Northlight

Nerves, that was all. Did I want a local director hi the field who panicked every time a wheel came off?

The last thing I said to him was: 'If I phone your number again I'll expect an answer. I want to go home. You're not going to leave me to the in this bloody country.'

'Of course not.'

It went on snowing all night and by morning the ploughs were rumbling past the hospital and traffic had come to a standstill.

She gave me her address, little Pleshakovna, as I walked out of the ward, writing it on a dirty scrap of paper and thrusting it into my hand. 'I'm always home in the evening, after I get off here.' Her starved face creased into a seductive smile, leaving the desperation staring naked from her eyes as a guffaw sounded from one of the men in the row of beds.

I put the scrap of paper into my pocket and slipped her a fifty-ruble note, more than she'd earn under the brutish loins of a dozen visitors. What would I put it down as on my expense sheet for those arthritic hell-hags in Accounts to quibble over? Child maintenance? They'd go straight into terminal palsy.

I walked out onto the pavement, picking my way across greying drifts of snow and through patches of sand and clinker, feeling — as I had felt before — like a soldier groping his way home from a battlefield where the cries of the dying had faded, leaving only the scratching of a pen across the documents of surrender. I wasn't quite sure if I could ever pick up the step again, or even hear the drummer.

They were breaking ice in the harbour when I reached there, dim figures moving in the haze of the drifting snow, hauling on ropes as a barge nosed along the quayside, sending miniature ice floes ringing out discordant music as they jostled together on the dark water. The Old Harbour complex loomed on the other side like a mausoleum, and I picked my way towards it over the iron bridge. There was no point in trying to check out the environment before I closed in on the safe-house: the intersection at Lenin Prospekt and Vernadskogo Street was deserted except for an abandoned truck with its belt of snow scoops hanging from a broken pulley. Anyone waiting here for me would by now look like a snowman, invisible under camouflage, and if a watcher had been posted at one of these hundred dark windows I wouldn't see him either. I had been given the address of a safehouse over an untapped line by my local control and that should be enough: I wasn't expected to question it. The executive in the field needed shelter, and it was a responsibility of the highest priority in London to see that he got it. This was why, when I climbed the stairs to Apartment 12 and the door was opened to me, my mind lurched instantly into a state of shock.

21 WHO?

And you turn over?'

The room swung and I was looking upwards into her sea-green eyes.

'It feels good,' I said.

'Sure. I had some training once. But Jesus, it's a wonder you're still alive.'

The smell of the Tiger Balm was sharp, pulling me out of my lethargy for a while until I slipped back. More than anything I wanted to sleep, because here it was so quiet after the hospital.

'Does that hurt?'

'Don't worry.' The light from the cheap table lamp shadowed her cheekbones and the curve of her pensive mouth.

'You didn't look surprised,' she said after a while, 'when I opened the door.'

That gave me comfort: the shock hadn't shown.

'I already knew you were CIA.'

She stopped massaging and looked down at me with her eyes narrowed. 'How?'

'You didn't behave like a journalist when the KGB stopped you leaving the hotel. And your friend in Moscow couldn't have known there was a duplicate tape and a man running with it unless he was in the Company.'

She considered this, and then began massaging slowly again. 'So I guess you're kind of pissed off about the whole thing. Your case officer warned us that you prefer working alone.'

'It makes things less difficult for other people.'

'That figures. Who else needs to drag themselves around black and blue all over?' She took one foot and eased a knee-joint, carefully folding my leg. 'Does that feel okay?'

'Everything in life is relative.'

'I mean really. Is it damaged?'

'No. I walked two miles from the hospital.'

'Okay. Just relax again.'

'Liz,' I said, 'who else knows you're here?'

'Only my own case officer.'

'He's your friend in Moscow?'

'Right.'

'Does he know I'm here too?'

Her hands stopped sliding across the bruises again. 'Gee, Clive, I don't know. He just told me to get here and wait for further instructions. He didn't say you were coming. Is it important?'

'No.'

What had shocked me when she'd opened the door wasn't that I'd been sent to a safehouse run by the CIA but that Fane hadn't told me. If Northlight hadn't shut down on me I would have signalled London through the embassy in Moscow and our line through Cheltenham and told Croder to get Fane out of Russia and send me a local control who knew how to keep his executive informed. When you set up a safehouse you do it with the knowledge dial it can make the difference between the life and death of a hard-run ferret and you don't tell anyone — anyone at all — where it is, not even a friendly service. It's not a matter of trust; it's a matter of total security. We can trust someone with our lives but we can't know for certain that they won't hit a trap and go pitching into an interrogation cell before they can reach a capsule to stop themselves blowing the safehouse out of the ground and the ferret with it.

A safehouse is sacrosanct.

The slow pain of the bruises was seeping into my head, into my mind and burning there, becoming anger. Fane was going to get me killed at this rate: the mission was dead and buried in Karasov's grave but I still had a chance of reaching home if I had a local control experienced enough to get me there.

Fane wasn't.

Or had he established liaison with the CIA on instructions from London?

No. Croder was a crack professional. He was a bastard and he would drive you into the ground but he wouldn't throw you to the dogs unless by the nature of the mission you became expendable. He wouldn't blow your safehouse the minute he'd set it up for you.

'Does that feel okay?'

'Yes.'

My eyes were almost closed, and I watched the outline of her head against the pool of light on the ceiling, the swing of her chestnut hair and the shadowed face where her eyes were set like liquid jade.

'Stop me if it hurts.'

'It's fine.'

Her hands slowed, their pressure sliding across the pain and giving it recognition, making it acceptable instead of something I wanted to hide.

'It doesn't bother you,' Liz asked reflectively, 'to come out of the cold and have your wounds licked by a mere woman?'

Only half of what she said got through to me: I was thinking about Fane. I supposed she was a feminist.

'Where else would a man go, but to the earth mother?'

She gave her soft, private laugh. 'I can't see why the hell anyone would divorce a man like you.'

'Her psychiatrist assured me she wasn't in her right mind at the time.'

She laughed again and her hands stopped moving as she lowered her head and put her face against mine for a moment; her hair lay across my eyes and I closed them and let the lethargy- well over me in a warm tide, forgetting Fane, forgetting how very unlikely it was that I would ever leave this alien and snowbound city alive, and giving myself instead to the peace of the winter solstice the earth mother had brought me. 'Sleep,' she whispered, 'if you want to.'

The phone rang just before nine o'clock hi the evening and Liz answered it.

'It's for you, Clive.'