Quiller Balalaika

1: SNOW

As the TU-154 bounced and floated and bounced again I wiped the mist off the window with the back of my hand and the flashing lights out there became brighter, and I could see a white carpet of fire-foam with yellow-caped figures wading through it.

The smell of garlic came suddenly on the air as Ivan leaned across me to take a look. Ivan had been my fellow-passenger all the way from Paris and I knew the names and ages of his six grandchildren but still wasn't sure what had happened to Rudi, the third-from-youngest: Ivan had been reticent on the details, and all I knew about little Rudi was that he had 'been an angel' and that hundreds had sobbed when they'd lowered the casket into the ground, hundreds.

'The last one,' Ivan said now with disgust as he stared through the window at the wrecked jetliner, 'was in Tashkent, only a week ago. A Yak-42, with thirty more people on board than there should have been.' He shrugged into his black astrakhan collar. 'Par for the course – there aren't enough planes.' The scene swung in a half-circle as the jet made its turn and started rolling towards the terminal, and the question flashed through my mind: why wasn't I feeling relieved that we were safely down? Because it can never happen to us, that's right. 'But it wasn't the extra load,' Ivan told me. 'They said there was water in the fuel tanks. It had been refuelled in St Petersburg in the pouring rain.' He slumped back into his seat. 'Get the water out of the fuel tanks and the vodka out of the pilots and we'd all sleep easier under our seat belts.'

Light snow was falling as we nosed into the runway gate; it had been announced from the flight-deck earlier: light snow, the wind at five knots, the night temperature ten below freezing, welcome to Moscow.

Ivan pumped my hand and presented me with a Cellophane-wrapped packet of toothpicks, courtesy of McDonald's. He said he hadn't checked any baggage. Nor had I, but I went off in the direction of the baggage claim because that was where I'd been told that Legge would make contact.

On my way there I passed an Aeroflot official standing on some kind of box to give him height above the people flocking around him; their faces were blank with disbelief or angry or wet with tears as he tried to reassure them: the rescue teams had now prised the cabin door of the crashed plane open and gained access to the passengers; the flight-deck had continued to report to the tower since the landing, but 'reception was difficult'. It was said that some – perhaps many – passengers were alive, together with three of the crew. Hope must be steadfastly maintained, the official told them, until definite news became available; meanwhile, free vodka and other refreshments were to be had at the cafeteria for those who wished to go there. Some of this was half-lost in the wailing of an ashen-faced babushka who stood rocking her shawled head back and forth between her hands, a little girl clutching at her skirt, her huge eyes staring at something she had never seen before: the sudden spinning away of the world she had always been told she could trust.

Legge was waiting for me at the baggage claim, watching me from the middle of the crowd until he thought I matched the description he'd been given. I'd never seen him before either; I'm just quick to note when I'm being watched, and no one else knew I was here. All I'd been given was his name, and the code-intro.

'All my eye,' he said.

'And Betty Martin.'

'You've got no baggage coming through?'

'No.'

'This way, then.' He was short, energetic, rolled a little in his walk, didn't look round to make sure I was keeping up as we nudged our way between people with wet coats and snowboots, their eyes half-hidden under their fur hats, snow on some of their shoulders: they were in from the street, like this man Legge, to meet passengers. From snatches of conversation I picked up they were talking about the crash, just heard the news.

'We've got customs clearance for you,' Legge said, 'but they'll want to see your visa at Intourist.' A young woman was coming out of the office with a clipboard and Legge steered her back and gave her the visa and she checked it and ripped off her section and didn't seem certain whether to give the visa back to Legge or to me, so I took it and put it away.

'If we can be of any help to you,' she said, 'at Intourist, here is our card and you have only to call us.' A stunning smile: she knew about the customs waiver and that I had to be some kind of VIP to qualify.

We got into a battered black Audi outside the terminal and the chains began beating a tattoo as we moved off through the rutted ice of the street.

'Ex-Navy?' I asked Legge.

He didn't look at me. 'Crystal ball?'

Sometimes a man's walk can tell you more than his eyes, that was all, especially if he doesn't know you're watching him. After a couple of miles I took another look at the far right top corner of the outside mirror on the passenger's side and saw the dark grey Volga was still there, keeping station two cars behind.

