No go. I'd relieved the strain on my arm but we were locked again and the gun was pressed against my face with the barrel pointing downwards along my body and it was only a matter of time before he fired and waited for blood loss and pushed me out of the train.

He began hurrying now and I knew why. If he could shoot me and push me out while we were still in the tunnel he'd bring off a certain kill: it wouldn't matter if the shot didn't do anything lethal because when I went down I'd hit the wall and bounce back under the wheels and that would be final. He was hurrying by millimetres and I felt it and gave it some thought and realized that he wanted to make sure of a useful shot before he pulled the trigger: it was no good just putting it into my leg because you can go on working for quite a long time unless there's an artery hit and even then you can try for an overkill before the blood loss starts weakening the organism.

So I began hurrying too and pulled my arm from his neck and formed a half-fist and went for the windpipe but he was ready for any kind of move and blocked me and then there was a rushing of foetid air and the eardrums opened as the train ran clear of the tunnel and I lost my balance and clawed for a grip on anything I could find but it was no go and I went pitching down to the track.

15 OBJECTIVE

'Look at this! And they expect me to keep to a schedule!' The huge windscreen wiper grated across the glass.

'Three snow ploughs, in fifty kilometres. It's a joke!'

We hit a drift and he dragged us clear again.

'They should try it themselves some time!"

He tugged the gearshift, double-declutching, and the engine roared. Ahead of us the sky was black with snow clouds.

'Don't they make allowances for the conditions?' I asked him.

'Allowances?' He turned his huge bearded face to me, his eyes rolling. 'They wouldn't make allowances if the engine dropped out and the wheels fell off and the exhaust pipe got stuck up a polar bear's arse! They think this is summer! They're whoresons!'

He kicked the throttle with a massive boot and put the truck into a slide to avoid a stranded tractor. A man in a fur cap waved to him for help, and he stuck his face out of the window. 'Fuck your luck, comrade!"

I shifted my weight on the worn seat to ease the bruises.

'Have you got enough petrol to get you to Kandalaksha?'

'If those constipated imbeciles have got the road clear, yes.'

It was a big Sovtransavto truck with a Leningrad licence and a TIR plate at the rear. It smelled as if it were carrying some kind of fertilizer, or perhaps it was the driver, but I didn't mind, he was my friend, my good friend. He'd been crawling in low gear through a mess of stranded vehicles a few miles back and I'd climbed into the cab without asking first and told him my car was broken down with a cracked cylinder block.

The coat was a good fit and most of the numbness had gone from my legs. The bruises were on my right shoulder and forearm where they'd hit the rocks alongside the track. The Lithuanian had been underneath me when we'd dropped because my weight had torn his one hand-hold away and he couldn't save himself.

'That's my wife!' the truck driver called above the drumming of the engine. He pointed at the coloured photograph stuck to the facia panel, of a girl with enormous breasts in a bikini.

'Very nice too,' I said.

'Don't I wish!' he yelled and gave a bellowing laugh.

I hadn't intended, in any case, to leave the train without the Lithuanian. I think he tried to bring the gun into some kind of aim on the way down through the freezing windrush but I knew he'd do that so I found his arm and twisted it and the only shot he managed to fire was wild. He was dead as soon as his head impacted on the rocks: I saw that much when I crawled back from where the momentum had thrown me. There wasn't any blood on the coat so I pulled him out of it and put it on as the last of the train rolled past and left a funereal quiet among the snows.

I searched his pockets for what I could find, leaving the wad of notes and taking the wallet to go through: his papers might tell me something about his cell and if they were forged I'd know, and if they were genuine they might be usable. In this trade you always pick a corpse: the dead can sometimes save the living.

I knocked the eight remaining rounds out of the chamber and scattered them and threw the gun across the tracks and into the deep drifts on the other side and then rolled him into a gully and threw snow over him until he was covered. One hand rose into sight again and I caught my breath and felt my scalp tighten as I stared down; it was the way he'd finished up, that was all, rolling deeper between the rocks so that his arm had moved upwards through the snow. I pushed it down again and started walking to the highway.

'This one's my wife, really!'

Next to the picture of Lenin was a faded sepia photograph of a strong young woman perched on a milk churn with a chicken struggling in her arms, her smile seductive except for a missing tooth. 'She's a good woman, a good cook. Feeds me like a fucking commissar!'

The road was clear most of the way to Kandalaksha and I asked him to drop me as close as he was going to the main post office. The time was 10:47.

'No. I covered him with snow.'

Fane gave one of his pauses on the line. 'What about the other man?" 'As far as I know he's still on the train.'

'As far as you know?'

'It didn't stop. No one pulled the cord. But he might have jumped off when he saw we'd both gone.'

'It's possible, then, that he could have caught up with you along the road, by getting a lift too?'

'Yes. But call it a thousand-to-one shot.' I checked the time again: it had taken me nearly an hour to get through to Murmansk. 'There was a third man on the train,' I told him. 'He was surveilling me.' There was some crackling on the line. 'Are we clear on this call?'

'What? I'm clear at this end. Are you in a hotel?'

'Post office.'

We both listened, but I couldn't detect a bug. It didn't mean there wasn't one because they're not always detectable, but there'd been heavy snow across the telephone lines between here and Murmansk and some of the poles were down.

"If you're in a post office,' Fane said, 'then we're clear. Was the third man in the Rinker cell?' "No. He was working his peep independently.'

A brief pause. "I'm not too surprised. With an international background this big we can expect almost any group to crawl out of the woodwork.'

In a moment I said quietly, 'Fane, he wasn't one of Croder's people, was he?'

I'd tried to sound casual but it didn't quite come off. My hands were shaking now and I couldn't stop them: that man under the snow was the fifth one to the since Northlight had started running and I'd been with him and just because he was working for the other side and just because he'd been trying to blow my brains out it didn't mean I wasn't going to get the shakes a couple of hours afterwards — we see a lot of it in this trade but we don't exactly enjoy it, we don't exactly revel in it, we're not bloody machines, you know 'Croder's people?' I heard Fane asking.

'Oh come on for Christ's sake — was he a shield or a backup or some kind of support, you know what I'm talking about.'

I was sweating badly because it wasn't only that man's death on my mind and the way his hand had come out of the snow like that as if he were asking for help, it was my own death too, the one that had nearly happened, because he'd only needed to force that gun round half an inch until it was against my head and I wouldn't have been standing here in this overheated fucking post office reporting the status of the mission to a local control I didn't like and didn't trust and didn't" Croder never told me he was sending anyone to support you,' Fane said. 'He-'