Wings crashed against the window and I looked out. That bloody hen had got loose and they were all trying to catch it, running all over the place.

I thought it was time to ask Ferris.

“What is the actual objective for Slingshot?”

Immediate reaction as the tension came into him, though there wasn’t anything to see: he was poker perfect I had to wait quite a long time.

“As you know,” he said with his voice a shade too bright, “we had to work out a suitable access. That’s why we had to get the air photographs, and we’ll be passing on some of these documents to certain organizations. But they were only the ticket for the trip.”

They’d caught that bloody thing down there and it was flapping and squawking, trying to get away again. Some children were laughing, and clapping their hands. Then a man tucked the hen between his knees and took the head and gave a jerk and the squawking stopped.

“The actual objective,” Ferris said beside me, “is less complicated. They want you to kill Kirinski.”

She sat hunched on the stool, shivering, cupping the bowl of soup in both hands. Two men came in and I looked up at the fly-stained mirror and down again.

“Because I’m afraid of him,” she said in a moment.

I’d asked her why she carried a gun.

“But you had it on you when he was away.”

“I always carry it. There are the others, too.”

The two men were all right: they were railway workers. I’d checked Liova all the way in from Gromyko Prospekt, three blocks from here, and it had been satisfactory. This place was behind the station, not inside it, and of course if the KGB wanted to drop on me they could do that: I wouldn’t be able to stop them. Wherever they wanted to drop on me in this city they could do it, unless I went to ground; and I couldn’t go to ground because this was the end phase and in the next few hours I’d have to get out of Yelingrad and get out of Russia before the pressure reached the point where the whole thing blew.

“What others?” I asked her, but of course she meant the KGB.

She put her bowl down on to the counter and I noticed she’d stopped shivering. I didn’t know her well enough to know whether it had been her nerves or the intense cold or both. When I’d called the apartment an hour ago she’d said Kirinski was there, but I’d wanted to talk to her, not him: if he’d answered I would have hung up without speaking. She said she’d meet me here.

“I mean the KGB,” she said.

“You weren’t afraid of them when you called them up and put them on to me, the first time we met.”

She closed her eyes and for a moment looked younger, a child asleep.

“Yes,” she said, “I was.”

It could be true but I didn’t rely on that. I didn’t rely on anything now, even Chechevitsin, even Ferris, even London. They’d got me to the point of the wedge again where the risk factor was a hundred per cent and I’d have to get out alone if I could get out at all. This girl and I had made love yesterday and today she could pull her gun and blast me off this stool and show her KGB card to the proprietor and walk out of here without even paying for the soup or she could make a signal and any number of agents could close in on this place before I had time to see them coming, but there’d been no way of diminishing the risks without diminishing my last few chances of getting out of Slingshot alive, and even those were thinning out the longer I sat here drinking this bloody stuff.

But there was no other way because time was too short now to plan anything foolproof.

“Do you belong,” I asked Liova, ‘to the KGB?”

She looked up. “No. They asked me to watch Alexei for them.”

“When?”

“A month ago.”

Why?”

“I don’t know. They just came to me. They asked me to report on his close friends, and anyone I saw him talking to.”

“And any visitors.”

“Yes.”

I stirred the soup with my aluminium spoon, and found some more meat at the bottom. “Why are you afraid of him?”

“Because of what he’s doing. I don’t understand it.” She spread out her hands suddenly: “Listen to me, I am a doctor’s daughter and I work in an office for the agricultural department, and I’m not used to the kind of things Alexei is doing. He’s suffering under an enormous strain, and that’s why he’s on this — ”

I waited.

She looked away and picked up her bowl, shrugging with her head. “He frightens me.”

“What is he on? Heroin?”

She looked startled. “No. How did you — ”

“Cocaine?” I’d heard there was traffic across the border.

Hesitation. “Yes.”

“Is he mainlining?”

She looked puzzled, I suppose because I’d used the Moscow argot. “Does he inject himself?”

“I think so.”

“How often does he get high?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He’d been high in the car, in the Trabant. It had been like struggling with a tiger. He’d probably been high when he’d killed the three people London had sent out here.

“Are you on it too, Liova?”

Her dark hair swung and her eyes were wide. “It’s killing him! You think I want to die too? Like that?” In a moment she said quietly: “There hasn’t been any sex for almost a year. It takes that away first. First sex, then life. I know about it.”

A man came in and sat down at one of the little tables, where the food cost ten per cent more. He looked all right but I went on checking him.

“Is he jealous?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “He doesn’t want other men to do the things he can’t do.” She pushed her bowl away and turned on the stool to face me, sweeping her hair from her eyes. “I want to see you again, Andreyev. Not at the apartment.”

I was getting out some money, to pay for our soup.

“I would’ve liked that,” I said.

She was watching me. “Isn’t that why you asked me to come here? So that we could talk?”

“Yes. So that we could talk.”

I put down a ruble and five kopeks.

“We haven’t said anything, Andreyev.”

“I’m going away.”

She slipped off the stool and we went to the door together.

“When?”

“Soon.”

We walked with her hand in my arm; the pavement was slippery. It was three or four minutes before she spoke again.

“When will you be coming back?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Chechevitsin had got me a Wolga, the medium-sized model, and I’d picked it up from the car park outside the football stadium last night after Ferris had gone. It was waiting for me half-way down the street that ran at right-angles from this one, at the next corner.

“When you come back,” Liova said, “will you let me know?”

“Of course.”

We turned the corner and I looked along the street and saw the Wolga standing where I’d left it. It was in the open, with no cover anywhere near; there was good cover farther along, where two trucks were still unloading into a warehouse, but I hadn’t used it.

“Where are you going?” she asked me.

“I’m never quite sure.”

Bitterly she said: “You’re like him. Why can’t you stop?”

“We don’t know how.” We were nearing the Wolga. “And we don’t want to know.”

There were five other cars standing against the kerb in this area and the dark green Syrena was the farthest away; but even from this distance I could see that he was still sitting there behind the wheel.

When we reached the first corner I said: “I’m going this way.”

She stopped and I kissed her cold mouth and felt her gloved hands tighten in my own. She said nothing, and I let her go, watching her into the distance. She walked with her head down, taking care on the treacherous surface, a lock of dark hair lying across one shoulder, Liova, a Russian girl, last seen in the street of a city under snow.

I turned and went back and got into the Wolga and started up and waited for the tyres to find a grip on the ruts, checking the mirror when I crossed the first intersection to make sure he was behind me.