'That a tail?'

Legge didn't glance up at his mirror. 'No. Escort.' He lost the rear end for a moment and let the curb kick him back straight, the chains jingling across the ice.

'And the man in front?' The Land-Rover had pulled out ahead of us from the terminal and was still there, in front of a Mercedes.

'Escort.'

The rear end thing had shifted my weight and I snapped the seat-belt tighter. Two escorts, call it a bloody motorcade; it worried me. All Hagen had told me over the phone at three o'clock in Paris this morning was that I had to make Aeroflot Flight 307 at 9:51 and that he'd have transport standing by for me and a man called Legge would meet me in the baggage claim at Sheremetyevo on arrival. I was on stand-by after two weeks' leave so I couldn't ask any immediate questions: they'd come later if I had any. But it didn't look like a mission per se: I would have been ordered to London first for briefing and clearance.

'Are we in a burned-out field?' I asked Legge. This was what worried me.

'Not as far as I know.' He pulled back to let a police car in and we watched it until it went past the Mercedes and got lost in the snow-haze. Dark was already coming down, sheeting the roof-tops with steel.

It was the only reason I could think of for an escort fore and aft: there'd been instructions to protect me from the moment I landed, and that could mean that someone had blown his mission out here and left the terrain smoking.

'Where are we going?' I asked Legge; tried to make it sound casual, as if I wasn't really interested, but didn't bring it off, he knew how interested I was – you never ask questions like that when you're dropped into the field in a hurry, on the principle that you'd have been given the answers already if London had wanted you to know: yours not to reason why, yours but to do or die, so forth.

'Got a rendezvous.' He flashed his lights at someone coming the other way, trying to blind us.

An escort taking us to a rendezvous: someone important, then. Important or desperate or blown or about to be blown: despite Legge's cool I could smell panic in the air, the subtle hint of brimstone.

'Looks different,' I said, ' Moscow.' I hadn't been here since it had become the capital of Russia again. The buildings were the same: it was the traffic, quite a bit more of it. 'Lots of shiny Mercs and Jags and BMWs.' Not lots, I suppose, but they stood out from the crowd of local products.

'Mafiya,' Legge nodded.

The leading escort began taking us into side streets – we were now inside the Boulevard Ring – and finally slid into the curbside just beyond a small Russian Orthodox church and stood there with its parking lights on. Legge stopped outside the church itself and told me to wait in the car. I watched him go along to the Land-Rover through the flurries of snow and talk to the driver. He'd been checking the environment while he was picking his way through the frozen snow with his back to me: he'd stumbled a couple of times, hadn't been watching the ground, even though his head was down. Then he came back and passed the Audi and in the outside mirror I watched him talking to the driver of the rear escort vehicle. There was good street-craft in his movements and I put him down as someone more important than a local contact or sleeper or agent-in-place, possibly the chief of a major Bureau support group: Moscow was still a major field.

When he came back to the Audi he put his head in the open window and nodded. 'We'll be out here. We shan't move.' He looked at his watch. 'Rendezvous time was for 18:00. Couple of minutes to go, but your contact's already arrived.'

I got out of the car. 'Code-name? Code-intro?' I shouldn't have had to ask.

Legge looked at me with no change in his expression. 'You won't need anything like that.'

I crossed the crusted pavement, a snowflake settling on my face and burning the skin as it melted. The arched main doors of the church were shut, chained and padlocked, but the narrow entrance door was unlocked and I went inside, having to get used to the dim lighting in here after the baroque lamps of the street. Security didn't cross my mind: I'd been brought here under escort and Legge had checked the environment – as I had – and my contact for the rdv was already here, would have done his own reconnaissance or been escorted here as I was.

Three candles were burning in a small chapel on my right, their light reflecting from the gilded robes of three plaster saints – Nikolai, Marius, Pyotr. At the far end of the nave I saw movement and more light, flashing on bright silver, silhouetting a dark figure with a bald pink head.

'He's the lay janitor,' a voice came from the shadows of the chapel. 'We shan't be disturbed.'

Croder, by his voice. By his voice and the way he was standing, still and thin as a heron, the steel claw at his left wrist outlined against the dark of his astrakhan coat.

Croder, Chief of Signals.

