Northlight

1 °CURFEW

'Why have you come here?'

'To complain.'

'Of what?'

'My room at the hotel was searched.'

'So?'

'I want to know why.'

He gave me a long stare.

'Why do you think we should know that?'

'Who else would search a foreign visitor's room?'

'A thief.'

I didn't answer.

'Perhaps that didn't occur to you?'

'Frankly, no.'

I had to watch my idiom.

'Then perhaps you should think again. It may have been someone with a grudge against you.'

He wore a captain's insignia and he was young, smooth, educated: one of the new school, not to be underestimated.

'Perhaps,' I said. My Russian was supposed to be adequate, not fluent. I was no longer clandestine. 'But I'd like your personal assurance that the KGB knew nothing about it.'

'You know your rights. Your famous civil rights.'

'I'm not an American.'

'You don't have civil rights, in England?' 4 I ignored that. a Bright lights, sticky warmth, a puddle of water near the door where the snow had come off my shoes. KGB headquarters Murmansk was the last place I wanted to be but there hadn't been any choice: they'd searched my room while I'd been at the railway station and I couldn't just let it go: an intelligence agent would expect the odd search somewhere along the line if he became suspect, but a bona fide journalist wouldn't expect it and he'd be pretty sure to notice it and he'd make a bloody great fuss. I was here to protect my cover, that was all.

But I didn't like it.

'Please take a chair.'

Thank you.'

He picked up a phone and asked for a Captain Bratchenko.

I didn't like it because it could be a trap. They'd had time enough, over an hour: they'd watched me leave the hotel and would have gone up to my room straight away. Their expertise varies: it depends how concerned they are that you shouldn't notice. This time they'd done a reasonable job — the razor was only a quarter of an inch out of place and the top drawer of the dressing-table was almost shut and my spare shoes were still touching the wall of the cupboard, that sort of thing — but it was in fact the razor that I'd used as one of the monitors and this tied in with the telephone's being five or six degrees turned away from the line from the edge of the bedside table to the mirror. They hadn't broken the hair I'd left across the medicine cabinet door in the bathroom but they'd made a mistake with the copy of Pravda I'd dropped on the floor by the armchair: it was turned over back uppermost. That didn't tie in with the care they'd taken generally and the thing that worried me was that they might have relied on that to get me in here, thinking I might not notice the other things.

'Bratchenko? This is Demichev, Headquarters.'

My papers were all right. I knew that. It's never a danger: the Bureau prides itself on certain things and that's one of them. The danger is always that these people are all-powerful, and they could simply take me from here to a cell with a barred door and play with me until I made a mistake, and when I made the mistake it wouldn't matter how hard the British ambassador tried to get me out: he wouldn't succeed.

You don't of course make any mistakes while you're fresh in from the street and on your toes and ready to go through with the whole thing as a technical exercise; but after a few hours of bright lights and shouting you begin to get worried and that's when you can make your first mistake and that one is going to be all they'll need because they'll seize on it and put you through the hoop until you make another one and then you're done for, finis.

I would very much like to have stayed in my comfortable hotel and let them think I hadn't noticed anything, but that would have been dangerous, more dangerous than coming along here and facing them on their own ground. To show them that I was prepared for a room search at any given time would be to blow my own cover.

'No, he's just making a formal complaint.' He looked up at me with a smooth swing of his head — he reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of Eichmann: a soft, delicate face with the eyes of a predator. 'Was there anything missing?'

'Missing?'

'From your room.'

'I don't think so.'

'Don't you know?'

'I didn't pay much attention. I was so annoyed that I came straight along here.'

Under the subheading Caver in my briefing papers someone had written a quite amusing bit about the British journalist: He is typically polite, a degree arrogant — as befits a scion of perfidious Albion — but often tests the authority of the host country, even be it the Soviet Union, by demanding fair treatment and respect. Indignation is expected by the law enforcement, bureaucratic and secret police agencies from any British journalist placed in an annoying or embarrassing situation. The objective is to exasperate the officers of these agencies to the point of giving you what they demand, offering their apologies or simply kicking you out without pressing whatever charges may have been laid.

