Quiller Balalaika

12: KICK

I told Ferris, 'Get Legge's people to check on the Mercedes. It should still be in a side street near the Hotel Faberge.'

'Check on it?'

'It could go bang.'

'I'll tell him. What did you come here in?'

'Nothing.'

I ate some more goulash, hunger beginning. We were in an all night greasy spoon cafe, as far as I'd been able to walk from Vishinsky's hotel before I dropped.

I'd signalled Ferris from the phone box outside and he'd got here a minute ago, so we had to deal with the essentials first. I didn't want some innocent policeman blowing himself up when he started investigating the abandoned Merc.

'Are you operational?' Ferris asked me. Another immediate essential.

'No.'

He sat taking me in with his calm yellow eyes. He must have been distinctly edgy, over the last few hours. When the executive's in a red sector his director in the field stays locked in his base with his nerves, counting the roses on the wallpaper while London comes through on the scrambler every ten minutes to ask for an updated report.

'You need treatment?'

I said no. There was nothing broken. But it'd be a while before I could run flat out or jump a wall or take on more than one assailant at a time with any success, which was what operational meant. Perhaps tomorrow, if I could get any sleep in what remained of the night.

Ferris scraped the legs of his rickety aluminium chair on the tiled floor and went across to the counter and came back in a minute with a ragged cotton napkin and dropped it onto the table. I wrapped my left hand in it: the bleeding had started again.

'Any down?' Ferris asked me.

'Three.'

He'd assumed I wouldn't be looking like this without somebody having become terminal somewhere along the line. There was Jakub, on the roof, and two of Vishinsky's bodyguards at the Hotel Nikolas.

'Self-defence,' Ferris said.

'That's right.' He'd have to report it to London. I'd used a full jokari.

'You reached the board?' I asked Ferris. The board for Balalaika.

'Oh, yes. As soon as you signalled.'

The stub of chalk would have gone squeaking across the slate: Executive clear of red sector. And Holmes would have gone over to pour himself some more coffee, celebrate, hallelujah.

'So you've no transport?' Ferris.

'What? No.'

'You phoned from here?'

'Box is outside.'

I finished the gruel while he went and signalled Legge for another car for me to use.

At least, Koyama would have called it a mawashi-geri, afull roundhouse kick. Qian would have called it a tie-yu, ahook kick. Actually it had been both, because when the roundhouse is drawn back to the fullest extent it automatically forms a hook, with the foot at right angles to the leg.

When I'd heard Vishinsky telling the bodyguard what he wanted done I was still approaching the bar to get him his cognac, and everything had slowed down. When we need more time, we are given it; any crisis will automatically trigger the mechanism.

At that instant the bar was still eight, nine feet away, and I had five or six seconds in which to think what to do. Something had to be done because as soon as I'd given Vishinsky his drink the bodyguard would drop me with a shot and they'd get the bag in here, finis, finito.

It was a full bar, ranging in proof from Dubonnet to straight vodka, twenty or thirty bottles in two rows. At the extreme right was a green frosted bottle of Remy Martin, which was what Vishinsky would be waiting for. The height of the bar top was some three feet, the approximate height of a jokari, depending on the build of the karateka executing the kick, which assumes the horizontal the moment the leg is drawn back.

With four armed men in the room I hadn't a chance of doing anything with my bare hands, and even a gun wouldn't have helped me: they never do. But all the same I would need a weapon, weapons, and here they were, lined up and immediately accessible. The jokari takes longer than any other kick to execute, as much as a full second, but it's also the strongest because of the build-up in momentum, and I thought there was a chance and went on walking towards the bar without breaking the pace, and when the distance had closed to an optimal two feet I dragged in a breath to fire the muscles and felt the rush of the adrenalin and initiated the jokari, turning my head to look behind me as my body swung into the movement and seeing four of the bottles at the end of the rows nestling into the hook before I called on my whole complement of strength and brought the hook forward, loaded and flying in a curve towards the targets.

