Had Fane told the KGB my cover?
When they'd made that famous deal of theirs, had London instructed my local control to reveal my cover: Petr Lein? So that everything should look above board? That was possible. It was possible that the two KGB officers who'd checked me out on the train had known who I was, that I was working partly for them, for their sacred motherland, by arrangement with Mr Croder. In which case my papers could now be lethal. It had been all right before that thing had blown one or two of their men to bits in the freight-yards but things were different now and if Petr Lein got picked up by a patrol he could find his name on their all-points bulletin sheet: finis.
They hadn't moved.
The scale was 1:250,000, the biggest I could find. Elevations and sea depth in metres, civil and military aerodromes marked, roads, railways, navigable canals. The area covered was from the junction of the Soviet, Finnish and Norwegian borders in the south to the Barents Sea in the north. The Soviet-Norwegian border was the northernmost leg of the Iron Curtain, ending in the sea.
Somewhere along this line I would have to cross into Norway.
Without London?
Movement along the periphery. They were going out. I lifted my head half an inch and saw them more clearly. One of them was looking back. Not at me, at the girl with the footballs under her sweater, ah, sweet affirmation of life, comrades, what would we do without it.
Finnmark on one side, Murmanskaya on the other. It looked easy enough on the map but the map didn't specify the number of watchtowers and floodlights and war-trained dogs and mines and trip-wires and peak-capped sharpshooters frustrated with boredom of guard duty and eager for relief, bang bang and you're dead, my good friend, you shouldn't have told Chief of Control where to get off, he doesn't like it.
No regrets.
The nearest part of the frontier to Murmansk: 110 km. The nearest town to the frontier: Pechenga, 11 km. Airports at Pechenga and Koshka-Yavr, with another one at Salmiyarvi, further west, much further west, too far from here with the roads in this condition. And in any case there was no chance of getting into an aeroplane without London's help.
It's easy for the local directors because they carry permanent cover and they don't have to go clandestine. It's possible for a shadow executive to reach his objective and get it across the border or hand it to his control or a courier and leave the host country — a charming term, yes — just as he came in with his cover still intact and his papers acceptable for franking, but it's rare. During the course of the mission things can get very sticky and he'll have to go clandestine and assume a host-country cover and operate just this side of the capsule unless he's lucky. Even if a wheel doesn't come off somewhere it's not often he can avoid going clandestine: I was working under the cover of a journalist but that was restrictive: a foreign journalist can't suddenly take off for Kandalaksha on his own and that's what I'd had to do because that's where the objective was.
The man opposite me at the worn teakwood table was nursing his chilblains under black wool mittens, running a finger down the columns of print, his one eye steady, his cracked lips moving as his finger stopped and he read the paragraph and then moved on, not an old man but a man beyond his years, his cheeks cavernous and ears shrivelled by unending winters, red as raw bacon. What was he looking for, with his eye and his finger? An apartment? A second-hand chair? A job?
Not for a hole in the frontier.
A railway line ran from Murmansk into Pechenga. That might be still open. The roads would be impossible. But once in Pechenga?
The sea.
A boat.
Without London?
In the ordinary way if your main control is good and knows how to pull strings internationally, how to handle DI6 in the overseas missions, how to use Interpol for special information, and if your director in the field is also good, and knows how to get papers forged and couriers briefed and safehouses set up and protected, you stand a fair chance of getting home, sometimes a bit shot up or with your nerves like a disco hall but getting home. Otherwise we wouldn't let them send us out, we're not in the kamikaze club for God's sake. We like to know there's a chance.
But that's with London behind you.
Different now.
A feeling of being dwarfed suddenly by the immensity of this foreign land with its regiments of men with black boots and peaked caps and bolstered. guns, their eyes restless as they looked for inconsistencies in the social environment, for someone hurrying or turning away or giving unsatisfactory answers to a doorman's questions — he offered me fifty rubles, comrades, but of course I refused, being suspicious of such a thing — and most of all for not being in possession of correct papers: that was where the greatest danger lay — at the checkpoints, the road-blocks, the frontier posts. You are from Murmansk, citizen? Then what are you doing in Pechenga?
A feeling of having, yes, committed suicide, or at least of having set the scene, tying the rope aloft and fetching the chair, and out of vanity, being too proud to go on marching to London's bloody tune. My chances were no better now: they were worse; the only difference was that when the time came I would at least go decently, mown down by enemy action, not sullied by traitor's knife.
He turned the page of the newspaper, the man opposite me at the table, his lips moving again as his chilblained finger stopped at a line of print. A second-hand stove to keep back the deathly cold of his cramped apartment? A coat with more weight to it than this moth-eaten thing he was wearing? His finger moved on.
It has been known for an executive to be trapped on this side of the Curtain and never get out. Thompson is in Moscow somewhere according to rumour in the Caff, and Pick is said to be in one of the labour camps. Another man, Cosgreave, is said to be living on the shore of the Black Sea with a woman from Tashkent, having decided that the risks of trying to get across on his own weren't worth taking: there's life, after all, in Soviet Russia. Those are the ones we know about, or at least talk about, creating legends to lend a little colour to those dreary corridors. There are others, but we won't discuss them, though I knew personally a high-echelon and very effective shadow who now works for the Fourth Department of the KGB.
And there are those known to have died here, caught in the heat of a counter-operation or running for the border or finishing off a mission the only way they can. Webster, Finnimore, Clay.
Requiescat in pace.
'Have you by any chance, comrade, a violin for sale?'
His one eye watched me with the light of hope in it.
A violin, with fingers like these? 'I'm sorry.'
'Never mind. I had mine stolen, and it's my living, that's all.'
'That was bad luck, comrade.'
I walked out of the public library and turned to the right, conscious that my feet were taking a definite direction, if only back to the hotel to fetch my overnight bag and pay the concierge for his silence. After that I would take the first step towards the frontier and see how far the animal cunning of the organism would get me.
I'd left some spare gloves and a train timetable at the safehouse but I couldn't go back there now. Liz had been sent there to monitor my operation for the Company and Fane would have made contact with them: there was no point now in her staying on. Even if she were still there the place could be a deathtrap for me if she were blown; she wouldn't be utmost-security trained for light cover and she hadn't gone clandestine because her Russian wasn't good enough.
Where else would a man go but to the earth mother?