Northlight

15 OBJECTIVE

'Look at this! And they expect me to keep to a schedule!' The huge windscreen wiper grated across the glass.

'Three snow ploughs, in fifty kilometres. It's a joke!'

We hit a drift and he dragged us clear again.

'They should try it themselves some time!"

He tugged the gearshift, double-declutching, and the engine roared. Ahead of us the sky was black with snow clouds.

'Don't they make allowances for the conditions?' I asked him.

'Allowances?' He turned his huge bearded face to me, his eyes rolling. 'They wouldn't make allowances if the engine dropped out and the wheels fell off and the exhaust pipe got stuck up a polar bear's arse! They think this is summer! They're whoresons!'

He kicked the throttle with a massive boot and put the truck into a slide to avoid a stranded tractor. A man in a fur cap waved to him for help, and he stuck his face out of the window. 'Fuck your luck, comrade!"

I shifted my weight on the worn seat to ease the bruises.

'Have you got enough petrol to get you to Kandalaksha?'

'If those constipated imbeciles have got the road clear, yes.'

It was a big Sovtransavto truck with a Leningrad licence and a TIR plate at the rear. It smelled as if it were carrying some kind of fertilizer, or perhaps it was the driver, but I didn't mind, he was my friend, my good friend. He'd been crawling in low gear through a mess of stranded vehicles a few miles back and I'd climbed into the cab without asking first and told him my car was broken down with a cracked cylinder block.

The coat was a good fit and most of the numbness had gone from my legs. The bruises were on my right shoulder and forearm where they'd hit the rocks alongside the track. The Lithuanian had been underneath me when we'd dropped because my weight had torn his one hand-hold away and he couldn't save himself.

'That's my wife!' the truck driver called above the drumming of the engine. He pointed at the coloured photograph stuck to the facia panel, of a girl with enormous breasts in a bikini.

'Very nice too,' I said.

'Don't I wish!' he yelled and gave a bellowing laugh.

I hadn't intended, in any case, to leave the train without the Lithuanian. I think he tried to bring the gun into some kind of aim on the way down through the freezing windrush but I knew he'd do that so I found his arm and twisted it and the only shot he managed to fire was wild. He was dead as soon as his head impacted on the rocks: I saw that much when I crawled back from where the momentum had thrown me. There wasn't any blood on the coat so I pulled him out of it and put it on as the last of the train rolled past and left a funereal quiet among the snows.

I searched his pockets for what I could find, leaving the wad of notes and taking the wallet to go through: his papers might tell me something about his cell and if they were forged I'd know, and if they were genuine they might be usable. In this trade you always pick a corpse: the dead can sometimes save the living.

I knocked the eight remaining rounds out of the chamber and scattered them and threw the gun across the tracks and into the deep drifts on the other side and then rolled him into a gully and threw snow over him until he was covered. One hand rose into sight again and I caught my breath and felt my scalp tighten as I stared down; it was the way he'd finished up, that was all, rolling deeper between the rocks so that his arm had moved upwards through the snow. I pushed it down again and started walking to the highway.

'This one's my wife, really!'

Next to the picture of Lenin was a faded sepia photograph of a strong young woman perched on a milk churn with a chicken struggling in her arms, her smile seductive except for a missing tooth. 'She's a good woman, a good cook. Feeds me like a fucking commissar!'

The road was clear most of the way to Kandalaksha and I asked him to drop me as close as he was going to the main post office. The time was 10:47.

'No. I covered him with snow.'

Fane gave one of his pauses on the line. 'What about the other man?" 'As far as I know he's still on the train.'

'As far as you know?'

'It didn't stop. No one pulled the cord. But he might have jumped off when he saw we'd both gone.'

'It's possible, then, that he could have caught up with you along the road, by getting a lift too?'

'Yes. But call it a thousand-to-one shot.' I checked the time again: it had taken me nearly an hour to get through to Murmansk. 'There was a third man on the train,' I told him. 'He was surveilling me.' There was some crackling on the line. 'Are we clear on this call?'

'What? I'm clear at this end. Are you in a hotel?'

'Post office.'

We both listened, but I couldn't detect a bug. It didn't mean there wasn't one because they're not always detectable, but there'd been heavy snow across the telephone lines between here and Murmansk and some of the poles were down.

"If you're in a post office,' Fane said, 'then we're clear. Was the third man in the Rinker cell?' "No. He was working his peep independently.'

A brief pause. "I'm not too surprised. With an international background this big we can expect almost any group to crawl out of the woodwork.'

