Chapter 9 No Signal

The emergency channel was a telephone number in a different city, a phrase, and a second phrase for the reply. She had used it twice in four years, once to confirm that the office was alive and once to report the death of a contact, and both times it had answered inside an hour. Now it answered with a recording of a woman's voice explaining that the number was no longer in service. She tried it from a call box by the cathedral at four different hours over two days, in case the recording was a fault. It was not a fault. On the second day she tried the number she had been given for the second emergency, which was a courier drop behind the railway office in Vetrana, and after that she stopped trying, because two attempts from a city where she was being hunted was already too many. The rule for a case officer who has lost the office was written down in one line in the training, and the line was this: withdraw to a place of your own choosing, break contact, and wait to be found. It was good advice for a case officer in a country with a functioning government and a case officer's passport. Vesna had neither. She had a cover identity whose documents were real enough to cross a border and not real enough to survive a serious check, six photographs of the Blackwake's money, and a lineman who was going to be taken into the third basin on Thursday and asked a question. She went to Kaldar on the Wednesday, in the afternoon, in ordinary clothes, with a shopping bag, because a woman with a shopping bag in Kaldar is invisible. She walked the lane past the bakery twice. The second time she saw Nevena on the step with the younger boy, and Nevena saw her, and Nevena looked at her for exactly as long as a stranger looks and no longer, and then looked away and went inside with her hand on the boy's shoulder. That was the answer. There was nobody in the bakery. Rasim's family had been told the same thing by the woman who had done the telling, and the woman was not Vesna. She bought two oranges at the stall and ate one, standing, and thought about the third basin, and about a ledger clerk being asked a question by two men in grey jackets. Then she did the thing she had told herself she would not do, which was the thing that every officer does in the end, because the training is a set of walls and the walls are only as good as the room they are holding. She went to the pharmacy. Stanko Dragas was behind the counter with the brass balance, and he looked up when she came in and did not ask her anything, which had become, over three years, its own kind of conversation. She put a prescription on the counter, which was a real prescription, written in a real doctor's hand, for a real medicine that she had no need of, because she had fetched it from the flat of a neighbour whose window she could reach from the fire escape. "I need to leave the country," she said. "I need it without a stamp, and I need it this week, and I have nothing to offer you except that if you help me you will be breaking the law and if you do not help me it will not matter to you at all." Dragas weighed something that did not need weighing. In the whole of her four years in this city he was the second person, and the only one who was not paid, to whom she had ever told a true thing. "Without a stamp," he said. "Or with one that looks like a stamp. The road is better than the port. The southern crossing at Malen is small and the officer there is old and has a nephew who is in the hospital." "You have thought about this." "I have thought about this for four years. I have thought about it in a way that was never supposed to include asking anyone for help." He put down the balance and looked at her for a long moment, and it was the most direct look he had ever given her, and she understood that he had known, for a long time, roughly what she was, and had protected both of them by refusing to know it precisely. "I have a cousin in Malen," he said. "He drives a produce lorry to the crossing twice a week. On Friday he has a load of seed potatoes and one empty pallet space behind the crates, and he does not ask who is in it any more than he asks what is in the crates." He took the prescription and filed it in the box where he filed prescriptions. "The seed potatoes weigh less than the paperwork says, because they always do. If a man is stopped at Malen the officer counts the crates, and the crates are correct. That is the whole of my cousin's business, and it is a very ordinary business, and no one has ever been interested in it." "And if someone is interested in it now." "Then you will have a different problem, and my cousin will have the same one as you, and I will have it too." He said it without drama, the way he said everything, and then he asked her the first real question he had asked her in three years. "Is there a person with you? A man? I ask because you have asked me for a lorry with one empty pallet space, and a pallet space holds one person comfortably or two badly, and I would like to know which I am arranging." She thought about Rasim in the third basin. She thought about the note on the tally sheet and the eight days that had begun it all, and about a rule in a training document that called a compromised lineman a liability, and she understood that the honest answer was the one she was least able to give. "There may be two," she said. Dragas closed the till. "Then I will tell my cousin to leave two spaces." She went out into the street with the oranges in her bag and a Thursday ahead of her before any of it could happen, and it was Thursday, and Thursday was the day they were going to take Rasim into the third basin and ask him his question, and she had one night to decide whether the office's rule about liabilities was going to be the last thing the office ever taught her. She spent the Wednesday afternoon performing the drills that make no difference and are performed anyway, because a person who has lost her service still does the drills, and the drills are the service. She changed the route to the pharmacy and back. She moved the camera from behind the skirting board to the lining of a second coat. She wrote her own name, the date, and the four-figure ministry code on a scrap of paper and burned it in the sink and ran the tap and wiped the sink dry afterwards, the way the manual said. At dusk she stood at her window and learned the ordinary faces of three people on the street below, none of whom belonged on it, and it was the only hour of that week in which she felt anything like competent, and she understood why, and the understanding did not flatter her at all. The drills were the office. The office was gone. What remained was a set of habits that a woman could still perform in a rented flat at dusk, while the men who had been sent for her learned the same street from the other end. ---