cover, buried among the trees, and I wouldn't have known he was there if I hadn't been looking for him, hadn't caught the glint on the windows of the car as the strengthening light of the day came creeping across the land from the east.

  A crackle of gunfire, stitching the silence.

  I'd etched the configuration of his car by now on the visual memory, and if it changed I would detect it at once — if, for instance, he opened one of its doors on this side. I would have put the distance between us at close to half a kilometre, but 1 could see that he was sitting in the front of the car, because his dark coat altered the reflective value of the window glass. The distance from his car to the nearest line of huts in the camp was more like a kilometre and a half, so that he'd have to be using at least a pair of 10 x 10s to pick up anything useful.

  He could have been — must have been — there all night, unless he had anyone in support, which I didn't believe: a rogue is a rogue, and works solo. They 're a breed apart, often neurotic, occasionally psychopathological, you can't ever trust them. Even if you can persuade them into working with you, with your cell or your network, you can't turn your back on them, they'll slip a knife in if it suits them, sometimes for kicks, ask that bastard Loman, he'd been running Fairfax through Tigerfish in the South China Sea when that executive had been found floating among the off-shore trash in Saigon, and it hadn't taken the Bureau five minutes to find out that Fairfax had been using a rogue agent who knew the area, and that the said rogue agent had decided to take a hundred per cent of the credit for the successful completion of the mission and the only way to do that was by putting a bullet into the executive's brain and dropping him off a pier.

  A glint came from the trees on the hill, this time in motion, brightening and dimming out. I hadn't seen that before.r />
  It was difficult at this distance to understand what that glint had meant. It wasn't the degree-by-degree passage of the morning light reflecting from the windows of the car up there: it was smaller, the glint, more focused — and then I got it, because when it moved again I saw it had a twin.

  I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew they were on me now, pressed to the 10 x 10s.

  Crackle of gunfire and this time the nerves reacted a little, goose flesh under the sleeves. The sudden contact that only the eyes can make at a distance between two creatures is intimate and dramatic. When that incredible girl looked up — remember? — from halfway across the crowded room and saw you watching her, there was a rush of hormones, wasn't there, as the glands kicked in; it was like swallowing all the perfumes of Araby in one gulp, I know the feeling, but that wasn't the feeling I had now as I sat in the car among these alien snows and kept still, perfectly still, submitting to a hostile scrutiny I couldn't escape.

  It wasn't unexpected. I'd known that if the man with the field-glasses were watching the camp again today he would also make frequent checks on his environment, and my cover wasn't as good as his: there were no trees here and all I'd been able to do was squeeze the Skoda in between the ruined hulk of a barn and the dry-stone wall that ran past it — not even cover, call it camouflage.

  It wasn't unexpected but there was engagement now; contact had been made at a distance between these two creatures out here under the early morning sky, and the scene had changed. He wouldn't just leave things like this, the agent up there among the trees. He wouldn't want to be watched. He would need to make a move, but it wouldn't be like yesterday's, because yesterday he would have had a whole battalion to contend with if he'd stayed his ground, and today there was only one man.

  He would be a violent antagonist, if he chose to confront me. That would be his nature: he was a rogue. And he would be armed. Their lives in the field are short, but they'd be shorter still without the advantage of weapons. I'd known this when I'd left the Natasha an hour ago and put the mission into hazard, but I'd had no choice. I still didn't know whether I had any chance at all of monitoring the movements of the generals and infiltrating whatever operation it was they were running, but I knew at least that I'd never be able to do it if a rogue agent were in the field and moving ahead of me with the intention of finishing what he'd started on that train — of killing them off.