The Scorpion Signal

14: DEADLOCK

He looked up at me from the driving-seat.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's you.'

I'd gone across to his car quite quickly, to stop him driving away.

He watched me steadily for a moment, his pale eyes narrowed and his small gnome's head slightly on one side. Even sitting down his body was twisted, with the left shoulder held low and noticeably still. He was trying to think what it would be best to do, and I couldn't have helped him even if I'd wanted to. I'd only just got here in time: I think he'd panicked suddenly while he was waiting for us to arrive, and decided to get out in case Ignatov brought someone with him: an example of the type of intuition we develop in the field as a natural aid to survival.

But he couldn't just drive off, now that he'd seen me. There was a question of pride involved. The most he could do would be to pretend he was just popping out for some cigarettes; but he didn't bother. We both knew the position.

'What about a little drinkie?' he said with a sudden lopsided smile.

'All right.'

I stepped back to let him get out of the car. He did it clumsily, though he tried not to let anything show, and I looked away in time to save him embarrassment. Perhaps this was why Ignatov had been impressed by my talk of a wheelchair: he'd seen what it looked like to be half crippled.

Dr Steinberg hadn't told me his patient was as bad as this: he'd just said he 'tended to hobble'.

He slammed the door of his car. 'Is that Ignatov you've got over there?'

'Yes. I'll go and get him.'

Schrenk peered across at the humped shape in the Syrena. 'Got him trussed up, have you?' He gave a dry snigger. 'Leave him there, he'll be all right.'

Oh no you don't.

'He'll get bored out here,' I said, 'with no one to talk to.' I went back to the Syrena and got out my pocket knife and cut through the scarf: the knots were there for life. I said quietly to Ignatov: 'Don't do anything silly, will you? Remember you want to see the children again, and Galya.'

'Yes. I understand.' He shook the stiffness out of his legs and came with me towards the building.

'Evening, Pyotr,' Schrenk said in Russian. 'Where did you find our friend?' Another dry little laugh, totally without humour.

Ignatov said nothing, but stared at the ground as the three of us walked across the rutted snow. Schrenk slipped a couple of times and I remembered I mustn't help him, even if he actually fell. I knew him that well.

Other things were coming back to me in flashes of memory: a plastic chess set on the corner table of the Caff, where he used to challenge people, waiting there like a spider; a girl with black hair and smoky eyes and an intimate way of laughing, seaweed draped over one naked shoulder on the beach at Brighton; a black Jensen Interceptor with an anti-radar unit, deafening jazz records, an ashtray made out of a piston and stuffed with butts, and the way his fingers moved over the bomb that time, stroking it like a baby rabbit. Shapiro. Schrenk.

Signal Bracken. I have the objective.

Not yet.

We went slowly over the snow. I could feel Ignatov's concern that Schrenk might slip and lose his balance and break an arm: he kept close to him, his head turned, looking down. I could also feel Ignatov's awareness that he mustn't help him, if he fell: he had tried to help him before, and been told never to do that, never to do it again. I felt these infinitesimal vibrations flowing between us and carrying their intelligence. Things were sensitive tonight.

I felt Schrenk's rage.

'How's London?'

We always ask that.

'Dockers on strike,' I told him.

He laughed again, whinnying softly.

Perhaps when people laughed to cover panic or fright or rage the sound was in some way inhibited, leaving nothing to show but a rictus.

'Good old London,' he said, and led us to the heavy metal door in the middle of the building.

His room was on the ground floor at the rear, either because it was the best he could find or because he couldn't manage the stairs and didn't want to get trapped in the lift; or perhaps this was the best he could afford, the London funding having been cut off when he'd left Moscow for Hanover.

Consideration: Steinberg hadn't said his patient was as bad as this. Had they worked him over again, after they'd picked him up in Hanover? I didn't think so. It hadn't been the KGB.

We all stopped, not far along the passage. The number on the door was 15A. Ignatov had seemed to hold back a little on our way from the car park, and I'd let him know I had noticed it and didn't like it. Ignatov had to stay with me until I was ready to let him go: if I'd left him out there he would have got help from the next good citizen to come into the car park and he would have said it was a prank on the part of some hooligans to leave him tied up like this and he would have gone straight to a telephone and blown me.

Leave him there, Schrenk had told me, he'll be all right.

Oh no you don't.

He opened the door of his room. It hadn't been locked.

'Hello sweetheart,' he said in Russian, 'I didn't go after all — I met an old friend of mine.'

She was a plump peasant girl, sturdy and vital and with her skin still glowing from the country air, a girl recently come to the big city to fulfil her dreams of concrete towers and grinding underground trains.

