Quiller Meridian

Chapter 23: VOICES

The dark pressed down across the snows from horizon to horizon, and our headlights cut a dazzling swathe through the landscape, the back-glare painful against the eyes.

I had asked Frome to drive. He knew the car and I was still slipping focus now and then. There was a certain amount of discomfort hanging around: the seat-belt in the Skoda had snapped while we were going through the final crunch, and the impact had opened a thigh wound and left sundry bruises. But the pain was a help, keeping the organism aware of itself during the time when consciousness wavered.

'Have you done a running drop before?' I asked Frome.

'Seen a couple.'

The front end of the Mercedes hit a transverse rut where tracks crossed the road, and we slid at an angle until Frome got it worked out. I didn't say anything. He already knew we were running things critically close and that if we lost even five minutes having to dig ourselves out of a drift we'd be too late and blow the drop.

The generals' transport column would be somewhere to the south, according to the map, and heading for the mansion in the park along a road more or less parallel to ours, and it shouldn't be long before we picked up their lights in the distance. The meeting would obviously be policed by the military contingent on board the transports, and once they were deployed in a ring round the building I wouldn't have a chance of getting inside. There could be security guards there now, and that was why I'd decided to do a running drop.

'We'd better go through it,' I told Frome. 'First, if it doesn't look as if I've got a reasonable hope of making it, don't do it at all, jus: back off and get clear. Second, when you give me the signal, keep running straight for at least five seconds, given a speed often c: twelve miles an hour — don't turn earlier than that.' the top of the windscreen began coming down across my eyes, and I realized my head was tilting backwards against the padded rest as the sound of the car faded. Sat up straight and got focus again.' third, whatever happens, don't go back if there's any opposition around — leave me to make my own way out. Let's run through it again.'

'Don't do it,' Frome said parrot-fashion, 'if it looks dicey, don: turn for five seconds, don't go back if there's a crowd. Got it.'

I checked the time at 5:49 and twisted in my seat to watch the south. The lights of the city slashed the dark along the west horizon; the rest of the world was a snowfield, ghostly pale under the stars.

'Shit,' Frome said and played with the wheel as the Merc drifted the winter stems of a copse swinging across the windscreen, the lights throwing their shadows in a moving frieze against the snow I picked up the convoy to the south two minutes later, a thin chair of lights lying across the steppe.

'We're well ahead of them,' I told Frome.

Another minute and we reached the east-west road out of the city and the trees of the park lifted from the landscape, silver-grey snow-covered, not far from the two chimneys of the power station to the east.

'Anywhere here,' I told Frome and he pulled up on the churned surface of a truck exit to minimize wheelspin later.

I got a tyre-lever out of the boot and dropped it onto the passenger's seat and stood for a moment watching the string of lights to the south. It was near enough to show movement now: the transports had met the east-west road and were turning towards the park.

'Is it a go?' Frome asked me.

'Yes. Stand off somewhere outside the park. If I need you later I'll use the walkie.'

I got down onto the snow and slid under the Mercedes, feeling for hand-holds good enough to use with gloves on, staying aft of the gearbox and to the driver's side of the propeller shaft away from the exhaust silencer, finding a cross-member with enough space above it for my hands and swinging my feet up, getting one of them lodged above the chassis and kicking with the other one until my boot found purchase on the back-axle casing.

Light began flooding the road to the west, and I could hear the rumbling of the military column, the faint ringing of the snow-chains on the smaller vehicles, the drumming of diesels. My right foot had slipped off the rounded axle casing and I shifted backwards, swinging my boot up again, but everything was blacking out and the sound of the transports died to silence, and in the silence I heard Frome's voice, a long way off.

'You all right?'

My shoulders were on the snow and the nape of my neck was freezing, but I couldn't move: the intention was there but the muscles were numbed. The light from the leading vehicle of the column was creeping under the Mercedes.

'You all right, are you?"

Said yes, but it didn't make any sound.

Cold against the neck, freezing cold, and my left foot coming away from the chassis and dropping onto the snow. The light crept, brighter now.

We needed to be inside the mansion over there. That was the objective for the mission, for Meridian: to get the information that was in the generals' heads, send it to London. But I was lying on the ground with the awareness floating insubstantially, the awareness of the creeping light and the rumbling of heavy vehicles and the man's voice.

'You got a problem?'

