'Where is your baggage?'
'They're still looking for it at the airport.'
I'd seen three jetliners lowering across the city since I'd left the Rossiya, and two taking off, so they'd managed to keep at least one of the runways clear in spite of the snow; they must be used to it, had got things worked out.
'I need to make a phone-call,' I said, 'to London, in the United Kingdom.'
Her eyes widened. 'To where?'
I told her again. 'I'm a journalist, as you know.' It was on my papers. 'I want to file my story on the train disaster — I've heard there were some British passengers on the Rossiya.'
In a moment: 'You speak English?'
'A little.'
It was another shocking breach of security but there was no option: I had to phone London and I had to do it from here because if I went to another hotel to put the call through I'd miss Tanya if she left here, wouldn't know where she'd gone, and she was the only chance I'd got of putting Meridian back on the board in London, and even then I couldn't do it without a safe-house and a director in the field and they were here forme somewhere, Ferris was in this city, or should be, let's hope to God, let us hope, my good friend, to God.
'What number is it?' the woman asked me.
I wrote it down for her on the curling sheaf of old registration forms she used for a notepad. There was no risk this time: the number was protected, untraceable.
'It will take time,' the woman said. 'It's long distance.'
I put another fifty roubles onto the counter and said, 'Tell them it's urgent, mother, give them some of your tongue, you know how to ginger things up. This is a news story and I could be the first with it in London.'
She watched me with her eyebrows raised and her faded blue eyes wide open; she'd got a face like a withered apple, round and red and wrinkled, but she wasn't your favourite aunt, any more than Chief Investigator Gromov had been your favourite uncle: her eyes had the stare of studied innocence, and she could recognize a piggy-bank when she saw one.
'I'll do my best,' she said, and lumbered across the creaking boards of the floor to the telephone in the corner, where a dead plant dangled from a chipped earthenware pot.
Through the brass entrance doors I saw a militia patrol-car bumping across the ruts in the frozen snow, but it didn't stop, not this one, not this time; I had a few more minutes, a few more hours, before one of those patrols would stop and they'd come in here with snow on their boots and ask to see the register.
'It is urgent,' the woman was saying and not for the first time, 'it is urgent, I tell you,' earning her fifty roubles as best she could while I stood halfway between the telephone and the glass doors, ready to move if one of those cars pulled up outside the hotel and started spilling uniforms.
There was a corridor off the lobby, lit by one glass-shaded lamp in the ceiling, and there were two recesses, one of which would lead to the rear of the hoteclass="underline" there was no way out of the lobby except that one, the corridor; the stairs and the lift didn't interest me. I would cripple my chances at that moment, inevitably, when the militia came up the steps and opened the glass doors; I would bring them closer even as I got clear of the hotel, by the very act of vanishing. But I'd have no choice, if they came.
'You are the newspaper?' the woman was shouting into the phone.
They'd say yes. The switchboard in London will say yes to anything when a call comes in from overseas, because they know the ferrets in the field can't always use a telephone in privacy and may have to throw them any name or the name of any organization on the spur of the moment. You can ask them if they're Tootsie and they'll say yes and tune in and take it from there, listening between the lines.
'It is the newspaper,' my little mother said, and I went across to the telephone and thanked her and stood half-turned so that I could keep the mirror in sight, the huge pock-marked mirror with its gilded plaster frame that gave me a view of the glass doors and even patches of snow in the street below the steps.
'This is Shokin,' I said into the telephone.
It smelled of garlic.
'Have you got a story for us?'
'Yes, I have story. But shall I tell now, or give to your agent here in Novosibirsk?'
It was a hundred-to-one shot that the woman knew any English, even though she worked in a hotel, and a thousand-to-one shot that she knew it well enough to tell whether I was fluent or only spoke 'a little', but you keep to your cover when you can, as a routine exercise.
'You can give it to our agent,' the man in Signals told me. I recognized Matthews' voice. 'He's at the Hotel Karasevo. Ask for T.K. Trencher.'
Ferris.
A snow-plough went past the hotel and everything vibrated: the tarnished brass shade of the lamp over the desk, the glass front of the fire-extinguisher cabinet, the chandelier in the ceiling. In the mirror I saw that the woman was watching me.
'Then I will give to agent,' I said. 'Story is about train crash. The Rossiya. Very bad. People dead.'
Matthews would be watching the signals board as he spoke to me, and Croder would be standing somewhere close, listening to the low-volume amplifier.
'Including the subject?' Matthews asked me.
'Yes.' the subject was Zymyanin, the Soviet contact. Dead.
This wasn't the time for details; the chief reason for this call was to find out where Ferris was, my director in the field. I would fill them in later, through him: Zymyanin hadn't died in the train crash; he'd been shot, probably on the orders of the generals.
In a moment: 'And how are you?'
'Thank you. Very good. Except arthritis. Cold here.'
In the established speech-code vocabulary 'arthritis' is a signal to Control that the executive is wanted by the police of the host country. We can run the gamut from arthritis to rheumatism, but rheumatism's not often used because it means the executive has finished up with his back to a wall somewhere with his escape routes cut off and the opposition forces closing in on him and this is the last signal London is going to get.
'Will you be sending in more stories?' Matthews asked.
I thought it over carefully before I spoke. 'Perhaps. Not sure.'
It's in the book at Norfolk: The executive is required to give as accurate a picture of his situation as he can when threatened with any opposition action, whether it be from the operations of a private cell or the police, intelligence or military forces of the host country.
Sometimes an apprentice spook will ask for it to be spelled out, and the instructors play it straight: 'It just means that if you're in the shit then you've got to tell Control exactly that. We've had cases where the shadow's got himself right up a creek but he'll try and put a bold face on it and tell Signals he hasn't got any problems, and that's just plain bloody stupid — we've lost people that way. If you don't tell Control you're in trouble, how can you expect him to help you get out of it?'
What Matthews had asked me was whether I thought there was any future — 'more stories' — for Meridian, since my Soviet contact was dead and the militia were hunting for me, and I'd had to give some thought to his question because if I lost track of Tanya Rusakova, no, I didn't think there'd be any future for the mission. I would have reached a dead end and the only thing left for me to do would be to try getting out of Siberia through the militia net and report back to London.