The Scorpion Signal

12: TAG

Zoya Masurov: a body like petrified smoke in her black sweater and black thigh-boots, her hair blackest of all and drawn away from her pale ivory face, her eyes smouldering in the charred silk of their brows and lashes, taking you in and giving you nothing back, reminding me of Helda, last seen at the edge of a minefield on the East German border, though this woman was harder and would have no mercy, would kill you if you were an enemy and kill for you if you were a friend. But she held most of it in, and it was only when you went close to her that you sensed the undercurrents and felt their pull.

'There is no need to bring a doctor here,' she'd told Bracken. 'I'm a doctor.'

She worked on me when Bracken had gone, taking a small black cauldron of boiling water up to the room on the top floor, the one right at the end like the one at Gorsky's place, because we're safest there: it's the required location.

'What should I look for?' she asked me, 'splinters, metal, glass?'

'Glass.'

'What contaminants? What was in the glass?'

'Nothing. It was a car crash. Are you the upravdom here?'

'Yes.' There wasn't much light from the bulb overhead and she was using a big hand lamp that must have come out of a railway sale, her black eyes narrowed as she looked for the glint of glass, swabbing and exploring and swabbing again, never looking at me, looking always at the wound, 'I am the upravdom, yes, but also a doctor, though no longer in the registry, of course, since they removed my name after nearly thirteen years,' the fragments cutting sometimes as she moved the steel probe, her body held perfectly still and only her hands working, the small veins in her temple thrown into relief by the backwash of the enormous lamp, the sweep of one eyelash sending shadow across her brow, 'that was at the hospital in Smolensk, the big new one they built after the war. It was there that they found me doing something unforgivable.'

The room was warm and this woman was healing me and Bracken had given me his guarantee, no one but himself in the field with me, so I was slowly coming down from the nervous high of the aftershock and beginning to think I had a chance of doing some work in this city and getting out of it alive. But I still didn't know how I could have asked him what I had, to keep it from Croder that I'd needed persuasion. Croder meant nothing to me.

'They found me using American antibiotics,' she said. 'We didn't have anything at the time for sickle cell anaemia, and they wouldn't allow the import of GH3 because Romania isn't loyal to the master state. But I had a friend at the consulate and he got me the drugs from Sloan Kittering — Kettering, is it? — and I was found using them, and so here I am, the upravdom of an apartment block in Moscow with instructions to report on the residents here if they commit any infraction of the rules.' She threw the swab into a metal-lined box and prodded again. I winced and she laughed and said, 'You can feel it better than I can see it, that's just what I want.'

'And a happy Christmas to you too,' I said and she laughed again and had to hold the probe away for a minute. She had sharp white teeth like an animal's, and it occurred to me that if I ever introduced her to the blue-eyed fair-haired Natalya Fyodorova this woman would eat her alive.

'It amuses me,' she said deep in her throat, 'the way men can't stand pain.'

'It's to get sympathy, even when we know there isn't a dog's chance. Did you appeal?'

She broke her laugh halfway. 'Appeal?'

'Against the medical brass.'

'I didn't know you were listening.'

'Oh yes, I was listening.'

The place was reeking of alcohol by the time she'd finished, and I stood at the other side of the room from the mirror and took a look; she'd put in a row of new sutures and covered the wound with a long strip of elastic dressing and it didn't look too bad in here, though it wouldn't do for the street.

'Will it start bleeding again?'

'No.' She was packing her things together in the big medical bag. 'Not unless you open it again as you did last time.'

There was a bloodied swab on the linoleum and I dropped it into the wood-stove. 'What did they tell you about me?'

'You are for safe keeping,' she said.

'What else?'

'Nothing else.'

'There's a hunt on,' I said, and looked through the grimy window to the lamps in the street below. 'They're looking for a man with a scar. If I run out of luck and someone follows me here, are you fully organized? I mean cover, background, instructions?'

'Yes.' She swung the bag over one shoulder like a knap-sack. 'But if that isn't enough, I have a sawn-off shotgun and some grenades.'

London wouldn't know about that.

'And you'd like to use them, wouldn't you?'

'Yes,' she said slowly, 'I would like to use them.'

