Northlight

The man wasn't looking in at me through the dirty glass panel; he was looking along the street, shrugging himself into his fur coat against the freezing night. I didn't think he was a danger.

'The objective is there,' Ferris told me. 'He's expecting you, and the parole is Potemkin. Repeat.'

I went over the quay and the barge numbers and the parole.

'The timing is very critical,' he went on slowly, articulating with care. This was not only the most important briefing for the whole of Northlight but also the last, if things went well. 'There will be a dark blue Zhiguli van within sight of the barge and just north of it, facing the shoreline. A courier will be waiting at the wheel. The parole is the same. He will take you both to the airport.'

I looked through the glass at the skyline but it wasn't possible to see how bad the fog was; since the full dark had come down the fog had been visible only in the floodlit areas. But this was why Ferris had been forced to give me a deadline: he was going to fly us out.

The man was peering into the kiosk now, getting impatient.

'At the airport, you'll be driven straight to a Beriev BE-12 twin-engined domestic aircraft with private markings, standing at the north end of runway Two. The pilot has flown for us twice before in the past five years and was found satisfactory. He is a mercenary. The parole is the same. Your flight time will depend on the weather conditions and on foxing the radar stations along the border, but we expect you to land in Hoybuktmoen, Norway, within roughly an hour from takeoff. I think that's all. Any questions?'

'Christ, you worked fast.'

'Fane set up most of it.'

Slight reaction in the stomach nerves.

'Have you checked everything thoroughly?'

There was a brief silence and I knew he wasn't going to answer that. 'All right, I know you did but I don't trust that man. He-'

'That's paranoia.'

I let the muscles go slack. Paranoia, yes, probably, but that bastard had taken on an execution for Croder and I didn't know where he was, he could be still in Murmansk. I was within a kilometre of the objective and we were triggered for the final run out and it was Fane who'd set most of it up and I didn't like it, I could feel the gooseflesh under the coarse sleeves of my coat as the skin shrank and stomach nerves went on crawling just as they'd crawled when I climbed into that van in Kandalaksha and sensed extinction.

'Do you know what you 're asking?'

The man was rapping at the glass door now and peering in again and I mouthed at him that he was a fucking whoreson and he seemed quite surprised.

'I am asking you to understand,' Ferris was telling me on the line, 'that I came here at your request to get you out if I could. It wasn't convenient, but I came, and now I can in fact get you out, and I'm not going to allow mission-fatigue and a touch of paranoia to stop me. It hasn't occurred to you that you owe me your trust.'

Sweat running down my flanks, the bloody little organism shit-scared to make the final move, take the final chance, teetering on the brink with cold feet and a sickening stomach, typical bloody end-of-mission panic because the nerves had taken enough and they didn't want any more, they wanted peace.

Using Fane as an excuse.

Fane.

A twitch in the stomach nerves every time I thought of him, Pavlov's dog syndrome but this won't do.

He tried to get you killed.

Relax. Let the muscles go, they're in knots again.

Fane. He might still be. Shuddup.

Fane might. Shuddup.

Standing here in a bloody phone-box running with sweat and scared to try the final run because it might not work, it might leave me here in this stinking hole with my blood icing in the bullet holes because somewhere along the line that murderous bastard. Fane. Shuddup will you for Christ's sake this is just-Relax. Sweat it out. Relax.

Slow down. Deeper breaths. Slow down.

Easy does it, so forth.

It's like coming up from dark water.

Have you ever panicked? There's only one way out, you've got to do it yourself and it's like coming up from the dark water. You'll know what I mean if it ever happens to you, you'll know.

Panic's a killer.

He hadn't said a thing. He was waiting. It hadn't been as long for him as for me because time slows down when the psyche gets pushed close to the edge of things.

'Do you think that's all it is? Paranoia?'

My voice sounded extraordinarily calm.

'Of course,' Ferris said.

'Sorry.'

'Don't worry, I've been waiting for it. As a matter of fact I was expecting it to happen sooner.'

Perfect handling. This was a model of perfect handling by a local director of an executive in the field suffering from a totally characteristic bout of mission-fatigue at the moment when he felt the final pressure coming on, at the moment when he longed so much to get out and go home that the thought of failing to do that was scaring the guts out of him. Ferris had known it had to come and he'd waited for it and simply held off and let me deal with it alone, which is the only way.

'God knows,' I told him, 'why I got you all the way from Tokyo.'

'Perversity. Any questions?'

'Only one. The objective's likely to be in an unpredictable state of mind. What do I do if he changes it suddenly and decides he ought to stay here in Mother Russia and face the music and all that?'

'Get him out.'

'Regardless?'

'Yes. Get him out.'

'Understood.'

'I shall be here at this number the whole time, until I get the signal that you're down safely in Norway.'

'Fair enough. See you in the Caff.'

I put the receiver on the hook and pushed the glass door open and nearly knocked the silly bastard over.

'I thought you were going to be in there all bloody night!'

'Bollocks.'

I reached the North Harbour soon after four o'clock, an hour and a half later. There were still checkpoints all over the place and I had to make a lot of detours through streets under deep snow, keeping away from the floodlit areas. No one followed me. A dark blue Volga saloon with the KGB insignia on the number plate had passed me twice when I'd had to leave cover and go through a main street but it looked like a routine patrol and I didn't let it worry me. The bout of eleventh-hour nerves was over, and as I walked through the ruts of the harbour road towards the final rendezvous I believed that whatever happened now, Ferris would get me out with the objective.

It was a black-painted hulk with snow thick on its decks and the mooring cables pulling at the rings to the movement of a swell rolling in from the sea. The dark blue Zhiguli van was standing against the wall of a wharf just north of the barge, and I went up to it and exchanged parole and countersign with the driver.

In the distance the headlights of the traffic swept the snow drifts and picked out the dark figures of the work gangs; I couldn't identify individual vehicles from here but some of them would be militia and KGB patrols. None of them turned along the quay in this direction.

It was 04:34 hours when I checked my watch and broke cover and walked across the packed snow to the barge and went aboard. The snow had been packed down between the landing-plank and the open hatch amidships by the passage of feet, and the outlines of boots had frozen into hard grey ice. I didn't call out because there was no need: the briefing had been perfectly clear and there should be only one man on board — the objective.

I went down the companion ladder into the pitch darkness and the acrid stench of coal, and when I reached solid planks I turned and looked for signs of life.

'Freeze.'

Light struck across my eyes and I put a hand up to shield them but all I could see in the glare was the blued steel of a gun.