The Scorpion Signal

6: IGNATOV

Two kopecks.

'Is Sergei there?'

'Who?'

'Sergei Panov.'

'I'm sorry, there's nobody here of that name. This is the British Embassy.'

'Oh, excuse me. I must have asked for the wrong number.'

'That's quite all right.'

Every line to the Embassy was tapped and radio was out of the question and protracted speech-code was a slow-burn fuse because they'd go straight through the exchange and trace the call and raid the place within minutes so I'd had to ask for a cut-out.

'Sergei' was for Taganskaja Metro station and I got there in fourteen minutes, feeling nervy again because in this city there wasn't much traffic at night and I was vulnerable. It had been bad enough half an hour ago.

Have you been to the cafe? the younger one had asked.

Yes, she'd said before I could stop her.

I see. And were you talking about the trial there? About the traitor Borodinski? His eyes going over my papers again, turning them to the light, looking for the wrong weave, the wrong coloration, the wrong serial number, looking at the photograph and then at my face, then back at the photograph.

We were talking about Prokofiev, I said before she could answer. She could get us arrested: they were trying to provoke us into saying something wrong.

Prokofiev, or Borodin-ski? A little joke, his tone amused, a young man who knew his composers.

He wasn't playing a game of his own. Since the trial had begun, the standing orders for the police were to show these dissidents that it was useless protesting and demonstrating and thumping the cafe tables. Comrade Borodinski would be tried in the court, not in the streets. A night in the cell would remind them of that.

If we call him a traitor before he's tried

It simply means, I cut in on her again, that it's how we regard him. With a short laugh, squeezing her arm, Ask Helmut — he says we ought to raid the courthouse and string him up from a lamp-post outside.

Who is Helmut? His eyes watching her, watching me.

A friend of ours, I told him. He feels rather strongly about traitors.

The other man stamped his feet, feeling the cold, getting bored. I was waiting for Natalya to say something, ready to cut in on her at once; but she was quiet now, because of my warning.

Where are you two going now?

Home, I said.

He looked down at the papers again. But you live in opposite directions from here.

I'm seeing my friend home first.

His head came up. Why? Are you saying the streets are dangerous?

Of course not. It's just that I'm enjoying her company.

A thin smile. Let's hope she's enjoying yours. He passed my papers back, slapping them on to my hand. It's late for people to be out on the streets. It disturbs the more respectable citizens who are trying to sleep.

Quite bad enough.

The cut-out came up the escalator of the Metro station, dropping his thin little cigar into the sand bin at the fourth pace from the moving stairs and sliding both hands into the pockets of his coat, thumbs hooked out. He wasn't too quick on the parole and countersign and I put him through a variation before I took him across to the car and drove five blocks and stopped between two trucks parked on the wasteground alongside a building site where a crew was working the night shift. It was a new apartment block and the crane was swinging an entire prefabricated wall into place with four window apertures in it; sparks flew in a fountain from a welder's torch on the floor below.

'Have they found Schrenk yet?'

'Not yet,' he said. 'You'd have been told.'

'I was absent from base.'

'Oh.' He gave me the tape recorder and took something else from the glove pocket and sat clutching it in his bare hands.

'What's that?'

'This? Handwarmer. Burns charcoal. I can't stand this bloody cold, look at these chilblains.'

I began talking on to the tape. 2/2 12.09. 1 need all info on Natalya Fyodorova, senior clerk, Kremlin office, companion of subject before arrest. Also all info on Pyotr Ignatov, Party member, often in subject's company, no other details known.

She'd told me I would find him at a meeting of the Izmajlovo chapter at ten o'clock tomorrow morning and I was going to be there if I could make it. This wasn't for the tape because Bracken might decide to send someone else in to watch Ignatov and I wanted to work solo: the man could be ultra sensitive about Schrenk's arrest and they could frighten him off.

I need to know how the subject was arrested: in a street or where? What street, what place? Had he made a mistake? Bad security? Was he blown? Need to know why he applied for post as a-i-p: this is important. I'm finding inconsistencies in his behaviour prior to arrest.

Condensation was forming on the windscreen and the crane swung its skeletonic arm through the floodlights insubstantially, like a back projection on frosted glass. The welder's torch flared with an acid radiance and I looked away from it to protect my night vision.