As soon as she'd gone I got out the material Bracken had given me. The capsule was in the regulation tin box and the report was in a digraphic code, key 5, using AMBER LIGHT for the first two lines in the grid with x separating the double letters; it wasn't new and it wasn't fast but it was almost unbreakable Of ten Natalya Fyodorovas in M. one in personnel office Kremlin, 27, attractive, possible part-time swallow, still tracing. Of seventeen Pyotr Ignatovs none linked with intelligence field or police, none suspect, still tracing. No details of subject's arrest though probably in open. Reasons given for application for post of a-i-p his interest in dissident affairs and possibility of his proving useful in that area. No inconsistency seen, since subject is Jewish and has contacts in M. State what link Nat. Fyo. and Pyot. Ign. if any. Destruct.

I opened the stove and watched it burn. It was about the least informative signal I'd ever received from a director in the field with the operation half blown and the subject probably dead. I think Bracken could have got me a lot more if London hadn't been standing on his hands: I didn't like the way he'd said we know what the risks are and we know what to do about them. They shouldn't know any more at this stage than that a Judas had started working through the Moscow cell and blowing the executives one by one, but Croder was running this thing and he wouldn't tell even Bracken any more than he had to know, and I had the feeling that something even bigger than the threat to Leningrad was involved or that in the last twenty-four hours the threat to Leningrad had developed into a threat of something bigger, something on a vaster scale than an inter-intelligence skirmish.

It wasn't my business. A shadow executive for the Bureau is a ferret and they'd put me down the hole and I hadn't found Schrenk and now they wanted Ignatov so I'd have to go down the hole again and find him and bring him in for Bracken to look at, and it was a quarter past eight when I put the capsule away and got the second-hand astrakhan coat they'd dug up for me and put it on and went downstairs and through the deserted hallway and out into the lamplit snow.

D.12-145.

I could see the archway of Spassky Gate at one end of the driving-mirror. The lights on each side of it had gone from red to green as three cars and a plain van had driven into the Kremlin during the past ten minutes. I was waiting for a car to come through from the other direction: the mud-brown Syrena. She'd said he would come soon after five o'clock and it was now three minutes to the hour.

'Did you tell him my name?' I had asked her.

At one stage she'd broken down and cried. That was last night. 'I've told you, I haven't seen him, I haven't seen him!' Shaking against the railings of the apartment block, her face wet and her thin shoulders hunched forward, her small gloved hands gripping the ironwork.

'It's all right,' I told her, 'but I thought you were lying.'

'Why should I lie?' She swung round to face me, furious. 'I want you to find him, don't you understand?' She meant Helmut Schrenk. He was all she could think about, and that was what I had to work on. There was no point in telling her I thought he was dead.

Syrena, Spassky Gate. Not brown. Not D.12-145. There were thousands of them all over the city.

The clock in the tower began chiming.

'Why should I give you away to Ignatov?' Blowing into her handkerchief, shaking her hair back, soot on her gloves from the railings.

'Somebody did.'

It got her attention and she stared at me in the acid light of the lamps. 'What happened?'

'He tried to get me arrested.'

'But he's not in the police!'

'No?'

'He's in the transport division, one of the chauffeurs for the Politburo.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course.' She wiped her face, half turned away from me. 'You didn't tell me much, you see, the first time we met. All I'm trying to do is find Helmut.'

'I didn't trust you, before.'

'What makes you trust me now?'

She leaned back against the railings and closed her eyes, exhausted from the anger and hope and uncertainty. After these last months I'd started her thinking about him again and it had disrupted her life.

'I trust you now because I want to. Because I have to.'

'They're good enough reasons. Listen, Natalya, I want to find Ignatov. Do you know where he lives?'

'No. We always met at the cafe, or the skating rink, places like that. But I can find out exactly where he works.' Another Syrena. Mud brown. Not D.12-145. The clock in the tower had stopped chiming. I watched the mirror. 'Can you find out tonight?'

'No. I don't have the keys of the office.'

'Is there anyone you can contact, whoever has the keys? Tell them you want to catch up on some work?'

She thought for a moment and then said, 'I could ask the security men to let me in with — '

'No, don't do that.' I stood closer to her. 'Listen, the KGB wants to find Helmut too. Think of it as a race — they get to him first, or I do. It's partly up to you who wins. Keep away from Ignatov and don't change your daily routine. Don't tell anyone about me and don't tell anyone there's a hope of finding Helmut. Try to forget him as much as you can, otherwise you might give yourself away. And him. All understood?'

