Quiller Meridian

'That would be easier, yes.'

Two men came out of the Harbour Light, slamming the door behind them, one of them bent over, laughing, the other one taking a leak against the wall, steam clouding up in the lamplight. 'All right,' I said to Rusakov, 'I'll leave it to you. Anything you can do to get me information will be a blow against the Podpolia. But you'll have to keep in mind the fact that sooner or later the militia's going to ask the army for your arrest.' I looked at him in the glow of the dashboard. 'Have you any kind of bolt-hole you can go to in the town?'

He thought about that too. 'Yes.'

'Where?'

He looked down. 'The house of a friend.'

'She'd be ready to shelter you? Keep you hidden?' He was silent. 'I've got to know,' I told him, 'because I want to keep in contact.'

He looked up again. 'She would help me, yes.' He wrote on the pad and tore a strip of it off and gave it to me. 'Her name is Raisa.'

The two men were lurching across the snow to a pick-up truck with a mast lying across the rear, a furled sail round it; the domed glass of the lamp at its head caught the light from the bar, a ruby eye in the fog creeping from the river.

I put the strip of paper away. 'Is there a fellow officer,' I asked Rusakov, 'or one of the men under you, who has your absolute trust?'

'Yes.' this time he hadn't had to think about it. 'A master-sergeant.'

'All right. If you can't avoid arrest, can he take your place? Make contact with me?'

In a moment,' I will ask him.'

'You're not sure he'll — '

'I will ask him as a formality. But he will do it.'

'Name?'

'Bakatin.'

'Master-sergeant Bakatin. Then — '

'But I must tell you,' Rusakov said, his eyes suddenly on mine, 'I shall resist arrest. I shall resist very strongly.'

'Of course. You put an apparatchik thug out of the way, no earthly reason to suffer for it.' I took my glove off and offered my hand. 'Keep in touch, then.'

I put the Skoda in the same place as before, under the cover of the fallen roof of the shed, and walked the half mile to the river, taking time to check the environment and going aboard the hulk just after half-past eleven, with the moon floating above the dark skeletonic arm of a grain elevator downriver.

The starboard bow of the Natasha had been stove in when she'd been wrecked, and I spent an hour shifting loose timber, stacking it against the bulkheads to form a tunnel that ran aft from the entrance to the cabin below deck and led to the smashed hatchway at the stern. Rats ran in the beam of the flashlight; they couldn't get at the provisions but they'd scented them and moved in to reconnoitre.

When the tunnel was finished I tested it out, checking for loose boards that might make a noise, leaving the flashlight in the cabin and feeling my way through the dark towards the hatch at the stern. I didn't think I'd need an escape route to deck level because Ferris would have tightened the whole support network after Roach had been blown, but these were confined quarters and if anyone came down here with a gun I wouldn't have any answer except to get out before he could use it.

It's just a touch of the usual paranoia, that's all.

Get out of my bloody life.

I went through the escape tunnel half a dozen times in the dark to get used to it, the feel of the timbers and the lie of the ground, the smell of rope in the chain locker and the crack of light between the Boards just below the deck where a lamp on the shore made a gleam, establishing my bearings, making the journey twice as fast and in more silence the last time through.

Heating some water and washing, I tried to feel that Meridian had got back on track tonight: the generals were still hi Novosibirsk and I had their exact location and it looked as if we could rely on Rusakov at least to signal a warning when they made a move, and that was about as good as I could expect at this stage of the mission.

I don't know if I'd managed to convince myself about this but it didn't really matter because it was less than an hour later when I heard the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony come whistling softly through the dark and the support man came below deck with the radio for me and said he couldn't raise Ferris any more on the telephone, the night porter at the Hotel Karasevo said that room was empty now.

Chapter 21: ROGUE

He stood there watching me, Frome, he'd said his name was, the wavering light of the candle moving the shadows across his face, its reflection in his eyes, two pale flames, his breath clouding on the air.

Floating ice, colliding with the stem of the hulk, rang in the silence.

'And the woman?' I asked him. 'Rusakova?'

'She's gone too.'

He watched me, hands in bus-driver's gauntlets hanging at his sides, moisture glistening on his fur hat where he'd caught it, I suppose, when he'd ducked down through the hole in the timbers up there, bringing away snow.

'And all measures are being taken,' I said, a statement, not a question, something to say while I thought things out, of course all measures were being taken to find the DIF, at least find his tracks.

I felt like an astronaut — this is the nearest I can get to the idea of what it's like — losing one end of his life-line when he's out there on a space walk, floating away.

'Did he leave anything in his room?' I asked Frome.

'I don't know.'

'What about her — did she leave anything?'

'I don't know,' he said again.

'Then what the bloody hell do you know?'

Ice clinked out there on the river.

He watched me, Frome, the two pale flames in his eyes.

'Sorry,' I said.

'That's okay. I mean, there's not much to know, see. I tried phoning him several times and the switchboard said he couldn't be in his room, so I went round there and checked, found his door unlocked and the room empty, same as hers on the same floor.'

'No signs.'

'None I could see. I took a good — '

'Toilet things?'

'Still there. So were — '

'Scrambler gone?'

'Yes. And the bug sniffer.'

It didn't mean much. If anyone had got in there and managed to take Ferris they'd have taken those things as well, they weren't cheap and you'd never find any more like that in Russia.

'Bitch, isn't it?' I heard Frome say.

'What? Yes.' He was still standing there. 'You want to sit down?'

'No. I don't like leaving the car out there too long, bit of a giveaway. Try the walkie?'

I picked up the unit and switched it on and moved the dial off the squelch and pressed CALL and said Meridian a couple of times and got a response from support base.

'Executive,' I said. 'Two numbers for you.' Rusakov's at the camp, and his woman friend's in the town. 'If Rusakov can't signal, a man named Bakatin might come through, replacing him. Any news?'

Of Ferris. He'd know that.

'No. I'll raise you if he calls. The minute he calls.' Remembering to hope, scratching around for straws, they all were, Frome was, I was, any straw of comfort we could find.

All right, yes, that's putting it a fraction too dramatically, about the astronaut thing, I mean that poor bastard's going to finish up somewhere on the far side of Pluto one day with his super-trained athletic body shrivelled inside its metal-alloy shell and his wife remarried and his kids middle-aged, and when one of us poor bloody ferrets loses his DIF he loses his life-line in a way, but it's not that bad, we can go on foraging for ourselves, get home with our heads still on if we're lucky, it's just that when the mission's running hot we tend to get a bit edgy and the last thing we want to hear is that we're cut off from our director and hence from London Control.