Northlight

13 MIRRORS

The conditions were unpropitious. Snow was still falling but less heavily, and on the northern horizon a crack of light shimmered, thrust between the dark earth and the dark sky like a bright sword blade.

The conditions were unpropitious for detecting surveillance.

The light was blinding if you looked at it directly. It was the edge of the sun's reflection on distant cloud banks, flooding across the polar ice cap. If you looked away it vanished. It was too distant to reach into the darkness here, where only the gooseneck lamps of the railway station kept back the night. Dawn would be hours yet.

The conditions mere unpropitious for detecting surveillance, it would be reported, if anything of this would ever be reported in the file on Northlight.

It's one of those stuffy phrases coined by the bureaucrats upstairs, hunched at their desks with a drip on their nose and frayed cuffs and patched elbows, their chilblained feet squeezed into their cracked patent-leather shoes and a mug of cold tea beside them as they scratch the epitaph across the file in longhand, like vultures picking at the bones of a dead mission.

They thumb through their mildewed copies of Roget's Thesaurus for euphemisms designed to give stark truths a burial more decent than the facts will allow. By reporting that the conditions were unpropitious for detecting surveillance they mean that the executive in the field checked and rechecked and couldn't see anyone but there must have been someone there because they got to him just the same and tripped his run and slammed him into an interrogation cell or waited until he was right in the middle of the piazza and then put him in the crosshairs and dropped him like a dead duck or set up the road-block on the far side of a blind curve and pulled him out of the wreckage while it was still burning.

There are other phrases.

He endeavoured to evade termination. That one's easy enough: the poor bastard broke a door down and took the stairs and got to the top floor but they'd been waiting for that and he went through the window because they'd opened fire and there was nothing he could lose but this time he wasn't lucky because there was only a glass canopy below to break the fall and it wasn't enough, finis.

They are the phrases we sometimes find in our minds, like official notices pasted on a wall, when a wheel comes off and we're suddenly on the brink. It would be amusing, I suppose, if we weren't so bloody frightened at the time.

The reason why the conditions were unpropitious this morning was mainly the snow. I'd got out of the hotel through the kitchens and the rear service door to avoid the KGB men in the lobby: the curfew was still on for foreigners and in any case I wanted to gain time and get as far as I could on the way to Kandalaksha before the chambermaids reported the man in 203 was missing. I'd gone clandestine now and there shouldn't be anything to connect the English journalist from the Leningrad Hotel and the Soviet engineer in the train except facial characteristics, which didn't amount to much considering the photographs. But you don't take chances.

The car started all right but the snowfall had piled up around it and I had to put it into gear and get the wheels spinning and then climb out and heave it across the ruts and get in again before it took off on its own. The main streets were still under ploughing and they'd thrown sand down but the traffic was chaotic: the early shift at the dockyards was at five o'clock and buses were taking to the side streets as an alternative to jamming up in lines at the main intersections and sometimes backing into the ploughed streets again because they couldn't get through the drifts.

In the three miles to the station I saw one car three or four times and a KGB van had followed me half the distance before peeling off, but it wasn't possible to detect any consistent surveillance operation going on: quite a few private cars were making detours and coming back again like the buses because they couldn't get through. A man — a dozen men — could have followed me on foot over the whole distance, and I wouldn't have been able to pick them out among the others along the pavements. The conditions, so forth.

It wasn't much easier on the platform here. There was too much cover: corners, doorways, shadows. Sailors were tramping along the edge of the platform, some of them dropping onto the rails and hopping from sleeper to sleeper, making a game of it to keep warm until an official waved a flag and yelled at them. There were two KGB men on routine observation duty near the booking office, keeping to the small area that gave them a good panoramic view of the platform. Two others were across the lines, watching their own territory; I didn't know whether this was the normal scene for Murmansk, but there would have been more of them in the streets and public places since Karasov had been posted as missing.

Across from where I was standing was the little waiting-room at the end of platform 4 where I'd met Tanya Kiselev. I'd phoned her from the post office on my way back from the church. She'd picked up the phone on the second ring.

'He's alive and safe,' I told her.

There was a sudden breath on the line and then she said, 'Where is he?'

'Not far. I'll tell him you were worried.'

'Yes. Please tell him I-' It sounded as if she was crying, or just trying not to. 'But where is he, please? I want to see him.'

