Northlight

22 TIGER

'DON'T,' He said.

I suppose I'd moved.

He hadn't gone for his gun — I wouldn't have given him time. He'd just taken a step back.

'Don't do anything precipitate.'

He watched me steadily with his expressionless eyes.

My neck pulsed: I could feel it. The carotid artery on the left side was palpable as the pressure went up, as the rage came.

'You've got guts,' I said.

He shrugged slightly. 'You had to know some time.'

'You could have waited until there were other people around to protect you.' I studied his face with its smooth white skin and its perfectly regular features, its short nose and straight mouth, seeing it for an instant as it would have looked if I'd actually decided to turn it into a mess.

'Save me the melodrama,' he said thinly.

The voice of sanity. It's one of the things, in point of fact, that the director in the field is expected to do for his executive when a fuse blows or a wheel comes off. Keep the poor bastard sane.

But he wasn't doing it very well because I moved again and only just managed to stop short and if you think it was lack of control you don't know what it's like when you're carrying some half-dead objective to the frontier and a courier-rendezvous blows up in your face and takes the whole of the mission with it and you find out it was your own local control who set it up, you think I'm a bloody robot or something?

Besides, that wasn't all he'd done.

'Be careful,' he said. 'I'm your only hope of survival. Don't make things difficult for yourself.'

It wasn't all he'd done.

'Fane, did you have that thing put in the truck?'

He looked down, looked up again.

'Yes.'

I turned away and walked through the pale blue light and saw my shadow moving across the dirt floor, rippling over the debris as if I were walking under water, so there you are you see, I knew there'd been something wrong with this mission from the moment when they told me Ferris had refused it, and I should have known better than to let that bastard Croder set me up and set me running again — he almost got me killed the last time he ran me, in Moscow, I tell you that man simply does not care what he does to his executives providing they bring back the product.

Stink of fish in here..

He was still standing perfectly still, watching me. From this distance he could have shot me dead and I suppose that was why I'd turned and walked away from him; I wanted to know the future and this was the only way to find out, Russian roulette, yes, but that's part of our trade, we're used to it.

'Does that make you feel better?' he asked me.

Fane is quite bright. Don't underestimate him.

'You'd have probably missed.' I walked slowly back to him.

'No,' he said.

'You missed with that fucking bomb.'

He lifted an eyebrow. 'I wish you wouldn't take it quite so personally, Quiller.'

'Just natural reflex. It'll pass.'

I forget exactly which page it's on in the book, the dark blue one, the first one they make us read, Structure of Employment, but I remember what it says, we all do. It should be borne in mind at all times during Briefing and Clearance that you are considered to be expendable, and that at any given moment during the course of a mission it may be decided that in order to protect security or to accomplish the objective, your freedom, welfare or even life may be forfeit.

They lose quite a few of their recruits when they throw them that particular book in Norfolk — you can feel the draught. But there are substantial compensations to widows and so on, and some people feel it can't ever happen to them, while others get some kind of neurotic kick: the brink isn't enough, they like a sword over their heads as well.

'What went wrong?' Fane asked.

I stared at him. 'You don't know?'

'I mean with the bomb.'

'Oh. It's not the first time I've been near one.'

'You mean you sensed it?'

'Does it matter?'

'Yes. If that man didn't set things up properly, Croder will want to know.' The man I'd seen on the train.

'He did a good job.'

Fane had the grace to glance down. 'It was the only way I could arrange matters. London made a deal with the Kremlin from the start.'

'Before I was briefed and cleared?'

'Yes.'

'Bloody Croder for you.'

Fane looked up again. 'You know the system.'

Life may be forfeit, so forth. 'It doesn't mean I have to like Croder. What was the deal?'

'We don't need to go into that now.'

I stood close to him. 'This time I want to know.'

He shrugged, dropping his cigarette-end and putting his foot on it. 'Both sides needed the summit, urgently. The Soviets knew that the American public wouldn't allow the president to meet them in Vienna, after they'd sunk the Cetacea, so a cover-up was agreed on. It was the only way they could protect the summit, and the only way the US would go ahead with it: by demanding vital concessions in the resulting talks as a form of penalization for sinking the sub. But there was a risk.'

