Northlight

18 RENDEZVOUS

The huge iron scoop slammed down and black gas rose. 'Back!' a man shouted, waving, and I reversed the truck again.

The snow plough moved forward another ten yards, its diesel roaring under full throttle as it lifted another ton of snow and swung it clear of the road. The exhaust gas drifted past us like a smoke screen and I felt safe for a moment, because they would have known by now that the barn hadn't gone up and they might be short of time and bring a gun in. It wasn't certain they'd do that. You've got to take calculated risks.

The man waved us forward again, standing back this time to let us through the gap: they were clearing the intersection, routing us through a detour.

Karasov sat beside me, leaning his head back against the seat and gazing through the windscreen with his eyes narrowed. He had the look of a man in a tumbril on his way to the guillotine, slack with despair.

'Was it a bomb?' he had asked me a little time ago. 'A bomb he was talking about, when he spoke of a 'toy'?'

'Yes.' He might as well know.

'How did you find it?'

'Bit of luck.'

I didn't tell him it was still here under the driving-seat. He would have got out and walked.

We ground along in first gear, shunting between a coal truck and a beaten-up Zhiguli van.

I didn't think they'd bring a gun in because they could have done that before: they could have dropped us as we'd come out of the cave. There were plenty of other ways, quieter ways, less public. But it was a calculated risk and every time we shunted to a halt I felt my head settling instinctively onto the top of the spine and my shoulders rising into the primeval startle attitude, because this was when they'd steady the aim and fire, when we were stationary. They would have to shoot twice or use two guns unless it was only Karasov they'd been trying to kill in the barn, expecting him to climb into the truck with me before I started the engine. My death could have been planned as incidental but that wasn't certain either: the Rinker cell could have reasons for taking me down, putting me out of their way.

The windscreen was filthy but I hadn't wiped it clean before we'd started off; we wouldn't be hitting up any kind of speed and it gave us a degree — just a degree — of safety: they'd have to judge where our heads were if they meant to station a gun somewhere in front of us along the road.

'Then they'll try again,' Karasov said suddenly. I didn't realize he'd been all that time thinking it out; there were a thousand things on his mind, I knew that. But I didn't know what they were.

'Not necessarily.' We halted again, and my head settled.

'Of course they will. When they know the bomb didn't kill us, they'll try again.'

'They wouldn't have let us get this far, don't worry.'

He didn't say anything to that, but put a hand into the pocket of his dark woollen coat and held something out to me. I glanced down and saw a cassette tape.

'Take it,' he said.

I put it into my pocket. 'What is it?'

'The second tape.'

We were stuck again by another snow plough and I turned off the engine so that I could hear better: not only his words but the tone. He was going to talk now. He was going to tell me why he was so deathly afraid. The sleeper had waked, now he would talk.

A second tape?

I didn't turn my head to look at him. It was already in my mind that what he would say to me would be in the form of a confessional. I'd sensed an element of guilt in this man before.

'What's on it, Karasov?'

'It's a duplicate of the one you took to London.'

I remembered the debris pattering down in Eaton Place after the two boffins had climbed into their car.

It had been for nothing, then. There was another tape.

A man's face was at the window suddenly and I looked at it through the glass. He was saying something. His breath steamed as he waved his hand, shouting now. I wound the window down. He wasn't an agent; he was a farmer, his face weathered into a grizzled brick-red mask and his eyes sunk into their sockets, rheumy with the cold.

'I'm out of petrol! Can you spare me a drop, comrade?'

I could feel Karasov's fear beside me. He was going to be like this all the way to the railway station, all the way to the coast.

"I'm almost out myself,' I told the man. 'That's why I've switched off the engine.'

He threw up his arms and trudged forward through the snow to talk to the driver in the truck. I wound the window up and asked Karasov, 'Why did you take a duplicate?'

It was a long time before he answered. 'For the others.'

The man's voice came back to us as he shouted to the driver in front. Somewhere on the road ahead I could see the shape of another mechanical scoop clearing the snow. I gave Karasov time, but he wanted me to drag it out of him like a priest in the confession box. Guilt never comes out in a hurry.

'What others?'

'The Chinese.'

