Northlight

'If anyone asks you about him, I'd like you to tell me.'

'Where will I find you?'

'At the embassy. We'd like to help him.'

Then the tears were in her eyes and creeping down her face, though she made no sound, but just looked down and let them come, and let me brush them away with my finger while we sat like that for a time, listening to the sailors laughing on the platform outside and the first rumbling of a train nearing the station.

'If they send him to a labour camp, it will kill me.'

'He'll be back.'

'I would like-' and then she was really sobbing, lowering her head so that I couldn't any longer see her face, just her fur hat as she brought her arms across the table and let her shoulders go on shaking while I put my hands over hers and waited, wondering for the first time if Karasov had even had a chance in hell of making a clear run out of Murmansk when the whole of the Soviet navy was in a state of freeze in the international limelight. He couldn't have done it in uniform; he'd gone to ground as a civilian. He'd had to; it was the only way, if he'd got clear at all.

Whatever else happens, Croder had said, you've got to bring that man across.

When the sobbing died away I said, 'He hasn't been in touch with you because he doesn't want you involved. That must have occurred to you.'

'Yes.' She straightened up from the table and blew her nose. She smelt of musk, and her coat had fallen open to reveal the softness of small breasts under her sweater; she was, I supposed, with her bronze eyes and that huskiness in her voice and a capacity for loving so desperately, the kind of woman who could hope to see Karasov again, if he were free.

It would be pointless to ask her about his wife, to ask if there were any chance he'd gone there for shelter. That was the last place he'd go; they'd expect him to do that, and she'd be under distant but intense surveillance day and night. If he went anywhere for help, where he knew it would be immediately granted, it would be to this woman who sat humped in the chilly waiting-room of a railway station, the only hope we had, at this moment, of finding Karasov and getting him across to the West and bringing the president of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union to a conference table in Vienna in eight weeks' time.

'The best way you can help him, Tanya, when you see him again, is to let us know. It's perfectly true: he does have British friends, and they're very powerful.'

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.