Northlight

3 BREKHOV

'Then what the fuck are you waiting for?'

There were only three other people in here, sitting in the corner by the tea urn hunched over what they were saying, as if they had to keep it a secret. My God, if anyone could keep a secret in this bloody place they'd have to be deaf and dumb.

'Clearance,' I said.

The Canadian sat back in his chair and I heard it creak, or it might have been his bones. He'd been here for years now, haunting the Caff, refusing to go, refusing to spend half the rest of his life picking up his pension at the post office and other half spending it on raw bourbon and cheap tarts till they came and picked him up and dropped him into an economy-model pinewood box and shovelled the earth over him.

He sipped his tea. Daisy had laced it with whisky, as she always did, strictly against the rules but of course she'd do anything for Charlie; the last time he'd come in from a mission she'd gone over to him with the entire stock of bountiful motherhood remaining in the world and gathered him into it with the passion of a Salvation Army girl who'd found a hit and run victim in the middle of the road.

'That was a nasty one,' she'd said — I'd been there, helping him find a chair — 'but you're all right now, dear, everything's all right now.' She'd sat down at the rickety plastic-topped table with him and automatically wiped a puddle of tea away with her cloth while she stared into his face, reading his soul with those copper-dark fathomless eyes of hers until Charlie had started to laugh gently, coughing a bit at first as he always did, as the thought was borne into his mind that maybe he was all right now, maybe everything was all right. 'Go and get me some tea, you fat old whore,' he'd told her, and she'd got up and brought him some, and that was the first time she'd ever put a tot of whisky in it, and she'd been doing it ever since.

'You're getting clearance,' he asked me, 'at four o'clock in the morning?'

'Croder's phoned them. They're on their way.'

'You're going out for Croder?'

'Someone's got to.'

He watched me, sitting back in his chair because his vision had been going lately; you had to be at arm's length, like the newspaper. His hatchet-shaped face had gone quiet, as if he'd found something significant to think about. I didn't like that. Tonight wasn't for significant thoughts; it was for getting through as fast as I could without thinking about what I was doing. Only Croder could have got me back into the action within fifteen minutes flat: that's why they'd given him the job, I suppose.

'It's awfully good of you to come and talk to me, Quiller.'

A soft manicured hand, a brilliant smile. Tonight he'd pulled a polo sweater over his pyjama trousers: he was in the top echelon, London Control level, and sometimes slept in one of the small dormer rooms under the eaves of the building, where a hundred years ago the servant girls had slept two in a bed for warmth, nursing their chilblains.

'You found things interesting, I'm sure, at No. 10.'

'A bit too political for my taste.'

His bright smile came again, like a flicker of lightning. 'She does wax a shade rhetorical, I know. But as long as you got the background. A little brandy?'

'I'd like to get down to business, if that's all right with you.'

'At once.' The pale blue eyes glittered slightly, lighting the fixed smile. Some people said he had a face massage once a week; others said he'd come back from a tricky one as a young shadow executive and they'd had to stretch a brand new skin graft right across his face; in some lights it did have the look of a mask. 'We would very much like you to go and fetch something for us,' he said, 'from Germany, or thereabouts.' A brief smile, as an apology for being so vague. 'It's only a small package.'

He stopped right there. He wouldn't say any more until I asked questions. At this stage, before briefing and before clearance, they want you to know as little as possible in case you turn down the job.

'When?'

'Soon, I believe. I'm sorry I can't be more explicit. Within a day or two.'

'From a courier?'

'Yes.'

'Which border?' If they wanted anything from West Germany itself they'd just shove it in the diplomatic bag or put a Queen's messenger on special assignment.

'Again,' he said in his soft tone of apology, 'we're not absolutely sure. Not yet.'

'Running like hell somewhere, is he?'

He didn't smile now. He looked at me with his bright eyes losing all expression as he took me another inch towards the heart of the matter. 'They're not on to him yet. But yes, he's running hard with it.'

'With the package?'

'Yes.'

'Is he trying to get into Norway?'

He shook his head. 'No. That would be too difficult.'

'But he started from Murmansk?'

'Yes,' he said straight away, and the lightning flickered faintly in the depth of his eyes.

I didn't want this.

'I don't want this,' I told him.

'Why ever not? There's nothing very complicated.'

I turned to look through the black glass of the window, where the rain made silver rivulets across the Houses of Parliament in the haze. 'I'm not a bloody messenger boy.'

