I turned again, wheeling into the wind with the edge of the cliff a hundred feet below me. The air feathered against my face, numbing it, and tears crept back from the corners of my eyes, drying on the skin. A pale sun was turning the sea into hammered gold, below on my right side, and the waves were rolling in ice-blue arcs, hanging poised for an instant before they shattered along the shore.

It had been the twentieth turn: I'd been counting them. I was now half hypnotized by the sliding images of grass and cliff and sand and sea as they floated below my prone body, and by the periods of near-weightlessness as the wind gusts dropped me into the troughs and lifted me out again. A minute ago two gulls had come abreast of me and drifted alongside not far away, their sharp heads turned to watch me as they wondered what I was; inland I could see our three shadows gliding in perfect formation across the short brown grass of the cliff top, two small ones and the third much bigger but still the shape of a bird, not of a man. By a degree, however small, I was taking on their character, watching the land below and feeling the lie of the wind, the muscles compensating as evolution worked on my humanoid body and adapted its behaviour to the needs of a bird.

I broke the next turn at ninety degrees and went down-wind across the edge of the cliff to try out the air on the lee side. For a moment the car was directly below me and I saw Norton again, standing near it and gazing up. Another car was pulling in rather fast from the cliff road and bouncing over the grass, but I lost sight of it as the sail hit some turbulence. I worked on the bar, tilting it back to gain speed and pulling the nose up to get some more height; then I veered into the wind and crossed the cliff again, turning to drift parallel with it.

After the next turn I saw the other car had pulled up alongside Norton's MG. There were a couple of men in dark uniforms, and Norton started waving to me with wide urgent gestures. I checked the sail and rigging but couldn't see anything wrong. I didn't expect to: I had a rough idea of what had come up. At the end of the run I turned and moved inland again. All three of them were waving to me with flailing downward motions, putting a lot of expression into it; I could now see the white letters on the back of the second car. I didn't like it, any of it, because I'd been on leave only two weeks and my nerves were still trying to shake themselves out.

I made three more runs, trying to forget about them, but they began using the horns at me and a siren wailed into life and died again. They were still waving, so I compromised: I think I could have got enough height to come in and land on the grass and ask them what the hell they wanted, but I gave myself a final fling and put the nose down and swooped over their heads in a long arrowing dive across the cliff and the beach and the sea, wheeling against the beaten gold reflection and moving into wind again, lowering, the trailing edge fluttering near stalling point a few feet above the ground; then I put the nose down and ran in with my feet ploughing up the sand as I got the last of the wind out of the sail. I was still dismantling when Norton came sprinting along from the cliff path to help me.

'London,' he said.

'I'm frozen stiff,' I told him. 'Look after this, will you?' I left him and ran hard for a mile, as far as the pier and back, feeling better because I'd worked a bit of the frustration out: there was absolutely no point in getting annoyed just because he'd mentioned London. They couldn't send me out again, not this soon.

'Police escort,' Norton said as he strapped the spars together. 'Not my fault.'

'All I need,' I said, 'is a phone.'

'And the best of luck.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake shut up.'

I hated panic, and a police escort meant someone in London was panicking.

It was ten minutes before we got the kite up the steps in the cliff. The two cops helped us stow it on the rack of Norton's MG, asking a lot of silly questions, what did it feel like, wasn't it dangerous, so forth. They followed us to the hotel and I used the telephone and talked to three people, one of them Tilson; then I put the phone down and came back to the lobby and told Norton:

'You weren't joking.'

He puffed out his cheeks. 'Are you taking your car?'

'Yes. I'll need it to come back in, tomorrow.'

He didn't make any comment. The two cops were looking at us from the entrance doors and one of them called out:

'We were told to get a move on. It's up to you.'

I went over to the desk to pay my bill.

'Give me a lift?' Norton asked me.

'Where to?' I was thinking of Helena.

'London.'

I turned and looked at him. 'Do they want you too?'

'They might.'

I suppose he could have gone over to the telephone booth by the doors while I was calling London: the first line I'd tried had been engaged. Maybe they'd told him to make sure I got there.

'Look,' I told the cashier, 'there's a Helena Swinburn meeting me here in an hour from now. Give her this message and get the florist to bring round some gardenias, if not, orchids, if not, carnations, all right? Add twenty-five to the card to cover it. And I'm leaving my bags in the room.'

He was making notes. 'You'll be keeping the room, then, sir?'

'Yes. I'll be back tomorrow some time.'

I could hear Norton whistling under his breath. He'd caught some of the panic from London when he'd phoned, typical admin reaction. I went over to the cops. 'What's the form?'

'You follow us. If you can't keep up, just give a toot.'

'Bloody cheek,' I said and went out to look for the jag.

In the next ten minutes we cleared all the red lights in the town with the siren and flashers going and settled down into the nineties as soon as we got on to the motorway north, reaching Mitcham in seventy minutes flat.

'Chopper,' Norton said. He hadn't spoken before.

I'd been watching it. The patrol car was slowing hard in front of us and taking us across the common, pulling up close to the spot where the helicopter was touching down on skis. It was a police machine with the coat-of-arms of the Royal Borough of Westminster on the side; I suppose they hadn't been able to get the Sussex constabulary to fly us in from the coast. Everyone had obviously been playing about with the radio and I began feeling depressed because this was fully-alert procedure and I was meant to be on leave.

The door slid back and a voice came above the sound of the blades. 'No baggage?'

'No'

'Hop in.'

Norton's foot slipped on the metal rung of the step as he swung up.

'Watch it.'

They slammed the door and gunned up and lifted off with the first of the neon lights falling away below. Norton was still untalkative; he sat puffing his cheeks out, trying to get rid of the tension. He'd been with the Bureau nearly as long as I had and he knew the signs. This wasn't a mission they wanted me for: someone had blown a fuse and the whole network had gone out of whack. It had happened twice before, during my time: once when Fraser had been pulling a Polish intelligence colonel across the frontier at Szczecin and the checkpoint had shut down on them, and once when they'd hauled me out of Tokyo to look for some nerve gas some bloody fool had dropped all over the Sahara. Whatever they wanted me for this time it was no go.

London was coming up, a haze of light from horizon to horizon under the late January fog. Norton was rubbing his hands together, though it wasn't cold in the cabin; I felt sorry for him, with all that adrenalin sloshing about before we'd even started.

'Never mind,' I said above the beat of the rotors, 'it's probably some bloody fool in Signals getting his homework wrong.'

'Oh shit,' he said and swung to face me, and I realized he'd been startled out of his thoughts by the sound of my voice. I began wondering if he knew something that I didn't: something about the panic going on.

'Where are you putting us down?' I asked the pilot.

'Battersea Heliport. All right?'

'It's your toy.' We were lowering now, with the city lights swarming to meet us.

'You from the Yard, are you, sir?'

'That's right.' We never mind what they think we are.

A signal was coming through and the navigator leaned towards me, the glow of the instrument panel on his face. 'They want to know if our people can take your jag to Sloane Street for you. They're off their beat already.'

'Can you do that?'

'Easy.' He talked into the headset and signalled out.

'Well,' I asked him, 'did you arrange it?'

'Yes, sir.'

He could have told me.

Nerves.

There was a bump and we keeled-even under slowing rotors while Norton hit his seat-belt open and went down first and stood on the landing pad waiting to help me if I slipped on the rungs, bloody little nursemaid, they'd given him instructions to Bo-Peep me all the way home.

'Much obliged!' he called through the doorway, and pulled his collar up against the icy draught. We jogged across to the door of the building as the rotors sped up and sent a gust of exhaust gas against our backs.

They'd got their liaison worked out: there was a squad car waiting at the kerb when we went out through the front. Norton showed his card and they snapped the rear door open and got the flashers going the moment we turned out into the traffic stream, using the siren once or twice to get us some headway. Norton still didn't talk and by this time I didn't want him to. We tumbled out of the car across the slush of a recent thaw and slipped through the narrow doorway halfway down Whitehall and hit the lift button and waited, not looking at each other. Dirty water seeped from our shoes under the bleak security lights as I thought of Helena and wondered if I'd ever see her again.

Tilson met us as we got out of the lift.

'My dear fellow,' he said, and held out his warm dry hand. 'Long time no see.'

'Two weeks. That's not long.' Norton had gone quietly rushing off along the corridor: I suppose he'd been told to report somewhere the moment we got in.

'I know what you mean,' Tilson said with a slow blink. He was trying hard to look amiable and comforting, since it was his role in life; but tonight he couldn't manage it; he just looked frightened to death, right at the back of his eyes. 'What about a spot of tea?'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'We've got a few minutes, you see.' He guided me gently along the corridor as far as the Caff. 'We're not quite set up for you yet.'

'Look, Tilson, just give me a clue, will you?'

'It's not really for me to.say, old horse.' He shuffled across the room in his carpet slippers to a corner table, one of the few left. Maggie saw us and came over and mopped up some spilled tea, and when she'd gone again he said with his lips hardly moving, 'They've sent for Mr Croder. He's on his way in from Rome.'

'Croder?'

'He shouldn't be long.'

I shut up for a minute. Croder was chief of the base directorate and handled the ultra-sensitive operations and had a mortality rate for foreign actions higher than the rest of them put together, not because he wasn't brilliant but because he took on risks that most of the others shied at. I'd never worked for him, not even on the Sahara thing. I didn't want to.

I listened to Jessop and Wallis, sitting at the next table; but they weren't talking about the job: Jessop had bought a Piper three weeks ago and took one of his girl-friends for a joyride and wrapped the thing round a power pylon and got away with it, except that she was suing him for five hundred thousand pounds for a new face before she could model again.

I listened to some people talking on the other side, but couldn't pick anything up. I was desperate for clues, because I knew I wouldn't get any from Tilson. He was just here to make sure I didn't get away.

'Tilson,' I said evenly, 'I've been on leave exactly two weeks and I'm due for eight and I'm not coming in yet, okay? No mission. Nix, niet, ninguno, are you receiving me?'

He looked vaguely at the wall. 'I don't think there's a mission on the board, old fruit. Not officially.' The tea came and he began spooning sugar into it. He hadn't looked at me since he'd met me outside the lift and that wasn't like him; he's always been cagey but not this bad.

'What about unofficially?' I asked him.

'Nothing ever happens in this place — ' he turned his bland pink face to me for the first time- 'unofficially.'

I held on hard. 'I just want a clue, Tilson. Why has everyone started tearing up the pea-patch?'

He began sipping his tea; it was too hot but he was just making a gesture and trying not to look scared. 'You'll have to be a bit patient, old horse.' He gave a wintry smile. 'Not quite your forte, I know.'

O'Rourke was coming towards us between the tables, his hands dug into the pockets of his mack and pulling it tight round his thighs so he wouldn't knock anyone's tea over. I thought he was coming to talk to Tilson but he dumped himself down between Jessop and Wallis at the next table. I heard him quite clearly. 'They've lost Shapiro,' he told them, and I saw Jessop going slowly white, and in a couple of seconds he got up and went out, bumping into a table on his way and not noticing.

'Dead?' I asked O'Rourke.

He looked up. 'What?'

'Did they find him dead?'

'Who?'

'Shapiro.'

'I don't know.'

'Who found him?'

'I don't know.'

I shut up. Tilson wasn't looking at either of us; he was just listening, with his face down over his tea. O'Rourke didn't know anything. Nobody in this place knows anything, because that's the official policy: the staff has to have an overall view of operations but there's always a handful of field executives hanging around between missions or waiting to be sent out, and the less we know of what's going on, the less we can tell the opposition if we make a mistake out there and they pull us in and throw us under the bright white light and keep us there till it burns through to the brain while they're asking us questions.

'You did a bit of work,' Tilson said conversationally, 'with Shapiro. Didn't you?'

'A couple of times.' Cyprus, Tenerife.

He nodded and looked down and drank some more tea while I sat there trying not to think about Shapiro, trying not to remember him too well. There wasn't anything definite about that bit of news I'd just overheard; he could still be alive, and if he wasn't, there was nothing I could do about it. We come and go.

'I wonder if I can find anyone,' Tilson said plaintively, 'to look after you until Mr Croder shows up. I don't like your having to hang about like this.' He got up and wandered off and I noticed his tea wasn't finished; he just wanted to get me away from Wallis and O'Rourke before I overheard anything else. That suited me; the more we hear, up and down these bleak green-painted corridors, the more we become involved, the more we become exposed. We don't want that to happen. The Bureau doesn't exist, so we don't exist either, if we're wise. It's less painful like that, and infinitely less dangerous.

It was nearly nine in the evening before Tilson came and got me out of Monitoring, where I'd been passing the time listening to a lot of flak from one of our cells in Africa which was trying to pull itself out of the general bush fire that had gone up after the Kibombo massacre.

'Talk to you,' Tilson asked from the doorway, 'for a jiff?' It was terribly low key, and I started worrying again. He took me along the corridor, with our footsteps echoing from the high arched ceiling; there's still no carpeting in this bloody place: they say the parquet's got woodworm in it and they have to keep a watch on it.

'We've got Mr Croder for you,' Tilson told me and hustled me into Signals. From that moment I began going cold. We can always refuse a mission and we don't have to give our reasons; some of the operations look strictly shut-ended during the planning stage and we reserve the right to go on living if we think the risk is too high. But we can't refuse to listen to a director if he's got something for us to do, and sometimes he'll prick our conscience or our pride and lever us into a tricky one before we know what's happening. My nerves were still out of condition from the last operation, although you'd think we'd get over it, one day, and learn to live with it; maybe some of them have, but I haven't yet, and it's getting late.

There were only four people manning the room tonight, two of them handling separate missions at the main console with the code names Flash point and Banjo on the boards above their heads, and two others waiting for us at the unit nearer the door.

'Where is he?' I asked Tilson.

'Mr Croder? He's in Geneva.'

'He was flying from Rome, the last — '

'Never mind,' Tilson said amiably, and looked at the big international clock.

'He's coming through on the hour,' one of the operators said, 'using the booster at Lausanne. Would you like to sit down?'

'No.'

They waited quietly with their hands on their laps and the light of the panel on their faces.

I'll need a shield, a sharp voice came from the main console, but you'll have to hurry. It sounded like Symes, but I didn't think they'd use him for an Asian job; both missions were designated Far East alongside the code names and he was a Latin-country specialist, you could smell the garlic the minute he came in for debriefing.

The operator flicked the switch for direct contact with the base director and started talking, but I didn't hear the rest because a light started winking on our unit and the man with the chewing-gum opened the signal and set to scramble and clarify.

'A-Alpha. Channel 3. Clarifying.'

We waited. The light went on winking.

'Croder.' There was a long pause. 'The weather's closing down everywhere, and the London flight was laid off.' His voice was thin and precise, the scrambler giving it a metallic echo. 'Have you brought Quiller in?'

'Yes, sir.' The operator slipped out of the padded chair and motioned me to take it.

I sat down. 'This is Quiller.'

'Ah yes.' A couple of seconds went by. 'You were on leave, I understand.'

'I still am.'

There was a much longer pause. 'Yes. I am on leave too. But I want you to listen very carefully. I don't think I can reach London with any immediate predictability, since a lot of flights are either being cancelled or diverted. But I can reach Berlin before midnight, according to current reports. I would like you to meet me there, as soon as you can get a plane.'

In a moment I said: 'Look, I'm still on leave and I need to relax. It's too soon.'

I felt Tilson move an inch, beside me.

'I understand that,' the thin, precise voice came from the speaker. 'But something rather exceptional has happened, and we've got to deal with it as soon as we can. Or if you prefer, I've got to deal with it. I was rather hoping you'd agree to help me, but — what can I say? You are on leave.'

The silence was so long that I thought he'd gone off the air again, like some kind of ghost, fading and reappearing. I was very cold now, and sat with my hands folded into my arms and my neck hunched into my coat. There was something weird about this whole thing: Croder was sitting on some sort of time bomb and he was having to use an awful lot of control in the way he handled me. He wasn't used to that. Finally I couldn't stand the silence any more.

'Is it a mission?' I asked him.

'It is a rescue mission. We — I — have to get someone out.'

I waited for more, but he'd stopped. T didn't ask him 'out of where' because that didn't make a lot of difference. He meant out of trouble.

The air in the room seemed to shiver suddenly as the sharp voice came from the main console across from us — I tell you we can't hope to go in without a shield.

Tilson moved again beside me, unnerved. He's normally a stoic type and can keep as still as a lizard for hours.

I said to Croder: 'Why can't someone else do it?'

He came back a little faster this time. 'Of those people available, I think you stand the best chance. If there's a chance at all.'

'I'm not available. Listen, I came off the last thing two weeks ago, didn't anyone tell you that? Two weeks.' My voice had risen a fraction and I didn't like that, but it might give him a clue as to the condition I was in.

'I know that, yes.' He paused again. 'You did rather well.'

I left that one. Every word he said was a baited hook.

'A very great deal depends, you see, on whether we can do anything for this man. It touches all of us.'

He was being as specific as he could, on the air. It was no use asking him to spell anything out: he couldn't. He was trying to get me to read between the lines and I wasn't interested. I didn't want to know.

The operator with the chewing-gum was on my other side, opposite Tilson, and I swung my head up. 'Would you go and spit that bloody stuff out for Christ's sake? I can't stand the smell.'

My hands were frozen. I was afraid of what Croder was going, finally, to make me do, by pricking my conscience, or my pride. I listened to the rain beating at the row of narrow sooty windows and wondered who the poor bastard was, and where. We have to get someone out. He couldn't be done for, yet; he was lying on a rooftop somewhere in the pouring rain with the patrol lights sweeping the streets, waiting till he had to show himself; or hunched between rocks in a frontier zone like a wild dog with a broken leg and no hope of food or shelter or mercy when they found him; or sitting in a basement propped in an upright chair with the bright light probing into his eyes till he couldn't see them any more, could only hear what they were asking him, feel what they were doing when he didn't answer. It touches all of us.

The man with the chewing-gum had moved away but I could still smell the stuff, like toothpaste.

I spoke into the console. 'Is it Shapiro?' Tilson moved again.

'Yes,' Croder said. I could tell by his tone that I wasn't meant to know. I wanted to say well what about O'Rourke and Wallis and Jessop, shouting the bloody odds all over the Caff down there? Security stank, in this place, always did, half the staff trying to keep the lid on things and the other half yelling their heads off.

Shapiro. A small quiet man with sharp pointed ears and a passion for chess and a girl in Brighton and a scar the length of his forearm where the knife had got him before I could throw the rest of them off and reach him in time, glass all over the place from the explosion and the sirens coming in, Tenerife, with a full moon and the night temperature still in the nineties and Rosita sobbing her heart out in a bar at the end of the jetty because they'd got Templer, nothing we could do. 'I'll take this one,' he'd told me the night before; 'they know you, but they don't know me.' But it was just that he'd been frightened, and wanted to prove that he wasn't. We've got a few things in common.

So he wasn't dead.

'What theatre?' I asked Croder.

'Europe.'

That was all I'd get. There wasn't anything more I could ask him. He could have switched to selective code but he obviously wasn't prepared to. In a couple of seconds he said: 'You know him quite well, I understand.' Shapiro.

'Not too well. But I know him.'

The bloody thing had been ticking all the time and he'd stood looking at it with his small gnome's head on one side: 'the best thing'd be to disarm it, don't you think, take it apart, before it can do any harm.' He'd worked at it for nearly three hours without a break, his pale grey eyes wide open, staring at God all the time while his nicotine-stained fingers stroked and caressed the matt-black metal components and the sweat ran off his face and dripped on to the bare boards where I sat waiting, hunched into my own ghost and unable to look away. 'I think that's it,' he said at last, and pulled the detonator clear and reached for a cigarette and put it into his mouth with fingers that shook so badly now that he knocked the flame out and I had to strike another match for him.

Shapiro.

Say this much: he was a professional.

'You know his work, at least.' Croder's voice came insistently.

'Yes.'

'What would be your opinion of him,' in slow and reasonable tones, 'as an executive in the field?'

I felt Tilson listening, beside me. I thought of lying, then realized I didn't have to. In the end I could refuse, I could refuse, repeat it like a litany, I could refuse.

'First class.'

'Quite so. You wouldn't,' Croder said with a certain silkiness, 'consider him expendable.'

Like a dog with a broken leg.

'No.'

Stonewall the bastard, don't give him any rope.

'All I would ask is that you would at least meet me in Berlin, so that I can give you the details.' Three seconds, four. 'That is all I would ask, for him.'

The lights glowed on the console. I could hear the voice of the man in the field coming faintly across the room, where they were running Flash point. Tilson hadn't moved. The smell of peppermint had gone now, or I was getting used to it. I leaned forward towards the console so that Croder would hear me clearly, and know by my tone that I meant what I said.

'I'm on leave. I haven't got my nerve back yet — it was close to the crunch, that time, and I'm lucky to be here. So you'll have to find someone else, because I refuse.'

I got out of the chair and went past Tilson without looking at him and opened the door and threw it shut behind me and walked down the green-painted corridor to the lift and pressed the button for down.

It was a deluge outside and there was a traffic block near Hyde Park Corner and I sat waiting for fifteen minutes before I took the phone off the clip and got Tilson and told him I wanted a police car to get me out of this mess and I wanted a flight to Berlin, the first he could find for me. And tell Croder.

Blinding sleet and the runway lights floating up from the dark as the wheels hit and we bounced and they hit again and we bounced again with the airframe shuddering.

'Was, zum Teufel, macht der Pilot?'

A few uneasy laughs but at least we were down.

Bitte behalten Sie Ihren Sicherheitsgurtel an.'

A fat man sat leaning forward with his face white and his head down; I hoped he'd found the bag. Sleet washed past the windows in a bow wave.

'Mon Dieu, it est impossible meme de voir la tour d'observation!'

'Esperons que nous n'allons pas s'enfoncer contre elle!'

Reverse thrust and we sat feeling the drag.

'Are you all right, Audrey?' someone asked.

'Sort of.' A breathless giggle, then she lit a cigarette and blew out a noisy sigh. In the rear of the plane a child had started crying.

Tempelhof was packed.

'Excuse me, but do you know where the information desk is?'

'In the middle of that crowd over there,' I said, and she went hurrying off, trailing a flight bag with a broken strap. There were puddles everywhere, with people bringing slush in from the front of the building.

'Haben Sie etwas zu deklarieren?'

'Gar nichts.'

'Keine Rauchwaren, kein Alkohol?’

'Nein.'

He didn't bloody well believe me, went right through my bag.

'We were meant to land at Tegel,' a man with an astrakhan coat said to me, 'but there was too much stuff in the circuit.' I wondered if he'd got any other useless information.

In the main hall people were milling around looking for friends, children, baggage, a porter to help them out of the chaos. Three North Africans carrying skis edged their way through the crowd, clouting people every time they turned round to look for what they'd lost.

'Entschuldigen. Sie, Bind Sie Herr Wolsieffer?'

'Nein,' I told him.

A party of Chinese trotted past towards the main exit, their leader waving a little red flag to guide them.

'Pardon, monsieur. Vous etes de Paris?'

Non, mademoiselle, c'est le vol de Londres.'

She went across to the information desk. Pretty legs.

'Not a very nice evening.'

'Not very,' I said.

'What sort of flight?'

'Bloody awful.' We started walking, looking for somewhere we could talk. 'Been waiting long?'

'Half an hour,' he said.

'Did what I could. London was a mess.'

'Let's go over there,' Croder said.

'All right.' There was a lot of water on the floor below one of the big windows, which had sprung a leak, and we stood there with our backs to the dark glass watching the people near us. I didn't know whether he'd got here without any tags on him; as a rule the London directors aren't too good in the field. He stood with his hands in the pockets of the big military coat he was wearing, its buttons plain now and the marks still showing where the insignia had been taken off. It looked too big for him: he was a slight man, thin-boned and pallid, with a head like a skull and the hands of a skeleton and only the eyes alive, brooding in his face as if they were trapped there under the taut parched skin, their black luminescence shadowed by heavy lids. He hadn't looked at me yet.

'Good of you to come,' he said formally. 'I was surprised when they said you'd changed your mind.'

'So was I.'

He made a smile with his small teeth, like a rat nibbling.

'We nearly missed each other. They had to get back to me through Interpol.' It was a reprimand.

'Where's Shapiro?' I asked him.

