He was the only danger. It would only need a couple of railway workers to pass anywhere near the rendezvous zone and Karasov would take off on his own and we'd never find him again. It was like taking the cat to the vet.
'If you think it is safe,' he said. His face was losing its colour and his eyes were dying another of the thousand deaths he'd been through since his nerve had gone.
'There'll be no trouble. Just leave everything to me.'
In a moment he said, 'Very well,' and looked away.
I swung the truck down the ramp and into the freight-yards and saw the footbridge, a frieze of black iron girders running across the pale sky. The time was 11:59. We jolted across frozen ruts with the chains crunching through clinkers where the snow had been cleared by the work gangs. There was a man standing under the end stanchion of the bridge, the tip of his cigarette making the only point of colour in this desolate place.
'The courier,' I told Karasov.
He was waiting this side of the freight sheds, immediately under the bridge. There was a train standing on the other side, with a fat woman swabbing the windows with a brush and a steaming bucket. There was no one else here.
It was noon when I stopped the truck exactly under the bridge and the man dropped his cigarette and began making his way across the ruts towards us. The black van came from behind the train at the same moment, moving in very fast and spilling men with their hands at their holsters.
KGB.
19 FINIS
I have never been so cold. You think you have been cold? Not like this. Not like this.
This is the cold of the dead, when the blood itself is cold. When the heart itself is cold. This is the chill of death.
The cold was the worst.
I thought about it, recognizing it as something that I must try to stop, then realizing that there was nothing I could do to stop it. If I tried to stop it I would meet death of a different kind.
The cold was the worst. No. The dark was the worst. It was the darkness of not existing, bringing with it the knowledge that you have arrived somewhere unfamiliar, not where it is dark but where there has never been light. Death, yes, the regions of death far beyond any knowing.
The dark was the worst.
No. The noise was the worst.
It was the noise of infinite destruction, the never-ending tumult of holocaust, bringing the irreversible death of silence, the death of peace. I knew now that there would always be this thunderous noise, this all-extinguishing darkness, this killing cold.
Spark.
I was curled in the foetal position on one side, lodged between metal beams and plates. A rivet was against my head and I moved a little, for comfort.
Comfort? You must be joking.
Another spark and in the total darkness it brought light enough to throw a reflection on the rail immediately below me, on the shining rail, so that there seemed to be two sparks. My eyes seized on it, my soul drank from it: there was light, just for this little time. All had not been extinguished, then.
Don't fall asleep.
No. That would be unwise.
Keep awake. If you don't keep awake you'll fall.
Yes. I'll fall down there onto the. Wake up. Wake up or you'll- What? Yes — wake up, I'm waking up now, I'm — oh my Christ. Grab it, grab that beam, come on.
Close. That was rather close.
I sat up now with my back to the big iron plate that spanned the chassis, pulling my legs up and trying not to think of what would have happened to them, to my legs, if I'd dropped onto the rails, under the wheels.
The stink of the locomotive raked at my throat and I shut down most of my breathing. Another spark flew and I took warmth from it into my mind. Not much, true, not much. But when you're as cold as this, a spark is like the sun.
I would have to stay like this now, sitting up. There wasn't much room, about as much as a bicycle saddle to perch on with my feet resting on a three-inch ledge, one of the big I-section girders that ran the length of the carriage. I would have to keep awake now.
Unidentified body found on railway lines, severely mutilated.
Then on to the sports news.
It wasn't fatigue. It was delayed shock. But all that was over now. Northlight was finished. The objective, Viktor Pavlovich Karasov, was a dead man. The sleeper had waked but was now sleeping again, his fears at rest forever.
The sixth death for Northlight, and the worst.
Karasov's death was the worst.
Mission unsuccessful.
We try not to think about it. In the ranks of the shadow executives — God, you can't call them ranks, that's ridiculous — we're more like rats in the wainscoting, scuttling our random way through the tunnels of unknown territory in the earthy dark, the nerves galvanized and the ears tuned to catch the distant song of the deathbringer as he comes on his way to meet us — in the wainscoting, then, in the tunnels if you will, we try not to think about one of those snivelling little clerks in the records room picking up his pen and writing it down in the space provided, neatly in the space provided, Mission unsuccessful.
We would do anything rather than see it written down, to avoid the knowledge, as we lie angled across some rubbish dump listening to the sirens, waiting for the headlights, fumbling at last for the capsule and trying to find our mouth, the knowledge that it will later be written down, our failure spelled out letter by letter in that crabby hand, for others to see.
Not everyone, of course. The records are classified. And there's a gentleman's agreement that along those creaking and half-lit corridors our secret shall forever be sacrosanct, that we shall all of us conspire to protect what rags of pride may still be left in the bosom of a failed brother-rat.
Did Thompson get back?
Oh yes. Came in last night.
What sort of condition?
Bit done up.
What happened? He'd only just gone out.
Called off, I believe. They scratched it.
Change of plan?
That's right. Are you coming along for some tea?
And we sit in the Caff for longer than usual, wanting company but not to talk about anything significant, just not wanting to be alone with the creeping nightmare thoughts that one day this could happen to us. Because our pride is pretty well all we've got. None of us do it for the money. Do you know the kind of money we get paid? Then you know what I'm talking about. We do it from vanity, from the arrogant and overweening urge to prove that we can go out there and take anything on and get away with it and bring back the product. So the worst thing that can happen to us is failure.
Northlight: finis.
The train thundered through the night.
Dark had come down an hour ago at three in the afternoon. Black snow clouds, driving in from the north, had thrown shadow across the freight-yards, blotting out the light from the polar cap. Images weren't too clear, but of course we could recognize the van all right and the men running with their hands on their guns.
'Did you know about this?
He didn't answer.
I still couldn't trust him, at the last. This was a trap and I think he could have known about it, could have made some kind of sordid pact with the KGB to lead me into them and then do what they wanted of him. I'd asked him before: 'Are you taking me into a trap? And soon afterwards he'd asked me: 'What will happen if the KGB are watching the station?'
But there wasn't much time to think about that now. I'd got the objective for the mission with me and my local control had got an escape route set up and the one thing I was not going to do was sit here and shut down Northlight and let them put our sleeper under the thumbscrews and blow our Murmansk network out of the ground so I got the toy from the floor under my legs and made a rough estimate of the weight and the range and the force needed to land it where it would give us a flamescreen and swung it through the open window, but the tip of the lever caught the frame and sent the thing spinning and slowed it down and it fell too close and the whole truck came up and smashed down on its side so we couldn't get away in it after all.