Adam Hall - Northlight

'Oh,' Ferris said, 'he's safe for the moment.'

'He's made contact again?'

'Yes.'

'Where is he?'

'Not far. We're looking after him.'

'That was fast.'

'There isn't a lot of time.'

A diesel engine gunned up outside as a bulldozer started reversing. Ferris turned to the window again.

'Pretty bells,' he said. 'Rather like Christmas, with the snow and everything.' He was half in profile, his glasses no longer hiding his eyes. They were watchful.

'Are we all right?' I asked him.

He gave a sigh and turned back to me. 'Tell me about the Chinese. The Rinker cell as you call it.'

'They've lost me.'

'Are you sure?'

'They didn't show up in Kandalaksha after I'd killed one of them on the train.'

'But we're not expecting them to "show up" until we bring Zhigalin to the surface. Are we?'

I didn't like this.

'You think they're still active?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'For one thing, I would say that the Chinese would go to very great lengths to secure Zhigalin. Once they'd persuaded. him to give a press conference they could wreck the last of our chances for a summit meeting in Vienna, and that would give them a priceless advantage.' He looked through the window again. 'For another thing, and rather more immediately, I think they're watching us now.'

The whole of the fuselage began drumming and I felt the vibration through the metal seat. Light swept across Ferris as the plane lifted from the runway, leaving the sound of its jets echoing across the airport like the booming of a thunderstorm. A loose chip of glass in one of the smashed instruments set up a tinkling vibrato.

'Where?'

'Among the trees.'

'Which trees? Which direction?'

'Forward of the plane-'

'This plane?'

'Yes.'

'How far away?'

'A couple of hundred yards. I-'

'One man?'

'I'm not sure. All I could see were the field-glasses.'

'Two lenses? Are you sure there were two?'

In a moment he said: 'Good question.'

'You're not sure?'

'I could have been mistaken.'

'It could have been just one lens.'

'Yes.'

'A telescopic lens.'

'Yes.'

The drumming eased off, and the chip of glass stopped tinkling. It seemed quieter because of it, quieter than before, and colder, even colder than before, the kind of cold that shrinks the scalp and crawls on the skin.

'I was opening the door,' Ferris said, 'when I saw him. The only way to warn you was to come aboard, as if I hadn't seen anything.'

'Civil of you.'

He could have turned back and left me here waiting. The director in the field is almost never at risk: he's too valuable to the opposition as a human constant; his job is to keep in contact with the executive, to keep the lifeline intact, to be instantly available if something goes wrong. Half the time when the executive goes to ground and the opposition lose track of him they can find him again by throwing a surveillance net across the local director's environment, physically and electronically, and there's nothing we can do about that because the alternative is to send the shadow in alone and he wouldn't last more than a couple of days in the field without support and communications: it'd be like throwing a man off a ship in mid-ocean.

'Does he know you saw him?'

Assume one man. One sniper with a long-distance rifle. It would be dangerous to assume anything else.

'I don't think so.'

'Why not? You were looking straight at him.'

'At a distance of a couple of hundred yards. And I didn't stop moving.'

'It looked as if you were just making a last check before you came in here.'

'Yes.'

He was slowly pulling off his gloves.

'It can't be the KGB,' I told him.

'No.'

They wouldn't work like that. This was their territory, what London so graciously calls the host country. The KGB don't need to set up a sniper to pick off a spook: they'll just send a van in and drag him on board and if he gets clear then they'll send in a hundred men, cover a whole city with checkpoints as they were doing now. You don't in any case get very rapid promotion in the KGB for hauling a dead spook into headquarters without giving anyone a chance to put him under the light and pick everything out of his head.

'Then it can only be the Rinker cell.'

'As far as my briefing tells me,' Ferris said, 'they're the only active people in the field.'

Three lights, red, green and white, crossed the oblong of the window as the plane climbed into the circuit. They vanished quite suddenly into the fog layer. It was getting worse, creeping in from the sea.

'I couldn't be absolutely sure,' I said, 'when I came here.'

'Of course not.' He said it at once and with emphasis.

I always know when I'm being followed. No one had followed me here to the rendezvous. They'd used chain surveillance, and at a distance: two or three of them taking up positions at strategic points and using field-glasses — they'd be totally undetectable. If they'd used more people than that, they would have been some of the men with shovels among the work gangs: again, undetectable. It wasn't important any more to question how they'd got a fix on me at the hotel. It could have been the courier in Kandalaksha turned by the Rinker cell to work for them under duress or a bugged line or the hotel porter or simply efficient field work. What was important now was how to leave this hulk alive and if that were possible then how to lose them before I went to meet Zhigalin.

Ferris took a card out of his pocket and passed it to me, a regulation issue made of wide-grain wood fibres treated with magnesium and designed to burn in less than one second or dissolve into pulp in water. On it was an address in Murmansk.

'Your safehouse,' he said, 'though you may not need it for more than a few hours; it depends on what my people can arrange for you. The phone number is mine, though I may have to move in with you until we can secure Zhigalin. If you lose contact with me you can still call that number and they'll put you in direct touch with the chief of station in Moscow.' He stared through the window again. He couldn't see the man with the lens from this angle; he wanted to be ready if anybody came past the window from that direction: there would be one or two seconds' warning before they opened the door.

I put the card into my wallet.

'If someone else answers the phone when I call that number, do I speak English or Russian?'

'It doesn't matter. They're fluent in both.'

'Is it strictly secure?' Briefing terminology for bug-proof.

'Yes.'

'I don't think Fane's line was.'

Ferris turned from the window to gaze at me. 'Possibly not. Mine is. You're safe with it in any eventuality.' He paused to give it emphasis. 'If there's no answer, it just means they've had to abandon.'

'They'd cut the phone?'

He looked faintly shocked. 'No. Blow it up.'

'Sorry.'

'You really have been slumming it, haven't you?'

This was why I'd demanded Ferris from London. He's not only highly experienced in handling a shadow but he's also technically faultless. Most people would cut a phone line and leave it at that if they had to clear out, but a line can be joined together again and you can call up and blow the whole of the mission if you don't know they've done that. Ferris had rigged a bang.

'Any briefing?' I was getting impatient now. I wanted to know what was going to happen when I went through that doorway, whether I was going to get my brains blown all over the place or whether I could go back through the snow and find a cafe and sit with a bowl of soup by the steamy windows and let everything else wait while I celebrated life as the warmth reached my stomach.

It happens often during a mission but you never quite get used to it. It's the feeling that comes to you when you know you've moved into a close-focus red sector that can prove terminal, when you can't go back and you can't stay where you are and you can't move forward without risking the absolute totality of all that your life has meant until this point in time. The feeling is like hunger but less physical, more ethereal, almost mystical, because you're close to the final answer and it might not be what you hope.