Northlight

Then I was watching her small figure again crossing the snow the way she had come, Tanya Kiselev, leaving me with salt on my fingers and the lingering scent of musk.

1 °CURFEW

'Why have you come here?'

'To complain.'

'Of what?'

'My room at the hotel was searched.'

'So?'

'I want to know why.'

He gave me a long stare.

'Why do you think we should know that?'

'Who else would search a foreign visitor's room?'

'A thief.'

I didn't answer.

'Perhaps that didn't occur to you?'

'Frankly, no.'

I had to watch my idiom.

'Then perhaps you should think again. It may have been someone with a grudge against you.'

He wore a captain's insignia and he was young, smooth, educated: one of the new school, not to be underestimated.

'Perhaps,' I said. My Russian was supposed to be adequate, not fluent. I was no longer clandestine. 'But I'd like your personal assurance that the KGB knew nothing about it.'

'You know your rights. Your famous civil rights.'

'I'm not an American.'

'You don't have civil rights, in England?' 4 I ignored that. a Bright lights, sticky warmth, a puddle of water near the door where the snow had come off my shoes. KGB headquarters Murmansk was the last place I wanted to be but there hadn't been any choice: they'd searched my room while I'd been at the railway station and I couldn't just let it go: an intelligence agent would expect the odd search somewhere along the line if he became suspect, but a bona fide journalist wouldn't expect it and he'd be pretty sure to notice it and he'd make a bloody great fuss. I was here to protect my cover, that was all.

But I didn't like it.

'Please take a chair.'

Thank you.'

He picked up a phone and asked for a Captain Bratchenko.

I didn't like it because it could be a trap. They'd had time enough, over an hour: they'd watched me leave the hotel and would have gone up to my room straight away. Their expertise varies: it depends how concerned they are that you shouldn't notice. This time they'd done a reasonable job — the razor was only a quarter of an inch out of place and the top drawer of the dressing-table was almost shut and my spare shoes were still touching the wall of the cupboard, that sort of thing — but it was in fact the razor that I'd used as one of the monitors and this tied in with the telephone's being five or six degrees turned away from the line from the edge of the bedside table to the mirror. They hadn't broken the hair I'd left across the medicine cabinet door in the bathroom but they'd made a mistake with the copy of Pravda I'd dropped on the floor by the armchair: it was turned over back uppermost. That didn't tie in with the care they'd taken generally and the thing that worried me was that they might have relied on that to get me in here, thinking I might not notice the other things.

'Bratchenko? This is Demichev, Headquarters.'

My papers were all right. I knew that. It's never a danger: the Bureau prides itself on certain things and that's one of them. The danger is always that these people are all-powerful, and they could simply take me from here to a cell with a barred door and play with me until I made a mistake, and when I made the mistake it wouldn't matter how hard the British ambassador tried to get me out: he wouldn't succeed.

You don't of course make any mistakes while you're fresh in from the street and on your toes and ready to go through with the whole thing as a technical exercise; but after a few hours of bright lights and shouting you begin to get worried and that's when you can make your first mistake and that one is going to be all they'll need because they'll seize on it and put you through the hoop until you make another one and then you're done for, finis.

I would very much like to have stayed in my comfortable hotel and let them think I hadn't noticed anything, but that would have been dangerous, more dangerous than coming along here and facing them on their own ground. To show them that I was prepared for a room search at any given time would be to blow my own cover.

'No, he's just making a formal complaint.' He looked up at me with a smooth swing of his head — he reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of Eichmann: a soft, delicate face with the eyes of a predator. 'Was there anything missing?'

'Missing?'

'From your room.'

'I don't think so.'

'Don't you know?'

'I didn't pay much attention. I was so annoyed that I came straight along here.'

Under the subheading Caver in my briefing papers someone had written a quite amusing bit about the British journalist: He is typically polite, a degree arrogant — as befits a scion of perfidious Albion — but often tests the authority of the host country, even be it the Soviet Union, by demanding fair treatment and respect. Indignation is expected by the law enforcement, bureaucratic and secret police agencies from any British journalist placed in an annoying or embarrassing situation. The objective is to exasperate the officers of these agencies to the point of giving you what they demand, offering their apologies or simply kicking you out without pressing whatever charges may have been laid.

'The complainant is very annoyed,' the captain said into the telephone, and had the courtesy to keep his face straight while I heard a faint laugh from the other end. I should have liked him for that, but I didn't. He had his role to play just as I did. He'd been trained in the new school of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti to show foreign visitors — especially journalists, who would be writing it up when they got home — an official image of courtesy, authority and efficiency. This didn't mean that if he found anything wrong with my papers or I made some kind of mistake he wouldn't order me into an interrogation room and get enough out of me to send me to a forced labour camp for ten years, and the fact that he'd be doing something perfectly understandable in protecting his country from the activities of an espionage agent wouldn't do anything to soften the guards' clubs or break the ice in the buckets or give me more than a bowl of watery gruel with only the roaches in it to crunch for protein.

'Please show me your papers.' He leaned forward slightly with the phone still to his ear and took them from me. I'd already shown them to the guard at the desk outside but I couldn't refuse. He studied them, taking his time.

'Clive Gage,' he said into the telephone. 'He is in Room 45 at the Hotel Leningrad.' He waited, occupying himself by gazing at my papers, turning them to the light with his eyes narrowing slightly: I think he was simply trying to frighten me, but he did it well.

Please tell me what is happening.

The prime minister had a reputation for phoning people before they could phone her.

As far as me know, ma'am, Karasov is still somewhere in Murmansk. We've now placed our agent there to bring him across the moment he makes contact. We also have a lead that should enable us to do this before very long.

That wouldn't satisfy her but she wasn't aware of the difficulty. There was only one, but it was a facer. Karasov wouldn't make contact.

The 'lead' was of course Tanya Kiselev. I suppose they could call her that. London knew their sleeper well enough to be sure that if he was more likely to go to anyone else for shelter, they'd know about it, and instruct me accordingly. But the longer time went on and he didn't surface, the more difficult it was going to be. A shadow executive or a cutout or a courier would break for a frontier within an hour of closing down his mission and he'd expect instant help and he'd get it — I'd brought three of them across like that, earning one down a mountainside into Bavaria and throwing another into a meat truck on the drug route across the Isonzo Bridge and shoving a third man into a plane in Topolovgrad with a bullet still in his shoulder blade but a lot of life left in him and a photocopy schedule of the Warsaw Pact military exercise still taped round his leg. It's difficult work but it's fast and you don't have to rely on signals or changes of plan from London: you just make your run and bring him with you and there isn't time to think about frontier rifle-fire or airfield security forces or sirens in the night — you're running hard and you can only keep up the pace by going into Zen, and it works, it really works, because the instant you switch off and leave it to the alpha waves you're moving into a protection zone where you can do things that would otherwise kill you off.