Quiller Balalaika

I'd never heard him be so graphic. He was worried, that was all. Ferris was worried. Then help me, God. 'It could be interesting,' I said.

'Unfortunately I've got instructions from Control.'

'Twist his arm.'

'On what grounds? When you've got nothing to report.'

'Perfectly true.' It doesn't help, either, while you're listening to the roaring of the riptide, to hear that your director in the field is striking camp.

'Just give me one good argument,' Ferris said. 'Just one.'

It was tempting to make a rendezvous and give him the whole picture, but it wouldn't work. He'd tell me I hadn't got a chance of pulling this one off, that for the first time I was letting the mission run me totally out of controclass="underline" I was groggy from getting clear of two red sectors and couldn't be expected to think rationally, and the thing to do was to let him take me home while I was still alive, fight again another day, so forth, and all this in his most silken tones, stroking my ego and gently calming it down, getting inside my defences as only he could do, without leaving an entry wound.

'I haven't got any argument you could use to Control,' I said at last. 'Go home.'

'I'm afraid those are already my instructions.'

'No regrets, then. But do something before you leave. Get Legge to pick up the Mercedes.' I told him where I'd left it. 'If it's not there, then the opposition's commandeered it.'

'How did you get back from the forest?'

'In their car. They didn't want it any more.'

The thought was cheap, sour, and Ferris heard the note.

'Are you operational?' he asked me.

'Actually no. That doctor, by the way – where can I find him?'

'What's the problem?'

'I pulled the stitches, that's all.'

'He's near the UK embassy.' He gave me the address. 'I'll meet you there.' Didn't want to leave his executive less than operational in the field, would try very hard, if I let him see me, to get me home.

'You'd be wasting your time,' I told him. 'Give my love to Blighty.' I shut down the signal, and in the silence of the room heard the lifeline snap.

Mitzi Piatilova came out of the RAOC office alone again, taking a chance crossing the icy street and tossing her head back and laughing as a driver yelled at her.

I followed her into the fast food cafe and got behind her in the queue and whispered, 'This is on me. Go for the caviar.'

She turned, recognized me, couldn't think of my name.

'Dmitri,' I said.

'Well, hi! What are you doing here?'

'I hoped I could join you.'

'Sure!' Remembered the thousand dollars she'd earned the last time.

At the table she dropped her coat onto a chair and pulled her black sweater tight, her eyes bright in the haze of tobacco smoke. 'Did your friend get off that charge? What was his name?'

I looked around. 'Boris. Yes. Thanks to the Cougar.'

Her eyes went deep. 'When was this?'

'On Monday. Four days ago.'

'You know he's in hospital, do you?'

'Vishinsky?'

'Yes.'

'I hadn't heard.'

'The police had a call on Tuesday and went into his hotel and found his suite looking like a slaughter house.'

'That's the mob for you.'

'I guess. So how's business?'

'Very good. Except that someone's getting in my way.'

She stilled, looked down, up again. 'You need something done about him?'

'Yes and no. But I'm not looking for a hit.'

'Why not?'

'It doesn't always have to be the answer. I'm a businessman at heart.'

'So what do you need from me?'

I told her.

17: GULANKA

'Where is your police escort?'

I grunted, shaking my head, pointing to my ears, then to my mouth.

The receiving officer gave a frown, squeezing the whole of his enormous face into it, as mystified as if I'd let forth with a torrent of Italian.

'What do you mean, you clod?' In a cloud of vodka.

I shook my head again, pointing.

He stared at me, then stared down at my papers again, his hands shaking, the split in his thumbnail impacted with grime.

The train stood waiting, a black, rusting barrier against the west, the rails beneath it shining, the mounds of trash between them covered with snow, an acrid reek of excrement drifting from where the contents of a lavatory had been dumped. Overhead the sky was dark, swollen with more snow to come, the only light in it electric, charged with unspent force.

The clock on the platform wall showed noon.

The officer shook my papers out again with a huge raw hand, a forefinger stabbing at the name near the top. Berinov, Dmitri Stanislav. Then he thumped me in the chest. 'You?'

I nodded. I'd asked Mitzi to have the papers made out bearing the forged signatures of a magistrate and a clerk of the court, plus the official stamps and frankings. I'd filled in my own name later, in capitals. The charge on which Berinov, Dmitri Stanislav had been convicted was specified as murder.

'Where is your escort?' the officer asked me again, pointing to one of the policemen standing against the train with his rifle slung.

I looked confused. I'd chosen the deaf-and-dumb act to avoid too many questions. This was nothing more than a cattle drive going on, which I'd expected, but bureaucracy would nevertheless be in charge of things, and papers were papers. He was extraordinarily worried, this huge red-headed man, that I hadn't been correctly presented to him by an escort detailed by the bailiff of the court. It was like watching table manners in a buffalo.

'Clod!' He picked up his pen and dipped it into the encrusted inkwell, scratching his signature at the bottom of the sheet. His desk was a packing crate, once having contained – according to the stencilling – sewer fittings from No. 3 Sanitation Equipment Factory, Smolensk. 'Over there!'

I tapped the papers and looked enquiring.

'What? No, I keep these. Over there!'

Two of the police guards came forward to lead me across to the huddle of prisoners near the front of the train, and I heard the metallic echo of the last of so many doors slamming behind me. I'd listened to them all morning, the first time when I'd left the hotel in the railway worker's clothes Legge had originally provided, complete with a heavy moth-eaten astrakhan hat and hogskin boots, the coat cut out of thick woollen felt, proof against even a Siberian wind-chill. The second time I'd heard a door slam was when I'd got into the taxi, telling the driver to take me to Gorkogo Station in the south-east of the city. The third time was of course when I'd arrived here and sat for half an hour on one of the benches outside, going over the whole thing again and reviewing the few, ineffective alternatives and coming up with the same answer, always the same answer: this was the only chance I'd got of bringing Balalaika home.

Then I'd picked up my duffel bag and walked into the station and that door had slammed too, and the nerves had flickered like iced lightning through the system as I reached the point of no return.

'Got a cigarette?'

A thin man beside me as we stood packed together, tears on his face from the cold, a five-day stubble.

'I don't smoke.'

He turned away.

Gulanka, it said on the weathered board near the rear of the train, the letters scoured by time and the whipping slipstream.

Once he's in there, Mitzi had told me, you won't see him again. No one ever gets out of Gulanka.

Wire mesh, half a mile of it, stretched like a shimmering net across the rocks, bearing a frieze of curved blades glinting like scimitars in the glare of the floodlights, beyond them a cliff, a massif of sheer rock rising to a thousand feet against the arctic night sky, gates swinging open on shrieking hinges, their timbers shaking as the huge locomotive rumbled between them, steam clouding under the lights, and now an outcry from a pack of dogs straining at the leashes of the handlers, their wolvine shapes rearing alongside the carriages, the guards behind them in ranks, rifles slung, and finally whistles blowing, an outbreak of shouted orders, doors slamming back.