I'd had my bowl of soup last night. Sat there with it, savouring the warmth in some stinking little railway cafe while a drunk had told me all about his bitch of a wife and the way she looked down on him because she'd landed a job in the post office as a sorting clerk. Now she's in government service she thinks she's running the bloody Politburo, leaning over the table with his face stuck into mine and one black-nailed hand so close to my bowl of soup that he kept getting drops on it and once or twice raised it to his mouth and licked it, three times a week I have to get my own supper, the bitch, the satanic bloody stuckup strumpet, but I listened to every word because I loved the man, because Ferris was right last night, it had just been a pair of field-glasses under the trees and my brains hadn't gone all over the place when I'd stepped down onto the snow — life is sweet, my friend, and never sweeter than when you believe it's no longer yours for the living, so why don't you, I asked the poor bastard — he was a huge man — just pick her up and sit her down on a red-hot samovar and don't take her off again till she promises to get your supper?

Soup in my stomach, blood in my shoe. And never sweeter, so forth, because any time now they were going to drive me so hard that I'd end up making a mistake and go pitching straight into a checkpoint, finis.

But they knew the danger of that. They were extremely efficient. They knew that if they drove me too hard they could lose me to the KGB and lose Zhigalin too because I was the only way in to him. I'd never been in this kind of situation before when the very people who'd trapped me were doing all they could to protect me from the host-country security services: one of them had actually given a little signal when he'd seen I was going to run into a KGB patrol on the far side of a work gang: he'd actually warned me.

But the rope was shortening. Ferris couldn't keep Zhigalin underground forever. The Rinker team couldn't keep on running me through the streets like this forever. One of two things was going to happen: they would unintentionally run me slap into a checkpoint or they'd close right in and pick me up and take me somewhere with thick walls and turn up the stereo and ask me where they could find my local control and get him to lead them to Zhigalin with a gun at his back, and that would be all right because I couldn't tell them where Ferris was but they'd still have to risk leaving me on the floor in a mess with the stereo still blaring away. But it would be their last chance and they knew that. They would only come for me if there was no other way.

'Can you give me any kind of picture?' I asked Ferris.

He wouldn't want to do that at this stage. At this stage there was the risk of getting caught and grilled.

'All right,' Ferris said. 'We've got Zhigalin safe for a few hours, but not much longer than that. The moment you can make contact with him we can get you both out, but that depends on how fast we can move.'

'How fast we can move from the time I meet him?'

'From that time, yes.' He paused for a few seconds and I think it was because he wanted to get the tone of his voice right. He had to warn me but he didn't want to scare me off. 'From that time you'll be in good hands, but until then — until you make contact with Zhigalin — we're working with diminishing chances.'

Ferris is as bad as Croder sometimes: it's like talking to a bloody schoolmaster. 'For Christ's sake spell it out, will you?'

He thought for a moment. 'I would say that unless you can reach Zhigalin within a couple of hours from now, we won't have any chance left at all. This is the final run.'

The final run, with Croder sitting in London nagging the guts out of the signals people at the console while the monitor sat in front of the board of Northlight with scum gathering on his cup of tea while he waited to know if the crooked cross was going to stay there much longer or if he could hit the switches and shift the status for the mission according to what Signals was giving him — executive has made contact with the objective or executive compromised or action ends here.

Compromised: caught, killed or capsule-terminated.

'Two hours?'

'Sorry,' Ferris said.

'But they've got me like a rat in a trap.'

'You'll have to get out.'

The whole bloody town was down in the Metro and I'd expected that because the streets were still under snow.

Boot full of blood and getting dangerous now: the wound was trying to heal but every time I walked it opened up again and I was worried that it was going to bring attention.

Two of them were on the same train with me, standing jammed in with everyone else and watching my reflection in the steamed-up windows. It had been the only thing to do: they would have run me through those streets for the rest of the day before I finally hit a checkpoint so I'd moved into this phase because it was the last chance and so far it was working all right — I'd broken their chain surveillance mode and forced them closer, close enough for me to recognize them whenever I saw them next, a critical advantage. I'd also lost three of them because I'd gone through a ticket barrier so fast that only these two had time to follow me onto the train. They couldn't cause any fuss; they couldn't do what the militia could do; they were as worried as I was about bringing attention to themselves.because their papers were probably check-proof but if they were asked to show them it would hold them up and give me time to get clear.

'Who are you shoving?'

'I'm going to be sick.' That got him out of the way very fast and I made some more progress, nudging through the packed bodies towards the end of the compartment. I estimated that we were halfway between stations and if I could reach the doors first I could hit the platform running and get clear.

'Get off my bloody foot!'

'Sorry, comrade.'

Stink of garlic, garlic and sweat and wet astrakhan, wet rabbitskin, soaked boots and bad breath and tobacco, the tobacco was a real help.

'What's the bloody rush?'

'I'm on the wrong train.'

Swaying together round the bends, lurching forward and lurching back with the flicker of the tube light casting a sickly glow across our faces, a small boy clutching a red plastic windmill and a huge Mongolian with fish-scales like sequins on his longshoreman's jacket fast asleep on his feet, a young woman pressed to the glass panel with no room to move away from the thin furtive-looking man until he went too far and she heaved herself back and brought her hand up and across his face in one beautiful swing, much rough merriment from our good fellow-passengers.

They were starting to move now, one of them looking directly at me instead of in the window, getting a little worried, shoving his way closer as the train began slowing and someone dropped a horde and the intercom speaker came alive and made some grating noises until the voice sounded: Proletarskaja… the next stop is at Proletarskaja… stand clear of the doors!

A man's weight came against me as the train went on slowing and I turned sideways and let the momentum carry him past me and felt the glass panel behind me and pushed past the upright stanchion and got a curse from a man trying to shield his little girl from the crush, we're getting off here too, damn it, a miniature gold Party emblem on his coat. I'm sorry, comrade, but I'm very late, and my need is more urgent than yours, my friend, you wouldn't believe.

The brakes came on harder now and I grabbed a rail and got to the doors and saw one of them shoving his way along the packed aisle with his eyes on me through the glass panel, the hard stare of the hunter in a square implacable face as the intercom sounded again and two other men started crowding me at the doors. I let them because I needed them — I needed cover, shields, obstacles, distractions, time and distance and I suppose luck but we never count on that, it can be fatal.