Quiller Meridian

'Because I bloody well exposed her, yes.'

My anger against myself was information for him, and I meant it to be. He needed to know my frame of mind, because his job was to handle me in the field, nurture and protect me as best he could and pull me out alive if that were possible, and he would be quite aware that my anger would diminish my instinct for survival by a degree, and the risks I decided to take would be greater.

The obvious had to be put into words to give it weight, to offer me atonement, bring the anger down, lessen the risks. 'But of course,' Ferris said, 'you wouldn't have checked in at that hotel if you'd known Rusakova was spotting the target for an assassin.'

'All right,' I said, 'I would have kept clear, yes, but that isn't in point of fact what happened, is it?'

He paced for a little time and I waited, hoping for more sops for my conscience, but he did better than that. 'See if she'll put you into contact with her brother,' he said gently, 'and then I'll do what I can to fly her out of the city and ask Control to keep her safe in London or the country. Then you can clear your mind.'

He was being too bloody accommodating.

'Listen,' I said and went up to him, looked into those quiet honey-coloured eyes that can conceal his thoughts so well that it seems he's not even thinking at all, that you're looking straight through and into an empty skull. 'Are you going to let me go on running?'

Nothing changed, nothing in his eyes, even though I'd just asked him, in effect, whether Meridian had quietly crashed, here in this freezing rat-infested hole, because of the debriefing, because of his assessment of it.

He said at last,'That's a good question,' and I took it in the stomach.

He turned away and watched a rat fretting with something at the bottom of the garbage, its big tail threshing as it worked; and then I saw what it was working on, the entrails of the dog.

I looked away, looked at Ferris. 'For Christ's sake leave those fucking rats alone,' I told him, and he turned to look at me with the faint cynical smile touching his mouth.

'Give a lot,' he said, 'for a brick.'

'I know.'

He turned his back on the garbage and took two seconds to put the whole thing into shape and said, 'The thing is, I can't get you enough support. We — '

'I don't want support. You know — '

'Oh yes,' Ferris said, 'you do. If I let you go on running you're not going to bitch me about like you do other people. Remember me?'

All right, I'd agree to support in the field since this man was running me; he knew how to handle things, how to keep them out of my way until I needed them and how to get them to me in five seconds flat if things got sticky.

I didn't say anything, didn't tell him that. He knew it.

'We can't move too many people into this town because with all the frontier feuds going on across the whole of Eastern Europe there's been a drain on manpower — executives, directors and support groups. You were lucky to get me for this one.'

'You were a bargaining chip, you know that.'

He left it.'The thing is, your chances aren't terribly good, are they?'

'Are you talking about timing?'

'Partly.'

He meant the zero-deadline thing. 'What else?'

'You're being hunted actively by the police and the militia and there's a murder charge on your head. That alone means that you can't even show yourself on the street without very high risk. You've also come close enough to the opposition — the generals — to be recognized by their aides, who in fact engineered that murder charge against you, and if you go closer to them again — which you'll have to if you're to pursue the mission — you'll be up against a group of military professionals, and if — '

'Christ, I've been inside Lubyanka and got out again — remember me?'

Ferris tilted his head. 'You're very competent, I know. I also know from experience that you possess a pathological fascination for the brink.'

'That's my problem.'

He turned it, instantly: 'I agree.' He gave it the weight of silence, then: 'Apart from the Russian police and militia and the generals' aides, you have a rogue agent in the field, if you're right about that — and I suspect you are. And a rogue agent, difficult to track and difficult to trap, can be more dangerous to you than all those other adversaries put together.' A beat. 'You know this.'

I didn't say anything. It was perfectly true: he wasn't telling me anything I didn't know. He was just telling me things I didn't want to know.

Ferris waited, then gave the slightest shrug. 'To make contact with Captain Rusakov,' he said, 'without even being able to show yourself on the street is I think close to impossible, without the extreme risk of getting caught or trapped or shot out of hand. If you — '

'Look, I can't work like that. If I stopped to think of the bloody risks I'd never leave London.'

Ferris took a turn and came back. He'd lost the stillness I'd seen in him earlier, and it worried me. For this man to get up and walk about was like anyone else climbing the walls with their teeth.

He sat down on the crate again, and I felt a frisson: he'd been reading me.

'Finally,' he said, 'your target for information — Captain Rusakov — is at risk himself, and he'd also be the subject of a manhunt if his sister got herself arrested and they put her into an interrogation cell. He couldn't go near you and you couldn't go near him, and I would have to get you both off the streets.'

A wind had got up, a light wind, and it was fretting at a bit of loose corrugated iron on the roof. It would also bring a chill factor across the city, and the air was going to skin us alive out there when we left this place. Extreme cold can work on your system in so many ways, numbing your hands and your thoughts and what's left of your ambitions, but it wasn't the cold, really, that worried me — it was simply that the director in the field for Meridian was telling his executive to drop the mission and go home. That was the real chill factor.

I looked at Ferris and asked him: 'What are you going to tell London?'

He took his time. 'What do you think I should tell them?'

'Say that if you don't keep me running I'll go underground.'

I think he drew a deeper breath: his body straightened a degree as the lungs filled. Then he said: 'You'd do that to me?'

'I've no choice.'

But it had taken some saying. If I broke contact with him and got off the streets and went underground, found a foxhole somewhere and operated from there, they'd give him hell in London. The DIF is totally responsible for the man he's running in the field and if that man breaks off and goes solo it means his director hasn't done his job, hasn't protected him, hasn't kept him on track, hasn't even managed to bring him home.

'If you go underground,' Ferris said, 'you won't have a chance.'

'Then keep me running.'

Screaming broke out and slashed at the nerves.

'I'd have to tell London how things stand,' Ferris said. 'And you know Croder. He'll instruct me to pull you in.'

It wouldn't work.

'You'd never find me,' I said.

'He'll instruct me to convince you that you must break off the mission. You can still be useful to the Bureau. They're not ready to throw you out.'

That wouldn't work either.

'Why should they be?'

'You're not easy to control, you know that. They like discipline in the field. This time you could blow your credit.'

'That's a bloody shame.'

He got off the crate and stood there with the light slanting across his glasses, and I couldn't see his eyes. It didn't matter; they wouldn't have told me anything.

'I want you to report to me,' he said, 'as often as you can. If I decide to put support into the field I want you to accept it. And I want you to bear in mind that the minute you let yourself fall for the death-or-glory thing I 'm going to cut you loose and throw you to the dogs.'