'This is Misha,' Schrenk said. She gave me both her hands, warm and damp from the kitchen, bobbing and saying she was pleased to meet any friend of Viktor's.

'Konstantin,' I said, 'Konstantin Pavlovich:

She bobbed again and then kissed Schrenk on the cheek to show me she adored him, while his bright eye watched me over her shoulder, daring me to judge him for shacking up with a girl like this, reminding me of other times, between missions, when the field executives amused themselves by comparing one another's fortunes: Christ, old boy, that was an absolute stunner you were with last night! And where did she get the Bentley? It occurred to me, in this moment of contemplation as Schrenk's eye stared into mine, that nothing in a girl could be much more stunning than adoration.

Misha smelt of stewed cabbage, and so did the room; she hurried across to the corner and clanked the lid of a black iron pot on the stove, letting out steam.

'What'll it be?' Schrenk asked me. He always spoke to me in English, and to the others in Russian. I don't think he was deliberately ignoring security; I think he felt that security wasn't necessary, because one of us was totally in the other's power and was therefore harmless. It was probably true, though neither of us knew which one would be the survivor, because this was what we were going to have to work out.

'I'll have some beet juice,' I told him, and he asked Misha to pour me a glass while he hobbled across to the plywood table under the window and got himself some vodka, waving the bottle to Ignatov, who said he would like a small one, yes. It was all very sociable, though I knew I was in much greater danger here in this room than I'd been inside Lubyanka.

'Cheers,' said Schrenk, and tilted his glass. He was having to use so much control that he looked like a half-broken robot going through its mechanical gestures: I couldn't tell whether the slight trembling of his limbs was due to his injuries under torture or to the rage that was in him. The only human thing about him was the brightness of his eyes, but even that was feverish. I thought he wasn't far from the edge of a breakdown.

'Cheers,' I said, and we drank together. Ignatov moved half a pace and I got annoyed because he'd had quite enough warning. I went across to the door and turned my back to it and looked at him until he looked down, sipping his drink. I didn't want to put a spark to the tension here by saying anything to him directly, but the fact was that if he tried to get out of this room I'd kill him. I couldn't afford to let him into the streets again: the only hope I had of doing anything for Bracken without losing my life was to take other lives if I had to. They ought to know that; I shouldn't have to keep telling them.

'Like to sit down?' Schrenk asked me.

There was only one small settee, hardly big enough for two people; there was a chair near the window but it was piled with books and magazines and some knitting I supposed the girl was doing — a nice warm scarf for Viktor, perhaps, in the name of adoration.

'I'm all right here,' I told him.

He sat down on the settee with a slight twisting motion that he'd become unaware of and no longer tried to cover. Misha moved nearer to him and was going to sit down too but he motioned her away with a little jerk of his head that she understood, even though he didn't actually look at her. She went back to the stove.

'Likes to mother me,' he said with a twist of his thin mouth. 'I'm a crashed pilot, you understand. Suitable cover for the state those bastards left me in.' He drank some vodka.

Lights swept across the window from the car park. It had been from this window that he must have seen me two days ago, checking out the environment.

'She seems a nice girl,' I said, 'and she obviously looks after you well.' I was aware of the clock ticking: it was a small grandfather type, tilted with one side resting on a wad of folded paper to keep the pendulum going. Schrenk had always liked clocks, and of course had used quite a few of them in his work. 'Did you tell this man to blow me?' I asked him.

Schrenk's small head jerked slightly: he hadn't been ready to talk business quite so soon, and I suppose at the back of his mind he'd been hoping we'd never have to. He got off the settee with a sudden lopsided movement and stood looking away from me for a moment while he fought for control.

'I had to, don't you know that?' I saw Misha at the stove swing her head to look at him. 'Snooping round here like that. I want people to leave me alone.' He stood shaking, unable to face me, hating me for making him put up some kind of defence against the indefensible. 'I knew you'd be able to look after yourself, wherever they put you. I think you've proved that.'

Misha came across the room and took a cigarette from the black and yellow packet and lit it and gave it to him, as she must have done so many times: there was habit in her movements.

'Did you tell him who I was?' I asked him.

'No.' He drew the smoke in deeply. 'No.'

'What instructions did you give him? What did he tell the police when he phoned them?'

He couldn't answer right away, though I saw he was trying. He'd wanted me to call him all the bastards under the sun for doing a thing like that, for blasting me off the street as if we'd never worked together or been close to death together, as if we'd never learned to trust each other. I would have made it easier for him if I'd gone across to him and smashed him against the wall, and I think he was still waiting for me to do that.