'The complainant is very annoyed,' the captain said into the telephone, and had the courtesy to keep his face straight while I heard a faint laugh from the other end. I should have liked him for that, but I didn't. He had his role to play just as I did. He'd been trained in the new school of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti to show foreign visitors — especially journalists, who would be writing it up when they got home — an official image of courtesy, authority and efficiency. This didn't mean that if he found anything wrong with my papers or I made some kind of mistake he wouldn't order me into an interrogation room and get enough out of me to send me to a forced labour camp for ten years, and the fact that he'd be doing something perfectly understandable in protecting his country from the activities of an espionage agent wouldn't do anything to soften the guards' clubs or break the ice in the buckets or give me more than a bowl of watery gruel with only the roaches in it to crunch for protein.

'Please show me your papers.' He leaned forward slightly with the phone still to his ear and took them from me. I'd already shown them to the guard at the desk outside but I couldn't refuse. He studied them, taking his time.

'Clive Gage,' he said into the telephone. 'He is in Room 45 at the Hotel Leningrad.' He waited, occupying himself by gazing at my papers, turning them to the light with his eyes narrowing slightly: I think he was simply trying to frighten me, but he did it well.

Please tell me what is happening.

The prime minister had a reputation for phoning people before they could phone her.

As far as me know, ma'am, Karasov is still somewhere in Murmansk. We've now placed our agent there to bring him across the moment he makes contact. We also have a lead that should enable us to do this before very long.

That wouldn't satisfy her but she wasn't aware of the difficulty. There was only one, but it was a facer. Karasov wouldn't make contact.

The 'lead' was of course Tanya Kiselev. I suppose they could call her that. London knew their sleeper well enough to be sure that if he was more likely to go to anyone else for shelter, they'd know about it, and instruct me accordingly. But the longer time went on and he didn't surface, the more difficult it was going to be. A shadow executive or a cutout or a courier would break for a frontier within an hour of closing down his mission and he'd expect instant help and he'd get it — I'd brought three of them across like that, earning one down a mountainside into Bavaria and throwing another into a meat truck on the drug route across the Isonzo Bridge and shoving a third man into a plane in Topolovgrad with a bullet still in his shoulder blade but a lot of life left in him and a photocopy schedule of the Warsaw Pact military exercise still taped round his leg. It's difficult work but it's fast and you don't have to rely on signals or changes of plan from London: you just make your run and bring him with you and there isn't time to think about frontier rifle-fire or airfield security forces or sirens in the night — you're running hard and you can only keep up the pace by going into Zen, and it works, it really works, because the instant you switch off and leave it to the alpha waves you're moving into a protection zone where you can do things that would otherwise kill you off.

But with a sleeper it's different. He's like a mole, deep underground, and when he surfaces he finds the light too bright and it frightens him and he's liable to go back and stay low for a while. In the case of Karasov the temptation to do this was greater than usual: from the moment he was reported missing, the KGB would have started a massive search — they'd already been looking for the man who'd copied the tape of the submarine kill and he was the obvious target.

The thing that worried me most was that he hadn't contacted Tanya, simply to reassure her: it was the first thing he'd be expected to do. But the answer to that could be that he hadn't gone back underground: he could still be on the surface somewhere, running, and running too hard to stop.

'Very well. Thank you, comrade.'

Demichev put the phone down and dropped my papers onto the desk for me to pick up and said carefully, 'I have talked to the officer who would have been in charge of any search made in your room at the hotel. He assures me that no search was in fact made. I can only assume that it was a thief, or one of the staff, or that you were perhaps mistaken after all. I wish you a pleasant stay.'

He didn't get up. I put the papers into my coat.

'All right.' I turned back, halfway to the door. 'What's your opinion, Captain? Do you think this submarine thing is going to stop the summit?'

He laughed nicely. 'You people never miss an opportunity, do you?'

'We can't stop anyone in the street and ask them, without getting them into trouble.'