Should I stress the importance of Natalya Fyodorova? She probably knew more about Schrenk than anyone else in Moscow, more than Bracken's team could find out in a month. But I was seeing her again tomorrow: leave it at that and don't risk over-surveillance. She could be frightened off as easily as Ignatov.

I suggest messages by hand direct to base in digraphic square, key 5. When absent I'll report hourly at the hour plus 15, Extension 7, silent line. Signal ends.

I sat thinking for another five minutes. There was a lot more I wanted to ask but I wasn't going to put it on tape because I didn't want to show my hand at this stage: I didn't know how Bracken normally worked but I knew he was the key man in a crisis and he might react differently; once he knew my line of enquiry he might throw in contacts and tags and shields and the whole bloody bazaar. I didn't want anyone in my way.

'Who does this go to?' I asked the man beside me.

'Winfield.'

'Who's he?'

'One of our a-i-ps.'

'Where's his base?'

'Didn't anybody tell you anything? We — '

'Where's his base?'

Low threshold.

'The airport.' His head was turned to watch me now.

`Oh come on, which one?'

'Sheremetyevo.It's — '

'For Christ's sake,' I said, 'you don't go all the way out there every time?'

'No. We use a drop.'

'Mobile?'

'Yes, the Aeroflot ferry bus.'

Desperate times. Bracken was keeping himself strictly in the shadows while he tried to dig himself in and set up an untapped phone line and signals facilities somewhere outside the Embassy and it wouldn't be easy to do but he'd have to do it because all I'd wanted was a brief squawk on the tape and this man had taken twenty minutes to make the rendezvous and so had I. You'll receive every possible support, Croder had said, Bracken had said, both of them lying, this wasn't support, it was bloody musical chairs. Or was that what they'd meant by possible? Was this all they'd got for me?

'We're trying to put someone into your sector,' the cut-out was saying, rubbing his hands on the charcoal thing. 'I mean really close, you know, five minutes away. Make things a lot easier. Of course it's always getting a phone that's the trouble. I mean a clean one.'

I dropped the tape recorder on to his lap and started the engine and wiped the stuff off the windscreen. 'Who's my director?' I asked him.

`I don't know.'

Strictly in the shadows. But that was all right; it was what a cut-out was for: to protect both ends of the signal.

'I'm going to put you back on the Metro at Proletarskaya,' I told him.

`Is that closer?'

'No, but I don't like doubling on my tracks. The trains don't stop running till one o'clock, you've got enough time.' I got into gear and swung the headlight beams across the low relief of the wasteground.

'What's he done?' he asked me in a moment.

'Who?'

'Schrenk.'

I got fed-up again: he hadn't been fully trained. The executive asks all the questions and it's strictly one-way conversation because otherwise it's dangerous: once in the field you don't look for nonbrief information any more than you look for a gas leak with a match and they ought to have told him that.

'He's disappeared,' I said.

'I know, but — '

'And it's all you need to know.'

It began snowing the next morning not long after first light, a few big flakes drifting down from a lead-grey sky. I'd slept for three hours, with the foot of the bed jammed against the door and the castors out and the window raised a few inches from the bottom with the lid of the samovar hanging from one edge of the frame, a fat lot of good against a full-scale raid but it'd give me five or six seconds to trigger the organism and I was here in this city now with the morning light in my eyes because more than once, somewhere along the line in Berlin or Bangkok or Hong Kong, there'd been five or six seconds to spare on my side instead of theirs.

He took me right across the Jauza from the place in Izmajlovskij prospekt where they'd held the Party meeting, and it was difficult at first because he'd walked for two blocks to where he'd left his car, and his flat heavy features and his dark fur coat and hat made him look like most of the other men in the street. I'd had to tag him in the Pobeda, moving at a crawl and stopping when I could, in case he got on to a tram. I wasn't even certain he was the right man: at the meeting they'd addressed him as Comrade Ignatov but it was a common enough name and there might have been more than one of them.

He was driving a small mud-coloured Syrena, taking his time and going westwards across the river into the Baumanskaja district. The snow was still falling steadily but the sky wasn't thick with it; this looked like the edge of a cloud formation that was moving in from the north at slow speed. The road surface wasn't affected yet and there were no sand trucks on the move. Along Baumanskaja the Syrena turned right and stopped just after the intersection, so that I had to drive past and pull up a hundred yards farther on, using a parked van for cover. I was out of the car and walking towards the apartment block just as Ignatov was going up the steps and I kept moving because if he lived here I could get his number from the upravdom and if he didn't live here there'd be no way of tagging him inside the building without the risk of a confrontation and I wasn't ready for that. All I wanted from him was information on Schrenk's movements before the arrest but I might learn more by watching him than by asking questions and it might be safer that way: Schrenk could have been blown by one of the people he'd been running with and it could have been Ignatov.

