28 PANIC
It took me almost an hour to find the right place. Dark was down now but the streets were still crowded with snow-clearing gangs, and the floodlamps they were running from mobile generators cast a kind of sick daylight among the buildings. They'd brought the lamps in because someone had shoved his spade into a body buried under a drift: an old man had died from exposure and no one had seen him before the snow had covered his corpse.
This was the perfect place, a long alleyway with blank walls at each end, deep under snow but that didn't matter: what I needed was an isolation zone to make absolutely certain.
He hadn't dropped. He couldn't have dropped right away.
The other one must have been stopped by those militia — he hadn't caught up with me by the time I'd walked out of the Metro station. In the normal way I would have moved back to the safehouse without making more than a few visual checks from random cover to make sure I'd lost them, but there was no time to go anywhere now but to the rendezvous Ferris had for me; we were already ten minutes past the deadline at 2:10 pm. There'd been two or three chances to signal him on the way through the streets but I'd resisted them because the moment I telephoned him he would steer me to the rendezvous and it was the objective I was going to meet and I had to be absolutely certain I'd broken the Rinker surveillance.
I'd known he couldn't have dropped in a heap on the stairs because it would have caused confusion and I would have heard it before I reached the street. I'd counted on that. The crowd on the stairs was so thick that it would have carried him with it on the way down and when he eventually hit the ground he would've been taken for just another drunk until somebody noticed the bluish area.
I do not care.
The alley was quiet after the clanging of the shovels and the drumming of the engines in the open street. Halfway along it I looked ahead and saw no one. I looked back and saw no one. Then I went on.
I tell you I do not care. He would have done the same if it had been necessary. It was his life or a dead mission and a lost summit, what the hell do you expect of me for Christ's sake?
But this was the hand.
The snow was so deep here that it reached almost to the top of the walls on each side. Even the dustbins were buried: I kept barging into them as I clambered my way through. I looked ahead again and saw no one. I looked back and saw no one. I'd broken their chain surveillance when I'd lost three of them in the Metro and from then on there'd been only two and one of them was on the slab now and that left only one, and even if he'd managed to satisfy the militiamen and follow me this far from the Metro he wouldn't have let me into this alley without taking up his position to keep me in sight, because I could climb over these walls if I wanted to and disappear altogether and he would know that. But he wasn't there.
This was the hand, yes, and that makes all the difference you see, it's so very personal, so very intimate, I mean they're not just beasts in the field reared for the slaughter-house any more than we are, they had a girl for the first time and played football and lived like other men until they felt the strange insidious affinity for the shadows, for the devious ways and the serpentine turns of the warren that runs in the dark below the surface of society where we finally choose to make our way through a different kind of life and to a different kind of death. He'd been one of us and this was the hand.
They'd been uneasy about this at Norfolk when I'd been put through my first psychological evaluation. Until you can bring yourself to face this aspect of the work, Quiller, you 'II be a danger to yourself and to those working with you. Fowler, with his degree in abnormal psychology and his totally blank eyes and his frightened-looking wife. During your mission it will occasionally be necessary to take life, and we shall expect you to do it only when the need is vital to the mission or to your own survival but with no hesitation, no compunction, no regret. Fowler, with his cultivated penchant for the telling phrase. During your missions you must learn to travel light, and leave your conscience behind.
Another bloody dustbin, this one with the lid off and my foot breaking through something that felt like bones, some kind of carcass, perhaps a dead dog or perhaps only a figment of my own morbidity.
I looked ahead again and saw no one. I looked behind and saw no one. Then I went to find a telephone-box and call Ferris.
'I'm ready to meet the objective.'
Short silence.
'My salutations.' He didn't ask me if I were now certain of a secure environment; he knew I couldn't rendezvous with Zhigalin unless I could go there alone.
He also knew that I had broken a major surveillance chain in not much more than two hours because he'd pushed me to a deadline and it might have meant my taking what the Bureau officially refers to as extraordinary measures. It's sometimes possible for a local director to cover the resulting commotion in both the host country and in London, but we didn't have a consulate in Murmansk to put out a diplomatic smokescreen and London wouldn't make a fuss because the subject had been working for an opposition network: he hadn't been militia or KGB.
'One of them came too close,' I said.
'One of the Ranker people?'
'Yes.'
'And no one is looking for you?'
'Not in that connection. I was clear before anything was noticed.'
'Well done.'
A man of no conscience. Ferris is very sinister beneath the owlish looks and the silken tone. They say that when there's nothing on the telly he strangles mice.