He didn't answer for a moment. There was a lot of noise from a bunch of people over by the doors, and Croder gazed at them steadily. 'East Germans,' he said. 'They were going into Schoenefeld but an engine was out, so they came into Tempelhof instead.' His small teeth made a token smile. 'Half of them are demanding asylum. Wouldn't you? We don't know where Shapiro is,' he said without looking away from the group. 'His cover name is Schrenk. Forget Shapiro. Schrenk.' He spelt it for me. 'He was in Moscow for two months, working very well, then they uncovered him and put him through interrogation in Lubyanka. Then he escaped.'

For the first time he turned and looked at me with his black contemplative eyes and I thought, Christ Almighty, only Shapiro could have got out of Lubyanka by the midnight express. Only Schrenk. 'He got as far as West Germany,' Croder said, 'and we had him put straight into a clinic. I don't think he would have made it as far as London — he was in a pretty bad way.'

'Were you running him?'

I didn't think he'd answer that.

He looked back at the group of East Germans. 'It doesn't matter who was running him. He was in the clinic for nearly three months, and recovering steadily. They were going to discharge him before long, as soon as he was fit enough to stand up to debriefing. But the K got him again, and one report says he's back in Lubyanka.'

There was a chill coming into the air; I felt it against my skin: possibly the sweat was starting to creep, setting up refrigeration. I have never been inside Lubyanka, but I've talked to people who have. There aren't many of them at liberty. North had got back from there, the night he blew his brains out at Connie's place.

Croder was gazing across the hall in silence, and I asked him: 'What's our timing on this?'

'There's a flight for Hanover in forty minutes, and there's a seat booked for you.'

'In case I want one.'

He ignored that. 'Schrenk carried a capsule. It was part of the contract, on that particular mission. Obviously he didn't use it.' He turned away from the group of people and stood facing me, hunched into his big coat and saying with muted force: 'He would have saved us an immense amount of trouble if he had used it. An immense amount of trouble.' He waited for the message to sink in. 'Because what we have on our hands now is a potential disaster — unless we can somehow prevent it. Schrenk prided himself on his ability to survive the most gruelling interrogation by the use of practised and convincing disinformation; he had three or four different scenarios worked out and he rehearsed them every day of his life, in series. We know that. We had him tested at Norfolk, a year ago, and even hypnosis couldn't break him down, because he'd used autohypnosis himself, to move his scenarios down into the subconscious. That is the kind of man he is.' The heavy lids were lowered for a moment. 'But Norfolk isn't Lubyanka. We do not know, you see, how bad the position is, because we don't know how much he gave away.'

He withdrew into himself again, staring at nothing, or maybe at Schrenk's insubstantial image, lost somewhere in the wastes of Soviet Russia. The sleet outside was turning to water on the window, and the light from the tall gooseneck lamps threw its translucent delineations against his face, so that his skin crept with rivulets.

'What has he got,' I asked him, 'to give away?'

'I'm sorry?' He swung to look at me.

'You said you don't know how much he gave away. You mean something specific?'

His sharp teeth bit at the air again. 'Yes. The Leningrad cell.'

Mother of God.

This was why Norton had been showing his nerves today, and why Tilson had looked scared behind the eyes. The Leningrad cell had taken eleven years to build up, and once established and running it had given us the Sholokof Project and the submarine dispersal pattern and the tactical analysis for the buried-weapons system for transmission to NATO and the CIA, plus satellite scanning, plus laser progress in the military-application laboratories, plus the whole of the missile-testing programme including the ultra-classified global-range ICBMs from X-9 to the city-heat guidance Marathon 1000. That was the Leningrad cell.

'But he couldn't have known,' I said hopelessly, 'much about it:

'He worked there for two years, before he was seconded to the field-executive branch. He knows everything about it.'

I didn't understand. 'But who could have let him — '

'That is not your concern.' Spittle came against his lower lip, and in a moment he licked it away and said more slowly, 'For your information, it wasn't I.'

I let it go. Someone had blundered, and disastrously, because once you're with a cell you stay there till your time's up: you don't go anywhere else and you don't get seconded to the field-executive pool, because you know too much of value and they won't risk sending you into the field where the opposition can pick you up and drag you in and take your brain apart. But someone had done that with Schrenk.

'Your only concern,' Croder said with a lot of control, 'is to find him and pull him out — if indeed you're prepared to do that for us.' The need for control worried me, because this man was known for his cool and he'd lost it, and in front of the executive he was desperate to recruit. My nerves were jumping again. 'You would receive intensive support, I need hardly say.'

'In Moscow?'

'Right in the target area, wherever that may be. Cut-outs, back-ups, shields — '

'No shields — '

He shrugged. 'You may be glad — '

'I said no shields.' My own control wasn't too good and I waited and counted three. 'I make my own decisions and my own mistakes and I won't involve anyone else.' Shields were dangerous; they could get in your way, and when the crunch came they'd save themselves, not you. 'What about the director in the field? If the timing's that close you can't — '

'Bracken,' he said.

'Bracken's in Singapore.'

'We called him in.' He moved his eyes to the clock over the information desk. 'He is at present airborne with BAC, arriving Moscow at noon tomorrow, local time.' He waited.

'I've never worked with him.'

'He's first class, you know that. He directed Fenton in Cairo last year. He got Matthews out of Pekin. First class.'

There were thirty minutes left on the clock, and I thought of something else. 'When did you find out Schrenk was back in Moscow?'

'Early this morning.'

'Then you haven't had time to set it up. I'm not — '

'It was ready to run before I called base from Geneva. You have a director, a safe-house, contacts, sleepers, signal availability and Embassy liaison.' His thin mouth was contemptuous. 'What more do you want, for God's sake?'

'Access. I'm on their files and I'd never get through the airport.'

'You have access by road into East Germany.'

'Overt?'

'Of course not.'

'What are you talking about, a bloody farm cart or something?'

'A closed truck will take you across the frontier at Zellerfeld, in the Harz Mountains, with no questions asked.'

He was blocking me every time. I was his last hope, I knew that now. He'd tried half a dozen other people and drawn blank, because this was a suicide trip and he didn't pretend it was anything else.

'What about access into Moscow?'

'By commercial airline: Aeroflot. We have a seat for you on the morning flight from Leipzig, where the truck will drop you. It's perfectly straightforward.'

I took a slow breath. 'Cover?'

'Transit papers, East German national.'

It was beginning to sound like a trap and I stopped thinking about it for a minute, watching the people in the group by the main doors. A man was shouting his head off now and so was his wife: he wanted asylum but his wife said it would mean leaving her mother behind, and the secret police would take reprisals. A younger man, possibly their son, was trying to make them shut up. Two more policemen were marching towards them, unbuttoning their holsters to make an effect. A crowd was collecting.

Fluggaste fur Flug Nummer 903 fur Hannover kommen Sie bilge so fort Eingang Nummer 2.

I looked at the clock.

'Is that the flight you booked for me?' I asked Croder.

'Yes.'

'Then there's no time for briefing.'

'You'll be briefed on the access in Hanover, and fully briefed In Moscow.'

'By Bracken?'

'Yes.'

'Who's our man in Hanover?'

'He's an agent-in-place.'

'I want to know who he is.'

'All you want,' Croder said with his mouth tight, 'is just one good reason for getting the next plane back to London with what's left of your conscience, and the problem is that you won't find one because we've been hard at it setting the whole thing up, and it works, it really does. The odds, of course,' he said without looking away from my face, 'are not in your favour, and I'd quite understand it if you didn't feel up to the task. Your nerves, as you say, are still — '

'My nerves are my business.' A lot of heat came out and his black eyes flickered. 'You know bloody well you've got me hooked or I wouldn't be here in this stinking hole, would I?' Control, get control. 'It's just that I want — ' but the anger ran out and we stood facing each other without another word, while the shadows of the rain crept down his neon-grey face and his eyes looked into mine and waited to know whether I would do the job that had to be done or whether I was too old, at last, for this game, or too scared.

When I was ready I said: 'Who else did you ask?'

'I told you before. I went straight for you.'

His eyes went on waiting.

I only had one more question, and it was difficult, because I thought I knew what he'd say, what he'd have to say. 'What happens if I find him, but can't get him out?'

He didn't hesitate. 'That would make things easier for you. All we want is his silence.'

It had been snowing in Hanover; the roofs were white with it under a full moon when we touched down.

He was waiting on the other side of the gate, a short man with a deerstalker hat and a long green woollen scarf wound several times round his neck. He was rubbing his hands and blowing into them, watching me as I came through.

'From the office?' he asked me.

'Who are you?'

'Floderus. Have you got any baggage?'

'No.'

'OK. I've got a car here.' He led the way with short energetic steps, his hands in his coat pockets now.

'I want to see the clinic,' I said when we got outside. 'Did he tell you?'

'Yes. I only just caught the doc there: he's off on vacation first thing in the morning.' We got in the Mercedes.

It was the only condition I'd made to Croder: I wanted to know everything I could about Schrenk, if I were going to do anything for him.

'What was it like in London?' Floderus asked.

'Pissing down:

'I should've known.'

He got off the autobahn at the Hanover-Herrenhausen exit and drove south on Route 6 as far as the river.

'Are you expecting any problems?' I asked him.

'What? No.' He did it again. 'Why?'

'Fond of the mirror.'

'Oh. Habit.'

I supposed he could have been in from the field; sleepers and a-i-ps aren't normally so nervous. 'What's this man's name?'

I asked him. 'What man?'

'The doctor.'

'Oh. Steinberg.' Along Dorfstrasse he turned right and began slowing. The clinic was just after the church, a long white building with a board with gold letters. Floderus pulled up.

Steinberg opened the door to us himself, tall, stooping, wrapped in a dressing-gown with cigarette burns on it, a man who worked too late. He took us straight into a consulting-room and I let Floderus stay. We spoke in German.

'You wish to know about your patient here, I understand.'

'Yes. I want to know the state of his mind.'

He considered this, staring at the top of his desk through thick round glasses. 'I know nothing at all about his present state of mind, of course. He was abducted in violent fashion, and that would have induced further shock. I have no means of knowing what has happened to him since, in terms of his state of mind.'

'What was he like just before the abduction?'

He lit a cigarette and squinted through the smoke. 'At that time he was quite alert, quite normal. The nightmares had stopped, and he did very well in tests. Still rather bitter towards those people, understandably. We felt he — '

'Bitter?'

He glanced up quickly. 'He harboured a grudge against them. Don't you feel that was understandable, Herr Matthofer?'

'I suppose so,' I said. It was as far as I could go; he didn't know who we were. But something was odd: we don't harbour grudges against the opposition, whatever they do to us; there's nothing personal: it's dog eat dog. I didn't see why Schrenk should have been 'bitter'.

'He put up quite a struggle,' the doctor said. 'The place was in a mess, with blood on the carpet and some glass from a broken syringe. One of my staff ran into the street after them, but they didn't stop.'

'You called the police?'

'Immediately. We are not used to that sort of affair in my clinic. It was very disturbing.'

'What did they do to him?'

'They took him away.' He looked at me quizzically. 'I told you, they — '

'I mean before. Before he was brought here.'

'Ah. That.' He screwed his face against the smoke and pulled a drawer open, putting a thick file on to the desk and opening it. 'I have had some experience with these things, you understand. I am a member of Amnesty International and the World Medical Association. We study these phenomena.' I looked at my watch and he noticed, but didn't hurry. Floderus sat snuffling in his handkerchief. 'We questioned the patient, and his answers were consistent with the trauma we noted on his body.' He studied the file. 'He was subjected to the "wet canvas" treatment. Do you know what that is?'

'Yes.' But they wouldn't have started off with that one. They risk losing you, that way, because panic sets in.

'They used falanga, and we found extensive ecchymoses and edema, with some degree of irreversible ischemic changes in the intermetatarsal areas of the foot. There were — '

'What was he walking like, before they took him away?'

'His feet were still rather painful. He tended to hobble.'

'All right. What else?'

He looked at the file again. 'He said they had suspended him from the arms for prolonged periods, but we found no evidence of cervical dislocations. We took X-rays, of course. He could use his arms perfectly well, after about eight weeks. We found hematuria and some bleeding from the ears, but again we were able to treat these symptoms successfully. This kind of thing is found extensively in Chile, by the way, and Uruguay.'

'You'll find it everywhere,' I said.

I heard Floderus swallowing saliva.

'So we are beginning to discover.' Steinberg nodded, and dropped ash on to his dressing-gown. 'There was, in Herr Schrenk's case, local infiltration of anaesthetics into the eyelids.'

Floderus was leaning forward. 'What for?' he asked the doctor.

'I beg your pardon?'

'So that he couldn't shut his eyes,' I told him, 'against the light.' I wished I hadn't let him stay; he was getting on my nerves. 'Did they use drugs?' I asked Steinberg.

'He described certain phases of mental disorientation, including hallucination, but of no great significance. It might have been induced by reaction to the physical trauma. If they used drugs, they may have used thiopental or one of the amphetamines; he exhibited no lasting evidence of this.' He closed the file and put it in the drawer.

'Can you tell me anything else?'

He drew on his cigarette, leaving a shred of tobacco on his lip. 'I think that is all I can give you. As to his present state of mind, it depends upon how they have treated him since they took him away.' He spread his thick white hands. 'We can only hope that by some good fortune…'

'Did he tell you he'd revealed any information?'

'I heard nothing about that.'

'Would you have heard?'

'It would be in the records.'

'Taped records?'

We record conversations with patients, yes. It is routine, an essential part of the therapy.'

'Can I hear some of the tapes?'

'That is quite out of the question. Such matters are strictly confidential. We — '

'Did he mention any names? Names of people in Moscow?'

'I cannot say. It would be in the records.' He began fidgeting with a pen-holder.

'Did he scream any names in his nightmares?'

'Herr Matthofer, I am not at liberty to — '

`Did he make any threats?'

'Of what nature?'

'Any nature. Any threats against anyone at all.' I got up and walked past his desk to the window and back. 'You said he was bitter, and bore a grudge. Against whom?'

'There was nothing specific.' He stubbed out his cigarette, annoyed by the way things were going. He was the top kick in this place and he'd found me on the doorstep washed up by the night.

'You mean he was bitter in general? What made you think he bore someone a grudge?'

He stood up and came from behind his desk, drawing the dressing-gown around him. 'Surely you can understand that a man in his condition should bear a grudge against those responsible for it?'

'Or did you just expect him to feel like that?'

It was important and he didn't realize it and I couldn't explain.

'You will have to excuse me, Herr Matthofer. I agreed to receiving you in the middle of the night in order to discuss this patient's case for a few minutes, but not to submit to an Interrogation. I am leaving Hanover at nine o'clock and I need some sleep.' He jerked the chain of the desk lamp and went over to the door. Floderus got up. I asked Steinberg:

'Did the police find any clues?'

'Not to my knowledge.'

'They came here to ask questions?'

'But of course.'

'Did anyone see the car these people used?'

'No, they did not. I would have been told. Now I will say good night, gentlemen.' He opened the front door for us.

Floderus started blowing into his hands again the minute we were in the street.

'Haven't you got any gloves, for God's sake?' I asked him.

'I lost them,' he said irritably.

'Haven't you got any others?'

'Why was it so important,' he asked me, 'about Schrenk being bitter?' He swung the Mercedes in full turn and headed north by the river.

'It's right out of character. What time's our rendezvous?'

'03.30 at Zellerfeld. He should be there by now.'

'Why so early?'

'I didn't know you wanted to see Steinberg first.'

'Couldn't you signal him?'

'Look,' he said, 'we're all doing our best, OK?' He got on to the autobahn at Hanover-Flughafen and drove east, moving into the eighties before turning south at the cloverleaf with the Hildesheim sign coming up. 'Your stuff's in the glove pocket if you want to start looking it over.'

I found the thick envelope. It had the single word Scorpion written in pencil at the top left corner. 'Where else did they take him,' I asked Floderus as I pulled out the papers, 'apart from Lubyanka?'

'We think he was at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, and the mental hospital in Chernyakhovsk. London's still checking with our people in Moscow and you'll be briefed when you get there.'

'Is that all you know?'

'I'm just contact and relay, sorry.'

I checked the stuff over: transit cover in the name of Hans Matthofer, East German representative for Plastichen Farben; visa and travel permit, Moscow only; record of previous visits; stated purpose of present visit; advanced hotel booking and proposed itinerary (including a visit to the Bolshoi Theatre on the evening of February 23rd, unaccompanied); currency vouchers; a batch of sheets in a file with photographs of plastic moulding and three letters of introduction, one of them to the Ministry of Labour. My photograph was recognizable, with fur hat.

'Have you got any clothes for me?'

'In the back. Coat, hat, furlined boats and gloves; it's twenty below in Moskers, rather you than me.'

We drove for two hours, through Hildesheim and over roads covered with snow when we reached the mountains, while I thought of Croder and Schrenk and Steinberg and tried to think why Schrenk should feel 'bitter' about what they'd done to him. It didn't fit in with the pattern and I kept on worrying it because these are the little things that can take you off course if you're not watching. I'd done two missions with Schrenk and in two missions you learn a lot about a man; Schrenk knew the score, all the way along the line, and he wouldn't bear a grudge against the KGB any more than he'd bear a grudge against a snake that had bitten him, because there's nothing personal about these things.

Floderus was slowing, and I tore off the top left corner of the envelope and put the papers back.

'Where are we?'

'The other side of Zellerfeld. I made a loop.' He drove slowly for another half mile and pulled up on a snow-covered patch alongside the road, dousing the headlamps. The moonlight brightened gradually.

'Is this the place?'

'Yes.'

'Where is he?'

'He should be here.'

'What's the landmark?'

'That sign over there.' Einbeck.

I began worrying. 'How far is it to the checkpoint?'

'Four kilometres.' He began blowing into his hands and I reached over to the back seat and rummaged about and found the gloves and dropped them on to his lap.

'For Christ's sake put these on.'

'You'll need them when — '

'Put them on till then.' A slight break in the tone, inadmissible in the pre-jump phase but my nerves were only just under the surface and small things were picking at them because this is the phase when you're stone cold and your mind is clear and you know you're putting your life on the line and you know you've done it before and got away with it but this time it's different and you're scared again, and swallowing, and alert to the signs and portents that are suddenly in every sound and every shadow, till you can't stand a man blowing into his hands because the repetition drives you up the wall.

Not good. Not at all propitious. Better to get to a telephone and pull Tilson out of bed and tell him to find Croder: Tell him I was right, I'm not ready, he'll have to get someone else.

'… Gunther.'

'What?'

'His name's Gunther,' said Floderus again. 'The man with the truck.'

I wound the window down and listened. The air was perfectly still and the snow had brought its own peculiar silence; a jet was moving at altitude, lost in the brightness of the moon, its thin whine threading the night. I could hear other sounds, distant and muffled by the terrain.

'Dogs?'

'What? Yes. At the checkpoint.'

'Where else?'

'Nowhere else, in this area.'

I don't like dogs.

'You want a gun?'

'What for?'

He looked at me in the pale light, sniffing a drop off his nose. 'For the mission.'

'No. Is this meant to be clearance?'

'Sort of.'

I wanted to laugh. Clearance and briefing normally takes hours and you see a dozen people and sign a dozen forms and make half a dozen declarations because that's all that's going to be left of you if you muck it up out there: a record of what you were. It makes you feel you're important to somebody, if only to the computer clerks. But this trip I was being kicked across the frontier by a junior a-i-p with a drip on his nose and only just enough control over himself to keep him from telling me I shouldn't have got him out of bed in the first place.

'You'd better sign this.' He sniffed again and got out a crumpled handkerchief, taking off one of my gloves to use it. 'Is that your own code?'

I looked at the form. 'My own what?'

' "Five hundred roses for Moira." '

I didn't want to talk about that so I got a pen and signed the form, no next-of-kin, no dependants, nothing saved up to leave to anyone, just enough for the roses. What was she doing now? When did she last think of me?

'Where the hell is that man Gunther?'

Floderus looked at his watch in the moonlight. 'He'll be here.' He put the glove back on.

'How big's the truck?'

'It's a ten-tonner.'

'What's it carrying?'

'You.'

'Come on for Christ's sake I want briefing!' He jerked back and stared at me. 'I want to know what else that truck's carrying and where it's going and why he's got a free run across the frontier. I want information, is that too much to ask?'

He pulled himself round on his seat and said a bit shakily: 'Look, I haven't been told all that much. You're being briefed in Moscow, they said. All I'm here for is — '

'Information, don't you know what it means? About the truck.'

'Oh. Well,' he gave a long riffling sniff, 'it's taking luxury goods across for the black market in Leipzig, a regular run. Scotch and perfume and American goods, jazz records and cassettes and stuff like — '

'Who runs this?'

'The Party, if you want to go right to the top. It's for them and their wives, the same thing that goes on in Moscow. They — '

'How often does this truck go across?'

'About every month. It varies.'

'Just the driver, no one with him?'

'No. He — '

'Is he Russian? East German? West German?'

'He's from Hamburg.'

'Has he ever been turned back?'

'Only once. He — '

'Only once?'

He caught his breath and said in a moment, 'There was a new guard commander, and he wasn't tipped off. He was changed again.'

I didn't want to know any more. This was Russian roulette they'd got me playing: either we'd get across the frontier or we wouldn't. Either I'd find Schrenk or I wouldn't. All I could do was to stop thinking and let the strain off and leave it to Croder and try to believe he knew what he was doing.

I shut my eyes for a while, until I heard the faint clinking of snow chains and the throb of a diesel engine. There was light flushing across the road behind us.

'Is this Gunther?'

'Yes. He said he'd — '

'How do you know it's not someone else?'

'There shouldn't be anyone else up here, this time of night.'

'Shouldn't? Jesus Christ.' I wished Ferris were here, or someone who didn't leave everything to chance.

'It's okay,' Floderus said, 'he's flashing us.'

'What sort of terrain is there,' I asked him wearily, 'between here and the checkpoint?'

'What? Oh, just rocks, and a few trees.'

'Why doesn't he just give a blast on the horns?'

He stared at me. 'They'd hear it from the frontier.'

Some kind of laughter came out of me, maybe panic in disguise. The truck came alongside and I waited for Floderus to check the driver before I got out and opened the rear door of the car and changed coats and put on the fur hat; at least London had got this much right, pulling the tailor out of bed as well, to check on the size.

'Gloves,' I said.

'Oh.' He gave them to me. 'This is Gunther,' he said in German.

A thick-shouldered man in a reefer jacket and woollen hat, his flat square face half buried in a scarf. 'Everything is in order,' he said.

'Why were you late?'

'There was snow.' He pulled open the rear doors of the truck and jumped up. 'In here.'

Most of the stuff on the floor was Scotch, in cases of a dozen bottles, and he had to shift four of them before he could drag the lid of the recess upwards and swing it to one side. The compartment was lined with felt. He stood clear of it to let the roof light shine down.

'What's underneath?'

'Nothing,' he said. 'The road. But it's thick, and there are steel brackets.'

'Do you bring people across in this, the other way?'

'I have brought seven, in the past three months. Seventy thousand US dollars. Not for me. For them: His breath clouded under the roof light.

'How much do you get?'

'One thousand. I get one for you.' His small brown eyes moved over me. 'It's the first time I've taken anyone this way.'

'Are you going to move those cases back over the trap when I'm inside?'

'Yes.'

'How many of them?'

'These here. Four. Maybe five.'

'How much do they weigh? Each?'

'Seventeen kilos.'

I dropped into the recess face-down and told him to shut the lid; then I humped my back until my spine made contact. There weren't more than a few inches of leverage but it might be enough to shift five cases of Scotch because I'd only have to do it if I got trapped and if I got trapped there'd be a lot of adrenalin to help me. I told him to open the lid.

'On your back,' he said, 'is best.'

'That's the way you put people in coffins.' I looked at Floderus, standing out there at the back of the truck with his hands tucked under his arms. 'Is there anything else?'

'This,' he said, and gave me a small red metal box. Normally I refuse it but on this trip I didn't think much of my chances and if they caught up with me in Moscow and pulled me in I might want to opt out rather than finish up like Schrenk, his feet were still rather painful, he tended to hobble. I put the box in my pocket. 'Send a signal,' I told Floderus, 'as soon as you can get to a telephone. Understood?'

'OK.'

I dropped into the recess again and told Gunther to shut the lid. The time by my watch was 03.37.

I sat waiting.

The night was perfectly quiet, with no movement in the air. The moon neared its zenith, towards the south.

I shifted my position again and the nerves in my right thigh reacted; the tissues had only just begun healing. I didn't know if I could run yet, if I had to. There was nothing else wrong with me, except for the lingering effects of the shock: unexpected sounds made my head jerk, as if they were shots.

