Quiller Meridian

Chapter 14: LIPSTICK

'Are you alone?'

In a moment he said, 'I don't understand.'

'Are you alone in the room?'

'Yes. Who is this?'

'Your sister has been arrested.'

I heard him let out a breath, and then there was another brief silence before he asked me again, 'Who is this?' there was caution in his voice now, and an undertone of shock; in the last few seconds his life had lurched.

'Write this down,' I told him.' there's a rooming-house with a bar at Pier 9 on the river, the west bank. The bar is called Harbour Light. Wait for me there at — '

'Where are they holding her?'

'Listen carefully,' I told him. 'We've got to cover the important things first, in case we're interrupted.' A militia patrol-car had crossed the intersection a minute ago, eastwards towards the river. 'You should know that I am your ally and that I'm going to try getting your sister free tonight. Now I want you to wait for me at a table at the Harbour Light Bar at Pier 9 on the west bank of the Ob at eight o'clock this evening. You should — '

'Give me your name,' he said.

Not too bright, this army man, trained to respect discipline, to have his life run for him on rails, didn't care for anonymous phone calls. But he'd at least had the imagination and the necessary passion to set up an assassination and bring it off, a private enough act, he hadn't done that to orders.

Or had he?

The thought came at me like a stray bullet and I filed it. That had been the second attempt on the life of General Velichko.

'Rusakov,' I said, 'if you waste my time you could wreck our chances of getting your sister free. She'll be under interrogation now and may at any moment expose you, under duress, as the assassin of General Gennadi Velichko. Are you prepared to cooperate with me?'

A huge shape was on the move beyond the filthy window of the booth, and I watched it.

What I didn't want him to do was panic and put the phone down and run for some kind of cover. He would have got the point by now: it didn't need a lot of intelligence. The instant his sister told the militia who had shot Velichko there'd be a telephone call from the officer commanding Militia Headquarters to the officer commanding the Russian Army garrison with a request that Captain Vadim Rusakov of Ordnance Unit Three be placed under immediate arrest on suspicion of murder pending the arrival of prisoner transport and an officer bearing information.

If Rusakov ran, I would lose the second key to Meridian.

The dark shape moved slowly past the gap between the rooming-house and a stevedore's gantry, and its port riding light bloomed like a rose in the river fog. A freighter bringing salmon, perhaps, canned salmon from Kamen' — na — Obi in the south for my friend out there in the taxi.

'I am going there now,' I heard Rusakov saying.

'Going where?'

'To Militia Headquarters.' His tone was strong, adamant.' that's where they must be holding my sister. I will give myself up — '

'Rusakov — '

'I will give myself up and tell them she had nothing to do with it!'

'Rusakov, listen to me. They won't take your word for that. They'll get at the truth and the truth is that she was an accomplice. She — '

'I must help her! She is my sister!'

God give me patience. 'If you go there, Rusakov, you will both be held for enquiries and by midnight tonight they'll have got the whole thing out of you and there'll be nothing I can do for Tanya. You will have condemned her.'

I waited.

Emergency numbers, it said on a panel by the phone, 01 Fire Service, 02 Militia, 03 Ambulance. It is not necessary to use coins.

'Why should I believe you?' Rusakov was asking suddenly.

'Why would I call you and warn you to lie low if I didn't want to help you?'

Waited again. Time was running out, would go on running out as the minutes and the hours measured the long night's passing and I did what I could, what I must, before it was too late. I wanted to shout at this man, force him to understand what he'd got to do; but that wouldn't work: I had to appeal to his intelligence.

His voice came again. 'Why should you want to help me?'

'It would take too long, Rusakov, to tell you. I'm going to give you a last chance, and remember that the longer they keep Tanya there the worse it's going to be for her, and that I alone can hope to get her free. Now write this down.' I went over it again, the name and location of the bar and the time of the rendezvous. 'Go there in civilian dress,' I told him, 'not in uniform. You should — '

'I am on duty until midnight.'

'Then request immediate compassionate leave: say that you've just heard that your sister was injured in the crash of the Rossiya and you must visit her at the hospital immediately. Can you do that?'

'Yes.'

'Good. You should put on your oldest clothes: the Harbour Light is a seaman's hangout. When I go in there to find you I shall look for a pair of slightly odd gloves lying on the table beside you. Now give me your description.'

He took a moment to think. 'I shall be wearing a — '

'Colour of eyes?'

'What? Green.'

