Quiller Meridian

'I'll toe the line.'

'No,' he said, 'you won't.'

The wind cut between the buildings and blew flotsam across the snow, bits of paper and a milk carton and a plastic bag. I left Roach's Skoda on some waste ground half a block away from the building where the safe-house was, and approached it slowly, making a circle. The early afternoon sky pressed down on the city, leaving the pale orb of the sun sinking towards the west as if through dark water.

Ferris had come with me to the door of the shed, and it had taken both of us to wrench it open on the frozen runners. 'As soon as you've made contact with Rusakov, I'll get his sister out of Novosibirsk.' It was the last thing he'd said to me.

The wind brought the river smell from the east, foul water and coal-smoke, tar and diesel gas. The Ob wasn't far from this part of the city, three or four miles; earlier I'd heard an ice-breaker working, its engine roaring as the bows thrust and drew back and thrust again.

I moved in closer, completing the circle. Traffic was thin, most of it trucks; no one was walking in the streets: all I'd seen on my way back were a drunken militiaman throwing up in a doorway and a pack of stray dogs lurching from one garbage bin to the next, ravenous and out of luck — it was winter and times were lean.

The peep was standing in a doorway; he'd seen me from a distance and hadn't moved out of shadow, but now he lit a cigarette and in a moment flicked it away, the glowing tip tracing an arc through the lowering light before it hit the snow and went out. I kept walking and crossed the street, stopping when I reached the doorway. I've got surveillance on the place, of course, Ferris had told me. The man took a few steps to meet me.

'Everything all right?' I asked him.

'No.' he said. 'The woman's been arrested.'

Chapter 13: WHORES

What that man Roach hadn't known when he'd told me there was a telephone booth in the building was that the cord had been cut by hooligans, and I had to drive two miles before I found a booth that didn't have the glass smashed or the cord cut. I didn't expect to find a directory, took the phone off the hook and dialled for Information, the wind fluting through the gap in the door.

'Yes?'

'Military Barracks.'

'Which department?'

'Administration.'

'Wait.'

I waited.

Arrested. Mother of God.

I could look along the street from here, both ways. I'd left the Skoda round the comer where I could see its reflection in the window of the No. 3 Dock-workers' Union of Novosibirsk Meeting Rooms.

Someone had carved some crude letters on the tarnished aluminium panel behind the telephone — WHERE IS THE FOOD?

Jabbing at the panel, slashing at it with the force of desperation.

'Here is the number,' the woman said on the line. She rang off before I could repeat it or thank her.

I hadn't any one- or two- kopek coins so I used a ten and dialled. Not at the safe-house: she hadn't been arrested at the safe-house, Tanya. She'd left there soon after I had, the peep told me, when I'd gone to meet Ferris at noon. The peep had followed her. He was surveillance, not support: he would have told us where she'd gone — that was his function, and he'd had no instructions to stop her. But she hadn't gone anywhere, hadn't arrived.

'She was crossing the street,' he'd told me, 'down by the bus station, and the militia stopped her and checked her papers — '

'A patrol on foot?'

'Yes. Then he used his walkie and called a car and they put her inside and that was it. 11:51. I got to a phone by 12:03 but the DIF didn't answer.'

Because he'd been with me in that stinking shed.

Ten rings, twenty, they were taking their bloody time.

This was so very risky.

'Military Barracks.'

'I want to speak,' I said, 'to Captain Vadim Rusakov.'

'Wait.'

So very risky because I couldn't get an introduction to Rusakov now from his sister; I'd be talking to him cold, and when I told him what had happened he could duck out and run for cover in case she broke and talked and exposed him. I wouldn't expect much chivalry from a man who'd talked a woman into spotting the target for him, bringing her right onto the scene of the shooting. Anything could have happened and he must have known that.

The wind gusted through the gap in the door, flapping at an official notice that said vandals would be arrested for damaging the property of the Intercity and International Telephone Service of Novosibirsk, that did not say that accomplices in the assassination of former Red Army generals would also be arrested and would face imprisonment for life, were they going to answer this bloody telephone or weren't they?

Steady there.

Yea, verily, but time was of the essence: once they put Tanya Rusakova under the five-hundred-watt lamp in Militia Headquarters it wouldn't be long before she told them what they wanted to know, before she blew her brother and the safe-house and Meridian.

I had to make contact with Rusakov before that happened.

'Ordnance Unit Three.'

I asked again for Captain Vadim Rusakov.

'Wait.'

It was going to be like this until at some hour in the future I would secure Meridian and keep it running and find the means of bringing it home, or leave its ashes here in this dark and frozen city and make my way out, with luck, with luck and nothing more, nothing to show them in London.

'Captain Vadim Rusakov is not present.'

I cut in fast before she could ring off — 'When will he be there? This is a matter of urgency.'

'I cannot say.'

'Do you know where he is? Is there another number I can try?'

'He is not here.'

The line went dead.

I dug another ten-kopek piece out of my pocket, dropping a glove and bending to pick it up, caught my temple on the corner of the metal shelf and felt the freezing draught against my face from the gap in the door, straightened up and pushed the coin into the slot and dialled. It was the last one I could use in a telephone; I'd have to get change as soon as I could.

'Hotel Karasevo.'

I asked for Gospodin T. K. Trencher.

'Yes?'

Ferris.

'You heard the news?' I asked him.

A brief silence, then: 'Tell me.'

He would have gone straight back to the hotel after leaving me because he was the signals centre for the field, but it could have taken him longer than I'd taken to reach the safe-house, and the peep hadn't yet made his second call.

I told Ferris what had happened.

Silence again. Then he asked questions, but all I could tell him was what the peep had told me.

A militia patrol car had turned out of the intersection half a mile away and I watched it.

'What are your plans?' Ferris asked me at last.

'I'm trying to contact her brother.'

'He could be at risk, yes, before long.'

'I'm going to use him, if I can. He's in the military. He might know where the other two generals are.'

It sounded thin, a last desperate chance. It was.

'The safe-house could also become hot,' Ferris said. He wasn't impressed with what I'd said about using Rusakov.

'Yes,'

The militia patrol car was heading in this direction, going slowly. But then all the traffic was going slowly because of the snow and the ice.

'I'll find you a new safe-house,' Ferris said. 'You'll need somewhere to stay while I make plans to fly you out under a new cover.' He was speaking in a monotone. Tanya Rusakova had been the key to the mission, and he didn't expect me to rope in her brother as an ally without her introduction. His hands were still red and he'd startle easily.