Quiller Meridian

Chapter 19: CHRISTMAS

Night and silence.

I stood in shadow, smelling the river smell.

Ice drifted on the water, breaking away upstream and floating down through the channels gouged by tugs and dredgers and coasters big enough to make headway. The ice made soft xylophone music as the floes touched and bumped together.

I had left the Skoda half a mile away, buried under an iron roof that had slid at an angle when the walls of a shed had collapsed some time ago, perhaps under the weight of snow, to lie like a broken box in the thickets of weeds. It was almost invisible, the Skoda, but I had no illusions. That was a hot car. It had been under extensive surveillance ever since Roach had blown his cover and got into it and picked up a tracker without knowing it. I'm not blaming him. Support people don't get the training they give the shadow executives at the Bureau, though some of them apply for the higher echelons and graduate.

Dark shapes moved as I watched: a small high-decked freighter with coal smoke curling behind it on the motionless air, to lie in skeins along the water; a truck on the far bank, sliding among the wharves, its diesel rattling. Nearer to where I stood, nothing moved, but I had no illusions about that either. Watchers keep still. The motor-vessel Natasha lay in her berth some sixty or seventy yards distant from the stack of rusted freight containers that I was using for cover. I needed to know if the Natasha were being watched.

The sensible thing to have done would have been to phone Ferris and ask him to send someone out with another car, leave the Skoda back there in the side street and take over whatever they brought me. But the time for doing the sensible thing had run out now because Meridian was compromised, and the new car they brought me could be hot too, the subject of undetected surveillance. I would think that Yermakov had been the only man tracking the Skoda, and that it was therefore safe to use for the moment. It was still hot, because it could be recognized later, but it could only be by chance, and that chance I was ready to take.

That was his name: Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. His wallet was still in my pocket. I didn't think he'd been the rogue agent loose in the field. The surveillance of the Skoda had been the work of a cell, at least of a cell, possibly of an organization. It had needed at least two peeps to maintain the operation, because that car had been watched for more than twelve hours, from the time when Roach had picked it up to the time when I'd driven it away from the patch of waste ground at two minutes past eight tonight. A rogue agent would work alone; it is their nature.

A night bird screeched and a ring of light flashed inside my skull and died out like a firework. I'd seen cormorants, earlier, wheeling under the lights of a warehouse crane. I had been here for twenty minutes and hadn't moved; I too was a watcher, and kept still. There are good and bad among the ranks of the peeps; some can stay silent for hours on end, moving only by indiscernible degrees when they have to, flexing the leg muscles to keep the blood flowing and the brain supplied, turning their heads as slowly as the hands of a clock, sweeping the environment continuously. Others, less professionally trained, can't go for long without needing to release tension, and they'll shift their feet or yawn or cough or even stretch their arms, and they're blown.

Night and silence, who is here?

A rat ran squealing in the shadows and the light flashed again behind my eyes. It didn't worry me: it was reaction, that was all. I hadn't expected to get out of that place, out of Militia Headquarters, but I was only aware of that now: the heat was off and the blood was cooling, and looking back at the whole enterprise it seemed as if I must have been clean out of my gourd to have taken a risk that size.

I told you. I said you'd gone mad, but you wouldn't listen.

Nor will I ever, you little shit. You can get away with things in hot blood that'd never work if you thought about them. Ask any tightrope walker — they never look down.

The broken ice rang like a peal of bells in the distance as a tug moved upstream, towing a barge, blacking out the lamps along the far shore and then relighting them. But nothing was moving, had moved, closer than that. I believed the Natasha was clear, and I broke cover and walked across the snow-covered boards of the quay. The gangplank had been cleared by whatever support man had brought the provisions here for me, and he hadn't found it an easy choice: to leave evidence that the hulk was in some kind of use, or to leave me to make footprints on the snow and testify to the very same thing.

I dropped onto the deck and stood there, watching and listening again. The cabin had been wrecked and there was no door, just a hole through smashed timbers; I would have thought a crane had toppled or the boom had run its brake discs, coming down on the cabin. Snow had drifted inside the wreckage, its minuscule facets diamond-blue under the light of the moon.

Something splashed into the water and I swung my head and saw ripples crossing the surface some distance away, near the third vessel downriver, a sailing boat with the mast lying like a dead tree across the quayside. Yellow light came from its dark hulk, burning steadily, and I turned my head away. Watchers do not burn lamps to mark their presence, nor throw garbage out.