The building was red brick with the single word Pavilion in corroded aluminium over the entrance: four storeys, eighteen windows along the front and no other doorway into the street. I made one circuit and found a yard with a dozen cars parked in it and room for a dozen more; Ignatov would have used this if he'd lived here. Then I went back and moved the Pobeda into deeper cover but left it facing the same direction and used the mirror and rear window, focusing on the Syrena.

He was in the building for an hour and he came out alone. I'd got his walk now: he leaned backwards slightly and his feet were splayed, the walk of a heavy man with somewhere to go. Where was he going? His time and travel pattern might be repetitive and I noted 11–39 on my watch as he got into the Syrena and started up and drove past me without turning his head.

He took me west again, this time along Karl Marx ulica and across the ring road. Traffic was light and I kept well back, leaving a truck and a VW between us and pulling ahead only when there was no street to the right at the lights to take up the slack if he went through close to the yellow: I didn't want to lose him.

At 11.52 he stopped near Plevna Metro and went across to the telephone box by the cigar store, looking at his watch. I noted this because the people of this city are not punctual and he wasn't going to call anyone to say he'd be late, because he hadn't been hurrying. I didn't like it.

There was a slot by the kerb and I put the Pobeda into it and sat scanning the environment and doing it carefully. He shouldn't have looked at his watch like that. When I'd picked him up at the Party meeting he'd walked to his car without any hurry and he'd driven at a normal speed to the Pavilion building and driven away from it at the same speed and suddenly he wanted to know the time.

Nerves: the alarm threshold was still too low.

Ten private cars parked, and a light van unloading cardboard cases near the intersection. A No.14 trolleybus moving in to the kerb and putting down four passengers, taking on seven. A militia man standing not far from the cigar store, hands behind his back, his feet feeling the cold. Other people on the pavement, most of them hurrying a little because the snow was getting worse. Nothing in the environment to worry me. Nothing. But the hairs had begun rising on the backs of my hands and my breathing had quickened.

Ignore.

The trolley bus pulled away and I could see the whole of the environment again, as it had been before. Nothing had changed. Ignatov was still in the telephone box, the pale blur of his face showing through the condensation on the glass. A woman in a muskrat coat came up and started waiting for the phone, a child with her, both of them eating ice-creams from the stall on the other side of the cigar store. In Moscow the people eat ice-cream in all weathers, even in the depth of winter. In Moscow the people are not punctual, and should not look at the time.

The cold was creeping into the car again but I didn't switch the heater on because it would mean running the engine, and I didn't want to do that till I was ready to drive away because the militia man would catch the sound and turn his head. The ideal to aim at in a potentially hostile environment, they tell us repeatedly at Norfolk, is to become or remain invisible, inaudible and unfindable. Noted.

A black Zil limousine with Central Committee MOC number plates and its rear windows curtained and its headlights on came hounding down the Chaika lane and I watched the policeman at the intersection jumping into the roadway with his illuminated baton raised to halt the cross traffic, his whistle shrilling as the Zil went through the red, heading westwards towards the Kremlin.

The woman was still standing there eating her ice-cream. The small boy was waving his in the air, trying to make a snowflake settle on it. The woman laughed, and began doing the same thing.

11.55. Ignatov had been in the phone box for three minutes.

My legs were getting chilled because of the cold air coming into the car through the gaps round the doors, and because of the nerves. Three minutes was a long time. In three minutes the environment had changed considerably: most of the people who'd been on the pavement when I'd arrived here had gone, and as many others had taken their place. But the woman and the child were still there, and the militia man had moved a few paces to stand watching them, smiling as the boy caught a snowflake settle on it. The woman laughed.

The light flashed across the glass door of the telephone box as it opened and Ignatov came out. In the warmth of the box he had loosened his dark coat, and now he buttoned it up and pulled his woollen scarf straight, tucking it in. Without looking around him he stopped to talk to the militia man, halfway across to his car, taking something out of his wallet and show it to him briefly and getting a salute and putting the wallet away as he went on talking, standing quite close. In a moment the militia man undipped the radio from his belt and began speaking into it, looking up and down the street.