Hence the motorcade and the formality and Legge's touch of pride when he'd looked at his watch and said, 'Rendezvous time was for 18:00. Couple of minutes to go…' The Chief of Signals is a punctual man. He is also brilliant, ruthless, and without mercy when the choice is to abandon a mission or the life of its shadow executive in the field, showing compassion only when the cost is nothing. He saved my life, once, and that had been the price.

But I was glad to see him. It always stimulates me to find myself in the presence of excellence – let's forget, in this case, the other things.

'Shall we sit down?' Croder suggested.

There was a hewn bench below Marius, the saint. Croder's claw hit the carved edge with the sound of a stone dropping onto a coffin, scattering echoes; he's never careful with it, doesn't find it embarrassing: I've seen him open a tin of sardines with it, push in the broken cork of a '92 Pommard, and, once, smash through the window of a Jaguar and hook the driver's throat before he could take off.

'It's so bloody cold in here,' I said, and sat down near him. Not too many executives, I suppose, would come so close to telling the Chief of Signals he'd chosen an inconvenient rendezvous.

'Yes, I apologise – you don't like the cold, do you? But we needed total security, as you can imagine, and I rather left things to Legge. But I was glad to see you turn up – I thought you'd crashed.'

'Crashed?' I was thinking of the journey here from the airport through the icy streets.

'I heard there was a plane down.'

'Oh, that, yes. It didn't have my number on it.' What the hell are you doing in Moscow? Iwanted to ask him. The COS hardly ever leaves the signals room in London: it is the innermost of inner sanctums – once a wine cellar underneath the building – where at any given time half a dozen directors in the field could be calling in their reports to the mission boards and asking for immediate instructions, and where sometimes the voice of a shadow executive with direct access to the short-wave bands is heard for the last time if he's left things too late to pull out of whatever death-trap he's caught in and even his local support group can't get him clear. Only a man with Croder's impregnable nerves could run a place like that – but here he was in Moscow.

'You're on stand-by,' he said, 'I believe.'

'Yes.' He didn't believe; he knew: he would have checked before he sent for me.

'I'm not sure I have anything for you.' He watched the man with the bald head at the far end of the nave; I could now see he was polishing some silver candlesticks. 'By which I mean,' Croder added, 'anything you would accept.'

I left that. It wasn't like him to hedge, and it alerted me.

'I was with the prime minister,' he said, 'late last night.'

He waited.

'And how was the prime minister?'

'In a towering rage. He told me in effect that while the US is pouring billions of dollars into the Yeltsin economy and the UK is doing its rather more limited best in the same direction, the Russian mafiya is threatening to destroy that same economy and bring the country to its knees.' His narrow head was turned to watch me suddenly from the shadows. 'We may remember that quite recently the head of Russia's Analytical Centre for Social and Economic Policies warned Yeltsin that the growth in organized crime here could well overturn his government and force Russia, with her back to the wall and at gun-point, to choose between anarchy and fascism under the leadership of some dangerous fanatic like Zhirinovsky – with twenty-eight thousand nuclear missiles at his command.'

'I understand it's on the cards, yes,' I said. But that wouldn't account for the 'towering rage'. I waited again.

'General Mikhail Yegorov, Russia 's first deputy interior minister, believes there are upwards of five thousand individual mafiya gangs operating in this country, totalling a hundred thousand active members. Other estimates are double that. Four million business organizations are known to be forced to pay protection money to their local mafiya "services", some of them foreign entrepreneurs – American, British, Japanese – with the result that the price of consumer goods is being forced up by more than twenty per cent, triggering a runaway inflation and damaging the economy to the point where the Russian man-in-the-street is near destitution at a time when Yeltsin is desperate to keep down the threat of revolution on the scale of the storming of the Winter Palace. I'm quoting these few statistics from memory simply to give you a brief picture of events.'

'Understood.'

Behind Croder's narrow, silhouetted head, snow eddied past the stained-glass windows, black against the acid neon of the street lamps beyond.

'But this doesn't,' he said, 'explain the prime minister's feeling of an almost personal affront, does it?'

The rage thing. 'Not really.'

I'd never known the C of S take so long to reach the point. Normally he'd get there so fast that if you didn't duck you'd get it right between the eyes. Again, this worried me.

