'And then they wait till it's been snowing for twenty-four hours before they call us out. Is that intelligent?'
'What would you expect of the civic leaders in this place? They spend all day round the stove playing dominoes!'
'Or in the whore-house.'
'That too!'
'Which is not inappropriate, if you think of it, since they're a pack of whoresons!'
Much laughter.
My shovel hit on stone and sent a shockwave up my arm.
'What are you, comrade, a volunteer?'
'Yes.'
'More fool you.' He spat.
A navy transport went past, mud dripping from its dark green paintwork, and jeers went up from the work gang. Jeers came back from the bus. We were left choking on diesel gas with our legs soaked again from the slush-wave.
When I next looked at my watch it was midnight. It was eleven hours since Fane had left the hotel and I'd been back three times to see if there'd been a telephone message. In between I'd worked at the snow with the volunteer gangs, taking a break for a bowl of potato soup at the Red Dawn cafe, hunched by the steamy window in a soaked coat, sure now that Croder wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it, couldn't locate Ferris or persuade him to take over from Fane and local-control me for Northlight.
'Volunteers are all very well, comrade, very patriotic, but what have they done with the taxes we pay? We let them bleed us white and then do the snow-clearing ourselves!'
'Mind my foot with that bloody shovel, that's all I ask.'
After eleven hours of waiting for news I was certain that Croder would leave Ferris in Tokyo and crash-brief one of the shadow executives on standby and put him on a plane in London — one of the Soviet specialists, Hopkins or Bone or Reilly — with instructions to report to Fane in the field. I'd signalled Croder to let him know I was outraged, that was all, to make demands he couldn't hope to meet, simply as a way of easing my injured pride. He had known that.
Another bus crawled past, its wheels spinning on slush and its windows opaque with steam; an open truck followed it, packed with volunteer workers.
'Come on home, you bloody lunatics! It's gone midnight!1 Gravel drummed under the mudguards, thrown up by the tyres.
Fane had put it perfectly well. Tokyo was seven thousand miles from here, twenty-four hours by air even if Ferris had boarded a plane the moment London had signalled him, even if he could get instant connections in Calcutta or Karachi or Tehran and an instant connection in Leningrad. And he'd need high-level Overseas Trade Commission cover to get him through Leningrad to Murmansk: that too was true.
I pushed the shovel under the snow and swung it upwards across the side of the truck, feeling ready now to go back to the hotel again after twelve hours' more or less constant exercise. In that freezing garret I'd have gone crazy listening for the phone to ring in the hall below, and my muscles would have lost their tone.
'Come on, comrade!'
'What?'
'Room for one more!'
Men waving from the truck. I slung my shovel into the bin with the others and climbed onto the running board, hanging on as we lurched through the slush, the mudguards scraping between the snow drifts that loomed under the flickering lamps.
On the other hand Croder might not find anyone available, anyone with my degree of experience. Reilly had come back from the Budapest thing two weeks ago looking like death and Bone was in Norfolk pounding his way through a refresher course in unarmed combat. I didn't know where Hopkins was, but he'd left Bureau-DI6 relations in a mess at the end of his last mission in Rome and Croder would think twice before he sent him out again.
It could conceivably be that the only competent agent available for Murmansk was already there now, jolting his way back to his hotel with ice forming in his boots and the chill of a different climate forming along his nerves because there might, yet again, not be a message.
The concierge was asleep behind his desk when I got there, and shone a torch on me through the glass door before he'd open it up.
'You are asked to ring this number, comrade.' He unfolded a scrap of dirty paper. 'They called an hour ago, but I didn't know where to find you.'
Fane answered.
'They can't locate Ferris. My instructions are to ask you whether you are willing to continue the mission under my local direction.'
Water seeped from my boots across the worn parquet floor, reflecting the light from the cracked white globe above the doors. An engine rumbled outside as a truck spun its wheels, sending gravel hammering against the wall like machine-gun fire.
Fane was waiting.
I didn't trust him.
The concierge was sitting behind his desk with a newspaper, turning the pages — as he waited for me to speak again into the telephone. How many English words did he know, apart from football and chewing-gum and rock 'n' roll?
I didn't trust Fane and I didn't trust Croder. Croder would instruct my local control to set up a trap for me if it suited Northlight, if it would protect the infinitely delicate machinery of East-West relations at this crucial time, if one lone man's death could make safer the lives of millions. And my local control would follow the instructions, as he'd done before.