In a moment I said quietly, 'Fane, he wasn't one of Croder's people, was he?'

I'd tried to sound casual but it didn't quite come off. My hands were shaking now and I couldn't stop them: that man under the snow was the fifth one to the since Northlight had started running and I'd been with him and just because he was working for the other side and just because he'd been trying to blow my brains out it didn't mean I wasn't going to get the shakes a couple of hours afterwards — we see a lot of it in this trade but we don't exactly enjoy it, we don't exactly revel in it, we're not bloody machines, you know 'Croder's people?' I heard Fane asking.

'Oh come on for Christ's sake — was he a shield or a backup or some kind of support, you know what I'm talking about.'

I was sweating badly because it wasn't only that man's death on my mind and the way his hand had come out of the snow like that as if he were asking for help, it was my own death too, the one that had nearly happened, because he'd only needed to force that gun round half an inch until it was against my head and I wouldn't have been standing here in this overheated fucking post office reporting the status of the mission to a local control I didn't like and didn't trust and didn't" Croder never told me he was sending anyone to support you,' Fane said. 'He-'

'That doesn't mean a bloody thing. He wouldn't necessarily tell you what he was doing if he decided to send out a pack of bloody amateurs to get in my way.'

Watch it, you're losing your cool and he won't like that, he'll signal London and tell them this one's losing his nerve, better have a replacement standing by. He's not Ferris. He doesn't understand.

'I very much doubt,' the voice picked its way carefully along the line, 'that Main Control would put secondary agents into the field without first informing me. It would endanger my executive and the whole mission.'

I waited a minute and took a breath before I spoke. 'All right. I accept that.'

'Thank you.'

He had a point in any case. When some kind of international crisis breaks between East and West they both set up priority missions to defuse the powder keg and stop it blowing the whole thing apart, and it does in fact bring a lot of low-calibre grey-area intelligence outfits out of the woodwork to look for anything they can pick up and trade. They don't amount to much more than mobile listening-posts, I've just got hold of some rather interesting stuff on troop movements along the Chinese border, old boy, do you think your people would like me to get in touch? That sort of thing, but you can never be certain they won't tap a line or get wind of a courier run and then they'll try to throw shadows across your operation in the hope of picking up something they can trade with any legitimate network who'll buy it.

The line had gone silent. Fane was leaving me on the hook, waiting for me to say something, expecting me to behave like a model executive in the field.

Standing here in my dead man's coat.

'Have you any instructions?'

'No.' His tone was conversational, offering a copybook example of how mine should sound. 'Will you be able to make the rendezvous?'

'Yes. He came in a minute ago.'

'Have you paroled and countersigned?'

'Not yet.' The man was going across to the end of the main counter, sweeping the ground in front of him with his white stick. No one had followed him in.

'As soon as you locate Karasov,' Fane said carefully, 'I'd like you to signal again.'

'Understood.'

I put the phone back onto the hook and watched the contact for a moment. He was a small man in a moth-eaten fur coat, hollow-cheeked from hunger or some kind of wasting disease, waiting at the counter with his head slightly lifted in the listening attitude that blind men have. The left lens of his dark glasses was cracked. The time on the round mahogany-framed clock on the wall was a minute past noon. I waited until he'd been served and moved across to him on my way to the door.

'Can you tell me where I can buy American cigarettes?' His head tilted towards me. 'Those things are only fit for women.'

I shrugged and turned away and went ahead of him through the door, walking as far as the first corner and then crossing the street and using the window of a bathhouse to keep the post office in sight. He came out and turned along the pavement with his stick poking at the crusts of snow, and after a moment I began following.

'I wouldn't do that,' Volodarskiy said.

After the brightness of the snow outside it was semi-dark in here and the dog's fangs gleamed from the shadows. I brought my feet back underneath the bench.

"He knows you're a friend,' Volodarskiy said as he spooned his kashta from the bowl, 'but you're still unfamiliar to him, and he knows also that sometimes a new friend will turn.' His sharp eyes glanced up at me and his face took on something like a smile. I think he was a man to smile into the face of death itself, and I think he had done that more than once. 'He's a noble enough creature, as you can see. His ancestors hunted bear in this region a hundred years ago. He could kill a bear now, bring it down without assistance, but he wouldn't eat from it.'

As my retinae adjusted to the light from the stove and the lantern I saw the dog more clearly. It looked like a Doberman pinscher bur was larger, some kind of breed native to the north here; it had the long canine teeth of the dogs that patrol a sensitive security area, the kind that I would meet again, probably, if I had to breach the frontier without papers.

