The Scorpion Signal

He shouldn't have said that.

I think I shouted at him as the car pitched against a kerb stone and rolled again. I think I tried to tell him what had happened, that he had said something wrong, that I was a sensitive man and quick to take offence. I heard my voice shouting something, and it was to him, so perhaps that was what I was saying. Then the car rolled again and I could smell the petrol fumes and feel them pricking against my eyes, so I looked for the space where the windscreen had been. My hands were sticky with blood and they slipped on the edge of the instrument panel as I used it for purchase, but I managed to kick back against the seat squab and get the momentum I needed.

The car was still in motion when I slid across the bonnet and grabbed the windscreen pillar to save myself as it bounced for the last time and turned over on to its side. This was when I caught a glimpse of Vader's face again: he'd got out through one of the side windows and timed it badly because of the rolling movement, and went down with his legs still inside and his hands trying to stop the impact as the car turned over on him. His head was just in front of the rear wheel and there was still a certain amount of forward motion. Perhaps he'd been trying to follow me out, I don't know.

I began running.

11: SNOWBALL

'I'm getting out,' I said and he stopped dead and stood there watching me under the trees.

'You can't do that.'

I came back to him, hands in the pockets of the torn coat, bruises all over me, the blood on my face sticking to the woollen scarf I'd put on under the fur hat, my nerves still on the jump even after ten hours' sleep if you could call it sleep, jerking my eyes open every five minutes because I could still hear that bastard yelling at me from the panel over the door, and now Bracken trying to tell me what I could do and what I couldn't do. `This isn't my field,' I told him, 'I need to work alone.'

There'd been two signals for me when I'd got back to the safe-house, one in cypher, one in code: they'd been worried stiff because I hadn't reported, so I'd called Bracken by silent line at the Embassy asking for an rdv — that was four o'clock this morning and now it was six at night and I was shaking with bad dreams and no use to London any more, only a danger. He'd have to understand that.

`What do you mean?' he asked me, 'you need to work alone?'

`There are too many people involved. One of them blasted me off the street.'

I'd never seen him so still. In the car last night he'd been like a cat in a sack and I'd thought it was because he was nervous, maybe I didn't know him very well, he wasn't moving a muscle now and he must be half out of his mind after what I'd just said.

'What happened?' he asked me.

I told him about Ignatov and he stood thinking about it while I listened to those bloody children on the far side of the trees: I'd seen them on my way into the park, making a slide on the snow. Their voices unnerved me: it sounded as if they were screaming.

'Ignatov,' Bracken said quietly, not really to me.

'He's a Judas. Someone who knows me. You'd better find who he is before he does something else.' I wished Bracken would start walking again but he just went on standing there under the black winter trees, appalled. I felt sorry for him: he'd been thrown out here at a minute's notice just as I had and he didn't know half the contacts who were working for him, he couldn't do, this wasn't his field either, he directed penetration operations through foreign embassies, he wasn't Moscow.

'A Judas,' he said on his breath.

'So now you know why I'm getting out.'

In surprise he said: 'Did your cover stand up?'

'No.'

'You mean they just let you go?'

'No. They put me into Lubyanka.'

He watched me as if he were watching a fuse burning, scared of what I was going to say next. None of this was his fault, it was Croder's: the brilliant and persuasive Croder, chief of the London directorate, you will receive every possible support, so forth, I shouldn't have listened to him but he knew how much I was prepared to do for a man like Schrenk.

'You got out,' Bracken said tonelessly, 'of Lubyanka?'

'No. They were taking me to the Serbsky Institute, but there was an accident.' I kept seeing that man's face under the wheel, you always seem to remember the rotten bits. 'One of their intelligence colonels got killed, possibly two, so you know what my chances are if I spend any time in the open street: there'll be a full scale hunt ordered and I've got a scar on my face you can see for miles, so it's a dead end, are you getting the message? I want out.'

I stood listening to the thin distant screams of the children and the moan of the trams along Soldatskaja ulica and someone saying he stinks, put him under a shower, a dangerous thing to have said, the only satisfaction I'd had since I came out of London, his face under the wheel, was this why Schrenk had been 'bitter' after they put him through the same kind of thing, was it really so impersonal after all?

'… Ignatov for us.'

'What?' I turned to look at him.

'London would ask you to get Ignatov for us,' Bracken said. I hardly recognized his voice any more: he was watching this mission being blown right out of his hands and he hadn't begun thinking of the repercussions.

'London's already asked too much,' I told him. 'They pulled me off leave too soon, I wasn't ready for the stress.'

Quietly he said: 'Croder mentioned that, yes. And you mentioned it yourself.'

'Got a good memory,' but it was all I could do not to walk away and leave him the whole bloody mess to look after because he'd used the same tone as Croder had, and looked at me in the same way, wondering if I was getting too old now, too scared. What were they trying to do, push me over the edge?

'We're all of us quite aware,' he said in a low voice, 'of how much we're asking of you.'

'Look, it's no big deal, Bracken, I took on the job when I knew I wasn't ready for it and that was my fault but I need to work alone so that I can be absolutely sure that no one's going to Judas me into Lubyanka without any warning, you can't expect anyone to work like that.' I turned and started walking through the trees and he had to come with me, I needed movement, I was frozen stiff standing there picking over the bits of a broken mission, I wasn't used to it and I didn't know how to handle it and neither did Bracken. 'I'd agree to get Ignatov for you and pull out afterwards but the streets are too dangerous now: I would have asked you to meet me at the safe-house but I'm not even sure it's safe any more.'

We tramped together through the snow, the blind leading the blind. The trees were darker here and I felt less exposed.

'I have another safe-house for you,' Bracken said and I thought oh Christ he's not going to give up. 'I would also guarantee that in future your only contract in Moscow would be myself.'

I didn't say anything. I wasn't interested.

'If there's a Judas in the local network,' Bracken said, having to make himself say it, make himself believe it, 'we have to find him.'