Quiller Balalaika

6: MOTORCADE

Ferris had said 10:30 and it was only a twenty-minute run so I took my time, trying out the S420 as I drove it away, getting used to the controls and instrument panel and pushing some of the buttons and folding the outside mirrors back and dropping the head rests and activating the headlamp washer jets. I suppose most of this stuff had been put into the design to give the dealers something to sing about in the showrooms, but if I ever had to drive this car through an ambush or a blizzard or do any fancy footwork with it the extras would give me a distinct edge on the opposition.

Found the button for the traction control and gunned up and got normal wheelspin until the chains dug through the snow and we moved off, not a lot of acceleration with a car this heavy but you can't have everything – the thick storm windows and door panels would absorb or deflect oblique fire and that could raise the chances of survival if things began running hot.

I shut all the whistles and bells down and slowed to a steady pace and turned north towards the ring road, checking the time al 10:15. Dried blood inside one of the fingers of my right glove was sticking to the knuckle, the one I'd used on Rogov's nerve points, and I eased it clear, watching the BMW in the mirror and making a square circuit when it didn't go away, but this was just for practice because the Mercedes was completely clean: it hadn't been within sight of the two bodyguards when I'd driven away and there hadn't been enough action to draw attention to me personally.

By 10:29 I was making my first, pass through the rendezvous zone near the Borovickaja metro station under a clear night sky with less than full-contrast shadow from the first-quarter moon. The taxi moved in soon after 10:30, and I took up the tail along Vozdvizenka and when it made a right turn and stopped I left the Mercedes with the offside wheels on the pavement and locked it and watched the alarm flasher shut down and then walked through the dry snow to the taxi and got in.

'How was Beijing?' I asked Ferris.

'Terrible smog, horrible food.'

'It's not what I meant.'

'I know.' He told the driver, 'This is Berinov, the executive.' The man looked round, just enough to show some of his face underneath the big fur hat. 'Charlie Tolz,' Ferris said, 'one of our sleepers.' Tolz faced his front again. 'Let's just keep moving, Charlie, anywhere you like. And you can leave the radio on.'

Rachmaninov, the Prelude in G. 'How's Rickshaw?' Iasked Ferris, spelling it out this time. In the presence of a Bureau sleeper there's total security.

Ferris looked down at the folders on his lap, his thin, sensitive face catching light from a passing car. 'It could go either way.'

'Shit,' I said.

'Don't worry, they've sent a perfectly capable replacement in.

'Who?'

'That's not important. The important thing is to get you debriefed before the heating in this thing chokes us to death.' He switched on his tape recorder. 'We're running.'

I wanted to ask him about Tully – how did Tully feel about getting his DIF suddenly replaced in the end-phase of a mission that 'could go either way'? But Ferris wouldn't say any more than he had already even if I asked him, so I shifted round a bit on the seat and started debriefing. 'I've made contact,' I began, 'with a woman called Mitzi Piatilova who officially works for the RAOC branch office in my area. She also tries to make tentative connections with the mob, because she likes money. She could be useful.' I filled in the details, her night work at the club, her thoughts on Zhirinovsky as a potential dictator, so forth. 'I've also -'

'Spell her name.'

I spelled it for him. Debriefing always sounds stilted when we do it on a recorder: the tape's going to be reviewed and examined and picked apart by half a dozen Bureau analysts in London and then put into a computer that's going to leave our every word carved in stone, and we're aware of this. 'I've also made contact,' I went on, 'with a medium-weight mafiyosa named Vishinsky. I muscled my way in to talk to him – he was playing poker at the Baccarat Club – and pitched him the story that Ihad some sable for sale and told him the deal could make him half a million US dollars. He liked it, but when I showed him the diamonds to prove -'

'The diamonds?'

'Legge gave me some for bartering chips. When I showed them to Vishinsky to prove I was a pro in good standing he took the hook and decided that two million pounds sterling was better than half a million dollars and sent a couple of his bodyguards after me when I left the club. They -'

'For the stones?'

