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.