Northlight

I thought about it. 'Are there lamps there?'

'Not near the doors.'

'What about harbour security? What about militia patrols?'

Short silence. 'When did you last go outside?'

'I got here yesterday evening.'

'The snow hasn't stopped since long before then. This city is dead. So far they've managed to keep two of the runways clear at the airport but the roads are blocked solid. The last militiaman I saw was dozing over a coke stove in the middle of the Kulinin-Terechovo crossroads. You'll see what I mean when you go outside.'

A frisson passed through my nerves. I was beginning to feel the squeamishness of the burrowing animal for the light of day. It was night out there but there would be lights in places and I didn't want to pass under them.

But I had to see Fane.

'All right. Ten o'clock.'

We synchronized watches and I rang off.

Place stank of fish.

There'd been lights along the harbour road and I'd had to walk under them because the only alternative was to clamber across man-high snow drifts.

'Is this safe?'

'I told you, the city is dead.'

Bad choice of words. The bruises, I suppose: pain all over, total reluctance to move, to have to move, to have to move fast if anything happened, if anyone came here.

'Have you got a gun on you?' I asked Fane.

'Why?''

'I want to know.'

I always want to know if people near me are carrying weapons but my reasons are different. With Karasov it had been because I wanted a quiet run to the rendezvous and no fuss when we got there. With Fane it was because I would know what to do if anyone came here and we had to react. I would let him draw fire and get clear if I could.

'Yes,' he said.

'All right. I just wanted to know.'

'Try and calm down.'

I bit off the first thing I thought of saying and watched him light one of his bloody cigarettes with a gold Dupont — Jesus, this man was unreal — and blow out smoke that went drifting across the oblong of pale blue light coming through one of the high narrow windows from a lamp outside. If you stood facing the light the rest of the place was dark but if you stood with your back to it you could make out some of the environment: crates of dried fish, two trolleys, a loading gantry rearing like a gibbet. I stood with my back to the light and made Fane move to face it.

Freezing in here.

'Do you want debriefing?' he asked me.

'What for? We've shut down. Leave it for London.'

My eyes were accommodating after the lamps outside and I could see the expression of long-suffering patience on his face. 'All the same, I'd like to hear about Karasov.'

'I told you.' My breath clouded in the light, as substantial as the smoke from his cigarette. 'He was selling product to Peking as well as to us.' I brought the cassette out of my pocket and gave it to him. 'This is the duped tape.'

He glanced at the labels and put it away. 'It could still be of some use. Did he confess quite freely?'

'You could say that. I didn't use any pressure — I hadn't any idea what he'd been doing.'

Fane looked away. 'No one did. This was why he didn't ask us for help the moment he went to ground, I imagine.'

'He was bargaining with Peking through their Rinker cell.'

'Yes.' Ash fell from his cigarette.

Something was wrong.

A ship's foghorn sounded a long way off and it sent a flicker along the nerves. I watched Fane. He hadn't even noticed. He was standing perfectly still, looking at the dirt floor of the warehouse, not actually seeing it. It was as if I weren't there.

There'd been something wrong with this mission from the very beginning and I still didn't know what it was and it frightened me because I wanted to stay alive and get clear of this bloody country and it might not even be important to them, to London, to Fane, to help me, to do this last thing for me, to bring at least one thing home from Northlight, if only a bruised and defeated executive.

Perhaps he was having to get used to the fact that I was here at alclass="underline" he'd thought I was dead. That was why the phone had gone on ringing when I'd tried to call him. Not his fault: it's routine. When the executive's compromised beyond saving, his control has to close down the whole cell — bases, the safehouse, courier lines, cyphers, contacts, cutouts, every facility in the system that the executive might have given away under interrogation. Fane would have done that, and started for Moscow or Leningrad to get on a plane for London; then he'd heard from the embassy that I was still in the field.

That would have pleased him, until I'd told him the objective was dead. I suppose it was a bit of a nuisance having to get me home, bit of a chore.

He was looking up at me now, still not saying anything, watching me in silence. And then, because of the light in his eyes, because of the angle of his head or because of a thousand infinitesimal impressions that were streaming into my consciousness — then, because of all these things and most of all because he hadn't asked me that one specific question over the telephone, I knew suddenly what was wrong, I swear to God I knew, even before he spoke.

'Fane. Who blew the rendezvous?'

A slight catch of his breath.

'I did.'

22 TIGER

'DON'T,' He said.

I suppose I'd moved.

He hadn't gone for his gun — I wouldn't have given him time. He'd just taken a step back.

'Don't do anything precipitate.'

He watched me steadily with his expressionless eyes.

My neck pulsed: I could feel it. The carotid artery on the left side was palpable as the pressure went up, as the rage came.

'You've got guts,' I said.

He shrugged slightly. 'You had to know some time.'

'You could have waited until there were other people around to protect you.' I studied his face with its smooth white skin and its perfectly regular features, its short nose and straight mouth, seeing it for an instant as it would have looked if I'd actually decided to turn it into a mess.

'Save me the melodrama,' he said thinly.

The voice of sanity. It's one of the things, in point of fact, that the director in the field is expected to do for his executive when a fuse blows or a wheel comes off. Keep the poor bastard sane.

But he wasn't doing it very well because I moved again and only just managed to stop short and if you think it was lack of control you don't know what it's like when you're carrying some half-dead objective to the frontier and a courier-rendezvous blows up in your face and takes the whole of the mission with it and you find out it was your own local control who set it up, you think I'm a bloody robot or something?

Besides, that wasn't all he'd done.

'Be careful,' he said. 'I'm your only hope of survival. Don't make things difficult for yourself.'

It wasn't all he'd done.

'Fane, did you have that thing put in the truck?'

He looked down, looked up again.

'Yes.'

I turned away and walked through the pale blue light and saw my shadow moving across the dirt floor, rippling over the debris as if I were walking under water, so there you are you see, I knew there'd been something wrong with this mission from the moment when they told me Ferris had refused it, and I should have known better than to let that bastard Croder set me up and set me running again — he almost got me killed the last time he ran me, in Moscow, I tell you that man simply does not care what he does to his executives providing they bring back the product.

Stink of fish in here..

He was still standing perfectly still, watching me. From this distance he could have shot me dead and I suppose that was why I'd turned and walked away from him; I wanted to know the future and this was the only way to find out, Russian roulette, yes, but that's part of our trade, we're used to it.