All I could see from the profile of the vehicle behind me was that it was a private car, not a van or a truck or anything with emergency lights on the roof, unlit or otherwise.
But you said you weren't worried about lights in the mirror.
I wasn't.
You gave us all that bullshit about watching mirrors with the ritualistic devotion of a priest, just because you thought it sounded good, and now -
Bloody well shuddup.
There was no way that anyone could have tracked us last night from the Velichko killing-site to the hospital without my knowing, but I used the throttle again and fought the ruts and pulled alongside the Trabant and signalled the driver to stop. His offside wing caught the side of my door as he slewed on the snow but it wasn't more than a bump, and then we were stationary side by side and our windows were down and we started talking.
'I've got some lights in the mirror,' I told him.
They were still there in the distance, but the car had stopped.
The support man was watching me, a stubbly face with unsurprisable eyes under a black leather ski-cap. 'Was he there before I intercepted?'
'He could have been.' there'd been more traffic, earlier.
'He's not mine,' the support man said. 'I got there clean.' there was a note of censure in the tone, as if he'd just noticed I hadn't washed.
'Where's the safe-house?' I asked him.
'You peeling off?'
'I might have to.'
Our engines idled, echoing from the wall alongside.
'Two kilometres east of here, and you're on the river. It's the wreck of a coaster, single mast with four deck hatches and the starboard bow stove in, the M. V. Natasha, but you can't make out the name very well. She's on the west bank, three berths down — that's south — from No. 7 Granary, Novosibirsk, black clapperboard with the Russian flag painted over the main doors, recently done.'
He waited, watching me, his eyes in the shadow of his cap.
'Vessels on either side of the wreck?'
'Another coaster, north, and a dredger with a list on it. Place is a graveyard.'
The lights were still in the mirror.
'All right. Stay where you are, and if I'm wrong I'll be back and we can keep going. Give me half an hour.'
'You need help?'
'No.'
It had better be done solo.
I knew what had happened, now, and the chill of the night air was creeping through the skin and reaching the nerves, because it might not just be a case of throwing off the tracker and resuming operations without him. Meridian had been compromised, and even Ferris could be in hazard. It was perfectly true that no one could have tracked us through this city last night, that we'd been absolutely clean when Roach had picked us up at the hospital. But the lights back there were still in the mirror, and now I knew why.
There must have been surveillance on the Skoda when I'd picked it up twenty minutes ago, and they'd started tracking me, were behind me now. But they couldn't have found it there by chance on that patch of waste ground in a city this size: they'd been surveilling this car since I'd brought it away from the safe-house, and before then; they'd been surveilling it when it had been standing outside the apartment block after Roach had left it there for me to use, and before then: they'd tracked Roach to the rendezvous at the hospital, must have got onto him when he'd started out to meet us there. The thread went back, and back, as far as the unthinkable.
I looked across at the support man.
'Change that,' I called to him above the drumming of the engines. 'Don't wait for me. Get away from here and watch your tail. 'He'd caught my tone, lifted his head an inch like an animal scenting. 'Signal the DIF as soon as you can,' I told him. 'Make sure the line's not tapped. Tell him I think your whole support base could have been blown, and tell him to look after Roach, if it's not too late.'
Chapter 18: BLOOD
Lights flashing.
It looked like a militia patrol crossing the intersection behind us and coming this way, so I got into reverse and tucked in behind the support man's Trabant. The coloured lights began filling the mirror.
It should be noted that the wanted man is possibly wearing a militia uniform at this time.
I'd taken the fur hat off as soon as I'd got into the Skoda, but if a patrol took an interest in me and looked down through the window he'd see the uniform.
But they couldn't be on to me yet.
Oh yes they could. They've had quite enough time to -
Shuddup and sweat it out, you snivelling little bastard.
Flashing lights, filling the mirror and reflecting in the windows of die factory and the bus garage opposite, colouring the night.
Then it was passing us and I heard banging and a voice raised, a muffled shouting, a drunk, perhaps, trying to break out of the car, giving the boys a hard time.
The support man waited until it was out of sight and then started up and wagged his tail a bit over the snow and found traction and took it away, slewing into a side street and vanishing. The car behind me hadn't moved, was still standing a hundred yards away, its lights in the mirror.
I reached across and put the window up on the passenger's side and got into gear and left the back end to dig for traction with the chains and then got a grip and moved off, going three blocks before I started playing with the gears and looking for patches of sand and using them for acceleration while the headlights fanned from side to side across walls and doorways and parked and stranded trucks, cars and carts and the characteristic bric-a-brac of the dockland environment, while the tracker fell behind for a minute or two before he saw I was onto him. His own lights began swinging across and across the mirror as he went into a series of slides and then got a grip and lost it and found it again and started to close up a little.
I chose a side street where the snow had piled into a drift against the wall of a warehouse and used it to get me through the ninety-degree arc, letting the rear end hit the snow and kick the Skoda straight again as I found traction in patches and put fifty yards behind me before the tracker's lights came flooding into the narrow street and threw my shadow ahead of me against the snow.
It happens. It happens sometimes: the director in the field sets up a model deployment of his shadow executive and his support group and his contacts and couriers and whatever he needs for a given mission, spinning his small and delicate network of resources and testing it out for strength and making changes where potential danger threatens, sitting back in his inner sanctum plugged in to his communications system with its portable scrambler and its bug monitor and taking signals from the shadow out mere and relaying them through the mast at Cheltenham to the signals board in Whitehall, the whole thing running like silk through a loom, and then one man and one man alone can suddenly send the web shaking because he's made a mistake, talked to the wrong people, exposed a password, missed the half-seen face in a doorway or the figure humped at the wheel of a parked car or the broken hair across a drawer in the hotel room, and the network becomes an alarm system and all we can do is shut down signals to prevent interception and get out of the safe-house before it's blown, run for cover, go to ground, hole up somewhere as the smell of the smoke starts drifting through the field where the fuses have blown and someone reaches for the chalk in the signals room in London and writes it up on the board: Mission compromised, clear all channels and stand by.