I dropped onto the deck and stood there, watching and listening again. The cabin had been wrecked and there was no door, just a hole through smashed timbers; I would have thought a crane had toppled or the boom had run its brake discs, coming down on the cabin. Snow had drifted inside the wreckage, its minuscule facets diamond-blue under the light of the moon.

Something splashed into the water and I swung my head and saw ripples crossing the surface some distance away, near the third vessel downriver, a sailing boat with the mast lying like a dead tree across the quayside. Yellow light came from its dark hulk, burning steadily, and I turned my head away. Watchers do not burn lamps to mark their presence, nor throw garbage out.

The support man had dropped a rope mat over the snow where the lower part of the steps was still solid, and I went down into the smell of rotting timber and rope and lamp-oil, ducking my head under abeam and seeing the glow of a night-light showing the way to the stairs down to the lower berths. I stood listening again, hearing nothing but the slap of water against the vessel's beam. The light grew stronger as I went below: there was a brass hurricane lamp burning with a good flame on the table of the main cabin below deck, with supplies stacked around it: black bread, cheeses, canned milk, dried fruit, half a dozen military-issue cans of self-heating soup, a plum cake… and I felt a moment of warmth for Ferris: all he'd been able to scrounge in the way of a safe-house for me was a rotting hulk among the ice floes, but he'd told the support man to raid the black market for what he could find to make it look like Christmas, on this unholy night.

I could still taste that man's blood in my mouth and I got the little black iron kettle and filled it and put it onto the butane stove for warm water to wash with and brush my teeth, we are not here to stint ourselves, my good friend, it's Christmas, remember, and have you ever tried to clean your teeth by biting on bloody icicles?

9:15 on my watch and I did only the necessary, getting out of the uniform and putting on warm sweaters and sheepskin boots. There were no rats here but they wouldn't be long in coming once they caught the scent of human habitation; I stowed all the vulnerable food packages in the cupboard with the torn poster on the door, girl in a fur hat and slacks and fur boots to the knee, I think it says a lot for a country where the women can look sexy in the depth of winter without a single bikini in sight.

I turned down the wick of the lamp and looked around for a bit of rope and took the militia uniform and boots on deck, burying the standard-issue Malysh "Little Boy" automatic pistol inside the clothes and weighting the whole bundle with a rock I'd marked down when I'd crossed from the Skoda to the ship. Then I crouched at the quayside watching the bubbles break surface under the light of the moon.

At 9:461 signalled Ferris.

'Location?'

'The Harbour Light.'

I'd taken fifteen minutes to check the environment when I'd arrived here, but it was simply an exercise in security: any danger would come from inside the bar.

'Have you met Rusakov?' Ferris asked me.

'Not yet. I've just got here.' then I said,' there's a man gone. Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. He was tracking me.' I told him what had happened. 'He's down as a pipe-fitter on his papers. He couldn't have been operating solo. I'd say he was in the Podpolia. 'Two men came from the quay, hands buried in the pockets of their padded coats, boots clumping across the snow. 'I'm surprised you're still there,' I told Ferris.

'I'm taking all precautions.'

The two men hit the door of the bar open and bundled in. This phone booth was outside, at the end of the wall where the door was. There weren't any windows on this side.

Taking all precautions, well, all right, but God knew where Roach had picked up that tracker — it could have been outside the Hotel Karasevo, where Ferris was. I didn't want him blown from under me.

'We lost Roach,' I heard him saying.

Merde.

'I thought we might have,' I said.

'They trapped him and there was a shoot-out.'

Those shifting eyes, yes, and the nervous fingers, trigger-sensitive. We don't often get a shoot-out because weaponry isn't normally part of our stock-in-trade; we prefer silence and shadow, the soft-shoe retreat. But Roach would have carried a gun, yes, I could believe that, had spent his life looking over his shoulder, had found sleep difficult, until now.

'As long as you think you're safe there,' I told Ferris, meaning for Christ's sake don't blow the nerve-centre for Meridian and wishing instantly I hadn't said it, because when the executive starts worrying about the safety of his director in the field it can only mean he's starting to feel mission-pressure.

'Relax,' Ferris said quietly on the line.

'Did I say something?'

'Not really.'

Someone had used his finger across the grime on the glass panel of the booth, Fuck Yeltsin, 'Many kind thanks,' I said to Ferris, 'for the plum cake.'

'Nothing too good.'

I made the effort and asked, 'Where is Tanya Rusakova?' It had taken an effort because I was worried about her too, didn't want to hear him say we'd lost her again.

Relax, yes.

'I've put her in a room on the same floor here, only three doors along, two people on watch. 'He'd heard the effort I'd had to make.

He hears everything, Ferris, if the line's good enough; he can hear you taking too deep a breath to quiet the nerves; he can hear goose flesh rising under your sleeve.

'I need to talk to her,' I told him.

'I know. She's waiting here now.'

He'd known I'd have to debrief Tanya before I talked to her brother, to find out what she'd said in Militia Headquarters, what his situation was now, and Ferris had brought her into his room to wait for my call, saving a few minutes' delay as I stood here in a telephone booth with glass panels and no identification papers on me that I could show anyone, now that is direction in the field.

'Hello?'

Her voice soft, her green eyes shimmering behind the notice that said you didn't have to put coins into the receptacle when summoning the fire brigade, ambulance or militia.

'Are you comfortable?'

We say strange things, when not knowing what to say.

'Yes. And filled with remorse, and gratitude.'

Been rehearsing it. 'Tanya,' I said, 'what did you tell the militia? As briefly as you can, just the essentials.'

She went straight into it, had been briefed by Ferris. 'They asked me why I had come to Novosibirsk, and I told them it was to see my brother, as I always did when I had leave. I knew they would telephone Moscow to ask about me, and would find I had a brother here. I said I met General Velichko by chance on the Rossiya, and he proposed an assignation when we arrived in the city. He seemed quite a gentleman, and said he would like to please me by «arranging» early promotion for my brother.'

She was surprising me, Tanya Rusakova. It would have taken courage, in that interrogation cell at Militia Headquarters, to admit that she'd made plans to meet a man who was later shot dead against a wall. But she'd had no choice: she couldn't have explained, otherwise, why she'd booked in at the Hotel Vladekino and then left there soon afterwards, under the eyes of the concierge.

'I told them that when I met General Velichko at the appointed place, I was shocked and horrified to see a man force him from his car and shoot him down. I ran away, terrified, but the man caught up with me and threw me into another car, where I was blindfolded. He took me to a house, and kept me there. Of course I realized he was protecting himself — I'd seen what he had done and could recognize him again.'