'Were you seen coming in here?'
'Not by any professionals.' We kneeled together, our heads bowed.
'He's made contact,' Fane said.
My nerves tautened, then rebounded and went slack.
'We haven't got much time.' His hand dug into his coat.
I'd thought it would never happen, but now it was here with us, a cold fact, and the mission was suddenly swinging into a new phase, the most difficult, the most dangerous. We had access to the objective and now it was possible, achievable, after that first long run without real direction, four deaths in five days as we'd circled blindly in the dark with nothing to do but wait. Now the waiting was over. The sleeper had wakened.
I would remember the Church of Saint Peter for a long time, and the way we had kneeled together on the cold marble while the others chanted around us, mostly women — white hair and black shawls and worn mottled furs, boots caked with snow — and one old man alone but not far from us, weeping as he prayed, perhaps for peace through the days whose number was growing small for him now in the chill of these deathly winters.
I would remember the scent of wood smoke and incense, and the prismatic light flowing from the coloured glass windows above the dais where the priest stood, a white-bearded man of immense height, a brass ikon jangling on a chain from his neck as he moved in incantation. I would only know later why I would remember this time and this place so well, as a haven for the spirit that I would soon want desperately, and in vain, to return to.
'Take this,' Fane said. 'It's your train coupon.'
I put it away. 'Where to?'
'He's in Kandalaksha, two hundred and twenty kilometres south of Murmansk, on the shore of the White Sea.'
'What the hell is he doing there?'
'He was trying to reach Leningrad and catch the Red Arrow to Moscow.'
'Why Moscow?'
'I think he just panicked and wanted to run.'
Karasov had surfaced and we had access to the objective and on the board in London where the red lamp had been glowing since I'd accepted the mission there were hieroglyphs going up: Northlight was now proceeding as planned, but I' felt sudden anger because panic's got no place in deep operations and Karasov had made things more difficult for us all 'What condition is he in?'
'He sounded frightened, on the phone. Badly frightened. You'll have to handle him with care.' He shifted on his knees. 'Tell me about Rinker. Are you absolutely certain it was a capsule?' I'd reported to Fane first thing this morning from the post office, but we'd been cut off; the snow was causing havoc to the telephone lines.
'Yes. I was there when it happened.' I'd seen capsules used before, when Hideo Matsuda thought he was blown when he came through London airport and saw me waiting for him, and when Clifton had lost his nerve in the run out from Beirut. In the Caff they're called blue babies but it's not very funny..
'So he was making sure the KGB didn't interrogate him,' Fane said. 'He was following instructions.'
'Yes. A real pro.'
He'd know what I meant. Rinker hadn't been operating alone: he was with a cell and it was highly disciplined. Only I the really professional networks can demand of an agent that he gives his life rather than information.
'Have you any clues?' Fane's tone below the chanting of the faithful was very quiet, very controlled, and I knew by now that this was characteristic and consistent with the pressure that had come down on him. We'd assumed that our only opposition to getting Karasov across the frontier would be the KGB, and that was bad enough; but we knew now that some other network was putting its agents into the field. Rinker would be replaced — would already have been replaced.
That was why Fane had asked me if anyone had seen me come in here. The KGB wasn't alert to us. Some other organization was.
'No,' I told him. 'No clues at all.' That was his job, not mine: it was for local control to find out if the field had been breached. 'All I know is that he was Swiss-French with an address in Geneva, but that doesn't mean much: he could be working for any one of a dozen masters and on any level, from secret service to terrorist group."
The priest began leading a canticle, and we all stood up.
'He wasn't CIA,' Fane said. 'They're very keen to get our reports but they wouldn't put surveillance on you: that's been agreed in London.'
I took a prayer-book from the ledge and opened it. 'I want instructions. If you think they've sent in a replacement it might not be possible to get on that train.'
He gave one of his pauses. 'You've got to reach Karasov and get him out. That's paramount. So if anyone gets in your way…'
'You'll have to spell it for me, Fane.'
London is very touchy about taking life, unless the executive's own is endangered.
'If anyone other than the KGB gets in your way, you must get him out of it by whatever means are available, including terminal.'
'Understood.'
He began briefing me, while the singing filled the cavernous stonework of the church, his voice a monotonous undertone as if he were reciting a psalm of his own faith. 'Your train leaves at eight tomorrow morning. It's the earliest available but you'll be quicker than going by road. Don't check out of the hotel: the lobby is under KGB surveillance, as you know. I'll try to get a courier to pick up your things before the staff reports your absence. Have you got a spare key to the room?'
I gave it him.
'I'll try to get someone to take your car down to Kandalaksha if the roads are still open, so that you'll have transport if you need it. I can't guarantee that: he might not get through. Your rendezvous is at noon tomorrow in the main post office. It isn't with Karasov: he's sending a contact.'
'Why?'
'I told you. He's badly frightened. The contact will be wearing smoked glasses with the left lens cracked, and using a white stick. You'll ask him where you can find imported cigarettes, and he'll tell you that those things, are only fit for women. He'll take you to Karasov.' His breath clouded against the prayer-book. 'Karasov told me he changed his identity when he left his unit at Severomorsk, and got someone to do him some new papers. They might be sloppy: you'd better check them over. I'm doing everything I can to get some good ones for him in Moscow, but it'll take time and we'll need a courier to fly them in by hand. Then I've got to send them from here to Kandalaksha. Your own clandestine papers are absolutely foolproof for the whole of the peninsular region, but if Karasov's look unreliable, hold him underground until I can get the new ones to you. Questions?'
'I'll need a bag.'
'Leave the car unlocked tonight outside the hotel. The bag will be put into a rear seat-well, packed for five days.' This time he paused so long that I half-turned to look at him. 'I hope you won't need that amount of time,' he said. 'Control wants the objective over the frontier just as soon as you can get him there.'