'He told them,' he said at last, 'that you were Helmut Schrenk.' He tried to laugh but it turned into a coughing fit and he bent over, drawing in smoke with the air and making it worse until the girl went over to him and held his thin shaking body.

I should have thought of that. I should have realized why they'd come at me so fast and with so many men, and why Colonel Vader had been so annoyed when he'd realized I wasn't Schrenk.

'I had to get you out of the way,' he said between the spasms of coughing. 'I had to get you locked up, so that you couldn't — ' he broke off, interrupted by a fresh paroxysm, and lost his train of thought. 'But it obviously didn't work.'

'Yes,' I said, 'it worked.'

He turned to face me at last, his eyes bloodshot and the cigarette trembling in his hand and his body twisted with the effort of keeping upright.

`What happened?'

`They took me into Lubyanka.'

He went on staring at me. 'You were lucky. Is that all they did to you?' He meant my face.

Ignatov was moving.

'What is it you've got to do,' I asked Schrenk, 'that needs me out of the way? And how much is the KGB going to pay you?'

The colour was leaving his face. In something like a whisper he said, 'You think I'd work for them?'

'If you could do what you did to me, you could do anything.'

He crumpled as if I'd hit him. His head went down and his eyes clenched shut and he stood there sagging like a puppet under invisible wires and for a moment I felt the sweetness of revenge coming into me and warming me, and then, when it was over, I was able to think more clearly and remember that this wasn't Schrenk at all; it was the remains of the man they had worked on in Lubyanka.

'Help him to sit down,' I said in Russian to the girl.

Ignatov moved again.

It seemed a long time before Schrenk was on the settee, looking up at me, dragging on the new cigarette Misha had lit for him. 'You think I'd work for them?'

`You don't seem to be working for us any more.'

'I suppose,' he said and dragged more smoke in, hungry for it, 'I suppose you think I blew Leningrad, do you?'

'No. It's still intact.'

`That doesn't tell you anything?'

Ignatov moved again and this time vanished behind my field of vision. He was working his way towards the door, behind me. I got very annoyed and swung round with a face-high back-hammer fist and he hit the door with a crash and bounced off and brought down a stack of shelves with cheap ornaments on them and I watched them disintegrating on the threadbare carpet while the girl screamed. Ignatov was staring up at me, blood trickling on his temple.

`Don't you ever listen?' I asked him.

It was very quiet. There didn't seem to be any noise in the whole of the building. Bad security: I hadn't got any more control than Schrenk.

Misha was hurrying across to help Ignatov, her face shocked as she passed me. One of those coy little Hummel figurines with gold paint on it and its toes turned in toppled off the remains of the shelves and broke on the floor, so I hadn't chalked up a total failure.

'What did he do?' Schrenk asked me irritably.

'Tell him if he tries to leave this room I'm going to kill him. He won't listen to me.'

'Pyotr,' Schrenk said in Russian, 'keep away from the door. And clear up that mess.' Then he looked at me again and said in soft astonishment, 'Work for them?' Apparently it had been on his mind.

'Oh come on,' I said impatiently, 'it's happened before.'

He looked shocked. 'Not anyone from our show.'

'There's a first time for everything.'

Then he was on his feet again, moving very fast considering his condition. 'I tell you I'm not a defector!'

The veins were standing out on his temples and he was staring at me with the last control over his rage slipping away. 'Do you understand that?'

In a moment I said: 'I don't understand anything, yet. I was hoping you could help me.'

Misha went over to him and tried to make him sit down again but he didn't even know she was there: he just went on staring at me, his thin body trembling. 'Detsky Mir,' he said softly, 'Detsky Mir,' with his mouth twisting into a hateful smile. Ignatov was looking up at him, his hands full of broken china, and the girl's face had gone blank. I didn't know what Schrenk was talking about either: Detsky Mir was a big shopping centre, that was all — Children's World.

No one spoke. I listened to the slow tick of the clock in the corner, and the sounds that had come into the building again. I'd been expecting someone along here knocking on the door because Ignatov had made a lot of noise with the china and Misha had screamed, but nobody came. Family fight.

Schrenk was getting over his rage, but there was something else there just as intense. He stayed on his feet, and he brought the words out with the whole of his body, twisting and crouching over them as if he were whittling them away, one by one, with a razor-sharp knife. His eyes never left my face. 'I had time, inside Lubyanka, to think about Children's World. All those soft cuddly animals, and toy trains, and ribbons for little girls. I had a lot of time.'