'Oh, come.' I watched his reflection. 'You don't really think I'd encroach on your evening's leisure and ask you to spend all that time in Downing Street just to propose our using you as a messenger boy, surely?'

'It's too political,' I said.

'You're just dodging the issue.'

'I know.'

His soft laugh came. 'Now please don't equivocate.'

Wrong word. Before he'd come into the Bureau he'd been a schoolmaster, and it still showed.

'Cliff can do a job like this,' I told him. 'Or Wainwright.' I turned to face him. 'I'm ready to go out again, but not just to fetch the paper.'

'Certainly we could send Cliff, or Wainwright. But this is extremely important, as you should realize. You know what's in that package, don't you?'

'Proof.'

'Quite so.'

If certain information I received earlier tonight is reliable, we may shortly be in possession of absolute proof that the US submarine Cetacea was in fact attacked and sunk by Soviet arms.

'Anyone can bring that package in,' I said. 'Tuft, Malone, Flood, why on earth don't you use them?'

He watched me with the light playing in his eyes. He'd be in a towering rage by now, I knew that, because I wouldn't do what he wanted me to do. But this was as much as he'd show: just this shimmering light at the back of his eyes.

'You know, of course, that the Vienna conference may depend on whether we can bring this package across. That is why I sent — that is why I asked you to go along to Downing Street. You know we're not being specious. You know we're not just asking you to fetch and carry. We are asking you to do what you can to ensure that in four weeks' time the president of the United States and the Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet will meet in Vienna and call an armistice in the Cold War.'

'Bullshit.'

He gave a gentle sigh. 'If you're trying to test my patience, Quiller, it happens to be infinite.'

That was true. The last time out, Wainwright had smashed up three Avis cars and left an Arab contact in a doorway of the kasbah with an icepick in his brain and got himself photographed in bed with the wife of the French ambassador to Morocco knowing bloody well that the KGB had stuck a camera in the wall of the Hotel Palais Jamai, and Croder had debriefed him personally and given him the keys of his flat on the Croisette with a chef and maid service and instructions to get his nerves back into shape. That was patience.

'There just isn't enough to it,' I told him.

'You're so terribly egotistical.'

'Didn't anyone tell you?'

'Oh yes. But I didn't realize how much it got in your way.'

'So I go and bring this thing in and they tell the Soviets they've got proof about the sub and they'd better apologize or they'll wreck the summit and I get a pat on the back, is that it? For Christ's sake, give me something more interesting.'

'I would have thought you'd be interested in the fact that Chief of Control has decided to stay up through the early hours to do his utmost to persuade one of his elite shadow executives to take something on that has international dimensions. Since you're not, why don't you think about him?'

'Who?'

'The courier.'

'The courier from Murmansk?'

'Yes.'

I turned away from him again, and wished I hadn't, because he could see I was ready to think, and wanted to do it without his eyes on me.

'Who is he?'

'Brekhov.'

I thought about him, about Brekhov. I'd only worked with him once, but he'd been very good: he'd taken three days to bring me something to my hotel in Moscow from our contact at the border, but that was quick because he'd had to get through a militia road check and hole up at a blown safehouse and chance his arm with the kind of papers I wouldn't even show a bus conductor. He even got to my room without going through the lobby, using a fire escape the KGB never bothered to watch because the bottom section had been taken away and they'd put chains across.

Brekhov, a short man with sturdy legs and a big black moustache and a pair of mild brown eyes that could stare — had stared — a hundred militiamen in the face with the look of an innocent child. Brekhov, running hard now through the frozen ruts of Leningrad or Minsk or Lvov or Warsaw if he'd got across by now, with his sturdy legs working under him and never stopping, never tripping, never taking him an inch away from the course he'd set for himself through the night of a Russian winter, not literally of course — they could be flying him through or bringing him out by road in the hollowed floor of a vegetable truck — but he'd be moving as steadily as that, as doggedly, all the way from the Arctic Circle to some overheated gasthaus west of the wall, where he'd sit with a beer and swap code-identities and look around him before he took out the package and put it down on the table, covering it with his hand until you were ready to take it, here it is, what about another beer, here it is, it's warmer in here than up there in the north, I can tell you, here it is.

A good courier, Brekhov. Reliable. The best.

Croder hadn't spoken. He'd wait for me all night, but he knew now that he wouldn't have to. The bastard had got right inside me when I wasn't looking.

'I worked with him once,' I said. 'With Brekhov.'

'Did you?'

He knew bloody well I had: it was only a year ago, on the Corridor thing, when he was already Chief of Control.