It was freezing cold.

'What held you up?'

Another trolleybus went past the end of the street, along Ckalova ulica, a No.10. It was the seventh I'd counted. There had been a dozen cars during the same period; it was eleven o'clock and traffic was light.

'We crashed the truck,' I told him.

He started the engine again to blow some more air through the heater. It was a Pobeda, stinking of oil and stale cigarette smoke. We couldn't run the engine all the time because it'd be noticed: we parked by the river, close to the intersection, and four militia patrols had gone past in the last fifty minutes, one of them slowing to look at us. I didn't like it, any of it; my scalp crept too easily, and I was breathing too fast. I'd got close to being wiped out in that truck and the organism remembered.

'We thought we'd lost you,' the contact said. His speech was indistinct, as if his mouth were bruised. 'There was a complete blackout on you after Floderus signalled from Hanover.'

'It was close.'

'What happened to the driver?'

'The truck went up.' I didn't want to talk about it.

He turned the engine off and the cold began creeping through the cracks again from outside the car.

'What else?' he asked me.

It was his job to find out. This was Moscow and in Moscow you live from one minute to the next because there's no building that isn't bugged and no street that isn't surveyed and no hope of getting away with sloppy security or a doubtful drop or inadequate cover. They could stop, the next time around, and poke their torches in here and ask for our papers and pull us in if everything wasn't exactly right. Or even if it was.

So he had to find out what I'd been doing, because in five minutes from now I might not be able to tell anyone. I said: 'I got as far as Ashersleben in a shepherd's Volkswagen and asked for some medical attention and bought a new coat. That was this morning. There wasn't a plane till 13:20 Leipzig time. Then — '

'What medical attention?' He turned to look at me, and the oblique light shadowed the scar that ran from one ear along the jawline. A lot of them look a bit creased in one way or another when they've come in from the field.

'Torn leg,' I said.

'Is that all?'

'And screw you too.'

He laughed without any sound at all, laying his head back and giving a little shake. 'As long as you're fit for work.'

'I'm as fit as I'll ever be. Where the hell is Bracken?'

He began watching the intersection again. Through a gap in the buildings I could see a curve of floodlit gold, one of the domes of the Kremlin. 'It's difficult,' he said in that soft-slipper voice of his. 'Since the trial started we can't make a move without drawing a tag. There's a lot of foreign journalists in town and the K don't like it.'

'How did Bracken get in?'

'Diplomatic cover. It was last-minute stuff: they had to fake a case of hepatitis in the Embassy and send a man home, with Bracken to replace him.'

My nerves reacted again, shrinking the scalp. Most of the field directors come in like that, but not so fast: London would prepare the ground a month ahead to avoid any fuss. But this wasn't a planned operation; it was a last-ditch emergency job, and the man they'd thrown me as director in the field was trying to shake off the ticks before he got close to me and blew me sky-high at the first rendezvous.

I began taking slow breaths, working on the nerves.

'Bracken's all right,' the contact said. 'He knows his Moscow, don't worry.'

'It won't help him. Not at night.' Bracken would have left the Embassy in a car with diplomatic plates and the tags would have fallen in behind: it was routine KGB procedure when someone new joined the staff. And he couldn't drive dear of them by putting his foot down because he wasn't going to ground: he was going back to the Embassy sooner or later and they'd ask an awful lot of questions. There's not much traffic at night in this city and you'd wake the dead if you hit the tit and left rubber all over the road. All he could do was to try getting a truck or a bus or something between them and himself and ease off into a side street while their view was blocked. And the best of luck.

'Have you worked here before?' the contact asked me.

'No. I was trained here for Curtain operations.'

'Are you fluent?'

'Yes. Local accent.'

'When were you here last?' he asked me, watching the intersection.

'Three years ago.' Another militia patrol went past, in one of their snubnosed Volgas. A face was turned towards us. The car didn't slow.

'That's a long time,' the contact said. 'Things are changing fast over here. You'll have to be careful.'

'Oh for Christ's sake d'you think I need telling?'

His head moved a fraction to watch my reflection in the windscreen. 'Sorry, old boy.'

I slowed my breathing, counting the breaths. I'd have to do better than this, a hell of a lot better. Otherwise I was going to blow up when the heat came on. Eight, nine, ten, 'They pulled me in from leave,' I said more quietly, 'two weeks after the last lot.'

'Bastards, aren't they?'

We watched the car.

'I could have refused.'

'Why didn't you?'

'Vanity.'

He laughed again soundlessly, but didn't take his eyes off the car. It was moving into better light now, turning off Ckalova ulica towards us and speeding up a little. It was a black Humber with CD plates.

'You're driving this one,' the contact said, 'all right?'

I said yes, and watched the Humber. There was nothing behind it but there was still plenty of time: we were parked less than a hundred yards from the intersection. It came on, slowing as it neared. Another bus passed along the ring road, then a private car, going quite fast.

'Cutting it fine,' the contact said.

The Humber was nearly abreast of us now and slowing under full brakes, the driver's door coming open a moment before it stopped. A man got out and came across to us as the contact hit the door open and left the wheel to me. I slid behind it as the other man got in and said, 'You'd better hurry.'

A squeal came as the contact took the Humber away with the engine racing in low gear before the change. I hit the stick-shift and did a tight U-turn and found a side street and swung into it with my eyes on the mirror. There was nothing.

'You'd better go south,' the man said. 'Get on to the ring road as soon as you can.' He sat back, stretching his legs out. 'But I think we're all right. I'm Bracken.'

'Quiller.' I made two right turns, watching the mirror.

'This is the car you'll use,' Bracken told me. 'The papers are in the glove pocket. I was getting worried about you.'

'We had problems.' At each turn the street lights threw his reflection on to the windscreen and filled in what I remembered of him. He was a shut-faced man with a tight mouth and eyes that never came to rest on anything for more than a second: he was looking around him now with brief jerks of his head. He couldn't keep his feet still either; he kept on shuffling them against the floorboards. Maybe he wasn't always like that; he could be worried at the moment because he'd been cutting things fine. If they'd turned off the ring road after him he would have driven straight past us but there's always a risk and he could have come dose to blowing me. I didn't know much about him, only a few things I'd heard over cups of tea in the Caff between missions; someone had said he'd been thrown out of an instructor's job at Norfolk because he'd used a live charge to demonstrate his de-arming techniques, and someone else had told me he'd murdered his mistress and been acquitted because the Bureau had suppressed some of the evidence; I didn't necessarily believe either story but the truth was probably somewhere there in the background. There's usually something a bit touched about the field directors: look at Ferris, always strangling mice.

'What sort of problems?' Bracken wanted to know.

'Access. Croder's not as good as they say.'

His blunt head turned quickly. 'Croder is very good. It couldn't have been his fault.'

'He took a hell of a risk.'

'Quite possibly. He takes on things that other people won't touch. So do you. That's why he wanted you for this one. Did you fly in?'

'Yes.'

'Where did you land?'

'Domodedovo.'

'What hotel?'

'The Aeroflot.'

'Are we still in the clear?'

'Yes.' I'd been using the mirror at five-second intervals.

He stopped shuffling his feet. 'Did you leave your passport with Immigration?'

'Yes.'

'I want you to ask for it back in the prescribed two days and then go to ground and come up as a Soviet citizen.' He took an envelope from his coat and put it into the glove compartment. 'Everything's there.' He talked for ten minutes without stopping except to answer questions; we covered liaison, contacts, signals, the safe-house and possible exit procedures. 'I want you to know that you'll receive every support from the people here in the field and of course from London. I'm not trying to boost your morale. We want Schrenk, badly, and we think you can pull him out for us.'

'Where is he?'

'We don't know. We've — '

'You don't know?'

He waited three seconds. 'We are looking for him very hard. We have a contact inside Lubyanka, watching for Schrenk to come in. At the moment we can't understand why he wasn't taken straight there from Hanover. We're therefore watching a lot of other places: the Serbsky Institute here in Moscow and the facilities they run in the Urals, the Komi Republic, Murmansk, the Potma complex, and of course — ' with the slightest pause- 'in Leningrad.'

'They might have gone to Hanover to kill him.' I made another turn and got on to the ring road going south. The mirror was clear except for a trolleybus in the distance.

'Not without trying again to break him, and they couldn't do that in Hanover. It's going to take time, and a lot of personnel. We know that.'

'What about Leningrad?'

His speech became slightly faster, pushed by his nerves. 'The cell is still intact. Obviously Schrenk hasn't been broken yet. Of course they might have gone too far: he might be dead. But we've got to know.'

'What are their plans, if he breaks?'

He said in a moment, 'Some of them will try making a run for it, but they won't get across any of the frontiers because the guard posts will be alerted, and so will the airports. They can't quietly leave their jobs before the balloon goes up because most of them are entrenched very deeply in official positions and they'd expose the whole network. One or two have elected to take capsules if they have to, rather than face interrogation and the labour camps.' He took some kind of inhaler from his pocket and started using it: it smelt like Vick's.

'How many people are there?'

'Fifteen.'

Headlights came into the mirror and I watched them. 'Can't any of them get clear?' Comstock was in Leningrad, and so was Whitman. I'd worked with both of them.

'Not without putting everyone else at risk.' He'd begun shuffling his feet again. 'Incidentally the CIA is furious with us about Schrenk. They know Leningrad could blow.'

'They've done all right for eleven years.'

'That's why they're furious.' He inhaled again and then screwed the cap on. The whole car was reeking of menthol.

'The papers for this car,' I asked him, 'are for which cover?'

'You've got both.'

'Get them out, will you? Put the East German papers in your pocket. These too.' I pulled out the credentials Floderus had given me. 'Start reading the Russian cover, do you mind?'

'Aloud?'

'Yes.'

He didn't turn his head. 'Have we picked someone up?'

'I don't know yet. It's just some headlights.'

His hands began working busily, transferring the papers. 'Don't you trust the German cover?'

'I'd rather be a local citizen if I'm going to be found with a foreign embassy man. Just a slight edge.' But I wasn't happy, because every minute we were together we risked being picked up and questioned. The whole operation was balanced on a knife edge and we had to keep very still.

'Kapista Mikhail Kirov,' Bracken began reading, 'age 42, born Moscow, October 29^th 1937_, the Kuncevo district.' He paused briefly. 'Height, weight and description are all yours precisely. The — '

'Faster.' The lights in the mirror were getting bright now.

'Father, now deceased, Valery Kapista, died in an industrial accident, Troice-Lykovo district, 1976. Mother also deceased — '

I took a right turn and gunned up with the tyres just this side of squealing-point and passed three parked trucks and crossed some lights at red and turned right again. Glare filled the mirror and died away.

'This car's perfectly all right,' Bracken said.

'They've picked up a radio call and they're sniffing out the area where you slipped them. They started calling the minute they lost you.' I turned off all the lights and waited as long as possible before I put the Pobeda into a side street a hundred yards before the next major intersection. There was a whole line of trucks parked along one side of the street and I gunned up again and found a gap and hit the brakes and pushed the stick into reverse and got a brief whimper from the rear tyres as the power dragged us against the kerb. I cut the engine and sat waiting.

'Read more?' Bracken asked.

'No time.'

He sat with his feet perfectly still, his head turned slightly to the left, where he could pick up echoes and reflections from the buildings opposite. The wheel was locked hard over and I left it like that because they might be stupid enough to leave a gap if they came past and saw us and stopped: there was just a chance we could get out fast enough to confuse them before they could open fire. If they saw us and pulled up and blocked the gap I could try making a break on foot: the trucks gave a lot of cover and there was no snow on the ground. It would depend on what Bracken wanted me to do.

'Instructions,' I said.

He waited two seconds. We both had to listen. 'If you can drive us out of it,' he said evenly, 'do that.' We listened again, and heard the distant sound of a car. 'But not unless the chances are good.'

'All right.' The sound of the car was loudening. It was accelerating very hard in one of the indirect gears. 'Where do I drop you, if I can get dear?'

'Any cab rank. I'm going back to the Embassy.'

We listened again. The car had changed into top and was travelling flat out. Echoes were coming in now from the buildings at the intersection and they made it difficult to hear what was happening. I thought I was picking up a second car somewhere, also accelerating. I wasn't sure.

'If I can't drive us out?' I asked Bracken.

'Run.'

'All right.' I sat listening again. Bracken wouldn't have a lot of trouble: they couldn't search him and they couldn't arrest him and at the moment they didn't have anything on him to justify kicking him out of the country. But if they caught me they'd question me and a Soviet citizen shouldn't make contact with any foreigners, least of all members of a diplomatic mission. The cover wouldn't stand up, if they wanted to put it under the light.

'Two?' he asked suddenly.

'What?'

'Two cars?'

We listened again.

'Yes.' The first one was close now; the second one was still piling up the speed in an indirect gear, somewhere in the distance. 'What is there in the envelope,' I asked Bracken, 'on Schrenk?'

'Quite a lot. Everything you ought to have.'

'Local friends, movements, contacts?'

'Everything. Croder instructed me.'

'Fair enough.'

We sat waiting. Light swept suddenly across the face of the buildings opposite, brightening and going dark as the first car crossed the intersection flat out with its echoes drumming and fading over the next few seconds.

'One.'

'Yes.'

Tyres started howling and light came again on the buildings as the second car turned at the intersection and sped up towards us with a gear botching and the power coming on and the exhaust sending out a hollow rising roar until the gears shifted and the power came on again. I got comfortable in my seat and moved the stick into low and kept my foot down on the clutch and put my fingers against the starter key and watched the light flood brightly across the buildings as I waited to know if the trap we were sitting in was going to spring shut.

'Good evening, little mother.'

Her head came up sharply. She was sitting with her back to the wall of the hallway, her cracked black shoes resting on the edge of a slow-combustion stove, the naked bulb throwing light on her white hair. Some mauve knitting was on her lap, and she had been nibbling at a sausage when I'd come in.

'What do you want, comrade?' Her small eyes were narrowed, focusing on my face.

'I want to see the upravdom. Is he here?'

She eyed me up and down again, noting my clothes, needing to find a pigeonhole for me in the infinitely-varied strata of Moscow society. 'I will see,' she said, and took another small bite of sausage.

I waited while she reached and took a brass bell from the shelf of her vestibule, and swung it three times. I was standing halfway between the stairs and the entrance doors, with the street exposed to my peripheral vision. This was just routine: I'd left Bracken at a taxi rank along Narodnaja ulica ten minutes ago and got here clean. The second militia patrol had gone hounding straight past us and I'd used the back streets towards the ring road, working my way out of the search area. 'Reach me through the Embassy,' he'd told me. 'I shall be in signals with London direct. We're on the board as «Scorpion» and you'll use that in paroles and countersigns.' I'd had to ask him for my East German papers back: he hadn't thought of it first. Not a good sign: he was here to direct me in the field and the field was dangerous and already he'd missed a trick because the brush with the militia patrols had unnerved him.

I felt vulnerable and exposed.

Footsteps sounded on the stone stairway. 'I am Yuri Gorsky.' A fleshy man with watchful eyes and a shock of stiff graying hair, his worn suit smelling of black tobacco. His hand was steady and strong.

'Kirov,' I said.

He led me upstairs to a room at the end of the passage on the third floor and showed me in. It was small, cluttered and stifling, with the fumes of a charcoal heater sharp on the air. One door, one window, one light bulb and one narrow bed. No telephone.

'I have been expecting you,' Gorsky said in a low voice. He stood waiting.

I was looking for signs everywhere, signs of something wrong, of a hundred things wrong. He understood this, and I could feel his understanding as we waited the time out, unsure of each other. That was on the air, too, as strong as the charcoal fumes: the scent of creatures met by night, their hairs lifted and their eyes watching at the edge of vision, their breath held and their muscles tensed by the knowledge of where they stood on dangerous ground.

Bracken had said he was totally reliable, but I didn't trust that. I trusted my own feelings. 'Is this the top floor?' I asked him.

`Yes.' He closed the door quietly and went to the window, lifting the lower sash so easily that I knew the wooden frame must have been soaped. He beckoned to me.

The freezing air came into my lungs as I leaned and looked down, tracing the skeletonic pattern of the fire escape downwards to the ground, where a street lamp stood. There was nothing running upwards, against the wall; the guttering passed across the top of the window, two feet higher; it looked strong but that meant nothing.

'It's the best room,' Gorsky said, and I believed him. People from the other rooms on this floor would have to run the length of the iron balcony before they reached the fire escape. The lower floors were more dangerous: they would be searched first, if anyone came. 'Don't worry,' he said in his low voice, 'about the little dezhurnaya in the hallway. She has a grandson in the labour camps. But give her money if you want to. Not too much.'

'How long has she been in this building?'

'Nearly seven years. As long as I have.'

I slid the window shut. 'Was Schrenk here?'

'Yes.' He offered me a black and yellow packet and I shook my head.

'When?'

'Before they arrested him.' He took a cigarette and lit it, throwing the match into the charcoal heater. I went absolutely still, and he sensed it. 'Don't worry,' he said, `they arrested him in the street, nowhere near here. They wouldn't have been interested in where he came from; they would have been interested in what he was doing. If they had wanted to know where he came from, they would have asked him, and if he had told them, they would have come here.' He drew the cigarette to a bright red glow, and then blew the smoke out in a slow cloud, watching me through it. 'So don't worry. You will be safe here.'

I looked at the bed, and the cracked handbasin, and the flimsy bookshelves, one end wired to the wall where a calendar was pinned, two years out of date and with a portrait of Lenin on the yellowed paper.

`Was he here in this actual room?'

`Yes,' said Gorsky. 'He was comfortable.' Gorsky was responsible for the safe-house, not for people who got arrested in the street.

`Telephone?' I said.

`You must not use the one in the building. I cannot send messages, either. You must use the telephone box in the street, at the first corner. The light in it doesn't work, but if you need it, screw the bulb in tighter.' He drew deeply on the black tobacco. 'Will you have visitors?'

'No.'

`That is better. I won't write your name on the residence record, of course. We shall agree, if it is ever necessary, that I forgot.' He gave a faint smile. 'Though it would be too late for excuses, by then. Tell me,' he said as he moved to the door, 'if there is anything you need. There is an alleyway, quite narrow, not far from the building; you go past the telephone box and turn right, and you will see it. It is useful.'

When he'd gone I looked round the room again, at the armchair with the stuffing out and the cracked mirror askew over the handbasin and the pile of dog-eared magazines on the floor by the window. Schrenk had been here, then, before they'd arrested him. I was that close. And that far.

Two kopecks.

'Is Sergei there?'

'Who?'

'Sergei Panov.'

'I'm sorry, there's nobody here of that name. This is the British Embassy.'

'Oh, excuse me. I must have asked for the wrong number.'

'That's quite all right.'

Every line to the Embassy was tapped and radio was out of the question and protracted speech-code was a slow-burn fuse because they'd go straight through the exchange and trace the call and raid the place within minutes so I'd had to ask for a cut-out.

'Sergei' was for Taganskaja Metro station and I got there in fourteen minutes, feeling nervy again because in this city there wasn't much traffic at night and I was vulnerable. It had been bad enough half an hour ago.

Have you been to the cafe? the younger one had asked.

Yes, she'd said before I could stop her.

I see. And were you talking about the trial there? About the traitor Borodinski? His eyes going over my papers again, turning them to the light, looking for the wrong weave, the wrong coloration, the wrong serial number, looking at the photograph and then at my face, then back at the photograph.

We were talking about Prokofiev, I said before she could answer. She could get us arrested: they were trying to provoke us into saying something wrong.

Prokofiev, or Borodin-ski? A little joke, his tone amused, a young man who knew his composers.

He wasn't playing a game of his own. Since the trial had begun, the standing orders for the police were to show these dissidents that it was useless protesting and demonstrating and thumping the cafe tables. Comrade Borodinski would be tried in the court, not in the streets. A night in the cell would remind them of that.

If we call him a traitor before he's tried

It simply means, I cut in on her again, that it's how we regard him. With a short laugh, squeezing her arm, Ask Helmut — he says we ought to raid the courthouse and string him up from a lamp-post outside.

Who is Helmut? His eyes watching her, watching me.

A friend of ours, I told him. He feels rather strongly about traitors.

The other man stamped his feet, feeling the cold, getting bored. I was waiting for Natalya to say something, ready to cut in on her at once; but she was quiet now, because of my warning.

Where are you two going now?

Home, I said.

He looked down at the papers again. But you live in opposite directions from here.

I'm seeing my friend home first.

His head came up. Why? Are you saying the streets are dangerous?

Of course not. It's just that I'm enjoying her company.

A thin smile. Let's hope she's enjoying yours. He passed my papers back, slapping them on to my hand. It's late for people to be out on the streets. It disturbs the more respectable citizens who are trying to sleep.

Quite bad enough.

The cut-out came up the escalator of the Metro station, dropping his thin little cigar into the sand bin at the fourth pace from the moving stairs and sliding both hands into the pockets of his coat, thumbs hooked out. He wasn't too quick on the parole and countersign and I put him through a variation before I took him across to the car and drove five blocks and stopped between two trucks parked on the wasteground alongside a building site where a crew was working the night shift. It was a new apartment block and the crane was swinging an entire prefabricated wall into place with four window apertures in it; sparks flew in a fountain from a welder's torch on the floor below.

'Have they found Schrenk yet?'

'Not yet,' he said. 'You'd have been told.'

'I was absent from base.'

'Oh.' He gave me the tape recorder and took something else from the glove pocket and sat clutching it in his bare hands.

'What's that?'

'This? Handwarmer. Burns charcoal. I can't stand this bloody cold, look at these chilblains.'

I began talking on to the tape. 2/2 12.09. 1 need all info on Natalya Fyodorova, senior clerk, Kremlin office, companion of subject before arrest. Also all info on Pyotr Ignatov, Party member, often in subject's company, no other details known.

She'd told me I would find him at a meeting of the Izmajlovo chapter at ten o'clock tomorrow morning and I was going to be there if I could make it. This wasn't for the tape because Bracken might decide to send someone else in to watch Ignatov and I wanted to work solo: the man could be ultra sensitive about Schrenk's arrest and they could frighten him off.

I need to know how the subject was arrested: in a street or where? What street, what place? Had he made a mistake? Bad security? Was he blown? Need to know why he applied for post as a-i-p: this is important. I'm finding inconsistencies in his behaviour prior to arrest.

Condensation was forming on the windscreen and the crane swung its skeletonic arm through the floodlights insubstantially, like a back projection on frosted glass. The welder's torch flared with an acid radiance and I looked away from it to protect my night vision.

Should I stress the importance of Natalya Fyodorova? She probably knew more about Schrenk than anyone else in Moscow, more than Bracken's team could find out in a month. But I was seeing her again tomorrow: leave it at that and don't risk over-surveillance. She could be frightened off as easily as Ignatov.

I suggest messages by hand direct to base in digraphic square, key 5. When absent I'll report hourly at the hour plus 15, Extension 7, silent line. Signal ends.

I sat thinking for another five minutes. There was a lot more I wanted to ask but I wasn't going to put it on tape because I didn't want to show my hand at this stage: I didn't know how Bracken normally worked but I knew he was the key man in a crisis and he might react differently; once he knew my line of enquiry he might throw in contacts and tags and shields and the whole bloody bazaar. I didn't want anyone in my way.

'Who does this go to?' I asked the man beside me.

'Winfield.'

'Who's he?'

'One of our a-i-ps.'

'Where's his base?'

'Didn't anybody tell you anything? We — '

'Where's his base?'

Low threshold.

'The airport.' His head was turned to watch me now.

`Oh come on, which one?'

'Sheremetyevo.It's — '

'For Christ's sake,' I said, 'you don't go all the way out there every time?'

'No. We use a drop.'

'Mobile?'

'Yes, the Aeroflot ferry bus.'

Desperate times. Bracken was keeping himself strictly in the shadows while he tried to dig himself in and set up an untapped phone line and signals facilities somewhere outside the Embassy and it wouldn't be easy to do but he'd have to do it because all I'd wanted was a brief squawk on the tape and this man had taken twenty minutes to make the rendezvous and so had I. You'll receive every possible support, Croder had said, Bracken had said, both of them lying, this wasn't support, it was bloody musical chairs. Or was that what they'd meant by possible? Was this all they'd got for me?

'We're trying to put someone into your sector,' the cut-out was saying, rubbing his hands on the charcoal thing. 'I mean really close, you know, five minutes away. Make things a lot easier. Of course it's always getting a phone that's the trouble. I mean a clean one.'

