Adam Hall - Quiller Balalaika

An escort taking us to a rendezvous: someone important, then. Important or desperate or blown or about to be blown: despite Legge's cool I could smell panic in the air, the subtle hint of brimstone.

'Looks different,' I said, ' Moscow.' I hadn't been here since it had become the capital of Russia again. The buildings were the same: it was the traffic, quite a bit more of it. 'Lots of shiny Mercs and Jags and BMWs.' Not lots, I suppose, but they stood out from the crowd of local products.

'Mafiya,' Legge nodded.

The leading escort began taking us into side streets – we were now inside the Boulevard Ring – and finally slid into the curbside just beyond a small Russian Orthodox church and stood there with its parking lights on. Legge stopped outside the church itself and told me to wait in the car. I watched him go along to the Land-Rover through the flurries of snow and talk to the driver. He'd been checking the environment while he was picking his way through the frozen snow with his back to me: he'd stumbled a couple of times, hadn't been watching the ground, even though his head was down. Then he came back and passed the Audi and in the outside mirror I watched him talking to the driver of the rear escort vehicle. There was good street-craft in his movements and I put him down as someone more important than a local contact or sleeper or agent-in-place, possibly the chief of a major Bureau support group: Moscow was still a major field.

When he came back to the Audi he put his head in the open window and nodded. 'We'll be out here. We shan't move.' He looked at his watch. 'Rendezvous time was for 18:00. Couple of minutes to go, but your contact's already arrived.'

I got out of the car. 'Code-name? Code-intro?' I shouldn't have had to ask.

Legge looked at me with no change in his expression. 'You won't need anything like that.'

I crossed the crusted pavement, a snowflake settling on my face and burning the skin as it melted. The arched main doors of the church were shut, chained and padlocked, but the narrow entrance door was unlocked and I went inside, having to get used to the dim lighting in here after the baroque lamps of the street. Security didn't cross my mind: I'd been brought here under escort and Legge had checked the environment – as I had – and my contact for the rdv was already here, would have done his own reconnaissance or been escorted here as I was.

Three candles were burning in a small chapel on my right, their light reflecting from the gilded robes of three plaster saints – Nikolai, Marius, Pyotr. At the far end of the nave I saw movement and more light, flashing on bright silver, silhouetting a dark figure with a bald pink head.

'He's the lay janitor,' a voice came from the shadows of the chapel. 'We shan't be disturbed.'

Croder, by his voice. By his voice and the way he was standing, still and thin as a heron, the steel claw at his left wrist outlined against the dark of his astrakhan coat.

Croder, Chief of Signals.

Hence the motorcade and the formality and Legge's touch of pride when he'd looked at his watch and said, 'Rendezvous time was for 18:00. Couple of minutes to go…' The Chief of Signals is a punctual man. He is also brilliant, ruthless, and without mercy when the choice is to abandon a mission or the life of its shadow executive in the field, showing compassion only when the cost is nothing. He saved my life, once, and that had been the price.

But I was glad to see him. It always stimulates me to find myself in the presence of excellence – let's forget, in this case, the other things.

'Shall we sit down?' Croder suggested.

There was a hewn bench below Marius, the saint. Croder's claw hit the carved edge with the sound of a stone dropping onto a coffin, scattering echoes; he's never careful with it, doesn't find it embarrassing: I've seen him open a tin of sardines with it, push in the broken cork of a '92 Pommard, and, once, smash through the window of a Jaguar and hook the driver's throat before he could take off.

'It's so bloody cold in here,' I said, and sat down near him. Not too many executives, I suppose, would come so close to telling the Chief of Signals he'd chosen an inconvenient rendezvous.

'Yes, I apologise – you don't like the cold, do you? But we needed total security, as you can imagine, and I rather left things to Legge. But I was glad to see you turn up – I thought you'd crashed.'

'Crashed?' I was thinking of the journey here from the airport through the icy streets.

'I heard there was a plane down.'

'Oh, that, yes. It didn't have my number on it.' What the hell are you doing in Moscow? I wanted to ask him. The COS hardly ever leaves the signals room in London: it is the innermost of inner sanctums – once a wine cellar underneath the building – where at any given time half a dozen directors in the field could be calling in their reports to the mission boards and asking for immediate instructions, and where sometimes the voice of a shadow executive with direct access to the short-wave bands is heard for the last time if he's left things too late to pull out of whatever death-trap he's caught in and even his local support group can't get him clear. Only a man with Croder's impregnable nerves could run a place like that – but here he was in Moscow.

'You're on stand-by,' he said, 'I believe.'

'Yes.' He didn't believe; he knew: he would have checked before he sent for me.

'I'm not sure I have anything for you.' He watched the man with the bald head at the far end of the nave; I could now see he was polishing some silver candlesticks. 'By which I mean,' Croder added, 'anything you would accept.'

I left that. It wasn't like him to hedge, and it alerted me.

'I was with the prime minister,' he said, 'late last night.'

He waited.

'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.' His narrow head was turned to watch me suddenly from the shadows. '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.'

'I understand it's on the cards, yes,' I said. But that wouldn't account for the 'towering rage'. I waited again.

'General Mikhail Yegorov, Russia 's first deputy interior minister, believes there are upwards of five thousand individual mafiya gangs operating in this country, totalling a hundred thousand active members. Other estimates are double that. Four million business organizations are known to be forced to pay protection money to their local mafiya "services", some of them foreign entrepreneurs – American, British, Japanese – with the result that the price of consumer goods is being forced up by more than twenty per cent, triggering a runaway inflation and damaging the economy to the point where the Russian man-in-the-street is near destitution at a time when Yeltsin is desperate to keep down the threat of revolution on the scale of the storming of the Winter Palace. I'm quoting these few statistics from memory simply to give you a brief picture of events.'

'Understood.'

Behind Croder's narrow, silhouetted head, snow eddied past the stained-glass windows, black against the acid neon of the street lamps beyond.

'But this doesn't,' he said, 'explain the prime minister's feeling of an almost personal affront, does it?'