17 Meridian by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

13 WHORES

What that man Roach hadn’t known when he’d told me there was a telephone booth in the building was that the cord had been cut by hooligans, and I had to drive two miles before I found a booth that didn’t have the glass smashed or the cord cut. I didn’t expect to find a directory, took the phone off the hook and dialled for Information, the wind fluting through the gap in the door.

‘Yes?’

‘Military Barracks.’

‘Which department?’

‘Administration.’

‘Wait.’

I waited.

Arrested. Mother of God.

I could look along the street from here, both ways. I’d left the Skoda round the comer where I could see its reflection in the window of the No. 3 Dock — workers’ Union of Novosibirsk Meeting Rooms.

Someone had carved some crude letters on the tarnished aluminium panel behind the telephone — WHERE IS THE FOOD?

Jabbing at the panel, slashing at it with the force of desperation.

‘Here is the number,’ the woman said on the line. She rang off before I could repeat it or thank her.

I hadn’t any one — or two — kopek coins so I used a ten and dialled. Not at the safe — house: she hadn’t been arrested at the safe — house, Tanya. She’d left there soon after I had, the peep told me, when I’d gone to meet Ferris at noon. The peep had followed her. He was surveillance, not support: he would have told us where she’d gone — that was his function, and he’d had no instructions to stop her. But she hadn’t gone anywhere, hadn’t arrived.

‘she was crossing the street,’ he’d told me, ‘down by the bus station, and the militia stopped her and checked her papers —’

‘A patrol on foot?’

‘Yes. Then he used his walkie and called a car and they put her inside and that was it. 11:51.1 got to a phone by 12:03 but the DIF didn’t answer.’

Because he’d been with me in that stinking shed.

Ten rings, twenty, they were taking their bloody time.

This was so very risky.

‘Military Barracks.’

‘I want to speak,’ I said, ‘to Captain Vadim Rusakov.’

‘Wait.’

So very risky because I couldn’t get an introduction to Rusakov now from his sister; I’d be talking to him cold, and when I told him what had happened he could duck out and run for cover in case she broke and talked and exposed him. I wouldn’t expect much chivalry from a man who’d talked a woman into spotting the target for him, bringing her right onto the scene of the shooting. Anything could have happened and he must have known that.

The wind gusted through the gap in the door, flapping at an official notice that said vandals would be arrested for damaging the property of the Intercity and International Telephone Service of Novosibirsk, that did not say that accomplices in the assassination of former Red Army generals would also be arrested and would face imprisonment for life, were they going to answer this bloody telephone or weren’t they?

Steady there.

Yea, verily, but time was of the essence: once

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