Northlight

'Do you know his name?'

Fane's tone had become almost casual now, and I recognized for the first time that the more the pressure came on the quieter he got. That was good: there was more to him than I'd thought. But I didn't like this new situation. It had unnerved me to the point of thinking that Fane might have been blown.

'Yes. Rinker.'

'How do you know?'

'I got a look at the reservation book.' He asked a lot of questions, never taking me for granted.

'What does he look like?'

'Short, compact, maybe thirty-five, in training, works out with weights, or it's some form of martial art. He-'

'Eyes?'

'Brown. Dark hair smoothed back. Good tailor. Why?'

'I thought I might recognize him as some kind of opposition tool. So what are you going to do?'

I thought about it. 'Do you have any instructions?'

'Not really, but I'll get some if you like.'

'If I blow him, he'll only bring other people in. That's all right at the moment but when Karasov makes contact I'll want to be free to move.'

A long pause. There was a very faint voice on the line and it occurred to me that he was blocking the mouthpiece and talking to someone else; but it sounded like Russian. I couldn't be sure.

'Fane?'

'I was thinking.'

'All right.'

'Is he worrying you?'

'He'd worry me less if he stopped searching my room.'

'You think it was him?'

'If it wasn't Galina.'

A heavy man came through the doors and banged the snow off his boots.

'See what you can find out,' Fane said, 'and let me know.'

'I can't find much out unless I blow him.'

While Fane was thinking again the heavy man came over and stood stolidly in front of me, flipping a two-kopeck coin. This was the only telephone in the place.

'Don't blow him,' Fane said. 'That would complicate things, as you say. Just see what he does.'

'All right.'

I rang off and went to the doors and out into the yellow twilight and the scent of wood smoke. Fane had sounded so very certain that the KGB hadn't caught my vibrations, and this tied in with the denial they'd made at their headquarters; but Fane could be wrong and they could be lying. I didn't feel comfortable yet: there were too many things going wrong with this mission and I couldn't trust anyone. Or maybe it was the strange light here: at noon it was either dark with snow clouds or shimmering with the first ripples of the aurora flowing from the northern ice cap. Nothing seemed acceptable; everything seemed suspect in some way.

I don't like the cold. I felt cold now, under the thick fleece-lined coat and the astrakhan hat. I was shivering with it.

He wasn't where I'd left him. He was in a doorway of the next block, barely an outline in the shadows, and I took the same route back to the hotel, never looking behind me but sighting him twice in reflections as. we passed windows, climbing snow drifts and crunching through scabs of ice along the gutters while a snow plough followed us, lumbering down the middle of the deserted road and sending up clouds of diesel gas. The staff at the hotel were complaining bitterly about the traffic conditions, and the city's sanitation commissioner was being criticized in the local paper for not doing his job. Before we reached the hotel I saw a whole party of skiers gliding down the street, overtaking a tractor hauling a bus out of a drift.

I stopped once or twice to watch, and again saw Rinker's silhouette in the window of a workers' outfitting shop before I went on. He held back at the last corner and I quickened my pace through the lobby and got to the first floor balcony in time to see him come in through the doors.

This is a time for understanding.

You many wonder why we appear so truculent, and so suspicious, and so seemingly unready to sit at a conference table with the peoples of the West. It is perhaps because our Motherland has seen so much suffering at the hands of the peoples of the West, by France, when only our will to resist and wear down the forces of Napoleon saved us from defeat, and by Germany, when that same will, together with our own greater force of arms, turned back the forces of Hitler. But the cost was high. We lost twenty million of our young sons in the Second World War alone.

We ask you, today, to think of that.

It had been slipped under my door.

We ask you to try to understand why we appear so 'paranoiac', as you call us. Perhaps we are, especially to the people of the United States, who have never known the setting foot of one single enemy on their shores, who have never known the meaning of rape, massacre and the burning down of whole cities across their sacred land, as we have.

The follies and mistakes recorded in the history of the American nation are often said to be due — and in all truth are due — to the fact that it is a 'young' nation, and this we understand. But we would like it also to be understood that our Soviet nation too is young, in terms of the yean since the yoke of Csarist oppression and injustice was thrown aside. In those brief years we too have made great progress, from the inception of a just, orderly and fulfilled society to the placing of the first human being into space.

It was on white paper with a red border and a small hammer and sickle in the corner, nothing else. It wasn't one of those quaint, pidgin-English pamphlets that get Xeroxed for discreet circulation at embassy cocktail parties to get a cheap laugh.

We understand that since Mr Carter relinquished the presidency of the United States it has been felt necessary to increase the production of armaments and bring America to equality with the Soviet Union in military strength. But we do not understand why President Reagan continues to vilify our nation and its leaders by verbal abuse. We would ask that we are accepted as a strong, young and successful society emerging from the shadows of oppression into the light of a common understanding with the rest of the world — if the rest of the world is ready to hear our voice. Only if we are seen as a fellow nation, with worth to offer the world, with goods to trade, with ideas to exchange and with the future to share on an equal footing, can it also be seen that we are ready, yes and again yes, to go to the conference tables and join with others in drawing the world back from the abyss of war and mutual annihilation that lies in our path.

There are follies and mistakes, too, in our own short history as an emerging nation, but we ask that they be seen as such, and not as 'evil' and aggressiveness. It is simply that we are fearful, as America is fearful, of war and rumours of war. Today we stand equal in terms of military strength, as powerful enemies. We are prepared, if others are prepared, to ensure that tomorrow we stand as powerful neighbours, and later, even, as powerful friends.

Meanwhile we say to you these words that you do not believe we mean, but which we mean in all truth and from the bottom of our hearts.

Peace be with you.

'Bullshit?'

Liz Benedixsen dug for another meatball with her fork.

'They don't think so.'

'The Soviets don't think so?'

She had drawn her chestnut hair back and fixed it with a ribbon, and it left her face unframed, stark in the cold light, her cheekbones casting shadows. It didn't give her the mien of a sculpting; she looked somehow more alive, more defined.

'I don't think we're talking about the Soviets,' I told her. 'They didn't write this stuff.'

'Who did?'

'Some kind of human activist group.'

'You mean underground?'

'Yes. They'd get arrested for pushing pacifism under people's doors.'

He was sitting at the other side of the room: he'd come in soon after I had. Liz had already been here and had invited me to join her. The curfew hour was for nine o'clock, in fifty minutes from now. Before then, I was going to take a trudge through the snow, and if he followed, lose him, and then see what he'd do, where he'd go.