I was beginning to pick up a thread. Children's World is right opposite Lubyanka, in Dzerzhinsky Square. In Lubyanka there are no windows along the top floor, because the top floor is only a facade bordering an open space under the sky, with a machine-gun positioned in each corner: it is the exercise yard for the prison. I'd passed Children's World on my way to the prison when they'd picked me up in Red Square.

'I spent a lot of my time,' Schrenk said, whittling the words out, 'trying to see some connection. Some connection between those two places. I had more time in there, you see, than you did, and you've got to think of something, haven't you, when they start work.'

Schrenk prided himself on his ability to survive the most gruelling interrogation by the use of practised and convincing disinformation, Croder had said. We tested him at Norfolk, and even hypnosis couldn't break him down. That is the sort of man he is. But we don't know how bad the position is, because we don't know how much he gave away.

Nothing. He'd given away nothing. Not even Leningrad, let alone London. Now he was here in this squalid little room, staring at me, wanting me to know something important, his maimed body trembling with the remnants of his rage and with something else I didn't understand. That was why I was listening carefully.

'And finally I got it,' he said, 'I got a connection going between Children's World and Lubyanka. It worried me, you see. I mean, it's like having one of our prisons with its execution chamber right across the street from Harrods. Could only happen in Moscow, couldn't it? Typically Russian — slightly short on good taste.' He got himself a cigarette before Misha could do it for him, and flicked the match away. 'I had to think up a connection, yes. Wandering a bit, am I?'

'No.'

Ignatov had finished clearing up and was squatting on a tea chest near the grandfather clock, watching Schrenk, not understanding a word but listening to the sharp dry sibilants that cut through the silence.

'They're so clever these days, aren't they, at making mechanical toys. I mean that monkey, you know, that beats the two little brass cymbals together when you wind it up — that's old hat now, but I'm not thinking of anything more complicated. Surely they could make a small doll, with trousers and a moustache to show he's a man, and hang him upside down from a kind of trapeze with another doll beside him, also in trousers and with bushy black eyebrows slanting down towards the middle to make him look fierce, and a wooden stick in his hand — you see what I mean? It shouldn't be too difficult.'

I think he was trying to laugh, at this point, or the laugh was just coming naturally because of his macabre sense of humour, I'm not sure; whatever it was it ended in more coughing, because of the cigarette smoke. I suppose his lungs were in a pretty bad way, with the ashtrays always full.

'Then,' he said when he could, 'you'd wind him up and he'd move the wooden stick up and down, beating the bare feet of the doll who's hanging upside down from the trapeze. I'm sure,' he said and the laughter started now, and I hope I never hear a sound like that again, 'I'm sure all the little boys would tug their mummies along there to buy one — in this country it'd be a smash hit, don't you think?'

The laughter went on, the strangest sound I have ever heard from a human throat, a kind of soft yelping, like the cry of an animal caught in a trap. I saw Misha staring at him, her plump hands going slowly to her face, while Ignatov watched him with his thick grey mouth slightly open, his eyes bewildered.

Schrenk stood in a crouch as the breath came out of his body in spasms; his eyes were squeezed almost shut, with the glint of tears showing. 'You see,' he said painfully, 'I finally succeeded in making a connection, a connection between Children's World and that other world across the square. I could finally believe they existed within a stone's throw of each other. Of course there's always the funny side to these things, isn't there, I mean quite a lot of good citizens are taken inside Lubyanka for interrogation, sometimes for days on end if they prove obstinate, as you well know.' Ash dropped from his cigarette and he brushed it clumsily off his jacket. 'So you can easily imagine a young mother, worried about the fact that her Jewish husband has disappeared, buying her little boy the funny mechanical toy he's been pestering her for. Then, when he keeps on asking where Daddy is, she can tell him not to worry about him, just go and play with his toy.' He began laughing again, in soft little yelps. 'Don't you think that's an absolute — absolute scream?' But when he swung his head up to look at me I saw the hatred burning in his eyes with a white hot flame.

Then I understood. His rage wasn't against me. It was against that jackbooted crowd of thugs in Lubyanka, and the regime in which they operated, and the order of command that structured it from the omnipotent Politburo down to the cocky little militia men in the streets. Dr Steinberg had been surprised that I hadn't grasped that most obvious of facts: that when you damage a man as they had damaged Schrenk, with your bare hands and with special implements and with humiliation, you will engender in what remains of him the most murderous hate. It does, after all, become personal.

I could believe him now. Schrenk wasn't a defector.

Misha had got him to sit down again on the settee, and for a moment sat with him, her head against his shoulder and her hand cupping his cheek. She looked at me with her face questioning, then withdrew into herself as she remembered what I had done to Ignatov.

