Northlight

20 SHUTDOWN

'Fifty roses, yes.'

'What colour, sir?'

'I don't mind. Red. No, not red. Anything but red.'

She stared at me. 'Not red. Of course.'

Colour of blood.

'And the address, sir?'

'Hotel Les Jardins, Paris.'

She wrote it down. 'And they are for Miss Moira Cavendish, is that right?'

'Yes. But not fifty. Not fifty roses.'

'Not fifty?' She began staring at me again.

'No. One rose.'

But of course she wouldn't understand. I'd long ago worked it out that fifty roses would be too many. Too vulgar.

'Keep still,' she said.

I always got them to write it down very carefully when I was being cleared. All my savings to the abused wives thing, and a rose for Moira.

'He's coming round,' she said. For some reason she was speaking in Russian.

'Only one rose, sir?'

'Oh Christ, you'll never understand.'

Pain burned through me like a lava tide.

'Get Dr Novikova.'

But what about the roses? 'Aren't I dead, then?'

Her pale face looked more surprised than ever.

'What did you say?'

Watch it. I'd spoken in English.

In Russian I asked her: 'What kind of condition am I in?'

I didn't ask her where I was. By the smell of the ether this wasn't a bloody flower shop.

Another woman was standing over me now, dark and greasy-looking with her stained linen coat bursting at the buttons, a stethoscope round her neck.

'How do you feel?' she asked me with monumental disinterest.

'Fucking awful.'

She gave a bellowing laugh, full of silver teeth, and poked me in the ribs. It was enough to make me pass right out, and things looked different when I came to again. They'd moved me into a ward that smelled of stewed cabbage and human sweat. The ether had been more pleasant.

'What time is it?'

'Can't you see the clock?'

I craned my neck and noticed the pain was quite a bit less than before. I felt better in terms of morale, too, and decided that if the good Dr Novikova came along and tried to poke me in the ribs again I'd have her finger off.

A lot of questions were clamouring for answers inside the skull, rolling around like dice. Then it was light again and they brought me soup. I bent the handle of the aluminium spoon more or less straight and thought: Who blew the rendezvous!

Nobody here could tell me that, but I kept watching the doors at each end of the ward because at any given time a couple of men in plain clothes could walk in here and they would be able to tell me who blew the rendezvous, if they wanted to.

Karasov?

It would explain the aura of doom about him: he'd looked like a man on his way to the guillotine. But he hadn't known they'd shoot him. He hadn't known I would throw the toy.

And he'd tried to run clear: he hadn't just picked himself up and let them take him.

Not Karasov.

'You want some more?'

A slut with the eyes of an angel, pulling a lock of hair as wet as seaweed away from her brow.

'No thank you.'

I let her take the bowl away. There wasn't anything else I had to ask them: I'd wanted to know the usual things, which town was this, where had they found me, what day was it, so forth. They'd found me between the railway lines in Murmansk station early yesterday morning, unconscious from exposure: the train had pulled in late the previous evening. So I must have grabbed something when I'd started falling and saved myself, though I didn't remember anything about it. The organism, when left alone, when left to invoke the powers of zen, can do surprising things.

Volodarskiy?

No. Without any question: no. I knew that man. I'd known him in the first five minutes. Deadly, yes, but not to his friends, not to his guests.

'Do you know what they've done? They've taken my bloody leg off!'

He leaned over and spat on the floor.

'Are you sure?'

He turned his head and looked at me with that slow stare of appraisal we save for the mad. 'Don't you know,' he said with a throat filled with rage, 'when you've got one leg or two? Can't you count?'

'Sometimes we get strange ideas,' I said, 'in hospitals.' But in this region he was probably right: frostbite or gangrene set in quickly.

Phantom limb. My breath blocked in my throat and the ward rocked until I shut my eyes, one hand going down under the sheet, reaching down lower and lower and then at last from side to side until I was sitting up, feeling my feet. Then I began breathing again. That poor bastard was wrong: you can't always tell. You've got to count.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling, where the husks of last summer's flies still dangled from deserted webs. It could only have been the courier, the one who came in on the train from Murmansk with the papers for Karasov. He'd been a double operator and Fane hadn't known.

