Quiller Balalaika

19: FLASHLIGHT

Behind the counter the so-called orderly room was a mess, box files made of cardboard at all angles across the floor and piled up the wall, three empty vodka bottles still where they'd been dropped among the cigarette cartons, five or six pairs of snow boots crowded near the door at the rear with a thick rawhide whip lying across them, the tip of its lash frayed from long use and the bone handle worn to an ivory brilliance, teasing the nerves unpleasantly.

It was cold in here, but that was all: not freezing, you could feel your fingers, there'd be some embers still warm in the pot-bellied stove. I kept the small plastic lamp held low – there were no curtains. The lamp had been on a bicycle once, Alex had told me, was part dynamo, and he'd managed to keep it hidden when he'd arrived at Gulanka and the guards had gone through his belongings; every day he secretly span the wheel of the dynamo to keep the lamp charged; the only source of light we were allowed here was a box of matches.

Antanov, Marius.

The tricky thing was going to be leaving the files as I found them: they didn't seem to be in any particular order. A to K, for instance, was on one of the labels, but this box dealt with guard duties. The A to K file next to it dealt with the inmates of Hut five, Arkady to Bakar, no Antanov between them. There were, I would have said, thirty or forty files.

Midnight plus fifty on the wall clock, no means of knowing if a sentry came round to check, or if so, how often. The orderly room was the nerve centre of the camp, and therefore for me, now, a distinct red sector.

Mr Croder? Another red sector signal for Balalaika's just come through from Moscow.

Joking, of course: it was eight days since Ferris had been ordered out of the field and by now the lights would be switched off over the board, either that or a new mission would already be set up there with data coming in from the director in Algeria or Baghdad or Beijing, while Mr Croder shut himself up in his tempered-steel shell to consider whether or not to resign, how much guilt to feel for the little ferret he'd left running in circles through the snow, or whether he could hold out a spider's-thread hope for an eleventh-hour last-ditch breakthrough for the mission, knowing as he did the blind tenacity of said ferret when the jaws of adversity gaped from the shadows of the labyrinth.

It wasn't my concern now. London could go straight to hell.

MOSKVA. Deliveries by train from the 'city' last week: three tons of canned food, twelve pairs of new boots, a field telephone, two radios, three dozen towels, two hundred feet of one-inch rope and a hundred feet of half-inch cord, ten handcuffs, ten chain shackles, four pinewood coffins, six crates of vodka.

I'd seen two men going into the dinner hall yesterday with their feet shackled and their heads shaven and no winter jackets on, simply trousers and T-shirts; they'd been blue with the cold. In a place like this there'd be a whole variety of punishments.

The wind was moaning under the door, powdering the bare boards with snow. Somewhere above the storm layer was a full moon two diameters high from the horizon, and from the window the light was eerie and the snowflakes black, silhouetted against the eastern sky.

Voices, and I switched off the lamp and froze.

Voices or the wind, or voices in the wind.

A beam of light was on the move out there, probing along one of the pathways that had been cleared earlier, two dark figures behind it with their faces lit by the back-glow. Turning left, turning right, coming back, the beam sweeping the door of a hut – the commandant's HQ – and moving on again and again coming back along a parallel path, coming this way as I lowered myself behind a cabinet, waiting, the voices out there torn by the wind but louder now.

And what, if those men came in here, would there be to say? Some instant rehearsal was in order.

I was looking for a friend of mine in the files.

Who let you in here?

Nobody.

You've got no permission to be here?

No.

You mean you broke in?

I picked the lock.

Isn't that breaking in?

I suppose so. But -

My God, are you in trouble! Hold your hands behind your back.

Click.

The beam of the lamp flooding the window now, then the cracks of the door, flickering across the powdering of snow on the floor and gilding it.

Waited.

'I told him I wasn't going to do another fucking guard duty for him till he'd paid me for the last time.'

'Maybe he's out of cash.'

'Shit, then that's his problem, not mine.'

The clump of their boots on the pathway, the sound fading.

Inside the organism the pulse rate higher, throbbing at the temples, and I gave it a couple of minutes to come down. It wasn't the idea of having to answer a few questions that worried me, or the handcuffs, or the thought of the rawhide whip. This was the worry: if I left here tonight without finding Antanov in the files there'd never be another chance.

Time, then, is distinctly of the essence. I cannot afford to be caught in here before I've finished. Hold one thing and one thing only within the third eye.

Marius Antanov is the key to Balalaika. Hut nineteen. Abel, Aker, Avonik.

