The Pamyat brigade. Goodbye Stalin, hello Hitler, le plus ca change, so forth.
'When shall I see you again?' Tanya asked me.
'I don't really know,' I said. She'd turned over sometimes, during the morning at the safe-house, and lain with her face against me, not moving away, moving closer. She didn't wear perfume, but I remembered her scent. 'As soon as I can manage,' I told her. 'Put our friend back on the line, would you?'
The two men were crunching across the snow towards the bar, one of them with blood on his wrist.
When Ferris came on the line I just told him that if Rusakov was in the bar I'd call back in twenty minutes and let him talk to his sister for a moment.' I've got to have his trust, and her voice will give him proof that I've got her into safe hands.'
'We'll stand by for you,' Ferris said, and then, 'I've been doing a bit of research, by the way, on your rogue agent. There was a man in the Ministry of Defence called Talyzin who spoke out rather too loudly against some of the die-hard generals, and they put him into a psychiatric ward when no one was looking. After six months he escaped, and from raw intelligence data going into London he might be your agent.'
'Why?'
'Three reasons. It's believed he came out of the psychiatric ward with some of his marbles gone, two of the generals who put him in there were Kovalenko and Chudin, and he'd served in Afghanistan as a mine-sweeping engineer.'
'Knows explosives.'
'Yes.'
'Another case of revenge, then, if he blew that train up. Attempted revenge.'
'We've had reports of hundreds like that, following the coup. Old scores to be settled. They're still working on it for me in London, and if I get anything more I'll pass it on.'
'That name again — Talyzin?'
'Yes.' He spelled it for me. Then, 'Control has also been in signals with me, asking for a progress report.'
Bloody Croder. 'So what did you give him?'
There was nothing. There was nothing to give Control.
'I just said that progress is being made.'
It's the stock diplomatic answer the director in the field sometimes uses when London asks what's happening and there's nothing positive to offer. The shadow can be crawling on his stomach out of a wrecked support car with his clothes on fire and the host country's security forces moving in on him with war-trained Dobermans and if Control wants a report he'll be told that progress is being made, if only by the fact that the poor bloody ferret has managed to crawl another six inches with his smashed leg as the heat of the flames reaches his skull and his brain begins going into short circuit as a prelude to the big goodbye, I don't mean to dramatize, but that is exactly what happened to Siddons when he bought it in Beirut, while his DIF was reporting progress to that bastard Loman in London.
Compared with which of course my situation was decidedly cushy, I was only holed up in a phone booth in Siberia watching that poor bugger out there struggling to get up before he froze to death, but all the same I didn't take kindly to Croder, Chief of bloody Signals, asking for a progress report from a director in the field who was notorious for refusing to call up London when there was nothing to tell them, believing it quite rightly to be a waste of time.
'May he get the pox,' I told Ferris and shut down the signal and dialled the ambulance service and told them there was a man outside the Harbour Light Bar on the west bank of the Ob needing attention. Then I forced open the door of the booth against the rust on the hinges and went across to the Jew and helped him onto his feet and told him there was an ambulance coming with any luck.
Pulled open the door of the place and got hit by the reek of black tobacco smoke and straight spirits and human sweat, the air hot against my face after the freezing temperature outside. When my eyes adjusted to the smoke haze I saw a man sitting alone in a corner on the far side of the room from the bar, a pair of gloves on the table, different shades of brown. He saw me come in but I looked past him and went over to the end of the long teakwood counter and ordered a vodka straight up, pulling out a stool and settling down to check everybody in the place, one by one.
I took fifteen minutes, not hurrying, because I didn't know Captain Vadim Rusakov any better than he knew me and even though he'd shot that general down he could still be working undercover for the Podpolia or Pamyat, the extreme nationalist right, and could have brought people in here to look me over. Or he could have picked up ticks in the army barracks and brought them here without knowing it, and I just wanted to talk to him alone, wasn't in the mood for a party.
Bloody London.
Rusakov was the only hope I'd got of putting Meridian back on track and bringing it home. But he might know nothing, nothing at all.
Six or seven tarts, two of them Chinese, they brought them here regularly from Beijing and Vladivostok on the Rossiya, one of the taxi-drivers had told me. The other women were jealous of them, of their slight and flawless looks, blowing smoke over them from their lipstick-reddened cigarettes to loud laughter from the men.
A huddle of Russian naval officers round an illegal crap game, three sailors drinking themselves under a table near the door, one of them with a trouser-leg soaked. A lone militiaman in uniform, too far gone to be on duty unless someone had slipped him a mickey for a giggle. Two dogs, one of them with a broken leg, snuffling and tearing at something unholy under one of the tables.
I poured the shot of vodka down the leg of the bar stool and put the glass back on the counter and left the change and made my way close to the walls until I came up on the table where the odd gloves were lying and pulled out the chair opposite Captain Rusakov and sat down and saw the chalk moving across the board for Meridian in the basement in Whitehall, Executive reports possible breakthrough, is now in contact with valuable informer.
Not really. There's just a chance, that's all, the last we've got. But remember, we're making progress.
Chapter 20: VADIM
'I saw you come in,' Rusakov said, 'some time ago. Why didn't you come straight over here?'
'You get served quicker, at the bar.'
He gave a slow blink, perhaps of patience, then went on watching me with a gaze as steady as a beam of light. He had green eyes, like his sister, but you didn't notice that so much as the concentration in them. He'd be good at interrogation, Rusakov, may have done a bit of that.
'Where is Tanya?' he asked me.
'Want to talk to her?'
His eyes lit. 'Yes.'
I took him outside and along to the phone booth and dialled the number for the Hotel Karasevo with my back to Rusakov and got Ferris on the line and asked for Tanya. Then I waited outside the booth, watching the lights of the ambulance dimming in the distance through the river fog.
Ferris allowed them a minute or not much more; he would have briefed her not to tell her brother where she was, since it was the nerve-centre for Meridian, and the longer she spoke to him the more easily she might let something slip.
When he came out of the booth Rusakov stood in front of me with his feet together, advanced one pace, gave me a bear hug, retreated one pace and stood at ease.
'You gave her freedom,' he said.' I cannot express my gratitude.'
He'd put on a seaman's clothes, as I'd asked him to, but there was no disguising Captain Vadim Rusakov of the Russian Army.