'Where was it trained?'

'I trained it myself It was said with pride. 'One day I'm going to use him for some work I have in mind.' He looked at his stew when he said that, not at me.

Karasov said nothing, had said nothing since the contact had brought me in here. He ate his kashta with no appetite. He was a very frightened man.

'He would not eat the meat from a bear,' Volodarskiy said in a slightly sing-song tone, 'because I am the provider of his meat. To that extent, he is tamed. But if I slipped on the ice one day and died of exposure, then he would eat me, or enough of me to end his hunger, because I am the provider of his meat, and it would be logical. But he would wait until I was really dead before he started forward. All dogs, and most humans, are of course carrion eaters.'

I came to one of the gristly lumps in the stew and avoided it, then thought again. I needed the protein.

'Would it attack me, with you here?'

Volodarskiy tilted his head, a habit he'd formed in his occasional role as a blind man. 'Probably not. But he is very sensitive. I trained him to attack anything he feels would bring me harm, even without my orders. I did that because there may come a time when I'm unable to give him those orders.' He glanced at me in the lantern-light and his rather unnerving smile came again. 'He feels he knows, you see, better than I do when it comes to my welfare and anything that threatens it. He's an extension of my body, so what hurts me would hurt him.' He looked down at the dog. 'He's not really intelligent, in the sense we mean it. But he's intuitive, and of course deadly.'

Karasov ate his stew in silence. There were strong vibrations in here, and I'd caught one of them as soon as I'd arrived: the contempt Volodarskiy had for Karasov, for his terror.

It had taken more than an hour to get here because the drifts had blocked some of the narrow streets leading out of the town, and the contact had made a show of bumping into things now and then when there were people about. I'd followed at a distance, making short detours to dissimulate the travel pattern and check for surveillance. I had to make certain we were clean because the executive was nearing the objective and Chief of Control was sitting there in the operations room in London watching the lights over the signals board and studying the blown-up relief map they would have prepared for him as soon as Fane had reported that I was moving into Kandalaksha.

There are three main phases of any given mission on foreign soil: when you get access and when you reach the objective and when you bring the objective or the product back across the border, and things get more difficult as the mission progresses, and if I picked up the slightest hint of any surveillance at this critical stage I would break off and leave the contact to go on alone until I'd gone to cover and closed in on the opposition and wiped them out before they could tag him to the objective and blow the whole mission out of the ground or even worse than that, because if the KGB or the Rinker cell or anyone else reached Karasov "first they'd put him under the light and prime the needle and get everything out of him, everything in his head, his local contacts and Moscow communications and courier routes and operations history, the whole ultra-sensitive scenario reaching as far as London and sending reverberations right across the network from Hong Kong to Washington. Karasov had been an important sleeper for five years in a Soviet naval base bristling with secret installations and if he got blown before I could pull him out of here it would shut down a dozen files and open up a dozen top-level enquiries that would drop hand-bearer memos on the desk of the prime minister and CIA liaison, and as I crunched over the packed snow under the black winter trees in the tracks of the contact I made certain — absolutely certain — that we were alone and clean and unsurveilled and later I would repeat that, I would report that I had made certain — absolutely certain.

Near the end of the journey we'd crossed the surface of a frozen stream and worked our way through a knoll of black and leafless tress that stood petrified under the leaden midday sky. It was half-cabin, half-cave that the contact led me to, with walls of rock and rusting iron sheets and stitched hides from cattle buried in the snows of past winters here. Inside, in the gloom where only the one lantern burned and the stove glowed red in the shadows, I had found the objective for Northlight, Viktor Karasov.

He was eating his stew with the motions of a man condemned, his hands listless. Bigger than Volodarskiy, he was more brooding, his nicotine-brown eyes sliding away when I glanced at him. I think he believed I'd come here to bring his end in some way, to make a pretence of getting him through the gauntlet of the KGB and leave him dangling across the electrified fence of the frontier riddled like a colander. This was another of the vibrations I was getting: his guilt seemed as bad as his fear — he'd gone to ground without warning us and he'd stayed there and then tried to run for Moscow when he couldn't stand the fear that the KGB were slowly closing in on him while he crouched there in his bolt hole doing nothing. It wouldn't have been here, I knew that. The moment he'd signalled our network he'd been told to move and cover his tracks and make contact with Volodarskiy and leave the rest to him. We never go near the quarry if he's holed up without reporting his location first: you can go in and try reaching an agent who's trapped or been turned or has lost his nerve or his sanity and you can the in there with him — it happened to Travis in Berlin and it happened to Baker in Singapore and it happened to Powys in Tangier and we didn't get the feedback in time to realize what was going on until someone had got back to London and told us what it had been like for Powys and then thrown himself under a bus.

