Quiller Meridian

Chapter 21: ROGUE

He stood there watching me, Frome, he'd said his name was, the wavering light of the candle moving the shadows across his face, its reflection in his eyes, two pale flames, his breath clouding on the air.

Floating ice, colliding with the stem of the hulk, rang in the silence.

'And the woman?' I asked him. 'Rusakova?'

'She's gone too.'

He watched me, hands in bus-driver's gauntlets hanging at his sides, moisture glistening on his fur hat where he'd caught it, I suppose, when he'd ducked down through the hole in the timbers up there, bringing away snow.

'And all measures are being taken,' I said, a statement, not a question, something to say while I thought things out, of course all measures were being taken to find the DIF, at least find his tracks.

I felt like an astronaut — this is the nearest I can get to the idea of what it's like — losing one end of his life-line when he's out there on a space walk, floating away.

'Did he leave anything in his room?' I asked Frome.

'I don't know.'

'What about her — did she leave anything?'

'I don't know,' he said again.

'Then what the bloody hell do you know?'

Ice clinked out there on the river.

He watched me, Frome, the two pale flames in his eyes.

'Sorry,' I said.

'That's okay. I mean, there's not much to know, see. I tried phoning him several times and the switchboard said he couldn't be in his room, so I went round there and checked, found his door unlocked and the room empty, same as hers on the same floor.'

'No signs.'

'None I could see. I took a good — '

'Toilet things?'

'Still there. So were — '

'Scrambler gone?'

'Yes. And the bug sniffer.'

It didn't mean much. If anyone had got in there and managed to take Ferris they'd have taken those things as well, they weren't cheap and you'd never find any more like that in Russia.

'Bitch, isn't it?' I heard Frome say.

'What? Yes.' He was still standing there. 'You want to sit down?'

'No. I don't like leaving the car out there too long, bit of a giveaway. Try the walkie?'

I picked up the unit and switched it on and moved the dial off the squelch and pressed CALL and said Meridian a couple of times and got a response from support base.

'Executive,' I said. 'Two numbers for you.' Rusakov's at the camp, and his woman friend's in the town. 'If Rusakov can't signal, a man named Bakatin might come through, replacing him. Any news?'

Of Ferris. He'd know that.

'No. I'll raise you if he calls. The minute he calls.' Remembering to hope, scratching around for straws, they all were, Frome was, I was, any straw of comfort we could find.

All right, yes, that's putting it a fraction too dramatically, about the astronaut thing, I mean that poor bastard's going to finish up somewhere on the far side of Pluto one day with his super-trained athletic body shrivelled inside its metal-alloy shell and his wife remarried and his kids middle-aged, and when one of us poor bloody ferrets loses his DIF he loses his life-line in a way, but it's not that bad, we can go on foraging for ourselves, get home with our heads still on if we're lucky, it's just that when the mission's running hot we tend to get a bit edgy and the last thing we want to hear is that we're cut off from our director and hence from London Control.

Make a note, we should perhaps make a note here, should we not, my good friend, to get it put into the training manuals at Norfolk: Do not learn to regard the director in the field as your bloody mother.

'I'll need your radio manned,' I said into the unit, 'round the clock.'

'Yes, sir, understood.'

I shut down the signal and looked at Frome. 'Mind your head when you go back up there.'

I should have got used to the broken bells by now, but as the dark body of the river moved under its scales of ice the sound kept sleep away for a time, and then I lay drifting at last, the current turning me and turning me back as I kept the fur of the dead cat close against my face, using it as camouflage to deceive the men who were waiting there along the bank with their guns swinging as they moved, watching for the target, for me, on the surface of the river, but that must be a dream, perhaps of an earlier mission, I'm always having them, they never leave us, I've talked about it to others in the Caff, and now the feeling of movement across the scalp, the delicate exploratory scratching and then the first nibble, with the small sharp teeth rooting more boldly among the hair — Oh Jesus Christ and I swung up an arm and felt the soft warm body before it vanished into the shadows, not a dream this time, no, and I got up and found a length of timber and lay down again with one end of it under my hand, waiting but drifting down again after a while, down into the lulling silence of the delta waves before I felt it again, this time on my foot and I hit out with the bit of timber and felt a splashing across my cheek and hit out again and then sat up and saw it lying there, big as a boot, its blood pooling across the boards in the candlelight, some of it on my face.

