'That doesn't mean a bloody thing. He wouldn't necessarily tell you what he was doing if he decided to send out a pack of bloody amateurs to get in my way.'

Watch it, you're losing your cool and he won't like that, he'll signal London and tell them this one's losing his nerve, better have a replacement standing by. He's not Ferris. He doesn't understand.

'I very much doubt,' the voice picked its way carefully along the line, 'that Main Control would put secondary agents into the field without first informing me. It would endanger my executive and the whole mission.'

I waited a minute and took a breath before I spoke. 'All right. I accept that.'

'Thank you.'

He had a point in any case. When some kind of international crisis breaks between East and West they both set up priority missions to defuse the powder keg and stop it blowing the whole thing apart, and it does in fact bring a lot of low-calibre grey-area intelligence outfits out of the woodwork to look for anything they can pick up and trade. They don't amount to much more than mobile listening-posts, I've just got hold of some rather interesting stuff on troop movements along the Chinese border, old boy, do you think your people would like me to get in touch? That sort of thing, but you can never be certain they won't tap a line or get wind of a courier run and then they'll try to throw shadows across your operation in the hope of picking up something they can trade with any legitimate network who'll buy it.

The line had gone silent. Fane was leaving me on the hook, waiting for me to say something, expecting me to behave like a model executive in the field.

Standing here in my dead man's coat.

'Have you any instructions?'

'No.' His tone was conversational, offering a copybook example of how mine should sound. 'Will you be able to make the rendezvous?'

'Yes. He came in a minute ago.'

'Have you paroled and countersigned?'

'Not yet.' The man was going across to the end of the main counter, sweeping the ground in front of him with his white stick. No one had followed him in.

'As soon as you locate Karasov,' Fane said carefully, 'I'd like you to signal again.'

'Understood.'

I put the phone back onto the hook and watched the contact for a moment. He was a small man in a moth-eaten fur coat, hollow-cheeked from hunger or some kind of wasting disease, waiting at the counter with his head slightly lifted in the listening attitude that blind men have. The left lens of his dark glasses was cracked. The time on the round mahogany-framed clock on the wall was a minute past noon. I waited until he'd been served and moved across to him on my way to the door.

'Can you tell me where I can buy American cigarettes?' His head tilted towards me. 'Those things are only fit for women.'

I shrugged and turned away and went ahead of him through the door, walking as far as the first corner and then crossing the street and using the window of a bathhouse to keep the post office in sight. He came out and turned along the pavement with his stick poking at the crusts of snow, and after a moment I began following.

'I wouldn't do that,' Volodarskiy said.

After the brightness of the snow outside it was semi-dark in here and the dog's fangs gleamed from the shadows. I brought my feet back underneath the bench.

"He knows you're a friend,' Volodarskiy said as he spooned his kashta from the bowl, 'but you're still unfamiliar to him, and he knows also that sometimes a new friend will turn.' His sharp eyes glanced up at me and his face took on something like a smile. I think he was a man to smile into the face of death itself, and I think he had done that more than once. 'He's a noble enough creature, as you can see. His ancestors hunted bear in this region a hundred years ago. He could kill a bear now, bring it down without assistance, but he wouldn't eat from it.'

As my retinae adjusted to the light from the stove and the lantern I saw the dog more clearly. It looked like a Doberman pinscher bur was larger, some kind of breed native to the north here; it had the long canine teeth of the dogs that patrol a sensitive security area, the kind that I would meet again, probably, if I had to breach the frontier without papers.

'Where was it trained?'

'I trained it myself It was said with pride. 'One day I'm going to use him for some work I have in mind.' He looked at his stew when he said that, not at me.

Karasov said nothing, had said nothing since the contact had brought me in here. He ate his kashta with no appetite. He was a very frightened man.

'He would not eat the meat from a bear,' Volodarskiy said in a slightly sing-song tone, 'because I am the provider of his meat. To that extent, he is tamed. But if I slipped on the ice one day and died of exposure, then he would eat me, or enough of me to end his hunger, because I am the provider of his meat, and it would be logical. But he would wait until I was really dead before he started forward. All dogs, and most humans, are of course carrion eaters.'

I came to one of the gristly lumps in the stew and avoided it, then thought again. I needed the protein.

'Would it attack me, with you here?'

Volodarskiy tilted his head, a habit he'd formed in his occasional role as a blind man. 'Probably not. But he is very sensitive. I trained him to attack anything he feels would bring me harm, even without my orders. I did that because there may come a time when I'm unable to give him those orders.' He glanced at me in the lantern-light and his rather unnerving smile came again. 'He feels he knows, you see, better than I do when it comes to my welfare and anything that threatens it. He's an extension of my body, so what hurts me would hurt him.' He looked down at the dog. 'He's not really intelligent, in the sense we mean it. But he's intuitive, and of course deadly.'

Karasov ate his stew in silence. There were strong vibrations in here, and I'd caught one of them as soon as I'd arrived: the contempt Volodarskiy had for Karasov, for his terror.

It had taken more than an hour to get here because the drifts had blocked some of the narrow streets leading out of the town, and the contact had made a show of bumping into things now and then when there were people about. I'd followed at a distance, making short detours to dissimulate the travel pattern and check for surveillance. I had to make certain we were clean because the executive was nearing the objective and Chief of Control was sitting there in the operations room in London watching the lights over the signals board and studying the blown-up relief map they would have prepared for him as soon as Fane had reported that I was moving into Kandalaksha.

There are three main phases of any given mission on foreign soil: when you get access and when you reach the objective and when you bring the objective or the product back across the border, and things get more difficult as the mission progresses, and if I picked up the slightest hint of any surveillance at this critical stage I would break off and leave the contact to go on alone until I'd gone to cover and closed in on the opposition and wiped them out before they could tag him to the objective and blow the whole mission out of the ground or even worse than that, because if the KGB or the Rinker cell or anyone else reached Karasov "first they'd put him under the light and prime the needle and get everything out of him, everything in his head, his local contacts and Moscow communications and courier routes and operations history, the whole ultra-sensitive scenario reaching as far as London and sending reverberations right across the network from Hong Kong to Washington. Karasov had been an important sleeper for five years in a Soviet naval base bristling with secret installations and if he got blown before I could pull him out of here it would shut down a dozen files and open up a dozen top-level enquiries that would drop hand-bearer memos on the desk of the prime minister and CIA liaison, and as I crunched over the packed snow under the black winter trees in the tracks of the contact I made certain — absolutely certain — that we were alone and clean and unsurveilled and later I would repeat that, I would report that I had made certain — absolutely certain.