The dog turned its head and a sound began in its throat, a low menacing vibration as if someone here in the shadows had plucked a cello string. Volodarskiy watched the dog, pausing with his spoon halfway to his mouth, and I noticed that half-smile glittering at the back of his eyes. I'd never been near a man with so much rage in him, with so much readiness to confront death in whatever form it came for him.

I could have been wrong but these were my thoughts about him. So much in this place was tacit, unspoken.

Karasov took no notice of the dog. He was wrapped in his fear.

'Is there someone outside?' Volodarskiy asked the dog.

The low snarling went on.

'Not many come this way,' Volodarskiy told me softly. 'I am not popular. That is of course by intent.' One of the most extraordinary things about him was that he had the accent of an educated Muscovite. 'They do not like my dog either. We're well off, he and I.'

The dog stopped snarling and turned its head away from the door. Fane, I thought, had done well, finding a place like this for Karasov the sleeper, and a man like this to guard him, My worry now was how to get him to the frontier: there was no courage in him, and we'd need that.

Our host made coffee for us, black, Ukrainian, steeped in a porcelain filter, its surface gold with bubbles in the lantern-light. It was how I'd begun thinking of him, as our host; there was a formality about the man in total contrast to his life as a cave-dweller. He hadn't been brought down by circumstance to this smoky hovel; he'd come here to the end of the earth and to find his shelter.

I got Karasov to show me his papers, and our host turned the wick of the lantern higher for me without a word exchanged. The identity card was worn right across the surface instead of just around the edges, and one corner of the photograph was raised; because it had obviously been stuck on in a hurry. There were two typographical errors and there'd been two machines used, one original and the other a forger's.

'How much did you pay?' I asked Karasov.

'Six hundred rubles.'

I dropped the papers into the open front of the stove. The higher the price the worse they are: these had been put together for him in one of those little backstreet basements you can find all over Europe, all over the world, and I would say that a high percentage of the agents that have been blown or shot since the invention of the printing press were carrying papers like these.

'They were the best I could get,' Karasov said, shock in his voice as he watched his papers burning.

'That was because you were in a hurry.' I wanted to say other things but held them back because I didn't want to embarrass him in front of Volodarskiy. 'If you'd ever shown those to a KGB man you'd have been shot.'

'What shall I do now?'

He talked like a bloody child. God knew how I was going to get him as far as the frontier — he wasn't like Brekhov, I couldn't run with him, I'd have to drag him there.

You knew this, Cruder, you knew he was a broken reed, you bastard, you knew nobody else would take on this bloody job.

The dog turned its head to watch me, the vibrations of my rage touching its nerves. I stared back at it in awe. What if it had thought my rage was against its master? 'He is sensitive," nodded Volodarskiy and I turned to see that half-smile in his eyes. 'You should be careful of your thoughts. You should think only good things, charitable things.' He laughed now, giving a short sharp sound in his throat like a muted bark, and I felt my skin crawling.

'Look,' I said, 'hasn't it got somewhere to sleep, a kennel or something?' I hate dogs.

Volodarskiy laughed again and took the thing back into the shadows, and I heard a chain clinking. 'It is not his fault, you know. We haven't had a man here with so much tension in him. It makes him nervous.'

'It makes him nervous? Jesus Christ!'

He laughed again and went back through a curtain of hanging cattle-hides, leaving me alone with the sleeper.

'All right, Karasov, give me the picture.'

It took an hour, maybe more: he'd been in Murmansk five years and had a lot of contacts — not many friends but contacts, couriers, Latvian underground dissidents, Estonian counterrevolutionaries with clandestine printing presses, Lithuanians with nationalistic pride and vengeance simmering in them, the kind of people a good professional sleeper would take an interest in without committing himself, useful people, dangerous people, three of them with enough material on them to make it worth our while to get them to London if we could.

'Why did you leave Murmansk?'

'I was scared.'

'Were they close?'

'I thought so.'

'How close?'

He didn't answer. It would mean telling me how close they needed to get to make him scared and that was exactly what I wanted to know but he wasn't going to tell me: there was some kind of pride left in him and since the meal and the hot sharp stimulus of the coffee he'd come out of his shell a bit. I wanted to know how close they needed to get to make him scared because it would tell me how much work I would have to do to spring him from Russia, how much or how little I could rely on him if a wheel came off. He knew this but his fear was still keeping him halfway in his shell.