His nerves had begun showing, and I noted it. It might not have happened to him before. It had happened to me only twice: at the moment we had access to the objective an unknown network had sent its agents into the field to surveille my travel patterns, and this time the reason was the same. The Rinker cell was hunting for Karasov and trying to use me as a tracker dog. It wasn't going to make things any easier: Karasov himself had lost his nerve and would need dragging like a dead weight to the frontier.
'Questions?' asked Fane again.
'Put a capsule in the bag, will you?'
His eyes moved slightly towards me. 'Didn't you draw one in London?'
'Yes.' I left it at that.
In a moment he said: 'Very well. It'll be inside the head of the electric shaver.'
When the service was over he moved away from me, and I gave him time, hanging back until half the people had shuffled to the massive doors; then I began moving, going out of the candlelight into a night so black that the sky was like a shroud thrown across the city.
She had rings of dark pigment around her nipples, and a way of moving like a swimmer, long-legged and flowing.
'Then I lost my folks, when I was quite young. They were in a car and there was a drunk. By the time I could sleep the whole night through and not wake up crying I was into the cults from coast to coast. A lot of the kids I got to know had lost their parents, except that they were still alive, you know? Then there was this bad cocaine trip and I woke up in a clinic tied to the bed with restraints and everything — but somehow they pulled me out of it. Not too many can survive that amount of coke.'
She was huddled against me like a child, no longer a lover, and in the glow from a street light I saw a tear glistening below her dark lashes.
'And then — oh God, this is going to sound so corny — after two pointless marriages I realized I wanted to spend my life with something much more than a man. I wanted to marry a cause. It sounds more like California than Boston, Massachusetts, doesn't it? But that was the way it was.' She lifted herself onto one elbow so that she could look down at me. 'I kind of found myself standing back and seeing the whole human race caught up in lunacy — war and the fear of war and the threat of war, hot wars, cold wars, wars to end wars, you name it, it comes in all flavours. I saw high school kids on TV saying they didn't feel there was any future any more because they weren't quite sure they could go on waking up and not see a mushroom cloud through the window one day. And finally I discovered — out of anger, I guess — a sense of direction, a conviction there was something I had to do. And I've been doing it ever since, Clive, in my own way, hurling myself at the barricades while everyone else is busy making a detour and maybe getting home sooner. But the barricades are still there, and until I can bring them down, I don't believe-'
'What are they, your barricades?'
'Lies. I don't mean the ones we all tell ourselves and other people, I mean the big ones, the world-class international lies dial talk peace and mean war. Like the ones we were all told about the attempted assassination of the Pope, and like the ones we were told about the Korean airliner. Like the ones we're being told right now about the sinking of the Cetacea.'
'Which ones are they?'
'There's no direct lie, except that the Soviets say they didn't have anything to do with it. There's a cover-up going on, and dial's lying by default. Do you really think we, the people, ever really get to know what goes on behind the scenes? Are we meant to believe there's no quiet diplomacy going on right now between the White House and the Kremlin? Do you believe-' she broke off and gazed at me for a moment and then let her breath out in a quick soft laugh. 'Jesus, Clive, I guess this isn't your night. After a glorious fuck like that you find you're in bed with a poor man's Joan of Arc.' She lowered her body over mine, and I felt the tears dropping one by one on my bare shoulder, while the soft laughter went on. 'You know when people say they don't know whether to laugh or cry?'
'It's a revelation,' I said.
'A what?' She leaned away and watched me again, her eyes liquid in the glow from the street, the colour of green chartreuse.
'I'm not often close to anyone who lets their feelings go.'
'I know. You're a lone wolf type. But that's what you want. Right?'
'It's what I've got." She was beginning to stir questions in me that I'd spent all my life refusing to ask, since the day I had looked down from the window at the broken body of the schoolboy on the flagstones a long way below, while a master hurried from the cloisters with his black gown flapping in the winter wind, to see what had happened: the day when I was suddenly old enough to understand that I had a choice. I could either do what that other boy had done, or I could spend the rest of my life outside society, where it was safe.
'The kind of loneliness I feel,' she said, 'is different.'
I hadn't thrown him, of course. But I knew why he'd done it.
'What kind is that?'
'I get so involved in this idealistic crusade of mine that I don't notice anything else going on. It's like, you know, you're acting on a stage someplace and pulling out all the stops, giving a performance that's going to go down in history, and suddenly you look up and see there's nobody out there, all the seats are empty and the whole place is dark.'
'Yes, that must be lonely.'
'But that's about me again. What about you, Clive? You really enjoy the lone wolf bit?'
I could see, beyond the curve of her naked shoulder, white flakes drifting across the aureole of a street lamp, whirling slowly in the wind.
'I expect I do.'
If there were more snow, the courier might not get the car through to Kandalaksha. It might even hold up the train.
'You expect you do?' She was watching me again. I'd put my wrist watch on the heavy darkwood table by the bed, and could see its figures. It was gone midnight, and I would need to leave here at three, in case of snow on the road to the station.
'Yes,' I told her, and pulled her gently down against me my hands moving along her body from the warmth of her hi — to her long swimmer's thighs, the thought in my mind, as.. comes always to us when we've just received briefing in the field, that Liz Benedixsen might be the last woman I would ever have known. 'I'm going to let you get some sleep,' I told her.
'You don't have to go.'
It wasn't easy to leave her. With the slow drifting down of the snow from the dark sky there was a sense of foreboding.
Post coitus, so forth.
I got into my clothes and took my watch from the table, leaning down to kiss her for the last time. When I reached the door she was sitting up in the bed with her arms round her knees, watching me, her eyes the only colour in the shadows.
'Take care,' she said.