'I haven't got long,' I said. 'One thousand, take it or leave it.' I got up to go.

She watched me, still as a toad. 'Are you on the run?'

'No.'

'You'll have to tell me more about yourself.'

'There's nothing to know. One thousand, cash.'

'Fifteen hundred. I'll do it for that.'

'A thousand's all I have.'

I got as far as the door.

'And suppose I get into trouble with this?' she asked me.

'If you don't know how to keep out of trouble, Marina, nobody does.'

'Let me see the cash.'

She counted it. 'All right.' Her face began creasing, and a wheeze started coming out of her that almost sounded like laughter.' I would have done it for half,' she said, and tears glistened in the folds of flesh.

'I know,' I said, 'but the other five is to make sure you don't cross me.' I went close to her and smelled her foul body smell as I looked into the little black slits of her eyes. 'If you cross me, you fat stinking bitch, I'll see that you croak, they'll find you sitting in this chair like a stuck pig with your throat cut and your blood running under that door and into the street for the dogs to drink.'

I told Mikhail to drive me back to within two city blocks of the safe-house and check for a usable phone booth on the way.

Ferris answered at once.

'I've got things set up,' I told him.

There was a short silence. He hadn't known, before the phone had rung, that I wasn't already in a red sector at Militia Headquarters and desperate for help.

'I haven't told London,' he said.

He meant he hadn't told London I was going to try getting Tanya Rusakova out of Militia Headquarters. Control would have wanted to talk to me direct on the phone and I didn't have time for that; he would have said no in any case, would have gone through the roof and ordered Ferris to call me in, would have created a strictly monumental fuss, and I'd started moving too fast now for London to block my run; of course Ferris hadn't told them, he knew better than that, he was a seasoned director in the field, and quite possibly the only DIF who was in fact capable of running this particular shadow executive through a mission without calling on London for instructions, because this particular shadow executive is difficult to control — as Ferris himself has said — isn't amenable to discipline, so forth, is not your most popular ferret in the Bureau, and that's a bloody shame.

I am a little nervous, my good friend, as perhaps you note.

We are going in very soon now.

It hadn't surprised me when Ferris had said I'd have his full support. He'd had no choice. He's run me before, and through some extremely sticky operations — Mandarin, Northlight — and he's learned to read what it says on the bottom line: if I've decided to take a mission into a new direction with some really significant risks attached I 'm not going to back off if the director gets cold feet, I'm going to do it anyway and if I can't do it with his support I'll do it solo. Ferris understands that.

But I felt for him. He wasn't going to get any sleep tonight, and when I signalled him again he would pick up before the second ring.

'What's the score?' he asked me now. His tone was particularly cool, and I heard the control in it.

'I've made contact with Rusakov,' I told him, 'and we've got a tentative rendezvous. There's no time to go into details. Now here it is — I need two support men and two cars. The first one is to pick up Tanya when she leaves Militia Headquarters. The second one is to do a relay.' To take Tanya over from the first one and leave a cold trail.

'Timing?' Ferris asked me.

'I'll come to that. 'I'd have to work it out; it could be two hours from now, three hours, four, midnight, possibly, even as late as that, it'd depend how things went. 'You should deploy the first car just off the square in front of Militia Headquarters, out of sight and in a street with a clear run.' I went over the details with him, told him the car should be parked facing away from the square, told him how I wanted the relay set up, though it wasn't really necessary to spell it out: a relay is a relay and it's designed to do one thing — to throw off pursuit.

'What else?' Ferris asked me.

'That's all. We just need to get Tanya clear and into your safe keeping.'

'Will you be going with her?'

'No. I'll be making my own way out.'

In a moment, 'When do I send in the support?'

I gave it some thought. 'Make it an hour from now. No later than that.'

'Five forty-one.'

I checked my watch.

'Yes. I'm synchronized.'

Tentatively Ferris said, 'You know, don't you, that if you get stuck in Militia Headquarters there'll be absolutely nothing I can do.'

I translated that in my mind: was I prepared to push the mission right to the edge at this stage and risk sending it over? Because the director in the field for Meridian would be put through a rigorous debriefing when he got back to London, and Control would want straight answers. Yes, I warned the executive that there'd be nothing I could do for him if he placed the mission in final hazard.

'The thing is,' I told Ferris,' there are no options. We're working with a zero deadline and we can't slow up, we've just got to go for it'

The executive felt there was no choice but to proceed with the mission, despite the risks.

'I'm sure you'll do well,' Ferris said, and I didn't like the polite formality: it showed nerves.

I left it. 'Final thing,' I said, 'I'm going to call the peep off the safe-house. It's going to get blown in any case, sometime before midnight.'

He took it cold, didn't ask why. 'But you still need a new one.'

'Yes. With spare clothes, provisions, the usual thing.'

'I've been working on it.'

"Then it's over and out,' I told him and put the phone back onto the hook.

In the crown of the night sky the stars were huge, fading as they sank into the smog that clouded the city. The snow was brittle under my boots as I finished circling the block and closed in on the safe-house.

'You're free to go,' I told the man in the doorway. 'Report to the DIF by phone.'

He was huddled into his coat, his eyes peering from above the scarf he'd wrapped round his head. 'No one relieving?'

'No. Go and get some grog.'

He left a patch of bare wet concrete in the doorway where he'd cleared the snow with his heels. I walked on and checked the windows of the building and then went in.

The bedclothes were still rumpled and Tanya's bag was gone, but she'd left the toilet things in the bathroom and a message on the mirror scrawled with a lipstick.

Thank you. Forgive me. Tanya.

I wiped it off with some toilet paper and flushed it and looked around; there were no other signs that a woman had been here.

The shower head in the bathroom was dripping, rhythmic as the ticking of a clock.

It was time to go.

You 're mad, you know that? You've gone mad.

Shuddup.

You 'll be walking straight into a trap.

Oh for Christ's sake shuddup and leave me alone.

I took a last look round and left the curtains almost closed and the light on and the door unlocked and went down the stairs and into the street and across to the Skoda and started it up, letting the engine warm while I scraped away the ice that had formed on the windscreen. Then I drove three miles east towards the suburbs and left the car on some waste ground and locked it and had to walk nearly five blocks before I saw a militia patrol car and stopped it and told the driver I was Viktor Shokin, the man they were looking for.