'Of course not.' He said it at once and with emphasis.

I always know when I'm being followed. No one had followed me here to the rendezvous. They'd used chain surveillance, and at a distance: two or three of them taking up positions at strategic points and using field-glasses — they'd be totally undetectable. If they'd used more people than that, they would have been some of the men with shovels among the work gangs: again, undetectable. It wasn't important any more to question how they'd got a fix on me at the hotel. It could have been the courier in Kandalaksha turned by the Rinker cell to work for them under duress or a bugged line or the hotel porter or simply efficient field work. What was important now was how to leave this hulk alive and if that were possible then how to lose them before I went to meet Zhigalin.

Ferris took a card out of his pocket and passed it to me, a regulation issue made of wide-grain wood fibres treated with magnesium and designed to burn in less than one second or dissolve into pulp in water. On it was an address in Murmansk.

'Your safehouse,' he said, 'though you may not need it for more than a few hours; it depends on what my people can arrange for you. The phone number is mine, though I may have to move in with you until we can secure Zhigalin. If you lose contact with me you can still call that number and they'll put you in direct touch with the chief of station in Moscow.' He stared through the window again. He couldn't see the man with the lens from this angle; he wanted to be ready if anybody came past the window from that direction: there would be one or two seconds' warning before they opened the door.

I put the card into my wallet.

'If someone else answers the phone when I call that number, do I speak English or Russian?'

'It doesn't matter. They're fluent in both.'

'Is it strictly secure?' Briefing terminology for bug-proof.

'Yes.'

'I don't think Fane's line was.'

Ferris turned from the window to gaze at me. 'Possibly not. Mine is. You're safe with it in any eventuality.' He paused to give it emphasis. 'If there's no answer, it just means they've had to abandon.'

'They'd cut the phone?'

He looked faintly shocked. 'No. Blow it up.'

'Sorry.'

'You really have been slumming it, haven't you?'

This was why I'd demanded Ferris from London. He's not only highly experienced in handling a shadow but he's also technically faultless. Most people would cut a phone line and leave it at that if they had to clear out, but a line can be joined together again and you can call up and blow the whole of the mission if you don't know they've done that. Ferris had rigged a bang.

'Any briefing?' I was getting impatient now. I wanted to know what was going to happen when I went through that doorway, whether I was going to get my brains blown all over the place or whether I could go back through the snow and find a cafe and sit with a bowl of soup by the steamy windows and let everything else wait while I celebrated life as the warmth reached my stomach.

It happens often during a mission but you never quite get used to it. It's the feeling that comes to you when you know you've moved into a close-focus red sector that can prove terminal, when you can't go back and you can't stay where you are and you can't move forward without risking the absolute totality of all that your life has meant until this point in time. The feeling is like hunger but less physical, more ethereal, almost mystical, because you're close to the final answer and it might not be what you hope.

'No further briefing,' Ferris said, and put on his gloves and looked at his watch. '22:14?'

I checked my own and had to set it back half a minute. It doesn't ever matter what the time is by your own watch or by the local clocks: the time is what your local control says it is, because everything depends on him.

Without my gloves on the cold was already numbing my hands; as soon as I'd reset my watch I put them on again but the cold didn't go; it was everywhere in my body now, in my bones, because I would have to go out there first. One field director could run a dozen missions, a dozen executives: he was normally an older man with infinitely wider experience and infinitely greater responsibility to the Bureau; he would always get home safely because his papers were unimpeachable, unless he ran foul of a strike or a trap that was set for the man he was running.

So I got up first, pulling my gloves tighter and stepping past Ferris to the door as the wrecked fuselage creaked to the shifting of my weight.

The man out there would be cold too, crouching against the trunk of a tree and unable to move, impatient, as I was, but for a different reason: he'd want to get it done with successfully, get it over and report back to base while the blood still seeped from the body and the whiff of cordite tainted the stillness and the arm lay outstretched with the hand reaching for what now it could never hold.

'Probably just field-glasses,' I heard Ferris say as I pushed open the door.

'Yes.' I stepped down onto the snow.

The first time I telephoned Ferris was at noon on the next day. He answered himself and at the second ring.

'It's difficult,' I told him.

One of my feet was bleeding.

'How difficult?'

She didn't go back to her desk as the man had done at the last hotel: she went out of the lobby and left me alone in the phone-box, an immense woman, immense.

'They simply won't let me go,' I told Ferris.

I'd been trying to shake them off the whole morning but the militia checkpoints were all over the place and that made it impossible to use the normal routine for getting clear of surveillance because the risk of running into a checkpoint or a two-man patrol was now appalling and the Rinker cell knew that: they had me in what amounted to a mobile trap.

'You'll have to keep trying,' Ferris said. 'I'll have a deadline for you any time now and it'll be close.'

Sweat was clammy on me: I'd been scrambling through those bloody streets and into buildings and out again and onto buses and off again and all they'd done was switch stations with their field-glasses and keep me comfortably in sight.

'How close?' I asked Ferris. I don't like close deadlines, they can be murderous.

'Some time today.' He didn't like saying that. He knew what I was up against.

'In daylight?' (If you could say that: it was already like dusk.) 'If it can be done. If not, as soon after nightfall as we can do it.'

I didn't need to ask him what the deadline was for: it was for making contact with the objective, Zhigalin. Ferris wouldn't set it up until he knew he could get us both out: we were running right into the final phase of the mission but the whole bloody place was a bright red sector and I didn't know what the chances were of throwing off the Rinker cell. Until I could do that, I couldn't go to meet Zhigalin. He was their main target: the moment I was with him they'd close right in and shut the trap and throw me onto a scrap heap and take him underground.

There were five of them. I'd seen four of them at one time and when I'd gone round a corner and into an apartment block and out through the fire escape on the second floor I'd seen the fifth there waiting for me as if he'd known my next move and when I'd got clear of his surveillance zone I'd run right into one of the others at a distance of fifty yards, close enough to recognize him if I saw him again. That was when I'd cut my foot on something buried in the snow, the blade of a shovel or something.

The blood seeped into my boot.

'They're extremely good,' I told Ferris.

'They must be.' He meant if I hadn't been able to get clear of them by now; I'd been working at it the whole morning.