'Did I what?'

'Did you come in a car?'

'We're better off in here. Nobody can watch us. The car's in the open.'

She looked quickly through the small smoke-grimed window, her lips parting as if to say something. Then she looked back at me but said nothing. A shiver went through her.

'Come and sit down.' I led her across to the wooden bench. There was no heating in here; that's why I'd chosen it: so that we'd be alone. It was the best of the four or five places I'd checked out yesterday when the embassy in Moscow had prepared me for an imminent rendezvous.

'Do you know where he is?' She'd been holding the question back: it came out with a little rush, her breath clouding under the light that hung from the ceiling.

I ignored the question.

'Why aid you call my embassy, Tanya?'

She took it as an accusation. 'I… I hoped someone there might know where he is.'

'It's perfectly all right to call us. I just want to know why you did. I mean, why us.'

She was watching my eyes intently, either not trusting what I was saying or believing there was a hidden meaning.

A lot of rdv's are like that, with strangers.

'I…' She looked down, then up again. 'He said sometimes that he had "British friends".'

'In Russia?'

'He didn't say that. He just said friends.'

'So you phoned the British embassy?'

'Yes.' She darted a glance at the window again and at the glass-panelled door.

She says she's Karasov's mistress, the message had told me. It had been in read-through code with the name changed, handed to me by a small man in a duffle coat as I was getting out of the lift at the hotel, a perfect pass — I'd hardly seen his face as he'd turned away. Fane hadn't told me he was running couriers, and I didn't know how the embassy could have made contact with him: the rooms were bugged. We suggest you meet her and see if she can be useful in any way. The telephone number had followed.

'Have you heard from him?' I asked her, and she looked back at me from the window.

'No. That's why I'm so worried.'

I didn't know if she'd seen anyone outside, or was simply frightened. For me there wasn't much risk: I'd gone from covert to clandestine when I'd left the hotel, putting my London papers inside a door panel of the car and bringing the others — Boris Antonov, Moscow work and residence visa — because a visiting foreign journalist had no business talking to a Soviet citizen in the waiting-room of a Murmansk railway station and they'd send me out of the country at a minute's notice after the interrogation was done with. At best. If I made some kind of mistake they'd keep me here and go to work on me.

I took one of her gloved hands. 'It's all right if the militia come in here. I'm a Soviet citizen with full visa.'

She looked surprised, then relieved.

'Then what is your name?'

'You don't know it. You came in here because I was pestering you, but I still followed. With your looks, they'd believe that.'

She glanced away with a little dipping motion of her head.

'Very well.'

'Just go with whatever I say. You're perfectly safe.' I took my hand away. 'He hasn't tried to get in touch with you, even, through friends?'

'No.' She looked suddenly desolate. 'I love him. I love him very much.'

'Are there friends he could use as a go-between?'

'No. We… meet very privately.' Suddenly she asked, 'Do you think he's dead?'

'No. Why?'

'Because even if they'd arrested him, he would have got a message to me.'

'How?'

Her head came down. 'I don't know. Somehow.'

'There's no reason why he should be dead. You should be hearing from him at any time.'

She seemed to know I was just trying to make it easier for her. 'Do you think he's a spy?'

'Why should he be?'

'Because he's missing from his unit, and has British friends. And there's this news about the American submarine.'

'We don't know very much about him.'

'Then why did you come to meet me, when I asked?'

'We're always interested in any Soviet citizen who contacts the embassy, in case they need our help.'

Her hands gripped mine quite hard. 'Would you give him asylum, if he asked for that?'

'Probably.'

'I love him so much, you see.'

'We understand.'

Laughter came suddenly from outside, raucous, masculine. She didn't look up; she wasn't afraid of laughter, only of eyes in the shadow of peaked caps, only of questions.

'If he makes contact with you,' she said with less despair, 'will you tell me?'

'Of course. Will you be at the same number?'

'Yes. It's my apartment.'

'What's the address?'

She gave it to me, and I wrote it down.

The laughter broke out again, and I saw the heads of three sailors passing the window, their breath steaming. I said: 'Did you go to any bars together, any cafes?'

'Sometimes.'

'Which ones?'

'It was never the same ones.'

'But you've gone there, asking if they've seen him?'

'No. I'm afraid.'

'Have the naval police questioned you?'

'No. We-'

'Has anyone?'

'You mean the KGB?'

'Why the KGB?'

She shrugged. 'That's what we always mean when we say «anyone». But nobody has questioned me. They don't know I'm his friend.'

'If anyone asks you about him, I'd like you to tell me.'

'Where will I find you?'

'At the embassy. We'd like to help him.'

Then the tears were in her eyes and creeping down her face, though she made no sound, but just looked down and let them come, and let me brush them away with my finger while we sat like that for a time, listening to the sailors laughing on the platform outside and the first rumbling of a train nearing the station.

'If they send him to a labour camp, it will kill me.'

'He'll be back.'

'I would like-' and then she was really sobbing, lowering her head so that I couldn't any longer see her face, just her fur hat as she brought her arms across the table and let her shoulders go on shaking while I put my hands over hers and waited, wondering for the first time if Karasov had even had a chance in hell of making a clear run out of Murmansk when the whole of the Soviet navy was in a state of freeze in the international limelight. He couldn't have done it in uniform; he'd gone to ground as a civilian. He'd had to; it was the only way, if he'd got clear at all.

Whatever else happens, Croder had said, you've got to bring that man across.

When the sobbing died away I said, 'He hasn't been in touch with you because he doesn't want you involved. That must have occurred to you.'

'Yes.' She straightened up from the table and blew her nose. She smelt of musk, and her coat had fallen open to reveal the softness of small breasts under her sweater; she was, I supposed, with her bronze eyes and that huskiness in her voice and a capacity for loving so desperately, the kind of woman who could hope to see Karasov again, if he were free.

It would be pointless to ask her about his wife, to ask if there were any chance he'd gone there for shelter. That was the last place he'd go; they'd expect him to do that, and she'd be under distant but intense surveillance day and night. If he went anywhere for help, where he knew it would be immediately granted, it would be to this woman who sat humped in the chilly waiting-room of a railway station, the only hope we had, at this moment, of finding Karasov and getting him across to the West and bringing the president of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union to a conference table in Vienna in eight weeks' time.

'The best way you can help him, Tanya, when you see him again, is to let us know. It's perfectly true: he does have British friends, and they're very powerful.'

Then I was watching her small figure again crossing the snow the way she had come, Tanya Kiselev, leaving me with salt on my fingers and the lingering scent of musk.