'Yes.' Her mouth was trembling: she was going to cry again but not out of anger this time, but just because she was out of her depth and didn't know what to do, didn't know whom to trust, didn't know if she'd ever see Helmut again. This girl wasn't a swallow, she was just another young Muscovite with a mother and father and friends and a job, and the most clandestine thing she knew how to do was to march with the cafe crusaders through dreams of freedom in the long night where freedom was dead.

'Ivan was arrested,' she'd told me before I left her.

'What for?'

'Handing out leaflets, outside the courtroom.'

'Three days. You'll see him again. But keep away from the cafe, and don't hand out any leaflets yourself. I may need to see you again if I don't find Ignatov.'

D.12-145.

Turning to the right as it came through Spassky Gate. I started the engine and moved away from the kerb. She'd said he normally took Razina ulica and I turned right and slowed and saw him go across the intersection and turned left when the lights changed and took up the tag with two cars and a taxi in the space between us. The Mercedes 220 was four cars behind.

I knew how good Ignatov was in the street: he'd used his mirror when I'd tagged him before and it had got me into Lubyanka so this was strictly a red sector I was in. I'd be secure all the time we were on the move but if he stopped anywhere in an open street I'd have to make sure he didn't speak to a militia man, and if he went to a telephone box I'd have to leave him there and get the Pobeda into some kind of cover. There was no reason why he should suspect the tag: this was a different car with a different number and he'd never seen me closer than a street's width away and this was the rush hour and there were a dozen Pobedas in sight of him at any given minute. But he'd blown me the last time and he could do it again if I gave him the ghost of a chance.

I didn't think he had a transmitter with a concealed antenna because this was the same Syrena he was driving and two days ago he'd had to get out and telephone to trigger the action.

Mirror. The Mercedes was now three spaces behind me and in front of a truck with a high profile and after that I couldn't see anything but if a police patrol wanted to come up on me for any reason he'd overtake the rest and dose me in. I could only relax when there was a right-hand street within sight for use as an escape road but this was oversensitive because my image was dean and I didn't think Ignatov had a transmitter. After Lubyanka, Bracken had said, you'll feel a bit paranoid for a while.

We crossed the first ring road at 5.14 and the second one five minutes later and followed Kazakov ulica eastwards with no significant change in the pattern except for some shunting when Ignatov went through the lights at yellow and I had to get the spacer vehicles behind me and close the distance and then hang back and wait for some new ones to cover me in his mirror. He'd seen me once or twice but he'd seen a lot of cars behind him as we all headed for the suburbs, and the rake of my windscreen was reflecting the street lamps and he couldn't see my face. I don't think he was going through on the yellow because he'd discovered the tag: Natalya had said he was a chauffeur for the Politburo so he'd be used to storming along the Chaika lane at the wheel of a government Zil and going through on the red with the policeman stopping the cross traffic, and he must feel frustrated on his off-duty runs in the Syrena.

5.22 and a right turn to take us across the river at the Radio ulica bridge two minutes later. Three spacers, two taxis and a small van, with the Mercedes keeping station behind me. The road surface was fair, with sand across the snow and not too many ruts forming as yet.

This astrakhan coat smelt bloody awful: God knew where Bracken's people had got it from. It reeked of black tobacco and borsht and camphor balls, this week's unrepeatable bargain out of the railway workers' union second-hand store, I'd put it at fifteen roubles. I wound down the window and let the freezing air come in.

Slowing.

He was slowing and peeling off to the right at the fork opposite the park and I saw the pumps of a filling-station and slowed with him and took the same turn, because if I went straight on and took two rights I'd come back on him from the opposite direction and he'd get a close look at my face when I passed him; at that point he'd be on my left and the cheek wound would be on the other side but my image was an eighty-eight per cent security risk on an inverted scale: I'd made a count while I was waiting for him to come through Spassky Gate and one out of eight men on the pavement had been wearing his scarf as I was, to cover each side of his face against the cold. Ignatov was observant and he'd recognize me if he saw me twice.

He was stopping at the end of the queue for the pumps and I made a half-turn and pulled up with a parked truck for cover and waited. At this angle the mirror gave me a square centimetre of critical reflection: the forward half of the Syrena's driving-window and Ignatov's head and one shoulder. After thirty seconds he opened the door and got out and I shifted my head to keep his reflection in sight: the back of his dark fur coat and the lower half of his head. Then the image disappeared and I had to risk looking round.

