It had happened in Oslo and it had happened in Singapore: an opposition-surveyed eye-contact situation can be the same as an identity parade and in Oslo the executive had taken the slightest step forward when he’d seen his cutout coming down the gangway and in Singapore a courier had glanced down quickly when his man came through the gate at the airport and we’d lost two good operatives because of it. For this reason it’s a situation we don’t get into if we can help it but today I’d arrived here shortly before a plane was due in and I’d left the observation deck shortly after it had landed and the first tag was already on to me and the only thing to do was to conform to the pattern: I was obviously here to meet someone off the Moscow flight and so I must stand here looking for him.
Five young girls in red woollen scarves and pom-pom hats, their arms interlinked as they came past me, singing and giggling.
A woman in a wheelchair, her face grey and her eyes already dead; a young man pushing her, watching the girls.
An Air Force captain, eating the last of an apple down to the core.
Ferris.
He was looking vaguely around him and our glances met for a half-second and passed on and this was when we could have blown Slingshot if we hadn’t worked together long enough to know each other’s style.
I went on waiting, watching the rest of the passengers as they came through and wishing to Christ that Chechevitsin had put a little more information into his last signaclass="underline" I was in the target area with the KGB moving in and the last thing I wanted was a top field director dropping out of the sky to make a rendezvous. The signal had said courier and if it had been a courier I could have left him to fend for himself and take the risk that Gorodok had taken and I could have handled these tags on my own. If I’d known London was sending Ferris here I would have made damned sure of getting a different car and I would have waited outside this bloody place and watched from cover without even showing myself because Ferris is a veteran and knows precisely what to do.
He was doing it now, walking straight through the hall and out by the main doors, no hat, a light gaberdine coat, a tan brown overnight case. I was watching his reflection in the three glass panels along the wall beyond the stream of passengers and now he had gone.
When the last of them came through I gave it another minute, going up to the gate and looking along the passage and coming away disappointed, checking my watch and then going out through the main doors at a steady pace. This was when they would have made the snatch if they’d received the instructions and I was sweating because I had the films on me to give to the ‘courier’ and they were enough to get me a life sentence and those places aren’t easy to get away from because of the barbed wire and gun towers and guard dogs: Cosgrove had tried it six months ago at the Potma Complex in Chita Province and he was badly savaged because they couldn’t control one of the dogs. I hate those bloody things.
Ferris had got it right: he’d had a rough idea of how many more passengers there’d been behind him and he’d known I’d have to wait till they were through and he’d used time outside the building and was now walking steadily north along the airport boulevard, his fuzz of thin hair blowing around his head. Most of the passengers were getting into the terminal bus or sharing cabs but a dozen or so were walking along the boulevard and Ferris was keeping pace with them, swinging his case and not looking around him any more. He couldn’t be feeling very happy: a rendezvous is normally secure and I hadn’t had time to warn him and he’d seen immediately that we had a problem when I let him go by.
I wasn’t very happy myself. Parkis had put an executive and a director into the field in Central Asia and at this precise moment they were in a KGB trap and I didn’t know if we could get out of it because this was the third alternative I’d begun working on and it was the one that needed miracles.
Ferris hadn’t been sent down here personally for nothing. I didn’t need a director in the field because the operation was close focus and London knew that: the target was one man, Kirinski. So Ferris was here to slam something new on the board for me to handle and I wasn’t ready for it but I had to know what it was and that meant I had to bring him to some land of rendezvous in a safe place and there weren’t any safe places in this city now that the KGB were into the action: they’d hold off until the point came when they could see they’d never drive us to ground and then they’d pull us in, finis.
I didn’t know how good his cover was but in a sense it was only as good as I could make it: at the moment there was no connection between us and technically he was in a clear field but as soon as I went too close to him they’d get the point and put the drop on us and start interrogating.
A black Moskwicz saloon went slowly past from the airport, chains biting on the snow and scattering it across the ruts, a face at a steamy window, featureless, the acrid scent of exhaust gas as the car gathered speed and turned the corner. Shoes crunched faintly behind me and on the other side of the boulevard a short dark figure walked in substantially through the reflections on the Intourist windows, a man with a sloping shoulder. Far ahead of me, Ferris.
He could only go on walking, or stop: he hadn’t got the training or the experience to take any kind of initiative and we both knew that. The one move he could make would be to hole up in public cover and wait for me there but it wouldn’t be easy and it might be impossible because this operation was based on geometry and involved angles, distances and vectors: we would be moving, he and I and these other men, across a chessboard as the light of the day began lowering across the streets.
He turned left and I stayed on this side of the boulevard and began looking for cover. This too might be impossible to find in time but it was my main concern. Without Ferris on the scene I could have flushed these tags within minutes because a city is a warren and I am a ferret who knows its way and who knows how close to go and how far: I’ve done it before, a hundred times, and I could have done it again today but there was Ferris and I mustn’t lose him.
I crossed at the intersection and for the first time turned my head to watch for the traffic and saw five of them among the people who were walking from the airport, five or conceivably more because I couldn’t see farther than the second group who were crossing farther down, hurrying before the bus came, one of them slipping and finding his balance again. They were men with coats and hats and gloves and they didn’t look any different from the others in actual appearance: I knew who they were because I’d seen them before, hundreds of them, Russian and Czechoslovak and Polish and French and Italian and Turkish, average and undistinguished men in respectable suits and worn shoes, their movements casual and their faces noncommittal as they worked their daily round like pilot fish. Of course they vary in their temperaments: the subtlest are the French and they’ll hang on whatever you try to do; the Italians will do well until they see a girl and then they’ll go off with her and leave you flat; the Turks will hound you to the ends of the earth and then drive you into the ground; and the Russians will keep their distance but never lose you unless you can pull something totally unexpected, because they are logical and trained to move in straight lines as these were doing now.
A hundred yards after I’d crossed at the intersection and started west along this street the black Moskwicz came past again, but faster this time: it had turned left along the side street parallel to the boulevard and come up and turned left again and found me crossing from the first to the second block and it would now make a series of right turns and come back and look for me two blocks ahead and that was all right, providing it went on doing the same thing and didn’t stop. I liked the pattern as it was, because at this stage I knew where people were and what they were doing.