It was gone four o'clock in the morning when I woke next time, swathed in the extra blankets with a hole for breathing through. I hadn't felt them again; perhaps they'd recognized the scream that thing had given for what it was, had heard death in it and kept their distance. I impressed future time on the subconscious and it woke me accurately at seven, an hour before first light. For my breakfast, turtle soup from one of the self-heating cans, with two hard-boiled eggs and a slice of that Christmas cake, 'twas the season, if not to be jolly, to indulge the appetite, on the sound and ingrained principle that I didn't know when I would eat again.

Then I opened the map Frome had brought me and spread it out in the candlelight, walking my fingers around the wooded area where the army camp took up three-quarters of a square kilometre. It was served by two minor roads that joined and made a fork three kilometres from the main gates of the camp. Then I folded the map and picked up the radio unit and left the hulk and put Meridian into extreme and imminent hazard, because I had no choice.

The crackle of gunfire came again, and the rooks took off from the poplars that laced the eastern horizon, wheeling and cawing. The rifle range was out of sight from here, below a fold in the ground, and the sound of the guns was muffled, echoing from the long corrugated iron huts that formed most of the camp.

The new day was frozen, as the days before had been, the earth invisible under the snow, the bare trees standing in a black iron frieze across the hill to the south. The air was motionless, its cold clamped to my face as I studied the landscape from beside the car.

Gunfire again, its echoes mimicking.

He could have been anyone, the man they'd seen watching the camp from his car, but I thought I knew who he was, and if he'd been there yesterday he would be there today; he'd driven away before he could be challenged, but he would have come back, must have come back, standing off at a greater distance now, finding cover in the trees. They'd nothing to fear from him, the soldiers in the camp; they were an armed battalion. They wouldn't have sent out scouts to hunt for him; they'd been curious, that was all.

He could have been anyone, but I thought he was the rogue agent in the field — Talyzin, if Ferris were right.

There was a man in the Ministry of Defence called Talyzin who spoke out rather too loudly against the generals… From raw intelligence data going into London, he might be your agent.

I'd sensed his presence in the environment ever since the Rossiya had been blown up, had thought I'd seen him once, getting clear of the militia blocks at the scene of the wreck, as I had. I didn't think he'd had anything to do with the death of Roach: he'd had no motive; and I didn't think he'd had anything to do with the surveillance on the Skoda that had brought that man Yermakov on my track, may he rest in peace. But I thought he might have set that bomb, the rogue agent, and if so, his motive would obviously have been to wipe out the three generals and their entourage, because it doesn't take high explosive to destroy life force in a single human being — Velichko, say — you can do it with one bullet, as Rusakov had done. So if it was the rogue agent who had set that bomb, then he would still be locked onto his private — personal? — mission: the death of the two generals who were still pursuing their own operation in Novosibirsk, pursuing it just over there, in point of fact behind the wire fence of die camp.

So I would expect him to be here, the agent, somewhere in the immediate environment, observing the generals — perhaps that mar. on the hill between the trees, sitting in the car.

He'd been there before I arrived, or I would have seen him drive up; he would have had to use the further road branching from the fork, and I could see its whole length, from the fork to the hill. The minor road didn't go up the hill, only around it, but he was nevertheless on higher ground there, with a good view of the camp. He was also in rather good cover, buried among the trees, and I wouldn't have known he was there if I hadn't been looking for him, hadn't caught the glint on the windows of the car as the strengthening light of the day came creeping across the land from the east.

A crackle of gunfire, stitching the silence.

I'd etched the configuration of his car by now on the visual memory, and if it changed I would detect it at once — if, for instance, he opened one of its doors on this side. I would have put the distance between us at close to half a kilometre, but 1 could see that he was sitting in the front of the car, because his dark coat altered the reflective value of the window glass. The distance from his car to the nearest line of huts in the camp was more like a kilometre and a half, so that he'd have to be using at least a pair of 10 x 10s to pick up anything useful.

He could have been — must have been — there all night, unless he had anyone in support, which I didn't believe: a rogue is a rogue, and works solo. They 're a breed apart, often neurotic, occasionally psychopathological, you can't ever trust them. Even if you can persuade them into working with you, with your cell or your network, you can't turn your back on them, they'll slip a knife in if it suits them, sometimes for kicks, ask that bastard Loman, he'd been running Fairfax through Tigerfish in the South China Sea when that executive had been found floating among the off-shore trash in Saigon, and it hadn't taken the Bureau five minutes to find out that Fairfax had been using a rogue agent who knew the area, and that the said rogue agent had decided to take a hundred per cent of the credit for the successful completion of the mission and the only way to do that was by putting a bullet into the executive's brain and dropping him off a pier.

A glint came from the trees on the hill, this time in motion, brightening and dimming out. I hadn't seen that before.