There wasn't any question of taking aim: it was inevitably a scatter-shot attack and I'd known that, but as the first of the bottles were hurled through the air I saw a man go down to one of them with blood springing from his face and then I was working hard for as many hooks as I had the strength for – three, four, five, the trunk swinging into a steady reciprocating rhythm and the hooks raking the top of the bar for more bottles, three of them reaching the window and crashing against the glass, their splinters glittering as a man found his gun and a shot puckered my sleeve before I lost track of the scene in detail, was aware only of the smashing glass and a man's scream and a fusillade of shots and Vishinsky yelling something about get him and the reek of cordite and alcohol as the kicks went on hooking, sweat in my eyes and blinding me and muscle-burn setting into my right thigh as I went on working, it was this or the forest, my choice, the breath sawing in and out of my lungs and a sudden freeze-frame glimpse of a guard lurching back as a bottle caught him on the front of the skull and smashed the bone, Vishinsky on the floor now with his gold dressing-gown spread out around him and blotched with crimson while I kept the hooks coming, glass fluting through the air in a brilliant shower until hands reached for my legs and I chopped downward and broke a wrist, someone behind me and close and I used a spinning elbow strike and then fell, finding his face and using an eye-gouge and bringing a scream, silence coming in now, a kind of silence as I staggered up and saw Vishinsky groping for a fallen gun and smashed his hand with a heel strike and kicked the gun clear, stunned him with a front snap to the temple and saw him drop, heard movement and felt a hand clawing for me and snapped the fingers back and chose a heel-palm to finish him off and then stood clear and took in the scene, watching for danger.

But there was no movement now. Vishinsky and the guards were lying in a wasteland of smashed glass, blood pooling across the liquor-soaked carpet, a man's face upturned, one eye missing, another man's head cocked unnaturally beneath one of the walls, his hand still reaching for the gun he'd had smashed away from him. I moved from one to the next, checking for vital signs, then dropped like a dead weight as the reaction hit me, lay for minutes, starved for oxygen, lights flashing behind the eyes, a sense of having done something difficult, of being at least half alive, until a degree of strength came back into the organism and I lurched onto my feet, going into the bathroom and washing the blood off my face and hands where the flying glass had cut into the flesh, then making my way out and down the fire escape and into the falling snow.

'Legge is worried about you,' Ferris said when he came back and sat down.

'As long as he does what I want him to do, and otherwise keeps out of my way.'

'He thinks you're trying to rush the mission.'

'It's none of his bloody business.'

I finished the goulash, felt better.

'Well, hello, boys.'

Rouge as thick as mud, navy-blue eye shadow, a broken tooth, what d'you expect in a greasy spoon?

'Don't let me get in your way,' I told Ferris.

'But my dear,' he said and touched my arm skittishly, and she went off on her rounds.

'How's London?' I asked him.

'We'll come to that. Debrief?'

Damn his eyes, I didn't want to wait to hear how things were in London, they didn't sound too bloody good. But he wouldn't tell me until he was ready – you know Ferris.

So I went into the debriefing from the point where I'd run into Vishinsky at the party to the jokari bit forty-five minutes ago and Ferris didn't interrupt, made a couple of notes on his scratch pad, that was all, and this worried me too.

'That's it?' he asked me.

'I think so.' If there was anything I'd forgotten it'd come to me later, with any luck. Just at the moment I was trying to get the wall back into focus: the concussion thing hadn't improved during the fuss at Vishinsky's hotel and I needed sleep, for the love of God.

'What sort of shape was Vishinsky in when you left him?'

'Not bad. Had to put him out.'

'How liable is he to try tracking you and settling the score?'

'He'll do his best, I'd say. He's a psychopathic megalomaniac and takes offence easily.'

'But you left a cold trail.'

I swung my head up and looked at him, said nothing.

'You think you did,' he said evenly, 'but you've still got some lingering concussion.'

Point taken. No one in Vishinsky's suite could have trailed me but someone else could have seen me leaving the building at two in the morning looking like a zombie and decided to check me out – it was Vishinsky's hotel and he might have peeps stationed in the environment.

'I wasn't so far gone,' I told Ferris carefully, 'that I couldn't see a tracker. If I hadn't got here clean this place would be full of ticks by now, and look, I've got to say this, do you really think I'd signal my director in the field for a rendezvous if I thought there was the slightest risk?'

The DIF, by the nature of his calling, must stay strictly out of the action, whatever's happening in the field, and part of the shadow executive's job is to protect him from any risk of exposure. This is sacrosanct and with good reason: the shadow needs to know that he can always rely on getting signals to London, getting support in the field, getting everything he needs – sometimes desperately – to help him through the mission. The director in the field is his communications channel, his universal provider, counsellor and nurse. Without him, nothing can work.

