Northlight

Our host made coffee for us, black, Ukrainian, steeped in a porcelain filter, its surface gold with bubbles in the lantern-light. It was how I'd begun thinking of him, as our host; there was a formality about the man in total contrast to his life as a cave-dweller. He hadn't been brought down by circumstance to this smoky hovel; he'd come here to the end of the earth and to find his shelter.

I got Karasov to show me his papers, and our host turned the wick of the lantern higher for me without a word exchanged. The identity card was worn right across the surface instead of just around the edges, and one corner of the photograph was raised; because it had obviously been stuck on in a hurry. There were two typographical errors and there'd been two machines used, one original and the other a forger's.

'How much did you pay?' I asked Karasov.

'Six hundred rubles.'

I dropped the papers into the open front of the stove. The higher the price the worse they are: these had been put together for him in one of those little backstreet basements you can find all over Europe, all over the world, and I would say that a high percentage of the agents that have been blown or shot since the invention of the printing press were carrying papers like these.

'They were the best I could get,' Karasov said, shock in his voice as he watched his papers burning.

'That was because you were in a hurry.' I wanted to say other things but held them back because I didn't want to embarrass him in front of Volodarskiy. 'If you'd ever shown those to a KGB man you'd have been shot.'

'What shall I do now?'

He talked like a bloody child. God knew how I was going to get him as far as the frontier — he wasn't like Brekhov, I couldn't run with him, I'd have to drag him there.

You knew this, Cruder, you knew he was a broken reed, you bastard, you knew nobody else would take on this bloody job.

The dog turned its head to watch me, the vibrations of my rage touching its nerves. I stared back at it in awe. What if it had thought my rage was against its master? 'He is sensitive," nodded Volodarskiy and I turned to see that half-smile in his eyes. 'You should be careful of your thoughts. You should think only good things, charitable things.' He laughed now, giving a short sharp sound in his throat like a muted bark, and I felt my skin crawling.

'Look,' I said, 'hasn't it got somewhere to sleep, a kennel or something?' I hate dogs.

Volodarskiy laughed again and took the thing back into the shadows, and I heard a chain clinking. 'It is not his fault, you know. We haven't had a man here with so much tension in him. It makes him nervous.'

'It makes him nervous? Jesus Christ!'

He laughed again and went back through a curtain of hanging cattle-hides, leaving me alone with the sleeper.

'All right, Karasov, give me the picture.'

It took an hour, maybe more: he'd been in Murmansk five years and had a lot of contacts — not many friends but contacts, couriers, Latvian underground dissidents, Estonian counterrevolutionaries with clandestine printing presses, Lithuanians with nationalistic pride and vengeance simmering in them, the kind of people a good professional sleeper would take an interest in without committing himself, useful people, dangerous people, three of them with enough material on them to make it worth our while to get them to London if we could.

'Why did you leave Murmansk?'

'I was scared.'

'Were they close?'

'I thought so.'

'How close?'

He didn't answer. It would mean telling me how close they needed to get to make him scared and that was exactly what I wanted to know but he wasn't going to tell me: there was some kind of pride left in him and since the meal and the hot sharp stimulus of the coffee he'd come out of his shell a bit. I wanted to know how close they needed to get to make him scared because it would tell me how much work I would have to do to spring him from Russia, how much or how little I could rely on him if a wheel came off. He knew this but his fear was still keeping him halfway in his shell.

'Have you had many brushes with the KGB?'

'No. I'm a careful man.' He spoke in a low whisper, in the way one would speak in the presence of someone dead, and I wondered what it was that had died, or been killed, on his run out from cover. Perhaps it was the man he'd been, the one I would never know. His fear was as deep as that, as crippling; it had changed his personality. I think I might have left him there in that smoking cave, walked away from him into the snow and left him nursing his terror until Volodarskiy had thrown him out. I think I would have signalled Fane and told him there was nothing to bring home to London, just a wrecked psyche.

But it wasn't as simple as that. If he'd done nothing for the last five years except duplicate that one tape he'd have earned his keep and we'd have owed it to him to pull him out and see him safely home. But the tape had been blown apart and he was all we had left now, the living evidence of the death of the Cetacea, and even if I couldn't get him across the border I'd have to keep him out of the hands of the KGB, find a haven for him and a new identity and a new life.

Or silence him, of course. They might ask me to do that.

'You think they got close to you? The KGB?'

'No. Not close. I know how to use cover.' There was that shred of pride in him again, waving like a ragged banner.

'Then why are you frightened, Karasov?'

Wrong move — he went back into his shell, looking down, not answering, sitting near the stove with his big hands clasped and his wet brown eyes staring at the things he wouldn't speak of.

What were they? 'Then is it someone else?' I asked him.

He looked up. 'Someone else?'

'Other than the KGB.'

I saw his eyes change but he looked down again quickly.

'Perhaps.'

A log tumbled in the stove, sending out a spark, I brushed it off my coat and from the shadows the chain clinked and I thought Jesus Christ can't I even move my hand?

Nerves not terribly good, you're perfectly right, but apart from that bloody dog I wasn't having a very nice day because I'd had to kill one man just to get here and God knew how I was going to drag this poor wretch to the frontier without having to kill a lot more or winding up in the minefield with my hands a hundred yards apart and this poor bastard here — the objective, the objective — blown out of his bloody shell forever, surely it doesn't take a lot of understanding.

All right, there was more than that.

Much more.

'Who?' I asked him.

'I don't know.'

'Have you ever heard of a man named Ranker?'

He looked up. 'No.'

'Has anyone tried to get at you?'

'I've had — ' he shrugged with his hands — 'suspicions, you know. People watching. Cars following. That sort of thing.'

I didn't believe him. I did not believe him. If the Rinker cell had got onto him he'd have been dead by now or full of aminazin. They would have devoted as much energy to pulling him in as they'd devoted to me, in fact a bloody sight more because their only interest in me was that I could lead them to the objective and he was the objective.

Or he could of course be so frightened of getting caught by the KGB that he was ashamed of it and making up ghost stories to explain it away: when the nerve goes it takes everything else with it.

I was pushing him too hard. He wasn't going to tell me anything unless I could get him relaxed and then creep up on him with the right questions.

'The thing is,' I said quietly, 'to get you home."