I sensed him near me, Frome, caught a glimpse of his face as he peered under the car, felt the known world coming back into focus, the strength moving into the muscles, my fingers tightening inside the heavy gloves, the lungs expanding against the ribcage.

'Look, we're leaving it too — '

'Minute,' I said. 'Give me a minute.' Reached for the cross-member and got a grip on it with one hand, both hands, the headlights flooding the snow and the drumming of the diesels filling the night as I got my left boot lodged again and kicked upwards, finding the rear axle, shouting to Frome, 'Get going.'

His face vanished and the door of the car slammed above me and the engine gunned up and the rear chains cut into the snow as the wheels span and then got a grip and the tension came into my hands and I locked my fingers and closed my eyes, we stay like this, felt a drop of oil against my face as Frome made the turn through the gates of the park, we stay exactly like this with the fingers locked, this is all we have to do, someone shouting somewhere, perhaps a guard at the gates, is he armed and do we wait for a shot, no, we stay like this and think of nothing else, nothing at all, the gears banging as the military column slowed outside the park, the transmission shunting, the light brightening again as the leading vehicle turned, then dimming out as Frome took the Mercedes in a curve alongside the building, we stay like this until the time is right and he signals, exactly like this, the clinking of the Mercedes' snow-chains echoing from a wall now, from stone or brickwork, my body swinging as the car straightened and I hung on, if it doesn't look as if I've got a reasonable hope of making it, don't do it at all, just back off and get clear, the tension in the fingers burning now and my shoulders brushing the snow and the light of the convoy spreading again and then going out as the double knock from the tyre-lever sounded against the floorboards above my head and I let go and dropped.

Smell of furniture polish, leather, ancient fabric, wood smoke.

The first three doors I'd tried had been locked; the fourth had taken me into a boiler room, and this short passage had led from it to the huge rotunda.

Two galleries circled it on the first and second floors, the higher one set back from the lower by its own width, their beams and pilasters deep red mahogany. The windows of the rotunda were mullioned, its doors gilded like the ornate balustrades of the galleries above. The lower walls were silk-panelled, and boxed silk canopies overhung the doors. Logs burned in a huge open hearth.

In the centre of the rotunda, at a ring of tables below three brilliant crystal chandeliers, sat a group of Chinese military officers, most of them wearing the epaulettes of high rank, and when the main doors of the building were banged open they got to their feet. As the two Russian generals came down the steps with their aides and bodyguards, a Chinese officer, grey-haired and with a general's flashes on his lapels, left the group at the tables and went to greet the Russians, who returned his salute. An interpreter from each party came forward and stood waiting.

Slamming of metal doors and thudding of boots as the rearguard of the generals' convoy halted outside. Shouts: orders to deploy.

In the centre of the rotunda, introductions were being managed with the aid of the interpreters: much formality, punctilious bows. I recognized the aides and the bodyguards who had been with the generals on board the Rossiya.

I was aware of the short passage behind me, the one that had led me here. I was aware of the shadows above the two galleries that circled the dome. I listened for sounds, for soft, alien sounds, alien to the voices of the international delegates in the centre, the clicking of boots and the scrape of chairs, for sounds nearer than that, closer to where I watched.

Because he was here in the building too, the rogue agent.

Talyzin — was that his name?

There was a man in the Ministry of Defence called Talyzin, Ferris had told me. From raw intelligence data going into London, he could be your rogue agent.

The SAAB 504 had been outside, buried among the trees, when I'd rounded the building trying the doors. I had looked for it, or I wouldn't have noticed it. It had arrived here only minutes before I did, it must have. The agent hadn't been waiting there on the hill road to launch an attack on the generals. He hadn't been waiting to follow them here — or wherever they might have gone. All he'd wanted to know was when they would leave the camp, and the moment he'd seen the transports gathering and the figures of the two generals framed in the field-glasses he had left the hill road and driven here first, ahead of them.

He'd known that when they left the camp they'd be coming here.

And so I was aware of the passage behind me, and listened for alien sounds.

'… Marshal Jia Chongwu… Major-general Yang Zhen… Lieutenant-general Zou Xinxiong…'

More introductions: salutes, bows and handshakes, no smiles — the atmosphere was heavy with significance. These people weren't gathered here to exchange courtesies; they were here to work.

'Colonel Rui Zhong… Colonel Wang Yongchang…'

Their voices carried clearly under the immense dome of the rotunda, and the scraping of chairs as they sat down would have pushed the needle of an audiometer into the high sector. I would have to listen very carefully if I were to pickup any sounds the rogue agent might make.