'Yes. It was the only way I could isolate them for working on. One of them gave me the location of Vishinsky's headquarters.'

'Really,' Ferris said, his pale eyes watching me in the shifting light from the street. He wasn't showing any excitement, but he should have been.

'Of course, he could have been lying.'

'You know,' Ferris said, 'when someone is lying under duress.'

'All right, then he wasn't.'

Watching me. 'This looks like access.'

'No need to get excited.'

Ferris hit the stop and ran back and cleared the last bit and replayed and took it as far as 'access'.

'Anything more?'

'I don't think so. Obviously I've blown my image the first day out. Vishinsky's going to keep watch for me.'

'It was worth it, for the access.'

Charlie had been watching the mirrors a lot in the last few minutes and now he made a couple of left turns and a couple of rights and there were no more lights behind us. Ferris dropped the folders onto my knees. 'Moscow information, mainly, that Legge wouldn't have access to. And your complete legend. I picked it up from the embassy when I flew in.'

I looked at him. 'How much does the embassy know?'

'Nothing. This one is very hot indeed.' Ferris shifted on the seat now to look at me, stretching his long thin legs. 'Let me tell you exactly how hot.' When he spoke again his voice was muted. 'Mr Croder is out on a limb.'

It was like saying that God had blundered.

'I got some vibrations,' I said, 'when he briefed me last night.'

'That doesn't surprise me. The thing is, he's not only committed himself to Balalaika, but if you can't bring it home he's not going to send anyone else into the field.'

He waited. I said, 'He'd shut the whole thing down?'

'The whole thing. I assume that from the vibrations you picked up you also realized that not only did he commit himself – and the Bureau – when he was with the prime minister, but he had to face the necessity of sending in an executive with, shall we say, none too sanguine a chance of staying alive. You'll forgive my disarming candour.'

We were following the river now, north along Kremnevskaja, and I watched a garbage truck stuck in a snowdrift and trying to barge its way out like a trumpeting elephant, half lost in a cloud of diesel gas.

'I know all that,' I said in a moment. I felt I was moving – being pulled – towards something I wasn't going to like, wouldn't know how to handle.

'But you haven't thought about it,' Ferris said, his voice sounding a little way off as my thoughts focused inward. 'And you've got to do that, before we go any further.'

I needed time, and took it. 'I'm not quite sure what you mean. Before we push the mission any further?'

'Yes.'

I wished he'd take his pale, unblinking eyes off me; I could feel them as I watched the river running past us, a coal-black glitter with the reflection of the lamps afloat on the surface.

'Brief me,' I said.

'It's not like that.' Ferris waited, but I didn't say anything, still needed more time. 'This is nothing I can brief you on.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, how much has he told you? Croder?'

'Not much. I've only talked to him through signals, scrambled in Beijing.'

'And?'

'He simply told me you'd accepted Balalaika and had asked for me to direct you in the field.'

'So where did you pick up this – this other stuff?'

'From London.'

'On the phone?'

'Yes. I sensed' – he lifted his pale hands, dropped them – 'certain undercurrents.'

And this is Ferris for you. At birth he was furnished with antennae, as sensitive as an insect's. It's why I always try to get him when there's a new mission on the board: he can show you the way through the labyrinth without even looking at the map.

'Who did you talk to,' I asked him, 'in London?'

'Who would you think?'

'Holmes?'

'Of course.'

Had to be Holmes, yes, you could ask him things you couldn't ask anyone else, because you knew he wouldn't let it go any further; it would stop right there, locked in the security of his totally impregnable mind.

'And what did Holmes tell you?'

'He never really tells you anything, does he? You have to read between the cyphers.' Ferris turned his head to watch the river for a while, and I left him to think, wasn't easy. Then he turned back and said, 'I probably know the Chief of Signals rather better than you do, since the directors in the field are in closer touch with the controls. He comes across as Machiavelli on ice, doesn't he, hard as a diamond cut in the rough and all that. But deep under the shell he has a conscience, and it's bugging him now.'

