'Or in the whore-house.'
'That too!'
'Which is not inappropriate, if you think of it, since they're a pack of whoresons!'
Much laughter.
My shovel hit on stone and sent a shockwave up my arm.
'What are you, comrade, a volunteer?'
'Yes.'
'More fool you.' He spat.
A navy transport went past, mud dripping from its dark green paintwork, and jeers went up from the work gang. Jeers came back from the bus. We were left choking on diesel gas with our legs soaked again from the slush-wave.
When I next looked at my watch it was midnight. It was eleven hours since Fane had left the hotel and I'd been back three times to see if there'd been a telephone message. In between I'd worked at the snow with the volunteer gangs, taking a break for a bowl of potato soup at the Red Dawn cafe, hunched by the steamy window in a soaked coat, sure now that Croder wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it, couldn't locate Ferris or persuade him to take over from Fane and local-control me for Northlight.
'Volunteers are all very well, comrade, very patriotic, but what have they done with the taxes we pay? We let them bleed us white and then do the snow-clearing ourselves!'
'Mind my foot with that bloody shovel, that's all I ask.'
After eleven hours of waiting for news I was certain that Croder would leave Ferris in Tokyo and crash-brief one of the shadow executives on standby and put him on a plane in London — one of the Soviet specialists, Hopkins or Bone or Reilly — with instructions to report to Fane in the field. I'd signalled Croder to let him know I was outraged, that was all, to make demands he couldn't hope to meet, simply as a way of easing my injured pride. He had known that.
Another bus crawled past, its wheels spinning on slush and its windows opaque with steam; an open truck followed it, packed with volunteer workers.
'Come on home, you bloody lunatics! It's gone midnight!1 Gravel drummed under the mudguards, thrown up by the tyres.
Fane had put it perfectly well. Tokyo was seven thousand miles from here, twenty-four hours by air even if Ferris had boarded a plane the moment London had signalled him, even if he could get instant connections in Calcutta or Karachi or Tehran and an instant connection in Leningrad. And he'd need high-level Overseas Trade Commission cover to get him through Leningrad to Murmansk: that too was true.
I pushed the shovel under the snow and swung it upwards across the side of the truck, feeling ready now to go back to the hotel again after twelve hours' more or less constant exercise. In that freezing garret I'd have gone crazy listening for the phone to ring in the hall below, and my muscles would have lost their tone.
'Come on, comrade!'
'What?'
'Room for one more!'
Men waving from the truck. I slung my shovel into the bin with the others and climbed onto the running board, hanging on as we lurched through the slush, the mudguards scraping between the snow drifts that loomed under the flickering lamps.
On the other hand Croder might not find anyone available, anyone with my degree of experience. Reilly had come back from the Budapest thing two weeks ago looking like death and Bone was in Norfolk pounding his way through a refresher course in unarmed combat. I didn't know where Hopkins was, but he'd left Bureau-DI6 relations in a mess at the end of his last mission in Rome and Croder would think twice before he sent him out again.
It could conceivably be that the only competent agent available for Murmansk was already there now, jolting his way back to his hotel with ice forming in his boots and the chill of a different climate forming along his nerves because there might, yet again, not be a message.
The concierge was asleep behind his desk when I got there, and shone a torch on me through the glass door before he'd open it up.
'You are asked to ring this number, comrade.' He unfolded a scrap of dirty paper. 'They called an hour ago, but I didn't know where to find you.'
Fane answered.
'They can't locate Ferris. My instructions are to ask you whether you are willing to continue the mission under my local direction.'
Water seeped from my boots across the worn parquet floor, reflecting the light from the cracked white globe above the doors. An engine rumbled outside as a truck spun its wheels, sending gravel hammering against the wall like machine-gun fire.
Fane was waiting.
I didn't trust him.
The concierge was sitting behind his desk with a newspaper, turning the pages — as he waited for me to speak again into the telephone. How many English words did he know, apart from football and chewing-gum and rock 'n' roll?
I didn't trust Fane and I didn't trust Croder. Croder would instruct my local control to set up a trap for me if it suited Northlight, if it would protect the infinitely delicate machinery of East-West relations at this crucial time, if one lone man's death could make safer the lives of millions. And my local control would follow the instructions, as he'd done before.
I will risk death in the labyrinthine tunnels of a given mission, ferreting my way through the dark and through the dangers, alert for the footfall, for the shadow, for the glint of steel that must be seen in time and dealt with, dog eat dog, for this is the way, the only way to the objective: this is my trade and this is how I ply it. I always know, when I leave the open streets of public life and slip into the alleyways of private peril, that this time it may lead me to that last dead end, that this time there may be a rose for Moira.
But I won't let my own controls plot my destruction, however vital the issue, however great the gain. I reserve the right, gentlemen, to face my deathbringer in my own good time.
'Are you there?'
Fane.
'Tell Croder no. Tell him I'm resigning the mission.'
It was the first time I'd shut the trap for myself.
Quite a breakthrough. Something new every day.
No regrets.
Master of my own fate, so forth. If I can't parry the knife in time I'll take it into the heart, not in the back.
Bullshit. Bravado.
You 're cut off from London.
Aye, there's the rub.
Cut off from London, yes, the lifeline snaking away across a white-capped sea, or any other bloody metaphor you can think of.
Militia.
I bent over the map, concentrating on the frontier. It didn't give much idea of what I would find there, if I ever reached it.
Two militiamen. They'd come through the doors a minute ago and were standing still, looking around. Routine. What did they expect to find in a public library, an English spy or something?
I concentrated on the map, leaving the two still figures at the periphery of my vision, where only movement was registered. I had my papers on me but they could be dangerous now, fatal. It would depend on what connection they'd made in their minds between the dead Lithuanian they'd found alongside the railway lines and the explosion in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha and the engineer Petr Lein, who'd been found by the railway in Murmansk and taken to the hospital. The man with the scarred face.
Had Fane told the KGB my cover?
When they'd made that famous deal of theirs, had London instructed my local control to reveal my cover: Petr Lein? So that everything should look above board? That was possible. It was possible that the two KGB officers who'd checked me out on the train had known who I was, that I was working partly for them, for their sacred motherland, by arrangement with Mr Croder. In which case my papers could now be lethal. It had been all right before that thing had blown one or two of their men to bits in the freight-yards but things were different now and if Petr Lein got picked up by a patrol he could find his name on their all-points bulletin sheet: finis.