'Look, Vishinsky,' I said, 'I'm a businessman and I deal with businessmen. I told you that at the club. If you want to play the robber baron that's entirely your choice and it's probably quite fun, but I'm not interested. I prefer working with men of intelligence.'
Pushing him as far as I could to see what would happen, bring out his character, test his reactions, watching his eyes change, catching a hint of unease, which I understood quite well. There were no bodyguards in here: the Federal Counterintelligence Service people had presumably issued the invitations with that proviso, not wanting an army standing around to embarrass them in the presence of foreign diplomats. They would be outside the building, the guards, waiting for their employers, watching over the Mercedes and the Jaguars and the Lamborghinis. And this was worrying Vishinsky: at any other time he could have had me surrounded with muscle. It's the same situation when someone who relies on a gun finds he can't reach it in time: suddenly he's lost, powerless. Legge would have to learn this, because it was a lesson that could one day cost him his life.
'You like provoking me, Berinov,' Vishinsky said, his narrow head lifting an inch, the stare as steady as a beam of light playing on my face. 'You like provoking the Cougar.'
'Not really. I never waste energy, and frankly I've got better things to do. If you'll excuse me.' I turned my back on him, looking past the drunken major to the massive gilt mirrors ranged along the wall.
Vishinsky wasn't wasting any time now, didn't want to show haste but moved deceptively fast among the guests towards the main doors, which were standing wide open because of the heat.
I waited until he was out of sight before I followed him, watching the top of his dark pomaded head as he went down the staircase to the lobby. There was a telephone on the mezzanine floor and I used that.
I heard the line open as Ferris picked up on the second ring. He didn't speak.
'Red sector.'
'Where?'
'The Hotel Faberge.'
'Do you need support?'
'No.'
I shut down the signal and used the door to the fire stairs and climbed the eight floors of the building, taking my time. Vishinsky wouldn't bring any action into the hotel until the party was over, didn't need to. There would be three or four exits, possibly more, and by now there'd be at least one of his guards mounted on each of them, sealing the place off from the street. I didn't have any illusions: this was a trap.
You knew there was a chance he'd be here.
Very thin chance, yes. But there must be a hundred dons in this city, and only seven of them are here tonight. Weren't you counting?
I left the fire stairs and went into the corridor, looking for a vacant suite.
I don't like traps.
That's a shame.
Bloody little organism starting to panic.
You needn't have come here tonight.
I'm getting in their way, that's all. I've done it fifty times and the principle's perfectly sound: when you want to bring the opposition into the open you just get in their way. You know that.
The door of the fifth suite along the passage was open and I went in there. found no one.
You could have asked for support.
Oh for Christ's sake shuddup.
The gradual emergence of sweat on the skin as the imagination tripped in and brought biochemical reactions, to be read as normaclass="underline" a trap is a trap and no animal is at peace in one.
Support was the last thing I wanted anyway. Legge had said he could call on fourteen men in his group and Vishinsky had brought six guards into the Baccarat Club and there would have been no earthly point in staging a twenty-gun shoot-out in the street; my job was to infiltrate, not start a bloody war.
The Croder thing, though, was a worry.
The suite was ornate in the fin de siecle Russian style: an ormolu writing desk, two inlaid consoles, a Volkov print – 'Girl With Red Bow' – ivory plush chairs. The windows looked down on the front of the hotel and I could see dark figures against the snow, their breath clouding under the lamplight. Later there would be more, if Vishinsky sent for increased support of his own.
The Croder thing was a worry because the executive had signalled a red sector to his director in the field and it wouldn't stop there: Ferris would relay the information to London through the mast at Cheltenham and the man at the board for Balalaika would reach for the chalk and when the Chief of Signals saw what he'd written it could trigger his decision then and there. Ferris: I think it's possible that at any given time Mr Croder might act suddenly on the dictates of his conscience and instruct me to pull you out of Balalaika and send you home.
We're usually at least halfway through the mission before we find ourselves in a red sector, but this time I'd got into one almost straight off the starting block and Croder wouldn't like that, would blame himself and pull me out before it was too late.
It might be too late already. This is -
Shuddup.
I moved for the door. Time was of the essence: we teach the neophytes at Norfolk that if you're in a red sector you need to get out as fast as you can before the opposition brings in reinforcements and turns the trap into a siege. That was a Federal Counterintelligence Service party going on down there but the Faberge was a regular commercial hotel and a mafiya boss of Vishinsky's calibre could tell the manager he wanted his guards to search the whole building, every vacant room, the elevators, the staircase, the corridors, the mezzanines: the only difference between the dons and the police squads in this city was that the dons didn't need to flash a badge.
Get out fast, but I hadn't got many options. Vishinsky would have ordered his people to cover every exit from this place and stay on the watch all night if they had to, all tomorrow, all the next day – he wouldn't give up, would, on the contrary, bring in more guards to mount the search, changing them in shifts until they'd found me. He was enraged, the Cougar, because I'd committed the unthinkable and laid a hand on his employees, and he wouldn't rest until I was pitched into the back of his Mercedes and driven into the forest and pushed against a tree with no blindfold, no ceremony, just the one short burst that would bring the rage down and leave him sated, redeemed.
With every exit covered the only thing I could do was to get to higher ground, so I moved for the emergency staircase again and climbed the last flight. There was only one chance of getting out of here and that was via the roof.
When I reached the top step I stood listening, hands on the rail as I watched the silent concrete vortex of the staircase below me for movement, shadows, caught one almost at once, flowing across the wall down there and darkening, sharpening under the lamp and then softening as the man kept on climbing, the shadow-gun swinging, cradled in his arms. This was to be expected: the staircase was an obvious exit path and they'd cover it. I could hear his shoes now on the steps, softly, softly, not hurrying – he was simply patrolling the vertical perimeter of the search area, could lock onto me in the instant if he heard or saw me above or below him, rat-tat-tat and the echoes hammering, the smell of cordite, finito.