Quiller Meridian

Chapter 2: MOSCOW

He opened the door but not much, just his tense grey eyes in the gap, and I went through the introductions and he let me in and said he was on the line to London so I shut the door behind me and slipped the lock and waited, watching him, an angular man with thinning hair and a straight uncompromising back and expressive hands, using one of them now, cupping the air with his fingers to hold out his explanations until they were ready to accept them, London, Pritchard I suppose, because he was the control for Longshot, or perhaps Croder had taken over and was perched there under the bright lights of the console in the signals room with his metal claw scratching at his knee, the only evidence that he was in a towering rage because there'd be nothing in his voice except the cutting edge of his careful articulation as he skinned this poor bastard alive.

'No, sir. There was no question of that. I just told the support group to wait thirty minutes, and if the executive hadn't reported that the rendezvous was established then they could go in with the utmost caution and find out what had happened.'

Holding his own, not flustered, even with the angel of death at the other end of the line, copybook phraseology, 'rendezvous was established', 'utmost caution', so forth, drive you mad in the ordinary way but he just wanted to show he was still in control, I rather liked him, you give a man like this a jodan-zuki and you wouldn't get feathers out, you'd break your wrist.

'Yes, sir, I understand that.' He'd dropped his right hand, spilled his explanations all over the floor, Croder wouldn't buy them, he should have known that, Croder wouldn't buy a box of matches from you even if you were starving. 'Yes, he's just come in.' He looked across at me and held out the telephone. 'COS.'

Chief of Signals: Croder.

I took the phone. 'Good evening.'

There was silence on the line for a couple of seconds, while Croder wrenched his mood round and put his towering rage onto the back burner for a while — this was my impression. When Croder and I made contact with each other we both had to keep our cool: we shared what some people called a flint-and-tinder complex.

'I'm most grateful to you,' he said at last, 'for giving up your holiday in Rome at such short notice.'

'I wish I could say it was worth it. There's nothing I can do here.'

'We thought there might be time.'

'Yes, I understand that. Are you keeping the mission running?'

The green LED was glowing on the scrambler to show that it was in synch with the unit on the Government Communications HQ signals mast at Cheltenham, and the red LED was unlit: we weren't being bugged. But it always worries me to trust a telephone with ultra-sensitive information.

'No,' Croder said. 'I'm taking it off the board.'

So we'd lost the Russian contact, Zymyanin. And for the record book under Longshot: Mission unaccomplished, executive deceased.

'Then blame COT Norfolk,' I told Croder. 'No one else.'

I didn't say that for the sake of the man standing over there watching the street from the window: I'd been wrong — this crash hadn't been Turner's fault even though he'd been the DIF running die mission locally. Hornby had just gone and got himself killed because he hadn't secured his approach to the rendezvous, couldn't have done.

'Please explain that,' Croder said on the line. No edge to his tone — he just wanted to get things clear, and so did I. I'd been in a towering rage myself ever since I'd picked up that man's head from the dirt in the freight yard, because you could still see the youth in his face, the clear skin, the smoothness around the eyes.

'In my opinion,' I told Croder, 'the Chief of Training at Norfolk is sending people into the field too young and too soon.' I looked across at Turner. 'How old was Hornby, d'you know?'

He turned from the window. 'Oh, early twenties.'

'They're sending out kids,' I told Croder, 'and they're getting them killed.' The chief of support down there in the freight yard had looked even younger, could have been nineteen.

In a moment Croder said, 'Your comments are noted.' All I'd get, and I let it go. 'In the meantime you should know that the Soviet, Zymyanin, has signalled us and given his whereabouts.'

'Oh really.'

'He arrived in Moscow twenty minutes ago.'

'Intact?' There could have been some shooting down there at the rendezvous point.

'Yes. He's quite experienced.'

An older man, well-trained. Bloody Norfolk.

I waited. A tram went moaning through the street below. Turner watched it, not actually seeing it, I knew that. He was trying desperately to pick up what information he could from my end of the conversation with Croder: he'd been the DIF for the mission but I already knew more than he did about the crash. I cupped the mouthpiece and told him, 'Zymyanin's alive and well.' It'd help him to know that his executive hadn't compromised the contact and got him killed too.