The support man had dropped a rope mat over the snow where the lower part of the steps was still solid, and I went down into the smell of rotting timber and rope and lamp-oil, ducking my head under abeam and seeing the glow of a night-light showing the way to the stairs down to the lower berths. I stood listening again, hearing nothing but the slap of water against the vessel's beam. The light grew stronger as I went below: there was a brass hurricane lamp burning with a good flame on the table of the main cabin below deck, with supplies stacked around it: black bread, cheeses, canned milk, dried fruit, half a dozen military-issue cans of self-heating soup, a plum cake… and I felt a moment of warmth for Ferris: all he'd been able to scrounge in the way of a safe-house for me was a rotting hulk among the ice floes, but he'd told the support man to raid the black market for what he could find to make it look like Christmas, on this unholy night.

I could still taste that man's blood in my mouth and I got the little black iron kettle and filled it and put it onto the butane stove for warm water to wash with and brush my teeth, we are not here to stint ourselves, my good friend, it's Christmas, remember, and have you ever tried to clean your teeth by biting on bloody icicles?

9:15 on my watch and I did only the necessary, getting out of the uniform and putting on warm sweaters and sheepskin boots. There were no rats here but they wouldn't be long in coming once they caught the scent of human habitation; I stowed all the vulnerable food packages in the cupboard with the torn poster on the door, girl in a fur hat and slacks and fur boots to the knee, I think it says a lot for a country where the women can look sexy in the depth of winter without a single bikini in sight.

I turned down the wick of the lamp and looked around for a bit of rope and took the militia uniform and boots on deck, burying the standard-issue Malysh "Little Boy" automatic pistol inside the clothes and weighting the whole bundle with a rock I'd marked down when I'd crossed from the Skoda to the ship. Then I crouched at the quayside watching the bubbles break surface under the light of the moon.

At 9:461 signalled Ferris.

'Location?'

'The Harbour Light.'

I'd taken fifteen minutes to check the environment when I'd arrived here, but it was simply an exercise in security: any danger would come from inside the bar.

'Have you met Rusakov?' Ferris asked me.

'Not yet. I've just got here.' then I said,' there's a man gone. Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. He was tracking me.' I told him what had happened. 'He's down as a pipe-fitter on his papers. He couldn't have been operating solo. I'd say he was in the Podpolia. 'Two men came from the quay, hands buried in the pockets of their padded coats, boots clumping across the snow. 'I'm surprised you're still there,' I told Ferris.

'I'm taking all precautions.'

The two men hit the door of the bar open and bundled in. This phone booth was outside, at the end of the wall where the door was. There weren't any windows on this side.

Taking all precautions, well, all right, but God knew where Roach had picked up that tracker — it could have been outside the Hotel Karasevo, where Ferris was. I didn't want him blown from under me.

'We lost Roach,' I heard him saying.

Merde.

'I thought we might have,' I said.

'They trapped him and there was a shoot-out.'

Those shifting eyes, yes, and the nervous fingers, trigger-sensitive. We don't often get a shoot-out because weaponry isn't normally part of our stock-in-trade; we prefer silence and shadow, the soft-shoe retreat. But Roach would have carried a gun, yes, I could believe that, had spent his life looking over his shoulder, had found sleep difficult, until now.

'As long as you think you're safe there,' I told Ferris, meaning for Christ's sake don't blow the nerve-centre for Meridian and wishing instantly I hadn't said it, because when the executive starts worrying about the safety of his director in the field it can only mean he's starting to feel mission-pressure.

'Relax,' Ferris said quietly on the line.

'Did I say something?'

'Not really.'

Someone had used his finger across the grime on the glass panel of the booth, Fuck Yeltsin, 'Many kind thanks,' I said to Ferris, 'for the plum cake.'

'Nothing too good.'

I made the effort and asked, 'Where is Tanya Rusakova?' It had taken an effort because I was worried about her too, didn't want to hear him say we'd lost her again.

Relax, yes.

'I've put her in a room on the same floor here, only three doors along, two people on watch. 'He'd heard the effort I'd had to make.

He hears everything, Ferris, if the line's good enough; he can hear you taking too deep a breath to quiet the nerves; he can hear goose flesh rising under your sleeve.

'I need to talk to her,' I told him.

'I know. She's waiting here now.'

