The first of the passengers were coming through, all of them muffled against the cold and hurrying from habit, many of them with the slightly Mongol faces of the region, a group of children in red jackets, three youths with long hair and jeans getting attention from the provincials here, a man waddling alone with a ‘cello case, no one, recognizable on sight.

Alternatives: keep back and let the courier go by without seeing me and put it down as a missed rendezvous; let them trap him if that was what they’d come here to do. Or let him see me and let him go by and try to make a rendezvous later; this would depend on his degree of training and if he wasn’t any better than Gorodok he’d foul it up and blow both of us and therefore Slingshot. Or tag him and get him alone in a clear field and made the rendezvous then; this would call for miracles and I hadn’t got any because Kirinski had been very strong and my right bicep was still numb from one of his strikes and the neck-blow from the edge of the back seat had left me with nerve shock and I’d never had to tag a contact and throw my own tags, three of them, except in training at Norfolk — and a lot of the stuff they give us at Norfolk is too sophisticated to work in practice: it’s on the curriculum as a mental exercise.

Five Red Army officers in shiny boots and enormous greatcoats, one of them a general with his jowls overflowing his collar; three Tadzhik women in traditional costume; another man with a musical instrument and now a plump woman smiling over her bouquet of faded carnations while the man explained to her that they were all he could find.

Decision: I wouldn’t let the courier go by without seeing me. I would make eye contact and take it from there.

A group of men came past in black coats and Homburgs, most of them with beards and gold-rimmed spectacles, their Muscovite accents chipping at the air as they herded together towards the main doors. I glanced at their faces: I glanced at every face and looked away to the next, forming the habit. At this moment I was under close scrutiny and had to take the utmost care, because my eyes, staying too long on one face among all the others, could condemn a man to death.

It had happened in Oslo and it had happened in Singapore: an opposition-surveyed eye-contact situation can be the same as an identity parade and in Oslo the executive had taken the slightest step forward when he’d seen his cutout coming down the gangway and in Singapore a courier had glanced down quickly when his man came through the gate at the airport and we’d lost two good operatives because of it. For this reason it’s a situation we don’t get into if we can help it but today I’d arrived here shortly before a plane was due in and I’d left the observation deck shortly after it had landed and the first tag was already on to me and the only thing to do was to conform to the pattern: I was obviously here to meet someone off the Moscow flight and so I must stand here looking for him.

Five young girls in red woollen scarves and pom-pom hats, their arms interlinked as they came past me, singing and giggling.

A woman in a wheelchair, her face grey and her eyes already dead; a young man pushing her, watching the girls.

An Air Force captain, eating the last of an apple down to the core.

Ferris.

He was looking vaguely around him and our glances met for a half-second and passed on and this was when we could have blown Slingshot if we hadn’t worked together long enough to know each other’s style.

I went on waiting, watching the rest of the passengers as they came through and wishing to Christ that Chechevitsin had put a little more information into his last signal: I was in the target area with the KGB moving in and the last thing I wanted was a top field director dropping out of the sky to make a rendezvous. The signal had said courier and if it had been a courier I could have left him to fend for himself and take the risk that Gorodok had taken and I could have handled these tags on my own. If I’d known London was sending Ferris here I would have made damned sure of getting a different car and I would have waited outside this bloody place and watched from cover without even showing myself because Ferris is a veteran and knows precisely what to do.

He was doing it now, walking straight through the hall and out by the main doors, no hat, a light gaberdine coat, a tan brown overnight case. I was watching his reflection in the three glass panels along the wall beyond the stream of passengers and now he had gone.

When the last of them came through I gave it another minute, going up to the gate and looking along the passage and coming away disappointed, checking my watch and then going out through the main doors at a steady pace. This was when they would have made the snatch if they’d received the instructions and I was sweating because I had the films on me to give to the ‘courier’ and they were enough to get me a life sentence and those places aren’t easy to get away from because of the barbed wire and gun towers and guard dogs: Cosgrove had tried it six months ago at the Potma Complex in Chita Province and he was badly savaged because they couldn’t control one of the dogs. I hate those bloody things.

Ferris had got it right: he’d had a rough idea of how many more passengers there’d been behind him and he’d known I’d have to wait till they were through and he’d used time outside the building and was now walking steadily north along the airport boulevard, his fuzz of thin hair blowing around his head. Most of the passengers were getting into the terminal bus or sharing cabs but a dozen or so were walking along the boulevard and Ferris was keeping pace with them, swinging his case and not looking around him any more. He couldn’t be feeling very happy: a rendezvous is normally secure and I hadn’t had time to warn him and he’d seen immediately that we had a problem when I let him go by.

I wasn’t very happy myself. Parkis had put an executive and a director into the field in Central Asia and at this precise moment they were in a KGB trap and I didn’t know if we could get out of it because this was the third alternative I’d begun working on and it was the one that needed miracles.

Ferris hadn’t been sent down here personally for nothing. I didn’t need a director in the field because the operation was close focus and London knew that: the target was one man, Kirinski. So Ferris was here to slam something new on the board for me to handle and I wasn’t ready for it but I had to know what it was and that meant I had to bring him to some land of rendezvous in a safe place and there weren’t any safe places in this city now that the KGB were into the action: they’d hold off until the point came when they could see they’d never drive us to ground and then they’d pull us in, finis.

I didn’t know how good his cover was but in a sense it was only as good as I could make it: at the moment there was no connection between us and technically he was in a clear field but as soon as I went too close to him they’d get the point and put the drop on us and start interrogating.

A black Moskwicz saloon went slowly past from the airport, chains biting on the snow and scattering it across the ruts, a face at a steamy window, featureless, the acrid scent of exhaust gas as the car gathered speed and turned the corner. Shoes crunched faintly behind me and on the other side of the boulevard a short dark figure walked in substantially through the reflections on the Intourist windows, a man with a sloping shoulder. Far ahead of me, Ferris.

He could only go on walking, or stop: he hadn’t got the training or the experience to take any kind of initiative and we both knew that. The one move he could make would be to hole up in public cover and wait for me there but it wouldn’t be easy and it might be impossible because this operation was based on geometry and involved angles, distances and vectors: we would be moving, he and I and these other men, across a chessboard as the light of the day began lowering across the streets.