Northlight

19 FINIS

I have never been so cold. You think you have been cold? Not like this. Not like this.

This is the cold of the dead, when the blood itself is cold. When the heart itself is cold. This is the chill of death.

The cold was the worst.

I thought about it, recognizing it as something that I must try to stop, then realizing that there was nothing I could do to stop it. If I tried to stop it I would meet death of a different kind.

The cold was the worst. No. The dark was the worst. It was the darkness of not existing, bringing with it the knowledge that you have arrived somewhere unfamiliar, not where it is dark but where there has never been light. Death, yes, the regions of death far beyond any knowing.

The dark was the worst.

No. The noise was the worst.

It was the noise of infinite destruction, the never-ending tumult of holocaust, bringing the irreversible death of silence, the death of peace. I knew now that there would always be this thunderous noise, this all-extinguishing darkness, this killing cold.

Spark.

I was curled in the foetal position on one side, lodged between metal beams and plates. A rivet was against my head and I moved a little, for comfort.

Comfort? You must be joking.

Another spark and in the total darkness it brought light enough to throw a reflection on the rail immediately below me, on the shining rail, so that there seemed to be two sparks. My eyes seized on it, my soul drank from it: there was light, just for this little time. All had not been extinguished, then.

Don't fall asleep.

No. That would be unwise.

Keep awake. If you don't keep awake you'll fall.

Yes. I'll fall down there onto the. Wake up. Wake up or you'll- What? Yes — wake up, I'm waking up now, I'm — oh my Christ. Grab it, grab that beam, come on.

Close. That was rather close.

I sat up now with my back to the big iron plate that spanned the chassis, pulling my legs up and trying not to think of what would have happened to them, to my legs, if I'd dropped onto the rails, under the wheels.

The stink of the locomotive raked at my throat and I shut down most of my breathing. Another spark flew and I took warmth from it into my mind. Not much, true, not much. But when you're as cold as this, a spark is like the sun.

I would have to stay like this now, sitting up. There wasn't much room, about as much as a bicycle saddle to perch on with my feet resting on a three-inch ledge, one of the big I-section girders that ran the length of the carriage. I would have to keep awake now.

Unidentified body found on railway lines, severely mutilated.

Then on to the sports news.

It wasn't fatigue. It was delayed shock. But all that was over now. Northlight was finished. The objective, Viktor Pavlovich Karasov, was a dead man. The sleeper had waked but was now sleeping again, his fears at rest forever.

The sixth death for Northlight, and the worst.

Karasov's death was the worst.

Mission unsuccessful.

We try not to think about it. In the ranks of the shadow executives — God, you can't call them ranks, that's ridiculous — we're more like rats in the wainscoting, scuttling our random way through the tunnels of unknown territory in the earthy dark, the nerves galvanized and the ears tuned to catch the distant song of the deathbringer as he comes on his way to meet us — in the wainscoting, then, in the tunnels if you will, we try not to think about one of those snivelling little clerks in the records room picking up his pen and writing it down in the space provided, neatly in the space provided, Mission unsuccessful.

We would do anything rather than see it written down, to avoid the knowledge, as we lie angled across some rubbish dump listening to the sirens, waiting for the headlights, fumbling at last for the capsule and trying to find our mouth, the knowledge that it will later be written down, our failure spelled out letter by letter in that crabby hand, for others to see.

Not everyone, of course. The records are classified. And there's a gentleman's agreement that along those creaking and half-lit corridors our secret shall forever be sacrosanct, that we shall all of us conspire to protect what rags of pride may still be left in the bosom of a failed brother-rat.

Did Thompson get back?

Oh yes. Came in last night.

What sort of condition?

Bit done up.

What happened? He'd only just gone out.

Called off, I believe. They scratched it.

Change of plan?

That's right. Are you coming along for some tea?

And we sit in the Caff for longer than usual, wanting company but not to talk about anything significant, just not wanting to be alone with the creeping nightmare thoughts that one day this could happen to us. Because our pride is pretty well all we've got. None of us do it for the money. Do you know the kind of money we get paid? Then you know what I'm talking about. We do it from vanity, from the arrogant and overweening urge to prove that we can go out there and take anything on and get away with it and bring back the product. So the worst thing that can happen to us is failure.

Northlight: finis.

The train thundered through the night.

Dark had come down an hour ago at three in the afternoon. Black snow clouds, driving in from the north, had thrown shadow across the freight-yards, blotting out the light from the polar cap. Images weren't too clear, but of course we could recognize the van all right and the men running with their hands on their guns.

'Did you know about this?

He didn't answer.

I still couldn't trust him, at the last. This was a trap and I think he could have known about it, could have made some kind of sordid pact with the KGB to lead me into them and then do what they wanted of him. I'd asked him before: 'Are you taking me into a trap? And soon afterwards he'd asked me: 'What will happen if the KGB are watching the station?'

But there wasn't much time to think about that now. I'd got the objective for the mission with me and my local control had got an escape route set up and the one thing I was not going to do was sit here and shut down Northlight and let them put our sleeper under the thumbscrews and blow our Murmansk network out of the ground so I got the toy from the floor under my legs and made a rough estimate of the weight and the range and the force needed to land it where it would give us a flamescreen and swung it through the open window, but the tip of the lever caught the frame and sent the thing spinning and slowed it down and it fell too close and the whole truck came up and smashed down on its side so we couldn't get away in it after all.