'Just checking,' Ferris said, his eyes still on me. That too is part of his job: to assess what condition the executive is in after there's been some action, to query whether he might have picked up a tick, to decide whether his charge is fit enough to continue the mission, and if not, send him home.

'Understood. As long as we -'

Headlights swept the steamed-up window and Ferris scraped his chair back and went over to the door, taking a look before he went outside.

The food counter began sloping at five or ten degrees and the heavy-faced babushka behind it swayed to one side until I got my head back straight and re-established focus.

'Mercedes,' Ferris said when he came back. 'Not the same model but it's this year's, all right?'

'I'll take it.'

'Some more goulash?'

'No.'

A couple of seconds went by and then Ferris said, 'About London.'

I didn't want to hear. I tell you I did not want to hear about bloody London. You know why?

'You're being recalled.'

That was why. I'd seen it coming, of course. I'd worked with Ferris long enough to catch his vibes, and ever since he'd come in here I'd been listening to the knell of doom in the far distance of my mind.

'Bullshit,' I said.

There was a crust of bread on the table I hadn't eaten and I began breaking it up, pulling it apart, still moist, doughy, smelling of the oven, and I remember doing this, I suppose, because in the last few seconds Balalaika had started to run clean off the track. But that was all. It hadn't crashed. I wasn't going to let that happen.

'Mr Croder,' Ferris said evenly, 'sends you his congratulations, of course.'

On getting clear of the red sector alive. 'How nice,' I said.

'As I told you before, he may not be sleeping too well, having sent you into this one rather impulsively, to save his face vis-à-vis the prime minister.'

Ferris had never spoken like this before: Croder, Chief of Signals and arguably the most effective control in the whole of the Bureau, is regarded with infinite respect, and his personal motivation is never called into question.

'Tell him to take a couple of Oblivons,' I said.

Ferris tilted his chair back, his lean body sloping like a board as he watched me obliquely. 'Strictly entre nous, he may be considering his resignation.'

I stopped fiddling with the crust. 'Croder?'

'His ego,' Ferris said, 'is almost as bad as yours, and just now his pride's hurt, I believe terminally.'

In a moment I said, 'There's something he hasn't considered, in his access of overweening pride.'

Ferris waited, turning his head an inch, and I saw the cockroach darting along the bottom of the wall, bloody place was teeming with them.

'So tell me,' he said.

'I can save his face for him. All he's got to do is leave me in the field and there's a very good chance I can bring this thing off, then he can go back to the PM and shine like an archangel in his eyes. It'd give me a lot of satisfaction to do that for a man like Croder. And for Christ's sake leave those bloody things alone.' He likes putting his foot on them, hearing them crack open. You know that.

Someone came in and Ferris swung his head, a shift worker, leaning a shovel against the wall, snow on its blade.

'Even if you weren't being recalled,' Ferris said as he looked back at me, 'you're not going to be physically operational for another week, and they can't keep this one on the board forever.'

'I'll be back on form,' I told him, 'in a couple of days. For God's sake give me a chance, I'm not superhuman.'

'Even though you may think you are.'

'And a happy Christmas to you too.'

He got up and went over to the wall and I tried to tune out the little cracking noises and when he came back he said, 'The problem, of course, is that these are the instructions I've received from Control.'

In brief there was nothing he could do. When Control instructs the director in the field it's with the voice of God, and this is well understood.

'Have you booked the flight?' I asked him.

'Control only told me tonight, when I reported you out of the red sector. Don't worry, I'll give you plenty of time to rest up first, where you won't be disturbed.'

In a moment I said, 'That's deuced civil of you, but there's another problem. It's my decision to stay in the field, and neither you nor Control can do anything about that.'

I didn't throw down the ace because I didn't know how much it was worth. During the night's business I'd seen the chance, thin if you like, of getting closer to the target for the mission: Vasyl Sakkas. And that was all I needed to run with.

'You make it difficult for me,' Ferris said.

'That's a shame.'