He would have to know. He would also have to know that he could go home now and tell them the show was over. I'd have to get out too: he would see to that. But it wasn't urgent: I was in no hurry to present myself for debriefing at Grader's desk.

'I want to use a phone,' I told the angel-eyed slut when she came past my bed.

'There isn't one. Not for patients.'

'Where are my things?'

'Things?'

'Possessions.'

She got the point and brought the stout cardboard box with the metal fastener and waited while I fished inside it and found a ten-ruble note.

'You'll have to wait,' she said, 'till the coast's clear.'

'Soon as you can.'

The ward started rocking again half an hour later, but not as badly as it had before when I'd gone along to the loo. The girl went with me, running a gauntlet of whistles from those patients whose libido had survived gross injury, amputation, concussion and the stink of Lysol and cabbage stew.

As we reached the telephone against the wall she said, 'Are you a Party member?''

'No.'

'If anyone asks what you're doing at the phone, tell them you're a Party member.' She draped her lock of seaweed higher across her brow and pouted her little egg-sized breasts at me under her soiled white coat, turning away with her eyes lingering seductively. You don't earn much in Murmansk, nursing.

I took the phone off its hook and asked for the number.

A man was leaning against the wall between the telephone and the door of the ward, thin as a skeleton and bearded like the Ancient Mariner, his bones shaking so hard that I could hear the brushing of his hospital gown against his legs. In the yellow light from the one bulb hanging from a hook in the ceiling his eyes glinted as he stared at me, and I looked away.

The number began ringing.

Good form, I supposed, should be observed when I spoke to Fane and told him what had happened. He was my local control and in a way this would constitute an interim debriefing.

The rendezvous was blown. The mission is now shut down. The objective is dead.

He would light a cigarette, slowly, before he answered. Then he would ask, because London would ask him, who blew the rendezvous and how did the objective meet his death.

It could only have been the courier. The objective was shot down by the KGB, in error, as he was trying to run clear.

The phone went on ringing.

I began counting.

He would ask me where I was now.

I'm in No. 2 General Maritime Hospital in Murmansk.

He would ask. Twelve rings. Thirteen.

He would ask me what I needed, and if I were in good enough shape for him to get me through the frontier.

I need a safe house first. They'll be discharging me any time now.

Sixteen. Seventeen.

The hairs were lifting at the nape of my neck. The number I was calling was the number where Fane had said I would always find him in this city. Always. For the executive in the field, sometimes hard pressed, sometimes hunted, sometimes dying, the telephone number of his local control is his lifeline. For as long as I remained in the field, Fane would man that line or leave someone with total trust to take over from him in shifts.

Twenty. Twenty-one.

The skeleton with the frosted beard was still staring at me in the yellow light, one of his knees knocking rhythmically against the wall, his thin shadow behind him, waiting to follow him to the grave. He seemed to be listening, but might not be, or if he was, there might not be anything left inside his bone-white head to understand.

Did he know, even, what a telephone was?

Twenty-five. Twenty-six.

Did he know there was a shadow behind me too, coming closer one step at a time, one step closer as the telephone went on ringing?

Fane had shut down.

The trickle began at the top of my spine, the familiar visitation of terror that comes when we know it's certain that we are done for. I'd known that much already when I'd asked for a telephone, and I'd managed to contain the idea by concentrating on the practical considerations of who could have blown the rendezvous and how I would get home. But this measured, insistent ringing on the line brought confirmation. No one was there. The ringing was going on in an empty room, echoing against the blank glass of a window, its vibrations disturbing the motes of dust that had begun settling since the door had closed and the footsteps had died away.

'There is no answer,' the operator said, and the line went dead.

The executive in the field had been abandoned.

The man's knee knocked against the wall like a nail going into a coffin. Can't you go back to bed for Christ's sake? Is that all you can find to do?

Steady.

'Have you finished, lovey?'

I looked at her. I'd seen her somewhere before.

'What?'

'You'll get caught if we're not careful.'

The nurse, yes. Her big eyes frightened.

'I will?'

That would be terrible, to be told off by some fat cow for breaking the rules here.

I put the receiver back on its hook. Fane had already got the news, that was all. He thought I was dead, so he'd shut everything down.

Executive deceased.