I dropped the tape recorder on to his lap and started the engine and wiped the stuff off the windscreen. 'Who's my director?' I asked him.

`I don't know.'

Strictly in the shadows. But that was all right; it was what a cut-out was for: to protect both ends of the signal.

'I'm going to put you back on the Metro at Proletarskaya,' I told him.

`Is that closer?'

'No, but I don't like doubling on my tracks. The trains don't stop running till one o'clock, you've got enough time.' I got into gear and swung the headlight beams across the low relief of the wasteground.

'What's he done?' he asked me in a moment.

'Who?'

'Schrenk.'

I got fed-up again: he hadn't been fully trained. The executive asks all the questions and it's strictly one-way conversation because otherwise it's dangerous: once in the field you don't look for nonbrief information any more than you look for a gas leak with a match and they ought to have told him that.

'He's disappeared,' I said.

'I know, but — '

'And it's all you need to know.'

A city is a warren and the nearest hole I could see was one of the dark arched doorways of the GUM department store and I went for that, headlong across the roadway and the pavement and through the people as a man tried to trip me and someone shouted, whistles blowing and the last of the glass still tinkling among the wreckage as the doors were forced open, the whole street shocked and full of sound and stilled movement for the six seconds it took me to reach the arch, another man with his hands going down to tackle me but not fast enough as I hit the doors and pitched through into the bright lamplit interior and swerved at right angles and broke through a group of people, faces opening in surprise, someone running to the glass doors to see what was happening outside in the street, stop thief someone was calling out, it was a trap in here but worse in the open, keep running it's all you can do.

Glass doors, arches, windows and a stairway, everywhere crowded, wrought iron bridges crossing the cathedral form of the building, a bell ringing somewhere, then more shouting as doors crashed open behind me and to my left, keep running and find a door, a man's hand swinging out and his arm hooking round my throat but I used a face claw and span clear and hit the door and went through, a woman screaming and a table going over with buttons everywhere, a thousand of them and reels of cotton rolling and a box of scarlet plumes falling and exploding through the air, my hand on a brass handle and the inner door slamming back against shelves as I went through and saw the long narrow window and got there and used a packing case as a springboard and rolled, breaking the iron latch and falling, the woman screaming again.

It was a corridor and I ran hard for the door at the end, slowing and going through at a quick walk, shutting it behind me. I was back in the main building again with a lot of commotion at the Kujbyseva entrance where I'd come in. I began walking the other way, a little faster when I reached the big central fountain, not too fast, watch it, everyone's looking the other way and I'm not, I'm on the move, become or remain invisible, inaudible and unfindable, an old woman in black watching me, question it, and now a man, why? Watching my face and I touched it, blood, and got out my handkerchief as someone began shouting, a lot of them looking at me now so I went low and broke and ran again, dodging a group of children, the whistles blowing behind me and a foot darting out and sending me pitching against a man whose lined grey face loomed and stared straight into mine before I span away and went full tilt at the big glass doors at the end, stop thief, a dull rising roar of voices filling the arched building and then the crash as I hit the door on the left and swung through and found the street, slow down, the snow filling the dark sky and the pavement slippery with it, slow down, the sound of sirens on the air again, directionless and echoing from everywhere, a black patrol car slewing in to the kerb with uniformed men getting out of it, uncertain where they should go.

I began walking faster because people had started staring at my face again and I kept on using the handkerchief but it was soaked by now and I put it away and broke into a run as far as the corner and saw two militia men and swerved away and found a doorway as they shouted behind me and I knocked someone down, running hard, a room on the left and a girl with her face opening in shock and starting to scream as I kept going and found a corridor empty and ran hard to the end, the word MEN on a door and I went in and the bloodied face met me in the mirror as I stopped dead, no wonder she'd screamed.

Water gushing and a rolled paper towel: it was a long gash from the cheekbone to the chin and I could feel glass fragments moving in it as I went to work. Blood on my hands, on my coat: I used more water, swabbing at the astrakhan, listening for sounds outside, a door thudding and someone shouting. I ripped off some more of the towel and made a wad and held it against my face as I went out and climbed three steps and found the street again.

Slow. Slow down. Get the breathing under control, head down and watching the wet pavement like everyone else, breathe deep and breathe slow and don't look up, don't look round. The noise was behind me: a staccato medley of voices, and farther away a siren dying and the slam of a car door. I was on the east side of Red Square now with the walls of the Kremlin opposite. I went that way, crossing the open space with the knowledge that if they found me here there wouldn't be any cover except for the long queue of people reaching from below Spassky Gate to Lenin's tomb. I kept walking, my head down and the snow drifting across the ground, beginning to settle.

Three men walked together towards the line of people, and I moved nearer them to make a group. Others were crossing Red Square towards the walls of the Kremlin, hurrying because of the snow and because the queue was lengthening. One of the sirens was still wailing through the streets behind me, and I could hear a car moving at high speed with its engine racing. I didn't look back; I walked with the three men in black through the drifting snow. The wad of paper was pressed hard against my face; if I could stop the blood flow I could regain something like a normal image. I didn't know whether the paper was white or red; it would make a difference when I reached the queue of people. They were facing towards us, all of them, wrapped tight in their fur coats and hats and headscarves, staring across the square.

'What's happening over there?'

'Was there an accident?'

We walked steadily towards them, joining the line near Spassky Gate. It was four deep and I took up my position on the far side, away from the department store.

'Do you have toothache?'

'Yes,' I said.

'What's happening across the square there?'

'I don't know.'

I counted seven police cars, one of them moving slowly round the cathedral and another one turning and accelerating in the opposite direction, but both keeping close to the square.

'Tch! There's blood on your face. Are you hurt?'

'It's nothing much. I slipped on the snow.'

'You need medical attention.'

'It will heal.'

A body of militia men was moving away from the thick of the patrol cars and spreading out along the edge of the square, facing this way. One of the cars had dropped two men off not far from Nikolsky Gate, and they were walking steadily past the museum towards the queue of mourners. They looked closely at everyone they passed. I turned away from the queue but saw a police van slowing to a halt opposite Nabatny Tower; a dozen men got out of it and began forming a group facing this way. I turned back.

'Do you live in Moscow?'

`Yes,' I said.

'We are from Abramtsevo.' She was a motherly woman half buried in black shawls, her bright eyes watching me. 'This is my son, Viktorovich. He would like to live in Moscow, but he can't get a visa. He's a sewage engineer, an apprentice.'

I nodded to him. 'You must keep trying. You know how it is, when you want something from them.'

When I looked behind me again I saw the group of police spreading out and moving slowly towards the queue, stopping a man here and there and questioning him. I turned again and looked towards Spassky Gate, where two sentries stood.

'Have you visited the Mausoleum before?' asked the woman.

'No. I've been wanting to see it for a long time.'

The sentries would certainly see me and probably stop me: they were aware that every male in the square was being scrutinized. The three lines of police and militia men were moving steadily in from the other three sides.

'We have been twice already,' she said. 'Every time I see the sepulchre, I have tears.' She rocked gently, nodding with the whole of her round shawled body. 'Every day we have fifteen thousand people here to see it. But you will know this, since you live in Moscow.'

The snow was falling thickly now; the sky overhead was storm-dark and the air was heavy. We shuffled forward, watched by the police guards.

'The last time we came,' the woman said, 'the queue reached right round to Kutafya Tower! Of course it was summer then.' She peered up at me with her bright eyes. 'Do you have influence in Moscow?'

'No,' I said. 'But your son should keep on trying. It wears them down in the end.'

A man and a woman broke from the queue not far away, and a police guard called to them. 'Return to the line, please! Get back into line!'

'But we can't wait any longer. My wife has a cold.'

'Very well.'

We shuffled forward again.

The militia men were halfway across the square by now, one of them stopping the man to question him while his wife waited, puzzled. When I turned round I saw two of the police unit reach the end of the queue and start moving along it, scrutinizing the men. Ahead of us people were breaking away to put their cameras and parcels into a locker room, coming back to their places and shuffling forward again. The militia men were moving steadily in our direction.

There wasn't any way out. If I tried running they'd head me off and if I stayed where I was they'd question me: what have you done to your face? Why is your coat torn like this? Were you in an accident?

'The snow is already thick, in Abramtsevo. The chickens can hardly find the grain.' She moved forward with her son.

There was no way out but I had a choice. Schrenk carried a capsule, Croder had said. He would have saved us an immense amount of trouble if he had used it. The small red box was in a pocket on the inside of my waistband and in it was the capsule, cushioned in Silica-Gel desiccant. They might not search me immediately, not for anything small; but they'd see me if I tried to reach it and in any case they'd make a detailed search as soon as we got to Lubyanka and that wasn't far from here, four minutes in a police car.

It depended on how much he'd told them. Ignatov. He didn't know who I was. He was a total stranger and he hadn't looked at me once in the meeting hall or when I'd followed him to his car, not once. But he'd told them to pick me up.

We moved forward again and the woman's son took his camera across to the locker room and came back. The police guards were watching us closely now, their caps jutting and their bone-white faces reflecting the snow.

Natalya? She might have told Ignatov, he said that if Helmut was in Moscow there were certain friends who'd try to get him out of prison. Natalya, possibly. I didn't think so; she hadn't enough guile. Who else, if not Natalya? There was no one who knew me.

'Keep close in line.' Their eyes moved over our faces.

We shuffled forward again and climbed the steps between the guards of honour, going inside. It was quiet now except for the movement of feet across the wooden platform. People had stopped talking, and the men were taking off their hats. Guards with fixed bayonets stood watching us as we climbed the steps to the tomb.

It would depend on what Ignatov had told them. If he'd said I was a dissident trying to provoke others last night in the Star Cafe, a dissident with certain friends who would try getting Schrenk out of prison, I could manage what they would do to me. But if the inconceivable had happened and Ignatov had told them I was an agent from London then they'd take me through the full routine as they'd taken Schrenk, and I didn't know for certain if I could stand up to it as he'd managed to do, because I wasn't fresh in the field and the tensions of the last operation were still flickering in the nerves. I could break and if I broke I could blow London, the whole of what I knew.

'There…' said the woman in front of me, and leaned forward in her black shawls to gaze at the bright glass coffin with the exhibit inside it, either the preserved body or an effigy, it was impossible to tell. She began weeping quietly, but the line wouldn't stop for anyone and I had to nudge her, as the man behind me was nudging me. We went down the steps and made for the huge rectangle of the doorway, passing between the guards and reaching daylight. The snow fell softly over the square and over the dark moving figures, bringing its silence to the scene. I stayed with a group, talking to the woman and her son; she was still weeping quietly but he took no notice. The nearest policemen were fifty yards away; I could hear their voices under the dark sky.

'When do you expect to get your licence,' I asked Viktorovich, 'in sewage engineering?' I steered the two of them to the left, towards the history museum, keeping my head down to talk to the boy and holding the paper wad against the wound with my hand covering most of it, because the blood must have soaked through by this time.

'When they give it to me,' the boy said. 'I've passed my exams. It's a question of time.' He looked around him at the huge museum and the gilded domes. 'One day I'm going to live here, you know that? But you need a visa, and you can't get a visa without a job here, and you can't get a job here without a visa.' He kicked at the snow, thrusting his bare knuckly hands into his pockets.

The woman stopped weeping and gave a sigh, fumbling among her shawls for a handkerchief. 'It was beautiful,' she said, 'beautiful.'

I held her arm, keeping her in a straight line for the museum through the gap between the two policemen. I watched the ground.

'Look at this snow,' the boy said. 'I forgot to cover the tractor before we left this morning.'

The policeman on the left was questioning someone: I could hear his voice. It was the other one, on the right, who came suddenly across to us, the leather of his new boots creaking.

'You,' he said. 'Papers.'

Within a minute there were five or six of them round me, forming a circle.

'His face,' they kept telling each other. The first one had raised his arm and held it like that until a captain came up, the heels of his polished black boots clinking on the hard surface: I think they were iron-capped.

'His face, Captain,' the first one said.

'What have you done to your face?' The captain pulled my hand away and stared at the wound.

'I fell against some railings outside my apartment.'

'When?' His breath steamed against my face.

'An hour ago, when — '

'An hour ago. Did you have an accident?'

'Yes, I slipped on the snow — '

'Did you have an accident in your car?'

Others came up. Behind them I caught a glimpse of the woman in the shawls, staring at me with her bright eyes, shocked.

'When did he have the accident?' It was another captain.

'He's lying.'

'How did he tear his coat?'

'Papers. Show me your papers.'

I could feel blood trickling on my chin: the wound had opened when the captain had pulled my hand away.

'Kapista Kirov. That tells us nothing.' They came closer, gathering round like boys who'd found an injured animal. More of them came, and one of them said: 'He is the man I saw running away from the car.'

'Are you sure?'

'I was there! Of course I'm sure.'

They all started talking at once.

Capsule.

'Take him along. Four of you.'

'March!'

People stood perfectly still in the falling snow, watching us as we walked past them towards the roadway. Three Black Ravens had already pulled up alongside the kerb; their engines were still running. The rear doors of the nearest one swung open with a bang and I got to it when they hustled me inside: it was in my hand by the time I sat down on the padded bench.

The rear doors slammed and the steel bar was dropped across outside. Four of them sat with me, watching me but not talking.

'I don't understand,' I told the captain. 'I fell against some railings. You're making a mistake.'

'Perhaps.'

I went on talking to him, explaining that I wasn't the man they wanted. He shrugged at intervals. The box was in my hand but I hadn't decided yet. I couldn't get the capsule out while I was sitting here: they were watching me the whole time.

Dzerzhinsky Square, through the barred windows, and the Children's World department store. Then, just opposite, Lubyanka.

I had no information. The choice was simply heads or tails, black or white. Ignatov had known I was an agent and had told them so, or he hadn't. If he had known, and had told them, then I risked betraying London when they brought the pressure on and my system began overloading. If I wanted to avoid that risk, I would have to take the capsule within the next few seconds, and blow the fuse.

'You can open up!' the captain called out.

Hands hit the steel bar upwards against the rear doors.

Once inside Lubyanka I would be closely watched and meticulously searched, if they were doing their job. They would know there were two critical points at which an active intelligence agent is liable to take his capsule: within minutes of his arrest, and when the interrogation began breaking him. Woodison had done it; so had Racklaw; so had Fane. The pressure had got too much: not just the pressure of their last arrest and interrogation but of all the other arrests and interrogations they'd been through since they'd first gone eagerly into the field as younger men, brandishing their unbruised innocence. The pressure is accumulative.

'Out! ' the captain told me. Two of the men dropped from the rear of the van and two stayed behind. A dozen more were waiting for me outside, and two patrol cars swung through the heavy gates, pulling up alongside and spilling their crews.

There was another decision I had to make, within the next few seconds. If I didn't take the capsule I must get rid of it.

'Was he driving that Pobeda?'

'He says he fell against some railings.'

'Get Orlov here. He was in the van that crashed.'

'Come on, out! March!'

I dropped to the ground and made my first decision. If I became certain, three days from now, four days, five, that I couldn't protect London, there was the other way of blowing the fuse.

'Orlov! Is this the man you saw running from the Pobeda?'

'Yes, Captain!' His face peered into mine. 'This is the one!'

Bloody fool, I'd come out of the smash like a bat out of hell and he didn't have time to take anything in because the van had rolled over. He wanted the kudos.

'Get him inside!'

There was a drain grid at one side of the steps and I let it drop and waited to hear if it made any sound, metal on metal, that would be.audible above the tramp of their boots.

'Captain,' I said loudly, exasperated, 'you're making a mistake.'

'I don't think so. But we shall see.'

Green-painted walls, passages, doorways, uniformed clerks, a smell of leather, black tobacco, gun oil and the ancient smells that breathe from the walls of old buildings.

'Search him in there and then bring him to my office. Is Colonel Vader in the building?'

'Yes, Captain.'

'Tell him we have the suspect in Room 9.'

Barred windows, and the smell of sweat and damp uniforms and my own fear.

The rat sat preening its whiskers.

I watched it.

It sat with its rear paws spread on the ground, their tips visible at the edge of the grey fur body. The front paws worked rhythmically, pulling each fine whisker through the toes from the root to the tip.

It hadn't seen the snake.

I watched the snake. It was rock-still, coiled in a perfect ring with the angular head slightly lifted and pointing in the direction of the rat. The distance between them was about three feet. The snake was large, and I could see that its length was quite sufficient to carry the jaws that far when it struck.

The rat was facing at right-angles to the snake. Its round black eyes reflected the environment in miniature. I think it saw the snake, in terms of light reception by the retinae, but didn't know what it was: the brain interpreted it as a rock formation, or just a pattern of light and shade. Otherwise it wouldn't be sitting there.

I detected movement now in the snake, though it was so slow that it was almost an illusion: the pointed head was drawing back, millimetre by millimetre, across the coils, the neck flexing to keep the head pointing directly at the rat. At the same time the coils were tensing, as the muscular energy gathered and flowed, preparing for the whiplash speed of the strike.

The rat was oblivious of this movement. Once, it turned its head for an instant, but away from the snake, catching some small sound that escaped me. Then it went on preening.

I watched quietly, wondering if — then the snake struck like a whip and the rat -

'Wake up!'

The rat tried to leap but -

'Wake up! Wake up!'

I swung my head up and opened my eyes and called out, 'All right, I'm awake now, why don't you bugger off?'

Blinding light.

'Are you awake?'

'Yes. Bugger off!'

The light was above the door and angled downwards, a flood bulb in it so that there was nowhere in the cell where I could get away from it. The glare hid the small sliding panel immediately below the light, so that I couldn't see him watching me. It was the third time he'd woken me up. Third, or fourth? It didn't matter, but I'd have to start counting things like that because some of them would be important. Call it the third time and start counting from there.

Bloody snake. I'd dreamed about that before; I suppose it was that long leather belt whipping through the air at the table. Where was Vader now? Sleeping? They'd taken my watch and there wasn't a window, only a ventilation grille near the ceiling, clamped across a square of darkness. That didn't mean it was night, necessarily: this was a close confinement chamber for sleep deprivation and disorientation so they would have fixed the grille accordingly. The metabolic clock pulsing in my system told me it was midnight, give or take an hour; but that wasn't reliable because I'd fallen asleep three times. Three, or four? Three. Yes.

A man screamed suddenly from somewhere close, and I sat listening to him with the sweat springing on my skin.

Ignore. Ignore and do some work.

Of course they'd started with an advantage. Today was Wednes — no, yes, Wednesday, and on Monday I'd still been in England hang-gliding over the cliffs, and from the time when Norton had escorted me to London that bastard Croder had had me on a pinball table — Berlin, Hanover, Leipzig, Moscow — and the only sleep I'd had was a couple of hours on the mountainside after the truck had crashed and a few hours at the safe-house last night — five or six hours in sixty-four, not enough, and if I'd known the rat was going to sit there I would have look out it's going to strike again -

'Wake up!'

'I am awake I Can't you tell when someone's asleep or awake for Christ's sake?'

`You were falling asleep!'

`Go and screw yourself.'

Then the man started screaming again next door and I had to listen to it until it was cut off abruptly, and all I could hear was my own breathing.

Bastards. Do some work.

Oh yes, well, the terribly interesting thing is this: they don't know my name, and they don't know Ignatov's. Unbelievable. I mean, what did he say when he phoned them: there's a man in a Pobeda tagging me, pick him up? That wouldn't have been enough to trigger all that action — a whole fleet of police cars and militia. They'd have asked him who I was, and why it was so important. But Ignatov hadn't known. He didn't know anything about me. So what had he told them? What information had he given them, to persuade them to throw all that action at me? He didn't have any information.

Sweating. I was starting to sweat, because of the cerebration and the heat of the floodlight. All right, that's one thing. Take the other. These people here don't know Ignatov's name either, or anything about him, except that he made a phone call from a public box. What had he shown that militia man, to get a salute? What name had he given, over the phone? He couldn't have given them any name, or Vader would know it: and believe me, he wouldn't have asked me for that man's name unless he'd wanted it: it wasn't part of the technique or a feint question because he was in a rage at the time, piping hot. So there you are: an unknown man rings up the security forces and tells them to pick up another unknown man and that is precisely what they do, in full force and with no questions asked. Unbelievable.

I suppose that was why Vader was so bloody annoyed.

But don't forget one thing, old boy. This isn't so funny. It looks like a Judas operation. A Judas somewhere in Bracken's team. Out to blow me. Successfully.

Not funny.

Bracken ought to be told. Vader, old horse, can I use your phone?

'Turn round!'

'What?'

`Turn round. Face the light.'

`Why don't you buzz off?' You come in here, my son, and I'll go for your throat and you'll never know your eyes popped out before you snuffed. I'm getting cross.

'I'm getting cross!' I yelled at the light.

'Repeat that.'

Watch it. Watch it. Did I use English then?

I am a Russian citizen. I speak only Russian. I will -

'Repeat that.'

'Oh shut up, will you?' Yes, I'd said it in English and the bastard had caught it. He might not recognize English but he'd heard something foreign. This was getting dangerous.

Perhaps it was time to blow the fuse.

I had the whole of London in my head, inside this sweating brightly-illuminated skull: names, duties, operations, DI6 liaison, signals, codes, the whole thing. It was time to think about the fuse. But before I did that I ought to tell Bracken he had a Judas in Moscow who'd blown me, just as he'd blown Schrenk, a Judas working through Ignatov.

Footsteps.

Or it could be Ignatov himself. That'd shake them, by God. I need all info on Natalya Fyodorova, senior clerk, Kremlin office, companion of subject before arrest. Also all info on Pyotr Ignatov, Party member, often in subject's company, no other details known. Shake them rigid.

Was Bracken trying to get a signal to me, while I was sitting here in this bloody place? Re info requested: Ignatov is one of our people. State reason for request.

No reason, really, except that I don't like being blasted off the street. Nor did Schrenk. Signal ends.

Query: if Ignatov is a Judas working inside Bracken's operation, why don't the KGB know about him? That's a nasty one. He'd been coming out of the telephone box, not looking around him in the beginning, beginning to snow, with the ice-cream waving about in the air, the air, trying to catch, watch it -

'Wake up! Wake up!'

I got on to my feet and threw a wheel-kick at the door, controlling it enough to make a noise without hurting my foot. 'Does that sound as if I'm asleep?'

'Keep away from the door!'

Voices. They were talking. I'd forgotten about the footsteps. I backed away from the door because this could be interesting, it could be someone else wanting to talk to me and I felt murderous and I might decide to take someone with me, a half-fist into the thyroid with enough force to kill, a matter of.5 seconds and nothing they could do in time to save him.

Watch that too. Emotion was dangerous because they'd got a red lamp over a board marked Scorpion in London and the executive in the field for the operation was holed up in a disorientation cell in Lubyanka prison and he'd have to get out and if he couldn't even control his emotions he'd never make it so start thinking with the brain instead of the gut, this is life or death.

Bolts drawing back.

Two men.

One of them beckoned. 'You will come with us.'

They walked on each side of me along the green-painted corridor, and stopped outside a door halfway along. Assume clowns now.

So this was the place was it.

I'd thought it was going to be some other place, so often: the street outside the Hotel Africa in Tunis when the car had gone up, or ten fathoms down at Longitude 114° and Latitude 22° in the waters off Hong Kong, or in that hot stinking room on the Amazon when she'd found me there and gone on squeezing the trigger. No. Not in any of those places.

Here. In a city under snow, in a bleak green-painted room twelve feet by fourteen with a door two feet eleven inches wide and a window five feet three inches high and nothing in it but a lamp and two chairs and a table and the man: the last man I would ever see, the man who didn't know I was the last man he himself would ever see. We had a lot in common.

I don't want to die.

Oh it's you is it. Snivelling little organism starting to panic. Shut up, it won't hurt.

We can get out of here if we try.

Oh really.

The light shone down. This wasn't the table with the smooth top; it was the one with the narrow marks on it. The two guards had only just gone out, shutting the door. Vader was standing under the window, watching me with the blank stare of the predator that contemplates the prey without emotion, his honey-coloured eyes unblinking and his big square hands hanging by his sides, his booted feet set in a balanced stance ready for instant movement. He was a strong man, and young for his rank. The room was so quiet that I could hear the faint rustling creak of his leather belt as he breathed.

'My patience is exhausted !' All on one note and with the words drawn out, his mouth moving like a trap. The sound went into my head and beat there, hammering. I hadn't been ready for it, and my nerves weren't too good: it made me blink and he noticed it, I saw it in his eyes, the satisfaction of the victor in the presence of the vanquished.

