'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.'

15: PENDULUM

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.