Quiller Balalaika

8: MOONLIGHT

He wouldn't waste any time.

'You assaulted two of my guards,' he said. His eyes were fixed in a stare, as they'd been in the private room of the Baccarat Club last night. 'I don't like that.'

'You shouldn't have sent them after me. If you want the diamonds, you'll have to buy them.'

Behind the stare, crystallizing it, giving it depth, was the rage again. 'You assaulted the Cougar personally,' he said, 'when you assaulted his guards.'

This was new. I hadn't detected megalomania in him before. He was standing so still that he made a centre of calm in the movement going on around him and behind him as the groups of people shifted, gestured, as the waiters weaved among them. There was quite a bit of the reptile about this man, but he wouldn't be aware of that, or he would have called himself the Cobra.

'Look, Vishinsky,' I said, 'I'm a businessman and I deal with businessmen. I told you that at the club. If you want to play the robber baron that's entirely your choice and it's probably quite fun, but I'm not interested. I prefer working with men of intelligence.'

Pushing him as far as I could to see what would happen, bring out his character, test his reactions, watching his eyes change, catching a hint of unease, which I understood quite well. There were no bodyguards in here: the Federal Counterintelligence Service people had presumably issued the invitations with that proviso, not wanting an army standing around to embarrass them in the presence of foreign diplomats. They would be outside the building, the guards, waiting for their employers, watching over the Mercedes and the Jaguars and the Lamborghinis. And this was worrying Vishinsky: at any other time he could have had me surrounded with muscle. It's the same situation when someone who relies on a gun finds he can't reach it in time: suddenly he's lost, powerless. Legge would have to learn this, because it was a lesson that could one day cost him his life.

'You like provoking me, Berinov,' Vishinsky said, his narrow head lifting an inch, the stare as steady as a beam of light playing on my face. 'You like provoking the Cougar.'

'Not really. I never waste energy, and frankly I've got better things to do. If you'll excuse me.' I turned my back on him, looking past the drunken major to the massive gilt mirrors ranged along the wall.

Vishinsky wasn't wasting any time now, didn't want to show haste but moved deceptively fast among the guests towards the main doors, which were standing wide open because of the heat.

I waited until he was out of sight before I followed him, watching the top of his dark pomaded head as he went down the staircase to the lobby. There was a telephone on the mezzanine floor and I used that.

I heard the line open as Ferris picked up on the second ring. He didn't speak.

'Red sector.'

'Where?'

'The Hotel Faberge.'

'Do you need support?'

'No.'

I shut down the signal and used the door to the fire stairs and climbed the eight floors of the building, taking my time. Vishinsky wouldn't bring any action into the hotel until the party was over, didn't need to. There would be three or four exits, possibly more, and by now there'd be at least one of his guards mounted on each of them, sealing the place off from the street. I didn't have any illusions: this was a trap.

You knew there was a chance he'd be here.

Very thin chance, yes. But there must be a hundred dons in this city, and only seven of them are here tonight. Weren't you counting?

I left the fire stairs and went into the corridor, looking for a vacant suite.

I don't like traps.

That's a shame.

Bloody little organism starting to panic.

You needn't have come here tonight.

I'm getting in their way, that's all. I've done it fifty times and the principle's perfectly sound: when you want to bring the opposition into the open you just get in their way. You know that.

The door of the fifth suite along the passage was open and I went in there. found no one.

You could have asked for support.

Oh for Christ's sake shuddup.

The gradual emergence of sweat on the skin as the imagination tripped in and brought biochemical reactions, to be read as normal: a trap is a trap and no animal is at peace in one.

Support was the last thing I wanted anyway. Legge had said he could call on fourteen men in his group and Vishinsky had brought six guards into the Baccarat Club and there would have been no earthly point in staging a twenty-gun shoot-out in the street; my job was to infiltrate, not start a bloody war.

The Croder thing, though, was a worry.

