I didn't think Tanya Rusakova would leave her room until morning, but I had to keep her under constant surveillance in case she did. The steps of the fire-escape had been covered with snow from the storm that had driven across the city tonight, and the small square yard down here was the same, with crates and refuse making humps against the building. There was a light on the ground floor at the back and I kept clear of it, pulling open the door in the wall of the yard that led to the street. It opened only an inch or two and then the snow blocked it, and I found part of a broken crate on one of the rubbish heaps and worked in silence and with care, checking the light in the window of Room 32 at intervals.

When I'd cleared enough snow away from the door to the street I latched it again. This wasn't the street where the hotel had its entrance; it was at right-angles, and there were three cars and a truck parked there, offering cover.

I went back to my room and pulled down the blind on the window to keep out the light from the street: I'd left the door of the room an inch ajar, and through the gap, from the bed, I could see the door of Room 32 and would hear it open. Tonight I wouldn't be sleeping.

The pipes behind the wall banged and juddered when I turned on the hot water; it ran cold for half a minute and then turned scalding hot. The paper around the small cake of soap was printed in Chinese, and the soap was dark brown and smelled of tallow.

Ten minutes later I was lying on the bed with my back to the wall and my boots off, watching the door across the passage through the gap in my own and slipping into the limitless repertoire of the memory, at first working over the events that had taken place since I'd boarded the Rossiya in Moscow, then analysing them, looking for insights, then taking a break and starting a search through the memory for the stimulus I would need for keeping sleep away.

The pipes banged again behind the walls, and I heard voices from the hotel lobby rising in the stairwell as some people came in. One of them sounded indignant: was my little mother telling them the hotel was closed? I would think so. They weren't the militia, these people. The militia would send a different and distinctive sound through the stairwell, with their boots and their sharp questions, their tone of authority. I would recognize them. I have lain on beds like this one, their springs musical under the slightest movement, their sheets reeking of strong soap or camphor or disinfectant or the stale scents of the human animal asleep or at play, have lain listening so many times, God knows how many times, for the sounds of my pursuers, the baying of the hunt.

The people below in the lobby went away, a man's voice raised enough for me to understand that first thing in the morning he would be reporting my apple-faced little mother to the Inspectorate of Hotels and Lodging Places. She made no answer that I could hear.

In the room next to mine there was a commercial traveller counting his samples, which were made of glass and had glass lids. I welcomed the sound; it would help to keep me awake, though by midnight the hotel would have fallen quiet, and then would come the need for mental concentration. I was not here to throw away my thousandth chance of keeping Meridian alive by going to sleep on the job.

But then she surprised me, Tanya Rusakova, because when the door of Room 32 came open and the light was switched out I looked at my watch and saw it was still only 10:41, local time. I saw her briefly in the passage as I pulled my boots on, and when I reached the top of the fire-escape I could still hear the moaning of the lift.

The night was still clear, with the galaxy strewn like gossamer across the tops of the buildings and the moon low in its third quarter. The air was numbing to the flesh. From the comer I watched Tanya going down the steps of the hotel and turning along the street towards me, so that I had to move back and use one of the parked cars for cover. Then she passed the end of the street, her grey fur gloves held against her face and her boots slipping sometimes in the snow, and I followed.

She was standing in a doorway, her gloves still protecting her face, and it was quite clear that she was waiting here for someone. It was an intersection of two minor streets, one of them Kurskaja ulica by the sign below the lamp, and I had taken up station obliquely across from her in a doorway much like hers but deeper in shadow.

The night was not quiet. A snow-plough was on the move along the major street that we'd crossed on our way here; I could see its warning lights reflected in the windows of a laundry. Trucks were still rumbling, perhaps delayed by the snowstorm and working late. She was not only waiting here for someone, Tanya Rusakova, but the rendezvous was clandestine, precisely pinpointed on the map at the intersection of two minor streets but otherwise without identity or landmarks: no hotel, no cafe, no building even with any lights still burning.

A clock had begun chiming the hour of eleven, its strokes booming from the gilded dome of a church two streets distant, and as the last note died on the air a Russian Army staff car turned the corner and pulled up, sliding a little in the frozen ruts, and Tanya came into the light and walked across to it as the front passenger door came open.

She looked inside the car, saying something — I could hear her light clear voice — and it seemed she was about to get in, but a figure had broken from the shadows and reached the car and snapped the other door open, dragging the driver out and using a vicious stomach blow to soften him up; then he hauled him across the ruts and threw him against the wall and pulled a gun out and took aim. I think it was Velichko, the man reeling against the wall, General Velichko, and he was trying to say something, asking for mercy, I would think, his hands flung out, but the man with the gun was talking to him, not shouting but spitting the words out — Pig! — as the first shot went into the general's body and he tried to cover his face with his hands, then something about My father — and then Pig! again, Bastard! as the next shot banged and blood burst from the general's face and he staggered with his arms flying out as the third shot blew half his head away and his legs buckled and he pitched across the snow.

Chapter 9: FUGUE

'The airport,' I told the driver, and he set his meter going.

Tanya Rusakova sat with her head back against the upholstery and her eyes closed. Her face was so pale that even her lips had no colour. One of her legs was straight out in front of her, the fur-lined boot against the back of the driver's seat; the other was bent at the knee. She was sitting sideways a little: I'd noticed it in the dining car on the train.

'Why are we going there?' she asked me, her mouth moving as if it were numbed. I only just heard her: the taxi was running on chains, making a lot of noise as we hit the ruts of piled snow and bounced out again.

'Trust me,' I said.

I didn't think she did. I wasn't even sure she understood the danger she was in. When the general had pitched down onto the snow she'd turned away and started running, and that was when the militia patrol had swung round the corner, its headlights flooding across her. It hadn't been responding to the scene, couldn't have been, unless they'd been tipped off, given the location of the rendezvous and told that something might happen there. But I doubted that. Even if Velichko's companions had suspected anything they would only have warned him; they wouldn't have exposed the assignation — he would have killed them for that.

He has a reputation as a lady's man, Galina had told me, Galina Ludmila Makovetskaya, that perfidious bitch.