'Work for them?' Schrenk said bitterly. He shook off the girl and stared at me.

'What does he say?' she pleaded to Ignatov. 'What is it about, this Lubyanka and this Detsky Mir?'

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

'Why did the man hit you like that? Should I get the police?'

'You know better,' he said, 'than to get the police.'

Schrenk patted the girl's hand. 'There's nothing to worry about, sweetheart. But your Viktor would like some tea. Would you make some tea for us?'

'There's some in the samovar,' she said eagerly, sensing a return to normal.

'That would be very nice.'

She hugged him in relief and I saw pain flicker across his face; then she bounced off the settee and ran across to the urn, leaving him staring at me.

'We've got a mission on the board,' I said, 'and I'm the executive in the field. Guess what they want me to do.'

He brushed ash off his knees. 'Tell them I'll make my report when I'm ready. I'm not ready yet.'

'The objective,' I said patiently, 'is to get you out of Russia.'

'Sorry I can't help you.' He drained his glass of vodka and put it on to the rickety little stool at the end of the settee, getting it wrong and letting it fall to the carpet. Ignatov ambled forward to pick it up for him.

'Leave it there.'

'Of course, Viktor.'

'I can pick things up for myself, don't you know that?'

'I was forgetting.'

We watched Schrenk double over and feel for the glass, his hand swinging like a hook till his fingers connected with the rim; then he put the glass back on to the stool with ostentatious care, though it rattled to the trembling of his hand before he could stop it.

'You mean,' I asked him, 'you're staying in Moscow?'

'I've got friends here.'

'If they're anything like this son of a bitch here then you're welcome to them.'

He laughed and said: 'He's not too fond of you either. Why do they want me out of Russia?'

'They want to debrief you on the interrogation.' I could tell him so much and no more. He was going to lie when it suited him and he was going to do it convincingly, and if I shot questions at him I was going to get as much out of him as they'd got out of him in Lubyanka. All I could do was feel my way softly into the rage, into the silently roaring battlefield they'd made of his mind, and hope to intercept a few signals when he was off his guard, and try to come out alive and get the message to Bracken. 'They want to give you some leave. You've earned that, God knows.'

'I'll pay my own way,' he said, and fumbled in the black and yellow packet for another cigarette.

It meant nothing at all. It was just a spark coming out of the volcano. I had to find a way of reaching him. 'Natalya hopes to see you again.' At the edge of my vision field I saw Misha turn her head to listen.

'Natalya's dangerous,' Schrenk said at once. 'Don't forget that.' He didn't ask me how I'd got on to her: he knew that when I'd come into the field I would have started by contacting his friends.

'Noted,' I said. 'But she's got her heart in the right place. They're all worried about Borodinski.' It was an oblique shot and I got a hit though he kept most of his control.

'Certainly they're worried about Borodinski.'

'D'you think he'll get off?'

'Get off?' No control now. 'He'll get life, you know that.'

I took it further. 'There's a lot of protests going on.'

'Protests? They're not protests, for God's sake! There's only one thing those bastards'll listen to.' Then he angled his head and watched me steadily. 'You're not interested in Borodinski.'

No go.

Ignatov moved and I whipped a glance at him, but he was only helping the girl with the tray of tea. The room was full of comfortable sounds: the clinking of cups on saucers and the slow tick of the clock. But the company was wrong. Give Schrenk a few more days in here and he'd wire himself to that clock and blow the whole building apart.

'Thank you, sweetheart,' he said, and took his cup from her. 'The thing is,' his head turning to me, 'I want to be left alone for a bit. I've done enough for London, for the moment, you've said that yourself. I applied for a job here as an a-i-p but you know what happens to an application in that bloody place, it's like a snake trying to scratch its arse, can never quite find it.' He sipped some tea. 'So you see I don't want anyone coming here, you or Bracken or anyone else. And that makes it difficult, doesn't it?' He didn't look at me when he said that. He wasn't going to enjoy this, and neither was I, but it was something we had to do, had to work out.

Misha brought some tea for me, standing directly between Schrenk and me with her plump country-girl's body and whispering, 'Who is Natalya?'

'Only an acquaintance,' I whispered back, but of course she didn't believe me.

'It makes it difficult,' Schrenk said, 'because when you leave here you're going to signal Bracken and tell him where to find me. And I don't want that.' I noticed the colour was leaving his face as he sat squinting through the smoke, and his voice took on a forced quality as he made himself tell me the rest. 'The KGB must be hunting you pretty hard if you gave them the slip in Lubyanka. So when you leave here I'm going to blow you as I did before, and there's no way you can stop me.' Then his head went down. 'Sorry.'