He needn’t have come: I hadn’t counted on it. There’d been two alternative procedures I could have used if this one hadn’t worked, but they were now academic: he was here. I turned west, soon after the park where the Lenin Monument stood, and took the major road out of the city so that he could follow without any trouble. There was sand along most of the route and we drove at thirty miles an hour, keeping up with traffic. This was the way I’d come into the city after the woman at the farm had cleaned my injuries; the farm was below the caves, six or seven miles into the foothills of the Khrebet Tarbagatay range, where I’d sheltered for a time, coming down from the mountain.

Of course I’d told Ferris to go to hell. He’d expected that.

“I don’t think you’ve got any option,” he’d told me sharply.

“You know bloody well I’ve never done an execution.”

“Things have changed, you see. The man in the train.”

“I killed him for my own reasons and I’m damned if I’m going — ”

“The position taken by the Bureau is that you are expected to do for them what you readily did for yourself.”

“I won’t kill a man in cold blood. I never have.”

“Novikov was — ”

“I was in a rage when I did that!”

“You can’t be particularly fond of Kirinski. He destroyed one of our major operations down here and he killed three — ”

“I don’t give a damn what he did. He didn’t do anything to me.”

“There are, of course, certain other aspects. You are the subject of a manhunt throughout northern Europe, and Parkis believes he can get you reinstated at the Bureau if — ”

“Fucking coercion. He can’t use me like a — ”

“What do you think we’re running, Quiller, a garden party? You’ve been placed in the centre of a situation in which this man has to be eliminated, for the sake of — ”

“Tell them to send out someone else.”

“They sent three people out, and they didn’t take enough care.”

“That’s their bloody lookout, if — ”

“We think you can do it for us.”

“Christ, I’ve never done it before, so how can they — ”

“It’s not technically difficult, of course.”

“You bloody directors never go near the edge, do you, you’re — ”

“It simply requires skill in making your approach, doesn’t it?”

“You’re as bad as that bastard Loman, you talk like a — ”

“I wouldn’t throw this chance away, Quiller. I really wouldn’t.”

“Tell them to get someone else.”

“If it’s a question of morality, you should — ”

“Conscience, is that what you — ”

“Not quite, after the incident in London.”

“I’ve told you before, that was personal.”

After a bit he’d said with enforced patience: “Very well, I’m obliged to put the matter into the simplest terms. We would expect you to defend yourself, if attacked.”

That one shut me up and we’d left the bus station without saying anything else. Ferris hates having to spell things out but I’d been groggy from all that exhaust gas and not cerebrating too well.

He would have signalled London.

I checked the mirror again and saw the dark green Syrena sliding about and trying to keep up, so I slowed a little. There were no more buildings now: the last thing we’d passed was some kind of processing plant with steam pluming into the grey winter sky. The caves were two miles ahead and the traffic was thinning out after the road forked, with the military stuff taking the southern route towards the border.

The foothills were coming up on the right, a sloping waste of snow with dark crags exposed on the lee side. The first of the farm buildings were now spread out on the left of us and I passed them at the same speed and then began accelerating. We had a mile to go and I didn’t want to let him pull up behind me when we stopped because he’d have a gun and he’d use it at once.

The sand was patchy along this stretch and the Wolga was breaking away at the rear all the time until I got the near side wheels stuck well down on the camber and used the grass verge as a cush. I saw him twice in the mirror, a long way behind but still on the move, and I kept my foot down until I came to the caves.

They were high on the hillside, their entrances strung out along a ledge that ran a hundred feet or so above the lower slopes. At this point the road had no particular border but the ground was obviously flat and I ran the Wolga through virgin snow and left it angled against the bank higher up. The stuff I’d taken from the consignee this morning was on the floor in the rear and I left it there, slamming the door shut and starting the climb on foot. The Syrena was still half a mile distant and the air here was quiet, giving me privacy.

I suppose there were other places as convenient for what we had to do, but I’d made my way instinctively from the city, seeking the wilds as animals do when the presentiment of death is on them. And I suppose there were alternatives: I could have gone to ground and spent the rest of my life in uneasy hibernation, or I could have lain low for a year or two and then gone back to that bloody place to ask them for a job in one of those offices where the halt and the lame and the superannuated finish up, complete with a pen and a pension, to hell with that.

The thing that had brought me here was the fact that a mission was still running and I was the ferret they’d sent down the hole and they were waiting for me to come up with something, and this was the situation that had shaped my whole life since I’d first gone into the trade, and it had become a habit.

I watched the Syrena coming.

Kirinski had contacts and by this time he might have found out I was from London, and that would be sufficient incentive for him to kill me, as he’d killed the others. He knew I’d taken a copy of the material, and he would want that copy and would kill for it if he could, at the same time destroying the information stored in my brain. But I had wanted to make absolutely sure he would attack me, so I had kissed her there in the open street while he was watching.

I climbed higher, and reached the ledge where the caves made holes in the snow. The car had slid to a stop below me, not far from the Wolga, but he didn’t get out immediately and because of the reflection on the window glass I couldn’t see what he was doing; his gun would already be loaded, and he was probably using the needle. Cocaine works fast, within a minute of the injection, and he would have left it until now, so that by the time he reached me he would feel that overwhelming power flowing through him. Without it he could look after himself well enough: he was bigger than I was, and heavier. With the cocaine in him he would be galvanized, unstoppable.

The door of the car snapped open and as he got out I could see him clearly enough to recognize that great wedge of a nose sloping down below the eyes, and that odd backward-tilting walk of his as he came across the snow, his knee-boots kicking at it. He looked upwards now, and saw me; and I had the thought that in different circumstances I would have waved to him.

It was at this point that conscious linear cerebration broke up suddenly into random flashes, as if a bare wire had been dropped across an electronic circuit. I’d been briefed for this mission and I’d been given enough information to see it as a logical attempt to achieve logical goals, but there was always the unknown background to any mission and as I stood here watching Kirinski climb the slope I was thinking of Parkis... It would save us the unpleasant task of later ensuring that the threat to security he would continue to represent was nullified… Parkis and Novikov… Did they plant him on me in that train?… Novikov and Ferris and the way Ferris had looked away when I’d asked him if they’d worked out an escape-phase for me once I’d reached the objective.