'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.
'No further briefing,' Ferris said, and put on his gloves and looked at his watch. '22:14?'
I checked my own and had to set it back half a minute. It doesn't ever matter what the time is by your own watch or by the local clocks: the time is what your local control says it is, because everything depends on him.
Without my gloves on the cold was already numbing my hands; as soon as I'd reset my watch I put them on again but the cold didn't go; it was everywhere in my body now, in my bones, because I would have to go out there first. One field director could run a dozen missions, a dozen executives: he was normally an older man with infinitely wider experience and infinitely greater responsibility to the Bureau; he would always get home safely because his papers were unimpeachable, unless he ran foul of a strike or a trap that was set for the man he was running.
So I got up first, pulling my gloves tighter and stepping past Ferris to the door as the wrecked fuselage creaked to the shifting of my weight.
The man out there would be cold too, crouching against the trunk of a tree and unable to move, impatient, as I was, but for a different reason: he'd want to get it done with successfully, get it over and report back to base while the blood still seeped from the body and the whiff of cordite tainted the stillness and the arm lay outstretched with the hand reaching for what now it could never hold.
'Probably just field-glasses,' I heard Ferris say as I pushed open the door.
'Yes.' I stepped down onto the snow.
27 DEADLINE
The first time I telephoned Ferris was at noon on the next day. He answered himself and at the second ring.
'It's difficult,' I told him.
One of my feet was bleeding.
'How difficult?'
She didn't go back to her desk as the man had done at the last hoteclass="underline" she went out of the lobby and left me alone in the phone-box, an immense woman, immense.
'They simply won't let me go,' I told Ferris.
I'd been trying to shake them off the whole morning but the militia checkpoints were all over the place and that made it impossible to use the normal routine for getting clear of surveillance because the risk of running into a checkpoint or a two-man patrol was now appalling and the Rinker cell knew that: they had me in what amounted to a mobile trap.
'You'll have to keep trying,' Ferris said. 'I'll have a deadline for you any time now and it'll be close.'
Sweat was clammy on me: I'd been scrambling through those bloody streets and into buildings and out again and onto buses and off again and all they'd done was switch stations with their field-glasses and keep me comfortably in sight.
'How close?' I asked Ferris. I don't like close deadlines, they can be murderous.
'Some time today.' He didn't like saying that. He knew what I was up against.
'In daylight?' (If you could say that: it was already like dusk.) 'If it can be done. If not, as soon after nightfall as we can do it.'
I didn't need to ask him what the deadline was for: it was for making contact with the objective, Zhigalin. Ferris wouldn't set it up until he knew he could get us both out: we were running right into the final phase of the mission but the whole bloody place was a bright red sector and I didn't know what the chances were of throwing off the Rinker cell. Until I could do that, I couldn't go to meet Zhigalin. He was their main target: the moment I was with him they'd close right in and shut the trap and throw me onto a scrap heap and take him underground.
There were five of them. I'd seen four of them at one time and when I'd gone round a corner and into an apartment block and out through the fire escape on the second floor I'd seen the fifth there waiting for me as if he'd known my next move and when I'd got clear of his surveillance zone I'd run right into one of the others at a distance of fifty yards, close enough to recognize him if I saw him again. That was when I'd cut my foot on something buried in the snow, the blade of a shovel or something.
The blood seeped into my boot.
'They're extremely good,' I told Ferris.
'They must be.' He meant if I hadn't been able to get clear of them by now; I'd been working at it the whole morning.
I'd had my bowl of soup last night. Sat there with it, savouring the warmth in some stinking little railway cafe while a drunk had told me all about his bitch of a wife and the way she looked down on him because she'd landed a job in the post office as a sorting clerk. Now she's in government service she thinks she's running the bloody Politburo, leaning over the table with his face stuck into mine and one black-nailed hand so close to my bowl of soup that he kept getting drops on it and once or twice raised it to his mouth and licked it, three times a week I have to get my own supper, the bitch, the satanic bloody stuckup strumpet, but I listened to every word because I loved the man, because Ferris was right last night, it had just been a pair of field-glasses under the trees and my brains hadn't gone all over the place when I'd stepped down onto the snow — life is sweet, my friend, and never sweeter than when you believe it's no longer yours for the living, so why don't you, I asked the poor bastard — he was a huge man — just pick her up and sit her down on a red-hot samovar and don't take her off again till she promises to get your supper?
Soup in my stomach, blood in my shoe. And never sweeter, so forth, because any time now they were going to drive me so hard that I'd end up making a mistake and go pitching straight into a checkpoint, finis.
But they knew the danger of that. They were extremely efficient. They knew that if they drove me too hard they could lose me to the KGB and lose Zhigalin too because I was the only way in to him. I'd never been in this kind of situation before when the very people who'd trapped me were doing all they could to protect me from the host-country security services: one of them had actually given a little signal when he'd seen I was going to run into a KGB patrol on the far side of a work gang: he'd actually warned me.
But the rope was shortening. Ferris couldn't keep Zhigalin underground forever. The Rinker team couldn't keep on running me through the streets like this forever. One of two things was going to happen: they would unintentionally run me slap into a checkpoint or they'd close right in and pick me up and take me somewhere with thick walls and turn up the stereo and ask me where they could find my local control and get him to lead them to Zhigalin with a gun at his back, and that would be all right because I couldn't tell them where Ferris was but they'd still have to risk leaving me on the floor in a mess with the stereo still blaring away. But it would be their last chance and they knew that. They would only come for me if there was no other way.