Northlight

11 CYANIDE

Where are you speaking from?'

'The post office.'

'Which one?'

'In Obolenskij prospekt.'

I counted the seconds of silence. Four.

'What do you need?'

'There's something wrong.'

'In what way?'

I listened carefully to his voice.

If it had been Ferris local-controlling me it would have been easier. I didn't know Fane well enough to know what the sound of his voice was like in the field. He didn't sound tense, but that might not mean anything: he could have reserves of nerve fibre that I didn't know about.

The thing was, I'd done some work on the room-search thing and the only reason for the KGB to do that was because Fane had been blown, and had talked, and if that had happened he could be speaking to me now with a gun at his head.

'Are you clear,' I asked him, 'at your end?'

Three seconds. I tried to remember the conversation we'd had on the bridge in Moscow, and whether he'd always paused like this.

'In what way?'

'Bugs.'

'Perfectly clear. I told you this number was all right.'

'I know.'

'What's happened?'

I'd decreased the risk as far as I could. This was a post office but it wasn't in Obolenskij prospekt: it was in Bockova ulica, and if anyone else were on the line and sent out a van they'd draw blank at the other place.

'My room was searched.'

A long pause but I'd expected that.

'Tell me about it.'

I just said I'd complained and the KGB had denied everything.

'How did they treat you?'

'They were civil.'

'I mean did they… ask any awkward questions?'

'No.'

The silence drew out, but I wasn't worried now. I'd been listening hard enough to have picked anything up, anything wrong. He was thinking, that was all.

'Your set-up is absolutely all right.'

He meant my cover.

'If you say so.'

'There is just no way they could have got anywhere near you. I know this.'

'So what's your answer?'

'You've been protected,' he said, ignoring my question, 'all die way from London through Moscow and into your hotel here. I've been in constant signals, and Croder is handling you with die most extreme care. You're absolutely sure, of course?'

'That my room was searched?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, come on, Fane.'

'Just making sure. It's so extraordinary. Have you any ideas?'

'I thought they might have got onto me and decided for some reason to give me rope.'

'I would have known.'

'How?'

'This is the most sensitive assignment I've ever been given, and Croder himself is running it. If anything had started to go wrong — in terms of Galina — we would have known at once.'

Galina Borisovna was spook terminology for the KGB.

'All right,' I said.

'What about you? Have you got any ideas?'

'Only one. There's a journalist at the hotel, a French-Swiss by his accent. He's been taking an interest in me.'

Another pause. 'What sort?'

'He's watching me now.' | The strange, saffron light of dusk was seeping through the grimy windows. It was three o'clock: the nights were long here.

'Is he in the post office?'

'No. He stopped short when I came in. He'll be outside waiting for me.'

'Does he know you've seen him?'

'No.'

I was facing the main doors and already knew the answer to what Fane would ask me next.

'Can you go out the back way?'

'No.' It would mean going past the counter and through the sorting room.

'You say he's a journalist. You mean that's his cover?'

'Yes.'

'How do you know that?'

'I know a spook when I see one.' He'd only made one mistake on the way here through the streets from the hotel: he'd hurried a little when I'd walked round a corner and slowed, looking back. It hadn't been easy for him, over the snow. Figures stood out.

'Do you know his name?'

Fane's tone had become almost casual now, and I recognized for the first time that the more the pressure came on the quieter he got. That was good: there was more to him than I'd thought. But I didn't like this new situation. It had unnerved me to the point of thinking that Fane might have been blown.

'Yes. Rinker.'

'How do you know?'

'I got a look at the reservation book.' He asked a lot of questions, never taking me for granted.

'What does he look like?'

'Short, compact, maybe thirty-five, in training, works out with weights, or it's some form of martial art. He-'

'Eyes?'

'Brown. Dark hair smoothed back. Good tailor. Why?'

'I thought I might recognize him as some kind of opposition tool. So what are you going to do?'

I thought about it. 'Do you have any instructions?'

'Not really, but I'll get some if you like.'

'If I blow him, he'll only bring other people in. That's all right at the moment but when Karasov makes contact I'll want to be free to move.'

A long pause. There was a very faint voice on the line and it occurred to me that he was blocking the mouthpiece and talking to someone else; but it sounded like Russian. I couldn't be sure.

'Fane?'

'I was thinking.'

'All right.'

'Is he worrying you?'

'He'd worry me less if he stopped searching my room.'

'You think it was him?'

'If it wasn't Galina.'

A heavy man came through the doors and banged the snow off his boots.

