Christ, the man was a dreadful singer, off-key, voice cracking before it even climbed halfway up a note.
“Here,” he dug in his pants pocket for another coin, “now go away, would you?”
“Five pee—fuck am I ‘sposed to do wif fifteen pee? Sheep bastard.”
“Sheep?”
“Aye, sheep,” the man said, and began to sing again.
‘My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.’
It belatedly occurred to an indignant Gareth that the man was calling him cheap, rather than comparing him and his thick and curly hair, to the woolly farm animal.
“Go the fuck away!” he hissed at the drunk. The old man stepped back and ceased his singing. He looked, Gareth was amazed to see, really quite offended.
“Lor’ you gots a filfy mouf on ye, son.”
Gareth considered that this was a tad rich, considering the man’s own mouth.
“Please just get away from me!” His voice was rising in anger, and people were beginning to turn their heads to view the spectacle the two of them presented.
The drunk held up his hands in surrender. “Oiright son, no need to telt me twice, I’m be off an’ away then.”
Gareth gave a short pent-up bark of relief and turned, his eyes clocking every head in the place. He couldn’t see the man anywhere, heaven help him if he had given him the slip.
The drunk was tugging on his sleeve again. Dear Lord, what did the miserable sod want now?
“That feller ye’re lookin’ fer—I think he just got on that train.” The drunk pointed a filthy finger to the trains moving in the opposite direction, toward Waterloo.
“What makes you think I’m looking for someone?”
“Well, ya keep lookin’ about like ye’re a puppet on a string, figured ya was lookin’ for someone. Thought it might be the feller with the yaller hair.”
“Yaller hair?” Gareth echoed.
“Yis sir, him was lookin’ about like he thought he were bein’ followed, an’ you were lookin’ about as if you’d lost someone, so I figured as you might be lookin’ for him. He’s only jist gettin’ on now—see there he is!”
Gareth looked about wildly, panic fluttering at the edges of his composure. Sure enough he caught the blazoning flag of gold that had kept his quarry in sight all day. He threw a pound note at the old man and ran toward the train, just barely making it through the doors before they closed on him. He looked about wildly, wondering where his quarry had disappeared to. There wasn’t a single head in the car with that distinctive golden hair. Duns and dirty blonds, black hair and grey, and even a redhead but not one with that shimmering gold hair. He looked out the window, wondering if the man had run in one door and out the other. The train was moving now and it was too late.
The old drunk was still on the platform, standing straight and tall, no slouch to him anymore. He saluted Gareth in a most jaunty fashion and then swept a low bow and took off his hat. With it went the filthy and matted grey hair, to reveal a head as gold as a guinea coin.
Gareth hit the dirty glass between him and the man. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!!”
“The filthy mouth on you, you ought to be ashamed!” The sharp tip of an umbrella stabbed him in the arm, the old woman on the other end of it looking at him censoriously.
He was ashamed, but not for the reasons the old woman thought he ought to be. He got off the train at Waterloo and dragged himself up the stairs, his fury turning to a grudging respect for the man.
In fairness, he thought, limping down the street, he had been warned.
Sergei the Fox was late. In Jamie’s experience the one reliable thing about Sergei was that he was never on time for anything. He was a little late himself, for it had taken longer than expected to give the slip to the young fool MI6 had following him. The boy had been fairly proficient, but Jamie had been followed by the best in the business and he ran on Moscow rules, which kept it simple and was entirely effective. One always assumed one was under surveillance and acted accordingly.
He approached the hotel from the back. It was, to put it kindly, a down-at-the-heels establishment, renting rooms by the week or month to people down on their luck. Most of the clientele were alcoholics or drug addicts. If anyone saw him or Sergei, they weren’t likely to remember their faces later.
The lobby, which still had its furnishings from Victorian times, was a bit gloomy and very quiet on this sunny afternoon. He retrieved a room key from under a potted palm. The receptionist was asleep, gently snoring with a copy of The Telegraph on his chest, open to the racing results, the pages fluttering a little with each rise and fall of his breath.