It was like a bullet coming through the windscreen. I hadn't been ready for it.

'Go on,' I told him. He wanted goading.

'I-' and that was all for another minute. I didn't prompt him again, because he'd hear fury in my voice and that would frighten him off altogether. He wouldn't know that the fury wasn't against him but against myself, against Fane, against Croder. None of us had known and, we should have known. We should have known that an international incident big enough to threaten the summit conference would inevitably involve triangle diplomacy and the China card.

'I–I've been giving product to them for a long time now,' Karasov said.

Mother of God.

''How long?

I felt him jerk in fear as his head swung to look at me. He'd heard it: the fury. I would have to do better than this but by Jesus Christ I was sitting here in a stinking farm truck with our run to the coast blocked off by snow and the objective for the mission sitting beside me and telling me he'd been working for both major intelligence networks, East and West, for a long time, eight days into Northlight and already five on the deathroll and a live bomb under my legs and someone out there putting the windscreen into the crosshairs or signalling ahead of us to get a trap set or coming up from behind us like the man who was out of petrol and there was nothing I could do about it until I could get this bastard to the frontier and take him to London and leave him there to spill his guts all over Croder's debriefing desk and then I was going to ask questions, an awful lot of questions about the man running our Murmansk cell and why the hell he'd let his sleeper go on working for London and Peking without checking on his product and his couriers and his contacts and his communications because somewhere he could have been caught, could have been seen slipping a package into a furtive hand in the shadows of a crowded bar or on a bus or in a brothel or wherever they'd set up their drop, somewhere they could have tapped a line or checked a crossed signal or questioned the travel patterns or stood close to a talker, catching a hint of smoke on the air, a whiff of something burning.

'What?'

'Years,' he was saying. 'Years.'

I didn't answer him until I'd got control again. Keep cool, yes, absolutely, nothing to get into a tis-was over, just sitting here thinking I'm working exclusively in the Soviet zone and all the time there's a Chinese cracker rigged to go off, love from Peking, bit of a joke really, something funny happened to me on my way to Murmansk, this one's going to kill you.

That, too, yes.

'Have you been giving them everything?'

He waited until I'd dragged the gears in: we'd started moving again. 'Not everything. Only the stuff they'd be interested in.'

'Only the stuff they'd buy?' Rather rude, that, yes, but I wasn't really in the mood for good manners.

'They were only interested in naval matters,' he said with an attempt at dignity, 'affecting the security of their own coastline.'

'And how precisely did the sinking of the SSN Cetacea affect the Chinese coastline?'

He didn't answer, and I realized he didn't even need to. Of course it was nothing to do with the Chinese coastline: it was to do with the summit conference in Vienna.

'Keep aver this side? someone was yelling, and I wound the window down for a better view and slowed the truck. Two men with shovels were out there levering a rusty Volkswagen clear of the ruts. I turned my front wheels and got the rear chains working at the surface and nudged the VW onto the cleared surface with its tyres slewing across the sand. It pulled his offside wing off but he was out of trouble now. One of the road gang picked up the wing and threw it across the snow.

'Keep going! Keep your wheels moving!'

The VW sent a cloud of exhaust gas into the air and I shut the window. 'Karasov,' I said, 'have you got a gun on you?'

He looked at me sulkily. 'No.'

He could be lying: his eyes hadn't given anything away. It occurred to me that he might have brought a gun along to use on someone or on himself.

'Are you taking me into a trap?

Because anything was possible now. A few minutes ago he'd been a blown sleeper dependent on me to get him across but now he could be anything, any kind of Judas working for London, Moscow and Peking, raking in pounds sterling, rubles and yen while he kept the product coming and reported to the KGB through a backstairs courier. Maybe all that frightened him was the idea of sitting next to someone who was going to see the bits of glass coming at him first and then the flat-nosed slug as it moved into the target just above the eyes.

