'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.

12: TAG

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.