He shot me a look of relief and I lifted the phone again.

'We would like you to meet him there,' Croder was saying.

Meet Zymyanin in Moscow.

Bloody nerve. Someone else could do that.

'We could see Carmen tonight,' she'd said at lunch today at Gaspari's, 'if you would like that. I have a permanent loge at the opera house.'

Valeria Lagorio, her huge dark eyes glowing, two locks of black hair damped and curled into perfect circles against her shadowed alabaster cheekbones, you don't go to Rome, do you, my good friend, to wade through the ice cream wrappers in the Coliseum. As things were, I'd had to break my date with Valeria when the embassy had phoned my hotel, and that was going to take a dozen very expensive gardenias and a champagne supper at the Palazzo di Firenze just to get things back on track again.

'You've got plenty of people in Moscow,' I told Croder, 'who can look after Zymyanin.'

It was only three weeks since they'd pulled me out of the Atlantic with a helicopter, and not in terribly good condition. I'd got another week to go before they could put me in a briefing room again, officially, and we can always ask for more time if we don't feel we've got our nerve back: go into a new mission with your scalp still tight and you'll crash, somewhere along the line. I felt fit enough, but I wanted my final week, it was in my contract and I'd already done my bit — instead of sitting in a plush and gilded box at the opera tonight with the totally breathtaking Valeria Lagorio I'd been grubbing around in a freezing freight yard stuffing a body in a sack, not quite my idea of a holiday.

'Zymyanin,' Croder was saying, 'is an important man, and we think he's carrying an important message — was carrying it to the executive in Bucharest and may still be able to give it to us if we show willing.'

I didn't say anything, so he knew he'd got to go on, give me the whole thing. 'It's not, you see, just a case of someone — anyone — "looking after" this important Soviet contact in Moscow. Since the rendezvous with the executive in Bucharest was set up, a great deal of raw intelligence has been coming in for analysis, and I should tell you that if we'd known as much as we do now about Zymyanin, we wouldn't have left it to a minor cell to find out what information he has for us. We would have asked him to make the contact in Moscow, not Bucharest, and we would have sent in someone of very high calibre to meet him.' One of the windows vibrated as a truck rumbled past the hotel, and I watched its brake lights come on at the intersection. 'We would like,' Croder said, 'to do that now.'

I said, 'I hope it all goes well.'

They'll use you, those bloody people in London, they'll use you like a pawn on a chessboard if you let them. This man was pussyfooting me into going out again, putting his cold steel claw into a velvet glove and stroking me with it.' Our intention,' he said carefully, 'is to put a new mission on the board and bring a high-echelon team together. I would undertake to control the new operation personally, and I have asked Ferris to direct for me in the field.' A beat. 'He has agreed.'

The lights went green and the truck pulled away through the intersection, a big round cabbage dropping onto the street and rolling into the gutter. It looked sickeningly like a head.

'I'm still on leave,' I told Croder. We always played this game and he always won, but I still put up a bit of protest because there was usually something I could get out of him in exchange. This time I had something important.

'I am aware of that,' he said, 'and of course I apologize.'

You don't take an apology lightly from Chief of Signals. It's like God apologizing for the Flood.

I watched the woman at the opera house, Valeria Lagorio, one pale ivory arm resting on the crimson plush of the loge, her huge eyes intent on the stage. Then the picture faded as I said, 'I'll do a trade with you.'

'I'd consider anything you suggest, of course.'

'I want you to bring the Chief of Training, Norfolk, onto the carpet at the Bureau and I want you and the whole of the administration — including senior executives and directors in the field — to confront him with the present situation, namely that there are people being sent into the field without a hope in hell of completing their missions before they're killed.'

Turner had come away from the window and was leaning with his back against the wall, head lifted, watching me through narrowed eyes. I listened to the static on the line. There was a gale blowing across southern England and the north of France, I'd heard at the airport in Rome, and the communications mast in Cheltenham would be swaying in the dark.

'I will give you my guarantee,' I heard Croder saying, 'that your demands are met.'