Security guards had taken up station on the ground floor, all military, all of lower rank. Three men in plain clothes were moving along the walls, not going anywhere, just stirring their feet as they watched the assembly in the centre. They would also be security, not civilian but MPS, former KGB officers, or possibly GRU.

The tables in the centre were not uniform, had been pulled out of the rooms and office's leading off from the rotunda. As a courtesy the most ornate pigeonhole desk had been offered to the leader of the Chinese delegation, and he was sitting behind it now, flanked by an aide and an interpreter. The desk was mahogany like the walls here, and overlaid with gold scrollwork at the corners. It was massive, an important piece.

Preliminaries were still going on, and I went back along the passage and took the corridor that followed the curve of the rotunda. Doors were set in the wall at intervals, some of them open to reveal offices; I took care when I passed them, but he wouldn't be in any of these rooms, Talyzin: he would be watching the assembly in the rotunda, and watching it from one of the galleries, remote from the security guards below. I believed he would have the assault rifle with him, the one he'd used against the Skoda I'd been driving. But even if he'd left the rifle in the SAAB outside he would still be armed.

The staircase I'd been looking for was simple, with a thin iron banister, curving upwards behind the main wall of the rotunda; it was used for service, presumably, for cleaners and maintenance crews. I'd seen the main staircase to the galleries when I'd arrived here: an ornate affair leading directly from the well of the chamber. Talyzin wouldn't have used that one; he would have used this.

I tested every stair as I climbed, putting my feet on one end, against the wall. Voices came from below, fainter now but still intelligible.

'We have just learned that Marshal Trushin should be arriving very soon — his plane was delayed by bad weather. He is replacing General Velichko, and will receive a transcript of the preamble as soon as he reaches here.'

I tested another stair.

'I am asked by my colleagues — ' first in Mandarin, then translated' — to offer our sincere condolences on the loss of the late General Velichko in such tragic circumstances. We feel personally bereft of a valiant comrade in arms.'

I thought that was interesting, because it was in line with the show of formality I'd seen before, the salutes and the bows and the.handshakes. Despite the military uniforms, these were the studied courtesies of statecraft. It told me something. It told me a very great deal more than I wanted to think about at this particular moment.

A stair creaked under my weight and I froze. I didn't think the sound could have carried as far as the gallery above, but I was moving into that deadly zone where a slight indiscretion, a lapse in attention to even the smallest degree, could be terminal. This was the final phase of Meridian and I'd broken into it before I'd realized, and if I could send anything useful to London I'd be doing it within the next few hours: that, or lacking discretion, lacking attention, I could go down without feeling anything much, just the instant inferno as the bullet hit the brain and blew the circuits and brought down the dark.

The nerves edgy, that was all, because those bloody things had come intimately close as they'd smashed the windscreen and ripped into the car.

'Your sympathies are appreciated, gentlemen.' the voice of the Chinese interpreter, full of throaty aspirates, took it up as soon as he got the drift. 'But fortunately, we are certain that Marshal Trushin — a Hero of the Soviet Union — will be able to help us further our cause with a degree of courage, energy and foresight equal to that of our late comrade.'

Our cause… Yes indeed, our cause… I would have given a great many roubles, a great many yuan, for a tape recorder here with me now. I could of course raise Frome on the radio and give him a short, urgent debriefing for onward transmission to the signals board in London through the support base in Novosibirsk: Russian and Chinese — repeat Chinese — military talks taking place Novosibirsk, subject a joint cause. But I'd have to go down the stairs again and into one of the rooms below to do that, and it was vital that I found Talyzin first and in some way got him compromised, made safe, so that I could concentrate on taking in the information I was here to get.

The Bureau should do everything to keep those people under surveillance. Zymyanin. Had he known there was to be a clandestine meeting in Novosibirsk, of great significance?

Talyzin had known. He'd known the generals were coming here.

He'd been here before.

I reached the fourth stair from the top, my eyes level with the floor of the first gallery, the scalp tightening. The gallery was in deep shadow, thrown by the chandeliers below; I could make out the shapes of tables here and there, of chairs; above them, catching the light, leather-bound volumes lined the walls. If Talyzin were here he would be here to watch the assembly down there, and to watch it he would have to sit or stand near the balustrade, where his face would also catch the light.