'How are they sending him through?'

'We're not quite sure.'

'When will you know?' I turned around and looked at him, and he offered a faint, deprecating smile.

'I think at this point the questions ought to stop, don't you?'

I took a deep breath, slowly so that he shouldn't notice. 'Not necessarily.'

He shrugged. 'We had a signal in from Leningrad an hour ago. He was trying to get onto a plane for Potsdam, using permanent cover for the run out, a maintenance engineer for Aeroflot. We-'

'Are Signals keeping open for him?'

'Oh yes.'

'Who's at the console?'

'Fletcher.'

'Listen, has Brekhov got any backups, any relay people, anyone in the field with him?'

'No. He only ever runs alone.'

I stuck my hands in the pockets of my mac, feeling the cold now, the cold of the nerves, of the night, as the knowledge of total commitment began spreading through the organism like a drug, sending a slow awareness through the infinitely manifold receptors that things had changed, that soon it would be as it had been not too long ago, only weeks ago, when I had believed, crossing the narrow neck of water from Tangier, that they were still with me, and would never leave me until they'd done for me.

This feeling would go, soon. The cold would go. It was just a kind of shock, extended in time to lessen its impact. The organism looks after itself, if only you'll let it.

'There's a lot more,' I said, 'to this thing, isn't there, than picking up a package from a courier?'

Croder turned away and turned back and said when he'd thought it out, 'I'll put it this way. Whoever we send out to meet Brekhov, we'll be putting on continuing standby in case there's more to be done. And with this kind of background — the business of the American submarine — it would be logical to think that there will indeed be more for him to do, a very great deal more. He might not even find himself alone any longer, but the nucleus of quite a complex cell.'

'I only ever work alone. You know that.'

'The mark of the true professional is that he's flexible.'

'Damn you,' I told him, 'don't keep putting up obstacles. I want the job.'

He stood with his feet carefully together and the light playing in his eyes as he watched me, while through the glass of the window I listened to the rumbling of a late taxi turning a corner down there in the rain, and then silence, and then, I swear it, the sound of steadily running feet.

'But of course.' He went to the desk and picked up a phone and pushed three buttons and waited. Someone came on the line and he said, 'Quiller has agreed to go. Set it up, will you?'

'You know, of course,' Charlie said, stirring the whisky in his tea, 'that Croder is a non-fattening, sugar-free, artificially-flavoured turd. Don't you?'

'He's all right.'

'But he's conned you into another mission, three weeks after you got back from Tangier.'

'I let him do it.'

Charlie watched me for a bit and then drank from his cup.

'Lucky bastard.'

I wanted to leave him, but we never do, or not without a good excuse. It's been a year now since they took him off the books and he's been sitting here in the Caff ever since, talking to anyone who'll listen. He says he's waiting for them to send him out again, not on his own — he knows that's over now — but to help a spook who's messed things up so badly that they can only send someone who's totally expendable to get him out alive if he can. It could even happen, but it would only be a gesture, something to tell the widow: we sent a man out there to help him, but things were just too difficult.

'Go home, Charlie,' I said. 'It's gone four.'

'When the rain stops.'

He's afraid he won't be here when they need him, as a gesture, as comfort for someone's widow. That's why you can never get him to go home when there's something big running, with the main console in Signals manned twenty-four hours a day and the Chief of Control sleeping here and that unearthly sense of quiet that settles over the building in ways that a stranger wouldn't recognize, not knowing, for instance, that Daisy and the other girls don't normally put the china down as carefully as this.

'You want a drop more, love?'

'I shall be pissed.'

She took his cup away.

'I shall be pissed,' he said to me with his red eyes narrowed with fatigue, 'and then I shall go out of this fucking place and walk under a fucking taxi. But that's not my game.'

His game is to wait, if necessary forever, for them to send him out again on a last hopeless mission, so that he doesn't have to be picked up in the street or in whatever bleak one-roomed flat gives him shelter. He sits here waiting to go out, and take his own death with him to the rendezvous.

'You say it's gone four?'

'Five past,' I said.

He fiddled with his Seiko. 'Synchronize watches, gentlemen.'

Then I saw Binns coming in. He looked round and saw me and came between the tables and stood looking down with the rain still dripping off his mac.

'You're waiting for clearance, right?'

'Yes.'

'Let's go.'

I put my hand on Charlie's shoulder as I got up. 'It's nothing interesting this time. Nothing you'd even touch.'