Not an unreasonable assumption, actually, and not a bad guess at the future if I had to get home alone.

'You feeling all right, lovey?' She wiped my forehead with her dirty towel.

This was at ten in the morning.

I tried three times to reach the British embassy in Moscow during the day, finally getting a connection and speaking to one of the DI6 cypher clerks in Russian and telling him that my friend in Murmansk wasn't answering his phone and that I was worried about him because he hadn't been well lately.

The clerk wasn't in too much of a hurry to get the point: the Bureau doesn't post staff in any of the embassies because our network isn't meant to exist, so we're given courtesy access to DI6 stations abroad with certain signalling facilities and they do this simply because the prime minister tells them to do it, and it makes them sulky.

'Your friend?'

'This is Boris Antonov speaking.' It was the standard name for any accredited Bureau agent operating anywhere in Soviet Russia with privileges of requesting assistance. In Paris I would introduce myself as Jacques Lafayette, in Bonn as Karl Heidi, in Rome as Julio Napoli — they were the names in the secret files in those embassies and this simple-minded bastard should know that, and he should know that the designation «friend» meant one thing and one thing only: the agent's local control in the field.

'Can you spell it out for me?' he asked oafishly.

Little Pleshakovna — I knew her name now — was hanging around near the doors to the ward, keeping watch. She didn't understand that I couldn't care less about getting a lecture from the comrade matron but that I would care a very great deal if she stopped me using this telephone.

'No,' I told the cypher clerk, 'I can't spell anything out for you. Get Mr Spencer on the line.' Spencer was the code name for the DI6 chief of station in all embassies.

'I'm afraid he's out to lunch.'

'Then get his best friend.'

'I'm sorry, I don't-'

'Listen, this is a 909 call and if you don't do what I want you to do extremely fast you'll hear direct from little mother.'

There was a brief silence.

'Okay, just a tick.'

He was getting the idea. The 909 designation had replaced the original BL565 Extension 9 call a year ago but it meant the same thing: it amounted to an inter-intelligence services hotline and the little mother he'd be hearing from was the prime minister.

'Hello?'

'Is that Mr Spencer?'

'No. But perhaps I can help you.'

'I may not have long so you'd better take this down.' Pleshakovna was making urgent signs to me from the entrance of the ward. 'This is Boris Antonov and my friend in Murmansk isn't answering the telephone. I'm extremely worried about him, so if you see anything of him please tell him I shall phone him again as often as I can.' I waited while he repeated the salient information as he wrote it down. He was a senior spook and knew immediately what I was talking about.

'Where can I phone you back?'

The little white-coated Pleshakovna was hurrying up to me and glancing over her shoulder. 'You've got to put that phone dorm, citizen! She's coming!' It wouldn't have mattered but I was going to have to use the telephone again and if I blew it now it could make things much more difficult later.

'You can't phone me back. Please do everything you can.'

I put the receiver back on the hook and came away as the little slut grabbed my arm and pulled me against her. I leaned on her for support as the matron came through from the ward, a Hero of the Soviet Union medal dangling on her massive chest.

'Is this patient all right?'

'He's overdone it a bit, comrade Matron. He-'

'Then get him back into his bed, you stupid little bitch!'

This was at two o'clock in the afternoon.

Snow was falling again: in the ward we could see it through the tall grimy window panes, the flakes catching the light and then dying away into the dark. Night had come down four hours ago, soon after three o'clock.

'With only one leg, things won't be so easy.'

He'd already started whining.

'You'll look like a hero.'

I watched the snowflakes, aware of a creeping sense of limbo. The record had wound down through final discord, leaving silence. I was a man lying in a hospital bed, numbed still from exposure and extensively bruised — I'm quoting from my chart — with nothing to do except console or show contempt for the man in the bed next to me, as I felt inclined, nothing to do except watch the mesmerizing drift of the snowflakes whirled by the wind into the light and whirled away again out of sight.

By the tone of the senior man on the line I was sure that he'd try to raise Fane for me and tell him to stand by his telephone again; but there was no guarantee. I didn't know at what time Fane had got the news of the ambushed rendezvous or how long it had been before he decided to shut down his base and leave me to whatever fate had overtaken me. All he would know was that if I were dead there was nothing he could do for me, and that if I were still alive I would do everything I could to reach the capsule in time if I were caught and had to protect the Bureau.