He took the stairs to the second floor swiftly. There was seemingly no one about. He let himself into the agreed upon room and closed the door gratefully. The room was dingy, the wallpaper a design of William Morris’ which had likely been put on the walls when the man himself was still alive. The carpet was a faded blue with a scrollwork of overblown pink roses undulating around its grimy edge. He sat in the threadbare armchair by a window which looked out over the narrow alley that ran behind the hotel. There was a distinct whiff of urine wafting up from the alley and the sound of a bottle breaking in the distance. He took a breath, bringing his mind into the here and now and out of that book-lined room at Oxford.
The door opened with a quiet snick. Jamie turned.
Sergei the Fox fit his nickname well. He was a small man with a sharp-pointed chin, fading ginger hair and narrow blue eyes. He was the sort of man who looked like a minor hustler or petty thief, and as such he blended into any city landscape in any country. Appearances, of course, were often deceptive and his looks worked to his advantage in a world where a man wanted others to forget his face five minutes after they had seen it.
Jamie pulled out three packs of Marlboro cigarettes and put them on the table in front of Sergei. All the rest of their trade would be in the nebulous form of information.
“Cigarettes,” Sergei clapped his hands together. “How well you know my weakness, James. Sit down, man. You will take a drink with me, no?” Sergei pulled a paper bag with a bottle in it out from under his arm with a theatrical flourish.
Jamie nodded. The sound of Russian words was oddly comforting, in the way that icy vodka was comforting—it might burn like hell, but it gave a warm afterglow. He accepted the small, smudgy glass of vodka that Sergei poured for him. A man didn’t refuse to drink with a Russian, especially not one he was priming for information.
Sergei pulled a cigarette out of his cuff. He would save the Marlboros for later, or use them in one of his own trades. He lit up the home-rolled cigarette and took a long deep drag on it, then breathed out in great wreathes of blue smoke, lending him a rather Mephistophelean air. Jamie took a drink of the vodka, and the taste was memory itself, of snow and fire and blood and the bone weariness of the camp. It brought to mind other things, too, but he shut the door on those things as swiftly as the vodka opened it.
“You heard about Tony?” Tony had been Sergei’s handler for more than a decade.
“No, I am out of the loop, having just returned from the gulag, where information was somewhat thin on the ground,” Jamie said, acidly.
“He got caught in compromising circumstances in a French brothel. There was him and a chef de cabinet and a boy strapped naked to a table. I will leave it to you to fill in the blanks.”
Jamie rather thought that Sergei hadn’t left any blanks to fill. It was an ignominious end for a man who had been considered one of the most talented agents in MI6. He had met Tony more than once, at parties in London, and his friend Jonathan had known him as well. He had been a kind man, and good at his job. His homosexual escapades aside, Tony had been a damn good spy. The situation sounded like a set-up.
There was a certain pattern to their exchanges and Sergei was given to abrupt shifts in subject, i
n part because he didn’t see the point of small talk, nor in the fine stitching of politeness to pull together the different cloths of their conversation. Sergei often replied to questions Jamie hadn’t asked, but he didn’t mind, it was an effective way to get information without appearing overeager for it.
“And so, Russia.” Sergei shrugged and lit another cigarette. “Russia—is anything ever clear cut? Well, Stalin was clear cut, I will give you that,” he said as if Jamie had made a slur on the man. “They are moving chess pieces about on the board, courting Syria and wooing Arafat. It is, as ever, say one thing, mean another. It is the game, and the game never changes, only the players.”
“Except in this game the players die when they lose,” Jamie said.
Sergei smiled, a slightly frightening exercise as he was missing a few teeth and had four of the remaining ones capped in gold.
“Ah, that is what makes the game interesting, no? The risk.”
