Northlight

He'd raised his voice slightly. I didn't like that. If you're going to local-control a shadow through the field you've got to keep your cool.

'How many times have you been out, Fane?'

He went on staring at me, and I wondered how far I'd have to push him before he lost his cool completely. If he did that, I'd signal London and tell them to send someone else.

'One loses count,' he said levelly. 'Doesn't one?'

He'd seen the danger and taken the heat off at once.

'How many clandestines have you run?'

'We don't keep an actual score like the shadow executives. But quite a few. And I didn't lose anyone.'

This time I made the first move and we went on walking again in the other direction, towards the hotel. I wanted to get out of this bloody wind. I hate the cold. 'Then you'll know,' I said conversationally, 'that at any given time I might have to go clandestine, either-'

'Yes. I know that.' He had a swinging walk, perhaps to make up for his short legs; or it could simply have been an expression of his inward anger because I was being difficult. 'And you know what I'm saying, I'm sure. I don't want you to go clandestine unless you have to.'

When we passed the solitary man he turned his back to us, staring down into the river. He smelled of black tobacco.

'The thing is,' I told Fane, 'you can cut a lot of corners that way.' There was a big difference between a covert and a clandestine mission, and he knew that. When you're sent out with a cover and a legend you've got to stick to it and that can slow you up: you can't go anywhere you like, you can only go where your cover takes you. Tonight I was here as a journalist for the Monitor, and it would be all right as long as I stuck with that cover: I could go to the press club and my embassy and the Soviet Ministry of Information, places like that, but I couldn't just wander about in the streets without an obvious destination: journalists don't rubberneck. I couldn't do any kind of surveillance if anyone interested me and I couldn't pop into a phone-box without my own KGB surveillance people noting the fact and if I stopped to talk to a Soviet citizen they'd haul me along for questioning and it doesn't matter how perfect your papers are, you 're never certain that your cover's going to hold up. And that's when you suddenly realize it's too late to go clandestine. You can't run. As a clandestine you're a free agent, using light cover if you want to — Boris Antonov, Soviet citizen, so forth — but running free through the tunnels and the night hours and the back streets and following your own instincts, sniffing the wind for smoke.

'You can cut corners,' Fane said, 'yes.' We turned from the bridge into the Rausskaja nabareznaja towards the Bukarest, and the wind was less sharp. 'I simply want you to do it only if you have to.' He stopped and looked up at me again. 'I don't mind your being difficult, you see, if that's your character. But I don't want you to use it as a policy.'

I'd never had to spell out the parameters of a mission with my local control before. It unnerved me.

'They've never given me anyone,' I said carefully, 'who didn't turn out to be first class, even if we finished up hating each other's guts. All I ask is that you get me home alive. Even if it's the last thing you want to do.'

He went on watching me with his level eyes, perhaps not knowing whether I was being funny. 'From someone as boorish as you, I suppose that's a compliment.'

'Sorry. It must have slipped out.'

In the hotel lobby Fane picked up a message and used an outside line while I looked at a display of dolls in regional costumes and had the odd thought that there actually were children like this dancing somewhere on some village square to the music of a pipe band while I stood here living my lies and practising my deceits on the pretext that I was doing my bit to keep the Cold War from hotting up. Which was the real world, those children's or mine? It can only ever be the one we create, the one we have to design for ourselves to give us shelter from confusion and sustenance for our needs. I don't dance so well to a pipe band as to the tune of my own dark drummer.

Fane was coming away from the telephone.

'They've put us on the quota. We're flying to Murmansk.'

'When?'

'As soon as they've got the runways cleared up there. They've had snow.'

9 TANYA

Night was coming to Murmansk. There had been no sun. This was winter. The light was changing from steel grey to gunmetal blue, so slowly that it mesmerized. Shadows deepened as the weight of the dark came down, because the light wasn't leaving; it was simply changing, from the monotone arctic wash of the daytime, sunless and moonlike, to the trembling and fragile glow of the northern lights across the snow.

Only here, and in places along this latitude, does die coming of the night bring shadows. In its strangeness there is a certain quality of safety, if you are being watched: you can find concealment in the kaleidoscope of light and shade. And if you are watching, you can more easily detect abnormal configurations among the formal geometry of streets and buildings, such as the shape of a man's head.

Tonight I was watching. Soon I would know if I were also being watched.

The last I'd seen of Fane, an hour ago, was his short neat body with its swinging walk disappearing into die lift at die hotel. I was glad to see him go. In the days ahead I would need him, of course, perhaps desperately; but if I could make my way through this mission without his help I would like to do that.

There was something wrong about him. There was some-tiling wrong about their not giving me Ferris. I knew this without questioning how I knew, just as I knew without any question that the man at the end of the platform had missed the last train. But I didn't want to pay too much attention to there being something wrong until I knew more about North-light. That was the name across the top of the board at London Control, the name for the mission. It could still be a matter of nerves, though I'd been long enough in this trade to know that your nerves will tell you things more accurately, on a primitive level where sensitivity is subconscious, than your brain, which can make up answers of its own to explain the inexplicable, rather than admit to having none.

When the next train came in, its steam clouding against the pale luminosity of the sky and its hot smell reaching me and bringing warmth, I saw the man get into a carriage and slam the door. He hadn't, then, missed the last train: it wasn't going where he wanted to go, that was all.

'My name is Tanya.'

You can't tell much over a telephone. Her voice had been low, a little husky, that was all. But there'd been caution in the tone, a note of vigilance. There'd been silences, after I'd spoken, in which she had listened a second time to what I'd said, sifting it for danger.

'Why did you want me to telephone?' I asked her.

'Because of…' she'd hesitated, 'the snowbirds.'

She should have brought it in straight away, the moment she'd told me her name; but perhaps some idiot at the embassy hadn't told her that; or she'd forgotten. 'Snowbirds' was the code-introduction.

'What do you want me to do?' I asked her.

'To meet me.'

'Why?' This was routine. I already knew, but I wanted her to go on talking in case there were anything wrong, anything dangerous.

'Because-' she hesitated again — 'because of the snowbirds. That is all I can say, over the telephone.'

'All right. In an hour, then.'

'Very well.' She didn't ask where. They'd told her that it was for me to make the rendezvous. She was getting things right.

'At the east railway station,' I told her. 'How far is that from where you are now?'..'Not far. Perhaps five kilometres.'