Near the end of the journey we'd crossed the surface of a frozen stream and worked our way through a knoll of black and leafless tress that stood petrified under the leaden midday sky. It was half-cabin, half-cave that the contact led me to, with walls of rock and rusting iron sheets and stitched hides from cattle buried in the snows of past winters here. Inside, in the gloom where only the one lantern burned and the stove glowed red in the shadows, I had found the objective for Northlight, Viktor Karasov.

He was eating his stew with the motions of a man condemned, his hands listless. Bigger than Volodarskiy, he was more brooding, his nicotine-brown eyes sliding away when I glanced at him. I think he believed I'd come here to bring his end in some way, to make a pretence of getting him through the gauntlet of the KGB and leave him dangling across the electrified fence of the frontier riddled like a colander. This was another of the vibrations I was getting: his guilt seemed as bad as his fear — he'd gone to ground without warning us and he'd stayed there and then tried to run for Moscow when he couldn't stand the fear that the KGB were slowly closing in on him while he crouched there in his bolt hole doing nothing. It wouldn't have been here, I knew that. The moment he'd signalled our network he'd been told to move and cover his tracks and make contact with Volodarskiy and leave the rest to him. We never go near the quarry if he's holed up without reporting his location first: you can go in and try reaching an agent who's trapped or been turned or has lost his nerve or his sanity and you can the in there with him — it happened to Travis in Berlin and it happened to Baker in Singapore and it happened to Powys in Tangier and we didn't get the feedback in time to realize what was going on until someone had got back to London and told us what it had been like for Powys and then thrown himself under a bus.

The dog turned its head and a sound began in its throat, a low menacing vibration as if someone here in the shadows had plucked a cello string. Volodarskiy watched the dog, pausing with his spoon halfway to his mouth, and I noticed that half-smile glittering at the back of his eyes. I'd never been near a man with so much rage in him, with so much readiness to confront death in whatever form it came for him.

I could have been wrong but these were my thoughts about him. So much in this place was tacit, unspoken.

Karasov took no notice of the dog. He was wrapped in his fear.

'Is there someone outside?' Volodarskiy asked the dog.

The low snarling went on.

'Not many come this way,' Volodarskiy told me softly. 'I am not popular. That is of course by intent.' One of the most extraordinary things about him was that he had the accent of an educated Muscovite. 'They do not like my dog either. We're well off, he and I.'

The dog stopped snarling and turned its head away from the door. Fane, I thought, had done well, finding a place like this for Karasov the sleeper, and a man like this to guard him, My worry now was how to get him to the frontier: there was no courage in him, and we'd need that.

Our host made coffee for us, black, Ukrainian, steeped in a porcelain filter, its surface gold with bubbles in the lantern-light. It was how I'd begun thinking of him, as our host; there was a formality about the man in total contrast to his life as a cave-dweller. He hadn't been brought down by circumstance to this smoky hovel; he'd come here to the end of the earth and to find his shelter.

I got Karasov to show me his papers, and our host turned the wick of the lantern higher for me without a word exchanged. The identity card was worn right across the surface instead of just around the edges, and one corner of the photograph was raised; because it had obviously been stuck on in a hurry. There were two typographical errors and there'd been two machines used, one original and the other a forger's.

'How much did you pay?' I asked Karasov.

'Six hundred rubles.'

I dropped the papers into the open front of the stove. The higher the price the worse they are: these had been put together for him in one of those little backstreet basements you can find all over Europe, all over the world, and I would say that a high percentage of the agents that have been blown or shot since the invention of the printing press were carrying papers like these.

'They were the best I could get,' Karasov said, shock in his voice as he watched his papers burning.

'That was because you were in a hurry.' I wanted to say other things but held them back because I didn't want to embarrass him in front of Volodarskiy. 'If you'd ever shown those to a KGB man you'd have been shot.'

'What shall I do now?'

He talked like a bloody child. God knew how I was going to get him as far as the frontier — he wasn't like Brekhov, I couldn't run with him, I'd have to drag him there.

You knew this, Cruder, you knew he was a broken reed, you bastard, you knew nobody else would take on this bloody job.

The dog turned its head to watch me, the vibrations of my rage touching its nerves. I stared back at it in awe. What if it had thought my rage was against its master? 'He is sensitive," nodded Volodarskiy and I turned to see that half-smile in his eyes. 'You should be careful of your thoughts. You should think only good things, charitable things.' He laughed now, giving a short sharp sound in his throat like a muted bark, and I felt my skin crawling.

'Look,' I said, 'hasn't it got somewhere to sleep, a kennel or something?' I hate dogs.

Volodarskiy laughed again and took the thing back into the shadows, and I heard a chain clinking. 'It is not his fault, you know. We haven't had a man here with so much tension in him. It makes him nervous.'

'It makes him nervous? Jesus Christ!'

He laughed again and went back through a curtain of hanging cattle-hides, leaving me alone with the sleeper.

'All right, Karasov, give me the picture.'

It took an hour, maybe more: he'd been in Murmansk five years and had a lot of contacts — not many friends but contacts, couriers, Latvian underground dissidents, Estonian counterrevolutionaries with clandestine printing presses, Lithuanians with nationalistic pride and vengeance simmering in them, the kind of people a good professional sleeper would take an interest in without committing himself, useful people, dangerous people, three of them with enough material on them to make it worth our while to get them to London if we could.

'Why did you leave Murmansk?'

'I was scared.'

'Were they close?'

'I thought so.'

'How close?'

He didn't answer. It would mean telling me how close they needed to get to make him scared and that was exactly what I wanted to know but he wasn't going to tell me: there was some kind of pride left in him and since the meal and the hot sharp stimulus of the coffee he'd come out of his shell a bit. I wanted to know how close they needed to get to make him scared because it would tell me how much work I would have to do to spring him from Russia, how much or how little I could rely on him if a wheel came off. He knew this but his fear was still keeping him halfway in his shell.

'Have you had many brushes with the KGB?'

'No. I'm a careful man.' He spoke in a low whisper, in the way one would speak in the presence of someone dead, and I wondered what it was that had died, or been killed, on his run out from cover. Perhaps it was the man he'd been, the one I would never know. His fear was as deep as that, as crippling; it had changed his personality. I think I might have left him there in that smoking cave, walked away from him into the snow and left him nursing his terror until Volodarskiy had thrown him out. I think I would have signalled Fane and told him there was nothing to bring home to London, just a wrecked psyche.