I 'Karasov.'

'Yes. The Soviets knew we'd listened to the tape, but that was destroyed now. Karasov was still alive, and might talk to the world media, a living witness to the Soviet's guilt. Again, the American people wouldn't let the president go to Vienna.'

Sound. Very slight sound.

'The Soviets didn't know where to find Karasov. He was our own sleeper. So it was agreed that the moment we had him in our hands we would let them know, and let them despatch him.'

'Kill him.'

In a moment: 'Yes.'

The snow on the roof, stressing it, making the slight sound.

Rationalize.

But I turned my head to the left. The right ear feeds aural input to the left hemisphere for logical analysis and I wanted to know more about the sound, and if it meant danger.

'He was, after all, a Russian,' Fane said. 'And a traitor.'

'And trusted us.'

He shrugged.

'Trusted us with his life.'

He gave a sigh. 'Northlight was set up to protect world peace.'

'So a few dead espions along the way don't count.'

'Of course not.'

'All right,' I said, 'I'll buy that.'

'Jolly good show.'

Tiger.

'But why did you want me out of the way?'

He lit another cigarette and blew out smoke. 'It wasn't quite like that.'

Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the warehouse of the night.

'What was it like, then?'

'We had to-'

Not a very big tiger but I put up an arm block as it sprang for me and bounced off and hit the floor with its ears back and its claws out and a sound of total menace going on in its throat like a distant police siren; I was quite impressed.

'Pussy, you old bastard, stop that noise.'

What surprised me most was that Fane had his gun out. Local directors aren't normally so nervous.

'I think you're over-reacting,' I told him, and he put it away. The cat hadn't actually meant to attack me — they don't do that, it's not their nature. It had wanted to reach the fish crates and I was in the way. You can't always tell what's going on in their minds but I suppose it thought we were in here to open up the crates and there'd be a chance of nefarious pillage — the thing was near death from starvation, the winter and everything, and the locals in this region wouldn't keep these things for pets, they'd prefer them deep fried.

'We had to flush Karasov,' Fane went on, 'and hand him over to the Soviets. They said they'd finish him off. That was the deal.'

'But you didn't trust them.'

'Of course not. Before they killed him they would have put him under implemented interrogation and got everything out of him — our Murmansk network and all that goes with it.'

Fifteen agents, according to the background briefing I'd had in London. Fifteen agents and their communication channels and cover construction and courier lines and cypher modes: a major intelligence coup, not to be contemplated. I could see their point.

The poor little bastard was clawing at the fish crates, well not little, for God's sake, it was the size of a wolf, but there was no flesh on it, just fur and bones.

'Why didn't you put Karasov in the crosshairs?'

'It had to look like an accident' Fane said. 'We had to flush him, but we couldn't kill him.'

'You could have said it was the Rinker cell.'

'The what?'

'The Chinese.'

'But we couldn't have proved it. There was only one way we could really convince them.' He looked down again, concentrating on his cigarette.

'By blowing me up with him.'

'Yes.'

'Who-' but I left it at that. It didn't matter who'd thought of it, who'd given the final instructions, probably Croder but it could have been someone even higher than he was in the Bureau because even in our trade we don't regard the death of a shadow executive as a family joke and Croder would have needed the sanction of a special committee. Bloody vultures, who did they think they were, to put a man's neck on the block, to write his death certificate while he was still alive, while he was- Steady, lad, steady. They were the Bureau.

'You'll never do it that way, Pussy, don't be such a bloody twit.' I went over and smashed my boot down across the fish crates, breaking a wire, smashing it down again and bringing splinters away while the cat shrank back with its ears flattened and its eyes huge in the gloom and that low wail in its throat as I brought my boot down again — 'Don't you swear at me, you old bastard, or I won't get your supper-' down again and ripping the whole side of the crate away as the fish came tumbling out — 'Go on then, bon appetit and all that.'

I swung around to face Fane — 'So what the hell was that rendezvous all about, the one in the freight-yards, what was the KGB doing there right on time if we were both meant to be hanging from the roof of that fucking barn with our guts hanging out — come on Fane I want to know.'

