It has been known for an executive to be trapped on this side of the Curtain and never get out. Thompson is in Moscow somewhere according to rumour in the Caff, and Pick is said to be in one of the labour camps. Another man, Cosgreave, is said to be living on the shore of the Black Sea with a woman from Tashkent, having decided that the risks of trying to get across on his own weren't worth taking: there's life, after all, in Soviet Russia. Those are the ones we know about, or at least talk about, creating legends to lend a little colour to those dreary corridors. There are others, but we won't discuss them, though I knew personally a high-echelon and very effective shadow who now works for the Fourth Department of the KGB.

And there are those known to have died here, caught in the heat of a counter-operation or running for the border or finishing off a mission the only way they can. Webster, Finnimore, Clay.

Requiescat in pace.

'Have you by any chance, comrade, a violin for sale?'

His one eye watched me with the light of hope in it.

A violin, with fingers like these? 'I'm sorry.'

'Never mind. I had mine stolen, and it's my living, that's all.'

'That was bad luck, comrade.'

I walked out of the public library and turned to the right, conscious that my feet were taking a definite direction, if only back to the hotel to fetch my overnight bag and pay the concierge for his silence. After that I would take the first step towards the frontier and see how far the animal cunning of the organism would get me.

I'd left some spare gloves and a train timetable at the safehouse but I couldn't go back there now. Liz had been sent there to monitor my operation for the Company and Fane would have made contact with them: there was no point now in her staying on. Even if she were still there the place could be a deathtrap for me if she were blown; she wouldn't be utmost-security trained for light cover and she hadn't gone clandestine because her Russian wasn't good enough.

Where else would a man go but to the earth mother?

Not now.

Between the library and the hotel I saw three street-checks going on in the distance: four or five militiamen stopping every pedestrian and at one intersection a whole group of men with shovels on their way to the snow-clearing zones. The search for Captain Kirill Zhigalin, Soviet Navy, was being intensified.

Two militiamen were patrolling the street where the hotel stood and I had to make a detour and keep them surveilled until it was safe to go on. Question: if it was like this between the Murmansk public library and the Aurora Hotel, what would it be like between here and the frontier?

I kicked snow from my boots against the brickwork at the top of the steps and pushed the glass door open.

'You are asked to telephone this number again, comrade.'

He held out the scrap of dirty paper.

Fane answered after three rings. 'They've located Ferris,' he said. 'He's on his way.'

25 CHECKPOINT

I was getting used to the thing. Most of the time I carried it across my shoulder, and I was taking more care with it now when I passed people on the pavements. ' Watch that shovel, you stupid whoreson!'

And a happy Christmas to you too, comrade. But he was perfectly right: I'd slipped on the slush and nearly clouted him with the edge of the blade.

In the last two days there'd been three more signals from Fane. The first was to the effect that Ferris had confirmed by a radio message from the flight deck of a British Airways plane that he was prepared to local-direct me and that he needed all facilities made available to him. London would have already begun work on that, the moment Ferris had agreed to switch his operations. I didn't know who was going out to replace him in Tokyo but I hoped for the sake of the shadow there that it wouldn't be Fane.

The second signal reported that Ferris had landed in Karachi and had received Telexed briefing material from our consulate there, sent from London through Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham.

The third signal had been to the effect that Ferris had raised questions concerning the courier who had purportedly been sent to rendezvous with me in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha at the time when the KGB had moved in. Had they arrested the courier following the explosion and had they interrogated him and if so horn much did he know of the executive's operations in Murmansk? That was a good question and I'd asked Fane for the answer. He said the courier hadn't been seen since the explosion and might in fact have been arrested and put under intensive interrogation. The last part of the question was therefore important. Perhaps crucial.

In the two days before the fourth signal came I had time to surveille the environment and try to find out how to move across the city without running into a checkpoint or a militia patrol. By the end of the second day I'd begun to see that it was impossible. The KGB had relied on taking Karasov and putting him under interrogation as soon as we'd flushed him for them but he was dead, and their one last chance of allowing the Kremlin to send the President of the Presidium to Vienna without making critical concessions to the West was to find Captain Zhigalin and obtain his absolute silence with a bullet through the brain. Even though they had no idea that at this moment a British Secret Service agent was flying in to Murmansk to direct an operation specifically designed to get Zhigalin over the frontier they were throwing a security net across the city to make certain that if he emerged from ground they would seize him and that if he remained there they would eventually find him and drag him out.

If they had known that he had already contacted a Western embassy and requested transit across the frontier and subsequent asylum and that his request was being given immediate and active response they would have called out military reserves to augment their efforts to find him. If Ferris actually found it possible to put me into contact with Zhigalin and arrange and somehow protect a rendezvous it was my opinion at this time that it would be impossible for him to move us as far as the frontier, let alone across it, simply because the search for Zhigalin would extend and intensify towards that frontier on the assumption that he would try to reach it. We would be going into increasing KGB and militia activity at every hour and we had no papers that could get us through any checkpoint.

It's possible to represent any given mission schematically on graph paper and these days it's put through the computers before the monitors at the board over the mission control desk are allowed to make any report or recommend any decision, and at this stage my operation in Murmansk would look like a V configuration narrowing to a point in the direction of the future, since the more effort we made towards achieving our goal the more risk there would be of exposing the operation, be it given that the environment was at the same time being brought under increasing KGB surveillance.

This was my view, as the shadow executive in the field, of the status of Northlight at noon of January 18th, and it was reported in essence to London by Fane, the outgoing local director.

Nothing would appear on the operations board in that anonymous building, in Whitehall to show that in point of fact the focus of the mission was at this moment a man lurching over the snow drifts of Murmansk with a shovel across his shoulder.

At 20:00 hours the telephone rang in the lobby of the hotel and the concierge fetched me to take the line. It was the last time I ever spoke to Fane. He reported that Ferris was due to land at Murmansk airport from Leningrad and that I was to meet him there as soon as I could. The precise rendezvous was arranged for 22:00 hours without further alternatives Ferris would wait for me if he reached there first.