The Scorpion Signal

4: MOSCOW

I sat waiting.

The night was perfectly quiet, with no movement in the air. The moon neared its zenith, towards the south.

I shifted my position again and the nerves in my right thigh reacted; the tissues had only just begun healing. I didn't know if I could run yet, if I had to. There was nothing else wrong with me, except for the lingering effects of the shock: unexpected sounds made my head jerk, as if they were shots.

It was freezing cold.

'What held you up?'

Another trolleybus went past the end of the street, along Ckalova ulica, a No.10. It was the seventh I'd counted. There had been a dozen cars during the same period; it was eleven o'clock and traffic was light.

'We crashed the truck,' I told him.

He started the engine again to blow some more air through the heater. It was a Pobeda, stinking of oil and stale cigarette smoke. We couldn't run the engine all the time because it'd be noticed: we parked by the river, close to the intersection, and four militia patrols had gone past in the last fifty minutes, one of them slowing to look at us. I didn't like it, any of it; my scalp crept too easily, and I was breathing too fast. I'd got close to being wiped out in that truck and the organism remembered.

'We thought we'd lost you,' the contact said. His speech was indistinct, as if his mouth were bruised. 'There was a complete blackout on you after Floderus signalled from Hanover.'

'It was close.'

'What happened to the driver?'

'The truck went up.' I didn't want to talk about it.

He turned the engine off and the cold began creeping through the cracks again from outside the car.

'What else?' he asked me.

It was his job to find out. This was Moscow and in Moscow you live from one minute to the next because there's no building that isn't bugged and no street that isn't surveyed and no hope of getting away with sloppy security or a doubtful drop or inadequate cover. They could stop, the next time around, and poke their torches in here and ask for our papers and pull us in if everything wasn't exactly right. Or even if it was.

So he had to find out what I'd been doing, because in five minutes from now I might not be able to tell anyone. I said: 'I got as far as Ashersleben in a shepherd's Volkswagen and asked for some medical attention and bought a new coat. That was this morning. There wasn't a plane till 13:20 Leipzig time. Then — '

'What medical attention?' He turned to look at me, and the oblique light shadowed the scar that ran from one ear along the jawline. A lot of them look a bit creased in one way or another when they've come in from the field.

'Torn leg,' I said.

'Is that all?'

'And screw you too.'

He laughed without any sound at all, laying his head back and giving a little shake. 'As long as you're fit for work.'

'I'm as fit as I'll ever be. Where the hell is Bracken?'

He began watching the intersection again. Through a gap in the buildings I could see a curve of floodlit gold, one of the domes of the Kremlin. 'It's difficult,' he said in that soft-slipper voice of his. 'Since the trial started we can't make a move without drawing a tag. There's a lot of foreign journalists in town and the K don't like it.'

'How did Bracken get in?'

'Diplomatic cover. It was last-minute stuff: they had to fake a case of hepatitis in the Embassy and send a man home, with Bracken to replace him.'

My nerves reacted again, shrinking the scalp. Most of the field directors come in like that, but not so fast: London would prepare the ground a month ahead to avoid any fuss. But this wasn't a planned operation; it was a last-ditch emergency job, and the man they'd thrown me as director in the field was trying to shake off the ticks before he got close to me and blew me sky-high at the first rendezvous.

I began taking slow breaths, working on the nerves.

'Bracken's all right,' the contact said. 'He knows his Moscow, don't worry.'

'It won't help him. Not at night.' Bracken would have left the Embassy in a car with diplomatic plates and the tags would have fallen in behind: it was routine KGB procedure when someone new joined the staff. And he couldn't drive dear of them by putting his foot down because he wasn't going to ground: he was going back to the Embassy sooner or later and they'd ask an awful lot of questions. There's not much traffic at night in this city and you'd wake the dead if you hit the tit and left rubber all over the road. All he could do was to try getting a truck or a bus or something between them and himself and ease off into a side street while their view was blocked. And the best of luck.

'Have you worked here before?' the contact asked me.

'No. I was trained here for Curtain operations.'

'Are you fluent?'

'Yes. Local accent.'

'When were you here last?' he asked me, watching the intersection.

'Three years ago.' Another militia patrol went past, in one of their snubnosed Volgas. A face was turned towards us. The car didn't slow.

'That's a long time,' the contact said. 'Things are changing fast over here. You'll have to be careful.'

'Oh for Christ's sake d'you think I need telling?'

His head moved a fraction to watch my reflection in the windscreen. 'Sorry, old boy.'

I slowed my breathing, counting the breaths. I'd have to do better than this, a hell of a lot better. Otherwise I was going to blow up when the heat came on. Eight, nine, ten, 'They pulled me in from leave,' I said more quietly, 'two weeks after the last lot.'

'Bastards, aren't they?'

