Quiller Meridian

As close as I'll let myself get? You read well, my good friend, between the lines.

'I blew the safe-house,' I told Ferris. 'It was full of militia when I left there.'

'They were looking for you?'

'Yes.'

'What's your location now?'

'I'm about three miles away, at Iskitim Prospekt and — wait a minute.' the glass panels were steaming up.' Iskitim Prospekt and Borodin ulica. And I've got the car here.' I'd just walked across the patch of waste ground where I'd left the Skoda earlier this afternoon. 'You've got Tanya in safe keeping?'

'Here at the hotel.'

'For God's sake try and make her understand,' I said,'that if she goes off on her own again we won't be able to help her.'

Lights swept across the telephone booth and I turned my back until they'd gone. I wouldn't have long: they'd be spreading the hunt.

'She's hating herself,' Ferris said. 'Feels she let you down.'

'Then maybe she's learned.' I tried to remember the names of the major intersections east of here, but a lot had gone on since I'd studied the map of the city on board the Rossiya. 'Look, I'm still a bit too close to things at the moment, so I'm going to start driving eastwards from here as soon as we shut down. Have I got a new safe-house?'

'Yes. Nothing posh.'

'I'll take anything. I need someone to intercept and lead me there. You should also send someone to the Harbour Light Bar on the river.' I gave him the location. 'Captain Rusakov should be going there in a couple of minutes from now.' I repeated the description Rusakov had given me of himself and told Ferris about the recognition mark: the odd pair of gloves. 'He should be told as soon as possible that his sister's free and in safe keeping and that I'll meet him there as soon as I can. Where's the safe-house?'

I could hear the faint crackling of a map on the line. 'Five kilometres from the Harbour Light, downstream on the river.'

'What sort of place is it?'

In a moment, 'It's an abandoned hulk. We didn't have much time to find anything better.'

'No problem.'

But it wasn't good news. If the best the director in the field could find for his executive was an abandoned hulk on the river it meant that the local support people were not only spread thin on the ground but couldn't come up with anything safer. It was the nearest they could get, I suppose, to a bloody cellar.

'There'll be a change of clothes for me there?' I asked Ferris. The collar of the uniform was rough and my neck had started itching.

'Clothes,' Ferris said, 'food, oil stove, oil lamp, bedding, the usual supplies.'

There hadn't been a trace of satisfaction in his tone but I said, 'More than I could have hoped for, considering.'

'Thank you.'

'Look, I'm still a major target and they'll start spreading out from the safe-house the minute they find out I'm not there, so I want to get off the streets as soon as I can. Let Rusakov know that I'll try and meet him at the Harbour Light by nine o'clock.'

'Noted.'

'And tell the support man I'll start driving east from Borodin ulica along Iskitim in two minutes from now and I'll expect him to flash me when he intercepts.'

Ferris acknowledged and we shut down the signal and I shouldered the door of the booth open against the heavy spring and waited until a dark blue van went past with only the left headlight going; then I walked across the street to the patch of waste ground and got into the Skoda. The clock on the dash was three minutes slow and I adjusted it to read 8:02 and started the engine and moved off along Borodin, sitting with my neck forward a degree to keep it clear of my collar, not my collar in point of fact, the whole outfit belonged to the sallow-faced and brutish-looking militiaman who'd come sliding in there an hour after I'd finalized the deal with that fat stinking bitch.

She'd looked shocked at first when I'd told her what I wanted, sitting there like a great female Buddha in her rusty black satin dress, her rings glinting on her fat fingers and her mouth hanging open: 'But I couldn't ever do such a thing!' she'd get arrested and shot, so forth, hamming it up because she'd already scented money in it, perhaps quite a lot if she played hard to get.

I'd had to start from there.

'But they come in here, don't they? The militia? Just for a quickie?'

'It has happened,' she said cautiously.

'All right, I'll give you three hundred roubles for the uniform off the first militiaman my size who comes in here, the hat and the boots included, the whole kit. Three hundred.'

The huge Ottoman chair creaked as she shifted her weight in it, settling herself for the struggle. 'How could I possibly get such a thing for you?'

'Oh come on, Marina, how long have you been running a whorehouse? Tell him it's your birthday, give him two or three girls and a bottle of vodka and slip in a Mickey Finn.'

Her fleshy mouth opened in shock. 'You want me arrested?'

Rhetoric. I didn't answer.

'Can you imagine what they would charge me with? Physical assault on an officer of the law, attempted — '

'Bullshit He couldn't tell them where it had happened, you know that. Tell them he'd gone into a brothel and got drunk on duty and they'd give him a year in the brig.'

Her right foot began tapping on the stained Kazakhstan carpet. 'And how would I get him out of here? You expect me to — '

'Wrap him in a blanket and dump him into a taxi.'

She looked as if I'd gone out of my mind, and the price went up another hundred.

'And how would he ever find another uniform?'

She couldn't care less but I said, 'He'd buy one or steal one.'

The door from the street opened and a man came in, turning to look behind him before he shut the door, a gross creature with the veins on his face broken into a purple network and one eye dulled, unseeing, the other too bright by far, too hungry.

Marina jerked her head and the man parted the slit in the heavy red curtains and pushed his way through them. I have Chinese girls, this woman had told me, thirteen, fourteen years old. You should see them. They are like porcelain.

But this is a man's world, my little slant-eyed alabaster loves, and there's no hope in it for the likes of you. 'I'm waiting,' I told the woman, and though I'd said it quietly I saw a leap of fear in her eyes at something she heard in my tone.

'It's too big a risk,' she told me.

'Five hundred.'

'I would lose my licence.'

'One thousand,' I told her, 'take it or leave it.'

I'd given her cash and she'd counted it and it had been an hour before the sallow-faced militiaman had come through the door, and now I could smell the vodka on his uniform as I drove east along Iskitim, watching the mirror, a blade of freezing air cutting through a gap where the window-rubber had rotted away, the heater pushing oil fumes into the car from the engine compartment, the mirror trembling to the vibration.

Two militia patrols, both coming past from the opposite direction, two militia patrols and a bus crowded with fur hats and featureless faces behind the steamy windows, a truck lurching half across the pavement to keep out of its way, ten blocks, eleven, twelve, and support still hadn't intercepted. A dog loped into the roadway and I felt the bump and the front end of the Skoda slid across the ruts in the snow and I brought it back again, thirteen blocks, fourteen, until I could see the red lights winking at the top of the radio masts where the land rose towards the river and fell away again.

He found me at the twentieth block and flashed me and I put a hand up to steady the mirror and took a look at him and slowed and let him go past and took up station fifty yards behind him; he was in a two-door Trabant with most of the paint gone and a strip of adhesive tape slanting across the rear window and one of the tail lights flickering; nothing posh, as Ferris would have said, dear Jesus, I was beginning to realize the kind of operation London had thrown that man to direct in the field — Meridian was not your fancy West European parlour game with elite-status supports and backups and courier lines and signals facilities by courtesy of the British embassies in Berlin, Paris and Rome; this was a strictly cut-price package trip through the frozen hinterland of Siberia at a time when even the dogs were too thin to be thought worth catching for the pot.