As my retinae adjusted to the light from the stove and the lantern I saw the dog more clearly. It looked like a Doberman pinscher bur was larger, some kind of breed native to the north here; it had the long canine teeth of the dogs that patrol a sensitive security area, the kind that I would meet again, probably, if I had to breach the frontier without papers.
'Where was it trained?'
'I trained it myself It was said with pride. 'One day I'm going to use him for some work I have in mind.' He looked at his stew when he said that, not at me.
Karasov said nothing, had said nothing since the contact had brought me in here. He ate his kashta with no appetite. He was a very frightened man.
'He would not eat the meat from a bear,' Volodarskiy said in a slightly sing-song tone, 'because I am the provider of his meat. To that extent, he is tamed. But if I slipped on the ice one day and died of exposure, then he would eat me, or enough of me to end his hunger, because I am the provider of his meat, and it would be logical. But he would wait until I was really dead before he started forward. All dogs, and most humans, are of course carrion eaters.'
I came to one of the gristly lumps in the stew and avoided it, then thought again. I needed the protein.
'Would it attack me, with you here?'
Volodarskiy tilted his head, a habit he'd formed in his occasional role as a blind man. 'Probably not. But he is very sensitive. I trained him to attack anything he feels would bring me harm, even without my orders. I did that because there may come a time when I'm unable to give him those orders.' He glanced at me in the lantern-light and his rather unnerving smile came again. 'He feels he knows, you see, better than I do when it comes to my welfare and anything that threatens it. He's an extension of my body, so what hurts me would hurt him.' He looked down at the dog. 'He's not really intelligent, in the sense we mean it. But he's intuitive, and of course deadly.'
Karasov ate his stew in silence. There were strong vibrations in here, and I'd caught one of them as soon as I'd arrived: the contempt Volodarskiy had for Karasov, for his terror.
It had taken more than an hour to get here because the drifts had blocked some of the narrow streets leading out of the town, and the contact had made a show of bumping into things now and then when there were people about. I'd followed at a distance, making short detours to dissimulate the travel pattern and check for surveillance. I had to make certain we were clean because the executive was nearing the objective and Chief of Control was sitting there in the operations room in London watching the lights over the signals board and studying the blown-up relief map they would have prepared for him as soon as Fane had reported that I was moving into Kandalaksha.
There are three main phases of any given mission on foreign soiclass="underline" when you get access and when you reach the objective and when you bring the objective or the product back across the border, and things get more difficult as the mission progresses, and if I picked up the slightest hint of any surveillance at this critical stage I would break off and leave the contact to go on alone until I'd gone to cover and closed in on the opposition and wiped them out before they could tag him to the objective and blow the whole mission out of the ground or even worse than that, because if the KGB or the Rinker cell or anyone else reached Karasov "first they'd put him under the light and prime the needle and get everything out of him, everything in his head, his local contacts and Moscow communications and courier routes and operations history, the whole ultra-sensitive scenario reaching as far as London and sending reverberations right across the network from Hong Kong to Washington. Karasov had been an important sleeper for five years in a Soviet naval base bristling with secret installations and if he got blown before I could pull him out of here it would shut down a dozen files and open up a dozen top-level enquiries that would drop hand-bearer memos on the desk of the prime minister and CIA liaison, and as I crunched over the packed snow under the black winter trees in the tracks of the contact I made certain — absolutely certain — that we were alone and clean and unsurveilled and later I would repeat that, I would report that I had made certain — absolutely certain.
Near the end of the journey we'd crossed the surface of a frozen stream and worked our way through a knoll of black and leafless tress that stood petrified under the leaden midday sky. It was half-cabin, half-cave that the contact led me to, with walls of rock and rusting iron sheets and stitched hides from cattle buried in the snows of past winters here. Inside, in the gloom where only the one lantern burned and the stove glowed red in the shadows, I had found the objective for Northlight, Viktor Karasov.
He was eating his stew with the motions of a man condemned, his hands listless. Bigger than Volodarskiy, he was more brooding, his nicotine-brown eyes sliding away when I glanced at him. I think he believed I'd come here to bring his end in some way, to make a pretence of getting him through the gauntlet of the KGB and leave him dangling across the electrified fence of the frontier riddled like a colander. This was another of the vibrations I was getting: his guilt seemed as bad as his fear — he'd gone to ground without warning us and he'd stayed there and then tried to run for Moscow when he couldn't stand the fear that the KGB were slowly closing in on him while he crouched there in his bolt hole doing nothing. It wouldn't have been here, I knew that. The moment he'd signalled our network he'd been told to move and cover his tracks and make contact with Volodarskiy and leave the rest to him. We never go near the quarry if he's holed up without reporting his location first: you can go in and try reaching an agent who's trapped or been turned or has lost his nerve or his sanity and you can the in there with him — it happened to Travis in Berlin and it happened to Baker in Singapore and it happened to Powys in Tangier and we didn't get the feedback in time to realize what was going on until someone had got back to London and told us what it had been like for Powys and then thrown himself under a bus.
The dog turned its head and a sound began in its throat, a low menacing vibration as if someone here in the shadows had plucked a cello string. Volodarskiy watched the dog, pausing with his spoon halfway to his mouth, and I noticed that half-smile glittering at the back of his eyes. I'd never been near a man with so much rage in him, with so much readiness to confront death in whatever form it came for him.
I could have been wrong but these were my thoughts about him. So much in this place was tacit, unspoken.
Karasov took no notice of the dog. He was wrapped in his fear.
'Is there someone outside?' Volodarskiy asked the dog.
The low snarling went on.
'Not many come this way,' Volodarskiy told me softly. 'I am not popular. That is of course by intent.' One of the most extraordinary things about him was that he had the accent of an educated Muscovite. 'They do not like my dog either. We're well off, he and I.'
The dog stopped snarling and turned its head away from the door. Fane, I thought, had done well, finding a place like this for Karasov the sleeper, and a man like this to guard him, My worry now was how to get him to the frontier: there was no courage in him, and we'd need that.