It was difficult at this distance to understand what that glint had meant. It wasn't the degree-by-degree passage of the morning light reflecting from the windows of the car up there: it was smaller, the glint, more focused — and then I got it, because when it moved again I saw it had a twin.

I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew they were on me now, pressed to the 10 x 10s.

Crackle of gunfire and this time the nerves reacted a little, goose flesh under the sleeves. The sudden contact that only the eyes can make at a distance between two creatures is intimate and dramatic. When that incredible girl looked up — remember? — from halfway across the crowded room and saw you watching her, there was a rush of hormones, wasn't there, as the glands kicked in; it was like swallowing all the perfumes of Araby in one gulp, I know the feeling, but that wasn't the feeling I had now as I sat in the car among these alien snows and kept still, perfectly still, submitting to a hostile scrutiny I couldn't escape.

It wasn't unexpected. I'd known that if the man with the field-glasses were watching the camp again today he would also make frequent checks on his environment, and my cover wasn't as good as his: there were no trees here and all I'd been able to do was squeeze the Skoda in between the ruined hulk of a barn and the dry-stone wall that ran past it — not even cover, call it camouflage.

It wasn't unexpected but there was engagement now; contact had been made at a distance between these two creatures out here under the early morning sky, and the scene had changed. He wouldn't just leave things like this, the agent up there among the trees. He wouldn't want to be watched. He would need to make a move, but it wouldn't be like yesterday's, because yesterday he would have had a whole battalion to contend with if he'd stayed his ground, and today there was only one man.

He would be a violent antagonist, if he chose to confront me. That would be his nature: he was a rogue. And he would be armed. Their lives in the field are short, but they'd be shorter still without the advantage of weapons. I'd known this when I'd left the Natasha an hour ago and put the mission into hazard, but I'd had no choice. I still didn't know whether I had any chance at all of monitoring the movements of the generals and infiltrating whatever operation it was they were running, but I knew at least that I'd never be able to do it if a rogue agent were in the field and moving ahead of me with the intention of finishing what he'd started on that train — of killing them off.

Listen, Zymyanin had said as the corridor of the train had rocked under our feet, this is all I can tell you for now. The Bureau should do everything — everything — to keep those people under surveillance.

That was why I was here this morning, with the ice caking the windows and the rasping of the digital clock on its worn bearings stressing the silence inside the car — to reach the objective for Meridian if I could, and get the information to London. I'd lost my director in the field but I'd set up a close support base with communications and liaison for Rusakov, but it would all be useless if I let that man on the hill take over the action.

I'd found him. Now I had to stop him, get him out of the picture.

He was here to follow the generals when they left camp, and in this we had the same purpose, but I believed it would end there. He had their death in mind, and when he'd followed them far enough from the camp to do the thing without bringing all hell on his head, then he would do it. Or it could be a suicide run he was here for, and the moment the generals left camp through those gates across there he'd move down from the hill and intercept and pump a volley of dum-dums into them as the alarm was sounded and the first of the armoured cars was started up and sent in pursuit. He wouldn't get far and he would know that, but a suicide run would fit quite well into the thinking process of a typical rogue agent, and he could be one of the psychopaths, capable, for instance, of bombing a crowded train with no thought for the women and children.

And if that was his plan, the hail of dum-dums would not only obliterate the generals. It would blow Meridian into Christendom.

He was still watching me. The field-glasses hadn't moved since I'd seen them lock onto the image of the Skoda.

Gunfire, echoing from the huts. I kept still, watching the twin glint from among the trees, staring him out.

He would have plans for me, too, now that he'd seen me. It had been the major calculated risk I'd had to take. If he were here to wipe out the generals with a burst of fire he would do the same with me, immediately afterwards, because I'd present a threat: at the least I would be a witness to his act of assassination and at most I might intercept him when he left the hill and block his run, leave him set up for the armoured cars. But perhaps he wouldn't wait for that. Perhaps he would deal with me first, soon, get me out of the way, as a spider moves onto the web and removes a foreign object that has fallen there and then goes back into cover to wait for the fly.

That was the risk, but it was calculated: it's the only kind I'll take.

And I had options. Perhaps, for instance, I could talk to him.

He was still watching me, so I started the engine. He hadn't swung the field-glasses away, was still wondering who I was and what I was doing here. I wanted him to see me move off, so that he could follow me with the glasses, know that I was coming. I didn't want to surprise him: he might react, and lethally. I had to approach him overtly — he knew that I knew he was watching me; I wouldn't be some honest burgher out here to admire the view, because all the honest burghers in Novosibirsk were in the queues for a loaf of bread, poor buggers, be there all bloody day. He would know, that man on the hill, that I would be one of his kind, up to nothing innocent, and perhaps might sense a kindred spirit in the field.