Sergei had a point there, it was why many of them got into the game. The love of risk. It was why many of them were no longer amongst the living as well.
Sergei paused to delicately pick a piece of tobacco off his tongue, and having retrieved it, flicked it to floor. No one could accuse the man of an overabundance of etiquette. He took another drag on his cigarette, and spoke on the expelled cloud of smoke.
“So, not finding what they want in the quagmire of Middle East politics and players, they have turned their faces to other pastures.”
“Africa and Central America,” Jamie said.
“Astute and to the point as ever, my friend.”
It made sense to him, as much as Russian policy and paranoia could make sense. They lived in strange times, and the spy world was as surreal as an acid trip at times. A bad one. The signal intelligence base in Cuba, less than one hundred miles from the US coast, was rumored to be the largest of its kind in the world with acres and acres of antennae fields and intelligence monitors, not to mention more than two thousand Soviet technicians. The Red Menace was real and far too close for comfort. The Soviet Republic was always looking to plant its flag in another country, to find another foothold, to protect its own borders while encroaching upon others.
“What I have to tell you is to do with another area entirely. The most valued bit of real estate in the world,” Sergei said, blowing another succession of smoke rings into the already foggy room.
“Svalbard.” Jamie said it automatically. Svalbard meant one thing—the oil interests of both West and East, and Soviet paranoia that any oil rigs operating there could be equipped to monitor the surface ships and submarines of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Soviet paranoia was overblown, but not necessarily wrong. With Russia’s immense naval facilities to one side of the Kola Peninsula, it was a foregone conclusion that in any kind of battle of the Atlantic, the Soviet military would seize Norway first and take questions later. Svalbard was too close to Russia and the West, and it had the potential for far too many riches for either side to shy away from it. Why Sergei had brought it up was another matter, however. A matter which became clear with his next sentence.
“Our man in Norway has just been appointed as undersecretary to the Law of the Sea negotiations.” The Law of the Sea negotiations were to determine who had rights where concerning the world’s oceans. The Soviets had long had a man on the inside of Norway, who had now been appointed to the negotiations—it would give them a huge advantage on knowing what was coming and when.
“That’s putting the fox in with the chickens.”
“I’m giving you the shotgun for the fox,” Sergei said.
“I’m not in the game anymore,” Jamie said.
Sergei shrugged. “Use it or don’t, it might be the last useful bit I have for you. I’ve been summoned home to Moscow.”
Jamie knew what such a summons usually meant. It wasn’t going to be a friendly téte-a-téte with his master. The look on Sergei’s face said he was fully aware of this.
“I will likely not make my appointment and that means I am going to have to make myself scarce for a time. We will resort to our original channels for the passing of information. It will be like the old times, my friend.”
‘For a time’ was a euphemism for ‘the rest of my life’ in spy speak.
“And now, James, what do you have for me?” Sergei butted out his cigarette and leaned back, wiry arms crossed over a narrow chest.
What he had wasn’t high grade information, at least not that he was willing to share with Sergei. They had their own version of détente, and Jamie had never been fool enough to trust the man. He assumed and hoped that Sergei exercised the same caution with him. What he told him was enough to satisfy him, and it was enough so that he could trade it wherever it might be of most use. It wasn’t information that was going to harm anyone, but it might buy Sergei time or favors when he needed either commodity. He was likely to need both in the near future.
“And so to the real reason we are meeting here today,” Sergei said, putting another few inches of vodka in his glass.
Jamie took another swallow of his own drink. He would have liked to drain the glass, but then Sergei would refill it, and things would spiral down from there. He had no wish to compromise his faculties right now, as tempting as the idea might be.
Sergei fished a grubby pot of tobacco out of his equally grubby pocket. He took roll paper from his other pocket and set to making himself another cigarette. Jamie thought he was going to be a candidate for emphysema by the time he got away from the man. He waited, outwardly patient while Sergei tamped and rolled and licked and lit.