Sleep. Don't take any -

London. Remember London.

My head came up a fraction and I was warned: it had been dropping, degree by degree, as the soporific wave had crept over me despite the shock of his voice. London, yes.

'Do you understand?'

The voice of a bull, roaring out of the barrel chest and drumming in the room.

Think about what has to be done. It has to be done in the next sixty seconds, or I won't have the strength left.

I don't want to die.

Shuddup.

I had to take him down, and I had to do it with all the speed I could manage, and with all the force. Standing here thinking about it, I could believe I would never do it; but I knew from experience what the mind can make the body do, if enough depends on it. I wasn't worried about that. Vader was mine, unless he'd had my specific style of training. The enemy was in myself, in my emotions, in the undisciplined tides of feeling that can stifle logic and inhibit action.

Moira.

Is that your own code?

Five hundred roses for Moira. To be delivered only after she has been informed by the Bureau.

Where was she now?

The tides of feeling, yes, that would have to be ignored, because they were irrelevant, and dangerous.

Take him down, and with as little force as necessary, so that I would find the strength. Let him come close first.

'I have given you every possible chance of co-operating! And you have refused!' He began walking, dropping his boots squarely on the worn parquet, walking towards me. 'Do you happen to enjoy the kind of interrogation you will receive at the Serbsky Institute? M'm?' He stopped within three feet of me. It wasn't close enough. 'Are you a masochist?'

Sleep. Dear God let me sleep.

He was blurring again in front of me, his thick body swaying gently backwards and forwards, sending me to- wake up, come on, wake up.

'Answer me!'

Yes. Keep him talking. Keep him close.

'I can't think straight, that's all. Too tired.' I heard the words slurring, couldn't quite recognize the voice.

'Too tired ! And you think that is all that's going to happen to you? Do you?'

Rehearse. A preliminary shankutsu, my left foot behind his right heel, with a spinning nagashi at the jodan level, my right fingers hooking for the eyes. Then the hand-edge to the throat, half an inch above the khaki serge collar. Then the work on myself, at the median cubital artery. Rehearse.

'No. I know what's going to happen to me.'

Rehearse. Shankutsu, nagashi, eyes and the hand-edge.

'Then why do you refuse to co-operate?'

Shouting at me as if I were fifty yards away, his voice roaring inside my skull.

'Told you,' I said. 'I'd betray a friend.'

'Friend!' He pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sent it crashing into a corner of the room, one of its legs flying off and hitting the barred window. 'What friend?' He came closer, his amber eyes staring into my face. 'You mean Schrenk?' He came right up to me. 'Do you mean your friend Schrenk?'

He was close enough and I shifted my left foot and got the nagashi spinning and in the next tenth of a second I saw surprise beginning in his eyes as he started pitching back with my foot blocking his heel before I formed the claw-hand and raked at his face. He wasn't off balance yet but his arm swung up and he lost the last of his equilibrium and the strike missed my head and he fell hard, harder than I was ready for, with my fingers too far from his eyes and my hand going flat and moving fast to bridge the gap and swing down for the throat with enough force to kill, but something crashed and I was on top of him and striking much too short as the door hit the wall and they took me from behind, pulling my arms back and locking them so that I had to stop moving, no go, it was no go.

'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.'

'You do. I don't. He's your pigeon.'

The snow kicked up from our shoes. Men over there, three men over there, keep an eye.

'You know where to find him,' Bracken said. 'We don't.'

'I can't look for him. Not in the streets.'

'Don't you have his address?'

'No.' The looked like businessmen, officials of some kind but not in uniform. They were walking towards the frozen pond and I watched them.

'They're all right,' Bracken said. 'Don't worry.'

'Those people?'

'Yes. They're all right.' He walked closer to me, protectively.

'You think I'm paranoid or something?' I moved away from him, bloody nursemaid, I'd got the wrong director, I should have been given Ferris.

'If you've just come out of Lubyanka,' Bracken said, 'under your own steam, you'll feel a bit paranoid for a while. We can accommodate that.'

The three men were moving away from us towards the gates of the park. They hadn't even seen us.

'You'll accommodate anything I do,' I said, 'even if I shit down the chimney, as long as I get Ignatov for you, right?'

'That's right.' He moved closer to me, and got into step.

'No go,' I said. 'You'll have to get him yourself. What I want from you is a ticket home and I don't care what plane it is.'

I said it to give him something to think about instead of thinking about Ignatov. He couldn't get me on a plane out of the city: they'd lost Schrenk and they'd lost Kirov and they'd lost one of their colonels and they'd be looking for me under every stone.

'I can't do that,' Bracken said. His voice was low and steady and I'd been thinking he'd got over the worst of the shock but I wasn't sure now; he could be containing it and bulldozing his way to some kind of terrain we could operate in. A man like Croder wouldn't call in a man who buckled at the knees at the first blow. 'You have to stay in Moscow,' he went on reasonably, 'until we can get you dear without any risk. That might not be for some little time.' He was walking more slowly. 'How do you feel about Schrenk?'

'How do I feel?'

'He was Croder's only argument, wasn't he? You wouldn't have agreed to take this one on for someone you didn't respect. You have a lot of respect for Schrenk, and Croder knew that.'

I slowed and said, 'Not that way.'

'I'm sorry?'

'This way. Bloody children.'

'Oh. I simply meant,' Bracken said carefully, 'that I'm going to do everything I can to pull Schrenk out, if it's not too late. We need him out because he's a danger to Leningrad but I don't mean that. I want him out because I respect him too.' He waited five seconds. 'I thought you'd like to know.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, spare me the auld lang syne. I'm going to be lucky to get out of this place alive, let alone take someone else with me. What makes you so sure he's in Moscow anyway?'

'It was in the briefing information. '

'Well the K haven't got him, I know that.' There were more children not far away and I hoped to Christ they weren't going to start screaming, like that man in the cell.

'Repeat?' Bracken stopped dead again to watch me.

'They thought I knew where he was. They offered me an exchange deal.'

'Dezinformatsiya?'

'No. They haven't got him, and they want him, as badly as we do.'

In a moment Bracken said: 'If he's free, why hasn't he reported?'

'I didn't say he was free. I'd say he was dead.'

He shut off again for a time. Then: 'Killed?'

'How should I know? They chewed him up in there and he just about got away with his skin and then someone did a snatch on him at the clinic in Hanover and it wasn't the KGB and there hasn't been a squeak from him since and that's all I know, it's all anyone knows.'

Hit me on the side of the head without any warning and exploded in a white shower all over Bracken and he laughed boomingly and bent down and got some snow and pressed it hard and slung it back at them, laughing all the time, good cover, while I stood there with my nerves screaming through my head, not a terribly good sign, scared of a snowball now, maybe if I could get some sleep tonight, some real sleep without that bastard yelling at me from -

'All right?' Bracken was watching me closely.

'Yes. I'm all right.'

'Come on,' he said and began walking the other way. 'Look, I'm going to be in signals with London most of the night and I'll ask for a complete screening background on every man we've got in Moscow. If there's the slightest doubt about any of them I'll get them recalled and kept out of here: ours is the only operation we've got running in this field.' He was talking briskly, confidently, and for a moment he got me thinking he wasn't worried. 'Meanwhile I've got three people working on your last signal, although the present findings are that there are seventeen Pyotr Ignatovs resident in Moscow — not that it means a lot because if he's a Judas in our group he'll be using an alias, obviously. One of the ten Natalya Fyodorovas in this city works in a personnel department of the Kremlin, which could match your info; she's described as attractive and possibly a swallow for the KGB. We're still digging, and you'll have anything we turn up.' He was walking closer again, nudging my arm sometimes, trying to make contact and pull me out of the aftershock. 'I'm going to find out if Schrenk is still alive but first I want to nail this Judas before he can wipe us out in Moscow. But if you feel there's nothing more you can do for us at this stage I can smuggle you into the Embassy and get you taken care of. One of the girls has had nursing experience and of course you — '

'I didn't say I wanted a nurse.'

'No, don't misunderstand me — '

'The streets are dangerous,' I told him through my teeth. 'I don't know how long I could last.'

He stopped again, his hand on my arm. 'I quite realize that. Why don't you come in for a while and think it over? You'll be perfectly safe at the Embassy. Then see how you feel in the morning.'

I looked away. 'There's no time to hole up. You know that.'

'We could send for someone else to come out.' He stood watching me with the light of the city bouncing off the snow and reflecting in his eyes. 'We'd quite understand,' he said gently, 'if you asked us to do so.'

Croder had spoken like that. They knew how to keep me running, as long as my feet could move.

'You're risking London,' I told him, 'if you keep on pushing me, you know that? They're looking for me and they won't stop till they find me.'

'We know what the risks are,' Bracken said quietly, 'and what we have to do about them.' He spoke with confidence, and my mind opened a degree to what he was saying. 'But if you could do just one thing for me, we'd all be so much safer. I need to get a look at this man Ignatov, without his seeing me, so that I can tell you whether or not he's working in our cell. Do you think you could arrange that, somehow?'

I stood listening to the moan of the trams at the far side of the park, and the chugging of a concrete mixer where a night crew was putting up a new apartment complex. The voices of the children had stopped; perhaps they'd gone home now. I wished they were still here in the park, even though they reminded me of screaming; they'd taken their innocence with them, and just for this moment I needed it as a touchstone.

Bracken was waiting, his large face patient as he watched me, and this time I knew he wouldn't speak again, before I did.

'I'd need another safe-house. And another cover. And another car. I wrote the car off.' We began walking together over the snow. 'I'd need another coat. This one's too far gone for mending, and it attracts too much attention.'

'I can see to all that,' Bracken said.

'You'd have to send the doctor from the Embassy. To the safe-house.' We kept to the path, or what we could see of it, knowing it led to the gates. 'To fix my face. Some kind of dressing to stop it bleeding — that attracts attention too.'

'That can be done,' Bracken said.

I could see the dark hump of his car parked in the shadow of trees outside the park, and had an urge to run there and use its cover. I'd have to get over that.

'If you've got a spare capsule at the Embassy, you can let me have it. Be on the safe side.'

'Didn't you draw one?' I suppose he knew it was required procedure for Moscow.

'Yes. I lost it.' We were nearing the gates, and the snow took on a chill glitter under the street lamps. I wondered if I could trust him, and thought I could. I'd never know if I were wrong. 'Bracken,' I said.

'Yes?' He leaned towards me.

'Don't tell Croder you had to talk me into going on.'

'But I didn't,' he said, and touched my arm for a moment as we crossed to the car.

Zoya Masurov: a body like petrified smoke in her black sweater and black thigh-boots, her hair blackest of all and drawn away from her pale ivory face, her eyes smouldering in the charred silk of their brows and lashes, taking you in and giving you nothing back, reminding me of Helda, last seen at the edge of a minefield on the East German border, though this woman was harder and would have no mercy, would kill you if you were an enemy and kill for you if you were a friend. But she held most of it in, and it was only when you went close to her that you sensed the undercurrents and felt their pull.

'There is no need to bring a doctor here,' she'd told Bracken. 'I'm a doctor.'

She worked on me when Bracken had gone, taking a small black cauldron of boiling water up to the room on the top floor, the one right at the end like the one at Gorsky's place, because we're safest there: it's the required location.

'What should I look for?' she asked me, 'splinters, metal, glass?'

'Glass.'

'What contaminants? What was in the glass?'

'Nothing. It was a car crash. Are you the upravdom here?'

'Yes.' There wasn't much light from the bulb overhead and she was using a big hand lamp that must have come out of a railway sale, her black eyes narrowed as she looked for the glint of glass, swabbing and exploring and swabbing again, never looking at me, looking always at the wound, 'I am the upravdom, yes, but also a doctor, though no longer in the registry, of course, since they removed my name after nearly thirteen years,' the fragments cutting sometimes as she moved the steel probe, her body held perfectly still and only her hands working, the small veins in her temple thrown into relief by the backwash of the enormous lamp, the sweep of one eyelash sending shadow across her brow, 'that was at the hospital in Smolensk, the big new one they built after the war. It was there that they found me doing something unforgivable.'

The room was warm and this woman was healing me and Bracken had given me his guarantee, no one but himself in the field with me, so I was slowly coming down from the nervous high of the aftershock and beginning to think I had a chance of doing some work in this city and getting out of it alive. But I still didn't know how I could have asked him what I had, to keep it from Croder that I'd needed persuasion. Croder meant nothing to me.

'They found me using American antibiotics,' she said. 'We didn't have anything at the time for sickle cell anaemia, and they wouldn't allow the import of GH3 because Romania isn't loyal to the master state. But I had a friend at the consulate and he got me the drugs from Sloan Kittering — Kettering, is it? — and I was found using them, and so here I am, the upravdom of an apartment block in Moscow with instructions to report on the residents here if they commit any infraction of the rules.' She threw the swab into a metal-lined box and prodded again. I winced and she laughed and said, 'You can feel it better than I can see it, that's just what I want.'

'And a happy Christmas to you too,' I said and she laughed again and had to hold the probe away for a minute. She had sharp white teeth like an animal's, and it occurred to me that if I ever introduced her to the blue-eyed fair-haired Natalya Fyodorova this woman would eat her alive.

'It amuses me,' she said deep in her throat, 'the way men can't stand pain.'

'It's to get sympathy, even when we know there isn't a dog's chance. Did you appeal?'

She broke her laugh halfway. 'Appeal?'

'Against the medical brass.'

'I didn't know you were listening.'

'Oh yes, I was listening.'

The place was reeking of alcohol by the time she'd finished, and I stood at the other side of the room from the mirror and took a look; she'd put in a row of new sutures and covered the wound with a long strip of elastic dressing and it didn't look too bad in here, though it wouldn't do for the street.

'Will it start bleeding again?'

'No.' She was packing her things together in the big medical bag. 'Not unless you open it again as you did last time.'

There was a bloodied swab on the linoleum and I dropped it into the wood-stove. 'What did they tell you about me?'

'You are for safe keeping,' she said.

'What else?'

'Nothing else.'

'There's a hunt on,' I said, and looked through the grimy window to the lamps in the street below. 'They're looking for a man with a scar. If I run out of luck and someone follows me here, are you fully organized? I mean cover, background, instructions?'

'Yes.' She swung the bag over one shoulder like a knap-sack. 'But if that isn't enough, I have a sawn-off shotgun and some grenades.'

London wouldn't know about that.

'And you'd like to use them, wouldn't you?'

'Yes,' she said slowly, 'I would like to use them.'

As soon as she'd gone I got out the material Bracken had given me. The capsule was in the regulation tin box and the report was in a digraphic code, key 5, using AMBER LIGHT for the first two lines in the grid with x separating the double letters; it wasn't new and it wasn't fast but it was almost unbreakable Of ten Natalya Fyodorovas in M. one in personnel office Kremlin, 27, attractive, possible part-time swallow, still tracing. Of seventeen Pyotr Ignatovs none linked with intelligence field or police, none suspect, still tracing. No details of subject's arrest though probably in open. Reasons given for application for post of a-i-p his interest in dissident affairs and possibility of his proving useful in that area. No inconsistency seen, since subject is Jewish and has contacts in M. State what link Nat. Fyo. and Pyot. Ign. if any. Destruct.

I opened the stove and watched it burn. It was about the least informative signal I'd ever received from a director in the field with the operation half blown and the subject probably dead. I think Bracken could have got me a lot more if London hadn't been standing on his hands: I didn't like the way he'd said we know what the risks are and we know what to do about them. They shouldn't know any more at this stage than that a Judas had started working through the Moscow cell and blowing the executives one by one, but Croder was running this thing and he wouldn't tell even Bracken any more than he had to know, and I had the feeling that something even bigger than the threat to Leningrad was involved or that in the last twenty-four hours the threat to Leningrad had developed into a threat of something bigger, something on a vaster scale than an inter-intelligence skirmish.

It wasn't my business. A shadow executive for the Bureau is a ferret and they'd put me down the hole and I hadn't found Schrenk and now they wanted Ignatov so I'd have to go down the hole again and find him and bring him in for Bracken to look at, and it was a quarter past eight when I put the capsule away and got the second-hand astrakhan coat they'd dug up for me and put it on and went downstairs and through the deserted hallway and out into the lamplit snow.

Then who was?

He was very difficult to work with: he kept trying to get away and I had to trip him and catch him before he could hit the ground or the concrete column that was somewhere near us. If I didn't catch him each time he was going to hurt himself because he had absolutely no idea how to fall.

'What did you tell them?' I asked him again.

He wouldn't answer, and that was another thing that made it difficult. I had to ask him everything two or three times and then work on a nerve until he got the message. But even then I didn't know when he was lying. I've never met anybody so difficult.

'What did you tell them, when you went into that phone box?'

'It was to tell my wife I would be late.'

'Not that time. I mean two days ago, on Wednesday. You phoned the police and they tried to pick me up. What did you tell them?'

'I didn't tell them anything. I — '

'Oh come on, Ignatov!' Used a centre-knuckle on the medial: he hated that. 'What did you tell them?'

I was getting annoyed because someone might come in here and make things awkward. Bracken had gone, five minutes ago: all he'd needed was a close look at Ignatov, and it was too dangerous for him to stay where the action was because he was ostensibly a member of the British Embassy staff and they could throw him out of the country if he came under any kind of suspicion.

Ignatov wasn't answering.

'You'd never seen me before in your life and you went into a phone box and called the police and they came right away so what did you tell them?'

'It was not me.'

'What do you mean it wasn't you? Come on !'

'I did what I was ordered.' He crouched over, hugging his arm because it had needed another jab to get that much out of him. But it sounded interesting. Who had ordered him? The Judas?

'Ignatov,' I said, 'I want you to understand the position. I can do a lot of things to you that would make you give me the answers I want, but it could cripple you for life and I don't see any point, do you?' He was still bent over, trying to get some of the feeling back into his left arm. I'd been leaving his right arm alone for the moment in case I wanted him to drive me anywhere: I didn't know what was going to happen yet. 'I'm going to get the answers out of you in any case, so why damage yourself?' He was breathing much too hard for a man of maybe thirty-five or forty, though he was a bit overweight and of course he was nervous. It's harder to make them understand when they haven't had any training because they've never learned what you can do to them. 'Have you any children, Ignatov?'

'Three, yes, three children.' He said it quickly because this was where his heart was, in his family.

'All right, do you want them to have to push you about in a wheelchair? You want them to help feed you? Listen to what I'm saying. Use your imagination. A wheelchair.'

Something went past along the street and a faint rhomboid of light swept across the columns and faded out. I didn't want anyone to come in here until I'd got what I needed from him.

'So we'll start again. Who ordered you to get me picked up in the street?'

I gave him five seconds and then covered him in fast light blows with a lot of control and the focus on the nerve centres so that he didn't even know what was happening. Then I had to wait until he could stand upright again.

'That was nothing, Ignatov. I didn't touch your face and I didn't touch your groin. I'm going to work on those next. Who ordered you?'

He whispered a name but I didn't catch it because his system was in shock.

'Who? Say it again.'

'Zubarev.'

'What was that? Zubarev?'

'Yes.' He nodded and went on nodding like one of those dolls with a weight in its head. 'Yes.'

Some more light came and this time it got very bright and the concrete columns stood out, row after row of them as the car came down the ramp and turned and parked with its nose against the wall, the light spreading and dimming and then going out. I put one arm round Ignatov's throat and left it there while we waited. He got the message this time and didn't try to do anything about it. A flashlight beam came on at the far end of the garage and I watched it bobbing towards the iron staircase in the corner, but it was promised, one of them was saying, it was promised, very cut up because her boss had said they could have two tickets for the circus if they reached their work goal for the month and he'd broken his promise and now they'd have to spend the evening playing dominoes with the Borisenkos next door, a bloody shame but at least they'd shown me the public telephone in the corner of the staircase, I hadn't seen it before.

'Give me your wallet,' I told Ignatov, and he reached inside his coat and I watched his hand when it came out. 'Hold this torch.' Normal papers plus Party membership card, plus identification as an official driver to the Politburo and a special traffic pass into the Kremlin and 'certain designated areas in the City of Moscow' as specified in the 1979 Amendment to the Control of Vehicular Movement. Nothing else in the way of privilege documents but that one would probably rate a salute from a militia man, yes.

No little book with names in, no sign of any Zubarev.

'We're going to make a phone call,' I told him. It was like trying to move a bear: he didn't know which way to walk. He wasn't used to this sort of thing, but that wasn't my fault, he shouldn't have blasted me off the street like that. 'We're going to call Zubarev,' I said.

Didn't know his number.

'Oh yes you do,' I told him, and whipped a very light reverse sword-hand against the larynx. 'Tell him you're coming to see him, and if he objects, tell him it's very urgent. Insist on it. Do you understand?'

He stood trying to get his breath and I had to wait for a minute because I wanted him to sound reasonably normal on the phone. I only had one kopeck on me, with a lot of bigger change. 'Have you got a kopeck?' I asked him.

He found one, moving slowly, and I watched his hand again when it came out. 'He only lets me go there,' he said with a slight wheeze, 'at prearranged times.'

'We're going to prearrange it.' I put two kopecks into the slot. 'Ignatov, you gave me a lot of trouble. I don't mind what I have to do to you. Remember the wheelchair.' I gave him the phone.

In the close bright light of the torch I watched his face, and his eyes. He was staring at the printed board behind the telephone as if he were reading its instructions, but he wasn't. He was staring at the possibility of saying something to Zubarev that would warn him, and at the possibility of hurling himself at me and throttling me before I could do anything about it. This was natural enough but I waited for him to turn his head and look at my eyes, and in my eyes I let him see without any shadow of doubt that I was the angel of death. He looked away and dialled the number, which I noted and committed to memory.

He asked for a woman first and I reacted and moved my hand in a threat and he whispered that Zubarev never came to the telephone himself.

'Misha,' he said with slow care, watching me, 'this is Pyotr. I am coming to see him. Tell him that.'

I heard her voice: young, strong, husky, positive. She would tell him, she was saying. Was he coming right away?

'Yes. I am coming now.' I prodded him and he said: 'Tell him it is very urgent, Misha. Tell him I must come.'

There was nothing wrong? she wanted to know.

In the light of the torch his flat featureless face struggled with the question, and he managed to get a note of reassurance into his voice. 'There is nothing wrong, no. But I must come.'

She said she would tell him. Neither of them had mentioned his name. He looked at me and I nodded and he hooked the receiver back. Light swept suddenly across the columns and I turned my back to the entrance as a car came down the ramp and swung at right angles and stopped. I moved Ignatov away from the staircase and talked to him as we walked across to his car, passing a half-seen man and saying good evening to him. When he'd started up the iron staircase I told Ignatov to get into his car on the passenger's side and then I took his scarf and tied his wrists to his ankles and shut the door on him and went round to the driver's side. He hadn't seen me tagging him from the Kremlin and he didn't know the number of the Pobeda but he'd see it if we used my car instead of his, and once he'd seen the number plate he could blast me off the street again the minute he got to a telephone.

He sat awkwardly beside me with his knees drawn up to his chin, his squat body swaying as I turned the car through the columns and pulled up near the entrance and reached across him and opened his door for a moment. 'Ignatov,' I told him, 'if you try to attract attention in the street by shouting out or falling against the steering wheel you might alert a militia man or a police patrol. If you did that, I'd have to leave you behind, and I'd do that by opening your door like this and giving you a push.' I used a fair amount of force so that he rocked half off his seat, then I grabbed him and pulled him back and he sat with his breath hissing out. 'You'd hit your head on the road because you wouldn't be able to save yourself, you understand?'

'Yes. Yes, I understand.'

'What are the names of your children?'

'Yuri, Irina and Tania.' His head swung to look at me because the question had surprised him.

'You want to see them again,' I said and pulled his door shut and drove up the ramp into the street. 'You must take care of yourself.'

'Yes,' he said, and I heard emotion in his voice, 'I understand.'

I turned into the street without slowing down too much and he rolled against the door with a thump and rolled back: I wanted him to know how extraordinarily helpless the human body can be without the use of hands or feet.

The evening rush hour was nearly over and the first set of lights was green. 'He's at the Pavilion,' I said to Ignatov, 'is that right?'

'Yes.'

I drove north-west along Soldatskaja ulica, feeling the onset of depression. Of all the questions in my head I thought I had the answer to one, and I didn't like it. Ignatov was a professional driver and would have been trained to watch his mirror when he was at the wheel of those big black shiny Zils because the members of the elite Politburo must not be followed about. But he hadn't discovered my tag on the way from Spassky Gate this evening: he had seen the Pobeda several times but hadn't realized it was following him specifically. Certainly I'd taken pains to do the job efficiently, but then I'd taken similar pains two days ago, and he'd known I was there behind him, and there on purpose. It had been daylight then, and this evening it had been dark; but this city was bright by night and visibility was good. So there was an additional factor involved, which had led him to discover the first tag and not the second.

