Northlight

21 WHO?

And you turn over?'

The room swung and I was looking upwards into her sea-green eyes.

'It feels good,' I said.

'Sure. I had some training once. But Jesus, it's a wonder you're still alive.'

The smell of the Tiger Balm was sharp, pulling me out of my lethargy for a while until I slipped back. More than anything I wanted to sleep, because here it was so quiet after the hospital.

'Does that hurt?'

'Don't worry.' The light from the cheap table lamp shadowed her cheekbones and the curve of her pensive mouth.

'You didn't look surprised,' she said after a while, 'when I opened the door.'

That gave me comfort: the shock hadn't shown.

'I already knew you were CIA.'

She stopped massaging and looked down at me with her eyes narrowed. 'How?'

'You didn't behave like a journalist when the KGB stopped you leaving the hotel. And your friend in Moscow couldn't have known there was a duplicate tape and a man running with it unless he was in the Company.'

She considered this, and then began massaging slowly again. 'So I guess you're kind of pissed off about the whole thing. Your case officer warned us that you prefer working alone.'

'It makes things less difficult for other people.'

'That figures. Who else needs to drag themselves around black and blue all over?' She took one foot and eased a knee-joint, carefully folding my leg. 'Does that feel okay?'

'Everything in life is relative.'

'I mean really. Is it damaged?'

'No. I walked two miles from the hospital.'

'Okay. Just relax again.'

'Liz,' I said, 'who else knows you're here?'

'Only my own case officer.'

'He's your friend in Moscow?'

'Right.'

'Does he know I'm here too?'

Her hands stopped sliding across the bruises again. 'Gee, Clive, I don't know. He just told me to get here and wait for further instructions. He didn't say you were coming. Is it important?'

'No.'

What had shocked me when she'd opened the door wasn't that I'd been sent to a safehouse run by the CIA but that Fane hadn't told me. If Northlight hadn't shut down on me I would have signalled London through the embassy in Moscow and our line through Cheltenham and told Croder to get Fane out of Russia and send me a local control who knew how to keep his executive informed. When you set up a safehouse you do it with the knowledge dial it can make the difference between the life and death of a hard-run ferret and you don't tell anyone — anyone at all — where it is, not even a friendly service. It's not a matter of trust; it's a matter of total security. We can trust someone with our lives but we can't know for certain that they won't hit a trap and go pitching into an interrogation cell before they can reach a capsule to stop themselves blowing the safehouse out of the ground and the ferret with it.

A safehouse is sacrosanct.

The slow pain of the bruises was seeping into my head, into my mind and burning there, becoming anger. Fane was going to get me killed at this rate: the mission was dead and buried in Karasov's grave but I still had a chance of reaching home if I had a local control experienced enough to get me there.

Fane wasn't.

Or had he established liaison with the CIA on instructions from London?

No. Croder was a crack professional. He was a bastard and he would drive you into the ground but he wouldn't throw you to the dogs unless by the nature of the mission you became expendable. He wouldn't blow your safehouse the minute he'd set it up for you.

'Does that feel okay?'

'Yes.'

My eyes were almost closed, and I watched the outline of her head against the pool of light on the ceiling, the swing of her chestnut hair and the shadowed face where her eyes were set like liquid jade.

'Stop me if it hurts.'

'It's fine.'

Her hands slowed, their pressure sliding across the pain and giving it recognition, making it acceptable instead of something I wanted to hide.

'It doesn't bother you,' Liz asked reflectively, 'to come out of the cold and have your wounds licked by a mere woman?'

Only half of what she said got through to me: I was thinking about Fane. I supposed she was a feminist.

'Where else would a man go, but to the earth mother?'

She gave her soft, private laugh. 'I can't see why the hell anyone would divorce a man like you.'

'Her psychiatrist assured me she wasn't in her right mind at the time.'

She laughed again and her hands stopped moving as she lowered her head and put her face against mine for a moment; her hair lay across my eyes and I closed them and let the lethargy- well over me in a warm tide, forgetting Fane, forgetting how very unlikely it was that I would ever leave this alien and snowbound city alive, and giving myself instead to the peace of the winter solstice the earth mother had brought me. 'Sleep,' she whispered, 'if you want to.'

The phone rang just before nine o'clock hi the evening and Liz answered it.

'It's for you, Clive.'

'It's been difficult,' Fane's voice came on the line, 'to find a secure location for the rendezvous.'

'As long as it's better than the last one.'

Short pause. 'Quite so.'

'I can't come to your hotel,' I told him. The chip of gravel that had flown up from the track had left a scar across my face, the last thing I wanted: Petr Stepanovich Lein, the engineer checked by the KGB on the Murmansk-Kandalaksha train, had been missing when it had arrived in Kandalaksha and a dead man had been found later near the track; a bomb had killed an unknown number of KGB officers in the freight-yards and a wanted fugitive had been shot down; later the engineer Petr Lein had been picked up unconscious on the rail track in Murmansk and taken to the General Maritime Hospital for treatment. Those were good enough leads to raise a hunt as soon as they put the pieces together and the latest information they'd have would be from the hospital. Oh yes, and there's one other thing — we treated him for a face wound on the left side.