I took him through it — clean-shaven, height one metre ninety-two, weight one-sixty, medium build, no visible scars. I didn't need all that for the rendezvous in the bar but I might need it later if he didn't show up or panicked and went to ground or made things tricky for me until he was ready to trust me.

'All right, you'll be wearing?'

Dark blue duffle coat, dark woollen hat with ear muffs.

'Don't forget the gloves. Now listen, I don't know if I can make it there by eight o'clock but you must wait and go on waiting unless the bar closes — it could be open all night, with shipping movement going on. Don't leave there and don't go back to the barracks until I've talked to you.' I took a moment to check his thinking: 'Do you know why?'

He found it difficult to say but he got it right. 'If — if my sister is made to talk, I would be arrested.'

'Right, at the barracks or in the open street or anywhere you habituate, but you'll be safe enough at the bar. If it closes, book in at the rooming-house next door and use a false name, give them some money instead of your identity; there'll be drug traffic on that river and they'll be used to people wanting privacy.' then I told' him, 'If I haven't reached you by midnight either at the bar or the rooming-house it'll simply mean I can't, and you should then consider getting out of Novosibirsk by ship — they'll be watching the airport and the train stations and the roads.'

He thought about that but didn't take long. 'I shall remain here and give myself up and try to help my sister.'

I heard a warning note and thought of telling him to shift the deadline to beyond midnight, but left it. If I hadn't got Tanya free by then it'd be no go.

'When did you see her last?' Rusakov was asking.

'This morning. She was trying to contact you when the militia picked her up.' Bite the bullet: 'Rusakov… how do you think she'd stand up to interrogation?'

I heard him let out a breath again.' she — she had a bad time with the KGB, a few years ago. Since then she's been afraid of getting hurt again.' He should have thought of that before he got her involved in an assassination.' that is why I tried to keep her out of… what happened last night.'

'So why couldn't you?'

'She insisted. She's very obstinate. I'd seen his photograph many times but she said that wasn't good enough. She was afraid I would make a mistake.' A beat.' she was also very… determined that we should go through with this thing.'

I thought that was interesting. 'Rusakov, do you know why those three men came to Novosibirsk?'

Mikhail shut off the engine of his taxi and silence came in. A tug's klaxon sounded from down the river like a night-bird croaking.

'No,' Rusakov said, but he'd taken a long time to think about it.

'Do you know where the remaining two of them are?'

Mikhail got out of the Trabant, stood stamping his feet, looking towards the phone booth.

'I think,' Rusakov said, 'I could find out. There's a lot going on.'

I felt a booster kick in for Meridian.

'Be there at eight,' I told him, 'and remember — '

'There must be some way I can help you,' Rusakov said quickly. 'I'll go with you to Militia Headquarters.'

'That would blow up the whole thing.'

'You must realize how I feel. I love my sister. I'm not good at waiting, doing nothing, when — '

'Be at the rendezvous.'

'If I'm not there,' he said, 'it will mean I changed my mind,' and the line went dead.

'There's only one more,' Mikhail said, 'in this district. There's always a girl here and there in the bars, of course, if you — '

'Let's go to the last house.'

There was another street closed, telephone wires festooned like a spider-web across the snow-drifts and the small dark figures of men working on them, trapped like flies, warning flags hanging limp and a flare burning, black smoke standing in a thick column from the oil barrel; the wind had dropped and the night was quiet except for the rumbling of snow-ploughs across the city.

The frayed wool at the wrist of Mikhail's right mitten trembled to the vibration of the Trabant as it rocked across the ruts with the ice popping under the tyres.

'She's very obstinate,' Rusakov had said.' she was also very determined that we should go through with this thing.'

I'd thought that was interesting because all I'd known of Tanya Rusakova was that she was unskilled in subterfuge — had given General Velichko, for instance, the name of the hotel where she was staying. Her obstinacy had shown itself perhaps when she'd left the safe-house despite my warning, but the same trait, together with her determination, could help to save her now at Militia Headquarters by dragging out the interrogation process until I could move in.

You don't need to go there now. You 're wasting your time.

Bloody little organism, starting to panic.

Of course I'm not wasting my time.

You should meet Rusakov now, as soon as you can. He thinks he can find the generals. That's your objective.

Dead wrong: he won't do a thing for me until I can get Tanya out of there.

You 're rationalizing.

An icicle as long as a spear dropped from a guttering and crashed onto the roof of a parked car, scattering rainbows in the headlights.

First get Tanya out, then work on her brother.

You should be working on him now. You should have told him to meet you right away. He's the key now, not her.

