Adam Hall - Quiller Balalaika

A wind was rising from the north, from the Arctic, coming over the top of the massif and curving down across the camp, rustling paper, rattling the doors. Another blizzard, Igor had told us, last night had been nothing.

'Getting warmer?'

'Bit.'

'Keep swinging. This is the half-fist, and it doesn't look like much but it's used mainly for killing. It's effective because the knuckles make a blade and you can drive the strike from the hip without having to waste time pulling back first – you're in there before your opponent knows it. Stop swinging a minute and try it. No, fingers tight, really tight, lots of tension at the instant when you go in, thumb tucked against the first fingertip – no, tight, that's it. You can practise the hand set whenever you get the chance, last thing at night in bed's a good time. Train the muscles – they're not used to it.'

'The hand set?'

'The shape you form with it. This is the hand set for the half-fist we're forming now. Okay, but tighter than that, tighter. Right, now this is the killing area, the best target for the half-fist, takes two seconds to kill once you're good enough. But if you mean to kill, don't pull the strike, go for it. And try and make sure you've got witnesses who can say it was in self-defence.'

'That would kill Gradov?' His young eyes were awed.

The man with the hare lip. 'Once your muscles are up to strength, yes. But that's going to take you a few months, a whole lot of secret training.'

On a slow breath: 'Gradov.'

'Anyone. But look, you don't have to kill people to make them understand you're not just a pushover. Cool them down with a strike or two and leave them to think about it.'

Snowflakes were mottling the black window pane, and the wind began keening under the door.

'Will you show me -'

'Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. But you can start practising right away, in bed. Get those muscles into condition, that's half the battle.' I put an arm round him. 'How long have you been taking this kind of thing, Alex?'

'This kind of – oh. Two years. Ever since I got here.'

'Well look, I know it's tough to say, but give it another two months, maybe three. The most dangerous thing you can do is to start hitting back before you've got the strength and the moves down right – they'll stop you in your tracks and things'll be even worse for you. Now come on, before we freeze to death in here.'

Later, after midnight when the main floodlights were switched off, I left the hut and made my way between the snow-banks, taking my time, taking an hour, more, watching for the sentries as they sheltered under the eaves, finding detours to avoid them and to avoid the marker lights as the new snow whirled past my face on the strengthening wind. Then I reached the target building.

It was a standard cylinder lock and I pushed the key in, my own version made out of a sardine-can opener bent at right angles and flattened at one end, felt for the tumblers, testing their resistance, finding the right pressure, turning the key and forcing them back and turning the handle next, cracking open the door.

Because there was one thing I had to do, primordially, despite the guards and the sentries and the machine-gun posts and the wire and the wolves.

Keep Balalaika running.

Behind the counter the so-called orderly room was a mess, box files made of cardboard at all angles across the floor and piled up the wall, three empty vodka bottles still where they'd been dropped among the cigarette cartons, five or six pairs of snow boots crowded near the door at the rear with a thick rawhide whip lying across them, the tip of its lash frayed from long use and the bone handle worn to an ivory brilliance, teasing the nerves unpleasantly.

It was cold in here, but that was all: not freezing, you could feel your fingers, there'd be some embers still warm in the pot-bellied stove. I kept the small plastic lamp held low – there were no curtains. The lamp had been on a bicycle once, Alex had told me, was part dynamo, and he'd managed to keep it hidden when he'd arrived at Gulanka and the guards had gone through his belongings; every day he secretly span the wheel of the dynamo to keep the lamp charged; the only source of light we were allowed here was a box of matches.

Antanov, Marius.

The tricky thing was going to be leaving the files as I found them: they didn't seem to be in any particular order. A to K, for instance, was on one of the labels, but this box dealt with guard duties. The A to K file next to it dealt with the inmates of Hut five, Arkady to Bakar, no Antanov between them. There were, I would have said, thirty or forty files.

Midnight plus fifty on the wall clock, no means of knowing if a sentry came round to check, or if so, how often. The orderly room was the nerve centre of the camp, and therefore for me, now, a distinct red sector.

Mr Croder? Another red sector signal for Balalaika's just come through from Moscow.

Joking, of course: it was eight days since Ferris had been ordered out of the field and by now the lights would be switched off over the board, either that or a new mission would already be set up there with data coming in from the director in Algeria or Baghdad or Beijing, while Mr Croder shut himself up in his tempered-steel shell to consider whether or not to resign, how much guilt to feel for the little ferret he'd left running in circles through the snow, or whether he could hold out a spider's-thread hope for an eleventh-hour last-ditch breakthrough for the mission, knowing as he did the blind tenacity of said ferret when the jaws of adversity gaped from the shadows of the labyrinth.

It wasn't my concern now. London could go straight to hell.

MOSKVA. Deliveries by train from the 'city' last week: three tons of canned food, twelve pairs of new boots, a field telephone, two radios, three dozen towels, two hundred feet of one-inch rope and a hundred feet of half-inch cord, ten handcuffs, ten chain shackles, four pinewood coffins, six crates of vodka.

I'd seen two men going into the dinner hall yesterday with their feet shackled and their heads shaven and no winter jackets on, simply trousers and T-shirts; they'd been blue with the cold. In a place like this there'd be a whole variety of punishments.

The wind was moaning under the door, powdering the bare boards with snow. Somewhere above the storm layer was a full moon two diameters high from the horizon, and from the window the light was eerie and the snowflakes black, silhouetted against the eastern sky.

Voices, and I switched off the lamp and froze.

Voices or the wind, or voices in the wind.

A beam of light was on the move out there, probing along one of the pathways that had been cleared earlier, two dark figures behind it with their faces lit by the back-glow. Turning left, turning right, coming back, the beam sweeping the door of a hut – the commandant's HQ – and moving on again and again coming back along a parallel path, coming this way as I lowered myself behind a cabinet, waiting, the voices out there torn by the wind but louder now.

And what, if those men came in here, would there be to say? Some instant rehearsal was in order.

I was looking for a friend of mine in the files.

Who let you in here?

Nobody.

You've got no permission to be here?

No.

You mean you broke in?

I picked the lock.

Isn't that breaking in?

I suppose so. But -

My God, are you in trouble! Hold your hands behind your back.

Click.

The beam of the lamp flooding the window now, then the cracks of the door, flickering across the powdering of snow on the floor and gilding it.