He'd known I'd have to debrief Tanya before I talked to her brother, to find out what she'd said in Militia Headquarters, what his situation was now, and Ferris had brought her into his room to wait for my call, saving a few minutes' delay as I stood here in a telephone booth with glass panels and no identification papers on me that I could show anyone, now that is direction in the field.

'Hello?'

Her voice soft, her green eyes shimmering behind the notice that said you didn't have to put coins into the receptacle when summoning the fire brigade, ambulance or militia.

'Are you comfortable?'

We say strange things, when not knowing what to say.

'Yes. And filled with remorse, and gratitude.'

Been rehearsing it. 'Tanya,' I said, 'what did you tell the militia? As briefly as you can, just the essentials.'

She went straight into it, had been briefed by Ferris. 'They asked me why I had come to Novosibirsk, and I told them it was to see my brother, as I always did when I had leave. I knew they would telephone Moscow to ask about me, and would find I had a brother here. I said I met General Velichko by chance on the Rossiya, and he proposed an assignation when we arrived in the city. He seemed quite a gentleman, and said he would like to please me by «arranging» early promotion for my brother.'

She was surprising me, Tanya Rusakova. It would have taken courage, in that interrogation cell at Militia Headquarters, to admit that she'd made plans to meet a man who was later shot dead against a wall. But she'd had no choice: she couldn't have explained, otherwise, why she'd booked in at the Hotel Vladekino and then left there soon afterwards, under the eyes of the concierge.

'I told them that when I met General Velichko at the appointed place, I was shocked and horrified to see a man force him from his car and shoot him down. I ran away, terrified, but the man caught up with me and threw me into another car, where I was blindfolded. He took me to a house, and kept me there. Of course I realized he was protecting himself — I'd seen what he had done and could recognize him again.'

I was listening with much attention. She'd taken things right to the brink, because she'd known she'd have to. She'd invented the simplest way to explain her known movements on that night.

'Are you still there?'

'Yes,' I said, 'go on.'

'I told them that the man had kept me tied to a bed all night, but the next morning when he was away from the house I managed to escape. And then, when I was safe again in the street, I was stopped by a militiaman, and arrested because of my papers.'

There was silence on the line, so I said, 'And they asked you to give a description of the assassin.'

'Of course. I said he was short, but very strong, with greying hair and a scar underneath his left ear. He spoke with an Estonian accent.'

'And they tried to break your story.'

'But yes. They tried very hard.'

And hadn't succeeded, because for a few days it would have remained unbreakable, until they'd taken their investigations to the point where they could destroy it, word for word, and get to the truth. Did you bear any kind of grudge against General Gennadi Velichko? Were you aware that he was the head of the regional state security office in Krasnogvardeiskaya at the time when your father, Boris Vladimir Rusakov, was rumoured to have been executed without formality? Didn't you in fact request five days' immediate leave on medical grounds due to uterine cramps at the time when General Velichko was about to visit Novosibirsk?

I didn't know what exact questions would have been asked, but that would have been their tenor, and she wouldn't have had any answers that would have kept her out of the penal servitude camps for life on a charge of being an accessory to premeditated murder.

'You did well, Tanya,' I said.

'I wanted very much to keep your name out of it all.'

'I'm indebted to you.'

'No. But perhaps it made up a little.'

Made up for her leaving the safe-house and getting herself arrested.

'Of course. Tanya, stay near the phone for twenty minutes.'

The door of the bar swung open and crashed back against the wall and a man came out with his hands covering his head, two others after him and catching him up, landing a kick and sending him sprawling, setting on him as he lay on the ground, 'Fucking Jew… You come here again and you 'll finish up in the river, cock-sucking Jew-boy…'

The Pamyat brigade. Goodbye Stalin, hello Hitler, le plus ca change, so forth.

'When shall I see you again?' Tanya asked me.

'I don't really know,' I said. She'd turned over sometimes, during the morning at the safe-house, and lain with her face against me, not moving away, moving closer. She didn't wear perfume, but I remembered her scent. 'As soon as I can manage,' I told her. 'Put our friend back on the line, would you?'

The two men were crunching across the snow towards the bar, one of them with blood on his wrist.

When Ferris came on the line I just told him that if Rusakov was in the bar I'd call back in twenty minutes and let him talk to his sister for a moment.' I've got to have his trust, and her voice will give him proof that I've got her into safe hands.'

