'Read more?' Bracken asked.

'No time.'

He sat with his feet perfectly still, his head turned slightly to the left, where he could pick up echoes and reflections from the buildings opposite. The wheel was locked hard over and I left it like that because they might be stupid enough to leave a gap if they came past and saw us and stopped: there was just a chance we could get out fast enough to confuse them before they could open fire. If they saw us and pulled up and blocked the gap I could try making a break on foot: the trucks gave a lot of cover and there was no snow on the ground. It would depend on what Bracken wanted me to do.

'Instructions,' I said.

He waited two seconds. We both had to listen. 'If you can drive us out of it,' he said evenly, 'do that.' We listened again, and heard the distant sound of a car. 'But not unless the chances are good.'

'All right.' The sound of the car was loudening. It was accelerating very hard in one of the indirect gears. 'Where do I drop you, if I can get dear?'

'Any cab rank. I'm going back to the Embassy.'

We listened again. The car had changed into top and was travelling flat out. Echoes were coming in now from the buildings at the intersection and they made it difficult to hear what was happening. I thought I was picking up a second car somewhere, also accelerating. I wasn't sure.

'If I can't drive us out?' I asked Bracken.

'Run.'

'All right.' I sat listening again. Bracken wouldn't have a lot of trouble: they couldn't search him and they couldn't arrest him and at the moment they didn't have anything on him to justify kicking him out of the country. But if they caught me they'd question me and a Soviet citizen shouldn't make contact with any foreigners, least of all members of a diplomatic mission. The cover wouldn't stand up, if they wanted to put it under the light.

'Two?' he asked suddenly.

'What?'

'Two cars?'

We listened again.

'Yes.' The first one was close now; the second one was still piling up the speed in an indirect gear, somewhere in the distance. 'What is there in the envelope,' I asked Bracken, 'on Schrenk?'

'Quite a lot. Everything you ought to have.'

'Local friends, movements, contacts?'

'Everything. Croder instructed me.'

'Fair enough.'

We sat waiting. Light swept suddenly across the face of the buildings opposite, brightening and going dark as the first car crossed the intersection flat out with its echoes drumming and fading over the next few seconds.

'One.'

'Yes.'

Tyres started howling and light came again on the buildings as the second car turned at the intersection and sped up towards us with a gear botching and the power coming on and the exhaust sending out a hollow rising roar until the gears shifted and the power came on again. I got comfortable in my seat and moved the stick into low and kept my foot down on the clutch and put my fingers against the starter key and watched the light flood brightly across the buildings as I waited to know if the trap we were sitting in was going to spring shut.

'Good evening, little mother.'

Her head came up sharply. She was sitting with her back to the wall of the hallway, her cracked black shoes resting on the edge of a slow-combustion stove, the naked bulb throwing light on her white hair. Some mauve knitting was on her lap, and she had been nibbling at a sausage when I'd come in.

'What do you want, comrade?' Her small eyes were narrowed, focusing on my face.

'I want to see the upravdom. Is he here?'

She eyed me up and down again, noting my clothes, needing to find a pigeonhole for me in the infinitely-varied strata of Moscow society. 'I will see,' she said, and took another small bite of sausage.

I waited while she reached and took a brass bell from the shelf of her vestibule, and swung it three times. I was standing halfway between the stairs and the entrance doors, with the street exposed to my peripheral vision. This was just routine: I'd left Bracken at a taxi rank along Narodnaja ulica ten minutes ago and got here clean. The second militia patrol had gone hounding straight past us and I'd used the back streets towards the ring road, working my way out of the search area. 'Reach me through the Embassy,' he'd told me. 'I shall be in signals with London direct. We're on the board as «Scorpion» and you'll use that in paroles and countersigns.' I'd had to ask him for my East German papers back: he hadn't thought of it first. Not a good sign: he was here to direct me in the field and the field was dangerous and already he'd missed a trick because the brush with the militia patrols had unnerved him.

I felt vulnerable and exposed.

Footsteps sounded on the stone stairway. 'I am Yuri Gorsky.' A fleshy man with watchful eyes and a shock of stiff graying hair, his worn suit smelling of black tobacco. His hand was steady and strong.

'Kirov,' I said.

He led me upstairs to a room at the end of the passage on the third floor and showed me in. It was small, cluttered and stifling, with the fumes of a charcoal heater sharp on the air. One door, one window, one light bulb and one narrow bed. No telephone.

'I have been expecting you,' Gorsky said in a low voice. He stood waiting.

I was looking for signs everywhere, signs of something wrong, of a hundred things wrong. He understood this, and I could feel his understanding as we waited the time out, unsure of each other. That was on the air, too, as strong as the charcoal fumes: the scent of creatures met by night, their hairs lifted and their eyes watching at the edge of vision, their breath held and their muscles tensed by the knowledge of where they stood on dangerous ground.

Bracken had said he was totally reliable, but I didn't trust that. I trusted my own feelings. 'Is this the top floor?' I asked him.

`Yes.' He closed the door quietly and went to the window, lifting the lower sash so easily that I knew the wooden frame must have been soaped. He beckoned to me.

The freezing air came into my lungs as I leaned and looked down, tracing the skeletonic pattern of the fire escape downwards to the ground, where a street lamp stood. There was nothing running upwards, against the wall; the guttering passed across the top of the window, two feet higher; it looked strong but that meant nothing.

'It's the best room,' Gorsky said, and I believed him. People from the other rooms on this floor would have to run the length of the iron balcony before they reached the fire escape. The lower floors were more dangerous: they would be searched first, if anyone came. 'Don't worry,' he said in his low voice, 'about the little dezhurnaya in the hallway. She has a grandson in the labour camps. But give her money if you want to. Not too much.'

'How long has she been in this building?'

'Nearly seven years. As long as I have.'

I slid the window shut. 'Was Schrenk here?'

'Yes.' He offered me a black and yellow packet and I shook my head.

'When?'

'Before they arrested him.' He took a cigarette and lit it, throwing the match into the charcoal heater. I went absolutely still, and he sensed it. 'Don't worry,' he said, `they arrested him in the street, nowhere near here. They wouldn't have been interested in where he came from; they would have been interested in what he was doing. If they had wanted to know where he came from, they would have asked him, and if he had told them, they would have come here.' He drew the cigarette to a bright red glow, and then blew the smoke out in a slow cloud, watching me through it. 'So don't worry. You will be safe here.'

I looked at the bed, and the cracked handbasin, and the flimsy bookshelves, one end wired to the wall where a calendar was pinned, two years out of date and with a portrait of Lenin on the yellowed paper.