He was going across the tarmac area towards the telephone box.

I watched him.

Bodily changes: sweat, blood leaving the skin, awareness of pulse. Panic trying to set in.

It's a trap. He did this before, when -

Shuddup.

Bloody organism.

We've got to get out of here -

Shuddup.

He went into the telephone box and I saw the dark of his shoulder and the pale blur of his face behind the steamy glass. He knew the number: he wasn't using the book.

The nerves were tingling as the adrenalin came into the bloodstream, and the muscles felt alert. Instinct told me to get out while there was a chance of finding cover and going to ground before the patrol cars arrived, and logic supported this. He'd led me a long way, two days ago, before he'd stopped to telephone, and he'd led me a long way now. I'd performed a model tag from Spassky Gate this evening, but I'd done as well two days ago and he'd seen me and set the trap, just as he was doing now.

So I got out of the car and walked the length of the truck and reached the shadows behind the buildings and watched him from there. The box was in full light under one of the tall gooseneck lamps, the snow reflecting it upwards in a wash of radiance; but I could still see only the indistinct image of his face as he stood half-turned towards the buildings. I think he nodded, once, before he put the phone back and came out. He couldn't see me in the shadows and I moved the woollen scarf away from my ears and listened to the sounds of the traffic, trying to be selective, trying to pick out a distant siren or the snow chains of a vehicle moving fast.

Ignatov stood looking towards the river, the way we'd just come. He might be watching the lights over there, or the stream of south-bound traffic, or the tail end of the Pobeda and its number plate: I couldn't see at this distance. When the queue moved up to the pumps he got back into the Syrena and kept his place, and when the queue moved again and he was alongside the end pump he got out again and stood watching the traffic.

I went on listening. The cold air was numbing to the ears after the warmth of the scarf, and the cheek wound was sensitive. It was seven minutes since he'd come out of the telephone box and his tank had been filled and he was paying the attendant. I could still hear nothing unusual in the traffic's sound. It didn't mean they weren't on their way: with the snow on the streets they'd take longer to get here and there'd be no particular hurry because if he'd given them the location they'd dose in from a dozen directions and block my way out.

When he got back into his car I would have to make the decision but the organism was feverish with apprehension the adrenals were releasing epinephrine and constricting the blood vessels and the liver was releasing glucose for the motor energy; the skeletal muscles were firming and strengthening and the pulse was strong and fast. But it might not be enough to save me if I made the wrong decision.

He was getting back into his car.

I went on listening and heard no change in the traffic sound. The last thing I did before going back to the Pobeda was to feel my waistband under my coat to make sure the small rectangular tin was still there.

Ignatov waited for a slot in the traffic stream and found one and sped up and I followed, watching the mirror and the side streets and the reflections in the windows and bodywork of the cars ahead of me, watching for the first sign of a flashing light. The Mercedes came into the mirror twice before Ignatov led me eastwards again, alongside the park; then I lost it for a while. The sweating had stopped but I was chilled with it, and my mouth tasted bitter. The organism was having to deal with the superfluous adrenalin and the muscles were fretting for action. There wasn't going to be any: he'd phoned somebody else.

Who?

His wife or a friend or a woman, anyone, it could be anyone, telling them he was going to be a little late tonight because of the snow. Ignore.

At 5.47 he slowed and took a side street and slowed again and I held back until he turned sharply into the entrance of an underground car park. It was alongside an apartment block and I drove straight past to make a check and then came back and stopped and doused the lights and got out and started walking fast over the snow. Halfway along the street I heard an engine die and a door open as I reached the black mouth of the entrance and went down the ramp, breaking into a run across the dry concrete because it wouldn't matter if he heard me coming.

The place was cavernous, with concrete columns standing at intervals, their pattern merging into the darkness. The slam of a car door came but the echoes bounced the sound from wall to wall and I couldn't locate it. Then a flashlight came on and its beam swung and focused on my eyes, blinding me. I began walking into the beam but it went out and I stopped dead, waiting for the dazzling after-image to clear. I think he was some fifty feet ahead of me, midway between two of the columns; I heard movement but it wasn't distinct enough to get a fix on.

I waited ten seconds, but there was only silence now.

'Ignatov,' I said. 'I need to talk to you.'

