The Scorpion Signal

by Adam Hall

  ‘Possibly. There’s this man Ignatov, and he mentioned two other people, Boris and Dmitriy. It’s either a cell or some kind of wildcat group of revolutionary dissidents.’

  Croder said nothing for a moment, then began speaking in formal Russian to Zoya. ‘You did a splendid job with this man’s injuries -1 should have mentioned it before. I’m most indebted to you, Doctor.’

  ‘It was good to work again.’

  He gave a slight bow. ‘Now if you’ll excuse us, we have to debrief him.’

  ‘I understand.’ She looked at me critically as she turned to leave. ‘Take care of him, please. He is still weak.’

  She took away the self-heating can and quietly closed the door. Croder sat with his head half-turned, listening to her footsteps growing fainter along the passage. Then he swung round to look at me. ‘I want to get a picture of Schrenk in my mind, as clearly as you can give it. Would you say he’s totally unbalanced by his experiences in Lubyanka? Do you feel his imagination has run wild and that he sees himself as the shining liberator of oppressed Russian Jewry, that sort of thing? Or would you on the other hand say that he’s still in full possession of his professional expertise and capable of mounting a sensitive operation with the help of an organized cell? Please consider carefully, because this is important.’

  They were both watching me in the silence, and I leaned my head back against the wall and shut my eyes, remembering all I could of Schrenk: the ravaged face and the crippled body with its rage contained like a furnace, that strange laughter that had led to those fits of coughing when the force of his hate had threatened to choke him, the chilling diatribe about Detsky Mir and its mechanical toys. When I felt ready I opened my eyes and said:

  ‘I don’t think he’s unbalanced, in the normal sense. I think he’s been given a direction. I’ve never seen such hate in a man, and he’s turned it into a driving force - which is typical of him. I’d certainly say he’s in full possession of his talents and could get a cell together. I don’t believe he sees himself as a shining liberator, but I’m pretty sure he’s capable of liberating Borodinski, for instance, by leading an armed raid on the courthouse and getting him out.’ I left it at that.

  Croder wrinkled his thin brows. ‘Did he mention doing such a thing?’

  ‘No. It was just an example.’

  ‘I see.’ He studied his skeletonic hands. ‘I don’t think he’s interested in Borodinski, but the rest of the picture you’ve given me ties in with the information we’ve received — that he means to assassinate the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Leonid Brezhnev.’

  I got off the crate and on to my feet. Bracken came to help me but I said, ‘No, I’m all right.’ I took a few steps, keeping dose to the wall, and began feeling stronger. The thing was, I couldn’t just go on sitting there. Not now. I went on shuffling between the furniture, making quite a lot of progress, and when I turned round I saw that Croder was standing up now, watching me. He said thinly:

  ‘You think he can do it. Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t hesitate.’

  ‘No.’

  Croder looked at Bracken. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think this is all we needed.’

  Croder said to me: ‘I should explain that we’ve had various information coming in, some of it to Bracken, some of it by signal to London. That’s why I decided to fly out.’ He was standing perfectly still, I noticed, like a perched bird of prey; he didn’t need to pace up and down or light a cigarette to transfer his tension: he could handle it internally. ‘The information we had was from fairly reliable sources but the informants weren’t close to Schrenk, as you have been. Frankly I was hoping you’d tell me that he was half out of his mind and a broken reed. Since your considered opinion is quite otherwise, then we shall have to take action.’ He looked at me very directly, as he’d looked at me in the airport in Berlin. ‘You say you tried to talk Schrenk into pulling out of Moscow and that he refused. Is that correct?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Is it correct, or isn’t it?’ Standing perfectly still, his shoulders hunched in his oversize military coat, his black eyes fixed on me.

  ‘Yes.’ And I waited for it.

  ‘Then why didn’t you follow my instructions?’

  Bracken looked away.

  I couldn’t tell him the truth: that I’d been going to do it. Three paces and a sword-hand to the larynx, a matter of four seconds. I couldn’t tell him that because it’d sound like a lie.

