Milton turned from the window and sat on the edge of the bed. He thought of Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko in the room next to his. What would she be doing? Making her report to her superior officers, informing them that she had successfully delivered him into the country? Her room would be identical to his and he thought of her on the bed, most likely adjacent to his and separated by the wall. Six inches away, perhaps. She was very attractive. He would have been lying to himself if he said that he did not find her beguiling. That, no doubt, was why they sent her. He thought of le Carré’s books or the films about espionage from the sixties and seventies; she was the lissome girl sent to guarantee his attendance, the honeytrap in the Cold War thriller. He wondered what would happen if he stepped into the corridor and knocked on her door. He did not doubt that she would welcome him inside. It was tempting and there would be no harm in it, an interesting diversion to kill the time until tomorrow, but Milton resisted. There were things he had to do. An old friend to meet, and information to gather.

He dressed in the warm clothes that she had provided, pulled on the Timberland boots and put on his thick overcoat, quietly shut his door and padded softly to the elevator. He took it down to the ground floor and, without pausing, strode across the lobby, down the small flight of stairs, through the revolving door and into the street outside. He had noticed the man sitting in an armchair next to an open fire, a copy of the Herald-Tribune spread out in front of him. He had chosen a spot where he could observe the door and the lobby and Milton pegged him as an agent from the internal security directorate immediately. He didn’t rush through the lobby — he didn’t want them to think he was trying to flee, a reason to call for backup — but neither did he dawdle. As he emerged onto the street outside he made a show of arranging his overcoat, fastening the buttons all the way to the top, and, as he looped his scarf around his neck and tucked it into the front of the coat, he allowed himself a quarter turn back to the interior and saw the man, without his newspaper, coming down the steps.

The snow was falling thick and heavy, fat flakes that settled on everything, softening edges, turning the parked cars into sculptures with gracefully curved lines. The snow was deep; a trough had been shovelled down the centre of the sidewalks that was wide enough for two people to pass, the walls of snow and ice on either side reaching up to Milton’s knees. He walked at a decent pace, following streets that he remembered from the last time he had been here.

He stopped at a currency exchange and swapped two of the hundred dollar bills in his pocket for roubles. He turned to the street as the cashier counted out his money and saw the man from the hotel a hundred feet behind him, talking into the open window of a Mercedes SUV that was parked against the bank of snow on the road side edge of the sidewalk. Reinforcements, Milton thought. Fair enough. It didn’t concern him. He took the notes from the cashier, put them into his pocket and set off again for the station at Ploshchad Revolyutsii. He stepped into the relative warmth inside the heavy glass doors and bought a fur trimmed ushanka from the stall-holder who was doing a brisk trade flogging hats, scarves and gloves to credulous tourists. He put the hat in his pocket, bought a day ticket for the trains and made his way to the platform.

A second tail got ahead of him, probably alerted by a call from the third agent, the one in the car. He was waiting on the platform. Milton recognised him as an intelligence man without very much difficulty. He was standing alone at the end of the platform where the civilian statues were; the athletes, the engineers, the proud revolutionaries with their puffed out chests and bulging biceps. It was the obvious spot for him to wait; he would have a good view of new arrivals. He was glancing at a newspaper that he obviously wasn’t reading, speaking the odd word from the side of his mouth into a throat mic hidden beneath the scarf around his neck. The Russians used to have plenty of good men. Times had changed; now that the prestige and influence of the security service had been affected by the fall of the Wall, they had plenty of bad ones too, and more of the latter than the former. They were bad ones tonight. Milton thought, a little ruefully, it might have been nice to have been assigned some professionals to keep an eye on him. More of a challenge to lose them and, he admitted to himself, he'd been out of the game for a year. It would have been good for his ego to know that he still demanded their full attention.

Never mind.

Milton walked towards the man and looked into his eyes for a moment before he clocked him and turned away. Milton wasn’t concerned that the man knew that his cover had been blown. He wanted him to know. His ego again.

Milton looked across the tracks to the other platform and waited until the display board advertised a wait of a minute for the eastbound train. He remembered the station well from the times he had been active in Moscow and its geography came back to him without difficulty. He turned on his heel and walked quickly to the stairs that you took to transfer to the green line. He took the steps two at a time, quite sure that he would have sent the man on the platform into a spin and enjoying that knowledge. He turned his head as he reached the middle of the bridge that crossed the tracks: on his left he could see the collection of disc-shaped chandeliers, running away down the platform and, eventually, into the darkened maw of the tunnel from which the trains emerged; on his right was the corresponding walkway that offered a way to cross the line from the other side of the platform. It was close enough for him to see the agent hurrying up the stairs, walking quickly but daring not to run. He was still being careful, even as he was fearful he was going to lose his target. Perhaps he didn’t know that he had been blown; if that was right, that just made him even more pitiable. The train wheezed into the station, the doors sliding open on runners that could have done with a drop of oil, and Milton embarked. It was just two stops to Pushkinskaya. He looked at the etiolated panelling and the strip lighting that flickered and cut out at regular intervals. Eastbound and westbound trains at Pushkinskaya pulled into different sides of the same platform and a second train was drawing to a halt just as the doors of Milton’s train opened. He walked across the platform, quickly obscured by the emerging throng of passengers, bundled up in their thick parkas and muffled hats.

He boarded the westbound train.

He took the ushanka and pulled it onto his head, untying the ear flaps from the crown and straightening them all the way out, enough to obscure his face. He looked down at his feet, yet glanced at the platform through the corner of his eye as the train jerked and bumped into motion. He saw the agent, confused and lost, caught between the eastbound and westbound trains, unsure which one he needed to be on. Had he changed trains or had he stayed where he was? The train slid away, Milton looking down again to hide his face as the agent passed before his window, and then they were back into the tunnel and accelerating in the direction from which he had arrived.

Milton sat in the seat, running his fingers over the rough, threadbare upholstery. He looked up and down the train and, satisfied that he was not being followed, settled back to read the advertisements that offered cures for indigestion and hair loss and sexual dysfunction that were neatly arranged beneath the line of the ceiling. He could have been on a train in London, or anywhere else in the world. His eyes drifted down to the woman sitting opposite him and, for a moment, their eyes held. She was dressed in form-fitting blue jeans, ankle length fur trimmed boots and a winter coat with brass buttons that might have looked good from a distance but, up close, looked like it was made out of cheap fabric and probably came from a Chinese or Korean sweatshop. The girl was definitely checking him out. Had she pegged him as a foreigner? Probably. He wasn’t dressed to blend in, and the hat looked like something a tourist would wear, not a native Muscovite. It didn’t matter. He gave her a careful smile; she smiled back, a little aloof, in that way that Russian girls have, and then he angled his head back to the advertisements and ignored her.