'I can't, as you well know, ignore my instructions. This is -'

'Oh for Christ's sake' – blowing up now and high time – 'the Chief of Signals himself comes to Moscow to offer me a decidedly tricky mission and I agree to take it as far as I can go because it's a challenge and I'm under his personal control and I gain access on the second day out and move into some action that leaves me a touch groggy and then I'm recalled to London because he suddenly gets cold feet. I don't intend -'

'Rather more than a touch groggy – you were very nearly terminal. And the Chief -'

'How many times have I come close to getting wiped out in any given mission, for God's sake, it's part of the job, you know that -'

'There's never been a mission quite so predictably lethal -'

'Then Croder shouldn't have challenged me -'

'And that is precisely what he's come to realize now -'

'A bit late -'

'Actually no, because you're still alive and that's the condition he wants to see you in when you reach London – I'm not interested in shipping a coffin out of Moscow. And let me remind you that as your director in the field I'm responsible for giving you whatever instructions I think fit, and you're responsible for carrying them out.'

Pulling rank, and he'd never done that before, and I was warned. Ferris is by nature the coolest of cats and he never raises his voice or drives his executives into a corner, but now he was really putting things on the line and I wasn't so stupid as not to listen. But I'd already made up my mind, so the only thing left was to try ducking the fallout.

'Be that as it may,' I said, 'I'm going to ground.'

And left it. You've heard, my good friend, of throwing the gauntlet down. That is the sound it makes.

The man who'd brought the shovel in from the street was going across from the counter to the table with his tin tray loaded with potato pancakes and a mug of vasti, and the tart moved in on principle, though her expression was not sanguine. Headlights swept the window again and Ferris watched the shadows swinging across the wall and didn't speak until they'd faded. This was noted, though I said nothing.

I gave him his time. For the executive to go to ground means that he vanishes from the face of the earth, usually with the full understanding on the part of his director in the field that he needs to do this because the situation suddenly demands it – there's been some action and the mission's running hot and the hunt is up and the opposition's closing in and the shadow has no choice but to get out of harm's way. But to go to ground against his DIF's instructions is to burn his boats and leave the ashes strewn across the field – and risk the ultimate sanction: the end of his career.

'If you do that,' Ferris said at last, and carefully, 'you would be aborting the mission.'

'Protecting it,' I told him.

'Without your being operational in the field, there'd be no mission.'

'I am the mission.'

Ignoring this: 'If you go to ground, the Chief of Signals will shut down the board for Balalaika. You'll have no director in the field and no support.'

He knew I realized this but he wanted to spell it out for the sake of formality. I had indeed made things difficult for him, and he also would need to duck the fallout when he got back to London: I warned the executive of the consequences, soforth.

'Point taken,' I said, and in my mind's eye saw the lights going out above the board for Balalaika in the signals room, the dusting block erasing the first reports in from the field and leaving the slate blank as Holmes stood staring at Croder with disbelief in his eyes and those bloody people upstairs put it on record: Mission abandoned, executive's decision.

'Have you any kind of a lead?' Ferris was asking. This was typical: his intuition had cleared a gap.

'Conceivably.'

'How useful?'

'It's pretty thin.'

'But it's there.'

'Yes.'

'And you want to follow it up?'

'Intend.'

'It concerns the target?'

'Sakkas.'

The cockroaches were out again after his recent assault, but now he wasn't interested.

'Do you think it might get you closer to the target?'

'There's a chance.'

In a moment: 'Obviously, if you felt like cluing me in, I might want to signal Control. And he might change his mind.'

'It's too slight,' I said. 'It's just someone's name, out of the blue. Croder wouldn't go for it.'

'Suppose' – Ferris picked up one of the crumbs from the table in his thin pale fingers and rolled it into powder – 'suppose I thought of going for it?'

'What would you do?'

'There are quite a few things,' he said, 'I could do. I could delay signalling London with your decision to go to ground.'

'You'd take that much responsibility?'

'It's vested in me as your DIF.'

He'd never sounded so formal. I asked him, 'What else could you do?'

He looked away. 'Would you go to the safe-house?'

'No. Somewhere else.' It could expose him to risk, because he knew where it was, the place Legge had fixed up for me. A safe-house, once blown, is the most dangerous place in the field. Besides which, Legge himself knew where it was, and he was liable to get in my way: he already thought I was 'rushing the mission', none of his bloody business; I don't like a pushy chief of support – they too can be dangerous.

'If you holed up somewhere else,' Ferris said slowly, 'then Mr Croder might instruct me to mount a search for you, so that I could send you home after all. Then in the meantime, if this lead of yours paid off, you could signal me and I'd report it to London. That could change Mr Croder's mind too.'