In the twilight the blast was blinding and the shockwave brought debris up from the ground and hurled it across the truck and for a couple of seconds I stayed where I was, sprawled across the clinkers with snow against my face and stones still ringing on the girders of the footbridge and pattering down. I heard Karasov screaming but I couldn't see where he was: he'd been thrown clear of the truck and was somewhere in the snow that had drifted against the bank. Then the first shot came and I got up and began running because at least one of them was still alive and had a gun and there was no point in staying put. I didn't know why he was firing but I supposed it was because Karasov was on his feet and running too.

There was a lot of smoke drifting across the ground by now and I went for the freight office and dropped behind it, crawling for a while and finding new cover behind sand-bins alongside the train. It wasn't until I was under the train that I saw what was happening over there: Karasov was running for the ramp leading to the road above and he tripped and fell and that was when the last shot went into him. He didn't get up.

You know when a record's playing and a fuse blows and the record-player slows down and stops? That was how Northlight ended, in my mind, as I crouched under the train with blood seeping into my shoe from the gash in my leg and the flash of the explosion still bright on the retinae whenever I blinked, that was how the mission wound down, like a slowing record, the rhythm broken and the music dying to a medley of strange moans before the silence came and I closed my eyes and watched the bright flare of the explosion again until that too died away and left the dark.

After a long time, perhaps a few seconds, I heard a man shouting in the distance of the freight-yards — 'You bloody fool?

I opened my eyes. From this distance I couldn't see clearly what was going on at the bottom of the ramp. I could see one of them tugging at Karasov, pulling him over onto his back, but I couldn't see whether he was dead or not. I didn't need to.

'You bloody fool?

It was a scream of rage, and that was how I knew that Karasov was dead. It was the senior KGB officer yelling at the man whose shot had gone in. They would have had strict orders to take Karasov alive. The man who had shot him had made a mistake, that was all: he'd tried to stop his run by firing at the legs, but after the explosion it wouldn't have been easy to achieve any kind of accuracy.

It had taken me an hour to crawl half the length of the train, because a lot of people were running across the freight-yards from the station to see what had happened, and I had to wait for a chance to crawl over the sleepers between one carriage and the next before I could climb again and swing my way along the framework. I'd assumed they'd search for me under the train because it was the nearest effective cover and I wanted to make as much distance as I could before the search began; but nobody came. I think they were too worried about Karasov, about his death, to take much notice of anything else. As the agent running with him I'd been incidental. Karasov was the man they'd been hunting for the past seven days and now they'd found him and their mission too was over.

I sat with my eyes closed against the foetid turbulence. The air blew in a freezing gale from the front of the train and the wheels broke it up into gusts and eddies, sending sparks and chips of stone flying, one of them cutting my face and drawing blood, not a good thing because a mark like that can give you away when the hunt's up, it won't matter how good your papers are.

But I didn't think there was going to be any hunt for me now; Karasov had been the shared objective for both missions: the Bureau and the KGB had both wanted him, and wanted him alive. Now he was dead, and it was over. The KGB would show a mild interest in finding the agent who had been operating against them on their own soil and who had flushed Karasov under their own guns, but it would be mainly out of frustration, out of spite. They would feel a bit better if they could put me against a wall or send me to break stones in the penitentiaries for the rest of my life, but that was all: they wouldn't mount a dragnet as they'd done for Karasov.

And even if they did, they'd draw blank. They might find my body, but there'd be no identification that would tell them I was an agent. Because this was the way it was going to be, I knew that now. My body would be found along the railway, churned by that spinning steel below me and torn later by whatever beasts of prey could find me first and use me for sustenance, gorging their fill amid the winter's frozen dearth.

That would be all right. The idea of piecemeal extinction under the busy claw and beak has never troubled me; I would be there to share the celebration of ongoing life as my blood and sinew passed into different creaturehood, sustaining the ecology. The show must go on, so forth. Better that than be shovelled up by a sanitation squad and strapped into a cardboard box and dropped into the ground by an indifferent and very minor civil servant for the worms to feed on. I can't stand those bloody things.

But it isn't all right. You can't. Shuddup.

You can't just give up. I don't want to the. I don't- Are you sure of that? Are you quite sure?

You've got to hold on. Wake up and hold on.

Wheels thundering below.

You've got to get your senses back, or. In this cold? In this cold?

Sparks flew up and a stone skinned my skull.

Wake up. Wake up.

The huge shape of the train swung me through the dark.

Yes, wake up, I suppose. But this cold was. You'll pass out if you don't wake up.

I thought yes that's probably true but when I moved one hand I lost my balance and my foot slipped off the beam and oh my God they're so murderous they're like a mincer they'll drag me under and flay me alive and spew me out like a red rag. Hanging on. I was hanging on. Awake now and hanging on with the fingers of one hand while my body swung above the void of dizzying movement below me, one foot still lodged on the edge of the metal beam and the other hanging down, the ankle burning from the onslaught of flying gravel. My fingers were slipping because the metal was smooth and covered with a film of oily soot, and as they went on sliding I could feel the edge of a rivet, round and smooth, its shape changing under the tactile recognition of my fingertips and changing so fast that I knew that to hang here like this wouldn't be enough. I would have to swing my leg up and get the foot lodged alongside the other one so that I wasn't swinging in the void — but to do that would put extra strain on my fingers and they were already on fire with fatigue.

There wasn't, in the end, much choice. My senses were numbed now by the freezing air-rush and my lungs dragged at smoke; the thundering of the great steel wheels was dying away as my eardrums failed at last to register vibrations, and I closed my eyes and saw nothing different, only the dark, until a little while later my fingers reached the edge of the metal beam and came away and I began falling.