'But they wouldn't, would they? They wouldn't have your status. Volper's afraid you might infiltrate his operation and destroy it, so he wants to get you first — it's that simple. So you're the only decoy worth sending his people out for.'

''That's all I am, then? A fucking duck?'

'Now there speaks a proud man.'

God damn his eyes.

'I like to think,' I said, 'that I've got more effective uses.' But it didn't carry conviction because he was right: my professional pride was getting in the way.

'Look at it like this,' Cone said quietly. 'You didn't get much out of that man Skidder. I think Yasolev feels that one of his people could've got more. You stand a chance of nabbing one of those tags today and grilling him, but so does Yasolev, if his idea is to do it first, using you as the decoy. And I'm not sure you'd agree that the KGB doesn't know how to interrogate people.'

Cold. By Christ it was cold standing here at this bloody telephone, the air coming in waves from the freezing river. But that wasn't the worst of it; the worst was the chill of horror creeping through the nerves. Not horror, quite — revulsion, a feeling not coming from the brain stem but the neocortex, philosophical, sophisticated; an awareness of the difference between driving myself to the brink of extinction on my own responsibility and being driven there by someone else, Yasolev, as a matter of cold-blooded expedience.

'You've got a point,' I said, 'but if that's what Yasolev is doing he should have put it to me first and asked for my approval instead of breaking our contract. Tell him that. Tell him my life's on the line and not his. And tell him that if he wants to use me as a pawn across the board he's got the wrong man and he'll have to get another one for Quickstep — if he can.'

Silence for a while, except for scratchy background on the line. The tag on the other side of the intersection wasn't alone any more.

'Understood,' Cone said at last. 'But I've got a question. What are you going to do now?'

'Keep going. I've got them in the zone and there's still a chance of bringing one of them down.'

'Keep in touch,' he said, and rang off.

It was past ten o'clock when they tried again.

Earlier, I was hungry, and had some potato soup in a place in Baum-Schulenweg further down the river. Earlier, I was cold and afraid, and went into a library for warmth, to experience the feeling of air that didn't paralyse the face, and to experience the atmosphere of the social norm, wherein ordinary people sat reading books or the papers, instead of seeing a movie, or instead of walking the streets from shadow to shadow, cold and afraid.

By ten o'clock I'd gone from Treptower Park to Konigsheide and north again to Baum-Schulenweg, waiting for twenty minutes in a U-bahnhof and checking my watch, making it seem that I was so desperate for the rendezvous that I was taking risks, making three phone calls and speaking the correct lines from the scenario because an efficiently-trained tag is taught to lip-read.

I still can't throw them off, so forth, I'll make contact when I can.

And now I was in a crowd outside a bowling-alley, huddling among the people for warmth and company and the chance of a close encounter that could give me what I wanted: information.

'I don't know,' I said. 'I think there's room for fifty but they're short of bowls.'

'Well, I'm not surprised. They're always short of something.' A man in a leather jacket ripped at the shoulder, his hands dug into his pockets to keep them warm.

'They should either let us in or tell us how long we've got to wait.' A thin girl half-buried in her boyfriend's arms, her nose raw from rubbing with a handkerchief.

Another bus stopped and people got off, some of them joining us, blowing into their hands, jogging up and down on the cold pavement.

'Can't get in?'

'They said they're short of equipment.'

'Then why don't they — '

I didn't hear any more because someone had moved against me and I brought an elbow down on that side and paralysed his wrist but the knife had already gone in and I could feel the warmth oozing under my clothes. Minimal pain because the shock had brought the endorphins flooding to the site.

I hadn't expected a knife in a crowd because it'd be difficult for anyone to get clear but he'd taken the chance and we were still close together — he was in a half-crouch because of the pain in the smashed wrist-bone and the knife was on the ground. He came up at me and I'd been waiting for it and I dropped him with a jab to the carotid nerve and he sank down again with his knees folding and I began easing my way out because there was no chance of getting him away for questioning — the others would be too close.

'What are you — '

'Pickpocket — he's a — '

'Is it a heart attack?'

'Tried to pick my pocket!'

'I think he's ill — '

'I'll get an ambulance — '

'Look, there's a knife — '

Everyone fussing and it kept them busy and I got to the edge of the crowd and kept walking, pain creeping into the nerves on my right side he'd gone for the liver and it could have been penetrated for all I could tell because the effects wouldn't be immediate, just a feeling of violation for the moment, dark physical mischief: I never see action with a blade of any kind without thinking of Macbeth and his mad frenzied thrusts in the lamplit chamber because a knife is so very personal, so very intimate, a feeling of violation, then, as I walked to the corner and turned, keeping to shadow, a hand pressed to my right side, how sordid, if this were going to be the last of this lone ferret, a knife-wound received in a crowd outside a bowling-alley on a dirty winter night, felled by a chance hit and not even ready for it, shadow down, and how ignobly, but what do you expect in this trade, for Christ's make, a volley of grapeshot as you stand with breast bared beneath the tattered banner at the barricades with time for the utterance of your famous last words?

In this game you get what you pay for and life's cheap.

Not oozing any more, or I wasn't aware of it, was perhaps getting used to it, the slow letting of blood. It was venous, not arterial, otherwise I'd have been soaked by now and weakening. I tried to walk as upright as I could because they might not have been near enough, the others, to know what had happened, but they'd catch on soon enough if I looked winged and then they'd make a rush to finish me off while I couldn't defend myself, though they'd be wrong there, my good friend, you will kindly refrain from composing my bloody epitaph while I'm still on my feet, and if you've ever tried chewing on a turkey's gizzard you'll know what I mean.

Narrower streets, these, running off Treptower Park, with the Wall half a mile away, less than that, a floodlit concrete dam strong in the night, strong enough to hold back the flow of humanity that would otherwise surge to meet its kind. If only someone would blast a hole in that bloody thing and let the world get on with its business, no one behind me when I turned a corner and looked back, no one, and that was a worry because there was no reason for them to leave my tracks; even if I'd gone for the throat instead of the carotid and dropped him to a quick death they wouldn't have gone near him: casualties were to be expected on this busy night.

A patch of waste-ground with a big rubbish bin against a rotting fence, and I moved into its shadow and sat on the frosty dirt and made a wad of my handkerchief and opened my coat and pulled up my sweater and put the wad over the wound in my side and held it there until it stuck to the blood; I wouldn't see much if I tried to look: a wound is a wound and if it looked big enough to need medical attention it'd have to wait in any case until this night's work was done.