'See what you can find out,' Fane said, 'and let me know.'

'I can't find much out unless I blow him.'

While Fane was thinking again the heavy man came over and stood stolidly in front of me, flipping a two-kopeck coin. This was the only telephone in the place.

'Don't blow him,' Fane said. 'That would complicate things, as you say. Just see what he does.'

'All right.'

I rang off and went to the doors and out into the yellow twilight and the scent of wood smoke. Fane had sounded so very certain that the KGB hadn't caught my vibrations, and this tied in with the denial they'd made at their headquarters; but Fane could be wrong and they could be lying. I didn't feel comfortable yet: there were too many things going wrong with this mission and I couldn't trust anyone. Or maybe it was the strange light here: at noon it was either dark with snow clouds or shimmering with the first ripples of the aurora flowing from the northern ice cap. Nothing seemed acceptable; everything seemed suspect in some way.

I don't like the cold. I felt cold now, under the thick fleece-lined coat and the astrakhan hat. I was shivering with it.

He wasn't where I'd left him. He was in a doorway of the next block, barely an outline in the shadows, and I took the same route back to the hotel, never looking behind me but sighting him twice in reflections as. we passed windows, climbing snow drifts and crunching through scabs of ice along the gutters while a snow plough followed us, lumbering down the middle of the deserted road and sending up clouds of diesel gas. The staff at the hotel were complaining bitterly about the traffic conditions, and the city's sanitation commissioner was being criticized in the local paper for not doing his job. Before we reached the hotel I saw a whole party of skiers gliding down the street, overtaking a tractor hauling a bus out of a drift.

I stopped once or twice to watch, and again saw Rinker's silhouette in the window of a workers' outfitting shop before I went on. He held back at the last corner and I quickened my pace through the lobby and got to the first floor balcony in time to see him come in through the doors.

This is a time for understanding.

You many wonder why we appear so truculent, and so suspicious, and so seemingly unready to sit at a conference table with the peoples of the West. It is perhaps because our Motherland has seen so much suffering at the hands of the peoples of the West, by France, when only our will to resist and wear down the forces of Napoleon saved us from defeat, and by Germany, when that same will, together with our own greater force of arms, turned back the forces of Hitler. But the cost was high. We lost twenty million of our young sons in the Second World War alone.

We ask you, today, to think of that.

It had been slipped under my door.

We ask you to try to understand why we appear so 'paranoiac', as you call us. Perhaps we are, especially to the people of the United States, who have never known the setting foot of one single enemy on their shores, who have never known the meaning of rape, massacre and the burning down of whole cities across their sacred land, as we have.

The follies and mistakes recorded in the history of the American nation are often said to be due — and in all truth are due — to the fact that it is a 'young' nation, and this we understand. But we would like it also to be understood that our Soviet nation too is young, in terms of the yean since the yoke of Csarist oppression and injustice was thrown aside. In those brief years we too have made great progress, from the inception of a just, orderly and fulfilled society to the placing of the first human being into space.

It was on white paper with a red border and a small hammer and sickle in the corner, nothing else. It wasn't one of those quaint, pidgin-English pamphlets that get Xeroxed for discreet circulation at embassy cocktail parties to get a cheap laugh.

We understand that since Mr Carter relinquished the presidency of the United States it has been felt necessary to increase the production of armaments and bring America to equality with the Soviet Union in military strength. But we do not understand why President Reagan continues to vilify our nation and its leaders by verbal abuse. We would ask that we are accepted as a strong, young and successful society emerging from the shadows of oppression into the light of a common understanding with the rest of the world — if the rest of the world is ready to hear our voice. Only if we are seen as a fellow nation, with worth to offer the world, with goods to trade, with ideas to exchange and with the future to share on an equal footing, can it also be seen that we are ready, yes and again yes, to go to the conference tables and join with others in drawing the world back from the abyss of war and mutual annihilation that lies in our path.

There are follies and mistakes, too, in our own short history as an emerging nation, but we ask that they be seen as such, and not as 'evil' and aggressiveness. It is simply that we are fearful, as America is fearful, of war and rumours of war. Today we stand equal in terms of military strength, as powerful enemies. We are prepared, if others are prepared, to ensure that tomorrow we stand as powerful neighbours, and later, even, as powerful friends.

Meanwhile we say to you these words that you do not believe we mean, but which we mean in all truth and from the bottom of our hearts.

Peace be with you.

'Bullshit?'

Liz Benedixsen dug for another meatball with her fork.

'They don't think so.'

