I went back to the Skoda and got into motion and reached the end of the street and did a skid turn and gunned up through the gears as the ambulance arrived on the scene with the blare of its klaxon filling the night with alarm.
Chapter 19: CHRISTMAS
Night and silence.
I stood in shadow, smelling the river smell.
Ice drifted on the water, breaking away upstream and floating down through the channels gouged by tugs and dredgers and coasters big enough to make headway. The ice made soft xylophone music as the floes touched and bumped together.
I had left the Skoda half a mile away, buried under an iron roof that had slid at an angle when the walls of a shed had collapsed some time ago, perhaps under the weight of snow, to lie like a broken box in the thickets of weeds. It was almost invisible, the Skoda, but I had no illusions. That was a hot car. It had been under extensive surveillance ever since Roach had blown his cover and got into it and picked up a tracker without knowing it. I'm not blaming him. Support people don't get the training they give the shadow executives at the Bureau, though some of them apply for the higher echelons and graduate.
Dark shapes moved as I watched: a small high-decked freighter with coal smoke curling behind it on the motionless air, to lie in skeins along the water; a truck on the far bank, sliding among the wharves, its diesel rattling. Nearer to where I stood, nothing moved, but I had no illusions about that either. Watchers keep still. The motor-vessel Natasha lay in her berth some sixty or seventy yards distant from the stack of rusted freight containers that I was using for cover. I needed to know if the Natasha were being watched.
The sensible thing to have done would have been to phone Ferris and ask him to send someone out with another car, leave the Skoda back there in the side street and take over whatever they brought me. But the time for doing the sensible thing had run out now because Meridian was compromised, and the new car they brought me could be hot too, the subject of undetected surveillance. I would think that Yermakov had been the only man tracking the Skoda, and that it was therefore safe to use for the moment. It was still hot, because it could be recognized later, but it could only be by chance, and that chance I was ready to take.
That was his name: Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. His wallet was still in my pocket. I didn't think he'd been the rogue agent loose in the field. The surveillance of the Skoda had been the work of a cell, at least of a cell, possibly of an organization. It had needed at least two peeps to maintain the operation, because that car had been watched for more than twelve hours, from the time when Roach had picked it up to the time when I'd driven it away from the patch of waste ground at two minutes past eight tonight. A rogue agent would work alone; it is their nature.
A night bird screeched and a ring of light flashed inside my skull and died out like a firework. I'd seen cormorants, earlier, wheeling under the lights of a warehouse crane. I had been here for twenty minutes and hadn't moved; I too was a watcher, and kept still. There are good and bad among the ranks of the peeps; some can stay silent for hours on end, moving only by indiscernible degrees when they have to, flexing the leg muscles to keep the blood flowing and the brain supplied, turning their heads as slowly as the hands of a clock, sweeping the environment continuously. Others, less professionally trained, can't go for long without needing to release tension, and they'll shift their feet or yawn or cough or even stretch their arms, and they're blown.
Night and silence, who is here?
A rat ran squealing in the shadows and the light flashed again behind my eyes. It didn't worry me: it was reaction, that was all. I hadn't expected to get out of that place, out of Militia Headquarters, but I was only aware of that now: the heat was off and the blood was cooling, and looking back at the whole enterprise it seemed as if I must have been clean out of my gourd to have taken a risk that size.
I told you. I said you'd gone mad, but you wouldn't listen.
Nor will I ever, you little shit. You can get away with things in hot blood that'd never work if you thought about them. Ask any tightrope walker — they never look down.
The broken ice rang like a peal of bells in the distance as a tug moved upstream, towing a barge, blacking out the lamps along the far shore and then relighting them. But nothing was moving, had moved, closer than that. I believed the Natasha was clear, and I broke cover and walked across the snow-covered boards of the quay. The gangplank had been cleared by whatever support man had brought the provisions here for me, and he hadn't found it an easy choice: to leave evidence that the hulk was in some kind of use, or to leave me to make footprints on the snow and testify to the very same thing.
I dropped onto the deck and stood there, watching and listening again. The cabin had been wrecked and there was no door, just a hole through smashed timbers; I would have thought a crane had toppled or the boom had run its brake discs, coming down on the cabin. Snow had drifted inside the wreckage, its minuscule facets diamond-blue under the light of the moon.
Something splashed into the water and I swung my head and saw ripples crossing the surface some distance away, near the third vessel downriver, a sailing boat with the mast lying like a dead tree across the quayside. Yellow light came from its dark hulk, burning steadily, and I turned my head away. Watchers do not burn lamps to mark their presence, nor throw garbage out.
The support man had dropped a rope mat over the snow where the lower part of the steps was still solid, and I went down into the smell of rotting timber and rope and lamp-oil, ducking my head under abeam and seeing the glow of a night-light showing the way to the stairs down to the lower berths. I stood listening again, hearing nothing but the slap of water against the vessel's beam. The light grew stronger as I went below: there was a brass hurricane lamp burning with a good flame on the table of the main cabin below deck, with supplies stacked around it: black bread, cheeses, canned milk, dried fruit, half a dozen military-issue cans of self-heating soup, a plum cake… and I felt a moment of warmth for Ferris: all he'd been able to scrounge in the way of a safe-house for me was a rotting hulk among the ice floes, but he'd told the support man to raid the black market for what he could find to make it look like Christmas, on this unholy night.
I could still taste that man's blood in my mouth and I got the little black iron kettle and filled it and put it onto the butane stove for warm water to wash with and brush my teeth, we are not here to stint ourselves, my good friend, it's Christmas, remember, and have you ever tried to clean your teeth by biting on bloody icicles?
9:15 on my watch and I did only the necessary, getting out of the uniform and putting on warm sweaters and sheepskin boots. There were no rats here but they wouldn't be long in coming once they caught the scent of human habitation; I stowed all the vulnerable food packages in the cupboard with the torn poster on the door, girl in a fur hat and slacks and fur boots to the knee, I think it says a lot for a country where the women can look sexy in the depth of winter without a single bikini in sight.