'You're talking about Croder.'

'Chief of Signals. But the problem here is that he started going too fast, gathered too much momentum when he came away from 10 Downing Street that night, and the result was that he suddenly found himself committing an executive to a probable early death. He -'

'I committed myself. He gave me every chance to say no.'

'Oh, I'm quite sure. But he was offering you something he knew you couldn't resist.' A beat, his eyes on me. 'Wasn't he?'

'Look, it's not the first time I've agreed to a suicide run.'

'Would you have committed yourself to Balalaika for Shatner? Or Flockhart?'

Two of the controls. 'I don't know.'

'You've got to face yourself. Then you will.'

Jesus, I'd come to this rendezvous for debriefing and here I was on a psychiatrist's couch. Ferris had never been like this before at the outset of a mission. Nothing had been like this before.

When I'd given it enough thought I said, 'No. I wouldn't have done this one for any other control.'

'Thank you. But you'll do it for Mr Croder. That too is his problem. He's very much aware of your loyalty and your respect. You're not alone – he can make people do things for him they wouldn't do for anyone else.'

'That's their decision. Our decision. Christ, you're right, it's too bloody hot in here.' I tried to wind the window down but the handle broke off so Ferris tried his, and the draft came cutting against our faces.

'Charlie,' Ferris said, 'turn the heater off for a bit.'

'I get chilblains.' But he reached for the switch.

Through the window the chiming of a clock sounded from somewhere in the Kremlin across the river, and in it I heard a note of inevitability, of life predestined.

'So give me the score,' I told Ferris.

In a moment, 'I wish I knew. I can't speak for Mr Croder, nor can I ask him what's in his mind. All I can do is suggest a possibility, and you've got to see it as such. I think it's possible that at any given time Mr Croder might act suddenly on the dictates of his conscience and instruct me to pull you out of Balalaika and send you home.'

I listened to the clock, waiting for the last of the strokes, for the silence to come in, wary of it, not wanting time to move on. Then there was just the air freezing on our faces, and Ferris watching me.

'He can't do that,' I said.

'He's your control.'

'Tell him I've got access, for God's sake. Send a signal.'

'I don't think I'd better, if you want to stay with the mission. The access you've got is to extreme hazard.'

'But that's a given.'

'I agree. But I don't think it'd take a great deal to tip the balance with Mr Croder.'

I watched a barge moving north along the river under the light of the quarter moon, leaving a white satin wake across the black velvet, a feather of smoke against the gold domes of the Kremlin. In Moscow the winter nights can be beautiful, and I didn't want to look away.

Waiting, Ferris, his pale eyes on me.

'If Croder pulls me out,' I said at last, 'there's nothing I can do.'

'That's not quite true.'

I felt pressed, hunted for the answer. 'No other control would take it over. And no other executive.'

Ferris wound the window up and the air was quiet again. 'Put the heater back on, Charlie.' Then he turned and lowered his voice. 'Suppose you tell me what you'd do if the Chief of Signals pulled you out. And take your time.'

We were turning south again now, along Varvarka, and in the distance across the square I could see a motorcade of four limousines on the move into the Kremlin, stark against the snow, funereal, three enormous Zils and – sign of the times – a Lincoln Continental, a piece of transport of which Boris Yeltsin was said to be fond. And suddenly I was listening to our voices, Croder's and mine, in the hollow confines of the church the night before.

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.

St Pyotr staring down from the wall of the chapel, his carved and painted eyes dispassionate.

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.

The black snow drifting past the coloured windows as the shots came from the distance, a three-second burst, quite long enough to bring about what was intended.

A last echo came… And bring the country to its knees…

I watched the motorcade vanish through the lamplit gates into the Kremlin. Had that man, then, made his leap onto the tank for nothing?

Ferris, waiting – not, I knew, impatient, wanting me to take my time. But I'd done that now.

'If Croder pulled me out,' I said, 'I'd stay here in Moscow and go to ground and run Balalaika solo.'