Northlight

'Take it,' he said.

I put it into my pocket. 'What is it?'

'The second tape.'

We were stuck again by another snow plough and I turned off the engine so that I could hear better: not only his words but the tone. He was going to talk now. He was going to tell me why he was so deathly afraid. The sleeper had waked, now he would talk.

A second tape?

I didn't turn my head to look at him. It was already in my mind that what he would say to me would be in the form of a confessional. I'd sensed an element of guilt in this man before.

'What's on it, Karasov?'

'It's a duplicate of the one you took to London.'

I remembered the debris pattering down in Eaton Place after the two boffins had climbed into their car.

It had been for nothing, then. There was another tape.

A man's face was at the window suddenly and I looked at it through the glass. He was saying something. His breath steamed as he waved his hand, shouting now. I wound the window down. He wasn't an agent; he was a farmer, his face weathered into a grizzled brick-red mask and his eyes sunk into their sockets, rheumy with the cold.

'I'm out of petrol! Can you spare me a drop, comrade?'

I could feel Karasov's fear beside me. He was going to be like this all the way to the railway station, all the way to the coast.

"I'm almost out myself,' I told the man. 'That's why I've switched off the engine.'

He threw up his arms and trudged forward through the snow to talk to the driver in the truck. I wound the window up and asked Karasov, 'Why did you take a duplicate?'

It was a long time before he answered. 'For the others.'

The man's voice came back to us as he shouted to the driver in front. Somewhere on the road ahead I could see the shape of another mechanical scoop clearing the snow. I gave Karasov time, but he wanted me to drag it out of him like a priest in the confession box. Guilt never comes out in a hurry.

'What others?'

'The Chinese.'

It was like a bullet coming through the windscreen. I hadn't been ready for it.

'Go on,' I told him. He wanted goading.

'I-' and that was all for another minute. I didn't prompt him again, because he'd hear fury in my voice and that would frighten him off altogether. He wouldn't know that the fury wasn't against him but against myself, against Fane, against Croder. None of us had known and, we should have known. We should have known that an international incident big enough to threaten the summit conference would inevitably involve triangle diplomacy and the China card.

'I–I've been giving product to them for a long time now,' Karasov said.

Mother of God.

''How long?

I felt him jerk in fear as his head swung to look at me. He'd heard it: the fury. I would have to do better than this but by Jesus Christ I was sitting here in a stinking farm truck with our run to the coast blocked off by snow and the objective for the mission sitting beside me and telling me he'd been working for both major intelligence networks, East and West, for a long time, eight days into Northlight and already five on the deathroll and a live bomb under my legs and someone out there putting the windscreen into the crosshairs or signalling ahead of us to get a trap set or coming up from behind us like the man who was out of petrol and there was nothing I could do about it until I could get this bastard to the frontier and take him to London and leave him there to spill his guts all over Croder's debriefing desk and then I was going to ask questions, an awful lot of questions about the man running our Murmansk cell and why the hell he'd let his sleeper go on working for London and Peking without checking on his product and his couriers and his contacts and his communications because somewhere he could have been caught, could have been seen slipping a package into a furtive hand in the shadows of a crowded bar or on a bus or in a brothel or wherever they'd set up their drop, somewhere they could have tapped a line or checked a crossed signal or questioned the travel patterns or stood close to a talker, catching a hint of smoke on the air, a whiff of something burning.

'What?'

'Years,' he was saying. 'Years.'

I didn't answer him until I'd got control again. Keep cool, yes, absolutely, nothing to get into a tis-was over, just sitting here thinking I'm working exclusively in the Soviet zone and all the time there's a Chinese cracker rigged to go off, love from Peking, bit of a joke really, something funny happened to me on my way to Murmansk, this one's going to kill you.

That, too, yes.

'Have you been giving them everything?'

He waited until I'd dragged the gears in: we'd started moving again. 'Not everything. Only the stuff they'd be interested in.'

'Only the stuff they'd buy?' Rather rude, that, yes, but I wasn't really in the mood for good manners.

'They were only interested in naval matters,' he said with an attempt at dignity, 'affecting the security of their own coastline.'

'And how precisely did the sinking of the SSN Cetacea affect the Chinese coastline?'

He didn't answer, and I realized he didn't even need to. Of course it was nothing to do with the Chinese coastline: it was to do with the summit conference in Vienna.

'Keep aver this side? someone was yelling, and I wound the window down for a better view and slowed the truck. Two men with shovels were out there levering a rusty Volkswagen clear of the ruts. I turned my front wheels and got the rear chains working at the surface and nudged the VW onto the cleared surface with its tyres slewing across the sand. It pulled his offside wing off but he was out of trouble now. One of the road gang picked up the wing and threw it across the snow.

'Keep going! Keep your wheels moving!'

The VW sent a cloud of exhaust gas into the air and I shut the window. 'Karasov,' I said, 'have you got a gun on you?'

He looked at me sulkily. 'No.'

He could be lying: his eyes hadn't given anything away. It occurred to me that he might have brought a gun along to use on someone or on himself.

'Are you taking me into a trap?

Because anything was possible now. A few minutes ago he'd been a blown sleeper dependent on me to get him across but now he could be anything, any kind of Judas working for London, Moscow and Peking, raking in pounds sterling, rubles and yen while he kept the product coming and reported to the KGB through a backstairs courier. Maybe all that frightened him was the idea of sitting next to someone who was going to see the bits of glass coming at him first and then the flat-nosed slug as it moved into the target just above the eyes.

'A trap?' He shook his head. 'Listen, I'm not as bad as that.' And suddenly he was crying, and I shut up for a while and let him get it done with. It was the strain, I suppose, and the feeling that he was letting everyone down — because they're like that, some of them, the mercenaries, the people who'll work for anyone who'll pay them, two at a time, three at a time, paying off the mortgage on their little place in Hampstead and looking for a bigger one, bribing the black market commissar in the back streets of Leningrad to put him higher on the list for a nice little Moscwicz, shifting a bank account from Paris to Cannes and commuting by Caravelle from wife to mistress and back, compared with which my good friend Karasov was doing rather less well for himself, stuck in a truck in the Arctic Circle in winter time and snuffling over his sins into a filthy handkerchief.

Snow exploded against the windscreen and Karasov shouted something as his head rocked back against the seat squab. Fright, that was all. The big scoop out there had swung across the line of traffic and lost half a ton of snow in the process. I stopped the truck and got out and stood on the running board and kicked the snow off the bonnet and if they'd wanted to squeeze the hairspring at this precise moment they could have blown my head off. The other drivers were rechristening the man in the scoop, clumsy prick, whoreson, pox-ridden idiot, so forth, not at all popular.