Adam Hall: Northlight

'I worked with him once,' I said. 'With Brekhov.'

'Did you?'

He knew bloody well I had: it was only a year ago, on the Corridor thing, when he was already Chief of Control.

'How are they sending him through?'

'We're not quite sure.'

'When will you know?' I turned around and looked at him, and he offered a faint, deprecating smile.

'I think at this point the questions ought to stop, don't you?'

I took a deep breath, slowly so that he shouldn't notice. 'Not necessarily.'

He shrugged. 'We had a signal in from Leningrad an hour ago. He was trying to get onto a plane for Potsdam, using permanent cover for the run out, a maintenance engineer for Aeroflot. We-'

'Are Signals keeping open for him?'

'Oh yes.'

'Who's at the console?'

'Fletcher.'

'Listen, has Brekhov got any backups, any relay people, anyone in the field with him?'

'No. He only ever runs alone.'

I stuck my hands in the pockets of my mac, feeling the cold now, the cold of the nerves, of the night, as the knowledge of total commitment began spreading through the organism like a drug, sending a slow awareness through the infinitely manifold receptors that things had changed, that soon it would be as it had been not too long ago, only weeks ago, when I had believed, crossing the narrow neck of water from Tangier, that they were still with me, and would never leave me until they'd done for me.

This feeling would go, soon. The cold would go. It was just a kind of shock, extended in time to lessen its impact. The organism looks after itself, if only you'll let it.

'There's a lot more,' I said, 'to this thing, isn't there, than picking up a package from a courier?'

Croder turned away and turned back and said when he'd thought it out, 'I'll put it this way. Whoever we send out to meet Brekhov, we'll be putting on continuing standby in case there's more to be done. And with this kind of background — the business of the American submarine — it would be logical to think that there will indeed be more for him to do, a very great deal more. He might not even find himself alone any longer, but the nucleus of quite a complex cell.'

'I only ever work alone. You know that.'

'The mark of the true professional is that he's flexible.'

'Damn you,' I told him, 'don't keep putting up obstacles. I want the job.'

He stood with his feet carefully together and the light playing in his eyes as he watched me, while through the glass of the window I listened to the rumbling of a late taxi turning a corner down there in the rain, and then silence, and then, I swear it, the sound of steadily running feet.

'But of course.' He went to the desk and picked up a phone and pushed three buttons and waited. Someone came on the line and he said, 'Quiller has agreed to go. Set it up, will you?'

'You know, of course,' Charlie said, stirring the whisky in his tea, 'that Croder is a non-fattening, sugar-free, artificially-flavoured turd. Don't you?'

'He's all right.'

'But he's conned you into another mission, three weeks after you got back from Tangier.'

'I let him do it.'

Charlie watched me for a bit and then drank from his cup.

'Lucky bastard.'

I wanted to leave him, but we never do, or not without a good excuse. It's been a year now since they took him off the books and he's been sitting here in the Caff ever since, talking to anyone who'll listen. He says he's waiting for them to send him out again, not on his own — he knows that's over now — but to help a spook who's messed things up so badly that they can only send someone who's totally expendable to get him out alive if he can. It could even happen, but it would only be a gesture, something to tell the widow: we sent a man out there to help him, but things were just too difficult.

'Go home, Charlie,' I said. 'It's gone four.'

'When the rain stops.'

He's afraid he won't be here when they need him, as a gesture, as comfort for someone's widow. That's why you can never get him to go home when there's something big running, with the main console in Signals manned twenty-four hours a day and the Chief of Control sleeping here and that unearthly sense of quiet that settles over the building in ways that a stranger wouldn't recognize, not knowing, for instance, that Daisy and the other girls don't normally put the china down as carefully as this.

'You want a drop more, love?'

'I shall be pissed.'

She took his cup away.

'I shall be pissed,' he said to me with his red eyes narrowed with fatigue, 'and then I shall go out of this fucking place and walk under a fucking taxi. But that's not my game.'

His game is to wait, if necessary forever, for them to send him out again on a last hopeless mission, so that he doesn't have to be picked up in the street or in whatever bleak one-roomed flat gives him shelter. He sits here waiting to go out, and take his own death with him to the rendezvous.

'You say it's gone four?'

'Five past,' I said.

He fiddled with his Seiko. 'Synchronize watches, gentlemen.'

Then I saw Binns coming in. He looked round and saw me and came between the tables and stood looking down with the rain still dripping off his mac.

'You're waiting for clearance, right?'

'Yes.'

'Let's go.'

I put my hand on Charlie's shoulder as I got up. 'It's nothing interesting this time. Nothing you'd even touch.'

'You don't use a gun, do you?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'None of your bloody business.'

Binns gave a faint grin and made a note: No firearm.

It's just that I prefer to use my hands.

'Next of kin?'

'None.'

He looked up again, then thought better of it and said nothing, making a note. They'd got all this stuff already in the files, but some of us go through changes in our habits or our personal lives and they want to catch things on our way through Clearance. We don't get any younger and we don't get any braver in this trade; there's a diminishing return syndrome at work, and when they take a shadow exec, through his clearance and find he's asking for additional things like a larger-calibre gun or a flak vest or extra cyanide capsules or permission to kill at discretion they'll fail his clearance and send him up to Norfolk for refresher training, and if he can't put out his usual score they'll give him an office job or retire him. Charlie isn't the only one; a lot of us go that way.

'Bequests?'

'The usual.'

Binns looked up. 'What's the usual?'

You're asked to be precise, in Clearance. They want statements, because they could be your last. 'Home Safe.'

'Is that a bank?'

'How did you get so bloody ignorant, Binns?'

He twisted in his chair and prodded the computer and the screen lit up. Shelter for Abused Wives.

'Sorry.' He made a note. 'Current languages?' "French, German and Russian.' I picked a splinter from the edge of his pinewood desk. Some of us pull up our chair close enough to do it, and it already looks as if the rats have been at it; we do it to leave a weird kind of signal, I suppose; or perhaps we think subconsciously that if we go on long enough we'll pick the whole bloody building down and we can all go home.

But I was feeling better now. The cold had gone, and the nerves had settled down; being committed is like that: you're in it again and there's nothing you can do about it now.

'Who's going to run me?' I asked Binns. He'd get to that part eventually, but I wanted to know now.

'Croder.'

'Personally?'

That's right.'

'Jesus.' The Chief of Control normally ran three or four operations at the same time, if there were no paramilitary involvement. 'Is he giving me a local control in the field?'

'Not yet. You won't need one. There's just the rdv with the courier and you're back home again.'