We watched the car.

'I could have refused.'

'Why didn't you?'

'Vanity.'

He laughed again soundlessly, but didn't take his eyes off the car. It was moving into better light now, turning off Ckalova ulica towards us and speeding up a little. It was a black Humber with CD plates.

'You're driving this one,' the contact said, 'all right?'

I said yes, and watched the Humber. There was nothing behind it but there was still plenty of time: we were parked less than a hundred yards from the intersection. It came on, slowing as it neared. Another bus passed along the ring road, then a private car, going quite fast.

'Cutting it fine,' the contact said.

The Humber was nearly abreast of us now and slowing under full brakes, the driver's door coming open a moment before it stopped. A man got out and came across to us as the contact hit the door open and left the wheel to me. I slid behind it as the other man got in and said, 'You'd better hurry.'

A squeal came as the contact took the Humber away with the engine racing in low gear before the change. I hit the stick-shift and did a tight U-turn and found a side street and swung into it with my eyes on the mirror. There was nothing.

'You'd better go south,' the man said. 'Get on to the ring road as soon as you can.' He sat back, stretching his legs out. 'But I think we're all right. I'm Bracken.'

'Quiller.' I made two right turns, watching the mirror.

'This is the car you'll use,' Bracken told me. 'The papers are in the glove pocket. I was getting worried about you.'

'We had problems.' At each turn the street lights threw his reflection on to the windscreen and filled in what I remembered of him. He was a shut-faced man with a tight mouth and eyes that never came to rest on anything for more than a second: he was looking around him now with brief jerks of his head. He couldn't keep his feet still either; he kept on shuffling them against the floorboards. Maybe he wasn't always like that; he could be worried at the moment because he'd been cutting things fine. If they'd turned off the ring road after him he would have driven straight past us but there's always a risk and he could have come dose to blowing me. I didn't know much about him, only a few things I'd heard over cups of tea in the Caff between missions; someone had said he'd been thrown out of an instructor's job at Norfolk because he'd used a live charge to demonstrate his de-arming techniques, and someone else had told me he'd murdered his mistress and been acquitted because the Bureau had suppressed some of the evidence; I didn't necessarily believe either story but the truth was probably somewhere there in the background. There's usually something a bit touched about the field directors: look at Ferris, always strangling mice.

'What sort of problems?' Bracken wanted to know.

'Access. Croder's not as good as they say.'

His blunt head turned quickly. 'Croder is very good. It couldn't have been his fault.'

'He took a hell of a risk.'

'Quite possibly. He takes on things that other people won't touch. So do you. That's why he wanted you for this one. Did you fly in?'

'Yes.'

'Where did you land?'

'Domodedovo.'

'What hotel?'

'The Aeroflot.'

'Are we still in the clear?'

'Yes.' I'd been using the mirror at five-second intervals.

He stopped shuffling his feet. 'Did you leave your passport with Immigration?'

'Yes.'

'I want you to ask for it back in the prescribed two days and then go to ground and come up as a Soviet citizen.' He took an envelope from his coat and put it into the glove compartment. 'Everything's there.' He talked for ten minutes without stopping except to answer questions; we covered liaison, contacts, signals, the safe-house and possible exit procedures. 'I want you to know that you'll receive every support from the people here in the field and of course from London. I'm not trying to boost your morale. We want Schrenk, badly, and we think you can pull him out for us.'

'Where is he?'

'We don't know. We've — '

'You don't know?'

He waited three seconds. 'We are looking for him very hard. We have a contact inside Lubyanka, watching for Schrenk to come in. At the moment we can't understand why he wasn't taken straight there from Hanover. We're therefore watching a lot of other places: the Serbsky Institute here in Moscow and the facilities they run in the Urals, the Komi Republic, Murmansk, the Potma complex, and of course — ' with the slightest pause- 'in Leningrad.'

'They might have gone to Hanover to kill him.' I made another turn and got on to the ring road going south. The mirror was clear except for a trolleybus in the distance.

'Not without trying again to break him, and they couldn't do that in Hanover. It's going to take time, and a lot of personnel. We know that.'

'What about Leningrad?'

His speech became slightly faster, pushed by his nerves. 'The cell is still intact. Obviously Schrenk hasn't been broken yet. Of course they might have gone too far: he might be dead. But we've got to know.'

'What are their plans, if he breaks?'

He said in a moment, 'Some of them will try making a run for it, but they won't get across any of the frontiers because the guard posts will be alerted, and so will the airports. They can't quietly leave their jobs before the balloon goes up because most of them are entrenched very deeply in official positions and they'd expose the whole network. One or two have elected to take capsules if they have to, rather than face interrogation and the labour camps.' He took some kind of inhaler from his pocket and started using it: it smelt like Vick's.

'How many people are there?'

