Hit the door open and got out very fast and went for the nearest oblong shadow, dark green gate but it was locked and I swung up and over, dropping and hitting a stack of crates with one foot smashing through the slats and having to tear it out, the whole stack lurching as I tugged the foot and fell back and flung a hand out in time, dogs somewhere I can’t stand the bloody things and someone shouting and hitting the gate you’d better run you’d better run like hell, a man’s face surprised with his mouth open run very hard with my shoes slipping on the snow where it had drifted into the corners of the yard, stop, they were shouting, stop.

There was some kind of basement and I went through it and out again, nobody in it, a stink of resin or some kind of industrial chemical keep running. Wide street with nobody near me, several doorways, a window grey with steam and some peeled lettering so I stopped dead and opened the door at the side and walked into the restaurant, taking my time, going through to the back and finding the lavatories, three small windows, two of them jammed by the ice, the third one swinging upwards and out.

It took me fifteen minutes to get clear, walking just fast enough to keep warm, the way everyone else was walking, head down against the light fall of the snow, eyes on the ground to avoid slipping. Two police cars went past me with their chains clinking over the snow and their lights flashing, and another siren started up somewhere north near the area they were still searching.

I used the map and worked my way east to the post office near the Museum of Folklore and Minerals and called up the hire firm and told them in a shaky voice that the Mercedes had been stolen from Union Square while I was in the reading room of the Civic Library in Gromyko Prospekt. Then I called Chechevitsin and asked if he’d got anything for me and he said yes, there was a courier coming through from Tashkent on the evening train arriving at 10:25, Central Station, Yelingrad. Name, description, rendezvous instructions, so forth. I said I’d be there.

04:56.

The snow had stopped.

I watched the Union Building.

I’d been here two hours and I was frozen stiff.

Every five minutes I had to wipe the inside of the windscreen because it kept misting up; there was ice on the outside and the wipers had seized up on the way here so I’d scraped the last of the snow away and left it like that. It was a fourteen horse-power Trabant with a stick shift and a defunct heater and a body like a foreshortened turd but Chechevitsin had said it was all he could get for me. It had been no good my trying another car-hire firm because the police would be on to that one: my call reporting the stolen Mercedes was just a routine action. On the principle that your survival in the target area can often depend on the narrowest margins of error you always take every possible step you can to cover yourself it was highly unlikely that the civil and secret police would miss the obvious but I couldn’t be certain. I only had the two sets of papers and I couldn’t use the Voronov cover because the whole of the Red Air Force knew by this time that his MiG-z8D had been shot down within fifty miles of this city and that he might have got out alive.

There was another risk factor coming into phase and it was the same wedge shape as the first one had been: Comrade Andreyev Rashidov and Colonel Nikolai Voronov were now the subject of a search from two directions and the more the opposition found out about them the nearer those two lines would get, until they came to a point. When it did, I wouldn’t have to be there.

04:59.

I’d counted more than thirty people entering or leaving the Union Building in the last two hours but she hadn’t been among them. She could be away from the place now, in which case I was wasting my time, but the train didn’t have to be met until 10.25 this evening and I could work on the target centre for the next five hours and maybe pick up some extra material for the courier to take away with the film.

This area was clean, at this moment. I’d checked it thoroughly and dangled my image three times round the square and twice past the Union Building in case any one of the hundred or so windows had an observer posted. There wasn’t one. They’d picked up the Mercedes in this immediate area and I’d pulled a phase three on them and if they were going to set traps anywhere it would be here.

At 05:12 the first street lamps came on and I started up and took the Trabant closer, parking it in fair cover between a military jeep and a small black Syrena at the corner of the square. It had meant taking my eyes off the field for a few seconds at a time and I nearly missed her as she came down the steps and started walking towards the corner. The engine was still running and I switched off and got out and waited two minutes and took up the tag.

She was crossing the intersection at Prospekt and Station Street when she saw the queue of people. I think she was on her way to a different place because there was a kind of double take in her attitude and she stopped to talk to a woman outside the store. She then joined the queue herself and I made a close detour and saw that a consignment of kitchenware had just come in: a truck with a Tashkent number plate was still unloading. There were approximately forty people already in the queue but that wasn’t too long for a Russian provincial city store in the middle of winter when transport problems were added to the general lack of supply. If Liova Kirinski stayed the course she’d be here for more than an hour because she’d have to reach the head of this queue, choose the merchandise, join the next queue with her order form for payment at the cashier’s booth and then join this one again to collect her purchases.

I gave it ten minutes. She was then off the street and inside the store, with exactly thirty-two people still in front of her. Assuming she’d been on her way somewhere else and might still go there when she left this store I assessed the risk as low and calculated and walked back to the Union Building and made one circuit on foot to check for ticks and then went round to the rear. The last of the daylight had gone but there was a three-quarter moon hanging across the eastern skyline and the street lamps were throwing down an ash-grey diffusion of light that picked up the iron fire-escape. On my first visit here I’d noted that the traditional custom was in force: on a lot of apartment buildings they remove the lowest section of the fire-escape so that it’s still easy for people to come down and drop to the ground if the place is on fire but difficult for them to climb it. The official reason is to discourage burglars but everyone knows that it’s to oblige people to go past the dezhurnaya every time they leave and return home: the Party, police and military factions are particularly interested in strangers visiting any given residential area and in Yelingrad this interest is increased by the city’s proximity to the Chinese frontier.

There was snow on the windowsill below the first platform and I threw dirt on it and got the necessary purchase without making any noise. The rest of the climb was slippery but I was in shadow the whole way up and the back door of the Kirinski apartment was in good visual cover because the three buildings standing nearby were blank-walled on this side and five storeys higher. The door had a glazed panel but I didn’t want to break it unless I had to. The lock was a standard tumbler bit and I started work on it.

At intervals I listened to the sound background: a line of trucks crossing the bridge over the canal half a mile away, presumably a military convoy; men’s voices on the far side of the nearest building, and the scrape of snow shovels; a radio programme, much closer, coming from the apartment below and on the left side.