Checkpoint.

It was two blocks ahead of me at the intersection of Lenin Prospekt and North Harbour Street. They were setting them up everywhere now and at shorter intervals, bringing in the militia from their barracks and substations in dark green vans and posting them at strategic locations. The moment they began spilling out of the van they called on anyone in the street to halt and show his papers.

I turned into a side street and climbed the virgin drifts that the ploughs and work gangs hadn't had time to deal with. Half an hour ago I'd seen a checkpoint being set up four blocks away to the west and from my observations during the past two days I'd noted that the average period of checkpoint left operating was one hour, depending on the importance of the street traffic.

Light snow had started falling again but most of the main streets were clear now except for ruts of frozen slush and gravel. In the side street where I was moving the lamps had gone out, and in the faint light from the aurora that was seeping through thin cloud banks the snow had a bluish tinge like an overcoloured Christmas card. My shovel was over one shoulder, part of my identity. The militia were checking the snow-clearing gangs as well as other pedestrians but it gave me a slight edge: they were to an unknown degree less likely to shout at a distant figure if he looked like a volunteer worker than if he lacked an instantly identifiable image. It was now 21:00 hours and I'd been moving for thirty' minutes towards the airport, doubling on my tracks and making detours to avoid the main intersections where the checkpoints were set up. I didn't know whether I could reach the rdv on time in these conditions but that wasn't important because Ferris would wait for me. The real question was whether I could reach it at all.

I was now operating in the uneasy twilight zone between clandestine and the final security status they haven't actually got a name for: on the board it would simply show the symbol of a crooked cross to denote that the executive was operating in hazard. But that might not be accurate. I'd gone from covert to clandestine when I'd shed my identity as Clive Gage, journalist, and adopted the identity of Petr Lein, engineer, and if I now pushed those papers among the tea-leaves and tin cans and fish-heads of the nearest rubbish dump I would technically be operating in hazard: without papers and without any chance of surviving if a single militiaman checked me in the street. It had happened in Warsaw: I'd turned a corner and walked straight into a routine police patrol and they'd asked for my papers and I hadn't got any and they'd put me into a cell and started work.

What I didn't know, as I climbed the drifts and lurched through the freezing ruts of this city's streets, was whether the papers I carried would get me through or trap me. I didn't know whether they had made the connection yet between the dead Lithuanian and the freight-yards bombing and the man who'd been taken to the General Maritime Hospital. They could still be sifting through the routine reports and questioning the last of the passengers on that train and watching the computer screens as they punched the data in. Two things were certain: they were doing that now and they were inevitably making progress. It was like a slow-burn fuse that would at any hour, any minute reach the papers I carried in my pocket and blow my operation the instant I fell foul of a random check and had to show them.

There was only one thing more dangerous: not to show them at all. It was a matter of time, and in the diminishing time frame available to me I had to reach the rendezvous before one of the computers threw the name of Petr Lein on the screen and the KGB operator flashed an immediate all-points bulletin to have me picked up.

Checkpoint.

I turned into a side street and saw two militiamen on routine patrol coming in this direction at a distance of a hundred metres and there was no cover except for a sandbin half-submerged under a snow drift so I turned back and waited for the shout but it didn't come, though I might not have heard it because one of the civic transport trucks was getting up speed along the main street and I started running — Halt! but only in my mind — Halt, that man! but only in the nerves as I slung the shovel high and one of the men caught it and gave me a hand as I clambered onto the truck and hung jack-knifed across the side until they hauled me aboard.

'One more for the cattle-yards!'

'Run out of snow, comrade?'

Packed, yes, like cattle in the open truck with the slipstream cutting our faces as it got up speed again with the gears jerking and a shovel clanging against the back of the cab.

'Is this a work party?'

'No, comrade, we're off to a bloody circus!'

In the last two days I'd seen that the checkpoint militiamen had let some of the trucks through if they were on their way to a clearing site but it wasn't a hundred per cent predictable and the situation now was strictly Russian roulette because the work truck ahead of us was being waved through the intersection but it didn't mean they wouldn't stop this one — they could be checking them alternately to keep the traffic moving.

'Which gang are you with, comrade?'

'Number 5,' I told him.

'Five's been sent home. This is the night shift.'

Slowing towards the intersection.

'I'm volunteering.'

'Glutton for bloody punishment!'

'No,' I said, 'it's just that I've got a nagging wife.'

Raucous laughter and the whiff of alcohol in the air-rush: for the past two days the snow-clearing gangs had been sent to the workers' canteens for free soup and a vodka ration.

Speeding up again with the green-lit batons waving us through and the eyes under the peaked caps checking us without much interest and the hope now, the definite hope that within another half an hour they could change the signals data on the board for Northlight to read Rendezvous made.

'From Moscow?' a man asked me.

'Yes.' We had the same accent.

They were letting the truck ahead of us through the next intersection, the illuminated batons waving. In the far distance I could see the lights of the airport control tower.

Is Air Croder there?

He went home.

Call him up for me. Our chap's made the rendezvous.

Much rejoicing because our first objective had been killed and the executive was operating in hazard and his local control had been changed at his own request and that had shaken the network because it's like switching partners on a trapeze but soon there would be much rejoicing, yes, and the monitors at the signals board would make some fresh tea.

'You like it in Murmansk?'

'Not in winter.'

He laughed briefly. 'No, but the sea air's pleasant, after the Moscow smog. I'm a lawyer.' He reached inside his coat and brought out a card. 'If you ever need assistance, let me know.'

The truck was slowing again. The one ahead of us had turned left along Lenin Prospekt. There weren't any green-lit batons this time: they were red.

'All right,' I said, and put the card in my pocket. 'I'm an engineer. Lein, Petr Stepanovich.'

Slowing hard now as the red batons began waving and spreading out as the militiamen moved across the road. The truck's brakes locked and the tyres slid across the slush, no rejoicing, no you won't have to call Mr Croder, the brakes coming off and the tyres finding grip but we were still slowing. I do, as a matter of fact, need your assistance, comrade, but I doubt if this is a matter you can do much to help me with, the brakes coming on again and sending us into the piled snow at the roadside, the rear of the truck clouting a sandbin with a scream of tearing metal.

'Bloody militia check again! Haven't those whoresons got nothing else to do?'

Grinding to a halt now at the intersection as we lurched into each other and grabbed for support, a shovel clanging down and the diesel exhaust gas clouding across our faces.