He shouldn't have said that.

`Come on, out!'

I went with them along the corridor to the prisoners' ablutions: a stone floor and zinc basins and open toilets and a row of showers, the water freezing, hitting me like a burst of glass fragments, shrinking my head and roaring in my ears, he shouldn't have said that, the block of abrasive soap scouring my skin, the face wound burning and throbbing but my eyes resting, soothed at last after the glare of that blinding light. A strip of sacking for a towel and my hair still wet when they took me away and threw me a sweater to wear instead of my shirt: it had been soaked in sweat and that was why he'd said what he had, correction, that was the excuse.

My whole body tingling and most of the torpor gone from my mind, remember London, 'Come on, in here!' Back in the cell again, not mine this time: a smaller one with no window, a slatted bench with one leg at an angle and bloodstains across the top and repeated on the wall, the smell of the human animal that had been in here, Schrenk? There was no means of knowing, there were fifty of these cells in the ground-floor block. 'Wait here.'

No option: they slammed the door and locked it.

I realized, yes, that with my shirt like that I was stinking to high heaven, but he shouldn't have pointed it out. He had done it to humiliate me, crossing the dividing line between the area where the captor and the captive are two civilized men and the area where one is a man and the other has become a pig. It's a critical stage in the business of interrogation, and he had introduced it deliberately, I knew that. But it didn't make any difference.

I walked from wall to wall in the narrow cell, seven paces and back from the door to the window. Drops of water still fell from my wet hair, and I pulled off the sweater they'd given me and tousled my head with it, putting it on again and feeling the dampness against my chest and my back. The lamp in here was a naked bulb of low wattage and gave no heat; I began shivering, and walked faster. There wasn't anything else I could do: I could see his eyes every time I moved towards the door, watching from the oblong panel above it.

They came for me soon afterwards, three plainclothes men and Vader, still in uniform and now wearing a greatcoat and peaked cap.

'Is he washed?'

'Yes, Colonel.'

'Bring him, then. Hurry.'

It was some time in the night: pilot lamps were burning along the corridors and the big high windows were dark, with a seepage of neon light from the streets along their frames.

'Tell this man where we are taking him, Grekov.'

One of them spoke from beside me. 'We are taking you to the Serbsky Institute.' He was a squat man in a dark coat; I could smell tobacco on him. The two others had an air of higher rank, walking in front of us, one on each side of Vader.

'Tell him he will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress.'

'You will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress,' grunted the man beside me. But the sense of it didn't get through to me: I was thinking of the other thing Vader had said. The man beside me was armed: I could smell the gun oil. They would all be armed. They walked in step with Vader, but I didn't follow the rhythm. Once, as we passed the main offices near the entrance to the building, the squat man looked down and gave my foot a quick little kick, to get me into step, but I didn't do what he wanted.

'Has he heard of the Serbsky Institute, Grekov?'

'Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute?'

I didn't answer. Vader would have to ask me himself.

'Repeat the question!'

'Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute? Answer!'

They bothered me with their voices; I needed to think. But I had heard, yes, of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry: it's an old granite building with iron gates and armed sentries, containing mostly political wards where those straying from the Party line are submitted to 'special diagnosis' and subsequent 'treatment'. One of the techniques involves wrapping the patient in wet canvas, and as it slowly dries he is asked if he feels ready to change his heretical views, or confess, or reveal whatever he is there to reveal.

I didn't know how Schrenk had held out against that, with out losing his mind. Maybe he'd lost it, and it was an animal that had escaped, not Schrenk at all.

'Have you heard of — '

'That's enough, Grekov. He probably doesn't understand the question.'

'Colonel.'

Then one of the big doors swung back and we went down the steps into the snow. The city had changed since I'd been brought in here: the slate roofs and parapets were white under the black sky, with the greenish neon glowing on it theatrically. The snow was soft under our feet. As we reached the black saloon the man called Grekov opened one of the rear doors and told me to get in. Vader went round to the other side. Another man was right behind me and as I climbed in he gave, me a push and got in after me, slamming the door. I was now wedged between him and Vader with the two others in front, Grekov at the wheel. The windows were all closed and the doorlocks down.

When Grekov started the engine and switched on the headlights the guards at the main gates swung one of them open and we drove through. I could hear chains clinking on the tyres: the snow was still falling and Dzerzhinsky Square was covered. There was no traffic. I couldn't see a clock but I was watching for one. The heater was now blowing and the chill of my wet hair began warming.

I had strange feelings about the man beside me. He shouldn't have said that. I knew it was part of the routine but that didn't make any difference: he shouldn't have said it. This comprised most of my feelings about him, but there were other things. I'd seen him as a friendly, cultivated man and as a brute in a towering rage, and these roles had alternated so that my attitude towards him had started to be ambivalent: he'd got closer than he knew to burrowing into my mind while it was half submerged in sleep. I think in another twenty-four hours he would have got me blurting things out between hallucinations. I even believe he might have known how close he'd come to success, but what he couldn't take was the way I'd attacked him and actually got him on to the floor before the guards had come in. It had hit a major nerve in him, deep in the psyche, and all he lived for now was to see me under treatment at the Serbsky Institute, to hear me scream when the clowns went to work. I believe he was that sensitive.

I too am a sensitive man.

One of the chains was slightly loose and kept hitting the underneath of the wing, producing a hollow sound like a drummer tapping for the dead. I could see the gold domes of St Basil's now in Red Square, and the clock in Spassky Tower — at too sharp an angle to let me read it. The city was beautiful tonight, its floodlit domes and spires and minarets half lost in the veils of falling snow; I was seeing it as I'd never seen it before, like a tourist with time to spare.

Colonel Vader was holding himself away from me as much as he could, and letting me know it. I didn't stink any more but I was still untouchable, the pig thing that has been squatting there in its cage, mired in its own dirt and unable to urinate or defecate without begging permission. That was his picture of me now and he wanted me to know it; he wasn't prepared even to talk to me without using Grekov as a sanitizing intermediary. I didn't mind what he did now: it would be insignificant compared to what he had done, what he had said, when he'd come into my cell. I don't think he realized that.

Grekov drove quite fast, considering the state of the streets; I suppose the snow wasn't deep yet and there were the chains on the tyres and he knew his way. It wouldn't have been possible without the chains because the car would have gone straight on with the front wheels locked over. At one stage I caught sight of Vader's face in the fraction of a second, distorting as the rear wheel went over it, but the rest wasn't easily remembered because everything went so fast: I think one of them had a gun out before I reached the steering wheel but there wasn't any shot. The initial move wasn't complicated: I had to hit the back of the seat to produce the necessary momentum and get to the wheel as soon as I could. My right foot smashed into the face of the man on that side and I felt the softness caving in but my main concern was to reach that wheel and wrench it over. My shoulder hit the back of the driver's head and pitched him forward and then the chains bit and the car lurched and lost traction and slid and then lurched again with the chains gouging into the road surface and swinging us halfway round before it rolled.