Read it like this: he was prepared to stay in the field in case I needed him, provided he could do it on formal instructions and the pretext that he was mounting a search through my support group. That could put Balalaika right back on track, keep my communications open and provide me with support if things started running hot. But I knew that Croder, despite his conscience, could throw me to the dogs once he was told I'd gone to ground: my DIF had been given instructions to get me home, and if I chose to risk death on the streets of Moscow then it wouldn't be Croder's responsibility.

I told Ferris: 'I can't see him leaving you out here with no executive and no mission.'

'There's a chance.'

'All right. Try.'

The flat of his hand came down softly on the table and he let out a breath. 'Let us pray, then, for Balalaika.' It was the closest, in my experience, Ferris had ever got to showing the slightest emotion.

'Amen.'

But I didn't think there was going to be any dancing in the streets. No control of Croder's stature would take kindly to his executive going to ground on his own decision: it was the ultimate offence, implying distrust and indiscipline.

'I'll give you three days,' Ferris said. 'Unless of course the Chief extends that.'

'I'll signal you.'

Headlights swung across the window again and he watched the wall. Then the lights were doused and a car door slammed and a man came in, stomping the snow off his boots.

'D'you need anything more to eat?' Ferris asked me.

'No.'

'Then we'll go.' He nodded to the man as we made for the door and he followed us out. 'This is Dr Westridge,' Ferris told me, 'from the UK embassy.'

Jolly and red-faced, despite the hour. 'And this is the patient?'

Yes.'

'Let's get into my car,' Westridge said. 'There's all my gear in there.'

'Look,' I said, 'I'm perfectly -'

'Just for the moment,' Ferris cut across me, 'you're under my instructions, so get in.'

Westridge got his bag and opened it. 'Been in the wars a bit, have we?'

'Not really.' God protect me from jolly red-faced men at three-thirty in the morning. 'I need some sleep, that's all.'

'Don't we all! Let's have your wrist.'

Three days. That was generous of Ferris. I could check out my one frail lead in less than twenty-four hours. 'What's that?' I asked Westridge.

He pushed the air out of the syringe. 'Tetanus. Sleeve up, which arm is it to be?'

We took it from there, the knee jerk reaction, flashlight in my eyes, tongue out, blood pressure, 'Still feel a bit skew-whiff, do we?'

'Just need sleep.'

'No giddiness when you stand up? Headache?'

'I feel like shit.'

A breezy chuckle. 'Well that's putting it in a nutshell! Now hold your hand still, you'll just feel a little prick, that's all.' I didn't say anything, didn't feel like jokes. 'Tell me when the numbness sets in,' he said.

Snow drifted across the windscreen. 'Is that it?' I asked Ferris.

'What?' He swung his head to look. 'Yes.'

Mercedes SL-4 E, black, two-door, Moscow plates. 'Got a phone?'

Ferris looked at me and said nothing, looked away. Point taken: did I really think he'd fix me up with transport that didn't have a telephone? He's always good at the touche, however long it takes.

'Gone dead,' I told Westridge.

'That's the stuff. Now hold still. What did you cut your hand on?'

'Glass.'

'Clean glass?'

'Some alcohol around.'

'Good, I've always said Chivas Regal's the best antiseptic. Bar-room brawl, was it?' A gusty laugh. 'Lucky you didn't get into anything worse than that, in this fair city. You hear about Seidov, the banker?'

'Car bomb,' Ferris said, 'I believe.'

'Second in a week, and he was the head of the Moskva Trust.' The curved needle and its thread went in again.

'Known for his defiance of the mafiyosa, it just isn't worth it, pay them and cut your losses. Hurt?'

'What?'

'Still numb, is it?'

'Yes.'

He got out some Band-Aids. 'Any more cuts anywhere, grazes, bruises, joints feel limber?'

'I'm fine.' Got him in focus again.

'That's the stuff! Now go and get some shut-eye, do you the world ofgood.'

When we got out ofhis car Ferris asked me, 'You all right to drive?'

'Yes.'

'Follow you up?'

'There's no need. Look,' I said as Westridge left us standing in a cloud of exhaust gas, 'how will I know if Croder drops me cold and calls you in?'

Ferris looked at me, his eyes amber now under the street light. You'll know,' he said, 'when you signal me and there's no answer.'