'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.

D.12-145.

I could see the archway of Spassky Gate at one end of the driving-mirror. The lights on each side of it had gone from red to green as three cars and a plain van had driven into the Kremlin during the past ten minutes. I was waiting for a car to come through from the other direction: the mud-brown Syrena. She'd said he would come soon after five o'clock and it was now three minutes to the hour.

'Did you tell him my name?' I had asked her.

At one stage she'd broken down and cried. That was last night. 'I've told you, I haven't seen him, I haven't seen him!' Shaking against the railings of the apartment block, her face wet and her thin shoulders hunched forward, her small gloved hands gripping the ironwork.

'It's all right,' I told her, 'but I thought you were lying.'

'Why should I lie?' She swung round to face me, furious. 'I want you to find him, don't you understand?' She meant Helmut Schrenk. He was all she could think about, and that was what I had to work on. There was no point in telling her I thought he was dead.

Syrena, Spassky Gate. Not brown. Not D.12-145. There were thousands of them all over the city.

The clock in the tower began chiming.

'Why should I give you away to Ignatov?' Blowing into her handkerchief, shaking her hair back, soot on her gloves from the railings.

'Somebody did.'

It got her attention and she stared at me in the acid light of the lamps. 'What happened?'

'He tried to get me arrested.'

'But he's not in the police!'

'No?'

'He's in the transport division, one of the chauffeurs for the Politburo.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course.' She wiped her face, half turned away from me. 'You didn't tell me much, you see, the first time we met. All I'm trying to do is find Helmut.'

'I didn't trust you, before.'

'What makes you trust me now?'

She leaned back against the railings and closed her eyes, exhausted from the anger and hope and uncertainty. After these last months I'd started her thinking about him again and it had disrupted her life.

'I trust you now because I want to. Because I have to.'

'They're good enough reasons. Listen, Natalya, I want to find Ignatov. Do you know where he lives?'

'No. We always met at the cafe, or the skating rink, places like that. But I can find out exactly where he works.' Another Syrena. Mud brown. Not D.12-145. The clock in the tower had stopped chiming. I watched the mirror. 'Can you find out tonight?'

'No. I don't have the keys of the office.'

'Is there anyone you can contact, whoever has the keys? Tell them you want to catch up on some work?'

She thought for a moment and then said, 'I could ask the security men to let me in with — '

'No, don't do that.' I stood closer to her. 'Listen, the KGB wants to find Helmut too. Think of it as a race — they get to him first, or I do. It's partly up to you who wins. Keep away from Ignatov and don't change your daily routine. Don't tell anyone about me and don't tell anyone there's a hope of finding Helmut. Try to forget him as much as you can, otherwise you might give yourself away. And him. All understood?'

'Yes.' Her mouth was trembling: she was going to cry again but not out of anger this time, but just because she was out of her depth and didn't know what to do, didn't know whom to trust, didn't know if she'd ever see Helmut again. This girl wasn't a swallow, she was just another young Muscovite with a mother and father and friends and a job, and the most clandestine thing she knew how to do was to march with the cafe crusaders through dreams of freedom in the long night where freedom was dead.

'Ivan was arrested,' she'd told me before I left her.

'What for?'

'Handing out leaflets, outside the courtroom.'

'Three days. You'll see him again. But keep away from the cafe, and don't hand out any leaflets yourself. I may need to see you again if I don't find Ignatov.'

D.12-145.

Turning to the right as it came through Spassky Gate. I started the engine and moved away from the kerb. She'd said he normally took Razina ulica and I turned right and slowed and saw him go across the intersection and turned left when the lights changed and took up the tag with two cars and a taxi in the space between us. The Mercedes 220 was four cars behind.