He let that go. 'I think it depends a great deal on whether you go back and vilify us as usual in your popular press. We are looking for mutual understanding, you see, and without it there's very little chance of a summit meeting.'

His smile had died away and as I left the office he was simply staring at me through narrowed lids, and as I touched the door handle a frisson passed through my nerves because I was suddenly sure it wouldn't turn, that the door was locked. But that feeling is quite normal, when you walk out of a KGB building.

On the way to the hotel through the unearthly night glow from the sky it occurred to me that I'd missed something. I'd fallen into the occupational hazard of identifying too closely with my function: I was an intelligence agent, and expected to be caught — or at least suspected — at any given time. But I carried a journalist's papers and there was absolutely nothing to connect me with any kind of deception. If the KGB had thought there were any cause for suspicion they wouldn't just have searched my room: they would have taken me along to their headquarters and put me under a light and yelled and gone on yelling until they found something. The only reason they'd have for making a room search would be to turn something up and confront me with it later; but they didn't normally work like that: they didn't need to.

If they'd made that search they'd found nothing: my Boris Antonov papers were in the door panel of the car. But that wasn't so important. Why would they have made it at all?

There was no reason.

I didn't like that. The only possible answer was that they'd found something wrong with my cover, and that frisson I'd felt along the nerves was justified. The door handle had turned and the door had opened and I'd gone into the street by virtue of one thing alone.

They were giving me rope.

'But you can't do that!'

Her Russian was atrocious.

'I'm sorry. It's the curfew.'

'But listen, I'm an American citizen!'

'We know.'

He was in plain clothes, with the slight regulation bulge above the left hip.

'Look, if I want to go out to get some fresh air, that's what I'm going to do. Okay?'

She tried to push her way past him.

'We'd prefer you not to make trouble.'

'If you don't let me past I'm going to make so much goddamned trouble you won't even know what's happening!'

It didn't sound exactly like that, because she was using only the present tense and the Russian for goddamned isn't translated as accursed, so forth.

'It won't do any good,' I told her in English and she turned to face me with her eyes bright.

'What the hell do you know about it?'

'That it won't do any good.' I said to the KGB man in Russian: 'It's her first time here.'

'Americans,' he said with a shrug. 'Are you American too?'

'No. English.'

'There's no difference. You cause trouble. You are in Russia now, do you understand? You are on the soil of the Soviet Union, and are expected to behave according to our laws.'

'What kind of bullshit is he giving you?' the girl asked.

'There's a curfew. The only thing you can do about it is calm down and come and have a drink.'

'D'you always let these bastards have their own way?'

'It's more comfortable.'

'Whose side are you on, for Christ's sake?'

'Come and have a drink.'

She stared at me with her head flung back and her eyes still hot. 'Did you know about this curfew?'

'No.'

'Then why are you taking it lying down?'

'Because this isn't my first time out here.'

'How d'you know it's mine?'

'It shows.'

'Christ, I don't know which one of you bastards I hate most.'

'You'd better choose, because I'm the one who's going to buy you a drink.'

'Shit.' She turned and walked off, then swung back to look at me. 'I guess that's not very polite.'

'It'll do.' I nodded to the KGB man and put an arm around the girl and took her into the bar. It was almost deserted. 'What would you like?'

'A iManhattan.'

She was young, though I couldn't tell which side of thirty: I'm no good at people's ages. In her blue parka and gloves she looked more like one of the jet set just off the ski slopes.

'But why are they suddenly having a curfew?'

I'd chosen a corner table with a view of the doorway. The three men at the bar were speaking English, but one was French; I could hear the accent.

'The whole place is jumpy. You should know that.'

'Why should I?'

'You're a journalist.'

'Jesus, I wish-' then she took her drink and looked down and said, 'I guess I need this.'

'Cheers.'

'What? Cheers.'

The other two were German. The Frenchman was getting tight.

'Where are you from?' I asked her. It was going to be fifteen minutes of small talk and then I was going up to my room because I wanted to do some thinking: I wanted to find out why they were giving me rope. It was like being on a pond in winter: I could hear the ice cracking.

'Boston. What about you?'

'London. My name's Clive Gage.'

