She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know whether to trust me, and I knew I couldn’t trust her. Living things only bite when they’re frightened and she was frightened sick.

“What time,” I asked her quietly, ‘is he coming back?”

In a moment she said: “In the morning.”

“All right.” I went across to the kitchen and picked up the gun and snapped the magazine back into it and gave it to her. “Tell him to meet me on the north side of the Lenin Memorial tomorrow at noon.”

She looked down at the gun as if she’d never seen it before, then dropped it on to the settee.

“Tell him to be there alone.” I picked up the telephone and tore the cable away. Tell him I can get him a life sentence at a forced-labour camp if he makes a mistake.” I went out and down the stairs and into the snow.

His name was Gorodok.

This must be one of the military roads: it had been cleared after the last snow and I’d only seen three private cars and a produce truck: the rest of the stuff had the Red Star on it — jeeps, transports, armoured cars, a mobile gun with a full crew muffled up to their ears in their greatcoats. There was a camp somewhere: these weren’t convoys.

I drove steadily, not too fast. I didn’t want any attention.

It was 09:32.

Of course he could be from London — some bright spark from the reserve pool on his first Russian assignment or one of the agents-in-place working the area south of the Omsk-Novosibirsk line, it could be anyone, cover name Gorodok, it didn’t mean anything.

I wanted to drive fast because my mind was racing but this had to be done with care and there was quite a bit of traffic on this stretch and if I hit anything I’d have to argue the point with the military and that could screw the whole thing up if someone hadn’t done that already. It was freezing cold in the Trabant but I was sweating because Chechevitsin had only given me the action signal and nothing else, no explanation.

He’d got pretty desperate because there were three messages for me at the hotel when I’d got back there and all of them were for me to call him. I did it from the pay phone round the corner at the household store because this one obviously wasn’t for the hotel connection.

Three military trucks in a line and I felt their wind-blast as they went by and left the night black again after the glare of their lights. The road was tricky along this bit because there were hedgerows and the traffic had blown the loose snow across the surface and it had got packed down over the sand.

I wished to Christ I knew what had happened. All Chechevitsin had said was that I had to stop the 10:25 express from Tashkent twelve miles north-west of Yelingrad and rendezvous with Gorodok at the south end of the Litsky Bridge. I had to fill in the gaps for myself and that wasn’t difficult but I didn’t like the message because if I had to get the courier off the train in open country it meant he’d already been blown at this end and if he got off at Yelingrad Central they’d snatch him cold.

So I’d been moving into a trap before I’d got the signal from Chechevitsin and I hadn’t known it, but London had. It’s not my favourite feeling: it’s like when you’re going across on the green and someone takes it on the red and it’s a question of inches and you think Jesus, what if. The labour camps were there in Murmansk and Chita Province for me too, as well as Kirinski.

09:41 and two miles to go and I took the left fork and found the dirt road that ran alongside the railway. There were clinkers and broken asphalt and bits of timber the whole way along it because it was a service road for the maintenance crews when they had a problem on the line: I’d talked to a switchman for half an hour at the station when I’d gone there to pick up the films.

The moon was in the south-east and I tried shutting the headlights down at intervals and found I could keep up the speed if I watched the left-hand side below the embankment. The switchman had said the signal-box was a mile this side of the bridge and the express was due at the bridge at 10.09 unless the snow had delayed it. He’d asked me why my department was surveying the line in midwinter and I’d said there were some embankment faults showing up on the far side of the bridge and he didn’t seem inclined to argue.

I passed the signal-box at 09:45 with my lights full on and kept going for two minutes and then slowed and doused them and turned round and stopped and waited. The timing had to be cut fine because the man in the box would put a call out for emergency crews and I would only have as long as they took to get here.

The snowscape was bluish-white under the three-quarter moon and the stars were huge; the line of telegraph poles alongside the railway cut the dome of night in half, their stark outlines diminishing to a vanishing-point where the squat black rectangle of the signal-box made a blot against the snow. Over to my right, to the east, a small cluster of lights drifted, red and green and white, as an aircraft went into the circuit above the field six miles away: the maps had it down as a civilian aerodrome. With the window down I listened in the silence, and picked up the sound of its engines: it was a turbo-prop. Nearer and much louder a night bird called across the desolate countryside.

At 09:53 I started up and put the headlights full on and reached forty miles per hour over the rough surface before I hit the brakes and began using the horn in short warning blasts as the yellow-lit windows of the signal-box loomed above me on the right. I was already running with the cinders crunching under my feet and the Trabant sliding to a halt with the door open and the hand brake on and the engine still running. The steps to the box were free of snow and dark with sand as I went up them two at a time and hit the door open.

“There’s a plane down across the line!”

One man, thin, greying, startled, dropping long-legged from the stool and standing uncertainly, staring at me.

“It’s blocking the down line — give me some flares!” I was looking around for them but the light was bad in here: a couple of enamel-shaded bulbs hanging low above the plotting desk that threw awkward shadows.

“Are there people?”

“What?”

“The pilot. Does he — ”

“Yes. Have you got a first-aid box too?”

He went on staring at me for another two seconds, was I a drunk, was I a joker, was I a psychopath, so forth, then he moved steadily and threw one of the big metal levers and ducked below the plotting desk and dragged out a bucket with a wooden cover and swung it towards me. I caught it and he pulled a cupboard door open and slid a box down, white-painted with a red cross, using his fist to make sure the lid was secure.

“You have a lamp?” he asked me.

“Yes.” I made for the door.

“Where is the machine down?”

“Just this side of the bridge.”

The Litsky Bridge?”

“Right.”

I left the door open and dropped down the steps and ran to the Trabant, gunning up and slinging a wave of snow and cinders into the moonlight as I skid-turned and hit the lights on and got going. At this point the time pattern became critical because the train had to reach the bridge before the emergency crews got there and in snow conditions it could be half an hour late, an hour, it was totally unpredictable and therefore characteristic of what happens when a wheel comes off: you can keep going but you’re always just this side of a smash till you make a mistake and then the whole lot goes.

I wouldn’t have to make a mistake but Gorodok could make one and so could Chechevitsin and so could London because they were running this thing by remote control with no director in the field and the courier line beginning to blow. We could go down on luck alone because tonight’s action was strictly shut-ended: if the Tashkent express arrived any time after the deadline I’d have to get out, and the deadline was the precise moment when the emergency crews would start asking questions. If they got here before tie train came they’d want to know where the aircraft had come down and I could expand the timing quite a bit by telling them it was between here and the signal-box, hadn’t they seen it, so forth: the embankment was forty feet high along this stretch and they could easily miss any wreckage because it’d be above them and unlit. But then they’d come back because they hadn’t found anything and at that point they’d start asking me questions and that would be when I’d have to get out of here and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t use the phone in the signal-box and report a hoax and get me stopped by a police patrol on my way back to the city, strictly shut-ended if I pushed the deadline to that particular point and just as bad if I decided to get out before they suspected a hoax because they’d douse the flares and change the signal and let the train go through and Gorodok would get off at Yelingrad and walk straight into a snatch, no bloody go: the classic mortality rate of a courier line after the first courier gets blown is a hundred per cent and that’s perfectly logical because they’re a chain and a chain is as strong as the first link to break, finis.