We could find a side turning and hole up under a drift until noon plus fifteen and then go in and check the environment but that would mean delaying the rendezvous until 13:00 hours and the longer we hung around Kandalaksha the bigger the risk we ran of drawing the opposition against us. There was no real reason for the KGB to be watching the freight-yards specifically: this was just paranoia on my part, a reluctance to take a calculated risk in broad daylight. The aura of this man's fear was reaching me, touching the nerves.
Make a decision.
A snow-clearing gang was filing along the railway lines towards a group of men hacking at frozen points with pickaxes. The truck directly in front of me was turning to the left, taking the ramp down to the main section and leaving me at the fork.
Make a decision.
If the train had been on time and the courier had got through without any trouble he'd be waiting under natural cover now for the noon rendezvous with the papers for Karasov, and the minute we had them we could head north and hope for clear roads and a final run in to the coast. We could be there in a few hours, before nightfall at mid-afternoon. By tomorrow morning we could be in Norway, in the West. And London by evening.
Make Karasov, listen carefully. We're going to make a rendezvous in a few minutes from now with a courier who'll have papers for you, good ones, reliable enough to get us to the frontier. I don't want you to do anything. Do you understand? I want you to sit there and look like the upholstery, keep your mouth shut and keep your hands on your lap. Do you understand?'
He was watching me with his craven eyes, his bulk in the big coat cowering in the corner between the seat and the door.
'What will happen if the KGB are watching the station?'
'We're not going near the station. We're going into the freight-yards. The KGB won't be there. The rendezvous has been arranged by my own local control and he's extremely efficient. We can have absolute faith in him. You understand?'
He was the only danger. It would only need a couple of railway workers to pass anywhere near the rendezvous zone and Karasov would take off on his own and we'd never find him again. It was like taking the cat to the vet.
'If you think it is safe,' he said. His face was losing its colour and his eyes were dying another of the thousand deaths he'd been through since his nerve had gone.
'There'll be no trouble. Just leave everything to me.'
In a moment he said, 'Very well,' and looked away.
I swung the truck down the ramp and into the freight-yards and saw the footbridge, a frieze of black iron girders running across the pale sky. The time was 11:59. We jolted across frozen ruts with the chains crunching through clinkers where the snow had been cleared by the work gangs. There was a man standing under the end stanchion of the bridge, the tip of his cigarette making the only point of colour in this desolate place.
'The courier,' I told Karasov.
He was waiting this side of the freight sheds, immediately under the bridge. There was a train standing on the other side, with a fat woman swabbing the windows with a brush and a steaming bucket. There was no one else here.
It was noon when I stopped the truck exactly under the bridge and the man dropped his cigarette and began making his way across the ruts towards us. The black van came from behind the train at the same moment, moving in very fast and spilling men with their hands at their holsters.
KGB.
19 FINIS
I have never been so cold. You think you have been cold? Not like this. Not like this.
This is the cold of the dead, when the blood itself is cold. When the heart itself is cold. This is the chill of death.
The cold was the worst.
I thought about it, recognizing it as something that I must try to stop, then realizing that there was nothing I could do to stop it. If I tried to stop it I would meet death of a different kind.
The cold was the worst. No. The dark was the worst. It was the darkness of not existing, bringing with it the knowledge that you have arrived somewhere unfamiliar, not where it is dark but where there has never been light. Death, yes, the regions of death far beyond any knowing.
The dark was the worst.
No. The noise was the worst.
It was the noise of infinite destruction, the never-ending tumult of holocaust, bringing the irreversible death of silence, the death of peace. I knew now that there would always be this thunderous noise, this all-extinguishing darkness, this killing cold.
Spark.
I was curled in the foetal position on one side, lodged between metal beams and plates. A rivet was against my head and I moved a little, for comfort.
Comfort? You must be joking.
Another spark and in the total darkness it brought light enough to throw a reflection on the rail immediately below me, on the shining rail, so that there seemed to be two sparks. My eyes seized on it, my soul drank from it: there was light, just for this little time. All had not been extinguished, then.
Don't fall asleep.
No. That would be unwise.
Keep awake. If you don't keep awake you'll fall.
Yes. I'll fall down there onto the. Wake up. Wake up or you'll- What? Yes — wake up, I'm waking up now, I'm — oh my Christ. Grab it, grab that beam, come on.
Close. That was rather close.
I sat up now with my back to the big iron plate that spanned the chassis, pulling my legs up and trying not to think of what would have happened to them, to my legs, if I'd dropped onto the rails, under the wheels.
The stink of the locomotive raked at my throat and I shut down most of my breathing. Another spark flew and I took warmth from it into my mind. Not much, true, not much. But when you're as cold as this, a spark is like the sun.
I would have to stay like this now, sitting up. There wasn't much room, about as much as a bicycle saddle to perch on with my feet resting on a three-inch ledge, one of the big I-section girders that ran the length of the carriage. I would have to keep awake now.
Unidentified body found on railway lines, severely mutilated.
Then on to the sports news.
It wasn't fatigue. It was delayed shock. But all that was over now. Northlight was finished. The objective, Viktor Pavlovich Karasov, was a dead man. The sleeper had waked but was now sleeping again, his fears at rest forever.
The sixth death for Northlight, and the worst.
Karasov's death was the worst.
Mission unsuccessful.
We try not to think about it. In the ranks of the shadow executives — God, you can't call them ranks, that's ridiculous — we're more like rats in the wainscoting, scuttling our random way through the tunnels of unknown territory in the earthy dark, the nerves galvanized and the ears tuned to catch the distant song of the deathbringer as he comes on his way to meet us — in the wainscoting, then, in the tunnels if you will, we try not to think about one of those snivelling little clerks in the records room picking up his pen and writing it down in the space provided, neatly in the space provided, Mission unsuccessful.
We would do anything rather than see it written down, to avoid the knowledge, as we lie angled across some rubbish dump listening to the sirens, waiting for the headlights, fumbling at last for the capsule and trying to find our mouth, the knowledge that it will later be written down, our failure spelled out letter by letter in that crabby hand, for others to see.
Not everyone, of course. The records are classified. And there's a gentleman's agreement that along those creaking and half-lit corridors our secret shall forever be sacrosanct, that we shall all of us conspire to protect what rags of pride may still be left in the bosom of a failed brother-rat.
Did Thompson get back?
Oh yes. Came in last night.