A touch optimistic this morning, aren't we?

Shuddup.

The snow broke under the tyres as I moved down to the fork in the road, and the bodywork creaked as we shimmied over the ruts. I had options, yes, but there weren't any others 1 could choose at this particular time. They were for later, if he proved a danger to Meridian, as I believed he was; then I would try to get past his weapons and contain him, bring him away from here, take him to the support base and tell them to look after him, get him medical attention if that were necessary, if he put up too much of a struggle and had to be subdued with some of the more extreme techniques.

I wished him no harm, be this noted. In looking for the death of those two generals he would, I'm reasonably sure, be seeking to dispatch them to the same Elysian climes to which they would have dispatched others, perhaps hundreds, in the execution yards. The late Gennadi Velichko, with at least a Rusakov's blood on his hands, had been their close confederate.

The snow crunched under the tyres, the chains clinking now on the roadway, where military traffic had pounded the surface and reached the hardtop. I couldn't see from here whether he was still watching me. I didn't need to see. He was watching me very carefully, I knew that, and a tingling sensation began in the exact centre of my forehead. It was familiar, and didn't rate any attention: this wasn't the first time I'd moved deliberately into a potential line of fire and felt the phantom impact of a bullet, perhaps this time a dum-dum, not my favourite, they blow the whole thing into a chrysanthemum, nothing left but the stalk.

I was halfway there now, a quarter of a kilometre from where I'd last seen him: a snow bank had blotted him out as I climbed the hill. He would use this, if he were trained, to change his position and turn the car to face my direction so that he could see me through the windscreen when I appeared; or he might get out and stand there with the assault rifle ready to swing up into the aim as soon as he saw me. Then there'd be the delicate business of going closer to him under the gun, close enough to talk to him, and then, if the talk broke down and he told me to get out of this area on pain of instant death, close enough to get behind the weapon and effect a change in things. That would be the tricky bit.

I kept a steady pace in low gear, bumping over the ruts, watching for him among the higher trees.

I don't like this. You won't have a chance if he -

Oh, piss off.

Watching carefully now, trying to find the profile of his car or part of it, enough of it to know if he'd turned it round or got out to wait for me.

Watch carefully.

The snow crunched under the wheels.

You won't have a chance if he -

I've told you before, piss off.

Crackle of gunfire and sweat broke instantly.

The rooks flew up from the camp.

Keeping a steady pace up the hill. Any change in the scene at this point — sudden acceleration, a burst of speed — could trigger his nerves and the gun.

There were widening columns of light now between the trees where I'd seen him last, but the configuration of his car wasn't there. He might have turned it, so that its narrower front-end profile would be presented, but I thought I should see it, even then: I'd marked his location at the outset, where the branch of a tree had hung down at an angle, broken by a storm.

He'd moved the car. This was where he'd been, less than a hundred yards away — and then I saw him, moving in the distance along the hill road, and I gunned up and lost the rear end and steadied things and gunned up again more carefully and started building up the speed, saw him again as the road straightened, saw that I was holding him now — at a distance but holding him.

The observer drove away, Rusakov had told me, before he could be challenged.

Skittish, then.

He was driving something European, not Soviet, possibly a SAAB 504 but nothing fast like a Porsche. The speed factor didn't come into things in any case: I'd simply have to gain on him by playing with the gears to get as much traction as possible on the snow, keep the Skoda on the road, keep him in sight until I could draw close enough to see where he was going, catch him if I could, yes, but in these conditions it wouldn't be easy.

He was still the same distance ahead of me when the road dropped from the hill and straightened out, and I was trying to bring the speed up a degree when I saw he was pulling away, not fast but gradually, taking me three kilometres, four into the desolate open ground between the military camp and the suburbs of the town, and it was here that he slowed and then swung in a U turn until he was facing me and the first shots hit the front of the Skoda low down and began smashing their way upwards in a raking volley of fire as I dropped below the windscreen and it was blown out and the shots began hammering into the metal roof in a deafening percussion storm that blanked out conscious thought, I was only aware of closeness to death, could only see the snow and the sky revolving slowly as the Skoda rolled and churned among the drifts and hit rock and bounced and rolled again, rearing now with the front end going down and the whole thing swinging over, over and down, crashing amidst whiteness, whiteness and silence and then a sunburst, sounds dying away.