'She's very obstinate,' Rusakov had said.' she was also very determined that we should go through with this thing.'
I'd thought that was interesting because all I'd known of Tanya Rusakova was that she was unskilled in subterfuge — had given General Velichko, for instance, the name of the hotel where she was staying. Her obstinacy had shown itself perhaps when she'd left the safe-house despite my warning, but the same trait, together with her determination, could help to save her now at Militia Headquarters by dragging out the interrogation process until I could move in.
You don't need to go there now. You 're wasting your time.
Bloody little organism, starting to panic.
Of course I'm not wasting my time.
You should meet Rusakov now, as soon as you can. He thinks he can find the generals. That's your objective.
Dead wrong: he won't do a thing for me until I can get Tanya out of there.
You 're rationalizing.
An icicle as long as a spear dropped from a guttering and crashed onto the roof of a parked car, scattering rainbows in the headlights.
First get Tanya out, then work on her brother.
You should be working on him now. You should have told him to meet you right away. He's the key now, not her.
If I don't get Tanya out he'll try to help her by giving himself up, then I'll lose him and the mission's gone.
You haven't got a chance of going in there and coming out again, you know that.
Scares you, doesn't it?
You're doing what Ferris said you might, it's the death-or-glory thing, go dashing in there like a white knight on horseback and carry the maiden off, you want your fucking head tested.
You're shit-scared, that's all, I know you of old.
Walking into a lion's den, you 'll get eaten alive.
Shit-scared.
Bloody little organism.
The tyre-chains dragged on the snow and the engine idled.
'Name's Marina,' Mikhail said, his rheumy eye in the mirror. 'Cunning old cow, you should watch it, keep your wallet in sight, know what I mean?'
She was sitting in a huge carved Ottoman chair, a woman with three chins and enormous breasts trapped in a rusty black satin decolletage and hips that bulged across the arms of the chair, four rings on her thick fingers, three dirty diamond solitaires and a black tourmaline, her feet squeezed into splitting court shoes on the stained Kazakhstan carpet.
'I have the best,' she said huskily,' the best in Novosibirsk. The youngest.'
The heat pressed against my face, sucking the moisture from my eyes and leaving them dry. The smell was the same here as it had been in the other places but with something added, sharp and indefinable, reaching from the lungs into the gut.
'I have Chinese girls,' Marina said.' thirteen, fourteen years old. You should see them. They are like porcelain. I'll show you.'
She picked up a brass bell engraved with dragons, and the sound seemed half-muted in the stifling air.
'You can have two in a bed,' Marina told me, her small eyes like sparks in the thick folds of her flesh. "Three in a bed, as many as you want. What about a boy? You like variety? Or I have whips here, chains. You like that?'
Perhaps it was stale blood, the sharp iron smell on the air.
I let her go on talking because I wanted to know what my chances were. Mikhail had said this house was the last one in the district and God knew how far we'd have to drive to find the next.
A whore came through the red velvet curtains and stood looking at me, her thick white body wrapped in a soiled nightdress and her coarse dyed hair lying across one shoulder, her lips parted to show the tip of her tongue, her eyes narrowed, fear in them, fear of the gross woman in the chair.
'She can go,' I told Marina. 'I'm not here for that.'
I told her what I was here for.
'You must think I 'm crazy,' she said.
I started at three hundred, implying I would go to five.
A drunk was in there somewhere and a girl was squealing, and the sound pierced the nerves like chalk on a blackboard.
'How do you expect me to do that?' the woman asked me.
'Say it's your birthday. Come on, you're smarter than I am.'
'I would lose my licence,' she said.
'You haven't got a licence. Not for the whips and chains.'
She offered me vodka.
'I haven't got long,' I said. 'One thousand, take it or leave it.' I got up to go.
She watched me, still as a toad. 'Are you on the run?'
'No.'
'You'll have to tell me more about yourself.'
'There's nothing to know. One thousand, cash.'
'Fifteen hundred. I'll do it for that.'
'A thousand's all I have.'
I got as far as the door.
'And suppose I get into trouble with this?' she asked me.
'If you don't know how to keep out of trouble, Marina, nobody does.'
'Let me see the cash.'
She counted it. 'All right.' Her face began creasing, and a wheeze started coming out of her that almost sounded like laughter.' I would have done it for half,' she said, and tears glistened in the folds of flesh.
'I know,' I said, 'but the other five is to make sure you don't cross me.' I went close to her and smelled her foul body smell as I looked into the little black slits of her eyes. 'If you cross me, you fat stinking bitch, I'll see that you croak, they'll find you sitting in this chair like a stuck pig with your throat cut and your blood running under that door and into the street for the dogs to drink.'
I told Mikhail to drive me back to within two city blocks of the safe-house and check for a usable phone booth on the way.
Ferris answered at once.
'I've got things set up,' I told him.
There was a short silence. He hadn't known, before the phone had rung, that I wasn't already in a red sector at Militia Headquarters and desperate for help.
'I haven't told London,' he said.
He meant he hadn't told London I was going to try getting Tanya Rusakova out of Militia Headquarters. Control would have wanted to talk to me direct on the phone and I didn't have time for that; he would have said no in any case, would have gone through the roof and ordered Ferris to call me in, would have created a strictly monumental fuss, and I'd started moving too fast now for London to block my run; of course Ferris hadn't told them, he knew better than that, he was a seasoned director in the field, and quite possibly the only DIF who was in fact capable of running this particular shadow executive through a mission without calling on London for instructions, because this particular shadow executive is difficult to control — as Ferris himself has said — isn't amenable to discipline, so forth, is not your most popular ferret in the Bureau, and that's a bloody shame.
I am a little nervous, my good friend, as perhaps you note.
We are going in very soon now.
It hadn't surprised me when Ferris had said I'd have his full support. He'd had no choice. He's run me before, and through some extremely sticky operations — Mandarin, Northlight — and he's learned to read what it says on the bottom line: if I've decided to take a mission into a new direction with some really significant risks attached I 'm not going to back off if the director gets cold feet, I'm going to do it anyway and if I can't do it with his support I'll do it solo. Ferris understands that.
But I felt for him. He wasn't going to get any sleep tonight, and when I signalled him again he would pick up before the second ring.
'What's the score?' he asked me now. His tone was particularly cool, and I heard the control in it.