Nothing, only the metallic smell of his blood filling the car.

The warehouse we'd passed coming the other way had a wide entrance and I pulled in there, cutting the engine and feeling for the carotid artery in the man's neck, finding it and sensing, shifting my fingers and trying again, finding no pulse-beat, trying again, watching his face, seeing how pale it was now between the streaks of blood, moving my hand inside his coat and sensing again over the heart, shifting and sensing and finding nothing, nothing at all There was mostly sand on the ground where they'd cleared the entrance way and I got him out as gently as I could and laid him on his back and held one hand behind his neck to tilt the head and put my mouth over his and began breathing for him, his blood sticky on my face, sticky and cold now, dear Jesus I wanted information out of this man.

Lights again and a pick-up truck rolled past the warehouse, no chains, the tyres crunching across the ruts as the driver slowed, seeing the wreckage ahead of him along the street.

Breathe one… two… three…

Heel of the hand on the chest.

Someone was running down the street, boots clumping across the snow, two people, two youths, their voices excited, breathe one… two… three… and press on the ribcage… the sound of an engine, the pick-up truck reversing, couldn't get through, his mouth cold against mine, the man's mouth, two… three… Come back, you bastard, I want to talk to you… press on the chest, his blood glutinous now and pulling at my mouth as it congealed, I want information, two… three… as the pick-up truck went crawling past the entrance in reverse, the smell of its exhaust gas on the air, don't go yet, you bastard, I want to talk to you… the back of his neck cold now under my hand, his eyes open, a pair of black buttoned boots behind his head, standing there on the snow and I looked up at the old woman, dumpy in her shawls, her eyes staring down at us, at our faces, at the blood.

'Babushka,' I said, 'go and phone, get an ambulance, babushka!'

The black boots turned quickly, scattering snow.

Press on the ribcage and breathe… two… three, but I believed now that I was wasting my time. I would have liked to leave him there but they might have some basic resuscitation gear on the ambulance so I kept going, using deeper breaths, deeper and slower as he watched me, two… three… as he watched me perhaps from a little distance, puzzled by my efforts and already wishing not to be pulled back to it all by this busy stranger, press on the ribcage until at last I heard the ambulance klaxon echoing between the buildings and felt for his wallet and found it and straightened up, lowering his head gently and going down on my hands and knees like a dog at a water hole, scooping up snow to wash the blood off my face and rinse the rich salt taste out of my mouth.

I went back to the Skoda and got into motion and reached the end of the street and did a skid turn and gunned up through the gears as the ambulance arrived on the scene with the blare of its klaxon filling the night with alarm.

Chapter 19: CHRISTMAS

Night and silence.

I stood in shadow, smelling the river smell.

Ice drifted on the water, breaking away upstream and floating down through the channels gouged by tugs and dredgers and coasters big enough to make headway. The ice made soft xylophone music as the floes touched and bumped together.

I had left the Skoda half a mile away, buried under an iron roof that had slid at an angle when the walls of a shed had collapsed some time ago, perhaps under the weight of snow, to lie like a broken box in the thickets of weeds. It was almost invisible, the Skoda, but I had no illusions. That was a hot car. It had been under extensive surveillance ever since Roach had blown his cover and got into it and picked up a tracker without knowing it. I'm not blaming him. Support people don't get the training they give the shadow executives at the Bureau, though some of them apply for the higher echelons and graduate.

Dark shapes moved as I watched: a small high-decked freighter with coal smoke curling behind it on the motionless air, to lie in skeins along the water; a truck on the far bank, sliding among the wharves, its diesel rattling. Nearer to where I stood, nothing moved, but I had no illusions about that either. Watchers keep still. The motor-vessel Natasha lay in her berth some sixty or seventy yards distant from the stack of rusted freight containers that I was using for cover. I needed to know if the Natasha were being watched.

The sensible thing to have done would have been to phone Ferris and ask him to send someone out with another car, leave the Skoda back there in the side street and take over whatever they brought me. But the time for doing the sensible thing had run out now because Meridian was compromised, and the new car they brought me could be hot too, the subject of undetected surveillance. I would think that Yermakov had been the only man tracking the Skoda, and that it was therefore safe to use for the moment. It was still hot, because it could be recognized later, but it could only be by chance, and that chance I was ready to take.

That was his name: Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. His wallet was still in my pocket. I didn't think he'd been the rogue agent loose in the field. The surveillance of the Skoda had been the work of a cell, at least of a cell, possibly of an organization. It had needed at least two peeps to maintain the operation, because that car had been watched for more than twelve hours, from the time when Roach had picked it up to the time when I'd driven it away from the patch of waste ground at two minutes past eight tonight. A rogue agent would work alone; it is their nature.

A night bird screeched and a ring of light flashed inside my skull and died out like a firework. I'd seen cormorants, earlier, wheeling under the lights of a warehouse crane. I had been here for twenty minutes and hadn't moved; I too was a watcher, and kept still. There are good and bad among the ranks of the peeps; some can stay silent for hours on end, moving only by indiscernible degrees when they have to, flexing the leg muscles to keep the blood flowing and the brain supplied, turning their heads as slowly as the hands of a clock, sweeping the environment continuously. Others, less professionally trained, can't go for long without needing to release tension, and they'll shift their feet or yawn or cough or even stretch their arms, and they're blown.

Night and silence, who is here?

A rat ran squealing in the shadows and the light flashed again behind my eyes. It didn't worry me: it was reaction, that was all. I hadn't expected to get out of that place, out of Militia Headquarters, but I was only aware of that now: the heat was off and the blood was cooling, and looking back at the whole enterprise it seemed as if I must have been clean out of my gourd to have taken a risk that size.

I told you. I said you'd gone mad, but you wouldn't listen.

Nor will I ever, you little shit. You can get away with things in hot blood that'd never work if you thought about them. Ask any tightrope walker — they never look down.

The broken ice rang like a peal of bells in the distance as a tug moved upstream, towing a barge, blacking out the lamps along the far shore and then relighting them. But nothing was moving, had moved, closer than that. I believed the Natasha was clear, and I broke cover and walked across the snow-covered boards of the quay. The gangplank had been cleared by whatever support man had brought the provisions here for me, and he hadn't found it an easy choice: to leave evidence that the hulk was in some kind of use, or to leave me to make footprints on the snow and testify to the very same thing.