  ‘I still thought I could talk him into pulling out’

  ‘Did you indeed? And what happened?’

  ‘He got to a gun.’

  ‘You let him do that?’

  The room had begun swinging slightly and I found my right hand on the back of a padded chair. Croder stood facing me with that eerie stillness of his, and I wanted to go and smash his face in.

  ‘You weren’t there,’ I said to him, ‘were you?’

  ‘It makes no difference, surely.’

  ‘Oh yes it does. If you want to know what the executives are up against why don’t you come out and do their bloody job for them? You’d learn a tot.’

  The echoes seemed to go on for a long time. In the silence I heard Bracken clearing his throat, but he didn’t speak.

  ‘The fault,’ Croder said icily, ‘is partly mine. I know your reputation. You’re ready enough to do dangerous things, even foolhardy things; but you’re not ready to do unpleasant things. When will you learn that in our trade a conscience is a luxury?’

  I held on hard to the back of the chair, thinking out what I’d say, that Schrenk wasn’t expendable, that in the army he would have got the VC for holding out as he had in Lubyanka, that killing in cold blood is not the same as killing in a rage. Other things crossed my mind, but in the end I said nothing, because I knew Croder was right in principle and was now proved right in fact: we hadn’t got a crippled lunatic on our hands, we’d got a man perfectly capable of assassinating the head of the Russian state.

  Something I wanted to know.

  ‘Are you suspending me?’

  He looked me over. ‘If you think your services can be of any further value, I’d appreciate your staying in. If there’s anything unpleasant to be done, I shall do it myself. That is why I’m here.’ He turned away.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ Bracken told me. ‘Get your strength up. Might need it.’

  I got across to the painted crate without much bother, but the shoulder was really coming back to life, a good sign but a bloody nuisance. ‘Give me some information, for God’s sake,’ I told him. ‘Fill me in.’ I’d been out cold for three hours and he said he’d been in signals with London the whole time.

  He glanced at Croder, who nodded. ‘Our information,’ Bracken said, ‘had been coming in for quite a time, and from more than one source. We -‘

  ‘Quite a time?’

  ‘Some few weeks,’ he said awkwardly. ‘That’s why it was decided to send you out here. One of the reports said that Schrenk faked his abduction at the Hanover clinic with the help of his friends: he meant us to assume the KGB had got him back inside Lubyanka, so that we’d give up and leave him alone. I wasn’t told of this until today, but -‘

  The first reports,’ Croder cut in, ‘weren’t directly from our own people: they were from the underground dissident faction and passed to London for raw intelligence analysis. The dissidents believed that Schrenk was acting officially and with the backing of the British secret service - revolutionary fervour always has an element of insanity, as I’m sure you know.’

  I began going cold. ‘If I’d been given this information,’ I said, ‘I would have eliminated Schrenk the minute I found him.’

  Croder wheeled on me. ‘The instructions were already there. I told you specifically in Berlin that all we required was his silence.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There was still some of the chicke
n broth left in the cup and I finished it.

  ‘Feeling all right?’ Bracken asked.

  I managed something like a laugh. ‘How would you feel?’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find him.’

  I looked at Croder. ‘I suppose you’ve considered warning the Soviets?’

  ‘Of course. It would be suicidal. The situation at this moment is that an attempt on Brezhnev’s life might be made and might succeed. If it succeeds, the interests of Russian dissidents will suffer unimaginably in terms of reprisals, since some of the action group are bound to be caught. But if we even leaked a warning to Russian security the repercussions could be disastrous, not only for the Jewish dissidents but for East-West relations, even if no attempt were made at all’ His feet had come together and he was standing perfectly still again, his black eyes brooding. Those two possibilities are unfortunately not the worst. The worst possibility is that Schrenk might make an attempt, and succeed, and be discovered and identified as a Western agent’ When he stopped speaking the room was intensely quiet. ‘Not long ago, when it was known in the United States that Oswald had offered his services to the KGB shortly before he assassinated President Kennedy, the KGB themselves were terrified that one of their number might have instructed him to do so, and that the Americans might find out. I can imagine few situations that could push us closer to the brink of world war, and that is the situation we are now faced with here in Moscow.’

