`Is that closer?'

'No, but I don't like doubling on my tracks. The trains don't stop running till one o'clock, you've got enough time.' I got into gear and swung the headlight beams across the low relief of the wasteground.

'What's he done?' he asked me in a moment.

'Who?'

'Schrenk.'

I got fed-up again: he hadn't been fully trained. The executive asks all the questions and it's strictly one-way conversation because otherwise it's dangerous: once in the field you don't look for nonbrief information any more than you look for a gas leak with a match and they ought to have told him that.

'He's disappeared,' I said.

'I know, but — '

'And it's all you need to know.'

It began snowing the next morning not long after first light, a few big flakes drifting down from a lead-grey sky. I'd slept for three hours, with the foot of the bed jammed against the door and the castors out and the window raised a few inches from the bottom with the lid of the samovar hanging from one edge of the frame, a fat lot of good against a full-scale raid but it'd give me five or six seconds to trigger the organism and I was here in this city now with the morning light in my eyes because more than once, somewhere along the line in Berlin or Bangkok or Hong Kong, there'd been five or six seconds to spare on my side instead of theirs.

He took me right across the Jauza from the place in Izmajlovskij prospekt where they'd held the Party meeting, and it was difficult at first because he'd walked for two blocks to where he'd left his car, and his flat heavy features and his dark fur coat and hat made him look like most of the other men in the street. I'd had to tag him in the Pobeda, moving at a crawl and stopping when I could, in case he got on to a tram. I wasn't even certain he was the right man: at the meeting they'd addressed him as Comrade Ignatov but it was a common enough name and there might have been more than one of them.

He was driving a small mud-coloured Syrena, taking his time and going westwards across the river into the Baumanskaja district. The snow was still falling steadily but the sky wasn't thick with it; this looked like the edge of a cloud formation that was moving in from the north at slow speed. The road surface wasn't affected yet and there were no sand trucks on the move. Along Baumanskaja the Syrena turned right and stopped just after the intersection, so that I had to drive past and pull up a hundred yards farther on, using a parked van for cover. I was out of the car and walking towards the apartment block just as Ignatov was going up the steps and I kept moving because if he lived here I could get his number from the upravdom and if he didn't live here there'd be no way of tagging him inside the building without the risk of a confrontation and I wasn't ready for that. All I wanted from him was information on Schrenk's movements before the arrest but I might learn more by watching him than by asking questions and it might be safer that way: Schrenk could have been blown by one of the people he'd been running with and it could have been Ignatov.

The building was red brick with the single word Pavilion in corroded aluminium over the entrance: four storeys, eighteen windows along the front and no other doorway into the street. I made one circuit and found a yard with a dozen cars parked in it and room for a dozen more; Ignatov would have used this if he'd lived here. Then I went back and moved the Pobeda into deeper cover but left it facing the same direction and used the mirror and rear window, focusing on the Syrena.

He was in the building for an hour and he came out alone. I'd got his walk now: he leaned backwards slightly and his feet were splayed, the walk of a heavy man with somewhere to go. Where was he going? His time and travel pattern might be repetitive and I noted 11–39 on my watch as he got into the Syrena and started up and drove past me without turning his head.

He took me west again, this time along Karl Marx ulica and across the ring road. Traffic was light and I kept well back, leaving a truck and a VW between us and pulling ahead only when there was no street to the right at the lights to take up the slack if he went through close to the yellow: I didn't want to lose him.

At 11.52 he stopped near Plevna Metro and went across to the telephone box by the cigar store, looking at his watch. I noted this because the people of this city are not punctual and he wasn't going to call anyone to say he'd be late, because he hadn't been hurrying. I didn't like it.

There was a slot by the kerb and I put the Pobeda into it and sat scanning the environment and doing it carefully. He shouldn't have looked at his watch like that. When I'd picked him up at the Party meeting he'd walked to his car without any hurry and he'd driven at a normal speed to the Pavilion building and driven away from it at the same speed and suddenly he wanted to know the time.

Nerves: the alarm threshold was still too low.

Ten private cars parked, and a light van unloading cardboard cases near the intersection. A No.14 trolleybus moving in to the kerb and putting down four passengers, taking on seven. A militia man standing not far from the cigar store, hands behind his back, his feet feeling the cold. Other people on the pavement, most of them hurrying a little because the snow was getting worse. Nothing in the environment to worry me. Nothing. But the hairs had begun rising on the backs of my hands and my breathing had quickened.

Ignore.

The trolley bus pulled away and I could see the whole of the environment again, as it had been before. Nothing had changed. Ignatov was still in the telephone box, the pale blur of his face showing through the condensation on the glass. A woman in a muskrat coat came up and started waiting for the phone, a child with her, both of them eating ice-creams from the stall on the other side of the cigar store. In Moscow the people eat ice-cream in all weathers, even in the depth of winter. In Moscow the people are not punctual, and should not look at the time.

The cold was creeping into the car again but I didn't switch the heater on because it would mean running the engine, and I didn't want to do that till I was ready to drive away because the militia man would catch the sound and turn his head. The ideal to aim at in a potentially hostile environment, they tell us repeatedly at Norfolk, is to become or remain invisible, inaudible and unfindable. Noted.

A black Zil limousine with Central Committee MOC number plates and its rear windows curtained and its headlights on came hounding down the Chaika lane and I watched the policeman at the intersection jumping into the roadway with his illuminated baton raised to halt the cross traffic, his whistle shrilling as the Zil went through the red, heading westwards towards the Kremlin.

The woman was still standing there eating her ice-cream. The small boy was waving his in the air, trying to make a snowflake settle on it. The woman laughed, and began doing the same thing.

11.55. Ignatov had been in the phone box for three minutes.

My legs were getting chilled because of the cold air coming into the car through the gaps round the doors, and because of the nerves. Three minutes was a long time. In three minutes the environment had changed considerably: most of the people who'd been on the pavement when I'd arrived here had gone, and as many others had taken their place. But the woman and the child were still there, and the militia man had moved a few paces to stand watching them, smiling as the boy caught a snowflake settle on it. The woman laughed.

The light flashed across the glass door of the telephone box as it opened and Ignatov came out. In the warmth of the box he had loosened his dark coat, and now he buttoned it up and pulled his woollen scarf straight, tucking it in. Without looking around him he stopped to talk to the militia man, halfway across to his car, taking something out of his wallet and show it to him briefly and getting a salute and putting the wallet away as he went on talking, standing quite close. In a moment the militia man undipped the radio from his belt and began speaking into it, looking up and down the street.