'A trap?' He shook his head. 'Listen, I'm not as bad as that.' And suddenly he was crying, and I shut up for a while and let him get it done with. It was the strain, I suppose, and the feeling that he was letting everyone down — because they're like that, some of them, the mercenaries, the people who'll work for anyone who'll pay them, two at a time, three at a time, paying off the mortgage on their little place in Hampstead and looking for a bigger one, bribing the black market commissar in the back streets of Leningrad to put him higher on the list for a nice little Moscwicz, shifting a bank account from Paris to Cannes and commuting by Caravelle from wife to mistress and back, compared with which my good friend Karasov was doing rather less well for himself, stuck in a truck in the Arctic Circle in winter time and snuffling over his sins into a filthy handkerchief.

Snow exploded against the windscreen and Karasov shouted something as his head rocked back against the seat squab. Fright, that was all. The big scoop out there had swung across the line of traffic and lost half a ton of snow in the process. I stopped the truck and got out and stood on the running board and kicked the snow off the bonnet and if they'd wanted to squeeze the hairspring at this precise moment they could have blown my head off. The other drivers were rechristening the man in the scoop, clumsy prick, whoreson, pox-ridden idiot, so forth, not at all popular.

''Get moving! Come on, get moving?

I botched the gears in through their worn shafts and we went forward again, shunting into the truck ahead and sliding into the clearway and getting some speed up. No trap, then, according to Karasov's behaviour: I'd been overestimating things — whatever he'd been doing and whoever he'd been busy working for he was still a burnt-out case.

'If you've got a gun on you, Karasov, I don't want you to use it. Do you understand?' He didn't answer. 'We may run into a road check between here and the coast and I don't want you to pull a gun on anyone. Do you understand?

He flinched again and a hand disappeared and he brought out a Soviet military JK-3. I took it from him and checked the safety-catch and shoved the thing under the seat.

'Who are they using? Who are the Chinese using?'

'They're being serviced through Zurich.'

The Rinker cell. Rinker had been a Swiss. But they'd used local agents: the two men on the train, one of them a Latvian. I didn't know about the third man, the other man: he'd looked European.

So Peking was worried about Washington and Moscow getting round a table in Vienna next month and they'd seized a chance in a lifetime: if they could get hold of a tape or Karasov himself and hit the American news media with the message that the Soviets had indeed sunk the Cetacea with a hundred and five lives on board they could scuttle the summit conference and leave that on the bottom too.

'So why didn't you sell them the tape?' He didn't answer. 'Wasn't the money good enough?'

The truck ahead of us was putting on more speed and I took up the slack; we were making nearly forty kph over sanded ruts. There was a lot of honking behind us in the distance; I supposed the fanner's vehicle was blocking the road because he still couldn't find any petrol.

'They wanted me to go in front of journalists, in Moscow.'

'Didn't they know you'd done a tape for them?'

'Yes. They knew.'

'Then why — come on Karasov I want some fucking information.'

'They knew I had a tape but they said they wanted me to be there too at the broadcast.'

'What was their price?'

'A million US dollars.' I looked at him. 'So why didn't you take it?'

'I knew then how serious things were. There was some talk at the naval base about the summit conference having gone down with the submarine, that kind of thing. So I told my contact the tape had-'

'Your contact for Peking?'

'Yes. I told him the tape had been accidentally wiped out when I'd passed through one of the power-station rooms. They said they still wanted me to make a broadcast, and for the same money. They also said that if I wouldn't do it, they'd blow me to the KGB.'

'That was when you got out?'

'Yes.'

'I still don't understand why you turned them down.' He leaned towards me and a light came into his wet brown eyes. 'I was making a little on the side, don't you see, I was selling a few things to the Chinese from time to time because it wasn't doing London any harm, it wasn't anything I was keeping back from your people, it was simply a matter of duplication, don't you understand, I wasn't doubling, I was only augmenting my income. London came first with me. I'm not a man completely without loyalty, I didn't do anything that isn't done among — among-' he waved a gloved hand — 'among business people all over the world, but when I saw how serious things were, with the summit in jeopardy and the headlines talking about it every day, I backed out of my commitment with the Chinese and went to ground.'

'You turned down a million American dollars?'

'Yes. Do you think money is everything? Do you-'

'You got frightened, that was all, it got too big for you?' He gave a kind of sob and I kicked the throttle and started a slide and smashed the sidelight off an abandoned trailer with the rear of the truck and got control again, slowed again, it wasn't for me to judge the poor bastard, what the hell did I know about the things I'd do if the pressure got too much or a deal got too hot to handle, I wasn't this man and I hadn't faced what he had faced, I wasn't my brother's keeper, nor his judge.

