Two skid turns and I hit something, part of a street island, but nothing burst.

I don’t think London had known I was going to walk straight into a trap when I called to see Kirinski, or if they’d known they’d had a good enough reason to let me do it my way: when you start investigating an unknown man on cold-war soil you take a lot of care and the only risk had been that the Union Building might be under permanent surveillance from one of those windows and that the observer cell had instructions to report on strangers. Apart from that consideration there’d been no hazard in calling at the flat because the woman Liova couldn’t make a move while I was with her: I’d watched her through the doorway to the kitchen when she’d gone in there and in any case she couldn’t have timed that stuff to boil over at any given effective moment — you can get terribly paranoiac about this kind of thing in the first few hours of work in the target area because everything’s new to you and you haven’t got any friends.

Crump.

I think the Wolga had crumped a wing on one of the trucks because it was hooting again and I could see the black saloon going into a slow spin across the street with some bare metal flapping up and down on the left front corner. I kicked at the throttle but there wasn’t any traction: the 220 was keeping a reasonably straight course at just below forty miles per hour but we were on ice and there wasn’t any useful degree of control. I was looking out for patrol cars now because it was essential to assume this was going to finish up in a concerted snatch with every department brought in to make sure they got it right. At any next second they could start coming in from somewhere ahead of me and then I’d have to do something different.

Much too fast and I took my foot off and touched the brakes and didn’t get anything. There were some deep ruts in the middle of the roadway and I managed to bring the 220 over there by turning the wheel a few degrees and waiting for some grip; then I did the zigzag thing again and got down to below twenty miles an hour and found some sand and made an immediate left turn into a side street because on principle you can get an advantage by changing the pattern though of course there’s the calculated risk of running into terrain you can’t handle, I mean a truck across the road or a cul-de-sac, so forth. This one was all right and I thought I’d lost them because in Russia you never make a left turn: you’re meant to go past the side street and do a U at the prescribed place and come back the other way, so they hadn’t been ready for it and it could have given me a couple of seconds or a couple of yards while they shifted their planning but it wasn’t a big success because the Wolga came into the mirror again and I said shit and speeded up as best I could and started using the kerb as a cush to keep me off the crown of the road: you could hit something head on without even trying and London is terribly fussy about that sort of thing, You will remember that on foreign soil you are a guest and your status is civilian, so forth, reference to the rights of citizens and the sanctity of private property and all very fine, we really do see the point about leaving innocent people alone and not scraping their paintwork but when it comes to the crunch and you’re running straight into your very own little private Armageddon with sirens and flashing lights all round you it’s not quite so easy to remember the Active Executive General Rules and Procedures thing and last year Fairchild dropped a grenade down a sewer outside the British Consulate in Costa Rica because some silly clown had pulled the pin out and he couldn’t see anywhere else to put it. There weren’t any casualties but Tewson said they’d had a signal through the Foreign Office complaining that someone had blown the ambassador off the pot, but Tewson’s always saying things like that.

Very nasty slide and the front end caught the post at the corner and the 220 swung right round and lost most of its speed and I had to throttle up in a series of jerks until the rear wheels found some rubbish in the gutter and pushed the whole thing forward to the point where I regained some of the steering. The Wolga was filling half the mirror now and I didn’t like it because we’d got into phase two a long time ago — it works like this: you can just drive off as if you haven’t noticed them and try to lose them somewhere in the traffic without it looking deliberate or you can let them tag along and stay with you long enough for them to know where you’re going, that’s all right, they won’t give you any trouble because all they want to do is get a fix on your travel pattern and find out where you’re based and you haven’t shown your hand.

Or you can decide to get rid of them as fast as you can and that’s what I’d done and we’d gone straight into phase two and the next decision was up to them: they could bring in the traffic police to set up a block or put out a stop-and-arrest call and that would be that because the odds were stacked and in this particular case they could simply wait for me to hit a wall or another car and come and get me while I was picking the glass out of my hair.

It was a T-section and I turned right, looking for phase three. There was a tramway on this street and they’d thrown a lot of sand down and the moment I saw it I gave her the gun and whipped up to forty again and slid wide to get past a horse-drawn wagon and got it right and saw the police car coming across the intersection and touched the brakes and got some friction out of the sand but not nearly enough: we were still going too fast and the lights were at red and if I did anything wrong they’d want to pull me in for it.

Wolga close now. Close in the mirror.

They could have called for that patrol car. I didn’t know.

No sirens yet.

A lot of slewing because I was trying to bring the speed down and the surface was a mixture of sand and ice where the traffic had packed it down on the approach to the lights. Speed now below twenty, nothing like slow enough to be able to stop. Traffic going across at right-angles: pickup truck, two Moskwicz saloons, a man on a bicycle so I spun the wheel hard over and got into a slow spin that smashed the rear end across a parked van and sent pieces of glass and chrome scattering across the snow. Facing the wrong way and I put my right foot down on the floorboards and waited for traction while the black Wolga saloon came skating towards me, two men in it, I hadn’t been able to make out the details in the mirror but now I was facing them and there was a siren starting to wail but the thing was I’d missed the man on the bike and the rear tyres were getting through to the rough stuff underneath the ice and the front came round in a slow waltz and we got going again, snaking into the side street, two sirens, the other one fainter but Hearing.

Phase three is when you get out and run but it won’t work unless you can get into some kind of cover and there wasn’t any here or at least I couldn’t see any because the 220 was pulling straight now and I had to concentrate and put on all the speed I could with this bloody surface like a skating rink and sirens all over the place and the Wolga close suddenly and the shriek of metal on metal as it clouted a lamp standard and heeled half over, rocking a lot until I lost sight of it, klaxons beginning and a voice on a loud hailer no go, there isn’t a phase three because there’s no hope of any cover in a street like -

Hit something again, a parked truck, oblique-angle front impact with the seat belt biting across the shoulder and a cloud of steam as the radiator took the crunch and I hit the buckle and kept low and waited for the sickening force of the swing to lose its momentum, side to side, the sirens closing in and the klaxons barking, side to side and still slowing, watch it, watch it and wait, slowing, try now.