''Then try this. We know where he is. Do you?'

His head turned slowly until he was looking at me, his eyes red. 'East Germany.'

'What part of East Germany?'

'Berlin.'

I got out the mini-Sanyo. 'Put it all on tape and I'll play it to my superiors. They'll see what they can do for you.'

He watched me for a while, his body shivering the whole time, his mouth slack, half open. 'Tell them they've got to spring me first. Or they won't get another word.'

'You'll have to be practical, Scarsdale. You're too dangerous to the country.'

It sounded almost like a laugh. 'What, now? You think I'd risk being put back in here?'

Probably not. But if Shepley could get him out, it'd only be for as long as it took him to give us all he'd got on Hood; then they'd start hounding him and pick him up on a trumped-up charge and slam him back inside. That had been the end of his life, that night on Victoria station.

'I don't think you'd risk being put back in here, no, but it's not up to me. Let's try one more question. Why has Hood gone to East Berlin?'

He went on staring at me and finally shook his head. 'That's the main thing, though, isn't it? That's what you're dying to know. But you'll have to spring me first.' Still shivering, couldn't stop. 'And tell them they'll have to be quick, because I don't know how long I'm going to last in this place, I really don't.'

Three street lamps, darkened windows, shadowed doorways, and the bleak perspective of the road. In the last hour we'd seen a couple of taxis, half a dozen private cars and a police patrol.

'Fill you up?'

'No. You finish it.'

The sweet smell of cocoa inside the Vauxhall. Pauling had run the engine for a few minutes to bring some more heat in, but we'd had to open a window.

'It was extremely difficult,' Shepley had told me. 'No one can be «sprung» from prison without a retrial or the Queen's pardon, and we haven't enough time. I need hardly warn you that this is ultra classified.'

They'd had to brief the warden and two guards. It was to look like a carefully-planned job, with another inmate helping Scarsdale and a getaway car cruising past a side gate.

Pauling reached for the phone and dialled. 'What's the hold-up, do you know?'

A starved grey cat was coming down the pavement, going into a crouch when it picked up the sound of Pauling's voice from inside the car, moving at a half-run now, ears flattened, amber eyes burning; then it was gone.

'The warden got cold feet,' Pauling said, and put the phone down. 'They've got the Home Secretary out of bed and Mr Shepley's gone to see him.'

'Christ, we're going to be found frozen to death in the morning.'

'There's another flask.'

Bloody cocoa. All I wanted was Scarsdale at a table with a tape-recorder going, spilling it all out for me so that I could go into Berlin and get a fix on Hood and throw him to the KGB and come back home with a whole skin. Quickstep wasn't precisely my idea of a shadow executive's favourite mission; I'd be more like a rat out there running for its life.

At 02:34 the phone rang and Pauling took it and said 'Roger' and put it down again.

The warden's satisfied. Any time now.'

But it was almost another hour before the Austin came round the corner and flashed its lights off and on again and pulled up and a door swung open and a man got out and began walking towards us, pale faced and hunched in a dark coat, crossing the road, walking right into the middle of the road as another car came blinding along from behind us and froze Scarsdale in its headlights and kept straight on and sent him spinning off the front end with his arms flung out and a scream coming and then cutting off as he curved through the air and dropped as the car reached the crossroads and turned with its tyres shrilling and leaving an echo in the night as the grey cat leapt for the top of a wall and vanished.

I heard Pauling say, 'You're going to have trouble with Hood. He's a professional.'

6: CONE

They've got concrete flower-boxes strung across Friedrichstrasse on the north side of Checkpoint Charlie because a couple of years ago Hans Joachim Pofahl rammed his fifteen-ton Skoda dump-truck through the three red-and-white barriers and the six-foot-high steel doors in front of fifty armed guards and made it to the West. That had been on a summer night with a clear sky but tonight it was November and close to freezing as a cold front came drifting through from the north.

There were only two guards on the west side and they checked me through and the third barrier swung up under the floodlights and I was into East Berlin, no one there to meet me, just the directions: turn right into Leipzigstrasse and go three short blocks. The hotel is on the left.

He was waiting for me in the car park, Cone, standing there with his feet together and his hands in his raincoat pockets and his collar turned up, didn't signal, just waited for me to get out of the BMW and go across to him.

'Maypole.'

'Faerie Fey.'

Hand freezing cold, just touched, just a gesture and back in his pocket while he studied me through a pair of dark glasses, couldn't see his eyes.

'Any trouble coming through?'

'No.'

A narrow head and narrow shoulders, a face with a mortuary pallor and a raw-skinned nose and a mouth like a recently-healed wound. His thin body was hunched, as if he'd been born in a bitter wind and never found shelter from it, never even looked for any, knowing there was none.

The director in the field for Quickstep.

His hand came out again. 'Give me the keys of the car. Here's your new set. It's over there, the black Lancia. East Berlin number plates. 'I'll have yours sent back. When did you last eat?'

'I don't need anything.'

'But when was it?'

'A couple of hours ago.'

Well on the ball: if he heard I was in some kind of trouble at any stage of the mission — snatched, missing, gone to ground — he'd want to know how fit I was, what strength I had, how long I could last out. In Final Briefing they'd told me he'd worked on Nightlight and mounted his own personal manhunt for his executive after he'd been signalled as missing for two weeks, and pulled him out of a cave in the mountains still alive and covered in batshit. 'Cone's like Brighton rock,' Pauling had told me, 'lasts all the way through.'

'All right,' Cone said, 'this is your base.'

I went with him into the hotel and he waited while I registered. In the lift he pressed for the third floor and took his dark glasses off but didn't look at me; he had a slight squint or a glass eye, something not quite right.

'Have you met Yasolev?' I asked him.

'Oh yes. We're knocking on his door first. Protocol: he wants to show you into your room. The KGB are paying, so technically he's your host. He’s in 308, you're in 357, I'm two floors up in 525. Best we could do the place is crowded.' He gave me a key. 'This is for my room, a spare one, if for any reason you want to duck in there instead of your own. I'll be available most of the time but if I've got to go out I'll let you know.' He spoke in a monotone as if he were reading aloud, and there was a dry harshness in his voice, maybe an echo of the wind he couldn't escape.

Yasolev opened the door in his shirt-sleeves, hurrying. 'Come in — you're earlier than I expected.' He looked at me hard with his nicotine-brown eyes, assessing me. A lot had happened since we'd last met. I'd turned the mission down and then changed my mind, and he'd have got the news about Scarsdale. 'Have a drink, gentlemen.' He gestured towards a side table and got a jacket out of the closet, shrugging into it. 'Or a chocolate.'