'No,' Fane said, 'don't come to the hotel. It's too far from where you are now and most of the roads are blocked.' I watched the snow still falling across the black grimed glass of the window. 'There's a warehouse half a mile from the apartment complex along the harbour road. One storey, steel construction, the number 19 painted on a board above the main doors, which are exactly opposite a weigh station with its harbourside window broken and boarded up. I shall be there in one hour, at ten o'clock.'

I thought about it. 'Are there lamps there?'

'Not near the doors.'

'What about harbour security? What about militia patrols?'

Short silence. 'When did you last go outside?'

'I got here yesterday evening.'

'The snow hasn't stopped since long before then. This city is dead. So far they've managed to keep two of the runways clear at the airport but the roads are blocked solid. The last militiaman I saw was dozing over a coke stove in the middle of the Kulinin-Terechovo crossroads. You'll see what I mean when you go outside.'

A frisson passed through my nerves. I was beginning to feel the squeamishness of the burrowing animal for the light of day. It was night out there but there would be lights in places and I didn't want to pass under them.

But I had to see Fane.

'All right. Ten o'clock.'

We synchronized watches and I rang off.

Place stank of fish.

There'd been lights along the harbour road and I'd had to walk under them because the only alternative was to clamber across man-high snow drifts.

'Is this safe?'

'I told you, the city is dead.'

Bad choice of words. The bruises, I suppose: pain all over, total reluctance to move, to have to move, to have to move fast if anything happened, if anyone came here.

'Have you got a gun on you?' I asked Fane.

'Why?''

'I want to know.'

I always want to know if people near me are carrying weapons but my reasons are different. With Karasov it had been because I wanted a quiet run to the rendezvous and no fuss when we got there. With Fane it was because I would know what to do if anyone came here and we had to react. I would let him draw fire and get clear if I could.

'Yes,' he said.

'All right. I just wanted to know.'

'Try and calm down.'

I bit off the first thing I thought of saying and watched him light one of his bloody cigarettes with a gold Dupont — Jesus, this man was unreal — and blow out smoke that went drifting across the oblong of pale blue light coming through one of the high narrow windows from a lamp outside. If you stood facing the light the rest of the place was dark but if you stood with your back to it you could make out some of the environment: crates of dried fish, two trolleys, a loading gantry rearing like a gibbet. I stood with my back to the light and made Fane move to face it.

Freezing in here.

'Do you want debriefing?' he asked me.

'What for? We've shut down. Leave it for London.'

My eyes were accommodating after the lamps outside and I could see the expression of long-suffering patience on his face. 'All the same, I'd like to hear about Karasov.'

'I told you.' My breath clouded in the light, as substantial as the smoke from his cigarette. 'He was selling product to Peking as well as to us.' I brought the cassette out of my pocket and gave it to him. 'This is the duped tape.'

He glanced at the labels and put it away. 'It could still be of some use. Did he confess quite freely?'

'You could say that. I didn't use any pressure — I hadn't any idea what he'd been doing.'

Fane looked away. 'No one did. This was why he didn't ask us for help the moment he went to ground, I imagine.'

'He was bargaining with Peking through their Rinker cell.'

'Yes.' Ash fell from his cigarette.

Something was wrong.

A ship's foghorn sounded a long way off and it sent a flicker along the nerves. I watched Fane. He hadn't even noticed. He was standing perfectly still, looking at the dirt floor of the warehouse, not actually seeing it. It was as if I weren't there.

There'd been something wrong with this mission from the very beginning and I still didn't know what it was and it frightened me because I wanted to stay alive and get clear of this bloody country and it might not even be important to them, to London, to Fane, to help me, to do this last thing for me, to bring at least one thing home from Northlight, if only a bruised and defeated executive.

Perhaps he was having to get used to the fact that I was here at all: he'd thought I was dead. That was why the phone had gone on ringing when I'd tried to call him. Not his fault: it's routine. When the executive's compromised beyond saving, his control has to close down the whole cell — bases, the safehouse, courier lines, cyphers, contacts, cutouts, every facility in the system that the executive might have given away under interrogation. Fane would have done that, and started for Moscow or Leningrad to get on a plane for London; then he'd heard from the embassy that I was still in the field.

That would have pleased him, until I'd told him the objective was dead. I suppose it was a bit of a nuisance having to get me home, bit of a chore.

He was looking up at me now, still not saying anything, watching me in silence. And then, because of the light in his eyes, because of the angle of his head or because of a thousand infinitesimal impressions that were streaming into my consciousness — then, because of all these things and most of all because he hadn't asked me that one specific question over the telephone, I knew suddenly what was wrong, I swear to God I knew, even before he spoke.

'Fane. Who blew the rendezvous?'

A slight catch of his breath.

'I did.'