Adam Hall - Northlight

'I am at your command, comrade Gage.' An odd kind of whimpering started as I got into the front and shut the door. I think he was actually weeping.

'Airport?' the driver asked me.

'Yes. Have you been over the route?'

'Of course.' He sounded hurt. 'We're running late, do you know that?'

'Best I could do. What's your name?'

'Antonov.' That's what we all said.

'Are you carrying arms?'

He looked at me as we got into second gear along the frozen ruts. 'I have a gun. Why?'

'If there's any trouble. I don't want you to use it. If you get clear on your own that's your own business but all the time you're with me you don't even show your gun, now is that understood?'

'Whatever you say, Colonel.'

Ferris had given him my executive's operational ranking. 'All right, but don't call me that if we meet anyone.' I watched a pair of blue-tinted headlights turning along the quay from the shore road. 'How long will it take us to reach the aircraft?'

'Not long. Fifteen minutes.' He was staying in second gear; the ruts were sending the front wheels all over the place. The blue-tinted headlights swept across our windscreen and didn't dip. 'Whoreson,' the driver said and lowered the visor.

'Have you a military escort for me?' Zhigalin-had stopped crying and was leaning with one hand on the seat-back.

'A what?'

'A military escort. That would be correct, and I have no objection.'

'All you've got as an escort to the West, old son, is a shagged-out ferret. Sorry about that.' I didn't expect him to understand but that wouldn't matter because the other vehicle was pulling across the quay right in front of us with its headlights still blazing and we slid to a stop to avoid hitting it.

Two uniformed figures got out and came up to the van with their — guns drawn, one on each side and dragging the doors open.

'KGB! Out! Out! Hands on your heads! Out!'

Liz threw the KGB patrol car into reverse across the ruts and then sent it forward in a tight sliding turn to miss the van and straightened up, driving on dipped headlights now.

I could hear a siren somewhere.

Zhigalin had been forced into the front of the car and I was in the rear with the KGB sergeant. He was holding his gun at my head.

Liz got into third gear, sending the car in a series of zigzags across the treacherous surface. She was in KGB uniform with major's insignia on the shoulders.

'Clive, can you deal with that man?' She said it in English.

Zhigalin sat in the front with his head turned to watch her, not understanding what she'd said.

There were more sirens now from the shore road, and headlights were swinging onto the quay towards us.

I had to take her on trust. There was no other way.

'Clive, you've got to see to that man. It's no good if you-'

There was only a marginal vector available because if I tried dragging the gun-hand downwards I risked taking the shot in the pelvis and if I knocked it aside it would send it in an arc across Liz and Zhigalin so I used a rising wedge-hand to send it straight upwards but there wasn't enough leverage and the first shot ploughed through my scalp and I had to work very fast and connect my left hand with his neck and even then I wasn't in time to stop a second shot smashing into the door pillar before I could impact with the baroreceptors in the carotid artery and shut down his nervous system. The gun dropped across my leg and I kicked it under the front seat and got the window down to clear the air before we started choking on the cordite fumes.

Liz threw a white-faced glance over her shoulder. 'Shit, he had two kids-'

'He's not dead.'

The car lurched as the wheels lost traction across a patch of ice and the headlight beams swung across the stern of a fishing boat tied up at the quayside. A lot of militia patrol cars were coming past us from the shore road with their code lights flashing and their sirens on, one of them clipping our rear wing as it slewed across the ruts.

'Hit that window, Clive. I don't want anyone seeing in.'

I wound it shut and took a look at the sergeant. He was slumped over across his knees and I dragged him upright because I didn't want him to get the blood back into his brain too soon.

'What about my courier?' I asked Liz. 'The one in the blue van.'

She talked across her shoulder. 'I told him to get the hell out of here on foot if he could. I didn't want him along.'

'How did it happen,' I asked her, 'did they get Fane?' It was difficult to think logically with this amount of action going on but I needed to know things because I didn't want to go into this kind of situation without a rough idea of the score. And that was all that could have happened: somehow they must have got hold of Fane. He'd set up this rendezvous and handed the briefing to Ferris.

'Right.' Liz swung the car at ninety degrees onto the shore road, sending a white bow-wave up from a snow drift. 'They got your courier in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha and grilled him and he blew Fane.' She had to choke something out of her voice. 'It took four days.'

'When did they pick up Fane?'

'Last night when he was getting on a plane for Berlin in Leningrad. They started work on him right away. Jesus Christ-' she was slapping the wheel with the flat of her hands-'I didn't know it was going to be like this when I-'

Someone else hit us and she swung the wheel and straightened up along the shore road. There weren't so many code lights flashing now and I jerked a look through the rear window and saw a whole line of patrol cars jockeying along the quay towards the barge. Fane must have held out until only minutes ago.

'Can we make the airport?' I asked Liz. There was some torn metal whining on a rear tyre where we'd just been hit.

'I'm going to try. There was no way you could've got there in that van — we're stopping everything that moves.' She tugged the radiophone off the clip and began talking in fluent Russian. 'This is Major Benedixsen. I have Captain Zhigalin under arrest and I'm proceeding straight to headquarters with him. There is no need for further action. I repeat: I have Captain Zhigalin with me now under close arrest.'

Zhigalin jerked a look at me across the seat-back.

'Everything's under control,' I told him. 'Don't do anything stupid.' I looked at the nervy green eyes in the driving mirror. 'Liz, how long have you been doubling for the CIA?'

Her eyes flicked upwards to watch mine, and she gave a strange little laugh. 'I've been doubling three years, but not for the CIA. I'm KGB. A defector from the militarist West. I'm working for peace, Clive, and right now the only chance of getting it is the Vienna summit. We've got to make it happen, and this man is the key. You've got to take him across.'

The front wheels hit something in the snow and sent us into a wild slide against a lamp standard before Liz got traction again. The KGB sergeant started moaning and I flicked his earlobe and got his eyes open and said, 'If you make any kind of move I'm going to blow your head off.' I looked back at the mirror but Liz was concentrating on the road again. Only if we are seen as a fellow nation, with worth to offer the world, with goods to trade, with ideas to exchange and with the future to share on an equal footing, can it also be seen that we are ready to go to the conference tables and join with others in drawing the world back from the abyss of war and mutual annihilation that lies in our path.

I had seen, in that hotel room, that she'd believed hi this, but I didn't realize till now that she'd actually written that pamphlet and slipped it under my door.

'Did Fane give your people the whole set-up?' I asked her.

'No. Just the rendezvous. I got it over the radio twenty minutes back when I was still trying to locate you and get you out.'