I couldn't see him.

It was necessary then to move higher, to climb the last three stairs, expose my head, shoulders, the heart area, moving slowly, watching for him, tracing the curve of the gallery full-circle.

'… And it is our conviction that the opportunity for us to assume joint command of all those territories hitherto known as the Soviet Union is immediately available to us, and that such an opportunity is not likely to occur again within the foreseeable future. The people of Russia and the so-called independent states are in a mood of imminent rebellion, thanks to the catastrophic breakdown in the economy. It is therefore the first step in our overall enterprise to oust the present government in Russia and the so-called independent states by inciting rebellion in Moscow and the major cities and demonstrating to the people that we alone have the power to put bread into their cupboards and shoes on their feet, to reinstate peace and stability and usher in a secure and promising future for their children — and their grandchildren. Our troops and our tank? will act demonstrably as the allies and the saviours of the people, thus ensuring their loyal support as we gather the reins of power.'

The two voices, Russian and Chinese, echoed among the shadowed reaches of the dome. I could see the complete circle of the lower gallery now, and if Talyzin were there he must be well back from the balustrade, watching, perhaps, through its polished redwood uprights.

Crawl. Crawl, then, to the next curve of the staircase, crawl in the shadow, silent and dark-garbed, moving a centimetre at a time past the ornate archway, a thing unseen, a creature of the shades, crepuscular, a night-crawler of harm to none, yet with the hairs lifted at the nape of its neck and its arms goosefleshed, its ears alert for the bang of the gun and the whine of the homing shot Crawl.

'… We consider our opportunity propitious in the extreme. The belated attempts of the government of the United States to buy the allegiance of our peoples at a time when they find themselves in need of the very basics of human life have brought the capitalistic empire-mongers to their knees economically, and their naive decision to reduce arms-production in the imagined light of global rapprochement makes the way ahead for us the easier…'

Faint light slanted across the first four or five stairs, and I crawled up them with the deliberation of a sloth, getting onto my feet in the higher shadows. I lost some of the generals' preamble between the first and second galleries but it came in again as I neared the top of the staircase.

'We fully understand the uneasiness of our Chinese neighbours in view of the possibility that Russia and her satellites might one day embrace capitalism and as a result cede their nationhoods to the West, leaving China as the last bastion of Communism on the globe, isolated and beleaguered, out-voiced and outnumbered in the halls of international debate, an island of a thousand million people in a hostile sea…'

Then their voices began coming out of silence, and I moved my head, trying to lift it off the stair, nerve-light flashing, an awareness of time passing, the pain of a splinter driven into my hand when I'd slumped, losing focus again.

'… And that together, as one ideologically homogeneous federation, we would claim no less than one fifth of the earth's total territory and comprise no less than one fourth of its population, a potential work force of one thousand three hundred million people dedicated to the socialist cause…"

I got onto my feet, the flat of my hands against the wall, stood there for a minute or two, feeling my way back to full consciousness before I began climbing again.

'… In the future. On the one hand the Russians will enjoy free and unencumbered access to the whole of the eastern seaboard of China from Korea to Vietnam, bringing Hong Kong and the Philippines within closer reach, while on the other hand the Chinese will enjoy direct access to the borders of Western Europe — including Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, once the independent states and the Balkans have been brought into the protection of the Federation. The opening up of new channels for international trade and the physical presence of the forces of the Federation in areas at present under the control of the West will be on a scale of unprecedented global significance…'

I reached the higher gallery, sighting along it through half its circle as the voices echoed from the dome of the rotunda. I still couldn't concentrate on this preamble of theirs but it occurred to m: that this wasn't normally the language of military men, however high their ranking: they were delivering this ground-breaking address of aims and intentions with a phraseology sufficiently rounded and structured to bear repetition through those generations of children and grandchildren, to be handed down through history with the weight and solemnity of the Magna Carta and the American constitution.

Easy to see it as an expression of mass megalomania, but in the still recent affairs of man the scions of a dozen nations had amicably established the most powerful union of states on earth. Nothing in the flux and turmoil of human enterprise could ever be termed inconceivable.

Not mine, thank God, to ponder. This was for London, if I could manage to get it through, for the presidents and their ambassadors and their ministers of defence.

If I could get it through.

I saw nothing here on the half-circle of the gallery I could observe, and when I moved, with infinite caution, to the point where I could see the whole of it, there was still nothing that I could make out as a face and shoulders, of a sloped barrel, nothing.