'That wouldn't be wise.'

'I want to be near him, don't you understand?'

'Of course. But if anyone questions you, the less you know about him the better.'

'I wouldn't tell anyone, ever.'

'For his sake, it's better. I'll ask him to phone you.' Then I'd just rung off because she would have gone on being insistent and it would only have wasted time. At least she didn't have to go on thinking he might be dead.

A green light had begun winking beyond the end of the platform and the public address speakers came on, announcing the departure of the train in five minutes. They were running it close because the locomotive was only just rolling in from the yards. I began another slow search of the environment, noting changes and new elements, walking to the end of the platform to check the shadows and coming back, passing the man with the shapeless leather bag who'd come from the booking office five minutes ago, and the other man who'd arrived earlier, no bag, but a briefcase under his arm. So far they'd avoided looking in each other's direction but that could mean nothing: I simply noted it. But they interested me more than the KGB. The people I was looking for — and the people who might at this moment be looking for me — would belong to the Rinker cell.

They'd put me under specific and close-focused surveillance and Rinker's death wouldn't have given them any reason to call off their operation: if a professional agent with instructions to use a capsule to protect his network had been given the job of surveilling me then it was important to them — it was that important. They had the same objective as the Bureau had: the sleeper, Karasov. And since Rinker's death I'd remained at the hotel for another six hours — ample time for his cell to replace him with a fully covert operator.

He could be the Lithuanian with the shapeless leather bag or the man with the briefcase or any one of the people who were inside the booking office or one of the waiting-rooms, and even if I could check all of them there'd be nothing to tell me who they were. I'd made three attempts to flush any surveillance since I'd got here, going into the main waiting-room and out through the emergency exit at the rear, moving into the deep shadow alongside the freight office and taking a turn round the building, going into the subway between the platforms and waiting for ten minutes on the far side of the station, but no one had followed, no one had provided any kind of image with partial cover concealment.

I'd drawn blank but it didn't mean they weren't simply sure of me, sure that I'd board the train. Once on the train it would be too late to do anything and in the normal way you don't let that happen: you don't move into a confined environment like a train or an aeroplane without making absolutely certain you're clean, and above all — above all — you don't start out to keep a rendezvous with a key contact until you're certain you won't expose him. But today we were going to throw the book away and take the risks as they came. Control wants the objective aver the frontier just as soon as you can get him there.

So when I went aboard the train I looked for a compartment at the end of a carriage in the «soft-seat» second class section and chose a place alongside the corridor. Nobody else came in before the train started; at this hour there weren't many people in spite of the fact that the roads were snowed under. I suppose that only a bloody fool would want to travel anywhere inside the Arctic Circle in midwinter and I was one of them.

They'd done their best to clean the windows but there were streaks of grime on the glass. Beyond the lights of the signal box I could see flares burning, silhouetting the huge shapes of the tractors and snow ploughs trying to clear the main road from the city, with a line of trucks crawling in their wake.

'Your coupon, comrade.'

I gave it to him and he clipped it.

We were getting up a fair speed: a train this size with a plough scoop on the front would go through a mountain. The sky was clearing in the east, the thin crack of light broadening and spreading an expanse of flat slate-grey across the sky in the wake of the snow clouds — the false dawn of an Arctic day. I turned my face away from it; on this trip I'd have preferred the dark.

'KGB.'

I showed him my papers while his colleague stood in the corridor. I'd seen them get into the train earlier, and presumably there'd be more. They were looking for Karasov.

'What's taking you to Kandalaksha?'

'There's a job going at the steel foundry.'

'You've got no work in Murmansk?' He was looking at me with that expressionless stare that will turn your blood cold if you can't trust papers or if you're carrying product or if you're not sure you can get through the act without his finding something to pick on, something to develop into a full-scale interrogation. These weren't the papers I'd shown at their headquarters; these hadn't been tested yet.

'Yes,' I told him. 'But the pay's better at the foundry — they can't get engineers of my grade.'

He studied the papers again under the yellow light from the ceiling bulbs. 'You didn't care for Moscow?'

He'd noted my Muscovite accent. 'Anyone who can find a job in that place has got a cousin in the Komitet.' A bit risky because it carried a hint of corruption, but it was also a compliment, flattering his authority.