'When can I use the telephone?'

'That depends.'

This wasn't my little waif: she'd finished her shift. This was a beefy Estonian woman, her arms folded across the bulwark of her breasts in a posture of impregnability, her dark eyes glinting with the secret exultation of power.

I got a ten-ruble note from my box of effects, rolling it and keeping my hand over it on the blanket. A gesture had to be made to propriety: the state was coming down heavily on corruption these days, driving it deeper underground.

'I'd like to make a phone call,' I told her, 'as soon as possible.'

'What's so urgent, then, citizen?'

'I'm worried about a friend of mine. He hasn't phoned to ask about me, and he knows I'm here.'

She stood over the bed, her eyes aswim with avarice. 'Perhaps you're less popular than you imagined, citizen. Perhaps she knows you're in no condition to get it up any more.' A faint wheezing came from the little fleshy mouth and the eyes narrowed to slits. She was laughing at my attempt to deceive her: a «friend» could only be a woman, and a woman wanted only one thing.

I put a second ten-ruble note with the first. 'Actually it's a male friend. He's a Party member, and it's his duty to find out if I need any assistance.'

Her eyes changed instantly, darkening. She had a problem now: if she took the twenty rubles, I might report it. This could be a trap I was setting for her — it was being done all the time.

'It's just that I don't want to get into trouble, citizen. You're not meant to use the telephone, you know that.'

'Of course. That's why I need your help. You have the authority to assist me in the interests of the state. Look at it that way, comrade.'

Her bright eyes were drawn to my closed hand for an instant. 'If I let you use the telephone, then, that will be my reason. I'll be assisting the business of the state, as any good citizen is expected to do. Is that what you mean?'

'Yes. That should be its own reward. But I'm of the old school, comrade, and I've always thought there's only one reward that's really worth anything.' I opened my hand.

It was another half an hour before she reported the coast was clear. A new matron had taken over the night shift, and I assumed that five of the twenty rubles would have been sacrificed to oil the wheels.

I unhooked the black bakelite receiver and asked for the number and waited.

Two rings.

An orderly came past with a trolley, swerving every now and then because the woman shuffling beside it was holding the man who lay there, his face moon-white and his eyes clenched shut, a blue-veined hand exposed at the edge of the sheet, clutching a small ikon. Tears trickled on the frail parchment face, but they were not his — they were the woman's, falling on him as she leaned over the trolley. I didn't think he would cry again; she had to have tears enough for both.

'I can't push on, citizen,' the orderly said irritably, 'if you won't get out of the way.'

Four rings.

I was counting from habit. There were a lot of reasons why the embassy might not have been able to raise Fane — the lines could be down between here and Moscow under the weight of the snow; Fane could be on his way to Leningrad by now to catch a plane for London; Croder could have signalled him with a change of plan.

Six rings.

The trolley banged through the doors of the ward, leaving the sickly smell of gangrene in the corridor.

'Hello?'

Flicker along the nerves. Fane's voice.

'This is Boris Antonov.'

Short silence. 'I see. I didn't quite know what to make of his tone but I didn't care. Contact had been re-established and my lifeline held strong again. Then relief brought its natural reaction: anger.

'Where the hell were you?'

In a moment he said: 'I received bad news.'

I thought vaguely that it was civil of him to put it like that. He was the type of director who considered any executive expendable, and on the slightest excuse.

Or did he mean some other kind of bad news? 'What did they tell you?'

'That you'd been killed.'

'I'm not surprised. The rendezvous was a trap.'

A longer pause. 'Where are you now?'

I told him. I also told him that a hostile agency — probably directed from Peking — had put a bomb on the truck. I told him the rendezvous in the freight-yards had been blown. I told him that the objective was dead.

Then I waited.

He would be reaching for his sharkskin cigarette-case now and pulling out a flat Egyptian cigarette, lighting it with care, his poker player's eyes gazing quietly at nothing while he absorbed my information.

A Chukchi woman, slant-eyed, blubbery, with skin like candlewax, came heavy-footed from the ward and pulled a pair of crutches from the pile leaning in the corner, dropping one of them with a noise that brought a cry from someone along the line of beds.