I waited, watching them. It was all I could do, or needed to do: I had no information. The militia man was gazing up the street now, also waiting; then he began walking into the roadway, taking his time as he raised his baton to halt the line of traffic on the side where I was parked. In my mirror the line was slowing to a stop, except for a low black van with lights on its roof, a police vehicle coming up fast and overtaking the other traffic until the militia man swung his baton and pointed it straight at my car and I thought Oh Christ it's a trap.

The police van was still slowing hard under the brakes and veering across the front of the traffic line when I hit the starter and botched the gears in and wheelspan into motion with the tyres squawking and the flashlight on the windscreen ledge sliding across and smashing against the pillar as I locked the wheel over and heeled into the roadway and straightened up, clouting the front end of the van and ripping my rear wing away: I heard it clatter behind me, a jangle of metal on tarmac as the whine of the siren came in and someone shouted.

On the conscious level the visual and aural experience was mostly a kaleidoscope of shapes and a medley of sound: the militia man leaping dear and the siren wailing and a faint thin whine starting from the rear of the Pobeda where a wing bracket was gouging the tyre, a face on the pavement — Ignatov's — and a small boy hunched in surprise and the lights at the intersection changing to red and the siren still howling as the van closed up and smashed into my rear bumper and bounced back with its reflection rocking in the mirror. The traffic policeman tried to get in my way but I kept going and he jumped back with the shrill of his whistle breaking off. A truck had started across and I touched the wheel and used the only space I had and ripped the rear door across his front end before I was clear and moving faster with the engine at peak revs in second gear. The mirror was vibrating but I could see the truck slewing to a stop and the front of the police van nosing round it with the rear end swinging as it struggled for traction.

This was Kujbyseva ulica and the street was wide but I needed obstacles for cover because if I kept straight on I'd be plumb in their sights so I took the first turn with the tyres sliding on the thin wet film left by the snow and the whine of the wing bracket descending in tone and then yipping suddenly as the rear wheels span under the acceleration. I was driving by instinct: the organism was in shock and trying to survive, but nearer the conscious level I knew there wasn't a chance because these were the streets that fanned out from the Kremlin and there were people along the pavements and a militia patrol at every corner and it was full daylight, strictly no go but I wasn't going to stop before I had to.

Mirror. The van was there with its roof light flashing. The siren died away and a voice came over the bullhorn: Stop — you are ordered to stop.

There wasn't a chance because they'd be sending this out on their radio and asking for a converging movement, a routine trap that would put me into the centre of a closing net and hold me there while they slid to a stop and the doors swung open and they came for me on foot, not hurrying.

I could drive this thing through any gap they left for me and run it into the ground if I had to but I'd need clear streets and there weren't any: if I kept on going I'd risk losing control and ploughing into the people on the pavements, this was a dead end, a bottleneck. There were sirens ahead of me now, echoing from the face of the building at the intersection while the surrealistic voice squawked from the bullhorn behind me: Stop — you are ordered to stop. The mirror was shivering, the black rectangular image jerking in it like an old film. I couldn't judge the distance between us but on this surface I could spin the Pobeda full circle without losing control and take it from there and hope for confusion — enough confusion to give me the five or six seconds I'd need to work in if I came out of the wreckage and there were anything I could do.

Another siren was cutting in: the whole city was wailing and the echoes were washing the sound back in undulating waves. I was still accelerating but the break-off point was close now and if I didn't shut down the speed I'd lose the surface and slide into the intersection with the wheels locked and no hope of any control. The nearest threat was still the vehicle behind me and if I could knock it out there was a chance of getting clear before the others turned into the street ahead of me. The surface was touchy and nothing much happened when I swung the wheel hard over and left it there and waited; then we found a drier patch and the Pobeda began spinning with one side lifting off the springs and a howl rising from the nearside wing brackets as they shaved the tyres while the street went swinging round against my eyes and the black rectangle came closer, curving away on the next swing and coming closer again, curving for the third time and suddenly filling the vision field as we met and hit and bounced and hit again as the van's momentum carried us locked together across the wet surface before a tyre burst and was wrenched off and the wheel buckled and dug into the roadway and the van swung hard and lifted, rolling over and slamming down with the Pobeda half-looping and then tumbling against it with a shrilling of metal and flying glass.

The sirens were dosing in.