When the train jerked to a halt and the doors opened I forced my way through the widening gap and dropped onto the platform and shoved a path through the crowd, working so hard that someone swung a fist from behind me and sent nerve-light flashing through my head as I pressed on and reached a clear area, along the curved wall of the platform where two militiamen were standing so I had to slow, the last thing I wanted to do, but only to a fast walk because a lot of people are in a hurry at one o'clock on the Metro, it's the end of the lunch break, pulling the ticket out of my wallet to keep my head down and longing to run because the nearest of those bastards wouldn't be far behind me now, not far behind. A shout came but I didn't look round because I was now on the far side of that critical line that divides the two worlds of the executive during the final phase of a mission, the world where he can still claim a legitimate identity and behave as a lawful citizen and even without reliable papers turn back and somehow cheat his way out of a confrontation with two militiamen and the world where he must keep going and even break into a run and turn his hand to every available device to keep his freedom and survive and complete his mission.

Now I began running and people turned their heads to stare at me as I reached a break in the wall and ducked into the passageway between the platforms and ran harder, ran very hard now with one foot squelching in its boot and the. sharp pain of the wound flaring through the nerves — 'Stop!' — but this time fainter because I'd got it wrong: he'd been shouting at the man behind me because he must have panicked and started running too soon and the militia had noticed it and become interested. That was nice but I didn't slow down because I was still in the crowded warrens of a Metro station and those wouldn't be the only two militiamen on patrol and there's always the odd comrade around who's mindful of his civic responsibilities when you're doing some thing suspicious and once the fight starts they all pile in and this place would shut down on me like a bloody portcullis, keep running and think about something more pleasant, more pleasant than that.

Then I had to double back because there were two more militiamen at the ticket barrier and I managed to turn before they heard my running footsteps, managed to reach the cover of the tiled wall and slow to a walk, turning again and finding some stairs with people crowding down them with snow dropping off their boots, someone holding a huge bag of onions on his shoulder to keep them out of the way and a man carrying a toilet seat above his head like a halo and two militia — not militia, no, Metro staff — dragging a trolley down the stairs with a crate on it, bang bang bang, mind your backs there, mind your backs! Then a crowd of sailors coming down with their whooping laughter sending echoes along the curved ceiling, out of the barracks on a week-end pass with their boots clattering on the stairway and their blue canvas bags swinging above the heads of the crowd as they raced each other to the platform below, it was uphill work for me, I can tell you, uphill work, and when I turned to look down the stairs to see if the man had decided not to stop for the militia, had decided to follow me instead and at all costs, I didn't see him, I only saw the other man, the one who'd been with him on the train, the more professional one if you want to look at it that way who'd stayed at the other end of the compartment and gone through the doors and followed me more easily and without attracting attention — or that was perhaps the plan they'd agreed on, one of them setting out to follow me at close range while the other — this one — covered the possibility that I would go in the opposite direction past the stationary train — but in any event he was here now and only two or three stairs below me and since we were both hemmed in by the pack of people and I couldn't move any faster in the hope of getting away from him there was no real choice for me in this last hour of the mission when it was paramount, absolutely paramount that I should reach the objective and get him out, so I turned right round and let the weight of the crowd force me down against him and then I went for the one area that will kill without a cry and watched his eyes open very wide before I turned again and went on up the stairs, no excuses, this is the trade we're in and this is the way we ply it.

28 PANIC

It took me almost an hour to find the right place. Dark was down now but the streets were still crowded with snow-clearing gangs, and the floodlamps they were running from mobile generators cast a kind of sick daylight among the buildings. They'd brought the lamps in because someone had shoved his spade into a body buried under a drift: an old man had died from exposure and no one had seen him before the snow had covered his corpse.

This was the perfect place, a long alleyway with blank walls at each end, deep under snow but that didn't matter: what I needed was an isolation zone to make absolutely certain.

He hadn't dropped. He couldn't have dropped right away.

The other one must have been stopped by those militia — he hadn't caught up with me by the time I'd walked out of the Metro station. In the normal way I would have moved back to the safehouse without making more than a few visual checks from random cover to make sure I'd lost them, but there was no time to go anywhere now but to the rendezvous Ferris had for me; we were already ten minutes past the deadline at 2:10 pm. There'd been two or three chances to signal him on the way through the streets but I'd resisted them because the moment I telephoned him he would steer me to the rendezvous and it was the objective I was going to meet and I had to be absolutely certain I'd broken the Rinker surveillance.

I'd known he couldn't have dropped in a heap on the stairs because it would have caused confusion and I would have heard it before I reached the street. I'd counted on that. The crowd on the stairs was so thick that it would have carried him with it on the way down and when he eventually hit the ground he would've been taken for just another drunk until somebody noticed the bluish area.

I do not care.

The alley was quiet after the clanging of the shovels and the drumming of the engines in the open street. Halfway along it I looked ahead and saw no one. I looked back and saw no one. Then I went on.

I tell you I do not care. He would have done the same if it had been necessary. It was his life or a dead mission and a lost summit, what the hell do you expect of me for Christ's sake?

But this was the hand.

The snow was so deep here that it reached almost to the top of the walls on each side. Even the dustbins were buried: I kept barging into them as I clambered my way through. I looked ahead again and saw no one. I looked back and saw no one. I'd broken their chain surveillance when I'd lost three of them in the Metro and from then on there'd been only two and one of them was on the slab now and that left only one, and even if he'd managed to satisfy the militiamen and follow me this far from the Metro he wouldn't have let me into this alley without taking up his position to keep me in sight, because I could climb over these walls if I wanted to and disappear altogether and he would know that. But he wasn't there.

This was the hand, yes, and that makes all the difference you see, it's so very personal, so very intimate, I mean they're not just beasts in the field reared for the slaughter-house any more than we are, they had a girl for the first time and played football and lived like other men until they felt the strange insidious affinity for the shadows, for the devious ways and the serpentine turns of the warren that runs in the dark below the surface of society where we finally choose to make our way through a different kind of life and to a different kind of death. He'd been one of us and this was the hand.