“I asked the questions you wanted me to ask. I do not think the answers will give you satisfaction.”
Jamie merely raised an eyebrow. Sergei knew well enough that he didn’t expect happily-ever-after answers to come out of the situation he had left in Russia.
“Do you want to know, Jamie? Think before you answer.”
Did he want to know? Sergei had a valid point there, and Russians understood the price of information better than almost any other people. Information exchanged or overheard, could cost a man his life, or a woman as it were.
“Yes, I want to know,” he said, and realized that he did, for he wanted to close off the trailing bloody ends of his Russian chapter before proceeding with the rest of his story.
“It could be that I am telling you what you already know, James. Yes, she is an agent. Once the KGB has their hooks into you you can never get them out, but you know that too, no?”
Jamie didn’t answer, he wasn’t going to give Sergei anything, not even acknowledgement of the rumors that flew like cotton tree fluff around the spy world. His time in Lubyanka and the resulting consequences of it were not something he discussed with anyone, ever.
“Whether or not she was a willing servant, I do not know. Whether or not she is still alive,” Sergei shrugged, “I do not know. I can continue to ask questions, if you like. It may take a long time. I have to be careful.”
Jamie eyed the small man in front of him. Sergei was as cunning as the fox for which he was named. It wasn’t impossible he was stringing him along for his own purposes, which were myriad and often nefarious. Such was the spy world. He would have to take his chances because there was information he wanted and needed and there were very few channels more effective than Sergei.
“As to the others. Your friend is dead. That is the word in places both high and low. The other one—the vor, of him I can find neither rumor nor whisper.”
Jamie nodded. Gregor had merely been a zek, a prisoner like the rest of them, and of little account, whereas Andrei had been an astrophysicist and a chess master. He had mattered as much as one human being could in the scope of the great and terrible machine of the USSR.
“And now we will speak of your own handler?”
Jamie knew Sergei wasn’t talking about his current handler, but the one who had started him out in the circus. Diane Landel. Who also happened to be Julian’s mother.
“She hasn’t been my handler in many years,” Jamie said quietly.
“I know. She’s the one who brought you in though and she’s the one you need intelligence on.”
“I just want to know if she’s still in the game?”
“Yes and no. Do any of us really ever get out?” Sergei said gloomily, making Jamie think of Eeyore. He was starting to relate much of life to the children’s books he read to Kolya. It was one of the strange quirks of parenthood. Just the other day Pamela had asked him how he was feeling and while he had understood she was wondering how he was finding the transition from life in the USSR to life in a house filled with children, friends, dogs and on one memorable day last week, a sheep, he had found himself replying, “Oh, you know how it is, Pamela. From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!” She had laughed, because she knew the quote all too well, having been made to read the book five times that day alone. He had taken a deep delight in making her laugh, yet he noted how her expression turned stricken in the wake of her laughter.
“Jamie?” Sergei’s voice was harsh, and he snapped his focus back into place.
“My apologies, my mind wandered for a moment,” he said, hoping his face hadn’t revealed anything.
“She’s not running agents anymore, but she’s still important to the company. She’s not the ring master, still she’s awfully close with him.”
“Felix Plum?” It was a rhetorical question, as everyone knew who the grand master was of their claustrophobic little world.
“Yes, and he wants you to stay in, at least that’s the butt-scuttle.”
Jamie politely refrained from laughing at Sergei’s turnabout of words, something he thought the man did purposefully to make himself seem less proficient in English than he actually was.
“Well, he’s going to have to live with disappointment, because I am done.”
“Be careful with her, Jamie, you weren’t once and you got yourself badly burnt. Don’t allow her to do it again.”
“I won’t,” Jamie said. “I just need to see her.”
“I understand that, but you loved her once, no? Even the memory of love can make a man weak.” Sergei splashed more vodka into his glass and leaned back, still with that same strangely sad look on his face.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 10