His eyes glanced up from the papers and stared into mine for three seconds: I measured the time for something to do, to take my mind off the trickle of cold that had started along the spine. It's not the thought of what they'll do to you later that chills the blood. It's the thought of getting trapped, of feeling the sudden shock as the thing closes on you with a single wrong word, cutting you off from the world you knew a minute ago where you ate and slept and moved freely along your way through the labyrinth, and shutting you into the new world of black vans and doors and bars and keys and dangerous, questions, dangerous answers, and finally the bright light and the brute force and the long journey through the long nights until they're forced to go beyond the point when they can get anything out of you, when the aminazin or the sulfazin or the reserpine has blunted the intellect and destroyed the emotions and wiped out the memory and left them with nothing but a husk to throw onto the trash heap where once there had been a man.

'What about your family?'

'They'll follow me, if I can get the job.'

He was taking more trouble than usual, listening for that single wrong word, looking for it on my papers, matching what I was saying with what he was reading. The other man was watching me the whole time; I could see him in my peripheral vision. The trickle along my spine grew colder.

The greatest weapon in the initial interrogation is persistence. This hadn't been written by those snivelling bureaucrats upstairs: it was in the manual they give us on refresher courses in Norfolk — Techniques in Interrogation. This is the reverse of the coin, though we don't do much of it ourselves; it's to teach us what to expect and how to deal with it.

Even the steathest subject will eventually yield to persistence, and there is a sound psychological basis for this. The subject's psyche has already been disturbed by the approach of the potential interrogator, who is often in uniform and armed. It is necessary only to develop that initial disturbance in the subject's psyche to reach a point where he will begin to doubt his chances of surviving the interrogative process without giving something away. This further alarms him on a multi-conscious level, and he may begin to exhibit subtle speech defects: hesitation, slight stuttering, the inadvertent elision of speech components and so on.

'If you find work in Kandalaksha, can you be sure your wife will be as successful?'

'She's a nurse.'

Nurses were in demand everywhere: the pay was insulting.

'What about your two children?' He was looking the whole time at my papers now, and this was also in the Norfolk manual.

To gaze steadily at the subject will intimidate him if he has anything to conceal, but this can be taken to a new phase where one can remove that gaze and study the subject's passport or visa or appropriate document without allowing the eyes to move from left to right as if reading. This gives the clear impression that one has discovered something suspicious during the interrogation and that one is therefore concealing this fact by the removal of the direct gaze and adopting an attitude of exceptionally careful listening.

'The kids will have to go to a new school,' I said. 'We can't let them dictate where we live, can we?'

He went on gazing at my papers. 'When did you move to apartment 68 in the East Park Building?'

'Apartment 58. Last July. Did they put down the wrong apartment number?'

He didn't answer specifically, but held the papers obliquely to the light, and I began feeling less worried. He'd thrown in a routine trap and I'd avoided it and left him with the impression that I didn't recognize it as a trap at all. The apartment number on the papers was in fact 58 and if I hadn't pointed out his mistake it would have meant I hadn't even read them. He'd got out of it by tilting them to the light to suggest he'd misread the number.

A trap like that can send you all the way to the Gulag if you don't recognize it.

'When did you board this train?'

'As soon as it stopped.'

'Did you see anyone else getting on?'

'I didn't notice anyone particularly. All I wanted was to get in here before my balls froze off.'

He gave the papers back to me with that typical gesture they all use to show who's in charge, half dropping them and making you catch them. It's rather endearing: there's comfort in the familiar. But the sweat was still gathering on me as I folded the papers and put them away.

'Did you notice anyone hurrying to board the train?'

'Not particularly.'

'Anyone who seemed unusual?'

I gave the impression of considering the question.

'I can't say that.' I wondered if he were actually going to describe Karasov. They must be getting desperate by now: it was four days since he'd gone to ground.

'If you notice anything unusual on the train, I want you to report it at once. Anyone who looks anxious, who looks as if he's trying to hide something. You understand?'

'Of course. Where shall I find you?'

'We shan't leave this carriage. Or you can tell the attendant.'

Karasov was a Latvian, with a facial resemblance to a northern European or an American. That was why the KGB man had taken so much interest in me.

'I'll keep my eyes open,' I said.

He nodded and went back into the corridor.

It was another half an hour before I knew they'd got me. Not the KGB. The Rinker cell. They were here and they were on to me and there was nothing I could do to reach the objective or keep Northlight running or save myself. Nothing.