Snow Falcon

He said, 'I understand what you mean by friends, Captain.' Vrubel's left eyelid twitched, as if a secret nerve had been struck. Vorontsyev became irritated by the smile on the other man's lips. Sexual dominance, which he had enjoyed over Natalia and her lover for the past hour was vanishing, evanescent as steam. He was being laughed at again.

'Of course, Major.' The tone was patronising.

'You met the General again?' he asked.

Vrubel shook his head. 'Our tastes do not coincide, Major. The General likes museums, art, sculpture. I prefer…' He spread his open hands on his knees, smiling. 'Other pleasures,' he added.

Vorontsyev became cold. He saw the man's intact ego, the sexual arrogance — and something more. Secrecy, the enjoyment of unimparted knowledge. He saw how the balance of their relationship had swung like a pendulum, in minutes. He used his insight.

'I see,' he said, looking down. 'You — where did you meet my wife?'

'We were introduced by — another friend of mine. A mutual friend.'

The amusement was evident.

'Who was that?'

'A member of the Bolshoi — a dancer.'

Vrubel was not lying — it was obvious that he was enjoying presenting himself as the stallion of the Bolshoi, and Natalia as a cheap tart.

'I see.' He looked up, snapping: 'When do you return to your duties, Captain?'

'Alas, tomorrow.' He stubbed out his cigarette, and looked markedly at his watch. Vorontsyev saw the confidence ooze, the skin of the face now smooth again, the look untroubled. 'I have tickets for a show — at eight,' he said pointedly.

Vorontsyev squeezed anger into his face.

'I see.' He stood up, robotically. 'I shouldn't waste your valuable time, then! I'll leave you.' He bunched his hands. Vrubel was unmoved, 'Tell my wile I'm sorry I interrupted you, won't you.'

'I will.'

Vorontsyev sat in the car, trying to recapture the professional mask that had slipped from his face in the lift; a moment of pure rage had smothered his coldness. Now, he regained something like composure. He picked up the microphone under the dashboard.

'Centre — go ahead Moscow Unit Nine-Six-Four,' he heard in reply to his call sign.

'Put me through to my office — night duty-staff.'

He waited, then he heard Ilya's tired voice.

'Yes, Major.' There was no amusement, only a peeved deference, and frustrated boredom. A broken date., probably.

'Don't sulk!' he snapped. Then he hesitated. 'I–I'm at my wife's apartment, on Kalenjin Street.'

'Yes, Major?'

'A — Captain Vrubel is being entertained there…' The words came out, dragged up, each with its separate soft explosion of breath. His chest seemed to hurt with exertion. 'I want a tail on them — on the man, understand?'

'Yes, Major — isn't he the — ?'

'He is. I want a team out here, and another car for myself. My wife knows this one.'

'You're going to tail them yourself, Major?'

'Yes. Anything in the rules against it?'

'No — sir.'

'Right, then! Anything on that bastard in black, yet?' He let the accumulated venom into the question, as if expelling saliva that had filled his throat. He spat at Vrubel in the emphasis of the words.

'Nothing, sir. The computer doesn't know him. We're waiting for time on the central records computer now.'

'Get that time! 1 don't know what Vrubel knows, but he 6?

knows something. But he won't be easy to question, or to break.' He understood how he had chosen the word — the personal life leaping over the snake of professional procedures. 'We must have that man who imitated Ossipov. He must know why he did it.'

'Yes, Major.'

'Get those cars over here, on the double. They're leaving soon.'

'On their way, sir.'

He almost wanted to plead that Ilya send men who would not laugh at the humiliating prospect of Major Vorontsyev trailing around the city after his wife and her lover, using the Centre's vehicle and manpower resources to do so. Instead, he clipped the mike back under the dashboard.

He gripped the wheel, noticed that he was cold. He took one ragged breath, then started the car, and drove some way down the service road to the flats. There he parked with a view of the foyer, waiting for his wife and Captain Vrubel to come out.

Folley crouched, exhausted, behind a spindly fir, his ears straining to catch the sounds of his pursuers. Nothing. For a few moments, he was safe. He drew in the cold night air in great heaving sobs, and his body began to shake with reaction to the demands he had made upon it. There was no impression of loneliness, of fear or loss of hope. Only the body, pleading with him, already wanting to curl into some foetal rest.

He looked at his watch. He had been travelling, with only two short sops, for four hours. He was on the very edge of the fir forest, the trees tiny, misshapen, dwarfish. He had climbed steadily, wearily, up out of the bowl in which the taller trees grew, and were dense, into the higher country, the bare landscape on which he would move like a white fly towards the main Ivalo road.

He could not use the radio; it would pinpoint him, since the frequency available to him was that used for ordinary NATO traffic. The Russians would be monitoring that; and the chopper that was airborne in order to pick up his reports would not be airborne until the morning.

He had lost the brief, illusory comfort of moving further into Finland — he wasn't safe, could not be until the chopper made the first of its dashes across the Finnmark, bearing Finnish markings, the pilot in Finnish army uniform, to the pick-up point. And it would happen only once more after that; exactly twenty-four hours later. If he did not appear, he was to be presumed dead.

Or captured.

Folley wondered, weakly, whether he was the first Snow Falcon; or had there been others, as there would be others after him if he did not return? Had any of the others learned what he knew? Snap, snap — had the pictures been removed from their bodies?

It would not matter, his limbs and joints persisted, if he was caught; lie down. It wouldn't be long before they caught up…

He pushed with his hands, but his body refused to rise from the snow. It was as if everything except his mind was straw. Even the way his legs stretched out, comical, like a scarecrow; ridiculous.

He attended to the body, in a compromise — as if bribing it with the chocolate from his pack. And he pressed the canvas sleeve of the rifle to his face, as if as a reminder.

So far — so far… No airborne search. He didn't think it likely, not yet. But he knew they would have to risk it after dawn. Perhaps they would use Kamovs or MILs to hunt for him — drop troops ahead of his possible and predicted course. They must know he would head for the road, had to be going west.

His thoughts tailed off into a lysergic acid photography, fed by the adrenalin of weary fear, in which the tactical moves of the day to come were vivid with terror and exhaustion and capture.

He knew they would do it; they had to. They understood what he had seen. He had to be stopped.

His left leg was twitching. A feeble attempt at movement, be wondered, or a protest at thoughts of continued Sight.

He wasn't sure that he slept, but the taste of sleep was in his mouth; yet it might have been minutes only. He jerked awake because a cry to attention sounded within him. Something was imperative as a dream of falling…

The cry was outside himself, he realised with a bright, tearing pain of betrayal and fear in his chest. A voice