Adam Hall: Quiller Balalaika

'No bodyguards.'

His head jerked up an inch and he hesitated, working out how he was going to put what he had on his mind: this was my impression. 'All the mafiya chiefs have bodyguards,' he said carefully, 'some of them twenty or thirty. It's as much for show as anything else, prove how big they are, you know? But they also live a lot longer like that. Six isn't too many, and I'd like to bring in -'

'I'll let you know,' I said, 'if I need bodyguards. Until I do, keep them well clear. Those are my express instructions.' I was getting fed up, that was all, with having to repeat myself so often. Legge stood there for another five seconds, six, then swung to the door. Over his shoulder: 'Infiltrating the Moscow mafiya with no weapons and no bodyguards, I give you three days.'

'That's not a bad start.'

When Legge had gone I used the phone and called the chief of hotel security to come and see me and gave him a hundred-dollar note and told him he'd get one every week if he looked after me, and if he didn't look after me he'd be found shot dead in the Katerinberg Forest, and by his reaction it seemed like language he understood.

I didn't want to work too close to the Hotel Moskva International so I walked across the street and went into the RAOC building and told the desk clerk that Inspector Loshak wanted to see me and they said there wasn't any Inspector Loshak there, maybe I was mistaking this branch for the one down on Suharevskij Prospekt. I said they could be right – how would I get there?

Then I got the Mercedes S420 from the garage and drove sixteen blocks and found the other place and left the car halfway on the pavement – A car like that, Legge's briefing noted in the Field Information file, can be left almost anywhere you can find a space. The police won't touch it: the image is distinctly mafiya.

The snow had stopped in the early hours of this morning; I'd slept for a time and then got up and gone through the whole of the briefing again, committing the essentials to memory and testing them, looking down from one of the windows at intervals to check on the movements of the two surveillance people, bundled in their black leather coats to look like plain clothes policemen, hands pushed into their pockets and snow on their fur hats and their breath clouding as they shifted their feet, giving an oblique glance upward at my windows every time they reached the end of their beat and turned, could have been looking at the sky, wondering when it would clear.

The fax had come just before five this morning.

Yelena and the children arriving Sheremetyevo Airport 18:12 hours today on China Airlines Flight 2129, no need to meet them, will be staying at Hotel Romanov. Have a successful trip. No one called, no messages.

Ferris.

And already I was beginning to feel uneasy about Tully, the shadow executive for Rickshaw, out there in Beijing and just going into the end-phase with a replacement director in the field less capable than Ferris – any DIF would be less capable than Ferris.

Does it look sticky?

St Pyotr staring down with his plaster eyes, Croder's steel claw flashing in the candlelight.

Not at present, though in the end phase anything can happen, of course.

Yea, verily: the end-phase is when the executive goes in close and starts feeling the heat, confronting the risk, taking final chances he'd never have taken earlier, committed at last to bringing the mission home or leaving it wrecked in the field – You can't win them all, love – Daisy in the Caff, small comfort, it takes a lot of tea to wash away the penitence, the self-reproach as those snivelling bastards spell it out in blood on the files: Mission unaccomplished.

Conscience pricked as I stood under the noon sky watching the RAOC building, this one smaller, shabbier than the one opposite my hotel, red brick and grimy windows, the brass handles of the entrance doors tarnished with age, birds there, pecking at crumbs someone had thrown down.

But you wanted Ferris, didn't you?

Right.

And you've got him. So forget this conscience shit.

Whatever you say.

People starting to leave the building now.

Whatever you say, my good friend, forget it, yes, we've got work to do.

The entrance doors banging back and the birds darting upward to perch on the window sills, complaining. Most of the office workers came down the steps in groups, with only a couple of men walking alone so far, one of them slipping on the crusted snow and laughing as he found his balance, the sound clear in the cold air, the others turning to look and a girl in a white fur hat giggling, some of them crossing the street now, lurching their way across the deep frozen ruts in the snow, their boots crunching.

In a small building like this there wouldn't be too many on the staff and I watched them, concentrating, needing only one, just one of them, the right one if I could find her, it had to be a woman, a woman walking alone, independent of groups, easily bored in company, needing to do her own thing in her own way, to hell with the rules and regulations. A tall order, this I admit, small chance of finding someone like that in a government office, a freethinking bureaucrat, but hope springs eternal and I waited patiently, watching the entrance doors, the steps, because this was important, this was the first day of the opening phase for Balalaika and I wanted information, a lot of information, to give me the one quintessential requirement the mission demanded before anything else could happen, before I could get inside the mafiya infrastructure in Moscow, before I could move in to the target: Vasyl Sakkas.

Access.

It's a heady thing, when you find it. It's the first signal the shadow's going to send, right at the outset of the mission, the one they're waiting for under the floodlit board in Signals, the one they'll scrawl in chalk across the slate.

Executive has access.

The air cold against the face, a blood-red leaf circling downward from the black skeletons of the elms, smoke drawing out in a skein as someone lit a cigarette, the flame of the match bright on his cheeks and flashing on his glasses, three more people coming down the steps in a group, one of them swinging a blue woollen scarf round her neck as they went along the pavement under the trees, and suddenly there she was, a young woman walking alone, pulling on her black sable gloves as she looked around her, not seeing anyone she felt like joining, shaking her head to someone who called her name – Mitzi – and asked her if she was going to the library this evening, shaking her head to tell them no as I began moving, crossing the street behind her, taking care on the ice as a beaten-up Trabant went past with its front wheels shimmying through the ruts, exhaust gas clouding on the cold noon air.

She went into the fast food place almost opposite the RAOC building and I hung back until the door had swung shut and then pushed it open again, going inside. Steam and tobacco smoke and the comfortable smell of cabbage, three servers working hard behind the counter, four people waiting, Mitzi the last in line.

When her battered tin tray was loaded I shuffled forward a bit too fast and my foot got in the way and she tripped and the soup and the dish of shashlik slid off and crashed onto the floor, much laughter from a couple of workmen who'd just come in, Mitzi's face open with shock and her eyes flashing as she looked at me.

'Shit!' she said, to more laughter.

'I'm sorry – I'll order some more, it won't take a minute.'

One of the servers came round from behind the counter with a bucket and a mop, looking daggers at me while I apologized again and gave the order, getting the same for myself, the potato soup and kebabs, while Mitzi told the two workmen to shut up, it wasn't funny, I liked her anger, it had a cat's energy, where did she want to sit, I asked her when I had the two trays in my hands.