'I would've done the same, Karasov. I would've got frightened.'

I don't think he heard me. He was a man of conscience, I suppose, and what he was trying desperately to rescue from the ashes was some kind of pride.

'Slow down! There's a detour! Slow dorm!'

More men waving, and a truck overturned and half-smothered under a snow drift, someone sitting by a fire he'd made from some oily rag, warming his hands while the black smoke rose like a dead vine from the ground to the winter sky.

We turned left, all of us, a dozen vehicles in front of me and a lot more behind, and I saw a railway signal poking up from the horizon: we were less than a mile distant now from the station and the freight-yards were this side.

11:47.

There wasn't going to be time to check out the environment: we were going to run in cold to the rendezvous and I couldn't do that with the objective for the mission on board. But the only option was to leave him somewhere safe while I went on and kept the noon appointment: this would leave him alive and available to London if anything came unstuck at my end, but it wasn't certain that Fane could ever find him again before he died of exposure or went trudging into the nearest KGB headquarters looking for a martyr's grave or waited for the next train and lay down on the sleepers with his neck on a rail — there was no knowing what he'd do.

We could find a side turning and hole up under a drift until noon plus fifteen and then go in and check the environment but that would mean delaying the rendezvous until 13:00 hours and the longer we hung around Kandalaksha the bigger the risk we ran of drawing the opposition against us. There was no real reason for the KGB to be watching the freight-yards specifically: this was just paranoia on my part, a reluctance to take a calculated risk in broad daylight. The aura of this man's fear was reaching me, touching the nerves.

Make a decision.

A snow-clearing gang was filing along the railway lines towards a group of men hacking at frozen points with pickaxes. The truck directly in front of me was turning to the left, taking the ramp down to the main section and leaving me at the fork.

Make a decision.

If the train had been on time and the courier had got through without any trouble he'd be waiting under natural cover now for the noon rendezvous with the papers for Karasov, and the minute we had them we could head north and hope for clear roads and a final run in to the coast. We could be there in a few hours, before nightfall at mid-afternoon. By tomorrow morning we could be in Norway, in the West. And London by evening.

Make Karasov, listen carefully. We're going to make a rendezvous in a few minutes from now with a courier who'll have papers for you, good ones, reliable enough to get us to the frontier. I don't want you to do anything. Do you understand? I want you to sit there and look like the upholstery, keep your mouth shut and keep your hands on your lap. Do you understand?'

He was watching me with his craven eyes, his bulk in the big coat cowering in the corner between the seat and the door.

'What will happen if the KGB are watching the station?'

'We're not going near the station. We're going into the freight-yards. The KGB won't be there. The rendezvous has been arranged by my own local control and he's extremely efficient. We can have absolute faith in him. You understand?'

He was the only danger. It would only need a couple of railway workers to pass anywhere near the rendezvous zone and Karasov would take off on his own and we'd never find him again. It was like taking the cat to the vet.

'If you think it is safe,' he said. His face was losing its colour and his eyes were dying another of the thousand deaths he'd been through since his nerve had gone.

'There'll be no trouble. Just leave everything to me.'

In a moment he said, 'Very well,' and looked away.

I swung the truck down the ramp and into the freight-yards and saw the footbridge, a frieze of black iron girders running across the pale sky. The time was 11:59. We jolted across frozen ruts with the chains crunching through clinkers where the snow had been cleared by the work gangs. There was a man standing under the end stanchion of the bridge, the tip of his cigarette making the only point of colour in this desolate place.

'The courier,' I told Karasov.

He was waiting this side of the freight sheds, immediately under the bridge. There was a train standing on the other side, with a fat woman swabbing the windows with a brush and a steaming bucket. There was no one else here.

It was noon when I stopped the truck exactly under the bridge and the man dropped his cigarette and began making his way across the ruts towards us. The black van came from behind the train at the same moment, moving in very fast and spilling men with their hands at their holsters.

KGB.