It had been a lot to ask, and his answer told me something about the size of the new mission he was mounting.

'Within a week from today,' I said.

In a moment, 'One can't always command the immediate attention of the administration, but I shall — '

'Within a week,' I said.

He could get those pontifical bastards out of hibernation sooner than that if he turned on the heat.

'Within a week,' he said, 'very well. As it happens, I share your concern in this matter, but that's not to say I shall find it easy to persuade them. I'm sure you — '

'Give them the facts. Show them the records for the past five years, tell them to count the increasing number of times we've seen "Executive deceased" on the bottom line.'

'I can only promise you to do my utmost.'

'That's all I ask,' I said. Croder's utmost could push a building down. 'Where do I report for clearance and briefing?'

I think it surprised him: it was a couple of seconds before he answered. 'I'm very pleased,' he said. 'I'm really very pleased. Let me switch you through to Holmes.'

It took half a minute, and while I was waiting Turner came away from the wall and dropped into a chair and just sat there with his hands on his knees, staring at nothing.

I blocked the mouthpiece. 'don't feel you're to blame for Hornby,' I told him. 'He was in the field, not you, and he made a mistake, that was all.' He turned his head slowly to watch me, didn't say anything. 'I've tried that death-on-my-hands bullshit, and it doesn't work, drives you up the wall.'

Holmes came on the line and I looked around for a scratch pad and found a bit of paper in the drawer of the phone table with Suzana, 6 P.M. on it and turned it over and found a bright green plastic ballpoint.

'Sorry to keep you waiting,' Holmes said. 'Got a bit of a flap on here, doesn't surprise me they've roped you in, only the best for our Mr C. The thing is, we've got to find you a plane right away.'

'How are you?' I asked him.

'Oh, absolutely ripping, old fruit. You?'

'God knows.'

'Don't worry, it'll be all right. You've got Ferris, no less, and Mr C. is extremely pleased you've agreed to take this one on. It's in the «M» group, by the way — Meridian.'

Code-name for the mission.

He got things worked out within fifteen minutes, sometimes using another phone to get information while I stayed on the line. By the time I reached the airport here in Bucharest there'd be a reservation for me on Aeroflot Flight 291 in the name of Viktor K. Shokin. From the moment I checked in I would use that as my cover name and adopt the identity of a Soviet citizen and would if necessary claim only a rudimentary knowledge of English.

I would be met at Sheremetievo Airport in Moscow and taken immediately to the British Embassy for clearance and briefing.

I put a few questions and got the answers and shut down the signal and left the scrambler on. Turner was sunk into himself and I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't sound like a trumped-up sop to his misery, so I just told him I was using the Honda and his people could pick it up at the airport, keys in the usual place. Then I shut the door quietly.

By 1:30 in the morning I was in Moscow.

There was a girl in a navy blue windcheater and fur gloves and zippered ski boots in the transport area and I went through one of the doors and walked with a slight limp as far as the comer of the terminal building and she caught up with me there and gave me Meridian in a soft clear voice and said her name was Mitchell.

'Viktor Shokin,' I said, and we got into a dirty brown Trabant and drove through the deserted streets under light flurries of snow.

'There's been a change of plan,' the girl said, taking a fur glove off the wheel and wiping her nose on it. 'They decided they didn't want you seen going into the embassy.' She had a small pale face with intent and intelligent blue eyes; sometimes I thought her teeth were chattering — there was no heating in the Trabant and the snowflakes weren't melting on the windscreen, just clogging the wiper blades. She stopped twice on our way through the city and I got out and unstuck them and scraped the glass a bit clearer with the edge of a notebook she had in the glove pocket.

She drove me to a decrepit three-storey building in Basovskaja ulica and parked the car on a patch of waste ground, burying its nose under a hedge and bringing a small snowstorm down from the leaves — 'It helps keep the engine warm.' She took me into the building and up two flights of rickety stairs under the light of a naked bulb hanging from the floor above. The reek of cooked cabbage was sharp enough to clear the sinuses. "They wanted to put me into one of those ghastly rectangular brown-brick workers' complexes, a bit nearer the embassy, but I said I'd prefer a bit of old-world charm, thank you, even if it was falling apart at the seams.'

