My fingers are steel hooks.

Nothing can break them.

We were going faster than before and the gas began fluttering against the side of my head and I turned it the other way and felt the heat on my hair but that was all right, I could stand that, I could stand anything that didn’t increase the strain on the fingers because they’d got to hang on.

They are steel hooks.

Nothing can break them.

But the throb of the exhaust was vibrating inside my head and the stink of the gas was sharp and sweet and permeating, stinging my eyes and making them water, making them close, making my thoughts drift, steel hooks, until my body sagged lower and the heels of my shoes began skating from side to side as the thigh muscles loosened, nothing, from side to side on the sand and the snow, nothing can break them, side to side, wake up or you’ll -

Tighten the fingers: tighten.

And be aware of the gas because it’s lethal. Christ’s sake cerebrate:

necessary to stay conscious, essential to review the situation and get it into normal perspective because it was simply a question of time. Soon the bus would stop and I could drop and roll clear and all I had to do until then was maintain the tension in the finger muscles and concern my mind with nothing else, nothing at all.

My fingers are steel hooks.

Nothing can break them.

Sweat pouring over me and cooling in the freezing air, my hands burning, my arms burning, my shoulders, burning, steel hooks, and the sound of the drumming in my head and the sweet tang of the gas swirling inside and my body swimming, slowing, we were -

Slowing again.

Hooks.

Slowing.

The truck was still behind. I could hear it and see its lights. Its lights were yellow on the snow. Slowing. My feet dragged on the sand, from side to side, side to side, slowing.

Hooks.

The traffic shunting behind us, a bumper banging: they couldn’t pull up on the snow.

Slow.

A Mush of red somewhere below me, coming from a light.

I watched the light on the snow, holding my breath because of the gas.

My head was full of it.

Slowing.

Stop.

Drop and roll clear.

“These are copies,” I said.

“Of everything?”

“Of everything I could find.”

He looked at them in the light coming through the window.

“This is all you found?”

“Christ, I’ve just told you.”

He looked at me and away.

“What happened to you?” he asked me.

“When?”

“I mean what sort of condition are you in?”

“First rate.”

I was getting fed up with him. You don’t throw yourself under a bus and come out looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy and he ought to know that. Come to think of it, of course, he didn’t know it was what I’d been doing.

“There may be some other papers,” he said.

“Where?”

“With Kirinski.”

A bus came in and filled the place with noise. It had the name Balkhash on the illuminated sign over the front. I supposed the lake was frozen now, though it hadn’t been when I’d flown over it to the north. Christ, that was a long time ago.

I shut my eyes and let them water. The exhaust gas had been the worst, though I still couldn’t feel my ringers.

“Opal Light,” he said after a while, ‘was our operation.”

I woke up very fast.

“It was what?”

He slipped the file back into the envelope with the films, and didn’t say anything. Someone came to the open doorway.

“Excuse me, comrade. Is this the one for Alma Ata?”

“No,” I told him. “This is for Ust’Kamenogorsk.”

“Thank you.” He went away, lugging a canvas bag with a hen in it.

“Is that the one,” I asked Ferris carefully, “where the wheel came off?”

“Didn’t you look at the file?”

“Yes, but there wasn’t anything specific.”

“That was the one.”

I sat back and tried to think, but my clothes still stank of that gas and my stomach was sour with it and I wanted to sleep, sleep for days. Fat chance.

“Kirinski,” I said, “was doubling for two sides. That’s why — ”

“Three.”

I looked at him. They’d got neon lights in the roof of this place and the windows of the bus we were sitting in were tinted, so that his face was grey-blue and mottled by the spots on the glass. But it wasn’t just that he looked like death: I think there was more on his mind than he’d ever had before, and it was wearing him down, even Ferris.

I said: “Three?”

He took a breath. “Kirinski is our executive for Sinkiang.”

I shut my eyes again, and let them stream.

The passengers were getting off the coach that had just come in and I could hear someone laughing, it was a shrill sudden laugh that echoed under the enormous roof, and I can still remember it.

“How long,” I asked Ferris, “has he been working for the Bureau?”

“Eighteen months.”

“What’s his status?”

“Third class. He doesn’t know anything about us.”

“He knew enough,” I said wearily, “to blow Opal Light.”

“Yes. And he’s beginning to know more.”

I started to listen carefully.

“Who got on to him, Ferris?”

“We sent three people out, one after another, with Chechevitsin to liaise for them.”

“What happened?”

“They sent some stuff back, but couldn’t get actual evidence.”

“Where are they now?”

“They were found dead.”

He shifted on the seat, crossing his legs the other way and turning his head to look past me at the passengers out there. “What sort of chap is he?”

“Kirinski?”

“Yes.”

“Untrained, aggressive, physically strong. Nerves like castanets. Christ, so would mine be, trying to keep three in the air.”

“Would you call him psychotic?”

“No more than the rest of us in this trade.”

I was still listening carefully to what he was saying, and to his silences. I was beginning to hear something that was only, as yet, in his mind.

“Do you want me to go back to his place,” I asked him, “and see if he’s got anything on the Bureau?”

He thought about this.

“No. He can’t have anything we’d want to destroy. But he’s been making too many contacts, and — ”

“Not Chechevitsin?”

“No.” He looked at me with a wintry smile. “We wouldn’t have sent you to investigate a man and give you one of his contacts for your liaison.”

“You bastards’d do anything.” But it didn’t sound funny. This was the end phase, and the end phase is never funny.

“London,” he said absently, “is still working on your case, naturally.”

“My case?”

“Novikov.”

“What are they doing?”

“Pressure,” he said with slightly more articulation than usual, “is being put on the Prime Minister to make the Yard see the point. The point being that even in a cold war there are sometimes casualties.”

It was all they could do. If you kill someone it’s murder, but if you kill someone who is a potential enemy working within the gates, there is a difference. Not that I’d slaughtered that man in the Queen’s name, but that was the argument the PM would use to get the thing wiped off the records.

“Still got the shits,” I said, “have they?”

“Until the case can be closed,” he said sharply, “the Bureau will remain at risk.”

I didn’t know at first why he’d brought the subject up. But now I knew, and I could feel the slight acceleration of my heart-rate under my ribs.

“Ferris,” I said very carefully, “did they plant Novikov on me in that train?”

He looked away from the window. “Surely,” he said with a certain impatience, “that’s rather too extravagant.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” I said and he heard the edge on my voice but refused to look at me.