'Most of the vori v sakone – the mafiya chiefs – are themselves Russian, though one or two of the Hong Kong triads have moved in, together with a few bold Sicilians, even though the Russian-style syndicates make the Italian and Sicilian operators look like harmless amateurs.' The steel claw glinted as Croder turned to face me again. 'In Moscow, one of the eight most powerful mafiya overlords is in fact a British national.'

Got to the point at last, had taken his bloody time. So there it was: while the PM was proposing and authorizing and implementing the transfer of relatively vast sums from the taxpayer's pocket to the Russian economy to keep Yeltsin in power, one British Moscow-based national was busy undermining the process for his own personal gain; a red rag, yes, I could see that, to a man like the prime minister, whose notorious sense of fair play had so far crippled most of his political ambitions.

'Do we know him?' I asked Croder. The Bureau knows a lot of people, some of them on the run, some of them wanted by the police, a few of them useful to us, since in our trade we see blackmail and threats of exposure as valuable tools.

'We know of him,' Croder said. 'His name is Basil Secker, and he uses the Russian alias of Vasyl Sakkas.'

'He passes for a Muscovite?'

'Yes.'

'Fluent, then?'

'Perfectly.'

This time he waited for more questions. The thing is he was being so bloody slow, and now that I knew the potential target for the mission I was getting impatient, smelling the blood, glimpsing the shadows, hearing the distant footsteps. Not that I was committed yet: Croder had spelled it out clearly enough – he didn't think he had a mission I would accept. And that could well be true.

'Go on,' I told him.

'While he was working in the Foreign Office, Sakkas, who had access to the ultra-classified files, blew his cover because of a woman and was sent down for life on a charge of high treason – this was four years ago. During the final months of the Soviet empire he escaped from special confinement by killing two guards – quietly with a piano-wire garotte – and commandeering a fishing vessel on the south coast. The owner's body was washed up at Dover three days later with a harpoon still in its throat.'

I thought I heard shots in the distance, couldn't be sure: the walls of the church were massive stone.

Croder's head was tilted: perhaps he'd heard the same thing. 'Reaching Moscow,' he said, 'with assistance from a special Soviet escort en route, Sakkas was immediately awarded the Order of Lenin for his services in London and given the rank of colonel in the KGB. A month later he was offered the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Patriotic War First Class, and the Order "For Personal Valour" – presumably for so expertly dispatching the two prison guards at Wormwood Scrubs and the owner of the fishing-boat. These bonus honours he refused: in some ways your Vasyl Sakkas is a modest man; or to put it another way he doesn't like too much limelight. With the regime on its way out at the time he may have decided that the Order of Lenin and the other gongs wouldn't mean a great deal to him in the future.'

Croder turned and sat down on the bench below the effigy of St Marius, resting his claw on his knees and looking up at me with his eyes shadowed by the glow of the votive candles. 'Sakkas then submerged for a year or two, then resurfaced as a Russian entrepreneur. We got wind of this from a Moscow sleeper who was doing some work for the ministry of the interior on the mafiya situation, with permission of course from London. We informed Scotland Yard as to Sakkas' whereabouts and opened a file on him ourselves. From the same sleeper we were told that he has so far put away fourteen major rivals and three informers, six of them bound together and burned alive in a stolen BMW in a forest outside the city. There was also a criminal court judge shot down on the steps of his own courthouse only a week ago; he was to try the case of a Sakkas aide brought up on a charge of rape. Sakkas doesn't make personal kills himself any more; he uses hit men. His bodyguard is said to number thirty-two young former athletes, most of them out of the karate dojos and two of them former Olympic bronze medallists in gymnastics.'

'Has he got a mistress?' It wasn't a non sequitur: Croder had said that Sakkas – Secker – had got his cover blown in London by a woman.

'He is fond of ballerinas.'

'Does he keep them to himself, or show them off?'

'I'm briefed that he's rather private about his women, as he is with the rest of his life-style.'

'Does he maintain contact with London?'

'Only as far as his entrepreneurship is concerned; he ships priceless ikons and Faberge jewellery there through his Aeroflot network, using the pilots.'

'The dossier's quite extensive.'

'Legge has your copy, if you decide to take this on.'

He'd said it lightly; it had sounded like an aside. It wasn't.