'Hi. I'm Liz Benedixsen.' She put out a cold hand. 'I don't normally blow my top that way. I just got fired.'

'From your paper?'

'Right. They called me home, but I'm not going.'

'You like Murmansk in winter?'

'You mean the cold? I don't mind that. Why did you order tomato-juice?'

'I like it.'

'Oh. Ex-boozer?'

That's right.'

'You don't look like a journalist, Clive.'

'This is a disguise.'

She had an interesting smile, it was private, confiding.

'What's your paper?'

'The Monitor.'

'Class.'

'A little conservative. Though not in your meaning of the word.'

'Redneck?'

'Quite. More blue-blooded.'

She laughed again.

A man had come in and was sitting at the far end of the bar and I watched him now and then but he was all right: he could have used the gold-framed mirrors to cover this corner of the room but he was sitting too far at an angle.

'Your editor hasn't called you back?' the girl asked me.

'No.'

'Most of them have gone. Didn't you notice?'

'Yes.' I hadn't. I'd thought they were out with a guide trying to rake up some local colour.

'You know why they've gone?'

'No.'

She looked around at the three men sitting at the bar and the man at the end, then back to me, her eyes concentrating, weighing me up. 'I haven't seen you around much.'

'I've been working in my room.'

She considered this. 'You know we're about the last ones left? You, me, and these guys in here? That doesn't tell you anything?'

'There's no story.'

'Well sure, that puts it simply enough. But I mean why not? The summit meeting in Vienna's in jeopardy and there has to be the most tremendous amount of secret diplomacy passing between the Kremlin and the White House over the submarine sinking and we're sitting right here in Murmansk where it happened — and there's no story?'

'But we're only here to make a gesture.'

'A what?'

'Secret diplomacy isn't for publication. All we can hope to get out of the Soviet Ministry of Information is continued denial.'

I was wrong. He was using a mirror.

'So what are we doing here?' Liz asked me.

'We're here to report that the city housing the Soviet Union's major naval base is full of tension tonight, that a curfew has been ordered for the protection of foreign journalists because the good citizens here resent the United States sending a submarine to spy on their most secret defence installations, and that they've been queueing up for clogs all day in a temperature of 25 degrees below.'

He was using the long narrow mirror between the end of the bar and the heavy plush curtains. He was watching me now.

'That doesn't sound like the Monitor.'

'The Monitor does what every other paper does when it has to. It prints whatever news it can get, and what it can't get it makes up.'

She looked down at her drink for a minute while I turned slightly and worked out the angles and found that I could watch him in the other mirrors while he was using the narrow one, and tell by the angle of his head when he was watching me. Or maybe I was being paranoid just because of the room search: he could be sitting there trying to make up his mind what the chances were of getting rid of me and moving in on Liz Benedixsen, who was quite attractive and the only woman remaining among the press contingent.

'You know something, Clive?' She'd lowered her voice and was looking at me with her green eyes totally engaged. 'I believe I know why there's no story. I believe I know why most of the gang has gone home. I believe there's a major cover-up going on over the sinking of that submarine. I mean major. Like I say, involving the Kremlin and the White House, on a hotline level.'

I drank the last of the tomato-juice. It tasted of brine.

'Possibly.'

She leaned nearer me across the low table. 'You remember what Claire Sterling did with the attempt on the Pope?'

'Yes.'

'She exposed a major cover-up, right? And they still wouldn't listen. Even the CIA. Even the New York Times. She said that even though there was actual evidence pointing directly to Andropov there was just no way the West could come out with a public accusation, because if it did, there was no way the West could go on maintaining diplomatic relations with people who had tried to murder the Pope. And if we couldn't go on maintaining diplomatic relations with the Soviets, it would be the end of our chances for peace.' She moved her glass round and round on the black marble table, the reflection of her drink playing across her eyes. Then she looked up again. 'Are you seeing any connection, Clive?'

'You might not be far from the mark.'