  The intense quiet came back into the room. The shock of what Croder was saying had left my head strangely numbed, and I didn’t have any particular thoughts, except perhaps, This is an awful lot to handle, even with Croder running things in the field. An awful lot.

  ‘When do you think this idea began,’ I asked Croder, ‘in Schrenk’s mind?’

  Bracken was turning his head, but not to look at me.

  ‘That’s hard to say. He’d applied for the post of agent-in-place a few months ago, so it seems that he was then involving himself with the dissidents. I would think that his experiences in Lubyanka not only left him outraged but determined on taking revenge, and finally the Jewish dissident cause provided him with the necessary rationale.’

  Bracken and I both had our heads turned to listen, and now Croder heard it too. Someone was coming along the passage outside and we waited, our eyes on the door. It would of course be Zoya. It had to be Zoya because if it were anyone else we were wiped out. It’s always like this in a safe-house: you’ll stop with half the toothpaste on the brush or your shoelace half tied while you listen, facing the door; but tonight our nerves were strung tight because we were the three major components of a mission cooped up together in one small room and we wouldn’t stand a chance in hell if we got raided.

  Knocking on the door. I sensed Bracken jerk his head a degree but he didn’t speak. It was Croder who spoke, his cold voice perfectly steady.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Zoya.’

  ‘Come in.’

  She opened the door and I heard Bracken let out his breath. I suppose he was closer to this thing than I was: he’d been in signals with London and London would be panicking; he’d also had Croder on his back, and the knowledge that unless we could do something the life of the Soviet chief of state could be running out.

  ‘There are two men,’ Zoya said.

  ‘Did they give the parole?’

  ‘Midnight red.’

  ‘Please have them come up.’

  They are English,’ she said. Croder nodded and she went out.

  ‘We have six people,’ Croder told me, ‘to support you in the field. I have asked two of them to come here for briefing. They are Shortlidge and Logan. Do you know them?’

  ‘No. Not by those names.’

  ‘Logan was an a-i-p in Bangkok,’ Bracken said, ‘liaising with the Embassy when you -‘

  ‘Yes, got him. Have any of them worked in the field?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Combat trained?’

  Three of them have been through Norfolk,’ Bracken said. They’re contact and liaison, outside of their post duties.’

  They can tag.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘I guaranteed you full support,’ Croder said.

  ‘I appreciate it.’ The bastard meant that he hadn’t sold me short despite the fact that I’d let him down by neglecting to kill Schrenk. Or perhaps he didn’t mean that; perhaps I was being paranoid, because of the size of this thing we had to handle, and because of the time factor: we had no idea of the deadline, and Schrenk could be going in at any minute, including now.

  Then they came in, Shortlidge and Logan, both typically nondescript men with quiet voices and poker-face reactions to what Croder told them. All he missed out was the bit about the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet: he used the word ‘coup’ every time.

  The situation, then, is that we have no idea when the coup is planned to take place, and we have no idea where. What we have to do is to find our way in, and our target for surveillance is of course this man Ignatov.’ He looked at Bracken. ‘How many are watching for him?’

  ‘Two. The other two are watching the Pavilion building.’

  ‘They never left there, I assume.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Shortlidge, you can join them and make enquiries after a woman named -‘

  ‘Misha,’ I said, and described her.

  Then Croder went through the whole of the briefing again and we repeated paroles, countersigns and contact modes until we’d got it right. We were to dispense with signals through the Embassy: he gave me an Ultravox walkie-talkie, told me that Bracken and the six members of the cell would keep in contact by that medium alone, using speech code only and using the air with extreme discretion.