'We'll stand by for you,' Ferris said, and then, 'I've been doing a bit of research, by the way, on your rogue agent. There was a man in the Ministry of Defence called Talyzin who spoke out rather too loudly against some of the die-hard generals, and they put him into a psychiatric ward when no one was looking. After six months he escaped, and from raw intelligence data going into London he might be your agent.'

'Why?'

'Three reasons. It's believed he came out of the psychiatric ward with some of his marbles gone, two of the generals who put him in there were Kovalenko and Chudin, and he'd served in Afghanistan as a mine-sweeping engineer.'

'Knows explosives.'

'Yes.'

'Another case of revenge, then, if he blew that train up. Attempted revenge.'

'We've had reports of hundreds like that, following the coup. Old scores to be settled. They're still working on it for me in London, and if I get anything more I'll pass it on.'

'That name again — Talyzin?'

'Yes.' He spelled it for me. Then, 'Control has also been in signals with me, asking for a progress report.'

Bloody Croder. 'So what did you give him?'

There was nothing. There was nothing to give Control.

'I just said that progress is being made.'

It's the stock diplomatic answer the director in the field sometimes uses when London asks what's happening and there's nothing positive to offer. The shadow can be crawling on his stomach out of a wrecked support car with his clothes on fire and the host country's security forces moving in on him with war-trained Dobermans and if Control wants a report he'll be told that progress is being made, if only by the fact that the poor bloody ferret has managed to crawl another six inches with his smashed leg as the heat of the flames reaches his skull and his brain begins going into short circuit as a prelude to the big goodbye, I don't mean to dramatize, but that is exactly what happened to Siddons when he bought it in Beirut, while his DIF was reporting progress to that bastard Loman in London.

Compared with which of course my situation was decidedly cushy, I was only holed up in a phone booth in Siberia watching that poor bugger out there struggling to get up before he froze to death, but all the same I didn't take kindly to Croder, Chief of bloody Signals, asking for a progress report from a director in the field who was notorious for refusing to call up London when there was nothing to tell them, believing it quite rightly to be a waste of time.

'May he get the pox,' I told Ferris and shut down the signal and dialled the ambulance service and told them there was a man outside the Harbour Light Bar on the west bank of the Ob needing attention. Then I forced open the door of the booth against the rust on the hinges and went across to the Jew and helped him onto his feet and told him there was an ambulance coming with any luck.

Pulled open the door of the place and got hit by the reek of black tobacco smoke and straight spirits and human sweat, the air hot against my face after the freezing temperature outside. When my eyes adjusted to the smoke haze I saw a man sitting alone in a corner on the far side of the room from the bar, a pair of gloves on the table, different shades of brown. He saw me come in but I looked past him and went over to the end of the long teakwood counter and ordered a vodka straight up, pulling out a stool and settling down to check everybody in the place, one by one.

I took fifteen minutes, not hurrying, because I didn't know Captain Vadim Rusakov any better than he knew me and even though he'd shot that general down he could still be working undercover for the Podpolia or Pamyat, the extreme nationalist right, and could have brought people in here to look me over. Or he could have picked up ticks in the army barracks and brought them here without knowing it, and I just wanted to talk to him alone, wasn't in the mood for a party.

Bloody London.

Rusakov was the only hope I'd got of putting Meridian back on track and bringing it home. But he might know nothing, nothing at all.

Six or seven tarts, two of them Chinese, they brought them here regularly from Beijing and Vladivostok on the Rossiya, one of the taxi-drivers had told me. The other women were jealous of them, of their slight and flawless looks, blowing smoke over them from their lipstick-reddened cigarettes to loud laughter from the men.

A huddle of Russian naval officers round an illegal crap game, three sailors drinking themselves under a table near the door, one of them with a trouser-leg soaked. A lone militiaman in uniform, too far gone to be on duty unless someone had slipped him a mickey for a giggle. Two dogs, one of them with a broken leg, snuffling and tearing at something unholy under one of the tables.

I poured the shot of vodka down the leg of the bar stool and put the glass back on the counter and left the change and made my way close to the walls until I came up on the table where the odd gloves were lying and pulled out the chair opposite Captain Rusakov and sat down and saw the chalk moving across the board for Meridian in the basement in Whitehall, Executive reports possible breakthrough, is now in contact with valuable informer.

Not really. There's just a chance, that's all, the last we've got. But remember, we're making progress.