If I don't get Tanya out he'll try to help her by giving himself up, then I'll lose him and the mission's gone.

You haven't got a chance of going in there and coming out again, you know that.

Scares you, doesn't it?

You're doing what Ferris said you might, it's the death-or-glory thing, go dashing in there like a white knight on horseback and carry the maiden off, you want your fucking head tested.

You're shit-scared, that's all, I know you of old.

Walking into a lion's den, you 'll get eaten alive.

Shit-scared.

Bloody little organism.

The tyre-chains dragged on the snow and the engine idled.

'Name's Marina,' Mikhail said, his rheumy eye in the mirror. 'Cunning old cow, you should watch it, keep your wallet in sight, know what I mean?'

She was sitting in a huge carved Ottoman chair, a woman with three chins and enormous breasts trapped in a rusty black satin decolletage and hips that bulged across the arms of the chair, four rings on her thick fingers, three dirty diamond solitaires and a black tourmaline, her feet squeezed into splitting court shoes on the stained Kazakhstan carpet.

'I have the best,' she said huskily,' the best in Novosibirsk. The youngest.'

The heat pressed against my face, sucking the moisture from my eyes and leaving them dry. The smell was the same here as it had been in the other places but with something added, sharp and indefinable, reaching from the lungs into the gut.

'I have Chinese girls,' Marina said.' thirteen, fourteen years old. You should see them. They are like porcelain. I'll show you.'

She picked up a brass bell engraved with dragons, and the sound seemed half-muted in the stifling air.

'You can have two in a bed,' Marina told me, her small eyes like sparks in the thick folds of her flesh. "Three in a bed, as many as you want. What about a boy? You like variety? Or I have whips here, chains. You like that?'

Perhaps it was stale blood, the sharp iron smell on the air.

I let her go on talking because I wanted to know what my chances were. Mikhail had said this house was the last one in the district and God knew how far we'd have to drive to find the next.

A whore came through the red velvet curtains and stood looking at me, her thick white body wrapped in a soiled nightdress and her coarse dyed hair lying across one shoulder, her lips parted to show the tip of her tongue, her eyes narrowed, fear in them, fear of the gross woman in the chair.

'She can go,' I told Marina. 'I'm not here for that.'

I told her what I was here for.

'You must think I 'm crazy,' she said.

I started at three hundred, implying I would go to five.

A drunk was in there somewhere and a girl was squealing, and the sound pierced the nerves like chalk on a blackboard.

'How do you expect me to do that?' the woman asked me.

'Say it's your birthday. Come on, you're smarter than I am.'

'I would lose my licence,' she said.

'You haven't got a licence. Not for the whips and chains.'

She offered me vodka.

'I haven't got long,' I said. 'One thousand, take it or leave it.' I got up to go.

She watched me, still as a toad. 'Are you on the run?'

'No.'

'You'll have to tell me more about yourself.'

'There's nothing to know. One thousand, cash.'

'Fifteen hundred. I'll do it for that.'

'A thousand's all I have.'

I got as far as the door.

'And suppose I get into trouble with this?' she asked me.

'If you don't know how to keep out of trouble, Marina, nobody does.'

'Let me see the cash.'

She counted it. 'All right.' Her face began creasing, and a wheeze started coming out of her that almost sounded like laughter.' I would have done it for half,' she said, and tears glistened in the folds of flesh.

'I know,' I said, 'but the other five is to make sure you don't cross me.' I went close to her and smelled her foul body smell as I looked into the little black slits of her eyes. 'If you cross me, you fat stinking bitch, I'll see that you croak, they'll find you sitting in this chair like a stuck pig with your throat cut and your blood running under that door and into the street for the dogs to drink.'

I told Mikhail to drive me back to within two city blocks of the safe-house and check for a usable phone booth on the way.

Ferris answered at once.

'I've got things set up,' I told him.

There was a short silence. He hadn't known, before the phone had rung, that I wasn't already in a red sector at Militia Headquarters and desperate for help.

'I haven't told London,' he said.

He meant he hadn't told London I was going to try getting Tanya Rusakova out of Militia Headquarters. Control would have wanted to talk to me direct on the phone and I didn't have time for that; he would have said no in any case, would have gone through the roof and ordered Ferris to call me in, would have created a strictly monumental fuss, and I'd started moving too fast now for London to block my run; of course Ferris hadn't told them, he knew better than that, he was a seasoned director in the field, and quite possibly the only DIF who was in fact capable of running this particular shadow executive through a mission without calling on London for instructions, because this particular shadow executive is difficult to control — as Ferris himself has said — isn't amenable to discipline, so forth, is not your most popular ferret in the Bureau, and that's a bloody shame.