I hadn't expected him to be here. I'd expected him to be on the lower gallery, and when I'd checked that one I'd had to check this, in case I'd been wrong. But he was nowhere.

Nowhere in the entire building, perhaps.

The nerves caught this thought in a closed loop, reacting even before I'd had enough time to assess the conclusion — the pulse was accelerating and the blood leaving the surface as the survival mechanism tripped in."

Given the possibility that it had been Talyzin who had bombed the Rossiya, I might expect him to go for the two generals surviving Velichko in the same way and by the same method. He'd known where they were going when they left the camp: they were coming here. He'd been here before, then, and if that were the case then he wouldn't be here now, inside the building, he'd be somewhere outside, wouldn't he, concealed in the SAAB, waiting with his hand on the remote control as the generals and their aides and interpreters sat together in the well of the rotunda around the ornate redwood desk with the gold scrollwork at the comers.

Talyzin is a bomber.

That is his way.

Everything slowing down.

He is waiting out there now. With a remote control in his hand A detonator.

General Kovalenko is sitting at the ornate redwood desk, turning a sheet of paper. I can see him through the bars of the balustrade What will I see first, floating upwards into the great dome of the rotunda? His head?

No. Their heads. All their heads, as the initial percussion at the core of the charge expands, billowing outwards over the milliseconds, its force thrusting its way hugely into its immediate environs finding the panels of the redwood drawer and sending their million splinters into the air an instant before they are consumed in the white and orange fire, finding the live bodies of the men gathered there and blowing them into nothing more substantial than a fountaining of blood, a flowering of crimson tissue and cartilage and skin, the whiteness of bared bones.

A spark crackles in the hearth below and deafens me, sending a shock-wave through the nerves.

And then the whole building, the galleries and the walls and the dome, blowing outwards like a drum, bellowing, radiant with apocalyptic fire.

And the body of this hapless ferret, too, blown out of all proportion, joke.

'… Later — ' and his voice woke me from nightmare — 'we shall go into the details for you, gentlemen — ' the Chinese interpreter rendering the last word as "honourable comrades" — 'and specify the target cities where we shall incite simultaneous rebellion by the populace. We shall present to you the blueprint, if you will, of our entire operation, in order that you shall understand that for our par we are committed to an undertaking of heroic and historic proportions, comparable with the equally heroic and historic decision of the Chinese military authority not only to bury past disagreements but to submit their present format of socialistic ideology to the radical changes necessary to meld it with that of our own, thus ensuring the unification of purpose essential to the creation of a federal world power of greater strength, of greater resolve and of greater military capacity than has ever been seen before.'

The echoes of their voices died within the hollows of the dome.

But then, honourable comrades, you are not aware, are you, that if such a grandiose enterprise should come to pass, you will not be there to pluck its fruits.

Tell them then — go down there and push the armed guards back as they close in on you, address the honourable comrades: There's a bomb in that desk there and if you don't get out of this place as fast as you can run you 'll go through the bloody roof.

Or words approximately to that effect but they wouldn't believe me because the generals' aides would recognize me as the man on the train they'd framed for the killing of Zymyanin and they'd have me under armed escort in five seconds fiat — All right then, look in the bloody desk, see for yourself — but that might not do anything useful either because there could be nothing there, the whole idea could be a product of my imagination.

But you don't think it is —

I can make a mistake, you know, like anyone -

We've got to get out of here before it goes off, we —

Oh for Christ's sake shuddup, the sweat crawling on me because yes, I thought it was true, I thought there was a bomb down there and I hadn't got a great deal of time to think, say two seconds, you name it, three, not long enough, so go down those stairs and out through the boiler room and work your way round that bloody SAAB 540 and get him before he can press the tit, wouldn't be terribly easy, would it, getting past the military guards out there, they were surrounding the whole place, so I can't get out of the building and I can't warn those people down there and I can't stay here and wait for the time to run out to the big ker-boom, so what action can I take?

Survive.

Go down the stairs and through the boiler room and tell those gallant soldiers out there that they can take me in charge, blow Meridian off the signals board and survive, but tell one of them they really ought to pop in there and tell the grand architects of the new world order that if they don't watch it they'll go through that bloody roof.

I started moving towards the staircase, might be time, there might be time, the scalp tight and a lightness in the chest, everything still slowing down, and then I saw him.