'Have you given it a name yet?' A code-name for the mission.

'Balalaika.'

At this stage it wasn't important; I didn't know why I'd asked. I knew later, a few minutes later.

'So why aren't the Russian police and security services targeting Sakkas, along with the other top mafiya kicks?' I swung away, took a turn, feeling restless, came back and looked down at the Chief of Signals. He sat perched in the half-light like a hooded crow. 'Or are they?'

I caught the slightest hesitation in him, a pause before he spoke. He'd noted the restlessness, and would know what it meant. Blast his eyes.

'The Interior Ministry's Organized Crime Section has been sending in some of its special investigators, of course. The RAOCs have also -'

'RAOCs?' I hadn't been in Moscow since it was the capital of the Soviet Union.

'Our own acronym for the regional administrations for fighting organized crime.'

'Bureau speak?'

'No, it's a straight translation from the Russian.'

Perhaps he wondered why I wanted to know. It was because I was beginning to want to know everything. 'Go on,' I said.

'The RAOCs have also been sending their people in, but the odds against success are suicidally high, because of the corruption at all levels of government. A large number of civil servants are in the pay of the organizatsiya – the mainstream mafiya – and some of them are actually in close touch, so that any incorrupt agents who try to infiltrate the opposition are immediately recognized by their own colleagues and marked down for the hit squads. Part of the problem is that every legitimate agent is to a varying extent terrified of the job.'

'Terrified of people like Sakkas.'

'Of Sakkas particularly.'

Something flashed through the mind: I suddenly wanted to meet him, Sakkas. Then it was gone but it left a trace, like a trail of smoke on a screen. It was in the same instant that I knew why I'd asked if the Bureau had got a name for the mission yet: I'd wanted everything brought together – their suddenly pitching me into Moscow, the impact of finding the Chief of Signals here, his hesitant and almost diffident briefing. And there it was: Balalaika.

It was also the name for something that hits the nerves of every shadow executive when he hears it.

'That's the only effective method of operation,' I said. 'Correct?'

Croder nodded. 'Yes. Infiltration.'

Hits the nerves because to infiltrate the opposition – any kind of opposition – exposes you more and more the deeper you go in, so that by the time you reach the centre of the web you daren't even move in case it sends out vibrations. Have you ever seen a spider working on a trapped fly? Most people have. It makes its rush, binds the wings until they stop buzzing and then stabs with its jaws, taking its time now, sucking out the vital fluids first, relishing in them.

You've infiltrated before.

Oh, sure. But what the fuck are you trying to push me into?

Sweat gathering: I could feel it. Worse, Croder would see it. Not on my skin. In my eyes. The first admission of commitment to Balalaika.

I took another turn, needing urgently to shake the idea out of my mind. It was too early yet to put my life on the line, if that was what I was going to do. The man with the bald head at the other end of the nave made clanking sounds with his silver candlesticks, trying to be careful not to knock them against each other, perhaps, but not quite managing his veined and sallow hands, his arthritic fingers, vexed with himself because these sacred ornaments were thus far flawless, burnished and gleaming, a glory to God; how satisfactory, how safe to live a life wherein the worst of your concerns is centred on the flawlessness of candlesticks, or isn't that a kind of living death, a perpetuation of all those years of trivia, what do you think, my good friend, what is your honest opinion, now face him again, Croder, pop the question, the next one, the obvious one, the one the bastard is waiting for, perched there on the bench, on my shoulder blades, like a hooded crow.

'If I say no, who will you try next?'

Croder got up, pushed his right hand into the pocket of his coat, let the steel claw dangle. 'No one.'

I thought about this. He'd asked everyone else? And been turned down? Every time? 'Who else have you tried?'

'Fern.'

'And?'

'He said his Russian wasn't perfect.'

'Fern's Russian?' I regretted it immediately, wished I hadn't said it. Croder knew it was a lie, too, but cold feet were cold feet and I've had them myself – pay attention to them and you stand the chance of a longer life. 'Who else?' I asked Croder again.

'Teaseman.'

'And?' Making me drag it out of him.

'He said it sounded like certain death.'

Honest enough. 'Who else?'

'No one.'

'Why won't you try someone else, if I say no?'

The black snow whirled past the coloured windows behind his head.