He didn't answer. I couldn't tell if he had a gun: it was pitch dark in this area and the click of a safety catch wouldn't necessarily carry this distance. If he had a gun and wanted to hold me off, he would have to put his flashlight on again to take aim. If he decided I was too dangerous then he would simply fire, but he'd have to use the flashlight even to do that, because the entrance was no longer behind me and I wasn't showing a silhouette.

I stood listening, perfectly still except for my head. I was turning my head to the left, until my right ear was facing Ignatov's last estimated position; the right ear feeds aural input to the left hemisphere of the brain where the logical analysis of crude sound is made. I picked up nothing at all. After thirty seconds something drove past the entrance along the street, and the sound came into the cavernous dark and set up diminishing vibrations: the acoustics were strange in here, with the concrete columns breaking up the sound patterns and reflecting their remnants.

I thought some kind of movement had been made, when the sound had come down from the street. I wasn't sure.

'Ignatov. We need to talk.'

My own voice sounded odd, its echoes overlapping. I went forward, using tai-chi steps, long and infinitely slow, keeping my feet slightly tilted to avoid the sound of flat contact, sole to floor. I took ten paces and stopped. I thought he was somewhere between where I stood now and forty feet away: a few minutes ago I'd estimated his distance from me as fifty feet and I'd just moved thirty, allowing for a margin of error of twenty and doubling it. Then he moved and I heard him and span into the fighting-horse stance and waited.

Total silence. I went on waiting. I thought I was close to him now, perhaps very close. In the far distance I could see the rectangular patch of light made by the street lamps above ground, but there was no light here. If I could move to one side and work round him in a half circle I could bring his silhouette in line between me and the entrance; but he might be trying to do that himself, and might be succeeding: at any time now the shot would come, if he were going to shoot.

My scalp was drawn tight and I could feel the slight lifting of the hair on my head. Ignatov could be within an inch of me now, and might detect me first. I didn't know what kind of training he had, whether he knew how to strike lethally, working by touch alone.

It was difficult to move now with any safety^: the dark itself felt hazardous. A degree of sensory deprivation was setting in, and my nerves heard movement where there was none. A few seconds ago I had heard the faintest rustling to my left, and I had moved one hand out in the hope of making contact and identifying his attitude and striking before he could. But he wasn't there. It wasn't any good listening for his breathing: he'd be controlling it, as I was controlling mine.

I moved again, with the underwater slowness of tai-chi, and took two paces before I felt something touching my elbow.

It was to my left. If it was Ignatov standing beside me he would make his move at once so I threw up a guard and used a very short controlled knife-edge with the left foot and struck solid, bruising it. Flat of my left hand — yes, a concrete column. I hit the floor immediately, doubling in silence, in case he was close enough to use the sounds I'd made as a bearing.

I began thinking he must have gone. He wore rubber-soled shoes: there'd been no footsteps just before he'd switched on the flashlight. He could have gone far enough, during the passage of the vehicle in the street, to move out of earshot. But that was dangerous thinking. I got up slowly, watching the rectangle of light in the distance in case he moved across it.

Silence.

I took two paces, slowly, undulating, and stopped. Then I heard him draw breath suddenly beside me because of the shock of proximity — I'd come up on him in the total darkness and a grunt sounded as he stifled a shout and I clawed with my left hand to find the shape of the target and felt softness, the curled wool of his coat, all I needed. He struck out with the flashlight and it grazed my head before I brought him down with a crescent sweep and caught him before he hit the ground. He didn't learn anything from this: he thought there was still a chance and tried to unbalance me and I stopped him with a low-power sword-hand against the carotid.

'Don't do anything,' I told him. 'We need to talk.'

He didn't say anything. I found the flashlight and switched it on, lighting his face. He was still in shock and his head was lolling, so I helped him upright and he stood swaying a little, dazzled by the light. I moved it down, out of his eyes, but he still didn't seem to understand the position because he jerked suddenly and hooked for my face with his stubby fingers, putting a lot of force into it and getting close before I blocked with a jodan and centre-knuckled the medial nerve with enough depth to paralyse.

'Ignatov,' I said, 'don't do that.'

He was quiet again, sagging against me for a time with the local paralysis affecting his system through the nervous meridians. When I was sure he understood the position I raised the flashlight to shine full on his face and looked round.

'Well?' I asked.

'No,' Bracken said from the shadows. 'I've never seen him before. He's not in my cell. He's not the Judas.'