'Nearer the embassy?' I said. She swung a quick look at me in the gloom as we stopped outside a yellow-painted door. 'I'm actually Bureau, agent-in-place, but I work at the embassy in the cypher room. Don't worry, nobody in this building understands English, I made sure of that on my first day here — stood on the landing and shouted Fire! but nobody came out.

This is my place.' She led me into a sitting-room with a Put-U-Up couch and a kitchenette in the corner and a door leading off it.

Make yourself at home. Can I call you Viktor? Me Jane. Would you like a drink or some coffee? Or are you hungry? Did you manage to get any dinner last night?'

I said I was fine.

She unzipped her ski boots and pulled them off and padded about m her thick red woollen socks, going across to a table in the corner and checking for messages. The telephone and the answering machine were linked up with a desk-model scrambler and the green light was on.

'I'm going to make some coffee anyway,' she said as she came away from the phone, 'got to keep my wits about me, haven't I?'

'Have you had any sleep tonight?' It was now gone half-past two.

'Oh, a couple of hours before London came through, I'm compos mentis, don't worry.' A sleepy-looking girl in a thick dressing-gown appeared in the doorway by the kitchenette.' It's all right, go back to bed,' Jane said.

'Who's this?' the girl wanted to know.

'An old friend. Sleep tight — you've got to be up early.'

The girl gave me a lingering look of curiosity and then went back into the bedroom and shut the door.

'Don't worry,' Jane said quietly, 'she's totally witless and never talks to anyone — she wouldn't know what to say. She's at the embassy too, makes the tea. You want to report in, or shall I do it?'

'Do you go through an operator?'

'God, no, we can dial direct now, through the new exchange.'

She went into the kitchenette and I got on the phone and told Signals I was in Moscow. I didn't know who was on the board at this time of night but it sounded like Medlock.

'I'll tell Mr Croder,' he said. 'Meanwhile we're waiting for Zymyanin to contact us again and tell us where he wants the rendezvous, and when.'

'He's still in Moscow?'

'As far as we know. You'll hear from us as soon as we've got anything for you. Everything all right there?'

I said yes, and shut down the signal. I hadn't caught anything in Medlock's tone but he was probably worried, and so was I. Zymyanin had got here soon after eleven o'clock last night — 'He arrived in Moscow twenty minutes ago,' Croder had told me when I was at the Hotel Constanta in Bucharest — and he should have oven us his ideas for a rendezvous before now. One of the reasons why he hadn't done that could be because he'd been frightened off by what had happened to Hornby, and he might even think twice about contacting us again. There were other possible reasons, and one in particular that I didn't want to think about.

'Would you like a cup, now I've made it?'

Jane had put a tray on the long carved stool; one of its legs had been mended with glue and string. 'It's not Chippendale,' she said — she was a quick observer — 'but it's better than the plastic able I found here when I came.' she'd taken off her windcheater and was suddenly thin, boyish, in a ballet top under a black cardigan.

I said I didn't want any coffee: there might be a chance of some sleep.

'They gave me instructions,' she said,' to clear you for the USSR, since it looks as if they'll be running the mission here. You're completely fluent and can pass for a Muscovite, is that right?'

'Yes.'

She fetched a couple of faded blue cushions and dropped them onto the floor, one on each side of the stool. 'Or do you want to sit a the table?'

'No.'

'Okay — ' she lugged a weathered black briefcase from under the stool and flipped the buckles open — 'this will be yours to keep, as well as the stuff inside.' she pulled out a thin typed file and a map and turned them to face me. 'Light cover — you probably won't have enough time to study anything deeper, will you? The map's only a few months old. When were you in Moscow last?'

'Before Yeltsin.'

'Been a few changes.'

'Yes.' I hadn't seen any KGB when I'd come through the airport, and there'd been no «concierge» on the ground floor when we'd come into the building.

'They're surface changes,' Jane said, 'at the moment. The KGB are meant to be calling themselves the MPS, Ministry of Public Security, but of course most of them are still very much KGB under the skin — think of the power they had! — and a lot of them are just going through the motions of being nice to the proletariat while they wait for another coup. And there — '

'You think they'll get one?'

