Slides.
They don’t tell you everything, in London. The principle is that if you know the overall background to any specific mission you’ll tend to over think and over-react to the point of actual purpose-tremor when you’re at the target centre picking a lock or laying a fuse or setting a trap: if you’re aware of the responsibility you’ll shy at an action you’d otherwise take in your stride. When Gary Powers was shot out of the sky in Soviet airspace the imminent East-West summit conference was cancelled and the cold war broke out again in Cuba, Laos and the Congo, and this was the direct consequence of one failed mission. It wasn’t his fault because the U-2 didn’t destruct: the point is that if he had known what the consequences would be he might have turned down the mission at the outset because he was only an executive in the field and he carried the built-in responsibilities of a five-star general in a hot war and that’s loading the dice in any language.
I didn’t know the background to Slingshot and I couldn’t have turned down the mission in any case because those bastards had me over a barrel and indirectly this was a help as I slid the panel back and found the spring release and swung the flat zinc box away from the wall and lifted the lid.
Two compartments, each of them a foot square and with separate serial numbers: Z-A23V2/S and 8-1289, the suffixes presumably belonging to one file and the main body reference belonging to two different systems. A lot of materiaclass="underline" photostats, diagrammatic printouts, two sets of holocryptic gammas with red and black pages printed on nit rated cellulose, KGB/GRU Monome-Dinome tables with complete matrices and side and top co-ordinates, so forth.
Local military deployments and facilities.
Airfields, underground communication channels, silos.
Names, file references, variable cypher drafts.
One code-word heading: Opal Light. The first and last pages were slashed across with a graphite pencil and the whole sheaf was stapled top and bottom.
I didn’t begin hurrying because there was no point: the deadline had burned out and all I had time to do was to swing the zinc box back and slide the panel across before she said:
“How did you get in here?”
Chapter Fourteen: FUSILLADE
She stood there watching me for two or three seconds with that total stillness of hers, her large eyes intent on me. The brown paper package she was holding looked heavy and I said:
“Let me take that.”
“No,” she said and put it down on the desk near the door and picked up the telephone and pulled a short 9mm automatic from inside her astrakhan coat. There wasn’t time to reach her but I was close enough to the low table and didn’t move.
“Operator,” she said into the phone without looking away from me.
“You’ve got the safety catch on,” I said, “so you can’t — ”
She looked down and I went for the big piece of jade on the table and swung it in a curving vector and pulled the table upwards against me and the shot sent splinters whining across my face an instant before the jade hit the gun and she cried out in pain and I got across to her before she could try it a second time.
The gun had slid across one of the Chinese rugs and she wrenched herself free and got half-way there before I caught her again and threw her against the settee and went for the gun myself and got it and hit the magazine out and slipped it into my pocket and kicked the gun hard and sent it spinning across the floorboards into the kitchen as she came at me with her nails and got close before I caught her wrists and crossed them and put some pressure on, twisting her round so that she had her back to me, snow on her astrakhan coat and her neck cold against my face as I whispered to her.
“If you make any noise I’m going to kill you.” It was the closest I’d been to a woman since that stupid bitch in Furstenfeldbruck and she smelt of woodsmoke and damp hair and the oils in her skin.
A door had opened. I only just heard it.
She leaned her back against me and took deep breaths, moving her arms slightly to find out how much strength she’d need to free herself. I didn’t have to warn her about this; the pressure I was using was already cutting off the circulation.
They were outside now.
I whispered again, close to her ear. “When is Kirinski coming back?”
She didn’t answer. They were knocking at the door. Kirinski wouldn’t do that. I brought more pressure on her wrists until a sound came from her throat; then I stopped because I didn’t want any noise. They began calling through the door.
“Liova! What happened?”
“It was nothing,” I whispered. “You broke a light bulb.”
I gave a quick twist to inflict pain as a warning and then let her arms free because she had to get her voice steady and I wasn’t sure she could do it.
“Liova Kirinski? Are you all right?”
Then she called back to them, doing it well, even getting the hint of a laugh in her voice as she told the woman it was a light bulb, that was all, she’d dropped it and frightened herself with the noise.
We listened together and in a moment heard them moving away along the passage; then she swung her head to look up at me and lifted her hands and I parried them with a wedge lock because I thought she was going to try for my eyes with her nails but she cried out softly, don’t, and put her arms round me and kissed me through the wing of dark hair that lay half across her face, bringing her thighs against me and moving them from side to side as she went on kissing, drawing her hair away and using her tongue, using her pelvis against me until my body began responding and my mind warned me that she’d tried to kill me once and would try again the instant I was off my guard.
But there was nothing she could do without a weapon and if she broke free and reached the gun it wouldn’t do any good and if she began screaming and managed to throw something and smash glass I could be clear of the building fast enough for total security so I let her go on and began using my own hands to open her coat and bring her against me as she asked on a breath who are you, again and again, as the girl had done in the snows of Prague, who are you.
We were on the floor now and she was already in orgasm as she pulled me in with her nails burning across my thighs and her dark head rolling from side to side as she moaned softly, from side to side in a rhythm she couldn’t stop. Part of my mind became occupied with impressions as twilight cerebration went on: the curved head of a dragon on a Chinese rug, an empty gun lying on a kitchen floor, a telephone dangling on its cable with a faint continuous whine coming from its black plastic, the glow of a huge iron stove and above it a bright copper samovar, and her name, Liova, and her sweat slipping on me, her breath against my face and her sharp hands everywhere, wanting to hurt and draw blood. And the smell of cordite still in the room.
In a moment she was lifting me with her thighs, faster and faster, her breath coming desperately as if she were drowning; so I hurt her as I knew she wanted me to and her second orgasm came at once like an explosion and she cried out and I put my hand over her mouth and she bit the palm with the sharpness of a snake but I kept it there because she was supposed to be alone here.