Northlight

I hadn't intended, in any case, to leave the train without the Lithuanian. I think he tried to bring the gun into some kind of aim on the way down through the freezing windrush but I knew he'd do that so I found his arm and twisted it and the only shot he managed to fire was wild. He was dead as soon as his head impacted on the rocks: I saw that much when I crawled back from where the momentum had thrown me. There wasn't any blood on the coat so I pulled him out of it and put it on as the last of the train rolled past and left a funereal quiet among the snows.

I searched his pockets for what I could find, leaving the wad of notes and taking the wallet to go through: his papers might tell me something about his cell and if they were forged I'd know, and if they were genuine they might be usable. In this trade you always pick a corpse: the dead can sometimes save the living.

I knocked the eight remaining rounds out of the chamber and scattered them and threw the gun across the tracks and into the deep drifts on the other side and then rolled him into a gully and threw snow over him until he was covered. One hand rose into sight again and I caught my breath and felt my scalp tighten as I stared down; it was the way he'd finished up, that was all, rolling deeper between the rocks so that his arm had moved upwards through the snow. I pushed it down again and started walking to the highway.

'This one's my wife, really!'

Next to the picture of Lenin was a faded sepia photograph of a strong young woman perched on a milk churn with a chicken struggling in her arms, her smile seductive except for a missing tooth. 'She's a good woman, a good cook. Feeds me like a fucking commissar!'

The road was clear most of the way to Kandalaksha and I asked him to drop me as close as he was going to the main post office. The time was 10:47.

'No. I covered him with snow.'

Fane gave one of his pauses on the line. 'What about the other man?" 'As far as I know he's still on the train.'

'As far as you know?'

'It didn't stop. No one pulled the cord. But he might have jumped off when he saw we'd both gone.'

'It's possible, then, that he could have caught up with you along the road, by getting a lift too?'

'Yes. But call it a thousand-to-one shot.' I checked the time again: it had taken me nearly an hour to get through to Murmansk. 'There was a third man on the train,' I told him. 'He was surveilling me.' There was some crackling on the line. 'Are we clear on this call?'

'What? I'm clear at this end. Are you in a hotel?'

'Post office.'

We both listened, but I couldn't detect a bug. It didn't mean there wasn't one because they're not always detectable, but there'd been heavy snow across the telephone lines between here and Murmansk and some of the poles were down.

"If you're in a post office,' Fane said, 'then we're clear. Was the third man in the Rinker cell?' "No. He was working his peep independently.'

A brief pause. "I'm not too surprised. With an international background this big we can expect almost any group to crawl out of the woodwork.'

In a moment I said quietly, 'Fane, he wasn't one of Croder's people, was he?'

I'd tried to sound casual but it didn't quite come off. My hands were shaking now and I couldn't stop them: that man under the snow was the fifth one to the since Northlight had started running and I'd been with him and just because he was working for the other side and just because he'd been trying to blow my brains out it didn't mean I wasn't going to get the shakes a couple of hours afterwards — we see a lot of it in this trade but we don't exactly enjoy it, we don't exactly revel in it, we're not bloody machines, you know 'Croder's people?' I heard Fane asking.

'Oh come on for Christ's sake — was he a shield or a backup or some kind of support, you know what I'm talking about.'

I was sweating badly because it wasn't only that man's death on my mind and the way his hand had come out of the snow like that as if he were asking for help, it was my own death too, the one that had nearly happened, because he'd only needed to force that gun round half an inch until it was against my head and I wouldn't have been standing here in this overheated fucking post office reporting the status of the mission to a local control I didn't like and didn't trust and didn't" Croder never told me he was sending anyone to support you,' Fane said. 'He-'

'That doesn't mean a bloody thing. He wouldn't necessarily tell you what he was doing if he decided to send out a pack of bloody amateurs to get in my way.'

Watch it, you're losing your cool and he won't like that, he'll signal London and tell them this one's losing his nerve, better have a replacement standing by. He's not Ferris. He doesn't understand.

'I very much doubt,' the voice picked its way carefully along the line, 'that Main Control would put secondary agents into the field without first informing me. It would endanger my executive and the whole mission.'

I waited a minute and took a breath before I spoke. 'All right. I accept that.'

'Thank you.'

He had a point in any case. When some kind of international crisis breaks between East and West they both set up priority missions to defuse the powder keg and stop it blowing the whole thing apart, and it does in fact bring a lot of low-calibre grey-area intelligence outfits out of the woodwork to look for anything they can pick up and trade. They don't amount to much more than mobile listening-posts, I've just got hold of some rather interesting stuff on troop movements along the Chinese border, old boy, do you think your people would like me to get in touch? That sort of thing, but you can never be certain they won't tap a line or get wind of a courier run and then they'll try to throw shadows across your operation in the hope of picking up something they can trade with any legitimate network who'll buy it.

The line had gone silent. Fane was leaving me on the hook, waiting for me to say something, expecting me to behave like a model executive in the field.

Standing here in my dead man's coat.

'Have you any instructions?'

'No.' His tone was conversational, offering a copybook example of how mine should sound. 'Will you be able to make the rendezvous?'

'Yes. He came in a minute ago.'

'Have you paroled and countersigned?'

'Not yet.' The man was going across to the end of the main counter, sweeping the ground in front of him with his white stick. No one had followed him in.

'As soon as you locate Karasov,' Fane said carefully, 'I'd like you to signal again.'

'Understood.'

I put the phone back onto the hook and watched the contact for a moment. He was a small man in a moth-eaten fur coat, hollow-cheeked from hunger or some kind of wasting disease, waiting at the counter with his head slightly lifted in the listening attitude that blind men have. The left lens of his dark glasses was cracked. The time on the round mahogany-framed clock on the wall was a minute past noon. I waited until he'd been served and moved across to him on my way to the door.

'Can you tell me where I can buy American cigarettes?' His head tilted towards me. 'Those things are only fit for women.'

I shrugged and turned away and went ahead of him through the door, walking as far as the first corner and then crossing the street and using the window of a bathhouse to keep the post office in sight. He came out and turned along the pavement with his stick poking at the crusts of snow, and after a moment I began following.

'I wouldn't do that,' Volodarskiy said.

After the brightness of the snow outside it was semi-dark in here and the dog's fangs gleamed from the shadows. I brought my feet back underneath the bench.

"He knows you're a friend,' Volodarskiy said as he spooned his kashta from the bowl, 'but you're still unfamiliar to him, and he knows also that sometimes a new friend will turn.' His sharp eyes glanced up at me and his face took on something like a smile. I think he was a man to smile into the face of death itself, and I think he had done that more than once. 'He's a noble enough creature, as you can see. His ancestors hunted bear in this region a hundred years ago. He could kill a bear now, bring it down without assistance, but he wouldn't eat from it.'