'There isn't anyone else,' he said.

'Pelt? Sortese? Vine?'

'There isn't anyone else capable.'

'So I'm your last shot.' Not a question but he answered it.

'Yes. You've got to understand -'

'So you've come down to the only psychopath you can think of who might say yes to your bloody suicide run.'

'You've got to understand that I find myself in an invidious position. I have virtual instructions from the prime minister' – he turned this way, that, the energy coming off him, palpable, his aura burning with it – 'to go for Sakkas and bring him down, and in my living memory the Bureau has never refused a mission coming directly from its commander-in-chief.'

His guard down now and I admired that: other men would have sheltered behind their authority. 'So you accepted it,' I said. 'This one.'

Look, anybody can make a mistake, even the Chief of Signals. Faced with virtual orders from the head of state he'd refused to believe he couldn't find a shadow to take this one on, and when the door of No. 10 had closed behind him he'd been committed.

'Yes. I accepted it.' He swung towards me. 'Should I have?'

'Oh for Christ's sake, I can't tell you the answer to that yet; it's too soon.'

'Take your time. Take all the time you need.'

And enough rope.

'This is why you're here personally,' I asked him, 'in Moscow?'

'Of course.'

'I don't quite see why it's so bloody obvious. You could have signalled me personally in Paris. Or sent an emissary.'

Standing close, face to face suddenly. 'You're making it very hard for me.'

'I've no intention. I'm just looking for the bottom line, that's all.'

He swung away again. 'The bottom line is perfectly clear if you choose to read it.'

So I read it, took a minute, but I think I got it right. Even Croder wasn't prepared to send a man to his almost certain death over a signals line. It had got to be done face to face, if at all. And he was forcing himself to the issue on the thinnest possible chance: that before my almost certain death I could get close enough to the target for the mission – Vasyl Sakkas – to bring him down. And you can interpret that how you please: put him out of business, run him out of Russia, destroy his network or conceivably arrange to have him found spread-eagled among the stinking bric-a-brac of a rubbish dump or floating in the Moscow River or sitting like a cinder at the melted wheel of a Mercedes 206 in Sokolniki Park: the Bureau too has its hit men, though I am not one of them. But even if I could pull this thing off, the risk would increase a thousand-fold in the final act because of the kill-overkill syndrome.

'Look,' I told Croder, 'if I take on Balalaika, what toys am I going to get?'

Again it was a second before he answered. I don't think he'd been quite ready to believe I'd even consider this one. 'I would be your control,' he said.

I felt the reaction. When you're offered the Chief of Signals as your control it's like being handed the Holy Grail on a gilded platter even before you can wipe your feet on the red carpet.

'On a twenty-four-hour watch,' I heard him saying, 'throughout every phase of the mission.' He wasn't turning away from me now, stood birdlike in the shadows, the candles touching his eyes with brightness.

This too impressed me. They've got cubicles next to the signals room where the controls can catch some sleep if a mission starts running hot and they have to keep close to the board. But I could remember Croder mounting a round-the-clock stint only once in the whole of my time with the Bureau, and that was when Flack was stuck in a trap within a mile of the Kremlin with the proceeds of a document snatch that had to reach the Ministry of Defence in London before the PM could raise the president of the United States on the red telephone to say whether or not he was prepared to send troops in with the UN forces if an air strike against Iran was ordered first. Croder had lit a fuse under Flack's support group and got the documents out and faxed within three hours and brought Flack home with not much more than a touch of shell-shock. Croder is that good.

More toys, I'm never satisfied. 'Who can I have as my director in the field?'

'Whom would you like?'

'Ferris.'

In a moment: 'Ferris is directing Rickshaw in Beijing. But if -'

'Who's the executive?'

'Tully.'

One of the higher-echelon shadows, or he wouldn't have been given Ferris. 'Where are they,' I asked Croder, 'with Rickshaw?'

'Approaching the end-phase.'

'Does it look sticky?'

'Not at present, though in the end-phase anything can happen, of course.'

