'I've been working in my room.'

She considered this. 'You know we're about the last ones left? You, me, and these guys in here? That doesn't tell you anything?'

'There's no story.'

'Well sure, that puts it simply enough. But I mean why not? The summit meeting in Vienna's in jeopardy and there has to be the most tremendous amount of secret diplomacy passing between the Kremlin and the White House over the submarine sinking and we're sitting right here in Murmansk where it happened — and there's no story?'

'But we're only here to make a gesture.'

'A what?'

'Secret diplomacy isn't for publication. All we can hope to get out of the Soviet Ministry of Information is continued denial.'

I was wrong. He was using a mirror.

'So what are we doing here?' Liz asked me.

'We're here to report that the city housing the Soviet Union's major naval base is full of tension tonight, that a curfew has been ordered for the protection of foreign journalists because the good citizens here resent the United States sending a submarine to spy on their most secret defence installations, and that they've been queueing up for clogs all day in a temperature of 25 degrees below.'

He was using the long narrow mirror between the end of the bar and the heavy plush curtains. He was watching me now.

'That doesn't sound like the Monitor.'

'The Monitor does what every other paper does when it has to. It prints whatever news it can get, and what it can't get it makes up.'

She looked down at her drink for a minute while I turned slightly and worked out the angles and found that I could watch him in the other mirrors while he was using the narrow one, and tell by the angle of his head when he was watching me. Or maybe I was being paranoid just because of the room search: he could be sitting there trying to make up his mind what the chances were of getting rid of me and moving in on Liz Benedixsen, who was quite attractive and the only woman remaining among the press contingent.

'You know something, Clive?' She'd lowered her voice and was looking at me with her green eyes totally engaged. 'I believe I know why there's no story. I believe I know why most of the gang has gone home. I believe there's a major cover-up going on over the sinking of that submarine. I mean major. Like I say, involving the Kremlin and the White House, on a hotline level.'

I drank the last of the tomato-juice. It tasted of brine.

'Possibly.'

She leaned nearer me across the low table. 'You remember what Claire Sterling did with the attempt on the Pope?'

'Yes.'

'She exposed a major cover-up, right? And they still wouldn't listen. Even the CIA. Even the New York Times. She said that even though there was actual evidence pointing directly to Andropov there was just no way the West could come out with a public accusation, because if it did, there was no way the West could go on maintaining diplomatic relations with people who had tried to murder the Pope. And if we couldn't go on maintaining diplomatic relations with the Soviets, it would be the end of our chances for peace.' She moved her glass round and round on the black marble table, the reflection of her drink playing across her eyes. Then she looked up again. 'Are you seeing any connection, Clive?'

'You might not be far from the mark.'

He wasn't lip-reading: he looked up at the mirror only at intervals. He wasn't KGB: his suit had been made in London and he was showing a tan. For the first time the idea occurred to me that Captain Bratchenko had been speaking the truth: it hadn't been his people who'd searched my room.

'Okay,' Liz said quietly, 'the sinking of a submarine isn't so horrendous as the idea of a pope getting shot to death — which was their intention. Tragic as hell, with all those lives lost, sure, but nothing like as far-reaching diplomatically — until you consider how vital that summit meeting is for us all. And then we get the parallel, right? There's no way the American public would allow the president to talk to any country that has just wiped out all those lives without any attempt to warn them first. These bastards shot from the hip, and before they woke up to the fact they were also shooting the summit conference right out of the water.'

I had begun listening.

'That's quite interesting.'

'I hope that's a good old British understatement, Clive, because I find the idea so goddamned interesting myself that when my editor cabled saying I had to go home like all the others I told him he could go screw himself.' She finished her drink.

I had begun listening because the work of a shadow executive is normally close-focus. Some of the missions they give us in London carry international background but we don't have to think about it; sometimes we don't even know about it. For our own sakes we're told only as much as we need to get through the mission and secure the objective and bring it home, whatever it is, a man or a document or an article like the one I'd taken from Brekhov. But there were things I didn't like about Northlight. Ferris had refused to local-control me; Fane was shut in and uncommunicative, and I didn't think he'd be able to give me the kind of support I'd need if I had to go to ground in a safehouse or start a fast run for the frontier; someone had searched my room and it could be the man sitting at the end of the bar watching me in the mirror; and above all, the sleeper hadn't made contact as he should have done.

It wasn't that these things made it difficult for me; it was that they didn't make an articulate pattern. The mission was out of focus and I couldn't see where I was going. I didn't trust Fane and I didn't trust Croder and I needed more information and I knew they wouldn't give it to me if I asked them, and there was no one else — unless this American journalist knew more about the background than I'd learned in No. 10 Downing Street or Eaton Place and could put it into focus for me.

'He's cut off my expenses, of course.'

She was moving her empty glass round and round, and I signalled to the barman.

'Have you got enough to keep going on?'

'If I sleep in the goddamned snow.'

She looked close to tears of anger.

'You think you're sitting on an exclusive,' I said.

'I think I'm sitting on a goddamned powder keg.'

When the man came I asked for the same again.

'The Monitor isn't mean,' I told her.

'What?' She'd been thinking of something else. Her green eyes watched me steadily.

'I'll pick up the tab for you here, if it'll help you get your story.'

'Look, I'm not bumming, Clive. I'll get by. I just mentioned it, you know?' She looked down again. 'The thing is, there's another parallel with this submarine story. Right?'

'Korean Airlines Flight 007.'

She swung her head up. 'Right. I believe some trigger-happy jerk in the Russian navy just went and let go with his torpedoes at the submarine before he asked anyone's okay.'

'It's one of the theories.'

'I believe it's the right one, Clive. And I'm not just guessing.' She looked at the other people at the bar again before she went on, lowering her voice. 'There's someone I know, in Moscow. An American. He-' she stopped and looked at me. 'Look, this is my story, okay?'

'Don't tell me anything you don't want me to send in.'

She thought about that, watching me steadily. 'I don't think you're like that.'

'You might be wrong.'

'No. I don't think I'm wrong. Let's put it this way. If I can get anything big, it goes in to my paper first. Then yours. Okay?'

'I thought you said you were fired.'

'Honey chil', when I send them this one they're going to put me back on the payroll so fast it'll look like sleight of hand. Where did this come from?' She looked down at her drink.

'The man brought it.'

'I didn't even notice. Okay, Clive, it's going to hit my page first, before yours. Is it a deal?'