'The Soviets don't think so?'

She had drawn her chestnut hair back and fixed it with a ribbon, and it left her face unframed, stark in the cold light, her cheekbones casting shadows. It didn't give her the mien of a sculpting; she looked somehow more alive, more defined.

'I don't think we're talking about the Soviets,' I told her. 'They didn't write this stuff.'

'Who did?'

'Some kind of human activist group.'

'You mean underground?'

'Yes. They'd get arrested for pushing pacifism under people's doors.'

He was sitting at the other side of the room: he'd come in soon after I had. Liz had already been here and had invited me to join her. The curfew hour was for nine o'clock, in fifty minutes from now. Before then, I was going to take a trudge through the snow, and if he followed, lose him, and then see what he'd do, where he'd go.

'But it doesn't sound-' she waved her fork in the air — 'subversive. Wouldn't the Russian people agree with the main content? Peace?'

If he came back to the hotel I'd leave it at that. But if he went to telephone someone and report losing me, then I'd at least know they had a net to throw over me.

'Certainly the Russian people would agree with it. But they can't tell their government to lay down their arms, any more than the Americans can.'

'I suppose I'm just a crummy idealist.'

'Don't lose it. It's our only hope.'

I felt her eyes on me for a while. 'What else do you do, Clive, apart from journalism?'

'Eat and sleep.'

'You don't look like a journalist. You look like an actor. You know, the face crumpled in a good cause, the eyes experienced. You're quite attractive to women, did you know that?'

'It takes all sorts.'

'And there's this look of-' she waved her fork again, and dropped a blob of beef onto the cloth. 'Shit.' She speared it impatiently. 'A look of privacy. Guardedness. You look like a man with past tragedies under the skin, and scars that won't ever quite heal.'

'That really is the most appalling journalism.'

'And you're a creep.'

I would need to leave here in fifteen minutes, to do what I wanted to do and beat the curfew. Most of all I wanted to come back to the hotel before he did and see if he were worried enough about losing me to stay out after nine o'clock to make his report. And then I wanted to see how the KGB men in the lobby handled him when he came in late. That would tell me a lot. This was what Fane had meant when he'd told me to find out about Rinker: it was routine but informative.

'Are you divorced?'

'That's right.'

'For whoring around?'

'What else is there?'

She laughed suddenly, with that rather private, confiding laugh she had, and I found myself thinking about her for a moment instead of about Rinker, but only for a moment because this wasn't the time for any diversions. Once I was out there in the street I could find myself in a red sector: it was dark now, with snow clouds lying across the city, and the moment I manoeuvred him into losing track of me he could call others in and bring the net down, and it would be too late to do anything. They'd done that to me in Berlin and Seoul and Hong Kong and I'd got out from under, but it had been close. Among the back alleys of this trade I'd used up my nine lives long ago, and every new risk was a step closer to death.

She was watching me with her green eyes narrowed.

'Did I blow it, Clive?'

'In what way?'

I had five minutes.

'Trying to get under your skin.'

'As long as it amuses you.'

'How about a drink, when we've finished here?'

'I've got to work for half an hour. Say nine-thirty?'

'Okay.'

I saw her into die bar before I got my coat from the cloakroom attendant and shrugged into it and went across to the main entrance. If anything went wrong, how would she put it? I know I was fired but I've got something that could develop into a story. One of the journalists here was found dead in the snow last night, and they believe he was murdered. If you'll hire me back on the payroll again you can have the follow-up.

Epitaphs vary: some are shorter than others.

When I went out through the main doors it was exactly 8:45.1 saw a plain van with steel grilles at the windows parked at an angle against the snow bank that had been piled up by the ploughs earlier in the day, and when I heard movement behind me I didn't look round until I reached the first corner, letting my foot slip into a snow rut and falling down so dial I could look behind me as I got onto my feet again, but I needn't have bothered to make it look natural because they were too busy outside the hotel, and I walked back slowly, getting a rough idea of what was happening.

It looked as though Rinker had followed me down the steps at about the same time as I'd reached the corner. His coat was still only half on because the two KGB men from the lobby had moved in on him and two more had come across from the van to help. It was a typical street snatch: they hadn't wanted to do it inside the hotel. It looked as if Rinker was trying to fight them off, which wasn't very bright for a professional spook, but when I got closer I saw what he was really doing, and they weren't in time to stop him. One of them tried to catch him as he fell, but he went down like a dead weight with his arms flung out across the snow and his skin already turning blue from the cyanide as he stared up at me and saw no one.