'Have you had many brushes with the KGB?'

'No. I'm a careful man.' He spoke in a low whisper, in the way one would speak in the presence of someone dead, and I wondered what it was that had died, or been killed, on his run out from cover. Perhaps it was the man he'd been, the one I would never know. His fear was as deep as that, as crippling; it had changed his personality. I think I might have left him there in that smoking cave, walked away from him into the snow and left him nursing his terror until Volodarskiy had thrown him out. I think I would have signalled Fane and told him there was nothing to bring home to London, just a wrecked psyche.

But it wasn't as simple as that. If he'd done nothing for the last five years except duplicate that one tape he'd have earned his keep and we'd have owed it to him to pull him out and see him safely home. But the tape had been blown apart and he was all we had left now, the living evidence of the death of the Cetacea, and even if I couldn't get him across the border I'd have to keep him out of the hands of the KGB, find a haven for him and a new identity and a new life.

Or silence him, of course. They might ask me to do that.

'You think they got close to you? The KGB?'

'No. Not close. I know how to use cover.' There was that shred of pride in him again, waving like a ragged banner.

'Then why are you frightened, Karasov?'

Wrong move — he went back into his shell, looking down, not answering, sitting near the stove with his big hands clasped and his wet brown eyes staring at the things he wouldn't speak of.

What were they? 'Then is it someone else?' I asked him.

He looked up. 'Someone else?'

'Other than the KGB.'

I saw his eyes change but he looked down again quickly.

'Perhaps.'

A log tumbled in the stove, sending out a spark, I brushed it off my coat and from the shadows the chain clinked and I thought Jesus Christ can't I even move my hand?

Nerves not terribly good, you're perfectly right, but apart from that bloody dog I wasn't having a very nice day because I'd had to kill one man just to get here and God knew how I was going to drag this poor wretch to the frontier without having to kill a lot more or winding up in the minefield with my hands a hundred yards apart and this poor bastard here — the objective, the objective — blown out of his bloody shell forever, surely it doesn't take a lot of understanding.

All right, there was more than that.

Much more.

'Who?' I asked him.

'I don't know.'

'Have you ever heard of a man named Ranker?'

He looked up. 'No.'

'Has anyone tried to get at you?'

'I've had — ' he shrugged with his hands — 'suspicions, you know. People watching. Cars following. That sort of thing.'

I didn't believe him. I did not believe him. If the Rinker cell had got onto him he'd have been dead by now or full of aminazin. They would have devoted as much energy to pulling him in as they'd devoted to me, in fact a bloody sight more because their only interest in me was that I could lead them to the objective and he was the objective.

Or he could of course be so frightened of getting caught by the KGB that he was ashamed of it and making up ghost stories to explain it away: when the nerve goes it takes everything else with it.

I was pushing him too hard. He wasn't going to tell me anything unless I could get him relaxed and then creep up on him with the right questions.

'The thing is,' I said quietly, 'to get you home."

His wet brown eyes were turned on me again, this time for longer. 'That's all I want, yes. That's all I want.'

'Of course. It's what I'm here for.' I got up and stretched my legs, keeping away from the corner. 'Has our friend got any kind of transport?'

'What?'

'Car? Has he got a car?'

'No.'

'Then we'll have to hang on here for a bit. My control's getting one through to us as soon as the roads are clearer.' I got the Lithuanian's papers out of my pocket and looked at the photograph and looked at Karasov and read the description but nothing matched; even if we could get the picture changed there was nothing we could do about the measurements: Karasov was five inches taller and looked heavier. 'How much do you weigh?'

'Seventy-one kilos.'

'Have you got any kind of scar across your left shoulder?'

'No.''

I dropped these papers too into the stove and watched the flames. Fane was going to get some good ones for him and until they were in my hands and we had a car to drive we couldn't make a move, but at least it would give me time to coax him out of his shell and find what was frightening him like this.

There was something I was missing or something I didn't know and would have to know before I could get rid of the feeling that there was more, much more, to the routine mission Control had given me, of taking a blown sleeper across.

'We're getting you some effective papers,' I told him. 'Then we can move. Once you're out of Russia you can start making a new life for yourself.'

'Yes.' His eyes hung on me like a grateful dog's.

There'd be people he'd miss, I supposed. His wife. His mistress. 'I phoned Tanya,' I said, 'to let her know you were all right. She was worried.'

'Tanya?'

'Your girlfriend.'

'I don't know anyone called Tanya.'