'Coups and rumours of coups… someone sounds the alarm about once a week, for obvious reasons: unless the Russians and the satellites can get through the winter with enough food and the basics they're liable to storm the government offices and demand a coup just to get Yeltsin out. This is mainly embassy gossip, but everyone knows there are something like three million die-hard apparatchiks holed up across the country with a hammer and sickle behind the curtains. We can't let our guard down yet, that's all.' With a shrug — 'But I expect you know all this, from the stuff going through the London signals room.'

'It's a help to have it confirmed in the field.'

A quick smile — 'thank you. Shall I get you cleared?'

She didn't have any printed forms here so I gave it to her verbatim and she made notes — no medical problems, date of last vaccination, no request for a codicil, bequests unchanged. Then she made some notes of her own and I signed them: active service waiver in the event of death, responsibility for expenses incurred, the undertaking to protect secrecy — most of the forms they had for this kind of thing at the Bureau were from the Foreign Office and totally out of date, and every time we ask them to do something about it guess what happens.

I made the final signature and Jane asked me: 'Do you want a capsule?'

Her eyes widened a little as she watched me.

'Ask them to send one out with my DIF. I shouldn't need one before then.'

She looked down. 'Or at all, I hope.' she made a note and shut the pad.

'They probably told you that as far as we know you'll be operating in the USSR, so there's a good little second-hand clothes shop for men I can take you to first thing in the morning — they've got shoes as well. And you can start letting your nails grow and don't wash your hair too often, work up a bit of stubble — but I'm sure you know all this, you're very — '

'Reminders are invaluable.'

She suddenly drew in a deep breath and let it out again. 'You're being terribly polite, but it's just that — you know — I don't get many people coming through here with your track record and I think I'm rather desperate to get everything right. Blown my cover?'

'Not really.'

She finished her coffee and said, 'Okay, I'll get you some blankets and we'll pull out the couch, bathroom's through there, you won't disturb Amy.' she levered her legs out of the half-lotus and took the pad over to the phone table and put it into the drawer and locked it and came back.

'You do ballet?' I asked her.

'Shows in my walk?'

'Yes:'

A wry smile — 'Always tell a beginner, can't you? We overdo it, hoping people are going to notice, not many things in Moscow that'll give you status unless you're in the nomenklatura and then you'd be in a Zil. Prance along with your feet out and your pony- tail dancing and you've got it made.' she went over to the Put-U-Up and I helped her. 'Stinks of mothballs, but I suppose there are worse things.' she brought a white patched sheet and some blankets. 'If you feel like some food, just help yourself from the pantry; the fridge is empty, doesn't work. It's only local fare but the bread's terrific, of course. You'll take the call, right?'

'Yes.'

She watched me for a moment, her young and intent blue eyes showing the concern of a mother. 'You'll be all right? There are more blankets if you need them, but the stove keeps in all night.'

'Get some sleep, Jane.'

She gave a little nod and went across to the other room, her feet out and her pony-tail swinging.

I went over the map and opened the thin typed file and gave my cover a first reading: Viktor K. Shokin, forty-two, married to Natalia Yelina, nee Maslennikova, two children, boy and girl, Yuri and Masha, six and seven. Brief history of schooling, university, first job as a stringer for a local newspaper and then a stint as copy-boy in the Pravda overseas office before joining the reconstituted Tass agency.

A lump of coke fell inside the big cast-iron stove and sparks lit the mica window. I thought I heard Jane and Amy talking, or it could have been some people in another flat.

Favourite sport, football, no hobbies, slight knowledge of English, Russian Orthodox.

It was just gone 3:15 when I dropped the file onto the floor and switched the lamp off and heard a spring twang as I lay down and started memorizing the cover, giving it another ten minutes. The voices had stopped, and through the small high window the snow drifted in silhouette, black against the haze of the city lights, and the last thing I saw was the steady green glow of the LED on the scrambler over there, and the last thought I had was about the other reason that might have delayed Zymyanin's getting into contact with us again: he could have set up the kill himself at the rendezvous in Bucharest and could be busy setting up another one, for me.