Adam Hall - Quiller Balalaika

Waiting, Ferris, his pale eyes on me.

'If Croder pulls me out,' I said at last, 'there's nothing I can do.'

'That's not quite true.'

I felt pressed, hunted for the answer. 'No other control would take it over. And no other executive.'

Ferris wound the window up and the air was quiet again. 'Put the heater back on, Charlie.' Then he turned and lowered his voice. 'Suppose you tell me what you'd do if the Chief of Signals pulled you out. And take your time.'

We were turning south again now, along Varvarka, and in the distance across the square I could see a motorcade of four limousines on the move into the Kremlin, stark against the snow, funereal, three enormous Zils and – sign of the times – a Lincoln Continental, a piece of transport of which Boris Yeltsin was said to be fond. And suddenly I was listening to our voices, Croder's and mine, in the hollow confines of the church the night before.

And how was the prime minister?

In a towering rage. He told me in effect that while the US is pouring billions of dollars into the Yeltsin economy and the UK is doing its rather more limited best in the same direction, the Russian mafiya is threatening to destroy that same economy and bring the country to its knees.

St Pyotr staring down from the wall of the chapel, his carved and painted eyes dispassionate.

We may remember that quite recently the head of Russia's Analytical Centre for Social and Economic Policies warned Yeltsin that the growth in organized crime here could well overturn his government and force Russia, with her back to the wall and at gun point, to choose between anarchy and fascism under the leadership of some dangerous fanatic like Zhirinovsky – with twenty-eight thousand nuclear missiles at his command.

The black snow drifting past the coloured windows as the shots came from the distance, a three-second burst, quite long enough to bring about what was intended.

A last echo came… And bring the country to its knees…

I watched the motorcade vanish through the lamplit gates into the Kremlin. Had that man, then, made his leap onto the tank for nothing?

Ferris, waiting – not, I knew, impatient, wanting me to take my time. But I'd done that now.

'If Croder pulled me out,' I said, 'I'd stay here in Moscow and go to ground and run Balalaika solo.'

It would do, at least for the time being.

'But you know the worst thing in all this?' The colonel fixed his bloodshot eyes on me. 'The worst thing?'

I looked away to watch other people's faces, committing them to memory. In a moment I would ditch this man and move on. He didn't know Vasyl Sakkas.

It would do, at least for the time being, the safe-house. The actual room was on the second floor. Ferris had given me the key to the only solid door left in the building, which was an abandoned ruin along Pushechnaya, the Street of the Cannon-makers near the Boulevard Ring, and I'd gone there alone to look at it after we'd shut down the rendezvous. It was nineteenth-century, had once been beautiful, if you care for Russo-Victorian, until the whole area had gone into decline and half this place had been gutted by fire and the other half left to rot with its paint peeling and its walls cracking and its windows missing, smell of decay and despair.

'Do you know?'

This colonel was a bloody bore. 'What? You mean the worst thing?'

'Yes.'

'No, I don't.'

'The caviar.'

'I thought it was rather good.' This was an official party launched by the Federal Counterintelligence Service, and Ferris had given me an invitation passed on from the British Embassy, thought I might make some useful contacts.

'The caviar is excellent, yes,' the colonel said. 'But it is doomed!'

'Oh.'

Make no mistake, when the Federal Counterintelligence Service throws a party it's to make another attempt at cleaning up the image of the organization that hides beneath the sheepskin – the KGB – before the very eyes of foreign diplos from the major embassies, ranking journalists from the international press, local bankers, deputies, entrepreneurs, here to feast on the caviar and roast sturgeon and stuffed crab while the women in their miniskirts and minks and sables stalked the captains of industry and other selected prey with diamonds flashing on their wrists and fingers – though none of them were making a play for the Service brass, who had brought their shabby, overdressed wives for the occasion.

It was on the second floor, the room in the abandoned building, because the executive's refuge in any safe-house is always there. The ground floor is too vulnerable to access and the third floor is too far from the ground if he needs to get out fast. This room was on a corner and Legge had put two windows in and smeared them with grime, giving me the view of an abandoned soap factory from one of them and a side street from the other, this furnished with battered trash cans and a broken ladder and the rusting wreck of a Trabant halfway down, useful cover only if I managed to get that far if the street became a target zone.

'It is doomed!'

'The caviar?'

'But of course! Ninety percent of the sturgeon swim in the Caspian Sea, which has now been turned into a chemical waste dump by the shit coming down the Volga, not to mention the years of oil-drilling near Baku.' The colonel went on watching me for my reaction, the heat of his eyes on me as I took in the woman in the gold sequined dress who was passing behind him, an exquisite imitation Parisienne with the gloss of a porcelain Lladro; she prowled with grace through the packed banquet room, radiating the confidence of a newly anointed mafiya moll: I was beginning to recognize them as they glowed like butterflies in their short-lived heyday before they made some kind of mistake or spoke out of turn and got beaten up and thrown back onto the street. There'd been women like this at the Baccarat Club, one of them sitting with a mobster, thick make-up over her bruises.

'And worse than that,' the colonel said as I decided to move on, 'the breakup of the Soviet Union' – moving with me, gripping my arm – 'has brought Russia into competition with Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan for the fishing grounds, which are producing fortunes from the dwindling shoals of sturgeon that are still there!' He stopped me, and I waited. 'Can you imagine, in two or three years, an evening like this, without caviar?'

'Terrible,' I said.

'Can you imagine life without caviar?'

'Pretty shitty,' I said. 'Thank God for McDonald's.'

I prised his hand away and moved for the buffet, taking it slowly, choosing the groups that looked interesting, that comprised the Service brass or had one or two of the mafiya dons in their midst, sleek in their silk suits, hair-oil gleaming, diamond rings on their fingers, some of them certainly former KGB officers who'd dropped out of the service to exchange the huge power of authority for the even greater power of the megabucks. Six months ago it wouldn't have been possible to invite them here, but with Yeltsin staggering on the tightrope and Zhirinovsky in the ascendant anything was possible today in Moscow, though I couldn't see any bodyguards here: presumably our hosts had decided to draw the line at that.

A girl from the British Embassy playing the little wallflower in traditional dress: a beige woollen cardigan and knee-length skirt with a single string of pearls and a circumspect perm, the pearls small but not cultured, an innocuous-looking drink in her pale hand but with the passion of her own kind latent in the soft blue eyes, I know her breed and am grateful that they walk the earth, my life being owed to one of them.