Antanov, Marius.
The tricky thing was going to be leaving the files as I found them: they didn't seem to be in any particular order. A to K, for instance, was on one of the labels, but this box dealt with guard duties. The A to K file next to it dealt with the inmates of Hut five, Arkady to Bakar, no Antanov between them. There were, I would have said, thirty or forty files.
Midnight plus fifty on the wall clock, no means of knowing if a sentry came round to check, or if so, how often. The orderly room was the nerve centre of the camp, and therefore for me, now, a distinct red sector.
Mr Croder? Another red sector signal for Balalaika's just come through from Moscow.
Joking, of course: it was eight days since Ferris had been ordered out of the field and by now the lights would be switched off over the board, either that or a new mission would already be set up there with data coming in from the director in Algeria or Baghdad or Beijing, while Mr Croder shut himself up in his tempered-steel shell to consider whether or not to resign, how much guilt to feel for the little ferret he'd left running in circles through the snow, or whether he could hold out a spider's-thread hope for an eleventh-hour last-ditch breakthrough for the mission, knowing as he did the blind tenacity of said ferret when the jaws of adversity gaped from the shadows of the labyrinth.
It wasn't my concern now. London could go straight to hell.
MOSKVA. Deliveries by train from the 'city' last week: three tons of canned food, twelve pairs of new boots, a field telephone, two radios, three dozen towels, two hundred feet of one-inch rope and a hundred feet of half-inch cord, ten handcuffs, ten chain shackles, four pinewood coffins, six crates of vodka.
I'd seen two men going into the dinner hall yesterday with their feet shackled and their heads shaven and no winter jackets on, simply trousers and T-shirts; they'd been blue with the cold. In a place like this there'd be a whole variety of punishments.
The wind was moaning under the door, powdering the bare boards with snow. Somewhere above the storm layer was a full moon two diameters high from the horizon, and from the window the light was eerie and the snowflakes black, silhouetted against the eastern sky.
Voices, and I switched off the lamp and froze.
Voices or the wind, or voices in the wind.
A beam of light was on the move out there, probing along one of the pathways that had been cleared earlier, two dark figures behind it with their faces lit by the back-glow. Turning left, turning right, coming back, the beam sweeping the door of a hut – the commandant's HQ – and moving on again and again coming back along a parallel path, coming this way as I lowered myself behind a cabinet, waiting, the voices out there torn by the wind but louder now.
And what, if those men came in here, would there be to say? Some instant rehearsal was in order.
I was looking for a friend of mine in the files.
Who let you in here?
Nobody.
You've got no permission to be here?
No.
You mean you broke in?
I picked the lock.
Isn't that breaking in?
I suppose so. But -
My God, are you in trouble! Hold your hands behind your back.
Click.
The beam of the lamp flooding the window now, then the cracks of the door, flickering across the powdering of snow on the floor and gilding it.
Waited.
'I told him I wasn't going to do another fucking guard duty for him till he'd paid me for the last time.'
'Maybe he's out of cash.'
'Shit, then that's his problem, not mine.'
The clump of their boots on the pathway, the sound fading.
Inside the organism the pulse rate higher, throbbing at the temples, and I gave it a couple of minutes to come down. It wasn't the idea of having to answer a few questions that worried me, or the handcuffs, or the thought of the rawhide whip. This was the worry: if I left here tonight without finding Antanov in the files there'd never be another chance.
Time, then, is distinctly of the essence. I cannot afford to be caught in here before I've finished. Hold one thing and one thing only within the third eye.
Marius Antanov is the key to Balalaika. Hut nineteen. Abel, Aker, Avonik.
In half an hour I spun the dynamo wheel, running it along the edge of the wooden counter for three minutes, switching on the lamp again, finding it brighter.
At 01:17 1 was among the boxes piled against the wall, taking the top one down, remembering the angle at which it had been set there.
INCIDENTS, 1994 to 1996. Escape attempts: details. Death due to escape attempts: Inside camp. Details. Outside camp (wolves). Punishments Awarded for 1) Disobedience,
2) Breach of lights out, 3) Attacks on other inmates, 4) Attacks on guards. Details. Punishments: 1) Snow-clearing for 20 hours with 2 15-minute breaks, hard rations. 2) Flagellation (12 Strokes). 3) Shackles, head shaven, 6 days. 4) Solitary confinement, 3 to 30 days.
The wind moaned under the door.
At 01:48: hut fifteen. Blank. At 02:13: hut seventeen. Blank. At 02:39: hut nineteen. Blank. At 03:21: hut twenty-two. The last one.
Berechov, Bulgarin, no 'A's. No Antanov down as Present, no Antanov down as Absent, Missing or Deceased.
What actually happened – Natalya – was that the Ministry of the Interior sent a squad to arrest my brother as he was coming out of a cafe on the Ring one night. The next day there were charges brought and he was summarily convicted of murdering a judge and sentenced to a life term at Gulanka.
I hadn't misheard her. Gulanka was one of the three most notorious penal settlements in Siberia, allocated specifically for life terms with no remote possibility of release.
So had Antanov been sent somewhere else? To one of the other two?
Mother of God.
I should have checked.
I should have asked Mitzi Piatilova to confirm it for me at her office. If I'd had a director in the field I would have had the time to think, to make careful plans, to structure the moves. But I'd got off the blocks too bloody fast, wanting to make a breakthrough and signal London and get Ferris back to help me put smoke out and head Sakkas off before he could send his army in, tie up the whole mission and bring Balalaika home to the cheering of the crowds and the dancing in the streets before it was too late to do anything as a lone-wolf executive with no local direction and no support group and no signals, no instructions through Cheltenham, running a mission with its head cut off, finis, finito, the end of the line.
Mea culpa.
Moaning under the door, the high wind from the Arctic sweeping the ice and tumbling the silvered crests across the ocean under the lowering moon, to reach the coast and the land and the massif out there, hurling a wave of snow across the camp and with such force now that the flakes hit the window audibly as I stood motionless, of what import is the life, of what import is the fate of this one puny creature trapped in the maelstrom of such a night, pinned by his predicament and unable even to move as he comes to know, is brought to know the truth, to hear the death knell of his grandiose ambitions?
Not much.
Yet we must strive, must we riot, my good friend, to play the game and at whatever cost? What else can we do when we're thrown the bloody ball?