He wasn't lip-reading: he looked up at the mirror only at intervals. He wasn't KGB: his suit had been made in London and he was showing a tan. For the first time the idea occurred to me that Captain Bratchenko had been speaking the truth: it hadn't been his people who'd searched my room.

'Okay,' Liz said quietly, 'the sinking of a submarine isn't so horrendous as the idea of a pope getting shot to death — which was their intention. Tragic as hell, with all those lives lost, sure, but nothing like as far-reaching diplomatically — until you consider how vital that summit meeting is for us all. And then we get the parallel, right? There's no way the American public would allow the president to talk to any country that has just wiped out all those lives without any attempt to warn them first. These bastards shot from the hip, and before they woke up to the fact they were also shooting the summit conference right out of the water.'

I had begun listening.

'That's quite interesting.'

'I hope that's a good old British understatement, Clive, because I find the idea so goddamned interesting myself that when my editor cabled saying I had to go home like all the others I told him he could go screw himself.' She finished her drink.

I had begun listening because the work of a shadow executive is normally close-focus. Some of the missions they give us in London carry international background but we don't have to think about it; sometimes we don't even know about it. For our own sakes we're told only as much as we need to get through the mission and secure the objective and bring it home, whatever it is, a man or a document or an article like the one I'd taken from Brekhov. But there were things I didn't like about Northlight. Ferris had refused to local-control me; Fane was shut in and uncommunicative, and I didn't think he'd be able to give me the kind of support I'd need if I had to go to ground in a safehouse or start a fast run for the frontier; someone had searched my room and it could be the man sitting at the end of the bar watching me in the mirror; and above all, the sleeper hadn't made contact as he should have done.

It wasn't that these things made it difficult for me; it was that they didn't make an articulate pattern. The mission was out of focus and I couldn't see where I was going. I didn't trust Fane and I didn't trust Croder and I needed more information and I knew they wouldn't give it to me if I asked them, and there was no one else — unless this American journalist knew more about the background than I'd learned in No. 10 Downing Street or Eaton Place and could put it into focus for me.

'He's cut off my expenses, of course.'

She was moving her empty glass round and round, and I signalled to the barman.

'Have you got enough to keep going on?'

'If I sleep in the goddamned snow.'

She looked close to tears of anger.

'You think you're sitting on an exclusive,' I said.

'I think I'm sitting on a goddamned powder keg.'

When the man came I asked for the same again.

'The Monitor isn't mean,' I told her.

'What?' She'd been thinking of something else. Her green eyes watched me steadily.

'I'll pick up the tab for you here, if it'll help you get your story.'

'Look, I'm not bumming, Clive. I'll get by. I just mentioned it, you know?' She looked down again. 'The thing is, there's another parallel with this submarine story. Right?'

'Korean Airlines Flight 007.'

She swung her head up. 'Right. I believe some trigger-happy jerk in the Russian navy just went and let go with his torpedoes at the submarine before he asked anyone's okay.'

'It's one of the theories.'

'I believe it's the right one, Clive. And I'm not just guessing.' She looked at the other people at the bar again before she went on, lowering her voice. 'There's someone I know, in Moscow. An American. He-' she stopped and looked at me. 'Look, this is my story, okay?'

'Don't tell me anything you don't want me to send in.'

She thought about that, watching me steadily. 'I don't think you're like that.'

'You might be wrong.'

'No. I don't think I'm wrong. Let's put it this way. If I can get anything big, it goes in to my paper first. Then yours. Okay?'

'I thought you said you were fired.'

'Honey chil', when I send them this one they're going to put me back on the payroll so fast it'll look like sleight of hand. Where did this come from?' She looked down at her drink.

'The man brought it.'

'I didn't even notice. Okay, Clive, it's going to hit my page first, before yours. Is it a deal?'

'All right.'

'Okay. Like I said, there's someone I know, in Moscow. I can't tell you who he is because he'd scalp me. But he's got a theory too, and if he's right it puts him way ahead of the game. He thinks some guy in that naval base duped a tape of the action when that sub got sunk, and now he's holed up somewhere in this city with half the KGB hunting for him. Now if we could talk to him… that would be quite a story, wouldn't you say?'