Quiller Meridian

'No, after the crash. I saw a man taking a lot of trouble to get past the checkpoint they'd set up and into one of the transports, just as I was doing.'

This bloody smell was getting on my nerves. If they'd killed that dog it must have been days ago. We support things like bad smells or too much noise with less tolerance, don't we, when the nerves are _ touchy, and mine were like that now because in any given mission the presence of a rogue agent in the field can burden our operations with the need to find out who he is and what he's doing, whether he's dangerous. It can sometimes crash the whole thing for us if he thinks we 're getting in his way and manages to put a bullet into the shadow executive's back. They're difficult to see, those people, difficult to catch, because they haven't got a cell running them — hence the name we give them, «rogue» — and they flit from one sector to another like a bloody bat in the dark.

'So he must have been,' Ferris said, 'on the train. You just didn't sense him there.'

He got off the crate and walked about — minced, almost, taking tiny steps, head down and hands behind his back, your archetypical professor on the lecture platform. It had got him worried, this rogue agent thing.

I said yes, he must have been one of the passengers.' I think I saw him later, in the town. He — '

'To recognize?' Ferris swung his head up.

'No. You don't see much of anyone's face in this weather. I think I recognized his walk, the way he moved. 'I'd seen him on the way to the hotel when I'd been tracking Tanya, but not after that, even though I'd started watching out for him.

In a moment Ferris looked at me and said: 'Paranoia?'

It was a legitimate question: paranoia becomes part of your psychological makeup as you go through the missions: you see shadows, hear footsteps. 'Possibly,' I said. 'But the man avoiding the checkpoint out there was real.'

'Could have been anyone.'

'Yes.'

'I think I've got a gap,' Ferris said, "in the debriefing. Why did you follow the Rusakova woman to that hotel?'

'I lost track of the generals when they were choppered out, and I thought there was the slightest chance that she'd agreed to meet Velichko in Novosibirsk. She'd — '

'An assignation?'

'Yes. She'd been having dinner with him, and it looked rather cosy.'

'Not a bad shot,' Ferris said.

'It didn't pay off — the minute I caught up with him he was dead.'

'Then why is Tanya Rusakova still the key?'

'Because she could put me in contact with her brother.'

'He could know something about the other two generals?'

'He's in the army, and might have his ear to the ground — '

'Or might be persuaded — '

'Yes.'

'You think the generals are here to meet some top brass in the Russian army?'

'Impossible.'

Ferris didn't answer, took a turn and minced for a while with his back to me, didn't want to point out how very thin our chances were of picking up the track again. I went over to the big timber door and found a gap in the boards and stood there with my nose to it, breathing in the sooty smell of the city instead of the sickening stink in this place, freezing my sinuses until my eyes watered, couldn't win.

A rat screamed and my scalp drew tight.

'How long have we got?' I turned away from the door and looked at Ferris. 'Have we got any kind of a deadline?'

He stood still, feet together, thinking it out. There was a whole mass of undigested information in his head, culled from the stuff that had been flooding Signals and Codes and Cyphers in London since Longshot had crashed in Bucharest and every Bureau sleeper and agent-in-place had been called on to send in whatever they thought was useful. Ferris wouldn't be giving it to me en masse: it would clog my perspective in the field, and the field is local, and the executive must concentrate totally on local events. What Ferris would give me, if he decided to give me anything at all, would be a minuscule condensation of the heap of raw intelligence that was burying the analysts in London as the uncut rolls of print came out of the fax machines by the mile.

'Yes,' he said at last, 'we have a deadline. It's zero.'

I listened to the echo of his voice. A zero deadline means just what it says: whatever we have to do will have to be done within every next minute. No leeway, no rest, and no respite.

'The generals were Zymyanin's target,' Ferris said, 'for information. That's what he told you before he was killed. They arrived here yesterday. We don't know that they might not have already finished what they came here to do. They could be leaving Novosibirsk tomorrow morning.'

'Or tonight.'

'Or tonight. Or they might be on their way out of the city now.'

I waited until I could get some kind of conviction in my voice. 'All right, we'll take it from there. I'll try to get Tanya to put me in touch with her brother.'

Ferris watched me, didn't answer. We'd worked together half a dozen times and this is the man I always ask for as my director in the field but don't always get; he is the man those bastards at the Bureau offer me when they're trying to con me into a mission that nobody else will take on. I like working with Ferris because he knows how to get inside my head and I know how to get inside his, which is ironical because we both cherish privacy. But we can cut comers, he and I, dispense with the bullshit and the rigmarole and come down to the bone without touching the flesh, and I knew exactly what he was thinking as he stood there watching me in that reeking hell-hole: he was trying to decide whether to let me go on running with Meridian, because the chances of making any progress with it were critically slight and the chances of my getting picked up by the militia before he could fly me out of the city were infinitely strong. Even the safe-house he'd put me in was a hazard: you don't normally put surveillance on a place like that, there's no need.

There was something else on his mind, and I knew what that was too. If I had to work with a zero deadline I was going to feel the pressure and take risks.

When he spoke I think it was to break my train of thought.

'How do you feel,' he asked carefully, 'about Tanya Rusakova? Roach told me she's rather a stunner.'

'Guilt,' I said. 'I feel guilt, chiefly.'

'Because you exposed her?'

In the debriefing I'd told him we'd both checked in at the Hotel Vladekino, so he knew our names had been together in the register.

'Because I bloody well exposed her, yes.'

My anger against myself was information for him, and I meant it to be. He needed to know my frame of mind, because his job was to handle me in the field, nurture and protect me as best he could and pull me out alive if that were possible, and he would be quite aware that my anger would diminish my instinct for survival by a degree, and the risks I decided to take would be greater.

The obvious had to be put into words to give it weight, to offer me atonement, bring the anger down, lessen the risks. 'But of course,' Ferris said, 'you wouldn't have checked in at that hotel if you'd known Rusakova was spotting the target for an assassin.'

'All right,' I said, 'I would have kept clear, yes, but that isn't in point of fact what happened, is it?'

He paced for a little time and I waited, hoping for more sops for my conscience, but he did better than that. 'See if she'll put you into contact with her brother,' he said gently, 'and then I'll do what I can to fly her out of the city and ask Control to keep her safe in London or the country. Then you can clear your mind.'

He was being too bloody accommodating.

'Listen,' I said and went up to him, looked into those quiet honey-coloured eyes that can conceal his thoughts so well that it seems he's not even thinking at all, that you're looking straight through and into an empty skull. 'Are you going to let me go on running?'