He drew in some smoke. 'That was just window-dressing. We told them you'd be there to meet the courier.'

'What do you mean, for Christ's sake?'

'It was to cover the contingency of your getting caught and interrogated. You would have admitted the rendezvous, even though you weren't going to keep it.'

Only Croder could be so meticulous.

'What about Tanya?'

'The KGB wanted you monitored. We agreed.'

'She was KGB?'

'Yes.'

'What if I'd shown my hand?'

He shrugged. 'I asked them about that. They said you were too experienced.'

'Why didn't you tell me who she was?'

'We couldn't. We would have had to tell you the whole set-up.'

'What was she for, then?'

'The Soviets assumed that when you found Karasov you'd let her know, and let her know where he was. Then they could have gone in for him.'

'I called her, Fane.' I went close to him. 'I told her we'd found him.'

He watched me carefully. 'We thought you'd do that, yes. But we knew you wouldn't say where.'

'How can Croder take that kind of risk?'

'There was no risk. You wouldn't have given away the objective. I asked you, on the phone, remember? And that's what you said.'

'One day Croder's going to go so close to the fire that he'll blow the whole of the Bureau through the roof." 'I doubt that.' He shrugged as I turned away. 'And it's a compliment to you, after all. He was relying on your experience. On your… dependability.'

'A compliment? From Croder?'

'He thinks rather highly of you, Quiller.'

'He ordered my death. But that wasn't what I hated him for. I hated him for his diabolical cold-blooded cunning, his ability to sit inside my brain as I went through the mission he'd set up for me, to know precisely the things I would do, could be relied upon to do, and the things I would not do, could be relied upon not to do, until finally he manoeuvred me into the position When I would complete the mission for him and turn on the ignition of that truck and ensure his success.

He is the only man I can loathe for his excellence.

'Put that behind you now,' Fane said, and lit another cigarette. The cat jerked his head up at the flash of the lighter, then went on gorging himself. 'It's turned out well for you: your death is no longer necessary.'

'Well that's a bit of luck.'

'Yes, as a matter of fact. We flushed the objective, as we agreed to do, and he is now dead, and by accident. And since they caused it themselves they can hardly say we arranged it, can they?'

I turned again and walked through the pale blue light, and my shadow flowed like a shroud across the earthen floor. The rage was over now and I felt the chill of stale sweat on me and the iron cold of this place, its metal buried under the new snows. 'So Northlight was a success.'

'Not quite,' he said.

I turned to face him. 'You've just said so. The mission was to flush Karasov and get him killed before they could put him under a light, and that's what happened.'

He was standing very still, the smoke from his cigarette drifting to the edge of the light and then forming tendrils that climbed in the updraught towards the roof. I waited for him to answer, but he was silent.

'You mean you still have to get me out?'

'It's not quite that, either.'

I didn't move.

'Then why-' but I stopped short. There are questions you should never ask, and perhaps this was one of them. But it circled inside my head.

Why had he brought me here?

He watched me steadily. The distance between us was ten or twelve feet, and I noted this subconsciously before I knew why it might suddenly have become important.

'Have you got an escape route for me?'

My voice sent an echo from the high metal roof.

'No.'

The cat dragged another fish from the smashed crate and crouched over it, tearing at it.

'Why not?'

'There hasn't been time.'

Ten or twelve feet was too far. He'd whipped that gun out very fast indeed when the cat had scared him just now. I could never reach him across this distance if he wanted to do it again.

Is that what he'd brought me here for?

What other reason could he have?

I was still expendable. My freedom, my welfare and my life could still be forfeit, if it would pay Croder, if it would in some way follow the convolutions of this mission to an effective goal.

But these were logical arguments and they didn't have a lot to do with my thinking, with my being suddenly afraid: it was the cold in this place, the deathly cold, and the pale unearthly light and the silhouette of the gantry with its gallows shape and the way Fane was standing there so still and so silent and above all the terrible understanding that since they'd already written me off in their minds it might be convenient, less expensive, less complicated for them to leave me here in this dead city under the snow.

Skin crawling at the nape of my neck.

'So why did you bring me here?'