Conscience pricked. 'I'd give a lot for Ferris, but -'

'You need give nothing.' He was looking down, Croder, saw the problem, was trying to assess my thinking. To take a major DIF away from a top shadow moving into the end-phase of a mission was probably unheard-of in the annals of the Bureau. But the trade-off was obvious: if the Chief of Signals was prepared to order it, it meant that he wanted me to have every single advantage he could give me for Balalaika because it was that dangerous. How much, then, was I ready to listen to my conscience? How willing was I to go into this one with someone directing me in the field who lacked Ferris' experience, brilliance, intuition, and ability to get me home with a few bones left, to pull me out of God knew what bloodied stew of an end-phase where Balalaika could leave me foundering?

I have little stomach, my good friend, for the last-ditch eleventh-hour death-or-glory gotterdammerung favoured by some of the shadows – Kruger, Blake, Cosgrove. Bold fellows, but they carry within them the death-watch beetle, quietly burrowing.

'If you took Ferris off Rickshaw,' Iasked Croder, 'who would replace him?'

'That is hardly your business.'

Perfectly true. I was being offered a director in the field of my own choosing and I could take him or leave him. I wasn't invited to play any part in decision-making at the highest control level.

'Then if I agreed to work this one,' I said, 'I'd need Ferris.'

Croder's head came up. 'You would have him.'

'I'm not saying -'

'You would have him,' Croder nodded quickly, 'if you in fact decided to accept the mission. It doesn't commit you.'

Croder has – has always had – his scruples. Tonight he was ready to give me anything I asked for as an incentive to get me into Balalaika, but he was going to stop short of coercion.

'What about -' I stopped short as the distant thudding of an assault rifle started hammering at the walls of the church – distant but closer, a lot closer than the last shots we'd heard. We waited for it to finish: I would have put it at a three-second burst, quite long enough to bring about what was intended.

'At this point,' Croder said, 'let me tell you that if you reach final briefing with Legge, he'll impress it upon you that these people in Moscow are not your cosy Sicilian brotherhood. These people kill those of their protectees who refuse to pay, simply as an example. But they also kill policemen, government agents, bankers, judges, whoever gets in their way. I mention this advisedly.'

The smell of cordite out there somewhere lacing the snow, blood creeping from the red-running eggshell skull, a hand flung out to clutch at the last vestiges of life, the fingers already uncurling, empty.

I suppose I'd been silent for a moment, because I heard Croder saying, 'I'm ready for questions, if you have any.'

'All right. What about expenses? If I had to infiltrate a milieu as affluent as the mafiya I'd need credibility.'

'The figure suggested – I have this directly from the prime minister – is one million US dollars in hard currency, immediately available from Barclay's Bank in Moscow.'

'And if that isn't adequate?'

'You'd be able to call upon whatever further funds you needed.'

'Fair enough. Now tell me about this man Legge.'

'Legge has been in Moscow for nearly ten years. He headed the leading support group for Cossack, Sabre Dance and Roulette. In his last operation – this was post-Yeltsin – he got the executive out of a remote detention camp run by a clandestine cell of former KGB officers by commandeering three armoured cars and a mortar unit from a Russian Army garrison in Tashkent. Prisoners were not taken.'

'Real pro. How big is his group?'

'He runs fourteen men under constant training, and can recruit more from sleepers and agents-in-place if needed.'

'He ever indulge in free-lancer bullshit?' A support chief who commandeered armoured cars from the host services could be tricky to handle.

'I don't quite follow.'

'I mean, he takes orders?'

'From those he respects. I rather think you qualify.'

One of the candles guttered, and smoke spiralled upwards across the statue of St Marius.

I hadn't got any more questions.

Took a turn, watched the man down there polishing his sacred artefacts, felt an instant of brotherhood, listened again to the thudding of the rifle and saw again the fingers slowly uncurling, thought of Moira – how long would the rose take to shed the first petal? – thought of Daisy in the Caff, good luck, she always said, knowing when we were going out, knowing sometimes more than the superannuated cardinals in Administration, knowing sometimes when a shadow wouldn't come home. Thought of life's continuance against great odds, turned back to Croder.

'Look,' I said, 'I'll take it as far as I can.' I heard the echo of my voice from a niche in the chapel. 'That's all I can offer.'

Croder's eyes were bright. 'That's all I can ask.'

The hot wax of the candle drowned the wick at last, and the tendril of smoke vanished into the shadows. I nodded and turned away, going out of the church through the small side door and into the drifting snow.