In half an hour I spun the dynamo wheel, running it along the edge of the wooden counter for three minutes, switching on the lamp again, finding it brighter.

At 01:17 1 was among the boxes piled against the wall, taking the top one down, remembering the angle at which it had been set there.

INCIDENTS, 1994 to 1996. Escape attempts: details. Death due to escape attempts: Inside camp. Details. Outside camp (wolves). Punishments Awarded for 1) Disobedience,

2) Breach of lights out, 3) Attacks on other inmates, 4) Attacks on guards. Details. Punishments: 1) Snow-clearing for 20 hours with 2 15-minute breaks, hard rations. 2) Flagellation (12 Strokes). 3) Shackles, head shaven, 6 days. 4) Solitary confinement, 3 to 30 days.

The wind moaned under the door.

At 01:48: hut fifteen. Blank. At 02:13: hut seventeen. Blank. At 02:39: hut nineteen. Blank. At 03:21: hut twenty-two. The last one.

Berechov, Bulgarin, no 'A's. No Antanov down as Present, no Antanov down as Absent, Missing or Deceased.

What actually happened – Natalya – was that the Ministry of the Interior sent a squad to arrest my brother as he was coming out of a cafe on the Ring one night. The next day there were charges brought and he was summarily convicted of murdering a judge and sentenced to a life term at Gulanka.

I hadn't misheard her. Gulanka was one of the three most notorious penal settlements in Siberia, allocated specifically for life terms with no remote possibility of release.

So had Antanov been sent somewhere else? To one of the other two?

Mother of God.

I should have checked.

I should have asked Mitzi Piatilova to confirm it for me at her office. If I'd had a director in the field I would have had the time to think, to make careful plans, to structure the moves. But I'd got off the blocks too bloody fast, wanting to make a breakthrough and signal London and get Ferris back to help me put smoke out and head Sakkas off before he could send his army in, tie up the whole mission and bring Balalaika home to the cheering of the crowds and the dancing in the streets before it was too late to do anything as a lone-wolf executive with no local direction and no support group and no signals, no instructions through Cheltenham, running a mission with its head cut off, finis, finito, the end of the line.

Mea culpa.

Moaning under the door, the high wind from the Arctic sweeping the ice and tumbling the silvered crests across the ocean under the lowering moon, to reach the coast and the land and the massif out there, hurling a wave of snow across the camp and with such force now that the flakes hit the window audibly as I stood motionless, of what import is the life, of what import is the fate of this one puny creature trapped in the maelstrom of such a night, pinned by his predicament and unable even to move as he comes to know, is brought to know the truth, to hear the death knell of his grandiose ambitions?

Not much.

Yet we must strive, must we riot, my good friend, to play the game and at whatever cost? What else can we do when we're thrown the bloody ball?

Gulanka. She had said Gulanka, and quite clearly.

So if they'd sent Marius Antanov to one of the other camps it had been done without her knowledge, perhaps deliberately, so that he would never receive her letters, her parcels of comfort, her love, her encouragement. That would be something a man like Sakkas would think of, would arrange. Or there'd simply been some official decision reached behind the scenes: Gulanka was already running beyond its specified capacity, Igor had told me yesterday, and the crowding had brought complaints from some of the staff. And again, Natalya Antanova hadn't known, hadn't been informed by the authorities – why should she be? Her brother had been thrown on the trash heap in northern Siberia and was of no further account.

So face the facts.

To find which camp Antanov had actually been sent to I would have to get out of this one first and reach Moscow and see Mitzi and start all over again. Easy to say. You want to know the only way to get out of Gulanka? Igor, his big knife whittling at the prop. Get yourself a bit of rope and sling it over a beam and kick the box away.

The hut flexed to the wind, and somewhere on the roof a loose patch of tarred fabric flapped, fretting at the nerves as I stood motionless still, thinking, letting the subconscious play in what peace it could find while I held patient, waiting for the final readout.

Conscious business: watch the window; the sentries would be back in this area before long now, or possibly new ones, after an unscheduled changing of the guard because of the blizzard. Rehearse again what I would say if anyone came in here, embellish on it. Remember that whatever the risk of standing for any length of time outside to lock the door again with the makeshift key, take it: it must be found locked, in case I ran foul of a sentry on my way back to the hut and they started putting two and two together in the morning.

Patient, be patient, let the infinitely subtle processes of the subconscious consult the higher self and look for answers, while in the forebrain the thoughts circled under the garish light of logic… Even if I tried to get out of this place there were the guards, the guns, the dogs, the wire, the wolves… there's a big pack out there, thirty or forty of 'em with a huge dominant male. You think the wire's something to get through? Try getting through the wolves. And even if I could -

Readout.