The suite was ornate in the fin de siecle Russian style: an ormolu writing desk, two inlaid consoles, a Volkov print – 'Girl With Red Bow' – ivory plush chairs. The windows looked down on the front of the hotel and I could see dark figures against the snow, their breath clouding under the lamplight. Later there would be more, if Vishinsky sent for increased support of his own.

The Croder thing was a worry because the executive had signalled a red sector to his director in the field and it wouldn't stop there: Ferris would relay the information to London through the mast at Cheltenham and the man at the board for Balalaika would reach for the chalk and when the Chief of Signals saw what he'd written it could trigger his decision then and there. Ferris: 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.

We're usually at least halfway through the mission before we find ourselves in a red sector, but this time I'd got into one almost straight off the starting block and Croder wouldn't like that, would blame himself and pull me out before it was too late.

It might be too late already. This is -

Shuddup.

I moved for the door. Time was of the essence: we teach the neophytes at Norfolk that if you're in a red sector you need to get out as fast as you can before the opposition brings in reinforcements and turns the trap into a siege. That was a Federal Counterintelligence Service party going on down there but the Faberge was a regular commercial hotel and a mafiya boss of Vishinsky's calibre could tell the manager he wanted his guards to search the whole building, every vacant room, the elevators, the staircase, the corridors, the mezzanines: the only difference between the dons and the police squads in this city was that the dons didn't need to flash a badge.

Get out fast, but I hadn't got many options. Vishinsky would have ordered his people to cover every exit from this place and stay on the watch all night if they had to, all tomorrow, all the next day – he wouldn't give up, would, on the contrary, bring in more guards to mount the search, changing them in shifts until they'd found me. He was enraged, the Cougar, because I'd committed the unthinkable and laid a hand on his employees, and he wouldn't rest until I was pitched into the back of his Mercedes and driven into the forest and pushed against a tree with no blindfold, no ceremony, just the one short burst that would bring the rage down and leave him sated, redeemed.

With every exit covered the only thing I could do was to get to higher ground, so I moved for the emergency staircase again and climbed the last flight. There was only one chance of getting out of here and that was via the roof.

When I reached the top step I stood listening, hands on the rail as I watched the silent concrete vortex of the staircase below me for movement, shadows, caught one almost at once, flowing across the wall down there and darkening, sharpening under the lamp and then softening as the man kept on climbing, the shadow-gun swinging, cradled in his arms. This was to be expected: the staircase was an obvious exit path and they'd cover it. I could hear his shoes now on the steps, softly, softly, not hurrying – he was simply patrolling the vertical perimeter of the search area, could lock onto me in the instant if he heard or saw me above or below him, rat-tat-tat and the echoes hammering, the smell of cordite, finito.

I moved and got the door open without making enough noise to travel down to him, got it shut again, inching it, my weight against the panel to stop the latch clicking, the air cold now against the face, the crescent of the moon clear below a cloud-bank and spreading light across the snow-covered roof, usable, dangerous light according to how things went.

The snow crisp under my feet as I checked out the environment: four squat chimneys stinking of soot, a cluster of metal ventilators, one with a cowl turning, some kind of wire antenna stretching halfway across the roof, the surface of the roof itself hidden by the snow, uncharted, perhaps treacherous if I went too near the parapets – this was nine floors up, call it a hundred feet from the ground for a building of this period with twelve-foot ceilings, not that it would make a dramatic difference if I fell nine floors or only six, five, la meme chose a la fin, I'm not a bloody cat.

I didn't think the man on the staircase would come as far as the roof, or at least not yet. Vishinksy had last seen me in the ballroom on the second floor, would expect me to be there when he went back because I hadn't shown any signs of leaving, had made a point of it. He'd have the lower floors searched first and it'd take him a little time to find the manager and give him the score.

So I had an immediately available but indeterminate time zone to work in before the man on the staircase thought of checking the roof, let's say ten minutes, and that was all I'd want. The thing to avoid was being seen at any distance from that door when – if – the guard pushed it open because if I wasn't within reach of him he'd simply level the thing and start pumping.