I thought I knew what it was. I had probably known for a long time, right at the back of the mind where we put things we don't want to look at. But it would have to be brought into the light, and looked at; and that was going to be painful. I would almost rather be going to Lubyanka again, in good heart and filled with the fierce animal instinct to fight and survive, than to this place filled with depression and unable to do anything about it. Depression is unreachable, the slow death of the spirit.

'What's your wife's name?' I asked Ignatov. The lights changed to red at an intersection and I put out a hand as he swayed forward again: I'd had to do it several times to stop him hitting his face on the windscreen.

'Galya,' he said, and looked at me, wondering why I had asked, and perhaps hearing something in my voice: the depression.

'What does she do?'

'She teaches the ballet, at the Centre for the Arts.'

The lights went green and he swayed back on his seat.

'Does she teach your children?'

We were almost there, but I wanted this journey to last a long time, and I wanted to talk to this man about his wife and his children and the ballet lessons.

'She teaches our two girls,' he said, his voice wary, suspecting some kind of trap.

'Irina and Tania.'

'Yes,' he said, surprised that I'd remembered. But like most people, I remember most things, and especially those things I'd rather forget.

'I suppose Yuri thinks it'd be sissy for him to learn, does he?'

'Yes, that's perfectly right!' As if I'd discovered a profound truth. But the wariness was still in his voice, the fear that I was building up this little edifice of human intimacy only so that I could knock it down. He didn't have the trust in innocence those children had had in the park.

He was silent, but I saw he was watching my reflection in the windscreen. I think he was beyond trying to do anything to help himself now, or to stop my going to see Zubarev. I'd found his weakness, or his strength, whichever you want to call it. But this didn't mean he wouldn't kill me if I gave him the chance and if he believed he had to, for his children's sake. Or of course for his own.

The lights were green for us at the turning into Baumanskaja and I didn't have to stop, though I would have liked to stop, and turn back, and never meet Zubarev.

The Pavillon block was on our left now and I turned past it and found the car park at the rear, where I'd explored the environment on foot two days ago. The snow was thick here, with the tracks of vehicles making ruts that tugged at the wheel as I drove through the entrance. The building was quite large, with a blank wall facing us and the headlights throwing the shadows of the parked cars against it. A man was walking towards us from the building, going across to his car, and our headlights held him frozen for an instant before I switched them off. He looked transfixed, like a wild creature caught in the dazzle of lights along a country road, and his shadow was enormous on the wall behind him, grotesque and distorted, with one thin shoulder held low like a broken wing and his body twisted to one side.

'Is that Zubarev?' I asked the man beside me.

'Yes.'

I watched as the figure moved on again, hobbling towards the car.

He looked up at me from the driving-seat.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's you.'

I'd gone across to his car quite quickly, to stop him driving away.

He watched me steadily for a moment, his pale eyes narrowed and his small gnome's head slightly on one side. Even sitting down his body was twisted, with the left shoulder held low and noticeably still. He was trying to think what it would be best to do, and I couldn't have helped him even if I'd wanted to. I'd only just got here in time: I think he'd panicked suddenly while he was waiting for us to arrive, and decided to get out in case Ignatov brought someone with him: an example of the type of intuition we develop in the field as a natural aid to survival.

But he couldn't just drive off, now that he'd seen me. There was a question of pride involved. The most he could do would be to pretend he was just popping out for some cigarettes; but he didn't bother. We both knew the position.

'What about a little drinkie?' he said with a sudden lopsided smile.

'All right.'

I stepped back to let him get out of the car. He did it clumsily, though he tried not to let anything show, and I looked away in time to save him embarrassment. Perhaps this was why Ignatov had been impressed by my talk of a wheelchair: he'd seen what it looked like to be half crippled.

Dr Steinberg hadn't told me his patient was as bad as this: he'd just said he 'tended to hobble'.

He slammed the door of his car. 'Is that Ignatov you've got over there?'

'Yes. I'll go and get him.'

Schrenk peered across at the humped shape in the Syrena. 'Got him trussed up, have you?' He gave a dry snigger. 'Leave him there, he'll be all right.'

Oh no you don't.

'He'll get bored out here,' I said, 'with no one to talk to.' I went back to the Syrena and got out my pocket knife and cut through the scarf: the knots were there for life. I said quietly to Ignatov: 'Don't do anything silly, will you? Remember you want to see the children again, and Galya.'

'Yes. I understand.' He shook the stiffness out of his legs and came with me towards the building.

'Evening, Pyotr,' Schrenk said in Russian. 'Where did you find our friend?' Another dry little laugh, totally without humour.

Ignatov said nothing, but stared at the ground as the three of us walked across the rutted snow. Schrenk slipped a couple of times and I remembered I mustn't help him, even if he actually fell. I knew him that well.

Other things were coming back to me in flashes of memory: a plastic chess set on the corner table of the Caff, where he used to challenge people, waiting there like a spider; a girl with black hair and smoky eyes and an intimate way of laughing, seaweed draped over one naked shoulder on the beach at Brighton; a black Jensen Interceptor with an anti-radar unit, deafening jazz records, an ashtray made out of a piston and stuffed with butts, and the way his fingers moved over the bomb that time, stroking it like a baby rabbit. Shapiro. Schrenk.

Signal Bracken. I have the objective.

Not yet.

We went slowly over the snow. I could feel Ignatov's concern that Schrenk might slip and lose his balance and break an arm: he kept close to him, his head turned, looking down. I could also feel Ignatov's awareness that he mustn't help him, if he fell: he had tried to help him before, and been told never to do that, never to do it again. I felt these infinitesimal vibrations flowing between us and carrying their intelligence. Things were sensitive tonight.

I felt Schrenk's rage.

'How's London?'

We always ask that.

'Dockers on strike,' I told him.

He laughed again, whinnying softly.

Perhaps when people laughed to cover panic or fright or rage the sound was in some way inhibited, leaving nothing to show but a rictus.

'Good old London,' he said, and led us to the heavy metal door in the middle of the building.

His room was on the ground floor at the rear, either because it was the best he could find or because he couldn't manage the stairs and didn't want to get trapped in the lift; or perhaps this was the best he could afford, the London funding having been cut off when he'd left Moscow for Hanover.

Consideration: Steinberg hadn't said his patient was as bad as this. Had they worked him over again, after they'd picked him up in Hanover? I didn't think so. It hadn't been the KGB.

We all stopped, not far along the passage. The number on the door was 15A. Ignatov had seemed to hold back a little on our way from the car park, and I'd let him know I had noticed it and didn't like it. Ignatov had to stay with me until I was ready to let him go: if I'd left him out there he would have got help from the next good citizen to come into the car park and he would have said it was a prank on the part of some hooligans to leave him tied up like this and he would have gone straight to a telephone and blown me.

Leave him there, Schrenk had told me, he'll be all right.

Oh no you don't.

He opened the door of his room. It hadn't been locked.

'Hello sweetheart,' he said in Russian, 'I didn't go after all — I met an old friend of mine.'

She was a plump peasant girl, sturdy and vital and with her skin still glowing from the country air, a girl recently come to the big city to fulfil her dreams of concrete towers and grinding underground trains.

'This is Misha,' Schrenk said. She gave me both her hands, warm and damp from the kitchen, bobbing and saying she was pleased to meet any friend of Viktor's.

'Konstantin,' I said, 'Konstantin Pavlovich:

She bobbed again and then kissed Schrenk on the cheek to show me she adored him, while his bright eye watched me over her shoulder, daring me to judge him for shacking up with a girl like this, reminding me of other times, between missions, when the field executives amused themselves by comparing one another's fortunes: Christ, old boy, that was an absolute stunner you were with last night! And where did she get the Bentley? It occurred to me, in this moment of contemplation as Schrenk's eye stared into mine, that nothing in a girl could be much more stunning than adoration.

Misha smelt of stewed cabbage, and so did the room; she hurried across to the corner and clanked the lid of a black iron pot on the stove, letting out steam.

'What'll it be?' Schrenk asked me. He always spoke to me in English, and to the others in Russian. I don't think he was deliberately ignoring security; I think he felt that security wasn't necessary, because one of us was totally in the other's power and was therefore harmless. It was probably true, though neither of us knew which one would be the survivor, because this was what we were going to have to work out.

'I'll have some beet juice,' I told him, and he asked Misha to pour me a glass while he hobbled across to the plywood table under the window and got himself some vodka, waving the bottle to Ignatov, who said he would like a small one, yes. It was all very sociable, though I knew I was in much greater danger here in this room than I'd been inside Lubyanka.

'Cheers,' said Schrenk, and tilted his glass. He was having to use so much control that he looked like a half-broken robot going through its mechanical gestures: I couldn't tell whether the slight trembling of his limbs was due to his injuries under torture or to the rage that was in him. The only human thing about him was the brightness of his eyes, but even that was feverish. I thought he wasn't far from the edge of a breakdown.

'Cheers,' I said, and we drank together. Ignatov moved half a pace and I got annoyed because he'd had quite enough warning. I went across to the door and turned my back to it and looked at him until he looked down, sipping his drink. I didn't want to put a spark to the tension here by saying anything to him directly, but the fact was that if he tried to get out of this room I'd kill him. I couldn't afford to let him into the streets again: the only hope I had of doing anything for Bracken without losing my life was to take other lives if I had to. They ought to know that; I shouldn't have to keep telling them.

'Like to sit down?' Schrenk asked me.

There was only one small settee, hardly big enough for two people; there was a chair near the window but it was piled with books and magazines and some knitting I supposed the girl was doing — a nice warm scarf for Viktor, perhaps, in the name of adoration.

'I'm all right here,' I told him.

He sat down on the settee with a slight twisting motion that he'd become unaware of and no longer tried to cover. Misha moved nearer to him and was going to sit down too but he motioned her away with a little jerk of his head that she understood, even though he didn't actually look at her. She went back to the stove.

'Likes to mother me,' he said with a twist of his thin mouth. 'I'm a crashed pilot, you understand. Suitable cover for the state those bastards left me in.' He drank some vodka.

Lights swept across the window from the car park. It had been from this window that he must have seen me two days ago, checking out the environment.

'She seems a nice girl,' I said, 'and she obviously looks after you well.' I was aware of the clock ticking: it was a small grandfather type, tilted with one side resting on a wad of folded paper to keep the pendulum going. Schrenk had always liked clocks, and of course had used quite a few of them in his work. 'Did you tell this man to blow me?' I asked him.

Schrenk's small head jerked slightly: he hadn't been ready to talk business quite so soon, and I suppose at the back of his mind he'd been hoping we'd never have to. He got off the settee with a sudden lopsided movement and stood looking away from me for a moment while he fought for control.

'I had to, don't you know that?' I saw Misha at the stove swing her head to look at him. 'Snooping round here like that. I want people to leave me alone.' He stood shaking, unable to face me, hating me for making him put up some kind of defence against the indefensible. 'I knew you'd be able to look after yourself, wherever they put you. I think you've proved that.'

Misha came across the room and took a cigarette from the black and yellow packet and lit it and gave it to him, as she must have done so many times: there was habit in her movements.

'Did you tell him who I was?' I asked him.

'No.' He drew the smoke in deeply. 'No.'

'What instructions did you give him? What did he tell the police when he phoned them?'

He couldn't answer right away, though I saw he was trying. He'd wanted me to call him all the bastards under the sun for doing a thing like that, for blasting me off the street as if we'd never worked together or been close to death together, as if we'd never learned to trust each other. I would have made it easier for him if I'd gone across to him and smashed him against the wall, and I think he was still waiting for me to do that.

'He told them,' he said at last, 'that you were Helmut Schrenk.' He tried to laugh but it turned into a coughing fit and he bent over, drawing in smoke with the air and making it worse until the girl went over to him and held his thin shaking body.

I should have thought of that. I should have realized why they'd come at me so fast and with so many men, and why Colonel Vader had been so annoyed when he'd realized I wasn't Schrenk.

'I had to get you out of the way,' he said between the spasms of coughing. 'I had to get you locked up, so that you couldn't — ' he broke off, interrupted by a fresh paroxysm, and lost his train of thought. 'But it obviously didn't work.'

'Yes,' I said, 'it worked.'

He turned to face me at last, his eyes bloodshot and the cigarette trembling in his hand and his body twisted with the effort of keeping upright.

`What happened?'

`They took me into Lubyanka.'

He went on staring at me. 'You were lucky. Is that all they did to you?' He meant my face.

Ignatov was moving.

'What is it you've got to do,' I asked Schrenk, 'that needs me out of the way? And how much is the KGB going to pay you?'

The colour was leaving his face. In something like a whisper he said, 'You think I'd work for them?'

'If you could do what you did to me, you could do anything.'

He crumpled as if I'd hit him. His head went down and his eyes clenched shut and he stood there sagging like a puppet under invisible wires and for a moment I felt the sweetness of revenge coming into me and warming me, and then, when it was over, I was able to think more clearly and remember that this wasn't Schrenk at all; it was the remains of the man they had worked on in Lubyanka.

'Help him to sit down,' I said in Russian to the girl.

Ignatov moved again.

It seemed a long time before Schrenk was on the settee, looking up at me, dragging on the new cigarette Misha had lit for him. 'You think I'd work for them?'

`You don't seem to be working for us any more.'

'I suppose,' he said and dragged more smoke in, hungry for it, 'I suppose you think I blew Leningrad, do you?'

'No. It's still intact.'

`That doesn't tell you anything?'

Ignatov moved again and this time vanished behind my field of vision. He was working his way towards the door, behind me. I got very annoyed and swung round with a face-high back-hammer fist and he hit the door with a crash and bounced off and brought down a stack of shelves with cheap ornaments on them and I watched them disintegrating on the threadbare carpet while the girl screamed. Ignatov was staring up at me, blood trickling on his temple.

`Don't you ever listen?' I asked him.

It was very quiet. There didn't seem to be any noise in the whole of the building. Bad security: I hadn't got any more control than Schrenk.

Misha was hurrying across to help Ignatov, her face shocked as she passed me. One of those coy little Hummel figurines with gold paint on it and its toes turned in toppled off the remains of the shelves and broke on the floor, so I hadn't chalked up a total failure.

'What did he do?' Schrenk asked me irritably.

'Tell him if he tries to leave this room I'm going to kill him. He won't listen to me.'

'Pyotr,' Schrenk said in Russian, 'keep away from the door. And clear up that mess.' Then he looked at me again and said in soft astonishment, 'Work for them?' Apparently it had been on his mind.

'Oh come on,' I said impatiently, 'it's happened before.'

He looked shocked. 'Not anyone from our show.'

'There's a first time for everything.'

Then he was on his feet again, moving very fast considering his condition. 'I tell you I'm not a defector!'

The veins were standing out on his temples and he was staring at me with the last control over his rage slipping away. 'Do you understand that?'

In a moment I said: 'I don't understand anything, yet. I was hoping you could help me.'

Misha went over to him and tried to make him sit down again but he didn't even know she was there: he just went on staring at me, his thin body trembling. 'Detsky Mir,' he said softly, 'Detsky Mir,' with his mouth twisting into a hateful smile. Ignatov was looking up at him, his hands full of broken china, and the girl's face had gone blank. I didn't know what Schrenk was talking about either: Detsky Mir was a big shopping centre, that was all — Children's World.

No one spoke. I listened to the slow tick of the clock in the corner, and the sounds that had come into the building again. I'd been expecting someone along here knocking on the door because Ignatov had made a lot of noise with the china and Misha had screamed, but nobody came. Family fight.

Schrenk was getting over his rage, but there was something else there just as intense. He stayed on his feet, and he brought the words out with the whole of his body, twisting and crouching over them as if he were whittling them away, one by one, with a razor-sharp knife. His eyes never left my face. 'I had time, inside Lubyanka, to think about Children's World. All those soft cuddly animals, and toy trains, and ribbons for little girls. I had a lot of time.'

I was beginning to pick up a thread. Children's World is right opposite Lubyanka, in Dzerzhinsky Square. In Lubyanka there are no windows along the top floor, because the top floor is only a facade bordering an open space under the sky, with a machine-gun positioned in each corner: it is the exercise yard for the prison. I'd passed Children's World on my way to the prison when they'd picked me up in Red Square.

'I spent a lot of my time,' Schrenk said, whittling the words out, 'trying to see some connection. Some connection between those two places. I had more time in there, you see, than you did, and you've got to think of something, haven't you, when they start work.'

Schrenk prided himself on his ability to survive the most gruelling interrogation by the use of practised and convincing disinformation, Croder had said. We tested him at Norfolk, and even hypnosis couldn't break him down. That is the sort of man he is. But we don't know how bad the position is, because we don't know how much he gave away.

Nothing. He'd given away nothing. Not even Leningrad, let alone London. Now he was here in this squalid little room, staring at me, wanting me to know something important, his maimed body trembling with the remnants of his rage and with something else I didn't understand. That was why I was listening carefully.

'And finally I got it,' he said, 'I got a connection going between Children's World and Lubyanka. It worried me, you see. I mean, it's like having one of our prisons with its execution chamber right across the street from Harrods. Could only happen in Moscow, couldn't it? Typically Russian — slightly short on good taste.' He got himself a cigarette before Misha could do it for him, and flicked the match away. 'I had to think up a connection, yes. Wandering a bit, am I?'

'No.'

Ignatov had finished clearing up and was squatting on a tea chest near the grandfather clock, watching Schrenk, not understanding a word but listening to the sharp dry sibilants that cut through the silence.

'They're so clever these days, aren't they, at making mechanical toys. I mean that monkey, you know, that beats the two little brass cymbals together when you wind it up — that's old hat now, but I'm not thinking of anything more complicated. Surely they could make a small doll, with trousers and a moustache to show he's a man, and hang him upside down from a kind of trapeze with another doll beside him, also in trousers and with bushy black eyebrows slanting down towards the middle to make him look fierce, and a wooden stick in his hand — you see what I mean? It shouldn't be too difficult.'

I think he was trying to laugh, at this point, or the laugh was just coming naturally because of his macabre sense of humour, I'm not sure; whatever it was it ended in more coughing, because of the cigarette smoke. I suppose his lungs were in a pretty bad way, with the ashtrays always full.

'Then,' he said when he could, 'you'd wind him up and he'd move the wooden stick up and down, beating the bare feet of the doll who's hanging upside down from the trapeze. I'm sure,' he said and the laughter started now, and I hope I never hear a sound like that again, 'I'm sure all the little boys would tug their mummies along there to buy one — in this country it'd be a smash hit, don't you think?'

The laughter went on, the strangest sound I have ever heard from a human throat, a kind of soft yelping, like the cry of an animal caught in a trap. I saw Misha staring at him, her plump hands going slowly to her face, while Ignatov watched him with his thick grey mouth slightly open, his eyes bewildered.

Schrenk stood in a crouch as the breath came out of his body in spasms; his eyes were squeezed almost shut, with the glint of tears showing. 'You see,' he said painfully, 'I finally succeeded in making a connection, a connection between Children's World and that other world across the square. I could finally believe they existed within a stone's throw of each other. Of course there's always the funny side to these things, isn't there, I mean quite a lot of good citizens are taken inside Lubyanka for interrogation, sometimes for days on end if they prove obstinate, as you well know.' Ash dropped from his cigarette and he brushed it clumsily off his jacket. 'So you can easily imagine a young mother, worried about the fact that her Jewish husband has disappeared, buying her little boy the funny mechanical toy he's been pestering her for. Then, when he keeps on asking where Daddy is, she can tell him not to worry about him, just go and play with his toy.' He began laughing again, in soft little yelps. 'Don't you think that's an absolute — absolute scream?' But when he swung his head up to look at me I saw the hatred burning in his eyes with a white hot flame.

Then I understood. His rage wasn't against me. It was against that jackbooted crowd of thugs in Lubyanka, and the regime in which they operated, and the order of command that structured it from the omnipotent Politburo down to the cocky little militia men in the streets. Dr Steinberg had been surprised that I hadn't grasped that most obvious of facts: that when you damage a man as they had damaged Schrenk, with your bare hands and with special implements and with humiliation, you will engender in what remains of him the most murderous hate. It does, after all, become personal.

I could believe him now. Schrenk wasn't a defector.

Misha had got him to sit down again on the settee, and for a moment sat with him, her head against his shoulder and her hand cupping his cheek. She looked at me with her face questioning, then withdrew into herself as she remembered what I had done to Ignatov.

'Work for them?' Schrenk said bitterly. He shook off the girl and stared at me.

'What does he say?' she pleaded to Ignatov. 'What is it about, this Lubyanka and this Detsky Mir?'

'I don't know,' he said broodingly.

'Why did the man hit you like that? Should I get the police?'

'You know better,' he said, 'than to get the police.'

Schrenk patted the girl's hand. 'There's nothing to worry about, sweetheart. But your Viktor would like some tea. Would you make some tea for us?'

'There's some in the samovar,' she said eagerly, sensing a return to normal.

'That would be very nice.'

She hugged him in relief and I saw pain flicker across his face; then she bounced off the settee and ran across to the urn, leaving him staring at me.

'We've got a mission on the board,' I said, 'and I'm the executive in the field. Guess what they want me to do.'

He brushed ash off his knees. 'Tell them I'll make my report when I'm ready. I'm not ready yet.'

'The objective,' I said patiently, 'is to get you out of Russia.'

'Sorry I can't help you.' He drained his glass of vodka and put it on to the rickety little stool at the end of the settee, getting it wrong and letting it fall to the carpet. Ignatov ambled forward to pick it up for him.

'Leave it there.'

'Of course, Viktor.'

'I can pick things up for myself, don't you know that?'

'I was forgetting.'

We watched Schrenk double over and feel for the glass, his hand swinging like a hook till his fingers connected with the rim; then he put the glass back on to the stool with ostentatious care, though it rattled to the trembling of his hand before he could stop it.

'You mean,' I asked him, 'you're staying in Moscow?'

'I've got friends here.'

'If they're anything like this son of a bitch here then you're welcome to them.'

He laughed and said: 'He's not too fond of you either. Why do they want me out of Russia?'

'They want to debrief you on the interrogation.' I could tell him so much and no more. He was going to lie when it suited him and he was going to do it convincingly, and if I shot questions at him I was going to get as much out of him as they'd got out of him in Lubyanka. All I could do was feel my way softly into the rage, into the silently roaring battlefield they'd made of his mind, and hope to intercept a few signals when he was off his guard, and try to come out alive and get the message to Bracken. 'They want to give you some leave. You've earned that, God knows.'

'I'll pay my own way,' he said, and fumbled in the black and yellow packet for another cigarette.

It meant nothing at all. It was just a spark coming out of the volcano. I had to find a way of reaching him. 'Natalya hopes to see you again.' At the edge of my vision field I saw Misha turn her head to listen.

'Natalya's dangerous,' Schrenk said at once. 'Don't forget that.' He didn't ask me how I'd got on to her: he knew that when I'd come into the field I would have started by contacting his friends.

'Noted,' I said. 'But she's got her heart in the right place. They're all worried about Borodinski.' It was an oblique shot and I got a hit though he kept most of his control.

'Certainly they're worried about Borodinski.'

'D'you think he'll get off?'

'Get off?' No control now. 'He'll get life, you know that.'

I took it further. 'There's a lot of protests going on.'

'Protests? They're not protests, for God's sake! There's only one thing those bastards'll listen to.' Then he angled his head and watched me steadily. 'You're not interested in Borodinski.'

No go.

Ignatov moved and I whipped a glance at him, but he was only helping the girl with the tray of tea. The room was full of comfortable sounds: the clinking of cups on saucers and the slow tick of the clock. But the company was wrong. Give Schrenk a few more days in here and he'd wire himself to that clock and blow the whole building apart.

'Thank you, sweetheart,' he said, and took his cup from her. 'The thing is,' his head turning to me, 'I want to be left alone for a bit. I've done enough for London, for the moment, you've said that yourself. I applied for a job here as an a-i-p but you know what happens to an application in that bloody place, it's like a snake trying to scratch its arse, can never quite find it.' He sipped some tea. 'So you see I don't want anyone coming here, you or Bracken or anyone else. And that makes it difficult, doesn't it?' He didn't look at me when he said that. He wasn't going to enjoy this, and neither was I, but it was something we had to do, had to work out.