I will risk death in the labyrinthine tunnels of a given mission, ferreting my way through the dark and through the dangers, alert for the footfall, for the shadow, for the glint of steel that must be seen in time and dealt with, dog eat dog, for this is the way, the only way to the objective: this is my trade and this is how I ply it. I always know, when I leave the open streets of public life and slip into the alleyways of private peril, that this time it may lead me to that last dead end, that this time there may be a rose for Moira.
But I won't let my own controls plot my destruction, however vital the issue, however great the gain. I reserve the right, gentlemen, to face my deathbringer in my own good time.
'Are you there?'
Fane.
'Tell Croder no. Tell him I'm resigning the mission.'
It was the first time I'd shut the trap for myself.
Quite a breakthrough. Something new every day.
No regrets.
Master of my own fate, so forth. If I can't parry the knife in time I'll take it into the heart, not in the back.
Bullshit. Bravado.
You 're cut off from London.
Aye, there's the rub.
Cut off from London, yes, the lifeline snaking away across a white-capped sea, or any other bloody metaphor you can think of.
Militia.
I bent over the map, concentrating on the frontier. It didn't give much idea of what I would find there, if I ever reached it.
Two militiamen. They'd come through the doors a minute ago and were standing still, looking around. Routine. What did they expect to find in a public library, an English spy or something?
I concentrated on the map, leaving the two still figures at the periphery of my vision, where only movement was registered. I had my papers on me but they could be dangerous now, fatal. It would depend on what connection they'd made in their minds between the dead Lithuanian they'd found alongside the railway lines and the explosion in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha and the engineer Petr Lein, who'd been found by the railway in Murmansk and taken to the hospital. The man with the scarred face.
Had Fane told the KGB my cover?
When they'd made that famous deal of theirs, had London instructed my local control to reveal my cover: Petr Lein? So that everything should look above board? That was possible. It was possible that the two KGB officers who'd checked me out on the train had known who I was, that I was working partly for them, for their sacred motherland, by arrangement with Mr Croder. In which case my papers could now be lethal. It had been all right before that thing had blown one or two of their men to bits in the freight-yards but things were different now and if Petr Lein got picked up by a patrol he could find his name on their all-points bulletin sheet: finis.
They hadn't moved.
The scale was 1:250,000, the biggest I could find. Elevations and sea depth in metres, civil and military aerodromes marked, roads, railways, navigable canals. The area covered was from the junction of the Soviet, Finnish and Norwegian borders in the south to the Barents Sea in the north. The Soviet-Norwegian border was the northernmost leg of the Iron Curtain, ending in the sea.
Somewhere along this line I would have to cross into Norway.
Without London?
Movement along the periphery. They were going out. I lifted my head half an inch and saw them more clearly. One of them was looking back. Not at me, at the girl with the footballs under her sweater, ah, sweet affirmation of life, comrades, what would we do without it.
Finnmark on one side, Murmanskaya on the other. It looked easy enough on the map but the map didn't specify the number of watchtowers and floodlights and war-trained dogs and mines and trip-wires and peak-capped sharpshooters frustrated with boredom of guard duty and eager for relief, bang bang and you're dead, my good friend, you shouldn't have told Chief of Control where to get off, he doesn't like it.
No regrets.
The nearest part of the frontier to Murmansk: 110 km. The nearest town to the frontier: Pechenga, 11 km. Airports at Pechenga and Koshka-Yavr, with another one at Salmiyarvi, further west, much further west, too far from here with the roads in this condition. And in any case there was no chance of getting into an aeroplane without London's help.
It's easy for the local directors because they carry permanent cover and they don't have to go clandestine. It's possible for a shadow executive to reach his objective and get it across the border or hand it to his control or a courier and leave the host country — a charming term, yes — just as he came in with his cover still intact and his papers acceptable for franking, but it's rare. During the course of the mission things can get very sticky and he'll have to go clandestine and assume a host-country cover and operate just this side of the capsule unless he's lucky. Even if a wheel doesn't come off somewhere it's not often he can avoid going clandestine: I was working under the cover of a journalist but that was restrictive: a foreign journalist can't suddenly take off for Kandalaksha on his own and that's what I'd had to do because that's where the objective was.