Light was flushing the building across the street from the entrance of the hotel and when I got to the parapet and looked down I could see the two dark figures I'd seen before from the window of the vacant suite. The snow crunched under my feet as I crossed to the side of the hotel and looked down into the street and saw a single guard covering whatever doorway he'd found. Bouncing on his heels to keep the blood circulating, the muscles in tone, an athlete, one of the chorus line of Cougarettes.

Straighten up from the parapet and watch the door over there, the door to the staircase, don't assume too much, assumptions are dangerous, he can open it at any given time. Keep to cover, then, crossing the roof to the side street on the opposite face of the building, two men there, hands pushed into the pockets of their padded track suits, their breath white in the lamplight. Three sides of the building covered, then, so let us hope for more luck on the fourth.

Hands on the frozen parapet, a shadowed alleyway below, hardly even that, a four-foot gap between the buildings with not even room for a garbage bin down there, no door, or there'd be a guard to cover it, no direct light from a window or anywhere else.

But there was a drainpipe.

Watch the door to the staircase.

A drainpipe, and this was what I'd been looking for. Not this one specifically, because sooner or later one of the guards would start patrolling the alleyway below; but there would be – should be – a pipe like this one running down from the roof of the next building.

What sort of red sector?

Croder, his voice coming out of the scrambler in Ferris' hotel room: he'd have got through by now, with only light traffic on the satellite into Moscow.

He didn't say.

Did he ask for support?

No, sir. He said he didn't want any.

No surprise in this for the Chief of Signals: he knows my views on support, especially at night when you need to identify people in a tricky field, and at once.

This was ten minutes ago?

Thirteen.

Silence on the line while Croder thought, while Ferris waited for him to say all right, if he breaks out of this I want you to abort the mission and send him home, is that understood?

Oh for Christ's sake, give me a bloody chance.

Watch, yes, the door. And think, reflect, my good friend, upon the situation, think again of clearing that four-foot gap between the buildings in these conditions: frozen snow with only pale moonlight to work with, the shadows deceptive, the distance too great for any kind of confidence, the muscles sluggish because of the cold, the chances of success dauntingly thin, so look, yes, before you leap.

The problem was that I hadn't got any choice.

You shouldn't have -

Oh piss off.

Vishinsky wouldn't do half the job. He would seal off this hotel – had already sealed it off – with every man he could muster, and they would be many when he called others in, as many as it would take to make absolutely certain that this single quarry would be flushed out, caught and cornered, spinning like a fox in the ring of clamouring hounds. I had, after all, offended him, had displeased the Cougar.

Watch the door.

Ice cracked in the silence as the mass of the building shifted by a degree, moved by its tectonic forces. Over the minutes, echoes came sharply from the walls of the buildings around it as the guests began leaving the party and getting into their cars and slamming the doors.

Certainties, then, consider the certainties. Vishinsky would never give up, would have me found and seized, and then would have me shot. This was certain. I couldn't stay here on the roof forever, even if no one came to search it. This too was certain. But if I could make that leap across the gap between the buildings without going down, without killing myself, I could use the drainpipe on the wall of the next building, and perhaps get to the ground, get to the ground and away. This at least was not certain, nor was death in the attempt.

Therefore make the attempt.

Voices from below, voices and laughter as one by one the revellers took their leave, the steam from their breath laced generously with vodka. Light flooded the walls of the buildings as the pinions bit into the starter-bands and the cars moved off with their chains clinking across the snow, leaving me in the gathering silence with a sense of departure crucially more personal, and before too long: we have presentiments, my good friend, do we not, when we feel the party may be over now, and have no wish to go.

I crossed the roof towards the parapet, my shoes crackling on the snow as Ipassed close to the staircase door in the instantwhen it was pushed open and the guard looked out at me and swung up his gun.