The foothills were coming up on the right, a sloping waste of snow with dark crags exposed on the lee side. The first of the farm buildings were now spread out on the left of us and I passed them at the same speed and then began accelerating. We had a mile to go and I didn’t want to let him pull up behind me when we stopped because he’d have a gun and he’d use it at once.
The sand was patchy along this stretch and the Wolga was breaking away at the rear all the time until I got the near side wheels stuck well down on the camber and used the grass verge as a cush. I saw him twice in the mirror, a long way behind but still on the move, and I kept my foot down until I came to the caves.
They were high on the hillside, their entrances strung out along a ledge that ran a hundred feet or so above the lower slopes. At this point the road had no particular border but the ground was obviously flat and I ran the Wolga through virgin snow and left it angled against the bank higher up. The stuff I’d taken from the consignee this morning was on the floor in the rear and I left it there, slamming the door shut and starting the climb on foot. The Syrena was still half a mile distant and the air here was quiet, giving me privacy.
I suppose there were other places as convenient for what we had to do, but I’d made my way instinctively from the city, seeking the wilds as animals do when the presentiment of death is on them. And I suppose there were alternatives: I could have gone to ground and spent the rest of my life in uneasy hibernation, or I could have lain low for a year or two and then gone back to that bloody place to ask them for a job in one of those offices where the halt and the lame and the superannuated finish up, complete with a pen and a pension, to hell with that.
The thing that had brought me here was the fact that a mission was still running and I was the ferret they’d sent down the hole and they were waiting for me to come up with something, and this was the situation that had shaped my whole life since I’d first gone into the trade, and it had become a habit.
I watched the Syrena coming.
Kirinski had contacts and by this time he might have found out I was from London, and that would be sufficient incentive for him to kill me, as he’d killed the others. He knew I’d taken a copy of the material, and he would want that copy and would kill for it if he could, at the same time destroying the information stored in my brain. But I had wanted to make absolutely sure he would attack me, so I had kissed her there in the open street while he was watching.
I climbed higher, and reached the ledge where the caves made holes in the snow. The car had slid to a stop below me, not far from the Wolga, but he didn’t get out immediately and because of the reflection on the window glass I couldn’t see what he was doing; his gun would already be loaded, and he was probably using the needle. Cocaine works fast, within a minute of the injection, and he would have left it until now, so that by the time he reached me he would feel that overwhelming power flowing through him. Without it he could look after himself well enough: he was bigger than I was, and heavier. With the cocaine in him he would be galvanized, unstoppable.
The door of the car snapped open and as he got out I could see him clearly enough to recognize that great wedge of a nose sloping down below the eyes, and that odd backward-tilting walk of his as he came across the snow, his knee-boots kicking at it. He looked upwards now, and saw me; and I had the thought that in different circumstances I would have waved to him.
It was at this point that conscious linear cerebration broke up suddenly into random flashes, as if a bare wire had been dropped across an electronic circuit. I’d been briefed for this mission and I’d been given enough information to see it as a logical attempt to achieve logical goals, but there was always the unknown background to any mission and as I stood here watching Kirinski climb the slope I was thinking of Parkis... It would save us the unpleasant task of later ensuring that the threat to security he would continue to represent was nullified… Parkis and Novikov… Did they plant him on me in that train?… Novikov and Ferris and the way Ferris had looked away when I’d asked him if they’d worked out an escape-phase for me once I’d reached the objective.
Uninformation, and a background to Slingshot that could make total nonsense of the understanding I thought I had of it: for all I knew I could be one unimportant component of a design so complex that only Parkis could make the changes necessary to remove that one component and render it harmless to the overall plan. My instructions were that the objective for this operation was Kirinski’s death, but who was Kirinski — the objective, or a reliable Bureau man with instructions that the objective for his operation was to kill me?
In this trade we see the world in mirrors and I’m used to that but when I go out it’s got to be someone from Moscow or Peking or Havana who finds me in the dark or pulls me into a trap or centres me in the crosshairs: someone in the opposition, not someone in London putting a small black cross at the point where the expendable executive is required to cease functioning, not someone I thought I could trust.
A final thought flashing through my head as I watched the man climbing the slope: You can’t trust Parkis.
When Kirinski was half-way from the road below I turned and moved towards the mouth of the nearest cave and the shot smashed into the rock close to my face.
“Rashidov!”
Even at this distance his voice was loud enough to echo in the cave as the second shot chipped fragments away and sent them whining past me. I went right inside now, and felt my way along the rock until faint light came into the darkness ahead of me: these weren’t isolated caves but a whole network tunnelling the hillside above the ledge, parts of it broken from above and blocked with boulders that had rolled down from the heights I’d lost my way when I’d come here before, and had to climb back up the slope to get out.
Light from the noon sky gave a leaden sheen to the ice that had formed below the snow mass, covering the walls where the arched roof had fallen in, and I moved again and noted distances and widths and gradients, listening for him as I went forward.
“Rashidov!”
It was the bellow of an animal, much closer now but impossible to locate because of the echoes. The cocaine was roaring in his veins and he would be feeling invincible and would behave accordingly. The heart-rate and breathing would be accelerated and the body temperature raised, with increased blood sugar and muscle tone; but it was the psychic effect of the drug that would give him the strength to deal with anything that got in his way and leave it broken behind him. Anything.
I picked up a stone and threw it against the angle of the rock face where I’d turned, and the light of the explosion flared as the shot crashed in the confines and left the mountain singing.
Three.
I moved again as the reek of cordite came on the air. There were faint regular sounds and I noted them as being less than immediately threatening, until I realized that my ears were still half deafened by the noise of the shot and that he could be much closer than he sounded.
The walls narrowed and the ground rose and I couldn’t see the light any more but there was no point in going back: he was close now and quiet, listening. I could be moving into a dead end but the risk had been calculated: to kill Kirinski I had to empty his gun and I couldn’t do that in the city streets and I couldn’t do it across open ground so I’d thought of the caves and I would have to do it here, where there’d be a chance of dodging him long enough to wear him down and come up on him from behind.