'Peking?'

'According to the objective. He was selling product to them too.'

'I see.' A cool man, Fane: he could absorb entire horror stories without even flinching. 'How was he killed?'

'They shot him down in error, while he was trying to get clear.'

'Are you sure?'

'I was there.'

'He didn't have anything on him?'

'No. I'd already burned the papers he was carrying.'

There was a question he hadn't asked yet.

'You clumsy bitch? a man was shouting from just inside the ward. The Chukchi girl was having trouble with the crutches: every time she stacked them back against the wall they fell down again with a noise like the roof coming in.

'What is that?' Fane asked.

'Someone dropping crutches. Have you got a safehouse lined up for me?'

In a moment he said slowly, 'There's a place you can try.'

'They'll be throwing me out of here any time now. I want to hole up for a day or two before I start the trip home.'

'I see. What sort of condition are you in?'

'I'm not ready for any games yet. I'll need a day or two.' «Games» was our word for anything demanding, like running a frontier under gunfire or wrecking a checkpoint. He still hadn't asked how the rendezvous had been blown. It worried me.

After a while he said: 'All right. I don't know yet how I'm going to get you across, but we'll work something out.'

'You didn't expect you'd have to, did you?'

A very long pause.

'No.' I thought he wasn't going to say anything more, but his voice came back on the line. 'You can go to Apartment 12 in the Old Harbour complex. It's on the north-east corner of Lenin Prospekt and Vernadskogo Street. Are your papers intact?'

'Yes.'

'Knock at the door and you'll be let in. Do you want that again?'

'No.' I repeated the address and instructions. 'Then I want a meeting with you.'

'Of course. That too will be arranged in good time.'

I wished he didn't sound quite so unshakably cool about all this. I'd called him up and told him the objective was dead and Northlight shut down and it should have rattled him badly: he wasn't going to get an awful lot of bouquets from Chief of Control for letting- it happen. This too worried me.

Nerves, that was all. Did I want a local director hi the field who panicked every time a wheel came off?

The last thing I said to him was: 'If I phone your number again I'll expect an answer. I want to go home. You're not going to leave me to the in this bloody country.'

'Of course not.'

It went on snowing all night and by morning the ploughs were rumbling past the hospital and traffic had come to a standstill.

She gave me her address, little Pleshakovna, as I walked out of the ward, writing it on a dirty scrap of paper and thrusting it into my hand. 'I'm always home in the evening, after I get off here.' Her starved face creased into a seductive smile, leaving the desperation staring naked from her eyes as a guffaw sounded from one of the men in the row of beds.

I put the scrap of paper into my pocket and slipped her a fifty-ruble note, more than she'd earn under the brutish loins of a dozen visitors. What would I put it down as on my expense sheet for those arthritic hell-hags in Accounts to quibble over? Child maintenance? They'd go straight into terminal palsy.

I walked out onto the pavement, picking my way across greying drifts of snow and through patches of sand and clinker, feeling — as I had felt before — like a soldier groping his way home from a battlefield where the cries of the dying had faded, leaving only the scratching of a pen across the documents of surrender. I wasn't quite sure if I could ever pick up the step again, or even hear the drummer.

They were breaking ice in the harbour when I reached there, dim figures moving in the haze of the drifting snow, hauling on ropes as a barge nosed along the quayside, sending miniature ice floes ringing out discordant music as they jostled together on the dark water. The Old Harbour complex loomed on the other side like a mausoleum, and I picked my way towards it over the iron bridge. There was no point in trying to check out the environment before I closed in on the safe-house: the intersection at Lenin Prospekt and Vernadskogo Street was deserted except for an abandoned truck with its belt of snow scoops hanging from a broken pulley. Anyone waiting here for me would by now look like a snowman, invisible under camouflage, and if a watcher had been posted at one of these hundred dark windows I wouldn't see him either. I had been given the address of a safehouse over an untapped line by my local control and that should be enough: I wasn't expected to question it. The executive in the field needed shelter, and it was a responsibility of the highest priority in London to see that he got it. This was why, when I climbed the stairs to Apartment 12 and the door was opened to me, my mind lurched instantly into a state of shock.