The man opposite me at the worn teakwood table was nursing his chilblains under black wool mittens, running a finger down the columns of print, his one eye steady, his cracked lips moving as his finger stopped and he read the paragraph and then moved on, not an old man but a man beyond his years, his cheeks cavernous and ears shrivelled by unending winters, red as raw bacon. What was he looking for, with his eye and his finger? An apartment? A second-hand chair? A job?
Not for a hole in the frontier.
A railway line ran from Murmansk into Pechenga. That might be still open. The roads would be impossible. But once in Pechenga?
The sea.
A boat.
Without London?
In the ordinary way if your main control is good and knows how to pull strings internationally, how to handle DI6 in the overseas missions, how to use Interpol for special information, and if your director in the field is also good, and knows how to get papers forged and couriers briefed and safehouses set up and protected, you stand a fair chance of getting home, sometimes a bit shot up or with your nerves like a disco hall but getting home. Otherwise we wouldn't let them send us out, we're not in the kamikaze club for God's sake. We like to know there's a chance.
But that's with London behind you.
Different now.
A feeling of being dwarfed suddenly by the immensity of this foreign land with its regiments of men with black boots and peaked caps and bolstered. guns, their eyes restless as they looked for inconsistencies in the social environment, for someone hurrying or turning away or giving unsatisfactory answers to a doorman's questions — he offered me fifty rubles, comrades, but of course I refused, being suspicious of such a thing — and most of all for not being in possession of correct papers: that was where the greatest danger lay — at the checkpoints, the road-blocks, the frontier posts. You are from Murmansk, citizen? Then what are you doing in Pechenga?
A feeling of having, yes, committed suicide, or at least of having set the scene, tying the rope aloft and fetching the chair, and out of vanity, being too proud to go on marching to London's bloody tune. My chances were no better now: they were worse; the only difference was that when the time came I would at least go decently, mown down by enemy action, not sullied by traitor's knife.
He turned the page of the newspaper, the man opposite me at the table, his lips moving again as his chilblained finger stopped at a line of print. A second-hand stove to keep back the deathly cold of his cramped apartment? A coat with more weight to it than this moth-eaten thing he was wearing? His finger moved on.
It has been known for an executive to be trapped on this side of the Curtain and never get out. Thompson is in Moscow somewhere according to rumour in the Caff, and Pick is said to be in one of the labour camps. Another man, Cosgreave, is said to be living on the shore of the Black Sea with a woman from Tashkent, having decided that the risks of trying to get across on his own weren't worth taking: there's life, after all, in Soviet Russia. Those are the ones we know about, or at least talk about, creating legends to lend a little colour to those dreary corridors. There are others, but we won't discuss them, though I knew personally a high-echelon and very effective shadow who now works for the Fourth Department of the KGB.
And there are those known to have died here, caught in the heat of a counter-operation or running for the border or finishing off a mission the only way they can. Webster, Finnimore, Clay.
Requiescat in pace.
'Have you by any chance, comrade, a violin for sale?'
His one eye watched me with the light of hope in it.
A violin, with fingers like these? 'I'm sorry.'
'Never mind. I had mine stolen, and it's my living, that's all.'
'That was bad luck, comrade.'
I walked out of the public library and turned to the right, conscious that my feet were taking a definite direction, if only back to the hotel to fetch my overnight bag and pay the concierge for his silence. After that I would take the first step towards the frontier and see how far the animal cunning of the organism would get me.
I'd left some spare gloves and a train timetable at the safehouse but I couldn't go back there now. Liz had been sent there to monitor my operation for the Company and Fane would have made contact with them: there was no point now in her staying on. Even if she were still there the place could be a deathtrap for me if she were blown; she wouldn't be utmost-security trained for light cover and she hadn't gone clandestine because her Russian wasn't good enough.
Where else would a man go but to the earth mother?
Not now.
Between the library and the hotel I saw three street-checks going on in the distance: four or five militiamen stopping every pedestrian and at one intersection a whole group of men with shovels on their way to the snow-clearing zones. The search for Captain Kirill Zhigalin, Soviet Navy, was being intensified.
Two militiamen were patrolling the street where the hotel stood and I had to make a detour and keep them surveilled until it was safe to go on. Question: if it was like this between the Murmansk public library and the Aurora Hotel, what would it be like between here and the frontier?
I kicked snow from my boots against the brickwork at the top of the steps and pushed the glass door open.
'You are asked to telephone this number again, comrade.'
He held out the scrap of dirty paper.
Fane answered after three rings. 'They've located Ferris,' he said. 'He's on his way.'