'Fifteen.'

Headlights came into the mirror and I watched them. 'Can't any of them get clear?' Comstock was in Leningrad, and so was Whitman. I'd worked with both of them.

'Not without putting everyone else at risk.' He'd begun shuffling his feet again. 'Incidentally the CIA is furious with us about Schrenk. They know Leningrad could blow.'

'They've done all right for eleven years.'

'That's why they're furious.' He inhaled again and then screwed the cap on. The whole car was reeking of menthol.

'The papers for this car,' I asked him, 'are for which cover?'

'You've got both.'

'Get them out, will you? Put the East German papers in your pocket. These too.' I pulled out the credentials Floderus had given me. 'Start reading the Russian cover, do you mind?'

'Aloud?'

'Yes.'

He didn't turn his head. 'Have we picked someone up?'

'I don't know yet. It's just some headlights.'

His hands began working busily, transferring the papers. 'Don't you trust the German cover?'

'I'd rather be a local citizen if I'm going to be found with a foreign embassy man. Just a slight edge.' But I wasn't happy, because every minute we were together we risked being picked up and questioned. The whole operation was balanced on a knife edge and we had to keep very still.

'Kapista Mikhail Kirov,' Bracken began reading, 'age 42, born Moscow, October 29^th 1937_, the Kuncevo district.' He paused briefly. 'Height, weight and description are all yours precisely. The — '

'Faster.' The lights in the mirror were getting bright now.

'Father, now deceased, Valery Kapista, died in an industrial accident, Troice-Lykovo district, 1976. Mother also deceased — '

I took a right turn and gunned up with the tyres just this side of squealing-point and passed three parked trucks and crossed some lights at red and turned right again. Glare filled the mirror and died away.

'This car's perfectly all right,' Bracken said.

'They've picked up a radio call and they're sniffing out the area where you slipped them. They started calling the minute they lost you.' I turned off all the lights and waited as long as possible before I put the Pobeda into a side street a hundred yards before the next major intersection. There was a whole line of trucks parked along one side of the street and I gunned up again and found a gap and hit the brakes and pushed the stick into reverse and got a brief whimper from the rear tyres as the power dragged us against the kerb. I cut the engine and sat waiting.

'Read more?' Bracken asked.

'No time.'

He sat with his feet perfectly still, his head turned slightly to the left, where he could pick up echoes and reflections from the buildings opposite. The wheel was locked hard over and I left it like that because they might be stupid enough to leave a gap if they came past and saw us and stopped: there was just a chance we could get out fast enough to confuse them before they could open fire. If they saw us and pulled up and blocked the gap I could try making a break on foot: the trucks gave a lot of cover and there was no snow on the ground. It would depend on what Bracken wanted me to do.

'Instructions,' I said.

He waited two seconds. We both had to listen. 'If you can drive us out of it,' he said evenly, 'do that.' We listened again, and heard the distant sound of a car. 'But not unless the chances are good.'

'All right.' The sound of the car was loudening. It was accelerating very hard in one of the indirect gears. 'Where do I drop you, if I can get dear?'

'Any cab rank. I'm going back to the Embassy.'

We listened again. The car had changed into top and was travelling flat out. Echoes were coming in now from the buildings at the intersection and they made it difficult to hear what was happening. I thought I was picking up a second car somewhere, also accelerating. I wasn't sure.

'If I can't drive us out?' I asked Bracken.

'Run.'

'All right.' I sat listening again. Bracken wouldn't have a lot of trouble: they couldn't search him and they couldn't arrest him and at the moment they didn't have anything on him to justify kicking him out of the country. But if they caught me they'd question me and a Soviet citizen shouldn't make contact with any foreigners, least of all members of a diplomatic mission. The cover wouldn't stand up, if they wanted to put it under the light.

'Two?' he asked suddenly.

'What?'

'Two cars?'

We listened again.

'Yes.' The first one was close now; the second one was still piling up the speed in an indirect gear, somewhere in the distance. 'What is there in the envelope,' I asked Bracken, 'on Schrenk?'

'Quite a lot. Everything you ought to have.'

'Local friends, movements, contacts?'

'Everything. Croder instructed me.'

'Fair enough.'

We sat waiting. Light swept suddenly across the face of the buildings opposite, brightening and going dark as the first car crossed the intersection flat out with its echoes drumming and fading over the next few seconds.

'One.'

'Yes.'

Tyres started howling and light came again on the buildings as the second car turned at the intersection and sped up towards us with a gear botching and the power coming on and the exhaust sending out a hollow rising roar until the gears shifted and the power came on again. I got comfortable in my seat and moved the stick into low and kept my foot down on the clutch and put my fingers against the starter key and watched the light flood brightly across the buildings as I waited to know if the trap we were sitting in was going to spring shut.