Misha brought some tea for me, standing directly between Schrenk and me with her plump country-girl's body and whispering, 'Who is Natalya?'

'Only an acquaintance,' I whispered back, but of course she didn't believe me.

'It makes it difficult,' Schrenk said, 'because when you leave here you're going to signal Bracken and tell him where to find me. And I don't want that.' I noticed the colour was leaving his face as he sat squinting through the smoke, and his voice took on a forced quality as he made himself tell me the rest. 'The KGB must be hunting you pretty hard if you gave them the slip in Lubyanka. So when you leave here I'm going to blow you as I did before, and there's no way you can stop me.' Then his head went down. 'Sorry.'

The clock ticked.

We listened to it. No one spoke.

He liked clocks. He liked the measured inevitability of time and the events it would bring. He liked watching fuses burn: I'd seen him do that. He liked mechanics-automatic relays, timed release units, delayed detonation devices. Even to bridge the philosophical gap between Lubyanka and Children's World he'd had to invent a mechanical toy.

It might be logical, though dangerously mistaken, to think he was therefore predictable, so that one knew what he was going to do next.

Where was the telephone?

He dragged on his cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs: he needed it more than food; he needed it more than life, because he was dying of it. But he'd got things to do first, and I was in his way.

He'd need a telephone.

Ignatov and Misha were absolutely quiet. They hadn't understood what Schrenk had said to me, but they had seen what an effort it had cost him to say it, and they had seen his head go down like that as he had quietly offered the executioner's apology. Sorry.

'There is a way,' I said, 'I could stop you.'

I could leave them both dead and the girl in shock when I left here.

'No,' he said, 'there isn't. But we don't have to go into that.'

Would he need a telephone, though? Ignatov might not be his only contact: he might have a dozen of them, one in the next apartment, one in the apartment opposite, any number of them. There was something he had to do and he might have got a whole cell established to help him do it.

'They're hunting pretty hard,' I said, 'for you too.'

He got up impatiently, twisting his body upright and holding it stiffly for a moment before he started pacing the worn carpet. 'But that isn't the position, is it? You're not going to have me picked up — your objective is to keep me out of their hands:

'I didn't mean that. I meant that you might not have much longer before they find you anyway. You must have left a trail and this isn't a safe-house — you can get a knock on the door any minute.' I tried to forget what this man had done to me and what he was going to do again if I couldn't stop him. 'I came out here to get you safely home, and with a bit of luck I can do it. You don't need Moscow any more.'

He came up to me quietly, one thin leg swinging slightly more than the other as he tried not to hobble, and looked into my face and said with his eyes bright: 'But Moscow needs me.'

It was the first indication I'd had that his mind had been affected, that there was more going on inside him than a hurricane of rage. It stopped me dead.

'Come on home,' I said. 'You're too dose to it all. You can always come back if you want to.'

'Humouring me?'with his eyes burning.

Oh my God, yes, that fitted too: they hate it when you refuse to believe they're Napoleon.

'Not really,' I said.

He watched me with his bright eyes for a moment, his small gnome's head on one side. 'You have to go now,' he said, and hobbled away from me across the threadbare carpet. 'He's leaving,' he told Ignatov in Russian. 'Don't do anything. Stay where you are.'

'Yes, Viktor.'

Where was the telephone?

There'd be one in the front hallway, a pay phone. If I went through there I could pull out the wire. But Schrenk knew I'd think of that because he'd think of it himself. This wasn't a half-trained novitiate I was having to deal with.

'I think you're making a mistake,' I told him.

'One more won't do me any harm.'

'You're relying on me not to get you picked up the minute they arrest me.'

Ignatov was halfway between the door and the window, nursing his temple. The girl was over by the stove. I began noting other things, because the trap was closing now and the organism was aware of the need to escape; but I didn't think I was going to be able to do that: Schrenk was a professional and he knew he had the advantage.

'You won't get me picked up,' he said, and turned to face me, squinting above his cigarette. 'They'd start work on me again and this time they might break me and then I'd have to blow London. I'm perfectly safe in your hands.'

Ignatov wasn't moving. He was watching Schrenk, trying to understand what he was saying. Misha stood rocking on her black strapped shoes, her hands to her face, waiting, watching the man she adored and ready to claw my eyes out if I tried to hurt him.

'You're perfectly safe in my hands,' I said, 'till they start work on me again and break me and ask me to tell them where you are, as they did before. This time I'll have the answer and I'll have to give it to them.'

He said immediately: 'That's all right. I won't be here.'

We watched each other. We weren't telling each other anything we didn't already know: each wanted the other to know that he knew. The scene going on in this tawdry little room in a Moscow suburb was the exact epitome of the cold war: the war that is kept cold by the ceaseless efforts of intelligence forces to assure the opposition that nothing can be done in secret, that no attack can be made without an immediate counter-attack. The danger cannot be contained simply by finding out what the opposition is doing: the opposition must be informed that it is known.

We knew this, and we had to go through the situation point by point in an attempt to contain the danger. We also knew we had to fail. It was going to be his life or mine. He wasn't going to have me picked up: he'd only wanted to know my thinking, and I'd told him. He couldn't risk making a phone call when I left here because it wouldn't give him time to get out when the KGB closed in and found him in the same net.

He couldn't afford to let me leave here alive.

'Give yourself a bit of time,' I said, 'to think.'

'I've done all the thinking.'

'There's no special hurry.'

'Yes,' he said, 'there is.'

The clock ticked, with a rhythm that was slightly off balance: it needed a wad of paper a sixteenth of an inch thinner, or a sixteenth of an inch thicker, to equalize the swing of the pendulum. Perhaps it worried him sometimes in the night, disturbing his sense of mechanical precision. Perhaps, every morning, he added a thickness of paper to the wad, or removed a thickness, to equalize the rhythm; it would be like him to do that; I could see him doing it, with his thin body twisted as he crouched at the base of the grandfather clock with Misha watching him, as a mother watches a small boy. I knew him quite well, and this made it so much worse for me to do what I would have to do.

If I didn't do it, I wouldn't leave here alive.

What happens if I find him but can't get him out?

The lamplight sending the rain pattern creeping in rivulets down Croder 's face, his dark hooded eyes glancing away as he instructed me, bestowing on me the powers of an executioner.

That would make it easier for you. All we want is his silence.

There was, then, no impediment. I had sanction from on high and there would be no record made of the incident. The file on Scorpion would simply note: Mission accomplished as per instructions. Physically there was no problem offered: I could reach him in three steps and use a sword-hand to the larynx with killing power.and there would be nothing he could do because he didn't have enough speed left, enough strength left, to defend himself. It would occupy perhaps four seconds of my time.

Then I could go home, get out of this bloody place and try to forget. Mission accomplished, good for you, old horse, you did it again, and two months' leave on the Sussex coast with Helena, a dozen gardenias, you shouldn't be so extravagant, two months to forget the twisted thing on the floor with the black bruise on the throat and the sound of a girl screaming, the comfortable smell of boiled cabbage.

God damn their eyes. This man had done good work for them time and again, put his life in hazard for them time and again, stood up to that hellish assault on his psyche in Lubyanka without breaking, without exposing Leningrad or London, and now they were asking me to leave him on the floor like a bit of rubbish we'd thrown out, God damn their eyes.

Mine not to reason why, of course. The ferret in the field obeys orders and goes down the hole and comes up again if he's lucky, leaving behind him those unnameable things in the dark that he had to deal with. Dear God, how long ago was it when they'd said to me: if you decide to go into the field you'll have to bear in mind the fact that you'll be asked to do things you'll find it hard to do, we don't mean dangerous things, you seem all right on that score, we mean dirty things, rotten things that may well give you nightmares afterwards… We're just giving you fair warning, you understand, so that you'll know what you're going into, if that's what you finally decide…

Mine but to do or die, yes, quite. If I didn't kill Schrenk he would have to kill me, I knew that. Things can get very basic in the end phase of a mission. Croder would probably laugh if he knew my thoughts, his rat's teeth nibbling with secret amusement, my dear fellow, the issue is cut and dried, surely you see that. It's impossible for you to get this man out of Russia if he refuses to go, and if he stays here he'll get picked up again and this time they'll get everything out of him, you've said so yourself. Are you really saying that one man's life is worth the entire Leningrad cell and possibly the security of the Bureau as well? You must be indulging in some sort of sentimentality, and that can be highly dangerous. The rat's teeth nibbling and the hooded eyes looking away. Besides, the man's a complete wreck now: we could never put him into the field again.

Good reason. Good logic. But Lord, hear my prayer, and damn their eyes.

He was watching me, squinting through the smoke of his cigarette with an expression I couldn't quite read. He was looking at me almost as if he'd never seen me before, though it wasn't exactly that. Got it, yes: as if he were never going to see me again.

How would he try to kill? He couldn't do it himself, and Ignatov was no use to him. He probably had a dozen people not far away, a clique of fanatical dissidents lying low in readiness for a coup. He'd set the whole pack on me once I was outside there in the dark. He seemed very confident.

So I'd have to get in first.

Give him a last chance.

'I was sent out here to find you,' I told him, and the tightness in my throat distorted the words slightly. 'I was told to pull you out.'

'I understand that:

'And you understand why.'

'Of course.' He began pacing again, one thin leg swinging an inch farther than the other, like the pendulum of the clock. That must worry him too, but he couldn't do anything about it. 'They don't want me to be put under interrogation again, because next time I might have to blow the whole works. I understand that.'

A bit too loudly I said, 'Then for Christ's sake give it a minute's thought, will you? Think out the implications.'

He looked at me sharply and away again, and went on with his pacing. I wanted him to think this out for himself. I didn't want to have to tell him, the instant before I had to do it.

Final considerations: reluctance to do it in front of the girl, because she adored him. Possibility of getting her to leave the room, ask her to fetch something, tell Schrenk to send her away for a moment. Other thought intruding: For sale, Jensen Interceptor, only 27,000 miles, fitted anti-radar unit, all refinements. Also 200 classic jazz records (15 Harry James, 12 Duke Ellington) and player. The plastic chess set would remain in the Caff and the other things like tennis racquets and skis and karate swords would be offered up and down the corridors in off-duty hours: there's usually a jumble sale when someone fails to come back, because we're loners, most of us, and not the kind of people who have relations to leave things to; we're born alone and we die alone and no one really notices. At the Bureau a prerequisite of our service is that we agree not to exist.

'I've told you,' Schrenk said, 'I've done all the thinking.' He brought his pacing to a clumsy halt between the window and the small Victorian writing-desk in the corner. 'But what you mean is, if you can't pull me out of Moscow you've got instructions to do the other thing. That right?'

'Yes.'

He nodded. 'Perfectly logical.'

I moved at once but the inertia cost me time and he was much closer to the writing-desk than I was and his lunge for the top drawer was accurate and he had the gun in his hand and the safety catch off before I was anywhere near.

'Careful,' he said.

I looked at his face and stopped dead. The desk was still rocking on its thin varnished legs and the drawer was sticking out at a slight angle with its brass handle swinging to stillness. There was something else in the drawer but I couldn't see it clearly from this distance; it was just one of a hundred items of data that were bombarding the consciousness and there wasn't enough time to examine it. In addition to this the emotional block was inhibiting reason: I'd lost.

'Back off a bit,' Schrenk said, 'you're too close.'

I did what he told me.

'Never carry a gun, do you?' His hand was absolutely steady. 'That's a mistake.'

Peripheral vision: Ignatov had moved away from the wall where he'd been standing with a handkerchief pressed to his temple; he was looking at Schrenk and waiting for instructions. Misha hadn't moved but I could hear her tremulous breathing: she was a country girl and not used to the big city with its tall concrete towers and the grinding underground trains and men who were ready to kill each other in the warmth of a ground-floor apartment with the comfortable smell of boiled cabbage in the air.

'Sweetheart,' Schrenk said, 'would you get me another cigarette?' He didn't take his eyes off me.

The girl moved out of my sight and then came back, lighting a cigarette from the crumpled paper packet and handing it to him, taking away the butt of the old one and dropping it into the ashtray. `Will everything be all right?' she asked him, close to tears.

'Everything will be all right, sweetheart, yes. Don't worry.'

My left eyelid had begun flickering and without thinking about it I was breathing more deeply. There wasn't going to be any action because things had passed beyond that stage: you can't rush a gun and I wasn't going to try. The only conceivable chance was in getting behind Ignatov and using him as a shield but there was Schrenk behind that thing, Shapiro, not some half-trained amateur. And he wanted me out of his way.

'Had some good times, didn't we?' He drew deeply on the cigarette. `Remember Rosita?'

I didn't say anything. He wasn't making sense.

`Tenerife? Tell you something. I took her out the night before old Templer flew in. What a gal!' He began wheezing with quiet laughter, his thin body shaking with it. But his gun hand remained perfectly steady. `Poor old Templer. He was going to take her out that night, but of course those bastards…' He began coughing but managed to control it: the range was fifteen feet and he knew I could move very fast. 'Remember that bloody bomb in the consulate in Cairo? Got the motto out, didn't we?' He giggled again. `Good times. We had some good times.' Then he straightened up as far as he could and his tone was serious. 'We could do a deal if you like.'

I began listening carefully. 'What deal?'

I think Ignatov must have moved at this point, though he was outside my vision field. Schrenk said to him sharply: 'Pytor, stay where you are. If you move any closer he'll try to use you as a shield, can't you see that? Stay exactly where you are.'

In English he asked me: 'Are you interested?'

'I don't know yet.'

'Pretty simple. If you agree to abort the mission I'll let you go home.'

`It's not on.'

'Always so bloody obstinate,' he said in annoyance. `Don't you know the alternative?'

'Yes.'

'You think there's a chance?' He shook his head. 'I'm not going to have you picked up again, you know that. It's too risky — you might get away as you did before. You know what I've got to do.'

He was losing his colour, and there was a certain stiffness coming into his body, as if he were readying himself to do something that would need a lot of effort on his part, a lot of determination. I could feel my eyelid flickering again and wondered if it showed: it's always been an embarrassment.

'Spell it out for me,' I told Schrenk. 'We don't want any misunderstandings.'

'You're so right. All I want you to do is to go back to London without telling them where I am, or even that you found me. I want to be left alone.'

In a moment I said: 'You'd take my word?'

He looked surprised. 'Of course.'

'You think you know me that well?'

'Oh yes. I'm not risking anything.'

I thought about it. 'Yes, you are. They could pick me up again and grill me, and I know where to find you.'

Concerned, he asked quickly: 'Haven't you got a capsule?'

'Yes.'

'Then you'd have to use it. That would be part of the deal.'

He waited impatiently.

I watched him, trying to read the truth in his eyes, in his face, in the set of his angular body, in the steadiness of the hand that held the gun. I believed he meant what he was saying. I was certain he did.

'You know what I'm offering you,' he said quietly.

`My life.'

'Yes.' His face was bloodless now. At least it was going to mean something to him when he finally had to pump that thing and watch my body go reeling back in a series of jerks.

I'd at least have an epitaph to go out with: Someone cared. But that didn't have to happen. I could take him at his word and walk out of here and report to Bracken and have the cell move in: there were six of them, fully trained, and they could take Schrenk and get him out of the country and put him back into a clinic and go on working on him, the best specialists, the best attention, until one fine day he could walk without hobbling and stand up straight and go and see that girl in Brighton again, take her out in his Jensen Interceptor and then one day, one day say to me, you broke your word to me that time in Moscow and it's a bloody good thing you did or I wouldn't be here now.

He was half out of his mind and needed protecting from himself: he was mixed up with a bunch of wildcat dissidents planning some kind of protest that was going to land him inside Lubyanka again or flat on his back in the street with his head in the gutter and the young po-faced militia men standing arrogantly over him, kicking him idly with their polished boots until the transport arrived. You have to use every means to complete a mission and the object of Scorpion was to get this man out of Moscow and I could do it without any problem, without lifting a finger, yes I accept the deal and you've got my word on it. The rest would be up to Bracken and his team and they wouldn't have any problem either, once Schrenk was subdued and in their care; Croder had lined up support facilities that would get them across the frontier at an hour's notice: Bracken had told me so.

'The thinking,' Schrenk said heavily, 'is for you to do, not me. But I haven't got a lot of time, quite frankly. I'm going to give you another minute. Sixty seconds. I think that's fair.'

The gun was aimed at my forehead. He was a first class shot and could drop me where I stood without any pain. He was a humane man. Sixty seconds. That was a long time, more time than I really needed. A generous man.

I heard the tick of the clock. We all heard it. The other two hadn't understood anything of what we'd been saying but they could sense what the silence meant: we'd both stopped talking and he was holding the gun perfectly still. I looked at it carefully; it was a 9mm Smith and Wesson and would carry eight shots in the magazine. Schrenk would only use one.

Tick… tock.

The idea occurred to me that if I remained staring into the barrel of that thing I would perhaps see the nose of the bullet travelling towards me in the final microsecond of life, as young Chepstow had possibly seen it when he'd been sitting at the cafe table drinking his last cup of coffee in Phnom Penh a couple of years ago, thinking perhaps it was a bee.

Tick… tock.

Schrenk was very pale now, and there was something coming into his eyes, a kind of blankness. I suppose he was having to blank out his mind and leave it clear of any philosophical considerations that might finally get in the way of what he had to do, which was to squeeze the first nicotine-stained finger of his right hand by a simple command to the motor nerves.

Tick… tock.

How long had he said? Sixty seconds. But he wouldn't fire without some kind of warning. He wouldn't expect me to know when the sixty seconds were up. Perhaps he was counting. Was I expected to count, as well? Schrenk. Do you want me to count?

Because it was no go. If I gave him my word I would have to keep it. It didn't matter if he were half out of his mind and needed protecting from himself, so forth: those arguments were rational but not admissible. It wasn't for me to judge him now. He'd worked damned hard for our people and kept us safe, all of us, Leningrad and London, all of us, while they'd been trying to break him in Lubyanka, and he'd earned our trust, my trust.

Tick… tock.

I really do wish you'd get that bloody thing. What I was not going to do was walk out of here and tell Bracken I was aborting the mission and ask him to give me safe passage back to London with my tail between my legs. Wish you'd get that bloody thing to tick evenly. It's getting on my nerves. Call it pride, would you, not enough guts to face the fact that for the first time in my life I'm failing a mission, I don't give a damn what you call it, it's none of your bloody business. Must I suppose be up by now, sixty seconds aren't long.

Tick…

Flickering. Left eyelid flickering. Sweat running down, wet on the palms. The face wound throbbing, the pulse rate high. Small round barrel and I suppose, I suppose that if in point of fact I finally glimpse the pointed lead nose of the bullet it's going to look quite large, two inches from the centre of my forehead, large enough to blot his whole face out of sight.

Tock.

'I'd say that's about it, Q.' I took a breath.

'All right. No deal.'

His eyes widened slightly. 'Why not, for God's sake?'

'That's none of your bloody business.'

He went on staring for another second or two. 'I didn't think you'd be such a bastard. Making me do a thing like this.' His tone had gone dead.

'You should have thought of that before.'

In a moment he nodded, and kept the gun on me while he felt for the drawer of the writing-desk with his left hand, and found it, and took the thing out, the thing I'd seen before. It was a silencer and he fitted it to the gun.

The distance was still something like fifteen feet, almost the width of the room. The window was obliquely behind him and the door was three or four feet to my left and out of sight. Ignatov was over by the wall and the girl was on the other side near the kitchen area. The only thing in the centre of the room was the short velvet-covered settee. There was nothing in the environment I could use for survival in the half second it would take Schrenk to fire. Nothing.

'No hard feelings, I hope.' I hardly recognized his voice. He stood there with his body twisted and the left shoulder down, the sweat shining on his thin agonized face as he stared at me — not at my eyes but slightly above them, making no contact, giving me the chilling idea that I was a lifeless object, nothing he could communicate with.

'It's your own conscience,' I told him. 'That's all you'll get.'

'All I expected. Mind turning round?'

'You mean you haven't got the guts to do it while I'm looking at you?'

I seemed to be breathing cold air in the warmth of the room, my lungs gradually contracting, my body shrinking. I didn't watch Schrenk any more: I wanted to forget him, if I could, in the last instant. I watched the heavy shape of the silencer.

'I'm not going to shoot,' he said. 'I just want you to turn round.'

Of course I could refuse but the organism was thinking for itself and I had the instinctive knowledge that if I didn't turn round he'd have to shoot anyway. So I turned round.

'Pyotr,' he said.

I heard Ignatov moving away from the wall. 'Yes, Viktor.'

'Take this gun,' I heard the strange voice saying in Russian, 'and go outside with him. Keep the gun in the pocket of your coat, so that no one else will see it.' The voice stopped, and I heard the effort he was having to make to go on with what he was saying. 'This man is extremely clever, and he will take risks, because his life is at stake. You must keep a good distance between him and yourself. Take him out to your car and when he is inside it, shoot him dead.' There was another pause, and when Schrenk spoke again there was anger in his voice, as if he had to work up some kind of resentment against me to go through with this. 'Drive him as far as the river. If you want to, ask Boris and Dmitriy to go with you, but I'd prefer you to go alone. You don't have to use any weights, in the river. All you have to do is to make sure he is found a long way from here. You understand?'

'Yes, Viktor.'

A change in Ignatov's voice, too: it sounded strong now, and deeper. He said to me: 'Open the door.'

The senses had become acute. I heard Misha whispering, so softly that I didn't catch the words. Some kind of prayer? I was quite moved, and had a sudden hatred of Schrenk for doing this in front of her, for being so coarse: he could have sent her out. Slightly short on good taste, I thought as I opened the door, and wondered who had said that, where I'd heard it.

'Pyotr. If he makes any attempt to get away, shoot at once, and to kill.'

'Yes, Viktor.'

Then I heard a long shuddering breath, and Schrenk spoke softly in English. 'Good times.'

He fired six rapid shots at short range into the spine and the impact pitched my body forward in a series of jerks as the chips of bone and cartilage from the shattered vertebrae were forced out through the rib cage in an explosion of blood and plasma. As my face hit the snow I thought Schrenk you bastardI hope they burn you for this.

Have to do better. Gut-think wouldn't help me.

I listened to his footsteps along the corridor behind me. I estimated the distance at something like six feet, not nearly dose enough to do anything in safety. We kept on walking towards the door leading to the car park at the rear.

He fired directly into the back of the head and the brain matter burst and splattered against the walls in a welter of skull fragments. There was no more time for conscious thought, even of Moira, even of roses: life was simply present, then absent. Executive deceased.

Have to do much better, yes. A normal reaction to awareness of imminent death with the imagination running wild but gut-think useless and dangerous: survival possible only through rational thought, brain-think.

Man in a worn brown overcoat and horn-rimmed glasses. 'Good evening, comrade.' Ignatov.

'Good evening. They say it's going to snow again.' 'Surely we've had enough!'

A chance, obviously, to move extremely fast and get the man in the brown overcoat between me and the gun, but Ignatov might have fired precipitately and shot him by accident.

'Keep walking.'

I quickened the pace a little. He had the gun in the pocket of his coat; otherwise the other man would have seen it. He couldn't take accurate aim like that but it didn't make a lot of difference: at this range he could hit me lethally with three or four shots, shifting the aim according to the visible point of impact. I didn't know if he'd handled firearms before but it seemed likely: Schrenk wouldn't leave me in the hands of an amateur.

'Open the door.'

His voice was heavy, its tone entirely changed by his possession of a killing instrument. There had been no power in his voice before, no authority; now there was both, and something else, something like anticipation. I'd pictured the end of the world for him too often, with his three children asking Galya where Daddy had gone, and now he had the end of my own world in his hands and he was impatient for it. Once the eight lumps of spinning metal had gone burrowing into me he would be safe again, and go home to Galya and the children. You could see his point.

The night air was freezing.after the heat of the apartment. The heavy door slammed shut behind us.

'Over that way.'

He was closer, I thought. Or it might simply be that the wall of the building was projecting his voice forward and making it sound louder. I would have to watch things like that.

His mud-brown Syrena was obliquely to our right, not far from the entrance to the car park and facing this way. I hadn't locked it after I'd got him out. The street lamps cast a sick greenish light across the area and the albedo was high, the reflections bouncing off the cellulose of the parked cars and the blanket of ground snow. Shadows were sharp.

Pyotr. If he makes any attempt to get away, shoot at once, and to kill.

But he was going to do that anyway as soon as we reached his car so I didn't have much to lose.

He fired into the neck and I felt the spine explode -

Steady.

