The Scorpion Signal

'Have you worked here before?' the contact asked me.

'No. I was trained here for Curtain operations.'

'Are you fluent?'

'Yes. Local accent.'

'When were you here last?' he asked me, watching the intersection.

'Three years ago.' Another militia patrol went past, in one of their snubnosed Volgas. A face was turned towards us. The car didn't slow.

'That's a long time,' the contact said. 'Things are changing fast over here. You'll have to be careful.'

'Oh for Christ's sake d'you think I need telling?'

His head moved a fraction to watch my reflection in the windscreen. 'Sorry, old boy.'

I slowed my breathing, counting the breaths. I'd have to do better than this, a hell of a lot better. Otherwise I was going to blow up when the heat came on. Eight, nine, ten, 'They pulled me in from leave,' I said more quietly, 'two weeks after the last lot.'

'Bastards, aren't they?'

We watched the car.

'I could have refused.'

'Why didn't you?'

'Vanity.'

He laughed again soundlessly, but didn't take his eyes off the car. It was moving into better light now, turning off Ckalova ulica towards us and speeding up a little. It was a black Humber with CD plates.

'You're driving this one,' the contact said, 'all right?'

I said yes, and watched the Humber. There was nothing behind it but there was still plenty of time: we were parked less than a hundred yards from the intersection. It came on, slowing as it neared. Another bus passed along the ring road, then a private car, going quite fast.

'Cutting it fine,' the contact said.

The Humber was nearly abreast of us now and slowing under full brakes, the driver's door coming open a moment before it stopped. A man got out and came across to us as the contact hit the door open and left the wheel to me. I slid behind it as the other man got in and said, 'You'd better hurry.'

A squeal came as the contact took the Humber away with the engine racing in low gear before the change. I hit the stick-shift and did a tight U-turn and found a side street and swung into it with my eyes on the mirror. There was nothing.

'You'd better go south,' the man said. 'Get on to the ring road as soon as you can.' He sat back, stretching his legs out. 'But I think we're all right. I'm Bracken.'

'Quiller.' I made two right turns, watching the mirror.

'This is the car you'll use,' Bracken told me. 'The papers are in the glove pocket. I was getting worried about you.'

'We had problems.' At each turn the street lights threw his reflection on to the windscreen and filled in what I remembered of him. He was a shut-faced man with a tight mouth and eyes that never came to rest on anything for more than a second: he was looking around him now with brief jerks of his head. He couldn't keep his feet still either; he kept on shuffling them against the floorboards. Maybe he wasn't always like that; he could be worried at the moment because he'd been cutting things fine. If they'd turned off the ring road after him he would have driven straight past us but there's always a risk and he could have come dose to blowing me. I didn't know much about him, only a few things I'd heard over cups of tea in the Caff between missions; someone had said he'd been thrown out of an instructor's job at Norfolk because he'd used a live charge to demonstrate his de-arming techniques, and someone else had told me he'd murdered his mistress and been acquitted because the Bureau had suppressed some of the evidence; I didn't necessarily believe either story but the truth was probably somewhere there in the background. There's usually something a bit touched about the field directors: look at Ferris, always strangling mice.

'What sort of problems?' Bracken wanted to know.

'Access. Croder's not as good as they say.'

His blunt head turned quickly. 'Croder is very good. It couldn't have been his fault.'

'He took a hell of a risk.'

'Quite possibly. He takes on things that other people won't touch. So do you. That's why he wanted you for this one. Did you fly in?'

'Yes.'

'Where did you land?'

'Domodedovo.'

'What hotel?'

'The Aeroflot.'

'Are we still in the clear?'

'Yes.' I'd been using the mirror at five-second intervals.

He stopped shuffling his feet. 'Did you leave your passport with Immigration?'

'Yes.'

'I want you to ask for it back in the prescribed two days and then go to ground and come up as a Soviet citizen.' He took an envelope from his coat and put it into the glove compartment. 'Everything's there.' He talked for ten minutes without stopping except to answer questions; we covered liaison, contacts, signals, the safe-house and possible exit procedures. 'I want you to know that you'll receive every support from the people here in the field and of course from London. I'm not trying to boost your morale. We want Schrenk, badly, and we think you can pull him out for us.'

'Where is he?'

'We don't know. We've — '

'You don't know?'

He waited three seconds. 'We are looking for him very hard. We have a contact inside Lubyanka, watching for Schrenk to come in. At the moment we can't understand why he wasn't taken straight there from Hanover. We're therefore watching a lot of other places: the Serbsky Institute here in Moscow and the facilities they run in the Urals, the Komi Republic, Murmansk, the Potma complex, and of course — ' with the slightest pause- 'in Leningrad.'

'They might have gone to Hanover to kill him.' I made another turn and got on to the ring road going south. The mirror was clear except for a trolleybus in the distance.

'Not without trying again to break him, and they couldn't do that in Hanover. It's going to take time, and a lot of personnel. We know that.'

'What about Leningrad?'

His speech became slightly faster, pushed by his nerves. 'The cell is still intact. Obviously Schrenk hasn't been broken yet. Of course they might have gone too far: he might be dead. But we've got to know.'

'What are their plans, if he breaks?'

He said in a moment, 'Some of them will try making a run for it, but they won't get across any of the frontiers because the guard posts will be alerted, and so will the airports. They can't quietly leave their jobs before the balloon goes up because most of them are entrenched very deeply in official positions and they'd expose the whole network. One or two have elected to take capsules if they have to, rather than face interrogation and the labour camps.' He took some kind of inhaler from his pocket and started using it: it smelt like Vick's.

'How many people are there?'

'Fifteen.'

Headlights came into the mirror and I watched them. 'Can't any of them get clear?' Comstock was in Leningrad, and so was Whitman. I'd worked with both of them.

'Not without putting everyone else at risk.' He'd begun shuffling his feet again. 'Incidentally the CIA is furious with us about Schrenk. They know Leningrad could blow.'

'They've done all right for eleven years.'

'That's why they're furious.' He inhaled again and then screwed the cap on. The whole car was reeking of menthol.

'The papers for this car,' I asked him, 'are for which cover?'

'You've got both.'

'Get them out, will you? Put the East German papers in your pocket. These too.' I pulled out the credentials Floderus had given me. 'Start reading the Russian cover, do you mind?'

'Aloud?'

'Yes.'

He didn't turn his head. 'Have we picked someone up?'

'I don't know yet. It's just some headlights.'

His hands began working busily, transferring the papers. 'Don't you trust the German cover?'

'I'd rather be a local citizen if I'm going to be found with a foreign embassy man. Just a slight edge.' But I wasn't happy, because every minute we were together we risked being picked up and questioned. The whole operation was balanced on a knife edge and we had to keep very still.