I'd drawn blank but it didn't mean they weren't simply sure of me, sure that I'd board the train. Once on the train it would be too late to do anything and in the normal way you don't let that happen: you don't move into a confined environment like a train or an aeroplane without making absolutely certain you're clean, and above all — above all — you don't start out to keep a rendezvous with a key contact until you're certain you won't expose him. But today we were going to throw the book away and take the risks as they came. Control wants the objective aver the frontier just as soon as you can get him there.

So when I went aboard the train I looked for a compartment at the end of a carriage in the «soft-seat» second class section and chose a place alongside the corridor. Nobody else came in before the train started; at this hour there weren't many people in spite of the fact that the roads were snowed under. I suppose that only a bloody fool would want to travel anywhere inside the Arctic Circle in midwinter and I was one of them.

They'd done their best to clean the windows but there were streaks of grime on the glass. Beyond the lights of the signal box I could see flares burning, silhouetting the huge shapes of the tractors and snow ploughs trying to clear the main road from the city, with a line of trucks crawling in their wake.

'Your coupon, comrade.'

I gave it to him and he clipped it.

We were getting up a fair speed: a train this size with a plough scoop on the front would go through a mountain. The sky was clearing in the east, the thin crack of light broadening and spreading an expanse of flat slate-grey across the sky in the wake of the snow clouds — the false dawn of an Arctic day. I turned my face away from it; on this trip I'd have preferred the dark.

'KGB.'

I showed him my papers while his colleague stood in the corridor. I'd seen them get into the train earlier, and presumably there'd be more. They were looking for Karasov.

'What's taking you to Kandalaksha?'

'There's a job going at the steel foundry.'

'You've got no work in Murmansk?' He was looking at me with that expressionless stare that will turn your blood cold if you can't trust papers or if you're carrying product or if you're not sure you can get through the act without his finding something to pick on, something to develop into a full-scale interrogation. These weren't the papers I'd shown at their headquarters; these hadn't been tested yet.

'Yes,' I told him. 'But the pay's better at the foundry — they can't get engineers of my grade.'

He studied the papers again under the yellow light from the ceiling bulbs. 'You didn't care for Moscow?'

He'd noted my Muscovite accent. 'Anyone who can find a job in that place has got a cousin in the Komitet.' A bit risky because it carried a hint of corruption, but it was also a compliment, flattering his authority.

His eyes glanced up from the papers and stared into mine for three seconds: I measured the time for something to do, to take my mind off the trickle of cold that had started along the spine. It's not the thought of what they'll do to you later that chills the blood. It's the thought of getting trapped, of feeling the sudden shock as the thing closes on you with a single wrong word, cutting you off from the world you knew a minute ago where you ate and slept and moved freely along your way through the labyrinth, and shutting you into the new world of black vans and doors and bars and keys and dangerous, questions, dangerous answers, and finally the bright light and the brute force and the long journey through the long nights until they're forced to go beyond the point when they can get anything out of you, when the aminazin or the sulfazin or the reserpine has blunted the intellect and destroyed the emotions and wiped out the memory and left them with nothing but a husk to throw onto the trash heap where once there had been a man.

'What about your family?'

'They'll follow me, if I can get the job.'

He was taking more trouble than usual, listening for that single wrong word, looking for it on my papers, matching what I was saying with what he was reading. The other man was watching me the whole time; I could see him in my peripheral vision. The trickle along my spine grew colder.

The greatest weapon in the initial interrogation is persistence. This hadn't been written by those snivelling bureaucrats upstairs: it was in the manual they give us on refresher courses in Norfolk — Techniques in Interrogation. This is the reverse of the coin, though we don't do much of it ourselves; it's to teach us what to expect and how to deal with it.

Even the steathest subject will eventually yield to persistence, and there is a sound psychological basis for this. The subject's psyche has already been disturbed by the approach of the potential interrogator, who is often in uniform and armed. It is necessary only to develop that initial disturbance in the subject's psyche to reach a point where he will begin to doubt his chances of surviving the interrogative process without giving something away. This further alarms him on a multi-conscious level, and he may begin to exhibit subtle speech defects: hesitation, slight stuttering, the inadvertent elision of speech components and so on.

'If you find work in Kandalaksha, can you be sure your wife will be as successful?'

'She's a nurse.'

Nurses were in demand everywhere: the pay was insulting.

'What about your two children?' He was looking the whole time at my papers now, and this was also in the Norfolk manual.

To gaze steadily at the subject will intimidate him if he has anything to conceal, but this can be taken to a new phase where one can remove that gaze and study the subject's passport or visa or appropriate document without allowing the eyes to move from left to right as if reading. This gives the clear impression that one has discovered something suspicious during the interrogation and that one is therefore concealing this fact by the removal of the direct gaze and adopting an attitude of exceptionally careful listening.

'The kids will have to go to a new school,' I said. 'We can't let them dictate where we live, can we?'

He went on gazing at my papers. 'When did you move to apartment 68 in the East Park Building?'

'Apartment 58. Last July. Did they put down the wrong apartment number?'

He didn't answer specifically, but held the papers obliquely to the light, and I began feeling less worried. He'd thrown in a routine trap and I'd avoided it and left him with the impression that I didn't recognize it as a trap at all. The apartment number on the papers was in fact 58 and if I hadn't pointed out his mistake it would have meant I hadn't even read them. He'd got out of it by tilting them to the light to suggest he'd misread the number.

A trap like that can send you all the way to the Gulag if you don't recognize it.

'When did you board this train?'

'As soon as it stopped.'

'Did you see anyone else getting on?'

'I didn't notice anyone particularly. All I wanted was to get in here before my balls froze off.'

He gave the papers back to me with that typical gesture they all use to show who's in charge, half dropping them and making you catch them. It's rather endearing: there's comfort in the familiar. But the sweat was still gathering on me as I folded the papers and put them away.

'Did you notice anyone hurrying to board the train?'

'Not particularly.'

'Anyone who seemed unusual?'

I gave the impression of considering the question.

'I can't say that.' I wondered if he were actually going to describe Karasov. They must be getting desperate by now: it was four days since he'd gone to ground.

'If you notice anything unusual on the train, I want you to report it at once. Anyone who looks anxious, who looks as if he's trying to hide something. You understand?'