  On street mobility Logan told me: ‘We’ve got most of the blood off the inside of your Pobeda and she’s tanked up. We didn’t have time to find new plates so we’ve altered the old ones and rubbed some mud on. Don’t forget to lose your papers’

  Bracken told us he’d be based here at the safe-house, since he wouldn’t be able to enter or leave the Embassy without surveillance. Croder and I would wait here with him until we got a signal from the field.

  ‘What was the street like?’ I asked Logan.

  ‘Looked clean enough. Three cars this side of the intersection, all facing towards it Truck outside the warehouse opposite with a lot of snow on it. Nobody moving. The militia work east and west across the intersection and their nearest phone is a hundred yards west of there.’

  It was one a.m. when he and Shortlidge left us. By that time I felt ready to eat solids and Zoya brought me some goat’s milk cheese and black bread.

  ‘Is there some pain?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes.’

  That is good,’

  ‘And a happy birthday to you too,’ I said, and she laughed because it was becoming our favourite joke. The left shoulder was throbbing to the rhythm of the pulse but it was only muscle and tissue pain: Ignatov hadn’t hit bone. ‘If I don’t see you again,’ I told Zoya, ‘you did a great job and I want to thank you.’

  ‘Of course you’ll see me again,’ she said, and left us.

  Bracken was getting increasingly nervy and couldn’t keep still. I did some walking about myself and tried out the arm for movement as far as the sling allowed; the shoulder flared up but the pain was confined to that area: the nerves and muscles through the tower arm to the fingers were unaffected and I’d be able to drive a car with the sling off.

  Croder stood still for most of the time, keeping clear of the window and taking a few short steps occasionally and coming to a stop with his feet together and standing still again, his thin neck buried in the collar of the military coat, his dark eyes impassive. Sometimes we heard sounds from inside the house, and turned our faces to tie door. The stove began losing its heat after a while but we didn’t put any more wood on.

  I went over the street scene as Logan had given it: th
ree cars parked this side of the intersection, a truck in the other direction, so forth. I went over the briefing pattern, contact modes, signals, the whole thing. I was getting thirsty because of the anaesthetic and the saltiness of the cheese, and kept going to the tap over the basin and coming away with the taste of chlorine in my mouth. We didn’t talk much, though Bracken began voicing his nerves after a while.

  ‘I don’t see how he can expect to do anything on that scale and get clear.’

  ‘I don’t imagine for a moment,’ Croder said thinly, ‘that he can get clear. What concerns me is that he might reveal his identity. If he is discovered to be a London agent I hesitate to consider -‘ he stopped and in a moment said so quietly that we barely heard him - ‘but we’ve already gone into that’

  I thought about Schrenk. ‘He won’t want to live, once he’s gone in.’

  Croder turned his head. ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘He was quite an athlete, before. Tennis champ, good-looking, lots of girls. Now he’s a wreck. This is a suicide run.’

  In a moment Croder said bleakly, ‘So we have that aspect to contend with too.’

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything we could do about it: a potential assassin who means to get clear after the act will take a lot of care and might finally baulk at the risks, but a kamikaze will go right in for the kill with nothing to lose.

  We grew quiet again, and every five minutes Croder took his few short steps and halted again, his death’s head staring at the wall:. Bracken lit a cigarette and then began chain smoking.

  Just before three o’clock we got a signal.

  Chapter 18

  Zil

  Driving was more difficult than I’d thought. The left arm worked all right with the sling off but I was still feeling the loss of blood and I got into three front-end skids over the snow before I reached the rendezvous because of partial blackouts. Within ten minutes of leaving the safe-house I passed seven militia patrol cars, one of which made a U-turn and followed me for five blocks before it peeled off, presumably in answer to a radio call. The whole environment was strictly a red sector because the number plates of the Pobeda weren’t legible and traffic was so thin at this time of night that I was liable to get pulled up by the police just to relieve their boredom. The operation could blow at any given minute and Croder knew that but all he could do now was run the whole thing into the ground if he had to, because of the time factor: we didn’t know when Schrenk was going in.