One, two, three… twelve cars. In the far corner, a pick-up truck. Thirteen objects of good cover, but too far away, the nearest car at least twenty feet from where I was walking: we were crossing an open space. No one in sight. A long way off, the drone of a tram. No sound of other traffic: the evening rush hour was over and in this city by night the streets are almost empty.

What would she do with them?

'Make for the car. The Syrena.'

Authority in his tone, the authority of death itself.

Five hundred were an awful lot: they'd fill the whole flat and what could she do with them afterwards, change the water every day, sit and stare at them, what pretty roses?

I listened to his footsteps on the snow behind me. I seemed to be crunching more than he was: perhaps he was walking in the hollows I was leaving, putting his feet exactly where I had placed mine. It would look rather comic, like a couple of ducks on their way to the pond, picking their feet up and putting them down at orderly intervals. But there was no one here to see. He would be the last person on earth I was going to see, a dough-faced plodding man with a wife and three little children and a gash on his temple and a gun in his -

'Keep walking.'

The sound of his voice jarred my nerves. Why had he said that? Had I been slowing? I must have. Perfectly understandable, as Schrenk would have said, squinting through the cigarette smoke: you don't run to your funeral.

'Which is your car?' I asked him.

'You know which one it is. It's the brown Syrena, near the entrance.'

I nodded and walked on.

Just sit and stare at them for God's sake? After twenty-four hours she wouldn't even be able to stand the smell, because it would remind her of what had happened. She'd go out and get stinking, that was all she'd do, or take her Lotus up the Mi flat out in the dark with the headlights swallowing up the night and everything she could ever remember of me, and when she got back to the flat she'd just think oh my God what am I going to do with all these bloody roses.

The snow crunched under our shoes. I think one of my shoes was leaking, or some snow had got in over the top: my left foot felt wet. Useless enough sensory data, if you like. I began turning my head very gradually, so that I could trap the sounds from behind me in the auricle of the right ear; his footsteps loudened slightly. I estimated he was still a good six feet behind me, so that there was no chance of turning on him. But I kept my head slightly to one side, exposing the right ear to the auditory source for the left hemisphere to process. I could hear his breathing now; he was a heavy man, too well fed by his loving wife.

So in fact the rose thing wasn't really going to work out after all — it was just a grandiose gesture, a juvenile urge to make an impression from out here in the never-ending dark. It would have been subtler to send one rose, one sublime and perfect rose to remember me by, not an ostentatious barrowload. Ignatov, old boy, do you mind if I just phone Harrods before we wind up the evening?

Something like laughter, a long way down in the psyche, a neural reaction perhaps, while the slow cold wave went down the spine and the sweat gathered and ran, the reaction of the beast that smells the slaughterhouse: he was squeezing his finger at every step we took and I could feel the impact and hear the shrill jangling of the nerve system as the organism took the shock.

I believe I've got another thirty seconds to live. But there's nobody I can tell. We're born alone and we die alone and no one really notices.

Headlights swung across the facade of the building opposite and sparked light from the windows. Sound of a vehicle, smell of exhaust gas.

'The Syrena,' the man behind me said.

'Oh yes. Sorry.'

I hadn't meant to go off course; it was the organism again, not wanting to go near that particular car because it was a hearse. The headlights swung in a half circle and I saw the vehicle turning in from the street, a small dark Moskvich bumping over the ruts with its snow chains clanking and the bodywork rattling — a kind of mad toy that some joker had wound up and sent into the car park to raise a laugh. It obliterated the slight sounds Ignatov was making and of course I couldn't see him because he was behind me, and for a moment the idea came to me that he wasn't there any more, that I'd let my nerves get out of hand to the point where I'd imagined him. It was an enormous relief and I took a deep breath and remembered the reports of people who had come back from the edge of death; they all said the same thing: first you panic, then you try to do something about the situation, then when you realize it's all up you get the feeling of euphoria as the organism anaesthetizes the final awareness of death.

But I wasn't at that stage yet and I'd better wake up to the fact that Ignatov was in fact still behind me and all he had to do was stumble a bit on the frozen ruts and his finger would tighten and I'd be finished.

'Ignatov,' I said. 'You didn't understand what we were saying, did you, Viktor and I?'

'No.'

The little Moskvich rattled to a halt a dozen yards away and its lights went out.

'He offered me a deal,' I said over my shoulder. 'He said he'd let me leave Moscow if I gave him my word not to tell anyone where he is.'

'Don't turn round,' he said, and I could hear that he meant it. I suppose the Moskvich was worrying him: it might be a friend of Schrenk's or someone he knew, and they might come over for a chat.

'I refused the deal,' I said. 'But I think that was unwise. I'd like to reconsider.' I wanted time.

'The Syrena,' he said. There was a note of warning in his voice.

'If Viktor knew I was ready to accept the deal, he'd prefer it that way. We've worked together, you know. He must have told you.' More than anything I wanted time.

'He told me nothing.'

A man got out of the Moskvich and crunched across the snow. He didn't look in our direction. In the quiet of the night the distant tram went on droning. My senses had become finely tuned in the last few minutes and I was acutely aware of the environment.

'Viktor and I are good friends,' I said over my shoulder, 'that's why we all had a drink before we started talking. It's just that he thinks I want to stop this little protest he's going to make — you know, about Borodinski. You can quite understand how I feel about it now. I'd like to reconsider the deal he offered me. I want to talk to him again.'

My voice sounded odd in the silence of the car park, the voice of a man talking to himself. 'Viktor would come down very hard on you if he ever found out I was finally ready to do the deal with him.' Time. Give me time.

But it meant nothing, except that a drowning man was grasping at straws, worse, fabricating them out of thin air. Ignatov didn't bother to answer. The Syrena was twenty feet away from me now and I was walking straight towards it. With my head still turned I couldn't tell if he'd come any closer to me; I didn't think so; I think he was still walking in my footprints, hoping to keep the deep snow out of his shoes.

Fifteen feet.

Ten.

The car stood broadside on. The passenger's door was closed, just as I'd left it when I'd cut the scarf from his wrists and ankles and let him get out. The keys would still be in the ignition: I hadn't been concerned about them at the time because I'd seen that the man hobbling across the car park was Schrenk.

'Open the door,' Ignatov said from behind me. His voice faded a little as he spoke: he'd stopped, to keep a safe distance between us when I opened the door.

Thought was becoming rarefied, and reality slipped out of focus: I nearly asked him who was going to drive. The Syrena looked bigger than it had before, a large brown container for the body, snow covering its roof like a white pall and a dead man's face in the window: my own reflection.

Take him out to your car and when he is inside it, shoot him dead.

The night was totally still. I could feel the cold creeping into my left foot, and smell the faint residue of the exhaust gas the Moskvich had left on the air. A long way off I could see the glint of a gold dome: one of the churches, with an illuminated red star at the tip of a spire. Beyond it the sky was black. In the immediate environment I saw my pale reflection in the window of the Syrena and Ignatov's crooked shadow across the bodywork. There was no one else in the car park, so he would have taken the gun from his pocket by now, in order to shoot accurately.

'Open the door,' he told me again. His voice was still heavy and authoritative, and there was something else there now, distinct but difficult to define. I think it was a kind of awe: my heightened awareness told me that he had never killed a man before.

I opened the door, and the snow fell away.

'Get in.'

I did as he told me. He was still six feet away from the side of the car and he wouldn't come any closer, in case I tried to attack him at the last minute. I was right: the gun was now in his hand, and I saw him lift it to eye level and hold it forward so that he could line up the sights.

'Wind the window down,' he said. 'Hurry.'

He wanted to get it done with before anyone else drove into the car park. I turned the cheap aluminium handle and the window went down in a series of jerks, sticking on the rubber flanges and then freeing.

'Shut the door.'

The keys were still in the ignition and I tugged them out as I dragged the door shut and flung them hard into his face and kicked away from the door to give me the impetus for a horizontal dive that took me clear of the steering wheel with my right fist punching the horn to provide sound shock and my left hand wrenching at the driver's door handle and the main force of the momentum sending me through the gap as the door burst open and the retaining strap broke and the panel smashed back against the bodywork. The first shot ruffled the sleeve of my coat and shattered the window: he'd shouted something, maybe a cry of alarm because of the horn, and the soft wet phutt of the silencer came an instant afterwards. I was into the snow and lurching on to my feet and losing balance and trying to find it again.

If I went underneath the car I'd be a sitting duck so I feinted to the right with my head and shoulders visible to him through the shattered window and dropped and span the other way with the sickening rush of a close shot fanning my temple. There was a row of cars immediately behind the Syrena and I went hard for cover and slipped on the snow and crashed down and dug my heels in and went forward again and reached the front end of a snow-covered Pobeda before he loosed the third shot and hit a headlamp and sprayed me with glass and fired again and hit my shoulder before I could use full cover. The 9 mm. Smith and Wesson had eight shots in the magazine and he'd used four and I'd have to remember to go on counting because that could become critical if I lived through the next few minutes.

He was taking it badly. He was a family man and too well fed and I'd been picking away at his nerves ever since I'd got him alone in the underground car park, threatening to pitch him out of the Syrena on our way here, so forth. The work I'd done on his carotid and medial nerves had worried him and the strike I'd used on him in Schrenk's apartment must still be giving him pain. He knew me well enough to realize that if he slipped on the snow and I got to him before he could aim and fire I might kill him out of hand. A professional hunter would have used this experience to his own advantage and move well away from the quarry and take careful aim before putting in the final accurate shot. This man was not a professional hunter: he was afraid of the creature he had to exterminate and his fear confused him. He'd already wasted four shots: half the entire magazine.

But of course he only needed one, even a lucky one, to drop me cold.

I'd lost sight of him and that was dangerous but he wouldn't know that. I was crouched under cover of the Pobeda and all he had to do was lie flat and take aim and smash one of my ankles to subdue me and stop me running but he hadn't thought of that: because of his fear he was thinking more about being attacked than attacking me. I was beginning to know him.

Then I saw his face and as the gun flashed my shoes slipped and dug in and I went sideways and then forwards, hurling myself towards the car immediately behind and feeling the bite as a bullet scored a neck muscle and smashed into the bodywork of the car alongside. I ran hard but it was open ground and my feet were slipping as the cold air pumped into my lungs and froze the neck wound as I lunged for the pickup truck in the corner and slipped again and hit the front wing and went down with one foot dragging and my back exposed. I could hear him following and I think he slipped once and went down because his breath grunted out and there was a scuffling sound; then I was behind the truck and moving towards its rear, backing and facing the way I'd come.

I couldn't hear him now.

Blood was seeping into the collar of my coat from the neck wound. The shoulder had been oozing and filling the sleeve but there was no artery hit or I would have weakened by this time; my left arm was still usable and there was no other damage. I stood in a half crouch, listening to the silence. He would be dose to the truck, on the other side: from here I could see the open ground I'd run across and he wasn't there. He had two more shots left in the magazine and he might be aware of that: he wouldn't like it but he'd now have to stalk me at close range and make sure of a lethal hit when he fired next. I didn't want to lie flat and sight for his feet underneath the truck because I'd be too vulnerable if he rushed me; I had to rely on auditory cues alone for information but they wouldn't be very strong: his breathing and the brittle sound of the snow when he moved. For the moment I heard nothing; the night was grave quiet.

The snow was fresh in the lee of the truck and I scooped it into my hands and compressed it, making a snowball, kneading it until it was heavy and iron-hard. I would need to blind him or hit the wound on his temple if I were going to do any good but there'd be no time to aim before he fired and he wouldn't fire until I was securely in his sights: he had learned from the uselessness of those six shots. I waited, with the snowball gradually melting through my fingers.

He was moving now: I heard the faint crunching of snow from the front of the truck. It was a risk but I dropped flat and sighted along the underside of the truck and saw his face and the blossoming flash of the shot and heard the fluting rush of air against my jaw as I twisted over and reached for the tailboard and pulled myself up with my left hand slipping because of the blood, my shoulder flaring with sudden pain as I flexed it: the bullet had lodged there close to the bone.

Seven. But I was scared now because he was getting close and he knew he'd have to make it for certain with the last shot. I lowered my feet to the snow again because he wouldn't shoot to maim at this stage. The snowball was resting on the surface and I picked it up and pressed it harder and put it on the metal footrest below the tailboard and stopped and made another one and held it ready, listening.

He didn't move. I thought I could see the top of his head, a dark patch in the corner of the truck's windscreen; but I was sighting through the rear window of the cab and the image was indistinct: it could be the driving mirror or the corner of a roof in the distance. The whole truck was sliding to one side and then lifting silently — watch it — and I fell forward against the tailboard and took a deep breath until the scene steadied, losing more blood than I'd thought, getting light-headed. I tried to drop flat again to see where his feet were but the scene started rocking badly and I straightened up and held the snowball against the neck wound to slow the bleeding.

Something below me and I looked down. Blood on the snow, black in the acid light of the street lamps. Nothing else to attract the attention, no sound from him. He mustn't know. He mustn't know about the blood because I couldn't do much to stop it until I was out of range and all he'd have to do was to wait it out until it left my brain, quietly draining, while the scene shifted and swung and turned over on me and I hit the snow and he came to stand over me, phutt… finis.

I would have to make him fire again for the last time. He hadn't moved yet, or I would have heard his shoes on the dry snow; he would be waiting for me to move first, waiting and listening. He was right-handed and if he moved he would circle the truck anticlockwise with his gun-hand leading; but he didn't move. It worried me. I made another snowball, a bigger one, black and white in the green unearthly glow of the street lamps, blood and snow, pressing it harder, the dark stain spreading across its surface as the truck tilted and went down, dipping and rising and oh Christ I'm leaving it too late, steadying, a deep breath, I would have to find him in the next sixty seconds while there was enough blood left to feed the brain, Ignatov where are you, the pain flaring again in the shoulder as I fell flat and stared into the narrow gap between the truck's chassis and the snow.

He wasn't there.

The ball of ice freezing my hand, the scene shifting again as I got to my knees and then to my feet. He wasn't there, that was all right, I could go now and try to get someone to look at my — watch what you're doing and think for God's sake think because he's -

Towering over me, stark against the street lamps with his feet on the step of the cab and the gun coming into the aim a short range, snowball, all the strength I had left and it flew upwards against the flash and struck his face but I was spinning round and going down again hitting the snow and bouncing with the pain bursting in the shoulder and the truck's angular shape rocking against the sky and the blood coming into my head again and bringing consciousness back, scaring me because there were sudden intervals of amnesia and I couldn't remember if that was the seventh or the eighth shot, but he didn't fire again and I managed to grab his foot as he dropped from the metal step and tried to start running. He came down full length and I put him out with a neck strike that would leave him alive because all I had to do was to stop him going to the nearest telephone before I could get clear.

The keys of the Syrena took a long time to find in the snow, two or three blackouts, the shoulder burning alive, but found them, the keys, all right.

'For God's sake leave me alone,' I told them.

'He's all right,' a voice said.

'Who is?' I hit out and felt an arm and heard something crash on to the floor.

'Steady,' someone said. It sounded like Bracken.

'Open your eyes.' This was in Russian, a woman's voice. I'd heard it before somewhere.

'Eyes?'

Then I saw her, swaying from side to side, leaning over me, melting into some kind of shadow and taking shape again. I remembered her now.

'Can't you keep still?' I asked her.

She laughed, deep in her throat.

Raging thirst.

'Can he sit up?' I saw Bracken now.

Place stank of chemicals.

They helped me, but only on one side. The other side was peculiarly numb. 'Am I in bed, for God's sake?'

'Take it easy,' Bracken said.

I let them pull me upright and when they weren't ready for it I swung my legs over and stood up and they caught me as the wall swung round and hit me full in the face.

Driving was more difficult than I'd thought. The left arm worked all right with the sling off but I was still feeling the loss of blood and I got into three front-end skids over the snow before I reached the rendezvous because of partial blackouts. Within ten minutes of leaving the safe-house I passed seven militia patrol cars, one of which made a U-turn and followed me for five blocks before it peeled off, presumably in answer to a radio call. The whole environment was strictly a red sector because the number plates of the Pobeda weren't legible and traffic was so thin at this time of night that I was liable to get pulled up by the police just to relieve their boredom. The operation could blow at any given minute and Croder knew that but all he could do now was run the whole thing into the ground if he had to, because of the time factor: we didn't know when Schrenk was going in.

The signal had specified a warehouse in Losinoostrovskaja ulica alongside the main rail line between Belokamennaja and Cerkizovo stations and I reached there at 3.21 and slid the Pobeda across the ruts into the shadow of the building and cut the engine and wound the window down and waited, checking for sound and movement. It wasn't likely to be a trap but if Schrenk picked up my trail he'd come for me himself instead of leaving it to Ignatov, I knew that.

There was a train rolling somewhere, north and west of the warehouse, and its sound made a blanket for aural cues in the immediate vicinity and that was dangerous: I would have preferred to leave the car and get into more flexible cover but the contact had to show himself first and it was a safe principle so I stayed where I was, listening to the train and trying to pick up closer sounds. Something was changing in the visual pattern on the other side of the car and I watched it: a door along the wall of the warehouse was coming open. Someone was standing there but I did nothing until a torch was flashed on and off three times, one long and two short; then I got out of the car and walked across the snow with a trickle running through the spine because a night rdv is always risky: a signal can be intercepted and you can find yourself walking straight into an ambush.

'Midnight red.'

I countersigned and he flashed the light briefly over my face and then his own, and I recognized Shortlidge. He led me into the warehouse and shut the door, then switched on the torch and swung the beam across piles of broken crates and sacking and loose timber until it focused on the black Zil limousine.

'OK?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Fill me in.'

'I was watching Area 1 and saw Ignatov's car come up. Two men got out and went into the apartment block — one of them could have been Ignatov but I'd only got your verbal description. One of them came out in about half an hour — not Ignatov, too young and too thin, a dark chap. We — '

'How was he walking?'

'Walking? Quite normally.'

'He wasn't crippled. Hobbling.'

'No.'

'All right, go on.'

'Two of us tagged him here and he stayed fifteen minutes and then left. Logan's still on the tag and we're reporting by radio. I was told to stay here and show you this lot.'

I gazed across at the brilliantly-polished Zil. 'Did you see what he was doing in here?'

'No. He locked the door after him.'

'How did you get in, afterwards?'

'Picked the lock. It's a tumbler.'

'Did he bring anything with him?'

'Nothing too big for his pockets.'

'Take anything away?'

'Not that I saw. He wasn't carrying anything.'

He was moving his feet up and down, his hands stuffed into his pockets. There was no heating on in this place and a freezing draught was blowing across the floor. The building was old and looked abandoned; above our heads there was a gap of light where the roof had started caving in under the weight of the snow, and the whole place creaked. Various smells were distinguishable: rotting timber, damp sacking, sour grain, petrol and rubber.

I went on staring at the big black limousine, not comfortable with it. 'All right,' I told Shortlidge, 'I want you to keep watch outside. I'll be here about an hour. Where's your car?'

'Round the back.'

'Can I use this torch?'

'Help yourself.'

'There's one in the Pobeda glove pocket, if you want one. Listen, if you can't see the door to this place from your car, sit in mine. I want you to warn me if anyone comes, but keep out of the action if anything starts, understood?'

He considered this, moving his feet up and down. 'What about if you're up against it?'

'I'll look after myself. Your job is to get a signal back. Croder's instructions.'

'OK.' He left me.

I stood listening to the creaking of the building, feeling the cold draught numbing my ankles as I stared at the big black Zil. It was probably going to be all right, but even Schrenk was human and could make a mistake, and it was a minute before I was ready to go across to the thing and start work.

Long wheelbase, four doors, Central Committee MOII number plates, immaculate bodywork and chrome. I shone the torch through one of the windows. Brushed vinyl club seats, thick blue carpeting, two telephones, built-in tape deck, air conditioning vents and controls, cocktail cabinet, wood-grain panelling, dark blue nylon curtains at the rear windows, a thick glass division between the front and rear seats separating the passengers from the chauffeur and escort.

I began underneath, fetching some sacking from a pile near the wall and spreading it on the dirt floor and sliding inwards on the flat of my back with the torch in my right hand. The general layout was massive but clean, with cross-braced box section chassis members and two enormous exhaust silencers running half the length of the car. I checked ledges, niches and junctions, inching my left hand along the topside of every component, the sweat beginning because the organism was confined and wouldn't be able to help itself if anything went wrong, wouldn't even know about it except for a microsecond of cataclysm.

Careful, old boy. Don't touch the wrong thing. Amusement in his tone as he watched me, his eyes narrowed against the smoke of the cigarette.

Bugger off.

I went over the rear axle casing, propeller shaft tunnel, flywheel housing, crankcase flanges and trays while the building creaked and the draught chilled my bones and the bastard began laughing softly with that awful laugh of his that turned to coughing because of the cigarette smoke.

You're taking a chance, old boy, I suppose you know that.

Yes, I knew that. He was human and he might have lost some of his cunning when they'd half-killed him in that bloody place and I couldn't be sure that my hand wouldn't at some time touch a badly assembled trip mechanism or set off a too-sensitive rocking device or break a circuit when I opened a door and triggered the interior lamps. Taking a chance, yes, and I couldn't get his voice out of my head.

I stopped after ten minutes and lay listening, with the torch switched off and the stink of oil in the air, the draught shifting and fretting and freezing the skin. Four vehicles had gone past the warehouse and each time I'd switched off the torch because this building wasn't light-proof. Five minutes ago a train had rolled slowly alongside, its vibration setting up a buzzing in one of the Zil's headlamps.

You're pushing your luck, old boy. You -

Shuddup.

I wiped my hands on the sacking and got out from underneath and opened the driver's door, doing it quickly because there was a Russian roulette factor in play: Schrenk was working in foreign terrain and he couldn't be a hundred per cent certain of his components or materials, however competently he assembled them.

In twenty minutes I was finished with the interior, lifting out the seat cushions and the carpets, checking the cocktail cabinet, telephones, tape deck, air conditioning vents and the tip-up seats. Most of this time was spent in checking the recess behind the facia panel in the forward compartment, working with extra care among the wiring, terminals and fuse boxes.

There's only one thing those bastards'll listen to.

A bomb.

He was so good at them. I'd watched him rigging a bang more than once, sitting over the bloody thing and crooning like a witch, his thin nicotine-stained fingers stroking and fondling and fiddling, the pliers paring the insulation and making the loop in the copper cable, his fingertip spinning the brass terminal free as if he were playing with a toy, his pale eyes bright and his mouth touched with a faint Gioconda smile.

'Anyone would think,' I'd said to him once, 'it was a baby rabbit.'

He'd looked up quickly. 'That's all they are, old boy. Baby rabbits.' A soft chuckle. 'Until they go up, of course. Then they're tigers.'

I pulled the bonnet lock and went through the engine compartment, taking nearly half an hour because of all the subsidiary tanks, reservoirs, chambers and small boxed components; a lot of them were labelled but I had to identify the rest by following the cables, pipes and linkages to find out which system they served. Then I shut the bonnet and opened the boot and checked the spare wheel, the first aid box and emergency tool kit. The torch battery was running low by this time but I'd almost finished now.

Didn't find anything, old boy?

It could of course be packed inside the upholstery or the roof lining or the door panelling, anywhere like that, but a major search with tools would take time and at this stage I'd prefer to report to Croder and get his instructions; until we knew the overall picture we didn't necessarily want Schrenk to know we'd found the Zil and we didn't necessarily want to immobilize it: he could have alternative procedures planned.

I started on a final check before the torch was too dim, covering the areas behind the radiator grille, inside the wings and under the bodywork valances. Another freight train was rolling through but the warehouse was a sound-box and when the door creaked I froze and waited, concealed by the Zil.

Light flashed from a torch.

`You there?'

`Yes.'

`Someone coming.'

I went over to the door. 'Keep inside and stay hidden,' I told Shortlidge. He moved for the pile of crates and I shut the door and got behind it and waited. The train was still rumbling but I could hear footsteps over the brittle snow outside and then a key in the door. It was turned sharply three times: he was surprised to find it was already unlocked.

I'd have liked to have a final word with Shortlidge because I didn't know whether he'd follow my orders and stay out of the action or decide to get mixed up in it and risk two deaths and no signal to base, but he was a fully trained a-i-p with a Curtain-country post and I stopped worrying and watched the door. It opened cautiously and a man came in and snapped a light on and I used the right hand and searched him for weapons while he was still out and then got some snow and packed his face with it till he came to. Then I began asking questions.

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