I am a little nervous, my good friend, as perhaps you note.

We are going in very soon now.

It hadn't surprised me when Ferris had said I'd have his full support. He'd had no choice. He's run me before, and through some extremely sticky operations — Mandarin, Northlight — and he's learned to read what it says on the bottom line: if I've decided to take a mission into a new direction with some really significant risks attached I 'm not going to back off if the director gets cold feet, I'm going to do it anyway and if I can't do it with his support I'll do it solo. Ferris understands that.

But I felt for him. He wasn't going to get any sleep tonight, and when I signalled him again he would pick up before the second ring.

'What's the score?' he asked me now. His tone was particularly cool, and I heard the control in it.

'I've made contact with Rusakov,' I told him, 'and we've got a tentative rendezvous. There's no time to go into details. Now here it is — I need two support men and two cars. The first one is to pick up Tanya when she leaves Militia Headquarters. The second one is to do a relay.' To take Tanya over from the first one and leave a cold trail.

'Timing?' Ferris asked me.

'I'll come to that. 'I'd have to work it out; it could be two hours from now, three hours, four, midnight, possibly, even as late as that, it'd depend how things went. 'You should deploy the first car just off the square in front of Militia Headquarters, out of sight and in a street with a clear run.' I went over the details with him, told him the car should be parked facing away from the square, told him how I wanted the relay set up, though it wasn't really necessary to spell it out: a relay is a relay and it's designed to do one thing — to throw off pursuit.

'What else?' Ferris asked me.

'That's all. We just need to get Tanya clear and into your safe keeping.'

'Will you be going with her?'

'No. I'll be making my own way out.'

In a moment, 'When do I send in the support?'

I gave it some thought. 'Make it an hour from now. No later than that.'

'Five forty-one.'

I checked my watch.

'Yes. I'm synchronized.'

Tentatively Ferris said, 'You know, don't you, that if you get stuck in Militia Headquarters there'll be absolutely nothing I can do.'

I translated that in my mind: was I prepared to push the mission right to the edge at this stage and risk sending it over? Because the director in the field for Meridian would be put through a rigorous debriefing when he got back to London, and Control would want straight answers. Yes, I warned the executive that there'd be nothing I could do for him if he placed the mission in final hazard.

'The thing is,' I told Ferris,' there are no options. We're working with a zero deadline and we can't slow up, we've just got to go for it'

The executive felt there was no choice but to proceed with the mission, despite the risks.

'I'm sure you'll do well,' Ferris said, and I didn't like the polite formality: it showed nerves.

I left it. 'Final thing,' I said, 'I'm going to call the peep off the safe-house. It's going to get blown in any case, sometime before midnight.'

He took it cold, didn't ask why. 'But you still need a new one.'

'Yes. With spare clothes, provisions, the usual thing.'

'I've been working on it.'

"Then it's over and out,' I told him and put the phone back onto the hook.

In the crown of the night sky the stars were huge, fading as they sank into the smog that clouded the city. The snow was brittle under my boots as I finished circling the block and closed in on the safe-house.

'You're free to go,' I told the man in the doorway. 'Report to the DIF by phone.'

He was huddled into his coat, his eyes peering from above the scarf he'd wrapped round his head. 'No one relieving?'

'No. Go and get some grog.'

He left a patch of bare wet concrete in the doorway where he'd cleared the snow with his heels. I walked on and checked the windows of the building and then went in.

The bedclothes were still rumpled and Tanya's bag was gone, but she'd left the toilet things in the bathroom and a message on the mirror scrawled with a lipstick.

Thank you. Forgive me. Tanya.

I wiped it off with some toilet paper and flushed it and looked around; there were no other signs that a woman had been here.

The shower head in the bathroom was dripping, rhythmic as the ticking of a clock.

It was time to go.

You 're mad, you know that? You've gone mad.

Shuddup.

You 'll be walking straight into a trap.

Oh for Christ's sake shuddup and leave me alone.

I took a last look round and left the curtains almost closed and the light on and the door unlocked and went down the stairs and into the street and across to the Skoda and started it up, letting the engine warm while I scraped away the ice that had formed on the windscreen. Then I drove three miles east towards the suburbs and left the car on some waste ground and locked it and had to walk nearly five blocks before I saw a militia patrol car and stopped it and told the driver I was Viktor Shokin, the man they were looking for.