'Security check! Get your papers ready!'

Floodlights came on, freezing the truck in a white glare, making us shield our eyes.

'One at a time, come on?

The gas was sickening and we stood choking in it until the driver switched off the engine and there was silence except for the thud of our boots as we dropped one by one on to the roadway. 'Your papers.'

26 FERRIS

It was A high-impact crash but not totally head-on because the main instrument panel was almost intact although the deceleration forces had wrenched it away from the left side holding bolts and smashed most of the dials. One wing sloped downwards from the main cabin, sheared off at the root; the other was missing altogether.

Smell of burning, and something else, like a stale oven, and I connected this with the soft charred shreds stuck to the instrument panel; in the faint light it looked like the remains of a scalp.

Small bells ringing, rather prettily.

I didn't know how long this thing had been here or whether they'd hauled it out of the way of the air traffic or whether it had finished up here smothered in fire foam, choosing its own grave-site where it could rest until the salvage crews came to settle on it like vultures and pluck it apart for what they could find. It wasn't pleasant in here because of the smell and the cold but I thought Fane had done well: as a rendezvous location it was as good as we'd get; it was a half-mile from the main runways and difficult to reach over the snow and unless we showed a light or made a noise nobody would come here.

The only light filtering in through the sooty glass of the windows was from the control tower and the occasional sweep of headlights as the Navy bulldozers turned across and across the perimeter roads, shovelling the snow into the waiting trucks. The little warning bells rang automatically when the bulldozers reversed.

A short-range commercial Aeroflot Yak-40 had landed five minutes ago with its centre engine reversing thrust as it slid past the lights of the terminal and left the scent of burnt kerosene seeping into the wreck where I sat wailing. It should be in from Leningrad.

I'd thought that the heat from my body was misting on the window where I sat but when I wiped my sleeve across the glass nothing changed. When I'd reached here twenty minutes ago the runway lights in the far distance had been clear; now they were shining through some kind of haze, perhaps sea fog from the north. Now that the sound of the Yakovlev had died away it was quiet in here, and I could hear metal creaking along the main wing as it contracted in the night's increasing cold. I could also hear faint screaming, and believed at first that a wind was rising and fluting through the gaps in the wreckage; but there was no wind outside: the tiny pennant drooping from the airspeed Pilot tube at the wingtip was perfectly still. It was just that my nerves were ultra-sensitive at this stage of the mission, taking the organism close to the zone where the psyche was picking up extrasensory vibrations from what we call the past.

Lights moved from the main terminal along the highway that had been kept clear by constant ploughing, allowing traffic to shuttle from the town and back, most of it dark blue Navy transports and coal-trucks piled with snow. Beyond them the red beacon of a radio.mast winked rhythmically, then it vanished as a dark shape passed close to the window and the screams were loud suddenly as the nerves froze because I hadn't expected him to get here so soon and he'd made no sound over the snow.

Ferris.

I hadn't recognized him because he'd passed close against the window, but it couldn't be anyone else; no one would come here alone: the militia and the airport security guards always patrolled in pairs.

He moved the lever down and pulled open the emergency door just aft of the flight deck and my scalp shrank as I watched the faint flood of light that came in. But if it wasn't Ferris there wouldn't be any problem: I was crouching now within arm's length of the door and the necessary imagery had started in my mind, going through the most effective moves at the calculated height and distance of a drawn gun.

Then he was suddenly there, pulling himself through the doorway and sending his shadow flitting across the smashed bulkhead on the other side. I could recognize his profile now.

'Greetings,' I said softly.

He stopped moving and his head turned, the right lens of his glasses catching the light and reflecting it across his temple, so that he looked like a thin, deformed monster with one huge eye.

'Sorry I'm late.'

He closed the door as quietly as he could, though the movement sent a metal spar twanging; then he lowered himself on to the jump seat opposite me, putting his briefcase down and settling it neatly in that awful prissy way he had of doing everything.

He sat gazing at me in the faint light, a thin pale owl with bits of straw-coloured hair sticking out below his fur hat like broken feathers, his gloved hands resting on his knees. This was the man who'd sat on the stairs in the Hong Kong snake-shop with a gun on his lap while those bloody things had writhed among the smashed glass jars on the floor and the assassin had brought more and more pressure to bear on my throat, the man who had taken a neat step out of his way on the pavement in Barcelona to crush a cockroach under his shoe while he'd told me this was precisely what London would do to me if I didn't take on the Sinkiang thing, the man who had seen me closer to the brink than any other control in the field and who had twice pulled me back from it, the only man I could trust to see me through the rest of the mission if there were still the ghost of a chance left to finish it.

'Not easy,' he said, 'this one, is it?'

'Do you know what they did to me? 'Never mind that.'

I tried to let myself go limp and half managed it, furious because I'd shown him what he'd got on his hands: the makings of a burnt-out case who was ready to sell the Bureau down the river the instant it tried another trick — I'll go straight into the nearest KGB headquarters and blow London.

Had Fane told him I'd said that? 'I just felt a bit annoyed,' I told him much more quietly, 'that's all.'

'I'm not surprised.'

Then I asked him. I hadn't meant to: I'd told myself again and again on my way here that there was one question I wouldn't ask Ferris because it would embarrass him, but it came out in a kind of soft explosion that I couldn't stop.

'Why did you refuse this mission?'

He didn't look down. Fane would have looked down. That was the difference.

'I detected a faint smell of fish.' He went on watching me, his expression lost behind the reflection across his glasses.

'Is that all?'

'Croder was running it, and there was the most monumental flap going on. Too noisy, for my liking.'

'Did you know-' and I should have stopped right there and perhaps tried to, but again I couldn't do it. 'Did you know I was down for termination?'

'No. But I thought it could happen. I'd caught a whiff of the deal they were making.'

'Then why-' but this time I managed to stop, because Ferris had the ability to make you go on talking until you gave yourself away and I was damned if I were going to let him do it now. He'd told me enough. I'd been answered.

'You know perfectly well why,' he said rather sharply. 'If I'd warned you about it, would you have taken any notice?'

'Perhaps.'

'Bullshit.'

'True.'

'Perfectly true. You would have seen it as the ultimate challenge to your resourcefulness and you would have gone headlong into the mission with your blood up and you would have probably got yourself killed off before they'd even had time to light the signals board.'