Not a breakthrough, but let's look it over. Conceivably, yes, Marius Antanov could have been sent to Gulanka under an alias, perhaps to sever his link with Sakkas. So I should now search the files again for a name I didn't even know?

No. Look at the photographs.

And start now: there are six or seven hundred of them. 03:32.

And don't just look at them: study them carefully. She had an elfin face, Natalya, finely sculpted and delicate. I wouldn't expect to find that in her brother, though there could be the same bone structure, the same overall slightness of feature. Or his genes could be paternal-dominant or he could even be a throwback to an earlier generation and look totally different, his face square, heavily set.

03:35. Three hundred of the photographs scrutinized, two noted as possibles.

04:49. The storm buffeted the hut, screaming now through the overhead cables outside.

Six hundred faces, with two more possibles, and forget the sinking of the heart as the cold hard facts nagged at the mind: it was a total shot in the dark to think that Antanov was here in the camp under a different name, and if he were, the chances of his looking anything like his sister were slight in the extreme; you can tell people more easily by their walk, the way they turn their head, the movement of their hands, their speech patterns; the camera is notoriously inaccurate, limited by the light factor and only two dimensions.

06:12. Six hundred and seventy-one, with a total of twelve possibles, the embers in the stove long since dead and the hands numbed and the feet frozen, the blood sugar low by this time and my estimation of the chances of success close to zero.

I slid the last of the files back into its correct position as voices sounded again in the alleyways outside and a beam of light began playing across the doors of the huts. A new guard would have come on at 06:00 if they conformed to recognized routine, and I sighted through the window again from cover.

I couldn't recognize them in their fur hats but one of them was stopping at the door of the commandant's office to try the handle and my boot kicked the corner of the counter as I came through the gap very fast but the sound wouldn't have carried outside. The key was in my hand as the two sentries – a change of guard, yes, the last ones hadn't checked the door handles – came along the pathway with the beam of light swinging through the snow.

Faster.

The tumblers obstinate, the crude key slipping across their surfaces, the voices outside louder now, the beam of light brighter, the wind screaming through the overhead cables, faster, the tumblers as firm as rocks, if that guard had checked the commandant's office door he'd be certain to check this one, tilt the key the other way, tilt it and try again, it doesn't follow that a home-made lock pick will work from both sides but keep on trying, tilt it this way again, the voices louder still, shouting against the wind as the beam swung across the window and then flooded the gap below the door, take the last chance then and abandon the lock and get behind the counter, got right down as the handle rattled and the door swung open and the sentries came in through a gust of driving snow, slamming the door against it and coming across to the counter.

'Leave 'em a note, Rudi, door found unlocked, 06:17. The skipper's going to piss all over poor old Sacha but we've got to report it, bloody hell, this is the orderly room, anyone could just walk right in.'

'God's truth.'

I could hear him tearing a sheet off a pad and raking among some pens, his breathing noisy as he took his time forming the words he wanted. Crouched on the floor in the shadows, I could see the top of his hat, the snow melting into diamond drops on the fur. If he raised his head too far my own would come into his line of vision, an inch too far, two inches, not more than that.

'Unlocked,' he asked, 'or left open?'

'What? Unlocked. Door wasn't open, was it? There's a difference. Door'd been open, this place would've been covered in snow by now.'

A brief laugh. 'God's truth. Unlocked, then.'

'Right.'

I couldn't move down any lower than I was, couldn't turn my head farther into the shadows, had to wait it out, listening to the guard's breathing and thinking of the whip, the shackles, the solitary cell.

'Come on, Rudi!'

'Writing ain't me best thing, you know that.'

'Let's have a look,' his boots clumping over the boards.

'Found's got a "d" for Christ sake, it's not "foun". Put a "d". Look.'

'Oh.'

'That's it. Now come on, we're holding up the fucking parade.'

For an instant I saw his eyes, Rudi's, but he wasn't looking down but turning away, dropping the pen onto the counter. Then their boots marched across to the door and one of their rifles swung and hit the frame as they went out into the howling wind and I heard the bunch of keys jingling outside as I slowed the breath, let the muscles go, re-establishing the norms in the system.

I gave them ten minutes to clear the area and then got the door unlocked again and worked on it from the outside before I left, took short detours between the huts on the way back to my own, tramping through the deep new snowfall with the names of the twelve apostles of Balalaika lodged in my head.