Two kopecks.

'Is Sergei there?'

'Who?'

'Sergei Panov.'

'I'm sorry, there's nobody here of that name. This is the British Embassy.'

'Oh, excuse me. I must have asked for the wrong number.'

'That's quite all right.'

Every line to the Embassy was tapped and radio was out of the question and protracted speech-code was a slow-burn fuse because they'd go straight through the exchange and trace the call and raid the place within minutes so I'd had to ask for a cut-out.

'Sergei' was for Taganskaja Metro station and I got there in fourteen minutes, feeling nervy again because in this city there wasn't much traffic at night and I was vulnerable. It had been bad enough half an hour ago.

Have you been to the cafe? the younger one had asked.

Yes, she'd said before I could stop her.

I see. And were you talking about the trial there? About the traitor Borodinski? His eyes going over my papers again, turning them to the light, looking for the wrong weave, the wrong coloration, the wrong serial number, looking at the photograph and then at my face, then back at the photograph.

We were talking about Prokofiev, I said before she could answer. She could get us arrested: they were trying to provoke us into saying something wrong.

Prokofiev, or Borodin-ski? A little joke, his tone amused, a young man who knew his composers.

He wasn't playing a game of his own. Since the trial had begun, the standing orders for the police were to show these dissidents that it was useless protesting and demonstrating and thumping the cafe tables. Comrade Borodinski would be tried in the court, not in the streets. A night in the cell would remind them of that.

If we call him a traitor before he's tried

It simply means, I cut in on her again, that it's how we regard him. With a short laugh, squeezing her arm, Ask Helmut — he says we ought to raid the courthouse and string him up from a lamp-post outside.

Who is Helmut? His eyes watching her, watching me.

A friend of ours, I told him. He feels rather strongly about traitors.

The other man stamped his feet, feeling the cold, getting bored. I was waiting for Natalya to say something, ready to cut in on her at once; but she was quiet now, because of my warning.

Where are you two going now?

Home, I said.

He looked down at the papers again. But you live in opposite directions from here.

I'm seeing my friend home first.

His head came up. Why? Are you saying the streets are dangerous?

Of course not. It's just that I'm enjoying her company.

A thin smile. Let's hope she's enjoying yours. He passed my papers back, slapping them on to my hand. It's late for people to be out on the streets. It disturbs the more respectable citizens who are trying to sleep.

Quite bad enough.

The cut-out came up the escalator of the Metro station, dropping his thin little cigar into the sand bin at the fourth pace from the moving stairs and sliding both hands into the pockets of his coat, thumbs hooked out. He wasn't too quick on the parole and countersign and I put him through a variation before I took him across to the car and drove five blocks and stopped between two trucks parked on the wasteground alongside a building site where a crew was working the night shift. It was a new apartment block and the crane was swinging an entire prefabricated wall into place with four window apertures in it; sparks flew in a fountain from a welder's torch on the floor below.

'Have they found Schrenk yet?'

'Not yet,' he said. 'You'd have been told.'

'I was absent from base.'

'Oh.' He gave me the tape recorder and took something else from the glove pocket and sat clutching it in his bare hands.

'What's that?'

'This? Handwarmer. Burns charcoal. I can't stand this bloody cold, look at these chilblains.'

I began talking on to the tape. 2/2 12.09. 1 need all info on Natalya Fyodorova, senior clerk, Kremlin office, companion of subject before arrest. Also all info on Pyotr Ignatov, Party member, often in subject's company, no other details known.

She'd told me I would find him at a meeting of the Izmajlovo chapter at ten o'clock tomorrow morning and I was going to be there if I could make it. This wasn't for the tape because Bracken might decide to send someone else in to watch Ignatov and I wanted to work solo: the man could be ultra sensitive about Schrenk's arrest and they could frighten him off.

I need to know how the subject was arrested: in a street or where? What street, what place? Had he made a mistake? Bad security? Was he blown? Need to know why he applied for post as a-i-p: this is important. I'm finding inconsistencies in his behaviour prior to arrest.

Condensation was forming on the windscreen and the crane swung its skeletonic arm through the floodlights insubstantially, like a back projection on frosted glass. The welder's torch flared with an acid radiance and I looked away from it to protect my night vision.

Should I stress the importance of Natalya Fyodorova? She probably knew more about Schrenk than anyone else in Moscow, more than Bracken's team could find out in a month. But I was seeing her again tomorrow: leave it at that and don't risk over-surveillance. She could be frightened off as easily as Ignatov.

I suggest messages by hand direct to base in digraphic square, key 5. When absent I'll report hourly at the hour plus 15, Extension 7, silent line. Signal ends.

I sat thinking for another five minutes. There was a lot more I wanted to ask but I wasn't going to put it on tape because I didn't want to show my hand at this stage: I didn't know how Bracken normally worked but I knew he was the key man in a crisis and he might react differently; once he knew my line of enquiry he might throw in contacts and tags and shields and the whole bloody bazaar. I didn't want anyone in my way.

'Who does this go to?' I asked the man beside me.

'Winfield.'

'Who's he?'

'One of our a-i-ps.'

'Where's his base?'

'Didn't anybody tell you anything? We — '

'Where's his base?'

Low threshold.

'The airport.' His head was turned to watch me now.

`Oh come on, which one?'

'Sheremetyevo.It's — '

'For Christ's sake,' I said, 'you don't go all the way out there every time?'

'No. We use a drop.'

'Mobile?'

'Yes, the Aeroflot ferry bus.'

Desperate times. Bracken was keeping himself strictly in the shadows while he tried to dig himself in and set up an untapped phone line and signals facilities somewhere outside the Embassy and it wouldn't be easy to do but he'd have to do it because all I'd wanted was a brief squawk on the tape and this man had taken twenty minutes to make the rendezvous and so had I. You'll receive every possible support, Croder had said, Bracken had said, both of them lying, this wasn't support, it was bloody musical chairs. Or was that what they'd meant by possible? Was this all they'd got for me?

'We're trying to put someone into your sector,' the cut-out was saying, rubbing his hands on the charcoal thing. 'I mean really close, you know, five minutes away. Make things a lot easier. Of course it's always getting a phone that's the trouble. I mean a clean one.'

I dropped the tape recorder on to his lap and started the engine and wiped the stuff off the windscreen. 'Who's my director?' I asked him.

`I don't know.'

Strictly in the shadows. But that was all right; it was what a cut-out was for: to protect both ends of the signal.

'I'm going to put you back on the Metro at Proletarskaya,' I told him.